Mission (Un)Popular

by Anna Humphrey

  I just nodded and tried to smile. I was practically holding my breath to fight back the tears. It was the story of my life. The guy I’d been in love with since third grade just so happened to like my new best friend, who, by the way, had no right to show up from New York and steal him away. I took a deep breath and tried to be rational. It wasn’t Em’s fault. She couldn’t help it that she knew famous people, and was so cool and pretty and smart.

  “So?” Em asked. “What did loverboy say?”

  I knew I should tell her and give her the chance to be with him. It was what a true friend would do. I tried to mentally replace the image of myself with an image of Em slow dancing with him under crepe paper cupids. It made my heart ache.

  “He didn’t say much,” I answered. “We just talked about the party in general.”

  I couldn’t do it. Not in front of Maggie and Joyce. I decided to tell Em later, when I could get her alone.

  “George is hot,” Maggie said. “Do you think he likes you?” I was sure she was being sarcastic, so I didn’t answer.

  “You’d be so lucky if he did. He’s really sweet,” Joyce added.

  “I don’t get it,” Em said as we walked toward the doors. “I mean, maybe he’s kind of cute, if you’re into jocks, but he’s not the brightest light on the Christmas tree. No offense, Margot. He’s just not my type. He reminds me of a Ken doll.”

  Personally, I’d always thought Ken dolls were kind of hot, in a plastic underpants, hair-gelled-in-place sort of way.

  “What’s your type?” Joyce asked.

  “I don’t know. Rich, famous, incredibly smart, and unbelievably good-looking,” Em answered. They both laughed.

  Normally I would have jumped in to defend George’s honor. He was so much more than a dumb jock. He was funny and stylish and thoughtful. But since Em obviously wasn’t interested, there was no reason for her to know any of that, was there?

  “Anyway,” she said, “enough about the Ken doll. Margot, you aren’t going to believe what happened. Maggie, tell her.”

  27

  I Eat Sea Slugs and Put Socks in My Armpits

  Three things I would rather do than ever eat sushi again:

  Go swimming in a pool filled with broken glass.

  Commit to a lifelong no-nacho diet.

  Be seen at the mall holding hands with my mother.

  Not to be prejudiced, but I don’t understand what the people of Japan have against fully cooked meat.

  “Look, Margot,” Em said when she opened the menu, “they have unagi.”

  “Huh?” I answered.

  “Unagi. Remember how you said yesterday on IM that it’s your favorite?”

  I’d actually been eyeing the vegetarian rolls. “Oh right.” I found the unagi and breathed a sigh of relief. “It’s fifteen dollars, though. I only have ten.”

  “Whatever,” Em said. “It’s on me. We’re celebrating. Sarah J. has finally been brought to justice for what she did to you.”

  The news Maggie had told me on the way had actually been almost enough to cheer me up. Sarah J. had been suspended.

  And not only that—it had happened in the most unbelievable way. Her two best friends had turned her in.

  “So? Tell us the details,” Em said, spreading her napkin over her lap. “I mean, we thought you guys and Sarah were so tight.”

  “Right.” Joyce held her empty teacup and spun it carefully on its bottom rim. “We thought that too.” She glanced up at Maggie like she was waiting for her permission to go on. “But then we started hearing these rumors.”

  “Sarah thinks I’m fat. She would talk to Joyce about it behind my back, then she started passing notes about it in class.”

  Em picked up a set of wooden chopsticks joined at the top and split them apart angrily. “We know. Margot and I have both heard her say that before, but, Maggie, you’re not fat.”

  “I know,” she said, although she didn’t say it with much conviction. “I mean, I went up a size since last year, but big deal. Anyway, that’s not all. She was always talking to me about how Joyce has bad teeth.”

  “Let me see,” Em said. Joyce opened her mouth and touched the two teeth on either side of her front ones. They overlapped slightly. “As if!” she exclaimed. “Drew Barrymore has the exact same teeth as you, Joyce. And they pay her millions of dollars to shoot lipstick commercials.”

  “I’m getting them fixed when I turn fourteen anyway,” she said, then she picked up her set of chopsticks and tried to separate them too, but instead of snapping apart, hers kind of splintered.

