Two-Faced #2

by Lin Oliver

  “Diamond and Diamond versus Huang and Knight,” the voice on the loudspeaker called out. “Report to court eight.”

  This was no time for tears, and certainly no time for confessions. It was time to put on our game faces.

  Chapter 8

  “You girls played great in the first match,” Dad said the next morning while toasting our whole wheat waffles for breakfast. He always reviews our matches for at least several days after a tournament, replaying them in his head. That’s how obsessed he is. “I was impressed the way you took Huang and Knight to the cleaners. You were all business out there.”

  Sammie and I had been in total sync for that first set. I’m quicker, so I play net. She’s strong, so she plays back. And the combination worked perfectly against Huang and Knight. We were on fire, or as Ryan says, “En fuego.”

  But my dad couldn’t leave it at that.

  “Charlie, what happened to you in the afternoon? You lost focus.”

  He didn’t have to tell me. For the second match, Sammie and I drew Kimberly McCall and Nicole Dennis, who we’ve played before. They’re from the Malibu Racquet Club, and they’re tough competitors. We were holding our own, though, and were tied at one set apiece, until you-know-who got all fuzzy in the head. I can tell you the minute it happened. It was when Ryan arrived, and I saw him climbing into the stands, holding a huge bag of sweet potato fries. That wasn’t what did it, though. I’m used to Ryan creating a scene. It was who he was with that shook me up.

  Lauren.

  What was she doing there?

  I’ll tell you what. Hanging out with Ryan. Munching on sweet potato fries. Looking fabulous in a powder-blue Juicy tracksuit. Cheering for me. The only thing she wasn’t doing was preparing for the history midterm, which I went through a lot of pain to help her with. That thought was pretty distracting to me.

  A little while later, Spencer arrived. He waved and sat down in the stands to watch us play. Talk about losing focus! His being there was the finishing blow to any shred of focus I might have had. Good-bye, net shot. Hello, Spencer. Every time I glanced up, all I saw was his cute dimple.

  I probably don’t have to tell you that we lost that match. It wasn’t totally my fault; Sammie’s play was off, too. She doesn’t like it when Lauren comes to watch us, because she thinks she’s there to see Ryan and not really to root for us. But as I’ve mentioned before, Sammie’s got a jealousy problem when it comes to Lauren, even though she’d be the last person to admit it.

  “So this week we intensify your practice schedule,” Dad was saying, handing us each a waffle to eat on the way to school. “I want you girls out on the court every afternoon.”

  “I have Truth Tellers Monday after school,” Sammie said.

  “And I have cheerleading practice.”

  “I don’t care what else you have,” he said. “You have to make time for your tennis. That’s what’s going to pave the road to your future. Diligence and hard work pay off.”

  I gathered my stuff together, tossed Sammie her backpack, and we bolted out the door before he had a chance to go into lecture number three, the one where he tells us that to be winners and have successful lives, you have to give 110 percent.

  “How’s your party coming along?” I asked Sammie as we climbed the hill called the “California Incline” that takes us from the beach up to town where school is.

  “The plans are temporarily on hold. Alicia had to spend the weekend studying.”

  “Oh, right. She’s got Mr. Newhart for history, too.”

  “Yeah, third period. Alicia is totally freaked. She says Mr. Newhart is an impossible grader. She’s studying so hard I didn’t even talk to her once all weekend.”

  I didn’t answer. Instead, I pretended to be huffing and puffing up the steep hill. I felt more than a twinge of guilt that Alicia was studying so hard while Lauren was partying.

  “Anyway,” Sammie went on, “Mr. Mintner doesn’t care if we know every little detail. He says it’s the big picture he’s after.”

  As we neared school, we saw Alicia up ahead. Usually, she looks good when she comes to school. She loves to wear embroidered tops from her native country, El Salvador, and they look really cute with jeans. But this morning, she looked . . . I don’t mean to sound judgmental . . . so I’ll just say she looked kind of messy. Like the way she looks when she’s just hanging out with Sammie. Beat-up hoodie, baggy jeans, running-shoes-with-no-socks type of thing.

