by Nancy Rue
But this wasn’t any other time.
All the way to the strip mall I sat in the back of Dad’s work van, where he’d installed a seat so I could be behind and between him and Jackson, and I thought about the e-mail. I’d only read it once, but it was burned into my brain. I was pretty sure it would totally combust if I didn’t tell somebody.
Twice I opened my mouth to do it. Both times something stopped me.
The first time it was Dad, telling Jackson he’d pay him to clean out the brush in the back of the yard that the landlord hadn’t taken care of. It was getting to be nicer weather, Dad said, and we needed to get a little grill and start barbecuing out there. Dad said that. Dad never planned anything for us past the next week. But Dad said that.
The second time it was Jackson. He opened the passenger side window and leaned his pointy elbow out and told Dad he was thinking about joining this club at school where everybody designed their own comic books. Jackson had spent most of his time in his room since he was ten years old, when it kind of hit him that Mom was never coming back. He wore all black and had more conversations with his video games than he did with Dad and me. Especially me. But here he was saying he wanted to join something.
I put my hand on my chin and pushed my mouth closed. If I told them about this—in fact, if they found out any way at all—they would both go back into those sad, dark places they stayed in all the time, and I would be alone again.
I pressed myself into the seat and squeezed my eyes shut. I was going to be alone anyway, because the only way to make sure they didn’t find out was not to be friends with . . .
I couldn’t even think it.
When we’d ordered our dogs and picked out our chips and got to our usual orange plastic booth, Dad said he had to go wash his hands, which left me with Jackson. I pulled a napkin out of the dispenser and started turning it into confetti.
“I thought Dad was gonna tell us we were moving again,” Jackson said.
“Are you talking to me?” I said.
Jackson looked around the booth. “You see anybody else here?”
I shook my head and tore off more pieces.
“He always takes us out to eat when he has to tell us we’re moving.”
“He does?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“Because we’re not gonna make a scene about it in public.” Jackson squinted the blueberries again. “Well, at least I’m not.”
“I don’t do that,” I said, although the lady in the next booth looked over at me like I was talking too loud.
“No, Freak Show.” Jackson pointed to the tabletop. “You just tear stuff up. It looks like it snowed over here. What’s up with that?”
“Clear the deck,” Dad said.
He was coming toward us with a tray. I swiped the “snow” into my lap. Then I started shredding the bun Dad put in front of me.
“Got some good news for you kids.”
“We’re not moving,” Jackson said.
I could tell Dad was disappointed because the freckles around his mouth sort of sagged.
“What makes you think that?” he said.
Jackson lifted his bony shoulders to his ears. “You want to clean up the yard and cook out there. And you didn’t tell me not to count on joining the comic book club.” He shrugged again. “It adds up.”
“Guess I ruined my own surprise.” Dad’s lips did that spread-out-go-back-in thing, which was as much of a smile as he ever seemed to be able to get going. “I got another job here in Grass Valley . . . a remodel on an old house on Church Street.”
“Where the rich people live,” Jackson said.
“These people are. The job’ll take at least six or seven months. Thought you’d like that. You two seem happier here than you have anyplace else.”
I sucked my lips in so I wouldn’t say, “Until today.”
“It’s okay here,” my brother said, which was Jacksonese for, I would do a cartwheel right now if it wouldn’t make me look like a dweeb.
Dad turned his stormy gray-blue eyes to me, and I tried to do what Ophelia would do: my best acting job.
“Yay,” I said. I smiled and tried to do a happy wiggle in the seat, which sent my napkin snow all over the floor.
But Dad’s freckles sagged a little more.
“I’m happy, really,” I said. I looked at Jackson. “I’m just trying not to make a scene.”
Dad play-smacked Jackson on the back of the head, and his eyes smiled some as he chewed a big hunk of The German Shepherd.
It would be okay, then, until I could get home and try to figure this out.
When we pulled into the driveway, I tried not to flee from the van like I was being chased by a pack of rottweilers or skid on the rug in the hallway running for my room, but it seemed like the click of the lock on my bedroom door echoed out into the rest of the house, the way it does in prison movies. If either Dad or Jackson noticed, they didn’t come around asking. For once, that was a good thing.
I sank onto the pile of orange and red floor pillows I’d talked Dad into buying for me on our last thrift store run—I called it my Hobbit Seat—and leaned against the wall under the front window. The border collie across the street was barking, probably because the sun was setting or a pine needle fell, but I blocked him out. I tried to block everything out, the way I usually could in my room. It was my Rivendell.
That was the peaceful land where the Elves live in The Lord of the Rings, which I knew more about than I did just about anything. You didn’t have to be in my room for more than, like, seven seconds to figure that out.
Dad had built me bookshelves that covered the one wall that didn’t have the headboard on the bed, the closet, or the window to interrupt it. I had it filled with books I loved, but especially everything Tolkien and Hobbits and Gandalf. Jackson and I didn’t get presents except for our birthdays and Christmas, and all I ever asked for were more books and posters and DVDs about all of it. A map of Middle Earth hung over my bed, and I’d taped a poster of Gandalf from the movie on my closest door. Under the picture it said, All those who wander are not lost.
