The Sound of Your Voice, Only Really Far Away

by Frances O'Roark Dowell

Kate nodded and followed her friend across the cafeteria, to where her other friend was sitting. Outside the cafeteria window, she could see the student commons, where the leaves of a lone dogwood tree fluttered in the breeze. It would have been nice to have a garden out there, she thought. And then she thought that you didn’t really need a lot of money to start a garden. Mostly you needed shovels and people to dig.

  “How do you feel about lettuce?” she asked Marylin, who looked at her like she thought Kate was crazy.

  “I like it, I guess. I mean, who doesn’t like lettuce?”

  “Everybody likes lettuce,” Kate agreed, and she wished like anything she had a writing pad and her Pilot Precise V5 pen. She wished she had a packet of seeds and a watering can. “You want to hear my big idea?”

  Marylin rolled her eyes. “Can I have some pie first?”

  Kate nodded. Pie was good. Eating pie with your friends while you planned a revolution?

  Even better.

  the crying game

  Marylin thought maybe she should keep a list of all her stupid mistakes on her wall, just so she could keep track of them. The only problem with this idea was that you couldn’t always tell what was a mistake and what wasn’t. For instance, not going to the mall that night with Mazie—had that been a mistake or a step in the right direction? Well, she hadn’t had much of a choice, had she? She couldn’t exactly have left Kate alone at her house while she ran off to get a mani-pedi. So not going wasn’t a mistake, but not having a good excuse? Big mistake.

  If Marylin was going to be honest with herself, her real mistake had been inviting Kate over in the first place. She hated to admit that, but it was true. She should have kept her friendship with Kate strictly a bus friendship. No sleepovers, no hanging out on the weekends, just sitting together on the bus if that happened to be convenient.

  Hurting Kate’s feelings by telling Mazie the only reason Kate was at her house was to drop some stuff off? Superbig mistake, but Marylin didn’t want to think about it, because when she did, she felt like a totally horrible person. And she really wasn’t horrible—she just kept doing the wrong things over and over.

  Marylin had been sprawled on her bedroom floor, drawing flowers on a school spirit poster, but now she sat up and leaned back against her bed. Okay, the number one biggest mistake she’d made lately? Trying to force Benjamin to get new cheerleading uniforms, even after her proposal lost. Which she knew was going to happen, she guessed, but she’d still been hopeful when Benjamin had read out the results of the What’s Your Big Idea contest over the loudspeaker.

  “And the third-place winner is . . . a new computer for the library!” Benjamin’s voice had echoed through the hallway. Marylin was standing on the outskirts of the ring of cheerleaders by Ruby Santiago’s locker, all of whom were rolling their eyes. Nobody believed the cheerleading uniform proposal was going to win, no matter how many times Marylin insisted it had a really good chance.

  “In second place, a school garden!”

  Marylin felt proud of Kate, though she felt a little annoyed, too, since she knew Kate and Lorna were going to go ahead with their garden plans even if the garden didn’t win. They should have pulled out of the competition and let some of the other ideas—new cheerleading uniform ideas, for instance—get some of their votes.

  “And the winner is . . .”

  Marylin had crossed her fingers and her toes. Please, please, please, she’d thought. Let me have this one thing.

  “. . . a school-wide pizza party!”

  Cheers had filled the air, along with shouts of “Yes!” and “Awesome!” Ruby had glanced coolly at Marylin and shrugged. “Maybe you could still get us some new uniforms,” she had said. “You’ve got Benjamin Huddle in the palm of your hand, right?”

  “Sure,” Marylin had told her. “No problem.”

  It turned out that only fourteen people had voted for new uniforms, which made it one of the least popular proposals; even the proposal for new audio-lab equipment had gotten more votes. But there was still going to be money left in the budget after the end-of-the-year pizza party. So why not uniforms?

  “Because the money could be used for better things,” Benjamin had insisted after Monday’s Student Government meeting, when they were standing in front of the school, waiting to be picked up. “A lot of kids voted for a school garden, and there’s enough money after the pizza party to at least get started on a garden. Mrs. Calhoun thinks it’s a great idea.”

