by Betsy Haynes
Tony folded his arms slowly and slumped against the back of his chair. "Like Mr. Naset says, I'm in trouble all the time."
Katie took a deep breath and pushed ahead, asking the question that had been nagging at her. "Had the bell rung for the class to begin?"
Tony raised his eyebrows at the force of her voice and hesitated a moment before he answered.
"No."
"No?" Katie saw the others leaning forward in their chairs.
"No. People were still coming into the room."
Kaci cleared her voice and looked at Mrs. Brenner as if to get reassurance before she spoke. "Mr. Naset, were people still coming into the room?"
"I suppose they were. One or two may have just come in."
"Were they seated?"
"Probably not. But that doesn't excuse Tony for making noise."
"How loud was he talking?" asked Shane. "Was he yelling?"
"He was loud enough to disturb the class."
"Was Tony seated?" asked Whitney.
"Yes," answered Mr. Naset curtly.
Finally the room was silent.
"Are there any more questions?" asked Kaci.
Even though Kaci was kind of stuck up, Katie liked the way she was taking charge. She understood why Mrs. Brenner had asked her to be senior judge to start off. No one had any more questions.
"Then, Kyle, er, bailiff, would you take them to the waiting room, please?" asked Kaci. "We'll have a decision shortly."
"I don't think it's fair," said Katie when Tony and Mr. Naset were gone. "When Tony got into trouble the bell hadn't rung, and Mr. Naset admits that the kids weren't all in their seats. I don't know how you can punish someone for talking if class hasn't begun. Who knows? He might have been telling someone else to quiet down." She glanced at Miss Dickinson as she said it.
"Knowing Tony, I doubt that," said Garrett, chuckling. "But it doesn't change things. If the class hadn't started, and Tony wasn't yelling or fighting, you can't say he was doing something wrong." The others murmured agreement.
Katie was dying to point out that it looked like a case of a teacher's picking on a student unfairly, but she forced herself to swallow the words. "Is this a case that we can dismiss?" she asked the counselor and the teacher.
Mrs. Brenner looked at Miss Dickinson.
"I think so," said Miss Dickinson. "It seems to be the fair thing to do." Katie could hardly suppress the smile that wanted to force its way to her lips.
When Mr. Naset and Tony were seated in front of the court again, Kaci announced the verdict. Mr. Naset's face tightened when he heard it.
Katie could feel Tony staring at her. Darn him, she thought. I wish he would quit doing that. It made her nervous. She was relieved when Mr. Naset and Tony finally walked out of the room.
Katie looked at Miss Dickinson. She had been fair even though it had meant overruling another teacher. Maybe she wasn't so bad after all. That just proved teachers could learn, too, she thought with satisfaction. Well, one thing was for sure. The cases couldn't get much tougher than the first two had been.
Katie picked up her things and followed the other judges out of the room.
"Don't forget we meet again next Friday," called Mrs. Brenner. "You all did a great job."
Katie pushed open the doors in front of the school and skipped down the steps. She was pleased with the way things had gone and couldn't wait to get home and call her friends and tell them about what had happened.
It was a shame that they had had to sentence Randy and Keith to clean up the cafeteria tables. But the boys had admitted they put the Alpo in the casserole, and the punishment was reasonable. Besides, it was funny. She was sure Jana and Beth would understand and laugh, too.
Just then she slid to a stop. Tony Calcaterra was standing by a tree, his arms crossed, smiling at her.
CHAPTER 6
All at once Katie's thoughts jumbled, and her face felt hot. She straightened her back and shoulders and surged forward, trying to walk past Tony as if she hadn't seen him.
"Hi." He fell in step beside her. "What's your rush?"
"I've got to get home." She gave him a quick, cold smile.
He walked next to her for a moment without saying anything. Her face felt as stiff as plaster.
"How come you went after Mr. Naset the way you did?"
"What do you mean, 'went after Mr. Naset'?"
"You know. You asked him all those questions: Had the class bell rung? and What were the other kids doing? Why did you ask him those things?"
