Confessions from the Principal's Chair

First published in the United States of America in 2006 by
Walker Publishing Company, Inc.

Distributed to the trade by Holtzbrinck Publishers

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this book, write to Permissions, Walker & Company,
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Myers, Anna.

Confessions from the principal's chair / Anna Myers.

p. cm.

Summary: After participating in a cruel prank, her mother moves them to Oklahoma, where fourteen-year-old Robin is mistaken for the substitute principal and gets to see a new perspective on bullying.

eISBN: 978-0-802-72145-7

[1. Bullying—Fiction. 2. Schools—Fiction. 3. Friendship—Fiction.

4. Mothers and daughters—Fiction. 5. Oklahoma—Fiction.] I. Title.

PZ7.M9814Co 2006 [Fic]—dc22 2006001970

Book design by Donna Mark

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Typeset by Westchester Book Composition

Printed in the United States of America by Quebecor World Fairfield

2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

All papers used by Walker & Company are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in well-managed forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

Ed and Dena Kephart, Josh and Kacie; Becky Kephart and Palmira Campos; Lisa and Dr. Mike Pruett, Sarah, Chris, and Luke; Amy and Dr. Robert Trent, Laura, Margaret Grace, and Rob; Emily Biggers; Tracie and Marshall Godfrey, Austin, Alisen, and Leslie; Jason and Tonya Hoover, Kyzor and Kinzer; Ross Hoover.

Laurie Scrivener and Joe Soliz; Greg and Joy Scrivener, Andy, Meredith and Ethan; Holly and Ryan Meek; Wendy and Tom Knight; Cody Flora.

Contents

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 1

S
o do you want to know how I ended up in the principal's office? I mean really in the principal's office, not in the chair across the desk where kids land when they are in trouble. Believe me, I've been in that seat plenty, but not this time. This time I was the principal! Yeah, that's what I said, me, Robin Miller, but BTW most people don't call me Robin.

See, Rendi (she's my mother) jerked me out of school in Denver. "I've had it, Bird!" she yelled at me soon as we were in our van after leaving the counselor's office, where they had made a big deal over a little teasing. "I don't want you being part of the Six-Pack anymore." She did that thing with her mouth, lips pressed together real hard like she always does when she's mad. Normally, she gets that look when she's fuming over someone who has a dog tied up without any shelter from the cold or because some oil company had a spill in the ocean or something.

Ordinarily she's laid back with me. She never carried on over the blue streaks in my hair or how I would only wear orange or lime green pants to school. "Your clothes express your personality," she said. "You get to choose."

Oh, sure, she got kind of quirky when she found out the other members of the Six-Pack also only wore lime green or orange pants. "I wish you would think for yourself instead of being a follower," she said back then.

"I do think for myself," I said. "I started the color thing. I can't help it if they copied me." Okay, maybe that wasn't exactly the truth. Okay, okay, that was a lie. Of course the pants thing had been Ivory's idea. Usually I didn't lie to Rendi, but back then she usually didn't push me into it.

"Well," she said, "I suppose you will grow out of it." Then she laughed. "Those pants are so tight, you're bound to grow out of them."

I remembered all that, sitting there in the van, Rendi with her lips pressed tight. Just stay cool, I told myself. I looked out the window, and I tried to keep my voice soft, but firm. "They're my best friends, Rendi. You can't expect me to stay away from them."

"You will." She reached over, took my chin in her hand, and turned my head so she could look me straight in the eye. "We're moving," she said. "They will have to call themselves the Five-Pack from now on."

"Moving! Rendi, we can't!" I said, but I was scared. See the thing is, my mother is a sculptor. She can do that work anywhere. When I was younger, we moved a lot. Before I started school, we lived in three different states and eight different cities. After I started taking classes with Miss Deirdre (I'll fill you in on her later), we stayed around Denver, but we never bought a place. We'd move at least once a year, so changing schools happened a lot. Two years ago, though, when I was in sixth grade, we had this big talk, one of Rendi's meaningful "Look deep inside yourself, Bird, and tell me what you feel" talks, and decided to settle down in Denver. The idea was to stay put in one school district until I finished high school.

I should have known Rendi would get all worked up when she heard about what happened with dopey Marcy Willis. Rendi is always for the underdog. I didn't even try to tell her how Marcy brought all her troubles on herself. It would have been a major amount of talk that wouldn't have done a bit of good.

Still, I thought she'd come around. Rendi always listens to me if I give her time. We've got this really good relationship. I know because I've seen what goes on between some of my friends and their parents. Ivory practically hates her own mother, and sometimes they don't say a word to each other for days.

