Being Fishkill

by Ruth Lehrer

  “If you just let it go around, Darsa gets away with it,” I said. “That’s not right. Sometimes a little revenge makes you feel better.”

  Duck-Duck seemed to be considering this. “Revenge isn’t exactly wrong,” she said. Her buttered crumbs were looking more and more like birdseed. “It’s not very Zen, though.”

  “We could push her down the stairs,” I said. It seemed the obvious thing to do, Zen or not.

  “No, there would be witnesses and forensic evidence,” said Duck-Duck, “and we could get suspended. Anyways, physical violence against girl evil doesn’t work.” She stirred her birdseed. “No, it has to be like that old movie with the train and the piano music. Subtle revenge.”

  “Huh?”

  “I forget the name of the movie. We borrowed it from the library. The good guys have to get back at the bad guy because he killed their friend, but they have to do it so that he never knows and can’t get back at them later. They con him out of hundreds of thousands of dollars but he never knows it was them.”

  I doubted I could do subtle revenge, but if that would make Duck-Duck feel better, I was willing to try.

  “So, what’s as bad as being pushed down the stairs but won’t be tracked back to us?” I asked. “Could we get her so confused she falls down the stairs without even being pushed?”

  “That’s a thought,” said Duck-Duck. She sounded impressed, as if I had come up with a scientific truth or proof. She stopped murdering her toast. “I’ve heard of apps you can put on someone’s phone that make it ring when there are no calls and not ring when there are. Darsa is so hooked on texting, it would screw her up for days. I bet there’s an app that makes any outgoing texts go to the wrong number. It would cause havoc, pure social havoc.” Duck-Duck’s eyes lit up like the night-lights Molly had plugged in so I wouldn’t get lost on the way to the bathroom.

  “But wouldn’t we have to steal her phone and know her password to be able to download the apps?” I asked.

  “Uh,” said Duck-Duck. “Right.” And her lights went out again.

  I felt bad, as if I should have protected Duck-Duck from all this and didn’t. I should have warned her earlier about the wolves.

  “What’s really, really important to Darsa?” I asked.

  “Soccer,” said Duck-Duck.

  “Besides soccer.”

  She looked at me blankly, and then she smiled. “Her reputation.”

  “Her good name?”

  Duck-Duck laughed. “No, her bad name. Teachers think she’s nice and sweet and athletic. Girls think she’s popular, all-powerful, and mean. In order to be all-powerful, everyone has to think you don’t care about anyone else.”

  “I don’t get it,” I said.

  Duck-Duck ran and got her computer. She opened it and clicked a quick click. “I,” she said, “single-handedly, am going to give Darsa a new reputation.” She opened a document and started typing. “When I’m done, Darsa will be the goody-goody of the year. She’ll hate it.”

  “What, are you going to sign her up for the glee club, the chess club, sewing circle, and gamers international all in one day? She’ll just say it wasn’t her that signed up and make fun of anyone who thought she did.”

  Duck-Duck typed faster.

  “Are you going to sign her up for that bake-sale charity group that gives money to underprivileged children in Africa?”

  “Nope,” she said modestly, “it’s more genius than that. She has to think she wants it, but then when she realizes she doesn’t, it will be too late.”

  Twenty minutes later, Duck-Duck stopped clicking and let me look. The top of the page read, “SCHOOL ESSAY CONTEST: My Greatest Accomplishment. By Darsa Peterman.” The title was in fancy writing that wound the G around the r in Greatest.

  “You wrote an essay for her?”

  “Not just any essay. A winning essay-contest essay.”

  “If you won, then everyone would know you were the smart one,” I said.

  “No,” said Duck-Duck, “Darsa is going to win this contest. Even with the few typos and dumb things I put in to make sure they don’t track it to me.”

  I started reading.

  Some people say that an accomplishment means something concrete that you do, like build a school or get a college degree. I think that an accomplishment can be something more simple, like a emotion or a feeling. I think an accomplishment is also doing some thing with that feeling.

