The Kitty Committee Read online

  I’d been so proud to learn I would skip a grade in my new school, but now I wondered if that was another huge mistake. It would forever mark me as the girl always at least a year less mature than her peers, and one look around told me that physical maturity mattered here. These kids didn’t seem as if they’d be wowed by my intellectual prowess. These kids held themselves as if it was what was on the outside that mattered. That was quite the opposite of what I’d been taught my entire life.

  I was just thirteen years old and still playing with dolls.

  Somehow, I was either pushed along or managed to push against the throng of students, passing period by passing period. For the most part, I wound up where I was supposed to be, until it came to fourth period English. I’d carefully chosen a seat in the back of each classroom for the strategic purpose of going most unnoticed, but when I heard “take out your books” and saw the images from around the world which adorned our social studies books, I knew I had to make a fast but inconspicuous getaway.

  “Miss . . .” the teacher halted his instructions to turn his focus on me before I could make it out the door. That one innocuous word succeeded in turning me into the main attraction for everyone else in the room who hadn’t, until that moment, been paying attention to the girl fleeing from the room.

  “Grace,” I said foolishly. “Templeton.” I threw in my last name as though it could somehow diffuse the situation. “I, I think I’m in the wrong class.”

  “And the right class would be?” He arched a pair of superior eyebrows at me.

  “English.”

  “Then you most assuredly are in the wrong class,” he said kindly. “Let me take a look at your schedule.”

  And while he was doing that and scratching out an excuse for tardiness for my English teacher, I permitted my gaze to stray from the top of my shoes. Most of the students were chuckling softly, but their eyes shifted compassionately when I looked up. What they must have seen in me that day would be a wonder to them—the strange creature who appeared inexplicably in their midst.

  But one girl didn’t look away, choosing instead to stare directly at me. She wasn’t snickering like the others, she observed me as though taking in my entirety and formulating a conclusion which I immediately wanted and didn’t want to know. She was lithe, legs covered in faded denim, cuffed at the hem, and sprawled out from underneath her desk. I noticed flip-flops and painted toenails in spite of the somewhat cool February day. Her shoulder-length, strawberry-blonde hair was perfectly coiffed with bangs that dropped to just above eyes I imagined would be green if I could see them. And then she smiled. Not laughed, but smiled. She held my gaze until I was forced to smile back.

  I loved her at that very moment.

  “Here’s your tardy excuse.” The teacher’s words ripped me from my reverie. “Good luck, Miss Grace Templeton.”

  And so began anew the muffled giggles and snorts. I didn’t dare turn around to see if the girl was part of it. I wanted the image of her cool acceptance—and yes, validation—to carry me through the difficult twists and turns of that first day.

  My next hurdle was health class, which was taught, to boys and girls alike, by the football coach. Health, the way it was meant in class, wasn’t a subject discussed much around my house. My parents talked a lot about maintaining a healthy body and mind through contemplation, exercise, a balanced diet, and shunning the obvious vices. But when it came to sex . . . well, I knew that somehow my parents had conspired physically to bring me and Luke into the world, but I was short on details and not really keen to get them. I hadn’t even begun to menstruate.

  Health class in school was about those other things too. Healthy food. Exercise. Staying away from cigarettes, drinking, and drugs. But by February, the teacher had eased into the more personal issue of sex. Girls and boys would be separated for certain classes, Mr. Janke let us know. But there was plenty we could talk about as a group. Premarital sex. Responsibility. How babies can ruin your life when you’re not ready for them. Protection if you absolutely must, although abstinence was the preferred method.

  My head swam with the details I heard that first day in class. I worried about Luke, who had missed sophomore year in America. How would he ever gain all the knowledge that I would soon possess? I knew my parents wouldn’t be much help. From my vantage point in the back of the class, I could see students diffusing the tension with snickers, passing notes, folding paper, spinning pencils, mindlessly thumbing through the textbook, and generally squirming.