  “But it’s not her decision,” Marylin had pointed out. “It’s kind of your decision, right? And it would mean a lot to me.”

  Benjamin looked uncomfortable. “Yeah, well . . .”

  “Please?” Marylin said, trying to sound sweet, like a little kid asking for candy. Except it came out more like a desperate person who was pretty sure her whole world was going to collapse if she didn’t get new uniforms for the cheerleaders.

  Just then Benjamin’s mom pulled up. “I’ve got to go,” he said. “I’ll see you—uh—I’ll see you around, okay?”

  That was Monday night. Now here it was Wednesday, and he hadn’t called or replied to any of her texts or shown up one time at her locker.

  “I guess that’s that,” Marylin said out loud, and started to cry. Again. For the ten thousandth time that week. Sometimes when she started crying, it was because of Benjamin, but after a few minutes she would start thinking about cheerleading, and then she was crying cheerleading tears.

  Really, if she was going to be honest about it, the biggest, biggest mistake she’d made that week? Opening the e-mail with the subject header 50 Things We Hate About Marylin. Sent from Mazie’s phone, of course. There had actually been only seventeen things on the list, with number seventeen being “To be continued.” Some of the things her fellow cheerleaders hated about Marylin included her hair (“dry and stringy”), her nails (“Ever heard of a pedicure?”), her breath (“Try brushing your teeth every once in a while!”), and her personality (“What a fake! Acts all nicey-nice, but is really super stuck-up”).

  Every item on the list felt like a little knife going into Marylin’s heart. Why did they hate her so much? She was the nicest cheerleader in the whole group! She hardly ever talked behind anyone’s back, and she was the only one who could do a double back walkover. Was that it? Did they hate her because she was flexible?

  She’d told Kate about the e-mail the next day on the bus—another mistake, but in a week of big mistakes, a pretty tiny one—and to nobody’s surprise whatsoever, Kate’s advice was to quit immediately. “If you quit cheerleading, you could dedicate your life to Student Government and not have to spend your time with all those horrible people.”

  “But then I’d be a quitter,” Marylin had pointed out. She didn’t like quitters the same way she didn’t like underachievers or people with bad attitudes. If you let go for just one minute, let yourself give up, who knew what would happen to you? You’d probably turn into somebody who wore her hair in a ponytail every day because—meh, why bother?

  “But sometimes it’s a good thing to be a quitter,” Kate had argued. “It’s good to quit smoking, right? Because smoking is harmful to your health. Well, I think cheerleading is harmful to your mental health. Just think about how you’re being treated. It’s not just e-mails. They’re saying some really mean things about you at school. Lorna has PE with Mazie, and she’s heard a lot of stuff.”

  Marylin had winced. “Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”

  “Okay, but it’s not good. I mean, Mazie’s telling everyone that you think you’re better than everybody else in the school. That you’re a total snob. Lorna stuck up for you, though. She said if you were such a snob, then why were you eating lunch with her?”

  Marylin had closed her eyes and leaned her head against the window. Great. Not only did the cheerleaders hate her, they were making sure everyone else hated her too. She had to admit it: Mazie was a genius. She could just imagine the circle of girls leaning in toward Mazie as she told t
hem how stuck up Marylin was. Mazie hardly ever talked to non-cheerleaders, so when she did, it was a big deal. Everybody listened. Everybody hoped that Mazie might swoop down and pick them for her friend, in spite of the million-to-none odds against that ever happening.

  Now Marylin picked up a purple Magic Marker and leaned over the spirit poster again. She read what she’d written, blinked a couple of times, and read it again. Had she really written, Go Maveriks! instead of Go Mavericks? Really? Marylin lowered her head until the top of it was resting on the poster. Why was she so stupid?

  I should just quit, she told herself, but she knew she wouldn’t. Or couldn’t. It wasn’t about being a quitter or even about being popular. Okay, maybe it was a little bit about being popular. A lot about being popular. But there was something else, too—her parents sitting two rows behind the home team bench. It was like they were Marylin’s cheerleaders, and when Petey came too, well, it was like they were a family again.

