So Not Okay

by Nancy Rue

  I counted. One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Three . . .

  I got to ten, which was the point where we needed to go around either side of them. I gave Heidi one more blank stare—

  And she stepped aside.

  “What are you doing?” Riannon said to her.

  We didn’t hear the answer. Ginger and I walked right between them and straight into the science room.

  When we got to our desks, which Mitch had already pulled into a circle, Winnie looked like she needed to go to the restroom.

  “What took you so long?” she said. “I was starting to get scared.”

  “We got past Shelby, but Heidi and Riannon were waiting outside.”

  “They’re onto us,” Mitch said.

  Winnie whimpered.

  “Yeah, but I think it’s okay,” I said. “It takes them exactly ten seconds to give up. I timed it.”

  “Could we please work on our project?”

  Ophelia’s voice was small and dry, like little flakes of Grass Valley snow. I actually saw Winnie shiver.

  “I’ve been thinking about this,” Phee said.

  I gripped the side of my desk. Should I hope?

  “And since I’m not putting together the presentation, I should do some of the writing. I am one of the best writers.”

  “You are!” Winnie said. “We could work on it together!”

  “No. Just give me half and I’ll do it by myself.”

  I thought Winnie was going to slide right out of her desk. It was one thing to be all snippy with me. I could take it. But not Winnie. I really, really wanted to tell Ophelia that was one of the meanest things I’d seen somebody do, and I’d seen a lot of mean stuff lately.

  Everybody went silent. I started counting. One Mississippi. Two Mississippi.

  Once again I got to ten. Then Ophelia said, “Okay. We can do it together. But it has to be here at school.”

  “Not after school,” Mitch said. “That’s when we meet at Tori’s.”

  “At lunch then,” Ophelia said.

  Winnie started to nod, and then she looked at me.

  “Go for it,” I said.

  The prickles all seemed to lie down like porcupine quills. We handed our research to Winnie, and she tucked it into her folder. Then we just sat there and waited for the fifteen minutes to be up.

  It was the longest fifteen minutes in the history of tween-hood.

  Mitch knew what she was talking about when she said the Pack was onto us. When fourth period ended and we gathered to walk Ginger to the cafeteria, the Alpha Wolf and her Pack were nowhere in sight. The BBAs, however, were stationed six feet in front of the door. They were hanging out all casual, doing the usual burping and shoving, but as we approached like four people all sharing the same umbrella, they formed a line, shoulder to shoulder. The Pack couldn’t even do all their own dirty work?

  “Keep walking,” I whispered. “Safe in a group.”

  “But it’s boys,” Winnie whispered back.

  “I can take ’em,” Mitch muttered to me.

  “No,” I said.

  “Then what?” Ginger was obviously trying to muffle the foghorn, but any minute she was going to be blaring.

  “Gold thumb,” I said.

  “Huh?” Mitch said.

  I stepped out in front of the tribelet. “Hey, guys?”

  Andrew turned his shaggy head. “You talkin’ to me?”

  “Yeah. Just a heads-up: Mr. Jett always comes around that corner exactly seven seconds from now. If he catches you hanging out here, he starts counting up for lunch detention.”

  “How do you know?” Douglas said. He had the most-likely-to-head-off-into-the-stratosphere voice of all adolescent boys.

  “Because one more and I get mine,” I said. “So if you’ll excuse us.”

  Andrew got on his toes and looked over Mitch’s shoulder down the hall. Douglas and Patrick jockeyed around us on the other side, peering with their mouths hanging open. Among the three of them, they seemed to have lost exactly twenty-one IQ points.

  Which was fine with us, because we simply walked between them and into the lunchroom. Behind us, I heard Mr. Jett yell, “What are you boys doing hanging around out here?”

  Like I said, perfect.

  Until the four of us got to our table. Ophelia was already there. She smiled at first, and hope flickered up somewhere inside me.

  And then her eyes went from large brown circles to lines so thin I could hardly see the brown at all. They were slanted right at Ginger.

