“What do you mean ‘we’? You wrote on the other essay topic, remember? You wouldn’t even be involved with this. You just want to make everyone else do extra work,” I said.
“That’s not the way the system works,” Melissa explained, as if she were some kind of expert on the subject. “Mr. Borden explained it in class that day. If there’s an irregularity in giving the test to a group, the whole group has to be retested. I had the same advantage everyone else did. Who knows what I would have done on test day if I hadn’t already seen one of the questions?”
My mouth dropped open for a moment and then I said, “You wrote an essay on the second question because Mr. Borden told you the answer you wrote to the first one for class would have received a low score. I’ll say you had an advantage.”
Melissa looked as if she was going to burst into flame right in front of me.
“That’s not why I used the second question! I never even thought of that! Never! I was just trying to behave like a decent person. Which question did you choose, as if I have to ask. And why did you choose it? Again, as if I have to ask.”
This argument wasn’t going to lead to anything good for me. Besides, if Melissa didn’t calm down, I was afraid people would start to stare at us.
“Why do you even want me to go with you, anyway?” I asked. “You hardly ever speak to me except to complain about something. I would have thought you’d have asked one of the A-kids.”
“The ‘A-kids’?” Melissa repeated. I’d definitely distracted her from her rant.
“You know. The kids who are in all those accelerated classes you take.”
Melissa laughed. “That’s what you call them? That’s good. That fits.”
“You’re one of them!” I exclaimed.
“So are you. You’re in two accelerated classes. Remember?”
Oh, if she only knew how I’d gotten into those classes. I very carefully didn’t tell her.
“Ask someone else to go with you,” I said instead.
“I already have,” she admitted.
“Who?”
“Everybody in our English class. They all said no.”
“All of them? Brad? Chelsea?” I asked.
“That’s what I just told you,” Melissa snapped. “They all said no.”
“Then you shouldn’t be surprised to hear that I’m saying no, too.” If Chelsea said no, I sure wasn’t going to say yes.
“Why won’t you go?” Melissa asked.
“For the same reason they wouldn’t go,” I answered.
“Which is?”
We were right outside our English class, which was not the greatest place to be talking about this. We also were running out of time.
“Whatever they said,” I answered vaguely.
“You think Mr. Borden’s a real nice guy and don’t want to get him in trouble?”
“Oh, come on! They said that?” She had to be making that up.
“ ‘A-kids’ like their teachers,” Melissa pointed out.
“I’ve noticed that,” I admitted.
Any fool could see that Melissa was the somebody who needed the help Happy Kid! was talking about. I didn’t care. When I thought of the phrase “working together with others,” Melissa was not the first “other” who came to my mind. She didn’t even make the Top Ten.
“Class is going to start,” I told her and walked past her into our classroom.
I was able to avoid Melissa most of Thursday morning because I had an orthodontist appointment and got to school just as third period was starting. I latched on to Brad on the way to English so she wouldn’t be on me during the walk between classes. One of the other guy A-kids rushed up to join us.
“I don’t want to be alone in the hall.” He laughed. “I’m afraid Melissa might get me.”
“Me too,” I said.
“She asked you to go see Mr. Alldredge with her?” Brad asked.
I could have gotten all upset because he sounded surprised that Melissa would ask for my help with a job no one else wanted. Then I decided to take the attitude of hey, two A-kids are walking and talking with me. What more do I want?
“Yeah, I couldn’t believe she was asking me, either. But once all you guys said no, I was all that was left,” I said. “How long do you think it will be before she gives up?”
“She’ll go by herself before she gives up,” Brad answered. “When we were in fifth grade, she was the only kid in her classroom who would eat lunch at the special-ed kids’ table. She didn’t do it all the time, and there weren’t any kids there she was friends with. She said it was the right thing to do.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “She went around bugging everyone else, trying to make them do it, too?”
Brad laughed. “She got me to do it once. The really funny part is the special-ed kids didn’t like her. They wanted her to leave them alone.”
“You know what the funny part about this testing business is?” the other A-kid asked. “Melissa is right. We did have an unfair advantage because we had a chance to practice that essay question. It’s just . . . I don’t know how to put it, but . . .”
“Sometimes you can be too right?” Brad suggested.
The other boy laughed and said to me, “We’ve known her since first grade.” He turned back to Brad and asked, “Do you remember back in second grade how she used to run tattling to the teacher all the time when other kids did things they weren’t supposed to?”
“Oh, yeah,” Brad recalled. “She wasn’t even trying to get anyone in trouble. She just thought she was doing the right thing. She just didn’t understand that—”
“—sometimes you can be too right!” the other A-kid recited along with him.
For a fraction of a second, a really short one, I almost felt sorry for Melissa because she couldn’t quite figure out how to get along in life the way all the other A-kids had. But it passed quickly because the three of us there in the hallway were laughing, and then a couple of other A-kids joined us. By the time I entered our English classroom, I was surrounded by people and not thinking about Melissa at all.
