George Read online

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  CHAPTER I: SECRETS

  CHAPTER II: CHARLOTTE DIES

  CHAPTER III: ACTING IS JUST PRETEND

  CHAPTER IV: ANTICIPATION

  CHAPTER V: AUDITIONS

  CHAPTER VI: TAKEN

  CHAPTER VII: TIME DRAGS WHEN YOU’RE MISERABLE

  CHAPTER VIII: SOME JERK

  CHAPTER IX: DINNER AT ARNIE’S

  CHAPTER X: TRANSFORMATIONS

  CHAPTER XI: INVITATIONS

  CHAPTER XII: MELISSA GOES TO THE ZOO

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT

  George pulled a silver house key out of the smallest pocket of a large red backpack. Mom had sewn the key in so that it wouldn’t get lost, but the yarn wasn’t quite long enough to reach the keyhole if the bag rested on the ground. Instead, George had to steady herself awkwardly on one foot while the backpack rested on her other knee. She wiggled the key until it clicked into place.

  Stumbling inside, she called out, “Hello?” No lights were on. Still, George needed to be certain the house was empty. The door of Mom’s room was open and the bedsheets were flat. Scott’s room was unoccupied as well. Sure that she was alone, George went into the third bedroom, opened the closet door, and surveyed the pile of stuffed animals and assorted toys inside. They were undisturbed.

  Mom complained that George hadn’t played with any of the toys in years, and said that they should be donated to needy families. But George knew they were needed here, to guard her most prized and secret collection. Fishing beneath the teddy bears and fluffy bunnies, George felt for a flat denim bag. Once she had it in hand, she ran to the bathroom, shut the door, and turned the lock. Clutching the bag in tightly wrapped arms, George slid to the ground.

  As she tipped the denim bag on its side, the silky, slippery pages of a dozen magazines fell out onto the tiled bathroom floor. Covers promised HOW TO HAVE PERFECT SKIN, TWELVE FRESH SUMMER HAIRCUTS, HOW TO TELL A HOTTIE YOU LIKE HIM, and WILD WINTER WARDROBES. George was only a few years younger than the girls smiling at her from the glossy pages. She thought of them as her friends.

  George picked up an issue from last April that she had looked through countless times before. She browsed the busy pages with a crisp flip-flip-flip that stirred up the faint smell of paper.

  She paused on a photo of four girls at the beach. They modeled swimsuits in a line, each striking a pose. A guide on the right-hand side of the page recommended various styles based on body type. The bodies looked the same to George. They were all girls’ bodies.

  On the next page, two girls sat laughing on a blanket, their arms around each other’s shoulders. One wore a striped bikini; the other wore a polka-dot one-piece with cutouts at the hips.

  If George were there, she would fit right in, giggling and linking her arms in theirs. She would wear a bright-pink bikini, and she would have long hair that her new friends would love to braid. They would ask her name, and she would tell them, My name is Melissa. Melissa was the name she called herself in the mirror when no one was watching and she could brush her flat reddish-brown hair to the front of her head, as if she had bangs.

  George flipped past flashy ads for book-bag organizers, nail polish, the latest phones, and even tampons. She skipped over an article on how to make your own bracelets and another on advice for talking to boys.

  George’s magazine collection had started by accident. Two summers ago, she had noticed an old issue of Girls’ Life in the recycling bin at the library. The word girl had caught her eye instantly, and she had slipped the magazine in her jacket to look at later. Another girls’ magazine soon followed, this time rescued from a trash can down the block from her house. The very next weekend, she had found the denim bag at a yard sale for a quarter. It was just the size of a magazine, and had a zipper along the top. It was as if the universe had wanted her to be able to store her collection safely.

  George settled on a two-page spread about FRAMING YOUR FACE WITH MAKEUP. George had never worn makeup, but she pored over the range of colors on the left side of the page. Her heart raced in her chest. She wondered what it would feel like to really wear lipstick. George loved to put on ChapStick. She used it all winter, whether or not her lips were really chapped, and every spring she hid the tube from Mom and wore it until it ran out.

