Truth about Truman School

by Dori Hillestad Butler

  Someone was setting me up. Someone was trying to turn the whole school against me. The question was who?

  It had to be Zebby and Amr. No one else hated me as much as they did.

  Zebby swore it wasn’t them. But if it wasn’t her and Amr, who else could it be? Who else would want to turn the whole school against me? Who else would even dare take on someone in my group?

  Could it be someone who was already in my group? Someone who wanted me gone from the group, but they couldn’t just kick me out because I was close to Hayley. Someone like … Brianna?

  Brianna and I have never really liked each other much. We just sort of put up with each other because of Hayley. To tell you the truth, I wouldn’t mind if she got bumped from our group. Was it possible she felt the same way about me?

  If she got to talking with someone who went to Hoover, she could have found out I used to be sort of fat in elementary school. She could have gotten a copy of my old school picture from anyone who had a memory book.

  I wouldn’t have thought she was smart enough to scan a picture in and upload it to a website, or set up an anonymous email address or a blog that was supposedly my diary. But everyone knew her stepbrother was some kind of genius. He could have helped her.

  All of a sudden, I heard a knocking sound coming from my computer. One of my friends was logging on to instant messaging. I switched windows to see who it was. It was Gymnasticsqueen. Hayley.

  I swallowed hard. I wondered what would happen if I tried messaging her? She’d probably ignore me, like she did at school. But at least with instant messaging, you can still talk to someone, even if they’re not talking to you, and maybe they’ll at least read what you wrote?

  I double-clicked on her name and typed, “hi.” What else did I want to say to her?

  A few seconds later Gymnasticsqueen wrote back. “hi.”

  Oh! She was speaking to me?

  “i thought u were mad at me,” I typed. “r u mad?” I didn’t even wait for an answer, I just kept on typing. “i didn’t write any of that stuff on that website. that’s not my diary!!! please, hayley, you’ve got to believe me!”

  “i’m not mad,” Hayley typed back.

  I waited for her to say more. Like whether she believed me or not, or whether or not we were still friends. But she didn’t.

  “someone (milkandhoney!) is trying to turn everyone against me,” I typed. “they r saying stuff about me that isn’t true. i’m NOT gay!”

  “then why would someone say that you are?”

  She was asking me? “i told you. someone’s trying to turn everyone against me.”

  “who would do that?”

  “i don’t know. i’ve wondered if it’s … brianna.” It would be interesting to see what Hayley said about that.

  “brianna? what makes u think it’s brianna?”

  Well … “i don’t think she likes me very much. i think she thinks i stole you from her or something, and i think she’d do anything to turn you against me.”

  I waited and waited, but Hayley didn’t say anything more.

  “hello???” I typed. “hayley? r u still there?”

  “hayley’s here,” someone typed a couple seconds later. “and I’m here with her. hello, lilly. it’s me … BRIANNA!”

  O.M.G.!

  Amr:

  My mom had just baked a fresh batch of pita chips with olive oil and herbs, so when I finished praying, I grabbed a bowl of chips, then headed up to my room. I could tell something was wrong the minute I walked in. Zebby was all slouched in my chair with her arms crossed, the blue of her hair hanging around her face.

  “What?” I asked, handing her the bowl of chips.

  She didn’t take it, so I set the bowl down on my desk and asked again, “What?” Louder this time.

  “You’re milkandhoney,” she said. It wasn’t a question; it was a statement.

  At first I didn’t know what she was talking about. Milk and honey? Then I saw what she had up on my computer.

  “Oh, that,” I said. “I didn’t write that.”

  Zebby cocked her head at me.

  “I didn’t! I saw it on our site this morning and … I took it down.”

  “Right,” Zebby said with a snort. “So tell me, Amr, what made you decide to take it down?”

  She had to ask? “Well, because it isn’t very nice,” I said.

  “There’s other stuff on our site that isn’t very nice, too,” Zebby said, rising to her feet. “Why would you take this down and not anything else?”

  “I, uh—” I shifted my weight from one foot to the other, not knowing what to say. She had a point. “How could you think I’m milkandhoney?” I cried.

  Zebby started listing things off on her fingers. “Well, this fable, to start with. I was on the site this morning, too, Amr. This wasn’t up there. Second, you still have your fifth-grade memory book, so you could’ve scanned that picture of Lilly and put it up on our website. Third, nobody knows more about computers than you do. You could set things up so no one, not even me, could trace the name milkandhoney back to you. But you made one mistake, Amr. Which brings me to number four: you used the same background to create Lilly’s Lesbian Diary as you used on your mom’s garden club’s website!”

  Zebby, my best and oldest friend, was calling me a liar. And a bully.

  I cleared my throat. “Well, that’s interesting,” I said calmly. “Because lately I’ve been wondering if you were milkandhoney.”

  “Me?” She stepped back.

  “Sure. I know for a fact you still have your fifth-grade memory book, too. You know as much about scanning and uploading as I do. You’re pretty artistic; you could’ve drawn all that stuff all over her picture. You know where I got that template for my mom’s garden club’s website, so you could’ve used it to create Lilly’s Lesbian Diary, too. And nobody has a bigger grudge against Lilly Clarke than you do.”