  Maggie and Joyce were both quiet for a while, feeling bad about their major flaws, I could only assume, which, honestly, were nonexistent. I’d never even looked at Joyce’s teeth before.

  Her perfect, pouty lips hid them. And as for Maggie, she looked great in whatever she wore. Like, for example, the olive green V-neck sweater she had on that matched her eyes exactly and was just tight enough to make it obvious she had a figure—unlike some of us.

  “Anyway, when we both found out she’d been backstabbing us,” Maggie said, “we just decided we’d had enough. Plus, we saw her push you down the stairs, Margot. I mean, making fun of people behind their backs is one thing, but actually breaking bones…” She snapped her chopsticks apart, and I winced involuntarily. “Plus, the whole lesbian poster thing,” she added. “Totally not PC.”

  “Exactly,” Joyce agreed. “I go to the gay pride parade every year. It’s really fun. And anyway, even if you were a lesbian, which we know you’re not, it’s none of her business.”

  Even though I was pretty sure Maggie and Joyce must have helped her make, photocopy, and hang the posters in question, I still kind of appreciated the apology.

  Just then, the waitress, dressed in a red kimono, came over to the table and bowed. Em grabbed my menu and passed it to her. “One order of unagi and the deluxe bento box,” she said. Maggie and Joyce were still scanning the menu uncertainly.

  “Do you have anything without fish?” Maggie asked, scrunching up her face.

  “They’ll have the California rolls,” Em told the waitress. “Hold the crab.” A minute later the waitress was back with a teapot.

  “So, what happened this morning when you told Vandanhoover?” Em asked as she poured tea for everyone. “Tell us everything.”

  “Well,” Maggie started, picking up her tea and smelling it suspiciously before taking a sip, “we were pretty sure we were going to do it, but not totally.” She gave me a look that wasn’t quite apologetic. “But then when I got to school this morning, Sarah was at the concrete ledge, and she goes, ‘Hey, where’s donkey teeth?’” Joyce looked down into her teacup as Maggie went on. “So then I said, ‘Sarah, you know that’s kind of a bitchy thing to say about someone who’s supposed to be your friend, right?’”

  “Did you actually use that word?” Joyce asked, looking up. Maggie nodded. “Oh my God. She must have freaked.”

  “She did. Anyway,” Maggie said, after taking the tiniest possible sip from her cup, “that was when Joyce got there and we both confronted her.”

  “Right. And Sarah tried to deny it. She said she’d never called me donkey teeth.”

  “And I said, ‘Right. Just like you never pushed Margot down the stairs?’”

  “And that was when we went straight to Vandanhoover’s office.”

  “My heart was beating so loud the whole time. I thought Sarah was going to burst into the office and try to stop us or something.”

  “Oh my God. Me too. When the secretary opened the door that time…”

  “I totally thought it was her.”

  The waitress came up to the table with a tray of food, and Maggie and Joyce stopped talking for a minute while they watched the plates being set in front of them. They didn’t look especially eager to dig in, and I couldn’t blame them. The blackened hunks of meat sitting in a box of rice in front of me didn’t look so appealing either. I rearranged my chopsticks in my hand, trying to get them int
o a position that would make them actually work.

  Em eyed me. “I thought you said you had sushi all the time.”

  “I do,” I lied. “I mean, I used to. It’s been a while.”

  She held up her own chopsticks so I could see how she was holding them. Maggie and Joyce watched intently, too. “Like this.”

  “Oh, right.” I practiced a few times before trying to pick up a piece of meat. It slipped and fell back into my bento box, but I tried again. I forced myself to swallow. According to the menu, unagi was grilled eel coated in a delicious sweet sauce. Delicious wasn’t the word I would have chosen.

  “Aren’t eels the slugs of the sea?” Joyce asked as she scraped some rice off the side of her roll and ate it. I spit my second bite into my napkin and made an involuntary gagging noise. “Sorry!” she chirped.

  “I’m not that hungry anyway,” I said, and after that I just pushed the eel meat around on my plate with a chopstick.

