BUT NOTHING WORKS!!!!!
Later on Monday, French
So even if Lilly and I weren’t in a fight, I wouldn’t have been able to sit with her at lunch today. She’s become the queen of the cause célèbre. All these people were clustered around the table where she and I and Shameeka and Ling Su normally eat our dumplings from Big Wong. Boris Pelkowski was sitting where I usually sit.
Lilly must be in heaven. She’s always wanted to be worshiped by a musical genius.
So I was standing there like a total idiot with my stupid tray of stupid salad, which was the only vegetarian entree today, since they ran out of cans of Sterno for the bean and grain bar, and I was like, Who am I going to sit by? There are only about ten tables in our caf, since we have rotating lunch shifts: There’s the table where I sit with Lilly, and then the jock table, the cheerleader table, the rich kid table, the hip-hop table, the druggie table, the drama freak table, the National Honor Society table, the foreign exchange students table, and the table where Tina Hakim Baba sits every day with her bodyguard.
I couldn’t sit with the jocks or the cheerleaders, because I’m not either. I couldn’t sit at the rich kids’ table because I don’t have a cell phone or a broker. I’m not into hip-hopping or drugs, I didn’t get a part in the latest play, and with my F in Algebra the chance of my getting into the National Honor Society is like nil, and I can’t understand anything the foreign exchange students say since there are no French ones.
I looked at Tina Hakim Baba. She had a salad in front of her, just like me. Only Tina eats salad because she has a weight problem, not because she’s a vegetarian. She was reading a romance novel. It had a photograph on the front of a teenage boy with his arms around a teenage girl. The teenage girl had long blond hair and pretty big breasts for someone with such thin thighs. She looked exactly the way I know my grandmother wants me to look.
I walked over and put my tray down in front of Tina Hakim Baba’s.
“Can I sit here?” I asked.
Tina looked up from her book. She had an expression of total shock on her face. She looked at me, and then she looked at her bodyguard. He was a tall, dark-skinned man in a black suit. He had on sunglasses even though we were inside. I think Lars could probably have taken him, if it had come down to a fight between the two of them.
When Tina looked at her bodyguard, he looked at me—at least I think he did; it was hard to tell with those sunglasses—and nodded.
Tina smiled really big at me. “Please,” she said, laying down her book. “Sit with me.”
I sat down. I felt kind of bad, seeing Tina smile like that. Like maybe I should have asked to sit down with her before. But I used to think she was such a freak because she rode to school in a limo and had a bodyguard.
I don’t think she’s as much of a freak now.
Tina and I ate our salads and talked about how much school food sucks. She told me about her diet. Her mother put her on it. She wants to lose twenty pounds by the Cultural Diversity Dance. But the Cultural Diversity Dance is this Saturday, so I don’t know how that’s going to work out for her. I asked Tina if she had a date for the Cultural Diversity Dance or something, and she got all giggly and said yes she did. She’s going with a guy from Trinity, which is another private school in Manhattan. The guy’s name is Dave Farouq El-Abar.
Hello? It isn’t fair. Even Tina Hakim Baba, whose father doesn’t allow her to walk two blocks to school, has been asked out by someone.
Well, she’s got breasts, so I guess that’s why.
Tina is pretty nice. When she got up to go to the jet line to get another diet soda—the bodyguard went with her; God, if Lars ever started shadowing me like that, I’d kill myself—I read the back of her book. The book was called I Think My Name Is Amanda, and it was about a girl who woke up from a coma and couldn’t remember who she was. This really cute boy comes to visit her in the hospital and tells her that her name is Amanda and that he’s her boyfriend. She spends the rest of the book trying to figure out whether or not he’s lying.
I am so sure! If some cute boy wants to tell you that he’s your boyfriend, why wouldn’t you just let him? Some girls don’t know when they’ve got it made.