  Zebby opened her mouth, but then closed it again before any more words came out. She pushed past me, stormed down the hall, down the stairs, and out my front door, which she slammed closed behind her.

  Brianna:

  “I can’t believe she said that about you. Can you?” Hayley asked after we closed her instant messaging program.

  I plopped down on Hayley’s bed and put my feet up against her headboard. “Yes,” I said. “I totally believe it. Lilly’s always talking about people behind their backs. She says stuff about you when you’re not around, too, you know.”

  “She does?” Hayley looked surprised.

  “Of course she does!”

  “What does she say?”

  Well, Lilly usually didn’t say much about Hayley to me, but that was because Lilly and I didn’t usually spend much time alone together. I was pretty sure Lilly said things about Hayley to other people, though. I mean, everybody talks about people behind their backs.

  “It’s okay, Brianna,” Hayley said, sitting down next to me. “I know you don’t want to hurt my feelings, but you can tell me. I want to know what she said.”

  I had to tell her something, so I said, “Well … she thinks you’re bossy.” Everyone thinks Hayley’s bossy. “And that you’re … well, kind of full of yourself.”

  Hayley stiffened. “Anything else?”

  “I don’t know. Not really.”

  She got up and wandered over to her dresser. I watched as she picked up tubes of lipstick, then set them back down again.

  “I don’t know what to think about Lilly anymore, Brianna,” Hayley said finally. “She’s not the person I thought she was.”

  “Me either,” I said.

  “What do you think we should do about it?”

  She was asking me? I shrugged. “What do you think we should do about it?”

  “Well, obv
iously we can’t keep hanging around with her. I think we’re going to have to cut her loose.”

  It was about time.

  Zebby:

  I couldn’t believe Amr was milkandhoney. Amr was one of the nicest people I knew. He was always so calm and easygoing. He never said anything bad about anyone else. That just goes to show you can never really know a person.

  It had been two years since Lilly dumped us. Even though I didn’t even want to be friends with Lilly anymore, I had to admit it still hurt. It didn’t hurt as much as it did back in sixth grade, but it hurt. Probably because she was so nasty about it. If she had just stopped hanging out with us that would’ve been one thing. But no, she had to show off to her new friends and say mean things about us to prove she wasn’t our friend anymore. Things like, “Zebby and Amr? No, they’re not my friends. I only hung out with them a little bit in elementary school. And I only did it because my mom made me.”

  FYI … her mom was such a mess when Lilly’s dad left that that were some days she never even got out of bed. Her mom was in no condition to make her do anything.

  Lilly called me Grease Girl in sixth grade because my hair wasn’t always squeaky clean. And I remember once she even called Amr a terrorist. That was the worst thing.

  I got really mad about that, but Amr said, “Let it go, Zebby. It’s not worth getting upset about.”

  But apparently, he was upset. More upset than I would have guessed. And now he was getting his revenge.

  So what was I going to do about it?

  Lilly:

  All my friends were ignoring me at school. How could I have gone from “popular girl” to social outcast so fast?

  Nobody was talking to me at school, but they sure were emailing me. Every time I got on the computer, I had several new messages. Most were from made-up email addresses, and most were messages telling me how ugly I was, what a hypocrite I was, or what a poser I was. One even said they wished I would die.

  Delete … Delete … Delete …

  “Lilly, are you on the computer again?” my mom asked.

  I jumped when I heard her voice. My mom was like a cat sometimes—you never heard her coming. I quickly closed my email program and my web browser and tried to act normal.

  “What are you doing?” Mom asked, peering at the plain background that was up on the computer.

  I shrugged. “School stuff.” It wasn’t a total lie.

  Mom frowned. “What kind of school stuff?” She stepped closer to the computer. “Why did you close everything up when I walked into the room?”

  I couldn’t deal with my mother on top of everything else. Not now. “Why do you have to know what I’m doing every single second of the day?” I asked. Then I hit the power button and stormed off to my room.

  I tried to slam the door shut behind me, but Mom caught it before it closed and pushed her way into my room.

  “Can’t I get any privacy around here?” I cried as I flopped onto my bed. I rolled over so I was facing my wall instead of my mother.

  “No,” Mom said. “Not when you act like this.”

  “Like what?”

  Mom sat down beside me. She touched my shoulder. “What’s going on, Lilly? Why are you being so secretive?”

  “I’m not!” I wiggled out from under her grasp and tears sprang to my eyes. Do not cry, I told myself, blinking them away.

  “Yes, you are. And whatever it is, I think it has something to do with the computer. You’re always using the computer, and then you shut everything down whenever I walk into the room.”

  I clamped my jaws together. I couldn’t talk about this. Not with her. Not with anyone.

  “You’re not talking to some stranger online, are you?” Mom asked.

  What? “No!” I cried.

  “I hope not. I hope you know better than to get involved with people you don’t know online, because that can be really dangerous.”

