The scissors were on Mrs. Lamprey’s desk, the sharp blades gleaming. Petra smiled. Oh, this was going to be an interesting project, all right. As interesting as she could possibly make it.
Chapter Seven
Ellie
Monday, October 2
Some writers took notes on their characters and made outlines of their stories before they started writing their novels, and others jumped in with only the slightest idea of what their story might be about. Ellie knew that J. K. Rowling was in the first group of writers, and so she decided that was the kind of writer she would be too. A planner and a plotter.
She’d spent the weekend taking notes on all the kids in her class. Well, not on all of them. She knew absolutely nothing about Ethan Lantzy, for instance, other than that he was obsessed with lacrosse, and Felicity Wallack was a mystery to her. All Ellie knew about Felicity was that her two best friends were in Mr. Lee’s class, and so in a way it seemed like Felicity was in Mr. Lee’s class too, because at recess and lunch and PE that was where you’d find her, over with Lee’s Bees, tucked between Madeline Connor and Anna Ross.
Ellie liked making lists, so that was the first thing she did: make a list of where everyone seemed to fit in. Her categories included Popular Boys, Popular Girls, Friendly and Nice Boys, Friendly and Nice Girls, Athletes, Shy People, Book People, People with Special Talents and Skills, and Uncategorizable People. She’d thought about making a category for People who Bring Good Lunches, and People Who Wear Cool Shoes, but then she decided she was overdoing it. It would probably be better to do an entry for each person in which she described their lunches and clothes and the kind of jokes they liked to make and who their friends were. Yes, that was exactly what she’d do. But first she would do categories.
Popular Boys was easy: Carson Bennett (cute, but goofy), Garrison Paul (stuck-up and full of himself), and Matt Collins (bully). Popular Girls, also easy: Petra Wilde, Rosie Nichols, and Lila Willis (meanest, almost as mean, jerk).
Friendly and Nice Boys: Rogan Kimari, Henry Lloyd (sort of—maybe not really? He could be a big pest, but he wasn’t mean), and Cole Perun. Ethan Lantzy seemed nice—Ellie would pencil him in, she decided, and then observe and take notes over several days in order to confirm. Stefan Morrisey also seemed nice, but he was too quiet to be called friendly.
Friendly and Nice Girls: Cammi Lovett, Ariana Savarino, Elizabeth Hernandez. Aadita Amrit was clearly nice and might be friendly, but like Stefan she was very quiet. Still, Ella put her in the Friendly and Nice group, because Aadita had friendliness potential. Of course, if she was going to do that for Aadita, she ought to do it for Stefan, too. She went ahead and penciled him in under Ethan.
The longer she worked on her lists, the more she realized she didn’t know enough about her classmates to write a novel about them. All she knew about Carson Bennett, for instance, was that he was popular, a vegetarian, and made lots of dumb jokes that everyone laughed at because he was popular and that was one of the perks of being popular—people laughed at your jokes even if the jokes were dumb. Did he play sports? It seemed like he should play sports, but he never wore a jersey on soccer game day. What was up with that? Maybe he was on a travel team. Maybe he was too good for middle school soccer. How could Ellie find out?
There was no getting around it: she was going to have to do research. The good news was that she loved doing research. Also, she loved spying on people and eavesdropping on their conversations.
So on Monday Ellie went to school with a new notebook and a new plan. Every day she was going to focus on three people, observe their habits, note who they ate lunch with, and generally look for clues and insights about what they liked and disliked. She’d describe what they were wearing and also their fingernails. Ellie thought fingernails said a lot about a person. Clean, dirty, bitten, clipped, polished, these fingernail conditions were like little signs people waved all day long, signs that said I’M NEAT! Or I’M NERVOUS! Or I DIDN’T TAKE A SHOWER THIS MORNING!
It only took Ellie a little while to figure out that you could observe people during class time, but it was hard to observe them doing anything interesting. Stefan Morrisey was on her Monday list, but all he did during first period was raise his hand a lot and get a disappointed look on his face when their science teacher, Mrs. Kafsky, said, “Does anyone besides Stefan have the answer to that question? I know Stefan is not the only one in this room who did the homework assignment.” When Mrs. Kafsky gave them the last ten minutes to get started on their homework, Stefan finished his in five and then spent the rest of the time reading a book whose title Ellie couldn’t make out.