I'd always thought I had an awesome mother, which sort of made up for the fact that I can't come up with anything at all in the father department. A time or two when I've been in trouble at school, some counselor has tried to bring up my father, like not having one is some kind of big deal or something. Well, it isn't, believe me. I don't even think about him unless someone brings him up, and that doesn't happen very often. Okay, okay, the truth is I do carry the little picture of him Rendi said a long time ago that I could have. She came across it in a drawer. I think she must have burned all the others or something. I mean there were bound to be others, don't you think? Anyway, I've got that snapshot in an envelope, and I usually keep it in a folder in my book bag. I don't think that means that I am troubled because he left us, do you?

I can't remember a single thing about him. Well, how could I? He dumped us about the time I was learning to use the potty chair. He was a painter (on canvas, not houses). Wait, I guess I shouldn't say
was,
like he is dead or something. I guess he is still a painter, although I sure haven't seen any pictures by him in the art shows I am always going to with Rendi. I haven't seen a penny of money from him either.

After a few years, Rendi went to a judge, and she got it all legal that he didn't have any right to come back into my life and start being all fatherish or anything. She even had my last name and hers changed to the name she had before she got married. Personally, I don't think she had to worry about him rushing back into my life, but I also think that it is good that I would recognize him, I mean because of the picture, if I should see him in a restaurant or something. Anyway, I think I would recognize him.

As far as I can tell, I got three things from my father. Number 1 is that I call my mother Rendi. That's what he called her because her name is Renee Dee. Her parents always called her both names, which I guess is real common where she grew up, the two-name thing, I mean. Rendi says my father sort of made fun of the double names and started calling her Rendi, as a combination. When I started talking, I picked it up from him. Now most everyone calls her that, and she even signs her work that way.

Number 2 is that wherever he is, he is tall. Me too. I've got these really long legs. Well, my arms are long too, and my body, and my neck. Isn't that awful? Oh, don't think I'm ashamed of being tall That would be so last century! I'm glad to be tall, and I've heard that guys really like girls with long legs. So far the boys I've known have not seemed to be really crazy about my legs. The last boy who said he loved me was Jon McBroom in third grade. We were so wild for each other that we pulled each other's teeth at recess. The thing is, my tooth came out really easy. Pulling Jon's tooth wasn't easy, believe me. It turned out that Jon's mother came up to school and made a big deal out of the fact that his tooth wasn't even loose. Rendi got called too, but she said a third grader couldn't pull a tooth that wasn't ready to come out. See what I mean about how she usually sticks up for me. Anyway, Jon was my last ardent admirer (I got "ardent admirer" from a book, and I am praying that some sweet day I will have one again). Not really likely with my neck. I am certain boys don't have crushes on me because of my long neck.

Rendi says that I don't have a long neck. She even took me to a big deal hairdresser woman who said girls with long necks should wear their hair long and full, so the neck isn't so noticeable. My hair was already long and not doing much to help in the neck department. Oh yeah, and the hairdresser woman said my neck wasn't unusually long at all. Of course, I knew that wasn't true. I mean, I can see myself in a mirror, can't I? I guess some people like to be lied to about their hideously flawed bodies. I do not like to be lied to about mine, and I wear turtlenecks all the time except around the house. For a while, I thought maybe I could have plastic surgery, but I have looked on the Internet. I have not found any mention of plastic surgeons who cut your head off and make your neck shorter. I guess my only hope is that by the time I have the money for such a surgery there will be major advances in the area of cutting off heads.

The third thing I got from my father, who BTW was, no,
is
named Richard, is that I can draw really well. Some of Rendi's friends say I should be a painter too, but I am not going to be, and that isn't because I resent Richard or anything if that's what you're thinking. It is because I am going to be an actress. My acting coach says I'm good, and someone even more important than Miss Deirdre said the same thing too. I'm not going to tell who that someone is, though, because that would be getting ahead of the story, and speaking of the story, I probably shouldn't have been going into my whole life history thing.

Okay, I'll get back now to how Rendi and I were sitting in our van and not feeling especially warm toward each other, with her threatening to move us and being all worked up over Marcy Willis and everything.

She started the engine, and I slid down in the seat, thinking I'd just sort of stay far away from Rendi, be real quiet and make her want me to talk. I folded my arms across my chest and kept my eyes turned down toward the floor of the van.

So the looking down thing is why I didn't realize Rendi had not taken the street one block from the school, the same street we use to get to our house. I didn't know that she had gone a whole different way until I felt the van slow down and turn. I lifted my eyes to see where we were stopping. In front of me was a big sign that said, "Box Store" and a smaller sign that said, "Boxes—50<£ and Up."

