The Sound of Your Voice, Only Really Far Away (11 page)

Well, there was no way Kate was going to stop herself from crying after that. The tears
that rolled down her cheeks were hot, and Kate wondered if tears were always hot, or was it only the tears you cried because you’d been an idiot? A bad friend. The kind of girl who did things to get boys to like her.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

Lorna sniffed and nodded. “Don’t let it happen again.”

Then they were quiet for a few minutes, until Lorna said, “Didn’t you say something about raspberry pie?”

Kate laughed in a hiccupy sort of way and opened her lunch bag. “I even remembered to pack two forks.”

“Wow, Martha Stewart would be proud,” Lorna said admiringly. And then she said, “Is that Marylin sitting over there by herself? I’ve never seen her alone before. She looks weird all alone. Like she’s missing an arm or something.”

Kate looked up and sure enough, there was Marylin at a table near the cafeteria exit, sitting by herself and reading a magazine.

“Should we ask her to join us?” Lorna asked.
“You could split your piece of pie with her. I’m keeping mine all to myself.”

“I don’t know,” Kate said. “Maybe she wants to be alone.”

Lorna shook her head. “Nobody wants to be alone, Kate. At least not in the cafeteria.”

Kate thought about this. She knew Lorna was right. She also knew that even if she thought Marylin was dumb for trying to get new uniforms to make Mazie like her, well, wasn’t Kate sort of trying to do the same thing? Make Matthew like her by writing the audio-lab proposal?

She guessed Marylin wasn’t the only person acting dumb around here.

Marylin gave her a little cheerleader-like wave when she saw Kate walking over to her table. “Hey! I’m just getting caught up on my reading for my current events journal!” She held up a copy of
Time
magazine.

“Why don’t you come sit with me and Lorna?” Kate offered. “We can figure out how to take down Jared Scott. Maybe we could rig the ballot box.”

Marylin sat very still for a moment, and then she began gathering her things. “You heard about that? Well, you’re probably right—nobody else’s idea has a chance. I guess it doesn’t matter, though. I’m thinking about withdrawing my proposal anyway.”

“Benjamin still mad at you?”

Marylin sighed. “Everybody’s mad at me, Kate. Why am I so stupid?”

“Everybody’s stupid sometimes,” Kate told her. “So let’s go eat some pie.”

“Did your mom make it?” Marylin asked, looking considerably brighter.

Kate nodded and followed her friend across the cafeteria, to where her other friend was sitting. Outside the cafeteria window, she could see the student commons, where the leaves of a lone dogwood tree fluttered in the breeze. It would have been nice to have a garden out there, she thought. And then she thought that you didn’t really need a lot of money to start a garden. Mostly you needed shovels and people to dig.

“How do you feel about lettuce?” she asked
Marylin, who looked at her like she thought Kate was crazy.

“I like it, I guess. I mean, who doesn’t like lettuce?”

“Everybody likes lettuce,” Kate agreed, and she wished like anything she had a writing pad and her Pilot Precise V5 pen. She wished she had a packet of seeds and a watering can. “You want to hear my big idea?”

Marylin rolled her eyes. “Can I have some pie first?”

Kate nodded. Pie was good. Eating pie with your friends while you planned a revolution?

Even better.

the crying game

Marylin thought maybe she should keep a list of all her stupid mistakes on her wall, just so she could keep track of them. The only problem with this idea was that you couldn’t always tell what was a mistake and what wasn’t. For instance, not going to the mall that night with Mazie—had that been a mistake or a step in the right direction? Well, she hadn’t had much of a choice, had she? She couldn’t exactly have left Kate alone at her house while she ran off to get a mani-pedi. So not going wasn’t a mistake, but not having a good excuse? Big mistake.

If Marylin was going to be honest with herself, her real mistake had been inviting Kate
over in the first place. She hated to admit that, but it was true. She should have kept her friendship with Kate strictly a bus friendship. No sleepovers, no hanging out on the weekends, just sitting together on the bus if that happened to be convenient.

Hurting Kate’s feelings by telling Mazie the only reason Kate was at her house was to drop some stuff off? Superbig mistake, but Marylin didn’t want to think about it, because when she did, she felt like a totally horrible person. And she really wasn’t horrible—she just kept doing the wrong things over and over.

Marylin had been sprawled on her bedroom floor, drawing flowers on a school spirit poster, but now she sat up and leaned back against her bed. Okay, the number one biggest mistake she’d made lately? Trying to force Benjamin to get new cheerleading uniforms, even after her proposal lost. Which she knew was going to happen, she guessed, but she’d still been hopeful when Benjamin had read out the results of the What’s Your Big Idea contest over the loudspeaker.

“And the third-place winner is . . . a new computer for the library!” Benjamin’s voice had echoed through the hallway. Marylin was standing on the outskirts of the ring of cheerleaders by Ruby Santiago’s locker, all of whom were rolling their eyes. Nobody believed the cheerleading uniform proposal was going to win, no matter how many times Marylin insisted it had a really good chance.

“In second place, a school garden!”

Marylin felt proud of Kate, though she felt a little annoyed, too, since she knew Kate and Lorna were going to go ahead with their garden plans even if the garden didn’t win. They should have pulled out of the competition and let some of the other ideas—new cheerleading uniform ideas, for instance—get some of their votes.

“And the winner is . . .”

Marylin had crossed her fingers and her toes. Please, please, please, she’d thought. Let me have this one thing.

“. . . a school-wide pizza party!”

