Truth about Truman School (5 page)

Zebby and I were stoked. People knew about the Truth about Truman.com now. I even saw some seventh graders checking it out at the public library. Every time I saw our site up on some computer somewhere, I thought to myself, that's
our
site. Mine and Zebby's.

“It was just like we said,” I told Zebby when she came over late Friday afternoon. “All we needed was one person to find our site.”

“All we needed was for the
right
person to find our site!” Zebby corrected. She tossed her sweatshirt onto my bed. “Too bad the right person had to be Hayley Wood.”

“Hey, look at it this way,” I said. “One reason you don't like people like Hayley and Reece is you think they're users, right?”

“Yeah … ”

“Well, for once
we're
using
them
,” I said. “We're using their popularity to increase the popularity of our site.”

Zebby grinned. “That's an interesting way of looking at it.”

“So let's see just how popular we really are,” I said as I turned on my computer.

Zebby pulled up a chair and I logged in to the domain control panel.

“Look at that!” I cried, pointing at the screen. It was even better than I expected. “We've had a total of four hundred and seventy-two hits since we launched!”

Zebby's eyes about popped out of her head. “That's like half the school.”

“Well, only if nobody ever got on more than once,” I said. “But still, it's good! It's very good.”

Zebby grabbed the mouse. “Let's see what all these people have been doing,” she said. “Have they just been reading, or have they been writing comments and posting new articles, too?”

I watched as she logged onto our site.

“They
are
commenting,” she cried, surprised. There were two or three comments under most of our articles, and
seven
comments under the Stupid Rules article.

“And look. They're voting, too,” I said, pointing to our poll. Mr. Reddy still had the most votes for Absolute Worst Teacher. But one of the math teachers, Mrs. Connor, was giving him a run for his money. (That bugged me a little because I thought Mrs. Connor was a pretty good teacher.) Even Mrs. Horton, our school counselor, had a couple votes for Absolute Worst Teacher.

“We'll have to get some more articles up so people keep coming to our site,” Zebby said.

“We?” I groaned.

“Well, maybe other people will start posting articles, too,” Zebby said, scrolling down the site. “Maybe that person who wants to do a comic strip will post the first installment soon.”

“And there's a football game today, so maybe this weekend Hayley will post her video.”

Zebby wrinkled her nose at that idea, then continued scrolling down the site. “Hey, look!” she cried. “Somebody posted a new poll.”

“Really?”

“Uh-oh,” Zebby said.

“What?” I said. “What's the matter?”

And then I saw what was the matter.

Who's the biggest poser at our school?

I read the new question out loud. But it wasn't just a question. If you clicked on the question, you got a picture to go along with it. An old elementary school picture of a girl who was sort of fat when the picture was taken.

Whoever posted this didn't say who it was in the picture. They wanted people to guess who it was. That was the whole point to the poll.

Well, I didn't have to guess. I knew who it was. So did Amr. And so would anyone who had gone to Herbert Hoover Elementary with all of us.

It was Lilly Clarke.

“Wow,” Amr said. “Are we really going to leave that up for everyone to see?”

I turned back to the picture of the unsmiling, fat girl with the greasy hair. And it was like our entire relationship—me, Lilly, and Amr—flashed before my eyes.

I live three houses away from Amr. Lilly lives across the street and down two more houses from Amr. Our houses were all built right around the same time, so we all moved in right around the same time. The summer before kindergarten.

From kindergarten through fifth grade, the three of us did everything together. We walked to and from school together, then spent afternoons running back and forth between Lilly's swing set, Amr's computer, and the old tree house we found in the woods behind my house when we were in first grade. Lilly wasn't fat then. We spent summers at the pool, and winters building snow forts into the hill in Lilly's backyard. We learned how to ride bikes together, we learned how to ice skate together, and we learned how to play T-ball together.

Our parents were friends, too. So on the weekends, our whole families got together. In the summer, our parents would grill hamburgers and then sit out around the fire pit in our backyard while us kids ran around the neighborhood. In the winter, they'd order pizza and play games of … whatever it was they played while the three of us hung out in somebody's basement.

Then, when we were in fourth grade, Lilly's parents got divorced.

Lilly and her mom stayed in their house, but things were never the same with our families. The three of us stayed friends (for a while), but our families didn't get together anymore.

