10. Jill Tierney's Dandruff

Jill Tierney had the worst case of dandruff I’d ever seen and was always asking me what I got on my math test. She was always asking everyone what they got on their math tests. As the teacher passed back the yellow papers with their smeared purple x’s and scribbled grades across the top to our fourth grade class Jill would bounce around the room saying to anyone who crossed her path, “What’d ya get?” “What’d ya get?”

We all knew Jill herself had straight one hundreds, although when asked she’d smile and answer, “I did all right.” She had straight blonde hair and a small mouth through which she’d call the boys “Shitheels” whenever they chased after her at lunchtime and stole her scarf. It was a curse word I’d never heard up until then. The thing about Jill was, she wasn’t just smart, she was popular. I’d watch in wonder as she galloped around the swingset after the boys, watch them slow down so she could catch them, watch her slow down so she wouldn’t.

I knew Jill and I were going to end up boyfriend and girlfriend. I just knew it. To begin with, there was the fact that we were the smartest girl and smartest boy in Mrs. Wortmann’s fourth grade class. My math tests too were straight one hundreds. And there were other signs. For example: when we trooped down in October to get our yearly photos taken, I was put in line behind Jill. The picture came back a few weeks later and there we were, our faces side by side on the bottom of the full class sheet, Jill with her blonde hair (the photos were in black and white, but when I looked at the picture I saw blonde) and me making a squinched face smile. We looked so good there together!

After Christmas break, Mrs. Wortmann rearranged the classroom tables into a boy-girl pattern, and of course put Jill and I side by side. I was still too shy and intimidated to say anything to her. Instead I took every chance to study the side of her face and structure of her inner ear. I found myself fascinated by the white specks of dandruff she’d leave behind on her desk when she went to the bathroom or to talk to our teacher Mrs. Wortmann during free times. I’d pick the flakes up on the tips of my finger, crumble them against my thumb.

Jill, I discovered from sitting next to her, left little to chance when it came to those one hundreds of hers. During tests she’d drop her pencil, dip to get it, and then on her way up lift the top of her desk. After a glance at her notes she’d return to furious writing. She caught me catching her at this one time, but her reaction wasn’t what I expected. “Pretty good, huh?” she asked. “Wortmann is so busy making sure nobody else cheats she never even bothers to look at us.”

Another time during a math test Mrs. Wortmann turned her back to us and Jill started jabbing into my arm with one of the gray number 2 pencils she always wrote with. (Her father worked for IBM and brought the pencils home for her.) When I looked up she started gesturing frantically at me to move my arm. She either wanted to look at my answers or copy them outright, I wasn’t sure. I gave her a serious look—I knew this wasn’t right, and besides, Mrs. Wortmann could turn around at any moment, she had to be more careful—but she smiled a tight smile (the most her lips would allow) and I melted. I moved not just my arm but my whole chair, so Jill could look on as much as she wanted, and continued to do the same for every test we had after that.

For the Valentine’s Party, I volunteered to bring in cupcakes. Usually I did something easy, napkins or paper cups, but Jill had already said she was bringing in cupcakes and I loved the way our names looked up there together on the blackboard, “Patty and Chris” underneath “Cupcakes.” But then I forgot to tell my mother about volunteering, and didn’t remember until eight o’clock of the night before the party. We had no batter, no icing, and I was near tears thinking about coming into class the next day without what I’d signed up for. So my mother grumbled and improvised and managed to make a batch of from-scratch cupcakes.

I appreciated the effort, but the cupcakes were not good. The icing was sugar and water with red food coloring, only not enough red food coloring, so they looked more pink. The insides were a grainy yellow. I brought the eleven of them that looked the best in a shoebox I placed next to the twine-wrapped cake boxes that held Jill’s two dozen cupcakes. Jill’s were devil’s food, with real red icing into which those Valentine heart candies had been pressed. “Be Mine.” “Sweetheart.”

People passed right over my cupcakes and went straight for Jill’s. I knew they were all laughing at me. If someone did take a cupcake of mine, they’d have one bite and put it down on a windowsill.

I knew it wasn’t Jill’s fault, exactly, but I couldn’t stop feeling like she had tried to show me up on purpose.

When Mrs. Wortmann put on our favorite record—“Rockin’ Robin”—and all the boys in the class went up to the front of the room to sing along, I sulked in back. No amount of Hi-C could cheer me up. In this nothing-left-to-lose frame of mind, I decided to accept my fate.

I cornered Jill near the food table, where she was throwing away her empty cupcake boxes. “Looks like you’re going to have to drag those home with you,” she said, pointing to the pathetic contents of my shoebox.

I nodded, took a deep breath. “Hey, Jill. Do you wanna be my girlfriend?”

She flipped her hair, considered it, perhaps weighed my lack of popularity against all the math test answers this would guarantee. “Nah, I don’t think so,” she finally said.

I grabbed one of my own cupcakes and dug in. They didn’t taste that bad. “Oh yeah?” I said. “Good.”