by Beth Vrabel
“Is that what you really think?” Tasha shook her head. For a second, some of the anger seemed to seep out of her, being replaced with just sadness. “Yes, I have a life. Yes, I have other friends. But I always make time for you. And when I say I’m going to be there for you, I am. I always am. But, you? As soon as someone better comes along, you forget about me.” She took a deep breath, closing her eyes. “Even when it hurts me, I’m there for you.”
“When would it hurt you to be friends with me?” I asked. “Are you… are you talking about socially? Like, socially, it hurts you to be my friend?” I always knew it, always kind of felt it, but to actually confront not being cool enough to be Tasha Martins’s friend? It sliced me up.
Tasha’s chin lifted a half inch. “I don’t just mean that, Pipi.”
“Just?” I repeated.
“You’re so ridiculous sometimes,” Tasha whispered. “Only you could be so obtuse.”
“Obtuse? What does that even mean?” I shook my head. When Tasha’s super mad her vocabulary gets intense.
“It means you can’t see anything beyond your own fat nose.”
I gasped. “Low blow.”
“Oh, don’t be like that. I’m not talking about your literal nose, but of course you’d think that.” Her jaw was set in a line. “You have no idea what I’ve gone through this year. None! Did you know I’m not captain of the cross-country team anymore? I messed up some stats, keeping a runner out of an expo, and the team voted for someone else. Did you know I can’t keep up with book club? They want to read a whole series that isn’t on audio and Ricky isn’t exactly up for reading to me twenty-four/seven.”
“I’m sure he would,” I butted in and rolled my eyes. “Ricky would do anything to spend more time with you.”
Tasha paused. “You don’t see anything, do you?” She rolled her eyes this time. “And, of course, my problems aren’t real problems. Not compared to yours.”
“I know I haven’t been there for you recently. But if you’ll give me a little time. Let me get through this List thing. I’ve got some things in motion and—”
“Know what?” she said with a fake smile. “Maybe this is a good thing. Maybe a little break is what we need.”
“A break?” I said. “Like you’re breaking up with me? Our friendship? Are you serious?”
“I’ll see you around, Penelope.” She turned away.
“Tasha!” I yelped. She paused. “This is going all wrong.” Now it was my turn to take a deep breath. I clenched and unclenched my fists, searching for the right words. “Just listen, Tasha. Everything’s all messed up right now. I’m just working on this List. And I knocked two more things off of it on Friday. Two! I’ve only got a couple more, and I’ve got a plan for one of them. It’s almost over!”
“And then what?”
“Then things will be back to normal. Egg salad, Supernatural normal.”
“But wasn’t the whole point to make things different?” Tasha shrugged without turning around. “Congratulations. Things are different now.”
“Just need a little more time,” I pleaded.
Tasha walked away. “I’m going to be late for homeroom.”
I stood there, alone, as the bell rang again.
Chapter Nineteen
Frau Jacobs made me come back to homeroom during lunch to give her the ten minutes she said I “owed” her for being thirty seconds late to homeroom. I walked into the classroom and sat in a chair at the back. She spent the ten minutes flitting about the classroom, watering plants and taking an occasional bite from the tuna fish sandwich she had opened as I walked in.
“The thing about respect, Miss McGee,” she said, “is that it’s always earned. I earned your respect by walking through the doors. Showing up, being a teacher, that garners me respect. But you must earn your respect from me by behaving properly. That’s in your actions and your choices. Too many of you girls just don’t make good choices.”
Maybe the fight with Tasha made my tongue loose and my defenses weak, because while I had walked into the classroom determined not to say a word to Frau Jacobs, I heard myself blurt out “Girls?”
“Yes, yes,” Frau said and threw up her hands, still holding the sandwich. “I know I’m supposed to say ‘girls and boys,’ but it’s only the girls I see pushing things too far. Trying to get away with inappropriate behavior.” Her eyes mocking and wide, she looked around the room. “I mean, do you see any boys around here?”
I slouched in the seat, staring at the clock.