  “Wow, she’s really taking this studying thing seriously,” I said to Sammie. “No time to pick a fresh outfit, I guess.”

  “Not like Lauren Wadsworth who has Esperanza to iron her clothes,” Sammie shot back.

  “I’m sorry, Sammie,” I said. “I deserved that.”

  I didn’t intend to say a mean thing about Alicia. I really do like her.

  “Man, I had a terrible weekend,” Alicia said as we caught up to her. “My mom had to work late at the Wadsworths’ Saturday to get the house ready for some big party they were having. My grandma has a cold, which means I had to babysit Ramon, who ate a whole box of raisins and then threw them up all over the carpet. It was gross. Remind me never to give raisins to a four-year-old.”

  “I’ll make a mental note of it,” Sammie said, and Alicia laughed.

  “Don’t even ask about Sunday,” she went on. “Ramon got his finger caught in the door, and we had to take him to the emergency room to get three stitches. He kept making me kiss his finger all night. Double, triple gross.”

  “Sounds gross,” Sammie said. “Did you get a chance to study for history?”

  “Here and there. Not nearly enough. I’ll just have to power through that midterm somehow.”

  “I can study with you at lunch,” I offered. “I know the material pretty well.”

  “Thanks, Charlie. But I have history third period. My fate will be sealed by lunch—for better or for worse. And I’m pretty sure it’s going to be for worse.”

  By the time we got to school, a lot of kids were hanging around on the grass, waiting for the bell to ring. Jillian saw us and came bouncing over.

  “Here’s everyone’s favorite new girl,” she said to me. It was clear that Brooke had told her about me getting the test for Lauren.

  Sammie gave me a strange look as if to say Since when did you become everyone’s favorite? Fortunately, good old Jillian didn’t pause and just went barreling right on to the next topic.

  “Whoa, Alicia,” she said. “What’s up with the outfit? You auditioning for World’s Dirtiest Jobs?”

  Even though everyone knows that Jillian sees life as one big reality show, I still thought it was a rude remark.

  “Yeah, right after you get the lead on World’s Biggest Airhead,” Alicia responded.

  “Oh, that would be so cool,” Jillian giggled, not quite getting the insult. She’d do anything to be on TV, even be an airhead, which come to think of it, comes pretty naturally to her.

  People were heading to class. Sammie and Alicia took off toward the bungalows, and Jillian and I headed up the front stairs. She noticed me looking around.

  “Spencer has a dentist appointment this morning,” she said.

  “What makes you think I was looking for him?”

  “You can’t hide anything in our group, Charlie. We see it all. Like what you did for Lauren. That’s called being a good friend.”

  I didn’t want to talk about it.

  “For your information, Jillian, I was actually looking for Lauren, not Spencer.”

  “Then look no further,” a voice said. I whipped around and saw Lauren, who had snuck up on us.

  “Where’d you come from?” I asked.

  “My dad’s BMW. See?” She turned and waved to her father as he drove off. “He lectured me all the way to school, and I didn’t say a word becau
se I know that he is going to be so happy with me tomorrow night. Wait till he sees my grade on the midterm. His little girl is going to make him proud. Thanks to you.”

  She hooked her arm in mine, and the three of us walked into the building.

  “Like my new jeans?” she chattered on. “Wait till you see what I got for you, Charlie. You’re going to love it. It’s for the bar mitzvah.”

  As we headed down the hall, we passed the teachers’ lounge. Mr. Newhart was just coming out, carrying a stack of about fifty stapled papers in a folder. I knew that folder. We had met before. I gulped, and my stomach did a 360.

  “Hi, Mr. Newhart,” Lauren called out.

  “Hello, Ms. Wadsworth. Ready for the exam?”

  “I was born ready,” Lauren said with a laugh.

  “We’ll see about that,” was all he said.

  I ran into Alicia at lunch. She looked a wreck, even worse than in the morning.

