Shirley Boohers Makes Me Sick

Do you like that song "Jam Up and Jelly Tight"?  My friend Terri won it for selling those glass candle thingies for Orchestra so we could get new uniforms.  Terri thinks Tommy Roe is cute but I don't.  You know who else I don't like?  That Shirley Boohers.  I mean, not like I even know her but I don't like her anyways.  The sixth-graders all think she's great, but they're not even in junior high yet, so what do they know.  Not like I care what she does.  I don't sit around with my eyeballs staring at Shirley Boohers.  Just because she's popular don't mean I have to watch every little thing she does.  But if I did it would make me sick.

Like the toe water.  That was enough to make a person puke.  I mean it.  See, we was coming back from this church trip to Garfield Park.  Some of the people from my grade go to our church too, except like Billy Craig who is a Jehovah Witness and doesn't say the Pledge of Allegiance.  And a few other ones.  But homeroom and Sunday School are the same people, pretty much.  So I get to see Shirley Boohers six days a week instead of five.  Big thrill.

Anyways, they made us go on this stupid trip to the park.  It was supposed to be like a pep rally or something, only religious.  So we could run around and get some fresh air in our lungs,  not like the air is very fresh in Garfield Park, because the International Harvester plant's right by there.  Me and Donna Carson went and sat on a picnic table in the shelter house and shined up dimes and tried to put them in our loafers but they wouldn't go because the slots were fake.  What a gyp.  

Finally it was time to go so everyone got back on the church bus and all the windows steam up from everybody's breath?  I sat in the very very back, in the next-to-last row.  I would have sat in the back seat but it was saved.  I don't like sitting up front.  They're too cheerful up there, like they sing, which like my friend Terri says is so juvenile.  You know what they sing?  "There was a man who had a dog and his name was Bingo."  With the hand claps.  Some of those church kids are so retarded, I swear.  

Like for instance, right in back of me was Shirley Boohers, who was soaking her foot in a plastic thing full of water.  She had something wrong with her foot or her toe or something, and her mother said she could only go to the picnic (oh yeah, we had a cookout, whoopee) if Shirley soaked her foot.  They wouldn't have let any other kid do that but Shirley's father is a deacon.

Anyways, she was trying to get Vann Becker to drink this nasty water, that dirty water which her foot had been in twice.  It probably had her old band-aid floating in it.  Shirley was going to give Vann five dollars if he did it but I can't feature how anybody could even think about drinking toe water for five dollars, even Vann Becker.  He is a strange person if you ask me.  Like him and me shared a table in Science (I didn't want to but it was assigned seats), and we had to dissect a frog.  I just let him do it because dead frogs make me puke.  But he went crazy with that little cutter-up thingie, you know?  I bet he cut that poor frog into about fifty million pieces.  It was enough to make you sick, I'm not kidding.

So the really horrible thing about the toe water was that, like, Vann Becker might drink it.  Shirley was waving a five-dollar bill around in his face saying "Well, all right, Vann, nobody's going to make you do it.  Like that.  I think he finally did it, but I'm not sure because I went up front to sit with Nancy Bates.  I'm pretty sure he did, though.  The scariest part about Shirley Boohers is that there's no limit on what she might make a person do.

Everybody says Shirley makes out with Youth Group boys in the Sunday School cloakroom.  I believe it.  Not like I care what she does but I do not think a person should be a deacon's daughter and be fast at the same time.  I mean, Shirley is so religious that it makes you puke and her mother gets Shirley's hair done at the beauty parlor every single week.  Rachel Peterson says Shirley's hair looks like a rat's nest but I don't believe in gossip.  I can't remember if gossip is a Ten Commandment or not.  All the parents think Shirley is such a joy to be around, and a real inspiration to the other girls her age.  Excetera.  Why they think she is so great is that she acts like she just loves church but her parents make her go same as me.  

My mom and dad haven't been making me go every week like they used to.  I used to always say I was sick and my sister Georgia Anne would say, "You big faker, you are not," and my mom would say, "Well, all right, Marletta.  Nobody's going to make you go."  But now Georgia Anne leaves me alone and even my mom and dad act like they believe me when I say I don't feel good.  It's because I got saved, and they don't believe in backsliding so once you're saved you can't get unsaved.  So now they can quit worrying about me.

Everybody was pretty worried that I wasn't saved.  Nobody said so but I could tell.  Sort of like no one ever says to my face that I'm tall for a girl, but the way they look at me I can tell.  

But I would never go forward for altar call because for one thing Shirley Boohers is extremely saved and whenever they had altar call Shirley would always turn around in her chair and look right at me.  I would have told her to take a picture it lasts longer but you have to be polite on Sunday.  She always sits in front of Youth Group because she gives these little talks like on why "Jesus Christ Superstar" is demon-inspired.  

The day I got saved she gave a speech on "Yellow Submarine"  is demon-inspired.  She's important and her dad is important and she gets a new hairdo every Saturday so so why was she so interested in me being saved or not?  She just wanted me to go to Heaven so she could have somebody there to have better clothes than.  In Sunday School when they talked about Heaven I tried to look forward to it but forever seemed like a long time expecially if you're going to be around Shirley Boohers the whole time.

So this one day I was just sitting there , like, and waiting for them to get done with the altar call.  They were singing "Tenderly, tenderly, Jesus is calling," the same people who sing "Bingo" on the church bus.  I was kind of scrunched down so Shirley couldn't give me any of her Jesus looks.  There was about three or four of the kids that had broke down and was up there crying and asking Jesus into their hearts.  I was figuring out what to wear to school the next day.  I decided on my yellow sweater that had the matching vest and maybe my wrap-around brown skirt.  

While I was thinking, I got this weird feeling.  Like my head was kind of buzzy.  My mom always thought that some kid was going to put LSD in my milk carton which that's really stupid but that's what I felt like.  Like those movies at school where the guy smokes grass and then he looks in the mirror and he has a lion's head.  And then I look up and there's old Shirley Boohers sitting right next to me and smiling at me.  I was kind of thinking "If you smile any bigger, Shirley, the top of your head will fall off," and then she was saying, "Marletta, do you want to ask Jesus to be your own personal Savior?"  I opened my mouth to say "Eat dirt, Shirley," but then I shut my mouth and nodded yes.  I went down front with her and bawled my head off.  But I almost chickened out for a second.  And then like my mind was like a television set and I could see black outer space with the pearly gates.  Everybody was inside and I could hear them talking and I could hear Shirley Boohers laughing her head off and I was outside by myself.  So I asked Jesus to come into my heart.  

Do you think it was the Holy Spirit?  Sometimes I think so, and then sometimes I don't.  So now everybody's a lot nicer to me in Sunday School but I don't like going there.  Every time I see Shirley Boohers I think about Vann Becker and the toe water.  And then I'm not sure about the Holy Spirit.