by Nancy N. Rue
“I cannot allow it!” Cynthia Cyber, Internet Investigator, cried. She lunged for the keyboard, fingers already flying—
“It’s a seven-passenger van, Little Bit,” said a voice from the driver’s seat. “You don’t have to sit in Jimmy’s lap.”
Sophie LaCroix jolted back from Sophie-world at several megahertz per second—or something like that. She found herself staring right into Jimmy Wythe’s swimming-pool-blue eyes. She had no choice. She really was in his lap.
A round, red spot had formed at the top of each of Jimmy’s cheekbones. Sophie was sure her entire face was that color.
“Do you want to sit on this side?” Jimmy said as Sophie scrambled her tiny-for-a-twelve-year-old body back into her own seat. “We could trade.”
“I don’t think that’s what she had in mind.” Hannah turned around from the van’s middle seat in front of them, blinking her eyes against her contact lenses practically at the speed of sound. She was Sophie’s inspiration to keep wearing glasses. “Personally, I think seventh grade’s a little young to be dating.
I know I’m only a year older, but—”
Mrs. Clayton didn’t turn around in the front seat, but her trumpet voice blared its way back to them just fine. “There is actually a world of difference between seventh graders and eighth graders.”
Yeah, Sophie thought, fanning her still-red face with a folder. Eighth graders think it’s all about the boy-girl thing. I am SO not dating Jimmy Wythe. Or anybody else! EWWW. She scooted a couple of inches farther away from Jimmy.
It wasn’t that Jimmy wasn’t a whole lot more decent than most of the boys at Great Marsh Middle School. He was one of the three guys who made films with Sophie and her friends. They didn’t make disgusting noises with their armpits and burp the alphabet in the cafeteria—like some other boys she knew. But date him—or anybody else?
I do not BELIEVE so!
“So, are you guys going out or what?” Hannah said.
“Not that it’s any of your business.” Oliver, the eighth grader next to her, gave one of the rubber bands on his braces a snap with his finger. Why, Sophie wondered, did boys have to do stuff like that?
“Oh, come on, dish, Little Bit,” Coach Nanini said from behind the wheel. He grinned at Sophie in the rearview mirror in that way that always made Sophie think of a big happy gorilla with no hair. She liked to think of him as Coach Virile.
She had to grin back at him.
“We’re not going out,” Jimmy said. The red spots still punctuated his cheekbones. “We’re just, like, friends.”
Mrs. Clayton did turn around this time, although her helmet of too-blonde hair didn’t move at all. “That’s very noble of you, Jimmy, to get Sophie out of the hot seat like that. You’re a gentleman.”
“Ooh, Mrs. C,” Coach Virile said, still grinning. “Don’t you know that’s the kiss of death for the adolescent male?”
“It’s okay,” Jimmy said. He pulled his big-from-doinggymnastics shoulders all the way up to his now-very-red ears. “It’s what my dad’s teaching me to be.”
“Bravo,” Mrs. Clayton said. “I’d like to bring him in and have him train the entire male population of the school.”
Coach Virile’s voice went up even higher than it usually did, which was pretty squeaky for a guy whose beefy arms stuck out from both sides of the driver’s seat. “I thought I was doing that, Mrs. C.”
“I wish you’d step it up a little,” she said.
Sophie glanced sideways at Jimmy, who was currently ducking his head of short-cropped, sun-blond hair. I guess he is kind of a gentleman, Sophie thought. She had never heard him imitate her high-pitched voice like those Fruit Loop boys did, or seen him knock some girl’s pencil off her desk just to be obnoxious. And somehow he managed to be pretty nice and still cool at the same time. The Corn Pops definitely thought so. The we-have-everything girls were always chasing after him.
“So if you’re not going out,” Hannah said, “why were you in his lap?”
She was turned all the way around now, arms resting on the back of her seat as if she were going to spend the rest of the trip from Richmond exploring the topic. Oliver groaned.
“Inquiring minds want to know,” Hannah said.
NOSY minds, you mean, Sophie thought. But she sighed and said, “I wasn’t really sitting in his lap. Well, I was, only that wasn’t my plan. I didn’t even know I was doing it, because I was being—well, somebody else—and Jimmy’s window was a computer screen—all our stuff’s piled up and blocking my window so I couldn’t use it—anyway, it all started with the conference. I really got into it.”
Coach Virile laughed, spattering the windshield. “We can always count on you to be honest, Little Bit.”
“Let me get this straight,” said Oliver. “You were pretending to be, like, some imaginary person?”
“More like a character for our next film.”
Jimmy, still blotchy, nodded. “For Film Club. Sophie always comes up with the main character.”
“I play around with it some before I tell the whole group,” Sophie said. “I try not to get too carried away with it in school.” She didn’t add that if she got in trouble for daydreaming, her father would take away her movie camera.
“Ya think?” Hannah said. She put on her serious face. “A little advice: don’t tell that to a whole lot of people at Great Marsh. You’d be committing social suicide.”
“Especially don’t let it get out on the Internet,” Oliver said. “Everybody’ll think you’re weird.”
“I am weird,” Sophie said. “Well, unique. Who isn’t?” That was the motto of Sophie and her friends, the Corn Flakes: Keep the power God gives you to be yourself.
“I may be weird,” Hannah said, “but I do not go around acting out imaginary characters, okay?”
You wouldn’t be very good at it, Sophie thought. She ran an elfin hand through her short wedge of honey-colored hair and squinted her brown eyes through her glasses.
“What?” Hannah said.
“Well,” Sophie said slowly, “you might not be unique in that way, but you are somehow. Everybody is.”
