The Class

by Frances O’Roark Dowell

  And sometimes they even e-mailed her mother telling her what a good girl she was, and that made her mother happy, which made life a whole lot easier for Becca.

  Mrs. Herrera was different. Mrs. Herrera didn’t seem to have a favorite student. Becca had been working on her steadily since the beginning of school, paying her three compliments a day rather than her usual two and bringing in special treats that she left on Mrs. Herrera’s desk—pencils that read WORLD’S GREATEST TEACHER and bags of mini Oreos. She stuck Post-it notes on the treats that said things like, This is for all the hard work you do! xoxo, Becca. Mrs. Herrera always thanked her, but she still didn’t act like Becca was her favorite. She’d never e-mailed Becca’s mother to say how much she appreciated Becca’s efforts and her thoughtful gifts.

  Up until the pizza party, Becca had refused to give up. In fact, she thought she might be making progress. Mrs. Herrera had twice asked her to run up to the office to drop off some forms in the last two weeks, and last week she had complimented Becca on how neat she kept her language arts notebook. Becca was already planning what to get Mrs. Herrera for Christmas, something her teacher would love so much she’d put it in her special collection of special things, next to her signed copy of Hatchet and her grandmother’s tortoiseshell comb. She was pretty sure a really good Christmas present would clinch the deal.

  * * *

  Well, she’d have to come up with an entirely new game plan, Becca thought now, sniffing back her tears. But first she needed to solve the pizza problem.

  “Aadita can have pepperoni and just take the pepperonis off. In her culture, cows are holy, but pigs aren’t, so it’s okay if there’s pepperoni juice on her pizza,” she told Mrs. Herrera. “Personally, now that I’m a vegetarian like Carson, pepperoni juice would probably make me throw up. I mean, you could even wipe the juice off with a napkin and I’d still get sick to my stomach.”

  She turned and smiled at Carson, but Carson didn’t smile back.

  Cammi raised her hand again. “Could you please stop saying ‘pepperoni juice’? I’m losing my appetite.”

  A bunch of other people said they were losing their appetites too, and Lila Willis said she’d just remembered she’d seen the same animal documentary that Becca had seen and now she didn’t want to eat meat anymore either. Lila was one of the three really popular girls in their class, and in Becca’s opinion she was almost as mean as Petra Wilde, but that didn’t stop Carson from giving her a big smile and saying, “Way to join the team, Lila!” Something he had definitely not said to Becca.

  As soon as Lila said she didn’t want pepperoni, no one else wanted it either, except for Ben McPherson, who never cared what other kids did. “Is it okay if I start?” he asked Mrs. Herrera, who nodded. “Who else will eat some pepperoni?” she asked the class, and when no one else said they would, she looked irritated. “Well, I just wasted a lot of our special treat money,” she said. “You might have become vegetarians before I placed our order.”

  Aadita raised her hand. “I’ll eat pepperoni if I can take off the pepperonis,” she offered. “I think that would be okay.”

  Carson raised his hand. “Maybe I could have pepperoni without the pepperoni too. I could use a napkin to sort of clean the pizza up.”

  Everyone decided to have pepperoni pizza without the pepperoni. Becca wanted a piece of pepperoni pizza so badly she thought she might fall over, but now she couldn’t have one, even if she took the pepperoni off and wiped the pizza off with a napkin.

  “I’ll just skip lunch,” she told Mrs. Herrera, hoping her teacher would notice the great sacrifice she was making for the class. “Carson and Aadita can have the cheese pizza. Could I go to the book nook? I can alphabetize the books while everyone else is eating.”

  “I have some things you could eat,” Mrs. Herrera said, opening her bottom desk drawer. “Here’s an apple and some cheese crackers. Oh, and three packs of mini Oreos.”

  They were the same packs of mini Oreos that Becca had given her. One still even had Becca’s Post-it note on it.

  It was the sight of all those uneaten Oreos that made Becca realize she would never be Mrs. Herrera’s favorite. Mrs. Herrera would never e-mail her mother to say she wished all her students were just like Becca Hobbes. Becca’s mother would want to know if Becca had started misbehaving in class. Was Becca turning into Leda French, a girl on their street who’d dyed her hair blue and started wearing clunky black boots in ninth grade?

