Authors: Rachel Vail
“HELLO?”
“Hi,” I said. “Tess.”
“Charlie! I am so glad you called. You weren’t online last night and I tried to call your cell but I think it was dead or something.”
I looked out the kitchen window toward the lake. Rain was coming down hard on a slant. “Tess, last night . . .”
“I was thinking I won’t ride today because of the rain. Do you want to do something after school? You could, like, wait for me while I do chorus and we could take the late bus home together? Maybe to your house, and I could flirt with Kevin a little and you could tell me what you think.”
“About what?”
“If you think I’m doing it well. Because I think I might be messing it up.”
“I’m sure you’re not messing it up.”
“I don’t know how to do it like the Pop-Tarts.”
“You’re better than they are,” I assured her. “The Pop-Tarts wish they could be you.”
“Really?”
“Yes. You’re smarter than they are, more talented, prettier, and more confident. Everybody wants to be you.”
“That’s just because everybody wants to be going out with Kevin lately.”
“True,” I admitted. “No, I mean, that’s not the only reason . . .”
“Right.” Tess grunted. “Don’t you hate sweaters with too-small head holes? Do I have a grotesquely large head?”
“No.” I grabbed my jacket off the hook.
“Do you think me and Kevin will last as long as you and George will?”
Oops, another thing I’d forgotten to tell her. I honestly used to be a good friend. I sat down on the bench and said, “He dumped me.”
“Who?”
“George.”
“No way.”
“Yup,” I said. “On the phone.”
Tess gasped. “When?”
“Last night.” Close enough.
“You didn’t even call me?”
“It was . . . late, and I . . .”
am a lousy friend . . .
“Oh, man! That’s why you weren’t picking up? Charlie, you need to lean on your friends, not go sulk by yourself! Is that what you were trying to tell me before? I am so sorry, Charlie. I’m so selfish. Can you forgive me?”
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s not . . .”
“Wait—is this like New Hampshire?”
“You mean cold?”
“I mean a joke. Are you just joking? About George?”
“No,” I said. “He said it wasn’t working out. What do you think that means?”
“It means he’s hooking up with somebody else.”
“You think?”
“I’ll kill her,” Tess said. “The little tart. Is it a Pop-Tart? I can’t believe George Jacobson is such a shallow pig!”
“I think he just stopped liking me.”
“That can’t be it,” Tess said. “Who would not like you?”
“George, I guess.”
“Then he’s an idiot.”
Who needs boys?
I thought. “Thanks.”
“So, anyway, will you?”
“Will I what?” I stood up to zip my coat. I had to hurry or I’d miss the bus.
“Stay after? I need your unbiased judgment on this.”
“Why do you think you’re messing up your flirtation with Kevin? Did something happen?” I prayed that didn’t sound like I was hoping.
“I don’t know,” she sighed. “He is a little . . . we had sort of a fight, I think, online last night.”
“Last night?”
“Yeah, at like eleven. He was just all cranky and, I don’t know, nasty, critical. Cryptic. You know?”
“Yeah,” I said. We both thought about Kevin for a bit.
“Maybe I just overreact,” Tess suggested. “I get so mad at him, but do you think maybe it’s because I’ve never felt this way about . . .”
“Hey,” I interrupted. “Remember you said his mother . . .”
“Charlie, I’m serious. Will you stay after with me? We can do whatever you want after, I promise. Please?”
“I have to go to the Board of Ed meeting tonight,” I remembered.
“Seriously? Why?”
“Newspaper. It’s my assignment.”
“Again?”
“Every month.”
“Yuck,” she said. “Sure, okay. I’ll go with you.”
“Really? It’s incredibly boring.”
“That’s why they’re called the School Bored, right?”
“Thanks,” I said. “Um . . .”
Hey, did I mention that my mom is going out with . . .
“You okay?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“You know, about George. That is so weird.”
