Hundred Percent

Copyright © 2016 by Karen Romano Young.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Names: Young, Karen Romano, author.

Title: Hundred percent / by Karen Romano Young.

Description: San Francisco : Chronicle Books, [2016] |

Summary: Christine Gouda, called Tink, and her best friend Jackie are entering sixth grade, and suddenly everything seems awkward and just plain wrong—boys are behaving differently, clothes do not fit the way they should, long term friendships suddenly seem tenuous, and most of all she needs a new nickname because Tink just does not fit anymore.

LCCN 2015047481 | ISBN 9781452138909 (alk. paper) | ISBN 9781452143644 (epub)

LCSH: Sixth grade (Education)—Juvenile fiction. | Best Friends—Juvenile fiction. Friendship—Juvenile fiction. | Nicknames—Juvenile fiction. | Families—Juvenile fiction. | CYAC: Schools—Fiction. | Best friends—Fiction. | Friendship—Fiction.Nicknames—Fiction. | Family life—Fiction.

LCC PZ7.Y8665 Hu 2016 | DDC [Fic]—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015047481

Illustrations by Natalie Andrewson.Design by Kayla Ferriera.Typeset in Scala.

Never Die Young (James Taylor). © 1988 Country Road Music. Used By Permission. All Rights Reserved.

Chronicle Books LLC 680 Second Street San Francisco, California 94107

Chronicle Books—we see things differently. Become part of our community at www.chroniclekids.com.

for Barbara

We were ring-around-the-rosy children, they were circles around the sun.

Never give up, never slow down, never grow old, never ever die young.

Synchronized with the rising moon, even with the evening star,

they were true love written in stone, they were never alone, they were never that far apart . . .

. . . Hold them up, don’t let them fall.

—James Taylor

In late August, Tink got a new name. Her best friend, Jackie, renamed her. This was after Tink realized that none of her school clothes fit and her mother took her on a hellish shopping trip involving two sizes up, three bras-for-the-very-first-time, and four arguments about style that had both Mom and Tink in tears. On the way home, Tink convinced her mother to drop her at Jackie’s with all six shopping bags, so they could have a fashion show.

Jackie had already been shopping—not because she had grown, but because she had insisted, and her mother said yes because Jackie was an only child. That was what Tink’s mother said. She couldn’t do as much when she had three girls between grades three and six to outfit, plus a first grade boy, all growing like weeds. Tink was just grateful that her mother had found two hours to take her shopping alone, without the whole circus. You could thank the bras for that.

The differences in Jackie and Tink’s appearances in their first-day outfits, viewed in the mirror, worried both of them. Jackie was smaller, lighter, and, face it, flatter. Tink was too big. Tall, and getting a figure, their mothers said. It was awkward.

Last year on the first day of fifth grade, they’d both worn flowered, ruffled skirts and pale blue T-shirts—twinsie best friends staking each other out, as if the kids they’d been in school with since kindergarten hadn’t figured out that they were a pair. But this year the best they could do for twinsies was jean skirts and red polo shirts, even if Jackie’s polo was from the boys’ department and Tink’s was borrowed from her mother. The only way they still matched was with their curly brown hair. Side by side they stood, Jackie on her toes and Tink slumping, and neither could tell which one was the problem. Neither, you might say. Or maybe both?

That night in the dark, Jackie voiced it. I wish I needed a bra. I mean, I’ll wear one, it’s sixth grade, but I wish I had—

—the chest to pin it on? finished Tink. It was the punch line of the jokey insult that went, What do you want: a medal? Or the chest to pin it on? Bushwhack had said that last year every five minutes.

So not funny, said Jackie, not just meaning Bushwhack, although it was him, too—a boy Tink thought was actually quite funny. I’m immature compared to you, Tinker.

Maybe I’m too mature.

You’re lucky. Well, I make up for it in charm and charisma. So Jackie’s mother said, Tink knew, and she was right.

Everybody loves you, Tink agreed.

Do you think Keith Kallinka will? asked Jackie.