  Seeing those cookies made Becca realize that Mrs. Herrera wasn’t a very nice person. A nice person would have at least taken the Oreos to the teacher’s lounge and let Becca think that she’d eaten them. Mrs. Herrera just left the packs of cookies—one with Becca’s note still attached!—where anyone could see them. It was humiliating.

  A nice person would have e-mailed Becca’s mother by now.

  That was when Becca changed her plan. Now you couldn’t pay Becca enough to be Mrs. Herrera’s favorite. From now on, she would be Mrs. Herrera’s unfavorite. She would make Mrs. Herrera pay.

  Chapter Three

  Carson

  Friday, September 29

  Carson Bennett didn’t get excited about the grocery bags stacked in the minivan’s wayback when his mom picked him up from school on Friday afternoon. He knew there wasn’t anything good in them. In July Carson’s mom had decided to become a vegan, which meant they all sort of became vegans. Being a vegan meant they didn’t eat meat or cheese or anything made with milk or anything that came from any part of an animal. No processed foods. Carson and his brother were allowed to eat cheese pizza at parties, but she made them promise that they would never, ever eat pepperoni or anything else that had nitrates or nitrites, which were some of the worst things they could put in their bodies.

  A year ago he would have complained, but now Carson didn’t complain about anything.

  A year ago most of the stuff his mom bought at the grocery store was healthy, because she believed in eating healthy meals all through the week, lots of vegetables, no junk. But she’d also believed in loosening up a little on weekends, so after Carson and Win carried the bags of groceries into the house when they got home, they dug down through the broccoli and chicken breasts and brown rice to find the good stuff, Cokes and Nutty Buddy ice-cream cones (six to a box, so three for Carson, three for Win) and one pack of Double Stuf Oreos and two bags of ranch-flavored Doritos.

  A year ago, weekends had been about pigging out and playing soccer and going to Frankie’s Fun House with their friends. Carson’s dad traveled a lot during the week, so he mostly liked to chill on Saturday and Sunday, which was fine; his mom was willing to drive them all over the place, mall, movies, games, it didn’t matter. “Where do you want to go now?” she’d ask, jangling her car keys.

  They always ended up someplace good.

  Then Carson’s mom got cancer. One day she was fine, and the next day she was in the hospital for surgery. After that, she had chemo, lots and lots of chemo, and she lost her hair and her energy and her appetite. Grammy came to stay with them, and Carson’s dad was home a lot more, but there were no more Friday night movies at the mall or Sunday afternoons spent at Frankie’s Fun House, no more jangling car keys.

  Mostly Carson and Win spent the summer riding their bikes to the neighborhood pool. Their buddies lived in different neighborhoods and went to different pools, so the neighborhood pool was pretty boring, but what else were they supposed to do? Home was too depressing, and besides, they had to be quiet because their mom was always resting. At the pool Carson and Win did a lot of underwater fighting, which was sort of fun, except for the last time, when they’d ended up grabbing each other’s hair and pulling really hard, and when they came up out of the water, they both were crying, the big hiccuping-snorting sort of crying, snot coming out of their noses, and they never did any more underwater fighting after that.

  In July and August the blood tests came back cancer-free three times in a row, and now his mom’s hair was growing in an
d she felt a lot better, though she still had to go to the doctor’s every month to get her blood checked. Hers was the kind of cancer that could come back. If it didn’t reappear for three years, the doctors said, it probably never would, but three years was a long time from now.

  * * *

  “How did the pizza party go?” his mom asked as she pulled away from the pickup line. “Was there plenty of cheese?”

  “Yeah,” Carson said. “I had three pieces.”

  “Good,” his mom said, sounding distracted as she waited to make a left-hand turn out of the school parking lot. “By the way, I got a call from somebody’s mother today, but now I’ve got total chemo brain and can’t think who it was. A girl in your class is having a birthday party tomorrow afternoon at her house, but the mom is just inviting kids now so the kids who aren’t being invited wouldn’t hear about it. Does that strike you as strange?”