  So Marylin couldn’t quit. If she quit, when would her family ever get together? The five minutes at the door when her mom dropped her off at her dad’s or her dad dropped her off at her mom’s didn’t count. Everyone being together in the gym, stomping their feet and yelling, eating hot dogs, making jokes?

  That counted. And Marylin didn’t want to ruin it.

  “You know what you need?” Rhetta asked her on Thursday, when they were hanging out in Marylin’s room doing their nails. Rhetta was finally off restriction, and she was taking advantage of it by spending every waking minute she could outside of her house. “You need more friends. Right now it’s like you have your so-called cheerleader friends, and then you have your friends like me and Kate. Your weird friends. Not that Kate’s actually all that weird, but you get my point.”

  “You’re not weird either!” Marylin exclaimed. “I can’t believe you’d even say that.”

  Rhetta looked up from where she was sitting, her back against Marylin’s closet, a bottle of black nail polish in her hand. “I’m a preacher’s kid, I dress all in black, and I’m in a bowling league. If that doesn’t say ‘weird,’ I don’t know what does. It’s not a big deal. I like being weird.”

  “Well, anyway,” Marylin said, deciding to ignore Rhetta’s weirdo claims for the time being, “I have plenty of friends.” She sat down on her bed and opened a bottle of pink polish. Sometimes she wondered what it would be like to paint her nails black, not that her mom would ever let her. Only she didn’t really think she was a black-nail-polish girl at heart. In general, Marylin preferred the happy colors—pink, yellow, baby blue, spring green. Life was depressing enough without having depressing nails.

  “Uh, no, you don’t,” Rhetta said. “You’re known by a lot of people. In fact, I’d say almost every kid at school knows who you are. But just because they know you doesn’t mean they’re your friends. Really, what you need to do is dump the cheerleaders, make up with Benjamin, hang out with Kate and me, and then join a group. Like the Girl Scouts, maybe. Are we too old to be Girl Scouts?”

  Marylin leaned back against her pillow, her knees pulled toward her chest, and began painting the nails of her right hand, which she was sort of terrible at, since she was right-handed. “I wanted to be a Brownie, but my mom had this rotten Brownie experience when she was a kid. Her troop leader made them do chores, like at her house. So she sort of discouraged me from signing up.”

  “Why don’t you come to youth group with me?” Rhetta asked, blowing on the freshly blackened nails of her left hand. “It’s not churchy at all, and everyone’s nice. And the best thing? Only a couple of the kids go to our school, and they hardly ever come, anyway. So it would be like this fresh start for you. We wouldn’t tell anyone you were a cheerleader or on Student Government. They’d get to know you just for who you are.”

  “But what if who I am is a cheerleader?”

  Rhetta looked at Marylin for several long moments before speaking. “Marylin? In all honesty? You’re not a cheerleader anymore. I think they’re making that pretty clear.”

  Marylin took in a deep breath through her nose and slowly let it out. She stared at her toes, which she’d always thought were strange-looking. She kept hoping that one morning she’d wake up and they would be totally different, the big toe the biggest, the little toe like a nice, plump peanut. But every morning they were exactly the same, crooked and uneven. Just like her life.

  I’m not going to cry, she told herself. I’m totally, completely not going to cry.

  But she cried anyway.

  Friday morning on the bus, Kate sitting beside her, Marylin thought about what Rhetta had said. Marylin was popular, but she didn’t have many friends, and look at who her real friends were! Kate and Rhetta were great, but they weren’t exactly normal. She guessed if she wanted to add another weird friend to the list, she could count Kate’s friend Lorna.

  Look at who your real friends are. Had Marylin really ever done that before? She went over the list carefully. Rhetta. Kate. Benjamin, maybe. Okay, and Lorna. That was it. How could that be? She was popular! She was pretty! How could she have only four real friends, and three of them weren’t even normal people?

  The bus pulled into the Brenner P. Dunn Middle School driveway. Marylin looked out the window at all the kids streaming through the open front doors. Really? Not one of them was her friend?

  She turned to Kate. “I think I need to join a club. Maybe meet some new people.”

