Lisa threw her arms around me and gave me a big hug. “And it’s all because of you. Congratulations, Mal!”
“Hey, what’s going on?” Justin Price called as he passed us in the hall.
I flashed him my biggest smile. “We’re doing some early celebrating. It looks like we just might meet our goal!”
“All right!” Justin beamed. “Way to go, Mal!”
The bell rang while Lisa and I were still in the hall. But we didn’t care. We were too happy. We confidently threw open the door and entered Mr. Cobb’s classroom late.
Mr. Cobb was in his usual spot at the front, perched on the corner of his desk. He was surrounded by Robbie Mara, Chris Brooks, and Craig Avazian, who were all laughing and joking with him.
Two girls, Renee Johnson and Jen Corn, sat quietly in the front row, their hands folded on their desks. Mr. Cobb seemed unaware that they were even there.
In that instant, I knew what I had to do. I took a deep breath and mustered all my courage. Then I marched to the front of the room.
“Mr. Cobb?” I said, stepping between Craig and Robbie. “Remember that conference you suggested? I would like to make an appointment to talk to you.”
Mr. Cobb blinked his eyes several times, then said, “Certainly, Val —”
“Mallory,” I corrected in a loud, clear voice. “Mallory Pike.”
“Right. Mallory. Okay, Mallory,” Mr. Cobb said, checking his desk calendar. “I’ll see you here after lunch tomorrow.”
As I walked back to my desk, I noticed Sandra Hart sitting across the aisle. She looked depressed. I patted her on the shoulder as I walked by. She looked up in surprise and her face brightened into a smile. As I slid into my seat, I made a silent vow to have a talk with Sandra, too.
I was afraid that after the fun booths we’d had for the first three days of the week, a booth that only sold candy would be a letdown.
But it wasn’t, because of Claudia Kishi, artiste extraordinaire.
I know Claud’s a seventh-grader and shouldn’t have been working on the sixth-grade FUN-raiser but we were stuck for an idea. So I had called her.
“Candy, huh?” There was a long pause. Then she said, “Why don’t you try a Halloween theme and fill pumpkins with kids’ favorite candies?”
That sounded good. Much better than putting out boxes with wrapped candy bars and Life Savers in them. But then came Claud’s stroke of brilliance.
“You could call it Trick or Treat. Some of the pumpkins could be filled with candies and some with disgusting things like plastic spiders and worms.”
“Then kids could pay to reach into a pumpkin,” I chimed in. “Fifty cents per grab.”
The Trick or Treat Booth was fun to make. Fiona McRae painted it to look like a picket fence with papier-mâché pumpkins perched on the posts. Each pumpkin had a Halloween design on it. There were skeletons, bats, ghosts — you name it.
The girls who worked the booth wore black Elvira witch costumes, with wigs of long black hair. The boys wore Dracula capes.
Sandra Hart and I sold candy during the lunch shift.
Woody Jefferson, a popular eighth-grader, appeared at our booth first with his friend Trevor Sandbourne. “Hey, Sandra, pick a pumpkin for me, will you?”
Sandra reached for the vampire pumpkin. “Here you go, Woody. This one’s perfect for you.”
Woody seemed pleased with Sandra’s selection and shoved his hand into the pumpkin. He came out with a fist full of Gummi Bears, licorice bites, jawbreakers, and tiny candy bars.
Sandra picked the pumpkin with the tarantula for Trevor.
“If Trevor and I are vampires and tarantulas,” Trevor asked Sandra, “what character are you?”
“Me?” Sandra pointed to herself and giggled shrilly. “I’m the witch.”
Trevor, who is possibly the handsomest boy at SMS, fixed his dark, brooding eyes on Sandra and said, “No, really, which pumpkin would you choose?”
Sandra looked at the pumpkins on display and gestured toward the one with the small black cat. “I guess that would be me.”
“A kitty?” Trevor smiled and nodded.
“Great booth!” Pete Black, the president of the eighth grade, said as he picked the skeleton pumpkin that was filled with worms and plastic eyeballs. “Did you two make the pumpkins?”
“Me?” Sandra pointed to herself again. “No way. Fiona McRae did it.”
