by Leila Sales
“Who’s Janet Teneman?” he asked.
“She’s my friend.” Then, in case it sounded like I was making that up, I added, “And my babysitter.”
“Right on,” he said. He signed his name—Ayodele Okereke—then put his pen back in his shirt pocket. “Good luck to you and Janet, kid.”
“Good luck to you, too.”
After Mr. Okereke walked off, I approached two women who were considering the cheese options while a boy who looked a few years younger than me hung out behind them, watching a video on a phone. I thought about Mr. Okereke’s advice, and I started with, “Do you think it’s a bad idea to get rid of arts education in schools?”
The women kind of smiled at me and otherwise ignored me. “I don’t think we need Swiss and Gouda,” one of them said to the other. “We should complement a hard cheese with a soft one.”
But the boy lowered his phone to gape at me. “Do you mean like video game design?” he asked. “Do you mean we wouldn’t get to do video game design?”
“That’s what the person who’s going to be mayor next year will do.” I held up my clipboard “If we don’t get enough signatures to stop her.”
He immediately started tugging at the women’s shirts. “Mom,” he said. “Mama. Sign this thing. Sign it right now.”
And, just like that, they did.
And that gave me a brilliant idea.
So that was what I did for the next two hours of the farmers market. I talked to every kid I saw. “Can you get your parents to sign this petition?” I asked. “Tell them it doesn’t cost any money. Tell them they don’t have to do anything except sign their name and address. It’s the only way to stop the city from getting rid of art at school.”
I sized up the kids as they approached, trying to notice specific details to help me craft my argument. When I saw a girl in a leotard, her hair in a bun, I said, “The next mayor wants to get rid of dancing!” and when I saw a boy engrossed in a book, I told him, “The mayor is going to eliminate creative writing programs in our schools!”
Not everyone stopped and got their parents to sign. But a lot of them did.
It was by far the most kids I’d ever spoken to on purpose. Sometimes there were full days where the only person my age I chose to speak to was My Friend Daniel. But today I was talking to everyone.
“You’re a real go-getter,” the cheese lady said to me at 3:00 p.m., as she began to disassemble her booth. She gave me another piece of cheese, but this one was really smelly. I didn’t want to be rude, so I just said, “Thanks,” took a tiny bite, and then subtly stuck the rest in my pocket.
I met up with Janet and Daniel at the main entrance to the market. “Did we do it?” Daniel asked, hopping from foot to foot. “Did we get enough?”
We sat down on the grass and started counting signatures. It took a while, because we had to figure out which ones were fakes (like the Poopy McPoopsters) and which were duplicates. We kept getting confused and asking questions like, “Is this Michael Smith’s handwriting the same as that Michael Smith’s handwriting?” and having to start over.
But finally we figured it all out. We went back to the first page of the petition and did one last final count of every single signature.
CHAPTER 10
THE LAWRENCEVILLE GAZETTE
NEW CANDIDATE ADDS NAME TO MAYORAL BALLOT
On Monday, the candidate list for mayor of Lawrenceville was finalized. With current mayor Enrique Peñate retiring at the end of this term, the seat is wide open.
As of last weekend, it looked like City Alderwoman Lucinda Burghart would be the only one on the ballot. But Monday—the final day to submit nomination paperwork—brought a surprise, with political newcomer Janet Teneman stepping into the ring.
Little is known about Teneman, who is twenty-three and grew up in Lawrenceville, graduating from Lawrenceville High School before receiving her degree in sociology from Drexel University. She is a volunteer for the City Parks Department, a nanny for a local family, and the moderator for what appears to be an online community that talks exclusively about the weather.
In a phone interview, Teneman told the Gazette, “I’m proud be a Lawrencevillian. There are so many things I think this city is doing right. At the same time, I have lots of ideas for things we can do even better. I want to focus on our education system. It wasn’t that long ago that I went to school here, which gives me a unique perspective. And I want to protect and expand our public park land.”