Sure to, said Tink, as expected. Do you think Will Wheeler will love me?

Sure to or he’s a dodo, said Jackie.

Then Tink raised the question that was on her mind. I’m too tall to be a Tinker Bell.

Bess says your mom should have never saddled you with that name, said Jackie.

Bess?

That’s what I’m calling her now. James’s kids get to, so why shouldn’t I?

Tink would never have gotten away with calling her parents Stevie and Tom.

That night was when Jackie worked out a whole new persona for Tink, also known as Christine Bernadette Gouda, to go with her new wardrobe. When school began, Jackie announced, Tink would be Chris, who was ever so much more grown-up and stylish after her summer than the girl the class had last seen in June.

Of course Tink hadn’t done anything to become more stylish or grown-up all summer. What she had actually done all summer was hang with Jackie, whose mother had a new boyfriend and let Jackie sleep over more than usual because of it. Except for brief visits to grandmothers’ houses in Maryland and New York (Tink) and Massachusetts (Jackie), they never got out of Connecticut, and didn’t even get out of town except for occasional trips to the mall. They rode their bikes to the beach, walked to Clampett’s for music magazines for Jackie and Mad magazines for Tink, and made up an elaborate bouncing game with a tennis ball against Tink’s garage door, because if they just played the real handball rules Tink looked up in the library, Jackie got bored and wouldn’t play.

And then Jackie had gone shopping and bumped into Maggie and Mitzie, two girls in their class, and uncharacteristically bought a pair of pants covered in tiny whales, which made Tink still more uncomfortable, since they were out of budget for a girl with a stay-at-home bookkeeper mother and a go-to-work housebuilder father. She had a vision of everybody showing up at school in clothes with tiny sea animals on them.

Into the dark of Jackie’s room, Tink said, But am I—

Jackie said, What?

Tink wouldn’t say until Jackie hit her with a pillow and then sat on the pillow and then tickled her, because Tink was embarrassed. But at last she opened her mouth and finished her question: —pretty?

Jackie considered the question for long minutes, even turned on the light to look at Tink’s face, and finally said, Cute. Maybe becoming pretty. Or maybe just going straight to grown-up gorgeous. To Jackie, grown-up was gorgeous.

Thank you, Jacqueline, whispered Tink when it was dark again.

Don’t thank me, Chris, said Jackie. Just make a little wish on my behalf for Keith Kallinka.

But Tink, who secretly thought Keith was sort of a fool, despite being the most crushed-on boy in the class, turned her thoughts instead to Will Wheeler, the second most crushed-on.

When school started, Tink told Ms. Cho that her nickname was Chris. But, two weeks into September, nobody was calling her that yet but Jackie and Ms. Cho. They still called her Tink, or Hundred Percent, a different nickname she’d been given, whether she liked it or not, by Bushwhack. Hundred Percent wasn’t as good a name as Chris, but maybe it wasn’t as bad as Tink.

Bushwah, Chris! Jackie would say, if she heard that. Bushwah was their sixth grade word, invented by Matt Alva, whose nickname (invented by himself) was Bushwhack. His friends were called the Farmers, but they were just a bunch of dorky boys with boring clothes, not the kind girls had crushes on. They had a lot of funny jokes, though, and Bushwhack made up words and insults. Yes, he was the same Bushwhack with the congratulations joke about the medal and the chest to pin it on. He also had these jokes in a situation where someone was wrong:

Close but no cigarette.or
Put another quarter in and try again . . . sucker.

And, in a nonhumorous situation:

That’s as funny . . . . . . as a screen door in a submarine. . . . as a gum machine in a lockjaw ward. . . . as a rubber crutch.

There were a lot more endings, but they weren’t what he was into this year. This year he was into insults.

In math Bushwhack sat right across the aisle from Tink. He didn’t seem to have to think about math much. He sat there making up names to call people and muttering them under his breath to crack up the people who sat near him. Since sixth grade had started, Bushwhack and the Farmers had the class saying, You eraser! to each other, or You combination lock! Instead of getting mad at being called a name, the kids would just laugh.