“Oh, George,” I said, remembering. “Yeah, I guess.”
“Well, be strong, pal. He’ll come crawling back.”
“Thanks.” It is sometimes surprisingly hard to be best friends with a person you wish you could be. “Really, Tess. Thanks.”
“Guys are so strange.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Kind of like girls.”
“Too true,” said Tess.
SCHOOL WENT BY numbingly as usual, except that Tess stuck close and gave poor George the evil eye all day. Jennifer and Darlene joined in at lunch, telling me he was just a jerk. When I told them that no, he was right, I had been pretty lousy to him, Tess said it just proves how stupid he was to dump me when even as the injured party I had the generosity to defend him. Jennifer is the only one who stopped at that point. On the way to our lockers afterward, she said, “That’s true, actually. You were pretty mean to him.”
Tess whispered to me later that I shouldn’t be mad at Jennifer for saying that because it was probably just that Jennifer is always cranky when we can’t go out at lunch on rainy days. I wasn’t mad.
After school, while Jennifer went to the gym for practice and Tess went to the chorus room and Kevin and George were both down at band, I sat in the lobby and watched the rain. I knew I should get my homework done because I was going to cover the meeting that night, but I spaced out instead.
Tess picked me up at the end of the period and we put on our jackets slowly, waiting for the band kids to get out. When they did, George smiled at me but then stopped himself. “Hi,” I said. I couldn’t help it. Tess was practically growling at the poor guy.
“Hi,” he said. “See ya. Nice weather, huh?”
“Yeah,” I said. I wanted to say something lighthearted, both to show that I was just fine, thank you, not crushed by his rejection, and also to show that we could be friends. And also a little bit to remind him what he had thrown away—a witty girl, a funny girl, a girl who could make him laugh on a stormy day. So here is the hilarious verbal joust I came up with: “See ya.”
Kevin passed us, drumming on his jeans. We followed him out. Well, we had to get to the bus, too, and by then our jackets were on.
George splashed through a puddle, running with his trumpet case over his head to his mom’s car. I think she might have waved at me. Even his mother is nice. I waved back and followed Tess onto the bus.
She slid into a seat across the aisle from Kevin. I sat down next to her. An awkward moment: How could she flirt with him when I was a boulder between them? But if I made a thing out of switching seats, well, how uncool and embarrassing.
I opened my eyes wide at her.
She shrugged.
In a slightly loud voice, I said, “Tess, would you mind switching seats with me? I get bus-sick if I’m not next to the window.”
I heard her make a little squelching-the-laugh noise before she said, “Why sure, Charlie. No problem at all.”
By then neither of us could keep from cracking up, especially once she started climbing over me. She clonked me in the ear with her book bag on her way. So when she turned her head away from me and said in a surprised voice, “Oh, Kevin, I didn’t see you there!” you can just imagine. We were doubled over in fits of laughter, with tears running down our faces and horrible snorting noises coming out of both of us. We are just lucky we didn’t wet our pants.
We got off the bus at my stop, which is a few before Kevin’s, tumbling out practically on top of each other in the pouring rain. We had to kind of hold each other up to walk down the hill to my house, and every time one of us was about to gain some control, the other would say, “Oh, Kevin!” and we’d both die all over again.
I COULDN’T EVEN tell what subject the Board of Ed people were discussing. Well, part of the problem was that I kept falling asleep. Another part of the problem was that Tess, who was fast asleep in the seat beside me, was snoring at top volume, which made it hard to hear. I raised my eyebrows in an attempt to keep my eyelids from closing, and told myself
pay attention, pay attention
. In the special reporter’s notebook Mom bought me, my hand wrote down the random words I heard through my semiconscious haze. When the tall bald guy in the center of the little stage bellowed, “All in favor?” I snapped awake and realized I’d missed yet another section.
I bit my cheek, pinched my wrist, promised myself I’d catch the whole next issue and focus the nugget on that, and then plunged numbly into la-la land again until the next gavel hit.
