Keep It Real (From the Files of Madison Finn, 19) (3 page)

It was a good thing. Without the distraction, Madison managed to finish her homework questions and read the assigned chapter. Thankfully, Mr. Danehy never returned. If he had, there surely would have been a surprise pop quiz or something equally painful.

At the final bell, the monitor dismissed everyone. Madison moved to the front of class.

Was she imagining things…or had Hart hustled over to be next to her as they exited the room? The only thing better would have been if he’d elbowed Ivy into the wall on his way over.

“Did you finish all the work?” Hart asked.

“Yeah,” Madison admitted with a sheepish grin. “You?”

“Yeah,” Hart said. “Looked like Ivy and you were arguing.”

“Big surprise,” Madison said with a sigh.

“She gets weirder every day,” Hart said, nodding.

“I actually thought you liked her,” Madison said.

“Me? Like Ivy? Uh…not exactly,” Hart said. “She’s pretty and all that, but sometimes she’s just…well, I said it. She’s a big weirdo.”

“She likes
you
,” Madison said.

“Whatever,” Hart mumbled.

Madison didn’t know what to say next. She considered saying, “Hart, don’t you know I like you? I want to date you. I’m your dream girl.”

But she said nothing.

They walked past a few banks of lockers in silence. When they finally reached the staircase, Hart needed to go up, and Madison needed to go down.

“Later, Finnster,” Hart said. “Er…Maddie. Sorry, I guess I should stop calling you Finnster. I know it bugs you.”

“Yeah, well…” Madison stopped herself in mid-sentence. “No, Finnster isn’t so bad. I like it. Don’t stop. Really.”

“Really?”

Madison nodded. “I just need to think of a good nickname for you.”

“Uh…Egg calls me Loser sometimes,” Hart joked. “Or Weasel.”

“I was thinking more like Hunk,” Madison said.

“Huh?” Hart blinked. “What did you just say?”

“What?” Madison’s face froze. She wanted to run. Her stomach was like a trampoline inside—
bounce
,
bounce
,
bounce
. Her knees started to quake. She couldn’t take it back. Had she really just called him Hunk? Oh. My. God.

“I said, ‘Dork,’” Madison replied quickly. “Why? What did you think I said?”

“Ha! That’s me.
Super
Dork, actually,” Hart said with a goofy wink.

Madison’s entire body was on the verge of collapse—she was
that
embarrassed. She slung her bag across her back and adjusted the shoulders of her pink-flecked sweater so that it wasn’t all bunched up at the shoulders.

“Gee,” she said a moment later, pushing through the doors to the staircase, “gotta dash. Bye!” She raced down toward the bottom floor.

Hart barely had time to yell out, “See you later!” before Madison was gone.

Once she was out of sight, Madison searched for a bathroom stall where she could lock herself in and recover. Or maybe she could stuff her head inside a locker and scream? Conversations with Hart were an endless series of missteps. Either he seemed interested in her and she seemed uninterested in him, or vice versa. Either they had nothing at all to say, or they would start talking and Madison would say all the wrong things. Why couldn’t her life turn out more like a TV movie of the week? Madison was ready for the boy, the sunset, and the big embrace. She just needed to work on her lines.

After school, Aimee met Madison so that they could walk home together. Madison didn’t mention the Hart/Hunk thing. She was still too embarrassed to tell anyone.

Aimee seemed down in the dumps. Madison asked what was wrong, but Aimee wasn’t talking much, and she just grunted in reply. Madison started rambling, to fill in the silence between them.

“How was ballet yesterday?” Madison asked. No reply. “So, you missed a funny time at my house. Egg and Drew and Fiona and Chet and everyone came over. Egg was showing us some new computer game called Disaster Zone. And he made this blog page devoted to it. I didn’t realize there’s this whole BloggerBlurt section on TweenBlurt.com now. Did you?”

Aimee shrugged. “I’m tired. Do we have to talk?”

Madison stopped in her tracks. “Since when do you want to stop talking?”

“Since today,” Aimee said. “My ballet teacher…” She stopped walking, too. And then she dissolved into tears.

“What’s wrong?” Madison cried, hugging her friend.

“My classes were canceled for a week. My teacher is sick, Maddie. Real sick.”

