Before Mint arrived, my life had far fewer questions.
“It makes me sick to watch this,” Ava said. “I mean, these people are totally breaking the law and should get arrested.”
“I don’t think anyone’s getting arrested,” Lucia said. “It looks like mall security is keeping the skating zone clear.”
And they were.
“I think this is a PR move,” a man behind us said. “The mall has gotten so much bad press about reducing mall goers’ personal freedoms that they wanted to stage an event where people could express themselves.”
“Really?” Ava asked. “Where did you hear that?”
“My son is one of the skaters,” the man said. “He told me about it.”
“Who’s your son?” Lucia asked.
“Jagger Evenson,” the man said.
Ava’s mouth dropped open and she just stood there.
“He’s been practicing with his friend from Alaska,” he offered.
I thought it was pretty good that Mr. Evenson had referred to Mint as Jagger’s friend and not girlfriend. Lucia put her arm around Ava and gently redirected her stare to the skaters.
“We don’t have to watch the whole thing,” I said. It seemed wise to declare our spy operation over and just try to shop.
“She is so slick,” Ava said as Mint switched direction in unison with Jagger and they both began skating backward.
“Does Diego roller-skate?” Rachel asked me.
“Probably,” I said.
“Look! A news camera,” Lucia said, pointing to a local camera crew set up on the other side of the mall. What a terrible thing to see. Three weeks in Santa Fe and my weird cousin had managed to make it on television. Maybe this had been her intent the whole time. Show up to my ordinary town acting like a super nerd by braiding a belt to her head and knowing five million things about Alaska. And then find a way to get on the local news with my best friend’s crush. Maybe Mint was way more calculating than I realized. She certainly was a far better skater than I’d realized.
The flash-mob routine ended in a burst of energetic circle skating. All the mob people zoomed in a curve in front of me so fast that their mismatched outfits began to blur.
“We don’t have to watch the whole thing,” I repeated.
“Is that your mom?” Lucia asked me, pointing across the mall to a person near the camera crew.
It was!
She held her phone up and snapped several pictures. I couldn’t believe my mom had known that Mint was going to be in a flash mob at the mall and hadn’t told me. I couldn’t even trust her anymore.
Ava turned around and looked me right in the eye.
“You should feel so betrayed,” she said.
And she was right.
“Woot! Woot!” Mr. Evenson cheered as all the skaters came to a dramatic stop by lowering themselves to the mall’s floor.
As people began to disperse, I tried to keep my vision on Mint. She looked so thrilled. So free.
“Is she holding Jagger’s hand?” Ava asked, placing a hand over her mouth.
“Maybe they’re just helping each other up,” I said.
But they continued to keep their hands linked as they skated to a bench off to the side so they could change out of their skates.
“It totally looks like they’re going out,” Lucia said.
“Poor Diego,” Rachel said in a sad voice.
“Poor Diego?” Ava said, her voice tense with pain. “Poor me!”
21
Is it possible to live with somebody you no longer trust or like? Even for five days? I didn’t think so. After the flash-mob incident, I avoided Mint as if she was made of poison. During the hours that followed the catastrophe at the mall, where Mint wrecked Ava’s heart, every time my cousin entered a room, I left it. And at dinner that night, I ignored everything she said. And when I settled into bed that night, I scooted so far to the edge of the mattress that right before dawn, I fell right off my side of the bed and onto the floor.
“Are you okay?” Mint asked in a groggy and concerned voice.
Okay? OKAY? How could she not see that I basically hated her? In less than a month, she’d trashed my life. How could she be so selfish?
“Are you on the floor?” Mint asked.
Why couldn’t Mint give me back my life and just shut up?
“Are you mad at me?” Mint asked as I slowly crawled back into bed.
I didn’t say anything at first. I just slid between my sheets and listened to the silence.
“Lane?” Mint asked. “Are you hurt?”
I couldn’t believe she kept talking to me. Wasn’t it clear that I didn’t want to have a conversation? Mint was so clueless!
