Bigger than a Bread Box Read online

  Then, in the cafeteria one day, when I’d forgotten my lunch money and had nothing to eat, I was just sitting there, watching everyone else munch and sip and chew. Hannah reached across the table and handed me a bunch of her grapes. She said, not quite looking at me but more at the rest of the table, “Broke today, Becky? That’s a change. Did your dad lose his job or something?” Then she laughed and added, “Just kidding!”

  I sat there holding the grapes. I could tell it was about to be my turn to get picked on. My turn. I remembered back to my first day. I remembered how I hadn’t said anything nice to Megan about her curly red hair, which was perfectly fine hair. I knew I couldn’t expect anyone to be nice to me now.

  I also knew what I was supposed to say next, as though I’d been handed a script. If I didn’t want to get picked on, I was supposed to laugh confidently and say, “Of course not, you freak!” Or, if I preferred, I could just roll my eyes and mutter, “Ha-ha, very funny.” That was how to escape the moment. That was what Becky would do.

  But I wasn’t Becky, not inside, and I couldn’t help thinking, what if my dad had lost his job today? What if I really cared, like Megan had cared about her big, curly hair? What if I couldn’t laugh?

  I remembered how my dad had come home on the bus, the day of the wreck, after they’d towed his cab away. I remembered how grim the house had felt, how worried my parents had been. I remembered taking Lew to the playground without being asked, just to get him away and give my parents time to talk. It didn’t seem like the kind of thing to joke about, not to me.

  So I didn’t roll my eyes or laugh. Instead I did the opposite. I looked her dead in the eyes and said, “Actually, my dad’s been out of work for a few months now, Hannah. And I don’t even live with him anymore. I miss him, so it’s not really very funny.”

  Hannah stared at me. The other girls eyed each other uncomfortably. I looked over at the boys’ table and saw that they were watching too, that Coleman was staring. But I didn’t care. I set the grapes back on the table, picked up my backpack, and turned away as fast as I could.

  As I left the table, making sure not to stumble, I heard Hannah whisper, “Sensitive much?” A few of the other girls tittered for her benefit, but I was pretty sure I’d won whatever game it was we were playing.

  I headed out the heavy metal cafeteria door to the bright, cold sunlight and the empty concrete of the schoolyard. I sat down on a bench, alone, took in deep breaths of cold air, and raised my face up to the warm sun. I was proud of myself, but I was nervous too, so I waited for a minute after the bell before I went back inside. I’d rather wait for the safety of my assigned seat and Mr. Cook’s poems. Then I’d go home and tell Lew what I’d done. He wouldn’t understand, but he’d listen. He’d probably laugh and poke me or hand me a race car or a plastic frog or some other junk. Still, that would be something. Maybe I’d even tell Gran about this. This seemed like something she’d want to hear about, a story she’d like. Then, tomorrow, I’d start all over, as Rebecca Shapiro, the bookish kid who liked poems and didn’t have to pretend otherwise.

  As the day wore on, I felt less sure that I’d won. Hannah didn’t just ignore me; she stared at me meanly, from under the long bangs of her perfectly layered hair. The other girls kept their distance in the hallway. Nobody came over to talk to me at my locker, not anyone. Not even the really nerdy kids were making eye contact with me. I guess that was fair, since I’d never talked to them either. As I was leaving the building, Maya bumped into me in the hallway. It didn’t seem like an accident. When Cat did the same exact thing going down the steps, and then laughed, I was sure it wasn’t.

  Walking home, telling Gran didn’t seem like a fun idea anymore. In fact, I was a little scared. I didn’t even tell Lew. I just sat in the living room with him and watched the first twenty minutes or so of a movie about the last robot on a planet covered in garbage. A robot whose only friend was a cockroach. It was a good movie, a sad movie, but it didn’t make me feel any better. That poor rusty little guy. I got up and left the room.

  The next day was even worse. I didn’t talk to anybody, from the moment I got to school until the moment I left. It’s a weird feeling, not talking at all. I’d spent almost a month now not talking much, but when you really don’t ever open your mouth, you start to feel weird. Your mouth gets to feeling pasty and thick. You get angry, and it starts to feel like everyone is staring at you.