"I wanted to know. I thought they might have something to do with the case."
"'The case'?" Out of the corner of her eyes she could see he was smiling again. She wished he wouldn't smile at her all the time. "I never thought of myself as a 'case,'" he said.
"Well, what I mean is, uh . . . you know. It's a Teen Court so everything we hear is a case."
"Aren't you worried that Mr. Naset might hold a grudge over what you did?"
"I wasn't the only one who asked questions," she said defensively. "Shane and Whitney and Kaci did, too." And then she blurted out, "Besides, it had nothing to do with you. We just wanted to be fair. That's what it's all about," she said, sticking her chin up defiantly.
"That's what I thought you'd say," he said and chuckled.
As they walked along in silence for a while, Katie was dying to ask him how he'd known what she would say, but she didn't say a word. She didn't want him to think there was a bond between them or anything.
"You have a boyfriend?" Tony asked suddenly.
Katie's arms tightened around her books. Then, trying to sound casual she said, "No, I'm between boyfriends." She cringed inside at her words. Boy! That sounded dumb.
"I mean, uh, I'm not dating." She felt the blood drain from her face. "I mean not anyone steady," she added hurriedly. Why don't I keep my dumb mouth shut, she thought angrily. She didn't want him to think she didn't date at all.
Tony said, "Me, neither." He was quiet for a moment and then asked, "Do you want to go out with me?"
She looked at him in disbelief. How could he think she wanted to go out with him? They were completely different.
"Not really," she said as coolly as she could.
"Whoa," said Tony. "The way you were sticking up for me in there, I thought you might be interested."
"Don't flatter yourself. The court was just trying to be fair," she answered stiffly.
"When you're interested, let me know. I gotta go." He took off at a trot. "Thanks anyway," he shouted back over his shoulder.
Katie stopped in her tracks. She was fuming. That showoff! How dare he think she was interested in him? There was nothing about him that she could like. All he wanted to do was fight and get into trouble.
Dumb! dumb! dumb! thought Katie as she walked down her street and turned into the driveway to her house. Why did she have to make a fool of herself in front of a macho guy like that? She had stuttered and acted as if she didn't know how to talk. How dare he think she wanted to go out with him? And she had not asked those questions at the Teen Court as a favor to him. She had just wanted to be fair.
She ran in the side door of the old white frame house where she lived with her mother and her cat, Libber. Libber was a scroungy-looking yellow cat that had staked out a claim on their back porch until they took her in. After they had taken her to the vet's to have her fixed, her mother said the cat was a liberated woman, so they named her Libber.
Katie's father had died when she was a baby, and her mother, Willie, earned her living as a freelance writer. Her real name was Wilma, but she hated it. Willie didn't make a lot of money, but like Jana's mother, she made enough for the two of them to live on.
Her mom was in the kitchen looking in the freezer when Katie came in.
"Hi, kiddo. How's it going?"
"Fine," answered Katie. "I made Teen Court."
Katie's mom gave her a quick hug. "That's great, honey. Congratulations."
Whenever she looked at
her mother, Katie knew exactly what she was going to look like when she grew up. They had the same red hair and slim, wiry figure. She had hoped that she would develop at least a little more than her mother, but so far it didn't look like that would happen.
"Do you want chicken Parmesan or sole au gratin for dinner?" her mother asked.
"Chicken," answered Katie, plopping down in a chair at the kitchen table. Willie didn't have time to cook much so they ate a lot of TV dinners during the week.
"Mom," Katie said thoughtfully. "What if you knew somebody who was always in trouble and acted real macho, would you be friends with them?"
"Umm . . ." Her mother looked at her as she popped open a can of dinner rolls. "It would depend on how macho he acted and what kind of friend he wanted to be. If he didn't want to boss me around all the time or get me into trouble, it would be okay. But I'd have to like him. I wouldn't want to be pushed into anything. Is someone trying to push you around, honey?"
