So Not Okay

by Nancy Rue

She paused again, like she wanted to make sure I knew those words.

  “Really?” I said. “Even when you get the power to like you are?”

  “Just because I’m brave doesn’t mean I don’t get scared. But I keep going, doing what’s right, because that’s what God wants me to do.”

  She said God so naturally I almost didn’t notice it. What I did notice was how much more she was limping as she climbed from the chair and rocked her way over to the refrigerator.

  “How about a grilled cheese sandwich?”

  “Does it hurt to be a little person?”

  Lydia stopped with her fingers around the fridge handle. “You’re far more compassionate than you give yourself credit for, Tori Taylor. That’s why you’re the leader of the tribelet.”

  “I am?”

  “You are.” She pulled open the door. “And yes, sometimes it does hurt. And then I pray.”

  Later, Nestlé and I went upstairs to say good night to Dad.

  “I was just getting ready to come down, Tor,” he said. “Everything feels kind of disconnected these days, doesn’t it?”

  I nodded as I curled up in my chair. He got his pipe and sat with me. Even with Granna getting better, his face was still pinchy.

  “Do you get to keep your contract?” I said.

  “Don’t know yet. I have to go to San Francisco to talk to the producers this weekend.”

  It felt kind of selfish to think it, but I said, “Is Lydia going with you?”

  Dad chuckled. “No. I think you need her more than I do.”

  “Is it okay with you that she’s been helping us?”

  He did a curious Nestlé-head-tilt. “Of course it’s okay. She’s getting her work done up here.” He motioned his pipe toward the wall in front of us. “Did you see what she did for me?”

  I looked up at a map that had all colors of pushpins in it, with drawings of buildings and streets, and things written in printing so good I at first thought it was done on a computer.

  “That’s Grass Valley the way it looked in the Gold Rush days,” Dad said. “Best one I’ve ever seen.” He got up and pointed with the pipe. “You can see where all the wealthy mine owners and investors lived—here along Church—and then down here where all the people who made the money for them lived. I’ve never seen the difference between the big people and the little people made so clear.”

  I stared at it. But I wasn’t seeing the mansions and the shacks. I was seeing Gold Country Middle School.

  “You just gave me a great idea, Dad,” I said. “Thanks!”

  “Don’t thank me. Thank Lydia. That young woman is a gold mine in herself.”

  “I know, right?” I wriggled out of the chair. “I need to go do something, okay?”

  “You go. But don’t stay up too late.”

  “When’s Mom going to start sleeping at home again?” I said.

  “As soon as Granna’s awake enough to give everybody a bad time. Won’t be long now.”

  “For real?”

  “For real.”

  “Then I need to go do something while it’s still fresh in my mind.”

  “Do it,” Dad said and kissed me on the top of the head.

  I almost cried then. I wouldn’t really be happy until Granna was doing that. And saying, “Victoria, my pet.”

  I stopped at the top of the steps so fast Nestlé ran into me. When Granna said it, maybe it would drive out the memory of Kylie saying it to make fun of me.

  Yeah, I really needed to make a map. And not just for Ginger.

  Dad didn’t say anything about me staying up until midnight doing it, even though we had breakfast together at the diner the next morning. Mom joined us. Maybe that was why.

  “I want you to sleep all day,” Dad said to her.

  “For a few hours maybe. Then I need to check in at the shop. Make sure it’s still there.” She squeezed my hand. “How you doing, sweetie?”

  “I’m okay,” I said.

  “She’s amazing, is what she is,” Dad said.

  That seemed like a good time to ask . . .

  “Is it okay if the tribelet comes over after your nap? We’re working on a project.”

  “Did you say ‘tribelet’?” Dad said. “Like the Maidu?”

  I nodded. “Lydia taught us that.”

  “I really am out of the loop,” Mom said.

  It occurred to me that she really was. She didn’t know anything about, well, anything, because my whole world had changed since January 26. To be exact.

