People of Consequence

When Stella arrived, selling the bracelets that could change our lives, we did not want her. Everything about her screamed too much: her frizzy hair, the extra stripe on her knockoff adidas, her backpack that bulged like it was about to give birth. When she stepped on the bus on the first day of our last year at Eberson White, everyone else must have looked out the window or shifted their bodies to say, Stella, go away! But I didn’t have that power. Mine was a power of attraction, but only for people I was trying to avoid. Mostly it was little things, like the teacher who kept calling on me during our seventh-grade unit on sexual health or the man outside Starbucks who only asked for change when I walked by. I regarded Stella as another sad addition to my destiny.

“I’m new,” she announced as she plopped down beside me. She acted as if I needed the reminder. As if I hadn’t gone to school with the same people for the past nine years.

“I’m Caro.”

“Nice name.”

She had Stella embroidered on her backpack in blue thread. On her wrists she wore further evidence of artistry–all the friendship bracelets I had always meant to learn to make, from a beaded daisy chain to a half hitch to five-strand braid.

“I like your bracelets,” I said.

She grinned. She unzipped her backpack, and I saw that it was stuffed with skeins of embroidery floss.

“My secret is, I always add a strand of my own hair.”

She held up her wrist. On an extra thick macramé, I could see it: a shiny black strand woven in among the scarlet cords. I shifted on the seat to make more space between us. I had no standing with my peers, but I knew, at least, how to order them correctly in the hierarchy that ruled our lives. I could give a full oral history of each of my classmates, but Stella’s newness scared me. I had no idea how many CDs she owned, if her period had started, if her parents got along, if she was satisfied with life or if she felt that she was missing some essential inner part that other people had.

“Why hair?” I asked.

She grinned. It was clear she’d never had braces. Her canines were too high–the poked out from the sides of her gums above the rest of her teeth.

“Like a signature,” she said, “so people can’t forget me.”

 

Wherever Stella was, she had a friendship bracelet going, embroidery floss taped to a desk or a wall or the bench seat in front of us when we rode the bus together, twice a day. Her hands would move so fast that it seemed like a joke–like she was pantomiming the act of knotting and braiding and weaving and making–and yet a bracelet would still form beneath her hands. It didn’t take long for all the eighth-grade girls to notice.

First it was Kendyl who requested a bracelet from Stella. Kendyl had real money, not just the crumpled checks that the rest of us brought to add to our hot lunch accounts. By rights she should have set the market price, but then Simi offered less and walked away with two, and Gabby Portinga, who had neither friends nor money, procured a truly exceptional fishtail. It soon became clear that Stella would sell bracelets for anything, really: a handful of butterfly clips, melted Jolly Ranchers fashioned into jewels, LipSmackers, slinkies, pencils with pink fuzzy tops, even those snack packs with the breadsticks and cheesy dip. As long as you valued it, it was currency enough, and Stella would take your offering, toss it in her backpack, and let you pick a bracelet.

“Stella is such a freak,” said Simi in the cafeteria a few weeks after school had started.

“A total witch,” said Anne C., whose Catholic parents had forbidden swearing.

“A bitch,” corrected Kendyl, who obeyed no earthly law. Kendyl feared nothing. Kendyl owned our world. She took a long drag from her Capri Sun, and the others nodded, not daring to speak the word but still assenting.

I was sitting farther down the table, eating a bean and cheese burrito and Sharpieing an S on the inside of my Pee Chee. It was the kind of S that all of us could make, with the two rows of the three lines linked together to form a mazy, pointy thing. The kind of S that appeared on every textbook, desk, wall, locker, binder, backpack–a communal flirtation with graffiti that now seemed to suggest Stella’s name, as if all of us, all this time, had been foretelling her arrival.

That was the thing about Stella: once she arrived, no one could forget she existed. I was the one who vanished until they needed me–until they needed a fifth in a five-person group or to pad out the guest list for a birthday party. I wasn’t unpopular, not like Stella or Gabby Portinga, because I wasn’t anything. I was a person of no consequence. If I wanted you to see me, you couldn’t see me, like Ms. Lantz, the stylish young woman who worked in the school library. And if I wanted to avoid you, you would call on me to describe the physical and emotional changes associated with female puberty, even though I hadn’t raised my hand.

On the bus ride home, Stella would let me look through her backpack and take whatever I wanted. In one of my desk drawers, I kept the LipSmackers I had amassed–every flavor, every color. I loved the root beer best. I would put it on at night and lick my lips as I lay in bed. “Stella, Stella, Stella,” I would whisper.

 

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