You Can't Sit With Us

by Nancy Rue

  Yeah, you could already tell that fifth-graders probably hadn’t been told about sweat and hormones and deodorant yet. Wait ’til Mrs. Zabriski got ahold of them.

  “One thing,” Lydia whispered, just as Mrs. Yeats stepped up to her microphone and it squealed. “You have been called to do a very important thing. It’s a sacred task, and God is with you.”

  “Amen,” Mr. Devon said.

  We sat on the bottom row of bleachers near the door, so nobody really noticed us. There was plenty to see out in the middle of the gym.

  Tori’s science team did a great job demonstrating something that sort of blew up and made red and blue smoke. The fifth-graders went nuts over that. They were so going to love Mr. V.

  Ophelia and her group did a pantomime of the stuff they were going to learn in social studies, while Evelyn and Shelby took turns reading it off. If Ophelia hadn’t stolen the show, the kids would’ve gotten more restless than they were already getting.

  Mitch totally dominated the P.E. demonstration, and that got the fifth-graders focused again. Her group did some really complicated basketball drill where you could hardly tell where the ball was, and then they jumped hurdles from the obstacle course and ended with doing a thirty-second workout to music. I clapped until my hands stung.

  “You’re up next,” Mr. Devon whispered.

  He put Colin’s cloak on him and went off to run the PowerPoint. Lydia stood up on one of the bleachers and draped mine around my shoulders.

  “Heed the call,” Lydia said.

  The music started and we were on.

  At first, when the lights dimmed except for the ones on us, the fifth-graders whistled and squealed like they’d never been in the dark before, and I wanted to run. But then there was a lot of shushing, and the first slide came up and Colin started to speak. They fell silent, and they didn’t make another sound except to laugh when it was right to and sometimes gasp, and even one time somebody yelled, “Yeah, that’s what I’m talkin’ about!”

  Because Colin and I told and acted the story of Samantha and Frank and every kid who ever struggled to be themselves when the Others didn’t get it and tried to hold them back and destroy friendship itself.

  We climbed on our boxes and cried out in horror when our old wagon, the only vehicle we had, was destroyed by angry Others. The audience was horrified too.

  When the wind whistled rumors up almost to the Heights, we calmed them with our capes and got some applause. That was immediately quieted so they could hear us tell the rest of the story, all the way through, until we took off the cloaks we didn’t need to hide in anymore and lifted the thin circles of metal that showed up on the screen as rings coupled together.

  They knew we had been lied about, manipulated, and left on the wall below to be dragged down back into falseness—and now they knew that even though the Others still wallowed below, we were free. Free to be who we were.

  Our lights went down and the music faded—and the whole gym went crazy. Mrs. Yeats let them stand up and stomp and whistle and clap even after the big lights came up. Then I could see my Tribelet jumping up and down and throwing kisses to me. Mitch put her hand up like she wanted to high-five me all the way across the gym. And there was Lydia next to Mr. Devon, nodding until I thought all her curls would bounce off—and Mr. Devon squeezing her hand.

  My dad was there, too, looking tall and proud beside . . . wait—Jackson? Jackson was there, with his hood off, not exactly smiling but clapping some. When he saw me looking at him, he pulled his hand out of his pocket, gave me a thumbs-up, and stuck it back in.

  I looked at Colin, and he was smiling too, but his eyes looked disappointed as they swept over the crowd. I was pretty sure that meant his mom didn’t show.

  “All right, students,” Mrs. Yeats said into the microphone. “That was wonderful. Wonderful. But there is more to come here at the fair, so let’s start settling down.”

  People did, sort of. I looked straight at Mrs. Yeats, and she must have felt it because she found me with her eyes.

  I made an O with my fingers and thumb, a question on my face. She smiled and nodded.

  Yeah. She got it.

  That meant something was definitely going to happen now. Maybe not right now, but soon. While people were sitting down and shushing each other, I looked for the only group that wouldn’t be clapping or bouncing.

