The girl a few doors over came over to wait for Brian and me. She didn’t want to go to school by herself, the first day. Kind of nervy, I thought, because she and her sister have never paid any attention to us at all since we moved in a month ago, and they were here first. But Mom said be kind and I thought it wouldn’t hurt to let her tag along, even though I know that she wouldn’t be interested in me any more after she makes some friends.
It’s Larry’s first year at high school and he left a half-hour ago, to get the school bus at the corner. Mom is all nervous, hurrying around all over the place. You’d think it was her first day at a new school, not ours. She’s making us all jumpy.
Anyway, Linda - that’s the girl next door - waited for us in the front hall while me and Brian got the rest of our things together. Brian would rather have gone by himself but Mom wanted us to go together, like a loving brother and sister. Sometimes I wonder where she gets her goofy ideas.
Brian was mad and he muttered under his breath that it’s bad enough to have to go with me, but he’d be darned (that wasn’t the word he used) if he’d go with some stupid girl next door. He did it anyway, because he didn’t want to hurt Mom’s feelings. He stayed with us - well, kind of walking ahead of us - until we got out of sight of the kitchen window, then he shot ahead like a bat out of hell, to put some distance between him and us girls.
I can’t blame him, that Linda is a pouty little brat. I wish I wasn’t so good-hearted. All she did on the way down to school meandering through the parkway, and then down Bearbrook Road until we got to the schoolyard was whine about how mean her older sister is to her. No wonder I’ve never seen her with other kids - she’s kind of hard to get used to.
At the school all kinds of kids were milling around. Looking for last year’s friends mostly, I guess. I felt a little lost looking around at all the unfamiliar faces. Nobody looked especially friendly. Linda kept hanging around me. She had gone to the junior school last year and was new too. I kind of felt sorry for her. For me too.
When the bell rang I went to the office and saw Brian there. Mom had registered us a couple of weeks ago, but we were supposed to check in at the office anyway. There were lots of other kids too. We had to stand around and wait until someone from the office took us around to our areas. We’d had a tour of the school before, when Mom had taken us to register, so I kind of knew the general layout, but it still seemed strange.
It’s an open-plan school, nice and bright, with a big library right in the middle. There’s carpeting on the floors and staircases all over the place to take you to different levels. There’s always lots of noise, too.
Well, I was taken to my area. It was called Cornelius Krieghoff-West, or CK-W for short. There’s C.K.-E, C.K.-N and C.K.-S. They’re called the quadrangles. The school’s called Cornelius Krieghoff Middle School. Cornelius Krieghoff was a Canadian artist (German, actually) who lived in Quebec and painted French-Canadian habitant scenes about a hundred years ago. That’s one of the first things Mr. Henderson told us. He was my home room teacher. He seemed really nice and he introduced me and some other new kids to the rest of the class. I mean, he told the rest of the class to tell us their names, then we did the same. Of course, I didn’t remember one name afterward. Nobody smiled, no friendly faces. I couldn’t figure what was the matter with everyone. It wouldn’t have hurt to smile, for heaven’s sake.
It was a boooring morning. Mr. Henderson kind of reviewed the school system, told us who our teachers would be for science, math, history, that kind of thing. We had him for English and geography. I thought I’d like him … but I wasn’t sure about the other kids in the class. I mean I didn’t know if I’d like them.
I met Brian coming through the park on the way back home for lunch. He looked kind of glum. Just like I felt, actually. He told me he had the same kind of morning as me.
“Yeah”, he said. “I met some of my teachers. They’re okay, I guess. There’s one guy seemed nice, the other kids all seem to know each other. They’re not too friendly.”
Mom was all anxious, waiting for us at the side door, and before we even got a chance to take a deep breath she wanted to know how wonderful everything had been.
“What did you do this morning?” - “ Did you make any friends yet?” - “What do the teachers seem like?” - “ Did you have any trouble finding your room?”
“It’s too soon to tell, Mom. Nobody’s busting out all over to make friends, anyway. Already there’s little cliques and I guess there’ll be some left-overs”, I gloomed.
“Yeah, that’s right”, Brian said. “There’s a bunch of goons who hang out together and the kids who aren’t like them wander around themselves. I mean by themselves. You'd think they'd make their own group, of discards or something, but they just kind of hang around on their own, ignoring everyone else hanging out on their own. As though they're not good enough to hang around with, if they've been rejected by the in-crowd.”
“Oh well”, Mom said, looking disappointed. But I knew she wanted us not to be. “It’s too early to tell anything yet. For goodness’ sake, it’s just your first morning. You’ve simply had a negative impression. I was very impressed when we were taken through the school. It looked just lovely. Everything will work out fine, you’ll see.”
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Well, she was right. Kind of. I saw Brian around the school sometimes, changing classes, and he’d got some friends. I made some, too. We weren’t part of the little groups who think they’re so special, but I had a few friends. We had our own little group, but we weren’t stuck-up like the other kids, mostly. There was Diane Roy, Laura Mansville, Sally Clung and Jennifer Thackeray. That made two Jennifers in our group, because that’s my name too, Jennifer.
I liked Laura the best. She seemed the most like me and the others seemed all right, although I could see almost right away that Sally Clung sometimes wasn’t very nice. Like the time we were in the library supposed to be doing some research during tutorial and she was being loud and stupid. I mean really stupid, because we’re allowed to talk but we’re not supposed to scream and here she was. Screaming, I mean, when Mrs. Barker, the librarian came over and asked her to behave. Was I ever surprised when Sally told her snootily that she was behaving. Mrs. Barker sent her out of the library and on her way out everyone heard her say Mrs. Barker was an old bag.
I felt bad because Mrs. Barker was really very nice. She tried to help us in research, and she knew all about almost every book in the library, so she could tell you what it was about before you got it out, so you could see if you’d like it even before you read it. Mrs. Barker’s face kind of fell, like she felt hurt, but she didn’t call Sally back. Laura and I talked about it later. We thought it was because maybe, Sally is from out west and maybe they behave differently there.
What we did was, we all got together, me and Laura and Diane and Jennifer and we persuaded Sally to go see Mrs. Barker after school, to apologize. She made us promise to go with her and we did. She did things like that. Like I mean, said nasty things to people. I’d really have rathered not have her in the group but that would have meant she’d have no one to hang around with because it seemed like no one else wanted her. We decided to make the best of it. Laura felt really sorry for her.
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