The Best Man by Richard Peck Page B

in the invisible section.
    Nothing happened until a girl kind of slinked up to the next seat. Out of the corner of my eye she had more of a seventh-grade vibe. Was she going to sit down? She made a fist and popped me on the shoulder, hard. The pain was intense and knocked me half out of the chair.
    Lynette.
    â€œLynette? Look at you!” I rubbed my shoulder in disbelief. There was less of her but more shape. I can’t describe it. She was still eleven, but twelve was clearly on the way.
    I wasn’t familiar with her hair. “Lynette, what happened?”
    â€œCamp happened.” She sat down, crossed a leg. “Weight-reduction no-carbs camp.”
    â€œWait a minute. It wasn’t vocabulary camp? Because I asked your dad—”
    â€œIt was fat camp with forced marches,” Lynette said.
    â€œI thought we weren’t supposed to use the fat word.”
    â€œYou can use it now.” Lynette looked down herself. “I had to get all new clothes. I’m going for a skirt and boots look. Is it working?”
    â€œI guess,” I said. “I mean yes. But what about your hair?”
    â€œThere was too much of it once there was less of me. I looked like a demented dandelion. After I got back to civilization, Mrs. Stanley took me for a cut and some feathering. Then we decided to tone down the color.”
    â€œYou dyed your hair?”
    â€œRinsed,” Lynette said, “with some lowlights. New school, new look, right? And how hilarious is it that Natalie’s new stepbrother is Jackson Showalter—probably still two feet tall and heavily armed! You can’t make this stuff up. Do you suppose the two of them were ring bearers at the wedding?”
    â€œHow did you even hear this where you were?”
    â€œThe paper. I read it online. We were really offthe grid up there in the Upper Peninsula. It was like
Hatchet
, so if I hadn’t been reading the paper—”
    â€œRight,” I said. “You and Josh Hunnicutt.”
    Lynette pointed at the two teachers sorting us out. “You can see where that’s heading,” she said. “Three sixth-grade classes into two homerooms. Do the math. It won’t be just our Westside class. We’ll be divided up and mixed in with these other people we don’t know.”
    I hadn’t done the math.
    â€œPoor us,” Lynette said. “Poor troops. In case they split us up, meet me for lunch. Not the food court. It’s what they call the cafeteria, and I’m hearing the seventh graders are going to run it as a scam. They shake you down. They charge admission, like a cover charge. But we’ll only have lunch together today, because I’m going to have to find some girls to hang with. I’ve got some peer-grouping to do.”
    Now they were getting ready to divide us in half. The woman teacher was Ms. Roebuck. I never knew who the man teacher was.
    â€œAnd for your information,” Lynette said, “I’ve dropped the
ette
.”
    â€œThe what?”
    â€œThe
ette
. From now on, I’m Lynn, not Lynette. I was never a Lynette anyway. It was never me, and it’s not the me I want to be.”
    â€œIs Mrs. Stanley going to call you Lynn?”
    â€œProbably not. She’s too old to change, but you aren’t.”
    Her eyebrows rose up. They were new too. Plucked or whatever. And more black than red. I squinted at her. “Who are you?” I said. “I don’t know you.”
    â€œI’m Lynn,” she said, and made another fist to help me remember.

17
    L ockers turned out not to be a problem. Eighth graders didn’t use them, and they’d won this battle long ago. Eighth graders liked the look of carrying all their stuff in a backpack from class to class all day. It worked with their casual image. Like they were just passing through. Like they’d be in high school before seventh period.
    And what the eighth graders did, we all