“If you’d just take personal responsibility, life would be so much easier. There are rules, Miss McGee.” She waved her sandwich in my direction, hitting me with a whiff of tuna fish. “Rules and expectations.”
She took a bite of the sandwich as she leaned against the edge of the desk, staring at me. Her voice dipped. “Expectations aren’t hard to understand. We as young women, we should expect certain things to happen us. Certain changes. We should be prepared for them. To go on as if those changes haven’t happened. To be all…” Frau Jacobs mimed being startled, her mouth flopping open and closed and hands (one still clutching the sandwich) waving in the air next to her face in mock horror.
It’s me, I realized. She’s making fun of me. How I looked that day. The day I never talk about.
I sucked in my breath. If shame were a liquid, my body was sucking it up, my fingertips straws, my veins open as it surged up my arms, over my shoulders and poured endlessly into my chest.
Her eyes narrowed as her smile stretched.
“When, really,” she continued, “all fault lies on ourselves when we don’t follow expectations. You’ve got to anticipate consequences.” She took another bite of her sandwich, little flakes of tuna fish collecting at the corners of her mouth.
“How long until Mr. Harper is back?” I managed.
Frau Jacobs frowned at me. “Were you paying attention to anything I’ve said, Pipi McGee?”
The timer on her desk beeped, and she waved me toward the door.
Images flashed through my mind—memories I didn’t want to have of the worst day of my life and of Frau Jacobs’s smug smile through it all. I shook my head. I wouldn’t think about seventh grade. Not ever.
I left the room on shaking legs.
I even made it down the hall to just outside the cafeteria. I could see Tasha sitting at a round table in the middle. She was laughing, and it was one of her laughs that fill up the entire room. I knew she wouldn’t be at our usual spot, not after how we left things that morning, but I didn’t think she’d be so happy about it. If I told her about what Frau Jacobs had said in the room, Tasha’s face would twist in anger. She’d tell me that Frau Jacobs was awful, and she’d hold my hand while I cried.
Maybe I’d even tell her all of it, everything that had happened that day in seventh grade. I never had; she only knew the ending.
Everyone knew the ending. No one knew the whole story.
I stretched onto my tiptoes to see our usual table, sure it’d be empty. But instead Jackson sat perched on the edge, his mouth moving as he read a poem to himself. A second later, my phone pinged in my pocket. Just wrote another one while I’m waiting here for you! I scrolled down the message. The poem was long, long, long. I shuddered and put the phone back in my pocket. We were getting together after basketball practice for another poetry club meeting. Sarah had texted something about the open mic being a couple days away and needing to prepare.
I watched as Sarah took a seat across from Jackson, and soon Kara joined, too.
I looked back to Tasha, and she also was checking out our old table. She rolled her eyes and turned back to her cross-country team friends at their new table. Ricky, leaving the lunch line, paused halfway between Tasha’s table and our usual spot. With another glance at Jackson, he pulled up a chair across from Tasha. Unlike times I had sat with the cross-country team, Ricky instantly was in the middle of their conversation.
Well, I had done it, huh? I had Jackson and Sarah
as friends at last. And I had Kara right where I wanted her. Yay, me. I turned my back to the cafeteria and headed toward the bathroom, planning to take my usual spot in the third stall and cry until lunch was over.
But when I got to the bathroom, I suddenly remembered something else.
Kara. Didn’t she go to the bathroom every single day just before lunch ended? Didn’t she make everyone else leave so she could “do her business”?
Every single day.
You know what? I wasn’t sad anymore. Something altogether different pulsed through me as a plan took shape. Kara was about to have a very bad afternoon.
Ten minutes until lunch was over. I got into position. Now, all I had to do was wait.
“What are you doing here?” Kara yanked open the bathroom stall and now stood in front of me, her lip curled up in its usual sneer. She jutted out her hip; a sliver of her stomach showed where her shirt rode up. Earlier she had been wearing a cardigan in homeroom. I guessed she figured she’d dodged Frau Jacobs’s dress-coding and could wear the tight, short T-shirt.