I read and watched over and over, and usually that took me into a world where the bullies were conquered and the fighters against bullying always won. There I could be Frodo, the unlikely choice to save the world from evil. It almost always helped.
But not that night. So I crawled from my Hobbit Seat to the bed, where I stuck my hand between the mattress and the box spring and pulled out a thin binder. It was decorated with stickers of Hobbits and Aragorn and Legolas—what else was there to decorate with?—but the inside wasn’t dedicated to The Lord of the Rings. It was where I kept a list that nobody knew about. Not even my Tribelet.
A knot tied itself in my stomach, but I tried to ignore it as I studied the list.
Things Nobody Knows About Me
1. I am a Tolkien freak.
2. I sometimes act out scenes from The Lord of the Rings when I’m by myself.
3. I love costumes even though I don’t have any.
4. I am writing my own fantasy novel in my head.
5. I want to be a professional writer someday.
6. I’m smarter than I act like I am.
7. My mom was killed in a car accident.
8. I don’t know why, and I’m mad at God.
The first six things on the list were there because I used to try to tell people that stuff about myself and they looked at me like I was the creature Gollum. After that, they used it to make fun of me.
Two schools ago, a group of Those Girls brought me a cape so I could dress up like Gandalf, but when I put it on, it had clumps of cat fur in it big as hamsters, and I had to walk around the rest of the day with hair all over me and people sneezing every time they looked at me. None of the teachers did anything about it.
That was when I made my list, and after that I never talked about the things on it to anybody. Even the Tribelet. They would never try to make me look like a freak because I liked
Tolkien, so maybe I’d tell them someday. But not yet.
I ran my finger down to Number Seven. That was on there because, like I’ve said, I just wasn’t allowed to talk about my mom’s accident. Dad never said, “Don’t!” but it made him go into a deep hole, and everything was so much harder when he was down there. That wasn’t the only reason either.
The other reason was one of those things I wasn’t supposed to hear but I did. It was only about a year after my mom died, so I was seven. We were still living in Santa Clara in our house, the one we got when Mom got her nurse practitioner license and a new job. Before she died, it was all sunshiny and clean and smelled like lemons all the time, but after the accident, Dad kept the curtains closed and my tennis shoes stuck to the kitchen floor and the whole place smelled like dirty socks and milk that went bad.
That day I was behind the couch, reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe because I didn’t have a Hobbit Seat yet (because I didn’t know about the Hobbits yet), and my grandma came over, my mom’s mom. She stormed all around the living room, pushing the curtains open and telling my dad he better “come out of it” or she was going to take Jackson and me to live with her.
Dad said, “You can’t do that. They’re my kids. They’re all I have.”
Grandma said, in that voice that reminded me of tight wire, “Then climb out of this black hole you’re in and start taking care of them. Or I will file for custody, Pete. I will.”
My stomach tied itself into a knot now, just like it did then. Ever since that day, I opened curtains and washed dishes and made good grades and did everything I could so my dad wouldn’t sink into the blackness and Grandma wouldn’t come in with her wire voice and take us away. Most important of all, I tried not to talk about the accident.
But today, I might have messed it up.
I got out my purple Sharpie and crossed out: My mom was killed in a car accident. Now somebody did know about that. Somebody who wanted to twist it and make it ugly.
That was my own fault. Maybe I was just that Gingerbread Girl who deserved to get bullied.
“Ginger!” Dad called from the dining room. Jackson never said he had a bullhorn voice, but he kind of did. “Phone!”
Who is it? I wanted to call back. If she says her name is Kylie, would you tell her I dried up and blew away? Please?
But Dad didn’t know much about the way I got treated when we first moved to Grass Valley. I considered that as I trudged down the hall. He couldn’t leave work and go to the parents’ meeting in our principal Mrs. Yeats’s office that everybody else’s moms or dads had gone to the day it all came out. He’d only read the letter she sent out about the Code and how the school was cracking down on meanness. If I told him now that the girl on the phone was a bully, he would probably just say, “So ignore her.”
If I could, wouldn’t I have done it already?
But it wasn’t Kylie’s voice on the other end of the line. It was Tori, and she sounded excited. As in, she talked fast and her sentences all had exclamation points at the ends.
“Lydia’s back!” she said.
“At your house?” I said.
“Well, at her apartment, but she’s back working for my dad! And guess what?”
“Wh—”
“She wants to meet with the Tribelet, here, after school tomorrow. Can you ask your dad if you can come?”
Dad was sitting three feet from me, blinking at the computer screen. My heart went into hyper speed as I peered over his shoulder, but he was reading some article about shutters or something. I did delete that e-mail, right? It was gone, yes?
“Can you?” Tori said in my ear.
Could I?
We won’t tell anybody IF . . . you stop hanging out with Tori Taylor and Winnie George and Ophelia Smith and Michelle Iann. Your little group.
Was having a Tribelet meeting considered “hanging out”?
But if you keep being with them, EVERYBODY will know how your mother died.
I couldn’t be with them at school. I couldn’t. But what if I was with them someplace where Kylie couldn’t see? And she didn’t say anything about Lydia. Lydia—the one person who might be able to help me.
