Sophie Gets Real

by Nancy N. Rue

  “Fiona is right, Mags,” Sophie said. “It’s not your fault. It’s mine for ever thinking of doing that stupid movie in the first place.”

  “No, it’s mine,” Fiona said. “I named it Project Brooke. That was so un-Corn Flake.”

  “It’s mine for even writing it down,” Maggie muttered.

  “Maybe you didn’t.” Kitty looked doubtfully at what used to be the Treasure Book. “’Course, there’s no way to tell now.”

  Fiona nodded. “I looked. When you push the strips together, you can see it: ‘Project Brooke.’ ”

  “I’d like to say something.” Darbie jammed her hair behind her ears. “It isn’t any of our faults that somebody got into our private property and cut it all in flitters.”

  “Somebody?” Willoughby said. “We know it was Brooke.”

  Fiona nodded. “We just don’t know how and when.”

  “But we know why.” Sophie’s voice squeaked like a clarinet some beginner student couldn’t play.

  “Who cares why?” Maggie said. “She broke a rule, and she has to take the consequences.”

  “That’s right.” Darbie looked right at Sophie. “I hope you don’t think we should let this go just because we feel bad that we hurt Brooke’s feelings.”

  Sophie looked miserably at the Treasure Book. Maggie was smoothing down its hopeless cover, as if she could make it whole again.

  “The Corn Pops told her a bunch of lies,” Sophie said. “And I bet when she saw this she just got mad like she does.” Sophie looked again at the book that had held so many of their dreams. “I want to try to help her one more time. Let’s just give it another day.”

  “Why?” Darbie said. “I’m about to eat the head off somebody, but you don’t see me looking for Brooke so I can reef her.”

  “You don’t have to,” Willoughby whispered. “’Cause here she comes.”

  Kitty whimpered and hid her face behind Maggie’s shoulder. Sophie slid the Treasure Book into her lap under the table, just as Brooke arrived.

  “Oh, my — what’s this show?” Darbie muttered.

  Brooke was still in Anne-Stuart’s purple track outfit, but she’d had some other changes made since Sophie last saw her.

  Her red hair was in a folded ponytail on top of her head, held in place by a blue-sequined scrunchie. Sophie was sure someone had applied makeup to her face with a spatula, especially the lipstick. There appeared to be an entire tube of Shimmering Cherry on her lips. The effect of clown-at-a-fashion-show was completed with the green feather boa Brooke had draped over her shoulders and wrapped around each arm like stripes on barber poles.

  “Hi, Brooke.” Willoughby wore her automatic cheerleader smile. “You look — ”

  “Interesting!” Sophie said. “Don’t you guys think she looks interesting?”

  “Fascinating,” Fiona said.

  Kitty pulled out the cereal box. “Want some Cheerios?”

  Brooke only looked over her shoulder. Then she straightened up and closed her eyes for a second, as if she were concentrating.

  “Are you okay?” Sophie said.

  Brooke slapped her hands together and threw her arms over her head, green feathers and all. She looked like a parrot trying out for cheerleading.

  “Ready?” she shouted. “Okay! Give me an F !”

  Nobody answered so she answered herself and went on with, “Give me an L!”

  “This is embarrassing,” Kitty whispered to Sophie.

  But Sophie said, “L.”

  Brooke flung her arms into a point over her head. “Now give me an A!”

  “Come on, you guys,” Sophie said through gritted teeth. “A!”

  The arms took a flying turn to the side. “Give me a K !”

  “K!” Sophie said. Kitty and Willoughby joined in feebly.

  Face now as red as Nathan’s had ever gotten, Brooke screamed, “Give me an — ” She paused, made-up brow furrowing like a wad of clay. “Oh — give me an E!”

  “E!” cried half the cafeteria.

  “Sophie, stop!” Fiona hissed at her. “Don’t you hear what she’s spelling?”

  “Give — me — an — S!”

  Sophie saw the word in her head, where she’d pictured it hundreds of special times. She went cold.

  “What do we have?” Brooke yelled.

  There was a slight pause.

  “What do we have?” Gill the Wheatie said at the other end of the table.

  “Flakes?” said Vincent across the aisle.

