On Tuesday morning Kate had left her lunch sitting on the kitchen counter, and now here she was in the cafeteria, face-to-face with a tray of brown and olive-green food. It was supposedly meat loaf and string beans, but Kate was not convinced.
“That should be illegal,” Lorna said through a mouth full of pasta salad she’d made herself the night before. In her left hand she held a crusty piece of artisan bread, also homemade. “I can’t believe the cafeteria is allowed to serve that kind of slop. I mean, look at it! All of the vitamins have been cooked right out of those beans. They’re not even beans. They’re bean remains. They could do a CSI episode on those beans.”
“I’ve got to eat,” Kate said with a shrug, halfheartedly sticking her fork into the slab of so-called meat loaf. “I’ve got a pre-algebra test this afternoon. I need the energy.”
Lorna sighed and passed Kate her Tupperware container of pasta. “Just eat this, okay? I can’t stand to watch you put that junk in your mouth. I can’t believe they can’t dish out some actual, fresh food. At my cousin’s school, they have this amazing salad bar in their cafeteria. It’s all stuff they grow in the school garden. How cool is that?”
“Pretty cool,” Kate admitted. “We should do that here. There’s lots of open space out on the student commons.”
Lorna slammed her fist on the table. “We should! We should enter that competition! The one that Student Government is doing.”
“The What’s Your Big Idea competition?” Kate asked, and when Lorna nodded, she leaned back in her seat and thought about it. There was a lot about the idea of a school garden she liked. For one thing, a salad bar would be good for the school’s vegans and vegetarians, who were always complaining about not having enough lunch options. Quite frankly, Kate could do with fewer cafeteria protests, especially since the leader of the vegans had gotten her hands on a bullhorn. And a school garden would be good for the environment, lower the school’s carbon footprint and all that. She thought about Flannery and her do-it-yourself thing. She would totally be into a school garden.
“Let’s do it,” Kate said, grinning at Lorna. “I think it’s a brilliant idea.”
“We have to grow herbs, too,” Lorna said, pulling a notebook and a pen out of her backpack. She started making a list. “Basil and tarragon would be totally great.”
“Maybe we could grow chickpeas and make hummus. And garlic. We could grow garlic.” Kate reached across the table and tore off a piece of Lorna’s bread. “We could grow wheat for bread.”
Without looking up from her notes, Lorna said, “I think you’re starting to get carried away here, Kate, but I like your thinking.”
“Me too,” Kate agreed. “I am a very profound thinker.”
“Incredibly, super profound,” Lorna added, skewering a piece of rotini from the Tupperware container with her fork. “Most profound-from-on-high thinker.”
Kate gnawed at the crust of her bread. “I wonder what the other ideas are going to be? Probably sports equipment for the gym and more computers for the library.”
“Doesn’t matter. Ours is the best. All we’ve got to do is submit it. Which means all you’ve got to do is write up the proposal.”
Kate’s mouth dropped open. “Me? Why me?”
Lorna smiled and handed Kate another chunk of bread. “No such thing as a free lunch, babe.”
That night Kate sat at the kitchen table and worked on the school garden proposal. It had to be five hundred words or less, which was the sort of writing challenge Kate liked. She thought she should focus mostly on the food angle, since most middle schoolers she knew were obsessed with eating. Not the way Lorna was—she read Bon Appétit and could talk with authority about different kinds of olive oil—but just about everybody she knew was concerned with where their next snack was coming from and what it would consist of. If Kate really wanted to win this contest, she’d write a proposal for a new vending machine that dispensed only sour cream potato chips and kiwi-flavored bubble gum.
But Kate liked the idea of a school garden. She wasn’t a gardener herself, but she could see how growing your own food was cool. Her mom usually had a few pots of cherry tomatoes growing on the patio, and it was always fun to take out a bowl and pick a bunch for a salad. It kind of made you feel like a farmer, or some kind of a hippie.
Her dad walked into the kitchen, carrying a plate. “Did you try some of Mom’s raspberry pie?” he asked, putting his plate by the sink. “Amazing.”
“You better rinse that plate off and put it in the dishwasher,” Kate warned him. “Mom’s going ballistic every time she sees a dirty dish in the sink or on the counter. She says she’s not our maid.”
