So Not Okay

by Nancy Rue

  “I’m sorry I didn’t go to the nurse like you told me to, Mrs. Fickus,” she said. “But you wouldn’t listen to me and I didn’t know what else to do so I came in here because I knew they were going to take turns holding Ginger in here.”

  “That is such a lie!” Heidi said.

  Mr. Jett looked at her like he was experiencing déjà vu too. Then he said to Mrs. Fickus, “I don’t want to discuss this standing in the girls’ bathroom.”

  “Well, no,” she said.

  “I’m taking this whole crew down to the office.”

  “I hope you get it sorted out.”

  She backed the door open wider, and Ginger, Heidi, Kylie, and Ophelia all filed out behind Mr. Jett. I tried to follow, but Mrs. Fickus stopped me in the doorway.

  “I’ve been watching you blossom, Tori,” she said. “And I am so sad to see you involved in this.” She broke the no-touching rule too and patted my arm. “You just tell the truth down there in the office. That’s the only thing you can do.”

  I didn’t say I’d been telling the truth for weeks now. My mother was right. It was pointless to argue. I might never try again.

  The inside of Mrs. Yeats’s office was so crowded I practically had to be shoehorned in.

  Mitch stood against the bookcases with her fists balled, glaring at the floor. A paler-than-ever Winnie leaned into Mitch’s arm. The chairs were taken up with Riannon and Izzy, who looked a little dazed, like they couldn’t believe they were actually in the office for something other than an award for being perfect, and Shelby, who was crying without making any sound. Riannon and Izzy brightened up considerably when Kylie and Heidi walked in and swished themselves into the other two chairs. Talk about “Safe in Numbers.”

  I wasn’t sure where Ginger and I were supposed to go, what with Mr. Jett taking up most of the room, but Mrs. Yeats told him to get more chairs and made the Pack scoot theirs over so when the chairs arrived we didn’t have to sit behind them. Kylie rolled her eyes. Of course Mrs. Yeats didn’t catch her.

  “It seems we have a situation,” Mrs. Yeats said, folding her arms across that gold vest she always wore, the one with the Gold Country Middle School insignia on it. At least she didn’t reach for those evil detention slips that lived in the pockets. Although, if we walked out of there with only detention, I would probably kiss her loafers.

  Kylie raised her arm halfway.

  “You’ll have your turn in a moment,” Mrs. Yeats said.

  “But I just want to say that Shelby probably needs to go to the nurse. When she starts crying like this, she needs her inhaler.”

  “I don’t recommend sending anybody to the nurse, Mrs. Yeats,” Mr. Jett said. “They never seem to get there.”

  “Do you need your inhaler, Shelby?” Mrs. Yeats said.

  Shelby shook her head. Kylie put her hand on Shelby’s arm and squeezed until her knuckles turned white.

  Mrs. Yeats leaned, half sitting, on the front of her desk. “I am going to listen to all sides of this story, and there will be no interruptions. You will each have your turn to speak.”

  “May we go first?” Kylie said without raising her hand.

  “No.” Mrs. Yeats nodded at Mr. Jett.

  Mr. Jett told his story and I had to admit he told what happened when he appeared at the locker just exactly the way it happened. But then he had to add that this was my fifth time not following the lunch period rules.

  I would have given up right then if Ginger hadn’t slipped her hand into mine. It was sweaty and sticky, but I let it stay there.

  Mrs. Yeats had Kylie go next. It was hard to sit there while the Alpha Wolf explained how my friends and I were jealous of her and her friends and how we stalked them and sent Mitch to harass them at lunch and even did a whole science project just to make everybody believe she and her friends were mean.

  “When I called her on it,” Kylie said in the sweet-like-Splenda voice she’d been using the whole time, “she took it out on poor Heidi and tried to stuff her into that locker. That’s when Riannon and I came along and put Tori in there so she wouldn’t hurt anybody else.” She lifted one of Heidi’s arms. “I can show you the bruise she got when Tori grabbed her.”

  Mrs. Yeats didn’t look. She turned her eyes on me.