  While the rest of us stared down our meals, Em started expertly putting entire sushi rolls into her mouth through the next part of the story.

  “Anyway, then Vandanhoover called her in,” said Maggie.

  “And she was pissed,” added Joyce.

  “So pissed. But with one eyebrow.”

  “And the peeling skin.”

  “Exactly. You have to remember to picture her like that every time we tell this story, because that makes it funnier,” Maggie said.

  Em stopped eating long enough to fill in the ending herself. It was the best part, after all. “And then she got suspended. For two days.”

  “I can’t believe it.” I raised my teacup. The liquid inside smelled like hay, but I drank it anyway.

  “Yeah, well,” Joyce said. “Nobody backstabs us and gets away with it.”

  “So, what are you going to do when she gets back?” Em asked.

  Maggie shrugged.

  Joyce just stared out the window. It was obvious they hadn’t thought that far ahead. “If she tries to talk to us, we could just pretend she’s invisible,” she suggested.

  “Or we could tell everyone she wears color contacts.”

  My mouth dropped open. I could have sworn Sarah J.’s eyes were too blue to be true.

  “I don’t know,” Em said, glancing at her watch and waving to the waitress for the bill. “I’m not saying those are bad ideas, but they’re exactly the kind of thing Sarah would do. Do you really want to sink to her level?”

  Maggie swirled her tea, looking embarrassed. “Well, yeah,” she said after a while. “I didn’t mean we’d torture her forever. Just for a day or something. Until she learns her lesson.”

  “Obviously,” Joyce put in.

  “Okay, good,” Em said. “I’m really glad you agree, because here’s what I think we should do.…”

  Besides the fact that there was no possible way my armpits could have hurt any worse, I didn’t mind the short walk back to school after sushi. For one thing, I was glad to get away from the unagi. But also, we had phys ed, and for once in my life I was looking forward to it. I’d have my cast on for at least six weeks, which meant I’d be sitting out.

  I left Em, Maggie, and Joyce at the doors of the locker room, planning to go straight to the gym to get started on my homework. But then I saw Andrew coming down the hall holding a basketball under his arm.

  “Hey! Did you conquer the level-four dragon and find the doorway to the Maze of Mystery?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he said, hardly turning to look at me.

  “Excuse me?” I smiled and called to his back. “You’re not even going to tell me how many heads the dragon had?”

  He stopped. “If you wanted to see level four, you could have met us at lunch.” I’d never seen him look so mad. “I saw you leave with Em and those Group girls.”

  “Sorry. You were with Mike and Amir anyway. I didn’t think you’d care.” And then I started to get mad that he was mad. Andrew had never cared when Erika and I used to eat lunch by ourselves. Or even when Em and I would go over to the maple tree. “Like, what? I’m not allowed to go eat lunch with other people all of a sudden?”

  He exhaled loudly and turned to go.

  “Just tell me why you’re so mad.”

  Andrew stopped and looked at the floor. “I know you went to the party.” He made a fist with one hand and drummed it against his thigh. “But you told me this morning you didn’t go, then Amir heard you were there and you—” He paused. “You didn’t have to lie to me. If you just didn’t want to invite us, I would have understood.”

  I rocked back and forth on my crutches, feeling like an idiot. Obviously, he would have heard that I’d been there. What had I been thinking when I’d lied to him that morning? “I’m sorry,” I said, finally looking him in the eyes. And I meant it. “I didn’t want to hurt your feelings.”

  “Yeah. Well.” He looked off behind me at the clock on the wall. “I get it.”

  “Get what?”

  “That I don’t fit in with the new people you hang out with. I guess I just thought you wouldn’t care. But obviously you do.”

  “It’s not that—” I started. “Look, I’m sorry,” I said again, lamely. What else was there to say?

  “Sure,” he said after a moment. “Anyway. I’d better get to class.” He turned to go, then stopped. “Wait.” He balanced the ball between his feet and opened his backpack. “I made these for you in family studies.” He handed me two gym socks that had been filled with stuffed-animal fluff and sewn shut. “Armpit protectors,” he explained.

