The Campaign

by Leila Sales

  On Monday, we had drama class, which would normally be one of the more fun periods of the week. But today, going to drama class just made me feel even more sad, because I couldn’t stop thinking about how, once Lucinda was mayor, we’d never have it again.

  Mrs. Cheng let Polly make an announcement before we got started. “Auditions for the fall musical are next week,” Polly told us all. “We’re doing The Lion King, and it’s going to be super-fun. I hope all of you will at least consider trying out. It’s going to have a big cast, so we need a lot of actors! Even if you don’t want to perform, you should come anyway, and Mrs. Cheng will tell you about what we need for stage crew. If you’re interested in designing costumes or building scenery or running lights and sound, then we need your involvement, too.”

  It was so dumb how Polly acted like this school play was so important when in fact it didn’t matter outside of the four walls of Lawrenceville Middle School. Not like the election, which really did matter.

  I couldn’t understand how people could spend so much time on something so meaningless, then claim that they were too busy to spend their time on the things that were actually meaningful.

  We need your involvement, Polly had said. No, you don’t. Not as much as Janet needs people’s involvement.

  And just like that, all of a sudden, looking at Polly, I had an idea.

  Mrs. Cheng divided us into small groups so we could each take a different fairy tale and adapt it for a modern-day setting. I wasn’t in Polly’s group. But as soon as everyone started talking and planning, I slipped away from my group, ran over to Polly’s, and tapped her on the shoulder.

  “Look, Dahlina,” I said. “I know we don’t always get along or whatever. But there’s something really serious going on, and if we don’t figure out what to do about it, then you and I are both going to be miserable.”

  Polly narrowed her eyes at me, like she couldn’t tell if I was playing a prank on her or if I was actually crazy. “What on earth is this about?” she asked. “What do you want from me? We’re supposed to be working on our skits right now, you know. Can’t you ever just do things the way you’re supposed to, Maddie?”

  She was about to turn back to her small group, and I could see Molly waiting for her cue to jump in and save her friend from having to talk to me, and Holly giving me the Holly Look, and Mrs. Cheng making her rounds through the room, about to notice that I was in the wrong place. So I just blurted it out.

  Polly’s eyes were as wide as saucers. “Are you kidding?” she demanded.

  “I’m dead serious.”

  “Why would anyone want to do that to us?”

  “Because she doesn’t care about us,” I said. “And because she can. Because she thinks no one’s going to stop her.”

  “All right,” Polly said decisively, and for the first time since Daniel semi-quit, I felt my heart lift. Because Polly sounded how I wanted to feel: confident. “I’m calling an emergency meeting at Jordan’s tomorrow after school. I’ll get people to show up if you come ready to tell us how we can fight back.”

  Mrs. Cheng noticed me then and said, “Maddie, is there a reason why you’re not with your group?”

  “Sorry, Mrs. Cheng!” I said. To Polly, I muttered, “I don’t really hang out at Jordan’s.”

  What I meant was, I’m not really welcome at Jordan’s.

  “Well,” Polly said, “you do now.”

  CHAPTER 13

  It seemed like half the seventh grade showed up at Jordan’s Hot House for the next day’s emergency meeting. Every beanbag chair had at least two kids squished onto it. Every booth was packed to the brim, with kids not only sitting six to a table but even more sitting on the tables themselves. I saw the drama kids and the band kids and the choir kids, the ones who made the literary magazine and the ones who made video games, the ballerinas and the painters and the poets.

  I hadn’t been to Jordan’s since a birthday party three years ago—one of those parties where the birthday kid’s parents insist on inviting everyone in the whole class—and somehow it had gotten even cooler since then.

  Grown-ups refuse to hang out at Jordan’s. Dad says it gives him a headache. Mom says she has nightmares set there. There is a small, noise-proof “retreat room” on the opposite side of the kitchen, where adults can sit quietly and check their phones while soft rock plays in the background.

  I couldn’t imagine how Polly might make our classmates pipe down long enough for me to tell them about the mayoral election. But then the piercing sound of an air horn blasted out. Some kids shrieked or clapped their hands over their ears, and we all turned in the direction of the noise.

  It was coming from Polly—or, more specifically, from Polly’s phone, which she’d hooked up to a speaker. She stood on top of the back of a booth, towering over everyone else.

  The room fell silent as we all looked up at her. The car-racing video game was paused. The jukebox was shut off. All of Jordan’s Hot House belonged to Polly—for the moment, at least.

  People were silent, enraptured. I had to hand it to Polly: She knew how to command a room.

  “You’ve probably never heard of Lucinda Burghart before, but she is poised to become the new mayor of Lawrenceville. And if we let that happen, she is going to destroy our lives.”

  Polly started pointing to people one by one and telling them what Lucinda was going to do to them.

  The room was a mix of horrified gasps, outraged nos, and stunned silence.

  “That is what Lucinda is planning to do to us if she wins,” Polly said. “Your own parents are probably planning to vote for her. Most adults are planning to vote for her. You know why? Because nobody cares what we think.