When told of her new opponent, Burghart was quoted as saying, “How wonderful to see such a very, very young person showing interest in the political process. Of course, when I was her age, I was just coming back from competing in the Olympics, so I can’t even imagine what it would be like to be so young and have the free time to run for mayor. As far as I’m aware, Janet Teneman is not an Olympian and has never held political office, so I suppose we have led very different lives. This race will give the voting public a clear choice, that’s for sure!”
The two candidates will meet in a debate hosted by the League of Women Voters on October 10. Election Day is Tuesday, November 8.
________
It was really cool, seeing Janet’s name in the Lawrenceville Gazette like that. And even cooler because I was sort of in there, too, in the line where it said that Janet was “a nanny for a local family.” They meant me. I’d never called Janet a nanny before, just a babysitter, and I didn’t know what the difference was except that “nanny” sounded more official. Which was maybe why the newspaper had used that word instead, so it sounded more like Janet had an actual job and not like she just came over to my house sometimes.
Not everybody seemed to find this article interesting, though. We each had to bring in news articles for social studies, and that was mine, but nobody wanted to talk about it. Mostly they had questions for Polly, who’d brought in a newspaper review of a Beyoncé concert that she’d gone to.
After social studies ended, My Friend Daniel and I walked to our next class together. “I’ve been thinking,” he said, which is never a good start to a sentence from Daniel, because in the past he’s been thinking things like “I should give my dog a haircut,” and “You should hide and I can tell your parents you were kidnapped.”
“I’ve been thinking,” Daniel went on, “that I should be less involved in Janet’s campaign.”
“What do you mean, less involved? The campaign literally just began. Were you even listening to my news article?”
“Yeah,” he said, “but it feels like I’ve already done a lot of work, and I just don’t know that it’s my priority right now.”
“Oh, really? What exactly is your priority right now, then?”
“Well,” My Friend Daniel said in this trying-not-to-brag tone, “I made the soccer team.”
“Oh!” I said. “Congratulations.” I’d never actually seen Daniel play soccer outside of gym class, but maybe he was secretly some kind of soccer genius. Maybe he had this natural gift for it that he had denied all his life, but it was in there all along, just yearning to break free.
“Thanks,” Daniel said in that same tone of voice. “I mean, it’s the Yellow Team, so I don’t want to make too big a deal about it—”
“Hold up,” I said, stopping so suddenly that a sixth grader almost crashed into me. “Yellow? Daniel, that’s not even a team.”
For most sports, our school just has a Red Team, which is the good team, and an Orange Team, which is the less-good team. For really popular sports like soccer, they sometimes add a Yellow Team, which is for everyone who not only isn’t talented enough to make Red but who can’t even make Orange.
“All the teams are equal,” Daniel said stubbornly. “I just got randomly assigned to Yellow. Maybe they knew it’s my favorite color.”
“All the teams are not equal. Red gets full uniforms, and they play at States. Yellow gets bandanas and doesn’t get to play anyone except one another.”
I didn’t say anything. Because here
’s the thing: I do want more friends. I just don’t know how to find them.
I don’t have anything in common with the other kids at school. They’re all like boring clones of one another. They care so much about stuff that just seems dumb to me. And I guess the stuff I care about seems dumb to them, too.
Maybe there are people like me somewhere out there in the world, and maybe someday I’ll meet them. But they’re not at Lawrenceville Middle School.
“No one cares about this election,” My Sort-Of Friend Daniel told me. “Like, you just brought in that article about it, and nobody cared at all.”
“Yeah, okay, I noticed that, thank you.”
“So I don’t want to get too involved in it,” he concluded.
“So you care about soccer because other people care about soccer,” I said, just to make sure, “but you don’t care about defeating Lucinda Burghart because other people don’t care about that.”
“Yeah . . .” My Friend Daniel rolled his eyes up toward the ceiling thoughtfully. “It sounds kind of bad when you say it that way. I dunno why.”
