Usually in a prison break you had a little help from another inmate. But no one in this prison wanted to get out.
She was surprised to discover that Lana and Juliet and Heidi had mixed things up today. They were walking counterclockwise. They were such rebels.
The truth was, Cricket could be judgmental. Plus she and Lana were about to be surfing buddies. Maybe Lana and her amazing eyelashes weren’t as vain and annoying as Cricket thought. She decided to abandon her scraping and join the girls on their loop around the playground. She felt like a hobo jumping a freight train.
When Cricket hooked her arm with Lana’s, Lana was surprised, but she didn’t stop walking. So far, so good. Cricket gave Vincent Lee the dirtiest look possible, but he didn’t see. It turned out Lana and Juliet and Heidi were not talking about socks. They weren’t talking at all. They were singing.
“Hey, I want you again, I’m so sure,” Lana sang, quietly and slightly off-key. Poor Lana—apart from her eyelashes, she really didn’t bring much to the table.
“Hold me, baby, count to ten,” Juliet sang more vigorously.
Cricket knew the song. Everyone in the world did. The girls were singing the latest number-one hit from the world’s most popular boy band. The band had a reality show on the Internet. The kind of reality that was super scripted. The kind of reality based on a pretend version of life. In the show the band members were best friends and each week they struggled and triumphed, writing their own material and somehow just scraping together the rent. In real life, Cricket guessed, they probably didn’t like one another, write their own material, or know how to play any instruments, and they were almost certainly very, very rich.
“You’re my cure, darling, no one else, but anything you want, I’m sure,” Heidi sang with passion.
Now it was Cricket’s turn.
“Babe, I did it again,” Cricket sang. “I pooped on the floor, wipe it up, close the door. Help me, I’m so insecure.”
Juliet and Lana laughed.
But Heidi shrieked and held her sides. “I’m going to pee! Cricket, you are so hilarious.”
Cricket adored Heidi. Maybe Juliet and Lana and Heidi were the nicest people after all? Maybe surf camp would be okay. Maybe Cricket had finally figured out recess. Maybe she’d made friends and wasn’t a loser after all. Maybe you could be popular and have fun.
“I’m going to the concert. My parents bought me tickets for my report card,” Juliet said.
“We haven’t gotten our report cards yet,” Heidi said. “We don’t get them till tomorrow, on the last day.”
“I know, but they always get me something at the end of the year,” Juliet said.
“But how do they know you deserve it?” Lana said.
“I deserve it,” Juliet said.
Heidi rolled her eyes.
“I’m dying. And so jealous, Juliet,” Lana said, batting her eyelashes.
“You are? Lana, you’re the one going to private school next year.”
“No, you’re so lucky, Juliet,” Lana moaned.
“Do you even understand?” Heidi said.
“I’m going to make a really big sign that says I LOVE YOU, LINCOLN, because if your sign is really big and they notice, you can get picked for a meet and greet. With them.”
“Oh my gawd,” Heidi said.
“I can’t even. You guys, they are everything,” Lana said. “Juliet, you have to be chosen and take their picture, and tell me every single syllable that happens.”
“I promise, Lana. I swear.”
“You guys,” Cricket said. It had been a while since she’d contributed and she wanted to make it count. “My father is their lawyer.”
“Shut the front drawer,” Lana said.
Cricket could feel her new friends’ excitement. She upped the ante.
“His caseload is mostly corporate real estate, but they put him in charge of the band because he went to high school with their manager.”
“Oh my gawd,” Heidi said. Her mouth stayed open, but nothing else came out. Lana and Juliet were grinning from ear to ear.
Cricket’s new friends loved her story. She had to keep the good times coming. “They came for dinner last night,” Cricket said.
“No,” Juliet said. “You did not just say that.”
“Oh my gawd.”
“Wait,” Lana said. “Cricket, you always lie. You’re lying. She’s lying. You’re a liar, Cricket Cohen. I should have known.”
“Ever since kindergarten. When you lied about that accident. I bet you never even had stitches,” Juliet said.
