Only Girls Allowed (5 page)

Kate was good at telling stories, and she would have reminded Forrest of something funny that happened when we were younger. There were tons of possibilities. The Halloween in kindergarten when our moms made us dress as a bride and groom. The time we had a wiener roast while camping and ate hotdogs that were charred black on the outside and icy in the center. (We called them “hotdogsicles.”) I actually had plenty of material, plenty of
topics
. There were field trips and mean teachers and so many other things we had seen together over the years. But not a single one of them came to mind on that ski lift.

As for Piper, well, you know what she would have done in my place. She would have told him that she liked him, flat out. And then she would have looked at him through her long eyelashes. He would have melted, as most guys do when Piper flirts with them. But me, I couldn't even glance
in his direction, let alone attempt that chin-down, gaze-up, bat eyelashes thing Piper does. I refocused my energies on what I'd say when we hopped off the lift at the top. I sooooooo wanted to say something like “Have a great run” or “See you at the bottom.” But I ended up saying nothing. Why? Because at the top of the hill, someone stopped me dead in my tracks. She was waiting for Forrest, her fur-trimmed hood the perfect frame for her face flushed pink with cold. It was Taylor Mayweather.

 

Our plan for Monday was this: We would have our own pre-meeting, without Bet, at lunch, giving us time to collect our thoughts before our real meeting at 1:35. The girls had given me tips and even had me practice the pink locker combination that morning. At lunch, I sat down with my pizza and milk and was ready to talk about the PLS. Here's what I wanted to go over:

 

• None of us has an assigned room for study hall. Discuss the potential negatives, such as getting caught and having less time to do homework.
  
• What happens if we are in the secret office during a fire drill?
  
• Ask the group: Can I show someone (like, say, Forrest
  McCann) the PLS office as long as I don't give out the combination or “discuss our work,” as prohibited in rule three?
  

 

But Kate and Piper wanted to get right to work on MG's question.

Great, but don't ask me. No-period girl has zero advice to give about periods.

I tried to stay very quiet and took tiny bites of my pizza so I could be chewing every time there was a break in the conversation.

“I got mine in sixth, so I think we should tell her to start worrying if she doesn't get hers by the end of the year,” Piper said, spearing a forkful of her Caesar salad.

“I don't know. I don't think we should be telling her to worry,” Kate said. “We should just tell her to hang in there. You can't schedule it like a dentist appointment. Periods happen when they happen.”

Kate looked at me knowingly.

“Yeah, but shouldn't she go to the doctor if it, like, never comes? Maybe there's something wrong with her,” Piper said.

They went back and forth for a while and couldn't decide what to say to MG. When they turned to me, I pointed to my chewing mouth and shrugged. But as the conversation went on, I started to feel a little better. The truth was, here were two girls who had their periods, and even they
didn't know what to tell MG. So my not knowing was beginning to seem like less of a big deal. Of course, this was also a problem, because if we couldn't give MG a good answer, maybe we wouldn't cut it as the new members of the Pink Locker Society.

When the girls turned to me for, like, the forty-fourth time, I had just swallowed the last square inch of my pizza. Kate's eyes widened as they turned to me, knowing how I didn't want to talk about this one. But luckily, the rules were there to bail me out.

“Well, rule number two says: ‘Give high-quality advice. Don't guess. Learn and share your knowledge.' We better do some research at the library or something.”

“Where did it say that?” Piper asked.

“In the handbook, page four.”

I held my breath, but they both agreed.

“Ugh, the library,” Piper said.

“I love the library,” Kate said. “We can go tonight.”

“Me too,” I said.

We stood up and, as I did, I took note of where Forrest was in the cafeteria—sitting with the other football players and Taylor, as usual. I would have to pass right by them on my way to take back my tray. I allowed myself a quick glance—long enough to notice that Taylor was not only sitting at his table, she was sharing his chair!

As if she knew I was watching, Taylor threw back her head and laughed like Forrest had said the funniest thing
she'd ever heard. I tried to look away but just couldn't. Then, for a flash, Forrest saw me. He didn't smile, but he didn't
not
smile, either. His in-between expression was even harder to figure out than the
hey
from the bus.
Watch your step, Taylor,
I thought. Yeah, right. You know who should watch her step? Me.

 

Later that day, at study hall time, I confidently opened my locker and waited until everyone else had drifted away. When I was alone, I thrust my hand in to open the pink locker and grabbed the combination dial. I was prepared for the lighting issues this time with my key chain that has a little green flashlight on the end. With one hand, I sent a bolt of green light toward the combination dial. With my other hand, I spelled out R-E-S-P-E-C-T. I was in. I even closed the door quietly and stepped
ever so carefully
down the too-tall step and placed both feet securely on the thick rose rug.

In fact, I was the first girl in the office and was able to look around without any distractions for about thirty seconds. What I saw made me feel once again like I was dreaming.
The old-lady furnishings and the dusty tarps were gone. It was spotlessly clean and completely renovated. It looked like a ritzy hotel suite. The place could have been on TV or in the movies, like if someone was running a modeling agency.

