Bessica Lefter Bites Back (16 page)

5.
Jury of your peers

I
got up and had breakfast with Mom, Grandma, and Willy, and we didn’t talk about the disco/jungle party fiasco at all. Partly, I think this was because my mom didn’t know about it yet. I really appreciated Grandma’s not bringing it up.

“Your food collage is due today, right?” my mom asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Can I see it?” my mom asked.

I wasn’t sure I wanted to show my mom my food collage, because it had a few candy bar pictures on it and a mountainous amount of cheese puffs. Did I want her to find out that one-third of my food collage was junk food?

“I’ve already rolled it up with a rubber band,” I said. “Can I show it to you after I get a grade?”

My mom frowned. “Are you hiding something?”

Then Grandma spoke and rescued me. “These eggs are so delicious they almost stop my heart.”

“Mmm,” I added.

“Very good indeed,” Willy said.

I glanced at Willy. I could not believe he was sitting at our table eating eggs with us. Didn’t he miss New Mexico? Didn’t his friends and family who lived in New Mexico want him to go back there? I sure did.

“Bessica,” my mom said in a chirpy voice. “Before I forget, I bought you a pair of wicking socks.”

I just stared at her and continued to eat my eggs.

“They pull moisture away from your feet and prevent blisters,” she explained. “I bought them for game day.”

Game day. I had very mixed feelings about that day.

“Thank you,” I said. Then I stood up very quickly so I could gather my things and catch the bus.

“Willy and I wear wicking socks when we go caving,” Grandma said. “In addition to preventing blisters, they also reduce chafing and fungus.”

“Gross,” I said. “I don’t have those problems.” It was hard to hear the word
fungus
and not think of Sylvie. And it was hard to think of Sylvie and not remember ruining her birthday.

“Here they are,” my mom said, lifting up a pair of gray socks.

“Okay,” I said. “I don’t need them now. I need to go to school.”

“You’re cranky,” my mom said.

“Let her be,” Grandma said.

I sure hoped Willy didn’t say anything, because I was getting madder and madder that he was even in our kitchen.

“I’m going to be late!” I huffed. I grabbed my things and hurried out the door.

Once I got to school, things got a little bit worse. Because word had gotten out about T.J.’s desire to facebomb me, and everybody was talking about it. Annabelle raced up to me right away. “Is it true that you’re going to get attacked by the other school’s mascot?”

That was a very unpleasant thing to hear. “I hope not,” I said, unloading my backpack.

“I can’t believe T.J. thinks he can get away with this!” Annabelle said. “I’m going to tell everybody in social sciences.”

“Wait, wait,” I said. But Annabelle was already gone. I wasn’t sure I wanted her to tell people about this in social sciences.

After I got to nutrition, I sat and waited anxiously for Mrs. Mounds to show up. I felt a little self-conscious
showing everybody what I’d been eating. I mean, how many cheese puffs had they eaten in the last two weeks? I had a feeling some people might not have been completely honest. When psycho-bully Redge arrived, he clomped into the classroom with his collage and sat down behind me and demanded his daily pen. But I put my head down and didn’t respond.

“I am waiting for my pen,” he said in a calm voice.

“Yeah,” I said. “Wait longer.”

Then he poked me. I didn’t know what was wrong with him. Didn’t he have any manners? I flipped around to snap at him, but when I did I saw him and his snotty face and it intimidated me and so I gave him his pen.

“Thanks,” he said.

I looked at my collage. All the food I’d eaten for two weeks swam around on the page. In an effort to add more orange to my collage I’d added too much. I wasn’t embarrassed by my cheese puffs, or macaroni and cheese, or carrots, or squash, or sweet potatoes, or mango smoothie, but I was suddenly surprised by the lack of green food. Especially when I saw other people’s collages. Wow. Were the people in my class really eating that much salad?

I studied mine again. I’d drawn a picture of myself in the center, but I wasn’t very good at drawing and the picture didn’t really look like me. It looked like a generic person with short hair. I wondered how many art classes
I would have to take before I became good at drawing. I stared some more at my collage and my generic hair. In the coming days I was going to have to make a decision about my pixie cut. Trim it? Or let it grow? Hmm. But I didn’t have much time to think about this because I felt another poke. I turned around.

“Do you want to see my collage?” psycho-bully Redge asked me.

“Not really,” I said. Then I started to flip back around.

“I think you’ll find it interesting,” he added.

So I turned back around. And he pointed to a picture of Two-Taste Teton donuts.

“Were those the donuts Cola swiped from me?” I asked.

“Yep,” Redge said. “They were delicious.”

And I didn’t understand why Redge wanted to make me feel bad. That was the thing I didn’t understand about bullies. They got joy out of hurting other people’s feelings. Jerks.

“I’ve heard the rumor,” Redge said.

“Yeah,” I said. But I didn’t turn back around.

“You’re in trouble. T.J. the Tiger is a psycho mascot,” he said.

I didn’t say anything.

“Psycho. Psycho. Psycho,” he said.

The way he said that made me feel very frightened. I didn’t even want to stay at school and hand in my food
collage anymore. But I did. I sat through nutrition. And English. And math. And I’d really hoped that Raya Papas would talk to me and maybe make me feel better about what had happened at the birthday party, but she didn’t. At least, not until the end of class, when she said, “Giving your friend a nose hair trimmer is crazy.” And I wanted to justify why I’d done that. But I didn’t. Because Grandma had pretty much nailed it when she told me that giving people grooming devices is always a bad idea.

