So Not Okay

by Nancy Rue

  Only it wasn’t how I expected it to be.

  She had a snack ready like always in the kitchen. Her hummus and pita bread, my favorite. And Greek olives. But that was the only thing that was like always.

  “Tor,” she said when she had folded her shaky little hands, “I have to go into the hospital for surgery.”

  Did someone just run over me with a truck? A big truck?

  “Surgery?” I said. “What kind of surgery?”

  She kind of smiled, although she didn’t seem like she was in the mood to. “I knew you’d want to know that right off. I have spinal stenosis. It’s a common complication of dwarfism.”

  “That’s what hurts.”

  “Yes. That’s what hurts. I’ve known I was going to have to have a laminectomy and we planned it for this summer when the movie’s done, but the symptoms have gotten worse and they want to do it right away.”

  “What happens if you don’t?”

  “I might lose the ability to walk.”

  I couldn’t say any of the things screaming in my head. You won’t die, will you? You won’t stay asleep for weeks like Granna, right? You won’t be different? You’ll come back—you’ll be here . . .

  “I’ll be okay, Taylor,” she said.

  “Do you promise?”

  She paused. “No, I guess I can’t promise that. Nobody knows what can possibly happen during an operation on your spine, but statistics are in my favor. You like statistics, right?”

  Until now. Now I just wanted a promise.

  “Besides, even if I’m not physically okay, I’ll be okay here.” She pressed her hand against her stomach. “I’ve got God, and that means I’ll have the strength to get through whatever lies ahead.” She moved her hand to my arm. “You will too. I know you’re worried about the tribelet carrying on, but you know how to do it. And I’m not the only adult in the world. You’re going to need more grown-up support anyway.”

  “There isn’t anybody else!” I said. “You’re the only one who can help us!” I waved my hands in front of my face, like I could erase what I’d just said. “That sounds really selfish. I’m scared for you, and I want you to get better. We can just wait ’til you come back.”

  “I don’t know when I’m coming back here. I could have a long recovery ahead. I’ll be working from the rehab center for your dad, but I won’t be here until I’m really ready.” She made little fists and rested her face on them. “Then I’ll be back to at least visit. We are friends, right?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  But you’re leaving me. You’re leaving me. Just when I need you the most.

  “I know this is the worst possible time for me to go.”

  I actually put my hand on my forehead to make sure my brain hadn’t opened up for her to see inside.

  “But you can do this, you and the tribelet. You have all the tools. Do you want to go over them?”

  What I wanted to do was tell her about the plot and ask her whether to trust Mr. V. But Dad opened the back door and fended Nestlé off and said, “You ready to go?”

  Lydia looked at the cell phone I hadn’t even noticed on the table. “Is it that time already?”

  “Where are you going?” I said.

  “To the hospital in Auburn,” she said. “Just pre-surgery tests. The operation’s tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “You can come with us now if you want, Tor,” Dad said. “We’ll get burgers on the way back.”

  But I shook my head. I knew if I went I’d want to talk about all my stuff, and I didn’t want to with Dad there. And it just felt wrong to be thinking about that when Lydia . . .

  “I’ll stay here with Nestlé,” I said.

  She climbed down from her chair and I stood up and she hugged me around the waist. Her head came to my chest, and I could look down into the top of her curls.

  “There’s mac and cheese in the fridge,” she said. “Comfort food.”

  When they were gone, I pulled it out. As I placed the dish in the microwave, I started to cry.

  When I got to school Friday morning I knew I looked baggy-eyed and sick like Ophelia did the day before. But I couldn’t abandon Mitch and Winnie and especially Ginger. After yesterday when she said, “I can never, ever do this without you,” I couldn’t be absent. Not until this “war” was over.

  Only, what war?

  The Pack had totally backed off. Mr. V was still waiting for somebody to come forward and, as I heard Patrick put it in the lunch line, “spill their guts.”