  Mitch and Winnie obviously didn’t see that because they both slid into place across from Phee. Beside me, Ginger took two little sidesteps.

  “I’ll just go sit . . . in the bathroom,” she said.

  “No.” I sucked in enough air to get my heart to stop slamming. “You’re in the tribelet. You should eat with the tribelet.”

  Ginger searched my face with her blueberry eyes. It was a strange moment to notice that her hair looked like it had been washed just that morning, and that she smelled like laundry detergent. She didn’t look exactly pretty, but she was definitely prettier than Ophelia right then. Nobody looked pretty with their face all flattened like that.

  I sat down next to her.

  “Could you slide down so Ginger can sit here?” I said.

  It didn’t take ten seconds for Ophelia to respond. She stood right up and said, “No, I won’t. If she’s going to sit here, I’m sitting someplace else.”

  For the first time that day, Ginger gave in to a blurt. “Why do you hate me, Ophelia?!”

  Mitch yanked Ginger’s arm, and she dropped to the seat beside her.

  “Save the Tears,” Mitch muttered.

  “But she’s not a bully,” Ginger said. “Can’t I tell her how I feel?”

  I had to bite my lip to keep from pointing out that Phee was sure acting like one. Ginger bit hers too and lowered her voice maybe a tenth of a decibel.

  “Why do you hate me?” she said again.

  Ophelia had her tray in her hands. “I don’t hate you. I just hate that you came in here and changed everything.”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “She didn’t change things, Phee,” I said. “The Pack did. And we can’t stand around and let them get away with it.”

  Ophelia’s knuckles went white on her tray. She was blinking hard, trying not to cry, I knew. Hope . . .

  One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Three . . .

  “You know what?” She flipped the braid she’d loosened from around her head. “Don’t call me ‘Phee’ anymore. In fact, don’t call me anything. I’m so done.”

  She slipped behind me with her tray over my head. I wouldn’t have been surprised if she had dropped it on me. But she held on to it until she got to the end of the table and then she leaned to look past Mitch at Winnie, who was huddled in her seat and trembling like the small, scared rabbit she suddenly was again.

  “Meet me before school tomorrow if you want to work on this,” she said. “Or we can just divide it up.”

  With another flip of her braid, Ophelia turned to go.

  “It’s okay, Win,” I said. “We can get Ginger to her locker without you.”

  “No,” said the wee voice. “Ophelia?”

  Ophelia looked over her shoulder.

  “I’m helping Ginger before school,” Winnie said. “So I guess we should just divide up the writing.”

  I expected another braid flip. What we got was Ophelia’s face twisting like it hurt.

  “See?” she said to me. “You even turned Winnie against me! We are never . . . ever going to be friends again.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  At first I thought I really would end up a pile of confetti. When Mitch escorted Ginger to the restroom after lunch, I told Winnie to go ahead to her locker. I needed some time to think. At least I remembered not to linger in the cafeteria. I so didn’t need lunch detention right now.

  I walked really slowly to Mrs. Fickus’s room and did what I
did best. I argued. With myself.

  Ophelia was the only best friend I ever had.

  Until now.

  I should be loyal to her, right?

  Or wrong? What if we didn’t believe the same things anymore like we always did? Like that boys were absurd little creeps and science projects were cool and she was the writer and I was the mathematician and we were the smartest ones in the class . . .

  “You’re like a gang now,” someone said.

  I smelled strawberry shampoo and new clothes and peppermint gum.

  I was only one door away from Mrs. Fickus’s room. I could just go straight there and not say anything. I could “Walk It, Girl.”

  But Kylie was suddenly in front of me, walking backward. One glance over my shoulder with that peripheral vision and I saw Heidi and Riannon. Shelby and Izzy must have been sent away in shame.

  “You are a gang,” Kylie said.

  “I’m a gang all by myself?” I said.

  “No,” she said, like I was an idiot.

  Why, I wondered, did everybody think Kylie was so pretty? Her lip was halfway up her trumpet nostrils so that her gums showed. What was cute about that?