  When I tried to take my lunch into the library, Mrs. Jenkins, the librarian, pointed me right back to the cafeteria, where I had to sit entirely alone at a table by myself, for everyone to see. I felt like I was in a cage or something, at the zoo. Not like a panda or a monkey, hanging out in a big glass box with all its friends, but more like something scaly and toothy and cold, like a crocodile maybe. Something that has to be kept apart.

  I wasn’t sure how I’d handle this, how I could stand to come back the next day. And the next. Again and again. It was too hard.

  At the very end of the day, when I passed Megan in the hall, she handed me a note and smiled slightly. I was too surprised to even smile back. I felt like I’d forgotten how to smile. It had been a very long day of nothing but mean, and now … a smile.

  She was gone before I knew what was happening. Standing there, with all the other kids I didn’t know rushing past me loudly, I unfolded the note. I found a smiley face beside words that read, “Everyone will forget about it. They always do. Chin up.”

  Megan is different, I thought. Megan is nice. Then it dawned on me: Maybe I can be real friends with Megan.

  The problem was, no matter how nice she was, Megan wasn’t going to come sit at my empty table with me. In order to be friends with Megan, I’d have to go crawling back to Hannah. Could I stand it? Was it even possible now? I sighed.

  Walking home, I remembered Megan’s smile. I tried to think of some ways to hurry up the crawling back. I tried to think of painless ways to make up with Hannah faster. Maybe I needed to apologize, or maybe I needed to start up with the presents again. Maybe I just needed to be cooler. Even more Becky.

  That was horrible to consider.

  When I got to Gran’s, I skipped checking in with Lew and made a beeline for my room. Carefully I closed the door, and then I stood in front of the bread box for the first time in almost a week. I stood there, wondering what might make me popular again. I asked myself, what was the awesomest thing I could think of? What would make people think I was cool?

  Then I had a thought. I patted the bread box and said, “I … I want a jacket just like Hannah’s.”

  The box would know which one.

  Hannah’s jacket was special. It was her most favorite item of clothing. Her “signature item,” she called it. As she’d explained to me several times, it was a riding coat, and it was made of soft tan leather, the color of caramel, but it had red flowers stitched on it in a kind of country-western style that wasn’t too country-western. Everyone loved Hannah’s jacket.

  She didn’t keep it in her locker but carried it with her through the day, hanging it on the back of her chair in each class. She was extra careful with it, always dusting it off when there wasn’t any dust on it. It wasn’t a seventh-grade kind of jacket. It was an older-sister kind of jacket, or maybe even a college-kid jacket.

  I opened up the bread box. There was a jacket just like Hannah’s, exactly like Hannah’s, folded neatly. I pulled it out and slipped it on. It fit perfectly. Like it had been made for me, which probably it had been.

  I turned to admire myself in the mirror. The sleeves touched my palms. The lines of the coat hugged my shoulders. It felt rich—thin but heavy.

  I pushed my hair aside with my hand so that the front swooped into pretend bangs. I didn’t look like myself at all, I thought, with my hair that way. Mary Kate would barely recognize me if I went home looking like this. I looked better than me, older than me. I got butterflies staring in the mirror. Maybe it wasn’t all bad to be cool. I patted the bread box again and wished for a head
band. I fixed my hair so that the swoop stayed.

  I made another wish and filled my pockets with the Starbucks gift cards from the bread box.

  CHAPTER 12

  The next morning, after watching Lew arrange raisins in a circle on top of his oatmeal and feeling a little bad that I hadn’t played with him the day before and that I didn’t have time for him now, I locked myself in the bathroom. I got dressed very, very carefully. I pulled on my skinny jeans and slipped into new red ballet flats. I picked out my favorite black shirt. Then I did my hair in the swoopy new way. When everything looked perfect, I went to my bedroom and put the jacket on. It all felt just right.

  I picked up my backpack, ran down the hallway, and shot out the front door, shouting, “Off to school!” before my mom or Gran could catch a glimpse of me. I knew the jacket was too much. I knew they’d ask questions if they saw it.

