by Dyan Sheldon
Clemens pushes his glasses back up his nose. “Well, the—”
“But, you know, before we get too deep into all the heavy, global destruction, and the who-does-what-to-whom stuff, there’s a couple of things I’d like to say. Or try to say.” Cody laughs good-naturedly. Everyone except Clemens smiles back. “You know, just about why I’m here and where I’m coming from – that kind of autobiographical-detail thing. Fill in my little piece of the big picture.”
Clemens says, “Well I—”
“I think some of you already know who I am…” When Clemens speaks, he focuses on a point over the heads of his listeners, but Cody spreads his smile around the room like butter over hot toast. No one is looking at their cell phone now. “But for those who don’t, I’ve been involved in the Green scene since junior high. Last year, at my old school, I was really active in our environmental club – we called it Mayday? – and I had a truly awesome time.” Cody was, in fact, the president of the club and receiver of a special personal achievement award from the EPA, but this is an autobiographical detail he chooses not to mention just yet. “Well, not just me – we all did. It was as incredible as walking on the moon. It was like opening the back door but instead of there being the deck and the grill and a couple of chairs, you walk out into the stars. And it wasn’t just life-changing, it was really fun, too.”
There is something about the way Cody speaks that makes his audience smile and nod in agreement, even when they have only a vague idea of what he’s talking about. “I’m not saying this isn’t a really important thing we’re doing here,” he continues. “It’s terminally important. And to tell you the truth, yours truly has a Green rap sheet, like, a mile long.” Cody’s laugh is infectious. “No, really,” he grins. “I’m, like, Mr Crunchy Granola.” Cody, though looking more like Mr Heart-stoppingly Gorgeous, turns out to be so seriously concerned about the environment that he buys a lot of his clothes second-hand and usually walks to school or rides his bike. He doesn’t patronize chain stores if he can help it. He’s a vegan. His parents buy organic and local as much as they can. Since it’s only birds who have to fly, he made the trip from California on a train. His mother drives a hybrid car. They reuse everything possible at his house, from jars and bottles to paper and envelopes, and what they can’t reuse, they recycle. One night a week, they even do without electricity. Cody grins self-mockingly. “And so forth.”
Even Ms Kimodo laughs.
“I’m not telling you all this to brag or anything. I just want you to know where I’m coming from.” Because of Clemens’ egalitarian principles, the chairs are always arranged in a circle at these meetings, but Cody has somehow drifted into the middle of the circle. “I don’t want you to think I’m just one of these weekend eco-warriors.” Several heads shake. They would never think that. “I’m, like, totally serious and committed. But lots of people think being Green is some kind of torture and punishment. They don’t get how much fun they can have.” In some miraculous, or possibly magical, way Cody manages to smile at every person in the room individually but at exactly the same time – as if each of them is sharing an intimate joke with him. “I’m telling you, man, a night without the lights on can be a very cool thing.”
An almost electric current of giggles and smiles runs through the room.
“Anyway, I don’t want to take up all our precious time talking about myself. I’ve got a lot of ideas I want to share with you guys – things we can do to get the school right behind us and have some real impact. But first I think we should hear about you. You know, just a few words about yourself so we know where you’re coming from.” Cody smiles back at all the faces smiling at him. “How about it?” He opens his arms, embracing the room. “Who wants to start?”
While the others are all glancing at each other to see who’ll be brave enough to go first, both Maya Baraberra and Sicilee Kewe leap to their feet as though tied together by invisible strings.
“I’d love to start,” says Maya before Sicilee can. Her smile bobs back and forth between Sicilee and Cody. “I know it’s going to sound kind of weird, but I’m a lot like Cody, really.” Maya, it seems, has been into the environment for as long as she can remember, possibly because of her artistic nature and her love of animals. “And I’ve been a vegetarian for practically eons, and I decided over the holidays that it’s time to go vegan. You know, because of all that Christmas carnage?”
“Me, too,” interrupts Sicilee. She can’t seem to decide who she’s looking at, either. “You know, into the environment? I believe we can change our ways. Like my parents? My parents wanted to go skiing over Christmas, but I insisted we stayed in town – so we didn’t have to take a plane?”