Sandra and I worked non-stop for the first half hour of lunch period. When there was finally a lull, I pulled up two chairs and said, “Sit down, Sandra. Let’s take a break.”
Sandra checked first to make sure no one was looking. Then she collapsed into her chair. “My shoes are killing me.”
I looked at her feet. She was wearing shoes with clunky two-inch heels. “No wonder,” I said. “You should have worn sneakers.”
Sandra slipped off her shoe and rubbed her foot. “I always wear heels. They make me look more feminine.”
“Why do you need to be more feminine?” I asked.
Sandra shrugged. “Guys don’t like girls who are jocks.”
This was the moment. I didn’t know how Sandra would take it but I just dived in.
“You know, Sandra, you’re really smart. And you’re cute,” I said. “You shouldn’t worry so much about what other people think about you.”
Sandra blinked at me. “I don’t.”
“You’re wearing shoes that hurt your feet just because you think boys want you to be more feminine,” I pointed out.
“Oh, that.” Sandra winced.
“And you told me you don’t like to contradict Chris Brooks’s or Robbie Mara’s point of view because you don’t want them to think you’re pushy.”
“Did I say that?” Now she really looked surprised.
I nodded. “And just a few minutes ago, you picked out the smallest and meekest animal to represent you.”
“Well, I couldn’t say I was a vampire,” Sandra replied. “Or a spider. Those are guy things.”
I raised one eyebrow. “Are they?”
“Well, no,” Sandra said, with the wave of her hand. “But if I’d picked the Frankenstein —”
“Trevor might have thought you were being too strong,” I finished for her. “Is that what you were going to say?”
Sandra looked down at the foot she was rubbing. “I guess.”
“I think I remember you speaking up more in class,” I said slowly. “And in life. I mean, that’s why our class elected you vice-president.” I paused for a long time and then asked, “Did something happen?”
Sandra raised her eyes to look at me. All trace of the perky mask was gone. Her green eyes looked tired and sad. “Ever since I became a class officer, I’m always in the spotlight,” she murmured. “I feel like the girls and boys in this school are watching me, waiting for me to slip up.”
“Slip up?” I repeated.
“You know. Say or do the wrong thing,” she explained. “If I don’t have a smile plastered on my face every second I’m in school, people think I’m stuck-up. If I raise my hand too much in class, people think I’m a show-off.”
Sandra’s words hit home, which surprised me. “I think I know what you mean,” I said. “When everybody started teasing me about the A’s on my progress report, I felt like I was in the spotlight, too. And I really didn’t like it.”
Sandra pursed her lips. “Sometimes I think I would do anything to keep the attention away from me.”
The next rush of students appeared at our booth as the seventh-graders were released for lunch. “Let’s talk more about this later,” I said as Sandra unbuckled her other shoe and tucked it under her chair. She worked the rest of the half hour in her stocking feet. (One small step, as they say …)
I went directly from my talk with Sandra to my conference with Mr. Cobb.
As I approached his classroom, my stomach started doing flip-flops. My throat went dry and my hands started to quiver. Not a good sign.
“Come on, Mal,” I w
hispered to myself. “Get a grip.”
I knew this talk was something I had to do — for me and for the rest of the girls in my class.
Mr. Cobb was sitting behind his desk, eating a sandwich, when I opened the door.
“Are you having lunch?” I said, backing up. “Maybe I should come back later.”
“No, no.” He gestured for me to come in. “It doesn’t bother me, if it doesn’t bother you.”
I walked down the aisle and sat at the desk in front of his. I clasped my hands tightly in front of me and dug my nails into my skin. If I was going to have this talk, I needed to stop shaking.
Mr. Cobb took the last bite of his sandwich and wiped his mouth with a napkin. “I’m glad you came in to chat,” he began. “I was starting to be a little concerned about your lack of participation in our class.”
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” I said, taking a shaky breath. “My reasons for not participating.”
“You have specific reasons?” he asked, tossing his lunch sack in the wastebasket beside his desk.
“I, um, guess you could, um, actually call them observations,” I stammered. “You see, children’s literature is my favorite subject.”