  “Do you want to speak for yourself and your friends?” she said.

  “Tori doesn’t like to talk in front of people,” Ginger said.

  “I don’t think any of us is ‘liking’ this,” Mrs. Yeats said.

  I looked at my tribelet. I didn’t want to speak for myself. I was already doomed, so what did it matter? But when I saw all of them holding hands, even Mitch, I couldn’t just sit there and let them go down with me. I was the leader.

  So I sat up tall in my chair. “First,” I said, “I want to make it clear that Ophelia wasn’t involved in any of this.”

  “Really?” Mrs. Yeats said. “My observation has been that the two of you go back to first grade as best friends.”

  I shook my head. “Ophelia doesn’t want to be my friend anymore. Not since Mitch and Winnie and I decided to protect Ginger.”

  The chins wobbled. “Protect her from what? Is something dangerous going on in my school?”

  As I looked into Mrs. Yeats’s eyes, I saw two things: (A) she might just suspend you for chewing gum, but (B) she wanted to know the answer to that question. The honest answer.

  “Could I stand up there with you?” I said.

  She looked a little surprised, but she nodded and motioned for me to join her at the desk. I looked at the Pack with their eyes all innocent, and I let the events of the last exactly thirty-seven days flip through my mind before I started to talk. After that, it was only Lydia and Granna and Mom and Dad and the code I saw and heard in my head.

  “I call somebody stuffing somebody in a locker and leaving them in there dangerous,” I said.

  “I do too,” Mrs. Yeats said. “Very much so.”

  “And I don’t ever want to be in that situation again, and I don’t ever want anybody else to be either.”

  “That’s why we’re here. Before I can make a fair determination of who is responsible, I need to hear your side of the story.”

  “No,” I said.

  The chins stopped. “I’m sorry?”

  “I don’t think it’ll do any good to figure out who the bullies are and who the victims are. Somebody will get punished and somebody won’t and whether it’s fair or not everything will go back to the way it was before.” I took a deep breath and wondered for a second why my knees weren’t knocking together. “Mitch and Winnie and I have never attacked the bullies. We’ve only attacked bullying itself. And that’s what we’re going to keep doing, only we can’t do it by ourselves. We need . . .”

  I swallowed hard. This was the part I’d never done before. This was the part where my mom would say it was time to stop arguing. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t just shrug and change the subject.

  “We need you and the teachers to know that kids get taunted and intimidated and put down here all the time. We don’t care if the people doing it get in trouble. We just want it to stop so we can take back the power to be ourselves. That’s all we’ve been trying to do.”

  “Why does she keep saying, ‘bullying’?” Kylie said, in a tone that, if I’d ever used it with my mother, would have gotten me flushed down the toilet. “Nobody ever bullied anybody until Tori—”

  “I beg to differ.”

  I looked up to see Mrs. Fickus standing in the office doorway. “If I may, Mrs. Yeats?” she said.

  “Whatever light you can shed on this would be appreciated,” Mrs. Yeats said.

  My legs were shaking now, and I asked Mrs. Yeats if I could sit down.

  After Mrs. Fickus handed Mrs. Yeats a piece of paper, I was glad I did take a seat because Mrs. Yeats silently read whatever was on it, scowled, and then read it again.

  “What’s that?” Winnie whispered to me.

  “I have no idea,” I whispered back. Bu
t judging from the look on Mrs. Yeats’s face when she finished her second reading, it couldn’t be good.

  “Do you know who wrote this?” she said to Mrs. Fickus.

  “No. It was turned in with the other essays.” She nodded her helmet head toward the paper. “That is bullying if I ever saw it.”

  “All right, ladies,” Mrs. Yeats said, “and I use the term loosely—I want to know who wrote this. And I want to know now.”

  She turned the paper around and held it up. It was the paper the Pack had written about me and sent to me via Nestlé, the one I passed in with the one I wrote about Ginger—the person I most admired.

  Kylie was the only one still looking innocent. Riannon’s face was blank. Izzy and Heidi were both inspecting their laps. Shelby was full-out bawling.