“Oh, and of course I ride my bike everywhere. I only go in the car when there is no other choice.” Maya edges forward, slightly blocking Sicilee from Cody Lightfoot’s view. “And obviously I wear vintage clothes. And I recycle everything.”
“Well, I’ve been doing the Green thing for, like, ever now,” says Sicilee, sliding to the left. “The bottles … the light bulbs … the whole vegan scene … I believe that we all have a responsibility. You know, to the polar bears and the trees and everything?”
“Gott im Himmel, you know what?” Laughing as though she can’t imagine how she forgot about this, Maya moves in front of Sicilee again. “I actually once had a sit-in, you know, all by myself, in this tree they were going to cut down?” But doesn’t mention that the tree was in her backyard and the “they” who were cutting it down were her parents.
“But the whole point of a club like this is that no one’s an island.” Sicilee shifts to the right this time. “I believe that it’s not about one person doing one thing every now and then. We all have to pull together. Then we’ll be able to save the planet!”
“Well, of course. That’s why we’re all here today.” Everybody knows that, Sicilee. The unspoken words shimmer on Maya’s smile. “Isn’t that right?”
This last question is meant for Cody, and both Maya and Sicilee, who have slightly forgotten about him in their attempts to outmanoeuvre each other, turn to him now.
Only to discover that he’s no longer there.
Chapter Seventeen
Warrior greens
As a further example of things they have in common, both Maya Baraberra and Sicilee Kewe imagined that they would be leaving the meeting with Cody Lightfoot. Each of them was prepared not just to walk all the way home, but to walk all the way to someone else’s home if it meant she walked with him.
But neither of these scenarios happened. Somehow, when Cody stood up at the end of the meeting, Maya and Sicilee were left looking at each other across the space where he’d been. Sicilee tossed her hair and shrank her smile so small that she seemed about to spit. Maya stared back unblinkingly. If looks were curses, Maya would have been turned into a toad and Sicilee would have vanished completely, and probably for ever.
By the time they picked up their things and stood up themselves, Cody was walking out of the room with Ms Kimodo.
And so, against all the odds, Maya Baraberra and Sicilee Kewe ended up leaving the school side-by-side.
“You know, you really are incredible,” Maya says as they cross the main hall. She puts on an exaggerated, shrill and girly voice. “Ooh, I’ve been doing the Green thing for, like, ever now … the bottles … the light bulbs … the whole vegan scene!”
“Oh, listen who’s talking!” Sicilee fumes. “You made it sound like you and Cody were virtual twins.”
Maya’s laugh will later be described by Sicilee as sounding like the squeal of a panicked pig. “At least everything I said was true!”
Naturally, Sicilee had been prepared to embroider the truth a little – to claim she turned off lights and things like that – but how could she with Maya standing there looking like the cat that had swallowed every pigeon in the park? She had no choice. What was she supposed to say? That her mother gives her old clothes to the church thrift store and, every time he
gets the electric bill, her father stomps around the house turning off lights? She had to lie. Boldly. Baldly. The worst thing was that once she got started, she couldn’t seem to stop. By the time she was done, she’d altered the truth so much that it wouldn’t have been able to recognize itself.
Sicilee yanks open one side of the glass doors. “Are you saying that you don’t believe me?” she asks as she sails through.
“Oh, heavens to Betsy! I wouldn’t dream of such a thing.” Right behind her, Maya catches the closing door with her hip, her expression sour as she pushes through. “I am so sure you’re Greener than grass.” She leans her mouth close to Sicilee’s ear. “Like not!” If the planet thought it had to count on Sicilee to save it, it would shoot itself now. “If there was one word of truth in anything you said, it was the word ‘I’.”
“That just shows how much you know.” Sicilee strides on, hair swinging, heels clicking against the pavement. “It just so happens that I am not a liar, Baraberra. I leave that kind of thing to people like you.”
Maya’s laugh pops like a blister. “Oh, please. Spare me the self-righteous crap. I bet you don’t even know what a vegan is.”