“I heard you didn’t even fall off any rock. You staged the whole thing with ketchup,” Heidi said.
“I did so fall off that rock. What are you talking about? Who carries ketchup around? I had forty-nine stitches. My head cracked open.”
“So you say,” Lana said.
“I bet those glasses are fake. You’re a human lie genome,” Juliet said, and the three of them walked away.
Cricket was stunned. Stunned that they had left and stunned by how much it hurt. It hurt way more than the volleyball that had hit her in the head three weeks ago in gym. She had to find her way back to the spork fence. She needed something to hold on to. Making up words to a song you didn’t like was fine. Saying that your father was the lawyer for the singers of that song was fine. Saying that he had gone to high school with their manager was fine. But saying that the band had come over for dinner, that part was not fine. She’d obviously said it to help them because walking in circles was boring. She hadn’t done it to be mean. She’d done it to be nice. She didn’t care about any dumb boy band. Lana and Juliet and Heidi lied all the time when girls called them on catty things they’d said. They were not nice. They were mean. Really mean. Tears burned like acid behind her eyes, but she refused to cry. Even if it meant going blind.
4
WATCHING THE CLOCK
At three o’clock, Cricket’s classmates would be released into the wild. But she had a meeting with her parents and Mr. Ludgate instead. Cricket stared at the unmoving clock. It was going to be 2:50 forever.
Maybe being stuck in last period for eternity was better than the impending meeting. A meeting with the teacher and your parents was never a good thing. But then an exciting idea occurred to Cricket. Maybe she wasn’t in trouble. Maybe Mr. Ludgate had called the meeting because he had decided that Cricket was too smart and interesting for middle school. He was sending her straight to NASA to begin her time as chief astrophysicist to the ambassador of Iceland. This was a farewell meeting.
She doodled fjords and swirling constellations all over her margins. Life in other countries and on other planets had to be better than life here.
Lana Dean reached behind herself and handed Cricket a stack of summer reading lists.
Cricket could barely look at her. Surfing camp was going to be impossible. Cricket’s existence was torturous, but she took a list and passed the stack.
Why did all the books for kids her age have characters dying of cancer? It was so boring. Not the death part. Death was exciting. Something was happening, you were dying! But the cancer? Couldn’t authors come up with another life-threatening condition besides cancer?
Lana fluttered her eyelashes. What if Lana was diagnosed with cancer? She’d have chemo and all her eyelashes would fall out.
Cricket felt a nudge. There was another stack of papers to pass down. She took a sheet without looking. She felt horrible for wishing Lana would get cancer. She drew hearts all over both papers to make up for it.
The bell rang and a landslide of kids tumbled past Cricket and out the door.
When the classroom had emptied, Mr. Ludgate looked up from his papers. “Cricket,” he said, “I need to straighten out my desk. I’ll meet you in the library in five minutes.”
Mr. Ludgate’s blotter was centered and all his pens and paper clips and staples were lined up, each in their own glass jar, next to a big ball of rubber bands. Cricket had no idea what M
r. Ludgate could possibly make straighter, but she took her backpack and left for the library.
5
BEARS AND SQUIRRELS AND HOT-AIR BALLOONS
The library was on the top floor and had a skylight. When it rained, the raindrops made little pinging sounds against the roof and it was relaxing. Maybe after she was an explorer-astrophysicist she would be a writer and she would visit school libraries. But not today. She dreaded going there today. Her parents were always so stressed in meetings with teachers. Actually they were always stressed-out, but they were more stressed-out in meetings with teachers.
What if she couldn’t walk? What if her parents hadn’t vaccinated her and she had been stricken with polio? If she had polio she’d never make it up these endless stairs. Her legs would be too stiff from illness to bend. No wonder she played alone with a spork in recess while the other children ran and were athletic. She was a poor polio patient. How would she get up all these stairs? In the olden days someone would have carried her. But this was now and there was no one here.
