by Nancy Rue
Ginger looked across the awkward circle at me and said, “So how are we going to do this?”
“I guess we should just divide up the parts and read them,” I said.
“That’s boring,” Ginger said.
“We have the charts.”
“Just so you know . . .”
We all looked at Ophelia.
“I’m not holding up one of those things. Not with that stuff on the back.”
“We could do them over,” Ginger said.
Mitch grunted.
It was like all the energy had been sucked out of us. And that made me mad. Granna, Lydia, my mom—they all believed in us. I couldn’t let them down.
I couldn’t let the Tribelet down.
I couldn’t let me down.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll divide up the parts and hand them out to you after lunch. Everybody read it over so you can at least do it with expression.”
Another grunt from Mitch.
“Jeepers . . . come on, guys!”
Nobody could even look at me. Except Ginger, and I knew what she was thinking. I can’t do this without you ever.
The Pack came back in with their pom-poms, which meant the bell was about to ring.
“Give me the binder, okay, Win?” I said.
“Will you be sure nobody takes it?”
Perfect timing. Kylie stopped right next to Winnie’s desk and squatted down. If I had been new, I would have thought they were best friends.
“Did somebody take your binder?” she said. “For your project?”
“I wonder who?” Mitch said.
I kicked her under the table.
“She just lost it for a while,” I said. “You have to be careful where you leave your stuff, y’know?”
I was Gold Thumbing all over the place. Everybody else might be giving up, but I couldn’t.
“I know.” Kylie pressed her hand to her chest. “Do you have an idea for your presentation? Like you usually do—all acting it out and everything?”
“We’re workin’ on it,” I said. The rest of my group was on mute.
“I have an idea.”
Kylie perched herself on the arm of Winnie’s desk. Win froze.
“Since you’re doing such a serious subject, I think you should just read your report. You’re all good readers, so that would work.”
“Thanks,” I said. “We’ll keep that in mind.”
“We’re still keeping the truce, right?” Kylie said.
Ophelia’s chin came up. Oh, yeah, she didn’t know about the so-called truce. Speaking of which . . .
“So, Kylie,” I said.
“Uh-huh?”
“Is barking allowed under the rules of the truce? Just asking, because I kept hearing sounds like dogs when we were walking down the hall.”
Kylie’s eyes flinched, but she smiled. Jeepers. Did she have her teeth whitened? She was eleven.
“I’ll talk to my people and see if they heard it,” she said, voice all chummy.
“Anything else?”
How was it that she could talk like the teller at the bank and still be so—how did Riannon say it? ImmaCHUR.
“That’s it,” I said. “Thanks.”
Kylie stayed there for a few seconds, like she wanted to make sure we knew it was her idea to leave. But when she did, she had that “bring it” look in her eyes.
The bell rang, and Ophelia jumped from her desk and practically ran for the door.
“I think I’m gonna be sick,” Winnie said, and I believed her. Her face looked like a bowl of mashed potatoes.
“I’ll walk you to the nurse,” Ginger said.
“No!” Winnie said, and then she shriveled.
So did Ginger.
I told them all to go ahead, that I’d catch up later. Then I took the binder to Mr. V.
“Could you make a copy of our report?” I said.
He gave me one of his elastic smiles. “Sure. Any particular reason?”
Because I’m not taking any chances.
“We need it for our presentation,” I said, which was true.
“You got it.”
“And would you keep an eye on it? Like, really close?”
His smile snapped into a concerned line. “Anything you want to tell me, Tori?”
“No,” I said. “I’m good.”
That part, I thought as I hurried toward the cafeteria, that part was a lie. I was far from good. Our whole tribelet was coming apart, and the project we’d worked so hard on was going to bomb in front of the exact people it was about. And tomorrow my parents were going to go to Mrs. Yeats, who would probably say we were all being overdramatic.
“Tori Taylor, what’s it going to take?”
I stopped just before running straight into Mr. Jett. Like, so close I could see the individual hairs on his mustache. No, I was clearly not “good.”
“The bell rang for lunch a whole minute ago.” He held up four fingers. “Fourth time. You’re out of chances.”
I didn’t say it, but right now, being late for lunch didn’t seem like the worst thing that could happen to a person.
“You know what that means,” he said.
“Lunch detention.”
“Right. Do you have a lunch with you?”
“I’m not hungry,” I said, which was the absolute truth.
“If you’re sure.” For a minute there, Mr. Jett actually looked like he cared. But I’d been wrong about teachers before.
“I’m sure,” I said.
“Follow me then.”
“Where are we going?” I said, although I was pretty sure I knew we were headed for Mrs. Fickus. That was the kind of day I was having.
“We’re going to your science room. Mr. Vasiliev has lunch detention duty today.”
Okay, so maybe it was the worst thing that could happen to a person. The only teacher who even halfway liked me anymore was now going to know that I was such a flake I couldn’t even get to the lunchroom on time.
I was SO not okay.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Just like I thought, when Mr. Jett deposited me in the lab, Mr. V’s mouth went into an upside-down U. If that wasn’t disappointment, I didn’t know what was.
