“You owe me, EllRay Jakes,” Cynthia says again in a low voice as we walk down the hall toward our classroom holding our excuse slips. “You owe me big.”
“I do not,” I say. “This whole thing was an accident.”
“Just look,” Cynthia says, not even listening as she points to her knee. “Do these Band-Aids go with this outfit? No, they do not. I clash, and it’s all your fault.”
Cynthia now has two bright blue rocket ship Band-Aids on her barely scraped knee. “These are for kindergarten boys,” Cynthia had objected to Mrs. Tollefson, but they were the only Band-Aids our school secretary could find. And Cynthia is almost angrier about those rocket ship Band-Aids than she was about getting knocked down at recess or being scolded by the principal.
“You have to make it up to me, EllRay, or else,” Cynthia says as we get near our classroom. “You have to pay me back. It’s, like, the law.”
“Not if I didn’t do anything wrong,” I tell her, my hand on the sticky door handle. “Anyway, you don’t get to decide stuff like that.”
“Then the kids in our class will decide,” she says, still keeping her voice low. “I’ll tell them to vote on how bad you are. This is a democracy, don’t forget.”
“Oak Glen Primary School isn’t really a democracy,” I inform her. “They say it is, but we hardly get to vote on anything.”
And it’s true. We don’t vote on anything important, like how much homework we get or how long recess should be. We just vote on stuff like should we sell magazine subscriptions, fancy popcorn, or chocolate bars for our fund-raiser.
“And anyway,” I add, “a democracy is—well, it’s voting for who’s gonna be President. It’s not kids voting on whether another kid did something wrong or not,” I say, trying to come up with a good argument, fast. “The truth either happened or it didn’t.”
I just hope I’m right, that’s all.
“Nope,” Cynthia says, smoothing back her hair with one hand as she gets ready to push open the door with the other, even though I am still holding onto the handle. “There’s gonna be a secret vote, and I’ll run it. And then I’ll tell you how it comes out. And if you lose, then you have to make it up to me about what happened at recess, and about the principal, and how you ruined my look with these stupid clashy Band-Aids. And I’ll tell you when you have to do that, and how. Period.”
“You can’t just make rules and stuff up, Cynthia,” I say. “You’re not the boss of me,” I add, sounding more like four-year-old Alfie than myself.
“Huh. Of course I am,” Cynthia says, lifting her stuck-up chin high in the air. “Until you pay me back, anyway.”