She looked at her poor, withered legs. So sad. With all her courage she took a tremendously deep breath. Cricket Cohen, polio victim, tried lifting one leg over the other. She gripped the banister with all her might, knowing she’d have to hoist herself up, hopping. But she didn’t have the strength. She couldn’t pull her dead legs up and over a single step. She was perspiring. She was probably breaking into a fever. She’d never make it.
She surrendered and walked up the stairs like the fully vaccinated person she was.
Her parents, of course, were already in the library. They were never late, anywhere, ever. Richard Cohen looked uncomfortable sitting in his child-size chair. Bunny Cohen rested her head on her husband’s shoulder. She was wearing her usual assortment of off-white clothing, which she fondly referred to as buff. Every hair was in place. But she was crying.
“Cricket,” Bunny said, giving her daughter a damp peck on the cheek and sniffling.
“Hi, honey,” Richard said.
Cricket handed her mother a box of Kleenex. She gave her father an abbreviated kiss.
“Thank you, honey,” Bunny said, wiping her eyes with a tissue. “Abby and my mother had another fight. No one I hire can stand working for Dodo. Not that I blame them, the whole situation is a disaster. But don’t worry. I promise I will pull myself together when your teacher walks in. He won’t know a thing.”
Abby, Abby, Abby. She always threatened to quit.
“Poor Bunny,” Richard said. He was comforting his wife like she was a six-year-old.
Cricket ran her hand across the laminate-topped table, which was pale blue. Everything about the library, except the presence of her parents, was soothing. The posters on the walls were some of Cricket’s favorite images. The two bears in beds made of logs covered by complementary patchwork quilts shared a nightstand piled high with books. Reading gives us a place to go when we have to stay here, the caption said. Another poster featured a family of squirrels climbing aboard a hot-air balloon. Fly away with books, that caption said. I wish, thought Cricket. How ironic that her mother was responsible for the library. Before Bunny got on the PTA the school didn’t even have one.
If only Cricket were boarding a hot-air balloon right now. Or turning into a squirrel. Ha! If she were a squirrel, she would be the kind with a really good tail. Not like the ones with the thin, gross tails that looked like reproductive experiments between squirrels and rats. Those squirrels were horrifying.
When Mr. Ludgate arrived, Cricket wondered if he’d not only straightened his desk, but had also pressed his clothes. He shook hands with her parents. Just like Bunny had promised, her eyes were dry and she was all smiles.
The sun streaming through the skylight above Mr. Ludgate made his neck red. It glowed and Cricket could sort of see plasma in there.
“Thank you for coming in,” Mr. Ludgate said as he sat down.
He had something stuck in his teeth. If he knew, he would die.
“What I’d like us to talk about is—”
“The way our daughter bends the truth?” Richard said, glancing at his wife.
Cricket looked at her father incredulously. Bunny made sure to look straight ahead. Had Lana and her squad reported Cricket saying the boy band was a client of her father’s?
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” said Mr. Ludgate. He put his papers in two piles. Sometimes Mr. Ludgate was boring, but Cricket forgave him because he was fond of her. He’d said her final memoir was so interesting he’d actually sent a copy to Dr. T, the geologist whose blog Cricket followed. Cricket had never written to Dr. T, but it was her dream that Dr. T would recognize Cricket’s geological passion and invite her on a field trip.
It turned out, though, that while Dr. T told Mr. Ludgate she was supportive of Cricket’s interest in geology, she also told Mr. Ludgate she didn’t know anyone named Cricket Cohen and had never traveled with an eleven-year-old to Iceland to observe rift valleys, but the descriptions of the trip were uncannily familiar. Mr. Ludgate explained this was why he’d felt it necessary to call a meeting.
“I don’t want this to be a character assassination,” he said, trying to smile reassuringly. “But, Cricket, you didn’t complete the memoir assignment as intended. Furthermore, the experiences you described were both fabricated and borrowed. You made up a story about accompanying Dr. T on her adventure, and you lifted descriptions of those adventures from Dr. T’s own writings. Isn’t that right?”
Cricket wished she could climb under the covers with one of those bears.
“Mr. Ludgate is asking you a question, Cricket,” Richard said.