"Kind of." Katie knew her mother wouldn't be pushed into anything. She was tough, and Katie wanted to be just like her. She had even tried to get her friends in The Fabulous Five to be more liberated. When Christie was running for seventh-grade class president, Katie had wanted her to put a feminist plank in her platform, but her friends had vetoed the idea.
Libber wrapped herself around Katie's leg, and Katie reached down to stroke her as her thoughts went back to Tony Calcaterra. He was exactly the kind of macho boyfriend she did not want to have. It was revolting the way he strutted around showing off his arms. She wanted a boy who would appreciate her as an equal. She bet he even watched wrestling on TV all the time.
After dinner, her mother went back to her office to work on an article for a magazine, and Katie decided to call her friends and tell them about the Teen Court. She knew they would be as excited as she was. She dialed Jana's number first.
"Hi." Jana's voice sounded chirpy as usual. "How did the court go?"
"Great. We had two cases, but I hate to tell you that Randy Kirwan and Keith Masterson were in the very first one. You won't believe what they did," she said, laughing. "It was kind of funny, but it was a bad thing to do. They made a casserole out of Alpo dog food and peas covered with melted cheese for French class, and some of the kids and teachers actually ate some of it."
The telephone line was silent for a moment, and then Jana asked, "What did the court do?"
"What could we do? Randy and Keith both admitted they did it and said it was a dumb thing to do. We sentenced them to clean the tables in the cafeteria after lunch for the next week."
"Katie," wailed Jana. "How could you punish your friends? It was just a joke."
"But people ate it."
"People probably eat things that are a lot worse. Why didn't you stick up for them?"
"They admitted they did it," answered Katie, "and the punishment was fair."
"Was it? Or were you just trying too hard to be Her Honor, Katie Shannon?"
Katie didn't know what to say. She had only wanted to be fair. She had to be, even if it was a friend who had been brought before the Teen Court.
"I've got to go now," Jana said. "I've got some things to do." She hung up, leaving the dial tone buzzing loudly in Katie's ear.
Katie sighed deeply and stood looking at the dead phone in her hand.
CHAPTER 7
Katie put the receiver in its cradle and tried to figure out what had just happened. How could Jana be mad at her? She had only done what was right. The other judges would have thought that she was just trying to protect her friends if she had argued against punishing Randy and Keith. Shane and Whitney had talked about not punishing them, but Miss Dickinson and Mrs. Brenner had said the court had to. Randy and Keith had even said themselves that what they had done was dumb.
She hesitated. Should she call Beth? Beth would probably be mad at her, too, when she found out about Randy and Keith. Well, she might as well get it over with.
Katie had been right. Beth didn't like it any more than Jana had.
"YOU WHAT?!" shrieked Beth. "How could you do such a thing? I mean, they're your friends."
"It wasn't just me," Katie defended herself as well as she could. "I'm not the only one on the Teen Court, you know."
"But it will be on their records, like criminals. It could follow them through life—keep them from getting into college or getting a job."
"Don't be so melodramatic," answered Katie. "It's not as if they're going to lose their citizenship over it. They'll survive. They admitted that they shouldn't have done it."
"What if they had done something really bad? Would you have hung them?"
Beth was going too far. "Now wait a minute," interrupted Katie. "I couldn't argue that they shouldn't be punished just because they're my friends."
"Ex-friends, probably."
"Come on, Beth. The court has to be fair."
"Well, I don't think that it was."
Katie sighed after they hung up. Boy, were Beth and Jana being unreasonable.
She wandered into Willie's office. Her mother's office was in the tiny bedroom at the front of the house. The desk and the small table next to it were always cluttered with piles of papers where Libber made a nest to lie in the sun while Willie was working. It always comforted Katie to see her mother tapping on the keys and staring at the big blue eye of her secondhand computer as she was now. Somehow it seemed that everything would be okay.
"Mom."
"Yes, sweetheart?" Willie made a note on a pad beside her keyboard and glanced at Katie. "What's up?"
"Oh, nothing."
Katie fingered through some papers on the table.
