Too Cool for This School

by Kristen Tracy

  “Do you want me to keep the light on for you?” I asked. This wasn’t ideal, because I needed total darkness to sleep. But I figured on her first night after having lived through so many solo adventures, I should let her write in her journal.

  “It’s okay. My diary has a built-in light,” she said.

  What?

  When she got in bed next to me, she opened her diary and a tiny light popped on. I knew it was rude to watch her scribble, but I couldn’t help myself.

  “I’m almost done,” Angelina said. “Just want to capture the conversation I had with the cabdriver before I forget it. Diego had some wise guidance.”

  This was so weird.

  “Done!” Angelina said, slamming the book closed. As soon as she rolled over, I felt her tug the covers a little bit, which didn’t thrill me. I really didn’t enjoy sleeping with a cover-tugger.

  “Night,” I said.

  “Night,” she said.

  I turned off my light and nearly screamed. There was a creepy glow coming from my closet. Then I realized what it was. “Does your wolf shirt glow in the dark?”

  “Yeah.”

  Poor Angelina. She was just too weird. Clearly, the next month was going to be brutal. And what was my job in all this? Was I supposed to be some sort of friendship lifeline for her? Or a public-humiliation shield? Since I was class captain, I had clout, but should I waste it all on Angelina? Shouldn’t I waste it on myself? And my friends?

  Sixth grade was under way and running like a well-oiled machine. How would Angelina find her place? Would she make friends? Would she be teased? Would she perform well on our frequent vocabulary exams? Would she end up having at least two cute shirts in her duffel bag? I had so many questions. But zero answers.

  On the verge of sleep, I turned and looked at Angelina one last time. Poor Angelina. In the dim light of evening, with her choppy bangs pasted to her sweaty forehead, she looked very much like a geek. Blink. Yawn. Blink. Yawn. Blink. I highly doubted daylight could improve this situation.

  Buzz. Buzz. Buzz.

  I grabbed my phone and looked at the message.

  Todd: Jagger thinks she’s cute.

  I stared at my phone in disbelief. And then Todd sent a second message.

  Todd: We want to crash your sleepover!

  On a normal day, that would have been thrilling news. But today was not a normal day. Then I did something that I had never done in the history of owning my phone. I deleted a message from Todd Romero. Jagger thinks she’s cute. I plunked the message right in the trash, where it belonged. Plink. It didn’t matter, I reassured myself. Angelina was only here for a month. And once Jagger met her, he’d see that she wasn’t that cute. He’d be way better off with Ava.

  7

  I was fairly certain Angelina would crash and burn without my social guidance.

  The next right at my sleepover, as soon as Angelina was out of earshot, I asked my friends what they thought of her.

  “She’s sort of fascinating,” Lucia said.

  “She has cute hair,” Rachel added.

  “She is W-E-I-R-D,” Ava said.

  “Shhh,” I said. “Be quieter with your insults.”

  We were all waiting for Angelina to join us on the trampoline, anticipating her makeover. We weren’t aggressive about it. Nobody wanted to cut her hair or smear her face with a bunch of makeup. We were only interested in improving her wardrobe.

  Then the screen door creaked and we all watched Angelina slide it open. As an experiment, we’d given her a pair of Ava’s triple-soft, hand-dyed pajamas, which she’d bought at a boutique in Tucson. We’d informed Angelina that the theme of the trampoline party was a pj swap, so everybody had to switch pj’s. It was a total lie. But we needed to get Angelina comfortable with the idea that our clothes were better than her clothes and that in order to establish a decent reputation she should start wearing them immediately.

  I crawled to the side of the trampoline so I could get the best possible view of Angelina. She walked onto the porch wearing a short-sleeved cotton top that circled her waist in ruffles. Both the top and shorts were multiple shades of green, and the bottoms were looped with a ribbon belt. Ever since Ava had shown me the pajamas, I’d been worried that Angelina would look like a forest and the pattern would swallow her. But it didn’t. What a relief. Angelina looked so cute.

  “Green is really your color!” Rachel said. “It makes your skin look less pale.”

  “The ruffles make your eyes pop,” Lucia said.

