So Not Okay

by Nancy Rue

  Dad was constantly reading and talking on the phone and Skyping and squinting at his computer. I went up to his office a couple of times to my curl-up chair, but I didn’t feel like talking to him. Not even about him letting me feel awkward with Lydia, who probably now thought I was the rudest kid on the planet.

  I talked to Nestlé a lot, but he basically just wanted his belly rubbed 24/7. I would have been glad to get back to school if it hadn’t turned into one big wolf den there.

  And on Monday, it got way worse. We’re talking fifty percent worse, to be exact.

  I was so grumpy the first three periods even Ophelia stopped telling me stuff about the Shakespeare weekend. If Winnie had asked me if I was okay one more time, I probably would have made her cry, and she was doing enough of that already.

  So I wasn’t in the best place fourth period when Mr. V. came over to our group and said, eyes doing no dance at all, “I’m a little disappointed in you guys. What’s going on with you?”

  Winnie, of course, burst into tears and Mitch got all grunty and Ophelia waved her arms around for no apparent reason and muttered, “Alas.” I could feel all of them waiting for me to say something, but a sob bigger than any of Winnie’s erupted from the Pack side of the room. Even Mr. V looked.

  “A-a-a-ll right, what’s going on?” he said—in that drawly way he used when people were going over the edge.

  “That Ginger chick freaked out,” Douglas told him, voice breaking into an octave only dogs can hear.

  “Where is Ginger?” Mr. V said.

  Evelyn raised her hand. “She left, Mr. V.”

  Mr. V went to the doorway, moving a little faster than usual, which wasn’t that fast since he never really hurried anywhere. As soon as his back was turned, the Pack all collapsed against each other, except for Heidi, who kept her eyes on Mr. V—obviously in case he turned around.

  As for my eyes . . . they were filling up like cups of salt water, and I couldn’t see how I could stop them from overflowing. I was so done with the whole room.

  I got up, grabbed the pass, and headed for the door.

  “Excuse me, Mr. V,” I managed to choke out. “I need to use the restroom.”

  “Sure,” he said, although I wasn’t sure he actually heard me. He was peering down the hall the other way.

  The urge to cry was gone by the time I got to the girls’ bathroom. It wasn’t the same for Ginger.

  I found her curled into a ball under one of the sinks, sobbing into her knees. From the smell of the place, she had just lost her breakfast in one of the stalls. Good thing I didn’t really have to go in there.

  I just didn’t know where I did need to go. It was like I was divided into two parts. One part wanted to pretend I didn’t see her and bolt out the door. The other part felt like I should at least ask her if she was okay. That seemed stupid though because anybody could see she wasn’t.

  There must have been another part of me. That part crawled under the sink and sat beside her with my back pressed against the cold tiles.

  Now to think of what to say.

  “I hate them,” Ginger said. “I hate them so much.”

  That was easy.

  “They’re awful to you,” I said.

  “I don’t even know what I did wrong.”

  I thought about what Ophelia said, about how maybe Ginger brought it on herself, but I decided not to give Ginger the list.

  “They just like to pick on people,” I said instead.

  Ginger raised her face from her knees. Jeepers. She looked like she’d been stung by about twenty bees and was allergic to all of them.

  “Have they ever picked on you?” she said, like she hoped the answer was yes.

  “Twice,” I said.

  “Why did they stop?”

  I wasn’t sure they had, actually. Not after Friday in Spanish class. But I said, “They found somebody else to pick on.”

  “Me?”

  “There was somebody else between you and me.” I was thinking of Winnie, who in Ginger’s shoes would have flushed herself down the toilet by now.

  Ginger swiped off a tear from under her eye. “Do you think there will be somebody else soon?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  The tear was replaced by three more. “I tried to be friends with them.”

  “Why?”

  She looked at me like I was nuts. “Because they’re the popular girls. Doesn’t everybody want to be friends with them?”

  “I don’t. I want to be friends with people who want to be friends with me.”