  “Absolutely they can come over,” Mom said. “It’s the least I can do for you being amazing.”

  As soon as I got home I called Winnie and asked her to get Ginger and Mitch and come over. It was a good thing she was efficient and got everybody’s phone numbers at the start of the project. I never thought about stuff like that. We really did each have a job we were good at.

  It made me miss Phee again. The old Phee.

  By the time they all got there, Mom had gotten up from her nap and gone to the shop. The four of us tried to cram into my room, but with Nestlé in there too, it was way crowded. I asked Dad if we could go up to the cabin.

  “As long as you don’t get too cold up there,” he said.

  Nobody was even thinking about the cold once they saw the cabin.

  After everybody finished telling me how lucky I was to have a “hideout,” as Mitch put it, I passed out flashlights and pointed to the map I’d tacked to the wall.

  “These are the places the Pack won’t let you go, Ginger,” I said, running the light over the restrooms, the cafeteria, and the lockers.

  “You forgot in front of the office where they always go before school,” she said. “And the library after school.”

  “Jeepers,” I said.

  “They think they own the whole place,” Mitch said, “which is a joke because they don’t ever go in the seventh- and eighth-grade wings. They might be all that in our wing, but they’d be toast over there.”

  “We’re not even allowed in that part,” Ginger said. “I tried going to the restroom in the seventh-grade wing, but Mrs. Yeats told me I couldn’t be there.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “You won’t need to go over there because we’re gonna make all these areas”—I shined the flashlight again—“safe for everybody.”

  “How?” Winnie said.

  “First, we reroute our moves from class to class so we don’t even have to deal with the Pack if we don’t want to.”

  “That’s runnin’ scared,” Mitch said. Even in the almost dark I could see her hair standing up.

  “No,” I said, “it’s just saving our energy for when we need it. Seriously, do you want them in your face everywhere you go?”

  Winnie said no before Ginger did.

  I pointed out the new routes I’d figured out. We went over them until I was sure we all had them down.

  “Now, see these yellow areas?” I said. “These are the places where we always need to be when Ginger needs to go there.”

  “Okay, but there’s five of them and only four of us now,” Winnie said.

  “It worked yesterday, didn’t it?” I said. Although I was a little nervous too. I wouldn’t have Kylie’s lunch on my clothes every day to make them move.

  Still, no one argued.

  “So we need to come up with a schedule. Ginger, when do you usually need to go to the bathroom?”

  “Between first and second, between third and fourth, and between fifth and sixth.”

  “You sure pee a lot,” Mitch said.

  “Okay,” I said quickly. “Does the whole Pack stop you from going in, or just one or two?”

  “They take turns.”

  “They have a schedule too?” Winnie said.

  Yeah. The Pack was even more on-purpose mean than I thought.

  “Then you only need one of us with you each time,” Mitch said. “I’ll take between fifth and sixth. I have to go then too.”

  We got that all divided up.
I took between third and fourth.

  Then we moved on to lockers. Ginger said she didn’t mind carrying all her books around, but she’d like to go before and after school. We decided we could all be there at those times, since the whole Pack usually was.

  “Don’t they have anything else to do?” Winnie said.

  “They need to get a life,” Mitch said.

  “I still don’t get why they gotta do this to me,” Ginger said.

  “That’s what we’re trying to find out,” I said. “Lydia said to observe how they react when we foil their plans.”

  Ginger gave her foghorn laugh—which made Nestlé lift his head and shake his ears. “I love the way you talk. ‘Foil their plans.’ That’s so cool.”

  I didn’t say that was really from Ophelia. I did better if I just didn’t think about her too much.

  We spent the whole afternoon acting out our various plans until it started to get dark and cold in the cabin. The one we had down best we called “Walk It, Girl,” where we just surrounded Ginger and went straight down the hall no matter who tried to stop us or what they said—including Nestlé, who was the whole Pack for rehearsal purposes. Winnie said she’d make us each a new card for “Walk It, Girl.”

  “I think we’re ready,” I said.