  Boys were so gross. But at least you knew what was going on with them. Kylie and the others were walking around with faces like in those old-fashioned photographs where everybody looks like they died and don’t know it.

  Ophelia still wasn’t talking to me in class, and she always disappeared the rest of the time. I had no idea where she went, and I didn’t have time to look. We were still going everywhere with Ginger, just in case.

  Things were so quiet I started thinking Ophelia had heard it wrong about the so-called plot. Or maybe it had gotten all blown up in her mind. Even my mom said she had a “strong sense of the dramatic.”

  But my invisible antennae went up again after school.

  Mitch, Winnie, and I went to Ginger’s locker with her as usual. Ginger had her whole head in there, searching for who knew what. She had as much stuff in her locker as she did in her backpack.

  “Do you have anything left in your house?” Mitch said.

  Winnie giggled as she slid our project binder into her way-neat backpack on the floor. I bet everything in there was in alphabetical order. That was just our Winnie.

  “Winnie the Ninny,” Kylie had called her. It was so hard for me not to call her Kylie the Wiley. Like the coyote in those old Road Runner cartoons.

  “Excuse me?”

  I jumped at least an inch and found myself looking right into the blue eyes with the gold specks. Jeepers . . . I hadn’t said any of that out loud, had I?

  None of the Pack looked like I’d just called their leader a coyote to her face. In fact, they were all wearing that Miss Innocence look they gave teachers all the time.

  “Gold Thumb,” Winnie whispered.

  The perfect card for this.

  “Did you need something?” I said to Kylie.

  “Yes.” She bumped her shoulder into Riannon’s.

  “We wanted to say that we’re declaring a truce,” Riannon said.

  She was still smiling, but I guessed there was nothing she could do about her eyes being so close together. That sort of canceled out the grin.

  “Define truce,” I said.

  This time Kylie shouldered Heidi. They had obviously divided up the parts before they came.

  “We don’t want to fight you guys anymore,” Heidi said.

  Mitch grunted. “Who said we were fighting?”

  Heidi opened her mouth, but Kylie waved her off like she was suddenly annoying her.

  “Whatever. We just don’t want a war. We’ll stay out of your way, and you’ll stay out of ours. Okay?”

  “For real?”

  That came from Ginger, who had finally pulled her head out of her locker. Her red hair was full of static so some of it flew out from her head like it was trying to get away. Izzy snickered, until Kylie glared at Heidi, who delivered the glare to Izzy.

  “How long?” Mitch said.

  “How long what?” Riannon said.

  “A truce has a time limit.”

  They all looked the way people do onstage when everybody forgets their lines. I saw it happen once in a play Ophelia was in. Phee had saved the day. I could do that.

  “How about forever?” I said.

  “Fine,” Kylie said. “Because really, this just isn’t worth it. Know what I mean?”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said. “I definitely know what you mean.”

  The gold and blue eyes locked onto mine, and I could almost hear Ophelia’s voice in my head. I know they’re planning a plot. But I heard Lydia’
s too. Stay pure. Think sharp. Kylie might say, “I want a truce,” with those glossy lips, but her eyes were telling me, “Bring it.”

  And then her lips said, “All right, everybody shake on it.”

  “Huh?” Mitch said.

  “To make it official.” Riannon stepped up to Mitch and stuck out her hand.

  Mitch looked at it like she thought it might have lice.

  “Baby Steps,” I muttered to her.

  I put my hand out to Kylie, and she squeezed it for exactly one tenth of a second. I didn’t watch to see if she wiped it on her jeans after. The three-foot space in front of Ginger’s locker looked like one of those scenes on the news when a candidate for something comes through and everybody’s pumping each other’s arms up and down when they don’t even know each other. Kylie insisted that every single person shake every other single person’s hand—although there was a nanosecond pause before she let Ginger touch her. That time she did wipe her palm on her jeans.

  Then she turned to Shelby. “Are we done?”

  What was Shelby, the handshake monitor?

  “Uh-huh,” Shelby said.