“Who are you eating lunch with?” I asked.

“My friends,” Raya Papas said. “And none of them would give me a nose hair trimmer. Because
they
are all normal.”

Then Raya walked away and I went to my locker and dumped off my stuff and headed to meet up with Annabelle, Lola, Dee, and Macy.

“Let’s consider the big picture,” Lola said as we sat down to eat. “If you do get facebombed, you’re going to be the most famous mascot our school has ever seen.”

“It’s not worth it,” Macy said.

Dee nodded.

“What if it hurts?” I asked.

“Of course it will hurt!” Annabelle said.

“Maybe he’s joking,” I said.

I wished I believed that.

“Mascots always tease that they’re going to fight the
other mascot. But they never do. They’re all talk,” Macy said.

Then Jasper walked up to our table and Annabelle quit breathing.

“Are you talking about T.J.?” Jasper asked.

Nobody said anything. We all just stared at Jasper. Hard.

“I’m here to give you the inside scoop,” he said. Then Jasper guzzled the rest of his milk, set the empty carton on our table, and squashed the container with his hand. “That kid is all business.”

Annabelle covered her mouth like she was shocked to learn this. Also I think she was trying to flirt with Jasper.

“Doesn’t anybody remember Track and Field Days last year and what he did to Robin Lord?” Jasper said.

I gasped. “What did he do to Robin Lord?” She was so nice. One of the nicest people I’d ever met. It was like a marshmallow met a puppy and became a person.

“Track and Field Day last year. Robin Lord was getting ready for the relay race and he taped a sign to her back that said
TEAM POOPER
.”

“That’s terrible,” I said.

“It gets worse. Everybody was laughing at Robin when she ran and she didn’t know why, and it was so distracting that when she passed the baton she dropped it and tripped. The team lost and she landed on her face.”

“That’s why her eye twitches,” Macy said.

“No!” I’d noticed that Robin Lord’s eye twitched, but I had no idea it was because she’d been ambushed with a
TEAM POOPER
sign.

“You need to take him down,” Annabelle said. “And the whole school will worship you.”

“That’s a great idea,” Lola said. “You should facebomb T.J.”

“Do it!” Jasper said.

But I didn’t even know how to do that. “I can’t even think about that right now. I just want to finish my lunch,” I said.

“Think it over,” Jasper said. “And let me know if I can help.”

“Thanks for stopping by,” I said.

“Yeah,” Annabelle said.

Jasper smiled at Annabelle. And he smiled at me. Then he left.

“Have you two made up?” I asked.

“Mostly,” Annabelle said. “But things still feel weird.”

“Duh,” Macy said. “He’s a guy.”

It was always a little surprising how accurate Macy’s observations were.

By the time I got to geography, the new rumor was that I was going to facebomb T.J. And by the time I got to PE, people were in such a frenzy that three girls came up to
me and said that they wanted to help me clobber T.J. at the game. They said they knew jujitsu.

I didn’t know what to say. So I told them what I knew about the football field policy. “Spectators aren’t allowed on the turf.”

I figured they were just venting.

But when I got to my locker and opened it and a flood of notes came tumbling out, all telling me that it was my job to punish T.J., I began to realize that if I could stand up to T.J. and also avoid getting facebombed, I would become super-famous at my school. And wasn’t that really why I’d tried out for mascot anyway? Honestly, wasn’t that the entire point of middle school?

W
orrying about getting facebombed zapped all my energy. My mind felt so fuzzy as I rode the bus home that I couldn’t daydream about good stuff, such as cheering like a champion at Friday’s game, or my reunion with gorgeous Noll Beck when I gave him back his lizard. My mind was stuck on T.J.
Jerk. Jerk. Jerk.
Tragically, as I stepped off the bus, the first person I saw was Willy. He and Grandma were sitting outside in the driveway on lawn chairs.

“How was your day?” Grandma asked.

But I didn’t want to talk about my day.

“Why are you sitting out here?” I asked.

“We just washed the chairs and were getting ready to
store them again and decided to take a load off,” Grandma said.

I couldn’t help noticing that there were two lawn chairs and two of them and no place for me to sit.

“Do you want to sit on my lap?” Grandma asked.

I looked at her lap. Had she forgotten that I was turning twelve in four months?

“I need to drain the refrigerator,” Willy said. “Why don’t you take my seat?”

So Willy got up and I took his seat.

“Did you turn in your nutrition collage?” Grandma asked.

“I did,” I said. “And I was called on to present it too.”

“Did you stand up in front of the whole class?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Other than my love of cheese puffs and orange food, I was one of the more normal eaters in there. Also, I should eat more salad.”

“As should we all,” Grandma said. “Did anybody have something exotic in their collage? Like octopus or cactus?”

I made a gagging sound so Grandma would understand that I never wanted to eat octopus or cactus. “Some kids eat a lot of canned foods. And a few people’s families catch fish in reservoirs that might be polluted.”

“Sounds like an informative assignment,” Grandma said.

“I guess,” I said. “Only I didn’t want to learn that
people in my class ate polluted fish. Their collages made me sad.”

“You’re very sensitive,” Grandma said.

And I turned and looked at her when she said this. “I really am,” I replied. Then I saw something weird in the grass. “What’s that weird thing?” I pointed to what looked like a jumbo washcloth attached to a stick.

“That’s Alma’s,” Grandma said. “It’s a cleaning system she brought over for Willy to borrow to wash the Winnebago.”