“Of course I do.” Sicilee doesn’t. She thinks that vegan is short for vegetarian. She slows down so that Maya can catch up with her and see the scornful edge to her smile. “Just because I don’t go around drooling cool the way you do, Baraberra – shaking your stupid badges in everybody’s face and thinking you’re so great because you wear somebody else’s old clothes – doesn’t mean that I don’t know what’s going on in the big picture. I know what’s going on.”
Maya sneers. Yeah, sure you do. “Sicilee,” says Maya with exaggerated sweetness, “we’re alone now – you don’t have to pretend. You don’t have a clue what’s going on in ‘the big picture’. Gott im Himmel, you think you’re the big picture. If you can’t wear it, drive it, watch it, listen to it, or eat it, it doesn’t exist.”
“What? Unlike you, Miss Sacrifice-and-self-denial? Like you’ve dedicated your life to protecting chipmunks and drawing on the walls of the cave you live in?” Sicilee’s laughter splutters like machine-gun fire. “You are such a total phoney. You know, you don’t look like you’re doing without much to me. Your parents have two cars, just like everybody else. And you have all the stuff everybody else has.” Sicilee’s smile shrinks contemptuously. “Your cell phone does everything but fly.”
They aren’t walking any more. They’ve stopped a little way down the drive, where they are squaring off like boxers.
“Sicilee,” says Maya, “the point isn’t whether or not I and ten billion other people have a cell phone. The point is that besides everything else you aren’t – you know, like human – you are so definitely not the animal-rights type.”
“And when did I say I was?” Sicilee has seen animal-rights types on the news. They’re usually screaming, wearing balaclavas and throwing paint on people wearing totally gorgeous mink coats. “Those people are nothing but terrorists.”
“Oh, spare me.” Maya purses her lips in that smug and irksome way she has. “To an animal, you’re the one who’s the terrorist, with your fur coat and those boots you wear that make you look like you’ve got dogs wrapped around your feet. Which is why you can’t be a vegan. Vegans are animal-rights types, Barbie-brain.”
“I know about fur and everything.” Sicilee’s smile shines like highly polished steel. “But for your information, I only just started being a vegan. I can’t completely change my whole wardrobe overnight.”
“I know you just started being a vegan.” Maya grins. “About forty-five minutes ago.”
“Oh, right. At about the same time that you started riding a bike everywhere.” Sicilee’s arm sweeps across the empty bike rack outside the library. “Just where is your bike, Your Greenness? Or is its invisibility part of it being environmentally friendly?”
“It has a flat. You probably don’t know this, but you can’t ride a bike with a flat tyre.” Maya starts walking again. “And anyway, I’m a hell of a lot Greener than you’ll ever be. Gott im Himmel, you are like a walking advertisement for the consumer society. You won’t last an hour being Green.” Maya looks over with a serene smile. “You won’t even last ten minutes.”
“Oh, really?” sneers Sicilee.
“Yeah, really,” says Maya. “You’re about as Green as strip mining. You probably leave the lights on when you’re sleeping, so you’ll be able to see yourself in the mirror if you wake up during the night.”
“And I suppose you’re Greener than a tree, Madame I-ride-my-bike-in-blizzards!” The many people who know only Sicilee’s dazzling smile would be surprised at how good she is at contorting her mouth into an expression of revulsion and disgust. “You are so false, Baraberra. I bet you’ve never even been on a bike.”
“Well, you lose, Kewe. Because not only have I been on a bike about a trillion times, but as soon as I get the flat fixed, you’ll be seeing me on it every day.”
Neither of these statements is much truer than Sicilee’s claim to be a concerned environmentalist and vegan. The truth is that Maya has been on a bicycle only a dozen times, the last being over four years ago when she skidded on something in the road, ran into a hedge and decided it was easier to get rides from her mother than risk her life.
“And you’ll be seeing me eating nothing but vegetables,” counters Sicilee (who has never thought of vegetables as more than a garnish).
