“Oops,” she thought as she quickly pulled it out.
“We don’t suck our thumbs in the sixth grade,” said Mrs. Hardlick proudly.
She heard some of the other sixth-graders snicker.
Mrs. Hardlick resented Angeline. She didn’t like having an eight-year-old kid in her class of sixth-graders. She especially didn’t like having an eight-year-old kid who was smarter than she, although Mrs. Hardlick would never admit that Angeline was smart. In Mrs. Hardlick’s mind, Angeline was a genius, which had nothing to do with being smart. It was more like being a freak, like a goat with two heads.
“Only babies suck their thumbs,” said Mrs. Hardlick.
Angeline felt ashamed. Even kids in the third grade, her age, didn’t suck their thumbs anymore. She felt like she was going to cry. “Oh, come on, Angeline,” she told herself. “Don’t start crying. Not now!” She cried way too much for the sixth grade. She even cried a lot for the first grade.
“Look, she’s crying,” someone teased.
She was not. It wasn’t true. But then, as soon as she heard that person say it, then, wouldn’t you know it, she did start to cry.
“She may be smart but she’s still a baby,” said someone else.
“She’s not smart, she’s a freak.”
“Angeline, don’t be a crybaby,” Mrs. Hardlick admonished her. “If you feel you must cry, go outside. You may come back in when you are ready to act like a sixth-grader.”
Still crying, Angeline walked outside.
“What a freak,” she heard someone say.
She sat down outside, next to the door. She was wrong. Mrs. Hardlick didn’t hate it when she sucked her thumb. It was just the opposite. Mrs. Hardlick loved it. The whole class loved it. They loved to put her down. And whether she realized it or not, that was why she cried. It wasn’t because they called her a baby or a freak; it was because they enjoyed it so much.
She bit the tip of her thumb and sniffled. She felt just like a double-headed goat.
Three
A Goat with One Head
At lunch, she sat by herself on the grass against a tree and ate a peanut butter and jello sandwich. She preferred jello to jelly with her peanut butter.
There was a boy also sitting alone not too far away from her. She watched him try to open his bag of potato chips. He pulled and pushed the bag in every direction until she was sure that all the chips inside had been smashed to smithereens. Still, the bag would not open.
She took another bite out of her peanut butter and jello and tried to keep from laughing. Besides crying too much, Angeline also thought she laughed too much. It wasn’t that she laughed a lot—just at all the wrong times. She thought watching the boy try to open his potato chip bag was the funniest thing she’d ever seen, but she didn’t want to laugh at him.
He bit the bag with his teeth and jerked at it with both hands. Nothing. Still holding it in his teeth and both hands, he vigorously shook his head.
She gulped down some milk, with her eyes fixed on the boy.
Suddenly the bag burst open, and Angeline instantly burst out laughing, causing milk to squirt out of her mouth. The potato chips exploded out of the bag and onto the ground. Angeline couldn’t stop laughing as she wiped the milk off her face with a napkin.
The boy stared at her. He still held part of the torn bag in one hand, part in the other hand, and part in his teeth. The potato chips were in little crumbs all around him.
Angeline did her best to stop laughing. She only managed to halt every other laugh. She hoped the boy wouldn’t hit her. She didn’t want to cry again.
But, to her surprise, the boy also laughed. It was a stupid, awkward laugh. He sounded like an embarrassed hyena. Then, seeing that Angeline was still watching him, he pretended to eat his empty bag of potato chips—not the potato chips, but the bag itself—as if that was all he ever wanted in the first place.
Angeline thought it was the funniest thing she’d ever seen.
Then the boy took his sandwich out of its plastic bag, threw it on the ground, and pretended to eat the plastic bag. Angeline couldn’t stop laughing. She watched as he poured the rest of his milk onto the dirt and pretended to eat the empty milk carton. She was hysterical.
At that moment there rolled past her a tennis ball, which someone had hit all the way from the baseball field. It stopped next to the boy who was so funny.
“Hey, Goon! Get the ball!” someone called.