by Nancy Rue
Before first period even started, Izzy dropped a plastic zip-up case full of little containers on Ginger’s desk, with her sitting right there.
Izzy looked back at Kylie the way Nestlé looked at me when I told him to “stay” and he did. Did I do it right? Did I? Huh? Huh? Was I good? I expected Izzy to start drooling when Kylie gave her the nod.
“What is all that stuff?” Ophelia whispered to me.
All I could see was a miniature deodorant and a comb. That was enough. Ginger was slowly unzipping the bag, and I wanted to yell, Don’t do it, Ginger! It’s a trick!
Ginger looked inside it and jumped like something had sprung out at her. She zipped the case back up and went to Mrs. Zabriski’s desk.
“She’s not gonna tell, is she?” Ophelia hissed in my ear.
It felt like the whole room was holding its breath.
“May I have the pass to the restroom?” Ginger’s voice sounded dead.
Mrs. Zabriski inserted a pencil behind one of her ears that stuck out from her supershort haircut like little doors. “Why don’t you go between classes, Ginger?”
Ginger didn’t answer.
Mrs. Zabriski sighed the way only teachers who don’t really like kids can sigh and handed her the pass. “This is the last time,” she said.
Ginger took it and went for the door. On the way, she dropped the zippered case on Shelby’s desk.
“You can have this back,” she said and left.
“Now you know why we can’t invite her to lunch,” Ophelia wrote in a note to me.
I didn’t write back, and not just because Mrs. Zabriski had a bad ’tude herself that day. I knew what Phee was talking about. But every time the Pack did something worse to Ginger, memories bit at me. Like Kylie laughing with Mrs. Bernstein over my Spanish mistakes. Kylie wrinkling her nose at my eyebrows. Kylie making fun of Granna.
Every time the Alpha Wolf bared her fangs at Ginger, I felt like they were going through me too.
When Ginger came back from the restroom she put her head down on her desk and didn’t move. She did that second and third periods too, and Mr. Jett and Mrs. C-C didn’t say a word to her.
Anybody else would have gotten the message from Ginger that she was done with them. But the Pack made signs in the shapes of gingerbread people with stuff written on them like “Don’t Touch the Gingerbread!” and “Gingerbread Alert: It’s Poisonous!” and handed them out between second and third periods. It was so bad, Ginger didn’t even take her test in math class. I knew, because I was watching her.
In fourth period, Mr. V gave us our usual fifteen minutes to meet in our groups after he took the roll. We barely had our desks circled up when Kylie raised her whole arm. The entire class turned around. For her to hold up more than a finger was that unusual.
“Yo, Kylie,” Mr. V said, smiling at her with his elastic mouth.
“I don’t mean to tattle but, um, Ginger isn’t doing anything. I thought we were supposed to be working in our groups.”
If I had had antennae, they would have gone up because (A) since when did she care if people were doing their assignment? and (B) since when did she do her dirty work herself?
Like everybody else in the room, I turned in my seat to see where Kylie was pointing. For once she was telling the truth. Ginger sat alone in the back of the room with her head on a desk that was pushed against an old dry-erase board Mr. V didn’t use anymore. On it, somebody had written “Stale Gingerbread is gross” with an arrow pointing down to her.
Just like somebody had lit the end of one of those long dynamite fuses in an old cartoon, the laughter fizzled from one end of the room to the other, getting louder and hotter as it raced toward Ginger and the big boom everybody seemed to hope for.
But I was the one who exploded. Or somebody who took over Me who didn’t like to talk in front of a bunch of people stood up and said, “She’s not doing anything because she doesn’t have a group.” I felt Winnie tug on my sweatshirt, but the other Me said, “She can be in ours.”
I wasn’t sure who choked harder—the Pack or the BBAs or the rest of the class that usually kept their heads down and their mouths shut. I just knew it wasn’t my friends or Mitch, because when I looked down at them, they were way beyond moving at all.
