So Not Okay

by Nancy Rue

  That day I heard the words “new girl” spoken by the Alpha Wolf as if she were tasting mud.

  “Did you see her?” Kylie said to the girls knotted around her.

  “I did,” Izzy said. She was a little rounder than Kylie’s other friends and right now her cheeks were neon red, the way Ophelia’s little sister Juliet’s were before they discovered she had a milk allergy. “I was in the office when her dad checked her in.”

  All eyes turned to Izzy. I made my way ultra slowly up the steps so I could listen. I wasn’t sure why I was doing that. I just did it.

  “She has the greasiest hair,” Izzy said. “It’s like she hasn’t washed it in like a week. Maybe more. And—”

  “I know.” I glanced down to see Kylie’s eyes flash. “And she’s wearing this sweatshirt that comes down to her knees. And she talks like this—REALLY LOUD!”

  “Nuh-uh!” Shelby said.

  Riannon pointed herself at Shelby. Everything about Riannon was pointy so that wasn’t hard for her to do. Her eyes were green—way greener than my mom’s because she wore contacts that I was pretty sure were tinted to look like they came out of Emerald City—and when she drilled them at somebody, it was like they got closer together over her nose.

  “Kylie wouldn’t say it if it wasn’t true,” she said to Shelby.

  “I know—”

  “What’s her name?” Heidi wrinkled her little pug nose and said it like Shelby hadn’t even started her sentence. Huh. Members of the Pack could even be invisible to each other.

  Speaking of being invisible, it felt like it was time for me to get out of sight before they caught me lurking. As I rounded the bend in the stairs, I heard Izzy say, “I didn’t hear what her name was,” and Kylie say, “Who cares? She’s probably not even going to be in our section. She’s probably special ed.”

  I felt bad for the new girl with the greasy hair and the loud voice. But it sure sounded like the spotlight was going to be off Winnie that day. My ’tude improved 88 percent.

  I was right. And Kylie, it turned out, was wrong.

  I was right because Winnie became nonexistent again as far as the Pack was concerned. No one glanced at my eyebrows again either. We were Saran Wrap again.

  As for the new girl, she was in our section. Mrs. Zabriski introduced her to our health class as Ginger Hollingberry, and the BBAs laughed like a trio of orangutans, which made no sense to me. What made even less sense was that Ginger laughed this sort of burro laugh right along with them.

  In fact, she didn’t act in any way like you’d expect a new girl to. Even though she did have flat reddish hair that could’ve done with some of Mom’s product (starting with shampoo), and she wore a faded navy blue sweatshirt that must have been her dad’s, and she talked like we all needed hearing aids, she didn’t seem like she (A) knew any of that about herself or (B) realized it made her totally different from everybody else in the room.

  All Ginger did was laugh when nothing was funny and raise her hand to answer questions she didn’t know the answers to and ask questions everybody knew the answers to. Exactly twelve times louder than anyone else.

  Talk about daring to be different.

  Between third and fourth periods, when I was at my locker, I turned around to find Ginger about five inches from my face. Jeepers, the breath. Listerine, anyone?

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Hi,” Ginger said back.

  “I’m trying to meet everybody in the class.” She moved even closer. “Are you Lori?”

  “Tori,” I said.

  “Oh. That’s cool.”

  She didn’t show any signs of moving, so I said, “And you’re Ginger.”

  “Yeah. My real name’s Virginia, but they call me Ginger. Because of my red hair.”

  “Mine’s really Victoria,” I said.

  “Oh. We’re both Vs. That’s cool.”

  I wondered if there was anything she didn’t think was cool. Including getting right into somebody’s space and yet still yelling like Granna’s friends down at the Bret Harte.

  “The bell’s gonna ring,” I said. “You know the way to the science room?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I’ll show you.”

  She took off down the hall like I was the new kid. I’d lived in Grass Valley since I was one, so I didn’t know how I would’ve acted in her place. But I made a note to self: if I ever am the new kid, don’t get all up in people’s grill work.