Chairs squeaked, people murmured, and I jolted awake. The meeting had ended and my notes were nonexistent. Uh-oh. On the plus side, I had not gotten such deep sleep in months, and felt very well rested.
“What am I going to do?” I whispered to Tess. “I kept falling asleep.”
“Really?” Tess asked. “I’ll tell you what happened. Elephants will be the new cafeteria monitors starting in . . .”
I shoved her. “Thanks anyway.”
“Interview somebody,” she suggested.
I turned to the lady standing beside me. “Excuse me,” I said in my most polite voice. “I am a reporter for the high school newspaper. What would you say was the most important thing that happened in tonight’s meeting?”
The lady smiled. “I thought my husband spoke well,” she said, and rushed away from me.
I looked at Tess.
“Follow her,” she whispered.
“Ma’am?” I asked, chasing her up the aisle. First time in my life I ever called anyone
ma’am
. I felt like I was in a Tennessee Williams play. “Which was your husband’s speech?”
She turned around. She had on a pink sweater set and a double strand of pearls. She smiled again, the exact same smile as last time. “He’s the superintendent of schools, Mr. Buckley.”
I wrote that down in my notebook, nodding as I wrote, which severely taxed my limited skills of coordination, because I was standing up at the same time. “Was he the, um . . .”—
Don’t say bald guy, don’t say bald guy . . . —
“gentleman seated in the center of the, um, thing?”
“Dais, yes.”
I wrote down
day-is. Bald. Buckley. Super
. I gave up on nodding because I almost dropped the pad. But she had stopped talking so I said, “And?”
“And?”
“And what would you say was the essence of his speech?”
“Were you that girl who was snoring, then?” Mrs. Buckley asked.
“Um,” I answered, thinking, forget journalism. There must be something less boring that I could force myself to be passionate about. I mean, other than passion itself. “Well, I . . .”
“No,” Tess answered, behind Mrs. Buckley. “That was me. She was wide awake. She just wants to liven up her piece with some interviews of the crowd. It’s her first article for the high school newspaper. She’s very diligent.”
“Mm-hmm,” said Mrs. Buckley. “Well, I think Mr. Buckley made a very convincing case about eliminating funding for those minor afterschool programs that benefit few students. Don’t you?”
“Which programs?” I asked her.
“Well, not newspaper, of course, and not real sports. The examples Mr. Buckley gave were, let me remember, the anarchy club, which has no members . . .”
I had to smile at that.
“Yes, that got a nice laugh the first time, too.”
Chastised, I lowered my head and wrote.
Anarchy club. No membs.
“Oh,” she said. “Also the Frisbee team. They’ve never gone to a single game, or match, or whatever it is you are supposed to do with a Frisbee team.”
“Mmm,” I said, still writing
cut funding Frisbee team never match.
“Anyhow, his proposal to take a careful look at the extracurricular budget was unanimously approved, and I think that was the most important thing accomplished at tonight’s meeting. That’s my opinion. Others may think the tax report was more important, but truthfully I may have dozed off for a moment during that one.”
I smiled at her. “Thank you, Mrs. Buckley.”
“Oh.” She frowned. I frowned, too. “Please don’t use my name for attribution.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “Strictly off the record.” Smiles all around.
“It is nice to see children involved in the process,” she said. “This is the kind of extracurricular activity that really does deserve funding. And your name is?”
“Her name is Tess,” Tess told her before I could say my name. “And my name is Charlotte Collins. But it’s not my fault I fell asleep. It’s a medical condition.”
Mrs. Buckley looked concerned. Tess smiled at her angelically. I shoved Tess out of there before she could engage the superintendent’s wife in any further fictions.
“How was it?” Mom asked.
“I don’t know,” I answered honestly.
“So evasive,” Mom answered. We walked out to the car. Mom was humming softly to herself. She never used to do that.