I can tell you my vow of silence got forgotten as quick as yesterday's history lesson. "Boxes!" I said, "Rendi, can't we talk about this?" I touched the little can, a charm I wore on a chain around my neck. All of us Six-Packers wore that charm. What would I do if Rendi really made us move? She turned off the engine and held the key in her hand.

"Nothing to talk about," she said. "Got to have boxes to move." She opened the car door. "Come on," she said to me before she got out. "There will be too many for me to carry."

I considered screaming. Not only had my mother completely lost her "let's talk about it" attitude, she was making me carry the boxes, sort of like, you know, carrying the cross they meant to hang you on. I didn't scream, though, because I still thought I could get her to change her mind if I stayed calm.

Rendi bought the boxes, and I
did
help carry them. I helped pack them too. Except for some things in her studio that she arranged with a friend to ship when we got resettled, we got rid of most of the big stuff and took only what we could put in our van. The rest Rendi gave away to her friends, some charity, or weird people she found on the street.

"Don't bother to pack those crazy pants," she told me when she came into my room the first time. "We will be buying you all new school clothes when we get there."

"Would it be asking too much for you to tell me where 'there' is?" I didn't try to keep the sarcasm out of my voice. I mean, I could see my mother was actually going through with this awful move. "I bet there's some kind of child welfare person or something that would make you not treat me this way," I said. "I'm not like some kind of criminal or something. I think it's child abuse to just drag me off without even telling me where we're going." I laid the stack of underpants I had in my hand down on a box that was turned upside down.

Rendi didn't comment on the abuse thing. Instead, she walked over, picked up the stack of underpants, handed them to me, and said, "Pack these. You'll need them when we get there." She turned to walk out, but just before she got to the door she turned back to say, "Bird, I don't know where we're going. We'll know when we get there." She shrugged her shoulders. "We'll start looking in Oklahoma."

"Oklahoma! Where Grandma and Grandpa live?"

"They live in Tulsa," Rendi said. "I think we need a little town." She closed the door behind her then.

I wanted to collapse on my bed, but it was gone. Rendi had put a sign on the corner that said, "Free Furniture," with our address and an arrow pointing our way. Two odd-looking women in long, dark dresses came in, took my bed apart like it was made of Lego blocks, and carried it between them, one piece at a time, out the door and loaded it on a trailer that held a lawnmower. One of them had a heavy shadow of a beard and walked like a man, and I kind of thought the other one moved like one (a man) too. I can tell you that I felt pretty strange watching bizarre strangers carrying off my favorite reading spot (not even to mention the place where I used to feel so comfortable and safe during snowstorms). Rendi, though, felt zero concern for my feelings. Oh yeah, she just chatted to the women-men about how we were going to have a real adventure. The short one made comments back to Rendi (the one with the beard didn't talk at all). Rendi held the door for them each time they went out. I watched from the front window as they threw my mattress on top of the lawnmower.

But I was telling you about how shocked I was to hear where we were headed. Since my bed was gone, I flopped on the floor to do some thinking. Oklahoma! I couldn't believe it. I never in my life would have thought Rendi would ever want to live in that state. I could just about count on the fingers of one hand how many times we had been there.

My first memory connected to my grandparents starts with flying there when I was maybe five or six. It was the first time I'd ever been on an airplane. Even though it was eight or nine years ago, I could remember it clearly and my grandfather's face too when I saw him at the airport, his dark eyes just like mine and the way his whiskers felt on my face when he kissed my cheek in the morning before he shaved. I liked my grandmother too, but it was my grandfather I took to most.

Rendi didn't seem to like either of them. She was quiet and kind of wound up tight, like she might just break into crying or screaming any minute. We only stayed two nights, but even a little kid like me could see that they were two too many days for my mother.

I saw how Rendi mostly made up excuses not to go to Oklahoma when her parents would ask us to come. If we did see them, the visit was short. Last spring we went for a couple of days, and I saw my grandmother once looking at Rendi when we were having breakfast. Grandma's face had the saddest look on it.

I did not mention that observation to Rendi. She would just have started telling me again about her parents, how they hadn't wanted her to marry my father and hadn't wanted her to be an artist. Rendi claims my grandparents have never approved of anything she has done. Maybe it's so, but personally I'd think they would be over any objections to her art by now. I mean, Rendi sells the stuff she makes for really good money. She has a piece in lots of important places, like airports and stuff. I kind of think maybe Rendi needs to forgive her parents for having doubts about her art, and, of course, they were right about Richard. Maybe that's what Rendi can't forgive them for, being right, but I am not claiming to be some kind of TV head doctor like Dr. Phil.