IT’S QUIET READING TIME BACK in the classroom. Everybody stares when we walk in. Except Amanda Anderson. She glares and grimaces. Her name should be Grimanda Growlerson.
“Girls, where’s Jessie?” Mrs. D. asks.
“Jessie went to the emergency room,” I explain and hand her the nurse forms. “She’s getting stitches.”
“Cool!” Ari Shapiro says. “One time my brother got five stitches. He walked into my sword.”
“My sister broke her arm once,” Ruby Snow says. “She fell out of our tree fort.”
Mrs. D. makes a shuddering sound. “How awful.” She looks at the forms and then at Savannah. “Where are your glasses, dear?”
Savannah holds up the baggy of glasses and squeaks something. So I say, “She broke them.”
Amanda looks over her book, Princess Power. “YOU broke her glasses!”
she yells out from a beanbag on the floor.
“I DID NOT!” I yell back.
“You did, too!
You shoved Jessie right in front of Savannah.”
“No, I didn’t,” I say. “I never did that. She shoved me! Then I fell over. And I grabbed hold of her. And …”
And that’s mean of Amanda to say because sometimes I’m lying about being bad, but this time I’m not. I didn’t mean to fall down.
“Why can’t you be nice, Lola Zuckerman?” Amanda says.
“I AM nice,” I say.
“Not to Savannah. And not to Jessie.”
“Amanda! Lola! That’s enough! What has gotten into you two?”
Amanda goes back to reading her book. Her face pinks up. I blink my eyes, one, two, three times.
Savannah squints out at the class.
“Is your book on your desk? I’ll get it for you,” I tell her, extra loudly so that Amanda can hear how helpful I’m being. And then she’ll believe me. We’ll be best friends again, and I’ll have a sleepover at her house. After we go out for Italian food, she’ll tell me haunted stories of the Wild West, and we’ll watch Cupcake Queens because being a friend means doing boring stuff the other person likes some of the time. And we will only paint our fingernails with adult supervision.
I rush over to Savannah’s desk and give her Your Pet Gerbil.
Then I hurry back to my desk and open my book. But every time the story gets good, I think about poor Jessie getting stitches. I wonder if they use a sewing machine like Mom’s.
“Quiet reading time is over,” Mrs. D. says. “Time to find your seats and take out your Kookamut Farm vocabulary sheet. Oh, Lola, come up here, please.”
I go up there even though I want to keep walking past her desk and right out the door.
“Lola,” Mrs. D. says. “Is there anything you want to tell me about the playground incident?” Mrs. D. looks right at me through her rectangles.
My knees sweat in the back. “Nope.”
“Nothing at all?”
I’m sure she wants me to tell her something and I’m sure I don’t want to. It’s a tug-of-war. Her eyebrows are stuck in I think you’d better and my face is frozen in No thanks.
She keeps looking at me.
My eyeballs swing this-a-way and that-a-way.
“Okay,” she says, and I know I’ve won. She slides an envelope across her desk. “Would you please give this to your grandmother?”
I take it. Maybe I haven’t won after all.
