Monday morning at school, everyone is talking about the amazing Halloween party at Ibby’s house. Mark even said that some of his high school buddies were buzzing about this middle school bash where they smashed pumpkins and went sledding on the guts. “Way to go, Tess,” he says. “None of that kiddie shaving-creamed cars or toilet-papering houses for you!”
Praise from Mark is rare, so I don’t tell him that it was Bo and Joey’s fight that started it all.
Juvenile delinquency has its price. Sitting in Science class, my neck and lower back hurt from the all-day cleanup at the Blooms’ on Sunday. It’s impossible to find a comfortable position. The others don’t look in any better shape.
Ibby’s taking notes with her head resting on her arm, and Bo looks like a pile of laundry thrown in the corner, with his body slumped over the desk and his hoodie pulled up over his head. They’re hurting, too. It’s easy smashing and sledding on pumpkins. It’s a lot harder hosing down and scrubbing the entire street and picking up pumpkin pieces—enough to fill twelve heavy-duty trash bags.
Poor Mrs. Bloom. She had been doing so well that night, too, at least up until the shrieks and shouting brought her out to the street. She lost it right there at the end of her driveway, when she saw her daughter covered in orange slime, slipping and sliding across the road.
Ibby says her mom’s been talking about living in a biosphere and the benefits of homeschooling.
Ibby has no regrets. With one wild party, she ditched her geekess image and has shot right to the top of our class as daring, creative, and cool. Something I’ve always known about her anyway.
From my window seat, I look out over the soccer fields and feel really sad that our last practice is this afternoon. A flock of Canada geese grazes on the field, depositing green turds wherever they walk. I daydream, imagining them challenging the seagulls to a soccer game and kicking a goal with their wide webbed feet or heading the ball into the net with their beaks. Or would that be a beak ball? Canada Geese 1–Seagulls o!
“So what do you think … Tess?”
Busted!
“Sorry, Mr. Metz, I wasn’t—”
“Paying attention? You’re not on that field yet,” he says with a smile.
How can he smile? Calypso is history after the biting incident with Georgie, and rumor has it that Metz is being forced to give equal time to intelligent design.
I slump down in my chair and rest my chin on my knuckles. I have a feeling that whether the levy passes or not, Mr. Metz won’t stick around Clarkstown Middle School teaching science for much longer.
At the thought of the election tomorrow, my stomach makes a growling noise like I’m hungry, only I’m not because I just had lunch, and my mechanical pencil feels slippery between my fingers. Our school’s closed tomorrow because they can’t control security with voters coming in and out of the building all day. Since we won’t be in classes, Olivia’s called a final levy meeting after school to organize which polling places we’ll stand in front of with our signs tomorrow.
I painted a sign of my own the other night, with a huge S.O.S. on it, in our school colors, orange and black. Underneath, I wrote, Save Our Sports!
“Nice, Tess,” Mark said. “Got to hand it to you. You definitely have a one-track mind.”
He’s wrong.
I have a two-track mind—winning our last soccer game of the season and helping the school levy pass!
* * *
Olivia stands in front of the chalkboard with her flip chart of polling locations and the names of the volunteers assigned to each. She distributes stickers she’d like us to wear on our clothes and posters we’re to display so people can see them as they walk into the churches, synagogues, and schools to cast their vote.
“I’ve made my own sign,” I say when she goes to hand me one.
“Can’t use your own sign,” Olivia says. “It’s not officially approved.”
“Approved by who?” I ask.
“By me!”
“Who made you the levy queen?” I look to Ms. Harper for help on this one, but she quickly looks the other way, evidently following my father’s philosophy of letting the kids work it out for themselves.
“I’m the president of this committee,” Olivia says in a snarky voice, “and I have final approval on all signs.”
I bet this has more to do with pumpkin pulp pelting Olivia’s big head the other night than with sign approval.