“She’s not,” Mr. Faber agreed. He reached over to turn on the faucet. “The problem is, she cares more than everyone else about the house being clean. I keep telling her she just needs to lower her standards.”
Kate raised an eyebrow. “Yeah? And what does she say about that?”
“Nothing I can repeat in mixed company,” Mr. Faber put his dish in the dishwasher, then sat across the table from Kate. “You working on homework?”
Kate told him about the What’s Your Big Idea campaign and her and Lorna’s proposal for a school garden. “I don’t know if I should emphasize the importance of fresh food or tasty food.”
“Go with taste, definitely,” Mr. Faber advised. “I doubt kids care that much about freshness. You could take a ‘tired of bland cafeteria food’ approach, make everyone think about how much better their food could be. Don’t worry about the vegetarians; you’ve got their vote already. Focus on the kids who have to eat cafeteria food every day. Would they rather eat some soggy broccoli or a great Caesar salad?”
“Do you think kids even care that much about salad?” Kate suddenly felt worried that no one would vote for her proposal because hardly anyone her age actually liked vegetables. She suspected that even the vegans didn’t really like vegetables all that much; they just liked having something to argue about.
“Probably not, but people like what’s new and different. You might also add a ‘stick it to the man’ element. Kids your age are starting to look for ways to rebel.”
“Salad as rebellion,” Kate mused. “I like it. You should have gone into advertising.”
“I thought about it,” Mr. Faber said. “I like messing around with language.”
“Me too,” Kate said. “I don’t know why, I just do.”
Kate’s dad pushed himself away from the table. “Well, let me know if you need any more help. In the meantime, I might just sneak an extra slice of raspberry pie. Do you think your mom would mind?”
“I think if you put your dishes in the dishwasher, you can get away with murder around here,” Kate told him.
After her dad left the kitchen, Kate stretched in her chair. She felt relieved all of a sudden, but she wasn’t sure why. Because her dad had given her some good ideas for her proposal? She didn’t think it was that. Maybe it was because they’d had a conversation where Kate didn’t feel guilty or angry by the end of it. They’d had a conversation that had ended on a funny note instead of Kate’s dad walking out of the room with a disappointed look on his face.
Disappointed over soggy broccoli? Kate wrote in her notebook. Tired of depressed lima beans?
She wrote as fast as she could, the ideas coming at her a mile a minute. It wasn’t even that she was so excited about the idea of a school garden. It was more that she was excited about messing around with language. About making words mean what she wanted them to say. There was a trick to it, Kate knew, and she also knew that sometimes she was magic.
The next morning Kate couldn’t wait to see Marylin on the bus. She thought Marylin was the perfect audience for her proposal—someone who was smart, big on school spirit, and okay with lettuce.
But before she got a chance to bring it up, Marylin was handing her a manila folder. “So I need you to tell me what you think about my proposal for the What’s Your Big Idea contest. Do you think it’s the sort of thing an average kid would vote for?”
Kate opened the folder and read Marylin’s title: Why New Cheerleading Uniforms Affect Everyone!
She turned to Marylin. “You’re kidding, right?”
“I’m not kidding at all,” Marylin insisted. “Cheerleading uniforms matter. To everyone.” She began ticking off the reasons. “They’re important for school spirit. They’re important for school pride. Studies show that when the cheerleaders are exceptionally cute, the teams perform better.”
“You’re making that up,” Kate said. “That’s totally bogus.”
“I’m not making anything up,” Marylin argued. “I might be paraphrasing a little bit, but that’s different from making things up.”
Kate handed back the folder. “This is so selfish! Nobody cares about your uniforms. And there’s nothing wrong with the uniforms you guys already have. They’re perfectly nice.”
“ ‘Perfectly nice’ isn’t good enough. Perfectly nice won’t win us the district cheering championship, will it?”
Kate stared at her. Even Marylin wasn’t this nuts, was she? “You’re doing this so Mazie won’t be mad at you, aren’t you? For not going with her to the mall Friday night?”
Marylin flinched, and Kate knew she’d hit a nerve. “So what’s she doing? Writing mean stuff on the bathroom walls?”
“She’s not doing anything,” Marylin said, examining her nails as though Mazie being mad at her wasn’t a big deal. “Well, she’s not talking to me, that’s true. And some of the other girls aren’t either, but that’s just how they are. They’ll get over it.”
“Just as soon as you get them new uniforms, right?”