  “Thanks, they’re…” My throat closed up. I couldn’t think of a single thing to say.

  “You’re welcome.” He shrugged and walked away.

  Before going up to the gym, I took a detour to the girls’ bathroom. I leaned my crutches up against the sink, then ran my fingers over the seams on the socks. He’d double stitched them in red thread—my favorite color. There was nobody else in the bathroom, so I tried them quickly, just to see. They were really comfortable. I felt awful, but as much as my armpits hurt, I couldn’t walk around with Andrew’s gym socks under my arms all day. I didn’t have a choice, I thought as I pushed open the flap of the garbage can; I had to throw them away.

  28

  I Desperately Need a Bee-Proof Cave

  WHEN MY GRANDPA Button was alive, and he and Grandma Betty lived in a big house on Chester Street, they used to do a lot of puzzles. They had a card table permanently set up in the den, and every time my mom and I would go for Sunday dinner there’d be something new: five hundred pieces of penguins, one-thousand pieces of the pyramids, or—I’m not even kidding—a five thousand piece puzzle of the sky.

  “Come sit with me, Margot,” Grandpa used to say while my mom and grandma were busy in the kitchen. “Tell me what’s new in your world. We’ll see if we can’t get some edges in.” He’d arrange the pieces in piles by color and put them together patiently while we talked until he had an entire cluster of clouds. Meanwhile, I’d be sighing in frustration over a small section of hot air balloon. “There you go,” he’d say when I fit a single piece in. “You’re getting it.” But I wasn’t really. I was just fumbling through, getting lucky enough, now and then, to find two pieces that went together.

  My grandpa, on the other hand, had eons’ worth of patience, and an unwavering faith that we’d get that puzzle done.

  I miss him pretty much all the time, but on that afternoon, especially, I would have given anything to be able to sit and talk with him again while piecing together that impossible-seeming sky.

  “Margot, lovely to see you back,” Mrs. Rivera said unenthusiastically as I walked into the gym. She seriously had to be the most sedated person I’d ever met. All she ever seemed to do was sit in the gym office trying to tune out whatever was going on outside. I could picture her on Christmas morning as a little girl, sighing as she opened her presents. “A doll. How interesting,” she’d say, before dropping it on the floor and turning to stare at the wall.

&n
bsp; “I have a little job for you.” She pointed to a pile of papers on her desk. “These equipment invoices need to be filed. Something to keep you busy these next few weeks.”

  Weeks? It was a big stack of paper, but not that big. “When you’re done with those, you’ll find more in the boxes.” She waved her arms around to show me the boxes, which were, literally, everywhere…under her desk, on top of the filing cabinet, piled up behind the door. This had to be against some kind of child labor law.

  The next hour of my life was spent sifting through one invoice at a time while I listened to the sounds of Mrs. Rivera crunching oatmeal cookies, humming along to soft rock radio, and flipping through the pages of a newspaper while the girls played basketball. Twice, one of them came to the door to report a foul, and Mrs. Rivera looked up just long enough to say, “Work it out.”

  It was easily the most boring period of my life. Not that I didn’t learn anything. Like, for example, did you know that Manning Middle School purchased thirty-two volleyballs in 1998? Me neither! Do you care? Me neither!

  I was actually glad when the bell rang and I got to go to French class. That is, until I saw that Em was at George’s desk in the back of the room. They were each sharing an earphone of his iPod, leaning in so close that their shoulders were almost touching. They must have gotten to an especially great part in the song, because he looked over at her, grinning and making a drumming motion in the air. I swallowed hard. Why hadn’t I noticed it before? Just from the way his eyes lit up when he looked at her, it was so obvious he liked her. I opened my cahier d’exercices and started miserably practicing my dictée words. But a minute later, a bag landed in the middle of my page. I looked up, and there was Em.

  “Okay,” she whispered. “Besides SubSonic, your loverboy has awful taste in music. He just made me listen to this entire song about weasels. It was like, five minutes long.”

  I smiled, relieved.

  “Anyway,” she went on, “I forgot that I brought you your clothes. The wet stuff you left at my house. I put some other stuff in there, too. A few camisoles and things.”