30 Days of No Gossip (4 page)

“Hey, Mads.”

I held in a groan. Just as I feared.

“Hi, Syd.”

“What’cha doin’?”

“Studying for midterms,” I lied. Well, it was only partly a lie. My history textbook was open on the bed next to me, but my laptop was on my lap. I’d been busily typing away on a
Troy Tattler
I could never, ever show anyone, but I figured it didn’t count as gossip if nobody ever heard or saw it.

“I thought you might be getting ready for tomorrow,” she said.

“What’s to get ready?” I asked, sounding more like Vi than I ever had in my life. “I’ll just throw something together in the morning.”

Sydney’s gasp was so loud, it was as if she were sitting next to me. “You’ll just ‘throw something together in the morning’?” I could almost see her gaping jaw. “I have to know what you’re going to wear.”

She
had
to know. Was it gossiping to tell her? I thought about it a minute and decided probably not. Gossiping was talking about other people, right?

“My red T-shirt and some jeans.”

“The ones with sequins on the back pockets?” she asked.

I nodded, then remembered she couldn’t see me. “Yes.”

“Good. What do you think Vi will wear? Do we need to call and tell her to wear something that fits?”

I winced. Granted, Vi wasn’t a fashion plate, but she had far more important things to worry about than clothes. She was on the honor roll because she spent time studying instead of trying to figure out what to wear tomorrow. That was a good thing. We all should be like that. Plus, Vi could make a normal bedroom look like something out of a magazine, so I was pretty sure that if she really cared
about it, she could outdress every single one of us.

I realized I couldn’t even stick up for her. Not without gossiping. I clamped my mouth shut. Again, I had that feeling that I was holding in words. Maybe I should just stay away from talking to people for the next twenty-nine-and-a-half days.

“I’m sure she’ll wear something cute,” I said, biting my bottom lip nervously as soon as the words were out. I was so confused about what was gossip and what wasn’t, I wasn’t sure what to say anymore.

“I’ll call her and tell her what we’re wearing,” she offered. “That should take care of it.”

“Don’t!”

I didn’t mean to yell into the phone, but I could already picture the conversation in my mind. Sydney would call Vi and tell her that she and I had just talked and decided tomorrow we’d be wearing our sparkly jeans and red tees. Vi would deem it “gossip” and stop speaking to me forever.

Maybe not, but I couldn’t risk it. “I’ll call her,” I rushed to say. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Wait,” I heard her say as I was reaching for the button to hang the phone up. “I wasn’t finished talking.”

Another suppressed groan. I’d figured as much. She’d
want to talk. And talking meant gossiping. And even if I listened to gossip, I could get in trouble. Even one “uh-huh” could be heard as agreement.

“What are we going to do about Trevor?” Sydney asked.

“What do you mean?” I asked. I wasn’t playing dumb this time. I really had no idea.

“The bus,” she said, sighing.

Oh, yeah. The whole bus thing. Trevor was supposed to sit at the front of the bus and Kelsey would be at the back, pretending she didn’t like Aiden. The plan had been that we’d sit up front, where Sarah and Trevor would be sitting, all hand-holdy and stuff, while Aiden stared at Sarah with puppy-dog eyes like he always did. We were supposed to watch the action, I guess. But now that I’d overheard someone saying Aiden had told Emma he might like Kelsey back, all of that had changed. I wasn’t even sure Aiden would sit near Sarah.

Of course, I couldn’t say any of that. I had to hold it all in, along with all the other words that were backed up inside my chest. This was a lot harder than I’d thought.

“We can just sit in the middle,” I finally said. “No big deal.”

“No big deal?” Sydney asked. “No. Big.
Deal 
? Who are you and what have you done with Maddie?”

Uh-oh. Busted. How was I supposed to deal with this? Nobody had told me how to deal with this.

“Gotta go,” I rushed to say. “My mom’s calling.”

I hung up the phone without waiting for a response and tapped in Vi’s number as quickly as possible. She had a cell phone too, but hers had unlimited minutes. Since she wasn’t much of a phone talker, that was kind of a waste.

No answer. Of course. Why had I thought there would be? I hung up the phone around the time it went to voice mail and stared at my laptop screen. What if I IM’d her? Would she reply to me then?