  George jumped when she heard a clatter outside. She looked out the window to the front door directly below. No one was in sight, but Scott’s bike lay in the driveway, the back wheel still spinning.

  Scott’s bike! That meant Scott! Scott was George’s older brother, a high school freshman. The hair on George’s neck stood up. Soon, heavy footsteps climbed the stairs to the second floor. The locked bathroom door rattled. It was as if Scott were rattling George’s heart inside her rib cage.

  Bang! Bang Bang!

  “You in there, George?”

  “Y-yeah.” The shiny magazines were spread across the tile floor. She gathered them into a pile and stuffed them into the denim bag. Her heart was thumping almost as loudly as Scott’s foot against the door.

  “Yo, bro, I gotta go!” Scott yelled from the far side.

  George zipped up the bag as quietly as she could and looked for a place to stash it. She couldn’t walk out with it. Scott would want to know what was inside. The bathroom’s one cabinet was stuffed with towels and didn’t shut all the way. No good either. Finally, she hung the bag from the showerhead and closed the curtain, desperately hoping that this wouldn’t be the moment Scott discovered personal hygiene.

  Scott rushed in as soon as George opened the door, unzipping his jeans before he reached the toilet. George exited quickly, closed the door, and leaned on the wall outside to catch her breath. The bag was probably still swinging in the shower. George hoped it wouldn’t hit against the curtain or, worse, fall and land in the bathtub with a thud.

  George didn’t want to be standing near the bathroom when Scott came out, so she went down to the kitchen. She poured herself a glass of orange juice and sat at the table, her skin tingling. Outside, a cloud passed overhead and the room grew darker. When the bathroom door banged open, George jumped in her seat, splashing juice on her hand. She realized she had barely been breathing.

  Thump, thump, thump-thump-thump-thump-thump. Scott tromped downstairs, a DVD case in his hand. He opened the refrigerator door, pulled out the carton of orange juice, and took a long swig. He wore a thin black T-shirt and jeans with a small hole in the knee. He hadn’t gotten a haircut in months, and dark-brown curls formed a mop on his head.

  “Sorry if I busted in on you while you were taking a dump.” Scott wiped the juice off his lips with his bare forearm.

  “I wasn’t taking a dump,” George said.

  “Then what took you so long?”

  George hesitated.

  “Oh … I know,” Scott said. “I’ll bet you had a magazine in there.”

  George froze, her mouth half-open and her brain mid-thought. The air felt warm and her mind swirled. She put her hands on the table to make sure she was still there.

  “That’s it.” Scott grinned, oblivious to George’s panic. “That’s my little bro! Growing up and looking at dirty magazines.”

  “Oh,” George said out loud. She knew what dirty magazines were. She almost laughed. The girls in the magazines she was looking at wore a lot more clothes than that, even the ones at the beach. George relaxed, at least a little.

  “Don’t worry, George. I won’t tell Mom. Anyway, I’m heading back out. Just had to get this.” Scott shook the black plastic box he held in his hand, and the DVD inside rattled. “Haven’t even seen it yet, but it’s supposed to be a classic. It’s German. The title means something like The Blood of Evil. When the zombies gnaw this one guy’s ar
m off and kill him, this other guy has to use the gnawed-off arm of his dead best friend to fight the zombies. It’s awesome.”

  “It sounds gross,” George said.

  “It is!” Scott nodded enthusiastically. He took another gulp of orange juice, put the carton back into the fridge, and headed for the door.

  “I’ll let you get back to thinking about girls,” Scott joked on the way out.

  George dashed up to the bathroom, rescued her bag, and buried it deep inside her closet, under the toys and stuffed animals. She put a pile of dirty clothes on top, just in case. Then she closed the door and collapsed face-first onto her bed, her hands crossed over her head, pressing her elbows to her ears and wishing she were someone else—anyone else.

  Ms. Udell leaned against her giant desk, reading to her fourth-grade class from a tattered copy of Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White. She wore her shiny black hair in a loose bun, and wooden earrings dangled from her long earlobes.