  “That midterm is a monster,” she said. “A fire-breathing monster with claws and fangs. Be warned.”

  Instead of sitting with my friends at our table at lunch, I went to the library to go over my notes one more time. I think it was the claws and fangs remark that did it. By the end of lunch, I felt like I knew my stuff. GoGo and I had studied well. I could even spell Tutankhamen, which is the full name of King Tut.

  I’ve taken a lot of midterms since I started middle school, but Alicia was right about this one—it was the mother of all midterms. There was matching, multiple choice, true/false, fill in the blank, plus a map of Egypt where you had to draw in all the cities and rivers. You had to know the kings and queens, a whole slew of gods and what they represented, the architecture, the geography, and about a million dates. And for the short-answer part, you had to know how to spell impossible words like papyrus, and hieroglyphics, and Nefertiti.

  Everyone in my class groaned all the way through it.

  Not Lauren, though. She never looked up from her paper, never groaned, and never erased so much as one letter. She spent the whole period sitting at her desk, concentrating on the work in front of her, checking off answers like the most confident student in the world. Occasionally, I’d sneak a glance at Mr. Newhart as he walked up and down the aisles to see if he was watching her or noticing anything unusual. But he seemed totally normal. Every now and then he’d check his watch and tell us how much time we had left. Most of us were still writing when he called out, “Time’s up.”

  Everyone but Lauren. She was the first one at his desk, putting her test paper down on top of his roll book.

  “You look pleased with yourself, Ms. Wadsworth,” he said.

  “I studied like a fiend this weekend,” she said. “I hope it paid off.”

  “Hard work always does,” he said with a nice smile.

  I went up to the desk and put my paper on top of Lauren’s.

  “And you, Ms. Diamond. You look less happy with yourself. I take it you didn’t study like a fiend.”

  “I tried,” I said.

  “Charlie had to play in a big tennis tournament, too,” Lauren explained. “She’s a ranked player, you know.”

  “That’s very admirable,” Mr. Newhart said. “But there is such a thing as a scholar-athlete. Someone who makes time for sports and studies. You might want to strive for that, Ms. Diamond. I see exceptional potential in you.”

  The way he looked at me made me extremely uncomfortable. Why was he telling me that? Did he know something? Had he figured out that I helped Lauren cheat? Maybe he was psychic and could read my mind. I read a story in People magazine about a psychic schoolteacher. Well, maybe it wasn’t a schoolteacher, but it was some kind of psychic.

  Stop it, Charlie, I told myself. You’re getting paranoid again. Just smile and say good-bye.

  “Good-bye, Mr. Newhart,” I said with a smile. And then I got out of there as fast as I could.

  As we walked to our lockers, Lauren suggested that we go to Starbucks after school to celebrate.

  “My treat,” she said.

  “I can’t stay long,” I told her. “Sammie and I have to practice. Our dad wasn’t too happy that we lost yesterday.”

  “We’ll just get one little, tiny Frappuccino,” she said. “You can be home in half an hour.”

  After school, I met Lauren and we walked to Starbucks. She never stopped talking. I thought she was going to float right off the ground. She was so happy.

  “You know what, Charlie?” she said. “I think I got almost everything right. How do you think you did?”

  “Probably not as well as you.”

  “Understandably. You didn’t have you to help you. I purposely made a few mistakes,” she babbled on, “because I didn’t want it to look too perfect. For instance, I said Nefertiti was the wife of King Tut, even though I know she was married to Akhenaton, whose mummy, by the way, has never been identified.” Then suddenly she stopped walking and burst out laughing. “Listen to me,” she said. “I actually learned this material.”

  In some strange way, that made me feel much better. Yes, I got the test for her. Yes, it was cheating. But look at the result, I told myself. Lauren had learned everything she needed to know. She knew as much about Egyptian history as I did. And we were going to get to go to Ben Feldman’s bar mitzvah. And our faces would be lit up on a thirty-foot-high screen. Things weren’t so bad. In fact, everything had turned out pretty well.