  “But,” Polly said, and I could feel the whole room hanging on her every word. Even I was leaning forward, eager to hear what came after but, what our hope might be, even though I knew our hope; I was the one who’d found it, after all.

  “But,” Polly repeated, “there is one other candidate in this race. Her name is Janet Teneman. She wants us to keep doing art and being creative. We can trust Janet. All we need to do is get her elected.”

  Isabelle raised her hand, like we were in school. “How can we get her elected when we can’t even vote?” she asked.

  “We can’t vote,” Polly said, “but that doesn’t mean we’re powerless. So Maddie’s going to tell us how we can win. Maddie, come on up here.”

  The crowd parted to let me walk slowly to the front of the room. I climbed up on top of the booth so I was standing next to Polly.

  But as soon as I made it there, it was like whatever spell she’d cast over the room was broken. People had been willing to listen to her. But they definitely weren’t going to listen to me.

  Uh-oh.

  Now what was I going to do?

  CHAPTER 14

  “Hey!” I hollered. My voice was louder than I’d ever heard it before.

  The grumbling of my classmates came to an abrupt halt.

  “Look,” I said, “Janet is my friend. I’ve known her since I was three years old. I found out what Lucinda was plotting. I asked Janet to run for mayor. I helped collect signatures so that Janet’s name would appear on the ballot. And now I am going to tell you how we can win this thing.

  “I don’t care if you like me, but you should listen to me. Because this is it, guys. These are your only two options: Lucinda or Janet. And if we don’t work together, Lucinda is what we’re going to get. Now, personally, I don’t want Lucinda. Do you?”

  “No,” a bunch of people muttered.

  Polly said, “We all know that not everyone in this room gets along. We want different things, we’re in different clubs, we run in different circles. But for the next two months, between now and Election Day, we need to set all of that aside, because we need to win.”

  She looked straight at me as she said it, and I got her meaning perfectly: Just because we were working toward the same goal, that didn’t make us friends.

  Which wa
s fine by me. I didn’t want a friend like Polly anyway.

  I just wanted to help Janet.

  “Our only hope of winning is to run a really strong campaign,” I announced. “Lucinda already has people working for her. But we have ourselves. Lucinda has already raised a lot of money. But we have manpower. We need to do everything Lucinda has done. And then we need to do even more.”

  “So what else does Lucinda have already?” Polly asked.

  And I presented my list.

  “That’s everything I know for sure that Lucinda has already done for her campaign,” I concluded.

  “What about us?” asked Deke. “What have we done?”

  “Nothing,” I answered.

  There was a moment of silence as everyone took in the enormity of the task ahead of us. Then Polly said, “So we’d better get started.”

  “For the slogan,” Chloe spoke up, “it could say something about how Janet cares more about young people than Lucinda does.”

  “Like ‘Kids for Janet’?” Molly suggested.

  Chloe chewed on her bottom lip, and I could see her playing around with different combinations of words in her brain. Chloe is the editor of Fishsticks, our school’s literary magazine. “Something about how Janet’s not just for selfish grown-ups; she’s for everyone. Maybe ‘Janet for all’? Or ‘Janet for the future’?”

  It all kind of sounded the same to me, but the rest of the creative writing kids seemed pleased by “Janet for the future,” so that decided it.

  “We’ll need to print our slogan on yard signs,” I said.

  “I guess we can’t just use, like, normal printer paper?” Deke asked.

  “Not unless you want it to turn into pulp the next time it rains,” Polly replied.

  “My parents actually run a printing company,” Molly volunteered. “They print logos on signs and banners and magnets and baseball caps and stuff like that.”

  An appreciative murmur went through the room.

  “That’s amazing!” I exclaimed. “Do you think they’d let us print all this stuff for free?”

  Molly shook her head. “I’ve had them print materials before for my youth group, and they still need to charge a little bit of money to cover the cost of the supplies. But they’ll give us a big discount.”

  “So no matter what, we need to raise at least a little money,” I said.

  “How?” asked Polly.

  It was a good question.

  “We could all chip in our allowances for the next two months,” Lucas suggested.

  Nicole nodded. “I would do that. I’d rather be two months further away from saving up for a trampoline than have the dance team taken away from me.”

  “I wouldn’t do that,” Holly objected.

  Of course you wouldn’t, I thought. Trust Holly’s one sentence of the day to be something negative.

  “Not everyone gets an allowance,” Dylan pointed out.

  “We can start by chipping in our own money,” Nicole said. “Any amount that you can contribute will help, even if it’s just a dime. And we can also fundraise outside of this room. So it’s okay if you can’t give any money, Holly. You can work on getting other people to donate instead. We can do bake sales, or sell the magnets and baseball caps at marked-up prices and make a profit from them.”

  Holly gave a Holly Look about this, but everyone else looked impressed.

  “I ran the fundraiser for the dance team last year,” Nicole explained. “We had to raise enough money for all new costumes. So that’s how I know about that stuff.”

  “Could you be in charge of fundraising for the campaign, too?” I asked.

  Nicole grinned. “Totally.”

