Only Girls Allowed (10 page)

It was nearly killing me that I couldn't say anything to anyone about Bet sneaking into the Pink Locker Society offices. I mean, I could have asked her what she was doing in there. But then she might have asked me what
I
was doing in there. And that was a question I really didn't want to answer. I knew that Bet hadn't said anything to anyone so far about my being there, but I didn't know if she was staying quiet out of respect for me or because she didn't want to admit what
she
was up to.

So since I couldn't talk about Forrest or share my suspicions about Bet, I actually got caught up on my schoolwork. I even got an A on my English paper. That gave me something good to tell Mom. But before long, I started to focus less on school and more intently on the uncertain future of the Pink Locker Society. I had a long list of questions and complaints:

 

• Would Edith and Anna ever get back in touch to say the Web site was working again?
  
• Was the PLS gone forever?
  
• What are girls going to do without us?
  
• We are like doctors, and they have closed the emergency room!
  
• Who knows how many girls are waiting?!!!!!
  

 

I wrote all that down in a note to Kate and Piper that I dashed off during geometry class. I probably shouldn't have been so energetic about those last exclamation points. The pencil tapped loudly against the hard plastic of the desktop:
Line-dot! Line-dot! Line-dot! Line-dot! Line-dot!

As I finished that last exclamation point, Mr. Ford leaned down and said, “What are you working on, Jemma?”

Great. I'm already annoyed at the whole world and Mr. Ford calls me out for writing notes in class. Worst of all, he took the note.

With the note gone, I grabbed Kate and Piper after class and told them all my complaints about the Pink Locker Society. Turns out, they were getting pretty fed up, too. I don't know if she was just trying to fit in, but Bet chimed in and said she felt “sick in my stomach” thinking about all those girls writing in and getting no response.

“What if people think
we
wrote those nasty notes?” Kate asked.

“They probably do, since we're completely shut down right now,” Piper said, then threw up her hands in frustration.

In a quiet voice, Kate said she was so upset that she turned to her mom for advice.

This made all of us turn at look at Kate, because no one had told her mom about the Pink Locker Society. Remember the rules? Tell no one.

“My mom was in the Pink Locker Society,” Kate said.

Mrs. Parker?

We exploded with questions for Kate.

 

• What was it like back then?
  
• What did they do when there was no Web site?
  
• Why were we picked?
  
• Does she have any idea who would hack into the site?
  
• Are we doing a good job?
  
• Did she always keep it a secret?
  
• Why did the Pink Locker Society shut down years ago?
  
• And who decided it should reopen?
  
• Can she help us get this junk off of the Web site?
  

 

Kate tried to answer them all. Her mother told her it had been a great honor and she loved serving as a Pink Locker Lady. Mrs. Parker confirmed that girls have always wanted to know pretty much the same stuff, Kate said. She also confirmed what Edith had said about how girls used to submit questions through secret boxes hidden around the school.

“Mom said they typed up the answers and published their own little newspaper,
The Pink Paper.
They left stacks of
Pink Papers
in the girls' bathroom,” Kate said.

“That's classy,” Piper said.

“Well, it makes sense. Girls would find them there,” Kate said.

This was all a great history lesson, but Kate's mom had no answers to any of our here-and-now questions about the Pink Locker Society. I could see Piper growing distracted. She picked up her phone and starting checking messages.

“My mom doesn't know why they decided to start it up again,” Kate said. “And she doesn't know why they got shut down way back when.”

“Sweet!” Piper said, raising her phone up high like it was a trophy she just won.

We looked at her, waiting for the news. I figured it was yet another boy asking her out. They were getting hotter and older with each passing month of eighth grade.

“The Pink Locker Society is back in business,” Piper said. “Anna just texted us. The hackers are gone, so let's get to work.”

 

I should have been happy, and I was. But something about passing through that pink locker door took me back to the last time I was in that office. I could barely concentrate as we waded through more than three hundred questions. We had received on average a hundred per week, even though we were shut down. And one of them, quite obviously, was from Taylor. Grrrrrrr.

The message said:

 

“Hey, secret Pink Locker people, you should SERIOUSLY consider putting that awesome show
Gotcha!
on this Web site!”

Forrest did tell me Taylor was on our Web site a lot, but
seriously? The Pink Locker Society site will NEVER broadcast
Gotcha!

I tried to put that out of my mind and dove back into embarrassing issues, starting with someone who was afraid to say she was scared to get braces. I could answer that one easily, having braces myself and knowing that it doesn't hurt to get them on and it's no big deal. But my mind kept drifting, drifting back to Forrest. I started to get really angry that he hadn't said one word to me since that study hall in the PLS. I mean, what was up with that? I showed him something personal and really cool, and he doesn't say anything? I wanted to poke him in the chest and, once and for all, get it on the table: I LIKE YOU FORREST MCCANN. DON'T YOU GET IT? ARE YOU BLIND?