They just stared at me like their faces had been shocked frozen.
Chapter Seven
Mr. V was the first to speak. “All right, Tori!” he said. “Way to be a team player!”
He put up his hand to high-five me, and I was surprised my palm didn’t slide off his. I was already sweating that hard.
“Ginger!” he said. “Get your stuff together and come let these ladies bring you up to speed. And, Evelyn, would you erase that board for me? I don’t know what that’s about.”
Mitch grunted. She was the only one who stayed in her desk in our circle as Ginger made her way across the room to us.
Winnie was already standing in front of Mr. V, her little voice begging, “Please let me do a project on my own. We haven’t started on ours anyway . . . ”
“This is a group project, Win,” Mr. V said. “One person doesn’t make a group.”
Winnie grabbed the bathroom pass and fled like the Pack was already after her.
Meanwhile, Ophelia was crouched beside my desk and from the way she was talking, I was convinced her top teeth were welded to the bottom ones.
“Why did you do that? You know we don’t want her in our group!”
“It’s fine with me,” Mitch said, “as long as she does the work.”
“It’s not fine with me. Winnie is going to have a total meltdown. Why did you do that, Tori?”
Ginger saved me from answering by dumping her overloaded backpack onto the floor beside the empty desk Mr. V had pulled into our circle. Ophelia tightened her teeth so hard I had to practically lean right out of the desk to hear that she was talking at all.
“If you weren’t my best friend, Winnie and I would start our own group right now,” she said.
Winnie returned, swollen-eyed, from the restroom, and Ophelia got back in her seat and began to make lunch out of the end of her braid.
“So what’s your question?” Ginger said.
“We don’t have one yet,” I said.
“I have one,” Ophelia muttered.
I didn’t find out what that was until after school when I called her to get help on the writing assignment Mrs. Fickus gave us fifth period. If you were a plant or a flower, what would you be? Right then I was thinking poison ivy because Ophelia had barely looked at me the rest of the day after science. I was sick of those lame topics, but at least it gave me an excuse to call her and get us back to where we were.
I had never needed an excuse before.
Three Shakespeare-named Smith kids answered the phone and passed it to the next one before I finally got Ophelia. Unlike at school, she suddenly had a lot to say to me. She was so freaked out, I was sure she had eaten several mouthfuls of her hair before I called.
“Did you call about the English paper?” she said.
“That and—”
“I’m not helping you with that until you tell me why you picked that Ginger person over Winnie and me.”
“I didn’t—”
“You invited her into our group without even asking us!”
“I didn’t know I was going to say it until I did it.”
Ophelia went on like I hadn’t even uttered a syllable. “I don’t have anything against Ginger. I kind of feel sorry for her. But that doesn’t mean we have to be friends with her. And you know what’s gonna happen now. Kylie’s gonna think we’re friends with Ginger, so she’s going to start treating us exactly the same way she does her.”
“Kylie doesn’t even—”
“And it isn’t going to just be them looking at us, like Winnie said. I didn’t say this in front of her because she would totally have a breakdown, but we’re gonna get gum in our hair and signs on our backs and have to eat our lunch in the toilet—
”
“Well, not actually in the toilet—”
“It’s one thing if she’s in our group. We can’t get out of that now. But just so you know, I don’t think we should hang out with her any other time than in science class.”
“Okay. But she’s not really that bad, Phee.” My voice must have gone all high because Nestlé was cocking his head at me like I was hurting his ears.
“But they think she is!” Phee said.
“I thought you didn’t care what they think.”
“I do when it means they’re going to turn on us. Even if you don’t care about me anymore, I still care about you.”
“What?” I said.
“I can’t talk about this,” Ophelia said. And with a very loud click, she hung up.
I knew that was Drama Queen Ophelia kicking in, and any other time I would have given it five minutes and called her back so she could enjoy an even more dramatic scene of us making up.
