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“Lexie?” I said on the first day of fifth grade. “Are you nervous about school?”
It was 6:10 a.m., and I was in the hall outside my big sister’s bedroom, leaning backward against her door, talking largely to the air. Lexie used to hang a NO PEARL sign on the door to keep me out, but these days I was welcome in her room as long as I was (a) fully clothed, since Lexie still didn’t approve of underwear visits, and (b) prepared to start a meaningful conversation. Like, I couldn’t interrupt her homework or her violin practice to say, “If Bitey died and then came back to life as a human, do you think he would ask me to marry him?” (Bitey is our cat.) Or, “Have you kissed your new boyfriend yet?” Actually, I thought the kissing question could start a very meaningful conversation, but Lexie never seemed to want to discuss either her boyfriend or kissing with me.
There was no answer from within Lexie’s room. In fact, there was no sound at all in our apartment. That was probably because it was 6:10 a.m. Everyone was still asleep. Everyone except me, Pearl Littlefield. I was nervous about starting fifth grade. And I was curious to find out whether Lexie was nervous about starting high school.
“Lexie?” I said again. “Lexie?”
I heard a thump from my parents’ room and decided to lower my voice.
“Lexie?” I said in a loud whisper.
“Pearl, WHAT?” replied my sister suddenly, yanking her door open. I fell into her room and landed on my bottom. “What are you doing? It isn’t even six fifteen yet.”
I got to my feet. “Are you nervous about school?”
Lexie clapped her hand to her forehead and flung herself on her bed. “You’re asking me this now?”
Well, duh. It was the first day of school. When was I supposed to ask? “I need to know,” I told her.
Lexie rolled her eyes. Or at least I think she did. She’d already closed her lids, but I could see that her eyeballs were rolling around underneath. “I guess so,” she replied finally. “Everyone is nervous on the first day of school, Pearl.”
“No, not everyone. I don’t think JBThree is nervous.”
JBIII is my new best friend. His complete name is James Brubaker the Third, but I shortened it to JBIII, which when you say it out loud it’s JBThree.
“So maybe you should talk to JBThree,” said Lexie, “and let me go back to sleep.”
Her alarm rang then and she made a face at me, but frankly, it wasn’t as mean a face as she would have made a few months ago. She turned off the alarm, patted me on the shoulder as she headed for the bathroom, and said, “You’ll be fine, Pearl.”
*   *   *
An hour and a half later I called good-bye to Mom and rode to the lobby of our apartment building with my father and Lexie and Lexie’s cell phone. There’s no cell-phone reception on elevators, but my sister had gotten a head start on her phone call by already speed-dialing her best friend Valerie’s number. Now her thumb was poised over the Send button, prepared to press it the very second she stepped out of the elevator, so as not to waste a moment contacting Valerie about important high school business. But she didn’t have to do that. When the elevator doors opened there were Valerie and also the two Emmas sitting on the couch in the lobby across from John, my favorite doorman. They were wearing a lot of black eyeliner and staring at their cell phones and not talking. But when they saw Lexie they jumped up, and the four of them started squealing and hugging like they hadn’t just been together the afternoon before.
“Bye, Dad! Bye, Pearl!” called Lexie, and she and her grown-up high school friends rushed out the door and onto Twelfth Street.
When you’re fourteen you don’t need an adult to take you to school, even if you live in New York City. When you’re ten you do. Also, just so you know, when you’re fourteen you get to have a cell phone and your own personal computer. When you’re ten, you don’t. (Well, I don’t.)
Dad and I walked past John, who gave me a high five and said, “Break a leg, Pearl,” which is a nice thing to say, not a mean one, except you’re supposed to say it to actors not students, but whatever.
We stepped outside and I looked across Twelfth Street, and there was JBIII coming out of his building with his mother who wanted to take a first-day-of-school picture. JBIII posed for one half of one second, and then joined Dad and me for the walk to Emily Dickinson Elementary.
“Remember the first day of school last year?” I said to my father. “You walked Justine and me to Emily Dickinson. This year you’re walking JBThree and me.”
“Things certainly do change,” replied Dad, and I thought he looked a little sad. That was because there had been a lot of changes in our lives besides who I walked to school with.
We turned the corner onto Sixth Avenue and passed by all the familiar places in our neighborhood: New World, which is a coffee shop, and Steve-Dan’s, which is my all-time favorite store because it sells art supplies, and Cuppa Joe, which is a new coffee shop, and Universal, which is a dry cleaner, and the Daily Grind, which is another new coffee shop. Over the summer Lexie and her friends started going to the Daily Grind to order Mocha Moxies, which they say are coffee drinks but which really look like giant milk shakes. Whenever Lexie starts talking about how she’s grown-up enough to drink coffee what I want to say back to her is, “Mom and Dad don’t squirt a tower of whipped cream on top of their coffee,” but one thing I have learned lately is when not to say something.
When Dad and JBIII and I passed Monk’s, which is a gift store, I could feel JBIII’s eyes on me. Well, not actually on me, which would be gross, but suddenly I could tell he was looking at me and I knew why. We were now one half of a block away from Emily Dickinson, and JBIII and I had decided that no matter what anyone thought, we were simply too old to be walked right up to the door of our school by a parent.
“Dad,” I said, “JBThree and I are ten years old now.” (JBIII was actually a lot closer to eleven, while I was just barely ten.)
“Yes, you are,” agreed Dad.
“And we think that—” JBIII frowned fiercely at me and I tried to remember the exact speech he had made me memorize the day before. “I mean,” I said, backing up, “and we feel strongly that we should be allowed”—JBIII poked my arm—“that, um, we’re responsible enough to walk the rest of the way to school by ourselves. Every day.”
“You can stand here and watch us,” said JBIII. And then he added quickly, “Sir.”
“Well…,” said my father.
Dad has let me do this 2x before, but now JBIII and I were asking to do it regularly, and my father has a teensy problem with change, whether it’s good or bad.
“Please?” I said, and now JBIII glared at me. He had also warned me not to whine. “Please, Father?” I said calmly.
“I...