Lydia charged around the last curve, running, as she did, like a knock-kneed duck. She had to be related to Daffy, no kidding.
Her lack of style was glaring, too, since she was all alone on the track. Someone, Fayola I think, said, “Quack,” to mock
Lydia, and Max’s head nearly propelled off her neck trying to catch who it was. I visualized it: one army boot to Fayola’s
front teeth. Crunch. Talk about colorful.
As Lydia came flat-footing toward home, the Nikes advanced. Suddenly Lydia went flying. She crossed the finish line facefirst.
An anguished yowl rose up from the dirt, loud enough to roust the roadkill in Rangoon. Where is Rangoon?
I lumbered over to Lydia, Max zooming past me. “You okay?” She yanked Lydia to her feet by the waistband of her stretch pants.
Prairie retrieved Lydia’s glasses and handed them to her.
Lydia’s nose was bleeding, and her palms were embedded with gravel. She shoved her glasses on. “My new pants!” she screeched.
Sure enough, the knees of Lydia’s green and yellow flowered pants were shredded. A blessing in disguise, I thought. “Someone
tripped me,” Lydia snuffled.
Max’s spine went rigid.
“It’s true,” I said, staring at Lydia’s knees. Without warning, my vision blurred. All that blood was making me woozy. Either
that or my blood sugar level was dangerously low, since I hadn’t eaten in an hour. Taking a deep breath, I added, “I won’t
name names, but it was Ashley Krupps. I saw her stick her foot out.” You couldn’t miss those size twelve, shocking pink Reeboks.
Max lunged for Ashley, fist clenched.
“It wasn’t me,” Ashley said, cowering behind Melanie. Max threatened Melanie with her other fist.
“I didn’t do it,” she whimpered.
“None of us did anything.” Ashley regained her composure. “She just fell. Lydia’s a klutz.” The Neon Nikes all nodded in unison.
Beside me, Max growled. I held her back. Tried to.
“All right, break it up.” Dauntless Dietz rushed in at the last moment. “You, go to the office and get cleaned up. The rest
of you girls take your starting positions.” He raised his whistle to his withered lips.
“But Mr. Dietz,” Lydia wailed, “Ashley tripped me! Aren’t you going to do anything about it?”
He looked from Lydia to Ashley and gulped. “Shake hands and make up.”
“For what?” Ashley said. “I didn’t do anything. She’s a whiner. Ask anyone.”
I hoped he wouldn’t. “Come on, Lydia.” I took her arm. “He isn’t going to do anything. He can’t. He has to keep working so
he can get Social Security.” I glared at him, daring him to deny it.
He didn’t.
Max, Prairie, and I trailed the sniffling, hobbling Lydia to the nurse. Someone behind us said under her breath, “Quack.”
I recognized that voice. I won’t name names. Max stiffened. She didn’t turn around. She just balled both fists at her sides
and seethed, “You know what this means.”
I took a stab. “Their goose is cooked?”
Between clenched teeth, Max snarled one word: “War.”
L
ined up along the length of the army cot in the school clinic, we watched while Lydia got her temperature taken. It’s a state
law or something that even if you go to the nurse bleeding to death from a pencil up the nose, you have to have your temperature
taken. After sticking the thermometer down Lydia’s throat, the nurse disappeared. We heard her giggling at some crack Principal
Krupps made out in the hall.
Max muttered, “Solano said it first. We need a strategy.”
“I said that? When did I say that?”
“We need to set up a command post. Some place underground. A secret headquarters.”
Max, I thought, you’ve been watching too many Schwarzenneger movies.
“What about Ms. M-Milner’s room?” Prairie said. She sat crouched next to me, elbows on knees. “N-no one goes there.”
Unless they have to.
“Forget it.” Lydia pulled the plastic thermometer out of her mouth. “I’m not setting foot in the special ed room.” She blinked
at Prairie. “No offense.” The thermometer slid back into her mouth.
I wondered what the human temperature was at the moment of strangulation. From the look on Max’s face, she was wondering the
same thing.
“N-none taken,” Prairie said, sparing Lydia’s larynx.
Prairie spent most mornings in Ms. Milner’s PC lab. I’m not sure what
PC
stood for—I didn’t think it was
Politically Correct
. Most everyone referred to it as the retard room.
“We need a place away from school,” Max continued. “At someone’s house.” She looked at me.
“Don’t look at me. I take the bus.” Which was another trauma I’d be dealing with well into adulthood.