  For the next two days, some people were polite to her and then ran the other way, including me. The BBAs laughed right in her face, and she acted like it was all hilarious. As for Kylie and the Wolf Pack, they acted like whatever was “wrong” with Ginger was contagious. And still Ginger didn’t get it.

  Until the next day in science class.

  Mr. V was the cool teacher. We all called him Mr. V because no one else could pronounce his last name.

  Vasiliev.

  I never saw what was so hard about it. It was Vas—rhymed with mass—and il—like when you’re sick, you know, ill—then eee—rhymed with bee—and ev—like in whatev. Vas-ill-ee-ev.

  I would’ve called him that because I thought he’d be impressed, but I knew for a fact that would set the BBAs off. Within seconds, they’d be burping it—Vas-ill-ee-ev—and that was just wrong.

  Mr. V caught the soccer ball some people were throwing around and tossed it between his hands as he perched on his high stool. He didn’t demand absolute silence like Mrs. Fickus, but most people paid attention to Mr. V just because. I was one of those.

  He smiled a lot, but his grin never looked the same twice. I guess that was because (A) his mouth was sort of like elastic and (B) he didn’t try to keep it under control like most teachers did.

  “Don’t you think Mr. V’s hot?” I’d heard Kylie ask her Pack at least fifty-one times.

  I wasn’t even sure a teacher could be hot, but I didn’t bother telling her that.

  “Hold your applause when I announce this,” Mr. V said now. “It’s time for another small-group project.”

  The BBAs whistled and clapped, and not because they loved doing small group projects. Just because Mr. V said not to.

  “Yay!” Ophelia said to me. “I love these!”

  “We’re gonna be a group, right?” Winnie said. Winnie needed a lot of us telling her everything was okay these days. Probably because everything was not okay at Grandma’s house.

  “Are you serious? Of course we are!” Ophelia said with exclamation points. The three of us were always a group—plus one.

  I couldn’t wait to see what the assignment was. Science was my absolute favorite subject, because (A) everything had a reason and (B) I could always figure out what it was and (C) it was 100 percent logical, so you never really had to argue about the results. No shrugging needed.

  Last time Mr. V said, “Choose a body system and find out everything you can about it.” So our group picked the nervous system because it’s the most complicated. Of course the BBAs chose the excretory system so they could talk about poop. The Pack took the skin, and all they talked about in their presentation was zits and how to prevent them. (Like any of them had ever had or would ever have a zit in their lives. Probably another one of those requirements for being in the Pack.)

  “I think this calls for a drumroll,” Mr. V said now.

  We turned our index fingers into drumsticks and hammered on our desks. Back in BBA world, it sounded like a rock band going out of control.

  Mr. V put his hand up, and it mostly stopped. I leaned forward in my desk, actually holding my breath.

  Wait for it . . .

  “This is a little different from your other projects.”

  I could do different.

  “I want your group to ask a question about . . .”

  He hopped off the stool, dropped the soccer ball on his desk, and went to the dry-erase board. He was killin’ me.

  He wrote with a thick orange marker, and the class read the words as they took shape.

>   “The . . . human . . . being . . . dot-dot (they actually said dot-dot instead of colon): mind . . . or . . . body.”

  The class was totally silent for the first time since . . . well, never.

  “Your question has to be something you don’t already know the answer to,” Mr. V said. “Your assignment is to discover that answer and present it to the class.”

  He rolled the marker between his palms and grinned at us. Personally, I didn’t know what he was smiling about. That had to be the worst assignment ever.

  Heidi raised her hand. She was looking at Kylie, who was mouthing words to her.

  “What is she, a ventriloquist?” Ophelia whispered to me.

  “Heidi!” Mr. V said. He always smiled biggest when somebody asked a question.

  “This is probably a lame question—”

  Douglas snorted. “Probably.”

  “Shut up!” Heidi said to him. Which, from what I’d observed before, meant “I love that you noticed me.”