  Meanwhile, Winnie was tugging on my sleeve and whispering, “What is it?” I whispered back, “Later,” and watched Mrs. Yeats, to see if she was believing this performance.

  “This is awful,” Kylie said. “Why would someone write that about Tori?”

  Mrs. Yeats’s eyes narrowed. “Tori?” she said. “Who said this is about Tori?”

  It was the first time I ever saw Kylie move her lips without anything coming out. So that was how Mrs. Yeats got to be principal.

  “You know what I think?” Kylie said finally. “I think Tori wrote this about herself, just to get us in trouble.”

  “No, she did not! Tori would never do anything like that!”

  The room was suddenly full of Ophelia as she stood up and flipped that wonderful braid over her shoulder.

  “You wrote it, Kylie,” she said. “You planned it at the lunch table with me sitting right there. And you cooked up your whole plot against Tori while I was hiding in the bathroom stalls—just like I was today when you and the rest of your Pack kept Ginger in there so she couldn’t tell any of the teachers that you had Tori trapped in a locker.”

  The braid whipped as Ophelia turned to Mrs. Yeats, who as far as I could tell, hadn’t moved an inch since Ophelia started talking.

  “I knew everything that Mitch and Winnie and Tori were doing for Ginger, too, and I’m sorry I never told on Kylie and them, but you know what I’m even more sorry for?” The tears broke through Ophelia’s voice. “I’m more sorry that I didn’t join Tori’s tribelet. And Tori—Tori is still the best friend I ever, ever had.”

  Then my BFF Ophelia dropped into her chair, put her face in her hands, and cried. The only person in the room crying harder was Shelby. Kylie put her arm around Shelby’s shoulders, but Shelby shook her off. That obviously wasn’t lost on Mrs. Yeats because her eyes narrowed like laser beams.

  “All right,” she said, “I’m going to have all of you wait in the outer office while I talk to each girl privately. Shelby, I’ll talk to you first.”

  Shelby sobbed anew.

  “Do you want someone to get your inhaler?”

  “No,” Shelby managed to say. “I don’t even have an inhaler.”

  Although Mr. Jett spread us all out so there was a chair between every two girls, Kylie kept whispering to Heidi and Riannon about how Shelby better not “spill her guts.” Lovely. Finally he said, “I don’t know what Mrs. Yeats is going to do, but I’m giving lunch detention to the next person who opens her mouth.”

  He stayed there until Mr. V showed up.

  When I saw him, I let out all the air I’d been holding in.

  The two teachers talked low so we couldn’t hear and then Mr. Jett raised his voice and said, “They stay silent until they’re called in. That’s the only way to quell the girl drama.”

  I was sure I heard Mitch growl.

  When he left Mr. V stood there, looking from one of us to the other. He looked so disappointed that for the first time since I was in the locker, I thought I was going to cry again.

  “I’m going to ask some yes or no questions,” he said. “Just nod or shake your head.”

  Kylie looked like she had no intention of doing either one, which was fine because Mr. V turned to Ginger.

  “Did you tell Mrs. Yeats about the gingerbread thing?”

  Ginger shook her head.

  He looked at me, and I shook mine too.

  “How about the sabotage on your science project?”

  We all shook our heads, even Ophelia.

  “Why not?” he said. And then he shook his head because (A) it wasn’t a yes or no question and (B) . . . he looked like he already knew.

  He shook his head again, this time at Kylie. “You don’t know how lucky you are that these girls have integrity. But your luck just ran out.”

  Then he walked straight to Mrs. Yeats’s office, tapped on the door, and without waiting for an answer, he went right on in.

  The minute he was gone, Kylie marched over to the secretary’s desk. “I need to call my mom,” she said, flipping her little splashy hair like she was giving out orders.

  “No, you don’t,” the secretary said without even looking up. “All your parents have already been called. They’re on their way.”

  The room erupted in a strange chorus of gasps and whimpers and even one wail. But that all came from the Pack.

