by Dyan Sheldon
Chapter One
Sicilee Kewe is not happy
It is a dark and rainy morning. An unfriendly wind pulls at clothes and umbrellas, and rustles the plastic bags caught in branches and overhead wires so that they make a forlorn, unhappy sound. Bent, huddled figures hurry through the downpour, jumping over puddles and avoiding the sodden grass as they make their way to the sprawl of buildings that is Clifton Springs High School.
Two bright spots flicker against the gloom of the storm like flames in a starless night. They are Sicilee Kewe and her best friend Kristin Shepl, two of the school’s most popular students. Kristin is enveloped in an oversized, hooded white coat, trimmed in fur that may once have barked or even miaowed, but for Sicilee this is an orange day – orange bag, orange boots, orange hat, orange jacket, orange dress over black-and-orange leggings.
The plastic bags trapped in the trees aren’t the only ones making forlorn, unhappy sounds.
“It just isn’t fair,” Sicilee moans. “Why do we have to come back today?” The orange umbrella bobs indignantly as she sidesteps a small body of water that Kristin, her eyes on Sicilee, inadvertently walks through. “Sweet Mary, it’s practically the middle of the week. I mean, really, what difference would a measly couple of days make? I swear, sometimes I really think there’s some kind of conspiracy going on to ruin my life.” The Christmas vacation is always far too short. There’s never enough time to do all the things that need to be done. The shopping. The parties. The entertaining. The outings. The visits. The events. And then there are all the preparations for New Year’s Eve – hair, nails, facial, sauna, more shopping. Not to mention the trips to the gym. You can’t be stuffing your face with roast beef and cookies and not go to the gym a couple of times at least. “I haven’t really had time to recover,” says Sicilee. “It’s a miracle I don’t have dark circles under my eyes or zits.” Besides which, Sicilee hasn’t even had a chance to take back all the presents that were the wrong colour, make or size. “Like that bag my Aunt Clarice and Uncle Vaughn gave me? You saw it, Kris. It’s a good label and everything, but it is, like, so totally last year that I can’t possibly be seen with it over my arm. I might as well carry all my stuff in a shopping bag from the supermarket.”
Kristin, who is now warily watching the ground for more surprise puddles, sighs. “I could’ve used more down time too, but, to tell you the truth, in one way I’m almost glad to be back at school.” That one way is Kristin’s mother. “Nag, nag, nag, nag, nag… It’s like she’s on automatic or something. She didn’t even stop for Christmas Day. I said to her, ‘You know, this is supposed to be the season to be jolly – not the season to go on and on about who didn’t empty the dishwasher’.”
“Oh, that’s nothing,” Sicilee assures her. “I didn’t tell you what happened last night at Chez Kewe.” She rolls her eyes. “It was like Nightmare on Coldwater Drive.”
“Really? What happened?”
Sicilee sighs. “Nothing, really. All I did was very casually say that I figured it was time we did ssomething about enlarging my closet – you know, since I can hardly turn around in it, it’s so freaking small.”
“Maternal meltdown?” guesses Kristin.
“Not this time. You know my mom, she prefers to talk you into submission than yell if she can. It was him.” Sicilee’s eyes (brown today to complement her outfit) widen dramatically. The orange umbrella sways with emotion. “I couldn’t believe it! One minute he was all normal and talking about having the tyres rotated, and the next he was all puffed up and practically drooling. It was like he was the Incredible Hulk or something. I felt like saying, ‘Hey, who changed the script?’ You should’ve heard him, Kris. He was yelling and screaming about how much everything costs and how spoiled I am and how when he was my age he worked thirty-eight hours a day so he’d have some lunch money and kept his one shirt and pair of jeans in a paper bag under his bed.” Sicilee is smiling as she tells her tale, but not because her father’s tantrum was amusing. Like the picture on the label stuck on a package of cheap meat, Sicilee’s smiles bear little relationship to what’s going on inside. She is smiling because she is out in public, a place where she smiles all the time. “And then he said that if I want to be able to throw a party in my closet, I should stop buying so many clothes.”