I kept checking Happy Kid! hoping it would open to a new message. No such luck. At taekwondo on Thursday night I got confused while I was doing my form, and Mr. Goldman sent me to the back of the dojang to practice on my own for a while. He said I still wasn’t controlling myself. (I may have stopped and stamped my foot or something when I realized that another white belt was going one way while I was going the other.) I thought for sure after that there’d be a new message from Happy Kid! It seemed like a good time for it to pop open to a page on how everyone loves people who are humble and listen to their teachers or how it takes patience to form satisfying relationships.
But no. All I found was “Help!”
Melissa was waiting at my locker Friday morning.
“I have an appointment with Mr. Alldredge at three o’clock on Monday afternoon,” Melissa began.
“Good for you!”
“It would be really helpful if you came with me,” she said. “I should have someone else there who knows that we had a chance to practice the essay.”
“No, it would not be helpful to have me there,” I said.
Instead of arguing with me, she reached into her backpack, which she had propped on the floor next to her feet, and pulled out some papers. “I want you to read these. They’re the newspaper articles I found on the Internet.”
“Thank you, anyway, but I already have an article for current events.”
“These articles are all about other teachers and schools that made mistakes with their standardized tests. It was a mistake for us to practice that essay before the SSASies,” Melissa insisted.
“That’s right. It was a mistake. Mistakes happen. Get over it. Get over yourself,” I added for good measure. “You’re being really negative about this, by the way. You’re only seeing the worst in this situation.”
“What would be a positive way of looking at this situation?” Melissa asked.
>
“I have a good shot at getting into the ninth-grade English class offered for eighth-graders because I accidentally practiced that essay is a positive way of looking at it. I want to be in that class next year. And since no one really cheated, I don’t see any problem with this situation. Just the opposite. It’s all good.”
“So you would have to take the test again. Big deal! So what?” Melissa exclaimed.
“That’s easy for you to say. You’re an A-kid,” I reminded her.
“You are, too.”
“Yeah, well,” I said uncomfortably, since I knew that wasn’t exactly true, “you do not want me to go see Mr. Alldredge with you. I am the guy who sat in Alldredge’s office with a state trooper last year. I am the guy he thought was going to use a screwdriver as some kind of weapon of mass destruction.”
If she were a really nice person instead of Melissa, she would have said, “Oh, that’s all in your head! No one ever thought that!” Instead she said, “I think that could work for us. We’d be a student leader and a—whatever you are—banding together for a common cause. That would make our argument a lot stronger.”
“Mr. Alldredge also thinks I’m part of Jake Rogers’s posse. Will that work for us?”
Melissa made a face. “Why do you insist on hanging around with Jake?”
“He hangs around with me.”
“Well, it can’t be helped.”
“I’m not going with you! You’re just going to make trouble,” I told her. “You’ll have to do it by yourself.”
“Why is it so wrong of me to want to do the right thing?” Melissa asked.
“If you’re so sure you’re right, why don’t you go by yourself?”
“I don’t want to go there alone. I’ve never done anything like this before,” Melissa explained.
“No? I heard you used to tattle when you were in second grade,” I said.
Melissa gasped. “I was seven years old! I didn’t know any better. Why won’t people forget about that? Who told you, anyway?”
“It doesn’t matter. I shouldn’t have said anything.”
She grabbed my arm as I started to go into advisory and made me stay out in the hall with her.
“Do you remember that Happy Kid! book?”
“What about it?” I asked suspiciously.
“If you don’t come with me on Monday, I’m going to tell everyone you were reading it. Everyone will know you’re a loser who needs a self-help book.”
I pulled my arm away from her. “Go ahead. I’ve had people talk about me before.”
I hoped I looked cool as I walked across the classroom to my desk because inside I was screaming, Everyone is going to know!
“Kyle’s got himself a woman,” Jake said before he even had his flabby self settled on his stool in the art room.
“Who?” I asked. I didn’t actually “have” Chelsea, so I didn’t think he could be talking about her.
“I saw you walking with Melissa Esposito in the hall this morning. Did you get her to rub her great big chest all over you?” Jake asked.
“People who really know Melissa hardly notice her great big chest because of her great big mouth,” I answered.
“Oh. Did she rub that all over you?”
“She’s trying to get me to go with her to see Mr. Alldredge,” I said between gritted teeth.
“Tell her that if she rubs her great big chest all over you, you’ll do it,” Jake suggested.
“She wants us to tell Mr. Alldredge about that essay question we practiced before we answered it on the English SSASie,” I told him.
“Why?” Jake asked.
“Because it’s the ‘right’ thing to do. She’s very big on doing the ‘right’ thing.”
Jake looked thoughtful and said, “Hmmm. The ‘right’ thing. You’ll have to explain that to me. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of that before.”
Luke had stopped working on his paper and was looking at me. “You practiced answering one of the essay questions that we had on the SSASies? That’s not fair.”
“It was an accident,” I explained for what seemed like the millionth time. “Our English teacher found old SSASies in a filing cabinet, took essay questions off of them, and gave the questions to us for writing assignments. Nobody knew one was going to be on this year’s test.”