Marylin didn’t say anything, but Kate could tell the answer was yes. She had two simultaneous, totally opposite feelings. She wanted to give Marylin a pat on the shoulder, like, There, there, everything will be all right, but she also wanted to punch her and yell, Get a grip! Earth to Marylin! These people are not your friends!
“I don’t know, Marylin,” she said, trying to sound nice about it. “I mean, do you really want to hang out with people who treat you like that? And also, do you think it’s fair for someone who’s on Student Government to submit a proposal? Isn’t that, like, a conflict of interest or something?”
Marylin shrugged. “There’s no rule that says I can’t. And Benjamin said it was fine.”
“Oh, that’s right,” Kate said, and now she was totally unable to keep the sarcastic tone out of her voice. “I forgot your boyfriend is president. I guess you’ve got this one in the bag.”
“Actually, he’s not all that crazy about my proposal,” Marylin said, sounding worried. “I called him last night to go over it with him, but he acted like he didn’t want to hear it. He probably just doesn’t want to seem like he’s playing favorites. Not that he actually has anything to do with which proposal wins. It’s a democratic process, right? One person, one vote.”
“And you think people are going to vote for cheerleading uniforms?” Kate snorted.
Marylin slipped the folder back into her back pouch. “I really do. You’d be surprised by how many students have true school spirit. Unlike some people I could name.”
Kate took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. She hated the cheerleading side of Marylin. She hated how dumb it made her. Marylin could be goofy about a lot of things—that stupid flowered backpack she insisted on calling her back pouch, for example—but Kate liked Marylin’s goofiness. The cheerleading thing was something else entirely. Dumb. It was just dumb.
They rode the rest of the trip in silence and didn’t even say good-bye when they got off the bus, which made Kate feel bad, but she couldn’t make herself be nice to someone whose big idea was getting more stuff for the kids who already had everything. How democratic was that?
She headed for the audio lab as soon as she got in the school’s front door. Matthew would appreciate her proposal, she bet. He’d get how cool a school garden was. Matthew Holler was totally DIY.
“You are exactly who I wanted to see at this exact very minute,” Matthew said when Kate found him working on his World of Noise recording. She felt her face flush and the tips of her fingers start to tingle. Really, she wished he didn’t have this effect on her. It made everything between them so uneven.
“What did you want to see me about?” Kate asked, trying to sound cool. “Do you have a bridge you want to sell me?”
Wow, she thought, that sounded so un cool. She gave Matthew a lame smile. “Or something like that?”
“Something like that.” Matthew grinned. “I have a project I want us to work on together. I want to enter that What’s Your Big Idea contest and get some new gear for the audio lab. There’s a new version of Pro Tools I’ve got to have, for one thing. And the soundstage needs a total upgrade.”
“Uh, that’s sounds really great and everything . . . ,” Kate said.
“But?”
“But I’m kind of doing a proposal with Lorna,” Kate told him. “For a school garden. So we can have—well, fresh lettuce at lunch and stuff like that.”
Matthew looked disappointed, but he nodded at Kate and said, “Yeah, that’s a totally cool idea too. I definitely get it. I’m just bummed because I thought this was something we could work on together. I thought we could go over to my house this afternoon, and you could maybe stay for dinner. My mom said it was cool, if you like spaghetti and garlic bread.”
“I love spaghetti and garlic bread,” Kate said, meaning it. She also loved hanging out at Matthew’s house, and she thought his mom was really nice, even if she had a rule about no girls in Matthew’s room.
Matthew sighed. “Yeah, well, another time, right? So let me see what you wrote about a school garden.”
“That’s okay,” Kate said. “It’s not that interesting. I’m not even one hundred percent sure we’re going to do it.”
“So, then maybe you could work on the audio-lab proposal? I mean, at least help? Please?” Matthew made a face like a little kid pleading. “My mom makes killer garlic bread.”
Kate found herself nodding. “Yeah, okay. Sure. I mean, the garden was really Lorna’s idea. She can submit that proposal. They’re both great ideas.”
“They’re both awesome ideas,” Matthew agreed. “Too bad they both can’t win.”
Yeah, too bad, Kate thought, and then she thought how mad Lorna was going to be at her. How betrayed she was going to feel.
And then she thought about garlic bread, and how it was on her top ten list of reasons to live. Number one? Well, he was sitting on that chair over there, grinning at her.