Cheers had filled the air, along with shouts
of “Yes!” and “Awesome!” Ruby had glanced coolly at Marylin and shrugged. “Maybe you could still get us some new uniforms,” she had said. “You’ve got Benjamin Huddle in the palm of your hand, right?”

“Sure,” Marylin had told her. “No problem.”

It turned out that only fourteen people had voted for new uniforms, which made it one of the least popular proposals; even the proposal for new audio-lab equipment had gotten more votes. But there was still going to be money left in the budget after the end-of-the-year pizza party. So why not uniforms?

“Because the money could be used for better things,” Benjamin had insisted after Monday’s Student Government meeting, when they were standing in front of the school, waiting to be picked up. “A lot of kids voted for a school garden, and there’s enough money after the pizza party to at least get started on a garden. Mrs. Calhoun thinks it’s a great idea.”

“But it’s not her decision,” Marylin had pointed out. “It’s kind of your decision, right? And it would mean a lot to me.”

Benjamin looked uncomfortable. “Yeah, well . . .”

“Please?” Marylin said, trying to sound sweet, like a little kid asking for candy. Except it came out more like a desperate person who was pretty sure her whole world was going to collapse if she didn’t get new uniforms for the cheerleaders.

Just then Benjamin’s mom pulled up. “I’ve got to go,” he said. “I’ll see you—uh—I’ll see you around, okay?”

That was Monday night. Now here it was Wednesday, and he hadn’t called or replied to any of her texts or shown up one time at her locker.

“I guess that’s that,” Marylin said out loud, and started to cry. Again. For the ten thousandth time that week. Sometimes when she started crying, it was because of Benjamin, but after a few minutes she would start thinking about cheerleading, and then she was crying cheerleading tears.

Really, if she was going to be honest about it, the biggest, biggest mistake she’d made that
week? Opening the e-mail with the subject header
50 Things We Hate About Marylin
. Sent from Mazie’s phone, of course. There had actually been only seventeen things on the list, with number seventeen being “To be continued.” Some of the things her fellow cheerleaders hated about Marylin included her hair (“dry and stringy”), her nails (“Ever heard of a pedicure?”), her breath (“Try brushing your teeth every once in a while!”), and her personality (“What a fake! Acts all nicey-nice, but is really super stuck-up”).

Every item on the list felt like a little knife going into Marylin’s heart. Why did they hate her so much? She was the nicest cheerleader in the whole group! She hardly ever talked behind anyone’s back, and she was the only one who could do a double back walkover. Was that it? Did they hate her because she was flexible?

She’d told Kate about the e-mail the next day on the bus—another mistake, but in a week of big mistakes, a pretty tiny one—and to nobody’s surprise whatsoever, Kate’s advice was to quit immediately. “If you quit cheerleading, you
could dedicate your life to Student Government and not have to spend your time with all those horrible people.”

“But then I’d be a quitter,” Marylin had pointed out. She didn’t like quitters the same way she didn’t like underachievers or people with bad attitudes. If you let go for just one minute, let yourself give up, who knew what would happen to you? You’d probably turn into somebody who wore her hair in a ponytail every day because—
meh, why bother?

“But sometimes it’s a good thing to be a quitter,” Kate had argued. “It’s good to quit smoking, right? Because smoking is harmful to your health. Well, I think cheerleading is harmful to your mental health. Just think about how you’re being treated. It’s not just e-mails. They’re saying some really mean things about you at school. Lorna has PE with Mazie, and she’s heard a lot of stuff.”

Marylin had winced. “Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”

“Okay, but it’s not good. I mean, Mazie’s telling everyone that you think you’re better than
everybody else in the school. That you’re a total snob. Lorna stuck up for you, though. She said if you were such a snob, then why were you eating lunch with her?”

Marylin had closed her eyes and leaned her head against the window. Great. Not only did the cheerleaders hate her, they were making sure everyone else hated her too. She had to admit it: Mazie was a genius. She could just imagine the circle of girls leaning in toward Mazie as she told them how stuck up Marylin was. Mazie hardly ever talked to non-cheerleaders, so when she did, it was a big deal. Everybody listened. Everybody hoped that Mazie might swoop down and pick them for her friend, in spite of the million-to-none odds against that ever happening.

Now Marylin picked up a purple Magic Marker and leaned over the spirit poster again. She read what she’d written, blinked a couple of times, and read it again. Had she really written,
Go Maveriks!
instead of
Go Mavericks
? Really? Marylin lowered her head until the top of it was resting on the poster. Why was she so stupid?

I should just quit, she told herself, but she knew she wouldn’t. Or couldn’t. It wasn’t about being a quitter or even about being popular. Okay, maybe it was a little bit about being popular. A lot about being popular. But there was something else, too—her parents sitting two rows behind the home team bench. It was like they were Marylin’s cheerleaders, and when Petey came too, well, it was like they were a family again.

So Marylin couldn’t quit. If she quit, when would her family ever get together? The five minutes at the door when her mom dropped her off at her dad’s or her dad dropped her off at her mom’s didn’t count. Everyone being together in the gym, stomping their feet and yelling, eating hot dogs, making jokes?

That counted. And Marylin didn’t want to ruin it.

“You know what you need?” Rhetta asked her on Thursday, when they were hanging out in Marylin’s room doing their nails. Rhetta was finally off restriction, and she was taking
advantage of it by spending every waking minute she could outside of her house. “You need more friends. Right now it’s like you have your so-called cheerleader friends, and then you have your friends like me and Kate. Your weird friends. Not that Kate’s actually all that weird, but you get my point.”