The Sound of Your Voice, Only Really Far Away (8 page)

Kate leaned toward her and whispered, “Do you want me to talk to her?”

“Who’s that?” Mazie sounded scandalized. “Is that Kate Faber? What is she doing there?”

Marylin panicked and said the stupidest thing in the world. “She’s just dropping something off.”

Kate stood up. “That’s right,” she declared in a loud voice. “And I’m leaving now.”

“Mazie, I’ve got to go,” Marylin said, wildly waving at Kate to stay put. “I’ll call you later.”

“We’ll be there in fifteen minutes,” Mazie told her. “You better be ready.”

Marylin could hear Kate stomping down the stairs in her big black boots.

“I really can’t,” she told Mazie. “I’ve got—”

“Yeah, I know, you’ve got stuff. Well, get unstuffed. I mean it, Marylin. You’re crossing the line. You’re totally out of control.”

And with that, Mazie was gone.

The door slammed. Kate was gone too.

Marylin walked over to her desk and picked up the ballerina snow globe. This was it. This was when she had to make the decision. Mazie wasn’t going to let her straddle both sides of the line forever—in fact, she wasn’t going to let her straddle both sides of the line for ten more minutes. Even if Marylin delivered new uniforms to the squad every season, even if she got on Ruby’s good side and became the second most powerful girl in the school, Marylin was going to have to choose, cheerleading and popularity versus everything else—Benjamin Huddle, Rhetta, Kate, Student Government.

Marylin turned the globe over and shook it up. Gracie McRae. She’d been the worst ballet dancer in the world! Marylin wondered what
she was like now. Had she gotten pretty? Was she still nice? Was she a cheerleader? A jock? No, probably not a jock. You had to be a lot more coordinated than Gracie McRae to be a jock. Maybe she was one of those girls who spent their Friday nights baking cookies for the homeless shelter. Marylin had always assumed those girls—Rebecca Levin was one, Isabelle Burkett was another—baked cookies because they didn’t have anything else to do. You could be sure Mazie Calloway wasn’t going to call them up and see if they wanted to go to the mall for a mani-pedi.

But as she watched the snow drift down through the water and land on the ballerina’s tulle skirt, Marylin wondered if Rebecca and Isabelle—and maybe Gracie McRae, for all she knew—baked cookies because they were good people. Really good. Not fake-smile good, not good so that everyone would like them good, but good because they had good hearts. Because they really wanted to help.

Marylin put the snow globe down on her desk. She’d spent her whole life having to choose sides.
Flannery or Kate? Mazie or Benjamin? She’d had to choose who to talk to in the hallways, who to pretend she hadn’t seen. She had to choose who to smile at, which boys to say hi back to.

And in second grade, walking home from ballet with Gracie McRae, when Gracie had asked if she wanted to hold hands, Marylin had had to choose whether she wanted everybody in their class to think she was friends with the girl who stomped across the floor like a rhinoceros.

“My hands are cold,” Marylin had told Gracie, quickly shoving her fists into her pockets. “Sorry.”

“That’s okay,” Gracie had said. “I don’t mind.”

Marylin rushed out into the hallway. “Kate!” she yelled from the top of the stairs, even though she knew Kate was already out of the house. She ran down the steps two at a time. “Kate! Come back!”

Kate was standing on the front porch, her overnight bag at her feet.

“Why?” she asked Marylin, and Marylin was shocked to see that her eyes were filled with tears.

“Because,” Marylin said, trying to catch her breath. “Because I need someone here with me when I tell Mazie no.”

“Oh,” Kate said. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and picked her bag up. “Okay. I can do that.”

“I know,” Marylin told her. “That’s why I asked.”

The two girls sat on the front step and waited. Marylin kept expecting Kate to change her mind, to stand up and tell her to forget it, she was going home. But Kate just sat there, writing invisible words on the sidewalk with a twig.

Ruby’s sister, Marta, was driving the white SUV that pulled up to the curb in front of Marylin’s house. Leave it to Ruby to have an older sister who seemed happy to drive her wherever she wanted to go, Marylin thought. No wonder she ruled the school.

As Marylin pushed herself up from the stoop, one the SUV’s tinted windows slid down and Mazie’s face appeared. “Get in the car!” Mazie yelled. “The salon closes in forty-five minutes.”

“I’m not going, remember?” Marylin called back in what she hoped was a cheerful, oh-I-guess-we-have-a-tiny-misunderstanding-but-that’s-okay tone. “I’m—I’m staying here with Kate. She’s spending the night.”

“You are insane,” Mazie groaned. “Kate Faber is not coming with us, Marylin. That’s out of the question.”

Marylin expected Kate to say something, but Kate just kept writing stuff nobody could see on the sidewalk. She didn’t even look up. Marylin was on her own.

“I’m not going with you either,” Marylin said. She walked halfway down the front walk to the car. “I already have plans. I told you that.”

Ruby Santiago’s face appeared at the window next to Mazie’s. “Then why are we even here, Marylin? You’re wasting our time.”

“I told Mazie on the phone I couldn’t go,” Marylin explained, flashing her best middle-school cheerleader smile at Ruby in hopes it would make her think of brand-spanking-new cheerleading uniforms. “I can’t just abandon my neighbor to get a mani-pedi.”

Ruby rolled her eyes. “Whatever,” she said, and disappeared back into the car. “Let’s go, Marta.”

Marylin could feel Mazie’s glare from ten yards away.

“Expect a text from me later!” Mazie yelled as the SUV pulled away from the curb. “This isn’t over, Marylin!”

Marylin watched until they’d disappeared around the corner, then went back to the front porch. “You were a ton of help,” she said, sitting down next to Kate. She pulled the twig out of Kate’s hand and snapped in two. “Thanks a lot.”