“Going to the bathroom,” I said, even though I had been doodling in a notebook.
“Oh, gross.” Kara stretched out the word. “Are you writing Jackson’s name in a notebook over and over again?”
My pencil point broke on the paper. “Haha,” I said, my voice crisp. “Hilarious.”
The stall door swung partly shut as Kara turned toward the mirrors and fluffed her hair. “That notebook was so pathetic,” she said. I felt a mean twinge of satisfaction inside me as she ran a finger along her too-thin eyebrows. “It was genius of Ricky to show it to Jackson. I didn’t think he had it in him.” She laughed while I tried to make sense of her words.
“What? Ricky didn’t give Jackson the notebook. You did. You messed with me all year about him liking me.”
Kara slowly turned around. A smile floated across her face as slow and satisfied as the one on Frau Jacobs’s face earlier. She crossed her arms. “No,” she said, again stretching out the word. “I told you someone liked you. I never said it was Jackson. You made that leap all on your own.”
“Then who liked me?”
“Ricky,” she said with an isn’t-it-obvious shrug. “Remember, his locker was on the other side of yours? He talked about you all the time.” Her mouth popped open. “Wait! All this time, still, you thought it was Jackson I had been talking about?” She chuckled and turned back to her reflection. “Oh, that’s priceless.” She smeared on some lip gloss. “And it makes everything sort of make sense now. Why you thought you had a chance with him.”
I stood up, the notebook falling to my feet. “It was Ricky?”
“Of course, it was Ricky. He’s been in love with you for, like, ever, hasn’t he? Even going to P. Art Tee’s with you.” She rolled her eyes. “But what a crap move on his part to out you to Jackson that way with the notebook.”
She smiled at her reflection, then turned back to me and crossed her arms. “I had it all worked out—Ricky was going to tell you he liked you at your locker at the end of the day. I’d finally be done being his little messenger—”
“Wait! He told you to tell me all those things? About the dress and my hair and everything?”
Kara shook her head and rolled her eyes again. “Not really. I improvised. You know, as a joke. Just to see how badly you wanted someone to like you. I told him you were so pathetic, all I had to do was tell you someone would like you more if you cut off your hair and you would. He didn’t believe me.” She shrugged.
“How could you?”
Kara sighed. “I didn’t do anything. You cut your own hair. Same thing with the dress.”
Something must’ve twisted on my face, because Kara’s eyes got super wide.
Her hands dropped to her sides. “It was a long time ago, Pipi. Let it go.”
I stared at her, my heart hammering just as hard as when I was thinking about Frau Jacobs.
“Ricky wanted to tell you he liked you. I arranged it, told you that day was the day. All that. We were waiting by the lockers for you, and he started to chicken out. Then he said he remembered you had a notebook in your locker. He said he’d find a blank page and write the usual. You know, Do you like me? Circle y or n. I told him just write y n or else you’d probably circle or. You seem the type.”
A low growl escaped me.
“Touchy. Anyway, he grabbed the notebook and when he flipped it open, there was Jackson’s name written, like, a million times. He kept flipping—probably looking for a Ricky somewhere in there—but the last page was Penelope Claire Thorpe.” Kara made a gagging sound. “Of all the girls in our grade, why Ricky wastes any time thinking about you, I’ll never understand.”
“You like him,” I said, thinking the words at the exact same time they left my mouth.
“Ricky?” Kara shuddered. “Ew. He’s, like, in love with you. Always has been.”
“But you tried. You tried to make him like you by making me look small and laughable over and over and over.” Again, the words left my mouth at the same moment I had the thoughts. “Just hoping he’d stop liking me and notice you instead.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Kara said, her words clipped.
Still moving super stiff, she turned back to the mirror. She stared down at me in the reflection. I knew that was the closest thing to a confession I was going to get. My mind was soup.
“That’s why you set me up like that, making me cut my hair. Why you made such a big deal about my eyebrow. Why you keep the Pipi Touch going. You like Ricky, and you can’t stand that he likes me.”
