Welcome, Caller, This Is Chloe (5 page)

That morning I could do anything. After all, I’d handily taken care of Grams, A. Lungren, and my new JISP.

Last night after the ER adventures with Grams, I filled out a whole new JISP book, titled
Barefoot No More
, which included details about childhood poverty in Sonora, Mexico, shoe collection sites, a budget, strategies, and timeline. Then I scanned the masterpiece and e-mailed a copy to A. Lungren. For good measure, I left a second message on her phone at 7:22 p.m. reminding her again of Grams’s medical emergency. That morning I slipped the new and improved JISP notebook into A. Lungren’s slot in the guidance office.

With my JISP tied in a shiny bow, it was time to tackle Brie, Merce, and the jellyfish whispers. Merce said Brie was upset because I wasn’t there for her the night of the Mistletoe Ball when she was in crisis. But I was now.

When the bell rang announcing the end of first-period econ, Duncan fell in step beside me. He wore another lumpy scarf, this one black and red with another lopsided red heart stitched into one of the ends. I wondered if he had a novice-knitter girlfriend, someone to smooth the harsh lines on his face. The Del Rey School was huge, more than four thousand students, and we had a few classes together over the past three years,
but I’d never seen him at any football games or dances or in the lunchroom.

Outsider.

Brie’s word for people who didn’t have a place in our world popped into my head again. Outsiders weren’t bad, but I couldn’t imagine life spent on the outside looking in.

“Did you get your econ essay finished?” I asked, trying to shake off the image.

“Turned in with ten seconds to spare.” Duncan didn’t smile, but the line carved in his forehead disappeared.

“Is it just econ, or are you one of those thrill seekers who likes living on the edge with all your classes?”

“Thrill seeker? In my dreams.” Up close I could see dark half-moons under his eyes, as if he was not getting enough sleep or having bad dreams. He reached into his back pocket and took out a piece of paper. “Speaking of edges, here’s an emergency memo from Clementine. She e-mailed it last night. All Edge staffers must attend today’s emergency meeting after school.”

With both hands I waved off the paper. “I’m not a staffer. I’m doing a different JISP.” I flashed him my ankle. “Something to do with shoes.”

That deep, vertical line divided Duncan’s forehead again. “You should check in with Clem. For some reason she thinks you’re an official staffer.”

“You had no right!” I slammed the KDRS memo on A. Lungren’s desk. “No right to commit me to a JISP with that radio station.”

“Your JISP was due last night at seven, and you failed to meet the deadline, which means you would fail your JISP and put a dark mark on your permanent record. As your guidance counselor, it is my duty to keep that from happening.”

“I was in the ER with my injured grandmother. You need a doctor’s note?”

“No, Chloe, I need you to calm down.” A. Lungren’s voice was a low purr. “I’m sorry about your grandmother, and I got your phone messages and e-mail, but your project came in twenty-two minutes after the deadline. This is a perfect example of how the real world doesn’t always go according to our plans. Real-world issues need to be dealt with in real-world ways. Your JISP is a tool to help get you ready for this kind of world.”

I pictured the dark, gloomy radio station and the crazy staff. “I don’t want to work at the radio station. I want to collect shoes for barefoot children in Mexico. I want to set up collection boxes in the quad and at lunch table fourteen and get donations from shoe manufacturers.”

“Chloe—”

“I want to go door-to-door and get pledges to sponsor entire schools of shoeless Mexican children.”

“Chloe—”

“I want—”

“Chloe! Be quiet!” A. Lungren steadied her cat glasses on the bridge of her nose. “The JISP review board has made its decision. For the next few months, you will do promotions work at the school’s radio station.”

“Do you know anything about the station?” A tremor edged my words. “KDRS is not a good place for me. It’s insane over there. Everyone fighting. Equipment breaking. They have no money and are going off air at the end of the semester.” I had enough disasters with my BFs, and I didn’t need any more with my JISP. “The radio station’s a lost cause.”