  “Your torso looks great belted,” Ava added.

  I cheerfully lowered my head. Maybe helping her wouldn’t require a ton of my time and effort. Things looked like they could turn out okay, because when you put normal clothes on her, Angelina looked like one of us. These realizations made me feel much more mellow about introducing Angelina to everybody I knew. She bounced down the steps and hopped onto the middle of the trampoline, making our sleeping bags slide to the center.

  Rachel squealed like she liked it. So Angelina bounced us again.

  “Stop!” Ava screamed. “I’m fragile!”

  But Angelina didn’t stop. “I’m going to crack you!”

  Whoa. That seemed hostile. And a little immature. We’d stopped playing crack the egg in fourth grade. Right after Lucia stepped on Ava’s ankle.

  “No!” Ava said. “We don’t play that game!”

  But Angelina didn’t stop. She bounced us very high.

  “I’m cracked!” Lucia said, unfolding her legs.

  “I’m double cracked!” Rachel said, falling onto her side.

  “I’m not playing,” Ava said.

  “Okay, Angelina,” I said. “Let’s sit.”

  “In Alaska, we play this game for days,” Angelina said.

  Ava looked horrified.

  “But we have our stuff on the trampoline,” I explained. “We don’t want to break anything.”

  “Yeah,” Ava added. “If my phone gets damaged, I’ll die.”

  “Okay,” Angelina said. “I don’t want to wreck anybody’s phone.” And so she did sit, but not before she released one more powerful bounce and landed hard on her butt in front of us. The force of that bounce made Ava topple onto her side.

  “Seriously, Angelina,” Ava said, springing back up to a sitting position. “We don’t play that game anymore for a reason.”

  “I know,” Angelina said, frowning big. “You’re fragile and your phone could break.”

  “And we’ve got secret visitors coming over and you’ve ruined everybody’s hair!” Ava pointed to her mess of a blond bob. Normally, it was very smooth. At the present time, not so much.

  “Shhh,” I said. Other than the five of us on the trampoline, I didn’t want anyone else to know that Todd and Jagger were going to crash our pajama party. My parents would flip. The whole point of the party was to introduce Angelina to a few of my friends before she started school. If we were caught with boys, my parents would ground me for weeks, and then be disappointed in me for eons.

  “Will I get to meet Todd Romero?” Angelina whispered. “Your boyfriend?”

  Rachel giggled.

  “I knew it!” Lucia said.

  I hadn’t told them either of them that Todd was almost my boyfriend. So I was furious that Angelina had said anything.

  “Shut up!” I said. I could feel myself blushing. “And, Angelina, don’t call him my boyfriend ever again.”

  I glared at Ava, because I figured she must have accidentally told Angelina. But Ava looked at me as if she was pretty surprised.

  “Oh,” Angelina said. “Don’t get mad at Ava. She didn’t tell me. You talk in your sleep. I think you have a recurring dream that you go to the beach with him. Because all last night, you kept telling Todd Romero to stop splashing you.”

  Rachel giggled again. This was awful. I didn’t want my friends to know that I dreamed about Todd Romero splashing me!

  That was when Ava stood up for me. She aimed her finger at Angelina an
d shook it in her face. “It’s rude to repeat what people say in their dreams. I mean, it’s totally against girl code.”

  Angelina lowered her head like she felt bad and apologetic. “I didn’t mean to be rude. I just can’t believe you have a boyfriend.”

  I couldn’t hold in my frustration. “Shhh. Stop talking about this right now.”

  “Nobody heard us,” Lucia said. “It’s okay.”

  But it was not okay. Because people had heard—Lucia and Rachel. “No more!”

  “Can I ask you a question?” Angelina whispered. Her voice sounded sad and filled with regret.

  “I guess,” I huffed.

  “What’s girl code?” she asked.

  That was when Lucia, Rachel, Ava, and I all gasped in disbelief. We knew Angelina was clueless when it came to clothes and trends. But we had no idea she was clueless when it came to girl code.

  “Girl code is the bond by which we live,” Ava said as she smoothed her hair and sat up very straight.

