“Yes, Leslie.” Lord, Mrs. Myers was liable to crack her face if she kept up smiling like that.
“What if you can’t watch the program?”
“You inform your parents that it is a homework assignment. I am sure they will not object.”
“What if”—Leslie’s voice faltered; then she shook her head and cleared her throat so the words came out stronger—“what if you don’t have a television set?”
Lord, Leslie. Don’t say that. You can always watch on mine. But it was too late to save her. The hissing sounds of disbelief were already building into a rumbling of contempt.
Mrs. Myers blinked her eyes. “Well. Well.” She blinked some more. You could tell she was trying to figure out how to save Leslie, too. “Well. In that case one could write a one-page composition on something else. Couldn’t one, Leslie?” She tried to smile across the classroom upheaval to Leslie, but it was no use. “Class! Class! Class!” Her Leslie smile shifted suddenly and ominously into a scowl that silenced the storm.
She handed out dittoed sheets of arithmetic problems. Jess stole a look at Leslie. Her face, bent low over the math sheet, was red and fierce.
At recess time when he was playing King of the Mountain, he could see that Leslie was surrounded by a group of girls led by Wanda Kay. He couldn’t hear what they were saying, but he could tell by the proud way Leslie was throwing her head back that the others were making fun of her. Greg Williams grabbed him then, and while they wrestled, Leslie disappeared. It was none of his business, really, but he threw Greg down the hill as hard as he could and yelled to no one in particular, “Gotta go.”
He stationed himself across from the girls’ room. Leslie came out in a few minutes. He could tell she had been crying.
“Hey, Leslie,” he called softly.
“Go away!” She turned abruptly and headed the other way in a fast walk. With an eye on the office door, he ran after her. Nobody was supposed to be in the halls during recess. “Leslie. Whatsa matter?”
“You know perfectly well what’s the matter, Jess Aarons.”
“Yeah.” He rubbed his hair. “If you’d justa kept your mouth shut. You can always watch at my…”
But she had wheeled around again, and was zooming down the hall. Before he could finish the sentence and catch up with her, she was swinging the door to the girls’ room right at his nose. Jess slunk out of the building. He couldn’t risk Mr. Turner catching him hanging around the girls’ room as though he was some kind of pervert or something.
After school Leslie got on the bus before he did and went straight to the corner of the long backseat—right to the seventh graders’ seat. He jerked his head at her to warn her to come farther up front, but she wouldn’t even look at him. He could see the seventh graders headed for the bus—the huge bossy bosomy girls and the mean, skinny, narrow-eyed boys. They’d kill her for sitting in their territory. H
e jumped up and ran to the back and grabbed Leslie by the arm. “You gotta come up to your regular seat, Leslie.”
Even as he spoke, he could feel the bigger kids pushing up behind him down the narrow aisle. Indeed, Janice Avery, who among all the seventh graders was the one person who devoted her entire life to scaring the wits out of anyone smaller than she, was right behind him. “Move, kid,” she said.
He planted his body as firmly as he could, although his heart was knocking at his Adam’s apple. “C’mon, Leslie,” he said, and then he made himself turn and give Janice Avery one of those look-overs from frizz blond hair, past too tight blouse and broad-beamed jeans, to gigantic sneakers. When he finished, he swallowed, stared straight up into her scowling face, and said, almost steadily, “Don’t look like there’ll be room across the back here for you and Janice Avery.”
Somebody hooted. “Weight Watchers is waiting for you, Janice!”
Janice’s eyes were hate-mad, but she moved aside for Jess and Leslie to make their way past her to their regular seat.
Leslie glanced back as they sat down, and then leaned over. “She’s going to get you for that, Jess. Boy, she is mad.”
Jess warmed to the tone of respect in Leslie’s voice, but he didn’t dare look back. “Heck,” he said. “You think I’m going to let some dumb cow like that scare me?”
By the time they got off the bus, he could finally send a swallow past his Adam’s apple without choking. He even gave a little wave at the back seat as the bus pulled off.
Leslie was grinning at him over May Belle’s head.
“Well,” he said happily. “See you.”
“Hey, do you think we could do something this afternoon?”
“Me, too! I wanna do something, too,” May Belle shrilled.
Jess looked at Leslie. No was in her eyes. “Not this time, May Belle. Leslie and I got something we gotta do just by ourselves today. You can carry my books home and tell Momma I’m over at the Burkes’. OK?”
“You ain’t got nothing to do. You ain’t even planned nothing.”
Leslie came and leaned over May Belle, putting her hand on the little girl’s thin shoulder. “May Belle, would you like some new paper dolls?”