While I was reading the back of the book, this shadow fell over it, and I looked up and there was Lana Weinberger. It must have been a game day, because she had on her cheerleader uniform, a green-and-white pleated miniskirt and a tight white sweater with a giant A across the front of it. I think she stuffs her pom-poms down her bra when she isn’t using them. Otherwise, I don’t see how her chest could stick out so much.
“Nice hair, Amelia,” she said in her snotty voice. “Who are you supposed to be? Tank Girl?”
I looked past her. Josh Richter was standing there with some of his dumb jock friends. They weren’t paying any attention to me and Lana. They were talking about a party they’d been to over the weekend. They were all “wrecked” from having consumed too much beer.
I wonder if their coach knows.
“What do you call this color, anyway?” Lana wanted to know. She touched the top of my head. “Pus yellow?”
Tina Hakim Baba and her bodyguard came back while Lana was standing there tormenting me. In addition to her diet soda, Tina had purchased a Nutty Royale ice cream cone, which she gave to me. I thought this was very nice of her, considering the fact that I’d hardly ever spoken to her before.
But Lana didn’t see the niceness of this gesture. Instead she asked, all innocently, “Oh, Tina, did you buy that ice cream for Amelia here? Did your daddy give you an extra hundred dollars today so you could buy yourself a new friend?”
Tina’s dark eyes filled up with hurt. The bodyguard saw this and opened his mouth.
Then a strange thing happened. I was sitting there, looking at the tears welling up in Tina Hakim Baba’s eyes, and then the next thing I knew, I’d taken my Nutty Royale and thrust it with all my might at the front of Lana’s sweater.
Lana looked down at the vanilla ice cream, hard chocolate shell, and peanuts that were sticking to her chest. Josh Richter and the other jocks stopped talking and looked at Lana’s chest, too. The noise level in the cafeteria plummeted to the quietest I’ve heard it. Everyone was looking at the ice cream cone sticking to Lana’s chest. It was so quiet I could hear Boris breathing through the wires of his bionater.
Then Lana started to scream.
“You—you—” I guess she couldn’t think of a word bad enough to call me. “You—you . . . Look what you’ve done! Look what you’ve done to my sweater!”
I stood up and grabbed my tray. “Come on, Tina,” I said. “Let’s go somewhere a little bit quieter.”
Tina, her big brown eyes on the sugar cone sticking out of the middle of the A on Lana’s chest, picked up her tray and followed me. The bodyguard followed Tina. I could swear he was laughing.
As Tina and I walked past the table where Lilly and I usually sat, I saw Lilly staring at me with her mouth open. She had obviously seen the whole thing.
Well, I guess she’s going to have change her diagnosis: I am not unassertive. Not when I don’t want to be.
I’m not sure, but as Tina and her bodyguard and I left, I thought I heard some applause coming from the geek table.
I think self-actualization might be right around the corner.
Later on Monday
Oh my God. I am in so much trouble. Nothing like this has ever happened to me before!
I am sitting in the principal’s office!
That’s right. I got sent to the principal’s office for stabbing Lana Weinberger with a Nutty Royale!
I should have known she’d tell on me. She is such a big whiner.
I’m kind of scared. I’ve never disobeyed a student rule before. I’ve always been a really good kid. When the student worker came to our G & T class with the pink hall pass, I never thought for a minute it might be for me. I was sitting there with Michael Moscovitz. He was showing me that the way I subtract is all wrong. H
e says my main problem is that I don’t write my numbers neat enough when borrowing. Also that I don’t keep track of my notes, and scribble them in whatever notebook I happen to have handy. He says I should keep all my Algebra notes in one notebook.
Also, he says I seem to have trouble concentrating.
But the reason I couldn’t concentrate was that I had never sat so close to a boy before! I mean, I realize it was only Michael Moscovitz, and that I see him all the time, and he’d never like me anyway because I’m a freshman and he’s a senior, and I’m his little sister’s best friend and all—at least, I used to be.
But he’s still a boy, a cute boy, even if he is Lilly’s brother. It was really hard to pay attention to subtraction when I could smell this really nice clean boy smell coming from him. Plus every once in a while he would put his hand over mine and take my pencil away and go, “No, like this, Mia.”
