Truth about Truman School

by Dori Hillestad Butler

  “Then talk to Zebby,” she said.

  But I never saw Zebby online last night. So our site was still up.

  Now this morning, my mom stood by the kitchen sink, sipping a cup of tea. She hadn’t made any breakfast. When she saw me coming, she poured a bowl of Cheerios and set it in front of me, but I didn’t feel like eating it.

  My dad was still upstairs getting ready for work. He and a bunch of other people from our neighborhood had been out late searching for Lilly the night before, but they never found her.

  My stomach was all twisted up. I couldn’t eat, so I got up and dumped my cereal down the sink. “I better go,” I said, even though I really didn’t need to leave for school for another ten minutes yet.

  “Have you talked to Zebby?” Mom asked just before I went out the door.

  “Not yet,” I admitted.

  “Today, Amr. You talk to her today and then you take that website down.”

  “Okay,” I said. I knew Zebby’s mom was worried about our site, too. They went back to their house about the same time my mom and I came back here. But Zebby’s folks aren’t as strict as mine are. I couldn’t imagine they expected her to take the whole site down. How was I supposed to tell Zebby that that was what my mom wanted me to do?

  I needed time. Time to figure out the exact right way to bring it up. So I decided not to pick her up on my way to school. I went the other way around the block. Past Lilly’s house.

  There was still a police car parked in front of Lilly’s house. Just one, though. I wondered if this was the same one that was parked there the night before, or if this was a different one that had come this morning. There was another car I didn’t recognize in the driveway, too. An unmarked police car, maybe?

  While I was staring at their house, the front door opened and Lilly’s mom stepped outside with a police officer and some other man who looked a little bit familiar, but I wasn’t sure who he was at first. He was tall and thin, and he dressed like a guy who worked in an office and made a lot of money. They were so busy talking they didn’t pay any attention to me as I walked past their house. Two houses later it hit me. I knew who that guy was. Lilly’s dad.

  Zebby:

  Amr forgot to stop and pick me up on his way to school that day. And I was so busy thinking about our website that I lost track of time and had to run all the way to school. I made it, though. With about thirty seconds to spare.

  My mom said I had to find a way to run the Truth about Truman School responsibly or take the whole thing down. I still wasn’t sure what she meant by “run it responsibly.” Did she really expect me to look at every single comment on the site and decide whether it was okay to leave up or whether it had to come down? How was I supposed to decide what was okay and what wasn’t? Where did you draw the line?

  A lot of people knew Lilly was missing now. I don’t know where they found out about it; I never posted anything about it on the site. But there were a lot of where’s-Lilly posts and a lot of talk about did-she-go-willingly-or-did-something-bad-happen-to-her that morning? I wondered if something bad had happened to her.

  There was one question nobody was asking, though: why did Lilly take off in the first place? Did anyone else wonder if maybe it was our fault she took off? All of us who either wrote mean things about her online or who read the things other people wrote and didn’t do anything about it. Or was it my fault because I’m the one who started the Truth About Truman? And I’m the one who let people post whatever they wanted.

  Anonymous:

  I never expected things to go so far. I never expected other kids to join in like they did. And I certainly never expected Lilly to disappear.

  Wherever she was, she was okay, wasn’t she? I mean, we would’ve heard something if she wasn’t, right?

  Hayley:

  It was all over school. Lilly Clarke never came home last night. A lot of people came up to us that morning to see if we knew where she was or what had happened to her. But how would we know? We haven’t been hanging out with her.

  “So, what’s the deal?” Morgan asked during lunch. “Did she run away?”

  “Did she run away because of the We Hate Lilly website?” Kylie asked.

  “If she did, she must really be messed up,” I said as I opened my yogurt.

  “What do you mean?” Kylie asked.

  “Well, anyone that would run away just because of a website has to be unstable,” I said.

  Brianna and Cassie agreed.

  Personally, I thought Lilly Clarke was getting entirely too much attention. She probably loved the idea that everyone was all worried about her. Wherever she was, I was sure she was fine.

  Zebby:

  Lilly wasn’t the type to just take off somewhere on her own. I couldn’t imagine her sleeping outside in a box like a homeless person. I couldn’t imagine her hopping on some random bus to who-knows-where. So where was she? I wondered during lunch.

  “Hey, Zeb,” Amr said, interrupting my thoughts. “We need to talk.”

  “Okay,” I said, glancing over at him.

  He stirred his macaroni and cheese around on his plate. “My mom says we have to take the Truth about Truman down,” he mumbled.

  “My mom said basically the same thing.”

  Amr’s head popped up. “She did?”

  “Well, she said we have to take all the mean stuff off our website or we have to take the whole site down,” I corrected.

  “What?” Trevor Pearson cried from the next table over. “You can’t take the Truth about Truman down!”

  “Why not?” What did he care whether we took the site down or not? A lot of people had given him a hard time about that comic strip he posted, and some kids even grabbed a comic he was working on in class and wrecked it.

