Too Cool for This School (15 page)

“I don’t think she’s interested in Jagger,” I said. “She’s just social.”

Ava looked a tiny bit happier.

“She is very social,” Rachel said. “She basically talks to anything with a face.”

“True,” Lucia said. “But she talks to Jagger a lot. Plus, they text.”

Ava looked devastated again.

“Good point,” Rachel said.

I watched Ava stare at her empty milk carton. She didn’t deserve to have her feelings hurt. So I just kept saying random things.

“I think Mint has a crush on somebody back in Alaska,” I blurted out, even though I had no idea. We’d barely talked about her life there.

“Really?” Ava asked. “Why do you think that?”

Hmm. That was a good question.

“Does she talk about him?” Rachel asked.

I really didn’t want to lie. So I thought of a way to avoid doing that. “She writes in her diary every night like a fiend. And she’s very secretive about it. She’s probably writing about the guy she likes.”

Lucia finished her bagel and then licked a crumb from her bottom lip. “Most people are secretive when they write in their diaries. It’s where people put their most private thoughts. She might not be writing about a guy.”

“Well,” I said. “I think his name is Diego.”

What was I doing? Why had the name of her cabdriver popped into my head? And why did I say it? It didn’t matter. Ava looked almost happy. “You never told me that Mint kept a diary.”

We heard Jagger’s laugh echo through the cafeteria. Followed by Todd’s. It was a painful sound to hear.

“I wonder what Mint writes about in her diary. Do you think she writes about us?” Rachel asked.

“Probably,” Ava said. “We’re very interesting. We would make a great reality show.”

Jagger’s laugh bounced through the lunchroom again. And then Mint zoomed out of the cafeteria.

“And she’s probably writing about Diego,” I added.

Everybody nodded. Which felt good. And bad.

“Do you know what would be fun to do this weekend?” Ava asked.

“What?” Rachel asked. “Work on our wolf plays?”

“No,” Ava said. “Have another sleepover.”

“Ooh! Maybe Jagger and Todd will bring donuts again,” Rachel said.

“So fun!” Lucia said. “Let’s do it.”

“Yeah!” Rachel said.

“I’ll ask my mom,” I said. But I wasn’t sure she’d let me have another sleepover so close to my last one. When it came to slumber parties, my mom believed in pacing.

When Mint and her huge smile came racing into the cafeteria holding a piece of paper, she looked like a happiness bomb had gone off inside her.

“I have our assignments!” she said, panting like a crazy person.

I couldn’t believe that Mr. Guzman had given them to Mint.

“They are so great!” Mint said.

Within seconds, Kimmie and Jagger and Todd were clumped around us.

“Okay. Okay. Okay,” Mint said. “This is the best assignment of our lives.”

“Do you have everybody’s parts?” Ava asked with a bunch of skepticism in her voice.

“Oh yeah,” Mint gushed. “This piece of paper lists E-V-E-R-Y S-I-N-G-L-E P-A-R-T.

“Lane,” Mint cheered, pointing an annoyingly happy finger at me. “You, Rachel, Kevin, and Felipe have the opening scene where she meets all the wolves.”

“Ooh,” Rachel said. “We could have done much worse.”

“Lucia!” Mint said, her voice breaking with enthusiasm. “You, Jasmine, Thad, and Lexy got a crazy awesome scene!”

“What is it?” Lucia asked. Her eyes looked bigger than I’d ever seen them.

“It’s, like, a double scene,” Mint explained. “It’s the part where Julie is starving to death and hunts the owlet and then watches the wolves take down the caribou.”

Lucia licked her bottom lip and mulled over the idea. “That’s a decent section,” she said.

“Decent? I loved that scene! It reeks of survival,” Kimmie said. “What did we get?”

Mint dramatically cleared her throat. “We have the section where the plane shows up and shoots at Julie from the air, because, dressed in her furs, she looks like a bear.”

This news hit Kimmie like a birthday present. She was so thrilled she couldn’t speak.