  “Does Janet already have a website?” Isabelle asked. When I shook my head, she said, “Can Coding Club be in charge of making her one? We make awesome websites, but hardly anybody ever visits them. Last year we made this site that was a list of every first name we could think of, and barely any of you even looked at it.” Isabelle gave a general glare to the room at large. “It’s a really good website,” she said, as if challenging any of us to deny it.

  “You should definitely make Janet’s website,” I said. “I promise we’ll all look at it.”

  Isabelle nodded, mollified, and then pulled out a laptop and propped it up against an arcade game, maybe so she could start coding right then and there.

  “What do you guys think about this for a logo?” Theo asked, holding up his sketchbook.

  “Oooh!” we all said, and Theo nodded in satisfaction.

  “Send that to me as a file,” Isabelle told him briskly, “and I’ll get it up on the website. Oh, the URL is JanetforLawrenceville.com, by the way. I just bought it. Nicole, you’ll pay me back once we’ve raised some money, right?” She didn’t wait for Nicole’s response, though, and just went right back to typing on her computer.

  “Can we meet Janet?” Evan asked me. “I’ve never met a politician before.”

  I almost laughed at the idea of Janet, my Janet, being called a politician—but then I realized that’s exactly what she was now.

  “I think so,” I replied. “When?”

  “Tomorrow,” Polly suggested.

  “Do you all want to come back here tomorrow?” I asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” Polly answered for everyone. “We are going to be here every day until the election. We’re going to be here every day until the day we win.”

  “Janet for mayor!” someone shouted from the back. And then the rest of the room took up the cry.

  CHAPTER 15

  When Janet and I opened the door to Jordan’s the next afternoon, we were greeted with so much screaming, you’d think that Janet was Taylor Swift paying a visit to the seventh graders of Lawrenceville.

  Janet hadn’t even been sure that she wanted to come meet all the kids.

  “I thought you wanted a job,” I reminded her.

  “I did,” she said. “I do. But . . . I don’t know, do I want this job? Maybe I want to be an astronaut. Or a pastry chef. Or . . . something.”

  “I feel so embarrassed about the plagiarism scandal, I kind of just want to hide,” she admitted. “I don’t know. Running for mayor seemed like a fun thing to do, but then it got really serious, really fast.”

  “You’re a hero to my entire school,” I told her. “Being a hero is a fun thing to do.”

  “Can I still be a hero even if I’m not perfect?” she asked. “Even if I lose?”

  “Of course,” I told her. I hoped I was right about that. Janet was the only hero we had.

  But now that we were at the front of the room full of cheering seventh graders, Janet seemed transformed. She was all confidence and energy, just like a politician should be. “Thank you so much!” Janet shouted. “Thank you! I’m so excited to be running for mayor, and I’m honored to have all of your support.

  “You guys are amazing. When I was at Lawrenceville Middle School, I was president of the Weather Club, but that was about it. I wasn’t doing anything as meaningful as you are. I thought politics was a boring thing that only affected grown-ups and that only adults could be involved in. I am so impressed that you’ve all figured out—years earlier than I did—that what happens in politics makes a difference to all of us, so we can all be political activists.

  “I can’t promise you that we will win, but I can promise you that we will give it everything we’ve got. And whether or not we win, we are going to make a positive impact on this city. Who’s with me?”

  Everyone cheered again. I felt like I was going to burst with pride.

  But then the crowd broke up to get to work, and I started feeling kind of . . . lonely. Kids kept coming up to Janet to talk to her. They seemed fascinated by everything she had to say, which made sense, because she’s interesting and also now an important politician. And she seemed fascinated by what they had to say, which also made sense, because Janet is an excellent listener and very supportive.

  But it made me feel jealous and unnecessary.
The way Janet was looking at them, focused on everything they were saying, nodding and asking thoughtful questions—that’s how she’d always treated me. Me and nobody else, because she was my babysitter.

  Only now it seemed like I wasn’t so special after all.

  Yesterday it had felt like my classmates needed me, because I had a solution to their problems. But now that I’d delivered that solution, none of them seemed to need me anymore, either.

  Nobody seemed to notice when I went outside. I sat down on a bench and pulled out my sketch pad. The air smelled crisp and autumnal. I wondered if there was a name for this sort of weather. I’d ask Janet if I ever got her to myself again.

  The garbage collector pulled up and started loading trash bags from the Jordan’s dumpster into his truck. His keys came unclipped from his belt as he was reaching for the last of the bags, so I picked them up and handed them back to him.

  “Hmph. I have no idea,” said the garbage collector.

  “You should vote for Janet Teneman,” I told him.

  “Look, I don’t have any time to figure out who to vote for,” the man said. “I might not even have time to vote. The sanitation department is understaffed, and I’m doing the work of two men here. This cesspool of children, Jordan’s? This isn’t even supposed to be on my route. They keep expanding my territory. It’s ridiculous—no one can fit in this many stops in a day. I could be the greatest garbage man of all time, and I still wouldn’t be able to handle this.”

  “Okay,” I said, “but if you do vote, will you vote for Janet?”

  “Why should I?” the garbage man asked.

  “Because she’s going to make sure there continues to be funding for arts education in public schools,” I answered promptly.

  “And why would I care about that?” he asked.