Of course, I was also having trouble concentrating because I kept feeling like Lilly was looking at us. She wasn’t, of course. Now that she’s fighting the evil forces of racism in our neighborhood, she doesn’t have time for the little people like me. She was sitting at this big table with all of her supporters, plotting their next move in the Ho Offensive. She even let Boris come out of the supply closet to help.
May I point out that he was all over her? How she can stand having his spindly little violin-stroking arm around the back of her chair, I can’t imagine. And he still hasn’t untucked his sweater.
So I really shouldn’t have worried that anybody was going to notice me and Michael. I mean, he certainly didn’t have his arm around the back of my chair. Although once, under the table, his knee touched my knee. I nearly died at the niceness of it all.
Then that stupid hall pass arrived with my name on it.
I wonder if I’m going to get expelled. Maybe if I get expelled I could go to a different school, where nobody knows that my hair used to be a different color and that these fingernails aren’t really real. That might be kind of nice.
FROM NOW ON I WILL
Think before I act.
Try to be gracious, no matter how much I am provoked to behave otherwise.
Tell the truth, except when doing so would hurt someone’s feelings.
Stay as far away as possible from Lana Weinberger.
Uh-oh. Principal Gupta is ready to see me now.
Monday Night
Well, I don’t know what I’m going to do now. I have detention for a week, plus math review with Mr. G, plus princess lessons with Grandmère.
I didn’t get home until nine o’clock tonight. Something has got to give.
My father is furious. He says he is going to sue the school. He says no one can give his daughter detention for defending the weak. I told him that Principal Gupta can. She can do anything. She’s the principal.
I can’t say I really blame her. I mean, it wasn’t like I said I was sorry or anything. Principal Gupta is a nice lady, but what could she do? I admitted I had done it. She told me I’d have to apologize to Lana and pay to have her sweater cleaned. I said I’d pay for the sweater but that I wouldn’t apologize. Principal Gupta looked at me over the rims of her bifocals and went, “I beg your pardon, Mia?”
I repeated that I wouldn’t apologize. My heart was beating like crazy. I didn’t want to make anybody mad, especially Principal Gupta, who can be very scary when she wants to. I tried to picture her in her husband’s sweat pants, but it didn’t work. She still scared me.
But I won’t apologize to Lana. I won’t.
Principal Gupta didn’t look mad, though. She looked concerned. I guess that’s how educators are supposed to look. You know. Concerned about you. She went, “Mia, I must say, when Lana came in here with her complaint, I was extremely surprised. It’s usually Lilly Moscovitz I have to pull in here. I never expected I was going to have to pull you in. Not for disciplinary reasons. Academic reasons, maybe. I understand you aren’t doing very well in Algebra. But I’ve never known you to be a discipline problem before. I really feel I must ask you, Mia . . . is everything all right?”
For a minute I just stared at her.
Is everything all right? Is everything all right?
Hmm, hold on a minute, let me see . . . my mom is going out with my Algebra teacher, a subject I’m flunking, by the way; my best friend hates me; I’m fourteen years old and I’ve never been asked out; I don’t have any breasts; and oh, I just found out I’m the princess of Genovia.
“Oh, sure,” I said to Principal Gupta. “Everything is fine.”
“Are you certain, Mia? Because I can’t help wondering if this isn’t all rooted in some problems you might be having . . . maybe at home?”
Who did she think I was, anyway? Lana Whineberger? Like I was really going to sit there and tell her my problems. Yeah, Principal Gupta. On top of all that other stuff, my grandmother is in town, and my dad is paying $100 a day for me to get lessons from her in how to be a princess. Oh, and this weekend, I ran into Mr. Gianini in my kitchen, and all he was wearing was a pair of boxer shorts. Anything else you want to know?
“Mia,” Principal Gupta said, “I want you to know that you are a very special person. You have many wonderful qualities. There is no reason for you to feel threatened by Lana Weinberger. None at all.”