Hannah’s eyebrows twitched. “I try not to let that get out. I’d like to get through middle school without being the punch line of everybody’s jokes, thank you very much.”
“Speaking of bullying …” Coach Virile cleared his throat. “Yes,” Mrs. Clayton said. “What did you glean from the conference?”
“Can I ‘glean’ if I don’t know what it means?” Oliver said. “It means what did we learn,” Sophie said. It came in handy to have a best-best friend who almost knew the whole dictionary. Fiona, she knew, would be proud.
Hannah gave Oliver a poke. “So what did you glean, genius?” Oliver held up his folder, which had the shield of the Commonwealth of Virginia on it, and the words “Governor’s Conference on Cyber Bullying.” He flipped it open and read, “ ‘Seventeen million children in America use the Internet. Twenty to thirty percent of them report being victims of bullying through email, instant messaging, chat rooms, websites, online diaries, and cell phone text messages.’ ”
Sophie hadn’t remembered any of that. She’d been way wrapped up in the stories actual kids told, right from the stage, about how people had written heinous things about them on the Internet (heinous was one of Fiona’s best words, meaning worse than awful) and everybody believed them. One victim changed schools. Another one refused to even go to school. And there was actually a boy who fought back with his own website and got suspended for the rest of the year while the original bullies were never caught.
Cynthia Cyber was outraged. This could not be allowed to go on! Fortunately she had taken on the job of Internet Investigator, ready to do battle to clean up cyberspace—
“Are you doing that imaginary character thing right now?”
Hannah said.
Sophie froze and looked at her hand, which was poised in the air, fingers curled around a not-there computer mouse.
&
nbsp; “Yeah, she’s doing it,” Jimmy said. He gave Sophie a shy smile. She noticed his teeth were as straight as slats in a fence. “You can’t tell me you two aren’t going out,” Hannah said.
“All right, Round Table,” Mrs. Clayton said. “Let’s stay focused.”
Yeah, can we please? Sophie thought. Sometimes she wondered if Hannah and Oliver even took Round Table seriously. She definitely did. After all, the four of them, plus Mrs. Clayton and Coach Virile and a few other teachers, were the group that was trying to stop bullying at Great Marsh Middle School by teaching kids how to treat each other and helping bullies be better people instead of just punishing them. To Sophie, it was an awesome responsibility, which was why she had spent the whole day at the conference in Richmond figuring out how the Round Table could help stop an even worse kind of bullying—the stuff that happened on people’s computers.
“How about you, Jimbo?” Coach Virile said.
“I know what Jimbo was thinking about,” Hannah muttered.
“Uh—that cyber bullying is simple,” Jimmy said. “Like, all you have to know is how to log on to the Internet, and do email and get in chat rooms, and download stuff.”
“Which is why it’s spreading like a wildfire,” Mrs. Clayton said. She shot the two back seats a bullet-eyed look. “And since there’s no adult supervision on the Internet, it’s up to you kids to stop it.”
“Not just you four,” Coach Virile said. “But you’re the leaders.”
Oliver snapped both sets of rubber bands. Sophie rolled her eyes at Jimmy, who rolled his back.
“I don’t see how we’re gonna stop it,” Oliver said. “It’s all under the adult radar, like you said, so people hardly ever get caught. Not like when they do regular bullying at school.”
“We adults definitely have to do our part,” Mrs. Clayton said. “I have absolutely no online life. I’m going to have to get hip to this Internet thing.”
Oliver snorted, and Hannah covered her whole face with her hands. As Sophie turned to grin at Jimmy, she saw in the rearview mirror that even Coach Virile’s eyes were twinkling.
“I’m so glad you’re all amused,” Mrs. Clayton said.
“What about you, Little Bit?” Coach Nanini said. “What did you learn?”
That Cynthia Cyber is going to kick buns as an Internet investigator, Sophie thought. But she gave Hannah a being careful look and instead said, “It seems like the first thing to do is keep trying to get kids to stop treating each other like enemies so cyber bullying won’t happen in the first place.”
“Good luck,” Hannah said.
“We are having good luck with that, though,” Coach Virile said. “For just about every student who’s come before Round Table, we’ve been able to get some change going.”
“Except that one fat kid,” Oliver said.
Mrs. Clayton shot him another bullet look.
“Sorry. That poor overweight kid that ripped off Sophie’s—”
“Eddie Wornom,” Coach said.
At the sound of that name, Sophie shivered. Stealing wasn’t the only thing Eddie had done to her since she met him back in sixth grade. Even working with Coach Virile on Campus Commission hadn’t changed Eddie, except to make him worse. He was away at military school now, and that was fine with Sophie.
“It would take a miracle to rehabilitate Eddie,” Jimmy whispered to Sophie.
“Yeah,” Sophie said. “That would be right up there with the loaves and fish.”
Jimmy laughed from someplace way down in his throat. “If Eddie had been at the loaves and fish, there still wouldn’t have been enough food to go around.”
“You know it.”
They settled into a comfortable silence. It occurred to Sophie that she had started out that morning wishing her Corn Flakes were with her—Willoughby and Maggie and Darbie and Kitty and especially Fiona. She had missed them some during the day, like when she went to the restroom and there was nobody to giggle with. Hannah wasn’t a giggler.
But most of the time she and Jimmy had talked—more than they did when the other Lucky Charms, Vincent and Nathan, were around.
But for Pete’s sake, Sophie thought now, why does Hannah think we’re going out? Like Mama and Daddy would let me, even if I wanted to.
Besides, Sophie could never figure out where seventh-grade couples “went” when they were “going out.” Yikes. They were twelve.
…for more, see Sophie Loves Jimmy
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