“Are you okay, Ginge?” Tori said.
Her voice was so nice, the knot that was my stomach almost untied and let me cry. I had to take a chance or I really would dry up and blow away.
“I’ll ask my dad,” I said.
And for the first time since the locker room, I felt a tiny flicker of hope.
Chapter Three
The first words out of my mouth the next morning—before the sun even peeked through the Grass Valley evergreens—were, “I want you to SHUT UP!”
The border collie across the street was carrying on like a band of robbers was carting away his entire house. Were the people who lived over there deaf?
I pulled my pillow over my head, but his high-pitched yipping came right through the down feathers. If they weren’t going to tell him to knock it off, I was. I pretty much fell out of bed—because I was all tied up in the covers—and stomped to the window. Then I yanked it up and opened my mouth to yell, “QUIET!!!”
But the word stuck in my throat. All I could do was stare, mouth hanging all the way open. Even though I was still halfway between sleeping and being awake, I knew what I was looking at.
The two big trees in our front yard were draped and looped and wrapped in so much toilet paper, I couldn’t even see the dog across the street. To make it even worse, a thin drizzle of rain was slowly soaking it so that it all sagged and stuck and made our entire front yard look like it was being flushed down the john.
My stomach grabbed itself. It grabbed even harder when I heard Dad open the front door.
“What the Sam Hill?” he said.
I shut the window and leaped for the bed. Maybe if I went back to sleep and woke up again I’d find out this was just one of my nightmares. But a very real Dad knocked on my door.
“You awake?”
“Huh?” I said.
“Look out front. Surprise for you.”
There was kind of a chuckle in his voice. He thought this was funny?
I sat up and gave it a few seconds and said, “Yikes.”
“Somebody likes you.”
Likes me? Was he serious?
“Who likes Ginger?” I heard Jackson say in that thick way he talked when he wasn’t awake yet. Like, until about noon. “This I gotta see.”
Dad rapped on my door again, so I said, “Come in,” which they both did. Jackson followed Dad’s point to the window and stood there with his back to me.
“We all did that to our friends when I was a kid,” Dad said. He sounded like he was proud.
“It doesn’t mean . . .” I started to say.
But Jackson whipped his head around and stared the words off my lips. The blueberry eyes said, Upset Dad and I will end you.
Dad did the almost-smile thing and gave my toes a quick squeeze through the bedspread. “Enjoy it for now. Clean it up when you get home today. Gotta get ready for work.”
When he’d left the room, Jackson leaned his hands on the bottom of my bed. “This is what you get for being all into that anti-bullying thing. Which means you can clean it up.” He turned toward the door and then looked back at me, eyes in blue slits. “Don’t tell Dad what this is really about. He thinks we’re totally good right now.”
Like he actually had to tell me that. Or like Dad had to tell me to clean it up. I wasn’t waiting for after school—I was going for it right now.
I pulled one of Dad’s old sweatshirts on over my pajamas, and jammed my feet into my sneakers, and went out the front door. My foot immediately slipped, and I had to grab onto the wobbly railing around our tiny front porch to keep from falling down the steps. When I looked to see what I’d stepped in, I almost barfed.
Dog poop. A big pile of it. And we didn’t have a dog.
Gagging, I hopped on my clean foot down the steps and grabbed some big wet leaves
. I rubbed the poopy shoe on another pile of leaves on the ground and used the handful to get the worst of it off the porch. That was when something caught my eye in the shrub beside the steps. Something pink.
With polka dots.
Even as I reached for it, I already knew it was Kylie’s makeup case. It was zipped up and bulging, but I didn’t open it. There was probably a snake in there or something. Why else would she bring it to a TP-ing?
Unless it accidentally dropped out of her bag.
Across the street, the dog was absolutely going crazy, and Jackson came to the door.
“Would you come in so he’ll shut up?” His face twisted as he looked at me. “Are you out there in your pajamas? That’s it. I’m changing my last name.”
I would’ve come back with something, but I wanted him to go inside before he smelled the poop. He shook his head like I was some kind of math problem he couldn’t solve and went back in the house. I hosed off the front porch, stuck the makeup kit under my shirt, and considered pretending I had appendicitis. Except I’d used that excuse three times already.
After the bullying of me had stopped—eight days ago—I’d started to like walking to school. Grass Valley wasn’t like any other town we ever lived in in California because it was sort of old-timey, like back in the Gold Rush days (which Tori knew all about because her father was a history person, and so was Lydia). I could close my eyes and imagine wearing a dress down to my ankles and being rich because my father struck gold. Plus, Grass Valley had its own smell, probably from the pine trees everywhere and because there was hardly any pollution. I could breathe really deep as I walked up and down the hills and not start wheezing and having my eyes turn red from allergies, which made me look like a frog. Or at least that was what I’d been told. More than once.
But that day on the way to school, with my sweatshirt hood up to keep the drizzle from turning my hair into carrot shreds, I couldn’t think about anything but what to do once I got there.
I couldn’t just walk up to Kylie and cry and say, “Why did you put poop on my porch?” I used to do stuff like that, and it only made things worse. Save the Tears was one of the cards in my pocket.