Rite of Passage

The small one was school. As I’ve said, the only kids who are supposed to know how you stand are the others at the same level in each subject, people just like you. In practice, though, everybody has a pretty good idea of just where everybody else is and those at the top and bottom are expected to blush accordingly. I’ve never been able to blush on command, and, as a newcomer, it was all the harder for me because of it. It’s not good to start by being singled out.

The big reason, on the other hand, was completely my fault. When we moved, I knew I wasn’t going to like Geo Quad, and it mattered not at all what anybody there thought of me. By the time it sank through to me that I was really and truly stuck in Geo Quad and that I’d better step a little more lightly, my heel marks were already plain to see on more than one face.

As it turned out, my position and my conduct interacted to bring me trouble. This is how things go wrong — and this is just a sample:

At the beginning of the week, the whole school went down to the Third Level on an educational jaunt. The afternoon was really more in the nature of a holiday because we older ones had seen the rows of broad-leaf plants they raise for carbon dioxide/oxygen exchange more than once before. At the end of the day we were coming back home to Geo Quad by shuttle and to pass the time some of us girls were playing a hand game. I was included because I was there and they needed everybody present to make a good game of it.

The game goes like this: Everybody has three numbers to remember. At a signal, everybody claps their hands on their knees, claps their hands, then the person starting the game calls a number. Knees, hands, then the person whose number was called calls someone else’s number. Knees, hands, number. Knees, hands, number. It goes on, the speed of the beat picking up, until somebody claps wrong or misses when one of her numbers is called. When that happens, everybody gets licks with stiffened fingers on her wrist.

The game is simple enough. It’s just that when the pace picks up, it’s easy to make a mistake. We girls stood in a group in the aisle, one or two lucky ones sitting down, near the front of the shuttle car.

We started out — clap, clap , “Twelve,” said the girl starting.

Clap on knees, clap together, “Seven.”

Clap, clap, “Seventeen.”

Clap, clap, “Six.” Six was one of my numbers.

I clapped hands on knees, hands together, and “Twenty,” I said.

Clap, clap. “Two.”

Clap, clap, “---.”

Somebody missed.

It was a plump eleven-year-old named Zena Andrus. She kept missing and kept suffering for it. There were seven of us girls playing and she had missed five or six times. When you’ve had licks taken on your wrist thirty or thirty-five times, you’re likely to have a pretty sore wrist. Zena had both a sore wrist and the idea that she was being persecuted.

“You call me too often,” she said as we lined up to rap. “It’s not fair!”

She was so whiney about it that we stopped calling her number almost entirely — just often enough that she didn’t get the idea that she was being excluded. I went along with this, though I didn’t agree. I may be wrong, but I don’t see any point in playing a game with anybody who isn’t just as ready to face losing as to face winning. It’s not a game if there’s no risk.

A moment later when somebody else lost I noticed that Zena was right up there in line and happy to have the chance to do a little damage of her own.

We seven weren’t the whole class, of course. Some were talking, some were reading, Jimmy Dentremont and another boy were playing chess, some were just sitting, and three or four boys were chasing each other up and down the aisles. Mr. Marberry, who was in charge of us for the afternoon said, “Sit down until we get to Geo Quad,” to them in a resigned voice every time they started to get too loud or to make too much of a nuisance of themselves. Mr. Marberry is one of those people who talk and talk and talk, and never follow through, so they weren’t paying too much attention to him.

As we reached the last station before Geo Quad, somebody noticed and we decided to play just one last round. Since we were so close to home, the boys were out of their seats and starting up the aisle past us to be first out of the shuttle. They were bouncing around, swatting one another, and when they got up by us and saw what we were playing they began to try to distract us so that we would make mistakes and suffer for it. We did our best to ignore them.

One of the boys, Thorin Luomela, was paying close attention to our numbers so he could distract the right person when that number was called again. By chance, the first number he heard repeated was one of mine.

“Fourteen.”

Thorin waited until the right moment and smacked me across the behind. He put plenty of sting into it, too.