Things Are Gonna Get Ugly (6 page)

I don't speak. What's there to say? Her curly brown hair sticks straight up but she's fully dressed, if you can call baggy sweatpants and the same shirt she wore to bed being dressed.

I plunk down in a beanbag chair actually shaped like a spaceship.

“What's going on?” Mom asks, entering my room. This is special. Usually, she's been up too late reading books on photography and the lost worlds
of Atlantis and Lemuria to be up at seven a.m. She must have been told to share some morning sunlight time with me from her medium Tosh. I think if he told her to sell shares of me on eBay, she would do it.

“I don't feel well,” I say, sinking farther down into the beanbag chair. I'm not about to get into the whole I'm-not-myself thing again. Then I remember the quake. “Maybe I'm still jittery, you know, from the tremor yesterday, waiting for an aftershock, or whatever.”

Mom opens my door and peers into the room. I can see the hall is filled with unopened moving boxes. “You sure?”

“Yes,” I say, standing up. “It felt pretty major.”

“Let me go check online because I didn't feel a thing yesterday, and I was shooting some photos for
The Palo Alto Tribune
up on the ninth floor of the VA Hospital. Believe me, if there'd been a quake that thing would've been swaying like a pendulum.” Mom pads into the hallway, hopping over the boxes, down to the computer in the kitchen, and a moment later, she calls out. “Nope. Honey, nothing. Maybe it was construction or something.”

Construction? I don't think so. As she closes my
bedroom door, it comes to me. It
was
something all right. I
know
I felt the floor shaking right after Dribble said he was going to help me.
Hello.
Right afterward, as in microseconds later. Earthquake. Fresh start. Dribble. Helping me. Major life change.

I think I'm getting this. Why did it take me so long to see what happened?

The direct connection jolts me, and it's like my whole body's buzzing. Quaking. Alive. But not in a good way.

Yesterday afternoon, when Dribble asked me if I wanted a fresh start, I thought he was talking about the test. Now I know better—he meant my life.

I Have to Get to School

For the first time, I'm dying to see Dribble.

But not to see me and my scary clothing. Apparently, it's not a budget reality to go to the Stanford Shopping Center and get a whole new wardrobe. Even when I very reasonably suggested a couple of small items from Max Heeder online, like their baby doll T-shirts, which are on sale for three hundred dollars, my mother declined.

With no decent choices, I pull on a pair of baggy jeans and a T-shirt that says QUESTION REALITY.
Lovely. My new motto. On a hook behind my door, I spy a purple hoodie with flowers, and put it on over my shirt. Looks-wise, I feel like I've stepped into a vat of bugs.

Is There Anybody Out There?

I slink down the hall with my hoodie pulled down over my head. Except for a custodian pushing a mop bucket down the hall, the place is deserted.

I race until I'm in front of my first-period class, social studies with Mr. Dribble, classroom number thirteen.

Of course.

How hadn't I noticed the BAD LUCK number on the door? Duh. I always knew he was a veeeery strange teacher—but completely altering someone? That's just WRONG!

I look both ways, expecting a black cat to cross my path or a ladder to crash on my head.

“Dribble! Yo, Dribble!” I bang on the door. “Hello in there!” Caylin opens the door, and I have never been so happy to see her freckled ski-jump nose and Tahoe blue eyes. “Girlfriend, I'll explain everything la-ter.” She glances at me, her eyebrows raised into a question. Dribble dramatically throws up his hands.
“Welcome to class, Ernestine. I'll need your late pass, ma'am.” He turns to face the rest of the class. “Anyhoo, what page did I say?” How can he act like everything is normal?

“Did you just call me Ernestine?” I ask.

“Did you just call me Dribble?” He wriggles his bushy mustache. His real name is Mr. Drabner, of course. But it's easy to forget.

Twenty-nine eighth graders sit at their desks with government books open to men in white powdered wigs. Caylin giggles, Petra makes the hand sign for “wacko,” and Olivia Marquez frantically motions for me to sit down. She's wearing a red babushka scarf over her hair, and a white peasant blouse with a black smocklike apron decorated with pink rosebuds. She looks like a Russian nesting doll.