Max arched an eyebrow at Prairie. “I have s-six brothers,” Prairie said.
We all groaned.
Eyes focused on Lydia. She removed the thermometer again. “My mother doesn’t allow me to have friends over when she’s not
home. Anyway, I go to day care after school.”
Day care? I said what everyone else was thinking. “Day care?”
If the blood rushing to her face was any indication, Lydia’s temperature shot up a hundred degrees.
“We’ll meet at my house then,” Max said. “You know where the old burned-out firehouse is?”
Everyone knew where the old burned-out fire-house was. Last year’s most talked about news event. And the name in the news
was Max McFarland. She’d been expelled for a month because someone reported her smoking there.
“I live right behind it,” Max said.
“In the dump?” The thermometer fell out of Lydia’s mouth.
Max glared. “It’s not a dump. It’s a junk car lot. My brother buys old cars and fixes them up. That’s his business. He sells
hard-to-find car parts.”
They
would
be hard to find in that jalopy junkyard, I thought.
Max added, “You can come to my house with me after school today.” It wasn’t a request. She twisted her head toward me. “My
brother will drive you home afterward.”
We were all expecting it, the whine, the excuse, the drawn-out explanation. The three of us looked at Lydia.
“I’ll have to call my mother at work,” is all she said. Shock. She retrieved the thermometer from under the sink and blew
it off.
We got up to follow Lydia to the phone. On the way out, Prairie took the thermometer from Lydia and squinted at it. “N-n-normal,”
she pronounced.
“Must be defective,” I muttered. Max slugged my shoulder. Good thing I’m padded.
We rendezvoused at the clown target after school. Before leaving the school yard, Max flung one last dirt clod at Bozo. Direct
hit, right between the eyes.
Max led us down Erie Avenue, through the alley, and in between a row of decrepit apartment houses. The sign said
LUXURY LIVING
.
“Which one’s Donald Trump’s?” I asked.
Lydia laughed. Max and Prairie didn’t get it, I guess.
As we passed by the burned-out firehouse, we all gaped, and gulped. None of us dared look at Max. At the junkyard—excuse me,
Used Auto Parts Establishment—we picked our way through the catacombs of car corpses back to a ramshackle house, nearly camouflaged
in the rubble.
“I’m home!” Max bellowed as she hurled open the back door. No one answered. It was dim in the kitchen, even though it was
still broad daylight at three-thirty in the afternoon and the overhead light was on. The walls were dingy, covered in striped,
mousy wallpaper, stained and peeling at the corners. I wouldn’t normally notice wallpaper except there was movement behind
one strip over by the stove. Maybe it was my imagination, or maybe this was the original roach motel.
“I said I’m home!” Max’s husky voice, raised in volume, flattened my ears.
“Keep it down, toad breath.” A taller, hairier version of Max emerged from the darkened doorway. He wore blue jeans, no shirt,
shaggy beard. He looked like he’d just got out of bed. “Mom’s channeling,” he said, raking fingers through his snarled hair.
Beside me I felt Max tense. “These are my friends.” She nodded to us. “Solano, Lyd, and Prayer. My brother, Scuzz-Gut.” They
traded sneers.
“Don’t you want to know who died?” he said to Max.
“Not really.” She flung her backpack through the open doorway into the living room. I’ve always wanted to do that—announce
my arrival home by pitching my backpack through the door. With my luck I’d bust a lamp.
“Some old lady’s great-aunt from Cleveland,” he told her anyway, scratching his chest. “She wants to find out where the old
bag buried all her money.”
I wanted to ask, but the look Max shot me said, “Don’t.” A thought flashed through my head: Where is Cleveland? Then another
one: I wish I lived here. The most unusual thing that ever happened at my house was the cable TV cutting out.
Even though we were squeezed in the kitchen tight as a Twinkies twelve-pack, Scuzz-Gut wrenched open the refrigerator and
pulled out a beer. Max said to him, “Mind if we hang out in the old VW van?”
“The Peacemobile?” He popped the top.
“We won’t wreck anything.”
“Better not. That microbus is a classic. I had a guy in looking at it yesterday. He might be interested.”
“In what?” Max said sarcastically. “The rusted-out frame? The battery cavity? The cracked engine block?”
She rolled her eyes at me. I was impressed with her knowledge of automobiles. I knew tires, steering wheel, tape player….
Her brother wedged by us toward the living room door. “Just don’t contaminate it with cooties.” He shivered all over.