Lilly started to gain weight in fourth grade. And I mean lots of weight. She'd always been sort of pudgy before, but in fourth and fifth grade she was F-A-T.

Amr and I never said anything about it, though, because Lilly was our friend. We didn't care what she looked like. Besides, we knew she was going through a hard time.

Then came the summer between fifth and sixth grade. Lilly went away to some camp for most of the summer and when she came back, she was suddenly thin! She was like a totally different person. She got a new haircut and new clothes, and she started taking gymnastics. That was where she met Hayley and Brianna. Hayley and Brianna came from a different elementary school than Amr, Lilly, and I did, but we all ended up at the same middle school in sixth grade.

Most sixth graders still hung out with their elementary school friends. But Lilly started hanging out with her new gymnastics friends. And she made it pretty clear that Amr and I weren't invited. Not that we wanted to be. The only thing those girls ever did was sit around and obsess over their hair, their makeup, and boys.

“Zebby?” Amr elbowed me.

“What?” I blinked.

“What do you think?” Amr asked again. “Can we really leave this up?”

Well … we said this was everyone's website. Anyone could post an article. Anyone could comment on an article that's already up. It said all that right on the front page. So how could we not leave it up? Aside from a few votes for worst teacher and a couple of comments on the articles we wrote, this was the first thing someone else—someone other than me or Amr—had posted. We couldn't take it down. Even if it was a little bit mean.

I shrugged. “It's just a picture, right? It isn't any big deal.”

“Right,” Amr said. “No big deal.”

“And it
is
the truth,” I pointed out. Lilly really did look like that in fourth and fifth grade. Plus if you asked me, she
was
a poser. Nothing about her was real anymore. Not since she started hanging out with Hayley and Brianna.

So … we left the picture up.

My stepbrother was being a total pain. Mark was always a pain, but he was being even more of a pain than usual.

“I don't even go to the high-school football games,” he said as shooting sounds came from his computer. “Why would I want to go to a middle-school game?”

“So you can record me and Hayley and Lilly cheering, so we can put it up on this school website.”

Mark finally killed whatever he was shooting at on the computer (that, or it killed him?) because the shooting sounds stopped and he turned to face me. “I suppose you'll need me to edit the video and put it up on the website, too?” he said like it was this huge deal. Even though he practically ran the high-school video club single-handedly. He loved video/website stuff.

“Well, if you showed me what to do, I could maybe do it myself,” I said in a small voice. Though I hated when Mark showed me anything. He always went through it way too fast and then made me feel stupid when I didn't remember it all. Just because he was really smart and skipped two grades doesn't mean I'm stupid.

“Right. You'd do something by yourself. When have you ever done anything by yourself, Brianna?”

If Hayley wasn't counting on me to get Mark to do this for us, I would have walked away right then and there. Who needs the abuse? But I couldn't go back to Hayley and tell her Mark wouldn't help us.

“Please, Mark,” I begged. “I really need you to do this. It's important!”

“Oh, I'm sure it's
very
important,” he snorted. But in the end, he agreed to do it. As long as I took his dishwasher duty for the next week.

It would've been nice if we could've gotten pleated skirts and sweaters like the high-school cheerleaders wore. Not to mention real pompoms. Preferably navy blue and white, like our school colors. But there wasn't time to get any of that, so we decided to wear our Truman T-shirts with dark blue shorts. And then we found some little blue pompoms on sticks at the mall. They were kind of sad looking, but at least we had something to wave around.

When Friday rolled around, we were set!

Hayley, Brianna, and I were so excited all day because we had this huge secret. We hadn't told Reece or any of the other guys that they were going to have cheerleaders on Friday. We hadn't told anyone. I could tell Cassie, Kylie, and Morgan were kind of wondering what was up with us, but we didn't even tell them. The whole thing was supposed to be a surprise!

After school, we went up to our bathroom and got changed. Then we ran back downstairs, bumping into each other and giggling the whole way. We wanted to be down on the field before the football players so we could cheer while they were coming out. That was what the high-school cheerleaders did.

There weren't a lot of people down by the field when we got there, but there usually aren't a lot of people at middle-school games. Just a few kids from school and a few parents who can get off work. They sit on blankets around the field because we don't have any bleachers at Truman.