“I understand everything. About the CYT file,” I state, pulling my hood farther around my face.

“CYT?” asks Dribble. “Is that like the CIA?”

The class laughs. Not that I blame them.

“You told me the day before. It means cover your—”

Olivia jumps out her seat and clamps her long, pale fingers over my mouth. “Too much cold medication,” she says, apologetically. Did I hear the
hint of a Russian accent? “Ernestine's not herself,” she says.

That's true.
Olivia's hand feels cool and smells like lanolin. I try to push it away but she's stuck to me like an octopus.

Mr. Dribble hobbles back to the board, holding his precious dry eraser. He's actually whistling “Yesterday,” an old Beatles tune, as he erases an old homework assignment in one wide, sweeping flourish. How can he be so happy?
I'm completely altered, Mr. Dribble! What about you? You appear to be the same strange teacher as always, in what you call “your Donny Osmond purple socks.” Why are you playing dumb???

Finally, I pull Olivia's hand off my mouth, and before she sits down, I hear her mutter, “Nyet.”

“I'm not going to just take this,” I say, still standing up. Then it hits me. Olivia's incantations in gym, and now muttering things in phony Russian. Her obvious hatred of me. I wheel around and glare at her babushka-covered head. “Was it
you
? You! Those magic spells. I know it was!”

Everyone in the class goes silent. I can hear the crackle of the loud speaker. Sneed nudges Winslow, who's reading whatever is inside his notebook, while Caylin and Petra roll their eyes.

Olivia steps backward, her eyes narrow. “Me? What are you talking about? Me what?”

I leap forward, my arm swinging near her face. “You're the one! Change me back! NOW! You used your magic on me! Help me! Please! You've got to use your woo-woo powers!!”

“Woo-woo?” asks Olivia, looking around the room as if woo-woo might be a new classmate.

The class is rolling in the aisles. Everyone is just completely cracking up. Even Winslow pops his head out from his notebook and gazes at me like I've got antennae sticking out of my head.

Mr. Dribble bounds toward me, his face stop-sign red, his bushy mustache twitching like a squirrel's tail. “Ernestine, we're going to have a little talk. NOW. In the hallway.” As he ushers me down the aisle and out the door, in his hands, I see he has his pink-slip pad, the one he keeps on the right corner of his desk like he's a doctor of detentions, and practically everyone goes,
“Oooh,”
at the same time. I can hear murmurs of “She's going crazy” and “She's going to get a detention.” And I can hear Caylin saying “Now, that was REAL random. What's up with that?”

“This is not free time, folks,” says Mr. Dribble,
through clenched teeth. “While I chat with Ms. Smith, you guys are going to be reading about Thomas Jefferson. Heard of him? The dude on the front of a nickel, third president, ringing a bell? Read pages 105 to 114. And answer the questions at the end of the chapter.”

The class groans and I hear a few sarcastic, “Thanks, Ernestines.” Dribble shakes his head. “Remember, you kiddos live in high-tech heaven, you got nothing to complain about. When I was kid, the number-one spot the Soviets wanted to nuke was here, the Silicon Valley. Not Washington, D.C. or New York or even Mount Rushmore, the place with the four presidents' heads. You kids now have it easy-peasy pie.”

The man makes absolutely NO sense.

As we walk into the hallway, Mr. Dribble clutches his pickle jar in one hand and his pink detention-slip pad in the other. I squeeze my knuckles, trying not to let out a stress-busting primal wail.

Dribble Speaks

Mr. Dribble leans against the wall in the hallway and fishes a pickle out of his jar. “You're right as rain, Taffeta Smith.”

“Right about what?”

He crunches into the pickle and juice drips down his chin. “I did it. Not Olivia. I hated hearing you give credit to the wrong person.”

For a moment, I feel like I'm in freeze-frame mode but then I feel the whoosh of air flooding back into my lungs, the buzz of the fluorescent lights, the chatter in the classroom.
He did this? Mr. Dribble, who talks like a game show host, who enjoys the color purple, who loves his mustache just a little bit too much?

My original hunch was right. I'm a quasi genius.

No, this is crazy. I have become crazy. Yet, deep down I know all of this is somehow REAL.