Oh, okay. Just because she’s the prettiest, most popular girl in my class, and she’s going out with the handsomest, most popular boy in school, you’re right, Principal Gupta. There’s no reason at all to feel threatened by her. Especially since she puts me down every chance she gets and tries to humiliate me in public. Threatened? Me? Nah.
“You know, Mia,” Principal Gupta said, “I bet if you took the time to get to know Lana you’d find that she’s really a very nice girl. A girl just like you.”
Right. Just like me.
I was so upset, I actually told Grandmère all about it at our vocabulary lesson. She was surprisingly sympathetic.
“When I was a girl your age,” Grandmère said, “there was a girl just like this Lana at my school. Her name was Genevieve. She sat behind me in Geography. Genevieve would take the end of my braid and dip it in her inkwell, so that when I stood up I got ink all over my dress. But the teacher would never believe me that Genevieve did it on purpose.”
“Really?” I was kind of impressed. That Genevieve had some guts. I never met anyone who’d try to dis my grandmother. “What did you do?”
Grandmère let out this evil laugh. “Oh, nothing.”
There is no way she did nothing to Genevieve. Not with a laugh like that. But no matter how hard I pestered her, Grandmère wouldn’t tell me what she did to get back at Genevieve. I’m kind of thinking maybe she killed her.
Well? It could happen.
But I guess I shouldn’t have pestered Grandmère so hard, because to shut me up she gave me a quiz! I’m not kidding!
It was really hard, too. I’ve stapled it in here, since I got a 98. Grandmère says I’ve really come a long way since we started.
Grandmère’s Test
In a restaurant, what does one do with one’s napkin when one rises to go to the powder room?
If it’s a four-star restaurant, hand it to the waiter who rushes over to help you with your chair. If it’s a normal place, and no waiter rushes over, leave your napkin on your empty chair.
Under what circumstances is it acceptable to apply lipstick in public?
Never.
What are the characteristics of capitalism?
Private ownership of the means of production and distribution, and the exchange of goods based on the operations of the market.
What is the appropriate reply to make to a man who says he loves you?
Thank you. You are very kind.
What did Marx consider to be the contradiction in capitalism?
The value of any commodity is determined by the amount of labor needed to produce it. In denying workers the value of what they have produced, the capitalists are undermining their own econom
ic system.
White shoes are unacceptable . . . .
At funerals, after Labor Day, before Memorial Day, and anywhere there might be horses.
Describe an oligarchy.
Small group exercises control for generally corrupt purposes.
Describe a Sidecar.
1/3 lemon juice, 1/3 Cointreau, 1/3 brandy shaken well with ice, strained before serving.
The only one I missed was the one about what to say to a man when he tells you he loves you. It turns out you aren’t supposed to say thank you.
Not, of course, that this will ever happen to me. But Grandmère says I might be surprised someday.
I wish!
Tuesday, October 14, Homeroom
No Lilly again this morning. Not that I expected there to be. But I made Lars stop at her place anyway, just in case maybe she wanted to be friends again. I mean, she could have seen how assertive I was with Lana and decided she was wrong to criticize me so much.
But I guess not.
The funny thing is, when Lars was dropping me off at school, Tina Hakim Baba’s chauffeur was dropping her off, too. We sort of smiled at each other, then walked into school together, her bodyguard behind us. Tina said she wanted to thank me for what I had done yesterday. She said she told her parents about it, and that they want me to come over for dinner Friday night.
“And maybe,” Tina asked, all shyly, “you could spend the night after, if you wanted.”
I said, “Okay.” I mostly said it because I feel sorry for Tina, since she doesn’t have any other friends, because everybody thinks she’s so weird, with the bodyguard and all. I also said it because I heard she has a fountain in her house, just like Donald Trump, and I wanted to see if that was true.
And I kind of like her, too. She’s nice to me.
It’s nice to have somebody be nice to you.
I HAVE GOT TO