Sixth Grade Can Really Kill You by Barthe DeClements

Author:Barthe DeClements
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

False Alarm

Mother wasn’t too mad about my ears. She said that she would have preferred that I had waited to pierce them until I was at least fourteen, but she thought the earrings were very tasteful. I told her the saleslady said topaz makes your depression go away.

“Topaz!” Mother exclaimed. “Leo, are these real stones?”

I quickly put them back in their boxes and disappeared upstairs, letting Uncle Leo handle Mother.

He left the next morning, which was Sunday. After lunch I went over to the Martins’ garage sale with the two dollars Dad gave me to spend. I wandered around in the crowd until I found a black sleeveless T-shirt of Christian’s that had white skulls printed on it.

Louise was being cashier at a table in front of the garage doors. I paid her fifty cents for the shirt and asked her if that old alarm clock on the tool shelf really worked.

“Sure,” she said. “We just don’t need it any more because we have electric ones.”

“Do you have a plastic sack to put it in?”

Louise got one from her kitchen. I gave her another fifty cents and left for home. There’s a big fir tree in our front yard. I stuck the plastic sack deep in its branches before I went into the house.

The next morning I came down to breakfast in my fuzz jeans and white turtleneck sweater with Christian’s T-shirt pulled on top.

“Helen,” Mother said, “you are not wearing that outfit to school.”

Dad looked up from his scrambled eggs. “I think she looks pretty cute.”

Mother served me my eggs in pursed-lip silence.

After she managed a begrudging kiss good-bye and had closed the front door, I walked across the wet grass to the fir tree and took out the alarm clock. There was a cold rain falling so I huddled against the branches while I set and wound the clock, set the alarm for one-thirty, and gave the alarm key one turn. I tucked the clock up inside my jacket where I could hold it with my arm, and took off for Louise’s.

Walking to school beside me, Louise noticed the gold posts in my ears. “You did it!” she cried. “You got your ears pierced.”

When I went into the classroom, Sharon and Marianne noticed them, too. “Where’d you have it done?” Marianne asked.

“In the U District,” I told her. Mrs. Lobb wasn’t in the room yet so I eased over to my seat, dropped my reading book on my desk, took out a couple sheets of paper, eased to the back wastebasket, slipped the clock into the basket, dropped the papers on top, and hung up my jacket.

“Wicked shirt,” Jimmy said when I sat back down.

Mrs. Lobb came in about five minutes later. I took my excuse up to her desk. She did a double take on the skulls, but didn’t say anything to me.

At lunch recess we couldn’t play any games because of the rain. Louise and I stood under the covered area talking about how much her family made on the garage sale and how she wished she’d thought of wearing Christian’s shirt.

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