  Things got even better the next day when Mr. Newhart returned our test papers. Lauren got a 96 percent, which was a solid A. Not the highest A in the class—that went to Phoebe Lee, of course, Will Lee’s older sister. But Lauren’s score would be good enough to get her at least a B-minus in the class. And I surprised myself, too. I got a 94 percent, the highest grade I’d gotten on any of my tests or quizzes so far.

  Lauren took me to Starbucks again. We got orange mango smoothies and clinked our plastic glasses together in a toast to us.

  “To friendship,” she said. “To fun. To the good life.”

  We took big sips of our delicious smoothies.

  I felt happy. Yes, I had gone through some rough moments, but they were over now. There was nothing but great times ahead.

  Or at least that’s what I thought.

  Chapter 9

  “Please report immediately to Principal Pfeiffer’s office,” the summons read. It was Wednesday, the day after we got our history midterms back, and I was sitting in Señora Molina’s second-period Spanish class. A messenger from the office had just delivered the note to me in a sealed envelope.

  I held the yellow slip in my hand and read the words over and over.

  Please report immediately to Principal Pfeiffer’s office.

  Ms. Molina’s voice was only a dim echo in the distant background, and the whole room was swimming. My mind was racing. Why did Principal Pfeiffer want to see me? What could this mean? Had he found out about the test? No, how could he? No one saw me take it. Maybe it was just a routine summons to go over my classes for next year. No, that would be Ms. King’s job, the counselor. Plus it’s way too early for that. Well, maybe it was to congratulate me on being such a great new addition to Beachside. To say how proud he was of our new tennis ranking. Or maybe he wanted to ask if I’d give tennis lessons to his son who was in kindergarten. I had seen them a couple of weekends ago, batting around a ball at the Douglas Park public courts.

  From deep within the chaos of my thoughts, I heard Señora Molina’s voice talking to me.

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  “Perdón,” she corrected.

  Really, Señora Molina, this was no time to be a stickler for the Spanish-only rule.

  “I was asking you, Carlotta, if everything was all right,” Señora Molina said.

  “I . . . I don’t know. I just have to go to the principal’s office,” I stammered.<
br />
  “Then you should take your books with you and make sure you call a friend for the homework assignment,” she told me.

  As I stuffed my Spanish book in my backpack, I wondered why she thought the meeting with Principal Pfeiffer was going to take the whole period. Did she know something I didn’t know? Or was I just being paranoid?

  Principal Pfeiffer’s office was upstairs in the main building. I had to walk by Mr. Falb’s science classroom on the way there. Lauren and Brooke have science second period together, and I was hoping like crazy I could talk to at least one of them for a second. Maybe they could give me a heads-up about why the principal wanted to see me in his office.

  The door to Mr. Falb’s room was open, so I stuck my head in. He was in the middle of doing an experiment for the class, holding a beaker over a Bunsen burner and saying something about the average mass of an unpopped popcorn kernel. When Lauren saw me, she let out a little squeal and waved. Mr. Falb looked up at her, then at me. He was wearing safety goggles, which made him look like an alien. His eyes looked as if they had popped out of his head, like magnified bug eyes.

  “May I help you?” he asked.

  “I was wondering if I could talk to Lauren for a second.”

  “Correct me if I’m mistaken, young lady, but I believe we are in the middle of a class period,” he said, his buggy eyes getting even buggier.

  I took that as a giant no.

  “I was just on my way to Principal Pfeiffer’s office,” I said in a loud enough voice so Lauren could hear. “But I guess it’s a bad time.”

  Lauren gave me a puzzled look and shrugged. It was clear she didn’t know anything more about the summons than I did.

  I did yoga breathing all the way up the stairs to the second floor. It didn’t help. By the time I got to the principal’s office, I was shaking like a leaf. There was no one in the waiting room, just me and a row of empty turquoise chairs. I sat down in one and waited for five minutes. It was totally quiet in there. The only sound was the ticking of the wall clock.