  Kylie splashed her hair along the side of her face. “All right then,” she said and led the Pack away from the lockers. I waited until I heard their pricey Uggs pad down the stairs before I turned to the tribelet and said, “That was weird.”

  “Do you think it was for real?” Winnie said.

  She looked so hopeful, with her little black eyebrows reaching for her bangs. Ginger was smiling so big I could see most of her teeth. They didn’t look so buttery anymore.

  “I think we should trust it until they give us a reason not to,” I said.

  “Huh.”

  “What huh?” I said to Mitch.

  “You sound like Lydia.”

  I smiled myself then. But I wished Lydia were there. I kind of knew the war wasn’t over. The Pack was just going to fight it in a different way.

  I wished I knew what that was.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Saturday started off as a circle-it-on-the-calendar-in-red day. In a good way.

  Mom had pancakes going when I got up. Dad had left for San Francisco to meet with his producers, and she said it was going to be a Mom-and-Tori Day, except for the two hours in the afternoon when she was going to visit Granna and then check in at her shop.

  “Can you take all that time off?” I said.

  Mom paused with the whipped cream can in her hand and licked at her lips for a minute. “I’m sorry, sweetie.”

  “For what?”

  “For not being here for you at all these last few weeks. I know you’ve been going through some things, with Ophelia and all, and I haven’t been much help.”

  I felt like I had a hair ball in my throat. “It’s okay.”

  “No. No, it’s not. That’s why I’m making today all about you. So eat up, and then we’ll do whatever you want.”

  “Whatever I wanted” was to tell her everything that was going on with the Pack. But I knew she wouldn’t really get it. She thought it was just “drama.” Besides, how often did these kinds of days happen? I didn’t want to drag the entire Wolf Pack into my time with my mom.

  “Bookstore?” I said.

  “Yes. What else?”

  “Um, lunch at Cirino’s?”

  Mom laughed. “You’re not going to be a cheap date, are you?”

  She sprayed some whipped cream on my nose, and I was pretty sure I’d made the right choice.

  It was a great morning. We went to the bookstore next to the Lazy Dog, and I got another biography of Einstein (I’d already read one). I was ready to get back to real science.

  After meatball subs at Cirino’s, we got ice cream at the Lazy Dog and walked around licking our cones. It reminded me of the last time Granna and I did that. The day she told me Lola Montez dared to be different. I didn’t even know that day that I was going to have to take that dare, not just Winnie. It suddenly struck me that I wasn’t the same as I was then. I was different. I couldn’t measure it. I just knew.

  When we got home, Mom asked me if I wanted to go with her to the hospital and then to her shop, but I told her I needed to stay home and work on the paper Mrs. Fickus had assigned us.

  “Is Ophelia going to help you?” Mom said.

  She was already standing in the doorway, car keys in hand, so I just shook my head.

  “You two still having trouble?”

  “It’ll be okay,” I said.

  “Maybe tonight I can help. We’ll talk about it over dinner. Pizza?”

  “Really?” I said.

  “I’ll get the good kind at the Briar Patch. Keep the phone with you.”

  From the window of my room, I watched her go. She must really feel bad about not being there for me. She never suggested pizza for supper, even the organic gourmet kind. It was a red letter day.

  But as soon as I sat down to write my paper for English, it was like things started falling on me.

  The topic was “The Person You Admire the Most.” At least we didn’t have to compare that person to an animal or a tree or a model of car. Mrs. Fickus did say to try to use a metaphor that we could carry through our five paragraphs.

  It was like she was in the room with me. “In your first paragraph, tell what your three points are. Give each point its own paragraph. In your last paragraph, remind us what you’ve just told us.”

  I could do that, even without Ophelia, if I could decide who I admired the most. The list I made was pretty impressive. Dad. Mom. Granna. Lydia. Nestlé. No, he wasn’t a person, at least not to Mrs. Fickus. Albert Einstein. Stephen Hawking . . . but she said it had to be somebody we knew.