  She stared at the knees she was hugging. “That’s the problem. Nobody wants to be friends with me.”

  I couldn’t argue with that.

  “I don’t even know how to make friends. This is my twelfth school since first grade.”

  “Jeepers. How come?”

  “Because my dad’s a construction worker and him and me and my brother have to move wherever the work is.”

  “What about your mom?”

  “She died.”

  It must have happened a long time ago because she didn’t start crying again. Maybe she’d used up all the tears she had for that.

  “I always try to make friends, but it never works. My dad says to just be nice to people and helpful and they’ll like you. I do that, but they just act like I have leprosy.”

  Something stabbed me in the chest. At first I thought it was guilt because I’d acted like that toward her some myself. But this was more like something was trying to cut me open. Like Ginger’s heart breaking was happening to me too.

  “We should go back to class,” I said.

  “I can’t,” Ginger said.

  “You kind of have to, or you’ll get in trouble. Even Mr. V doesn’t let people cut.”

  She shook her head, the way Ophelia’s two-year-old sister did just before she burst into I don’t want to! I don’t want to! I had to stop Ginger before she got to that because I really wouldn’t know what to do then. Ophelia was way better at that than me.

  “I’ll walk with you,” I said.

  She finally nodded and uncurled herself from under the sink, and we went back to Mr. V’s class.

  The room was quiet, and everybody had their books open and their pens moving. Mr. V looked up, but he just nodded at me like I’d done something wonderful and pointed to the assignment on the board.

  As I slid into my desk, I knew some other people didn’t think I was wonderful. I glanced over my shoulder and the entire Pack was watching me, practically panting.

  I rolled my eyes and turned back around. On top of my science book was a piece of pink paper folded into a triangle.

  I looked at Ophelia, but she was alternating between chewing her braid and gnawing her fingernails as she wrote in her notebook. Besides, if it had been from her it would have been purple.

  A voice whispered in my head not to open it, but I did. One word in and I wished I had listened.

  If you don’t hate Gingerbread, you must love it. And we can’t stand Gingerbread Lovers.

  I tore the note into tiny pieces until it looked like confetti and dumped them into the trash can when nobody was looking. Maybe Ginger didn’t know how to get out of their spotlight, but I did.

  I mean, right?

  Chapter Six

  The Pack’s spotlight only seemed to turn brighter until Ginger had to be blinded by it.

  Staring at her until she looked like she was going to shrivel like a grape that gets left in the bottom of the produce drawer for too long.

  “Accidentally” shoving her in the hallway and pretending they didn’t even notice her bouncing against the wall or falling into somebody who went, “Why don’t you watch where you’re going?”

  Forming a “casual” line across the cafeteria door so she couldn’t get in. I followed to see where she went to eat her lunch. She carried her brown bag into the girls’ restroom.

  I also noticed that she was toting all her books and notebooks in her backpack. �
�Methinks she looks like a camel,” Ophelia, who was still in Shakespeare mode, whispered to me as we walked behind Ginger on the way to fifth period Tuesday. “Why is she dragging all her stuff around with her?”

  You didn’t have to be a genius to figure that out. The Pack wasn’t letting her go to her locker.

  I stopped Ophelia outside Mrs. Fickus’s room. Winnie slipped in beside her.

  “Do you know where Ginger ate her lunch today?” I said.

  They shook their heads.

  “In the restroom.”

  Winnie put her hand over her mouth like she was going to be sick.

  “Why?” Ophelia said.

  “Because of the Pack. We should—”

  “Wait.” Ophelia’s hand was on my arm so fast I almost heard it go schwing. “You’re not thinking you should invite her to have lunch with us, are you?”

  “She’s not that bad,” I said. “I talked to her yesterday—”

  “And now Kylie and those girls are looking at you the same way they do Ginger.” Winnie’s already tiny voice was practically disappearing. “What if they start looking at Ophelia and me too?”