She got as close as she could to Ethan, her second victim, as the class went to Mrs. Hulka’s room for history, but he didn’t do anything notable in the forty-five seconds it took to get from one room to the other except to turn to Henry Lloyd and say, “History sucks, dude.”
By LA, back in Mrs. Herrera’s classroom, Ellie was starting to think that school might be the worst place to observe people, especially someone like Aadita (the third person on Monday’s list), who very rarely said or did anything. How could anyone be so utterly, fantastically quiet? Sometimes Ellie wanted to yell at the top of her lungs just to erase some of the silence that Aadita created.
Maybe school just wasn’t a place where people could be interesting, Ellie thought as the clock ticked away the last few minutes of the period. Maybe it squashed the interesting right out of people.
Two seconds later a sharp knock on the door caused Ellie and everybody else to look up at the same time. Henry Lloyd dropped his pencil and yelled, “Whoops!” and Mrs. Herrera issued a sharp, “Quiet, Henry!” Then she looked around the classroom and said, “Cammi, would you open—”
But there wasn’t time for Cammi to open the door. The vice principal, Mrs. Whalen, stormed into the classroom before Cammi could manage to get out of her seat.
“I need to speak to you in the hallway, Mrs. Herrera,” she announced. “We’ve got art room shenanigans on our hands.”
Art room shenanigans, Ellie happily wrote in her notebook.
“Would you mind telling me—”
Again, Mrs. Herrera was cut off midsentence.
“Outside, Mrs. Herrera,” the vice principal ordered, as she marched back out of the room, calling, “Becca Hobbes, I told you not to move a muscle!”
Becca Hobbes got caught doing something bad? Immediately the class hummed with doubt, and Ellie took notes as fast as she could. Some of the kids had known Becca since preschool, and she’d never gotten in trouble for so much as whispering when she was supposed to be working on an assignment. She’d never talked in the hall or stuck chewing gum under her desk or dog-eared a library book to mark her place. Late homework? Never. Cut in front of somebody in line? Nope, not the type.
“Quiet down,” Mrs. Herrera said when their whispers grew to a near roar. “I’m going to go speak with Mrs. Whalen. Ben is in charge until I return.”
Ben looked up from his book, glanced around the classroom, and then returned to his reading. It was Rogan Kimari who walked to the front of the classroom, put a finger to his lips, and then went to stand by the pencil sharpener next to the door.
“What’s going on?” Ethan called in a loud whisper, and everyone went, “Shhh!” at the same time.
Rogan practically had his ear against the door, his face turned toward the class. At one point, his eyes got really wide, and Ethan said, “What?” and everyone shushed him again.
“Quick, somebody throw me a pencil!” Rogan whisper-yelled a few seconds later, and Matt threw a pencil so hard that you could hear a little thud when it hit Rogan in the head. Ellie admired how cool Rogan was about it, picking up the pencil from the floor, calmly inserting it into the sharpener, and acting like he didn’t even notice when someone pushed open the door. But as soon as he saw Petra, he took a step back and yelled, “Whoa! What happened to your hair?”
Petra ignored him, and so did Becca as she followed Petra in
side. Ellie sat back in her chair—hard. What the heck had happened to those two on the way to the library? Had they been kidnapped by an insane barber? It was hard to say which girl looked less like herself. They both had shaggy pixie cuts now, but on Becca it looked sort of glamorous, like a French movie star. Petra, on the other hand, resembled a dandelion with its seeds blown off. Studying Petra, Ellie suddenly understood why every other TV commercial was for hair products. Hair, it turned out, was powerful.
Petra looked like a girl who’d lost her power.
“Petra, what did you do?” Rosie gasped, sounding horrified. “Your hair is ridiculous!”
Mrs. Whalen stood in the doorway. “Mrs. Lamprey nearly had a heart attack when she walked into her classroom and saw these two, and I don’t blame her.” She looked sternly at the class. “You’re not in elementary school anymore. You’re expected to act like young adults in middle school. You don’t skip class to give each other haircuts. You don’t cut off all your hair and get it in the paint! Mrs. Lamprey spent all morning mixing that paint!”
