hunkered down in Betsy’s room listening to records, eating peanut butter straight out of the jar, and planning the next adventure. But after Mindy’s arrival, I couldn’t count on anything. Sometimes instead of racing home with me, Betsy would linger after school with Mindy, doing penny drops on the monkey bars or playing H-O-R-S-E. On those days I’d shove my hands in my pockets and kick dirt all the way home. Resign myself to another afternoon spent watching Brooder terrorize the little kids who were just trying to get home too. Betsy would always catch up with me later, but by then I was sunk so deep in self-pity even Betsy couldn’t pull me out.
It was spring then, and Betsy’s latest scheme was a complex one aimed at framing Howie Burke in an April Fool’s prank. Howie was notorious for his own annual April Fool’s high jinx. He bragged endlessly about the rotten eggs he had thrown, the houses he had toilet-papered, the tires he had flattened. His crowning achievement (and the source of Betsy’s greatest fury) being the shaving cream fiasco of 1957, when he broke into Betsy’s father’s barbershop and stole a case of Barbasol, which (to add insult to injury) he used to write “Besty Praker Eats Boogers”(Howie was likely dyslexic, though back then we just thought he was stupid) in the windows of Two Rivers Graded School. Betsy and Howie had been sparring since the second grade, when Betsy started the war by beating Howie in a recess footrace. Sometimes her passion for getting back at Howie verged on the manic, and I found myself feeling jealous. I never seemed to incite much of anything in Betsy; even when she and I were pretending to dislike each other at school, I got little more than a tongue stuck out. Eyes crossed.
Howie had a crush on our English teacher, Miss Bean. (The rules were different when it came to boys and pretty teachers too. We all loved Miss Bean. We all openly adored her.) However, of all of us, Howie’s infatuation was the most intense, and Betsy Parker knew it.
“I’ve got it,” Betsy said one Friday afternoon when Mindy was occupied with something, or someone, else and I was contentedly playing second fiddle. We were sitting on Betsy’s bedroom floor drinking our third and fourth Cokes respectively. (Betsy’s dad had a refrigerator in the basement, which was always stocked with extra sodas.)
“Got what?” I asked.
“We’re going to TP Miss Bean’s house,” she said.
“Why?” I asked. Though my heart sang every time Betsy spoke in the plural, the thought of doing anything like this to Miss Bean seemed like sacrilege.
“We’re going to TP the house, put eggs in the mailbox, AND shaving cream her car.”
I shook my head. “We can’t.”
“Yes, we can,” she said. “If you wear this Superman mask,” she said, raising a lone eyebrow and reaching under her bed. She pulled out a plastic mask identical to the one that Howie Burke had worn for the last three consecutive pranks. (He was known to work in disguise.)
“And you ?” I asked.
“Lois Lane?” she said, smiling in the way that made my knees feel like oatmeal. The idea of sneaking around in the dark with Betsy was almost more than I could stand.
“We can’t,” I said then, laughing and shaking my head. “Miss Bean didn’t do anything. That’s just mean.”
“ You like her too ?” Betsy asked, accusingly.
“No,” I said, reaching for the mask, wondering if Betsy was jealous. Hoping Betsy was jealous. But I did like Miss Bean. I liked Miss Bean in her sweater sets and pastel pumps that matched. I liked the way she smelled like toothpaste and patted the top of my head when I said something insightful in class.
“She’ll know it’s not Howie,” I said.
“How?”
“Because Howie’s like six feet tall,” I said. (I was a late bloomer. I wouldn’t see six feet until I was sixteen. And then, as if my bones were making up for lost time, I would grow another four inches between my junior and senior years in high school.)
“True,” she said sadly, and hung the mask on her bedpost.
Relieved, I picked up my Coke and drained the last few sweet drops. “We’ll get him back someday,” I offered, closing my lips tightly around we .
I figured out what happened during English class when Miss Bean slammed her books down on her desk and said, “Well, I hope you enjoyed your little prank. Very funny.”
I heard giggles. Girl giggles.
I turned around and saw that Betsy was sitting next to Mindy, who was whispering something in her ear. Betsy was smiling. My heart dropped with the realization of what happened. Of course, Mindy. Mindy who was almost six feet tall. I felt like I was melting into my seat.
Howie sat in the front row as he always did, eyes wide and full of love.
“ Very funny,” Miss Bean said again, her voice shaking now. She looked out over us and frowned, her eyes teary. Then she opened her desk drawer and pulled out a shoe box. She took the lid off, and the smell of rotten eggs filled the room. She went to Howie’s desk and set the box down. “I just got a letter from my fiancé,” she said. “He’s in the service. He’s stationed in Germany. I haven’t seen him in almost six months.”
Howie looked confused as he peered into the box. When he reached in and pulled out the dripping wet letter, I heard Betsy gasp.
“April Fools,” Miss Bean said, crying now, and then she rushed out of the room.
Howie sat there, dumb. We all sat there, dumb.
After school, Betsy came running up to me as I made my way across the soccer field. “I should have listened to you,” she said, reaching for my hand.
I nodded my head. “Yeah.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t tell you, because I know how much you like Miss Bean. We didn’t know there was a letter from her boyfriend in there,” she said, running after me as I quickened my pace. “We did it because of Howie.”
I kept walking as fast as I could.
“I’m sorry, Harper,” she said. “We didn’t do it to be mean to Miss Bean.”
I stopped and looked at her. She had two braids and both of them were coming undone.
“It was stupid,” she said. “Really stupid.”
And she had no idea that though I felt bad for Miss Bean and her stinky, soggy letter, I felt worse for me. Because Betsy had picked Mindy Wheeler as her coconspirator. Because she and Mindy had their own secret, and that it had nothing to do with me. I went home sulking and mad. I didn’t answer the phone when she called, and didn’t answer the door when she came over.
But the next day when we got to school, Betsy was sitting at her desk, crying into her hands, and my heart sank. “Mrs. Praker’s in a nuthouse,” was scrawled across the chalkboard in Howie’s backward script.
And even though we were at school and everybody was watching, I went to her. I put my arm over her shoulder and hugged her. In front of the entire eighth-grade class, I held her. And in the crook of my arm, she shook with a sadness I knew I would never be able to understand or share.
“I told Mindy not to tell anybody,” she cried, wiping furiously at her tears. “She was supposed to be my friend. She promised . Why would she tell him?”
Mindy’s motives became clear that afternoon when instead of playing basketball, she and Howie disappeared behind the school and came back five minutes later with leaves in their hair, looking both guilty and proud. (Howie said later that her boobs felt like peaches, an observation we all believed since none of us yet had evidence to the contrary.)
Mindy Wheeler moved away before school let out for the summer, and everyone in the whole school seemed to mourn her passing except for me. I was glad she was gone. But thanks to Mindy, at least I’d found my purpose. I had been put on this earth to protect Betsy. To keep her