What Mr. Mattero Did (14 page)

Annie drew a breath. “My parents won't let me go.”

My mouth dropped. I couldn't believe that because Annie and I were
best friends
!

“But you can come
here,
Mellie.”

“Annie, you can't come over because of what those girls said?”

She pressed her lips together and met my eyes.

“You know my dad didn't do anything!”

She nodded and bit her lip. “I'm sorry.”

I turned away from her, yanked open the front door, and left fast, not even closing the door behind me or putting the umbrella back up.

“Mellie?” Annie called after me. “Mellie! Please don't go away mad!”

But I didn't turn around. Not once while I walked down her sidewalk in the pouring rain. Not even after I slammed our car door shut.

15

Claire

IT SOUNDED SO EASY.
Sure. Put two fingers way, way back on your tongue to kind of gag yourself—and then heave-ho! But have you ever tried it? Huh? Because it does not work. Not for me anyway. All it did was get me worked up and frustrated. I don't know how those bulimia girls could do it. I'm telling you, if I could have, I would have, because every day I was coming home from school and eating way too much on account of I was so nervous. I hated myself for it, but I was really worried about getting fat again.

Fat and ugly. That's how I saw myself. “Disgusting,” I even said out loud one night while I stared into the bathroom mirror. I had just brushed my yucky, thin, wispy hair straight back so I could wear a headband, but the headband made me look like a stupid clown. It's like I couldn't even do anything cool with my hair either.

I yanked the headband off and threw it in the sink. Then I sat heavily on the lid to the toilet, checked out my poor, aching finger, and started crying.

A complete and total loser is what I felt like. It had been a week since we reported what Mr. Mattero did, and every day it seemed like things were getting worse, not better. Not that most kids said anything. Most of them didn't. Most kids at school didn't give a damn one way or the other! They were too busy with their own perfect little lives to worry about
our
problems. But there were some—those snotty little band members and the goody-goodies in the chorus—who gave us the evil eye every chance they got.

And every time I saw Melody Mattero I got a stomachache. She was easy to spot. No one else at school had a long braid like hers. Watching her walk through the hallway, her feet skimming the floor, her head hanging down, I knew she was hurting. Well, I was hurting, too, but no one knew it!

Suzanne and I were still friends. I was really glad she came back to school, that her parents gave Oakdale another chance. But she wasn't the same. She seemed incredibly quiet—even more than she was normally.

“Nothing bad will happen,” I tried to tell Suzanne one afternoon at her house. We were in her basement, sitting on the floor beside all her exercise equipment shuffling cards, only neither one of us felt like playing anything.

“But I'm afraid,” she said. “I mean, what if they believe Mr. Mattero and not us? Then what are we going to do?”

“I don't know.” I kept shuffling those cards.

And that's when Suzanne's big sister, Addy, suddenly appeared like a bad dream from out of nowhere. She was home on a break from her college, and I guess she had been on the stairs eavesdropping, the little sneak. She came down with her arms crossed and her head cocked sideways, and she asked us straight out: “Did you guys lie?”

“What are you doing, spying on us?” Suzanne spit back at her.

Addy came closer. “Did you guys make up that stuff about your music teacher?”

Suzanne turned away. “Get lost,” she muttered.

I kept my eyes on the cards and divided the deck into two piles.

But Addy stood right over us. “You better not have,” she said. “You tell a lie like that, you'll have to
keep
lying to cover it up. And the more you lie, the more you'll have to lie.”

Suzanne whirled around on her butt and tried to kick Addy right in the shins. “Bug off, freak!” she yelled. Let me tell you, a whole other side of sweet little Suzanne pops out when her sister's around. Not that Addy is always so evil. I mean, she did bring us those Foakleys from New York. But sometimes she's such a damned know-it-all. She was the first person in any of our families not to support us. I guess that's why Suzanne reacted so viciously. Plus we were both on edge.

Anyway, Addy wasn't the only person getting weird.

Jenna was acting a little strange herself. Like one day on the way to class she says out of the blue, “Claire, you're not selling me out, are you?”

“What are you talking about?” Honestly, I was completely baffled.

“Did you have that second interview with Detective Daniels?” I stopped. We all three stopped. “Of course. Suzanne did, too,” I said.

“We had to,” Suzanne added.

“Did you tell him you couldn't remember some stuff?” Jenna asked.

“No! I told him everything I told him the first time.”

Jenna zeroed in on me. “Then why did he tell me that? Why did he tell me you were having trouble remembering?”

“I don't know!” I fired back at her. “I didn't say anything different, and neither did Suzanne. Why would we? You think we
want
to get in trouble?”

Jenna backed off and held up a hand to stop us. “All right, all right. Forget it. Forget I said anything. I'm not mad.”

We walked on, but then we paused at the water fountain. After Suzanne finished getting a drink, Jenna says to us, “Look, I've been thinking about something.”

I rolled my eyes. I almost didn't want to know what it was, but Suzanne wiped her mouth and asked her, “What about?”

“You guys,” Jenna said quietly, crooking her finger so we'd bend our heads close to hers. “I've been thinkin', like, how we need boyfriends.”

“Boyfriends?” I repeated.

Suzanne giggled and shook her head like it was a joke.

But Jenna didn't laugh. “Seriously. They could protect us, you know?”

“Protect us from what?” I asked.

“Everything. All this crap that's going down.”

