The Owl & Moon Cafe: A Novel (No Series) (19 page)

Sally nodded vigorously. “I am completely done with cursing, honest.”

Lindsay’s stomach burned, and she pictured her Pepcid bottle in her plain old Target backpack, a faithful dog waiting for his master.

“So, Taylor,” Sally said. “There’s lots of stuff you can ask a pop tart, I mean star, but why not someone who made a contribution to the world?”

“Her music is a contribution.”

“Yeah, but will it be around in two hundred years?”

“It could be.”

“I don’t know,” Sally said. “It could be just me, but if I could have dinner with anyone in the world living or dead, I sure wouldn’t pick a bottle-blond Madonna wanna-be. I’d have dinner with Bill Gates, or maybe Secretariat, or if I had to pick a dead guy, Mozart, or Jim Henson, because Kermit the Frog has persisted all these years, a puppet some guy made that people listen to like he’s a philosopher. I’d damn sure pick somebody who did something
significant,
for God’s sake.”

“Sally,” Mrs. Shiasaka said wearily, “once again you have not delivered a respectful inquiry and once again you have chosen to use swear words when so many others are available to you.”

Taylor stuck out her tongue, hot pink from Gummi worms.

“How mature,” Sally said in return.

“Girls, enough!” Mrs. Shiasaka said. “Did anyone else notice that Sally’s choices were all of the male gender?”

“So what?” Sally said hotly.

Taylor leaned close to Avril Corrigan. “That’s because she’s a lesbian. A dyke lesbian giant!”

Everyone laughed. Lindsay put her head in her hands. Where was Carl Sagan when you needed him? She longed for Mrs. Shiasaka to put the “kibosh” on it, as Gammy would say. But Country Day had shared governance. If the disagreeing parties couldn’t work things out themselves, they had to go to Mediation.

“Taylor,” Mrs. Shiasaka said, “apologize to Sally or you can go to Ms. Haverfield’s office.”

“I’m sorry,” Taylor said.

“Sally, accept Taylor’s apology.”

“I accept,” she said, but everyone except Mrs. Shiasaka knew better.

Mrs. Shiasaka nodded. “Good. Now let’s hear your choice, Sally. Then perhaps Taylor will have a few questions for you.”

Without hesitation, Sally said, “Eve. She probably had wolves for pets and rode wild mustangs and caught her own food and figured out fire before guys did, plus taught herself to build the wheel.”

Taylor burst out laughing. “Omigod,
Eve!
Everyone, can’t you just see Sally sitting around a campfire grunting and biting raw flesh off squirrels for dinner? She’d fit right in. She even has the right skin color.”

Except for Madison and Frankie, who looked bored, and Sally, whose face was flaming, there was a collective gasp.

“Taylor Foster!” Mrs. Shiasaka said. “I am deeply disappointed in you for referring to skin color as a polemic for any argument. Go to Ms. Haverfield’s office immediately. Leave your backpack in the cloakroom and your paper with me. Go.”

Taylor started crying. “Why am I in trouble? She made fun of my pick and she hates me. Ask anyone! She’s always teasing me on the quad.”

Sally had her head tipped back so far it looked like her neck was broken, but Lindsay could tell she was trying to stave off tears. “Sally,” Mrs. Shiasaka said, “go to the lavatory and get hold of yourself. You will stay in from nutrition break. Geico needs his cage attended. The rest of you are excused.”

Pachelbel came on, played by horns. Sally nearly toppled her chair running out. The room emptied.

Lindsay couldn’t help herself. “Mrs. Shiasaka? It’s not totally Sally’s fault.”

Mrs. Shiasaka looked at her the way she always did—distracted, taking a moment to remember who she was. “Lindsay, I know you mean well, but Sally has had problems in the past that contributed to this outburst.”

“It’s Taylor who’s been going after Sally.”

Mrs. Shiasaka began collecting their papers.

Lindsay stamped her foot. “God, will you just listen a second, please?”

Mrs. Shiasaka folded her arms across her chest. “I always listen to my girls.”

