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Chapter 1: Get Goated <figure> CHAPTER 1 GET GOATED
Jo Belmonte
Late July the summer before seventh grade
MY MIDDLE SCHOOL HAD A goat mascot. I’m not talking about a cartoon logo or some dad sweating through a ratty Halloween costume on the sidelines. This was a real, live, baaing, chomping, frolicking goat. Her name was Somerset Babette. She was glorious.
One sticky morning the summer before seventh grade, Babette was barreling my way at full speed after Mom dropped me off in the school parking lot. A girl in full soccer regalia followed hot on her hooves. Normally Babette roamed a little fake farm, which was really a fenced-in patch of grass with a tiny shelter as far as you could get from the buildings on our North Jersey campus, next to the soccer fields and backing up onto Green Acres land that could never be developed.
Which was why I was so confused by the chase unfolding in front of me. I finally recognized the soccer player as Meg from sixth-grade social studies, hollering over Babette’s bleats.
“Be the beast, Jo! Set a block!” she yelled.
Amateur.
I let go of my crutch handle, grabbed the grapes I’d snagged from the fridge on my way out that morning, and offered them up with a smile I saved exclusively for my ungulate friend. If we were in a cartoon, that little goat would have come screeching to a halt, smoke billowing out from her little hooves at the friction, for how much she loved grapes. And me.
But because this was real life, Babette stopped with a simple bounce and a hop. Goats are the one time reality is better than the movies. Her tongue tickled my palm as she glommed up the treat. Meg, all out of breath, grabbed her collar.
“There would need to be massive amounts of cheese to bait me out of a run like that. She’d be great on the wing,” Meg said.
“Why did you let her out of her farm in the first place?” I asked.
“Oh, you know, I love to start the day with some light terror. Dude! I got here early for warm-ups before my game, and she was already in the parking lot. The situation you entered was actually an improvement.”
I turned toward the little farm, where one of the many rotting planks had fallen from the fence. Babette didn’t even have to jump to escape.
“How exactly were you planning to capture her?” I asked, petting Babette gently.
“Chase her up a tree, obviously,” Meg answered, and pulled up the fence planks to put them back in the post slots. The fix looked less than secure. I took the tracker tag off my bag and attached it to Babette’s collar in case she escaped again. That wasn’t a permanent fix, though, and I needed her safe before I turned morning chores back over to 4-H for the school year.
Caring for Babette was my favorite part of summer break. Most kids might not want to spend their mornings shoveling goat poop, but we never went on vacation anyway, and I shared a bathroom with four older brothers. Babette had nothing on their collective stench. I was the first to sign up for morning goat care at the end of fifth grade. This summer, after sixth grade, we were old friends. It felt good to keep Babette comfortable and bring her a little joy.
I went for a shovel to manage Babette’s droppings, but Meg took it out of my hand.
“I have it,” I snapped. I’d invented a spring-action shovel that attached to the end of my crutch so I could do the job one-handed.
That adaptive shovel won first place for our grade in the science fair. It should have won the whole thing. Only they can’t have a sixth grader upstaging the eighth graders, so they gave the gold to Seamus Walsh for an egg drop demonstrating Newton’s first law of motion, like that hadn’t been done a zillion times. After the fair, I gave our principal a presentation on why we should patent the shovel, but he said there wasn’t a middle school intellectual-property budget. Some people have no imagination.
“If you’re on poop patrol, you should be dressed for a farm-fest and not a runway,” Meg said.
“It is just a wrap dress I upcycled from thrifting,” I said, though I didn’t actually take the shovel back.
“There is nothing just about your style. That’s like saying I’m just the greatest striker to ever grace the grass of Somerset,” Meg said, shoveling into the wheelbarrow.
The compliment was coming from someone who wouldn’t know a natural fiber or a button if it came to ransack her shorts-n-sweats closet, but it still felt nice. I normally wouldn’t let an intrusion like this happen. The truth was that I was in a flare and struggling more and more that week, which was why I was using my crutch in the first place, the pain in my left knee from my juvenile arthritis getting worse while I waited on approval for a new medication.
So while Meg was on droppings duty, I grabbed a brush from the shelter and ran the bristles through Babette’s gray beard, which contrasted beautifully with her reddish roan coat, and scratched behind her floppy ears and mini-horns.
“Thanks for helping me, or helping Babette, really,” I said.
“I only support her escaping if it is for an epic, crimey road trip with you,” Meg said, giving me a wink. Who does that?
“Anything else? Got nails for the fence?” she said.
Cars were starting to fill up the parking lot. “Don’t you have a soccer game?”
