At Alder Tree Elementary in 1986, Mrs. Moore’s class takes advantage of a perfect October afternoon, exactly forty-five minutes before the last bell of the day. They file their way to the back playground for kickball. The halls smell like school pizza, flat and glorious in its pasty-cheese-icing. Crust, bendy like the felt material Ms. Applebaum distributes for special art projects like their I Love My Family Because… quilts. It’s Friday, so the energy in the air is like a Van Halen song. “Panama.”
“Pick your captains. Line up on the curb and get into your teams. Tommy, hands to yourself,” Mrs. Moore urges, then finds her spot in the general vicinity of where the kickball game will commence on the pavement. A couple of other teachers had the same idea on a day like today: Friday, sixty-five degrees, and time to kill before a three-day weekend to commemorate Columbus Day. A day they don’t realize is a bunch of bullshit. Not yet. It’s the 1980s.
The teams are sorted, and the sentiments on the fourth graders’ faces range from this is the best thing ever in the world to I’d rather be sitting in front of my Atari playing Combat. Nina is right smack in the middle of that neon spectrum—she’s way more athletic than most of the girls in her class, but she’s wearing strapped sandals and her too-tight pair of culottes, so it will slow her down for sure.
John Simmons tells Nina she has huge biceps for a girl. “They’re huge! Let me see?” And so she plays on it. She shows him, flexing and posing. Giggling. On the outside she tightens her biceps. On the inside she wilts like over-glued tissue paper. Torn in half between pride and embarrassment, like one of those blush trio-rectangle settings-- three slightly different pinks. They all smell like rosewater, but one is clearly Mortified Mauve.
“Yeah. I’m strong, okay?” she says, giving him stink-Sicilian eye.
Nina can’t stand that she feels wilty inside because of a boy’s quick words, but it’s like the chemicals in the body are too strong to fight the wrong things boys spit out of their mouths. The fear of being further commented on makes her shrivel.
Nina holds back her bubble gum tears and instead, nails the ketchup-red kickball pitched by James Ritman, over Wendy La Grotta’s head and into Shawn Martin’s adorable just-as-muscular arms. It was a swift and healthy kick. Shawn grunts as the ball punches his gut and his arms secure it. Nina is halfway between first and second base. Her shoes don’t matter because her legs are quick, but she’s tagged out anyway, and Shawn shows his pretty teeth to her from yards away. She’s that blush selection again, but now it’s her face, not her insides that are blotching. What did his smile mean? It sort of felt tingly, but you never know with ten-year-old boys.
The class lines up and slogs back to B-10. Mrs. Moore has nothing else planned for the day and cannot leave any space for chaos in the classroom, so the slow pace to B-10 is essential. Boys smell like salt and oil, even though it’s October. Thank God it’s not June. Nina purposely sniffs the back of Greg Levine’s neck as they pass the second-grade wing because he has eyes like aquamarine crystals and Nina likes something about his legs in his jeans. He reminds her of Alex P. Keaton.
They return to class. Nina wonders what her friends eat for dinner every night after they do their homework or come home from dance class or soccer. Do their parents smoke in the morning too, when their kids’ stomachs aren’t ready for that kind of putrid stink so that their orange juice twists around their esophagus in pivots and back-out-steps? Nina swears it was her Dad’s morning smoke ritual that killed their small bird, Tessa, and not the scrambled eggs every Sunday morning. They found her face down in her cage on Easter morning. It was a festival of tears for a week after they buried her in an old iced tea mix container in the small tomato and cucumber garden in their backyard.
Like, did Wendy La Grotto’s Dad call her mom something cute the way Nina’s dad called her own mom Poopsy while she stirred the Bolognese sauce last Wednesday night?
Nina daydreams about prowling like a spider in her friends’ kitchens, watching their lives happen. Maybe she’d get an answer as to why Wendy’s hair was always clumped in a dirty brown knot on the left side only. Why was Wendy also the best reader in the class? Did she have stacks of fancy books all over her house, and maybe that’s where she lost her hairbrush?