“They made fun of her teeth. How tall she grew. And her skin being darker this year. This isn’t the first time.”

When Mrs. Shiasaka touched the jade necklace that she always wore Lindsay wondered if she was praying to Buddha the way Gammy touching her cross meant she was talking to saints. “This is valuable information, Lindsay. I’d very much like it if you’d agree to sit in on Mediation.”

Lindsay’s stomach flip-flopped again. If she did that, they’d go after her next. “Why can’t you just punish us like regular schools do? All you have to do is say ‘no’ really loud and make us write I won’t be mean to girls of other races six hundred times. Why can’t you act like teachers instead of friends!”

Mrs. Shiasaka remained silent long enough for Lindsay to realize she’d done a bad thing. “Please, join Sally in the lavatory, Lindsay. Frankly, I’m speechless at the moment. I’ll be speaking to your mother. Go compose yourself.”

The last thing Lindsay’s mom needed was more bad news. Gammy Bess would be so disappointed she might have a “spell.” But worst of all it might cause Allegra to have a setback. “This is just like the Salem witch trials,” Lindsay mumbled as she ran from the classroom, hoping to make it to the lavatory before she threw up.

After she flushed the toilet and washed her mouth out three times, she saw Sally sitting on the floor crying into the paper towel she’d pulled from the wall dispenser above her head. It had a motion sensor. All Sally had to do was lift her hand and roll out more paper towel to cry into. Lindsay took a tissue from her pocket and offered it to her. “This is softer.”

Sally took it. “Gum?”

Lindsay took two pieces. “Thanks.”

“You shouldn’t hang around me anymore,” Sally said, wiping her eyes. “You’ll catch cooties that’ll follow you to Carmel High.”

“I don’t mind cooties. You’re my science project partner. We’re going to win the prize, remember? You and me and Charlie and her clones. Though we should have named her Charlene.”

Sally laughed, and Lindsay snorted. It was true. Every marijuana plant was a clone of the mother. That was how you got the best strains. The plants with the biggest crop were like photocopies. In three and a half weeks, Gregorio’s plants had grown two feet tall. They thrived on bat guano, which Gregorio insisted was like giving the plants top-of-the-line vitamins: Centrum-stinky.

Since Sally’s punishment was staying in at nutrition and cleaning Geico’s cage, Lindsay stayed in to help. The girls moved Geico from his cage to the fish tank where he stayed while his cage was cleaned. “You gave up nutrition for iguana dookey,” Sally said, scrubbing. “I guess that makes you a masochist.”

Lindsay sprayed cleaner onto the cage bars. “I’d rather clean iguana poop every day of the week than get tortured outside for a half hour.”

“Ew, dead crickets,” Sally said. “Can you fish them out? We don’t want our class mascot, a reptile—how fitting—to get sick from eating rotten insects.”

Lindsay looked down the counter to the aquarium, where Geico was trying to climb the glass wall without success. “Do crickets have a shelf date?”

“They’re crickets. How could you tell?”

“That’s why I’m asking.”

“I have a question, too. Lindsay, why do you love Carl Sagan?”

“He had really good ideas. He made astronomy accessible to—”

“Omigod, speaking of good ideas! Let’s put these dead crickets in Taylor’s backpack. On second thought, the live ones, too. Put ’em in here.”

“Sally, we’re already in enough trouble.”

Sally held out a plastic sandwich bag. “Lindsay, we have to do this to show her we’re the law in Room Thirty-two! What we say goes.”

While Sally located Taylor’s pack and unzipped the top enough to shove the crickets in, Lindsay worried. Could crickets have heart attacks? Was a rudimentary central nervous system enough for an insect to feel terror? Taylor screaming in their cricket ears would be like getting caught in acid rain. She heard the sound of the zipper closing.

“Come on,” Sally said. “Let’s put Geico back. We better haul ass.”

“We?” Lindsay said. “All I did was stand here and watch.”

“Wake up, Sleeping Beauty. You scooped. That makes you an accomplice.”

