Standing Up to Mr. O.

by Claudia Mills

  “I was right about Jake,” her mother said with grim satisfaction. “I don’t want you to see him anymore.”

  “I don’t want to see him, either,” Maggie whispered. And she didn’t. Had Jake ever cared about Froggles? Had he ever cared about her? Or had he seized upon the rescue as a way to vent his rage?

  They rode the rest of the way home in silence. Maggie could feel the tension between them easing. Maggie’s mother had stayed angry at Maggie’s father for more than eight long years, but she never stayed angry at Maggie. The love between them was a deep, wide sea which anger could barely ripple.

  “He gave me Froggles,” Maggie said as her mother parked the car in front of their house. She held out her palm, with Froggles perched on it, blinking in the glow of the streetlamp overhead.

  “The frog?” her mother said, as if to verify the implausible evidence of her senses.

  “Can I keep him? For a pet?”

  Maggie’s mother had never let her have a pet. She said it was hard enough being the single mother of one human child, let alone of various members of the animal kingdom. And she had every right to refuse to let Maggie keep Froggles as part of her punishment. But Maggie didn’t think her mother would grudge Froggles a home now that he was there, looking up at them so hopefully.

  “Companion animal,” her mother said.

  Maggie looked at her blankly.

  “You can’t say pet anymore. According to people at the university. The new, politically correct term is companion animal.”

  Maggie pressed her plea: “So can I keep him?”

  Her mother sighed. “All right. What do frogs eat? Are they allowed to eat real bugs, or do we have to find bugs made out of soybeans?”

  * * *

  The phone was ringing when Maggie and her mother walked in the door. Maggie didn’t want to pick it up, but she did.

  “Maggie.”

  It was Jake. Maggie had known it would be. “I can’t talk to you.” Whatever her relationship had been with Jake, it was over.

  “I don’t expect you to. I just wanted to say—Maggie, you have to know I didn’t mean for you to get into trouble. Did Mr. O. call your mom? What are they going to do to you?”

  “He called her. I think I’m going to be suspended.”

  “He called my mom, too. Like I care about getting suspended. But what kills me is that we have to pay for the microscope, and my mom and I are not really rolling in dough right now. And he said I have to go to counseling. The school has some kind of special program for juvenile delinquents.” Jake gave his familiar mirthless laugh.

  “Jake?”

  “What?”

  “I’m never going to forget you. Being with you. In the tree. Not ever.”

  That was all Maggie said. But she knew Jake knew it was goodbye.

  Her mother called to her from the kitchen, where she was fixing a temporary terrarium for Froggles. “Was that Mr. Tofu? He called before.”

  “Matt. No. What did he want?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  Maggie reached for the phone. She was going to call Matt. But there was someone else she had to call first.

  Alycia answered the phone on the second ring.

  “Alycia, it’s me, Maggie. I’m sorry. I’m really truly sorry. I shouldn’t have said those things. I mean, you’re you, and I’m me, and you don’t have to fight for the same things I fight for. And I hope you’ll be my friend again, though I’ll understand if you won’t. Especially now that I’m going to be suspended from school. But I hope you will.”

  There was a pause at the other end of the line. Maybe Alycia didn’t want to be friends anymore. Maggie really couldn’t blame her if she didn’t. But it was hard to imagine what life would be like without Alycia to bake with and knit with and share hot chocolate with as they sat side by side doing homework.

  “Suspended?” Alycia asked.

  Maggie told her the story.

  “I didn’t know you were that involved with Jake,” Alycia said slowly.

  “I felt funny telling people about him. I should have told you. But you never seemed to like him very much—though I guess you were right not to like him. But I just … did like him.”

  “Listen, who you like is up to you. You can like whoever you want to like,” Alycia said. “And, anyway, a lot of the things you said about me were true. I don’t have guts. Not like you. You stand up for what you believe in. I don’t.”

  “You could,” Maggie said. She didn’t say it to put pressure on Alycia. She was through with expecting people to be who she wanted them to be. But guts were something anybody could have, who chose to have them. In that way, guts were different from, say, fathers.

  “You mean, refuse to do the dissection tomorrow.”

  “I’m not saying you should. I’m saying you could.”

  There was another long pause. Then, “Maybe,” Alycia said. Maggie knew that maybe meant maybe not. But that was suddenly all right, too. Alycia might not have guts, but she was honest enough to admit that she didn’t—and forgiving enough to welcome back a friend who had said some cruel things to her in anger.

  Maggie felt shy as she picked up the phone to return Matt’s call. She had never called a boy before.