  In her seat by the window, George couldn’t listen. She couldn’t think. Charlotte, the wonderful, kind spider, was gone and nothing was good. The whole book was about Charlotte saving the runt pig Wilbur, and then she goes and dies. It wasn’t fair. George pushed her fists into her eyes, rubbing until rows and rows of tiny triangles twirled and twinkled brightly in the darkness.

  A tear dropped onto George’s book and spread into a spiderweb on the page. She breathed in carefully, trying not to make a sound. Shallow breath followed shallow breath until she was dizzy. She inhaled deeply, and as she did, she sniffled. Loudly. George heard whispers, clear in the quiet room.

  “Heh, some girl is crying over a dead spider.”

  “That ain’t no girl. That’s George.”

  “Close enough,” followed by laughter.

  George didn’t turn to look. She didn’t need to. She knew exactly what she would see. Rick sat two rows over from George, and Jeff sat behind Rick. Jeff would be leaning forward in his seat, with his spiky hair nearly on Rick’s shoulder. Rick would be leaning back in his shiny black baseball jacket. They would both be holding their hands to their mouths, halfheartedly trying to keep quiet.

  Once, George and Rick had been friends, or at least friendly. In second grade, there had been a class checkers tournament, and George and Rick had been the two best players. The final match of the competition had been close, with Rick barely winning after he’d been able to king his final piece. Even though George had lost, the two had still called each other Checkers Champs for weeks.

  In third grade, Jeff joined the class. Jeff had moved from California and wasn’t happy about it. He started a few fistfights and threatened most of the boys at first, including George. But Jeff settled in by October, and once Jeff and Rick became buddies, Rick wasn’t so friendly with George anymore. By winter break, Jeff and Rick were inseparable, and now it was as if the Checkers Champs were two kids who had known each other once, but had never met either George or Rick.

  Ms. Udell glared at the snickering boys, cleared her throat, and read the final paragraph of the chapter. Her students were old enough that she rarely read aloud to them, but today she wanted them to be able to focus on what she called the “magnificent melancholy of Charlotte’s final moments.”

  When she was finished, Ms. Udell closed the book, placed it on top of a pile of papers on her desk, and removed her glasses. “I’d like all of you to take out your journals and spend a few minutes with your reactions to this chapter. You may take a moment to reflect, but then get your pencils moving. I want you to dig deep and use some feeling words.”

  Room 205 filled with the sounds of journals being removed from desks, pages being turned, and pencils being searched for. Ms. Udell walked down the aisle toward Jeff and Rick, and spoke to them privately. Her voice blended in with the noise of the room, so George could barely hear her even though she was only two seats away.

  “Some of us take death very seriously.” Ms. Udell’s words were icy. She looked at Jeff and Rick in turn; they each stared at their sneakers. “It is a solemn topic, and I hope that you will respect yourselves, your classmates, and life itself by treating it as such.”

  Jeff and Rick mumbled apologies. George wasn’t sure whether their halfhearted sorrys were meant for her, Ms. Udell, or Charlotte. She wasn’t sure she cared. The moment Ms. Udell turned away, Jeff rolled his eyes. Jeff was always rolling his eyes at something, usually with a snide comment to match.

  Ms. Udell passed by George’s desk. “To be honest, I’m not sure what I think of a person who doesn’t cry at the end of Charlotte’s Web.”

  “You didn’t,” George mumbled.

  “I did the first three times … and a good number of times since.” Ms. Udell paused, and for a moment it looked as if she might tear up right then. “My point is, it takes a special person to cry over a book. It shows compassion as well as imagination.” Ms. Udell patted George’s shoulder. “Don’t ever lose that, George, and I know you’ll turn into a fine young man.”

  The word man hit like a pile of rocks falling on George’s skull. It was a hundred times worse than boy, and she couldn’t breathe. She bit her lip fiercely and felt fresh tears pounding against her eyes. She put her head down on her desk and wished she were invisible.

  Ms. Udell returned with the bathroom pass. It was a worn wooden block from a kindergarten class and read BOYS in thick green permanent marker on one side. George flipped the block over with a hollow slap so the side facing her read ROOM 205.