I looked at Max. She made some hand gesture at her brother’s back I’d never seen before. I stored it in my repertoire for
Vanessa.
“Come on.” She led us out the door toward the microbus. “Oh, and Scuzz-Gut,” she hollered back through the torn screen. “Don’t
get drunk. You have to drive Solano home later.”
From the doorway, across the dim kitchen and through the torn back screen, his eyes met mine. I could tell he was thrilled.
He guzzled half the can. Be still, my stomach.
The Peacemobile seemed a strange place to set up a command post for war. But it was, in a word, awesome. My dad would say
cool, hip, groovy. The exterior—the part that wasn’t rusted out—had once been plastered with hundreds, maybe thousands, of
peace symbols. You know, the circle with the upside-down Y inside? All sizes, shapes, colors.
“You got anything to eat?” Max said as she yanked open the squeaky side panel to the microbus and motioned us in.
The magic word. I scrounged in my backpack. Yikes. My supplies were dwindling. We’d depleted a lot of the inventory at lunch.
Feeling around, I noticed a lump in my front jeans pocket. Voila. I held up half a package of Bit-o-Honey.
“Great.” Max grabbed it. “Sit.” She waved us to a saggy, flowered couch.
As I sat, a spring ripped through the upholstery and bit my butt. I screamed and Prairie giggled. Lydia lowered herself cautiously,
flicking a hunk of sponge to the floor.
Max ripped off one segment of Bit-o-Honey and passed around the last three squares. “All right,” she said, flopping into a
pistachio green beanbag chair across from us. “We have to attack tomorrow. Let ’em know we won’t put up with any more of this
crap.”
“Wait a minute,” Lydia interrupted. “I’m the captain of this squad. I should be in charge.”
Max lounged back. She crossed one army boot over her knee. “Okay.” She bit into her Bit-o-Honey. “You’re in charge.”
Lydia cleared her throat. She stood. Clasping her hands behind her back, she began to pace. About four steps. That was all
the room she had. “We have to strike soon.” She pivoted in place. “The sooner the better.”
“Tomorrow,” Max garbled.
Lydia silenced her with a look. Dangerous move, I thought. Lydia continued, “They’re going to have to pay for these pants,
number one.”
I groaned. “Look, the only way to really get at these airheads is to give them a taste of their own medicine. Taunt them.
Torment them. Humiliate them in public.” I said to Lydia, “Like Ashley does to you a hundred times a day.”
“Excellent.” Lydia spun on me. “What’s your plan, Solano?”
I balked. “I don’t have a plan. You’re in charge, remember?”
Lydia turned to Max. Max shrugged.
It was quiet in the van for a few minutes, so quiet you could hear metal rusting. Out of nowhere, a tiny voice piped up, “I-I-I
have an idea.”
All eyes locked on Prairie. She told us what it was. I think the Bit-o-Honey may have given her the inspiration, while it
just gave the rest of us cavities.
Besides being brilliant, Prairie’s plan was devious, demented, and dirty. We loved it.
Before the meeting broke up, we made a pact. If one of us goes down, we all go down. We stacked hands on it. The next day
I wished I hadn’t.
W
hen I got home, Mom met me at the door. “Who was that?” she asked, watching Scuzz-Gut spew gravel as he ripped away from the
curb. Miraculously he’d managed not to total the car on the ride home. Max came along, thank God. She still scared me, but
her brother reminded me of this serial killer my dad once told me about. Jeffrey Dahmer. He chopped up his victims and stored
their body parts in the fridge. For a year after that, I shivered every time I opened the fridge, and not from the cold. Something
in the way Scuzz-Gut eyed me and drooled sent chills down my spine.
“Max and Scuzz—” I stopped. “Just a ride. Where’s Dad?”
Mom closed the door behind me, still staring down the block where the smoking Camaro squealed around the corner. “He had a
job interview this afternoon.”
“Oh, yeah? Who with?”
“He didn’t say. He did say you called and told him you had a meeting after school.”
I tossed my backpack on the couch and flopped down next to it. “That’s right. You’ll be glad to know I’ve joined a club.”
Mom perched on the La-Z-Boy next to me. She folded her hands in her lap. “Really? What kind of club?”
“Oh, a girls club. You know.”
“No, I don’t know. What’s the name of this club?”
“The, uh—” I yawned. “SnobgarbleSquadgarble.” She still looked dubious. “We do good deeds, make pledges, that kind of stuff.
A girls club.”