  But I was fascinated that sex was something which could be discussed so openly and calmly by an adult in front of children. Only my father’s calamity had pried me away from my parents’ protective cocoon, thrusting me into a world where the words penis and vagina could be uttered with as much indifference as peanut butter and jelly sandwich. From the back of the classroom, I did have the advantage of being protected from the view of most everyone in the class, which allowed me to focus rather than fidget.

  As I was furiously taking notes that would have to be hidden deep in my backpack once I got home, I pressed too hard on the pencil in my excitement. The tip splayed helplessly against my paper and no amount of coaxing would anchor it enough to continue to function as a proper pencil. I searched uselessly through my backpack, knowing I’d only grabbed one pencil and no sharpener on my way out the door that morning. To get up and go to the front of the classroom to sharpen my pencil was unthinkable.

  “Pssst,” a boy sitting next to me hissed.

  He reached out to me, a pencil in his hand. When I stared dumbly at him, he jiggled his hand as if to wake me from a deep sleep.

  “Thanks,” I whispered, taking the pencil and returning to my note-taking, a little less frantically now that I knew I was being observed.

  When class was over, I permitted myself a sneak peek at the boy who had offered his pencil. A fuller look than what I’d previously seen from the corner of my eye. He was tall and gangly, his hair cut short but not stylishly from what I could tell. Luke was broad-shouldered and muscular. This boy was paper-thin; if there was a muscle in his body, I failed to see it. His clothes were rumpled and ill-fitting. The sheen of oil on his forehead highlighted several white-tipped red zits. He wore glasses that looked like they could have been borrowed from my dad. In other words—at least physically—he was my kindred spirit.

  “Do you want your pencil back?” I asked his back as he was leaving.

  “Nah.” He turned around. “You can keep it.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I’ll bring you a new one tomorrow.”

  And then, a burst of confidence I didn’t know existed within me. “My name’s Grace Templeton.”

  “I’m Timothy,” he said. “Or Tim. Whatever.”

  Chapter Two

  After Dad’s accident, he had surgery in Guatemala to stabilize him before being flown back to the states in an air ambulance. The next two years would mark a long, slow, painful path to recovery, but from my child-centric perspective, I didn’t fully understand what that meant for him. I knew that he rarely came out of his bedroom. I knew he slept and read and ate in a special hospital bed, delivered to our home and paid for by insurance. I knew he and Mom lost the ready smiles that had carried me through childhood. I just never considered him as having to adapt in the same way that I was adapting. He was a grown-up, after all.

  Although our new house was the nicest one, by objective standards, that I’d ever lived in, I couldn’t imagine it ever feeling like a real home. The mail continued to arrive each day, bearing the ghosts of past occupants. Dad’s torment was always just yards away, dampening any bright thoughts that might percolate in my brain. Mom was mostly missing, working as a nurse in a hospital thirty miles away where, by necessity, she tended to every patient except the one who needed her most. The neighbors kept to themselves, which was a concept totally unfamiliar to me. On the positive side, we had our first TV, but
it was in my parents’ room to distract Dad from the pain that was his constant companion.

  People travel for miles to visit the daffodils that begin to bloom in Indian Springs each February. The entire town was under orders to display daffodils in every conceivable space. Not exactly official orders, more of a community understanding. If you don’t participate, you undermine your community, turn your back on what it stands for—love, acceptance, support during the hard times.

  Judgement and ostracism.

  Nature’s smiles dominate the landscape for a few months, bringing a fleeting fame to an otherwise unremarkable town.

  My family was one of the few that didn’t live up to our obligation when we first moved to Indian Springs. Couldn’t. The bulbs in front of our house were old and hadn’t been well-cared for. The plants hadn’t been watered properly after blooming season. Mom was too busy taking Dad to his doctors’ appointments, and Luke and I were trying to adjust to our new school. Not that we would have known what to do with a daffodil even if we’d had all the time in the world on our hands. Eventually, well-meaning neighbors showed up and replaced bulbs and tended to the ones resilient enough to survive. I’d look out the kitchen window when I was rinsing my breakfast dishes to see an unfamiliar figure, trowel in hand, hunched over the strip of bare earth that edged our front lawn.

