Truth about Truman School (2 page)

You want to know where I first heard about the Truth about Truman.com? Believe it or not, I read about it in the second floor girls' bathroom. The one way at the end of the hall that no one except us uses. Somebody wrote: “Check out www.truthabouttruman.com” in lipstick on the mirror.

First of all, I don't know why someone would ruin a perfectly good tube of lipstick to write that on the mirror. But it made me wonder what truthabouttruman.com was. So I pulled out my phone and text-messaged Hayley to see if she knew anything about it.

Hayley messaged me right back and said: every1 is talkin bout it. wher hav u been?

Of course, now I wish I had never said anything about that site.

Okay, I never even saw the lipstick message. And if you must know, I had never even heard of the Truth about Truman .com until Brianna told me about it. But I couldn't let her think she knew about something that I didn't! You know how it is.

So when we were in the media center working on our disease projects for science, I waited until Mrs. Conway was busy with some other kids, then I typed in www.truthabouttruman.com and checked it out. I didn't know back then that that weird girl with the blue hair and her nerd friend had started it. I don't think anyone knew, because it looked like a pretty cool site. It looked like the kind of thing someone in our group would've set up. If we actually wanted to set up a website.

“Hey, what are you doing?” Reece asked, peering at my screen. He was at the computer next to mine.

Reece and I used to go out in fifth grade, but I got bored with him and broke up with him after about two months.

“Checking out what's new on the Truth about Truman,” I said.

“What's that?” he asked.

“It's a website about our school,” I said, like it was no big deal.

Reece checked over his shoulder to make sure Mrs. Conway wasn't looking, then he got on that site, too. And pretty soon Jonathan Nagle, who sat on the other side of Reece, wanted to know what we were doing. Even that freaky girl with the disgusting skin condition stopped to see what we were doing. Talk about a disease project!

That girl really creeps me out. It's not just her skin…she's weird! She doesn't ever say anything. If a teacher calls on her in class, she'll just sit there and stare back at them. She won't even get up and do a math problem on the board. But here she was hanging over my shoulder like it was any of her business what we were looking at.

“Keep moving, Freak,” I said. Would you believe she stuck her tongue out at me? Real mature.

“Whose website is this?” Reece asked.

“Don't know and don't care,” I said.

There was this list of stupid rules at Truman and you could write in and guess why the rule existed. Sk8terdude, whoever that is, said the reason we can't use the north stairs is because the teachers hang out there and smoke between classes. And Sweetfeet said he or she saw our principal, Mr. Gates, smoking something, and it wasn't a cigarette. I smiled. I didn't have anything to add to that, so I moved on to the section where you could vote for Truman Middle School's Absolute Worst Teacher.

Oh, that was easy! I scrolled down the list and clicked on Mr. Reddy because he took a note Lilly and I were passing last week during this boring movie on the Aztecs. He actually shut the movie off, opened up our note (like it was his business) and read it to the whole class. It was all about Brianna's new shirt and how yellow is so not a good color for her. As her friends, Lilly and I were going to tell her. Just … not like that. Not in front of the whole class.

You should have seen the look on Brianna's face when Mr. Reddy started reading. She was so embarrassed. Not to mention mad. So of course that started this huge fight between us.

We made up pretty fast, but still. The whole thing was Mr. Reddy's fault. He's such a totally bad teacher.

As soon as I cast my vote, I emailed all my friends and told them to go to this website and vote for Mr. Reddy for Absolute Worst Teacher.

Everyone thinks the whole thing started with Zebby and Amr's stupid website. But for me, it started with an email I got somewhere around the time that website first went up. The subject line read: For Lilly. And it was from somebody who called him or herself milkandhoney.

I had no idea who that was, but I opened the email anyway. There was just one line:
Dear Lilly … you are going down!

My first thought was, huh? Who is this?

My mom wanted to know why I didn't say anything about that email when I first got it. Well, it was just an email. No big deal. I hit delete and didn't think about it again until I got another email.

This one said:
Dear Lilly … have you visited
truthabouttruman.com
yet? If not, you should …

This email bugged me a little more than the first one. I guess because it was the second email from milkandhoney, and I didn't know who that was.