“Sure I will.” Maya takes a step towards Sicilee. An innocent bystander might wonder if she’s planning to hug Sicilee or give her a shove, but all she does is smile – albeit in a slightly spine-chilling way. “You may think everybody’s got the wool pulled over their eyes, you know? So let me be the one to tell you that they don’t. It is pathetically obvious that you only came today because you have the hots for Cody Lightfoot.”
“And that isn’t why you came?” Sicilee smiles back. “You are such a scammer, Baraberra. You are so transparent I could watch TV through you.”
“At least I have real Green credentials,” snaps Maya. “Unlike some people I could mention.”
“Oh, please.” Sicilee’s hair swings, scythe-like, with scorn. “You may be able to convince some people that you showed up because you can’t sleep for worrying about the whales, but not everyone’s that gullible, Baraberra. Sweet Mary! If you’d sat any closer to Cody at the meeting, you would’ve been on my lap.”
“You don’t stand a chance with him.” Maya’s voice is so reasonable and calm you’d think she’d started talking about something else entirely (socks, perhaps, or how to bake a potato). “Cody’s not one of your preppy puppets who’s only interested in what a girl looks like.”
“Oh, really?” Sicilee makes a face. “Then you’d better hope he’s not interested in brains or character either, because those are two more qualities you don’t have.”
Maya pretends to laugh. “But the joke’s going to be on you, you know. Because I’m going to win.”
“We’ll see about that.” Sicilee’s smile stretches so that it almost seems to wrap itself around her head. “I wouldn’t get his name tattooed on my butt just yet, if I were you.”
Chapter Eighteen
The times are a-changin’ – whether Clemens likes it or not
Waneeda may have scoffed at Joy Marie’s belief that the Clifton Springs High School Environmental Club could still be saved, but Waneeda, it seems, was wrong. Something was ventured and something was gained. It was very, very dark, but now here’s the dawn – all bright and golden and full of promise. In the space of just one afternoon, Cody Lightfoot has turned everything around. Room III buzzed with energy the way wild meadows once buzzed with bees. The geeky, whining image of the club vanished in knowing laughter. From now on, they’re going to have fun. From now on, instead of laying guilt trips on their fellow students, they’re going to show them the way. As Cody put it with that smile that causes everyone to smile back, “Make them aware and they will care.�
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Cody believes that they can inform people of the problems facing the planet and let them know what can be done about them in a laid-back, entertaining way. No pain, but plenty of gain. Cody Lightfoot is the sunny, hope-filled day to Clemens Reis’ moonless, gloomy night. Where Clemens has been known to bray about “Kamikaze Consumers” and the “Shopocalypse” to come, Cody talks mildly about “The Not Yet Awares” and what a big difference it would make if everyone bought a little less now and then. If Cody and Clemens were policemen and not teenage boys, Cody would be the nice, easy-going cop who asks you if you want a coffee, and Clemens would be the one who slams his fist down on the desk and tells you that you’ll never see daylight again.
“We have to get the communal qui flowing here,” said Cody. “Involve people. Make them feel like they’re really doing something. Let them know that we’re all in this together.”
To do this, this year they’re going to have a major celebration for Earth Day that will involve not just Clifton Springs High but the entire town. This is what they did at Cody’s school last year and it was an incredible success that got them widespread media coverage and national attention. If it can work in California, the birthplace of photochemical smog, says Cody, there’s no reason it won’t work here. There will be stalls and competitions, exhibits and information, swap shops and a recycling centre, music and food. Everyone will be encouraged to join in. There will be something for everyone, and something everyone can do. They’ll need plenty of volunteers to run the stalls. They’ll need people with special interests to run workshops. They’ll need tons of donations of clothes, books and household items. Everyone is excited. Even Ms Kimodo. Ms Kimodo thinks they’ll have less trouble getting Dr Firestone on board than they would have trying to fall off an ice-covered mountain. “The Earth Day celebration’s just the kind of upbeat thing he loves,” said Ms Kimodo. Which is true. Nothing pleases Dr Firestone more than a smiling photo of himself on page one of the Clifton Springs Observer.