“Didn’t you tell him you were late because you were talking to me?”
“There was no point,” I said. “It was my fourth time.”
The U got longer. “I’m actually glad you’re here. I want to talk to you about something.”
He motioned for me to sit down at one of the lab tables and then went into his office and came out with our binder. My heart was doing that double-action hammer thing again as I watched him put it on the table and sit backward on the chair across from me.
“I was looking this over while I was making copies—or starting to.” Mr. V flipped the front cover open. “Something seems a little off to me. See what you think.”
He was talking like we were two scientists about to review somebody’s research results. I would have gotten into that, if I hadn’t felt like I was going to die of a heart attack any minute.
Mr. V ran his finger down the first page. “I quote: ‘Boys bully, too, but they do physical things like punch each other.’ ” He looked up at me. “That sounds like . . . Winnie?”
“Yes.”
“That was what I expected. Then I get to the bottom of the page.” He pulled at his lower lip as he looked down. “Here. ‘But scientists and psychologists don’t know anything about what goes on in a middle school. If they did, they wouldn’t call what we do bullying. There’s always been groups, and some of them are popular and some of them aren’t. Scientists probably weren’t when they were in school, so how would they know?”
“Mr. V.”
He looked up again.
“None of us wrote that.”
Mr. V closed the binder and pushed it away. His forearms rested on the back of the chair. “So how do you think that got into your report?”
I wanted to tell him so bad I could taste it. Only
what I was really tasting was the memory of moldy gingerbread.
“Tori, I want you to trust me.”
“I can’t!”
“What have I ever done to make you think that?”
“Because you were in on it!”
It was too late to bite my tongue off.
“I was in on what?”
“Valentine’s Day.”
“You’re going to have to give me more information.”
He was half smiling and that made me want to, well, do exactly what I did.
“You called Ginger over to talk to you when she opened her locker door so they could put that stuff in there.”
“Who? What stuff?”
“The Pa . . . Kylie and Riannon . . . ”
None of that turned on any lightbulbs over his head, until I got to Izzy saying, “I could ask Mr. V again.”
“They said they wanted to put a treat in her locker because she was new and probably didn’t get any valentines.”
“They didn’t put a treat in there. It was moldy gingerbread, and it smelled disgusting.”
“You’re not serious.”
“I’m telling you the truth.”
He nodded at me, but I still studied his face. I didn’t see any doubt there. What I saw was him getting a mental whiff of that nasty stuff. Then he shook his head.
“All this time you thought I was part of that, Tori?”
My facial temperature increased by about twenty degrees. “Yeah. I mean, you always joke around with them, and it’s like you never see it happening . . . or you don’t want to—none of the teachers see it—so I thought . . . I guess I was stupid.”
“Uh, no, that’s not a word I would use to describe you. So this whole gingerbread thing, this was ‘them.’ ”
I didn’t answer for a second. I was right in the middle of a “Report Alert,” and I wasn’t sure how I got there.
“Yes,” I said.
“And who are ‘they’? And, hey, this isn’t tattling.”
“I know. It’s reporting. To get Ginger out of trouble.”
His forehead went up. Jeepers, his whole face was elastic. “You’re even smarter than I thought you were.”
“That’s not me,” I said. “It comes from our . . . the person who helped us with our report.”
Before I knew it I was telling him about Lydia and the tribelet and showing him our cards. I would have felt bad doing it without them there, except I wasn’t sure it mattered anymore. I ended up telling him about that part too.
“You’ve been through a lot,” he said. “Here’s the deal. I’m not going to make you redo your report. I know what’s your group and what isn’t. In fact, you don’t even have to do the oral presentation if you don’t want to.”
“Really?” I said.
“Why don’t you talk to the group? You can come in here after school if you want.”
That was way too much to think about all at once. I needed to get something clear first anyway.
“Mr. V?” I said. “What are you going to do, I mean, about the gingerbread situation? They’re going to know I told, which is fine, but I just need to know so we . . . I can be prepared.”
“Let me think about that, because we still don’t have real evidence. But I won’t do anything until after the presentations. Fair enough?”
“Nobody ever promised us fair,” I said. “But I’ll take that.”
We went to Mr. V’s room after school—Mitch, Ginger, Winnie, and I. I had to fight not to cry, because it felt like it was the last time we would meet as the tribelet. I wished we were in my kitchen eating chips and salsa. With Lydia.
On the way to the science room, Mitch walked beside me and I could tell she was working up to say something.
“Problem,” she said finally.
“What?”
“Ophelia.”
“What about her?”
“She ate lunch with the Pack today.”
I stopped so fast my sneakers squealed on the floor.
“No way.”
“Way.”
“Did they invite her?”
“I guess. They were all talking to her. Y’know, like holding her hands and all that stuff I’m glad we never do.”
My eyes blurred.
“Mitch?” I said.
“Yeah?”
“Are we still a ‘we’?”
“Huh?”