  Kylie and Izzy and Riannon and Heidi sat near the bottom of the third section, and Mrs. Bernstein was in the middle, between Riannon and Kylie. She talked into Kylie’s ear, but Kylie just stared straight ahead, eyes glazed over like she’d just woken up. Oh, but the lip. The lip was headed for the nostrils, and even as I watched, she yelled, “All right! Just leave me alone!”

  Right then it all got quiet. There wasn’t anybody who wasn’t at least looking down to see where that came from.

  “Next on the program,” Mrs. Yeats said, “you’ll have a chance to visit the booths.”

  “Hey,” Colin whispered to me from his big black cube.

  “Yeah?” I whispered back.

  “I think she got it.”

  I glanced at Kylie again. She was trying to get up, but Mrs. Bernstein said something to her, and Riannon grabbed Kylie’s arm and held her there.

  I took in air and felt the sharp pain in my side that I hadn’t even noticed during the presentation. She got it. Now we’d see if that changed anything. Right now, I was worried about the Tribelet booth.

  While the sixth-graders who had jobs were getting to their places, Dad came across the gym to me, and he was actually smiling. Like, all the way smiling.

  “You were great, both of you,” he said. “Great.”

  Colin ducked his head and said thanks, and, like he saw what Dad wanted him to do, said he’d see me at lunch and moved off to our storyboard. I had a pang of sadness. After today, there wouldn’t be any reason for us to have lunch together anymore.

  “I learned a lot,” Dad said.

  When was I going to stop being flabbergasted by the things he said?

  “We’ll talk about that later. Let’s go home. I want you to get to bed.”

  “May I just talk to my friends for a few minutes?” I said. “I’ll change and talk to them really fast, and then we can go. I promise. Okay?”

  Dad pulled his phone out of his pocket and looked at it. “Fifteen minutes,” he said.

  That wasn’t even long enough. The fifth-graders had an hour to visit all the booths before lunch. If Kylie was going to try something, I hoped it would be at the beginning.

  I walked as fast as I could (while still being able to breathe) to the locker room. I had my belt off before I rounded the corner into our locker row, but I ran into the bench when I saw it.

  My Easter dress was on its hanger where Mitch put it, but it wasn’t the same as when I left it. Right across the front of its beautiful greenness were the words KMART SHOPPER in bright pink lip gloss letters.

  My beautiful dress that Dad bought me. The dress nobody else had worn but me. The dress that made me look like my mom.

  I had just done the best thing I’d ever done, but the meanness and the awfulness still went on.

  Not anymore.

  Somehow, I got the dress down, took the costume off, and slipped my dress on. It wasn’t zipped all the way up, but it was good enough. I put my feet in my ballet flats and pushed my headband onto my hair, and I walked back out into the gym. Slow and with a purpose, my eyes on my Tribelet’s booth.

  Two fifth-grade girls fell into step with me. “You were really good,” one of them said.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  They peeled off at our actual storyboard, where Colin was answering questions with a pink face. I kept walking. If anybody saw or whispered about my lip gloss dress, I didn’t hear them.

  The Anti-Bullying booth was mobbed with fifth-grade girls. Some were reading the big copy of the Code. Some were getting smaller versions from Mitch and Winnie and Ophelia. Some were crowded around Lydia and Tori, an
d as soon as I got there, I heard them telling their own stories, all at the same time like they just had to get them out.

  “May I hand out some brochures too?” I said.

  Winnie turned to me and let out a little shriek. Mitch grunted. Ophelia started to throw her arms around me, but I took a step back and said, “I have a hurt rib.”

  She looked down at me, and her brown eyes took up the whole top half of her face. Her mouth came into a Who? but I shook my head.

  “You were awesome,” a tiny girl with a bright yellow ponytail said to me.

  “She was one hundred percent awesome,” Tori said.

  “These are the ones who are awesome.” I swept my hand out over the booth.

  “Hey,” the tiny girl said. “Why do you have that on your dress?”

  I didn’t answer her. I just looked across from us at the Spanish booth. Nobody was there except a couple of boys scarfing down Doritos and salsa, and of course Kylie and Those Girls.

  Kylie looked like she had been waiting for me to see her. When I did, she stepped in front of the booth and crooked her finger at me.