On one side of the room, there was now a U-shaped pink couch with a glass table in the center. Floral arrangements had been added to the now-dust-free conference table. The old pink phone had been replaced by a sleek black model. Silver appliances gleamed from the kitchen. Lifting my head toward the loft (aided this time by my glasses), I could see a row of computers giving off a green glow.

The only trace of the old office was a pile of machines at the foot of the stairs. Turns out they weren't sewing machines after all. They were typewriters: super-old black ones with no power cords and newer (but still old) electric ones that were aqua and must have weighed fifty pounds each.

Kate was next to arrive, and she just stood in one spot, taking in all the changes. Piper arrived next. “No way!” she said of the sparkling new faucets, stone countertops, and monogrammed hand towels. Not PLS, as you might expect, but P, J, K, and B—one for each of us.

“Who is paying for this?” Piper wanted to know.

“The Pinkies, apparently,” Kate said as she picked up a note that had been left next to the snacks on the table.

We watched her scan the note. As she held it up, I could
see through the back side of the rose-colored stationery. The writer had the formal, forward-leaning handwriting of a teacher or grandmother.

“It says that we're the new generation of the Pink Locker Society, and they wanted to give us a ‘well-appointed, comfortable place to work,' ” Kate said.

“May I?” Piper said, pinching a corner of the note and taking it.

“Hmmm . . . ‘For reasons you can understand, those who have endowed the new PLS shall remain anonymous.' And it's signed ‘Edith.' ”

“She must be the one who called us the first day,” I said, “She never gave her name.”

“So the retired Pinkies have some dough. That's good news,” Piper said.

“Hey, where's Bet?” Kate asked. “She's missing all the fun.”

Long after the golden minute had passed, Bet was still nowhere to be found. We went to her locker and opened it from the office side. It was dark.

“Should we, like, look for her or something?” Piper asked.

“Did anyone see her today?” Kate asked.

I hadn't, but I also hadn't really looked. The truth is I would have liked it better if it was just the three of us. Having a fourth person, who was a complete stranger, made everything more confusing. Like at lunch today, we
decided to go to the library, and now we'd have to bring her up to speed and invite her along, etc.

Before we could even begin to really search for Bet, the conference-table phone rang. I picked it up and clicked the red button so everyone could hear. It was a new voice coming in crystal clear over the new phone. This one was a younger woman with a Minnesota accent. That's where my dad's from.

“Hiya, girls,” she said. “Things are lookin' pretty good there, eh?”

We murmured our agreement.

“Okey-doke. Is everybody ready to do a little high-tech work today?” she asked.

“Uh, sure?” I said, a little wary.

“Ah, that's great! Why don't ya move upstairs where the computers are and put me on the phone up there?”

“Will do,” I said.

Up in the loft, we turned on the speakerphone, and there she was again.

“Pretty nice setup, wouldn't ya say?” she asked from the speaker box. “Ya got the Infinitrix 3,000 system up here, the same computers they use in the White House.”

It was awfully nice in the loft. The computer desks were whitewashed wood, and the chairs were those fancy super-comfortable ones that they sell in the back of magazines for eight hundred dollars. “Whose behind is worth eight hundred dollars?” my mother would say when she saw those
ads. But you just felt important sitting down in a chair like that. The PLS computers started up quickly—nothing like the chugging old computer we had in our basement family room.

After we all sat down and logged in, the woman on the phone told us that she was going to give us a “lickety-split” lesson in how to run the Pink Locker Society Web site. All we needed to do was learn a few basics and we'd be able to do it on our own. In other words, we soon could post MG's answer. If we had an answer for her.

But before our computer lesson could get going, the woman on the phone stopped and asked us where Bet was. We had all created usernames and passwords for our new computers.

“I don't see her signed in here,” she said.

“She didn't show,” Piper said. “We opened her pink locker, but she wasn't there.”

“Aw, that's a darn shame. This is a pretty important session,” she said. “You'll hafta fill her in later.”

It was right then that Kate and I had one of those friend-ESP moments. We both had exactly the same thought at exactly the same time: Bet's pink locker door was still open. If Bet did happen to show up late, she would open her regular locker and give the whole world an inside look at our secret world!

Before I moved a muscle, Kate leaped down the stairs of the loft.
Slam!
Mission accomplished, Kate returned to her
desk in time to get a tour of the Pink Locker Society Web site. It had way-cool music and one of those fancy intros. Then the bright pink page opened up, but it said only “Coming soon! Very soon!” Nothing like a little pressure.

The woman on the phone told us it would be “just great” if we could get our first answer up there by “Wednesday or thereabouts.” That was two days away.

“Ya don't want to leave gals in the lurch, ya know,” she said.

Piper mouthed, “We are dead.”

Kate waved Piper off and asked the woman another question about what it meant for something to be “live” on the Web site. She explained that “live” meant something had been published on the Web site. It was there for everyone to see. No one would be able to benefit from our advice if we didn't get something live, she said.

In twenty minutes, she had me thinking that it wasn't as hard as I thought to run a Web site. The site—
www.PinkLockerSociety.org
—was already designed for us. It was like a set of blank pages that we needed to fill. We created test questions and answers and watched them instantly fill the front page of
PinkLockerSociety.org
.