“It’s still not fair,” Luke objected. “You guys are going to get better scores than everyone else.”
“They would have gotten better scores than the rest of us, anyway,” Jake said. “One essay won’t change anything. They’re just going to beat us by more, that’s all.”
“It’s not a contest,” I objected. “We just don’t want to have to take the test over again. And if Melissa tells Mr. Alldredge about it, we’ll have to.”
“You should have to take the test over again. You’re cheating because you want to look smarter than the rest of us. You guys are already the smart kids,” Luke said angrily.
“What’s going on over there?” Mr. Ruby called from the back of the room.
“We’ve got a fight going. Don’t worry about it. I’ll break them up,” Jake shouted over his shoulder. Then he turned back to us. “Best two out of three rounds? And, yes, you may bite and punch below the belt.”
“Luke,” I whispered because a lot of people were turning to look at us. “I’ve never wanted to look smarter than you. I couldn’t, even if I wanted to. And I’m not cheating. I told you how it happened. The whole thing was an accident. No one did anything wrong.”
“Maybe what happened with the test was an accident, but what you’re doing now isn’t an accident. You’re intentionally doing something wrong because you don’t want to fix what happened the day of the test,” Luke told me. “Now you’re cheating.”
I opened my mouth to tell Luke that he didn’t understand, that the tests didn’t mean anything for us because they were a test to see if the schools were doing well. But they did mean something to me. I was hoping they would get me into those special courses.
Jake sighed dramatically and shook his head. “I’d go tell Gus about this whole thing, myself, because it would be so much fun to see him have to take care of a screwup that I didn’t have anything to do with. But I don’t think I can bring myself to snitch. Even on a teacher. A guy’s gotta have some standards, you know.”
Cheating? Snitching? There was no way I could get out of this mess without doing something that somebody wouldn’t like.
Why didn’t Happy Kid! do something about this? Why didn’t it help me?
CHAPTER 16
I had to force myself down the hall to social studies, where I was greeted by a cluster of A-kids who had heard about Melissa grabbing me in the hall.
“Better you than me,” one of them said, laughing.
“I can’t believe she won’t give this up,” one of the girls complained. “What is she thinking?”
“She hasn’t bothered anyone else since Wednesday. She’s determined to get you now,” the first speaker told me.
“I’m her last chance,” I agreed.
Brad slapped me on the back. “Don’t give in. Like I said before, if she can’t get anyone to go with her, I’m betting she’ll go by herself. Once she does that, she’ll leave the rest of us alone.”
Us. Which included me.
“She has an appointment with Mr. Alldredge on Monday afternoon,” I told them. “So I only have to put up with her for about three and a half more days. And two of those are Saturday and Sunday. I should be able to do that.”
“She made an appointment?” a girl gasped. “Shouldn’t somebody try to stop her?”
“Any volunteers?” Brad asked.
Oh, wow. What if this is it? I thought. What if I’m supposed to help the A-kids stop Melissa?
“The next time she tries to convince me to go with her, I could try to convince her not to go at all,” I offered.
The others seemed very satisfied with that suggestion. They didn’t have to do anything, and I had only
promised “to try.”
Helping the A-kids was going to be easy.
I was part of a group that walked together to English class. And in English class my creative team finally performed “Scenes from The Odyssey.” The five of us were all together at the front of the room, waiting our turns to speak, helping each other find our parts on the pages. It was like being at taekwondo because after a while I forgot Luke was mad at me and Melissa was trying to get me to do something no one else wanted to do. I got totally into playing my parts. So they weren’t great parts. I played one of Odysseus’s men who are turned into pigs by Circe and then one of the men who wanted to force Odysseus’s wife to marry him and let him take over Odysseus’s kingdom. But everyone was laughing between scenes, even Melissa. There was applause and shouts of “Again! Again!” after the guy playing Odysseus got me with his imaginary sword and I spun around and died.
When we finished the scene I’d written, in which I made Odysseus stupid and greedy and showed him stealing from the Cyclops and picking on him, Mr. Borden said I’d done some original work.
And he made it sound as if it was a good thing. He said it right out loud in front of everybody. In front of Chelsea.
The A-kids were right. Mr. Borden was a real nice guy. Well, maybe he wasn’t a real nice guy. But he was okay. He was definitely okay.
I think Chelsea was impressed, because after class when a group of us gathered out in the hall for a few minutes to talk about Melissa, she and a couple of her girlfriends joined us. She got there just in time to hear someone say, “If Melissa tells Mr. Alldredge about it, we’ll have to take the test over. It’s not fair. Why should we be punished like that when we’ve done nothing wrong?”
Chelsea nodded her head in agreement, and so did I. A couple of other kids said things, and Chelsea and I nodded again, agreeing with them and agreeing with each other. It was almost as if I was having a conversation with her. Except that someone else was doing all the talking.
I was going to have to walk right past Chelsea to get to the cafeteria, anyway, so I started slowly moving in that direction along with all the other kids who were walking past us in the hallway. I was hoping I could stop and stand beside her for a little while. I was almost next to her when I heard someone come up behind me and stop.
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