“Are you kidding me?” I ask, hoping that he will say yes. That it's all an elaborate hoax. That I've been punked.

“I'm an educator, Miss Smith. And right now I'm trying to educate you about the truth. I did it.”

Can I really be having this conversation? Yes, apparently, I can. Mr. Dribble is smiling at me and pulling on the ends of his mustache.

Right now I want to pull the mustache off his face. “Change me back. Make me into
me
.”

He winces like he's got food stuck in a molar. “Sure wish I could. Boy, do I.”

“What do you mean you
wish
you could? Do your thing!”

“It's not in my control, Miss Taffeta. After all, you're the one who said you wanted a fresh start.”

“I didn't mean change me into Freakzilla. I meant change what I did.”

“Did?” Mr. Dribble asks.

“You know,” I say under my breath. “My cheating. Not as me. As someone else. Oh, you know what I mean.”

Mr. Dribble licks his yellow teeth and his orange mustache woobles. “Like I said, it's all up to you.”

“Me? Something
I
need to do?” He's crunching on the pickle extra loudly and I want to tell him to close his mouth but I'm afraid he'll turn me into a rodent or something.

“Have you mistreated anybody lately?” he asks, screwing the lid on to the pickle jar extra tightly.

I think for a second.
What's he talking about? He is giving me a clue. Lucky me.

And I think some more.
Me, mistreat someone?

Slowly, though, a thought rolls in. “Winslow, I guess, but—”

“But nothing.” He sets the pickle jar down on
the floor. “I just asked you a simple question.”

Did he mean did I do something bad and now I need to do something nice to make it up? Was that it? “So I need to do something about it?” As I shake my head, frizzy strands of hair fly into my eyes. That's when it hits me—I'm really trapped in something. That my hair, as much as I brush it, isn't going to smooth down into controllable waves. It springs, it frizzes, it geeks hard. I can't do a makeover on myself to recreate Taffeta. I'm not going to be able to simply plunk contacts into my eyes and buy a whole new wardrobe. Somehow, I got into this mess magically and I've got to get out of this mess magically.

“You need to rectify,” says Dribble.

“Rectify?”

“Mmm. Dancing with Winslow at Winterfest would be sweet, don't ya think?” He grins at me, and I see this huge gap in the middle of his front teeth.

“That's it? We don't have to officially go there together? Just show up independently and then I ask him to dance. He says yes, we dance, and then I'm me again?”

He scratches his chin. “Sounds reasonable.”

“I thought you were going to say I had to learn
something or do something important. This is going to be SO easy.” I don't even have to
go
with him to the dance, I think. Just one dance. How hard is that?

Dribble fans his pink detention-slip pad. “Easy-peasy pie. Yay, team.”

“And how did you do this?” I blurt. “Who are you?”

“Who are
you
?” he asks.

I stare at him.
Infuriated
comes to mind.

Lunch

After stressing through math and English, I get in line, tray up my veggie surprise, and trudge out into the middle of the cafeteria. Kids crowd into long tables strewn with sporks, backpacks, and lunch bags. The constant chatter sounds like a dull roar. I'm not picking up a word anyone is saying. My eyes check out the lunch tables. I think of the time that Maggie the Mushroom showed me her color-coded map of the cafeteria.

Suddenly, the lunchroom becomes a rainbow of color.

Without thinking, I head to The Girls' table by the food cart. The Purples with their laughing,
long hair, baby tees, whatever's cool. But then I remember.

I am still Ernestine.

My legs press against the back of Caylin's chair, and I know I must get away from here.

“Looking for your friends?” asks Petra. She points to a table near the bathroom. “Over there, Ernie.”

The red wonks: poet wench Olivia and Girl Scout activist Ninai. They see me and wave me toward them.

I start to head over to Girl Geek Central, but a part of my brain screams,
Run! Get away. Once you've attached yourself to them in any way, you'll be associated forever.

Out of the corner of my eye I see Olivia, with a dramatic intake of breath, uncap her calligraphy pen.

Instead, I head over to an empty table and sit down. I can see Ninai give Olivia a quizzical look. Sorry, but I don't have time for this, for them. There is nothing that can get me to sit with those losers.