  I had just decided to approach it scientifically when the phone rang. It was Winnie. The minute I heard her voice, I knew she was freaking out.

  “To-ri!” was my first clue.

  “What’s wrong?” I said.

  “It’s gone!”

  “What’s gone?”

  “The binder for our project!”

  “It’s in your backpack, Win. I saw you put it in there.”

  “It’s not there anymore!”

  I stopped counting exclamation points.

  “Are you sure?” I said.

  She didn’t even answer me, probably because it was the lamest question ever. Winnie always knew where all her stuff was all the time. That was why she was the one holding on to it for us.

  “Maybe it fell out in your mom’s car,” I said.

  “No, Tori! It’s not anywhere!”

  I didn’t tell her it had to be somewhere. She was starting to cry in big gulps.

  “What are we going to do? We don’t have time to do the whole thing over!”

  “Okay,” I said. And then I said “okay,” again. I had to say something while my brain flipped through its files. Why didn’t we have cards for this kind of stuff too?

  “Okay, first of all, save the tears,” I said.

  “I can’t!”

  “Okay, forget that. Baby steps. That’s what we need. We’ll get everybody to find their notes again while you keep looking. You call Ginger, and I’ll call Mitch. What’s her number?”

  “I don’t know,” Winnie said.

  “What about the list?”

  “It was in the binder.”

  “Oh. Well . . . then we just wait ’til we get to school Monday. Maybe somebody found it and turned it in.”

  “They found it in my backpack?”

  I felt like something was crawling on my skin.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But it’s not like the end of the world, okay?” Jeepers, what would Ophelia say right now? “Hey, Win?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I love you. It’s gonna be okay.”

  “Okay . . .”

  It came out all wobbly and wet, but at least she didn’t sound as bad. Ophelia would’ve done that better, though. I missed her.

  I missed everybody. When Winnie hung up, I felt so alone, like the house was
too big for me to be in it.

  “Come on, Nestlé,” I said. “We’re going up to the Spot.”

  It was the last day of February. Some Grass Valley days in almost-March were (A) so cold you just wanted to wrap up in a blanket and read about Einstein with your dog. Or at least I did. Or they were (B) hurt-your-eyes bright and only cool enough for your favorite long-sleeved T-shirt.

  That day was type B, so even though it was three thirty in the afternoon, it wasn’t cold inside the cabin. I left the door partly open to let some sun in, and Nestlé laid right in the light-shaft on the floor and started snoring in exactly sixteen seconds. I counted.

  It used to be that everything was that exact. There was a cause for everything. If A happened, then you knew B was going to happen. Now it seemed like almost nothing was the way you expected it.

  I hadn’t said it to Winnie, but I knew what happened to the report. The reason for the whole truce thing and all the handshaking was to distract us so one of those Wolves—probably Shelby—could take the binder out of Winnie’s backpack without anybody noticing. I never saw Winnie zip it up after she put it in there because the Pack arrived right then.

  But I couldn’t prove it. The Pack was always so careful to make sure we didn’t have evidence. Even the “vandalism” on our charts couldn’t be definitely linked to them. They were smart. Scary smart. And when it came to this stuff, they were smarter than me.

  Nestlé did a twist thing, the way he did when something woke him up out of a doggie dream. One of his brown ears flopped the wrong way as he lifted his head and sniffed. His nose was like a vacuum cleaner hose.

  And then he barked, so loud and deep I went, “Jeepers! What, Nes’?”

  But he was already out the cabin door, barking and crouching like he was going to jump off the rock ledge.

  “Use the path, Nut Bar,” I said.

  He backed up and headed for it. I watched from the cabin door as he disappeared in the bushes and then came into sight again at the bottom. The barking turned to a happy yip. That was his “Oh boy, a treat. You have a treat for me. Oh boy” voice. I was going to have to ask our neighbor not to give him so many or he was going to turn into a wide-load Lab.