A bunch of kids laughed, but not Ellie. This was just too strange. Becca Hobbes wasn’t supposed to look like a French movie star. Petra Wilde wasn’t supposed to look like a wilted petunia. Ellie felt like she was watching a show on the Disney Channel, where two kids switch bodies. Not that Becca used to look like a wilted petunia before… Ellie sighed. She couldn’t explain the weirdness. She just knew that the scene in front of her was very, very strange.
Mrs. Whalen turned toward the hallway and motioned Mrs. Herrera into the classroom. Everyone was silent when Mrs. Herrera walked back inside, and because the room was silent, everyone heard Mrs. Whalen whisper, “We are getting very, very close to having a problem here, Judith. After what happened last year, the words ‘thin ice’ come to mind.”
Who was on thin ice? Ellie wondered, and looking around at her classmates, she could tell they were wondering the same thing. It had to be Mrs. Herrera, right? Petra and Becca hadn’t been at this school last year, and if Becca was in trouble, this was the first time ever. Usually you had to get in trouble three or four times before you were in thin-ice territory.
Ellie wished she had friends to discuss this with. There was so much to talk about! So much to dissect. You had the Petra-Becca situation, and the Mrs.-Herrera-on-thin-ice situation, and Ellie thought the two situations were probably connected, but it was the sort of thing you needed to work through with at least one other person, preferably a small group of people. She wanted to know what Rogan had overheard. Did anyone have any idea of what had happened in Mrs. Herrera’s class last year? Had there been a series of art room shenanigans? Were art room shenanigans a thing with Mrs. Herrera’s students?
As soon as the bell rang at the end of the day, everyone shot out of the building, probably so they could get on their buses as fast as possible and start texting each other about the day’s events. But Ellie didn’t have anyone to text. All she could do was get on her bus and think.
She wished that bus rides weren’t too bumpy for taking notes, because she had ten million thoughts and impressions rushing around her brain and she wanted to get all of them down on paper. How to describe the way she felt when she saw Petra Wilde looking like the opposite of Petra Wilde? How to describe the mean smile that played around Becca’s lips when Mrs. Herrera said, “Don’t worry, Becca. Your hair will grow back faster than you think.” The old Becca would have said, Oh, thank you, Mrs. Herrera! I feel so much better, Mrs. Herrera! This new Becca didn’t seem like she cared all that much about Mrs. Herrera’s opinion.
Ellie stared out the window at all the kids streaming to their buses. They looked so normal. Ellie was starting to wonder whether you could really tell if someone was normal by how they seemed on the outside. Petra Wilde had always looked normal—better than normal, really. She looked perfect. But this afternoon? Not so much. She was like that kid outside the bus window just now, the one who was working his way against the current of students leaving for the day. Maybe he had a reason for going in the wrong direction, but it still seemed strange.
It took Ellie a second to realize the kid was Sam Hawkins, the boy whose family had moved a couple of weeks ago—or “relocated,” as Mrs. Herrera had put it. What was he doing here? Had his family moved back? Seeing Sam just added to Ellie’s feeling that something was off about today.
Ellie wondered what Cammi had been thinking when she saw Becca with her new hairdo. What would it be like to see your best friend completely transformed? Would Becca’s hair change their friendship?
It would be so nice to have a best friend to discuss this with, Ellie thought as the bus pulled away from the school. Of course all she wanted at this point was any kind of friend. She’d like to have someone to sit with at lunch and talk about the things that she found interesting. She’d like to talk about the Weasleys, Ellie’s favorite fictional family. Sometimes she pretended she was a Weasley—that she and Ginny Weasley were twins and Ron was her overprotective big brother. She’d even written some stories about her life as a Weasley, and it would be nice to have a friend to share these stories with.
They’d almost reached her neighborhood when a girl in an oversize hoodie plopped down beside Ellie. Ellie recognized her as one of the kids who got on the bus in the morning two stops after hers.