I decided it was worth a try. I opened my instant messenger and started typing.

“Hey,” I typed, my fingers moving quickly over the keys before I could lose my nerve. “I know you’re, like, mad at me and all and not speaking to me, but I think Syd’s onto us.”

I waited, watching the blank white screen, which seemed to burn my eyeballs. It said Vi was online, but it always said that. She had it set so people couldn’t tell if she was offline, idle, or typing away, so nobody could bug her when she didn’t want to talk. She was kind of antisocial when it was exam time.

I waited a few minutes more but got no response. I
chewed my lip thoughtfully for a while. I imagined her across the room from her computer, not even looking in that direction. The Vi I knew would be furiously studying, buried in her work, only seeing her IMs later tonight, maybe right before she went to bed.

If that was the case, it wouldn’t matter whether she responded to me or not. I could say what I had to say and she’d read it and think about it. So I thought for a second longer before I started typing again.

“We were talking about the field trip tomorrow, and she noticed I wasn’t gossiping,” I wrote. “She asked who I was and what I’d done with Maddie. People are going to start to notice I’m not gossiping. I think we should tell them about our deal.”

I sat back, rereading what I’d typed. If I knew Vi, she wasn’t even thinking about the field trip. She’d jump out of bed and head to school in the morning like it was any other day.

That was when it hit me. I didn’t have to tell people Vi had made me not gossip. I could say I was trying to be a better person. It was my own idea. Still, people would freak out if they knew they couldn’t get information from me anymore. They’d try to talk me into gossiping and try to make it harder. It would be better if I could just change
the subject whenever someone tried to get me to gossip. They’d probably bug me about it, but they wouldn’t make me gossip.

The answer came to me while I was staring at that blank instant-message screen. I had to figure it out myself. That was part of it. Vi wanted me to be a better person and to stop gossiping altogether, not just for thirty days. I knew that much. And if I was going to be the person she’d dared me to be—the person she thought I never
could
be—I had to learn to find a way to handle everyone throwing gossip at me without having her talk me through it.

The phone next to my bedside rang, scaring the bejeebers out of me. I slammed the laptop shut and looked at the caller ID. Part of me thought it might be Vi, calling to talk to me about what I’d sent her. I knew better than that, though. If she did start talking to me again, it wouldn’t be because I’d IM’d her to tell her people were asking why I wasn’t gossiping anymore.

It wasn’t Vi. It was Jessica.

Deal with it myself. Okay. I could handle this. I picked up the phone and took a deep breath before blurting out a cheerful, “Hello.”

“Well. What’s with you?”

That wasn’t a good sign. The conversation hadn’t even
started yet, and already I was setting off Jessica’s “Maddie isn’t acting like herself ” alerts. I had to come up with something that wouldn’t mean the end of the
Troy Tattler
but would still explain my sudden change in personality.

That was when it hit me. It was the perfect idea.

“Just trying to be more positive,” I announced, smiling at the brilliance of my idea.

“It’s about time,” Jessica said. “Life’s too short to always be so grumpy.”

I started to agree before I realized what she’d said. “Hey!” I objected, sitting straight up on my bed and staring grumpily at the phone.

“No offense,” she said.

“I don’t think I’m that grumpy.” I caught my reflection in the mirror across the room, saw my frown, and immediately forced it into a smile.

“Whatever.” Jessica paused a minute, then continued. “Are you going to tell me what’s going on or what?”

I immediately tensed. Sydney had no doubt called her immediately after our conversation. The two of them talked to each other almost as much as they talked to me. Most of the time, they called me just to find out what I knew so they’d have something to talk about when they called each other.

“With what?” I asked, stalling for time.

“Tomorrow,” Jessica said. She didn’t sigh, but I knew she wanted to. “The field trip?”

This had been the same conversation I’d had with Syd a few minutes earlier. I wanted to talk about it. I wanted to gossip about what Sarah Dooley would be wearing and how we thought Kelsey would react if Sarah sat near Aiden. Instead, I asked the only nongossipy question I had.

“What time are we supposed to be there?”