  When Matt answered, he, too, sounded uncharacteristically hesitant, not at all like the Matt who was so sure about everything and everybody. “I was wondering—well, I checked at the library, and they have videos of dissections. Of all the dissections we’re doing in class. I thought maybe if you watched them, you’d get the experience of looking inside an animal without having to kill it or anything. And I could kind of explain things to you as we watched. If you wanted to. Watch one of the videos. Sometime. With me.”

  Maggie almost laughed. Was Matt asking her for a date? To watch an animal dissection video? It was so sweet, as well as so ridiculous, that Maggie hardly knew what to say. But Alycia’s father had said that videos were a good alternative to live animal dissections. Maybe Mr. O. would count watching them as makeup credit in biology.

  Matt was opinionated, arrogant, intellectually bullying—but he had taken her side in the essay contest and had given up his own prize to protest an injustice that he felt strongly about. And he really wanted to find a way for her to share the excitement he felt about science.

  “Sure,” Maggie said, as brightly as she could manage. “I’d like that.”

  “Sometime this weekend? I could bring one over to your house. Like tomorrow night? At seven o’clock?”

  “Which one?”

  “I thought we could start with the worm.”

  Maggie envisioned a series of Friday night dates: worm, fish, frog. She’d put Froggles’s terrarium in another room during the frog video. And she could make some microwave popcorn to munch as they watched.

  Maggie sat smiling to herself as she hung up the phone. For everything you lost in life, there was something you gained. Maggie had lost Jake and Mr. O. She had gained Matt and Froggles. She had lost Alycia, and she had gained her back again. She knew the friendship would be different, but she hoped it could be deeper and truer than before.

  And her father? Maggie still didn’t know why he had left her and her mother. No explanation could justify what he had done. But it had to have taken courage for him to send the card. He had to be waiting to see if she would write back. Maggie didn’t want to be like Jake, consumed with hatred and rage. In a way, Maggie had been given a choice whether or not to have a father. She wanted to choose to have one.

  Maggie found her mother in her bedroom, lying on the bed that she hadn’t shared with anybody for the last eight years.

  “Mom?”

  “Maggles?”

  “Would you mind if I wrote to him?” Maggie wasn’t going to write to her father if it hurt her mother, she knew that much. “On the card, he said I should write to him and let him know how I’m doing.”

  There was a long silence. Maggie could see the anger rising in her mother’s face.

 
; “You want to write to him? You think he deserves to know how you’re doing?”

  “No. But sort of. I mean, I sort of do want to write to him. I don’t think he deserves anything. But it’s like, he is my father. You guys must have loved each other once, at least a little bit, even if you hate each other now. So—would you mind if I wrote to him? I’m not going to do it if you don’t want me to.”

  “Oh, Maggles.” Maggie’s mother tossed her a pillow. Maggie lay down on the bed, on her mother’s patch-work quilt, with her head at the bottom of the bed and her feet at the top, facing her mother. “If you want to write to him, write to him.”

  “You mean it?”

  “I mean it. I don’t know, maybe Mistake Number Three is to hold on to bitterness. That’s what I’ve been doing, for lo these many years.” Her mother spoke so softly that Maggie had to strain to hear her. “But he’s lost more than I have. I just lost him. But he lost you.”

  Maggie reached for her mother’s hand and gave it a tight squeeze. She loved her mother more than she could put into words. She wouldn’t trade her mother for all the pita-pocket sandwiches in the world.

  She slipped away to her own room and took out a piece of flower-edged stationery from her bottom desk drawer. Then she pulled out a whole stack of it.

  “Dear Dad,” she wrote, staring down at the unfamiliar words as they appeared on the page. “You said to write, so I’m writing. But you had better write back! A lot has happened in eight years. Maybe the first thing I should tell you is that I have a companion amphibian now. His name is Froggles.”

  Also by Claudia Mills

  Dinah Forever

  Losers, Inc.

  Copyright © 1998 by Claudia Mills

  All rights reserved

  First edition, 1998

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Mills, Claudia.

  Standing up to Mr. O. / Claudia Mills. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Twelve-year-old Maggie comes to dread biology class because her favorite teacher is insisting that she dissect a worm, an assignment that makes her feel very squeamish and awakens her to the question of animal rights.

  ISBN 0-374-34721-2

  [1. Teachers—Fiction. 2. Schools—Fiction. 3. Worms—Fiction. 4. Animals—Treatment—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.M63963St 1998

  [Fic]—dc21

  98-3843

  eISBN 9781466852877

  First eBook edition: August 2013