“How draconian,” sympathizes Kristin.
“I told him. I said, look, I’m sorry, but I can’t cut back on something as important as my wardrobe. I do have a reputation to uphold, you know.”
“Well, duh… Of course you do.” Kristin shakes her head sadly. “They don’t get it, do they? They think you get to be really popular just by luck.”
“There was no explaining that to him last night, that’s for sure,” says Sicilee. “I swear, he was so overwrought, I thought he was going to have a stroke.”
“My dad gets like that. I figure it’s stress.”
“You’re probably right.” Sicilee sighs. “They said on TV that stress is the disease of the twenty-first century.”
“Too true,” agrees Kristin. “Plus, it was Christmas. That’s extra stressful. And you didn’t get to go skiing this year. That probably tightened his screws even more.”
The Kewe family’s annual ski trip had been cancelled this Christmas due to an unexpected lack of snow. Clifton Springs, apparently, is not the only place experiencing unseasonable weather.
“Well, it’s not like he was the only one to know crushing disappointment, Kristin.” Sicilee suddenly veers to the right, leaving Kristin on her own with the unfriendly elements. “I was looking forward to the ski trip too, you know. I mean, I haven’t been anywhere since we went to Cabo in the summer.”
“Yeah, but you know what parents are like. It’s all themthemthem…” Kristin jogs a few steps to get back under the umbrella. “So what are you going to do about your closet?”
“Oh, you know…” Sicilee’s smile takes on a philosophical tinge. “I’ll wait for him to calm down and everything, and then I’ll hit him with it again.”
Having safely reached the portico of the main building, Sicilee makes a sudden, unscheduled stop to check out her reflection in the glass doors. “Sweet Mary!” She tilts her head first to the left and then to the right, her scrutiny both professional and thorough despite the makeshift nature of her mirror. Although Sicilee has, in fact, been exposed to the storm for only a few minutes, she is far from happy with what she sees. “Look at me!” she wails. “I look like I went down with the Titanic!”
The boy who was forced to stop short behind her gives her a nudge. “Will you just go in?” he grumbles.
Sicilee lifts her umbrella so she can see him glowering over her shoulder. It’s Clemens Reis, one of the greatest geeks who has ever lived, and the fact that he touched her does nothing to improve Sicilee’s mood. She gives her umbrella a shake before shutting it, causing more grizzling at her back, and pushes open the doors.
The lobby is packed with students noisily reuniting after the holidays. All is not lost. Sicilee doesn’t see anyone whose opinion she cares about among them. “I’m going to the girls’ room. Right now. I have to repair the damage before anyone sees me,” she shouts above the din to Kristin. “You go and find Ash and Loretta. I’ll meet you by the lockers.”
“OK.” Kristin nods. “See you in a few minutes.”
Never handicapped by the sense that she needs to be either patient or polite, Sicilee marches through the crowd, which magically parts for her as the sea did for the Children of Israel. But when she reaches the nearest bathroom, Sicilee discovers that her day hasn’t started to improve just yet. Oddly enough, she isn’t the only one whose hair and make-up have been adversely affected by the bad w
eather. The space around the sinks is packed tighter than a designer sale. Sicilee’s sigh is heartfelt. Why does everything happen to me? she thinks. And she turns around and heads for the bathroom on the floor above. Which is sure to be empty at this time of the morning, being so far away.
There are two girls standing together near the entrance to the first-floor restroom. Sicilee doesn’t actually look at them. But, of course, she doesn’t have to. She knows instinctively – by their hair (which has obviously never seen the inside of a decent salon) and their bodies (scrawny and pudgy, respectively) and their clothes (beyond hopeless) – that they are geeks from the netherworld. Which puts them way beneath her notice. Because they happen to be in her way, Sicilee pushes past them, hitting the larger of the two (the pudgy one) with her bright orange backpack and knocking a stack of papers out of her hands.
“Hey!” snaps the girl. “Why don’t you watch where you’re going, Princess Pumpkin?”
Her companion quickly jumps back, banging her head against the wall.
