by Lin Oliver
After I sat down, the board had spent another ten minutes asking me questions about how I planned to learn from what I had done. Phoebe made a weak attempt to ask again who else was involved, but Lily spoke up and said that she thought they should respect my sacred pledge. She looked over to Spencer for support, but he didn’t say anything. I noticed that he kept glancing at the crumpled note that was still sitting on the table in front of Principal Pfeiffer. I wondered if he recognized the General’s green ink and distinctive handwriting. After all, they had grown up together. He had probably gotten hundreds of notes from him over the years. The note didn’t attract Lily’s attention, which made me pretty sure she didn’t recognize the General’s handwriting. But Spencer couldn’t take his eyes off it.
After a while, Spencer saw me looking at him, and when our eyes met, I was sure that he knew the note was from the General. He didn’t have to say a word, I could see it in his eyes. Now he was part of this, too. Was he going to have to tell the Honor Board? I had promised to keep the secret, but he hadn’t. Without meaning to, I had made Spencer part of this horrible incident. I was beginning to realize what Principal Pfeiffer meant when he said that lies spin tangled webs.
“Okay, we’re going to ask you to wait outside while we come to a verdict on your case,” Phoebe said in a very businesslike and unfriendly manner. “We’ll call you back in when we’ve reached our decision.”
“Thank you all for listening,” I said as Sammie and I got up and walked to the door. I was already wondering how on earth I was going to tell my dad that I had gotten expelled. He would be furious, and then he’d have to call my mom in Boston and she would say, “Oh, Charlie, I’m so disappointed in you. You know better than to steal.”
Stupid me. I hadn’t made any progress since I was four years old.
The only good thing about being out in the hall was that there was circulating air. Inside that room, it had gotten so hot and stuffy that I thought I was going to suffocate.
“Your neck has disappeared,” Sammie said, putting her hands out and pushing down on my shoulders, which had crept up to my ears from all the stress. “You look like a turtle.”
“I’d like to be a turtle right now. Then I could disappear into my shell and never come out.”
“Yeah, but you’d be all wrinkly and ugly and walk really slow like this,” Sammie said, making her eyes bulge out and doing a turtle-crawling gesture with her hands and feet. She was trying to lighten the mood. I let out a weak laugh, just to let her know how much I appreciated her attempt.
“Oh, thank goodness you’re laughing.” I whirled around to see Lauren running up the stairs. “Everything must have turned out okay.”
She bounded over and threw her arms around me.
“How’d you get out of class?” I asked her.
“Are you kidding me? You think I could sit there while you’re going through such agony? I told Mr. Weinstock that I had forgotten my homework in my locker, and he let me go.”
“We’re still waiting,” I told her. “They’re discussing their decision.”
“Good, then there’s still time,” Lauren said. “I wanted to bring this to you.”
She reached into the pocket of her salmon-colored cashmere sweater and pulled out a gold bracelet.
“It’s my lucky charm bracelet,” she said. “Wear it. I’ll help you put it on.”
“She can’t wear that,” Sammie said.
“Why not? It always brings me good luck. It’s very special. Look at this charm. It’s a calendar of August with a little ruby on the twenty-third, which is my birthday. And check out the adorable puppy one. My dad gave it to me the day we got Dixie, and it looks just like her.”
“That’s the point,” Sammie said. “Everything on this bracelet spells L-A-U-R-E-N, and that’s the one word Charlie’s been trying not to say in there.”
“Right,” Lauren said. “Evidence. Boy, can I be stupid sometimes.”
She dropped the bracelet back in her pocket.
“Listen, Charlie, Brooke said to send you a big hug. Everyone does.”
“Lauren, who else knows about this?” I asked her.
She shrugged. “I didn’t tell anyone. It’s a good thing, too, because Spencer and Lily are on the Honor Board. That would be a bummer if they knew the whole story.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I was pretty sure one of them did. I wondered what Spencer was saying about me in there.
“Charlie, promise me you’ll come find me as soon as you know anything,” Lauren said. “They’ve got to let you stay here. I’ll die if they don’t. I feel so responsible for this.”
“I made my own decision, Lauren. I didn’t have to do what I did.”
“You’re such a good person, Charlie, and I have so much respect for you. Now more than ever. I’m lucky you’re my friend.”
“You can say that again,” Sammie said, a note of sarcasm in her voice.
“For your information, I love your sister,” Lauren snapped.
“Yeah, that’s why you treat her so well,” Sammie snapped back.
“Listen, you guys, this isn’t helping,” I said. “Let’s just all keep our fingers crossed that this turns out okay.”
“Are you kidding, Charlie?” Lauren said, squeezing my hand. “I’m keeping everything crossed.”
“Then maybe you can hop on away from here,” Sammie said. “You don’t want this door to open up and have everyone see you.”
“Right. Evidence.” Lauren gave me one last hug, then quickly headed down the stairs.
The minutes passed slowly out in the hall. I could hear voices from inside, and they sounded like they were involved in a heated debate. The bell for second period rang, and the hall filled up with kids, but still the voices from inside the conference room continued.