But this wasn’t any other time.
I was suddenly so lonely even Nestlé pressing his head into my thigh didn’t help. I almost hated Valentine’s Day for keeping my mom away from me, and I almost hated that when I called Granna, the person who answered her phone said she was resting, which she, like, never did. Before I could think of anything else to almost hate, I marched up the steps to my dad’s office. If Lydia was there I would ask her if I could have ten minutes alone with my father.
Lydia wasn’t there. It was the first break I’d caught in days.
“I was just about to get a coffee,” Dad said. “You interested in some hot chocolate?”
Until I shook my head I hadn’t realized just how miserable I was. I saw it in his eyes as they dropped at their corners. He motioned me to my curl-up chair, sat himself down in the one across from it, and picked up his pipe. He didn’t light it because Mom wouldn’t let him smoke it. He just liked to hold it in his mouth when he was figuring something out. I evidently needed figuring out.
“So what’s on your mind, Tor?” he said.
I gave him the whole story, most of it anyway. I tried to stick to the facts; like, I left out the part about Ophelia. I’d save that for Mom. Valentine’s Day would be over in exactly four days.
Dad nodded through the whole thing, and when I was through, he just kept nodding for a few more minutes until I thought his head might just bob off. Finally, he put down his pipe and leaned forward with his hands folded between his knees.
“First of all, I think you did the right thing.”
“Thanks, but what do I do?”
“Have I ever told you about the Maidu tribe of Native Americans?”
What?
“They lived here in Grass Valley long before it was Grass Valley.”
I didn’t bother to tell him I knew that. I was too disappointed that he didn’t get it. I might as well sit through the story and go back to Nestlé. At least he listened to me.
“The Maidu elected their chiefs based on how much they were liked. Today we’d say ‘by how popular they were.’ Anytime their chief did something they didn’t like, they exercised their right to remove him and put in somebody else.” Dad put up a hand like I was about to interrupt, which I wasn’t. “Now, they didn’t have another election. They just consulted one another, just like we’d do over coffee down at the Briar Patch, and agreed on who was in.” He shook his head sadly. “That happened to Chief Wemah when he tried to lead the tribe through the tough times during the Gold Rush. They made a big mistake there. It led to their ruin. I think they could have—”
“Thanks, Dad,” I said.
I bit the inside of my cheek so I wouldn’t say, That really doesn’t help and neither did Granna’s story about Lola Montez. I didn’t want to (A) hurt his feelings and (B) get Granna in trouble.
I even started to stand up, but Dad scooted forward a little more like we were just getting to the good part.
“It must be human nature to try to get power over other people, Tor,” he said. “I told you the other day about the US government forcing the Maidu into a peace treaty and then never honoring it.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And yet the Maidu were just as cruel to each other when it came to who had the power.” Dad smiled like he was actually smiling at somebody else. “Reverend Jake calls that ‘original sin.’ I think that’s what you’re seeing with these girls you’re dealing with.”
Jeepers, he had been listening. I scooted to the edge of my chair too and was about to say, “So what do I do about it, Dad?” when somebody made a sound in the doorway.
“Sorry,” Lydia said. “I didn’t mean to interrupt. I’ll just go get us some coffee while you—”
“That’s okay,” I said and pretty much leaped out of my curl-up chair. I didn’t know how much of all that Lydia had heard, but I didn’t want her to hear any more. She already thought I was a big enough loser.
I got past her without knocking her down, and collected Nestlé from my room, and ran with him up to the Spot. Maybe up there I could analyze the facts about the Maidu and their popularity contests and see if it could help.
But after thirty minutes of sitting there outside the cabin with Nestlé licking the snowflakes off my face as they hit, all I could figure out was (A) there had always been mean people and (B) the mean people had the most power.
Between that and the fact that my feet were frozen into stumps, I left the Spot and went back to the house.