  “It means friends are more important than anything,” Lucia said.

  “It means we treat each other like sisters,” Rachel said. “And we keep each others’ secrets.”

  “Also,” Ava said, “we don’t crush on the same guy.”

  “Oh,” Angelina said. “That sounds reasonable. I can do that.”

  Knowing what I knew, I really hoped she could.

  It startled me to hear a crunching sound. But when I looked up, I saw my mom in her bathrobe walking across the lawn toward us.

  “You’re sure you want to stay out all night?” she asked.

  “Totally,” I said. Because that was the only way Todd and Jagger could crash our pj party.

  “If you want to come inside for any reason, use this flashlight.” She handed me a mini light that she’d given me to take camping.

  I tucked it inside my sleeping bag.

  “So when are Todd and Jagger coming?” Angelina asked.

  “Shhh,” I said. My mom wasn’t even back inside the house yet. “Don’t ruin this for us.”

  “Yeah,” Ava said. “Zip it.”

  “Sorry,” Angelina said. “I didn’t realize I was being loud.”

  “Well, you were,” Ava said.

  “Okay. Let’s drop this and look at the stars,” Lucia said.

  I thought that was a pretty good idea. After settling into our sleeping bags, we stared up into the sky.

  “Is it weird that I see squids when I do this?” Rachel asked.

  “No,” I said. I didn’t want Rachel to think she was weird.

  “There’s Ursa Major. And there’s the North Star. And I think that’s Venus,” Lucia said.

  It was a dark and cloudless night in Santa Fe and the stars shone brightly. I concentrated on the tip of Lucia’s pointer finger. All the smaller stars winked at us while we hunted for the famous ones.

  “How did you learn all the names of the stars and where to find them?” Angelina asked.

  “My dad told me,” Lucia said. “We stargaze all the time. We think it’s fun to look for nebulae together.”

  Angelina didn’t ask any follow-up questions. And the silence that followed while we stared into the starry sky made me feel a little bit sad for my cousin.

  8

  I was very lucky that Todd Romero and Jagger Evenson were so sneaky. Under the cover of darkness, late in the night, they crawled beneath the trampoline and lay in the grass. Todd reached up with his finger and poked the mesh near my face.

  “I’m here,” Todd whispered.

  “Hey,” Jagger said.

  I couldn’t believe I’d fallen asleep. I’d been so excited that they were going to sneak over that I’d tried to stay up as long as I could. But at some point I’d surrendered to sleep while staring at the dark sky filled with sparkling stars, and conked out.

  “Hi,” Angelina whispered. “I’m Lane’s cousin, Angelina. My mom is her mom’s sister. We were born five days apart. But I’m an Aquarius, and Lane’s a Virgo.”

  I wanted to die. Why was Angelina telling Todd and Jagger that I was a Virgo? And why did it matter that she was an Aquarius? And why was she talking about our family tree? Couldn’t she have just introduced herself as my cousin? Wasn’t that what normal sixth graders did? And why wasn’t she as groggy as I was?

  “You’re from Alaska, right?” Todd asked.

  “Yeah,” Angelina said. “I’m from a town called Eagle River near Anchorage.”

  I wanted to interrupt this conversation, but I wasn’t sure how to do it.

  “Cool,” Todd said. “How many eagles have you seen?”

  By now, Lucia and Rachel and Ava were up and we were all staring down through the mesh at Todd and Jagger.

  “Eagles are so common in Alaska that I see at least three or four every day,” Angelina explained.

  “Wow,” Jagger said. “You mean, like, bald eagles?”

  “Yes,” Angelina said. “I mean bald eagles.”

  “Have you ever seen a bear?” Todd asked.

  “I have,” Angelina said. “In the forest near my house there are fifty-two tagged brown bears and so many black bears that they don’t even bother to tag them. And there are wolves too.”

  “Awesome,” Jagger said.

  “Hi, Jagger,” Ava said. “I like your jacket.”

  I squinted to get a better look at Jagger’s jacket. In the darkness, all that I could tell was that it looked blue.

  “Thanks,” Jagger said.

  “What time is it?” Rachel asked, sounding groggy.