  Willoughby plastered her hands over her mouth. The other Corn Flakes looked too stunned to move.

  “Flakes!” Brooke swiveled her hips in a clumsy circle. “Coooorn Flakes! That’s what they call themselves!” Plunging toward the table end, she straightened her arms, grabbed on, and stuck out both legs to the sides.

  “Don’t, Brooke!” Willoughby cried. “You won’t make it!”

  Brooke didn’t. What looked like an attempt to land a pike on top of the table ended in Brooke halfway under the table on her hind end. But she wasn’t finished. She scrambled up, amid screaming middle-school laughter, and hoisted herself onto her knees on the table. With her hands cupped around her mouth, she shouted, “These are the Corn Flakes!”

  “The what?” somebody shouted back.

  The noise died down a level. Brooke pointed at Sophie’s head, and then Fiona’s. Sophie was sure she was going to throw up, right there. Beside her, Fiona was as stiff as a pole.

  “They call themselves the Corn Flakes,” Brooke cried. “That’s because they are flakes. A clique full of flakes. Don’t ever be their friend because you can’t trust them.”

  Gill and Harley both stood up, and some of the other Wheaties too. “That’s not true!” one of them said.

  “I trust them,” Jimmy said. Nathan nodded, face the color of a match head.

  Vincent got to his feet. “Where did you get this information? Sounds like you made it up to me.”

  “No.” Brooke pulled the back of her hand, still clad in green feathers, across her lips. Titters erupted from the crowd as she wiped lipstick from mouth to ear. “I’m not making it up. I got the 411 from my friends, who are not flakes, even though these flakes have wrecked everything for them.”

  She flung a hand toward Sophie’s Corn Flakes, whose faces were frozen into portraits of shock.

  “Name your source,” Vincent said to Brooke.

  “Huh?” Brooke said.

  “Who told you?”

  “They’re right over — ” Brooke jabbed a finger toward the Pops’ table. It was empty. Not even Tod and Colton were there. The feather boa slid off one arm. “They were over there,” Brooke said. “It’s Jul — ”

  “Brooke, get down,” Sophie said.

  As the cafeteria buzzed around them, Darbie thawed from her frozen state and grabbed one of Brooke’s arms. Fiona took the other. Brooke stared at them and then at herself, as if she’d just noticed she was on top of the table.

  Darbie and Fiona hauled her into a chair. With lipstick smeared across her face and sweat making streams through the makeup, Brooke looked like a little girl who’d just been caught in her mother’s cosmetics.

  She really is a little girl, Sophie thought. It took away some of her urge to stuff the feather boa down Brooke’s throat. While Darbie muttered and Fiona gritted her teeth and Kitty whined into Maggie’s unmoving shoulder, Sophie watched Brooke crane her neck toward the cafeteria door. She looked desperate, as if that same little girl had completely lost her mother.

  “Who are you looking for?” Sophie said.

  “My friends.”

  Darbie snorted. “You mean the friends that took off and left you making an eejit of yourself?”

  Brooke came halfway off the seat, but Sophie grabbed her arm.

  “Did your, um, friends tell you we called ourselves the Corn Flakes?” Sophie said.

  “No. I read it.” Brooke looked as if she wanted to bite her tongue off when Maggie pulled the mangled Treasure Book fr
om Sophie’s lap and laid it on the table.

  “Did you read it in here?” Maggie said.

  Sophie could almost see the possible lies flipping through Brooke’s mind. Again she half rose from the seat and threw glances at every corner of the room.

  “Okay,” Fiona said, “let me just tell you what probably happened, and you can tell me if I’m right.”

  Darbie and Maggie wore matching scowls, but Sophie said, “Good idea.”

  Brooke lowered herself back into the seat and stared down at the Treasure Book.

  Fiona folded her hands on the table. “When we were making the movie, the Po — uh, Julia and your other friends asked you if you’d ever seen inside our book. You said no, and they said if you looked in it, you’d find out what we were really like.” Fiona brushed her hair aside. “How am I doing so far?”

  “That’s maybe what happened.” Brooke wrapped the end of the boa around her finger, so that it too was coated with lipstick.