“Liked you,” she clarified. Kara smiled again, and this one didn’t look forced at all. “And that’s what you really don’t get, do you? I didn’t set out to do anything to you. You were just there. I didn’t spread the Pipi Touch because I don’t like you. I did it because I don’t care about you. Having everyone play this game I invented? It was fun.” She shrugged. “That’s why it was so weird—Ricky liking you, I mean. I am the one who’s interesting. Who actually does things.”
“You can’t stand that he likes me,” I said again.
“If he had any feelings for you at all, why would he be the one who gave the notebook to Jackson? I wanted to shove it back into your locker. He was the one who called Jackson over and showed him the notebook. He told Jackson everything—the hair, the dress, everything.” She turned to face me head-on. “He laughed while he did it, Pipi.”
Then she was the one laughing. “Oh, poor Pipi. Are you going to cry?” She arched an eyebrow.
My breath left my mouth in a huff. I shook my head, ignoring the wetness around my eyes. Focus, Pipi! “It’s the same now, isn’t it?” I said.
“What are you talking about?” Kara’s shoulders lifted and fell with another sigh.
“Except now it’s not Ricky, right? It’s Jackson. You spend all of your time trying to get Jackson to notice you, but he only likes Sarah. No one likes you, and you know it. No one likes you because if you’re not being mean, you’re boring.”
Kara’s nostrils flared and her jaw clenched. Something twisted behind her eyes. “Jackson doesn’t like Sarah,” she snapped.
“It’s all jealousy, isn’t it? That’s why you won’t let Sarah do anything without you. You know if you don’t have her, you don’t have anyone.”
Kara shuddered, her fisted hands trembling. “You don’t know anything, Pipi McGee. I protect Sarah. I’m the reason she’s popular. If it weren’t for me watching over her, everyone would know she’s ga—” Whatever Kara was about to say was cut off as the bathroom door swung open. A sixth grader peeked in, saw Kara’s scary statue face, turned on her heel, and left.
“Get out, Pipi. Forget I said anything,” Kara said, “and get out. I actually have to use the bathroom.” She grabbed my arm and led me out of the door.
“Wait,” I said as the door fell back against my side. “Do you remember fourth grade? When my zipper got stuck?”
“Seriously, Pipi?” Kara rolled her eyes. “While this whole memory lane thing has been super fun, I actually need you to leave now.”
“We were on a field trip, remember? Just the two of us in the museum library bathroom. And I begged you—begged you—to get the teacher?” I dug my heels in as she half pushed me out of the bathroom.
Kara sneered. “And then you peed your pants in front of everyone as you ran across the library screaming for help.” She pushed me again. “It was hilarious.”
“It was, wasn’t it?” I said.
Kara rolled her eyes. Then she grabbed her stomach and grimaced. “Will you please leave?”
“One more question,” I said as Kara groaned. “Would you do it again?”
She leaned in, her face a half inch from mine. “In a heartbeat,” she said, and then shoved me out of the bathroom.
I smiled at her as sweetly as I could and let the door swing shut behind me. I waited just a moment to hear the click of the lock on a stall and then left, every roll of toilet paper and paper towel in my bag.
A few steps into the hall I paused. Quickly, I scribbled Out of Order on a Post-it and slapped it on the bathroom door.
All that shame that had poured in me earlier? Whoosh. Gone. Something bubbly and new filled me up instead, starting at my toes and bursting through me.
Revenge.
I swung by the bathroom again between classes, opening the door just a crack. “Hey! Hey!” Kara called out. “Who’s there? Do you have any toilet paper? Hey!”
“I’m sorry, I can’t hear you,” I said back, disguising my voice.
“I’m stuck in here!” Kara yelled. “Bring me toilet paper! Bring me toilet paper!”
I opened the door just enough to let her voice leak into the hall as a group of girls walked by, then let the door swing shut again.
Chapter Twenty
What a day! Everyone whispering, the stories expanding and growing, taking flight and having nothing to do with me. Seriously, everyone was laughing at Vile Kara Samson, not me! And now for the cherry on top: my last class of the day was social studies with Kara.