  “And quit cheerleading,” Kate added. “Put that on your to-do list too.”

  “Could we focus here?” Marylin asked. “First, I think I’ll sign up for something. And maybe I’ll get to know some kids on Student Government a little better. There’s just never time during the meetings to talk.”

  “How about Marguerite Holmes?” Kate asked. “She seems nice.”

  “That’s not a bad idea,” Marylin said, looking at Kate. “I’m surprised you even know who she is, though. I mean, she’s pretty, well, mainstream.”

  “I am an observant human being,” Kate said, sounding the tiniest bit offended. “I know who people are, even the so-called mainstream ones.”

  As it just so happened, Marguerite Holmes’s locker was almost directly across from Marylin’s, and Marguerite was there, pulling out books, when Marylin came down the hall.

  “Hey, Marguerite! Are you ready for Student Government on Monday?” Marylin called in her best friendly, middle-school-cheerleader/Student-Government-rep voice. “I think we’re finally going to vote on the spring dance decorations!”

  When Marguerite looked up and saw that it was Marylin talking to her, she didn’t exactly look happy. She looked a little irritated, to be honest, like she didn’t have time to deal with people like Marylin. Had Mazie gotten to her, too? Or was Marguerite the type of person who just naturally looked down on cheerleaders, even cheerleaders who were also Student Government representatives?

  “It’ll probably be the same thing as always—streamers and balloons,” Marguerite said, turning back to her locker. “It would be great if we could do something different for a change.”

  “I totally agree,” Marylin said. “It would be good if we had a more specific theme, not just ‘spring dance.’ I’m not saying this is a great idea, but we could do something like Alice in Wonderland. Or is that dumb?”

  Marguerite shrugged. “It’s not that dumb. I don’t know if it’s exactly right, but I get where you’re going.”

  “Maybe we could eat lunch together today,” Marylin suggested, smiling her best middle-school-cheerleader/Student-Government-rep smile. “Brainstorm a few ideas?”

  “Sure, why not?” Marguerite said with a nod. “It would be good to go into Monday’s meeting prepared.”

  Easy-peasy, Marylin thought as she crossed the hall to her locker. This making normal friends was a piece of cake. And when she opened her locker door to see that someone had dumped french fries and the remains of several cheeseburgers on top of her stuff, well, she was in such a good mood that she only c
ried a little bit. Just a few sniffs and a swipe of her eyes, and she was done.

  Hanging out with nice girls was interesting. Not that Kate and Rhetta weren’t nice. They were two of the nicest people Marylin knew, in their ways. Kate’s kind of nice was gruff and maybe a little too much on the honest side, but it was nice all the same. Rhetta’s niceness was true-blue nice that just happened to be buried under layers of black clothes.

  But Marguerite Holmes’s niceness was of the no-nonsense, straightforward variety.

  “I’m only allowed three activities at a time,” she told Marylin at lunch that day. “So right now I’m doing Student Government, horseback riding, and Service Club. I can’t believe I got voted Student Government secretary this year. That’s like a whole other activity, though I wouldn’t tell my parents that.”

  “You’re doing a great job,” Marylin told her sincerely. “Being secretary is a lot of work.”

  “It really is!” Marguerite said, suddenly sounding more enthusiastic. “But it’s surprisingly fun. It makes me feel like I’m really contributing to the school, you know?”

  Marylin nodded. She did know. She also knew that if Mazie were listening to this conversation, she’d be rolling her eyes like crazy. Mazie was not the least bit interested in contributing to the school. She was more interested in what the school could do for her.

  “Is this a private club?” Benjamin stood at the end of the table, holding a brown paper bag. “Or can anybody join?”

  “What are you doing here?” Marylin asked, trying to sound nonchalant about it. She couldn’t believe Benjamin was actually talking to her! “You don’t have B lunch.”

  “I missed A lunch because I was at the dentist,” Benjamin explained as he sat down next to Marguerite. “Mrs. Parker said I should just take B lunch, and she’d get me out of algebra.”

  Mrs. Parker was the school’s administrative assistant, and as far as Marylin could tell, the most powerful person in the building.