  Ms. Udell put her hand on George’s shoulder, but George shook her off and stood up. She could barely see her way to the classroom door through her tear-blurred eyes, and she navigated the hallway more from memory than sight. She stumbled, sobbing, into the bathroom—the boys’ bathroom. Her lips trembled and salty tears dripped into her mouth.

  George hated the boys’ bathroom. It was the worst room in the school. She hated the smell of pee and bleach, and she hated the blue tiles on the wall to remind you where you were, as if the urinals didn’t make it obvious enough. The whole room was about being a boy, and when boys were in there, they liked to talk about what was between their legs. George tried never to use it when there were any boys inside. She never drank from the water fountains at school, even if she was thirsty, and some days, she could make it through the school day without having to go once.

  George put her head down close to the faucet and splashed cold water over her neck until she shivered. Then she rubbed a clump of paper towels on her head. She combed strings of still-wet hair with her fingers and smiled weakly at herself in the mirror.

  Back in the hallway, George held the hall pass loosely in her fingers and let it drag along the wall, sending vibrations up her hand. The rhythmic click echoed down the hall as the wooden block skipped over the thin strips of cement between the tiles.

  George opened the classroom door slowly, fearing laughter, but students were too focused on their journals to notice her return. The topic, “Personal Reactions,” was written on the board in Ms. Udell’s careful print. George pulled out her journal and wrote the date and the topic. By the time she had written Charlotte is dead, journal time was over.

  Ms. Udell didn’t ask anyone to read aloud. Instead, she addressed the class. “Tomorrow the real fun begins! For now, I am pleased to say that we are done for the day.” She spoke the rhyme as if it were a short poem. “Put away your notebooks, and we’ll see which row is ready to get its things.”

  By fun, Ms. Udell was referring to the play version of Charlotte’s Web that the two fourth-grade classes would perform for the younger grades. It was a school tradition that each spring, every student in the first through fourth grades read the same book. The first graders had the story read to them by their teachers, and sometimes even the kindergartners participated. Every grade then did some sort of project. As the oldest students participating, the fourth graders put on a play of the book for the younger grades as well as for the parent-teacher association. Only the fifth grade wasn’t involved, b
ecause they needed to focus on the spring tests to make sure they graduated and moved on to middle school.

  Ms. Udell had called four rows of students, and the room was filled with the sounds of zippers and backpacks being dropped onto wooden desks. George’s row was the last to be called, and the kids in it had their eyes trained on Ms. Udell.

  “Row one.”

  Chairs screeched against the floor. George gathered her things slowly, stalling as long as she could before joining the boys’ line. She wanted as much distance from Jeff and Rick as possible.

  Ms. Udell’s class walked through the halls of the school and down to the yard. The bus kids were released as a group, while other children waited with Ms. Udell to meet up with their parents, grandparents, or baby-sitters. George headed to her bus line.

  “George, wait up!” a voice called from behind her. Kelly, George’s best friend, wore her hair in braids and smelled like oranges and pencil shavings. She wore a T-shirt that read:

  99% GENIUS

  1% CHOCOLATE

  “My dad said you could come over this weekend to practice,” she said as soon as she got to George. She had been chattering about the auditions all week. “You do still want to be in the play together, right?”

  George did want to be in the play. More than anything. But she didn’t want to be some smelly pig. She wanted to be Charlotte, the kind and wise spider, even if it was a girl’s part. Her mouth was open, but she couldn’t speak.

  Kelly held up her hands, palms in front of George’s eyes. “I am Kelly the All-Wonderful and All-Knowing,” she intoned. “I can sense that you are not well. Now, my child, what seems to be your problem?” She closed her eyes and slowly brought her hands to the sides of George’s head, peeking just a little bit to make sure she didn’t poke her best friend in the eye.

  “If you’re all-knowing, then don’t you already know?” George asked.

  Kelly opened her eyes long enough to cross them so that they pointed at her nose. Then she fluttered her eyelids shut.