Ordinarily, Kate would talk me out of such foolishness. But there I was, locked in my own little head, unable to say anything to anyone. Even Piper would have talked sense into me, probably. But no, I forged ahead.

I had no script this time, which turned out to be even more dangerous than having a script. Last time, I at least had the memory of what I wanted to say. This time I was just freestyling when I stopped him by the water fountain.

“Don't you have anything to say to me?”

“Hey, Jemma. What?”

His green eyes were so clear when you got to look at them close. I realized right then that I hardly ever looked him square in the eye. I mean I looked at him from afar,
but not straight on like that. I had so much I wanted to say. I wanted to just unravel right there in front of him.

First I said, “Um . . . Um.” Then I said the first thing that came to mind:

“I saw someone throw up in that water fountain once.”

“Nasty,” Forrest said. “It wasn't today, was it?”

Once I said no, he stopped and took a drink. Then he was gone again.

Does it surprise you to learn how, that afternoon, a cold autumn rain poured down over Margaret Simon Middle School? What a perfect match to my mood. It rained extra hard when I was walking home from the bus stop—the kind of rain that gets you even under your umbrella. Thoughts of the restarted PLS Web site cheered me a little. But I couldn't stop thinking of how I had just had an actual encounter with Forrest, and the subject I decided to discuss was puke.

 

We truly were back in business. For a few days, we checked the Web site every few hours, like it was a sleeping baby. We wanted to be completely sure that the hackers were gone for good. Anna told us that she had to do a lot of patching, but she felt 95 percent confident that we were in the clear.

“Not one hundred percent?” Edith had asked her on a recent conference call.

We started to answer questions again, and our fan mail resumed. That helped us all to exhale and get back in our Pink Locker groove. During study hall, we answered question after question. And they just kept on coming. We started to think about fair ways of answering questions, if we couldn't answer them all. I suggested a lottery, but Kate
thought we should read them all and answer the most urgent ones. In the end, we resolved just to keep doing our best.

But it did not seem to me like we were doing our best on Friday, when Piper and Bet weren't doing any work at all. They bolted in during study hall and scooted upstairs to the loft. I ignored them for a while. But then I started to worry that if Piper and Bet were suddenly best buddies, maybe Bet was up there right now telling Piper about the Forrest incident.

“What are they doing up there?” I finally asked Kate.

“Piper's helping her with her makeup, for the contest. Didn't she tell you?”

“The contest—the MSTV contest?”

“Right. I hope she wins,” Kate said.

“Bet's going up against Taylor?”

“Taylor and everyone else who's trying to get their own show,” Kate said.

This was an odd development. I wasn't Bet's biggest fan, but I would root for her over Taylor any day.

Piper came bounding down the steps from the loft, holding her big professional-looking makeup case. Bet followed her, walking slowly and wearing a trim navy blue dress. Her eyelashes were curled and her lips were a soft pink.

“I don't know if I can do this,” Bet said.

“Sure you can,” Kate said.

 

Assemblies go one of two ways at Margaret Simon: They're either horribly dull, or everyone gets sooooooooo into it that it's completely rowdy and Principal Finklestein threatens all kinds of punishments until it's over. The anchorperson contest turned out to be one of the wild ones.

It was kind of like a reality TV show where everyone is competing and there's something big at stake. Taylor auditioned first and showed a new round of
Gotcha!
clips, hoping to make an impression on the audience. Thankfully, there was no footage of me this time. Unlike the ones in her first show, these clips seemed very inside-jokey, and sometimes it wasn't clear which part was the “Gotcha!” part. Some of the kids featured didn't go to our school, so they just didn't
pack the same punch. Quickly, the audience grew so rowdy you couldn't hear much of what was going on.

The restlessness started to take shape and turned into a chant that began at low volume but rose loud and clear: “Bor-ing! Bor-ing! Bor-ing!” When nearly everyone seemed to be saying it, I joined in, too—after checking around to make sure Forrest wasn't anywhere nearby. I didn't want him to see me being mean.

Principal Finklestein intervened, of course, and when Taylor's segment ended, there was some brief, polite applause. A few people booed, which made me wonder if they would boo for Bet too.

Clem was next. She put a new spin on her old show,
Clem's Crib.
This one was
Around the World with Clem Caritas.
In it, she showed the camera her favorite fashion souvenirs: a batik sarong from Bali, a sickly expensive purse from L.A., some rose soap that “someone really lovely” gave her in Paris. You get the idea. Clem received no boos, and at the end people cheered for her so that her name stretched to two syllables. “Cleh-em! Cleh-em!” But I think they cheered because she was great to look at no matter what she was talking about.