“You should go to class,” I said to Sammie. “Who knows how long this will take.”
“Right,” Sammie said. “I’m leaving. I’ll go get some cinnamon rolls and hang with my friends. We’ll talk about our party and just have a lot of laughs.”
“Really?” I asked.
“Not,” she said.
There it was, the old Sammie sarcasm. That’s the sister I knew.
Finally, in the middle of second period, the door opened and Phoebe came out.
“We’ve reached a decision,” she said. “You can come in now.”
Suddenly, my knees grew weak, and I actually had to grab on to Sammie’s arm to keep me upright. None of this had seemed entirely real before. Now that I was about to learn my fate, it was all too real.
“I don’t think we need you inside,” Phoebe said to Sammie.
“I think we do,” she answered. And holding my arm, she brushed past Phoebe and walked into the conference room by my side.
Phoebe took her seat in the brown leather chair and read over some notes on the yellow pad in front of her.
“We had a very hard time coming to a verdict,” she began. “The opinion was split down the middle. We had to take several votes. Finally, after much discussion, we came to a final vote on whether or not to expel you. You should know that the vote was three to two.”
I thought I was going to throw up. There it was. Obviously, Spencer and Lily had voted to keep me in school, and the three others had voted to expel me. What was going to happen to me now? I had to go to seventh grade somewhere. Would they take me back at Culver City, my old school? Or would I have to go to some kind of special school for kids who had been expelled, if they even have such things? I put my head in my hands.
“It was three to two in your favor,” Lily said. “You’re going to stay, Charlie.”
I couldn’t believe my ears. Lily’s voice sounded like an angel was talking to me.
“Really?” I said. “Oh, thank goodness
. Thank you. Thank you.”
“Don’t thank her,” Phoebe said. “You don’t know that she voted to keep you. Our vote here is confidential, between us. Therefore, you should thank all of us.”
“That’s what I meant,” I said. “Thank all of you. I am so grateful.”
“Me too,” Sammie piped up. For the first time in twenty-four hours, she actually had color in her cheeks. I think we both felt like we had been holding our breath for a day.
Principal Pfeiffer cleared his throat. He had put his pen down and was no longer marking up his yellow pad, but he was still rubbing his head.
“You are very lucky, Ms. Diamond,” he said, “that your fellow students showed compassion for you. Frankly, I wouldn’t have done the same. However, they think a great deal of you and are willing to give you a second chance to prove yourself.”
“But there are conditions,” Olivia said before I could get too happy. “You’re on probation until the end of the semester, and you have all of the following punishments.”
“I’ll read them,” Phoebe interrupted. “I’m chairperson.” From the tone of her voice, it was clear to me that she was not one of the people who had voted in my favor.
“First of all,” she began. “Your grade on the midterm will be changed to an F. Second of all, you will have one month’s detention every day after school. And third of all, you are forbidden to participate in any after-school activities for the rest of the semester. That means you’ll have to drop cheerleading, but you would have had to, anyway, because you’ll be in detention.”
“You forgot the lunch thing,” Olivia said to her.
“I’m getting to that,” Phoebe snapped. “Three times a week at lunch, you’ll have to do community service. We considered assigning you to tutor a sixth-grader, but then Ms. King suggested you work with Luz in the vegetable garden. He feels bad about turning you in, and you have a lot to make up to him.”
As bad as the punishment was, I felt like a hundred-pound weight had been lifted off my back.
“The meeting is hereby adjourned,” Phoebe said. “I want to thank my fellow members for attempting to maintain impartiality during our adjudication.”
Wow. Either Phoebe had been watching too many legal shows on TV or she just had a huge vocabulary. I’d never heard an eighth-grader use so many big words in one sentence. I felt sorry for Will. It would definitely be rough to be a second child living in the shadow of a sister like Phoebe. No wonder he needed Truth Tellers. I would, too.
Sammie and I waited while all the committee members left. Principal Pfeiffer was the first out the door, followed by Lily, who flashed me a relieved smile on her way out.
“That was a close one,” Bounce said as he passed by. “But you’re tough, you’ll be okay.”
Olivia and Phoebe said nothing, just pretended that I didn’t even exist. Spencer did the same. No smile, no dimple, no acknowledgment that I was even in the room. In fact, as he pushed past me, he looked furious. I could see him clenching his jaw, which changed the whole look of his face. It reminded me of that time a couple weeks before when a careless guy on a bike bumped into me on the bike path and knocked me down.
“You need to watch where you’re going, buddy,” my dad had said to him, clenching his jaw in just the same way. “You could hurt an innocent person.”
As Sammie and I got up to leave, Ms. King approached us. I hoped she wasn’t going to give me a lecture. It was the last thing I needed.
“I have a message for your grandmother,” she said, lifting her glasses off her face and moving them to the top of her head. “Tell her I think she’s a very wise woman. We all have to learn how to forgive ourselves.”
She smiled, put her glasses back on, and left before I had a chance to really absorb what she’d said. There would be time for that, though. I had a lot of hours of detention to put in.