“Can’t you just shut up?” I asked, yawning.
And we didn’t say anything else the rest of the night.
Avoiding Angelina Mint Taravel became my only goal. I arose before dawn and collected my things and got ready in the living room. While my mom and dad gushed at breakfast about Mint’s roller-skating performance, I requested to eat my toast and eggs in the living room, underneath the light of our most powerful lamp, so I could finish my homework. On the bus, I read through my vocabulary list. Adapt. Allegiance. Anguish. Awe. Once we got to school, I ditched Mint and just sort of drifted all by myself.
Drift. Drift. Drift. Except, when I got to my locker, something happened that made it impossible for me to drift anymore. Mint. Mint. Mint. Everyone was talking about her. And Jagger too. Not only were they the topic of every conversation, images of them kept popping up on everybody’s cell phones. I guess the footage had been featured on the nightly news. And circulated. And posted on the Internet. As the youngest skaters in the flash mob, she and Jagger were now basically celebrities. They’d gone viral!
“Have you seen this?” Lucia asked me, holding up her cell phone, showing me a website featuring the flash-mob footage.
“I’m sort of over it,” I said.
“One hundred thousand people have looked at it on this site alone,” Lucia said. “It’s nuts.”
I glanced at the picture of Mint zooming backward and then gracefully turning back around.
“And have you read the comments?” Rachel asked.
This made me jump a little, because I didn’t even know that Rachel was there.
“So many people think Jagger and Mint make the cutest couple,” Rachel said.
I glanced around to see if Ava was nearby. Luckily, she wasn’t. Because she should not hear terrible things like that. It would only wreck her more.
Rachel dragged her thumb across Lucia’s screen, scrolling through the comments. “They use a bunch of weird skater lingo.”
I peered over her shoulder and read a few of them about Jagger and Mint.
The rexing couple is my favorite.
Those two out-scissor everybody.
They are both great at trucking!
Love it when they shoot the duck.
Too cool!!!!!!
The hardest thing about skating is the floor.
“Five more days and I am done with her,” I said. “I don’t care if she’s great at rexing or not.”
I wasn’t sure I could make it through five more days.
“You can make it,” Lucia said.
She was right. My mind turned that idea over again and again. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. I’d lived through five days before. A lot. Plus, I’d survived chicken pox. Stomach flu. Poison oak. Severe sunburn. I could survive Mint. I just needed to handle the rest of her stay the same way I handled all those terrible illnesses: one terrible day at a time.
Lucia and Rachel could tell how stressed out I was. So they each gave me a hug. I took a deep breath.
“Let’s go in there and get this over with,” I said, pointing to our classroom.
“It’s probably going to be way better than you think it will be. Mint isn’t evil. She’s just really different,” Rachel said.
That did not make me feel better. When was Rac
hel going to see how terrible my cousin really was?
When we entered the classroom, the first thing I noticed was how clueless Jagger seemed to be about all the drama unfolding around him. What was wrong with him? Couldn’t he recognize drama? He sat at his desk reading a comic book, as if nothing had changed. Everything had changed. Not only did the whole world know he could roller-skate, but everybody at our school now thought he was going out with Mint. Was he? Shouldn’t he clear this up? For Ava? For me? For Mint? For himself? For everyone? Was he just going to walk around all day and pretend he didn’t have to address this issue? What a terrible thing to put Ava through.
And where was Ava? Lucia walked me to my seat and kept looking around. After I glanced at Ava’s empty chair ten times, I saw Todd walk up to Mint.
“Pretty awesome trucking,” Todd said. “And I love your orange wheels.”
He loves her orange wheels. That seemed like a pretty disloyal thing for Todd to say to a person I pretty much hated and considered a traitor.
As my classmates settled into their seats, Mr. Guzman didn’t waste a second of pre-class time. He hustled right up to Mint’s desk.
“Wonderful skating,” he said. “I’m incredibly impressed. I’m hoping you might talk a little bit about your experience after our quiz. Let’s hope our link works.”