“Will you still be my friend after the project is over?”
“Well, yeah,” she said. “I mean, duh.”
I waited for the proof. I got it. She high-fived me.
That made me feel exactly 20 percent better. I added another 20 percent when we got to the science lab and Mr. V had done all the corrections on our report so the Pack’s stuff was all out of there. But the best 20 percent was when he showed us our charts and graphs. He had stapled white paper to the backs of them so nobody could see the I Hate Gingerbread stuff.
“Just in case you decide to do the presentation,” he said.
He gave us the copy he’d made, and we divided them up among us. Ophelia wasn’t there, so Mr. V said he’d keep hers for tomorrow.
I was feeling a total of 60 percent better when I got home just as it was turning dark. I went up to seventy when Dad greeted me at the door. The whole house smelled like popcorn. That was worth at least another five.
“We’re celebrating, Tor. What are you drinking?”
“Orange juice,” I said. “What are we celebrating? Is Granna going home?”
“Granna is coming here. But that’s not why we’re celebrating.” He handed me the popcorn bowl and told me to sit by the fire.
He came back with two tall glasses of OJ and clinked his against mine. “Here’s to standing up for the underdog,” he said.
“Mom told you.”
“No. I already knew.”
“Um, huh?”
“Lydia kept me apprised. I hope that’s okay with you.”
“She told you?”
“Actually I told her.”
“Dad, what are you talking about?”
Dad jiggled some popcorn in his palm. The eagle face went serious. “The first time you came to me about the problems you were having, I knew I was totally out of my area of expertise. I mean, what did I do—tell you some story about the Maidu?”
“Yeah . . .”
“When I saw how much Lydia liked you—”
“Wait. Lydia liked me?”
“From the first. She didn’t feel like she made the best first impression but . . . I don’t know. Anyway, I saw you were floundering and your mom couldn’t be there for you, so I asked Lydia if she could help.” Dad grinned even as he chewed. “I didn’t expect her to get as involved as she did, but it seemed to be working.”
I started to sag. Dad shook his head at me.
“Don’t go there, Tor,” he said. “Lydia helped you because (A) she likes you, (B) she doesn’t want to you see any of you suffer the way she did, and (C) she saw the leader in you. That’s something your mother and I haven’t necessarily brought out in you. It’s time we did.”
If I wasn’t mistaken, there was a sheen over Dad’s eyes. If he cried, I was going to lose it again.
But he just kept chewing until I finally said, “Thanks for celebrating that with me, Dad.”
“Actually, that’s not all. I have news too.”
I sat up straight. “Lydia?”
“Ah, yes. The operation was a success, and she’s headed for rehab day after tomorrow.”
“Can I go see her?”
“She asked me to bring you down. I can do that.”
But my little surge of excitement fizzled out. She was going to be so disappointed that the tribelet was splitting up. Mitch said she’d still be my friend, and Ginger would probably stick to me until she moved again. But that didn’t feel like the tribelet we worked so hard on.
“But you haven’t heard all of it.”
I tried to smile at Dad. “There’s more?”
“There is.” His face got eagle-solemn again. “I spent two whole afternoons with my producers in San Francisco. It took some convincing, but this morning they finally told me that I should include the plight of the Maidu in the movie.”
“Yay, Dad!” I said.
“It was a big risk. A couple of times, I thought I was losing. But I hung in there, and you know why?”
“Because it was the right thing to do?”
He smiled. “Yeah. And because my daughter inspired me to do it.”
“I did? How did I do that?”
“By doing it yourself.” Dad clinked my glass again. “I hope I’ve made you proud, Tor, because I’m proud of you. And your mom and I have decided to wait until after your presentation tomorrow to approach Mrs. Yeats. You’ve come this far, and we think you deserve the chance to take it all the way in.”
I didn’t tell him we probably weren’t doing the presentation. I didn’t want to see that sheen go away from his eyes.
“I almost forgot. I brought you a present from Lydia.”
“You saw her?” Why did men tell you things in pieces instead of the whole story at once like girls did?
“Stopped by on my way home. Come up to my office.”
Nestlé followed us both up the stairs after he cleaned out the popcorn bowl. Everybody was getting away with a lot today.
Dad told me to sit in my curl-up chair and then he unrolled a big piece of paper, the kind we’d made our charts and graphs on.
“Lydia made this for you before she left. She asked me to give it to you the night before your presentation.”
I felt kind of a chill as he turned it around. The kind when you see something that makes it all come together.
Lydia had done the whole thing in calligraphy, that perfect fancy writing you do with a special pen and real ink. She’d even used different colors to draw designs.
But it wasn’t just that it looked like it should be framed like art. What it had on it took me straight back to our kitchen table. I could taste hummus and smell Ginger’s sort of stale odor getting fresher and hear Winnie giggling and Mitch grunting and all of us calling out answers that Lydia said were right. And they were all on that paper.
“Code for Respecting the Dignity of Every Human Being,” she’d written in large letters across the top.
Below that was a list. Our list.