Also this year, Bushwhack made up saying bushwah. It was such a spectacular word (and almost rude) that everyone in the sixth grade picked it up, even Jackie. It was so almost-rude that Ms. Cho and Mr. Bergman, the other sixth grade teacher, had already outlawed it, saying the kids couldn’t use any words that weren’t in the dictionary, so then they started just saying, You know what Bushwhack would say. That got shortened (because the teachers weren’t sure how they felt about the name Bushwhack) to two words: You know . . .

When they began getting teacher stink-eyes from saying that, they changed it to saying Two words. That’s what Tink said, because she was the kind of girl who didn’t get in trouble. She’d never even gotten detention, and she wasn’t about to start for one word, even as good a word as bushwah.

Jackie didn’t bother saying bushwah to anyone but Tink. Maybe she didn’t want Bushwhack to know she knew he existed. She smiled in her A+ way at the teachers and said flirty, charming things to Will Wheeler or Keith Kallinka. She was the one who started the whole Roll Over game. And the Roll Over game was what led to Will breaking his tooth.

Tink had never dreamed that today, in the second week of sixth grade, she’d be lying on the ground with the cutest boys in the sixth grade, rolling in the grass and singing.

What she dreamed of, when she dreamed of Will Wheeler, was what happens to Wendy in chapter one of Peter Pan and Wendy:

The window of Tink’s room is ajar. Outside is her favorite kind of weather, warm and windy all at once. The wind whistles and smells of fall and grass and leaves and horse chestnuts. She is lying in bed, almost asleep, wearing a long white nightgown, with her long red hair in a long silky braid. (Just so you recall, Tink didn’t have long red hair. Tink’s hair was short and brown and curly.)

The window opens, and someone comes in. It is a second-floor window, so how does this happen? The boy who comes in can fly, that’s how. He flies around Tink’s room bumping into things, making the wind chimes chime, trying to wake her up. He needs his shadow sewn back on, and only she has the magic to sew it. It has come loose from his body, and he’s lost without it. If she sews it, he’ll take her flying to Neverland.

So she gets up out of bed and takes a needle from her pincushion. (She’s the kind of girl who sews, which Tink is not.) She threads it with a strand of silver-gray thread, and she begins to sew. With her fingers she touches lightly along the back of the boy’s head (she pictures Will’s gold-brown hair), the back of his neck, his shoulders, down the backs of his legs to his feet. Somehow she doesn’t hurt him sewing his shadow on. All those needle pricks, and not a drop of blood.

Bushwah, Chris, Jackie would say to Tink, if she knew.

It was not the word Tink’s mother would say. She’d have two words of her own for it, two words she said often lately. Boy-crazy, she’d say. This is when it all starts. Sixth grade.

Sixth grade was the first time Tink noticed that Will Wheeler had eyes of a color that was hard to name.

Sixth grade was also the first time a boy ever barked at her. You can’t know how it feels if it has never happened to you.

It had happened last week, the first week of school, when she was riding her bike home up the hill, sweaty and wobbling. Keith Kallinka was riding by smooth and cool on the bus.

Woof! He barked out the window at her, and somebody else laughed, and barked along. She couldn’t see the other person who barked. Woof! One known barker. One unknown barker.

Then the bus passed Jackie, who had already reached the top of the hill. They didn’t bark at Jackie. They whistled.

It’s just as asinine. Boys are so immature compared to girls, Jackie complained when they got to her house. Her mother, Bess, just nodded. Bess didn’t say anything, but she looked at Jackie the way Tink’s mother looked at Tink when teachers talked about IQ, a way that made it clear Bess wasn’t surprised Jackie had been whistled at.

Tink didn’t say anything either. She knew Jackie was just as smart as she was, maybe smarter about some things the way Tink was smarter about others, but on the same level. But now she was realizing that other people thought Jackie was pretty, while she, Tink, was something else. Cute, Jackie had said, because she loved Tink, but was that really true?