  Barf.

  “The term ‘lame question’ is an oxymoron,” Mr. V said.

  Heidi looked at him with nothing on her face for a second and then tossed her hair back. “Okay, whatever. We don’t get it.”

  “I get it!” Ginger waved her entire arm like we did in kindergarten when we all wanted to be the first one to recite the alphabet.

  Patrick held his nose. Mr. V just smiled at her.

  “Tell us what you get, Ginger.”

  “Well,” she said in her usual megaphone voice, “you want us to explore and think and not just regurg . . . reglug . . . I forget the word, but you don’t want us to just find out facts and vomit them out.”

  “Gro-oss!” Kylie said. She turned to the Pack with her hands spread out like, “Did she seriously say that in front of me?”

  “Regurgitate is the word you’re looking for,” Mr. V said, his eyes doing some kind of fun dance. “And you are exactly right, Ginger. This not a report.” He looked at the whole class. “This is a study, and I want you to do it on something you really want to know more about.”

  “What if we already know everything we wanna know about the human body?” Douglas said. The look he gave Patrick and Andrew was a big clue that he was thinking something disgusting.

  “Then ask something about the mind,” Mr. V said.

  “Huh?”

  Mr. V let one side of his mouth go up. “Don’t you want to know how girls think?”

  Douglas’s face lit up. “Hey, can that be our question?”

  “You’ll have to refine it some but, yeah, you can go with that.”

  Kylie raised one finger. Picking up her whole arm was obviously too much trouble.

  “Kylie?”

  “What should our group do?”

  “Your group should figure out something awesome.”

  “Not fair!” Shelby said.

  But the Pack shut her up with a unanimous stare. She let her hair-almost-like Kylie’s cover her face as she looked down. Her part even turned red.

  I would have sat there analyzing how hard it must be to learn and follow all the Pack rules, but I was too jumbled up by Mr. V’s assignment. I studied stuff and figured it out all the time—but not for a grade.

  “Okay, form your groups and start brainstorming,” Mr. V said.

  “What if we already got our question?” Patrick said without raising his hand at all.

  “I’ll be around to approve your question and give you the sheet on how to do your proposal.”

  “What proposal?” Ginger said, waving half of her body.

  Mr. V smiled at her exactly the way he did at Kylie and Heidi and probably his own mom. How did he do that?

  “Form your question first. Then I’ll explain. But don’t drag your feet, guys. The proposal’s due by February 17.”

  Ophelia and Winnie turned their desks toward mine, leaving a space in our circle for Mitch. She was the plus one.

  She had joined us on the very first assignment after she walked around the room checking out all the groups.

  “I’m working with you guys,” she told us back then. “You don’t mess around like everybody else.”

  We let her be in our group because (A) it never occurred to us to say no to Mitch and (B) she always did her share of the work. In every other group, there was at least one kid who just sat around doing nothing and still got credit for the project. Not in ours.

  “We doing this like we always do?” Mitch said.

  We all nodded.

  Our group had a good system. Mitch and I came up with the topic, and then we all did the research, except not so much Ophelia. She went off on too many what my dad called “bunny trails.”

  Winnie mostly wrote up our report, with some help from Ophelia, but Phee’s big part was coming up with a very cool way to present it to the class. She knew not to give me an acting part. Like when we talked for the various parts of the brain, I just held the signs up over their heads.

  Everybody else was really good at that, even Mitch, which you wouldn’t expect because she didn’t say that much the rest of the time. She was scary quiet, until you got to know her some. Still, I was always careful not to argue with her.

  “So what question are we gonna ask?” Ophelia said, looking at me.

  Mitch said something, but whatever it was got drowned out by Ginger’s voice.

  “There would be room if you moved your stuff.”

  Everybody stopped what they were doing and stared. Ginger was standing just outside the Pack circle, pointing to the chair where someone had dropped a pink-sparkled backpack. Who knew which one of the wolves it belonged to, since they all had matching ones. It was still sliding down in the chair, like somebody had just dropped it there.