  “So,” Fiona went on, “you got into Maggie’s backpack, sometime when she wasn’t looking, and you found the book. When you saw that we called the movie Project Brooke, you were incensed, and you stabbed it multiple times with — something.”

  “I didn’t use incense,” Brooke said.

  “No,” Sophie said. “She means you got mad.”

  “And then you went back and told your friends.” Fiona made quotation marks with her fingers. “And you also told them that the book said we were the Corn Flakes.”

  Willoughby’s curls bounced. “So they taught you a cheer about Corn Flakes. They dressed you up like Ronald McDonald and told you to do the cheer in front of everybody.”

  Brooke looked at Sophie. “You all make it sound like they were trying to make me look stupid.”

  “No,” Sophie said. “They were using you to make us look stupid.”

  “Because if they’d done it themselves,” Maggie said, “they’d get in trouble.”

  “But they’re nice! They let me wear their clothes — they wanted me on their team.”

  Fiona leaned toward her. “And where are they now?”

  “They’ll be back.”

  “No, they won’t.” Kitty looked at Brooke from over Maggie’s shoulder. “I used to be in their group, and all they did was use me too.”

  “Me, three,” Willoughby said.

  “Personally, I think they even use each other.” Fiona sat back, arms folded. “You can believe them if you want to, but it’s only going to get worse if you do.”

  “Don’t believe Julia and the rest of them, Brooke,” Sophie said. “I mean it. We were wrong before when we made you our project, but we honestly wanted to help you because — ”

  “Because I mess everything up.” Brooke wound the boa around her neck. “Everybody tells me that all the time.”

  “We were trying to help you not mess things up, only we did it the wrong way. We’re sorry.” Sophie glanced around the table at the friends who suddenly wouldn’t look at her. “Well, I’m sorry, anyway.”

  The rest of the Corn Flakes were quiet for the longest minute Sophie had ever lived. Questions in her own mind tortured her.

  What if nobody had learned anything? What if the Corn Flakes really were nothing but a clique? If they abandoned Brooke now, were they really any better than the Corn Pops?

  Sophie was so afraid of the answers, she almost ran from them, right out the door.

  Brooke pointed at the Treasure Book. “What about that?”

  “You mean, are we gonna turn you in?” Willoughby said.

  Maggie cradled the book in her hands. “You can’t just go around tearing people’s stuff up because you get your feelings hurt.”

  “I don’t know how come I did it.” Brooke tightened the boa. “I just do stuff, and I don’t even know why.”

  “That’s why we were trying to help you,” Sophie said. “And we — well, I — still will.”

  The Corn Flakes still wouldn’t look at Sophie, but Brooke did. For a second, she reminded Sophie of baby Hope turning her head toward a voice, like maybe — just maybe — she could trust it.

  So — is this the Jesus-way? Sophie wondered. It sure looked like it.

  But Brooke’s eyes sprang open as if some sudden thought terrified her.

  “You won’t help me!” Brooke cried. “You won’t help me when you find out!”

  She bolted from the seat, and feet pounded toward the door. The feather boa trailed behind her.

  Eleven

  The bell rang, and the cafeteria erupted in one big push toward the door. Sophie sank back into her chair.

  “What’s wrong, Corn Flake?” some kid said to her as he pointed to her still-wet hair. “Too soggy to move?”

  For a moment, Sophie had forgotten that Brooke had just told the middle-school world their secret name. She sagged — sogged — further into the seat.

  “Like he even knows what a Corn Flake really is,” Fiona said. She nudged Sophie to a standing position.

  “Do we?” Sophie said.

  “Do we what?”

  “Know what a Corn Flake is?”

  Willoughby looped her arm through Sophie’s on the other side and tugged her along behind the crowd going out the door.

  “We know what it isn’t,” Darbie said.

  Sophie knew she was talking about Brooke and the Pops, but she didn’t feel much different from any of them as she trudged toward Mr. Stires’ classroom. She tried to ignore the stares of people who stopped whispering as she, Fiona, and Darbie went by.

  Mr. Stires stopped them in the doorway. For a minute, Sophie thought he was going to confront her about the lizard brain in Julia’s hair. But his face was as cheerful as always.

  “How’s that film coming along?” he said.

