ONE
 
An Awful Morning – Weird Kitchen – Worst Field Trip Ever – Bullies on the Bus – A Missing Friend
 
 
What Lee Jones should have suspected when he entered the City School’s multipurpose room was that the most awful morning of his life was about to get much awfuller. But Lee made a mistake that’s far too common. Brushing his hair before school, Lee convinced himself that his life was so horrid already, it couldn’t possibly get worse. Right?
Not necessarily.
Let’s back up a bit and see precisely how awful Lee’s life was that morning before it took a turn for the worse.
In less than a month, Lee would graduate from the eighth grade, all in all a good thing. He was excited to start high school, yet was a little nervous, too. Even though he’d be staying at the City School, only moving from the fourth floor to the fifth, and even though he knew a lot of the high school kids already, freshman year was a bit of a mystery to him. Going to high school seemed like entering a big dark cave through a narrow tunnel. You could get lost in there and never find your way out. But this was a minor awfulness for Lee, the usual sort of stuff you face in life. Not great but doable.
The true awfulness about starting high school was that Lee would be going into that dark cave alone. His very best friend—and pretty much only friend these days—Joan Lee, was transferring to Starr King Prep in the fall. Joan and Lee had attended the City School together since pre-K, but it wasn’t until sixth grade, on the first day of middle school, that they became best friends.
That day, both of them running late because neither could open their lockers, they found themselves next to each other in the hot lunch line in the basement cafeteria. As they pushed their trays along, they talked about their stupid lockers and the new teachers and last summer and were there going to be real dances and were eighth graders as cruel as they were supposed to be.
When they arrived at the dessert station, however, both Lee and Joan reached for the same Rice Krispies square, which happened to be the last Rice Krispies square. Joan held one side of the white plastic plate, Lee the other, and they commenced debating over who had dibs. Joan suggested that since she was first in line, the Rice Krispies square was hers. Lee claimed he only let Joan go first because he was a gentleman, so Joan should repay his good manners by letting him have the Rice Krispies square. Joan said she never asked him to be so polite; Lee said he couldn’t help himself. Joan tugged at the plate; Lee tugged back.
Later, they sometimes wonder if they would have become friends or not if they had shared that last Rice Krispies square. Maybe if they had broken the square in two, middle school would have turned out different. Lee would have taken his half, Joan hers, and they would have gone their separate ways.
But that possibility never had a chance to arrive. Because right at that moment, Trevor McGahee, the biggest sixth grader in the history of sixth graders, reached between Joan and Lee, snatched that Rice Krispies square off the white plastic plate, and proceeded to lick it with his big gross tongue. Trevor had claimed his dessert. Welcome to middle school. Ew.
Joan and Lee each let go of the plate, then looked at each other, then gave each other THE SHUDDER. Both of them shook a little, both raised their shoulders a little, both made a disgusted expression, and both let out low moans. This was the first time they shared what they would later call a LOOK. Joan and Lee soon discovered they could carry on an entire conversation with one shared glance, one simple LOOK. If it hadn’t been for that last Rice Krispies square and for big dumb gross Trevor, they might never have known that.
Joan and Lee did eat lunch together that day and started hanging out all the time—no big deal. They still had their other friends, but in middle school, they found that friendships and alliances changed on a weekly, if not daily basis. Oh, the other kids gave them a hard time, a boy and girl being best friends and all, but since this was middle school, the other kids would get bored quickly and move on to giving some other kids some other hard time about something else. Joan and Lee developed a LOOK to cover all this, THE MIDDLE SCHOOL, which roughly translated as, “Hey, it’s middle school, whacha gonna do?”
Their friendship was not a perfect one, but true friendships never were, Lee figured. What often helped build a friendship were the differences between the two friends, and Joan and Lee were opposites in many ways. Lee, Joan would probably say, was a little too laid-back, a little too “Whatever, dude.” Joan, Lee would happily tell you, was wound up way too tight, a homework-eating-robot machine. They were perfectly mismatched. Even their names said this, mirror images that were also opposites—Lee Jones, Joan Lee.
But despite their differences, maybe because of them, they both knew that their friendship was THE ONLY THING that made the murky swamp of middle school possible. All those cliques and romance dramas and popularity death matches—ugh!
But now Joan was leaving. Her parents had developed “serious reservations” about the City School’s “commitment to calculus” and were switching her to Starr King. Joan refused to ask her parents to change their minds. She would stand up to anybody in the world, Lee knew, except her parents. And no matter how much Lee’s parents told him that Joan’s transfer was “best for everyone,” and no matter how much he and Joan made promises to stay FRIENDS FOREVER, Lee suspected that such promises were impossible to keep. Deep down he feared that come the fall, he would never see Joan again. Their lives would be even more different than they were now.
Joan lived in San Francisco’s Presidio Heights, which is a very posh neighborhood, and Lee lived in the great flat streets of the city’s Sunset District, a neighborhood not known for its poshness. Joan’s enormous house looked out over the Presidio, the bay and the Golden Gate Bridge; Lee’s house looked out over Eighth Avenue and May Lee’s Free Chinese Delivery.
Where the City School was packed into a five-story sardine can downtown, Starr King Prep sprawled over acres of playing field above Ocean Beach. The schools’ athletic teams even played in different leagues, so he and Joan wouldn’t see each other at games. As an unspoken rule, Starr Kings and City Schoolers did not hang out together. It was highly unlikely that Lee and Joan would “run into” each other, no matter how often their parents told them otherwise. The size of the world was going to push them apart.
But Joan transferring was not the awfullest of the awful things this foggy May morning. The most awful thing about this morning had arrived just the night before at dinner. It arrived with a sudden, sickening quiet and some very strange behavior on the part of Lee’s kitchen.
He and his parents were sitting at the kitchen table, and Lee was just about to tear into a big and juicy BLT, when his mom began to speak ever so softly. The softness in her voice should have been Lee’s first clue, but BLTs can be distracting.
“Honey,” his mom said, “your father and I have,...