“I’m sorry,” Madison said. It was the only thing she could think of to say.

“She didn’t want us to know about it, but then she sat us all down after class yesterday and told us the real deal. We were all crying. I’ve felt like crying all day. She has breast cancer. That’s so serious, right? She’s the best teacher in the whole world, Maddie.”

“Wow,” Madison said. She’d only known one other person who had had breast cancer before that moment. It was a friend of her mom’s from work. The year before, her mom and the friend had walked in a Race for the Cure event together. Madison had tagged along. They’d sprayed fuschia color into their hair and worn pink ribbons on their shirts.

The girls said their good-byes in front of Madison’s house, and Aimee walked on to her house, a few doors down. Madison climbed up her porch, exhausted by the long day at school and all of the emotional things that had happened since the late-afternoon bell. She tore off her jacket and sweater and kicked off her sneakers. Phin was right there with a few welcome-home doggy snorts. He licked her foot, too.

“Good dog,” Madison said as she gave him some kisses on the top of his furry head.

Mom was pacing up and down in the kitchen, talking to herself. Classical music was playing on the radio. She had her hair swept up in a ponytail and was wearing a plum-colored crepe dress and black heels.

“Hello, honey bear,” Mom said, blowing Madison a kiss.

“Why are you so dressed up?” Madison asked.

“Oh, no reason,” Mom said. “I had an afternoon meeting today, that’s all.”

“Really?” Madison said, climbing into a kitchen chair. She tossed her bag on the table and pulled out her laptop. It was almost out of power, so she plugged it in to charge it.

“How was your day?” Mom asked.

“Fine,” Madison said. “Aimee just told me sad news, though.”

“What?” Mom asked.

“Her dance teacher is sick. She has to stop teaching for a while. She has breast cancer,” Madison explained.

“Oh,” Mom said. Her face fell, and she looked away.

“What’s wrong, Mom?”

Mom cleared her throat and smoothed the counter with her hand. “Oh, nothing. I was just thinking of Grandma Finn.”

Madison’s grandmother, on her father’s side, had died before Madison was born.

“She had breast cancer, too, you know,” Mom said.

“She
did
?” Madison wondered how she could have missed hearing that important fact.

“It just seems like so many women I know have it these days,” Mom said, sounding very sad.

“Really?” Madison asked. “I remember your friend from work. Who else?”

“Oh,” Mom said, staring into space. “No one. No one in particular, honey bear. Should we order a pizza for dinner tonight?”

Madison’s stomach rumbled at the thought of pepperoni. She got off the chair and pulled the Pizza Pie menu out of a drawer.

From across the kitchen, Phin howled.

Madison smiled. He’d want a piece all for himself—minus the pepperoni, of course.

F
OR A MONDAY NIGHT
, Madison was up very late. It was the pizza, she figured. Two and a half slices had given her a whopper of a bellyache. That was twice as much food as Madison usually ate for dinner. All the same, it didn’t stop her from chewing a stick of gum that she had found inside her desk drawer.

Madison’s computer beeped. She had an e-mail. She tapped the keyboard to retrieve it, but saw that the message was only spam. The uninvited e-mail was addressed to a Mr. M. Finn and advertised a miracle drug to make hair grow. Madison quickly hit
DELETE
and surfed over to TweenBlurt.com.

At the site menu, there was an option to surf to the pages most recently visited. Madison wanted to check out Egg’s Disaster Zone page again. At school that day, he had claimed that he would be working on it all night, so Madison was curious to see what he had added. Did it look any less like a blank page? Madison couldn’t access the first page link she hit. She went to the BloggerBlurt main menu to find the
SEARCH
function. It asked her to enter a word, so Madison typed the word
disaster
. A list popped up, and she scrolled through. People had chosen funny names for their blogs.

Disaster Area


Disaster Land: My Life


Disaster Sister!!!


Disaster Zone


Dis Me L8r, Homeboy


Don’t Ask: The Whole Truth


Don’t Forget Me


Don’t Worry Page


Madison clicked on Egg’s page, but apparently he hadn’t done any work yet. It was still as blank as before. She hit the
BACK
browser and looked over the list again. What else was on some of those blogs? She double-clicked on
Disaster Land: My Life
. A blue page popped up. In the background, the blogger had inserted images of raindrops. Each text entry was a poem—a lame poem as far as Madison could tell, although she knew it wasn’t fair to call people’s ideas or work lame when she didn’t know them personally.