“But don’t you care that if we lose, we won’t get to do anything creative at school?” I demanded. “It’ll all be textbooks and standardized test prep and memorization and reports. Doesn’t that bother you?”
“Of course it does.”
“Just not enough to do anything about it,” I concluded. “Not enough to put in effort or to make anyone think you care too much about something that they don’t care about.”
My Friend Daniel shrugged, and now it was his turn to look down at the floor.
“Great,” I said. “Well, when school is even more strict and boring and gray than it already is, I hope you feel like you made the right choice.”
And I turned around and marched into math class.
CHAPTER 11
I was in a rotten mood later that day as I sat in the kitchen eating the after-school snack Janet had fixed for me and scribbling angry, thick pen marks all over my sketch pad. I was annoyed with Daniel for caring more about his barely-a-soccer-team than he did about our future. And I was even more annoyed with him for being right: Nobody did seem interested in this election except for Janet and me. And as she and I started looking into what it actually took to run a successful political campaign, it was suddenly seeming like . . . a lot.
Janet had stepped outside to take a phone call, leaving me sitting alone with the information we’d found about the stages of a political campaign.
How exactly were we supposed to achieve all of that? Tens of thousands of voters lived in Lawrenceville. We’d never be able to reach them all. Especially considering there were only three of us working on Janet’s campaign. Really two and a half, since My Friend Daniel only kind of counted.
I threw my pen down and started to head outside to see if Janet was off her phone call so she could tell me what we should do. But I paused at the door when I heard her tone of voice. She sounded upset.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” I heard her say to whomever was on the other end. “It was a long time ago, and I was a lot younger then. I don’t think it has anything to do with who I am today.” She paused, listening. “Yes, I would,” she said, then paused to listen again. “Why? Because as mayor, I’d do what’s right for Lawrenceville. And if someone doesn’t want to vote for me because of a mistake I made when I was a kid, well . . . that’s their choice, I suppose, but I think that’s ridiculous.” She cleared her throat. “Yes,” she said. “Okay. Thanks for calling. Bye.”
She put her phone in her pocket and opened the door to come back inside. Then she saw me standing right there, looking at her.
“Hey, Maddie,” she said.
“What mistake did you make when you were a kid?” I asked. “Who was that? Are you okay? You sounded upset.”
She gave me a weak, unhappy smile. “That was a reporter from the Gazette. They heard . . . something about me, and they’re about to run a story about it, and they wanted to get a quote from me first.”
“What did they hear about you?” I asked. Whatever it was, clearly it was nothing good. But I couldn’t imagine what it might be. I’d known Janet since I was a little kid, and I’d never heard anything not-good about her. How could the Lawrenceville Gazette know something that I didn’t?
“Let’s sit down.” I followed Janet back into the kitchen and slid into the seat across from her. She rested her chin in her hands. “When I was fourteen,” she began, “I cheated in English class.”
“You did?” I jerked back to look at her.
She nodded. “Here’s what happened . . .”
“You plagiarized?” I whispered.
“Yes. Just that one time—not that it’s okay to do even once. The teacher checked everyone’s essays for plagiarism, so of course he caught me. He was angry, my parents were furious, and I felt so guilty. I failed the class.”
“How come I didn’t know about this?” I demanded.
“You were really little,” she reminded me.
“Yes, but how come you never told me since then?”
Janet sighed. “It was almost ten years ago. It has nothing to do with who I am today. I shouldn’t have done it, I made up for it, and I haven’t done anything like it since. It was a horrible decision, and I learned my lesson.”
“So how did the Gazette find out about it?”
“I imagine my old teacher told them when he heard that I was running for mayor. Or maybe someone else told the reporter—one of the other kids in my class, or one of the other teachers. A lot of people knew about it at the time, because I got in trouble and the school wanted to make an example of me. I don’t know how many of them would still remember and care about it a decade later.
