Miss E.

The fight was on a Thursday, which was the best possible day for it. People were actually calling it “the fight” which was an indication of how rare an occurrence it was. To me, a fight should have a little bit more to it than one punch. Calling it “the afternoon that Bethy Wells hit Peter Anderson so hard he spun around in circles before collapsing to the ground” was more accurate, but a little cumbersome. Regardless, it was on a Thursday, and that was a good thing.

That really only gave us one day to be in the spotlight. And if you had to be in the spotlight, Friday was a pretty good day to be in it. People talked about the fight all morning. Those who saw it, told others what had happened. Those who weren’t there talked to others who weren’t there as if they were there. So by the end of second period, everyone I walked past between classes had some sort of reaction. The girls were divided into three camps: those who disapproved and thought my behavior way out of line for a girl (these were mostly the cheerleaders and the girls who wished they were cheerleaders), those who approved but didn’t want to admit it, and those who approved and wished they were the ones that had taken a swing at Peter. The boys were much simpler. The ones who were friends with Peter were angry at me, and the rest were suddenly curious.

One would think that these were pretty good results for a girl who was relatively new to town and in her first year of high school. Two thirds of the girls admired me and nearly all the boys were elbowing each other out of the way to see who’d get up the nerve to be the one to ask me out first. But like I said before, no high school kid wants that much spotlight, so I was lucky it was Friday.

By noon most of the talk had turned to weekend gatherings and who was going to win the big game against Santa Rosa on Saturday. By seventh period, there were enough weekend plans buzzing around classrooms that most kids had forgotten about “that girl who hit some guy yesterday.”