Truth about Truman School

by Dori Hillestad Butler

  Lilly went out of her way to avoid me the whole rest of the year. We had two classes together, science and language arts. But somehow she managed to get her schedule changed in the middle of the trimester so we weren’t in those classes together anymore. And now, anytime she sees me in the hall, she says to her friends, “Oh, there’s Trevor. Ew, he stinks. Let’s go this way.” And then they all turn around and walk the other way.

  The thing is, people like Lilly and Reece and the other popular kids could choose to use their powers for good. Like Nero. Everyone listens to them. So they could just say hey, we’re not going to pick on people anymore. And the whole school would follow their lead. But they don’t do that. Instead they use their powers for evil.

  Lilly:

  I don’t know if I was just paranoid or what. But I sort of got the impression my friends were avoiding me after that picture went up. First, Hayley’s mom called my mom and asked if I could get to school on my own on Monday because Hayley had to go in early to work on a science project. Maybe she really did have to work on a science project, but why didn’t she mention it earlier?

  And what about Brianna? She and I were in the same science class, so I knew she didn’t have any special science project. She and I could have made carpool arrangements. But I didn’t call her, and she didn’t call me. And I ended up getting a ride to school from my mom instead of Hayley’s mom.

  Then when I got to school, there wasn’t anybody waiting at the rock. I knew Hayley wouldn’t be there, but I expected Brianna, Cassie, Kylie, and Morgan to be there. Our group always met at the rock before school, and then we walked in together when the bell rang.

  But that Monday I had to walk in all by myself.

  The whole way to my locker it felt like everyone was staring at me. I even saw a couple of girls from my history class whispering behind their hands when I walked past.

  “You know, that Truth about Truman website is Zebby Bower’s and Amr Nasir’s,” I said to the whisperers.

  They stopped whispering and just stared blankly at me.

  “The girl with the blue hair and her dork friend?” I said.

  Still no reaction. Which only proved what big losers Zebby and Amr were. No one even knew who they were!

  “You shouldn’t believe everything you see on the Internet,” I said. Then I walked away.

  When I got to my locker, I hung up my jacket and gathered all my stuff for my morning classes. Then I hurried to our bathroom (the one that Hayley claimed as ours at the beginning of the year).

  No one was there, either!

  Well, the door to the middle stall was closed, so obviously someone was in there. But just one person? Where was everyone else?

  Normally, this bathroom was hopping in the morning. Girls whose parents didn’t let them wear makeup crowded in close to the mirror so they could quick get their makeup on, while the rest of us complimented each other on our outfits and put the finishing touches on our hair. Other people traded homework or talked about who was going out with who or whatever.

  “Hey,” I said to whoever was in the bathroom, but they didn’t answer. So I went over to the mirror to check my makeup and fix my hair.

  The toilet flushed and I watched in the mirror to see who came out of that stall. I gasped. It was that weird girl who never talks!

  Hayley:

  Despite what everyone was saying, we did not dump Lilly when we found out she used to be fat. We are not that shallow! We thought it was really amazing that she lost a ton of weight and was popular now.

  But I have to admit, I was a little bit traumatized by the fact that people thought it was me in that picture. (Can you blame me?) So … maybe we didn’t exactly defend Lilly when people started saying bad stuff about her. And maybe we kind of avoided her a little bit at first while we waited to see how people acted around her at school.

  But we didn’t dump her. Not right away.

  Trevor:

  What can I say? People at our school suck.

  Mrs. Holbrook was late to social studies, so while everyone else was goofing around, I worked on my comic book (just in case I decided to enter it in that teen comic book-writing contest). I already had the whole thing sketched out in pencil (twenty-four pages!), so I was inking over the pencil marks. I wasn’t paying any attention to what everyone else was doing.

  All of a sudden Brianna Brinkman reached across the aisle and snatched the booklet right out from under me. “Look everyone,” she teased, holding the booklet out of my reach. “Trevor’s drawing a comic book!” She flipped the pages and laughed out loud. “Hey, it looks like Trevor’s the one who drew that comic on the Truth about Truman! You know, the one about the superhero? I’ve got the whole thing right here.”

  I could feel my face growing warm. “Give it back!” I cried.

  I tried to grab my book back, but then Reece called out, “Let me see it!” So Brianna tossed it over to him. Then several other kids grabbed it.

  “Oops,” Taylor Bryson said as the cover tore off in his hand.

  NO! I didn’t have another copy yet. I hopped over the chair in the next aisle and lunged for the book, not sure whether to go for the book or the cover. But it didn’t matter since I couldn’t get either one. Kids just kept laughing and passing the pages around.

  I did manage to grab page seven, which had landed on the floor. The top corner was crumpled and it had a big dusty footprint across it.

  “Hey, Trevor! Is this supposed to be you?” Reece sneered, holding up a page of my book. “Do you think you’re a big superhero?”

  “Just give it back,” I said, my voice cracking.

  This went on until Mrs. Holbrook finally came in to start class. “What’s going on here?” she demanded, hands on her hips.