“But now the Gazette is going to run an article about it. They talked to Lucinda before they called me, and she said that an unqualified cheater shouldn’t be mayor. She said that I didn’t do the work for that class, and I won’t do the work for our city. She said that she didn’t cheat at the Olympics. The reporter wanted to know if I had anything to say about any of that.” Janet closed her eyes, like it hurt to look at the world.
I felt like crying from frustration. “Why did you have to cheat?”
“I just told you,” she said. “I had poor judgment. I shouldn’t have—”
I felt like crying. Janet had betrayed me—she had betrayed me years ago, and I hadn’t even known it.
“I’m not perfect,” Janet said gently. “I never claimed to be. I cheated in school one time. I can’t find a job. I don’t have any money saved. I’m mean to my dad sometimes. I got a parking ticket a month ago and haven’t paid it yet. I’m not a terrible person, but I’m certainly not perfect.”
“But you’re supposed to be,” I repeated desperately.
“I wish I could be the person you want me to be, Maddie,” Janet said. “I love seeing myself through your eyes. You think I’m smart and brave and sophisticated and good at everything, and I want to be all of that for you. I don’t ever want to disappoint you.”
“So don’t disappoint me, then,” I muttered.
“Too late.” She rubbed her hands across her face. “Look, I didn’t tell you that I once plagiarized an essay because I didn’t want you to think any less of me, okay? I wanted you to keep seeing me the way you always have—as the person who can do anything, the superhero babysitter who can save the day, who can take on the bad guys, who could even become mayor. I wanted to be that person. But I’m just . . . not.”
“Does this mean you can’t be mayor?” I asked.
“Well, already probably nobody was going to vote for me except for my parents. Once this news gets out there . . . still nobody’s going to vote for me except for my parents.”
“Are you giving up?” She couldn’t be. Not when there was so much left to do. Not when I needed her. When all kids needed her.
“Maybe?” Janet said in a small voice.
I sucked in my breath. “The thing is, I didn’t rea
lly think about what it would mean to run for mayor. That all my private stuff, decisions I made years ago, would get dragged out into the spotlight for everyone to see and judge. It feels invasive and scary. I didn’t know it was going to be like this.
“I’m sorry I let you down,” Janet went on. “I’m sorry I let us both down. I would have liked to be mayor. But.” And then she didn’t say anything else. She didn’t have to.
CHAPTER 12
THE LAWRENCEVILLE GAZETTE
NEW POLL SHOWS Burghart WITH SIXTY-THREE-POINT LEAD
Election Day is still two months away, but victory already seems to be sewn up for Alderwoman Lucinda Burghart. Since her last-minute entry into the race, underdog Janet Teneman has made barely a peep. It’s not clear if she’s running an active campaign at all. In fact, the only news from Teneman’s camp since she declared her candidacy concerns a cheating scandal from Teneman’s high school years. “It was a long time ago, and I was a lot younger then,” said Teneman, who failed a ninth-grade English class after plagiarizing an essay. “I don’t think it has anything to do with who I am today.”
Burghart feels differently. “Once a cheater, always a cheater,” she told the Gazette. “Janet is a sweet little girl, but I wouldn’t trust her with a school assignment, let alone with our very important city.”
Part of the issue may be that Teneman, a recent college graduate, is not that much older now than she was when she was caught cheating.
A recent poll shows that 68 percent of voters say they are supporting Burghart, 5 percent say they are supporting Teneman, and the remaining 27 percent are undecided. When asked if she planned to ease up on the intensity of her campaign given her substantial lead, Burghart said no. “When I was in the Olympic Trials, I didn’t go easy on my second routine even though I’d already nailed my first,” she said. “I kept fighting for my personal best right up until the last moment.”
________
I didn’t hear from Janet at all over the weekend. As far as I could tell, she’d basically given up. We certainly weren’t doing any of the things that the various internet articles said were necessary for running a successful campaign. And we were already behind where we were supposed to be two months before an election. It felt like I saw stuff about Lucinda everywhere I looked, but there was nothing out there about Janet.