  “Because it’s real,” Trevor replied. “Because it’s the truth. It’s the only place where everyone at school can say whatever they want.”

  “That was the idea,” I said, shoving my tray away. “But things didn’t work out quite like I expected. Sometimes when you let people say whatever they want, they say things that aren’t very nice.”

  “Duh,” Trevor said. “This is middle school. I still think you should keep the site up.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it tells the truth,” Trevor said. “And the truth is, middle school sucks!”

  Yeah, it did. Sometimes.

  That was the whole reason I started the Truth about Truman to begin with. I wanted to give everyone a voice. Even the people who thought middle school sucked.

  Was it even possible to publish a newspaper or website that really was for everyone … without upsetting anyone?

  Brianna:

  We had a test in math that day. I had already answered all the questions I could (which wasn’t many), so I kept watching the clock. Fifteen more minutes until class got out.

  Bzzz! Bzzz! Mr. Wesack’s phone rang.

  A lot of people shifted in their seats as Mr. Wesack got up to answer his phone. “Hello? Yes?” Mr. Wesack glanced over at me, so I quickly lowered my eyes to my test.

  “I’ll send her right down,” Mr. Wesack said, hanging up the phone. “Brianna?”

  My head popped up. “Huh?”

  “Mr. Gates would like to see you in his office.”

  I felt a stab of fear in the pit of my stomach. “Why?” I choked. Why would Mr. Gates want to see me?

  “I’m sure you’ll find out when you get there,” Mr. Wesack said.

  Heart pounding, I stood up and started for the door. “Take your things,” Mr. Wesack said. Which was even more unnerving. “I don’t think you’ll be back before the end of the period.”

  I went back to my d
esk and gathered up all my stuff.

  Kylie mouthed at me, “Why do you have to go to the office?”

  I had no idea.

  I gave my half-filled-out test to Mr. Wesack, then headed down to the office. The secretary, Mrs. White, had a grim look on her face when I walked in. “They’re waiting for you in Mr. Gates’s office, Brianna,” she said. “You can go on in.”

  “Okay.” I didn’t even know Mrs. White knew my name.

  Mr. Gates’s door was open, so I slowly made my way toward it. I froze in the doorway. My parents were in there! My mom, my dad, and my stepdad. All three of them were sitting around a table with Mr. Gates … and two police officers.

  What was going on?

  Mr. Gates stood up when he saw me. “Have a seat, Brianna,” he said, closing the door behind me.

  I swallowed, then took a seat in the only chair available. Right between Mr. Gates and the lady police officer. Everyone was staring at me.

  There was a laptop computer on the table in front of Mr. Gates. He turned it so I could see the screen. “Does this look familiar to you, Brianna?” The We Hate Lilly Clarke website was up on the screen.

  I swallowed again, but didn’t say anything. My heart was really pounding now.

  “Did you make that website, Brianna?” my mom asked.

  I was too scared to answer.

  “Did you?” my mom asked again when I didn’t answer.

  I did … but I didn’t do it by myself. Hayley, Cassie, Kylie, and Morgan helped. In fact, they probably did more of it than I did. But I couldn’t say that. Not in front of the police. Why were the police here?

  “With the help of your Internet service provider, we were able to trace the IP address of this website to your home, Brianna,” the tall, skinny officer explained.

  “Is there anybody else in your home who could have set this website up?” the lady officer asked.

  I slumped down in my chair. Oh, boy. I was in big trouble!

  Hayley:

  Kylie told us that Brianna got called to the office during math.

  “Why?” I asked.

  Kylie didn’t know. So we made a detour past the office on our way to sixth period. We didn’t see Brianna in there, but we saw something else. There was a police car parked in front of our school.

  “Why is there a police car at our school?” Cassie asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. But I didn’t like it. There was a police car at our school and Brianna got called to the office. Were those two things somehow related?

  Morgan grabbed my arm. “Do you think they know about the We Hate Lilly website?” she cried.

  “SHH!” I glared at her, nodding toward the office. What if they had a speaker or something in there that made it possible for them to hear what people were saying out in the hallway?

  Mrs. White was the only person in the main office and she didn’t act like she heard us. She was busy typing something at the computer.

  “Even if they do know about it, the only way they’d know any of us had anything to do with it is if one of us told someone,” I said.

  “Well, I sure didn’t tell anyone,” Morgan said.

  “Neither did I,” Cassie said.

  “It’s possible they traced that website back to the computer it was created on,” Kylie said, not looking at me.

  “Can they do that?” Cassie cried.

  “Maybe,” I said. “But even if they did, why would anyone call the police over it?” Sure, it wasn’t very nice to hate someone, but was it really a crime? What was the big deal?

  Cassie chewed her bottom lip. “What if Brianna tells that we all worked on it?” she asked.

  “She won’t,” I said with more confidence than I actually felt. We don’t like rats in our group, and Brianna knows it.

  But Brianna is weak. And I wasn’t sure where her breaking point was.

