Wedding Drama – Nikki And Deja

There is something strange going on. Something in the air. Deja feels it as soon as she enters Room Ten at Carver Elementary School. She looks over at her best friend, Nikki, to see if she’s feeling it, too, but Nikki is busy pulling her homework out of her folder to drop it in the basket on Ms. Shelby’s desk. Deja looks at the other kids. They’re doing their usual first-thing-in-the-morning stuff. Gavin, the new boy, is sitting in his chair with his hands folded. Carlos is taking tiny action figures out of his backpack and squirreling them away in his desk. Antonia and Casey are whispering back and forth probably backbiting. Nikki says backbiting is her mom’s new word. It means something like gossip, which people shouldn’t do. So now Nikki is all the time reminding Deja that if you can’t say anything nice about someone, you shouldn’t say anything all. Deja personally thinks she’d have to be some kind of perfect person to say only nice things all the time. How could someone be lunch monitor if he or she could report only on the good stuff the kids at their lunch table did? How could a monitor report on someone talking with a mouth full of food? She’d said that to Nikki, and Nikki had to agree.