“Uh-huh.” Mr. Cobb leaned back in his chair with his hands behind his head. “And?”
“And, well, ever since this class began, I’ve been unable to join in the discussions. For a number of reasons.” I took another deep breath and continued. “One of them, I know, is my own lack of self-confidence about speaking out in this group. But there are other reasons.” I cleared my throat and looked Mr. Cobb directly in the eye. “Reasons that involve you.”
Mr. Cobb, who had been tilting his chair back, leaned forward abruptly. The two front legs of the chair made a loud clunk as they hit the floor. “Me? What have I done to you?”
“You haven’t done anything to me, specifically. It’s more what you don’t do.”
He folded his arms across his chest. This conference was going badly, I could tell. “And what don’t I do?”
I ticked off my list of complaints (I noticed my hand wasn’t shaking anymore). “You don’t call on the girls. We raise our hands and you ignore us. And guys like Chris Brooks and Benny Ott, who never raise their hands, just shout out answers and you listen to them.”
“Now, hold on,” Mr. Cobb protested. “I call on girls. Just this morning, I remember calling on Megan Armstrong and Liz Cohen.”
“Two really outspoken girls,” I replied. “But do you remember calling on Jen Corn? I’ve watched her sit quietly with her arm in the air for fifteen minutes.”
“What are you saying? That I favor boys over girls?” Mr. Cobb said. “Because that’s simply not true.”
“You may not do it on purpose,” I said. My stomach, which had been flip-flopping, now turned into a big, hard knot. I continued anyway. “But you do it. Look at the time you give girls to answer a question. Maybe one second.”
“You’ve been timing me?” Mr. Cobb’s jaw dropped.
I wet my lips. “Well, yes,” I said, looking down at my desk. “And you are very consistent. Girls have one or two seconds to respond to your questions. Boys, especially some of the guys you coach on the baseball team, take all the time in the world to think of answers. You let Chris Brooks think for nearly two minutes yesterday.”
Mr. Cobb rubbed his hand across his face and frowned. Then he took a deep breath, choosing his words carefully. “Look, Mallory, a student has to take responsibility for herself. If you don’t feel comfortable speaking out in class, you can’t blame it on me.”
“I’m not blaming you completely,” I said, looking him in the eye again. “But I do think that the way you run this class has something to do with my inability to participate.”
Unfortunately for Mr. Cobb and me, the bell rang. He pushed back his chair and stood up. “Well, thank you for coming to talk to me,” he said stiffly. “I know it was probably difficult for you.”
I nodded. “Very difficult.”
“I can’t say I agree with your observations,” he added. “But I appreciate your feeling free to express yourself.”
“Well, thank you for listening,” I said awkwardly, standing up.
Luckily, several students — boys — filed into the classroom then and started chatting with Mr. Cobb. I stumbled out of the room and into the hall.
If I were to rate that conference on a scale of one to ten — ten being great and one being a disaster — I’d have to give it a two. Mr. Cobb hadn’t yelled or thrown me out of the room, but I could see that he was more than a little miffed at me.
“Who needs straight A’s anyway,” I muttered as I walked home that afternoon. At least I’d had the nerve to speak up.
That night, I didn’t worry about homework. I couldn’t. I was too busy watching my brothers and sisters practice for the parade.
Margo insisted I sit on the couch and pretend to be the crowd. “We’re going to march by you,” she said in a very serious voice. “And when we do, you’re supposed to wave.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
The triplets took their position in front of the band with Adam yelling orders. “Claire, form a straighter line. Nicky, hold your kazoo with your elbows out to the side.”
Byron spun and motioned everyone to back up. “Everybody, let’s start in the dining room. We want Mal to hear us coming from far away.”
“How far back should we go?” Claire asked. “If we start next door, it will sound really far away.”
Adam chuckled. “No, the dining room will be fine.”
As they disappeared into the dining room, I leaned back on the couch and sighed. A week ago, I thought my brothers had it easier than me because they were boys. But maybe they didn’t.
All they had to do was lead a kazoo parade. I had to be a student in middle school.
“Smile, babies!”
