Only Girls Allowed (9 page)

Did you every worry that by wishing something, you made it come true? Confession: I loved the PLS, but before we were shut down, I had wished that it would slow down just a bit. The weight of everyone's problems was sometimes too much. We received more and more questions each week, and it was tough to answer them—and answer them right—and still keep up with my schoolwork. I had a huge English paper that I hadn't even started. And a ton of geometry proofs to do. Sometimes I turned off my phone so I wouldn't have to be bothered with new alerts from our PLS mailbox. But now, after of few days of never hearing that “Think pink!” ringtone, I felt guilty.

In our downtime, Piper, Kate, and I talked about whether we should try to keep up with the questions, just
so we'd be prepared for the moment the site turned back on. But in the end, we decided that made no sense. People asked us questions in the moment, and by the time we were back in business, their problems might have been solved or changed. It wasn't long before I started to miss the PLS. I liked being needed. And I was ready to tackle more questions in my “area of expertise,” which turned out to be embarrassing stuff.

So far, I had done especially well with questions about bad breath, stinky feet, and accidentally tooting in class. After the
Gotcha!
incident, I guess I was the school expert on humiliation. Actually, I couldn't have answered these questions without our school nurse, Mrs. Wolff, who must be starting to think I'm a pretty odd girl, to be worried about so many things at once. Somehow it wasn't embarrassing to ask an embarrassing question when it wasn't really about you. It was easy for me to ask questions about periods, for instance, since mine was still totally MIA. On that subject, there was no end to what girls wanted to know: Can you swim with your period? Do periods hurt? Should I eat certain foods during my period? I got answers for every one.

To my positive delight,
Gotcha!
did not appear on MSTV after that first week. Principal Finklestein halted it—at least temporarily—and announced a plan to have a contest for the MSTV Friday-afternoon slot. That didn't mean Taylor was out of the running, just that she had competition. All a student had to do was submit a video.

I thought for a moment about submitting my own video. I would have loved to interview everyone who was embarrassed in Taylor's first episode. But then I thought it would just draw more attention to stuff that everybody, including me, would have preferred to forget. Not that I had any time for another extracurricular activity. Even with the break from the PLS, I was still drowning a bit in my schoolwork, track, and everything else.

Principal Finklestein said we'd see all the videos at a school assembly, where there'd be a panel of judges including him, Ms. Russo, and a couple of real journalists from the local TV station and daily newspaper. We students would have “input” into the final choice, he said. But it was clear the panel would choose the winner.

Ordinarily, I would have been up in arms. After all, it's our TV station; shouldn't we students get to be the final judges? But in this case—suspecting Principal F. was no fan of
Gotcha!
—I was fine with it. In art class, I was happy to hear Ms. Russo say Taylor's broadcast could have been “tweaked” to be more playful and kindhearted. But she also had us debate whether
Gotcha!
was “free speech” and protected by the First Amendment. This only served to annoy me, especially when Taylor pled her own case.

“I have a right to say what I want when I want,” she told the class, predicting that she would win again in the end.

 

I know that what I did wasn't right. But the more I thought about the PLS, I thought it might not be so bad to let Forrest in on the secret, especially right now while we were on this forced vacation. Anna said she'd text us when the hackers had been stopped, but forty-eight hours had passed and we still had no idea how long we'd have to wait.

To prepare myself, I wrote a script for exactly what I would say to Forrest about the whole thing. Memorizing my lines made me feel sort of confident. Of course, I had to guess at what he would say back, but I figured I knew him pretty well. After all, did anyone else know that his favorite jelly was the mixed-fruit flavor—the kind you usually find only in those packets at a diner?

I planned it out like a crime and decided that I'd carry
it out on Thursday during my empty study hall period. That morning, I even pretended to worry about where I'd go during study hall, now that there was no reason for us to sneak into the Pink Locker Society offices. It was just depressing to turn on our computers and see all the questions stacking up. Girls were already complaining: “Where are you?” and “Hello? Is anyone home in there?”

Piper and Kate said they were going to spend their study halls in the library.

“Me too,” Bet said, quickly adding that she needed to find a spot to study alone.

I said (lied) that I had found an empty classroom in the art and music wing and that I too wanted to be alone to do those geometry proofs. I watched the three of them walk toward the library together and I prepared to spring into action.

My head felt like a balloon filled with love, fog, and electricity. I held my hand out and saw that it was shaking a little. Fortunately, Forrest was easy to capture. He was at his locker, right next to mine, just before study hall started. He often spent his study halls in the gym working out. No one would miss him, I figured. When the hall crowds thinned, I leaned over to Forrest and spoke my first scripted line: “I can
show
you now.”

Lesson number one to all you girls out there who really like a boy: Don't count on him remembering everything you ever said to him. You may think you have inside jokes and your own secret code, but you probably don't.

Forrest just looked startled and said, “What?” And when I said it again—“I can show you now”—he said, “What?” again. Maybe I should have started with something like hi.

Anyway, this led to me doing a lot of overexplaining, burbling on about our conversation on the bus and
Gotcha!
and how I said I would
show
him someday and now I was ready to
show
him. Finally, I saw a glimmer of recognition sweep across his face. I looked over my right and left shoulders, then motioned to the inside of my locker.