“Indeed. You should come. Somerset versus Waverly. David versus Goliath, but this time David wins. Well, I guess he wins in the original. You know what I mean. And we’re heading to the diner after for desserts.”
She was so smiley that I almost smiled back. Odder still, I almost said yes. This was the most I’d talked to anyone I didn’t share DNA with since school let out. Meg wasn’t bad or anything. In fact, we’d been on a social studies group text for a project last year. I stopped participating when it devolved into everyone talking in Stitch gifs, which really have little to no relevance to world geography. Although I’d muted notifications on the chat rather than deleting, which sort of made her one of my closest friends. But still.
“My mom works at the diner, so it isn’t a place I hang,” I said.
“I know—I always sit her in section. Are you aware,” Meg said conspiratorially, “that she lets me get a bowl of whipped cream, and now the owner does because your mom led the way? Not on a dessert, as the dessert alone, a rogue operation to make my dreams come true every Wednesday and Saturday.”
“We don’t really talk about my classmates’ orders,” I said.
Meg nodded. “Yeah server-eater confidentiality, makes sense.”
“This is the crossover event I didn’t know I needed!” said a booming voice behind me. “Somerset’s three best girls all in one place.”
I turned to find Principal Petrov resting his arms on the fence. He caught himself as a plank split in two and fell to the ground. The man kept talking like it hadn’t happened!
“Look at you taking care of Babette together. You know, I could see one of you being voted G.O.A.T. in eighth grade with all you do for this school.”
“Give me a backbeat,” Meg said as she started to dance with Babette.
“Absolutely not,” I said.
“How about a backbleat?” Petrov said, and then started beatboxing in his matching tracksuit and open-toed sandals, because middle school is truly the weirdest experience in the entire universe.
It was hard to think of something I cared less about than getting voted G.O.A.T., Somerset’s version of a royal dance court. Instead of choosing a homecoming king and queen, we selected someone who represented the greatest of what Somerset Middle School had to offer the world. Once upon a time, when our town was still full of working farms and considered too far for commuting to New York, the winner got to wish something into being at the school, like a bizarro fairy godmother. Now the G.O.A.T. opened the Harvest Ball by dancing with Babette under a temporary disco ball in a wildly decorated cafeteria.
It was weird, it was still a popularity contest, and it was absurdly important to a lot of grown-ups. Even decades later, the parent and alumni booster clubs that financed our sports mania talked about who had been the G.O.A.T. in their class. I planned to run a state-of-the-art invention laboratory or a sustainable fashion line in twenty years, not think about this place.
“All right, Ms. Mancuso, I think that’s enough,” Petrov said, sputtering and coughing. “Can’t have Babette tuckered out with all the luck she needs to bestow on our teams. The only thing more important than G.O.A.T. is beating Waverly, even if it is just the girls’ team in the summer,” he said, brushing the grass off his jacket and gesturing toward the field.
Meg turned to me, face beet red with what I knew mirrored my own attempt not to scream, because I was working on not getting angry when it wouldn’t get me anywhere. Then Meg did scream. And it felt good by proxy.
“DINER. WHIPPED CREAM. AFTER ‘JUST GIRLS’ GAME,” she bellowed. “UUUUUGGGGHHHHHH.”
Meg pointed to me, gestured like she was eating out of a bowl, then spraying something into her mouth, and jogged off to join the girls gathering on the other side of the fence.
“Well, that was unexpected,” Principal Petrov said.
“Sir, Facilities needs to look at the fence,” I said. “A few planks are loose. Babette escaped today.”
“How about I do you one better? The whole fence is coming down because this little lady is getting a completely new enclosure right before school starts,” he said.
I couldn’t believe it! I’d been advocating for better conditions for Babette for a year. It was bonkers that she had to live at school in the first place, but if she was there, it was on the principal, the PTA, and the school board to spend what was needed to treat her right. A shed she could walk on top of, a continuously refreshing water bucket, unlimited carrots. I couldn’t wait to hear what she was getting since my ideas had always been blown off.
“Do you need any help? I’ve drafted plans for a ten-foot goat perch,” I said.
“This one is covered, Jo. And a little under the radar. Your only concern is keeping up the great school spirit you show in taking care of Babette. Now I am off to official principal business. An administrator doesn’t get the summer off like everyone else,” Principal Petrov said with a sigh before hopping back in his car and driving up to his office entirely without my sympathy.
“It looks like we’ll both be getting fresh starts for the school year,” I assured Babette. She bit my finger. She truly got me. She was the only being in Somerset who did.
