Confessions from the Principal's Chair Read Free

light brown and pulled back by a loose ribbon. I've never seen her wear makeup, not even lipstick, and there is usually clay or something from her work under her fingernails. Still, Ivory really got me mad once when she said, "Your mother would be pretty if she did something with herself." Of course, I didn't say so to Ivory, but I like Rendi the way she is, or at least I used to before she turned on me over Marcy Willis.
    So there I was on the floor of my room that had one chair from the kitchen and a chest left in it. One of Rendi's friends wanted the kitchen table and chairs. Rendi had tried to give the women-men the chest, but the one who talked said, "No, thank you." Anyway, like I said, I was on the floor wondering what it would be like to live in Oklahoma. Would my grandparents show up at our place uninvited, or maybe the whole family would kind of sit down and talk things out. Before Marcy Willis, Rendi had been a believer in talking things out. Don't ask me why she hadn't ever talked things out with her own parents. Maybe things would have been different if my Aunt Jenny, Rendi's sister, had lived. Rendi was really close to her sister, but Jenny died in a car accident when she was sixteen and Rendi was my age, fourteen. I'll bet Aunt Jenny would have made my mother work on her relationship with their parents, but, hey, I had a lot bigger problem than wondering why Rendi didn't get along with her mother and father.
    I was about to get stuck in some brand-new school. I rolled myself into a fetal position (I read that in a book), you know, like a baby in the womb. I remembered what it had been like when I started middle school, me not knowing anyone from before and walking down those halls all alone. In elementary school, the halls had been friendly, even in new schools, but I can tell you middle schools do not have friendly halls. In elementary, the halls are all decorated with frogs and rabbits and pictures of presidents and stuff. Not in middle schools. Those halls are like prison halls, except I guess they don't have lockers in prisons. Anyway, I've never seen any lockers in prison movies, but I can tell you that the eyes that watch you in middle school halls are just as unfriendly as the eyes of all those murderers, rapists, and thieves. Those eyes (you know, at middle school) are as cold as the steel the lockers are made from. Wait a minute, I'm not sure that the lockers are made of steel. Maybe they are tin, but then, I guess you get the point about how cold the eyes were when I started middle school in Denver.
    Ivory had the seat in front of me in history. I could see that she was the coolest girl. She is tall, but not as tall as me. The thing is, though, that her neck isn't long at all. She could be a model or something, and she held her head up high, kind of like she might own the place or something. I guess you could say she does sort of own the place.
    She isn't a cheerleader or on the pom-pom squad or anything. She's not that kind of popular. She's the kind of popular that doesn't need to do anything to earn it. I'm willing to bet every kid in the whole, huge eighth grade knows who she is. But stay with me here. I don't want you to get confused. We were in the sixth grade when I first met her. She asked me a week or so after school started if I had an extra pencil, and I gave her the one with the pink stripes on it even though it was my best one. "You can keep it," I told her, "you know, for later."
    I liked her because of the way she looked and because she always nodded at me when she slid into her seat just before the bell rang. I knew why she was always nearly late and everything. I passed her every day in the hall with a group of other girls. They'd have their heads together, talking as fast as they could. Anyone could see they were good friends. I remember wishing I belonged to a group like that, with people who would always tell me their secrets and always be ready to walk down those cold halls with