“What?” he said, but he tipped his head in my direction and looked in.

He squinted as if maybe something was wrong with his vision and took a step back.

“What's in
there
?” he whispered.

I leaned into my locker and worked the combination dial. The combination hadn't changed since the site had been shut down.

“That's what I want to show you,” I said as I swung open the pink door. “C'mon.”

I went in, and once he saw me standing in there, he followed. He even pulled my locker door closed behind him.

In my script, I was the one who closed the locker door, but no matter. I was having trouble sticking to my script anyway. It wasn't that Forrest said anything so different from what I had guessed he would say. But once we were in the Pink Locker Society offices, he said nothing at all.

Standing there, he looked a little afraid. I think he was mad at me. Later, I had to feel sorry for him. On my first trip into the PLS headquarters, at least I had a little warning and time to get mentally prepared. Forrest just got pulled in, kidnapped almost. His face started to soften after I explained where we were and what this was all about.

“I'm the Pink Locker Society. I mean, I'm
in
the Pink Locker Society. This is our office. You know what the PLS is, right?”

Now Forrest gave me a look of disbelief, but then I pulled him toward the loft to show him the computers. Then I whipsawed back to kitchen area.

“Usually, there are snacks,” I said as I grabbed a box of crackers.

“Want some?”

“No,” Forrest said—his first word.

“Well, maybe if I had mixed-fruit jelly for the crackers?”

OK, girls. Have you heard me loud and clear? Assume no inside jokes or secret code. After that fruit-jelly remark, he looked at me as if I were wearing my underwear as a hat. Zero recognition. Maybe he had moved on to something more exotic in the jelly department.

I turned and pulled him back up to the loft, where I continued to talk too fast and move too fast. Forrest seemed to wake up when I turned on the computer up in the loft and went to the Web site. Edith had left the home
page up. A message apologized for the “temporary interruption.”

“Oh, I've seen this,” he said. “Taylor goes there all the time.”

Great. He's said eleven words to me and one of them was
Taylor.

“What's it all about?” he asked.

You can imagine that my answer was a little awkward. I like Forrest
a lot
so I don't exactly want to discuss PBBs with him. I mean, for me, he's the second B, after all. What I did tell him was that girls need to know a lot of stuff as they get older, and the PLS helps them get answers to embarrassing questions.

“Like about growing up, changes, and crushes and stuff,” I said.

“Okay, so why did you bring
me
in here?” he asked.

I knew the answer. In fact, I could have answered by describing all the layers of reasons I wanted Forrest to come to this place: to see something that mattered to me, something that made me special, and to see something that finally explained why I was climbing out of my locker in Taylor's
Gotcha!
video. But I never got the chance to speak.

Just then, we heard some noises from across the room.
Ka-chink
went a locker door, and then we saw a shaft of light. Before I could see who it was, Forrest was off down the stairs. I saw him head for my my pink locker door.
I waited just a moment longer, long enough to see Bet land in the room.

“Oh, Jemma. It's you. . . . ,” Bet said, looking up to the left and surprised to see me.

Did she see the back of Forrest flying out of there?

“Uh, I have to go,” I said, bolting toward my locker door.

I was momentarily crushed inside the locker with Forrest. He was jiggling the latch so frantically, I was worried about the noise coming through on the other side.

“I'll get it. I'll get it,” I whispered.

And then I paused just a few seconds before letting us out. I stopped to savor the smell of Forrest's hooded sweatshirt. I inhaled slowly and deeply, and then Forrest said, “Open the door. I'm suffocating.” I let out my breath and let him go.

My heart was pounding. After we stepped out of my locker, I wanted to explain that it was just Bet (though I could not explain
why
she was there). I wanted to finally give Forrest my layer cake of reasons why I wanted him to see the sacred offices of the Pink Locker Society. But Forrest quickly gathered his stuff from his own locker and, before I could utter a word, said he had to get going. I wanted a moment more to try to figure out if he was running off because he was worried about getting in trouble, or if he didn't want anyone to see him alone with me. But he didn't give me another moment. He turned, and I could only watch him hustle down the hall, cleats in hand, getting farther and farther away from me.

 

One thing I didn't think about was what I would do
after
Forrest and I had our pink locker moment. Fog, electricity, and love still filled my brain like a cloudy mess, but I started to feel more like myself. I wanted to tell Kate and Piper (especially Kate) what had happened. Had I made any progress with him? What did his actions mean, or how might we interpret them? But I had no one to overanalyze with.

I couldn't tell Kate or Piper anything without admitting that I lied. I took Forrest—a boy, no less—behind the pink locker door. I risked the future of the Pink Locker Society, all to make myself look good. It was like in a spy movie and I had become the weak link, blabbing about the secret stuff, endangering our mission. Before all this, I
would have bet all the money I have (forty-seven dollars, some of it in quarters) on my belief that Forrest would tell no one. But after a week passed and Forrest had not uttered one word to me about the locker incident, I started to doubt him. Perhaps I had made a terrible mistake, and it would, sooner or later, catch up with me.