Too Cool for This School (11 page)

A pimply teenager with three lip rings approached us. “If you’ve got any questions, shoot them my way.”

“Where are your Damaged Earth shirts?” Mint asked.

“Back corner,” the teenager said. “Buy one, get one fifty percent off.”

“Cool!” Mint cheered.

My mom and I followed Mint to the back corner. And as if things couldn’t get any worse, I actually spotted Tuma in the store. Which was doubly tragic. Because it meant that Tuma would eventually spot me.

“You came,” Tuma said.

I watched as he approached my cousin. I couldn’t believe that she’d convinced my mom to drive her to this store. Was she planning to hang out with him? Did she like him? Did she
like
like him?

“This feels so wrong,” I told my mom as we stood back and let Tuma and Mint chat while they looked through a pile of T-shirts.

“Come here,” my mom said, pulling me behind a round rack of black jeans.

“She had a disappointing phone call with Aunt Betina the other day and I’m trying to cheer her up,” my mom said.

“We are in a store filled with tarantulas, gross clothes,
and a lame kid rumored to have a violent streak from my school,” I snapped.

“Why are you making this harder than it needs to be?” my mom asked. “She’s making a friend.”

A friend? Mint flipped her hair several times while she and Tuma held up various T-shirts. I couldn’t believe it. Did Mint seriously like Tuma? The one positive outcome of Mint possibly
like
liking Tuma was that she’d stop flirting with Jagger.

“Mom, I am not making anything harder,” I said.

The sound of Tuma and Mint laughing interrupted our fight.

“Totally get that one,” Tuma said.

“Aunt Claire?” Mint called. “I think I found my shirts.”

I rolled my eyes. I couldn’t even imagine what Mint had found that she thought was wearable.

“Those are nice,” my mom said, as the cashier rang up our purchase.

It turns out I was wrong about everything being black in the store. Mint had found a tight-fitting, dark green T-shirt with a bunch of smeared patches of red on it. If you stood back far enough, the green spaces formed a world globe. And she also picked out a shirt that had a camouflage pattern on it that said
DON’T SHOOT
. It surprised me that these shirts even existed, let alone that I would be related to somebody who wanted to wear them to middle school.

While I stood beside my mom at the register, I could feel Tuma approaching me. I didn’t turn my head.

“So what’s Ava doing tonight?” Tuma asked me.

It creeped me out that Tuma asked me something so personal about Ava. They weren’t friends. And I was pretty sure she wouldn’t want me to discuss what she was doing. “She’s chillin’,” I said, trying to sound as nonchalant as possible.

“When’s her next cello thing?” he asked.

I glanced at Mint and shot her daggers. If it weren’t for her, I wouldn’t be in this awkward situation. I would be at home talking to Rachel on the phone.

“Next month,” I said. And then I turned my body away so he knew I was finished talking to him.

“Ready?” my mom asked as she finished signing the store’s receipt.

“Yeah,” I said.

As we climbed into the car and started driving home, I kept feeling a weird tingling sensation on my arms. Like maybe a spider was crawling on them. But every time I looked down they were fine.

“Tuma told me that the class captains get to plan all the school parties for the year,” Mint said.

This meant Mint and Tuma had been talking about me. I didn’t approve of that at all.

“Your school always has the best themes,” my mom said in an upbeat voice. “Last year they had a luau.”

I actually didn’t think the luau was very fun. The music felt too goofy and it didn’t make you want to dance. Our class was going to love our disco theme. When I closed my eyes, I could imagine everybody in my class dancing their
butts off. Too bad I couldn’t tell anybody about our disco theme yet.

“Theme parties bum me out,” Mint said.

“Why?” my mom asked as we turned down a road lined with aging, mud-colored, stucco homes.

“Because you don’t get to be yourself. You have to pretend to be a totally different person.”

“Good point,” my mom said, giving me a quick smile.

“I totally disagree,” I said. “I think theme parties are awesome. They give you the chance to be yourself and wear interesting costumes. And this year we have the best theme ever.”

“Ooh. What is it?” Mint asked.

I wasn’t even tempted to break my allegiance to my class captains and tell her. “We don’t tell anybody until we make the official announcement at school.”

“Ooh. I hope I’m around long enough to find out what it is,” Mint said.

“Yeah,” I mumbled. But that wasn’t how I felt at all.

11

Mint may have driven me nuts, but she drove Ava totally bonkers. One day, out of the blue, she started sending me text messages about how to get rid of her.

I never knew how to respond to these texts. It felt as if Ava wasn’t joking around.

Mint’s arrival also put a real strain on my relationship with Todd. Because even though Ava had clearly explained girl code to Mint at our pj party, Mint was terrible at remembering it. Especially the part about hijacking boys. She talked to Jagger
and
Todd like they were long lost friends every day before class started.