Tink wondered how it felt to hear whistling, now that she knew how it felt to hear barking. She kept thinking of all the things she could have done: yelled back Bushwah! or barked back or given the bus the finger. But she hadn’t had the nerve. At the time it happened, she had been too busy pretending she hadn’t heard to do anything at all. Anyway, she didn’t want those boys to think she minded being barked at, any more than Jackie minded being whistled at. Even if she did mind, more than she wanted to admit.

What she wanted was a boy coming in her window at night, a hazel-eyed boy, someone who would say, Only you. Only you have what I need. And she guessed something like that had happened today after recess when Will hit his mouth on the water fountain and was bleeding, a private moment when she alone could help him. She ran fast past everyone else into the girls’ room—it was right there, next to the fountain—and grabbed paper towels and wet them under the faucet and brought them out and held them to his mouth. Anyone else could have done it, but he asked only her.

Hazel was a word she’d read in one of her romance novels. Her mother said it described those kinds of eyes that were half green, half brown. In Will’s case it also meant speckled with gold. Hazel was what Tink thought—and kind of how she had felt at lunch today, a little mixed up, a little sparkly—when she looked at Will across the table where she sat with Jackie and the other cool kids. Tink wasn’t cool, but they had let her sit there with them, because of Jackie.

She had imagined other things about Peter Pan besides sewing his shadow. She had dreams of him rescuing her as Wendy when she was on the pirate ship walking the plank, or rescuing her as Tiger Lily when she was about to be burned at the stake. The weird thing was, it wasn’t the being rescued that intrigued her so much as the idea of rescue. Sometimes she imagined that she was the rescuer. But it was also nice to think that some boy might care enough to rescue her, and not just fly by and laugh or bark, but to put his life at risk.

This year in their class it was as if there were a circle of people playing Ring Around the Rosy and everybody who wasn’t holding hands was outside the ring. Some of the outside people formed little groups of their own, but not enough to make a circle. Most of them were just in little pairs or triangles. Some were alone, just dots, loners, and leftovers.

Jackie was in the circle (Tink had been right about the whale pants being a clue), and she always brought Tink in, even if the person on Tink’s other side—Maggie or Mitzie, Keith or Will—was barely willing to hold on to Tink’s pinky finger. That loose hand on the non-Jackie side let Tink turn, so she could see the outsiders. Sometimes things happened to make her want to let go of Jackie’s hand and step out of the ring, such as the antics of the Farmers, who were in some wacky parallelogram, a clump of other boy dots—six or seven on any day—that Bushwhack had magnetized and named.

Tink—no, Chris—didn’t want to be a dot of any kind. She wouldn’t let go of Jackie’s hand. And Jackie couldn’t help it if the circle kids liked her. Why would Jackie, or anybody, step outside if she didn’t have to? Tink wouldn’t. She really wouldn’t. And what would Jackie do if she did?

The Roll Over game had started today with Brave New World. That morning some of the elevated readers (they switched to Mr. Bergman for language arts) got to read this stupid book about this weird futuristic world. Tink didn’t get much out of it except page 146. On page 146 this guy is standing over this girl watching her sleep. She’s wearing a futuristic Star Trek sort of outfit with a zipper that goes all the way up.

Or, Jackie said to the group, all the way down. Everybody sat and read page 146, about this guy imagining things about that zipper. Then they went to recess and Jackie wanted to act it out. She lay down in the grass and said to Keith, Now you stand over me.

Tink didn’t know what would have happened if he had done it the way Jackie said. Instead, while Jackie’s eyes were closed, pretending she was the sleeping girl, Keith lay down next to her. And then Maggie Lindquist, who everyone knew also had a crush on Keith, lay down next to him, her golden hair on the grass. Next thing you knew, the circle kids were all on the ground, Tink included, giggling, side by side like sardines.

Keith started singing that song:

There were ten in the bed and the little one said ‘Roll over! Roll over!’So they all rolled over and one fell out.There were nine in the bed and the little one said . . .

All together, outside in the hot grass, they rolled over. Keith, next to Jackie, pushed her as she rolled so that it was like she fell out.