“Not necessarily.” A. Lungren’s feline features grew animated. “I did some research and discovered that, until four years ago, KDRS was a thriving part of the Del Rey School community. During radio classes, students learned about news and feature writing and ran the radio station for credit. Unfortunately, the English teacher who oversaw the program for decades retired. Admin discontinued the radio classes because they couldn’t get a qualified teacher on board. A few die-hard students have held things together as an after-school club, but things are looking bleak.”

As was I. Because I was shackled with a counselor who couldn’t resist a lost cause.

“It’s clear, Chloe, that KDRS needs a hand, and you can start by putting together a promotions plan for today’s emergency meeting.”

A hand? I wanted to give A. Lungren the Hand.

“By the way, you’ll need this.” A. Lungren handed me a composition notebook.

I was four again and standing on the edge of the Pacific Ocean getting battered by waves, but it wasn’t fun, and Grams wasn’t there holding my hand. “For what?” I asked.

“Your progress reports. You must turn in a report to my office once a week.”

“Why do I need to turn in weekly reports? That’s not a normal part of the JISP.”

“The reports are for your parents.”

“My parents?” Heart surgeons and deans of podiatry schools didn’t have time for parent-teacher conferences or JISP reports. That was a job for grandmothers who ran award-winning soap opera blogs from tuna cans.

“I spoke with your parents this morning, and they are extremely concerned about your lack of progress. They’ve been through this with your brothers and know your JISP is a permanent mark on your school transcripts, one that highly desirable, highly competitive universities will look at in determining admissions.”

I stared at my shoes. What if I didn’t want to go to a highly desirable, highly competitive university? I wasn’t like my brothers. I didn’t have college plans and my career mapped out. I didn’t even know what I wanted to be when I grew up.

With a final kitty grin, A. Lungren escorted me out of her office.

JISP intervention complete.

I stood in the breezeway, where voices chimed, and laughter, too, but it was all muted, as if something stood between me and the rest of my world. Space. Lots of space. As I made my way down the hall, one voice and one laugh were strangely clear—painfully familiar. The voice was low and breathy, and the laugh belonged to a friendly seal.

I gravitated toward those sounds and fell in step behind Brie and Merce. Habit? Stupidity? I shook my head. These were my people, my clan with whom I shared a woven plaid, and not just any plaid. We wore one of the fanciest, most coveted plaids in the school.

Brie stopped at her locker. My feet slowed, and I fidgeted with a pin curl. Brie and I needed to talk. We were best friends, and that’s what best friends did. When life was good we talked. When it was disastrous we talked. When it was confusing we talked. Yes, I should have talked to Brie the night of the Mistletoe Ball. I should have put my best friends above a stupid fungus crown. I screwed up, landed myself in a queenly quagmire of my own making, but it was time to right the universe.

I opened my mouth as Brie looked over her shoulder. A smile that didn’t reach her eyes slid across her frosty pink lips. Words froze in my throat as she linked arms with Merce, who didn’t once look my way. One by one other girls from table fourteen linked up with my two best friends, and they sashayed down the hall arm in arm. I thought of all the times I’d linked arms with them and bent my head for private talk meant for our ears only. It wasn’t a vicious gesture, not meant to exclude. Girlfriends did it all the time, a friendly way of saying,
We support each other. We are one
.

Today the intertwined arms looked like barbed wire.

SUBJ: KDRS Emergency Meeting

FROM: [email protected]

TO: KDRS Staff

Emergency meeting today after school. Miss it, you die.

Clementine

Aut vincere aut mori
.

WHEN LIFE GIVES YOU THE STOMACH LINING OF A COW, MAKE
menudo.

It was Josie’s twist on the whole lemon-lemonade thing. As I walked into Portable Five after school, I told myself I wouldn’t think about friends with barbed-wire arms or get into a catfight with the world’s most annoying guidance counselor. Instead, I’d embrace KDRS promotions and help with whatever emergency plagued the station.