  “You and Mitch the Witch and Winnie the Ninny and Gingerbread.”

  I stopped walking. So did Kylie. Either Heidi or Riannon, I couldn’t tell which, stepped on the back of my sneaker but I didn’t flinch. I was too busy deciding whether it was worth it to smack Kylie right there. She had names—ugly names—for my friends. Was I supposed to just let her get away with that? Was there a card for that?

  I sucked in air and started walking again. Kylie fell into step beside me, except just enough ahead to make it awkward.

  “Yeah, you’re a gang,” she said. “Mitch the Witch, Winnie the Ninny, Gingerbread and . . . Victoria, my pet.”

  “Don’t.”

  I came to a halt, and this time Riannon plowed right into me.

  “Stop right in front of me, why don’tcha?” she said.

  “Why can’t I call you that, Victoria?”

  Because only Granna calls me that, and it sounds dirty coming out of your mouth just like everything else you say because you’re an Alpha Wolf.

  All of that crowded into my brain, ready to bust out. I jammed my hand in my jean jacket pocket and felt the cards. I wasn’t with my group. I couldn’t think of a thing I wanted that these people would want too. I wasn’t going to cry.

  Baby Step. Take a baby step. Toward what?

  “Since you’re a gang, maybe you want to fight us,” Kylie was saying. She shook her hair back, and it splashed all over and settled right back to where it was, like she’d trained it to do that. “Not like beat-you-up kind of fight. We don’t do that.”

  By then the hall was filling up. I saw Mrs. Fickus step out of her door. She was looking the other way. Why did the teachers always seem to be looking the other way?

  Kylie got right up beside me, and before I knew it, I was being moved to the side of the hall. “If you want war, we’ll give you war,” she whispered in my ear, her breath like a heater. “You declare it, and we’ll fight you.” My back pressed the wall. “But you won’t win.”

  Baby Step? I could only think of one. It was like Lydia was right there in front of me, coaxing me forward.

  “We’re not declaring war on you,” I said. “We’re declaring war on bullying itself.”

  Kylie took a baby step too, backward. For exactly three seconds, she looked surprised. I took that opportunity to slide away from her and head for the door. Three bodies were suddenly around me. Mitch, Winnie, and Ginger. They sure didn’t feel like a witch and a ninny and a moldy piece of Gingerbread to me.

  “Did you just call me a bully?” Kylie said.

  The tribelet just kept Walkin’ It, Girl. When we got to the door, Mrs. Fickus was looking right at us. Of course.

  She tilted her sprayed-in-place head. “Is everything all right, y’all?”

  It was my turn to be surprised. So surprised that I didn’t say what I probably should have said, which was, No, it’s not all right. There’s bullying going on right under your nose, and you won’t even see it because you think Kylie Steppe is perfect.

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  “No, it’s not,” Mitch said to me when we got to our seats. “Something happened, didn’t it?.”

  “I’ll tell you about it later,” I said.

  I pretended to read the short story Mrs. Fickus assigned us and tried to get my heart to stop pounding so hard it hurt my chest. I had just declared war on bullying.

  And there was no turning back now.

  I waited until the tribelet was at my house—eating blackberry cobbler with our cocoa because Mom was actually home—before I told them what happened in the hall with Kylie. I wanted Lydia to hear it.

  “Did I do it right?” I said.

  “More than.”

  Lydia folded her tidy hands, which still shook a little. “You did great. But it sounds like you can’t overestimate the power these girls think they have over you.”

  “Think they have,” Mitch said.

  “I want you to be very careful, Mitch.” Lydia’s eyes were like drills. “It would be so easy for you to turn this into a war on them, not on what they’re doing.”

  “How do we know the difference?” Mitch said.

  Lydia got that look like she was flipping answers through her head the way Mom flipped through the folders in her file cabinet. We all waited. I guess we’d figured out by then that anything that came out of Lydia’s mouth was worth waiting for.

  “You think of them as the Pack, right?” she said at last.

  We all nodded.

  “Why is that?”

