Truth about Truman School

by Dori Hillestad Butler

  Oh, no. Now what?

  Anonymous:

  If you liked Lilly’s Lesbian Diary, wait until you see what I’m going to post later tonight. —milkandhoney.

  Wait a minute! I’m milkandhoney, and I didn’t post that!!! Who’s posting stuff with my name?

  Lilly:

  I kept waiting for milkandhoney to post whatever they were going to post, but they didn’t post it before my mom got home from work. And then once she was home, she totally guarded the computer. I couldn’t get on it the rest of the night. Well, no way was I going to school the next day without knowing ahead of time what milkandhoney had posted. So I set my alarm for two o’clock in the morning. It turned out I didn’t need the alarm. I never actually went to sleep.

  At two a.m., I slid out from under my covers and crept over to my door. I opened it slowly, quietly, and tiptoed out into the hall. I hardly breathed as I inched across the hall and pressed my ear against my mom’s door. I could hear her snoring in there, so I continued on to the living room. I turned on the computer, which, let me tell you, sounds really LOUD when it roars to life at two o’clock in the morning. The screen seems extra bright at that hour, too.

  Squinting against the brightness, I typed in www.truthabouttruman.com and waited for the site to come up. I dreaded seeing what was on there now.

  It was just one line again: Click HERE for something interesting.

  I clicked and was immediately taken to a brand new website. A We Hate Lilly Clarke website.

  How much do you hate Lilly Clarke? Tell us in 250 words or less. The winner will receive $5!!!!

  Five dollars? For writing about how much you hate me?

  Who posted this website? Who was judging the entries and awarding the prize? I couldn’t tell.

  But there were already five entries. I couldn’t stand to read them.

  Anonymous:

  I admit, I did the other stuff. I posted the picture of Lilly. I doctored it up a day later. I did the Lilly’s Lesbian Diary website. I posted some sort of mean comments on the Truth about Truman, and I sent Lilly a bunch of emails under the name “milkandhoney.” If I had thought about starting a “We Hate Lilly” website, I might have done that, too. But I didn’t; I swear I didn’t!

  Zebby:

  How much do you hate Lilly Clarke?

  Was this really Amr? Even if he did hate Lilly, it was hard to imagine him putting up a site like this. This was like … terrorism. And Amr was sensitive about terrorism.

  Which made me wonder: what if Amr wasn’t milkandhoney? Was it possible he wasn’t?

  There was an easy way to find out. Amr claimed that fable had been up on our site earlier that day. I had been on the site earlier that morning, too, and I never saw it. That was why I didn’t believe him when he said he took it down. But what if he was on before I was? Or after I was? All I had to do was check the history of our site to find out for sure.

  So I did.

  And guess what I found. That fable was up on our site for about twenty minutes that morning. I felt lower than I’ve ever felt in my life.

  Amr had been telling the truth. Somebody else posted that fable. He took it down. And I didn’t believe him.

  No wonder he was so mad at me. What kind of friend was I?

  I picked up the phone and dialed Amr’s number. His mom answered the phone.

  “Hello, Zebby,” she said. “I am sorry, but Amr is not here. He has gone out to breakfast with his father.”

  “Could I get his dad’s cell phone number? I really need to talk to him.”

  Amr’s mom gave me the number. I called it, but there was no answer. Maybe Amr’s dad just couldn’t hear his cell phone wherever he was.

  Or … maybe Amr was avoiding me.

  Lilly:

  “I don’t feel so good,” I moaned when my mom came in to wake me up. I really didn’t feel good because I’d hardly slept all night. Plus I’d just spent the last fifteen minutes holding my comforter over my head. So my head was all sweaty, and it was hard to get enough air.

  “What’s the matter?” Mom asked gently.

  I put on my most pathetic face. “My head hurts. So does my stomach. And so does my throat.” Why not cover all the bases?

  Mom leaned over and felt my forehead. “You are a little warm,” she said. “I’ll go get the thermometer.”

  She came back in about two minutes with an old-fashioned thermometer that you have to hold in your mouth. “Open up,” she said, sticking the thermometer in. Then she went to put in her contacts.

  There was one good thing about those old style thermometers. If you can get ten seconds alone with one … just you, the thermometer, and a light bulb, you can give yourself a fever as high as you want. So as soon as my mom left, I rolled over toward my bedside light and held the thermometer against the bulb. As soon as the silver stuff reached 102 degrees, I stuck the thermometer back in my mouth.

  Good thing, too, because I could hear my mom coming back. She grabbed the thermometer from my lips, peered down at it, and frowned. “Looks like you really are sick.”

  Yes!

  Mom sighed again. “Do you need me to stay home with you?” She looked a little worried that I was going to say yes.

  “No, that’s okay,” I moaned. I knew it was hard for Mom to get the time off. And I really didn’t want her to stay home with me, anyway. I wanted to be alone.

  Mom came back at noon to check on me. She also brought me some chicken noodle soup from Panera, which tasted so good I ate all four servings of it. I told her I was okay, but still feeling crummy. That way I was setting the stage for staying home tomorrow, too. Maybe even the next day. In fact, maybe I’d never go back to school.