After lunch—“Life Paths, Life Questions” class was four dreadfully long modular segments—one by one, students were interrogated about their pretend dinner guests. Avril picked Meg Ryan as a good role model because her movies were never gratuitous. Frankie and Madison picked Romania’s Blood Countess, but didn’t get a chance to explain why before Mrs. Shiasaka looked at the clock.

“I think we’ve broadened our minds enough for one day,” she said. “Your homework assignment is to write a dialogue with your chosen dinner companion each and every day from now until Thanksgiving.”

“But what am I supposed to write about?” Avril asked.

“Avril,” Mrs. Shiasaka said. “If you can’t think of anything to write to Meg Ryan, think of someone else. Or ask yourself where you’ll be five years from now. Ten. Fifteen. A grown-up.”

Avril sighed and set her pen down. “Then all I need to write is the same line over and over, because until I’m eighteen, I’ll be wherever my dad is, with his latest girlfriend.”

Lindsay was thrilled they hadn’t time to get to hers.

There were no bells at Country Day. Instead, over the loudspeaker they played the music of a different artist every week. Today it was Wagner. Sturm und Drang, Lindsay thought. We need Zeus to be our principal. Somebody who can throw lightning bolts. Girls began putting things in their backpacks.

“Handwritten, not typed,” Mrs. Shiasaka called out. “And at least a page long, no skipping lines, and no entries written entirely in capital letters. Before I dismiss you today, I’d just like to say, girls, I am feeling extremely disheartened about today’s class. I tried to give you a mature assignment and trusted you to respond honestly and respectfully, and what happens? Fighting? Racism?”

She looked away, and right then, Lindsay felt as if she were inside Mrs. Shiasaka’s skin.

“As someone whose family was interred at Manzanar, I sincerely hope that the next time we meet you will all have developed more tolerance. Otherwise, well, I just don’t know if there’s hope for the world. Sally and Lindsay, I will be in touch with each of your mothers. Taylor, your parents are waiting in Ms. Haverfield’s office.”

All the way down the hall and outside Lindsay’s legs shook. If she could do this day over, she’d cut school, spend the day in the library, look up Manzanar, and come to class ready to work. Her mom was going to cry, she was sure of it. If there was a silver pocket in today’s dark cloud, like Gammy always said there was, she wouldn’t be allowed to go to the Halloween party, and that would take care of one problem. “What do you think Mrs. Shiasaka’s going to say to your mom?” she asked Sally as they walked toward the bus.

“Probably that I need a therapist.”

“Why? You don’t have anything wrong with you, Taylor does.”

Sally looked out across the quad to the street, where the afternoon traffic was growing thick. “Maybe I do. Kids as smart as us are ten times as likely to off ourselves even without the Taylor Fosters of the world. Check the statistics. Did this day suck or what?”

“It sucked.”

“It sucked dead donkey!” Sally yelled. “Green dead donkey dong!”

Lindsay laughed. Soon Sally would board the bus, and she would head down the block toward the café. “Manzanar,” she said. “Don’t you feel bad for Mrs. Shiasaka?”

“Listen,” Sally said, smiling, “if I feel sorry for anybody, it’s the crickets whose last moments on earth before they die of fright will be smelling Taylor’s stinking breath when she screams her lungs out the minute she opens her backpack.”

The bus driver honked, and Sally ran. “See ya! Email me later and tell me what Mrs. S. said to your mom, ’K?”

The bus belched exhaust and Lindsay covered her nose. She and Sally had the exact same grades. Sally rode horses, and she’d had her picture in the paper three times, and while Lindsay had never been on a horse, her picture had been in
The Blue Jay,
once, her holding Khan dressed up as a bunny for Easter Sunday. Sally’s photos were because she won horse shows, and a two-page feature on her mom’s flower farm. The article referred to the story of Sally’s dad’s death, which everyone from Pacific Grove to San Celina knew about already. A man on his way to marry the love of his life dies in a chain-reaction car accident leaving wheelchair-bound fiancée alone and pregnant. The photo showed Sally at her computer, writing—a budding novelist, the article said.