Really, how could Kate say no?
“You’re doing what?”
Lorna stared at Kate from across the cafeteria table. Her face was the shade of a homegrown tomato.
“I’m going to help Matthew with his proposal,” Kate repeated. She reached into her backpack and handed Lorna the school garden proposal. “I worked on ours, and now I’m going to work on his. Just give him a little help. He wants to get some new equipment for the audio lab.”
Lorna grabbed the proposal out of Kate’s hand. “Oh! More stuff for the audio lab! Which already has everything! Which already sucks up all the school’s extra money! And which maybe ten people use!”
“That’s not true,” Kate argued. “Everyone uses it. I had at least two audio-lab projects I had to do last fall.”
“Yeah, that you had to do. People only use the audio lab when they have to.” Lorna rolled up the school garden proposal into a tube and smacked it against the table. “I’ve got a great idea—why don’t we split the money between new cheerleading uniforms and new sound equipment for the audio lab? That way we ensure the fewest number of kids will benefit. I love that idea! It’s the best idea ever.”
Kate didn’t even have to look up to know that people were staring at them. “Could you maybe turn the volume down to, like, nine? And could you quit destroying my proposal? I worked really hard on that.”
“You worked hard on it, so now you’re going to work hard on another proposal to compete against it?” Lorna asked in an only slightly quieter voice.
“They’re two totally different things. They won’t be competing against each other. If you’re the kind of person who wants a school garden, you wouldn’t even think about voting for the audio lab. It would be like the audio lab didn’t even exist.”
Lorna started packing up her lunch bag. “Do you even hear yourself? You sound like—I don’t know, a politician.”
“Matthew’s my friend!” Kate protested. “You’re my friend. I just want to help my friends.”
Lorna stood up and leaned across the table toward Kate. “I can’t believe you don’t get how much cooler a garden is than the audio lab! It’s something a lot of people could be part of. Not just the kids who work in the garden, but the kids who would want to hang out there because it was a peaceful place. Or the artists, who could decorate it. It would be a place where people could play guitar or flute or whatever. Toss a ball around. It could be this great space in the middle of this crummy school. Not everybody would want to work in it or hang out there, but a lot more kids would want to hang out there than in the audio lab.”
“Well, then, I guess everyone’s going to vote for it, won’t they?” Kate said in a tone of voice her mom would definitely call snotty. “So you don’t have anything to worry about.”
“No, I don’t,” Lorna said, and started to walk away. She got only a few feet before she turned back around. “But you do. Because you are turning into the kind of person I’d bet a million dollars you don’t want to be. Or maybe you do, which would be really sad. Really sad, Kate.”
Kate watched Lorna stomp out of the cafeteria. She tried to remember why she was even friends with her. Maybe Lorna was jealous because Kate had a lot of friends and she didn’t. All Lorna had besides Kate was her stupid World of Warcraft buddies, who weren’t even real friends, they were online friends, which were just one step up from imaginary friends, in Kate’s opinion. Kate couldn’t help it if she was friends with Matthew and Flannery and Marylin—although maybe not with Marylin right that very second.
Whatever. Kate had friends, and she couldn’t act like one friend was the most important, which was what Lorna wanted her to do. She wanted Kate to act like Lorna was the most important person in the world, and Kate couldn’t. Sorry, but that’s how it was.
Just think about garlic bread, Kate told herself as she finished her sandwich. So she did. She thought about garlic bread and hanging out in Matthew’s family room with his two dogs, Lemonhead and Ralph. Maybe she and Matthew would start hanging out at each other’s houses all the time. One night they could do homework at Matthew’s house, the next night they could do it at Kate’s. Maybe Matthew would invite her along on his family’s vacation next summer, and then he could come to the beach with the Fabers. Maybe they could start a band together and get famous.
The whole time she was thinking these things, another thought, a thought about kids hanging out in a garden, playing guitar, kept tapping against her brain, calling, Let me in, let me in. Kate shook her head. Nope, not thinking that thought, she told herself. It wasn’t like she was suddenly against the school garden. In fact, she’d be happy if it won. But she couldn’t put an idea in front of a friend, now could she? Matthew was more important to her than a school garden, because Matthew was her friend.
Kate’s brain was starting to get tired. Who was she arguing with? It felt like she was arguing with somebody, but Lorna wasn’t here anymore, so who could she be arguing with?