  I didn’t have an argument for that. The Alpha Wolf’s looks every time I went to the pencil sharpener had started to make the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

  Mrs. Fickus stuck her helmet head out the door and told us without even moving her rosy-lipstick lips that the bell was about to ring.

  “Please stay away from Ginger,” Ophelia said when she was gone. “Let’s just us three be friends, like always. Okay?”

  I didn’t point out that not much was “like always” anymore. I just said, “Okay.”

  For a minute, it was worth it to see both of them smile.

  The only thing that made me smile for the rest of the day was that I was going to go out with Granna after school. I would even take a Lola Montez story right then.

  But during sixth period I got a note from the office telling me to go ahead and walk home because my grandmother had a doctor’s appointment.

  I analyzed that right away.

  I had been going to Granna’s appointments with her since I was a toddler. I knew all the doctors’ names and what kinds of stickers and Band-Aids each of them gave out and what all Granna’s jokes were with them. So why suddenly did she need to go by herself?

  (A) It wasn’t time for any of her regular checkups—what she called “The Doctor’s Excuse to Get Money Out of You for Telling You That You’re Fine.” Which, of course, she already knew.

  (B) She liked having me there so I could see her prove to them that she might be old (something I never agreed with in the first place), but she was as healthy as a teenager. There was always ice cream at the Lazy Dog afterward to celebrate “Yet Another Victory Over Medicine.”

  That added up to the whole thing being strange and me being disappointed.

  Then when I got home, Nestlé didn’t even greet me at the back door. Not like he usually did, with his voice all whimpering and his tail banging against the kitchen chair and knocking over the newspaper Dad had left there at breakfast. He just peeked around the corner of the snack bar and sort of nodded and then went back into the kitchen to whatever was more exciting than me.

  It was Lydia.

  She held two coffee mugs over her head, like that was going to keep them out of Nestlé’s reach, and said, “Look, dog, if I spill this we’re both going to be sorry. And you don’t want me to be sorry.”

  “Nestlé!” I said.

  He turned his head to give me a glance that said, Don’t you see I’m busy here? Lydia tried to take that opportunity to slip by him, but Nestlé whipped back around and knocked his nose right into the cup in her left hand.

  It was like watching one of those paper towel commercials where the spill happens in slow motion. And just like I was watching TV, I stood there and witnessed coffee spraying everywhere and the mug smashing to the floor and Nestlé trying to play in the puddle while Lydia turned her whole body to face the refrigerator with the other cup shoved against her chest.

  “Get. Him. Out of here,” she said.

  “Do you want me to help—”

  “Yes—get him out!”

  I grabbed Nestlé’s collar and dragged him through the coffee and the pieces of what I was pretty sure was Dad’s favorite mug with the handle shaped like an old gold miner’s mustache. That of course made the whole mess worse, but I sure wasn’t going to offer to clean it up again. Lydia might be a “little person,” but she had a big voice when it came to giving orders.

  And so far, that was all I’d ever heard her do. I wasn’t sure I liked her any more than she liked me.

  Outside, Nestlé bounded to the back corner of the fence around the lower part of our yard and barked for our next-door neighbor to come out and give him a treat.

  “He’s not even home right now, Nut Bar,” I said.

  But Nestlé sat there, wagging his tail back and forth through the wet leaves and whining. He reminded me of Ginger before she figured out the Pack didn’t want her in their den.

  I shivered. And it wasn’t even that cold.

  I could have taken the wrap-around porch to the front door and gone back inside, but I knew Nestlé would head right for wherever Lydia was. And wherever Lydia was, I felt like Clifford the Big Red Dog.

  I started to sit on one of the metal chairs on the patio, but it was wet, just like everything else in Grass Valley in the winter. Besides, I needed to get farther from the house. I considered taking Nestlé for a walk around the Sunrise Lane loop, but his leash was inside. Where else . . .

  That was when my gaze drifted upward, and I remembered the Spot.

