Nice and Mean (19 page)

No chance of that now, though. I picked up my books and headed to my locker, looking straight ahead, never saying a word. But still—lunch—video time! I'd had some ideas about what to do with Sachi's interviews, but more than that, I just wanted to
talk
to somebody. Ooh, and there was Sachi at her locker! As I walked up to her, I realized I was not walking. I was bouncing.

“Hey!” I said. “Sachi,” I added when she didn't turn around.

She turned around. “Oh, hi.” She looked over my shoulder down the hall, then in the other direction, like she was scoping out the scene. What was that about? Weren't we going to work on the video together?

“Are you ready to get lunch?” I asked. “You know, so we can work on the video?”

She nodded—good. “I just have to get my pass from Ms. Avery.” She opened her backpack and began pawing through it.

“Don't worry about it,” I said. “She'll write you a new one.”

“No, I got it.” She pulled out a folded piece of loose-leaf paper, zipped up her bag, and closed her locker.

“Cool. Come on, let's get mine.” I turned and started to walk toward Ms. Avery's room, but then I realized Sachi wasn't next to me. When I turned back, I realized she was standing with her friends.

Oops. Guess I had missed that. “See you upstairs,” I told her, and waved.

She nodded. Her friends turned around and looked at me. What were
they
staring at? I hurried toward Ms. Avery's room, hoping I hadn't missed her.

It had taken me so long to track down Ms. Avery for my pass that I ran down the stairs to lunch, not wanting to waste any more time. When I threw open the door to the cafeteria, a barking laugh bonked me in the eardrums. Oh, great. Ex-friends in the house.

The menu outside the serving line said it was ravioli day, and I was hungry, but I did not need to go in there, so I backed into the corner by the stairs and waited. Rachel would get her food and then I'd get mine.

“She is so going to die,” said a voice—Chelsea? Addie? “I mean, she is seriously going to die.”

“Omigod, she wrote that?” That was definitely Addie. “I
can't believe she wrote that.”

What? Who wrote what? And who was going to die? I crept forward so I could peek into the serving line. They were all there—Rachel, Madison, Chelsea, Addie, and Elizabeth at the end. Did “she” mean me?

Rachel and Chelsea were looking at something on Rachel's tray. I couldn't see it, but I didn't think it was ravioli. I inched closer as Chelsea picked up whatever it was, and a whole bunch of little papers fell to the ground, scattering over the brown floor tiles.

“Chelsea!” Rachel groaned. “I had those in order!”

“Sorry!” Chelsea squatted down and started picking them up. One had floated into the doorway—a scrap with turquoise. Wait a minute—was that mine? I wrote in turquoise all the time. I stepped forward and bent down to grab it.

“Rachel!” Chelsea squealed, and before I knew it, a hand with silver nails snatched the note away from me.

“Hey!” said Rachel. We stood up, face-to-face—well, eyes to nostril, because she was so grossly tall. “That belongs to me.”

The way she said it made me think she was lying somehow, and through her claws I could see that the handwriting was mine. “Excuse me,” I said, “it actually belongs to me.” I tried not to breathe in her breath. “You seem to have a real
thing for looking at stuff that isn't yours, Rachel.”

She pursed her lips—maroon today, triple yuck. “It's mine now,” she said. “But soon I'm going to share it with everybody.” The maroon blobs curled into an evil smile.

“What do you mean?” I looked at the Plebe Squad for clues, but their lips were zipped. “What do you mean, ‘share it'? ”

“Do you girls want lunch or what?” the lunch lady asked impatiently.

Rachel handed the note off to Chelsea, who tucked it into a folder and scurried off into the lunchroom, then smiled at the lunch lady. “Sorry, Melinda,” said Rachel. “Can I have some ravioli, please?”

She knew the lunch lady's name? Show-off. I glanced at Elizabeth, who was still standing at the end of the line, her face completely blank.

“You might as well tell me what it is,” I told Rachel. “You obviously want me to know.”

Addie gave Madison a nervous look behind Rachel's back. What were they planning? Somebody should just tell me.