  “I know,” I said into my comforter. What? Did she think I was five years old?

  Mom sighed. “Then what is it? Tell me!”

  But I couldn’t tell her. I couldn’t tell anyone.

  Hayley:

  We were pretty sure Lilly would get the hint eventually and realize she wasn’t in our group anymore. But she’d already tried instant messaging me, and even though she seemed to know better than to sit with us at lunch, she still kept staring at me in school. It was like she was obsessed with me or something. Ew! What if she really was gay?

  “What if Lilly shows up at the football game on Friday ready to cheer with us?” Brianna asked when we were hanging out at my house after school.

  I didn’t think Lilly would really do that … but what if she did? That would be so embarrassing. For all of us. We had already replaced her with Cassie. And I don’t want to be mean, but Cassie’s a much better cheerleader than Lilly ever was. She shouts louder and jumps higher, and well, she makes Brianna and me look good.

  “What can we do to make sure Lilly doesn’t show up on Friday?” I asked. We couldn’t exactly go over to her house and take away her cheerleading uniform and pompoms.

  “Hey, I know!” Brianna said. “We could, like, pretend to be Reece or Austin or somebody else on the football team, and we could send her an email that says ‘please don’t cheer for us because people will laugh at us if we have lesbian cheerleaders.’ ”

  Hmm. Now there was an idea!

  So we wrote the email together. It was kind of fun to pretend we were guys. Brianna and I laughed and laughed as we reread what we wrote in deep, guy voices. You know, with lots of grunts and stuff. All I can say is, thank goodness for email! It’s so much nicer to drop someone by email than in person.

  Lilly:

  I checked the Truth about Truman website the next morning while my mom was in the shower. Whew! Nothing new.

  Then I checked my email. I deleted seven nasty emails without reading them. I was about to delete the one from “ten-concerned-football-players,” but then I saw Reece’s name at the bottom, so I went back and read the whole email: Dear Lilly, Yo! We don’t want you cheering at our games no more. It’s embarrassing. None of the other schools have any lezzie cheerleaders. We don’t want no lezzie cheerleaders either, you ugly cow! It was supposedly signed by all the eighth-grade varsity football players.

  Was this for real? Or had Hayley and Brianna written it to kick me off the cheerleading squad? Was there any way to find out?

  I clicked my instant message program and waited to see if anyone was online.

  I drew in my breath. Hayley was.

  What could I possibly say to her? Dear Hayley. Please be my friend again. That sounded so desperate.

  Well, I was desperate. So I double clicked on her user name, then typed, Can we talk?

  But a new window popped up. It said: This user has blocked you from instant messaging.

  I guess that answered my question.

  Zebby:

  Every time I passed Amr in the hall, he looked like he wanted to shoot me full of poison arrow darts. And Amr was not normally a violent person.

  What was the deal? Why was he mad at me? It wasn’t like I’d turned him in.

  If anyone had a right to be mad around here, it was me. Amr lied to me. He lied to me! And then he accused me of being milkandhoney.

  I was so mad at him, I went to the media center after school so I wouldn’t have to see him walking on the other side of the street.

  “Zebby! Hey, how are you doing?” Mrs. Conway asked when I walked in. She had a small stack of books in her arms.

  “Okay. Do you need any help putting books away?” I asked.

  “Well,” Mrs. Conway said, gazing off into the 500s. “This is all I have left. Trevor and
Sara have gotten everything else put away already.” I could see Trevor putting away paperbacks and Sara pushing in chairs.

  The two of them were always in the media center after school! Every single day. Didn’t they have lives?

  “I could still put those books away for you,” I said. I really didn’t want to run into Amr on the way home from school.

  “Okay,” Mrs. Conway said, setting the books in my arms.

  It didn’t take me very long to put them away. “Is there anything else I can do?” I asked Mrs. Conway when I finished.

  “I don’t think so, honey. But thank you.”

  I nodded, then started to walk away. But before I reached the door, Mrs. Conway asked, “Is everything all right, Zebby? You seem kind of down.”

  I was down. And if there was anybody at school I could talk to about my problems, Mrs. Conway was it. But I didn’t know if she even knew about the Truth about Truman. And I didn’t feel right talking to her about Amr.

  “I’m fine, Mrs. Conway. Just tired,” I said.

  I’d figure out what, if anything, to do about Amr on my own.

  Lilly:

  I have never in my life felt so alone. I went entire days without saying a word to anyone until six o’clock when my mom got home from work. And even then, there were days I spoke fewer than seventeen words out loud: “Yes. No. No. I’m fine. I have a lot of homework. Yes. I’m tired. Good night.” That was all I said one day. I was like that weird girl who never talked. Except at the moment, I think even she was more popular than I was.

  It just didn’t end! People called me names, whispered about me, or just plain ignored me at school. But then it was almost worse when I went home, because people would email me and IM me nonstop. I just couldn’t get away from it.

  Then one day, a whole new thing went up on the Truth about Truman.com: If you liked Lilly’s Lesbian Diary, wait until you see what I’m going to post later tonight. —milkandhoney.