Lauren cried when she heard the news that I was staying at Beachside. She wanted me to come to lunch and sit next to her at the SF2 table, but I couldn’t. Ms. King had sent me a note during third period saying that I had to arrange my detention schedule and also go find Luz and make plans to work with him every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
I found him out in the garden. Beachside has this community garden that’s in back of the art building, next to the soccer field. The Garden Club plants vegetables to give to the homeless shelter. Luz was busy pulling weeds from a patch of what looked like red-and-green lettuce leaves.
“I’ve been assigned to help you,” I said, sticking out my hand to show that there were no hard feelings. “I’m Charlie Diamond.”
“You look like your sister,” he said.
“We’re identical,” I said. “Well, almost identical.”
“I’m sorry I got you in trouble. You seem like a nice girl.”
“You didn’t get me in trouble. I got myself in trouble.”
He just nodded. “There are some extra gloves in the shed,” he said. “Go get them and I’ll show you how you can tell the weeds from the plants.”
Jillian and Brooke came by while I was working with Luz.
“Eeuuww,” Jillian said. “You’re going to get all filthy in there.”
I didn’t mind, though. Having my hands in the dirt actually felt kind of good. And Luz let me plant two whole rows of carrots. He called them “Charlie’s Carrots,” and he said I could take care of them until they were ready to harvest.
It was sixth period that was the killer. History. Mr. Newhart. I ran all the way there so I’d arrive early enough to talk to him in private.
“What do you want, Charlie?” he said when I walked in. He didn’t look up from his computer.
My heart was racing. What could I say? “I just want to say how sorry I am,” I blurted out.
“I’ve changed your grade on the midterm,” he said, still not looking up. “It brings your average down to a C-minus. You’ll have to do a lot of work to catch up. And from now on, the file cabinet will remain locked.”
“For what it’s worth, I didn’t cheat.”
“For what it’s worth, yes, you did,” he said, looking at me straight in my eyes. “History tells us, Charlie, that those who stand by and watch something wrong happen are just as wrong as those who do the wrongful deed. The reason for studying history is to learn from it. I hope you do.”
I had been really hoping that he would be nice about everything, tell me that he understood, and that all was forgiven. But he wasn’t nice, and when I think about it, he had no reason to be. It was just wishful thinking on my part.
Other kids were starting to file in, and, really, neither of us had anything more to say.
“I’ll do better, Mr. Newhart. I’m sorry I disappointed you.”
He looked up from his computer. “I told you several days ago, Charlie, that I see exceptional potential in you. Prove me right.”
I had my work cut out for me, and I knew it. But I was determined.
I would prove him right. For him. For Sammie. And mostly, for myself.
Chapter 14
“Hi, girls,” GoGo said. “Charlie, a friend of yours just called.”
GoGo was standing at the screen door of the Sporty Forty as Sammie and I returned home from school that day. She had gotten her cast off a couple of days before, and she was getting around pretty well on crutches. Ryan was standing next to her, just to be extra cautious in case she needed backup. Of course, GoGo wasn’t using just any old crutches. She had glued green and blue rhinestones on hers to make them fancy and wrapped colorful tie-dyed scarves around the two crossbars at the top. She said those scarves put her armpits in a good mood.
“Was it Lauren?” I asked her. “She said she’d call.”
“Guess again.”
“Spencer?” That was too much to hope for.
“No. Thin
k about it, Charlie. You should be able to guess. It has to do with something that happened in school today.”
“Oh, Lily March. Is she at home? Can I call her?”
“It was not Lily,” GoGo said. “It was your good friend, Principal Pfeiffer. We had a very informative conversation.”
“You’re duck meat, Charlie,” Ryan said. “You might as well go to your room now, because you’re never coming out.”
No one laughed. Well, Ryan did, but he’s an idiot.
“Come sit with me out on the deck,” GoGo said. “Ryan and Sammie, you kids go inside. Charlie and I need a little private face time.”
“I want to watch,” Ryan said. “This is better than Dr. Phil on TV.”
“Is everything a joke to you?” Sammie asked, taking him by the arm and yanking him into the living room.
“Where’s your sense of humor, Sams?”
“Obviously, not where yours is,” Sammie said. “Inside, big guy. Let’s get you a box of Cheerios to feed on.”
I followed GoGo as she hobbled across the deck to the round redwood umbrella table. She sat down on the cushioned chair, and I adjusted the striped umbrella so the sun didn’t hit her directly in the face.
“So,” she said, placing her crutches on the deck beneath her. “Is it true what he said? That you stole a test?”
“Yes. But I didn’t steal it for me.”
“Does that make it better, Charlie?”
“No, not really.”
“I’m not going to ask for whom you stole it,” GoGo said, “because I respect the fact that you want to protect a friend. But I hope you realize that no matter how much you love your friends, and I commend you for your loyalty, stealing is never acceptable.”
“I made a mistake, GoGo. I know that now.”
“People pay for their mistakes,” she said. “And your principal was very specific in describing all the various ways you will pay. I’m sure your father will have a few choice additions of his own.”
“You’re going to tell him?”