“Sure,” Mint said.
Gag. A link? Was he going to make us watch it?
Then he handed out a list of definitions, and we had to come up with the words and spell them correctly. But it was hard to focus, because while we worked on the assignment, Mr. Guzman lowered the projection screen, then brought a snarl of cords into our classroom and began untangling it.
I stared at my quiz. I stared at the cords. Quiz. Cords. Cords. Quiz. Each definition seemed to get harder and harder.
3. devotion or loyalty to a person, group, or cause: allegiance
4. an emotion variously combining dread, veneration, and wonder that is inspired by authority, or by the sacred, or sublime: awe
Focus. Focus. Focus. Why couldn’t Mr. Guzman stop fooling around with that cord? Why didn’t he tell us exactly what we were going to watch? Usually he told us. My mind would not sit still. Quiz. Cords. And where was Ava? I looked back at her empty desk.
“Two more minutes,” Mr. Guzman said. “And then we get to watch two of our class members demonstrating a very unique talent.”
I shot a glance at Jagger. No way. You show up to one stinking flash mob at the mall and suddenly you’re the coolest person to ever exist at Rio Chama Middle School. This had gotten out of control.
“One more minute,” Mr. Guzman said.
I rushed to scribble the last of my answers. Anxious. Arid. Agony. Before I knew it, Mr. Guzman was standing alongside my desk, collecting my quiz. Luckily, I had finished. Luckily, I’d stared so hard at all the words on the bus that I thought I’d gotten a perfect score. And then, even though I had no desire to watch it, Mr. Guzman played us the footage of the roller skaters at the mall.
“I haven’t seen rexing this impressive since I lived in Los Angeles,” Mr. Guzman said, giving Jagger a thumbs-up sign as he moved to the back of the class to turn off the lights.
I closed my eyes so I didn’t have to witness it again. Hearing the music was bad enough. But then I heard something way worse than the music.
“Isn’t that Lane and Rachel?” Kimmie asked.
“Isn’t that Lucia and Ava?” Paulette added.
I opened my eyes. Oh no! If you looked across the mall, on the other side of the skaters, outside Bra Universe, you could clearly see all four of us: me, Ava, Rachel, and Lucia. And if people were watching closely they could have spotted us actually inside the store. I couldn’t decide whether we looked like bra shoppers or total stalkers. Or maybe we looked like bra stalkers! Any one of them was terrible. We were totally recognizable, standing in the store’s front window, pointing and gawking at the flash mob, surrounded by a sea of bras. I wanted to die.
“What were you doing at Bra Universe?” Tommy asked.
Laughter rippled through the class.
“Let’s watch your talented peers,” Mr. Guzman said. “It’s a rare moment, usually only glimpsed during ballets and rhythmic gymnastics performances, when this much coordination and dedication meet in one place.”
“It is pretty amazing,” Rachel said.
I shot a look at her. What was she doing? I shook my head. Things were beyond being out of control. I needed to do something. So I got out two pieces of paper. Because I needed to write two notes immediately: one to Lucia and one to Todd.
Do you know where Ava is?
And even though I could get in trouble for sending it, I wrote Lucia’s name on it and handed it to Wyatt. Hoping he’d pass it to Lucia. Then I wrote a note to Todd.
I need to talk to you. Alone.
I tossed the note onto his desk, but it bounced onto his shoe. Luckily, he picked it right up and unfolded it. But then I turned around. Because I didn’t want him to see me watching him read the note.
A piece of paper landed next to my arm. It was Todd’s note.
Cool. Lunch?
I smiled. Todd wanted to spend lunch with me. Just the two of us. Then Lucia’s note landed next to me.
She puked four times yesterday.
She puked? Four times? After the mall? I flipped around and glared at Mint. This was the last straw. I could no longer publicly support her even if she was my own flesh and blood. Stealing my real friends’ crushes was bad enough, but now she was actually making my real friends ill. This could not continue. I had to stop her. And that meant talking to Todd. Because there was no way I could allow them to remain friends. It had to end. Today. At lunch. And I was prepared to say whatever was necessary to make that happen.