“Cricket, answer Mr. Ludgate,” Bunny said.
Whenever Bunny found things unpleasant she got extra-bossy.
“What?” Cricket asked.
“Mr. Ludgate is speaking,” Bunny said.
“I was saying that you didn’t exactly hand in the memoir I assigned, and it was hard to give you a grade on it.”
“I did hand it in.”
“Mr. Ludgate says you didn’t. Either you did or you didn’t,” Richard said.
“Cricket,” Mr. Ludgate said, “the criterion for memoir is writing that is based on the truth.”
“Divergent plates are true,” Cricket said.
“Cricket, I don’t doubt your passion regarding geology.”
“Cricket, I don’t understand your obsession with rocks,” Bunny said. “I never have,” she added, smiling.
“You’ve never been to Iceland. Alone or with any Dr. T!” her father declared as though he were the only person with a firm hold of the facts. He reached for a Kleenex and wiped his brow. “Plagiarism is against the law. Do you understand how wrong this is, young lady?” Richard asked. He took these things very seriously. He was a tax lawyer. He had studied the law.
“Well, Cricket hasn’t committed plagiarism, per se,” Mr. Ludgate said. “She hasn’t copied Dr. T’s words and pretended they were her own. She’s only imagined sharing certain experiences with the scientist.”
“That’s true, Richard,” Bunny said.
Cricket wasn’t interested in any of this. She was interested in plate tectonics.
Plate tectonics theorizes that the earth’s continents rest mostly on seven major plates located on the outermost layer of the planet, called the crust. The crust is rigid. But the slabs spread apart and come together. They are shifting all the time. Pangaea broke apart because of movement at plate boundaries. The continents are still moving. Just like cells in the human body replace themselves every seven years on average, the earth’s topography and geology redefine themselves every several million years. Science, the most fact-based, dependable thing we have, accepts constant change as reality.
But it was frustrating that so many dramatic things happened so slowly. Or that they happened so far away they might as well be invisible. Ninety percent of plate spreading, for example, occurs along the ocean floor. Underwater volcanic eruptions had created a mountain ra
nge more than forty thousand miles long. Cricket was dying to explore it.
Some of her favorite images were photos and videos of lava erupting undersea and cooling instantly in the water, solidifying into billowy puffs. Cricket wanted to watch that in person. She wanted to swim alongside the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and see all the rare jellyfish and the sea worms that burrow in the rocks and the strange undiscovered glowing fish that light up in those dark depths. The government spends more money on space exploration than on deep-sea exploration, so not that many people have been down there to explore. There is one place on earth, however, where two huge plates are spreading above water. That place is Iceland, and that was what Cricket had written her paper about.
“Did you go to Iceland?” Richard Cohen asked for the second time.
“What?” Cricket asked. Her father knew perfectly well she had never been to Iceland. He also knew she would give anything to go to Iceland. If she were capable of going anywhere by herself to pursue the things that interested her, she would. But she was a kid, and kids weren’t allowed to do anything. She’d already been on all the geological walks through Central Park that the Museum of Natural History had to offer.
So, like the posters in the library had been advising her to do since kindergarten, Cricket had boarded a hot-air balloon in her mind and traveled to Iceland. She’d written the adventure she wanted to have. It didn’t hurt anyone and she was sure her memoir was more interesting than anyone else’s, too.
“Oh, Cricket. Why must you make everything so complicated?” Bunny said. “Either you went to Iceland or you didn’t. Things are or they aren’t.”
Bunny liked order and structure and dependability. Cricket liked creativity. Maybe she’d been adopted. Or switched at birth. Except she was a lot like Dodo and Dodo was Bunny’s mother, so probably not.
This meeting was like a trial. Cricket was being treated like a criminal. Her parents and her teacher were the prosecuting attorneys. What a story. And the cameras, so many cameras! Everyone from the press was taking her picture over and over. Click, click, flash, flash. It was blinding. She needed sunglasses, something to shield her eyes.
The Half-True Lies of Cricket Cohen Page 2