So Not Okay Read online

  “Was I doing that?”

  Ophelia took a bite out of her hot dog.

  “Are we supposed to pretend too?” I said.

  She nodded.

  “You know I stink at that. I can’t even lie to my dog.”

  Ophelia swallowed hard and leaned into the table. “First you. Now Winnie. What is going on all of a sudden?”

  I took a bite of my burger and chewed as I surveyed the table in the center of the room, where the Pack sat—right where everybody could see them.

  There were five of them, counting Kylie. The tables were made for six, but nobody else ever tried to take that extra chair. How could they, with backpacks and stuff piled up like the Pack was about to jet off on spring break?

  Kylie sat in the middle between Heidi and Riannon, her identical bookends. They almost looked exactly like Kylie, too, but that was hard to do. She had these really dark blue eyes with little gold flecks in them that you couldn’t imitate like you could a haircut or bracelets or all the other things they copied from her.

  Kylie nibbled a pepperoni and swept the room with her eyes like she was looking for trash that needed to be gotten rid of. She looked . . . bored. Yeah, that was it. Like she was wishing something would happen to stir things up.

  “She’s just restless,” I said to Ophelia.

  “What does that exactly mean?”

  Ophelia was the one who was amazing in English, but even though I was the smart-in-math-and-science person, I knew more words than she did. I was her private dictionary.

  “You know, like when you’re in church and the sermon’s going on forever and you wish somebody would doze off in the pew and fall out into the aisle. Just to liven things up.”

  “Do you actually do that in church?”

  “About 50 percent of the time.”

  I had actually calculated it. I figured paying attention half the time was more than most people did. I’d seen a lot of them at Emmanuel Church look like Kylie did.

  “I don’t think we need to stress about Winnie,” I said. “Kylie’ll be picking on somebody else soon. Like exactly now.”

  Kylie was watching Evelyn Gottlieb dump her empty plate in the trash. Evelyn had obviously sat on a package of mustard, and it kind of looked like she didn’t make it to the bathroom in time. A howl went up from the Pack that got everybody in the whole lunchroom looking to see what was going down.

  Ophelia plastered her hand over her mouth. “Poor Evelyn. She doesn’t even know.”

  “Somebody oughta tell her.”

  But Mrs. Collier-Callahan, our math teacher, was already leading her out the side door. Evelyn still looked clueless, but in a minute she was going to turn the color of a raspberry—as only Evelyn could—and probably start breathing like The Little Engine That Could.

  I decided it was a good thing we had English after lunch, because Mrs. Fickus barely let us talk at all, much less laugh. Hopefully by then the Alpha Wolf and her Pack would get distracted by their lip gloss or something and forget about Evelyn’s mustard pants and Winnie’s homeless situation and, oh, yeah, my unibrow.

  “I bet one of the BBAs put that in her chair,” Ophelia said.

  That was our name for the group of boys in our section who spent most of their time Burping, Belching, and making disgusting noises with their Armpits.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Did you know the reason boys don’t mature as fast as girls is that the two sides of their brain don’t come together at the same rate ours do?”

  “I don’t even know what that means,” Ophelia said.

  “It means—”

  “Here comes Winnie. Don’t talk about you-know-what.”

  Winnie dropped herself into her chair—without the napkins—and stared down at her peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

  “I hate them,” she said.

  So much for not talking about it.

  “When I walked past their table, Riannon said I smelled like the inside of the Goodwill store.”

  “Like she’s ever even been in one,” I said.

  Ophelia glared at me and put her arm around Winnie’s shoulders. “You’ve got us,” she said. “Remember?”

  I knew the crying was about to start, so I looked over at the Pack. They looked right back. Heidi and Riannon and Izzy dared me with their eyes. Shelby, speaking of pretending, acted like she suddenly noticed a hangnail on her pinkie. Kylie simply twitched her perfect eyebrows. I could just about hear her saying, What are you going to do about it?

  Ophelia’s voice went into that singsong thing that happened when she was trying to cheer everybody up.

  “Do you have your essays ready?”

  She bugged her big brown eyes at me, which meant, Work with me here.