22
As Todd and I filed out the door for lunch, he ended up walking next to Kimmie and Jagger and sort of Mint.
“So the premise for the new game is that a zombie virus has struck both the iron and steel dwarf populations,” Mint said. “And so the iron and steel dwarves have to unite to fight the new zombie dwarves and prevent dwarf extinction.”
“That sounds intense,” Todd said.
“How do you kill a zombie dwarf?” Jagger asked.
“Only one way,” Mint said. “You’ve got to sever its head with a magic axe.” She drew her finger across her neck and stuck out her tongue.
“Awesome,” Jagger said.
What was wrong with these people? Severing heads with a magic axe was not awesome. As I examined their group dynamic, it became obvious what I needed to do: I couldn’t waste any more time. Instead of talking to Todd at lunch, I needed to talk to him right now.
So I reached out and touched him. And when I did this, an electric zap of static traveled through me and onto him. We both got shocked. Hard. Just like at his house.
“Ouch,” he said as he kept walking down the hall.
I decided to just ignore that fact that I’d zapped him a second time. “Can we talk before lunch?”
I thought back to the two times we’d touched hands. Had he reached out to me? Or had I reached out to him? The more I thought it over, it seemed like we’d both reached out at the same time. So I kept swinging my hand a little bit closer to his. But he never reached his back out. What did it mean? I wasn’t totally sure.
“Okay,” Todd said. “See ya in the lunch line.”
I shook my head. That wouldn’t work. I needed to tell him personal things.
“Todd,” Kimmie said, interrupting us. “Have you seen Mint’s new diagrams that depict the advancing glacier?”
I was so sick of Kimmie. And I didn’t remember an advancing glacier in that stupid wolf book. It was like their group was putting anything they wanted into their play as long as it had something to do with a snowy climate. It was pretty lame.
“Yeah, they’re great,” Todd said.
“The assignment is only worth a hundred points,” I reminded her. “I mean, I
really think you’re going overboard.”
Kimmie’s eyes looked big and round and so astonished. “When you’re given a resource like Mint, I think it makes sense to go a little overboard.”
And then Todd laughed at this. Laughed. What was so funny? I honestly didn’t see what was funny. I suspected that Todd could tell I was upset. And so he blinked at me in a concerned way with his soft brown eyes. “Let’s just talk here. At our lockers.”
I nodded. Once everybody left, we’d be alone and I could tell him how I really felt.
“What’s up?” Todd asked me, looking around like he was already ready to leave.
But when he asked me those words, I didn’t know quite where to start. I didn’t want him to think I was just complaining about Mint because she’d become extremely popular and I was jealous. That wasn’t really why I hated her. It was much deeper than that. It was hard to find the right place to begin, so I just said the first thing to come to my mind.
“You look really nice today.” He stared at me. “Thanks.”
But then I didn’t say anything else. Todd blinked again and waited like he expected me to ask my question. “So what do you want to talk about?”
Wow. Todd was so direct.
“Mint,” I said.
“Oh,” Todd said. “I think I know what this is about.”
“Really?” I asked. I loved the idea that Todd somehow knew what was on my mind before I told him what it was.
“Jagger told me that things didn’t exactly work out for her to move here, so she’s going back to Alaska in five days,” Todd said.
“That’s true,” I said, because things here had not worked out well for her at all.
“You want to throw Mint a surprise going-away party,” Todd said. “Don’t you?” Then he reached out and lightly punched my arm. “You love surprises more than anybody I know.”
I felt myself shake my head at this. Throwing Mint a party was the last thing I wanted to do.
“Jagger will want to help,” Todd went on. “For sure.”
“Right,” I said slowly.
“I bet it’s going to be huge,” Todd said. “I mean, we need to invite the whole class. And maybe some of the seventh and eighth graders. Will you invite the other class captains?”
Too Cool for This School Page 16