She hit the
BACK
browser once again and selected another page.
Dis Me L8r, Homeboy
seemed like a funny one. But when she clicked on it, the page listed underneath opened up instead.

Madison started reading. But she didn’t get very far.

Don’t Ask: The Whole Truth


A blog by Vicki (aka Bigwheels)


Bigwheels?

Madison’s eyes bugged out. She nearly fell out of her chair and choked on her bubble gum. But she kept reading.

I know I need to just relax but how can I relax when I don’t get any sleep either? I think I’m going to check out one of the chat rooms Dad told me about. I never knew it affected so many kids. I also found out that I can volunteer down @ the speech center in Seattle. I don’t think I’ll be working with kids who have autism but I will probably learn a lot.


--BW


Madison took a deep breath and reread the blog entry on her screen. This was no coincidence. This had to be BW, aka Vicki, aka Bigwheels, her keypal. There couldn’t be two Bigwheelses in the world, could there? Madison’s mind raced with questions. She clicked another key, marked
PROFILE
.

Screen Name: Bigwheels


Home Sweet Home: USA


Favorite Place: My basement, because that’s where my computer is now!


Favorite Person: My brother Eddie and my sister Mel and my keypal 2 b/c she’s nicer than nice


Madison stopped reading. There was no doubt now.

This was her Bigwheels.

How could Madison’s keypal have kept a blog on TweenBlurt.com, the place where they had first connected? And how could she have kept it a secret? It was too much to think about. Madison pressed the
ON/OFF
button on her laptop without even logging off.

Phin hopped up onto Madison’s bed with a rope chew toy in his mouth. It was frayed and wet at the ends, but Madison started up a game of tug-of-war to take her mind off the blog. Every time Phinnie pulled the rope one way, Madison pulled harder in the opposite direction. Halfway through the game, she yanked the toy right out of Phin’s little mouth. He yelped.

Madison sat there on the carpet, a little stunned. She’d pulled too hard. But she knew why. She was angry—really angry. She felt betrayed by Bigwheels. She’d been certain that she and her keypal shared
all
of the important stuff. They talked about boys they liked, teachers they didn’t like, and everything annoying that their parents did. Bigwheels always had funny stories to tell about her family. Madison loved hearing what life was like with a brother and a sister, since she had neither. But she had never heard anything about this blog—or the information it gave.

Why hadn’t she told Madison she was volunteering somewhere? After all, Madison always told her about her own experiences volunteering at the Far Hills Animal Clinic.

Phin yelped again. His ears went back, and his little curlicue tail went down. Now he was upset, too.

“I’m so sorry, Phinnie,” Madison said softly, leaning over. She rolled over, pulled him onto her tummy, and gave him a kiss. He cheered up right away and trotted back to get his chew toy.

Madison got up off the floor to power up her computer again. She was obsessed with what she’d seen on TweenBlurt.com. She needed to know why Bigwheels had not told her about the blog—and she needed to know now.

“Maddie, are you busy?” Mom yelled from downstairs.

Madison yelled back immediately: “Yes!”

“Well, I need you. Just for a moment. Can you help me?”

Phin scampered out of the room when he heard Mom’s voice.

Can you help me?
It was Mom’s typical refrain. Madison had often joked that her middle name should have been Help. Since the Big D, Mom often relied on Madison for assistance with things around the house, even though the reality was that Madison wasn’t much good at helping. She couldn’t locate a wall stud on which to hang a picture or find a washer in a toolbox filled with screws. But Mom asked for help anyhow. And Madison obliged. She liked being helpful—usually. Right now, though, she didn’t want to move from this spot. She needed to get back to the blog.

“Maddie?” Mom appeared at Madison’s bedroom door. “Just for a minute, honey bear. Okay? I know you’re doing homework.”

Madison hit the
STANDBY
button on her computer. She didn’t want Mom to see that she wasn’t doing the homework she’d promised to do before bedtime. A Bengal tiger screen saver appeared in the nick of time.