  Amr:

  “Amr!” I heard Zebby calling me between first and second period. “Amr, wait up!”

  But I didn’t wait. I had nothing to say to Zebby Bower. And eventually, she lost me in the crowd.

  She tried to catch me again between third and fourth period, but this time I escaped to the bathroom.

  I figured she’d be looking for me in the cafeteria, too, so I decided to go to the pool and swim laps during lunch. When I got out of the pool and went into the locker room, there was Zebby sitting on one of the benches between the rows of lockers.

  Unbelievable! “This is the boys’ locker room,” I informed her as I wrapped my towel around my waist.

  “So?”

  “So, you can’t be in here.” Hanging out in the boys’ locker room was bold, even for Zebby.

  “Relax. No one else is in here. We need to talk, Amr.”

  “I need to get dressed.” I shivered as I turned to unlock my locker. I took my clothes out and laid them on the bench next to Zebby, but she didn’t make any move to leave.

  I sighed. “Come on, Zeb. Go!”

  “I know you’re not milkandhoney,” she said finally. “I checked the history of the site. The fable was up there that morning, just like you said it was.”

  Well, that was something, anyway. “So why didn’t you check the history right from the start if you didn’t believe me?”

  “I don’t know.” Zebby looked down at the floor. “I should have.”

  “Yeah, you should have.” I pulled my shirt on, then sat down beside her. “I probably should have told you about that fable, too. I shouldn’t have just taken it down without saying anything.”

  “Why did you?” Zebby asked.

  “I don’t know. I was going to tell you, but I forgot. I just got so tired of all that milkandhoney stuff. That’s why I took it down. Don’t you get tired of it?”

  “Of course I get tired of it. But when you run a newspaper, you can’t just take stuff down
because you’re tired of it.”

  “Are you sure? It’s our newspaper; we can do whatever we want.”

  “It doesn’t always feel like our newspaper,” Zebby said, slouching down on the bench. “It feels like it’s just this big gossip site about Lilly Clarke. How did that happen, Amr?”

  I didn’t have an answer.

  “Did milkandhoney ever complain that you took the fable down?” Zebby asked. “Or did they ever try and put it back up?”

  “No. I think they’ve been too busy getting their new site up and running. Did you see that ‘We Hate Lilly Clarke’ website?”

  Zebby nodded. “That’s when I knew you couldn’t be milkandhoney. It’s too mean.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you really think I was milkandhoney?” Zebby asked.

  “I wondered,” I said. “But I didn’t really think so. Not until you thought I was. That made me really mad.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “Me, too.”

  Zebby:

  It was depressing how much of the Truth about Truman website was devoted to gossip about Lilly. That whole thing had sort of taken on a life of its own, and I wasn’t sure what to do.

  I always wanted the Truth about Truman to be a true and honest newspaper about middle school life. I wanted it to be something that everyone could relate to, and I wanted everyone to feel like it belonged to them, and they could post whatever they wanted without anyone telling them that what they were thinking or feeling wasn’t okay.

  And I guess in a sense, it was all that. People did feel comfortable posting whatever they wanted. I guess I had hoped that the stuff they posted would be a little more newsworthy than “Look! Lilly Clarke used to be fat.” Or “Oh, no! Lilly Clarke might be gay!”

  Hayley:

  Lilly hadn’t been in school all week. Which was really weird because Lilly never missed school.

  “I wonder what’s wrong with her,” Cassie said during lunch.

  “Maybe she’s got some horrible, incurable disease,” Kylie said as she bit into her apple.

  “She is a horrible, incurable disease,” Brianna muttered.

  “Brianna!” I said, pretending to be shocked. “That’s not very nice.” But then I sort of smiled.

  “Maybe she’s not coming back,” Cassie said.

  “Maybe she’s afraid to come back,” Kylie said. “You know, because she doesn’t have any friends.”

  “Aw, poor baby,” I said. “I wouldn’t like school if it wasn’t for you guys, but I’d still come to school. I’d just find other friends.”

  “No kidding. What a loser,” Brianna said.

  “So, who wants to come over after school and help me judge the We Hate Lilly stories we’ve received so far?” I asked.

  Brianna grinned. “I think we all want to help with that, Hayley,” she said.

  Everyone else nodded eagerly. Everyone except Kylie.

  “What?” I asked her.

  Kylie shrugged. “I was just thinking,” she said, stirring her salad around on her plate. “That We Hate Lilly website is supposed to be totally anonymous, right? No one knows it’s our website. And most people don’t even know who any of those screen names are.”

  “So,” I said, wondering what she was getting at.

  “Well, how are we supposed to give someone a prize if we don’t know who they are and they don’t know who we are?”

  Leave it to Kylie to obsess about something like that.

  “We’ll figure something out,” Brianna said right away.

  “Yeah,” I echoed. “We can email the winner or something.” Like Brianna said, we’d figure something out.

  Trevor:

  I overheard Lilly’s friends talking about her during lunch. Nice. With friends like them, who needs enemies?

  I wondered if it ever occurred to any of those girls that sometimes kids who are bullied just snap. There have been all sorts of articles about this in the news and on TV.