  Everyone scrambled for their seats, leaving what was left of my comic book spread out on the floor. Sara Murphy got up and helped me gather up the torn and crumpled pages. Most people think she’s even weirder than I am, but they only think that because she has eczema and she doesn’t talk. Still, she was only one who bothered to help me gather up my book.

  “Thanks,” I mumbled as she handed me a stack of pages. But the pages were all out of order, and I was missing the cover and half of page three. So much for entering it in the Galaxy Publisher’s contest.

  Lilly:

  I paced back and forth outside the noisy cafeteria. Dishes clattered and people were talking and laughing. I could see my friends crowded around our usual table over by the windows. Hayley, Brianna, Cassie, Kylie, and Morgan. The popular girls. There was an open seat between Hayley and Brianna. I could just walk over there and sit down like it was any other day, but … what if they all got up and left the minute I did?

  They wouldn’t do that, I told myself. Those girls are your friends. Don’t be afraid to go over there. You belong there.

  Or I could go sit with Reece and his friends. This wasn’t boyfriend day, though. We didn’t normally eat with the boys unless we’d all decided it ahead of time. The boys would probably think it was weird if I showed up at their table by myself. Plus, they could have seen that picture of me, too. And they might make a bigger deal of it than the girls. Boys weren’t always the most mature people in the world.

  In the end, I decided it was better to take a chance with the girls. So I forced myself to walk over there. “Hi,” I said, forcing a smile. I plopped my books and my lunch bag down on the table.

  Cassie and Kylie looked up at me, but neither one said a word. Morgan kept her head bent over her sandwich. Hayley was the only one who spoke to me.

  “Hey, Lilly.” She smiled back, pulled out my chair and patted the seat. “We were wondering where you were.”

  “You were?” Why wa
s Hayley acting all friendly to me when no one else was even looking at me?

  “Sorry I didn’t wait for you by the rock this morning, Lilly,” Brianna said as she stirred her yogurt. “I had to put lunch money in my account.”

  “And I had to return a library book,” Cassie said.

  “Me, too,” Kylie piped in.

  I just kept trying to act normal. “That’s okay,” I said like I hadn’t even noticed they weren’t at the rock. I unzipped my lunch bag and took out my turkey sandwich.

  “We did wait for you in the bathroom, though,” Hayley said.

  What?

  “N-no, you didn’t,” I said. “I was in the bathroom. I was there until the bell rang. You guys never came in.”

  You left me in there alone with Sara Freakazoid Murphy!

  They all looked confused. “Yes, we did,” Cassie insisted.

  “We were there until the bell rang, too,” Kylie said.

  I didn’t know what to say. They weren’t there. I knew they weren’t. Why would they lie about it to my face?

  “Uh-oh,” Brianna said, slapping the side of her head. “Didn’t you get the email?”

  I looked at her. “What email?”

  “I don’t really like having our bathroom so far away from everything,” Hayley said with a shrug. “So I decided we should claim the one by the front stairs instead. I emailed everybody last night.”

  Hayley moved our bathroom? Just like that?

  “That creepy Sara Murphy was in there putting gunk on her arms,” Cassie said, wrinkling her nose. “At first I didn’t think she was going to leave.”

  “Yeah, we all walked in and Hayley goes, ‘This is our bathroom now. From now on, your bathroom is the one on the second floor at the end of the hall,’ ” Morgan said, imitating Hayley’s voice perfectly. “But she just ignored Hayley and kept putting that stuff on her arms.”

  “So we all sort of moved in closer to her,” Brianna said. “After all, there were five of us and one of her—”

  “Yeah, and then she all of a sudden spun around and raised her arms like she was going to touch us!” Hayley said. “So we all jumped back because she had that stuff all over her hands.”

  “Then, you know what she did?” Brianna asked me. “She started laughing!”

  “She has the most bizarre laugh you’ve ever heardin your life,” Kylie said.

  And everyone else nodded and laughed.

  “I didn’t get any email,” I said.

  “Really?” Hayley said. She shrugged. “I wonder why not?”

  Amr:

  I really hate it when people ask me what religion I am. Most of the time they already know when they ask; I’m Muslim. They just like to hear me say it so they can act all shocked. Like no Muslims live in the United States.

  FYI … I was born in the United States. My parents come from Jordan and we are Muslim, but I’m as American as anyone else at school. I just don’t celebrate Christmas; I pray five times a day; I fast for Ramadan, and I don’t eat pork or drink alcohol.

  I also can’t date or go to dances. Sometimes kids give me a hard time about that. Like back in sixth grade Lilly told me she wanted to be my girlfriend and go to the fall dance with me. She knew I wasn’t allowed to go to the dance, so I couldn’t figure out why she asked me. And I was trying to figure out a nice way to tell her I couldn’t go since it seemed like she really wanted to go with me.

  Then I found out the reason she asked was because her new friends thought it would be funny if she pretended she wanted to be my girlfriend. The whole point was to make me look stupid and make fun of me because of my religion.