Kate shrugged. “It wasn’t my fight. But you handled it pretty well, even if you called me a neighbor instead of a friend. I thought that was sort of weird and possibly insulting.”

“I was just trying to make a point,” Marylin insisted. “You’re not just anyone. You’re someone I grew up on the same street with.”

“Uh-huh,” Kate said flatly. “Well, I’ll let it pass. I mean, like I said, you did pretty well for you.”

“Wow, what a compliment,” Marylin said,
throwing the pieces of Kate’s twig into the grass. She knew she ought to feel good about doing the right thing, but mostly what she felt was doomed. Nobody said no to Ruby and Mazie. Nobody.

Uniforms, uniforms, uniforms, she chanted to herself. New uniforms would make everything okay. She turned to Kate, determined to keep things positive. “You don’t want to give each other mani-pedis, do you?”

“Uh, I’m not sure that’s really my thing,” Kate said, but then she shrugged. “But sure, okay. Do you have any black polish?”

Marylin rolled her eyes. “Sure. I have a whole closet filled with black nail polish. It’s just my style.”

The two girls stood up. Kate brushed some pieces of grass off the back of her pants and said, “It could be your style. You could start a whole goth cheerleader thing.”

Marylin just nodded and smiled, pushing Kate toward the front door. Everything was going to be okay. She’d get the squad new uniforms, and everyone was going to love her.
She’d paint Kate’s fingernails a nice shade of raspberry and show her how awesome pink could be. All she had to do was keep smiling. All she had to do was keep pretending that everything in the world was fine.

a modest proposal

On Tuesday morning Kate had left her lunch sitting on the kitchen counter, and now here she was in the cafeteria, face-to-face with a tray of brown and olive-green food. It was supposedly meat loaf and string beans, but Kate was not convinced.

“That should be illegal,” Lorna said through a mouth full of pasta salad she’d made herself the night before. In her left hand she held a crusty piece of artisan bread, also homemade. “I can’t believe the cafeteria is allowed to serve that kind of slop. I mean, look at it! All of the vitamins have been cooked right out of those beans. They’re not even beans. They’re bean
remains. They could do a
CSI
episode on those beans.”

“I’ve got to eat,” Kate said with a shrug, halfheartedly sticking her fork into the slab of so-called meat loaf. “I’ve got a pre-algebra test this afternoon. I need the energy.”

Lorna sighed and passed Kate her Tupperware container of pasta. “Just eat this, okay? I can’t stand to watch you put that junk in your mouth. I can’t believe they can’t dish out some actual, fresh food. At my cousin’s school, they have this amazing salad bar in their cafeteria. It’s all stuff they grow in the school garden. How cool is that?”

“Pretty cool,” Kate admitted. “We should do that here. There’s lots of open space out on the student commons.”

Lorna slammed her fist on the table. “We should! We should enter that competition! The one that Student Government is doing.”

“The What’s Your Big Idea competition?” Kate asked, and when Lorna nodded, she leaned back in her seat and thought about it. There was a lot about the idea of a school garden she
liked. For one thing, a salad bar would be good for the school’s vegans and vegetarians, who were always complaining about not having enough lunch options. Quite frankly, Kate could do with fewer cafeteria protests, especially since the leader of the vegans had gotten her hands on a bullhorn. And a school garden would be good for the environment, lower the school’s carbon footprint and all that. She thought about Flannery and her do-it-yourself thing. She would totally be into a school garden.

“Let’s do it,” Kate said, grinning at Lorna. “I think it’s a brilliant idea.”

“We have to grow herbs, too,” Lorna said, pulling a notebook and a pen out of her backpack. She started making a list. “Basil and tarragon would be totally great.”

“Maybe we could grow chickpeas and make hummus. And garlic. We could grow garlic.” Kate reached across the table and tore off a piece of Lorna’s bread. “We could grow wheat for bread.”

Without looking up from her notes, Lorna said, “I think you’re starting to get carried
away here, Kate, but I like your thinking.”

“Me too,” Kate agreed. “I am a very profound thinker.”

“Incredibly, super profound,” Lorna added, skewering a piece of rotini from the Tupperware container with her fork. “Most profound-from-on-high thinker.”

Kate gnawed at the crust of her bread. “I wonder what the other ideas are going to be? Probably sports equipment for the gym and more computers for the library.”

“Doesn’t matter. Ours is the best. All we’ve got to do is submit it. Which means all you’ve got to do is write up the proposal.”

Kate’s mouth dropped open. “Me? Why me?”

Lorna smiled and handed Kate another chunk of bread. “No such thing as a free lunch, babe.”

That night Kate sat at the kitchen table and worked on the school garden proposal. It had to be five hundred words or less, which was the sort of writing challenge Kate liked. She thought she should focus mostly on the food
angle, since most middle schoolers she knew were obsessed with eating. Not the way Lorna was—she read
Bon Appétit
and could talk with authority about different kinds of olive oil—but just about everybody she knew was concerned with where their next snack was coming from and what it would consist of. If Kate
really
wanted to win this contest, she’d write a proposal for a new vending machine that dispensed only sour cream potato chips and kiwi-flavored bubble gum.

But Kate liked the idea of a school garden. She wasn’t a gardener herself, but she could see how growing your own food was cool. Her mom usually had a few pots of cherry tomatoes growing on the patio, and it was always fun to take out a bowl and pick a bunch for a salad. It kind of made you feel like a farmer, or some kind of a hippie.

Her dad walked into the kitchen, carrying a plate. “Did you try some of Mom’s raspberry pie?” he asked, putting his plate by the sink. “Amazing.”