  Like she expected me to come right over for a chat.

  “Did you want to talk to me?” I called to her.

  She gave me the Are you the dumbest person who ever lived? look.

  “Whatever you have to say you can say in front of my friends,” I said.

  I must have sounded pretty friendly because the chatter in our booth didn’t stop. I did feel Winnie freeze on one side of me, and I heard Ophelia whisper, “All righty then.”

  I held my breath, which was painful, until Kylie did exactly what I hoped she would do. She came straight to the booth and folded her arms and put on the Barbie smile.

  “Can I just say you were kind of rude just then, Ginger?” Kylie said.

  That quieted the booth down. Every fifth-grade girl in there looked at Kylie and probably thought, Uh-oh. This is the cool girl.

  “You’ll find this out anyway when you come here,” Kylie said to them. “But I’ll just give you a heads-up: you have to cut Ginger some slack because her mom rode in a car with her dad when he was drunk, and it was really sad, but he killed her. So she and her brother are both mentally disturbed now, and basically you can’t believe anything they say.” She pointed to our poster. “We just follow the Code and leave them alone. We feel sorry for them.”

  “Okay, wow,” Mitch said. She took a step toward Kylie, but I put out my arm.

  Little girls bunched together, and some of them giggled more nervously than Winnie ever did. They actually opened up a path for me to walk straight to Kylie.

  “She’s going to start in, girls,” Kylie said.

  “Yes, I am,” I said, in the voice I used to think was Samantha but was really me. “I don’t know why you decided to hate me and bully me the minute I came into this school, and I don’t know why I let you. But just so you know, you can’t hurt me. You don’t have any power over me. I’ll be friends with anybody I want and I’ll dress however I want and I’ll be just exactly who I am. You can’t take that away from me. And even if you threaten my friends or my dad, you can’t take away their power either. You can use Twitter and e-mails and text messages to tell people things about my family that totally aren’t true. You can even get other people to do your dirty work for you so you don’t get caught. You can do all that, and it doesn’t change who I am. But it sure shows the world who you are.”

  Dead silence in the booth. I mean, like a tomb. Until some little fifth-grader said, “Was that part of the play?”

  “No, honey,” Lydia said. “That was for real.”

  The gym was suddenly full of applause again. For once my bullhorn voice had come in handy because evidently everybody had heard it.

  Kylie’s face was purple. She waved her hands and shouted, “Wait, wait, wait—listen!”

  Heads turned her way.

  “You can’t prove any of that, Ginger,” she said. “I won’t get in trouble this time.” Any minute she was going to inhale her lip.

  “I didn’t say it to get you in trouble,” I said. “I don’t care if you do. I just wanted you to know how it is, and I don’t need proof for that.”

  “I think I have all the proof I need.”

  Mrs. Yeats parted the crowd of fifth-graders like she was walking through a wheat field, with my dad right behind her. She stopped in front of Kylie. Dad held back, but his eyes were smoldering coals.

  Mrs. Yeats nodded the helmet head at me. Well, at my dress.

  “I believe that’s your shade, Kylie,” she said.

  Kylie stomped her foot. She actually stomped her foot, exactly the way a two-year-old would when she was about to pitch a fit. A tube popped out of her shirt pocket and bounced right at Mrs. Yeats’s feet. She picked it up, and I saw that it was the same one Kylie had used on me the day of the makeover. Back when I was somebody else.

  “Let’s see,” Mrs. Yeats said. She held it up to my ruined dress. “Looks like a perfect match.”

  In a minute we were going to have to collect fifth-grade eyeballs off the floor.

  “Mrs. Yeats, is this what you’re looking for?”

  Mr. Jett joined us and held up a sweatshirt.

  Tori’s Einstein hoodie.

  “Where did you find it?” Mrs. Yeats said.

  “In Steppe’s locker.” He held the sweatshirt out to Tori, but his eyes were bullets firing at Kylie. “I’ve had about enough of your behavior.”