Sicilee glances over her shoulder, like a movie star forced to acknowledge a ragged beggar because the beggar is hanging on to her ankle. “Are you talking to me?”
“Yeah,” says Waneeda. “I am talking to you. Look what you did!”
“Well, maybe if you weren’t such a heffalump, you wouldn’t be in my way,” Sicilee drawls. And, still smiling, she yanks open the door.
Chapter Two
Why Waneeda and Joy Marie were in Sicilee’s way
There was no exhausting round of parties or events in the world of Waneeda Huddlesfield and Joy Marie Lutz this holiday season. They spent the Christmas vacation much as they spend most of their free time: Joy Marie studied, read, practised her violin and completed the special project on the Magna Carta she’s been doing for extra history credits; Waneeda played video games, watched television and ate.
And now, as Sicilee searches for somewhere to repair the damage wreaked by nature and Kristin searches for Loretta and Ash, Waneeda and Joy Marie move slowly through the hallways on the first floor. Joy Marie, her hair in a single perfect braid and dressed in a grey skirt and plain white blouse, is carrying a dispenser of tape, and a box of drawing pins clacks in the pocket of her grey sweater. Waneeda, her relentlessly unruly hair pulled back into a tight bun, her sweatpants and baggy pullover looking as though they are wearing her more than she is wearing them, is carrying a stack of flyers and chewing her last gumdrop. They move slowly, partly because Waneeda doesn’t really “do” quickly, and partly because they have been at the school for over an hour, going up and down the corridors taping flyers to the walls and pinning them to bulletin boards, so that even Joy Marie’s enthusiasm is starting to wane. The flyers say:
Joy Marie is here this morning because she is the co-ounder, vice-president and (due to a lack of volunteers) secretary of the Clifton Springs High School Environmental Club, which has the distinction of being the most unpopular club in the history of the school. Not that this lack of popularity bothers Joy Marie. She doesn’t do things because she wants to be liked; she does things because she is driven to achieve. Mr and Mrs Lutz expect a lot of her.
In comparison, no one expects much of Waneeda, and they are rarely disappointed. Indeed, it’s fair to say that Waneeda could be the girl for whom the words “I can’t”, “But I’m tired” and “Do I have to?” were invented. Waneeda is here this morning only because Joy Marie slept over last night and was, therefore, in a position to make her come.
“Are we done yet?” Waneeda moans as they finally complete their circuit of the first floor. “I have to sit down. My blood sugar’s really low.”
Joy Marie gives her a so-what-else-is-new? look. Waneeda’s blood sugar is always in imminent danger of collapse. “Almost. I just want to put a couple by the restrooms.”
Waneeda sighs, but dutifully follows. Waneeda is not so much driven as pulled.
She shifts restlessly from one foot to the other as she holds yet another flyer up against yet another wall. “I don’t know why you bother,” complains Waneeda. “Everybody who’s in the club knows about the meeting. And nobody new’s ever going to join.”
“You don’t know that,” says Joy Marie. Joy Marie’s nature is basically a positive one.
Waneeda’s is not. “Yes, I do know that,” she insists. “Everybody thinks your club is the pits.” Even the über-hip kids who wear vintage clothes and drink Fairtrade coffee have stayed away from the Environmental Club the way you’d avoid a house where someone died of the plague. “They’d rather pick up litter on the highway with a toothpick than join.”
“We still have to keep trying,” argues Joy Marie. “They could change their minds. Rome wasn’t built in a day, you know. These things take time.”
“I thought time was the thing you don’t have.” Waneeda fumbles in her pockets, hoping to find at least an overlooked stick of gum. “I thought the end was nigh.”
“Well…” Joy Marie’s single braid bounces as she marches on. “You know what they say, Waneeda… It’s always darkest before the dawn.”