  After they admitted it was all just a big joke, Lilly said to me, “I suppose I’m on your terrorist list now.”

  I gaped at her. “What?” I said. I couldn’t believe she’d say something like that to me. Lilly was my friend. Or she used to be. She knew how much a comment like that hurt.

  Then Brianna said, “Are you going to blow us all up when we grow up, Amr?”

  And then they all laughed—her, Lilly, and Hayley.

  Kids say things like that to Muslim kids all the time. I know people at Saturday School who don’t want any of their school friends to know they’re Muslim. One girl I know wears her hijab to mosque, but not to school. It’s like she’s ashamed of who she is.

  I’m not ashamed of my religion. If any of my friends have a problem with me being Muslim, then they’re not really my friends.

  I guess that was how I knew for sure that I didn’t just “have a fight” with Lilly back in sixth grade. Lilly stopped being my friend.

  Some things you just don’t joke about. Lilly didn’t get that back in sixth grade, but maybe she was starting to get it now? With me, you don’t joke about being Muslim or being a terrorist; with Lilly you don’t joke about her being fat.

  Lilly:

  We never talked about that picture. I knew all my friends saw it. I knew they all knew it was me. But we never actually talked about the fact that I used to look like that. We never talked about the fact someone had gotten hold of that picture and put it online. And we never talked about the fact that people were saying some not very nice things about me on that website.

  I got a few anonymous emails. Not just milkandhoney; other people, too. They said things like, “Wow, you used to be really fat!” Or, “Be careful, Lilly. It looks like you’re gaining a few pounds … ” Or, “If you start getting too fat, your friends will drop you.” But for the most part, people were treating me pretty normal to my face. I mean, at first it was just the one day that Hayley’s mom didn’t give me a ride to school. We rode together every day after that. Hayley, Brianna, and I either went to the media center to look up new cheers after school or we went to the gym to practice our cheers. And Reece still called or IMed me every night. So on the outside, everything seemed normal.

  But something still felt off to me. Like maybe things weren’t really what they seemed. And I couldn’t help but wonder if it was some of my friends who had sent those anonymous emails. But maybe that was just me being paranoid again.

  People think that if you’re popular, you’ve got it made. But that’s not true. You have to work at being popular. You have to wear the right clothes and hang with the right people and do the right things … It’s hard because people are always watching and waiting for you to screw up.

  Anonymous:

  Spreading that picture around was just step one in my plan. I wanted everyone to know that Lilly was not always the person she appears to be now. She wasn’t always so special.

  When things started to die down, I put phase two of my Bring Lilly Down! plan into action.

  Zebby:

  Now that the Truth about Truman had readers, I worked my butt off to keep them. I cranked out new articles as fast as I could. I archived anything that was a week old and wasn’t getting comments, like the article I did on the new math curriculum. I couldn’t believe it. The new math curriculum affects every student at Truman, but not one person had anything to say about it.

  Lots of people commented on Amr’s article about the short passing time between classes, though. And 103 people had commented on Lilly’s picture. It’s just no one was commenting on the stuff that really mattered.

  Well, what could you expect from middle­-school kids? I hoped the new stuff I was putting up would interest them a little more. I wrote about the quiz bowl taking second in the state, the drama club’s auditions for Wizard of Oz, and I listed new books that the media center just got, you know, stuff you’d see in a regular school paper.

  Then there was the day-old cupcake incident. Believe it or not, our school sold “day-old” cupcakes, and some of those cupcakes turned
out to be moldy! But you couldn’t tell they were moldy until you took the wrapper off. Amr about lost his whole lunch when he noticed the mold on his cupcake.

  “Yuck,” I said. “I’m glad I didn’t buy one.”

  I looked around to see how many other kids had bought them. Sara Murphy had. Most people won’t let her sit at their table, so she usually sat at the other end of our table. Amr warned her. “You better not eat that. Mine was moldy.”

  But she acted like she didn’t even hear Amr. We both watched as she slowly unwrapped her cupcake and shoved the whole thing in her mouth without even checking to see if it was moldy. It was like she was taunting us or something. I don’t know … she could be a little weird.

  Anyway, the whole thing gave me an idea for a big feature story—School Food: Is it Safe???

  We wrapped up Amr’s moldy cupcake and brought it home so we could take a picture of it for the Truth about Truman. “Day-old” cupcakes indeed! More like month-old, I’m guessing.

  Personally, I didn’t think the school should even be allowed to sell stuff that wasn’t fresh. McDonalds throws out hamburgers that have been sitting out for more than ten minutes. The health department says they have to. Doesn’t the health department have rules about what schools can serve, too? I decided to call the health department and find out.

  Guess what they said? Schools aren’t supposed to sell day-old food at all! And guess what else? The lady I talked to at the health department said they would schedule a “surprise” visit to Truman to make sure they were up to code on everything.

  I didn’t know whether any teachers read the Truth about Truman, but just in case they did, I decided not to write about the health department’s surprise visit. I still had enough material to write a really good article. This was going to be the lead story on the site.