  When I was nine my father left my family. We didn’t know he was leaving for good at the time but now we know he isn’t coming back. At first I was sad. Then I was mad. Now I am resigned ??? that we have to be a family without him.

  After a year I realized that although my father leaving us was a bad thing it was also a good thing. Because I had to be sad and then mad, I started to empathize with people who have hard things happen in their lives. Empathize means to feel bad for someone. I feel that now I empathize with people who have problems like the poor and the handicapped. I think because I had troubles in my life, I care more about other people who have troubles too.

  I have a clear vision in my brain of what the world should be like. I think we all should work to advertisse for charity work. We should all support kids who aren’t good in sports and maybe have trouble with subject like math and english. Sometimes a person is kind and innocent but then they have trouble learning and are horribly misfortunate.

  We should all empathize with each other and there would be no more bullying. I myself am certainly willing to make this true. I am going to volunteer two hours every day to help kids not be picked on. We should make our school a place other people are jealous of and make an extraordinary change in this world forever. This would certainly be a great accomplishment.

  It was quite an essay. It even sounded like Darsa, if Darsa were someone who said nice things and cared about people. “What are the question marks after resigned?” I asked.

  “It means I’m still thinking about it. Resigned might not be in Darsa’s vocabulary, and if this is going to work, people need to believe it came from her,” Duck-Duck said. “I haven’t finished the editing phase. Maybe I’ll spell it wrong.”

  “Did her father really leave?” I said.

  “Well, her parents got divorced. It has to have enough truth in it to make people believe she wrote it. I couldn’t write that she grew up in an orphanage from the age of two, because it’s too far from the truth, but desertion sounds close enough.” Duck-Duck hit spell-check and counted how many mistakes she had put in.

  It turned out that writing the essay was the easy part. The next phase was more difficult.

  “We have to steal Darsa’s real essay and replace it with mine,” said Duck-Duck, “before the April fourteenth deadline. We have to figure out how to find it with all the office ladies sitting there.”

  “I could start a fight in the hall as a distraction, and you could go for the box,” I said.

  “Start a fight? How are you going to start a fight in that time frame? Don’t you need some buildup?”

  Duck-Duck obviously didn’t have a lot of fight experience.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m an expert. Worm is good for a fight anytime. Just leave it to me.”

  On the last day the essays were due, we prepared for our super-undercover op. Op, Duck-Duck told me, meant operation, which wasn’t surgery but something the Army said when they had secret missions.

  “It’s like gang activity,” she said. “But with more helicopters.”

  First, we walked past the office as if we had no intention of going in but were on our way to the gym. When I got just past the office, Duck-Duck dropped back. I took the milk from my lunch bag, opened it, and waited.

  I could see Worm coming from all the way down the hall. Just as he trudged past me, I spilled the milk all over his huge feet.

  “Whoops,” I said real loud, so Worm would know I’d meant to do it and was only pretending like I hadn’t. “Sorry.” Milk splashed on his new red sneakers
and wet the bottom of his pants. Any second it would be leaking down into his socks.

  Just like I knew he would, Worm went for me, and I bent low so he wouldn’t knock me over when he hit me. But the fist never came. I looked up, and he had stopped just in front of me, his eyes squeezed shut and his fists clenched. He was holding his breath.

  “What’s the matter with you?” I said. “You look like a blowfish.”

  “I’m trying not to hit you, freak,” he said, and jammed his fists into his pockets.

  “Huh?”

  “Mrs. Clavel said I can’t hit anyone else or I’ll be expelled. I’m trying not to hit you.” He sucked in a big breath and held it.

  Mrs. Clavel was the psychologist who worked in all the schools. I had been to see her once, years ago, and she told me she was sure Grandpa had my best interests at heart.

  “Fine, Worm,” I said, “don’t hit me. But can you at least yell a little?” Worm looked confused. “If Mrs. Clavel asks, you can tell her you were using your words.”