  Carson’s mom glanced over at him. He’d noticed lately that she’d started talking to him like he was almost grown up, asking his opinion about stuff, telling him more personal things about herself. He didn’t really like it, but it didn’t matter what he liked or didn’t like anymore. Our primary goal is to make your mother happy, his dad had said back in May, and as far as Carson knew, that was still true.

  “They’ll hear about it Monday,” Carson said, “So it doesn’t really make any difference.”

  “Lila!” his mom exclaimed suddenly. “The girl having the party is Lila, and her mother’s name is… Well, I’m not going to remember that. But she said the party is at four o’clock, it’s a cookout, and instead of a present you’re supposed to bring a book for the Book Harvest program. And your swim stuff, because it’s a pool party. Do you think it’s a little late for a pool party? Maybe it’s a global warming thing—pool parties all year round, why not?”

  His mom sounded happy and relieved because she remembered the message, but Carson didn’t feel happy or relieved. He didn’t want to go to a party, not even a pool party at Lila Willis’s house. Nothing against Lila personally; he thought it was cool how she’d said she was a vegetarian in class today, like she wanted to make him feel less dumb about saying he couldn’t have pepperoni. But he’d been to one other birthday party since school started—Garrison’s birthday party at Climb the Walls climbing center—and he’d felt strange the whole time. He could tell nobody else there had a mom who’d had cancer; if they did, they wouldn’t be acting like everything was so great.

  “Did you say it’s a cookout?” Carson asked his mom now. “That means hamburgers and hot dogs, right? On a grill?”

  His mom frowned. “Yeah, usually.”

  “You said no grilled stuff. Grilled equals car—” He couldn’t think of the word, but he knew it meant stuff that caused cancer.

  “Carcinogens,” his mom said. “And grilled stuff can be okay, just as long as it’s not charred.”

  “But hot dogs aren’t okay,” Carson reminded her. “Hot dogs are the worst.”

  “You could bring some tofu dogs. You liked the ones I got last week, right—the spicy ones?”

  “Really, Mom? You really want me to walk into a party with tofu dogs?”

  “Why not? I bet at least one or two of the kids will be vegetarians. They’ll appreciate that somebody thought of it.”

  He didn’t bother to tell her that everyone in his class was now a vegetarian. It was kind of cool, how between him and Lila, they’d gotten the whole class turned against meat. Stuff like that had started happening to him last year. He hadn’t noticed it at first, and then Stefan Morrisey, who was his math partner, pointed it out to him one day. “Before Christmas all the boys in our class wore white footie socks, and then after Christmas, after you started wearing those socks like soccer players wear? A week later everyone else was wearing them too.”

  Now things like that happened all the time. Carson didn’t know why exactly, but he had to admit there were some pretty cool things about it. People gave you the good junk from their lunches, their M&M’s and cupcakes and Fritos. Girls like Becca Hobbes let him copy their homework, although he tried not to ask Becca too often because she got so freaked out about getting caught. “I’m only doing this because we’re friends,” she’d say, looking nervously around. As far as Carson was concerned, they weren’t friends at all, not that he ever said so.

  All in all, sixth grade was pretty okay. His mom wasn’t sick, people gave him things he didn’t even have to ask for, and for once in his life he had a teacher who seemed to like him. Not only that, Mrs. Herrera liked soccer and football, too, which was sort of amazing, since those were his sports. On that shelf where she kept all that stuff she liked, she had a miniature Browns football signed by this old-time player named Jim Brown, and once when Carson had to stay in at lunch because he’d gotten a little rowdy during morning announcements, out of nowhere she’d called, “Go out for a pass, Carson!” and thrown him the ball. And she’d even caught it when he threw it back. Pretty cool.

  “Doesn’t Win have a game tomorrow at four?” Carson asked his mom, thinking about everyone at the party tomorrow throwing balls around and splashing each other in the water, laughing and sort of being jerks (he could already hear Matt Collins yelling, “Take a joke, dude!” which is what he always said after he’d done something really stupid and mean). “We kind of have a pact about going to each other’s games.”