  They answered with “yes!” and “sweet!” and “yo!” Nestlé even barked that high-pitched happy-sounding yelp he used when Dad told him he was getting a soup bone.

  Then it got quiet. I wondered if maybe we should pray, like Lydia said she did. But I wasn’t sure how and I didn’t know if anybody else would want to.

  So I just said, “God love you, tribelet.”

  That felt kind of like it could have been a prayer.

  Chapter Seventeen

  I couldn’t believe how awesomely our plan worked Monday morning.

  We were all at Ginger’s locker with her before anybody from the Pack even showed up. Mitch looked disappointed that we didn’t get to do our “Safe in a Group” thing, but we made up for it when we all “Walked It Girl” down the hall to first period by the gym. We kept our heads up and our eyes forward, and only Winnie whimpered a little when Kylie, Riannon, Heidi, Izzy, and Shelby all came into view, in their usual knot outside Mrs. Zabriski’s door.

  “Just keep walkin’,” I whispered to her.

  We did, and in my peripheral vision, I saw Izzy’s round mouth drop open like she was about to get checked for tonsillitis. Riannon’s eyes popped. Any minute she’d be looking for one of her green contact lenses.

  “Awesome,” Mitch muttered to me when we were safely inside the classroom.

  That replaced her high five. We decided Saturday that it wasn’t a good idea to celebrate in front of the Pack. They were going to be mad enough as it was.

  I didn’t notice whether they were ticked off or not during health class. The only thing I was aware of was Ophelia sitting beside me. I guess I’d still hoped she’d forget what she said Friday. Two days was a lot of time for her to be BFF-less, especially since the same rule applied to Winnie. Winnie and I were busy with the plan, but Phee . . . she obviously didn’t have anything else to think about. Her fingernails were chewed way past the usual sawed-off looking place, and she was wearing her braid in a circle around her head, probably because her mom saw how much she’d been biting on the end of it.

  But mostly it was the way she was trying not to make it look like she knew I was there—that was my real clue. Every time I glanced at her during first period, which was a lot because we were watching a video about lice and Mrs. Zabriski was busy shouting down all the squealing, Ophelia’s head twitched because I caught her looking at me.

  My other clue . . . well, I guess you would call it evidence . . . was when she dropped a note on purple paper on my desk before she practically ran out of the room at the end of class. My hands went into immediate sweat mode as I unfolded it and read her curlicue handwriting.

  How come you’ll do all this stuff for somebody you hardly even like and you won’t do one thing for the person who was supposed to be your best friend? Forever?

  “Hey,” Mitch said from the doorway. “You comin’ or what? We gotta meet Ginger and Winnie when they come out of the bathroom.”

  I stuffed Ophelia’s note into my backpack and hurried after Mitch. I didn’t know how to answer that question anyway.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t have given Winnie the first bathroom shift,” I said as Mitch and I took the new route to the girls’ restroom on the second floor.

  “Nah, it’s okay. Those girls haven’t figured out what we’re doin’ yet.” Mitch gave me her halfway grin. “They’re not as smart as us.”

  I had to admit that was probably true, because when we got there, Winnie and Ginger were just coming out, and Izzy was up against the wall outside the bathroom, talking really fast to Heidi and Riannon and Kylie. They might as well have been Mrs. Yeats and Mr. Jett, as scared as Izzy looked.

  Winnie, on the other, didn’t look frightened at all. Her face was all pink, and I could tell she had a hard time holding back a giggle until we got inside Mr. Jett’s class.

  “It was so easy!” she whispered to me.

  “What did you say to Izzy?” I whispered back.

  “ ‘We need to go into the restroom. If you need to go, there’s plenty of stalls.’ ”

  Just like we’d practiced it. Now I wanted to give her a high five. But I didn’t, because I could hear the hissing from the den part of the social studies room. Izzy got the pass from Mr. Jett and left crying. I almost felt sorry for her.