Willie put her pencil down. "'Nothing' can be quite a bit sometimes. Want to tell me about it?"
Katie sat down on the edge of the table. "I was just thinking about how hard it is to know what's fair sometimes. You always seem to know what's right. Sometimes I know, and sometimes I don't."
Her mother leaned back and looked at her thoughtfully. "I'm glad you think I do. The truth is, I don't always know."
"How do you know when you're maybe being too tough on someone?"
Willie shrugged. "Sometimes you just have to trust your own judgment. If you feel inside of you that something is right, you should go with it. Most of the time you'll be right. If you aren't, well, you know you did your best, and you'll probably learn something from it."
Katie sighed. Why did things always sound easier than they really were?
For the rest of the weekend, Katie tried not to think too much about the Teen Court. On Sunday morning an article in the newspaper caught her eye. "It's about Teen Court, and there's even a picture of Mr. Bell with it," Katie cried excitedly as she pointed it out to her mother.
"Terrific. Let's see what it says," said Willie. Katie sat down on the sofa beside her, and they read it together.
Wakeman Junior High Appoints Experimental Teen Court
William Bell, principal of Wakeman Junior High, announced today the appointment of nine students and two teachers to an experimental Teen Court in the hopes of doing away with the detention system.
Bell said that he thought the experiment would be a useful lesson for students in how the judicial system works. He also expressed the hope that peers sitting in judgment of each other would reduce the volume of student rule infractions.
Student jurors are: seventh-graders, Whitney Larkin, Shane Arrington, Katie Shannon; eighth-graders, Daphne Alexandrou, Shelly Bramlett, Garrett Boldt; and ninth-graders, Kaci Davis, Kyle Zimmerman, D. J. Doyle. Teachers are Mrs. Joyce Brenner; school guidance counselor; Miss Elizabeth Dickinson, English teacher.
Teen Court heard its first cases on Friday.
"Hey, we're famous," said Katie. "Everybody in town will know about us now."
When Katie got to school on Monday morning, lots of kids were talking about the article, and several called out to her.
"Hey, Katie," shouted Alexis. "I saw your name in the paper yesterday. Way to go!"
Her friends were waiting at their special place by the fence. They all said "Hi," but Jana and Beth didn't smile the way they usually did.
"That was a neat article in the paper about Teen Court," said Christie. "How did the first session go?"
Katie cringed. Why did she have to ask that in front of Jana and Beth? "Okay." Then to change the subject she quickly asked, "Did you and Jon play tennis this weekend?"
Christie nodded. "Sure did, and my backhand is getting better now that I don't have somebody looking over my shoulder all the time." Katie knew she was referring to the way her father had always pressured her to play competition tennis. He had lined up one instructor after another until Christie had finally told her parents that she only wanted to play tennis for fun.
"What are Jon's mom and dad really like?" asked Melanie, who somehow always managed to bring the conversation around to subjects that had to do with boyfriends. Jon's father, Chip Smith, was a television sports director, and his mother, Marge Whitworth, was a TV news anchor with her own talk show. "Do they have big shiny perfect teeth the way they look on TV?"
"Kind of," admitted Christie. "They're both a little hyper. Jon isn't at all like them."
"I still haven't gotten over the way you and Jon came up with that idea for a mystery candidate for seventh-grade class president," said Jana, shaking her head and smiling. "That had all of Wacko Junior High guessing."
"Yeah," said Melanie. "And Laura McCall was furious when Melissa McConnell didn't win."
"Speaking of Laura," broke in Beth, "here she comes with her little ducklings right behind her." Laura McCall was headed toward The Fabulous Five, and right behind her were Melissa McConnell, Tammy Lucero and Funny Hawthorne.
"Well, if it isn't the supreme court justice and her friends," said Laura, speaking directly to Katie.
Beth stepped in between Katie and Laura. "Well, at least you're admitting there's something supreme about us, which is more than we can say about you."
It made Katie feel good when she realized that her friend was trying to protect her even though Beth was still a little angry over Keith and Randy's being punished.