  “Yell?” he said. “Sure,” and he started hollering. I hollered back and lunged at him as if I were going to sock him in the chest, and he fell back and hollered again. The office ladies ran out of the office and pulled us apart, and in the shuffle I saw Duck-Duck slip in toward the box of essays.

  I kept it up until I could see that she was out of the office and down the hall, and then I said, “It’s okay. He didn’t hit me or anything, so I guess it’s all right. Forgive and forget.”

  “Yeah, me too, shithead,” said Worm.

  After telling us twice about noise rules and cursing rules and disruption rules, the office staff gave up and went back inside.

  “Thanks,” I said to Worm. “I owe you.”

  “Whatever,” he said, but he was still looking at me. “What did you call me before?”

  Then I realized I had slipped up and called him Worm to his face.

  “Norm,” I said. “I called you Norm.”

  “No, you didn’t. You called me Worm.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I’ll call you Norm from now on.” I couldn’t think of how to get out of this one. He would probably break his promise to Mrs. Clavel and break my nose.

  “Worm,” said Worm. “What a gross name. Cool.”

  Boys were really weird.

  “Glad I could help,” I told him, and ran down the hall after Duck-Duck.

  “Did you find it?” I said when I caught up to her.

  “Sure did. It was right on the top. Now we have to run to the library and print out her new essay in the same font. We don’t want her saying it can’t be hers because her computer doesn’t have Apple Casual.”

  So we ran to the library, and I started talking to the librarian about how to look up the word photosynthesis.

  Duck-Duck printed it out and grabbed her paper, and we slunk back down the hall.

  “I’ll just drop it in the contest box,” she said, “like it’s mine.”

  We went to next period, feeling like we had made “a great accomplishment.”

  Now that we were planning subtle revenge, it was easier for Duck-Duck to be Zen.

  Because I had poured my milk on Worm’s feet, I didn’t have any milk left for lunch, but Duck-Duck was letting me share hers.

  “I look at Darsa now,” said Duck-Duck, “and I think of our winning essay.”

  It was almost as if Darsa knew we were talking about her, because just then she passed our table. She stopped and stared at Duck-Duck’s avocado-tomato sandwich on sesame-rye bread.

  “That totally looks like dog shit,” she said. She smirked at her new second-wolf-in-command.

  Tina was almost fat, but she wore really tight new clothes, and her father had a lot of money. On cue, she giggled hysterically, as if Darsa were going to win the annual comedy award. “Ohgod,” she agreed. “Isn’t it terrible? Like something out of a horror movie. Look, it has lice,” she said, gesturing toward a sesame seed.

  “But Miss Fish-gills has something even worse,” Darsa said, smiling. “What on earth are you eating?”

  I had finished my sandwich and was on to the granola pudding that Molly and Duck-Duck had invented the night before. I liked it, but Duck-Duck said she didn’t think they would serve it at the royal wedding.

  I kept chewing. Then I thought of the essay and smiled. The smiling was a mistake.

  “Hey, food-stamp kid, who you laughing at? Your mother left you because you’re such a loser, and you’re laughing at me?”

  Duck-Duck had said Zen meant you were really, really mellow and things didn’t bother you or give you a stomachache. I was trying for that, especially since we already had a subtle revenge plan, but somehow the granola pudding ended up on Darsa’s chin and down the front of her dress. The milk that came next probably even got her bra wet.

  You’d think I’d thrown gasoline on her.

  “AAAAHHHH!” Darsa screamed. “I’m allergic to dairy! I’m going into anaphylactic shock. You bitch! I’m going to kill you!” She dug her hand into her purse and whipped out an EpiPen. “You piece of trash!” She lunged at me with the EpiPen.

  At any other time, the lunch ladies would have heard her, and I would have been in big trouble, but just at that moment, the bell rang and an eighth-grade boy hit a girl who had the lungs of an elephant. Even Darsa’s shock waves couldn’t reach the adults. I grabbed Duck-Duck and we ran, blending in with the moving crowd.

  We hid in the bathroom for five minutes before we went to our next class.

  “Remind me to tell my mother I need an EpiPen,” whispered Duck-Duck. “Doesn’t it look like it would come in handy?”