We didn’t get a snow day off Thursday. The streets were cleared and the buses were running, and that didn’t help my ’tude at all. Ophelia did throw her skinny arms around my neck when I got to our meeting place by the window and said, “Okay. I think it’ll be all right with Ginger in our group, and I’ll help you figure out what kind of plant you are because I don’t understand the math homework at all and I’m going to fail and never get into college.”
That was the Phee I knew. It made me think for the next couple of hours that we were going to be okay.
Then we got to fourth period.
Mr. V told us our group could have the whole time to work on our project since Ginger had just joined us. Shelby came out from behind her hair and raised her hand to ask if that was fair—probably because Kylie told her to—and Mr. V said, “When did anybody ever promise you ‘fair’?”
It was a strange answer, but I didn’t have time to analyze it. The first thing Ginger did when we sat down was ask Mr. V if she could use the restroom pass.
“Why do you do that every single day in here?” Mitch said to her.
Ginger looked around our little group. The only people who looked back were Mitch and me, and we must have looked pretty trustworthy because she said in a hoarse whisper, “Because Kylie and those girls won’t let me in the restroom between classes.”
“What do you mean they won’t let you? You’re bigger than every one of them.” Mitch glanced over her shoulder at the Pack as if she were double-checking their size. “Yeah. You could push right through them.”
“Could we just get to work?” Ophelia said.
“What work?” Mitch said. “We don’t even have a question.”
“I’ve got one,” Ginger said. “I just thought of it.”
Mitch grunted. Winnie whimpered. Ophelia muttered something between her teeth.
Had everybody forgotten how to talk in real words?
“What is it?” I said to Ginger.
“Why are some people mean? Is there a part of the brain that makes them that way?”
Mr. V. stopped on his way back from the BBAs and put his hand on Ginger’s shoulder.
“Not bad,” he said. “Not bad at all. In fact, it’s awesome. What does the group think?”
Ophelia didn’t look at him. She was too busy burning a hole into me with her eyes. Winnie was tearing up again.
Only Mitch spoke. “You said it had to be a question we didn’t already know the answer to.”
“Yea-a-ah,” Mr. V said. “Do you know the answer to that, Mitch?”
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“Yes. Some people are just born that way. End of story.”
Without moving her head, she cut her eyes toward the Pack who were all innocently labeling the parts of the scientific method on a worksheet.
“That’s one of the theories you could test,” Mr. V said. “I’m thinking you should go with this, ladies. It’s a decent question, and you’re running short on time. Your proposal is due Tuesday.”
“Okay,” I said. And then Ophelia kicked me under the desk and I added, “We’ll talk about it.”
“What’s to talk about?” Mitch said when Mr. V went back to the BBAs. “We got a question. We do the work. Simple as that.”
“You know what they are going to do if we get up there and start talking about mean people,” Ophelia said.
“Uh-huh,” Winnie said.
“They’re so lame they probably won’t even know we’re talking about them,” Mitch said.
“Ophelia’s kind of right,” I said to Ginger. “Doing a whole project could make things even worse for you.”
Ginger’s shoulders sagged. “I don’t see how they could be much worse. If you want me to, I’ll go back to not being in a group—”
“Let’s look at this logically,” I said quickly. Ophelia was way too nice to say, That’s a great idea, Ginger, you go. But just in case . . .
I held up one finger at a time as I went through the letters.
“A—we don’t have time to think of another question. B—if we don’t make our report sound like it’s about them, they’re not going to stand up and admit they’re mean—”
Mitch gave the version of the grunt that I thought meant she approved.
“And C—we shouldn’t talk about it here where they can hear everything we’re saying.”
“But where can we talk about it?” Winnie glanced at the Pack. “They’re everywhere.”
“They’re not at my house,” that other Me said. “We could meet there after school every day until we’re done with the project.”
Ophelia grabbed my arm and squeezed it. “You have to ask your mom, and she’s so busy right now. And your dad’s working at home, right, so we might disturb him.”