But there was no threat in that second email. Just a question: Have you visited truthabouttruman.com yet?

I hadn't. I'd heard of it. Hayley had sent me an email about it a couple days earlier, but I hadn't gotten around to checking it out yet. After I read that email, though, I got on the Truth about Truman website to see what it was. It looked like an online newspaper about our school. There was an article about the math curriculum that looked kind of boring, so I didn't read it, and another article about how five minutes isn't enough time between classes, a list of Stupid Truman Rules, and a place where you could write about a bad teacher you've had. You could even vote for the worst teacher at Truman. Mr. Reddy was way in the lead. Big surprise. He was always yelling. And if your cell phone went off during his class, he took it away and didn't give it back for like a week!

It didn't say anywhere whose website this was, but something like this had Zebby Bower's name all over it. I should know; I used to be friends with her. We started like five different newspapers together when we were kids. Her, me, and Amr Nasir.

The Truth about Truman.com looked all right. It looked better than the last newspaper Zebby tried to start. At least this time she'd managed to start something that people actually wanted to read. But I couldn't figure out why milkandhoney, whoever that was, wanted me to see it so bad. It was just a computer newspaper.

Then I got the third email.

Dear Lilly … I know you've seen the Truth about Truman.com by now. You should know there's going to be a special surprise on that website on Friday featuring YOU! Make sure you log on. You won't be sorry. (Or maybe you will? Hahahaha!!!!)

— milkandhoney

I'm a little surprised everyone's making such a big deal about all this. So, a few people said and did some mean things to Lilly Clarke online. So what? I've put up with way worse things. I've had my head shoved in the toilet; I've been pushed down stairs; and I've had my butt super-glued to a bench in the locker room. I hang out in the media center for half an hour every day after school and shelve books for Mrs. Conway just so I don't have to walk home when everyone else is walking home.

Things got so bad for me last year that I actually went to see Mrs. Horton, the school counselor. Which turned out to be a huge mistake. She wanted me to name names. Yeah, right. Like I would really do that. Was she trying to get me killed?

When I told Mrs. H. to forget it; I wasn't going to tell her who'd been hassling me, she sat back in her chair and made a little steeple out of her two pointer fingers. “Well, then,” she said. “Maybe things aren't quite as bad as you're making them out to be.”

I didn't know what to say to that, because things were actually quite a bit worse than I was making them out to be. And unless you're the kind of person who avoids going to the bathroom at school and/or has to hang out in the media center after school till everyone else leaves, you have no idea what it's like. So let me tell you: NOBODY LIKES TO ADMIT THEY'RE GETTING POUNDED EVERY SECOND THE TEACHER'S BACK IS TURNED!

So I just said, “Yeah, I guess not,” and then I started to get up. At least I'd already missed the first ten minutes of P.E. The other guys would already be in the gym, so the locker room would be safe.

But Mrs. H. pointed to my chair. “Sit back down, Trevor,” she said. She seemed surprised that I was ready to leave.

“Let's talk about this some more,” she said, acting all concerned. “You're clearly having some sort of issue with your peers.”

Clearly
.

“Does it have something to do with your mother?”

“No!” I said right away. Because not everything was about my mother.

“Well, then why do you suppose you're having so much trouble with the other kids, Trevor?” she asked, like this was some big mystery she just couldn't figure out.

Well, gee, Mrs. H.
, I thought.
Could it be that this school is full of—
never mind. I won't say it. What would be the point?
I bet Mrs. H. was popular when she was in school. That was why she said such stupid things sometimes. She just couldn't relate to what kids like me go through sometimes.

Finally, Mrs. H. leaned across her desk like she was about to tell me something that was going to change my life. “You know, Trevor,” she said. “Sometimes we do things without even realizing it that sort of … set us apart from the other kids. If you could just try a little harder to get along … try a little harder to be more like the other kids … maybe you'd be happier?”

See what I mean about Mrs. H.?

Basically, she was telling me to just do what everyone else was doing. Be like everyone else, then everything will be fine. Right.

Fat lot of good all that did Lilly Clarke.