“Whatever,” I say, not wanting to get into an argument and miss even more soccer practice than I already have. I head for the door. “I’ll show you the sign tomorrow and you can approve it or not, but now, I’m going to practice.”
“Not yet!” She frantically flips through her charts. “I haven’t told you where you’re posted for Election Day.”
Right now, the only place I want to be posted is next to the goalpost, waiting for that corner kick to come flying over the defenders’ heads so I can one-time it into the back of the net!
The flip chart falls off its metal stand and lands in a crumpled mess on the floor. Olivia fusses and kneels down to retrieve it.
Bo was so right to ditch this last meeting. What a waste of time! Outside Ms. Harper’s window, I see my team has finished warm-ups and is hard at work drilling for tomorrow’s game.
“I’ve got to go, Olivia!” Is she doing this on purpose? I wonder.
“Okay, okay … here it is!” She reads, “Tess Munro and Bo Tauber—St. Jude’s Catholic High School from twelve noon until two p.m.”
“Got it—bye!” I race down the hallway. The clickity-clack of my cleats echoes off the tile floor. Free at last! It’s not until I’m on the field running my seven laps for being late that it hits me. St. Jude’s? Oh, great, I’m forced to stand in front of Jillian O’Hanlon’s high school.
I pick up the pace, practically sprinting the last lap. Maybe I should stand in front of her school dressed in my soccer uniform for my game later that afternoon and have my shin guards on for protection. Who am I kidding? The abuse won’t be physical. And plastic shin guards are no match against an army of Jillians.
* * *
After practice, I struggle with my laundry, which is piled up in my room, along with the muddy practice clothes I left fermenting like a forgotten science experiment in the laundry tub. Okay, I admit that I’m not much better than Mark is when it comes to keeping up with the wash. I don’t pay attention when sorting the colors and whites. And sometimes I forget to check the pockets and wind up with bubble gum stuck to my jeans after I pull them out of the dryer, money going through the wash, and the biggest disaster—the green gel pen that exploded all over my bras and underpants. Tie-dye anyone?
Eww! The muddy practice shorts and T-shirt from last week smell like the time my dad went grocery shopping in the summer and forgot the eggs in the trunk for a week. I grab the bottle of bleach to get rid of this stench so I can wear these practice clothes for basketball this winter—if we have basketball this winter!
As the washing machine fills, I spy the new bleach pen my mother put on the shelf for spot stains.
“Tess, goalie boy’s on the phone!”
I’m going to kill my brother. I grab my jeans from the dirty laundry pile and sit on the dryer cradling the phone between my ear and shoulder.
“Hey, Tess, so where did Queen Olivia station us for tomorrow’s blitzkrieg?”
“St. Jude’s—twelve to two.”
“Hmm, that’s doable.”
“Bo, if you’re not awake and ready to go by eleven thirty, I swear I’ll—”
“Tess-ty! Tess-ty! Don’t worry. I’ll be ready. Just stop by and pick me up, okay? It’s only about two blocks from my house.”
“Don’t oversleep. I’ve traumatized those two little neighbors of yours enough. If they see me pounding on your door again, they’ll call the cops. Officer Todd and I are on a first-name basis. He told my mom that the pumpkin bash was strike two. One more and—”
“Bye, Tess. Got a ton of homework. I’m hanging up now…”
“Yeah, sure, you don’t have a record like I—”
“Hanging up the phone … now!”
“Bo, wait!”
“What?”
“Think we’ll win, tomorrow?”
Silence.
“Bo?”
“Yeah?”
“Think the school levy’s going to pass?”
“Hey, Tess,” he says in a quiet, serious voice, one I so rarely hear from Bo Tauber’s mouth that I press the phone against my ear in order to catch every word.
“Don’t worry about it, okay? The only passing you should be thinking about is the passing that comes in front of the goal at your game tomorrow.”
I hang up the phone smiling. Bo’s right. Scoring a couple of goals during tomorrow’s game is something I have control over. Everything else is out of my hands now.