  They were at a red light. His mom turned to look at him. “Carson, you know Win won’t mind if you miss a game. Besides, he’s got another one on Sunday.”

  “We have a pact, Mom,” Carson said. “Do you understand what the word ‘pact’ means?”

  He couldn’t look at her. He looked out the window instead, and it took him a second to realize that he was crying. His mom could never understand what it was like spending the whole summer underwater, kicking and punching his brother, his brother’s slow-motion fists and feet kicking and punching back, how terrible and great that had felt. Every single day all summer they’d pretended to try to kill each other. It was like Carson was the cancer and Win was the cancer and if they just hit and kicked each other hard enough, the cancer would go away.

  And it had. His mom’s cancer had gone away. But it could come back any minute. If Carson or Win let down their guards—broke their promises, ate pepperoni, stepped outside the force field holding their family together the way the water had held Carson and his brother together this summer—the cancer could come back.

  “I know what a pact is,” his mom said softly. She reached over and put her hand on Carson’s shoulder, and then the light turned green and they headed for the elementary school, which was just a block down the street. When they got there, Win was waiting for them at the curb, and Carson could tell by the look on his face that something was up.

  “Hey, fart face,” Win said as he slid into the minivan’s back seat. “Do you know that in Spanish, ‘Carson’ is the word for ‘butt ugly’?”

  “News to me,” Carson replied, turning around to look at his brother. “Did you know that ‘Win’ means ‘fifth-grade snot eater’?”

  Win wiggled his eyebrows and opened his backpack so that Carson could see inside to where two bags of Cool Ranch Doritos were nestled against each other.

  “You’re a green-bean snorter,” Carson said, grinning at his brother.

  “You’re a cockroach chewer,” Win replied.

  “I was thinking we could have some quinoa and strawberries for snack when we get home,” his mother said, and that made Carson and Win laugh so hard that Carson thought his guts might explode all over the car.

  “Yeah, Mom,” Win said. “Sounds delish.”

  Carson shot his brother a thumbs-up. “Sounds like the best thing ever.”

  Chapter Four

  Cammi

  Saturday, September 30

  When Cammi Lovett got up on Saturday morning, she went to the bathroom and brushed her teeth, and then she went downstairs to watch Netflix on the computer. On Saturdays the screen r
ules were different. She could have an hour of screen time in the morning and an hour in the afternoon, but to get her hour in the afternoon she had to spend an hour reading or exercising first. She had to earn her second hour.

  Cammi had her own weekend screen rules. If she got up before her parents—which she almost always did—she had free screen time until one of them woke up. It seemed like a fair rule to her, although she couldn’t quite say why. She could also eat as many cookies as she wanted, because if her parents didn’t see the cookies, then the cookies didn’t exist.

  While Netflix was loading up, she checked her phone for texts. There were three from Becca sent this morning, the first one at six thirty a.m. Becca made a big deal about getting up early every day, not just school days. It was part of her program for Building a Better Becca, which she had started at the beginning of last summer. At first Cammi had sort of liked the idea. For her birthday in May, she’d been given a subscription to Girls’ Life magazine, and reading the articles had made her realize that she was behind in all sorts of things, like knowing what kind of jeans she looked best in and how to moisturize (you needed different products for your face and the rest of your body, it turned out, and it was important to moisturize your hair, too).

  The only problem with building a better Cammi? It was boring. Moisturizing was extremely boring, and so was reading about the do’s and don’t’s of breaking up (she’d never even had a boyfriend!) and going shopping for the shoes that would make her shine. All the shoes in the pictures had high heels, which Cammi thought was crazy. Where was she going to wear high heels? The Oscars?

  But the most boring thing of all was listening to Becca go on and on about her plan to impress for success. That was the motto for her Building a Better Becca (and a better Cammi) program. Becca believed that when you worked hard to impress other people, you were destined to be successful. By mid-July Cammi had started asking her, “Successful at what? Why do we have to be successful? We’re only eleven.” Becca swatted all of Cammi’s questions away. “Just stick with me and you’ll see,” she’d said.