  “I do,” I said. “I hope we don’t have to write any more for the whole rest of the semester. They’re so lame. Who cares what kind of animal you think you look like?”

  Ophelia gave a giggle that was about as real as the hamburger I’d just eaten. “I bet Kylie wrote she was a French poodle or something.”

  “I’m pretty sure she didn’t describe herself as an Alpha Wolf,” I said.

  Winnie finally smiled. “I said I was a rabbit.”

  “Perfect!” Phee said.

  But that circled-in-red day was far from over. Kylie and the Pack were still looking around the cafeteria like everyone was a rabbit and they were on the prowl. What had made them so hungry all of a sudden?

  Chapter Two

  Most of our six teachers let us talk while they took roll, but Mrs. Fickus wanted us working “bell to bell” in fifth period. When she announced that the first day of school—and in her Southern accent, it sounded like “bayul to bayul”—Andrew Scofield, one of the BBAs, went “ding-ding.” And Mrs. Fickus said, “Bless your heart, Andrew, you’re having lunch with me tomorrow.” After that, he and Patrick O’Conner and Douglas Underhill saved their BBA activities for other classes.

  Today Mrs. Fickus told us to get out our essays, and I was all ready to turn mine in—two typed pages thanks to Ophelia’s coaching—when she drawled, “Today I’m going to ask several people to read theirs aloud.”

  “To the class?” Shelby Ryan said.

  Even though Shelby was one of her friends, Kylie rolled her eyes all the way up into her head. “Who else are you going to read it out loud to?” she said.

  The rest of the Pack laughed, and Shelby looked like she wanted to disappear into a rabbit hole.

  “Sarcasm is the lowest form of humor, Miss Steppe,” Mrs. Fickus said.

  The one and only reason I liked it that she called us Miss and Mr. was because Kylie’s name came out “misstep.” Nobody else really got it. I didn’t point it out to Kylie.

  Of course, Kylie’s name didn’t go up on the board. It kind of looked like Mrs. Fickus wanted to say the same thing to Shelby herself.

  While Winnie was asking for a pass to the nurse, which I couldn’t blame her for doing, Ophelia slid a piece of purple paper to the edge of her desk. How come she always gets away with stuff? it said in her curlicue handwriting.

  I shook my head. I hadn’t figured that out either. It didn’t seem like it was worth my time.

  “Miss Taylor, since you are unusually animated today, let’s start with you.”

  My entire body jerked toward Mrs. Fickus. She was standing so close to me I could see her blue eyeliner and the cracks in her rosy lipstick, but I still said, “Me?”

  “You are the only Miss Taylor we have in this class.”

  Yeah. And the only Miss Taylor who hated to talk in front of people more than she hated hearing the BBAs burp the Pledge of Allegiance. About 90 percent more.

  But I didn’t argue with Mrs. Fickus. (A) I’d never had lunch detention, and I wasn’t planning to ever. (B) I didn’t argue with teachers. There were plenty of times when I wanted to. I was actually really good at it. But my mother was always telling me that arguing wouldn’t make me welcome in most conversations.

  She was right about
that. Younger kids stared at me like I was nuts when I told them things like atoms are made of quarks. People way older than me got that “isn’t she precocious” expression on their faces. People my age rolled their eyes. Early that year when the eye rolling got, like, out of control, I stopped arguing with most people. I just argued in my head.

  And right then, as I carried my essay up to the front of the room, I was silently explaining to Mrs. Fickus that I was exactly the opposite of the person who should be first to read their paper out loud, because I wasn’t going to set the standard very high. She was a Southerner, the kind that got her hair done at the salon every week. Surely she would have mercy on me if I . . .

  But the way she tugged her jacket into place and tapped her seashell-colored nails on her sleeves, I didn’t bother.

  My knees were actually banging against each other, trying to take each other out, so I was glad I got to stand behind the podium. But my paper was already so damp with sweat from my hands, I could hardly peel the pages apart.

  By the time I finished wiping my palms on my jeans and clearing my throat and taking enough breaths to hyperventilate, Mrs. Fickus’s eyebrows were pinching together. Talk about a unibrow . . .