  I also knew I looked really good. Each time I caught a glimpse of myself reflected in a car window, I couldn’t help smiling. I felt pretty. I knew where I was going. I didn’t feel like Becky, exactly. I felt like someone else. Maybe someone older. Or someone richer. Or something. I wasn’t sure. I felt new in my jacket, and I was pretty certain that, just like Megan had said, soon everyone would forget about what had happened at the lunch table. They’d be too jealous to ignore me, too impressed to make fun. I figured I’d begin with Megan. I’d get myself an ally.

  Before I could say hello to anyone, before I could even make it inside the doors of the school, they saw me. Or I should say, they saw the jacket.

  “Oh. My. God!” Maya called out when I neared the front steps. She was standing, facing me, in a tight little circle with a few other girls. When she spoke, the circle opened and turned to see what she was talking about.

  “Hi,” I said, walking over like there was no reason I shouldn’t walk over to them, like there was nothing wrong at all, like they hadn’t spent the last two days treating me like garbage. I walked over, even though the tone of her voice made me feel uneasy.

  “Look at you!” Maya said. “How did you manage that?”

  “Hannah lent it to you?” asked Megan. “Maybe because she felt bad about … the other day?” She looked at me hopefully.

  “No,” I said, setting down my backpack and taking a deep breath. “Nope. Actually, this is mine. My jacket. I just got it.” I brushed an imaginary fleck of dirt off the lapel.

  “Really?” Cat asked. I couldn’t quite read the expression on her face. It was like … like she knew a secret. “Where’d you get it?”

  “Oh, you know …,” I said, thinking fast and deciding to lie vaguely. “Online.”

  “Where online?” asked a girl I’d never really talked to, an eighth grader named Maddie.

  “Um. I don’t remember.”

  “That’s funny,” added Maddie. “Because I’m pretty sure Hannah said that hers was one of a kind, handmade, but maybe it isn’t!” She snickered. I couldn’t decide if the snicker was aimed at me or at Hannah.

  “She … she did?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” said Maya. “She said it was a designer thing her dad had gotten made for her. She made a big deal about it being from, like, Paris or somewhere. I forget. London?”

  “Italy,” said Cat. She turned back to me. “Her dad went to Milan. Remember?”

  “No, I—I don’t remember,” I stammered. If only I had—

  “That’s funny,” said Maya. “She talks about it enough, but anyway, maybe yours is just a knockoff or something?”

  “Um, yeah, maybe—that must be it,” I said. I nodded in what I hoped was a casual way. I was sweating under the jacket. I felt chilly and hot all at once. I wished I could run home and climb back into bed, start the day over. It was way too late for that now. “It probably is—what you said—a rip-off.”

  “Knockoff,” said Maddie, “not rip-off.” She laughed.

  “Knockoff, knockoff …,” I repeated, looking down at my feet. The toes of my ballet flats were newly scuffed, and they looked too red to me now. Like maraschino cherries. They looked like toy shoes. “It’s just a knockoff.”

  I breathed deeply and prayed for this to be true. A knockoff didn’t sound like a good thing to have, but it sounded way better than the alternative. What would Hannah do when I showed up with a coat exactly like her one-of-a-kind jacket? How would I explain that there were two one-of-a-kind coats in the same school? Could the bread box even do that? Could it have created an exact replica of something? Could the box clone something? I wondered what would happen if I wished for the Mona Lisa.

  Then, for the very first time, I wondered just where, exactly, the things I wished for came from. How they managed to appear in the box the very moment I wanted them. But I didn’t have long to think about it—

  “Come on!” said Cat, picking up her bag and starting up the steps. “We’ll be late, and now I can’t wait to see Hannah.” She gave me a mean smile.

  I felt sick. I felt so sick.

  “Come on, Becky,” said Megan gently, hanging back for me. “It’ll be okay. Who cares if your coat isn’t a real Italian one like hers? Who cares about coats?”

  Evidently a lot of people, I thought. Out loud I said, “Thanks.”

  I shuffled up the stairs behind the red pouf of Megan’s hair and into school. I trudged through the sea of kids whose names I mostly still didn’t know to what now felt like my doom.