  The tribelet? We just sat back and breathed. One “Report Alert” successfully called.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  I thought it was crowded when Mrs. Yeats had all of us in her office. When the parents crammed in there, they spilled out the door so they had to leave it open. That meant we heard almost everything that wasn’t mumbled.

  We heard that (A) Mrs. Yeats made it clear that the Pack (of course she didn’t call them that) were bullies and the tribelet (she didn’t call us that either) had tried on our own to protect the victim, Ginger. The only parent who argued was, naturally, Kylie’s mother. Something about suing the school.

  And (B) that Mrs. Yeats announced that Kylie, Heidi, Riannon, Izzy, and Shelby would all be suspended for five school days. That’s when Kylie’s mother stormed out and took Kylie with her. The rest of the Pack seemed to shrivel when she was gone.

  And (C) Mrs. Yeats said she was going to take every step possible to assure that bullying was stopped at Gold Country Middle School. And she was going to start by taking Shelby’s suggestion that my group’s Code for Respecting the Dignity of Every Human Being be signed by every sixth-grader.

  “Shelby’s suggestion?” Mitch muttered to me.

  But it was okay, because now I knew who had written me that note after our presentation.

  I looked at Shelby, but she was crying again. For that matter, so were Izzy and Heidi. Riannon just looked like she needed first aid for shock.

  And then came the best part, (D). Mrs. Yeats said, “Any sixth-grader who does not sign it or who signs it and breaks the code will be required to attend some special classes. I’ll have to work that out. Mr. Taylor?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I heard Dad say.

  “This young woman you spoke of earlier. Do you think she would be interested in teaching that for us?”

  “She’s having some health issues right now,” Dad said, “but I can certainly tell her you’re interested.”

  “Lydia?” Ginger said. Even her whisper had a foghorn quality, but I was actually starting to like it.

  “Cool,” Mitch said.

  Ophelia and Winnie did a seated version of the Happy Dance.

  Me? For a minute I wasn’t sure I wanted Lydia around people like Kylie. But then, when I thought about it logically, if Kylie was around a person like Lydia, maybe she wouldn’t have to be a person like Kylie anymore.

  The tribelet gathered at my house that day after school. Mrs. Yeats was making tomorrow Code Day at lunch—before the Pack went on their suspension—so we decided to make a big copy of the code for people to sign, instead of just a small sheet of paper.

  It was very cool having Granna there watching us. She was still in a wheelchair—I couldn’t see that lasting very long—but she was dressed in her usual baggy pants and dangly green cross earrings and a faded
T-shirt that said CELEBRATING THE MAIDU. She chuckled and nodded the whole time we were working.

  “Lola Montez would be proud of you,” she said, jabbing me gently with her elbow.

  “Who’s Lola Montez?” Ginger said.

  “No one,” Mom called from the kitchen.

  But I grinned at Granna and said, “She was somebody who dared to be different. Just like us.”

  When Granna had gone to take a nap, protesting all the way down the hall to the guest room, we made popcorn and admired our poster.

  Code for Respecting the Dignity of Every Human Being

  Bullying is not a normal part of growing up. It’s wrong, and

  we’re not having it at our school anymore. Please sign this

  pledge to be part of making this a safe place to be.

  I will not do any of the following things.

  I will help anyone who is being treated in any of these ways.

  If I’m being treated in any of these ways, I’ll

  get help from a friend or an adult.

  • Negative remarks about other people’s appearance

  • Threatening looks

  • Spreading rumors

  • Laughing at others’ mistakes

  • Laughing when they get up in front of the class (unless their presentation is funny)

  • Making fun of somebody’s family

  • Making mean jokes about someone, especially if that person can hear you

  • Damaging or destroying other people’s property, including their homework

  • Whispering, pointing, and laughing at someone just to make him or her feel bad

  • Imitating people in negative ways, especially in front of them

  • Giving someone a rude nickname, or insisting on calling them by a name they don’t like

  • Advertising put-downs of someone (signs, posters, things to sign)

  • Organizing a hate club against somebody

  • Giving people rude notes that put them down or scare them

  • Playing practical jokes designed to make people feel bad about themselves