  Brianna:

  “Are you sure those other girls you hang out with had nothing to do with this?” my mom asked. “The website says ‘We Hate Lilly Clarke.’ ”

  “It was just me,” I mumbled. Because I don’t rat on my friends! But it seemed a little unfair that I was the only one who was going to get in trouble for this.

  “So ‘milkandhoney’ is just one person,” the lady police officer said.

  What? Wait a minute. “I never said I was milkandhoney,” I told the lady police officer.

  The two police officers looked confused. “You just admitted you created the We Hate Lilly website,” the tall, skinny officer said.

  “Yeah, but that doesn’t mean I’m milkandhoney. I’m not milkandhoney!”

  Mr. Gates typed something on his laptop, then turned it around so I could see it. He had the Truth About Truman website up. “There’s a link to the We Hate Lilly Clarke website on this other website. And that link was posted by milkandhoney.”

  Uh-oh. I had forgotten about that. “I uh, borrowed the name milkandhoney. I’m not milkandhoney,” I said, knowing it sounded lame. But it was the truth! Milkandhoney had posted all this other stuff about Lilly, so we decided we’d post our link to the We Hate Lilly Clarke website under that name, too. It was Hayley’s idea. She said that way nobody would know it was our website. Because obviously we weren’t milkandhoney.

  “Who did you borrow the name from?” the lady police officer asked.

  “From … this other person who was posting all this stuff about Lilly. Hey, if you traced that post back to my house, can’t you trace milkandhoney’s other posts?” I asked. Now, I was thinking! “Then you’d know milkandhoney wasn’t me.”

  It turned out they already had traced milkandhoney’s other posts. To the school media center computers. The police had dates and times. All after school.

  “Mrs. Conway gave us a list of kids who have been in the media center after school,” Mr. Gates said. “Your name was on that list, Brianna.”

  I slumped down in my chair. Of course my name was on it. Hayley, Lilly, and I stayed after school and looked up cheerleading stuff in the media center.

  “W-what about those other websites?” I sputtered. “Did you find the people who created the Lilly’s Lesbian Diary website or the Truth about Truman website. Maybe they’re milkandhoney?”

  “We’ve spoken with the students who created the Truth about Truman,” the lady police officer said. “And while no one has claimed credit for Lilly’s Lesbian Diary, we were able to trace that one back to the school computers, too.”

  They all stared at me like they were waiting for something.

  What were they waiting for? I wondered.

  Then I got it. They thought I did Lilly’s Lesbian Diary, too.

  Anonymous:

  I expected more. More from the school, I mean. I figured if they ever found out what was going on, they’d confiscate all the computers, round up every single person who ever posted anything bad about Lilly online, call in extra counselors, and have a big school assembly to talk about cyberbullying, maybe even bullying in general. But none of that happened.

  When they called Brianna Brinkman to the office, I was sure they’d be calling my name next. If they knew about Brianna, they had to know about me.

  But apparently, they didn’t.

  Before the day was over, everyone knew that Brianna had been suspended for writing mean things about Lilly Clarke online and for creating the We Hate Lilly website and the Lilly’s Lesbian Diary site, too, and that she was milkandhoney. People thought Brianna was responsible for pretty much everything bad people posted about Lilly.

  Obviously, people were wrong.

  You might be wondering whether I felt bad about Brianna getting suspended while I pretty much got away with everything I did. Not really. Because I couldn’t feel too bad abo
ut Brianna Brinkman getting in trouble.

  Zebby:

  So Brianna Brinkman got suspended. I knew milkandhoney would turn out to be one of the popular kids.

  But just because milkandhoney got caught didn’t mean the whole thing was over. I still had to figure out what to do about our website. Find a responsible way to run it or take the whole thing down. My mom said I was grounded until I did one or the other.

  And Lilly was still missing.

  I have to tell you, I never meant for things to get so out of control. I just wanted to publish an alternative newspaper. I wanted to publish good, hard-hitting articles that said something about the middle-school experience. I wanted to publish something that mattered.

  But the Truth about Truman School didn’t matter to anyone except me and Amr. The only reason anybody read it was to see who said what about someone else.

  That was never what I had in mind.

  So in the end, I took the whole thing down. I replaced everything with just one line on the main page: The Truth about Truman School is … .

  If you clicked, another page came up that said, “people there can be really mean.”

  Amr:

  I couldn’t concentrate on my homework that night. My dad joined the search for Lilly again after work. I guess there had been people searching pretty much round the clock.

  Where could she have gone? It was hard to picture her wandering around out in the woods somewhere. Or sleeping outside. Lilly was not the sleep-outside type.

  Maybe she was hiding in Wal-Mart or something? Hadn’t I read a story in the news a while back about somebody living in a Wal-Mart? But if she was, wouldn’t someone have seen her and recognized her? This wasn’t that big a town.

  She wouldn’t have done something stupid like hitchhiked her way out of here, would she? Like back before anyone even knew she was missing? What if she ended up in a car with some psycho who—I didn’t want to think about it.