“When I call your row, get your things for home. Meg, put your hand down. It’s time to go home.” Meg never stopped asking useless questions like, “Do you have any suggestions for extra reading related to the passage we read about the Pinelands?”
Mrs. Moore, Nina imagined, anticipated trying a new chicken recipe this weekend from her Betty Crocker subscription and a weekend on her favorite pink chair while she grades her class’s paragraphs about blueberries growing in southern New Jersey. This is what Nina likes to think about. Mrs. Moore probably sips coffee while she grades. Maybe she listens to some Hall and Oates.
At pack-up time near the closet, Nina sees a few of her new markers on Larry G’s zipper pouch. She is too afraid to say anything about it. Maybe he can’t afford new markers. Besides, he only took four.
John starts in again about Nina’s muscles, then comments that her arms have hair. Again, Nina deflates. Hair is worse than muscles. She didn’t even have that much. Not like Steph Siller’s perm on her arm.
They all crowd out to the buses in no semblance whatsoever. Every person for him and herself. It’s been a month, and the routine is the routine. Shoving happens, so you power-on to your bus.
Nina’s is always torn between being just like Jenny Ripler and being totally herself. Jenny slips Nina an apple flavored fruit roll across the brown leather bus seat since her mom buys them by the dozen when Shoprite announces a sale. “In case you have school breath,” Jenny says.
Mark Janner says they made a list of pretty girls in third grade. But Nina is more like them with those biceps, so she doesn’t expect to be on it. Except she is. Way at the bottom. He takes the list, folds it and slips it into his camouflage pants pocket. It scares Nina to think what he might do with that list, but really, what could he do?
Nina runs straight to the bathroom upstairs to examine her arm hair in a good light. Yeah. It wasn’t thick, but it was a light brown and enough to be visible. She picked at a few strands, held back a few tears then remembers something.
She darts to the box under her bed, slides it out across her mint green carpet and rummages through her albums. Somewhere is that woman Madonna, and Nina swore she had hair on her arms too. And long, thick eyebrows too, in case John would attack those next. It is something about being Italian, Nina thinks.
Nina slides the record out of its sleeve and blows on the black vinyl. She sets it on the record player on her floor—a hand-me-down from her cousin Clair in Staten Island. She stands with her legs shoulder width apart but not before first applying a sheen of purple glittery lip gloss and a stripe of blue across her eyelids. She throws her lilac-colored legwarmers over her calves, just up to her knee and finds her favorite song with the needle. Head stretches. Leg bends. Some dance moves. Then a glimpse at her big biceps. “Dress You Up” is everything to Nina right now. Tinny drums and electric guitars.
Dad yells up through the walls of their 1979 colonial for Nina to stop jumping. “I’m dancing. Not jumping!” Her dad cannot discern between the two, ever. He didn’t even try.
Mom reminds her dinner is in five with her own yell up the stairs. The phone rings so Nina lowers the volume enough to hear it’s Jenny, her beautiful neighbor and thin friend. With the endless collection of fruit roll ups.
Jenny tells her she likes Shawn Martin. Great. Nina likes him too. She glances at her bicep again. His match hers. Going out with him would never work. She reacts to Jenny’s news with a “Wow. That’s cool”, says goodbye, and resumes her Madonna imitation—a space where she is everything she’ll ever need.
Elaina Battista-Parsons is a writer across genres. Elaina has an upcoming YA with Inked in Gray Press (1/23) and a memoir collection called Italian Bones in the Snow with Vine Leaves Press (2/22/22). She's had poems and prose published in The Spring City, Malarkey Books, Burnt Pine Magazine, Read Furiously, 3Moon Magazine, and Backlash Press. She lives on the Jersey Shore with her two daughters and her husband. Elaina loves ice cream, antiques, pop culture, and snow.