“So what’s the deal with the haircut situation?” the girl asked. “All of a sudden, Petra looks like a drowned rat.”
“How did you hear about that?” Ellie asked, at the same time wondering how this girl would know that she might have some inside information.
“I’m friends with Felicity, and she texted me a few minutes ago. I know you’re in Mrs. Herrera’s class, so I thought I’d ask.”
How do you know? Ellie wanted to ask. Someone actually knows about me? My presence has been noted?
“I’m Charlotte, by the way,” the girl said, sticking out her hand.
Ellie shook it. “Ellie. I’m new this year.”
“I figured,” Charlotte said. “Otherwise, we would have been on the same bus last year. So being new, do you understand the absolute weirdness of Becca Hobbes doing something like that—something that might actually get her in trouble, even if it was just messing up the art room?”
Ellie reached into her backpack, pulled out her notebook, and began to read the notes she’d jotted down in LA. “In recollections of Becca dating back to the two-day twos preschool class, there is not one memory of her committing even the most minor of offenses. Cammi Lovett seems to recall that once in kindergarten Becca dripped three beads of glue on her desk to make a glue-bead necklace, but the guilt proved too much and she washed them off before they had time to dry.”
“That is the essence of Becca Hobbes,” Charlotte said. “What’s got everyone in a tizzy is the fact that not only did Becca cut off all her hair, but she did it in cahoots with Petra Wilde. It’s sort of like the pope and a serial killer hanging out together. A conundrum.”
“It’s a mystery, all right,” Ellie admitted. “I wonder if Petra was trying to get Becca in trouble as a joke.”
“But why did she cut her hair too? I hear that Rosie has already posted Petra’s picture all over the Internet—name your platform, and you’ll find her very unbecoming new look.”
“I thought Rosie was Petra’s best friend,” Ellie said. “Why would she do that?”
Charlotte raised an eyebrow. “Rosie is nobody’s friend.”
“Not even her best friend’s friend,” Ellie mused. “That’s pretty sad.”
The bus pulled to the curb and the doors squealed open. “Well, this is me,” Charlotte said as she stood up. “Thanks for the info.”
“Gingie, wait up!” someone called from the back of the bus. “Help me carry my project.”
“Siblings,” Charlotte said with a sigh. “Older siblings are the worst.”
“ ‘Gingie’?” Ellie asked.
“Family nickname. We’ve all got them. You should—”
Before Charlotte could finish, a tall girl with red hair pulled back into a braid dumped a bulging canvas tote bag into her arms. “Do not drop this, do you hear me?”
“Yes, Your Highness,” Charlotte replied, sinking a little under the bag’s weight.
What should I do? Ellie wanted to call after her. I’ll do anything! Let’s be friends!
“See you tomorrow!” Charlotte yelled over her shoulder.
“Okay, that would be great!” Ellie called back, realizing as soon as the words were out of her mouth how stupid they sounded. She leaned back against the seat and sighed. She’d been this close to making a friend and somehow she’d blown it. It was like she didn’t know how to close the deal anymore. Oh well, she thought as she sat back up and pulled a pen out of her backpack, at least I have my notebook. That could be the title of her next book: My Notebook, My Bestie. And even though the road was bumpy and the bus shimmied and jerked, Ellie did what she always did in times of trouble. She wrote.
Chapter Eight
Rogan
Tuesday, October 3
Rogan Kimari and his friends weren’t into drama. When they got together after school or on weekends to play basketball or Assassin’s Creed, they didn’t talk about who liked who, or who was mad at who, or who wore what. Rogan had two older sisters, so he knew that girls talked about all that stuff, and his sisters swore that boys did too, but not the boys Rogan was friends with. They talked sports, they talked gaming, and sometimes they compared notes about teachers and homework. But girl stuff? No. Because they weren’t girls.
But when Petra Wilde walked into science on Tuesday, Rogan had to admit he wouldn’t mind talking to somebody about the thing with Petra and Becca cutting their hair off. Because while he thought he pretty much got girls (when you had two older sisters, you could write a book), he didn’t get that. It didn’t make sense, and Rogan liked things to make sense.
The Class Page 5