  “Miss Taylor, is there a problem?”

  All I could do was shake my head.

  “Then let’s get started. This is only a fifty-minute class period.”

  Somebody snickered in the back. At least it wasn’t a howl.

  I started to read.

  “I checked myself out in the mirror and tried to see what animal looked back at me. I’ve divided this into features.”

  I could feel tiny beads of perspiration popping out on my upper lip, but words were actually coming out of my mouth, so I went on.

  “Hair. I looked up synonyms for ‘brown’ in the thesaurus, and the closest to mine was ‘cocoa.’ Probably the dark chocolate kind, not like Nestlé’s. I have a chocolate lab named Nestlé, and we don’t have the same color hair. It’s thick—mine, not my dog’s. My mom says thick is good because hers isn’t and requires a lot of product. I looked up requires, and I don’t think that’s true, but I don’t argue with my mom that much.”

  I took a swipe at my upper lip with my tongue and continued. “Back to my hair. My mom keeps it cut in a bob, and I’ve had adults tell me they wish they had hair like mine. I never know what to say when they tell me that. My mom says ‘thank you’ is fine, but that seems sort of conceited. So mostly I shrug. My mom doesn’t like when I do that, but that’s a whole other subject. There is no animal resemblance to my hair.”

  That snicker erupted from the back of the room again, but Mrs. Fickus snuffed it out with a snap of her fingers. Personally, I didn’t see anything funny about my essay, but then it didn’t take much to amuse a BBA.

  I cleared my throat, blinked down at my paper, and froze.

  “Eyebrows,” it said.

  I could skip this part and go straight to the section about my eyes. Nobody would know. Except Mrs. Fickus later, and then she’d take off on my grade, and my A in English was tottery enough as it was. Nobody would take a chance on howling in here anyway, right?

  I gripped the edges of the page. “Eyebrows. They match my hair. I’ve noticed that not everybody’s do. It’s about genes, I think, which is something I want to study. My eyebrows are getting thicker, and that makes sense because my hair is thick.” I was almost through it. No snickers. No howls. I could do this. “Since not that many animals actually have eyebrows, I moved on to eyes.”

  I didn’t know why I chose that moment to look up. I regretted it the minute I saw the five red, bloated faces all the spitting image of Bob the Tomato as the Wolf Pack held back guffaws.

  “Is that all?” Mrs. Fickus said, dragging the all into three syllables.

  There was clearly a D in her tone. I shook my head, and my lips went into hyperdrive.

  “Eyes. My eyes are dark brown and small and shiny. Here’s where the animal part comes in. In science last year, we had to keep a list of birds I saw in my backyard, which was almost like cheating because my mom has like fifty bird feeders and I’m not even kidding. I got my dad’s binoculars and what I noticed is that my eyes are like theirs. Small and bright and shiny and sort of darty. I wish I had a bird’s-eye view like they do, but I’ll save that in case we do an essay on what kind of animal I wish I was.”

  I dragged in a breath and refused to look up. I didn’t have to. I could hear Heidi’s laugh spurting out of her nostrils.

  Only Mrs. Fickus’s grading gaze kept me going. “Nose. This is where the animal comparison kind of doesn’t work. My nose is definitely not a beak. Okay, maybe on a cardinal. I looked it up because we don’t have cardinals here, and their beaks are small and kind of turn under like mine does. Theirs are yellow though, and mine isn’t. The other thing about my nose is I have a superstrong sense of smell. I know somebody who once lived in my room kept peanut butter in there because it smells so much like it I can almost taste it sometimes. My mom tells me it’s my imagination, but as you yourself have said to me, Mrs. Fickus, my imagination muscle is underdeveloped.”

  I had to stop because I couldn’t breathe. Neither could most of the class, evidently. I could feel every single person choking and wheezing so they wouldn’t end up in detention. As for me, it was almost worth it to go there right now.

  Except that I caught Ophelia out of the corner of my eye. Her face was red, too, only it wasn’t from trying to keep from laughing. She was mad. For me. That was the only thing that kept me reading.