  When we got inside, there was Hannah, standing at her locker with her back to us. We walked up the hall toward her. I felt like I might puke. The jacket was weighing on my shoulders, pulling me down.

  “Hey, Hannah!” Cat called out eagerly. “Hannah!”

  Hannah whipped around, her hair fanning out, her eyes wide open. She began to say, “Guess what! Someone stole my—” Then she took everything in—she saw me.

  She stopped speaking.

  She closed her perfect mouth.

  She looked me up and down.

  She crossed her arms and smiled, suddenly much calmer.

  “I was just saying,” she said, “that someone stole my coat.” She laughed. “What’s up, Becky? Are you someone now?”

  “No,” I said, not thinking.

  “You’re not someone?” She smiled meanly. “I didn’t think so.”

  “No. I mean, I didn’t steal it. I—I—”

  “What, you were only borrowing it?” she asked with a smirk.

  “No, really. I bought it. Online.”

  “Sure you did,” whispered Cat.

  The other girls were enjoying this. I glanced over at Megan. She avoided making eye contact with me. She chewed her thumbnail and looked at her hand intently as she did it.

  I squirmed. “No, but … well … maybe someone else stole it and posted it on eBay, and then I bought it without knowing,” I said.

  “I had it yesterday,” said Hannah flatly.

  “Maybe it’s not the same coat!” I said, grasping at straws. I tried to keep my voice from rising or shaking. I didn’t want to cry. I wouldn’t be able to stand it if I cried now. “And it’s just a coincidence that you got yours stolen when I happened to get mine.”

  “Unlikely,” said Hannah. “Since mine was one of a kind. Mine was special.”

  “We told her that,” Maya rushed to say, looking proud of herself.

  “Yeah,” said Cat. “We told her.”

  I felt like I might have a heart attack. Did twelve-year-olds have heart attacks?

  The other girls backed away slightly as Hannah, still laughing, moved in on me to inspect the coat. She ran her finger along the red stitching. Then, with a quick jerk, she pulled the neck of the coat out and peered down at the tag.

  I went limp. “It’s not yours!” I bleated, hoping against hope. “It’s a knockoff.”

  Hannah stopped laughing.

  “I didn’t steal it—”

  “Oh, Becky,” said Hannah, her voice serious, cold, thin, and as sharp as a razor. “It’s mine—look!”

  The other gir
ls craned their necks and bunched around me to see, like dogs in a pack. They all stared at the back of my neck. Then they all stepped away from me.

  “You’re a thief,” said Hannah in that same steely voice, “and a liar, but at least now we know it. To think I almost felt bad for you yesterday. I almost apologized for saying that stuff about your dad.”

  Hannah jerked at the neck of the jacket, and I closed my eyes. The coat came off inside out, spilling those stupid plastic coffee cards everywhere. I heard them fall and hit the ground. When I opened my eyes again, I saw what everyone else had seen a minute before—her name, Hannah Ross, ironed neatly onto the tag by some mother who did things like that for her kid. Hannah’s mother.

  I looked around me. All the girls were smiling. Except Megan, who just looked surprised.

  I ran, pushing my way down the hall, through crowds of kids who would never be my friends.

  Behind me, someone yelled out, “Now I wonder where all that candy was coming from too!”

  A second voice chimed, “Yeah!”

  I pushed open a door and dashed into a stairwell, down into the basement, where nobody ever went. When I thought I heard footsteps on the stairs behind me, I turned a corner into a dark hallway. Quickly I grabbed for the first door I saw and threw myself inside. I looked around and saw that I was in a janitor’s closet. I locked the door.

  Then I sat down on an overturned bucket and waited silently.

  I wasn’t going to cry. I refused. I couldn’t give someone like Hannah—someone so shallow, so horrible, so dumb—any more of me. I wouldn’t waste my tears on her. I just sat in that tiny room, under those greenish fluorescent lights and surrounded by mops, and felt like crying.

  I wasn’t sure how long I could stand to sit there. It reminded me of that first day in Atlanta, in Gran’s attic. How long could I go without doing anything?