  “Time for donuts?” Todd asked.

  I watched as Todd pulled a bright white box from a paper bag and gently shook it.

  “You are so sweet,” Ava cooed.

  “Ooh,” Rachel said. “Do any of them have jelly centers?”

  Todd opened the box and peeked inside. “You’ll have to look for yourself.”

  “Hand it over,” Rachel said.

  I think I heard her stomach growl. In addition to drawing squids, Rachel’s other favorite pastime was eating anything with sugar in it.

  “You have to come and get it,” Todd said.

  “But the grass is covered in dew,” Lucia said.

  She was so practical.

  Todd shook the box again. “I’m going to count to ten. You better get them.”

  Jagger laughed. “If you don’t, I’ll eat ’em.”

  “No!” Rachel said.

  “Shhh,” I said. The last thing I needed was to get caught with my almost boyfriend bringing donuts to my pj party.

  “Can’t you just hand them to us?” Lucia asked.

  And then, before I could figure out a way to flirt with Todd and persuade him to give us the donuts, something terrible happened. Angelina ruined my moment.

  “I’ll risk the dew,” she said.

  With the speed of a wild dog and the flexibility of a monkey, Angelina hooked her legs on the metal frame of the trampoline and lowered herself to the grass. “Hand them over.” She reached her arms toward my almost boyfriend. And he surrendered the box right away.

  “You’re quick,” Jagger said.

  “Alarmingly quick,” Ava said.

  Angelina swung herself back onto the trampoline and handed Rachel the box. “There is a jelly-filled donut!” she squealed.

  I watched in horror as the kitchen light flicked on.

  “You better scram,” Lucia said.

  “Thanks for the donuts,” Angelina said.

  My big, exciting moment with Todd had suddenly turned to trash. We should have been able to hang out and talk to each other for hours. Maybe he would have even climbed on the trampoline with me. But before I could even come up with a good place for them to hide, Todd Romero and Jagger Evenson were absolutely gone. I watched my mother wave to us from the kitchen window. What a bummer. I waved back to her. And so did my friends. Angelina waved so much that it looked like she was trying to fend off a vicious mosquito.

  “That was so lame,” Ava said.

/>   “Why?” Angelina asked. “Don’t you like donuts?”

  It was tragic how clueless Angelina could be. Mostly tragic for me and Todd. But also tragic for her. How would she make friends and survive for a month at Rio Chama Middle School? It was going to be tough.

  “Getting the donuts was lame,” Ava said. “You stole Lane’s thunder. And it’s weird to talk about your zodiac sign with guys until you’re much older. Like when you’re in college.”

  “Yeah,” Rachel said as she bit into a donut that released a small stream of red jelly down her finger. “That did feel a little weird.”

  “Oh,” Angelina said.

  “You really hijacked the guys,” Ava said.

  “Hijack?” Angelina said. “Did I hijack somebody?” She turned toward me when she asked the question.

  “Yeah,” Ava said. “They were here to see Lane. And me. And we barely got to talk to them.”

  “Sorry,” Angelina said. “I didn’t mean to do that.”

  “Let’s call it an honest mistake and go to bed,” Lucia said. “It’s late.”

  But I didn’t feel like going to bed. I felt like being mad at Angelina. And so did Ava.

  “Sixth grade isn’t a joke at Rio Chama Middle School,” Ava said. “There are important rules to follow.”

  Angelina looked scared.

  “Don’t freak her out,” Rachel said. “You’ll be fine. Probably.”

  “Don’t lie to her,” Ava said. “She’s poised for geekdom!”

  “I doubt she’ll get branded as a geek,” Lucia said. “Her hair is very nongeek.”

  I thought about how her choppy bangs looked pasted to her sweaty forehead. She better not let her forehead get sweaty at school.

  Angelina stared at her donut but didn’t take another bite. “Thanks.”

  “Her hair needs to have a style. It can’t be loose like a wild animal. And she needs to wear clothes that help her blend. Blending will be critical to your social success,” Ava told her.

  “I don’t care if I blend,” Angelina said.

  Ava stared at her. “You better.”