  Sara Murphy and me, we’re used to being picked on, but Lilly’s not. Frankly, I wondered if she could take all this abuse. What if she freaked out and…did something really bad?

  Was anyone else worried about Lilly? I wondered. Any of the teachers? Mrs. Horton? Did any of them even have any clue what was going on? Probably not. Teachers and counselors were usually the last to know anything.

  Lilly:

  I had a “slight recovery” over the weekend, but then got worse again on Monday. All in all, I missed three days of school. After three days, my mom may have figured out what was going on, because she wouldn’t leave me alone with the thermometer in my mouth anymore. Which meant I couldn’t hold it up against my light and make the silver stuff go up.

  I tried to get her to go get me a drink of water, but she said to wait until after the thermometer was ready. And when it was ready, I suddenly had no fever.

  “That’s good news,” Mom said, shaking the thermometer down. “You can go back to school.”

  “But I still don’t feel good,” I moaned, clutching my stomach. “I don’t think I can go to school.” There was no way I could go to school!

  Mom came over and sat down on the bed next to me. “Tell me what’s going on, Lilly,” she said. “Why don’t you want to go to school?”

  “Because I don’t feel good.”

  “It seems like there’s something else going on. You like school. You like being with your friends—”

  Yeah, back when I actually had friends, I thought.

  “Are you having some sort of problem with your friends?” Mom asked.

  “No,” I grumbled. Because what I was having was more than “a problem.” It was a catastrophe. My friends didn’t like me anymore. Nobody liked me.

  “I just don’t feel good,” I said. “Please, Mom! Can’t I just stay home for one more day?” I really, really needed to stay home for one more day. At least one more day.

  Mom pressed her lips together and frowned. “Not unless you can give me a good reason for why you need to stay home.”

  “Isn’t not feeling well a good enough reason?” I asked.

  “Not after three days,” Mom said. “Not when I’m not seeing any symptoms. You say your stomach hurts, but you’re not throwing up and you’re eating well. If anything, you’re eating more than usual. I really don’t think you’re sick, honey. I think there’s something else going on.”

  Even if I told her what was going on, she still probably wouldn’t let me stay home. She’d tell me it would blow over, that my friends wouldn’t stay mad forever. She wouldn’t even get that they’re not mad. There’s a big difference between simply “being mad” and not liking someone anymore.

  “Well, if you’re not going to tell me what’s going on, then you’re going to have to go to school.” Mom stood up and yanked the covers off of me.

  I yelped.

  “Come on. Get up.” Mom went over to my dresser, opened my bottom drawer, pulled out a pair of jeans (even though I hardly ever wore plain old jeans anymore) and tossed them at me. She tossed me some socks and underwear, too. And finally a blouse from my closet. A blouse that didn’t even look good with jeans.

  “I want you dressed and ready to go in fifteen minutes!” Mom said firmly. Then she walked out of my room and pulled my door closed behind her.

  I swallowed hard, then raised myself up to a sitting position.

  Well, fine, I thought, reaching for my clothes. She could make me get up and get dressed. She could even drive me to school. But once I was there, she couldn’t make me stay.

  Hayley:

  “Did you see what someone wrote on the We Hate Lilly page this morning?” Kylie asked in a low voice on the way to school o
n Wednesday.

  “No. What?” Brianna asked, peering around her seat. Brianna and I had the middle seats in my mom’s van. Kylie, Cassie, and Morgan sat behind us.

  Kylie checked to make sure my mom couldn’t hear us, then we all leaned our heads together and Kylie said in a low voice, “Someone made a list of ‘the top ten things you’d like to see happen to Lilly Clarke.’ There are things on there like ‘fall down the stairs’ and ‘choke on her own vomit’ and ‘jump off a cliff!’ ”

  Cassie giggled. “Oh, wow,” she said. “I haven’t read that yet.”

  “Me, either,” Brianna said.

  “You guys!” Kylie looked totally offended.

  “What?” Cassie asked.

  “Don’t you find some of this just a little bit … disturbing? I mean, choking on her own vomit? Jumping off a cliff? She’d die!”

  Everyone turned to me. Like they didn’t know whether all this was disturbing or not.

  I rolled my eyes. “You are so dramatic, Kylie!”

  After all, I was the one who wrote the Top Ten Things You’d Like to See Happen to Lilly Clarke. But my friends didn’t know that yet. I was going to tell them when they all agreed this was the piece that should win our We Hate Lilly contest. Wasn’t Kylie the one who got all worked up about people finding out who we are when we had to give someone the five dollars? Well, fine. Let her figure out another solution then.

  “It’s not like whoever wrote that is planning to go over to Lilly’s house and kill her or anything,” Brianna told Kylie.

  “Yeah, it’s just stuff someone wrote on a website,” Cassie added. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Right,” Morgan nodded.

  Kylie hugged her backpack to her chest. “I don’t know,” she said softly. “How would you feel if you read stuff like that about you on a website?”

  I was getting a little tired of Kylie’s attitude. “Why are you so worried about Lilly all of a sudden?” I blurted. “Do you actually like her again? Do you want to be her friend?”