She felt the answer forming itself in the back of her mind, so she shook her head really hard. She didn’t want to think about it anymore. Enough thinking. She needed to start working on Matthew’s proposal. What would make other kids vote for it? Kate looked around the cafeteria, sizing up potential voters. She should definitely go for the creative types and the computer geeks, make them see why the audio lab was the coolest place in the world.
She saw Marylin across the room at the cheerleaders’ table. Nobody over there would vote for new audio-lab equipment, that was for sure. But just as Kate was about to look someplace else, she realized that Marylin was sitting at the very end of the table, and it almost seemed like she was sitting by herself, the way the other cheerleaders’ chairs were at least two feet away from hers. Poor Marylin, Kate thought, and then she remembered Marylin’s stupid idea for new cheerleading uniforms and decided not to feel sorry for her after all.
Maybe the audio-lab proposal should be entitled, Vote for the Audio Lab, It’s Better Than New Cheerleading Uniforms. Which it was. Which was why Kate was not going to feel sorry for Marylin at all, even if she did at that very moment look like the loneliest person in the world.
The next morning on the bus to school, Kate sat as far away from Marylin as she could. Or was it the other way around? Either way, they were definitely ignoring each other. Well, who cared? It wasn’t like what Marylin said or did mattered to her. She wasn’t bothered by Marylin’s silent treatment one bit.
No biggie. Whatever. Kate ignored the thought that now she was down to one friend. Why would she need more than one, anyway, especially if that friend was Matthew Holler? And so what if Matthew had kind of left the writing of the audio-lab proposal up to her? It made sense, really. Kate had already written one proposal; she knew what she was doing. So last night, she and Matthew had spent ten minutes brainstorming ideas for what Kate could say, and then they spent the rest of the time playing some game called Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep on Matthew’s PSP.
“I had another idea for your garden proposal,” Kate’s dad had said after she’d gotten home. She was sitting at her desk, putting homework pages into her various binders, and he was standing in her doorway with his iPad in his hand. “Are you still working on it? Or did you have to turn it in already?”
“Um, no and no.” Kate had kept her eyes on her paperwork. “Lorna’s sort of finishing it up. It’s due Friday. I’m actually helping another friend with another proposal.”
“So you’re going to have two proposals competing against each other? Is that such a good idea?”
“It is what it is, Dad,” Kate had said, sounding more irritated than she’d meant to. “I happened to have two different friends with two different ideas, and I wanted to help both of them. Why is that so horrible?”
Mr. Faber had walked over to the window and looked out. “It’s not, I guess. I’m curious, though. Which idea are you going to vote for?”
“Um, I don’t know,” Kate had told him, and she didn’t. She hadn’t even thought about that yet. “They’re both good ideas, but they’re totally different from each other. One’s the school garden, and the other is for money for the audio lab.”
Mr. Faber had laughed. “Hasn’t enough money been poured into that audio lab? Mac Warner from down the street told me he’s been to professional recording studios that weren’t as nice as your school’s audio lab.”
Kate had exhaled sharply. “Whose side are you on, Dad?”
“I don’t know, Katie,” her dad had said, turning to look at her. “I’d like to be on your side. Which side is that?”
“I don’t know,” Kate had mumbled. “I like both ideas.”
Only she didn’t, not really. She’d been telling herself and everybody else that she thought both ideas were great. But that wasn’t true, was it? She thought a school garden was a great idea, and she thought Matthew Holler was a great idea. The audio lab? Sure, she liked it, and she liked that Matthew liked it, but it was just the sonic version of Marylin’s cheerleading uniforms. Ten people would get something out of it, tops.
And then she remembered that Matthew was her friend, and Kate Faber was all about helping out her friends. After she put her homework binders into her backpack, she pulled out a pad of paper and her Pilot Precise V5 pen from her desk drawer and imagined being interviewed someday when she was a famous writer. “Do you write on a computer?” the interviewer would ask her, and Kate would say, “I always do my first drafts with pen and paper. It makes me slow down, so I can get exactly the right words.” Really, Kate just liked office supplies, and she liked the way the right pen felt on the right paper. Strange but true facts about Kate Faber, she thought, and then she started writing down why the audio lab needed more money to pile on top of all the money that had already been invested in it.