  The move from there to the third-period math room was tricky because we were taking one of our alternative routes, and it was going to be hard to go all the way down to the first floor, down the main hall, and up the other set of stairs and then book it ten doors down . . . and get there on time. Mrs. C-C kept close track of people’s tardies. Of course. She was a math person.

  I was a math person too, though, and I had it all calculated. We could move faster because we wouldn’t have to deal with the Pack at all on that route, and there weren’t usually any teachers on the stairs between classes so we could run there. If my calculations were correct, we should get there with exactly fifteen seconds to spare.

  The key was to be the first people out of the room, which wouldn’t be easy because Ginger had to get her social studies book back into a pack already stuffed with everything she owned. Mr. Jett got all over people who started getting their stuff together before the bell rang.

  We had a plan for that too. As soon as class ended, Mitch grabbed Ginger’s book and took off for the door. Winnie picked up her jacket and followed. I did a quick check for debris around Ginger’s desk and herded her to the door.

  Perfect.

  We were in our seats five seconds before the bell rang. It would have been sooner, but Mrs. C-C stopped us outside the door to ask us why we were all out of breath.

  “You weren’t running in the halls, were you?” she said. She wasn’t smiling, but her gray eyes were.

  “No,” I said. “We weren’t. We just hurried so we wouldn’t be late for your class.”

  She looked at me like she was trying to see through my cracks, but then she did smile and sent the lines in her face all spreading out and said, “I’m not going to argue with eagerness.”

  Winnie squeezed my arm when we got inside. “Tori, you lied!” she whispered.

  “No, I didn’t. We weren’t running in the halls. We were running on the stairs. And we did do it so we wouldn’t be late for class.”

  Winnie giggled. The Pack didn’t.

  I could practically feel an Arctic breeze coming from their part of the room. The Pack knew we were up to something, that was clear. But so far they hadn’t figured out what, and Ginger was sitting tall in her desk and waving her hand to do the first problem on the board. Lydia was going to love hearing about this.

  I was up for bathroom escort at the end of math. Shelby was the one standing guard at the door. She was t
he weakest wolf in the Pack. But then it occurred to me that she had to try harder because she was also the one most likely to be kicked out if she messed up.

  I didn’t tell Ginger that, though. We just headed for the bathroom door, and Ciara and Josie opened it to go in right then so Ginger and I slipped in before Shelby could jump back in the way. It was almost like cheating.

  “Go ahead,” I told Ginger, and she went into a stall.

  I pretended to be washing my hands, but I watched for Shelby in the mirror. She came in, looked around, and let her shoulders drop almost to the floor. Actually, everything on her dropped. She was like a wet puppy, only with freckles.

  “Is she in there?” Shelby said, waving a floppy hand toward the row of stalls.

  I really, really wanted to say something like, “That’s where people usually end up when they go in the bathroom.” But we weren’t supposed to lower ourselves to their tactics, so I just nodded and went back to rinsing my hands.

  “Which one?” she said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. And then before I could stop myself, I added, “It’s not my day to watch her.”

  “It sure looks like it is,” Shelby said, letting her hair fall across her cheek just the way Kylie did. “You guys have been all over her all day.”

  The toilet flushed, and I stuck my hands under the dryer. Shelby’s mouth moved, but I couldn’t hear what she was saying.

  “What?” I said as Ginger came out of the stall and went straight for the sink. “Did you say something?”

  “I said,” Shelby yelled. The dryer stopped but she was still yelling. “ ‘What do you guys think you’re doing, anyway?’ ”

  Man, I really wanted to say, “Is someone deaf?”

  But I just nodded Ginger toward the door.

  “We’re using the restroom,” I said. “And now we’re going to class. You?”

  I didn’t wait for an answer. Ginger and I bolted out the door. And straight into Heidi and Riannon.

  “Excuse us,” I said.

  Ginger and I stood there, just like we were supposed to. Any second they would have to move.

  Yeah, so why was my heart slamming in my chest like ten hammers? And why weren’t they moving?