“Huh?” Jessica asked. I knew I’d only get away with those kinds of questions until Jessica started talking again. “I don’t know. Check your e-mail. I’m talking about the whole Kelsey-Aiden-Sarah-Trevor situation.”

“I don’t want to talk about this.”

“Since when don’t you want to talk?” Jessica had a panicky, are-you-crazy tone to her voice. I had to pull the phone away from my ear to save my eardrum.

Great, Maddie. Now get yourself out of this one.

“I’m trying to be more positive, remember?”

I wasn’t sure that one would work or not, but it was worth a try. If they asked, I’d tell them I’d been watching some show on TV about positive thinking and how it can fix all the problems in your life.

“Talking about someone’s crush
is
positive,” Jessica said.
“It’s like we’re reporters. It’s our responsibility to know what’s going on.”

I was beginning to feel a little trapped. There would be no way out of this but to admit I couldn’t gossip, but if I did that, they’d try to talk me out of it. They might even do everything they could to get me to gossip again. There was only one thing I could do.

“Gotta go,” I said, the words rushing out of me. “My mom needs me.”

Chapter Five

THE FIRST THING I NOTICED
as i rode up to the school on my bike Saturday morning was that there were no kids out front. It was early, but we’d been told to get here early to leave for the field trip. Shouldn’t other seventh graders be gathered here for the field trip?

The front of the school wasn’t completely deserted, though. As I drew closer, I squinted at the strange shapes that were far too tall to be anyone who went to this school. Grown-ups. Three grown-ups I’d never seen before, to be exact. I sped over to the bike rack, locked up my bicycle, and by the time I turned around, they were walking toward me.

“Do you go to school here?” one of the women asked. She wore big dark sunglasses and capri pants with an expensive-looking tank top. Actually, everything she wore looked really
expensive. Her hair was perfectly styled and she had a lot of makeup on. In other words, she didn’t look like she was from around here.

“Yes,” I said. “Are you here for the field trip?”

It was probably a dumb question, but that was the only reason to be here today. The woman in the tank top looked at the two men standing behind her and smiled before turning back to me.

“No, we’re here to see Mr. Shelly.” Mr. Shelly was the principal. “I was just wondering if you could point us in the direction of his office.”

I turned toward the front door of the school and saw a line of cars heading down the street that led to the back of our school. That was where the band room was, as well as the practice football fields. It hit me then.

Our field trip! We were meeting in the back.

“I have to go,” I sputtered, rushing off. “The front door to the school is there. Good luck.”

I wondered about the three strange people on the front lawn, but only as long as it took me to get around to the back of the school and see the line of people climbing onto the school bus. How had I missed such an obvious instruction? I’d read the e-mail and it had said the time and place, but I didn’t remember anything about the back of the school.

There was no point worrying about the people out front, anyway. I couldn’t gossip about it, which meant I couldn’t even ask anyone what was going on. Someone might have known, but Vi would give me her disapproving frown if she heard me asking about it.

So I got in line behind the last person, craning my neck to see if I could see my friends on the bus and hoping they would save me a seat. After last night, they may have decided I was too boring to hang out with all the way to Four Cedars Park and invited someone else to sit with them.

I should have known better. There, in the third row, sat Sydney and Jessica, with Vi in the seat behind them. That brought me to a stop midway down the aisle. Was that spot for me? If so, did that mean . . . ?

Did that mean Vi was speaking to me again?

Feeling hopeful for the first time in more than a day, I started forward again. I plopped down on the seat next to her like nothing had changed at all. I thought, for a second, she might have been saving this for someone else, but then it hit me that if she were, she couldn’t tell me. She couldn’t say a word. She’d be stuck with me all the way to the park.

Vi didn’t speak. She just kept looking out the window and I wasn’t sure she even knew I’d sat down. I faced forward, looking past Syd and Jess. Sure enough, Trevor and
Sarah sat in the row in front of Sydney and Jessica. They weren’t holding hands.

“I thought you’d never get here,” Jessica said, spinning around in her seat to look at me. “What took you so long?”

I didn’t explain to her that I went to the front of the school. I felt like a big idiot, especially compared to Vi, who managed to make it to the right place even though she was absorbed in studying for midterms. In fact, it looked like everyone on this bus had known to come back here. I had clearly missed something.