Annabel - Kathleen Winter [30]
Wally Michelin had been born on the third of June, which was why her mother had named her after Wallis Simpson, whom Edward VIII had married on that date after renouncing his throne. Wally Michelin had announced this in kindergarten, when the teacher, Miss Davey, asked her where she got her name, and she had said it proudly, her hair black and her face the colour of cream with freckles all over it, and high walking boots on her like something out of an American catalogue. Wally Michelin had stomped through kindergarten and grades one and two with a certainty Wayne found fascinating. The day she got Coke-bottle glasses with black rims, such glasses immediately became a cool thing, not a thing to be laughed at. When she broke her arm falling off the slide in the playground, she had more signatures on her cast than anyone in Croydon Harbour had seen on a cast before. Her father had taken her on a trip to Quebec, and every time they stopped for pie all the waitresses and truckers signed it, and one of the signatures was in rainbow ink. Wally was the first one in the class to get mumps, chicken pox, and measles, and the only one to get whooping cough, which could kill you. She had a first cousin who lived in Boston, and her bologna sandwiches were always Maple Leaf brand. She was the champion marble player of Croydon Harbour Elementary and had an oversized green dragon and a rare black orange flare. Wayne was in love with her from the moment he heard her crumbly voice. So in love he wished he could become her. If there was a way he could make himself into a ghost without a body — a shadow — or transparent like the lures his father used to catch Arctic char, he would have done it. He would have transformed into his father’s lure, slipped under Wally Michelin’s divinely freckled skin, and lived inside her, looking through her eyes.
There was nothing pretty about Wally Michelin, but nobody noticed this for a long time. To Wayne it was apparent that nothing could make Wally doubt her own self, not even the advent of Donna Palliser.
Donna Palliser came to the school in the middle of grade five. She took one look around her and decided who had to be taken out and who could stay. She had a slow way of turning her head and giving a poisonous look to anyone she was taking out. Sometimes the look alone took the person out and that person retreated to the background, and sometimes Donna Palliser had to take action, which she did in the playground when none of the teachers was looking. She did not have a strong body; she bullied mentally, not physically, and the first and most important person she wanted to take down was Wally Michelin, who had been queen before Donna got there, and whom Donna could see was the kind of queen who ruled by natural nobility and not by cunning or cruelty or clever resolve. Wally was easy to take down because she did not care if she was queen or not. Wally was not going to move. The other girls would move. The other girls would swear allegiance to the new queen, and there would be a ranking order, and no one would care about Wally’s green dragon or orange flare, which they had genuinely admired. They would care about Hush Puppies crepe-soled Mary Jane shoes instead, and angora boleros, and having a ballpoint pen with pink ink, and Sweet Honesty perfume ordered from the Avon catalogue.
When Donna had been in town one month, she had a housewarming party and gave out invitations from the Details and Designs Emporium in Goose Bay. She gave invitations to everyone when Miss Davey was looking, but at recess