  Our yard was divided into two parts: the lower part where the house was and a higher part like a shelf that you could get to only on a path that curved up to it on the other side of the fence. The way-cooler-than-anybody-else’s yard thing about the Spot was the tiny log cabin up there. The cabin wasn’t big enough to live in, and it was too far from the house to store anything. Even if you did, it had a dirt floor so stuff would get wet in the winter.

  As I pried open the rusted-closed gate, memories rushed in. I did my first real science project up there when I was in fourth grade: a weather station where I could actually check rainfall and barometric pressure and wind velocity. I got first prize in the science fair for my grade level, and then I brought it back and set it up in the cabin again until the raccoons got it.

  I wasn’t too upset about that because by then I was doing other experiments up there, and only some of them were actually for school. It was cool to see how many different breeds of spiders I could identify and whether kudzu could grow in the dark because it took over every place else. I proved that it didn’t, which as I looked back on it, was probably a good thing. I didn’t think my mom would want kudzu coming down the hill and choking out her cucumbers.

  Until that afternoon, as I picked my way from the path and across the upper yard to the cabin, I hadn’t been to the cabin since September. I didn’t argue, of course, when my mom said I shouldn’t go up there anymore. Something about a girl my age needing to get past the bug-collecting stage. I’d forgotten about it until now, when suddenly, I didn’t have anyplace else to think.

  As I stood there with my hand on the cabin door, ready to push it open, the first thing I had to think about was whether to go in. Mom (and Dad) had made it pretty clear that I wasn’t supposed to, in that voice they saved for when I needed to know it wasn’t just a suggestion.

  But I decided (A) being “more like a girl my age” wasn’t going to help me solve any problems right now; and (B) I couldn’t think of anyplace else where I could be whoever I was.

  I wasn’t even sure where that came from because I never even thought about who I was before. Being up there just made me remember how I used to get all into a project and didn’t worry if the BBAs were going to tell me it was lame or the Pack would roll their eyes back into their brains. I didn’t think they even did that
stuff back in fourth and fifth grades. It used to be easier. And it felt easier again up in the Spot.

  At least I knew I wasn’t a person who argued with that this-is-not-a-suggestion voice. So I didn’t go into the cabin. I just sat on a rock overlooking the lower yard and the house and wrapped my arms around myself. Nestlé sat beside me and leaned his thick body into mine. For a few minutes, we just listened to the pines sing a low song about how a storm was brewing, and pretty soon the who-am-I feeling went away and then I felt smart enough again to take my problems one by one.

  Problem #1. Maybe Granna didn’t want me to go with her to the doctor because (A) she was going to have to put on one of those gowns and she didn’t want me to be embarrassed or (B) . . .

  I couldn’t think of a B, so I moved on.

  Problem #2. Maybe I could (A) time my hot chocolate runs so I wasn’t in the kitchen the same time Lydia was or (B) I could go back to going to Granna’s every afternoon after school like I did ’til this year. That led me back to Problem #1, so I kept going.

  Problem #3. I could try to convince Ophelia and Winnie that we should at least let Ginger sit with us at lunch so she didn’t have to eat next to the toilets by saying (A) . . .

  Another shiver went through me, hard enough to make Nestlé whimper.

  It was the first time ever that I couldn’t even think of an (A).

  I gave up on the Spot and went back into the house through the front door and ran straight to my room. Just in case Lydia was getting more coffee.

  The next day, Wednesday, I tried to focus on Winnie and Ophelia, who really were the best friends ever. I let Phee go on and on before school about how she wanted to be in the Empire Mine film—even though I’d told her like a hundred times that my dad didn’t have anything to do with picking the actors—and I listened while Winnie talked—okay, cried—about how her grandmother was telling her mom what a bad job she was doing raising her. I even let them both hug me, and I’m not the hugging kind.

  But I still couldn’t help seeing that the Wolf Pack attack on Ginger was escalating. It’s not like they didn’t make it obvious.