  Things happened fast and smooth after that. Kylie was half-carried off between Mrs. Yeats and Mr. Jett. Lydia stood on a chair and suggested the fifth-graders visit all the booths, and Mrs. Bernstein put on the sombrero and started hawking the chips and salsa. But before too much else happened, Ophelia jumped up on one of Colin’s and my big black cubes and shouted in her best theater voice, “That—that right there that you just saw? That’s what you’ll learn here about standing up to bullies.”

  A lot of little fifth-graders looked relieved.

  I was pretty relieved myself.

  Chapter Eighteen

  In the next week, my life changed. Not my whole life, but a lot of it. First of all, Riannon, Izzy, and Heidi all got ten days’ suspension. Kylie was expelled for the rest of the year, and she would have to petition to get back in for seventh grade, and that would be after she went to summer school to do the last grading period over again.

  When Mrs. Yeats told me that in her office, I said again that I didn’t stand up to Kylie in the gym that day to get her in trouble.

  “I understand that,” Mrs. Yeats said. “But it was justified, Ginger.” She listed all the things Kylie was expelled for.

  Lydia proved, using something called IP addresses, that Kylie got into my e-mail account and sent those nasty letters to Lydia and Tori, pretending to be me. When Mrs. Yeats explained what all that meant, I remembered the day Kylie stood over me at the computer in the library and insisted that I get into my account. That was probably when she got my password.

  And spreading the kind of rumors she did about my mom and dad, in school using Twitter, was what was called “defamation of character” and that was against the law. It was up to my dad to decide what to do about what happened off school grounds, but he would be allowed to use the proof Mrs. Yeats had if he wanted to press charges.

  Kylie also got expelled for destroying my property—my beautiful dress—and for stealing Tori’s sweatshirt and impersonating her and setting me up in a dangerous situation with the note typed on paper that matched some in her locker. Not to mention plagiarizing (as in copying) Tori’s poem and using me to try to pull it off.

  I got the feeling from the way Mrs. Yeats held her chins right then that there was more stuff that maybe I shouldn’t know about.

  I didn’t want to know about it. Not having Kylie and Those Girls in school made a gigantic difference, but I wanted to think about the other changes. The really good ones.

  Like the day I got back to school after I rested for
two and a half days until my rib felt better and Jackson told me to quit fakin’ (yeah, he came out of his cave). It was Friday, and I went to the lunchroom, ready to sit with my Tribelet, until I saw Colin sitting alone.

  When I went over to him, he looked up and gave me the whole smile. The pink started on his neck.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Hey,” he said. “I brought us some pickles.”

  “Oh,” I said. “You want to eat lunch with me?”

  “Well, yeah, unless you don’t want to, which is . . . I guess . . . fine.”

  “No, I do!” I said, before light pink could turn to flamingo. “Just let me do something first.”

  I left my brown bag there and went over to the Tribelet table. Shelby and Evelyn were with them, and all of them were smothering giggles. Except Mitch, who didn’t do the giggle thing.

  “What?” I said.

  “You should totally sit with him,” Tori said. “Seriously.”

  “Do it,” Ophelia said. “As long as you come to Tori’s after school for a meeting.”

  “Come,” Shelby said.

  Evelyn nodded. The Tribelet was expanding.

  I loved it so much.

  “Okay,” I said. “I have to ask my dad.”

  “My mom already called him,” Tori said. “Didn’t he tell you? They had a lo-o-ong talk.”

  “Was it a good talk or a bad talk?” I said.

  “It was about the parents’ group my mom’s starting,” Tori said. “Your dad wants to be in it.”

  Yeah, like I said, my life changed.

  So I ate lunch with Colin, and we didn’t exactly say we should keep being friends even now that the presentation was over, but we didn’t have to. Not after we decided to do a sequel to Samantha and Frank reaching the Heights on the weekends, just because.

  He and I had our last meeting with Mr. Devon that day, which also would have been sad if Mr. Devon hadn’t said he wanted us to both be library aides next year during our study hall, and one of the elementary schools that didn’t feed into Gold Country Middle found out about our presentation and wanted us to do it for their fifth-graders in May. Mrs. Fickus agreed that we should rehearse once a week during fifth period.