I’d make menudo.

Inside Portable Five no one seemed to be doing anything urgent. Frick/Frack sat in one of the two glass rooms in front of a microphone. Haley, who today was Tootsie Pop Mom, sat in her corner with her DVD player, her feet resting on a giant stack of movies. Taysom of the Earbuds flipped through a box of ancient vinyl record albums, and Clementine of the Nose Ring was hunched over a laptop in the main room.

Only Duncan, who stood on a ladder in a corner hammering the cover of a light fixture into place, acknowledged my presence. He stopped tapping long enough to give me a look that asked,
What are you doing here?

No, I don’t belong at KDRS
, I thought. These days I didn’t belong anywhere. Not at lunch table fourteen. Not in OurWorld. My heart rate quickened, and I hugged my bulging JISP folder to my chest and focused on menudo.

“Everyone ready to talk promo?” I pumped enthusiasm into my voice. When no one said anything, I asked Clementine, “Aren’t we having an emergency meeting?”

Clementine didn’t look up from her laptop. “Twenty minutes.”

Good, in twenty minutes I’d reveal the ideas Dos Hermanas and I brainstormed to grow the radio station audience and attract advertisers. Instead of sitting alone in the cafeteria for lunch and advertising my absolute friendlessness, I had hid out in my car talking on the phone with the sisters about promotions and menudo.

“Do you want to see my notes first?” I asked Clementine.

“No.”

“I have this great idea about—”

“Later.”

I tapped my shoe. “What can I do until then to help?”

Without missing a keystroke Clementine said, “Shut up.”

I turned toward the guidance center.
Do you see me, A. Lungren? I’m trying. I’m really trying
.

Duncan climbed down the ladder and packed his tools.

“You need some help?” I asked.

He shook his head and carried his things through a door at the far right side of the building I hadn’t noticed before. The air cooled and thinned. Yesterday Duncan had been the only friendly, albeit distant, being at KDRS Radio, the only one who wanted me around, and this morning he went out of his way to make sure I knew about the emergency meeting, like he cared if I showed up. Had he changed his mind and joined the Anti-Chloe Club?

“Stop making noise,” Clementine said with a dragon snort.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“Your shoe sounds like a jackhammer.”

I plunked my eyes closed. Thanks to growing up in a house with five older brothers, I was used to noise. When I could, I slept with my window open to hear the rush of the ocean, and when I was a kid, I used to fall asleep on Grams’s chest listening to her heart beat.

“And stop that, too,” Clementine said.

“Stop what?” I searched for a peaceful place, a soothing place. The ocean at sunset.

“Breathing.”

My eyes flew open. “You want me to stop breathing?”

Clementine smirked. “Would you?”

Taysom chuckled, and Tootsie Pop Mom, Haley, made a gurgling sound at the back of her throat, rolled her eyes, and thwunked her head on her desk as if dead.

I ground my back teeth. They were all wack jobs, and thanks to A. Lungren, I was forced into their wacked world.

I hurried across the station and through the door Duncan used to a narrow room full of maintenance equipment and janitorial supplies. Duncan stood at a sagging workbench, where he was prying the cover off an ancient clock and studying its intestines.

“Get the possessed lights fixed?” I asked. It sounded so much less pathetic than
Would you be my friend?

Without looking at me, he nodded and popped the cover off another clock. He took apart springs and gears and hands and placed them in a neat line on a workbench.

Voices had always surrounded me—my five older brothers, Grams, the soap opera divas on TV, Merce, and Brie. In my world, someone was always talking, and if not them, me. “I have some great promo ideas, some creative, low-cost stuff we can do right here on campus that will build our audience.” I watched as Duncan tugged and twisted various clock parts. “And after we get more students listening, we can promote the station to the general public. You know, other schools, the neighborhood, local businesses. Then we’ll start calling on advertisers.”