Rachel took her tray from the lunch lady—Melinda—with an even bigger smile than before. “The notes,” she said sweetly. “Yours. About people. You seem to really want people to know what you think of them, so we're going to do
you a favor and make them public.”

“Hello?” Melinda waved at me over the counter, and I realized she was talking to me. “We're going to start closing up here.”

“Ravioli, please,” I said, breathless like a moron, then turned back to Rachel. “Public where?” If people saw the White Pages, Volume 2—oh God. I wouldn't have a single friend in Jane Jacobs Middle School. The tomato sauce suddenly smelled overly sweet, and I didn't even want to look at the ravioli.

Rachel moved to the end of the line. “That's for me to know and you to find out. Liz-Bird, did they ever get you your cheese?”

Elizabeth shook her head.

“Poor thing,” said Rachel, and put her hand lightly on Elizabeth's shoulder as she left the lunch line. She waved over her shoulder and said, “Later, Marina.”

Melinda passed me back my tray. I thanked her—I think.

A different lunch lady appeared from behind the counter and handed Elizabeth a Parmesan cheese shaker, filled to the top. “Sorry you had to wait so long, sweetheart.”

“That's okay,” said Elizabeth. “Thanks, Evelyn.”

Did everybody know the lunch ladies' names but me? When did that happen? The plebes ganging up against me—Rachel plotting to humiliate me. It was like I'd stepped
into a new and horrible universe, right there on the lunch line.

“Elizabeth.” I slid my tray toward her. “What is Rachel talking about?” Even though we were right near the tomato sauce, her perfume drifted under my nose, and I tried to ignore how homesick it made me. “Is Rachel going to make a book or something out of the White Pages?” Then I realized it could be worse. “Wait—is she going to put them on the Internet?” That could not happen.

Elizabeth shook the cheese over her plate. “I'm not supposed to tell,” she said.

“Bird, come on.” I knew I sounded desperate, but I didn't care. “Or—whatever, it doesn't matter what it is. Can you tell her not to do it?”

“I tried.” She clicked the container shut. “She won't listen. She doesn't even care that she's going to get in trouble.” Elizabeth looked like she was in pain.

“When is she going to do it?” The sound of people talking in the lunchroom seemed far away and close at the same time. “Like, today?”

Elizabeth bit her lip. “I don't know. She keeps changing her mind.”

That was good news, at least. “So can't you, like,
really
change her mind? Tell her to stop?”

She stepped aside so some kid who had come in through
the back could get to the cheese. “I think she wants you to apologize.”

“I already wrote her an apology letter! What more does she want?”

“But Ms. Avery made you write that one, right? I think she wants you to
say
you're sorry.”

Ugh! It was just like when the hairdresser had burned Rachel's neck. She needed
everyone
to wear a hat at the pity party.

“She's really upset,” Elizabeth said. “She's been wearing sneakers all week. It's like she's afraid people are going to make fun of her, after what you did.”

I grabbed the container and shook cheese onto my pasta. “If Rachel really thinks her clothes are so great, she wouldn't care if someone else made fun of them.” Apologizing would be like saying it was wrong to make fun of her clothes, and I could think whatever I wanted about them.

“But you were friends!” Elizabeth cried. “Don't you care that you made her feel bad? And now she's going to do the same thing to you. You're going to feel just as bad, and it's going to keep going on like this unless one of you stops it. People are starting to think we're crazy. Alex keeps being like, ‘The girls are so moody this week,' and Crystal came up to me in rehearsal to ask me about the drama.
Can't you just end it now? What is so bad about telling her you're sorry?”

“Eliza-
beth
.” Chelsea had shown up at the back door of the lunch line with a pout on her face. “Rachel wants to know what's taking you so long.”

Elizabeth picked up her tray. “Will you think about it?” she asked me. “Please?”

I didn't even want to say that I would.

Elizabeth's eyes were still on me as she left with Chelsea, and I could hear Chelsea's not-so-soft whisper, “What was she saying to you?”

Oh, these plebes! I couldn't stand it. Who cared about the notes—who cared what any of them thought of me? I had one thing to do—well, two: check online about applying to Marlowe and work on the video with Sachi. I could do both upstairs, so I showed the teacher on duty my note from Ms. Avery and ran upstairs as fast as I could without spilling tomato sauce on my sweater.