After Kate had been writing for twenty minutes, she stopped and thought that maybe she should e-mail Lorna and see if everything was okay with the school garden proposal. She put down her pen and pad and opened up her laptop. After she sent the e-mail, she hit the send and receive all button approximately every three minutes, but Lorna never replied.
She probably went to bed early, Kate thought. She’ll probably e-mail back first thing in the morning. Finally, around eleven, she turned off the computer. She read over what she’d written about getting new equipment for the audio lab. She was surprised by what a convincing case she’d made. It was a little scary, really. Because even though what Kate had written was good, she wasn’t so sure she felt good about it.
What kind of person am I turning into? she wondered as she turned off her light and got into bed. The kind of person who helps out her friends, that’s who. The kind of person who’s there for the people who need her.
Sitting on the bus the next morning, ignoring Marylin as she read over her most excellent proposal for new equipment for the audio lab, she wondered if that was true. Was she really there for the people who needed her? And then she thought about going on vacation with Matthew Holler, and how she hoped they wouldn’t go to the beach after all, because she was pretty sure she didn’t want him to see her in a bathing suit.
To Kate’s surprise, Lorna was sitting at their regular table at lunchtime. “Am I allowed to eat here?” she asked when she reached the table. “I have two pieces of my mom’s famous raspberry pie. It’s a couple of days old, but it’s still good.”
“It’s a free cafeteria,” Lorna said, sounding like she didn’t care if Kate sat down or not. “It’s not like I own this table.”
“You never replied to my e-mail,” Kate mentioned as she sat down and started unpacking her lunch. “I mean, even if you’re mad at me, I did work really hard on that proposal.”
“And it’s really good,” Lorna admitted, even though her voice was still chilly. “But you know what makes me so mad? I bet your proposal for the audio lab is really good too.”
“I tried to make it less good, if that makes you feel any better,” Kate confessed. “Only I couldn’t. It would be like drawing a great picture and then tearing it up because you didn’t like the person whose face you drew.”
“It doesn’t matter anyway. It’s not going to win. Neither is a school garden, even if the proposal you wrote is great.”
“Why not?” Kate said, feeling offended. How could one of her proposals not win?
Lorna dunked a pita triangle into a container of spinach dip. “Because someone told me that Jared Scott is doing a proposal for a big end-of-the-year pizza party. You know everyone’s going to vote for that. Even if it weren’t Jared Scott’s idea, people would vote for it.”
Jared Scott was the world’s most popular eighth-grade boy. Lorna was right. Most kids she knew would sell their baby brothers for a pizza party. Not to mention that people would vote for his idea no matter what it was, just because they couldn’t believe somebody as good-looking as Jared Scott sometimes actually smiled at them in the hallway.
“That’s a bummer,” Kate said, feeling suddenly like a halfway-deflated balloon. “Because a school garden’s a truly awesome idea. I’m still going to vote for it.”
Lorna stared at her. “You’re not going to vote for the audio lab? Even though Matthew Holler would love you forever if you did?”
“Well, for one thing, it’s a secret ballot,” Kate said. “So he won’t know what I voted for. And for another thing, I don’t think he’s going to love me forever. It’s not really his style. And anyway, we’re just friends.”
“He’s just friends,” Lorna pointed out. “You’re more, well—I guess it just seems like you care more. My mom says I shouldn’t be surprised that you decided to help Matthew. She says a lot of girls do stuff like that to try to get a guy to like them.”
Kate could feel her face go red. She hated the idea that Lorna and her mom had been talking about her! And that Lorna’s mom thought Kate was like every other girl in the world, not to mention the kind of girl who would do stuff just to get a guy to like her.
“That’s a really stupid thing to say,” Kate said. “What does your mom even know about me?”
“She knows enough,” Lorna said with a shrug.
Kate felt her throat tighten. I’m not going to cry, she told herself, and she focused on breathing slowly through her nose, a stop-crying trick she had come up with in elementary school. “He’s my friend, why don’t you get that?” she hissed at Lorna through clenched teeth. “Why doesn’t anyone get that?”
Lorna looked at Kate for a long time. “I get it,” she said finally, her voice soft. “But I’m your friend too.” Now Lorna’s eyes shone with tears. “So how do you think it made me feel when you started working on Matthew’s proposal? It made me feel like I was a big, fat zero.”
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.