  I felt keenly the divide between those happy yellow flowers that decorated our new town and the mood that permeated inside my new home.

  My first night after school, I lay in bed replaying every minute of my day. I was pleased the work seemed easy enough, and I didn’t think I’d have trouble keeping up. I hadn’t made any friends, but then I hadn’t really expected to. I’d seen Luke during lunch—all the way across the cafeteria from where I’d taken a seat at a table occupied by kids who didn’t appear to be a cohesive group. Some were reading. Some were eating. Some were staring at the food in front of them. It seemed like a safe table, where I could take cover during lunch. Luke, on the other hand, was hanging with a group of boys who, to the outside observer, could have been his lifelong friends. I knew he was trying to decide between baseball and swim team. The boys most likely were sent by competing coaches to recruit Luke for their sport.

  I thought about Timothy, whom I decided to call by his real name instead of Tim because it was the first one he’d said, so I believed it must be his preferred. I had stocked my backpack with plenty of sharpened pencils and even a few pens for the next day. My homework was done. My clothes were laid out. I’d broached the subject of clothes with Mom who agreed to get me a pair of jeans and maybe a few t-shirts that weekend at the Goodwill.

  The walls were so thin between the three bedrooms of our house that I heard every footstep and every squeak of every bedspring. The TV murmured from my parents’ room where it had become constant background noise, long after they fell asleep. I waited for Luke to finish up in our shared bathroom so I could brush my teeth and go to sleep on the lumpy used mattress that came with the house.

  I thought about the girl who looked directly at me and smiled, refusing to let me go until I smiled back at her. I got up and walked over to my dresser where I stared into the mirror. I pushed my hair flat against my forehead, imagining bangs which grew down to my eyebrows. I knew that my hair grew a half-inch every month. I envisioned myself in one year, with hair that reached my shoulders and was perfectly styled.

  I selected a Pixy Stix from my private candy stash hidden from who-knows-who in my dresser drawer. Cherry-flavored. I tore open the top, and poured a small amount onto the tip of my tongue where it mixed quickly with saliva. I pushed the mixture onto my lips, spreading it with my tongue, rubbing my lips together to distribute the red color evenly.

  I pictured the girl I wanted to be.

  Mr. Janke shuffled our assigned seats once a month, so the next day I was no longer seated next to Timothy, nor was I in the back of the class. But I did manage to catch up with Timothy after class to present him with a brand-new, freshly sharpened pencil.

  “Thanks.” He dropped the pencil in the front pouch of his backpack and ambled away. Apparently, I’d misjudged our connection. Or his desire to converse with a kindred spirit.

  I hadn’t seen the girl with the strawberry-blonde hair again, not even at lunch. But then again, there were two lunch periods so she was probably in the second one. I had seen Timothy, though. I originally figured him for a candidate at my adopted table of social isolation but I was wrong again. Timothy hung with a small group of friends, both girls and boys, who seemed to enjoy each other’s company. If I had to judge by their appearance, I’d have pegged them for the smart kids.

  Timothy never showed any sign of recognition, not even when we stood side by side, waiting in the cafeteria line. I attempted a weak smile and a barely audible “hi,” but his gaze by then was already averted, and the sound of my voice was no match for our one-foot height differential. My puny greeting drowned in a cacophony of clattering dishes and clanking forks. Mercifully, the cafeteria server intercepted my smile and smiled back.

  “Hi,” she said, rescuing me from utter humiliation.

  That day at lunch, a girl at my table I’d seen the prior day leaned over mid-chew. She wore glasses which made her somehow less intimidating.

  “Are you new?” she asked, and I felt a thrill at the possibility of new friendship.

  “Yeah, I just started this week.” I turned my upper body to face her, trying to signal my openness to questions.