When I got upstairs, Ms. Avery and Sachi were talking about some show I hadn't seen—was Citizen Kane a person or a movie? I couldn't figure it out—so I got to eat my ravioli in peace. It took me three raviolis to realize that the whole thing was way too salty, and to look down and see that I'd
covered it with so much cheese, I could barely even see the pasta. I took a big gulp of water, but my mouth still felt hairy, and it was all Rachel's fault. If she hadn't made me mad with her stupid plan and brainwashed Elizabeth into telling me to apologize, I would have been enjoying my favorite lunch. Well, my favorite
school
lunch.

A voice came over the speaker and said, “Ms. Avery, we need you in the office.”

“Oh, right.” Ms. Avery sighed. “I'll be right back, girls,” she said, and hurried out the door.

“Hey.” Sachi pushed her lunch tray to the edge of the desk where she was sitting. “Are you okay?”

“What?” I asked. “Yeah. Why?”

She shrugged, and the cute hoops she was wearing bobbed up and down. “I don't know. You just look upset.”

“I'm fine,” I said. “I'm just ready to work on the video. Do you want to finish showing me your DVD?” We hadn't had time to watch it all yesterday before the bell rang.

“Yeah,” she said, “and I even have some notes for another interview.”

“Cool.” I ate a ravioli that didn't have so much cheese on it. “With who?”

She pulled a notebook out of the bag next to her and flipped through it. “My older sister. We were talking last
night, and she said all these interesting things that I want her to say on-camera.”

“Hunh.” The night I'd come over, her sister had mostly shot me mean looks. “What did she say?”

Sachi's eyes were still on the notebook. “Just about how so much of trends is what people decide to put in stores, and how stores only come up with new trends so we'll buy more stuff.”

“Um, okay.” I scraped the cheese off the next ravioli—crappy Parmesan. “But that's not really what we're talking about. I mean, yeah, there's new stuff in stores, but some people choose it better than others.”

“Yeah, but don't you think it's weird that everyone agrees on things at the same time? Like, every three years people think something Indian is cool, and then it's like, ‘Bhangra music is boring.' ”

Who had said anything about bhangra music? And why was this turning into Marina and Sachi's Very Special Tour of the World? Focus, people—focus.

“I see what you're saying,” I said, trying to let her down easy, “but I think that's too much. Remember what Mr. Phillips said—‘K-I-S-S? Keep It Simple, Stupid'?” Ew, the one thing I remembered from Video had the word “kiss” in it? “Let's just keep it about trends here at school.”

“But why?” asked Sachi. She pulled her hands under the desk, and I would have bet anything she was playing with her ring. “I think it's more interesting if we don't just talk about things at school. I mean, is Jacobs really that different from anyplace else?”

What, so talking about school fashions wasn't good enough? I punched my fork into the Styrofoam tray. “Lots of people care about what people wear to school,” I said, making rows, then a square, then a bigger square with my punches. “If we start talking about store owners and Indian music, the video's going to be like a social studies class.”

That had to get her. Squeegees never wanted to seem like squeegees. And I would not have my video be squeegee.

“Maybe,” said Sachi, “but I still want to talk about why things are the way they are. I mean, that was what I wanted to do with the video in the first place.”

I punched my fork in again, and it scratched through to the desk.

“We can put in the fun stuff that you shot,” Sachi continued. “I can ask if Mr. Phillips will give you back your
Victim/Victorious
footage. I just want to have the other ideas in there too.”

“But that's not how I thought of it!” I jammed my fork into the tray, then tried to pull it out, but I couldn't. It was
stuck.

I shoved the tray across the desk. Everything was stuck! Everybody wanted me to do what
they
wanted, all the time. Apologize—talk about random music. I was just—so—sick of it.

The sun burst into the room again, making my fork and tray glow so bright, I had to squint, and through my squint I could see that the tray looked really, really stupid. Who would put a fork in a tray? Forks were for eating with. Trays were for holding food. Anyone who would stick a fork in a tray was just too much. Too—oh God, did my mother's word just pop into my head?— intense.