The Hush-Button Game

Caution! These notes may contain some mild spoilers!

One of my favorite chapters to write in “Squeak” was taken from an actual memory. When I was in sixth grade, the teachers at our middle school in Baxter had us play this unusual game called “The Hush-Button Game.” I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone mention this game since, and none of my classmates with whom I’m in touch remember this. I wonder sometimes if I dreamed the whole thing.

The game involved the kids were given these little badges in their homeroom class. In the morning, the girls could not speak to the boys. For any reason. If a boy got a girl to speak to him, he won her button. In the afternoon, it switched, and the boys could not talk to the girls. The boy with the most amount of buttons, and the girl with the most boy buttons, won something.

I decided this could be a fun addition to the book, as well as it was sort of a catalyst for things to happen with Celeste and The Beastly Trio. Like Celeste, I didn’t think I could win the boys’ buttons in the afternoon, because I was too shy to try to trick any of them out of it. I mean, that would have involved going up and talking to them. But I wanted to try to at least keep mine, if I could.

Well, that didn’t happen.

This boy I knew named Jeremy, who was actually a friend, got right in front of me in the hallway, and out of the blue, commanded, “Donna! Give me your button!” And without thinking about it—like a fool—I covered my button and shrieked, “NO!”

Everyone around me laughed and laughed as he crowed, “Ha! Give it to me.” Well, I had no choice but to hand it over.

So that scene made it into that chapter. Celeste loses her button the exact same way as I did all those years ago, and her embarrassment and reaction is the same. The only thing that was different is that the boy who does it to her is not a friend.

It was so humiliating then, but I laugh about it now, and hope you get a laugh out of that too.