  “Mr. Vacillate said we could have six in a group and you only have five.”

  “Mr. Who?” Kylie said, not to Ginger but to Riannon.

  A laugh came out of Heidi’s nose. Let the howling begin.

  I looked at Mr. V, but he was sitting with the BBAs, explaining with his hands.

  “I need a group,” Ginger said.

  “Then go find one,” Riannon said.

  Kylie turned her head so that a panel of dark hair fell across her face as she got her glossy lips close to Riannon. “She’s big enough. She could be a group all by herself.”

  Riannon threw her head back and let her shrill laugh rip.

  “Why are you being so mean to me?” Ginger said.

  “Because you won’t leave us alone unless we, like, spell it out for you,” Kylie said.

  She nodded to Shelby, who looked at her with her plumped-up lips hanging open for a second before she said to Ginger, “We. Do. Not. Want. You. In. Our. Group.”

  “That new girl needs to get a thicker skin,” Mitch said to our group. “Mr. V sure isn’t gonna rescue her.”

  I was suddenly bristly. It’s not his fault! I wanted to say to her. He doesn’t even know what’s going on because the BBAs are taking up all his time. If he knew, he’d stop it.

  But like I said, I didn’t argue with Mitch.

  A few rows over, Evelyn was waving both of her arms. “Mr. Vee-ee, Brittney and I need help!”

  “Just keep throwing out ideas,” Mr. V said. “You’re not going to come up with something right away. This is a higher level of thinking—”

  “We have ours, Mr. V,” Izzy said.

  Kylie smiled, something she almost never did except at boys and teachers, and displayed the Crater Lake dimples. “Come see us, Mr. V.”

  Evelyn seemed like she wanted to point out that she and Brittney had asked first, but she deflated like a party balloon. Was it just me or was the Pack getting control over everybody?

  “Ginger’s about to cry,” Winnie said.

  Mitch didn’t even give Ginger a glance. “Yeah, well, like I said, she needs to—”

  “Anybody have any ideas?” I said.

  Ophelia chewed on her left thumbnail. “I don’t think I can do ‘higher level of thinking.�
�� ”

  I wasn’t sure I could either. My grades and test scores proved I was smart, but this might be a level I couldn’t reach. What if I couldn’t do this? Now that was weird. Since when did I doubt that I could do just about anything?

  Chapter Four

  I brainstormed for a study question with Nestlé on Saturday while it rained. Dad was pretending to read but was actually taking a snorey nap in the recliner in the living room, and Mom was at her shop selling people flower arrangements and doing a wedding. It seemed like a depressing day to get married.

  It turned out to be a depressing day to do anything. Every idea I came up with was lame. Nestlé didn’t even wag his tail when I read him the list:

  “Why do guys have low voices and girls have high voices? What’s that about?”

  “Why doesn’t my grandmother’s skin fit her anymore?”

  “If the appendix doesn’t really do anything, why do we have one?”

  “Some questions weren’t meant to be answered,” Dad mumbled from behind The Maidu Tribe.

  “I have to find one that is,” I said. “It’s for science class.”

  While he pried his eyes open I explained our assignment. I had the faint hope that he would call Mr. V and tell him the project was too hard for sixth-graders, but that pretty much died as Dad sat up straighter in the chair and got that This is phenomenal! look in his eyes.

  So I said, “What should we do?”

  Dad tilted his bushy head. “I know what I would do. I would ask why the United States government signed peace treaties with the Maidu that guaranteed them large reservations to live on, and then hid the treaties and didn’t give the Maidu a single acre of land.”

  I tried really hard not to roll my eyes. “Dad, that’s a history question. I need something about the body or the mind.”

  “Okay, so how about ‘Why do people do bad things?’ No, I guess that’s a spiritual question.”

  “Thanks, Dad,” I said. “I’m gonna keep working on it. Can I make popcorn?”