  “Mouth. I’m just going to go ahead and say it: my mouth is really big, sort of like a baby robin when it opens its beak to get the worm from the mom. It’s like too big for its little face. I know this because a mother robin built a nest in our camellia bush last spring, and the ground was still hard from all the cold weather, so my mother went to Safeway and got fishing worms and put some out every day for the mom so she could feed her three kids. Robins grow into their beaks. I haven’t grown into my mouth yet.”

  Half the class let go of their air and collapsed. “Howling” didn’t even begin to describe it.

  “Now that is enough!” Mrs. Fickus said.

  They squeezed themselves back into silence. Mrs. Fickus nodded her helmet head at me.

  I looked down at my final paragraph. “The rest of me,” I’d written. Thank heaven I hadn’t used the word body or Mrs. Fickus would never have gotten the class back under control.

  “I obviously don’t have bird wings,” I read, “but I’m kind of skinny, so when I stand up really straight my shoulder blades sort of look like wings. I do stand up straight because I’m a little bit taller than average and Granna (that’s my grandmother) always tells me not to slump but to be proud of my height. I’ll probably get taller because I need to grow into my big bird feet. I wear almost the same size shoe as my mom. But I won’t be wearing any of her shoes. We have way different taste in clothes.”

  Two more sentences.

  “So that’s how I’m like a bird and not like a bird. And now I’m going to fly off to something else.”

  I wasn’t kidding. I flew back to my seat and sat there so still I didn’t even inhale. The only thing moving on me was the sweat trailing down the sides of my face.

  Two more people were called up to read, but I didn’t hear anything they said.

  Actually, I didn’t see how anybody else really could either because there was so much grunting and squeaking and asthma-breathing going on as the Pack and the BBAs tried to keep from spewing all over the room.

  Two things occurred to me. (A) Nobody had ever laughed at me like that before. If they did, I didn’t know it, which is just as good as not having it happen. But (B) they didn’t just laugh at me. I knew it wasn’t all that nice of me, but I was relieved that they laughed at everybody.

  That was, until Mrs. Fickus called Miss Iann up to read.

  Michelle was the toughest kid in the whole sixth grade, not just our section. That was pr
obably why she was called Mitch. She even called herself that.

  I had done a study of Mitch, and I knew why she was the toughest.

  (A) She was a head taller than everybody else, especially the boys who were all shrimps anyway.

  (B) She hardly ever smiled. Not because she was mad but because it was like she knew adult stuff, so what was there to smile about?

  (C) Once, back in third grade, she punched a boy in the face because he called her little brother a “retard.” Nobody had messed with her since.

  The room got quiet as a funeral. Mitch stood behind the podium and folded her arms across her 49ers sweatshirt and scowled at her paper.

  “I’m like a bear,” she read. “I’m big, but I can move fast, especially if somebody threatens what I care about. I can smell trouble, and I avoid it if I can. I would sleep all winter if I could. If I’m just allowed to do my own thing and take care of my own stuff, I’m cool.”

  She lifted her head of spiky brown hair that I was now convinced was grizzly fur and gave the room a look that would have had everybody hiding under their desks if Mrs. Fickus hadn’t been there.

  “The end.”

  Nobody laughed. Nobody ever laughed at Mitch.

  For the first time ever, I envied her.

  Yeah, it was a day that needed to be circled on a calendar, and it wasn’t over yet.

  Actually, I forgot 99 percent of that suitable-for-circling afternoon when my mom took off from work sooner than usual and my dad said we were going to Cirino’s for an early dinner.

  That was only my favorite restaurant in all of Grass Valley, California. Nothing like eggplant parmesan done Sicilian style to make your whole day disappear. Halfway into it, when my stomach was starting to get that bulgy feeling, if you’d mentioned the name Kylie Steppe, I would have said, “Who?”

  “Not hungry, are you, Tor?” my dad said.

  “I find it highly unfair that she can eat like that and still stay slim as a pencil,” Granna said.

  She was joining us, of course, and she was late as always. Granna lived across the street at the Bret Harte, which used to be a big fancy hotel, like from 1917 until 1984, and was now a senior residence. I knew that because my dad liked to quiz me on Grass Valley history.