Mary Anne and Logan flashed big grins as Jessi pressed the button on her instant camera. They were standing behind larger-than-life cutouts of babies in diapers, poking their heads through the holes where the faces should be.
It was Friday, and Jessi was helping me run our Say Cheese! booth. My committee had made cardboard cutouts of babies, muscle men and tattooed women in bikinis, and punk rockers. And picture this, the local camera shop had donated the film. It was a smash hit!
We’d set up Say Cheese! stations all around the school, and each one had a long line of giggling kids waiting to have their pictures taken.
“Mallory!” Lisa Mannheim ran toward me waving a piece of paper. “We did it! We did it!”
“We reached our goal?” I gasped. “Already?”
It was only nine in the morning. We still had an entire day of fund-raising to go.
“There it is in black-and-white!” Lisa pointed to the figures on her piece of paper. She’d circled the number “one thousand” with bright red ink. “Anything we make today is gravy!”
Lisa hugged me. I hugged Jessi. Jessi hugged Mary Anne, who hugged Logan. It was another wave of hugging.
“Now that we have the student lounge,” I told the group, “we can use the extra funds to decorate it.”
“We could buy really fun posters,” Jessi cut in excitedly.
“And big pillows,” Benny Ott said, sticking his head over my shoulder. “For lounging around on and reading.”
“Speaking of reading,” I said, “we could use some of this money to buy new books for the library. And donate them in the name of all the students who worked on the FUN-raiser.”
Lisa loved that idea, and gave me another hug to prove it. Then she raced down the hall to break the good news to Justin.
As Jessi and I reloaded our instant cameras, she said, “You should feel really proud, Mal. Because of you, our class was able to reach our goal.”
I did feel proud. I think my face was stuck in a permanent grin.
Cokie Mason and Grace Blume (two of my least favorite people in eighth grade) were next in li
ne to have their pictures taken. They paid their dollars, and while they argued over which cutout they wanted to pose with, I talked to Jessi.
“I feel like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” I confessed in a whisper. “I spend half the day feeling really confident and smart. I spend the other half feeling intimidated and stupid.”
“Are you talking about Mr. Cobb’s class?” Jessi asked.
I nodded and checked my watch. “Which reminds me. Sometime before his class begins, I want to take a few minutes to review the book we’ll be discussing today.”
“We’re ready!” Cokie called. She and Grace had chosen to pose as punk rockers (naturally).
“Say Grrrrr!” I clicked the button, then handed my camera to Jessi. “I’ll see you at lunch!”
“Good luck, Mal!” Jessi called after me. “Remember, you’re a winner!”
I tried to keep Jessi’s words in my head later, as I hurried to Mr. Cobb’s class. My conference with him had ended on a weird note. I hoped he hadn’t stewed about it ever since and decided to take it out on me.
Mr. Cobb watched me come in and sit down. He even nodded hello to me, which he had never done before. After the bell rang, he cleared his throat and said, “Animalia, by Graeme Base. That’s the book. Let’s talk about it.”
Jen Corn raised her hand. So did Megan Armstrong and Glen Johnson. Benny Ott shouted, “I think the pictures are great!”
“Graeme Base is a wonderful illustrator,” Mr. Cobb agreed. He shot a nervous glance in my direction and added, “But in the future, Benny, raise your hand before you speak, will you?”
Chris Brooks’s hand shot up in the air and Mr. Cobb started to call on him, then froze. He turned slowly to face Jen, whose arm was still up. “Jen?” he said. “You were first, I believe. What do you think of Graeme Base?”
Jen seemed surprised that she’d been called on and hesitated for a second.
“Me! Me!” Robbie Mara called.
Normally Mr. Cobb would have let Robbie cut in. But not today. He looked at me again, then said, “Hold your horses, Robbie. Jen is thinking.”
Finally Jen spoke. She began quietly, but her voice grew stronger as she gained confidence. “Animalia is like one giant puzzle. First you read the book, just enjoying the pictures of the gorillas and the rhinoceroses. But gradually you realize there is a little boy hidden in each picture. So you go back to the beginning and examine each drawing, discovering more and more wonderful details as you go. It’s a book that you can explore over and over again.”