  You mean that heinous piece of trash that ruined everything? Sophie wanted to say.

  “Uh, we still have a lot of editing to do,” Fiona said.

  Mr. Stires bobbed his head. “Why don’t I take a look at what you have while you’re in groups today?”

  Sophie felt numb as she nodded. “I’ll get it. It’s in my camera bag.”

  She didn’t even look at Julia and Anne-Stuart as she headed for the storage room, but she could feel their victory smiles. She was just too tired to care.

  The bag was on a shelf above its usual place, and Sophie had to stand on tiptoe to pull it down. Maybe they wouldn’t even do any more films, she thought as she grabbed the strap. Maybe everything was just going to be different from now on —

  Her thoughts tripped themselves to a stop as the bag fell into her hands. It rattled. It had never rattled before. It wasn’t supposed to rattle.

  The old fear fingers gripped Sophie’s heart as she set the bag on a low shelf and squatted to open it. Something was wrong. Way wrong.

  Hands sweaty, Sophie unzipped the cover and peered inside. All she saw were broken pieces of what used to be her video camera.

  “Hey, Soph,” Fiona said from the doorway. “What’s taking so long? Mr. Stires is putting us in groups.”

  “It’s ruined,” Sophie said. Her voice sounded as wooden as Maggie’s.

  “No, it’s not,” Fiona said. “He’ll probably put us in the same group.”

  Sophie didn’t answer. She just pointed into the bag as Fiona crossed the storage room. When she looked in, her magic-gray eyes went wide, as if she were staring into headlights.

  “It’s been pulverized,” she said.

  If that meant the keeper of their many dreams was now reduced to shards of glass and pieces of bashed-in metal, Fiona was right. Sophie was sure her heart had stopped beating.

  “Mr. Stires said to hurry up,” said another voice from the doorway. “Why are you foostering — ” Darbie took a sharp intake of breath. “What’s wrong?” She too gasped into the camera bag. Then she said, “Brooke again.”

  Sophie couldn’t argue with her. Who else was angry enough to smash up the thing that was most important to the girls who made her feel
like a project?

  Who else indeed? Because as Sophie gazed down into the bag in disbelief, she saw something shiny that wasn’t a hunk of camera lens. It looked like the sparkly head of a cat.

  “Julia’s nail file,” she said out loud.

  “Where?” Fiona said.

  “Right there.” Sophie pushed aside some of what was now junk with her finger. The cat on Julia’s fancy file seemed to give her an evil smile.

  “I don’t get it,” Fiona said.

  “Last call for groups,” Mr. Stires called from the classroom.

  Sophie slapped the top closed and zipped the zipper.

  “What are you doing, Sophie?” Darbie said. “We can’t let this go. We have to tell!”

  “No,” Sophie said. “Brooke has to tell. And first she has to tell me.”

  “What are you talking about?” Darbie said.

  Sophie pulled the memory stick out of the front pocket and slung the rattling camera bag over her shoulder by the strap. “I don’t care if everybody thinks the Corn Flakes are a stupid clique. I’m still going to be one, even if I have to do it by myself.”

  “Who said anything about us not being Corn Flakes anymore?” Fiona’s face was the color of Cream of Wheat.

  “Nobody said anything,” Sophie said. “That’s just it. At lunch just now, nobody said a word about helping her take back her power from the Corn Pops. Everybody just stood there until she ran off.”

  “All right, ladies,” Mr. Stires said from the doorway. “Darbie, you and Fiona are a group. Sophie, I put you with Jimmy. You have the memory stick so I can look at your film?”

  Sophie handed it to him and brushed past Darbie and Fiona to a seat next to Jimmy.

  “You okay?” Jimmy’s blue eyes were so kind Sophie almost cried — except there was no time for tears.

  “No,” Sophie said.

  “I’m sorry about what Brooke did. I think Corn Flakes is a cool name.”

  Sophie winced.

  “I get it if you don’t feel like working right now,” Jimmy said. “I’ll just do part of the assignment, and you can do the rest for homework.”

  She nodded. She even wanted to tell him about the camera and ask him to help her make some kind of plan for Brooke.

  But she just couldn’t. This was a Corn Flake problem. Even if she was the only Flake who knew it.