And then came the worst of it. During the fifth day of her stay with us, I learned the truth about how close Mint was getting with Jagger and Todd. Because Ava texted me all about it.

I was not prepared for this text at all. I was getting ready to go out to dinner to a fancy restaurant to celebrate Mint’s first week of school.

I could hardly believe what my phone was telling me. I just stared at it. Why would Todd and Jagger want Mint to
text them a photo of Alaska? I didn’t even have pants on yet. I was still picking out which pair to wear. But clothes could come later. I had to text Ava back.

Because Jagger and Ava sometimes walked to school with a group of seventh graders, Ava would make an excuse to borrow his phone and then glance at his history.

Knock. Knock. Knock
.

I jumped a little and dropped my phone.

“Lane? Are you ready for dinner?” my mom asked. “We have six o’clock reservations.”

This was ridiculous. First, I still hadn’t put on pants. Second, we never went anyplace that required reservations. Why did we have to celebrate Mint’s first week of school? It sucked.

I chose a pair of black pants that flared at the bottom. Ava thought they looked like cowgirl pants, but I didn’t think she had seen enough cowgirls to make that assessment. “Where is Mint?” I asked. She’d asked to be dropped off at my dad’s work after school. But she couldn’t have stayed there all day. That would bore a person my age to death.

“She’s still with your father,” my mom said. “She really hit it off with his co-workers. They’re teaching her how to prune.”

Why did she want to become friends with my dad’s co-workers? Yuck. Mint was becoming more like bacteria every day. Spreading. Spreading. Spreading.

As my mom and I drove to the restaurant, I thought it might be a good time to complain about my cousin and get a little sympathy.

“I cannot wait for her to return to Alaska,” I said.

My mother groaned. “Don’t say that. You don’t mean it.”

I stared at her. “I absolutely mean it. She’s weird. And she makes my life difficult.”

“She is a good person,” my mother said.

It was amazing that in just a few days my cousin had figured out a way to poison my family’s minds. Why did they like her so much? She was a total mess. “You’re only saying nice things about her because you don’t have to go to school with her,” I said.

My mother pulled into the restaurant parking lot. “That’s not true. I like my niece. She’s spunky. And I’ve
talked to Mr. Guzman and he says that Mint is getting along fabulously with everybody at the school. He said he’s never seen anything like it before.”

Whoa. My mom was talking to Mr. Guzman about Mint? She shouldn’t be doing that. Mint was temporary. We needed to treat her like an exchange student who we sort of hoped we’d never see again. Unless we happened to travel to Alaska. Which, based on what she’d shared with me about their bear population, I hoped we never did.

“Well, Mr. Guzman is wrong. She doesn’t get along with
everybody
,” I said. And I thought about telling her how Mint’s behavior made Ava, Lucia, and Rachel, and me basically want to vomit. But I didn’t say that. I thought of something to say that my mother could not disagree with.

“Showing up to a new school and changing your name to an ice cream flavor is lame.”

My mother turned off the engine. Then she looked at me with a stern expression. “When I was in college, my first semester, I told people that my name was Clarice.”

“Is your name Clarice?” I asked. I’d only ever heard people call her Claire.

“No. Changing my name was a fun thing to do. I understand where Mint’s coming from. She’s exploring her identity. So stop judging her.”

I blinked several times. I just couldn’t relate. Because I liked my identity. So changing your name didn’t seem like a fun thing to do at all.

“Clarice is a better fake name than Mint,” I said, trying to stop the fight. Really, I didn’t want to start an argument
with my mom. I just wanted her to understand where I was coming from.

“It’s her middle name,” my mom said with a frustrated tone. “Lots of people decide to go by their middle names. And she didn’t pick the name Mint. My sister did.”

I nodded. Because she had a point.

When we walked inside the restaurant, I spotted Mint right away, because she was wearing a plastic bib with a picture of a big orange crab on it.

As we approached the table, she waved furiously at us. It annoyed me for several reasons. The biggest being that my mother returned her wave. With a lot of enthusiasm.

“They let you pick out your own crab,” Mint said, jerking her thumb toward a fish tank.

I did not plan to murder a crab for my dinner. And I said that. “I’m not killing an animal for my meal.”

Mint tilted her head. “Are you eating only salad?”

My mom laughed at this and sat down in her chair. “Crustaceans aren’t for everyone.”

But this sort of bothered me. Because it made Mint sound more mature than me. And she wasn’t. On her first day of school she braided her hair with a pajama belt!

“I think I might get the crab too,” my dad said.

“I feel like splurging tonight as well,” my mom said, picking up her menu.

I was stunned. Everybody at my table was going to kill a crab. At first, I was disgusted. But then I felt left out.