Hayley, Brianna, and I sort of tiptoed around everyone until we worked our way to the front. Cheerleaders
have
to be in the front! Then we knelt down in the grass and waited for the guys to come out. We kept elbowing each other and smiling because we knew what was about to happen and no one else did.

“Look, here they come,” Brianna said, nodding toward the gym door.

Hayley and I both turned. My legs about turned to jelly when I saw Reece was leading the pack.

“It's showtime,” Hayley said, nudging me and Brianna. So we all stood up and started waving our pompoms around.

“Here we go, Tigers; here we go!” we said. We started out kind of quiet and unsure, and then Brianna got the giggles. But Hayley glared at her and she knocked it off. We got a lot more serious, and our voices got stronger, and pretty soon everyone was staring at us. The parents, the kids, the players, the coaches, everyone.

There were a couple of kids from my language arts class who, I swear, looked right at me and then started whispering to each other, which made me a little panicky.
Why were they whispering?
Was there something wrong with our outfits? Were we out of step with each other?

Hayley and Brianna just kept right on cheering and waving their pompoms, so I tried to do the same thing, but it was hard when I didn't know what people were thinking. Were they happy to see us or did they think we were being stupid?

But I saw Reece and a few of the other guys sort of smile at us. And then the coolest thing happened. Some of the people who were there to watch the game started cheering along with us! “Here we go, Tigers; here we go!”

When the announcer introduced the players, we all cheered and turned cartwheels. I was a little worried that the coaches would tell us to stop, but they didn't. So we cheered the whole game.

I think people liked that we were there. At least the people from Truman did. The people from Harding Middle School kind of looked like they wished we'd go away. But they were probably mad that they were losing. And that they didn't have any cheerleaders of their own.

Some seventh grader from the
Bugle
took pictures during the game. He even took one of us. And then when the game was over, he came over to ask us a couple questions so he could write an article about us. Hayley had also written a three-page article about how we started our cheerleading squad for the Truth about Truman. And Brianna's stepbrother was there with his video camera, so we'd have a video to send in, too. It was like the
best
afternoon of my entire life!

Then I went home and everything crashed down around me.

First my mom told me my dad couldn't have me at Thanksgiving after all (big surprise). Something about a business trip or whatever. I wasn't going to let that get me down. After the wonderful afternoon I'd just had, I wanted to stay focused on good things, so I told my mom I had to check my email.

I expected a bunch of emails from people telling me how great me and Hayley and Brianna looked and how awesome it was that Truman now had their own cheerleading squad. But there was only one email in my inbox. It was from milkandhoney.

Dear Lilly … I bet I can take one of the most popular girls at school and turn her into one of the most unpopular girls at school. And I bet I can do it without her, or anyone, figuring out who I am. Or how I did it. Care to guess which popular girl I have in mind? By the way, don't forget to check out the Truth about Truman!

Your “friend,”

milkandhoney

What could possibly be on that website that was such a big deal? Something about
me
? It had to be if milkandhoney wanted me to see it so badly.

I opened my browser and typed in www.truthabouttruman.com.

At first it looked like it was just the same old stuff that was there yesterday. But then I saw there was a new poll. Different from the one that was there yesterday.

Who's the biggest poser at our school?

And underneath that header was … my old fifth-grade school picture.

I froze.

I had cut up every single picture we had of me from when I was in fourth and fifth grade. My mom got really mad at me when I did it, because now we don't have any pictures of me from back then. But I didn't care. As far as I was concerned, if there were no pictures of me from back then, then maybe I never really looked like that?

But I
did
look like that. This picture was proof.

My entire body started shaking.

It didn't actually say anywhere on that website that the picture was me, so none of my friends would know it was me. Not at first. I'd never actually come right out and said, “Oh, by the way. I used to be kind of heavy in elementary school.”

Anyone who went to Hoover would know it was me, though. So it wouldn't be long before the whole school knew.

I tried to tell myself it didn't matter. My friends wouldn't care. But deep down, I wasn't so sure. I hated to say it, but girls tended to come and go in our group. Like right now, Cassie, Kylie, and Morgan were part of our group, but they wouldn't be around forever. One day they'd say or do something to make Hayley mad and then they'd be out. Just like Leah, Shaowei, and Gabby were.

Would
I
be gone one day, too? Did milkandhoney, whoever that person was, really have the power to turn me into the most unpopular girl in school?