  “Because they’re always skulking around, watching for something to attack,” I said.

  Ginger bellowed a laugh. “Did you just say skulking? What a cool word!”

  She sure was in a good mood. I felt like I was carrying everybody’s backpack in the sixth grade on my shoulders, and she was laughing.

  “Do you want to be like that, attacking back?” Lydia said.

  “I do when I’m doing it,” Mitch said. “Then later I feel like I’m not any better than they are.”

  Lydia pulled one of her square little hands out of the tidy fold and held it up to Mitch. Now she was high-fiving.

  “That’s exactly it,” Lydia said. “What do you want to do instead? What will you feel good about later?”

  “Stop the attack!” Ginger said.

  “Right. And if you do that like wolves, it’s just going to end up in a big old nasty thing with teeth tearing and fur flying . . .”

  “No!” Winnie looked like somebody was about to put their teeth into her right then.

  Lydia rubbed her arm. “Sorry. But you get my point, right?”

  “So what animal are we supposed to be?” Ginger said.

  Mrs. Fickus would be loving this conversation.

  “Sheep,” Lydia said.

  Mitch grunted. I hadn’t heard her do that all day.

  “Just hear me out. Sheep never attack, and they never fight back. They just go where they’re supposed to go and they stay pure. But you also have to be sharp.”

  “Um, sheep are stupid,” I said. “No offense to the sheep but, they kind of are.”

  “They’re smart enough to follow when they’re led right,” Lydia said. Her eyes glowed at me.

  You’re the leader of the tribelet, she’d told me.

  And I was the one who had declared war on bullying.

  “Okay, Win,” I said. “We need a new card.”

  Winnie poised her pen over her notebook.

  “Think Sharp. Stay Pure.”

  “I like it,” Mitch said.

  “I do too.” Lydia looked at each of us, so that we knew we were being looked at one person at a time. “Don’t be pulled into playing the game like they do. But don’t be bluffed into silence either.”

  Winnie raised her hand.

  “Yes, Win?” Lydia
said.

  “Should Tori have told Mrs. Fickus what happened in the hall? Wasn’t that a ‘Report Alert’?”

  “Can I answer that? Because I’ve been thinking about it,” I said.

  Lydia nodded.

  “Kylie said they don’t fight fight, like hitting and stuff. So it’s not like anybody’s in trouble.”

  “Yet,” Lydia said. “Just remember there’s more than one way to be hurt.”

  “I know,” Ginger said.

  “You’re protecting everyone’s right to be exactly who they are.”

  Everybody smiled at Lydia.

  “Tori.”

  I looked up to see Mom in the kitchen doorway. She crooked her finger at me. She only did that when she was about to do a very mother thing.

  “Go ahead,” Lydia said. “We’re almost through anyway. I have to leave for an appointment in a minute.”

  I left the table and followed Mom. When she led me all the way to my bedroom, I knew this was going to be more than a “Why didn’t you pick up your dirty clothes?” kind of chat. We hadn’t had one of these since I let Nestlé eat my brussels sprouts when I thought she wasn’t looking. Back in December.

  Then she closed the door. Not good.

  “I didn’t want to embarrass you in front of your friends,” she said.

  She leaned against my closet door and motioned for me to sit on the bed. I guessed that was because I was getting so tall and she needed to be able to look down at me. That was not good either.

  “What did I do?” I said.

  “I’m not exactly sure. I just got a call from Ophelia’s mom. She says Ophelia’s so upset she’s making herself sick because you won’t be friends with her anymore. Something about an Indian tribe?”

  Mom’s face was one big question mark—so big I didn’t even know where to start.

  “She’s the one who doesn’t want to be friends with me,” I said, trying not to let my voice go all high like Douglas. “Or at least she won’t unless I drop out of the tribelet.”

  Mom pressed her fingers against her temples. “What is that, Tori? Is it some kind of clique?”

  “No!” I lost the battle with the screechy voice. “It started out as our science project and then—”

  “Mrs. Smith also said you’ve cut Ophelia out of the project.”