I felt uncomfortable and looked away. I checked out my finger, which had a new Band-Aid on it—SpongeBob blowing bubbles. I didn't want a boyfriend! Well, not right then I didn't. I was glad when the bell rang. I walked off fast. So did Suzanne.

“I'm serious!” Jenna called after us.

But her words were lost in the crowd.

 

 

That
same
morning in earth science, when we had to pick partners for the weather project, Jenna slid her chair next to Danielle and Winston. I mean, what the heck? Jenna can't stand Danielle, and she wouldn't give the time of day to someone like Winston, who is sort of a nerd and, like, way too smart for
her
. So I don't know what Jenna was thinking, unless maybe she figured she could get a better mark working with those two geeks. The thing that really annoyed me is how she didn't even look at us.

See? We had just risked everything for our friendship with Jenna and she treated us like dirt. It annoyed me. Big time.

So Jenna was getting weird. But the real killer that week was the letter that came in the mail. It was addressed to my parents, Mr. and Mrs. Bradford Montague, in really nice handwriting. It wasn't signed though, so we never knew who sent it, only that it was an adult, someone with kids at school.

That letter made me sick.

“It's that friend of yours! It's Jenna!” Mom exploded. “It's
her
influence!” Mom was really on the warpath, walking back and forth in the kitchen. It must've been like the twentieth time she read that stupid letter. “Jenna's been bad for you since day one!”

“It's not her fault!” I cried.

“But you didn't dress this way in sixth grade, at your other school!” Mom accused. “It's all since you started hanging out with that girl. I mean, look at the trouble you're in, Claire!”

“Well, since when do you care?” I hollered back at her. “All you do is worry about Corky! Your whole life revolves around him!”

That shut her up. Although instantly, I felt bad about what I blurted out. Sure, Mom worried about Corky. We
all
worried about Corky.

“What's going on?” Dad asked, coming into the kitchen after taking the kids upstairs to get into pajamas.

“It's that letter. I'm still upset,” my mother complained.

“Well, don't take it out on Claire like that,” my dad defended me. “She didn't do anything wrong!”

“But she's involved in this whole mess! And it's all because of Jenna. You know as well as I do Claire was never like this before. The clothes, the eye makeup, her grades! I mean, look at Claire's grades since she changed schools and met that girl!”

“That's not fair,” I muttered. I felt bad about my grades going down. And so what if it was partly because of the time I spent with my friends? It was nice to have good friends like Suzanne and Jenna. And we didn't cause trouble. Well, what I mean is, we could do a lot of
worse
things! Like go to parties where they drink beer and smoke pot. We knew kids who did that stuff! And if only my mom knew how Suzanne and I had put our feet down on the shoplifting, too. I flashed her a dirty look because I knew she could never understand. Not in a million years. I could not talk to my mother.

“Oh! And remember how Jenna wanted you and Suzanne to get your ear cartilage pierced? So you could be alike?”

True. It was true. We wanted to do that.

“You would have looked like a freak!” My mom was really losing it. “Next thing you know you'll want to pierce your tongue or something!”

“That's crazy,” I argued. Jenna talked about that once, and I laughed at her because no way was someone punching a hole in my tongue. Although I did wonder if it would stop me from eating.

“You need to wake up, Claire!” Mom yelled at me.

Dad stepped in between us. “Carlena, take it easy,” he said.

And just then Corky and Izzy came into the doorway, looking scared.

“Take a deep breath and calm down,” Dad said to my mother, trying to put his arm around her.

But she shook him off and stormed out of the room. “You deal with it!” she shouted at Dad. A familiar phrase. We hear it a lot, only usually it's on account of a bad day with Corky, and believe me, there are a lot of bad days with Corky.

“Why Mommy's mad?” Izzy asked, her eyes wide and worried. Trailing her pink blankie, she started following my mother, but Dad scooped her up. “Come on, pumpkin,” he said. “Let's go upstairs and look at a book.”

It was a relief to have my mother out of the room. While Dad put Izzy back to bed, I took on my little brother. It was one of those weeks when Corky didn't want to sleep, so we snuggled up under the afghan on the couch. I must have read him ten different stories—plus did a little play thing with his whale puppet. He likes that. I pretend I'm a seagull friend of his whale. Finally, he let me take him up to bed.

When I saw Dad again, he was standing in the kitchen rereading that disgusting letter. “Those cowards—they didn't even have the guts to sign their names,” he grumbled, tossing the paper on the table. “Who do they think they are?”

I agreed with Dad. Who
did
those people think they were? Because I am here to tell you that Jenna, Suzanne, and I did not dress different from most girls at school. Tight jeans, bare midriffs —that's the kind of clothes we
all
wore! Seriously, I was
not
dressing different. I mean, I would
kill
myself before I was different!

 

 

It was reaching a point. Every day, I thought, I just wanted to start over. I wanted to go to school and have friends and stick to my diet so I could lose more weight and maybe get a new dress and go to the spring dance. I just wanted all this stuff about Mr. Mattero to go away!

But it didn't.

The next week, Monday morning, I was hoping to make a fresh start again when Sara Martindale, the eighth-grade class president, came on the intercom with morning announcements:

“Good morning, Oakdale Middle School. Today the sixth grade will have their eye exams in the health room during second and third class periods . . . Chess Club and Movie Club meet after school today . . . Lunch today is a cheese sandwich or a steak sub . . .”

I moaned silently, feeling for the box of Tic Tacs in my pocket.