  “Cool. Where are you from?” Her upper lip caught on silver braces when she spoke, producing something akin to a lisp. I’d never seen braces that close before and tried not to stare but couldn’t help noticing a tiny sprig of green snagged in the wire of her front tooth.

  “Actually, we moved here from Guatemala. A village called Monte Verde.”

  “Guatemala? Isn’t that an island out in the middle of the Pacific? Like near Tahiti?”

  I hesitated to start down a path that would lead to all the ways I was different from everyone else, but she seemed genuinely interested and kind.

  “Nope. You’re probably thinking of Guam. I’ve been there too.”

  “Oh, cool,” she said, but the way she said it made me think she wasn’t impressed one iota. “What grade are you?”

  “Sophomore.”

  “I’m a junior,” she said as if to bring our conversation to a close. As if there would be no recovering from the difference in our grades, no going back to two strangers innocently reaching out to each other. The brief flicker of interest in her eyes extinguished. “Well, nice talking to you. Hope you like it here.” She flipped open a well-worn paperback novel and was instantly mesmerized. It seemed even a fantasy world was a better bet than a sophomore girl from a country that wasn’t close to Tahiti. I wondered if I’d come off as a know-it-all when I threw in the line about Guam. I wondered if I’d humiliated her by pointing out the difference in the two countries. I wasn’t sure when another opportunity like this would present itself, and I feared I’d blown my only chance for a friend.

  By the third day, I had no illusions about what lay in store for me. The daffodils were nothing more special than yellow bobbleheads. I’d fallen for their promise of new life and fresh starts, but I wouldn’t be deceived again. Nobody was interested in forming a friendship with me. Even kids like Timothy and the girl at the lunch table rejected me. I accepted my fate of counting down the days until school was over. Running out the clock. Summer would bring the promise of warmth and sunshine, which I associated with happiness. Maybe Dad would be better by then and we could go back to Guatemala or a different mission somewhere else. Luke could stay behind for college. It wasn’t so long to wait. Only a few months.

  In health class, Mr. Janke assigned a class project and advised us we were to work in pairs. Glancing down the list of possible topics, I wasn’t sure which was more daunting—the subject matter or the act of
securing a partner. I glanced nervously to my right and left but everyone was already partnering up, flagging down friends across the room or leaning over to whisper to ones nearby.

  “Come up and see me once you’ve picked your subject and I’ll mark you off,” Mr. Janke said. Already, more than half the class was lined up at his desk, declaring their partnerships and their preferred topics. A few had to pick second or third choices by then and I still didn’t have a partner.

  There was a tap on my shoulder, and I swiveled so quickly, I felt a sharp ping followed by a painful twinge in my neck.

  “Wanna be partners?” Timothy asked, and a relief so powerful overcame me that tears threatened to spring from my eyes.

  “Sure, but . . .”

  “I’ll get us a topic,” he said and walked right past me to the front of the room.

  I watched Timothy confer with Mr. Janke, and it was apparent from their knitted brows that there were slim pickings by then. At one point, they glanced over at me, and I forced a smile in return, wondering why I wasn’t up there bargaining on my own behalf, but also relieved Timothy was doing it for me. Mr. Janke leaned over his paperwork to note our partnership and whatever subject had been chosen for us.

  “Herpes,” Timothy said as he walked by my desk.

  The rest of class was a blur, a combination of physical illness and unreality. Wasn’t it clear to Mr. Janke I was in no way prepared to handle this? Herpes? STDs? What did I know about that world? What would my parents say? And with a boy as my partner? How could I calmly sit and discuss this with Timothy? Where would we work? And when? Would Mr. Janke allow us to work in class, or would we have to meet outside of school? In his house or (Heaven forbid) mine? Could I convince him to go to the local library? Was this a sort of date? Was Timothy asking me out on a date? How could I calmly discuss herpes with Timothy when I was already blushing just thinking about it? Would he expect me to kiss him at some point?