  “We don’t need it,” I said. “We have our essay to look forward to.”

  “Right,” said Duck-Duck, and she took a deep breath. “Zen.”

  “Calm Mind,” I said, and I took a peek out the door to see if the coast was clear.

  On April fifteenth the contest winner was announced during all-school assembly. I was as excited as if I had an essay in that box.

  First we had to sing the National Anthem and the school song. Then the principal talked about the new floors in the boys’ locker room. Then the school nurse talked about germs and hand-washing.

  “Hello,” I said to Duck-Duck, “I think we know how to wash our hands by now.”

  Finally, it was contest time.

  “What do we do if she doesn’t win?” I whispered to Duck-Duck.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “She will.” The principal walked onstage.

  “We are pleased to announce the winner of this year’s essay contest,” said the principal. “The topic was My Greatest Accomplishment. We had so many wonderful writers, it was hard to pick.”

  “I bet,” whispered Duck-Duck.

  “The winner is a wonderful young woman . . .” he continued.

  “ Young woman, ” echoed Duck-Duck. “Halfway there!”

  “. . . who has used personal hardship to make herself a better person. She did not become bitter or vindictive but became an asset to our community. I am pleased to announce that the winner is . . .”

  “Announce, already,” Duck-Duck whispered.

  “Miss Darsa Peterman!”

  We clutched each other’s hands and laughed. It was like winning money from a scratch ticket. We looked around for Darsa.

  She was sitting right up front, smack in the middle. Head wolf sitting at the front of her pack.

  “Come on up, Miss Peterman,” said the principal.

  Darsa stood and walked slowly up to the front, smiling, letting everyone see her boobs.

  “Darsa,” said the principal, “your essay was a wonderfully inspirational piece of writing.”

  Darsa smoothed her hair and smiled her cheerleader smile. “Of course,” she said. “Anything to inspire others.”

  “Gag me with a spoon,” murmured Duck-Duck. “That’s such garbage. Her real essay was a mediocre piece on soccer and nutrition. She thinks protein bars are the gateway to heaven. How
is that inspirational?”

  “We are going to post your essay on the school website,” continued the principal, “so everyone can learn from your wonderful attitude.”

  “Thanks so much,” purred Darsa.

  That afternoon, the essay was posted on the school website, along with a picture of Darsa.

  Parents immediately began posting comments. I wondered why they weren’t at work and why they cared so much about a kids’ contest.

  “Great work!” said one mother.

  “Everyone should follow your shining example!” said another.

  “They use too many exclamation points,” said Duck-Duck.

  Kids weren’t posting comments about the essay, just parents.

  “Maybe the kids are all too stunned to post,” was Duck-Duck’s guess.

  But then the whispering started. I noticed after fifth period. Every time Darsa walked down the hall, kids stared at her.

  “What’s your problem, slut?” said Darsa to one girl. The girl giggled.

  Giggled. At Darsa. Darsa’s face grew dark and she sprinted toward the library to go online, since the principal had outlawed using smartphones during school.

  “I have to go to English. I’ll get in trouble if I’m late,” I said to Duck-Duck. “They won’t care about you, though. Run after Darsa and see what happens.”

  “Not run,” said Duck-Duck. “Trail.”

  “She went ballistic,” whispered Duck-Duck when we met after my English class. “She ran to the principal’s office, and I watched her through the office window. I think she was going to tell him that she didn’t write the essay, but before she could, he said he wanted her to know he had called her mother and told her what an extraordinary daughter she had. He said he was going to make Darsa head of the anti-bullying task force.”

  “What did she do?”

  “It was hysterical. She couldn’t figure out what to say. She looked like she’d been beaten bloody but there was no blood.”

  “Cool,” I said. Subtle revenge was kind of fun. “You feel any better?”

  Duck-Duck didn’t say anything, but she smiled a big smile and flicked her blond hair. “Let’s go to the cemetery this afternoon,” she said. “We haven’t had a gang meeting in a long time.”