And it is certainly very dark at the moment. The club’s official enrolment (larger than the number of people who actually show up for meetings) has always hovered at the minimum needed for school support and funding, but that, unfortunately, is not its biggest problem. Its biggest problem is a greying and portly man who, besides being famous for his amusing and colourful ties, commands a great deal of authority and respect in the community. Although he likes to be seen to be politically correct, Dr Firestone, the principal of Clifton Springs High School, has never fully appreciated the club’s efforts to alert the student body to the many dangers facing the planet. The hundreds of plastic bags they dumped outside the main entrance… The posters of tortured animals they plastered through the corridors… Their picket protesting the sale of soda and water on campus… All of these things annoyed Dr Firestone, but it was last year’s infamous Earth Day Speech (in which Clemens Reis, co-founder and president of the club, suggested that his fellow students and their teachers were all complacent kamikaze consumers) that caused the principal to become openly critical. He said that the club, in general, and Clemens, in particular, lacked the delicacy and subtlety of the nuclear bomb.
This past November, things took a turn for the worse when Clemens began his current campaign to save the 500-year-old trees at the side of the tennis courts from being cut down to make way for the new sports centre. Clemens has written letters to the council, to the school, to the administration, to the school board, to the developers and to the local papers. More than one. Although these letters have proved no more effective than sticking a plaster over a crack in a dam, they did manage to alienate Dr Firestone even more. “Are you aware, Mr Reis, that you’re like Don Quixote, tilting at windmills and thinking they’re giants?” boomed Dr Firestone, running into Clemens in the corridor. “I suggest you stop wasting the club’s resources and address some real issues, not the fate of a couple of trees.” Clemens said he’d see what he could do.
And then, just before Christmas, Clemens took the mike at the end of the morning announcements, saying that he wanted to send holiday greetings from the Environmental Club to the rest of the school. What he did, in fact (as the few people who actually listened could tell you), was launch into a passionate plea on behalf of the ancient oaks and the inestimable value of the natural world. “If you eradicate a species or chop down a tree, it’s gone for ever,” he told them. “If you destroy everything, you’ll eventually end up with nothing.” If there was some eloquence as well as truth in Clemens’ speech, Dr Firestone failed to see it. Dr Firestone said it was a diatribe and summoned Clemens to his office for “a little chat”. Dr Firestone was decked out for the holidays in a Christmas-tree tie with tiny, flashing lights on it. Clemens was wearing a T-shirt he’d made himself that featured a photograph of the threatened trees and the legend: Where were you five hundred years ago? Where will they be next spring? Dr Firestone did most
of the chatting. “You’re turning what should be an ordinary high school club into a gang of junior eco-terrorists, Mr Reis,” he accused. “You’ll be setting fire to SUVs and breaking into animal labs next.” Dr Firestone made it clear that if the club didn’t improve both its image and its membership, the school would have no choice but to shut them down at the end of January.
“Anyway, we do have till the end of the month.” Joy Marie snaps off a piece of tape and slaps it into position. “And it doesn’t say anything about trees on the announcement.”
Waneeda blows fluff from the Tootsie Roll she found deep in the pocket of her sweat pants. The Tootsie Roll looks as if it may have been washed. “Does Clemens know you left out the trees?” Unlike Joy Marie, Clemens isn’t intimidated by Dr Firestone’s threats. Clemens would argue with God, never mind a man whose tie lights up.
Rather than answer Waneeda’s question, Joy Marie says, “What I was thinking was that we should do a serious recruitment. We could set up a table in the main hall … and do an announcement at the next assembly … and even go around the homerooms…”
Waneeda’s expression, though slightly diluted because of the candy in her mouth, delicately balances disbelief and disdain. Joy Marie is too shy to make announcements or talk to homerooms. When forced to speak in front of a class, she turns the colour of tomato soup and talks so softly that even she can’t hear what she’s saying. “You’re going to send Clemens out to convince people to join?” Which would be like using wild bears and packs of hungry wolves to convince people to picnic in the woods. “Are you nuts?”
“I didn’t mean Clemens.” Joy Marie smoothes out the paper she’s half fixed to the wall. “I was kind of thinking of you.” Waneeda may be self-conscious about her looks, but she is less shy than an angry bull.
“Yeah, right,” snorts Waneeda. “As soon as I give up my part-time job as Peace Envoy for the UN.”