The Small Things

-11- going viral

Copyright © 2015. All Rights Reserved.

CHAPTER ELEVEN: SIXTH GRADE

D A T E : October 2007

✖ going viral ✖

Sixth grade meant lockers, and lockers meant decorations, combinations, and forgetting said combinations halfway through the day.

Joni helped me later that year fill in my locker with pictures and magnets shaped like owls—a task we were supposed to complete before school even started and never got around to. I stashed the pictures in my backpack until free period when our homeroom teacher allowed us to go out to our lockers just beyond the doorway.

"You know what's weird?" she said as she flipped through my pictures. She was waiting for me to open up my locker, which took three tries of the combination to finally work.

"What's that?"

"That Ryan isn't our friend anymore. What, did we fall off the face of the planet or something?" she joked, and I gave a soft laugh to that before I pushed the door open and motioned for the first picture. She passed it to me and I applied the tape, sticking the picture of Joni, Ryan, Fynn, and I to the top of the locker door.

"I mean, I guess. He was sorta just friends with Fynn," I replied, the thought of him pricking me somewhere deep inside my chest. It always ached at the thought of my best friend across the ocean in that weird place called England.

"Yeah, but now he's suddenly friends with Bluebell?"

"I guess," I responded vaguely, sticking on a picture taken on the crappy digital camera I'd gotten just for the heck of it—I liked taking pictures and making videos anyway. The picture currently in my hand was of Puck chewing on a bone beside Clara at the park.

We were quiet for a while before Joni said, "You know, the librarian asked me if I wanted to be her assistant next year as a study hall."

"That's cool! You'd rock at that," I said, and she smiled and thanked me for the encouragement. "Let's be honest here, you've probably already read the entire library."

"Well, maybe, like, a third of it, but same thing."

Even if Joni hadn't read the entire library by that point, she had one of her own at her house. I'd known her mom was a little book-crazy, but I never truly knew that it was because she was an English teacher at the high school. She raised her only child to appreciate literature and all that it stood for, and expressed the immense desire to let Joni break away from social conformities by having opinions in controversial topics and the under-appreciation of women.

Of course, Joni never went so far as to pick fights in the lunch room with bozos who didn't understand that "girly" wasn't a real insult to guys, and "tomboy" wasn't a real insult to girls, either. Sometimes we'd sit at our table nearest the lunch room restrooms, and she'd be bored of whatever snack was in her paper bag and say something like, "I wonder what life would be like if we had unisex bathrooms."

Reading so much put Joni at an exponentially higher advantage to the other students, and while we were all still stuck in that awkward, immature stage, she staged being amused by low comedy when really, all she wanted was to hang out in the library with Mrs. Austen, the librarian. By the end of sixth grade, Mrs. Austen had two potential library helpers from our grade—a guy named Zach, and Joni.

The first time Joni showed me where the future library-helpers hid out, it was exactly as I pictured it would be. They had a corner in the room where they worked on their homework during study hall, with couches assigned specifically for them and their comfort needs. Zach had his homework spread out on the table near the couch and was scribbling answers down onto a loose leaf piece of paper for our reading that day in Earth Science.