“I’d forgotten about that part,” Jagger said. “It sounds good.”

“We’ll probably need an oil drum or something that looks like an oil drum,” Todd said. “The moment when she tried to protect herself by crawling underneath it had a ton of suspense.”

I was sort of surprised that Todd had read the book close enough to remember that part. He must have really liked Julie’s story. Did he read other books like that? Maybe he liked the gunfire part because he liked stories with life-or-death drama. Maybe I should have talked about this with him. Maybe discussing the novel and all its conflict would have been a good way to further our relationship.

“Did Wren get a good part?” Rachel asked.

Mint lit up. “Wren, Wyatt, Coral, and Isaac have the flashback.”

“The flashback?” Lucia said. “I don’t remember the flashback.”

Mint rushed to explain. “The second section of the book where Julie goes back in time to the life she had before the wolves. Not the part with her dad so much, but the part with her in-laws, Naka and Nusan, and Julie’s terrible husband, Daniel.”

I had forgotten that Julie had a terrible husband named Daniel.

“It was rotten when Julie was forced to make parkas for all the tourists,” Rachel said.

“It was rotten when Naka turned out to be an alcoholic,” I added.

“That book had a ton of themes,” Lucia added. The bell banged through the cafeteria and I started to stand up.

“What about me?” Ava asked.

Her voice sounded a tiny bit worried. It sounded so unlike Ava. So we all looked at her.

“Are you ready for this?” Mint asked, throwing her hands up over her head.

“Yes,” Ava said.

“You guys have the awesome part where she meets the Eskimo family,” Mint said.

Ava blinked. I guess she didn’t think it was an awesome part.

“That’s the only section without any wolves in it,” Ava said.

It was pretty obvious that in addition to not liking her group, she didn’t like her assigned section.

Mint shrugged. “I think it’s a good part. I mean, it’s a pretty emotionally charged scene. And some of it takes place on frozen river ice.”

Other than mentioning the frozen river ice, Mint didn’t try to sell Ava too much on the Eskimo scene. Mint looked revved and ready to leave. She took a bouncy step forward with her transformational genre group in tow. It made me sad to watch Todd leave with her. What good was having a relationship with a boy if you never spent quality time with him at school?

“School is so stupid this year,” Ava said.

“It’ll be okay,” Lucia said. “That’s not a terrible section.”

“I think it has a sled in it,” Rachel offered.

“Bleh,” Ava said as she dumped her tray.

Then we walked into the hallway and heard something that almost made Ava crumple.

“That’s an amazing idea!” Jagger said. “Mint Taravel, you are
so
cool.”

“
Too
cool,” Todd added.

I didn’t know if they were talking about their project or the dwarf game or something else entirely. Then we heard Kimmie’s mousy voice chime in. “Too cool for
this
school!”

Ava stopped walking. I pulled on her arm to make her keep going but she wouldn’t budge.

“She’s awful,” Ava said. “She’s ruining everything.”

But she was only going to be here for a little while longer. I wish I could tell my friends. They would feel so much better knowing that.

“Why can’t Jagger see how terrible she is?” Ava mumbled so softly only I could hear. “And weird.”

“I guess their personalities just mesh,” Lucia offered.

But Ava didn’t want to hear about their personalities meshing. “No,” she said. “It’s because he doesn’t see who she
really
is!”

“Maybe,” I said.

“I know what I need to do!” Ava said, pointing to herself. “I need to show Jagger Evenson exactly who Angelina
Mint Taravel really is. And once he sees that, he’ll want to puke.”

This didn’t sound good. I felt Ava’s arm slip through mine.

“We’ve put up with her weird, hijacking behavior long enough,” Ava said with so much force that a little bit of her spit landed on my face. “Now it’s time to destroy her.”

Lucia and Rachel both looked shocked. I just wiped it away with my sleeve.

“Um,” I said, thinking this over. “Destroy?” Did Ava really have time to finish learning her cello part for
Sleeping Beauty
and destroy Mint? I glanced at her index finger and spotted her callus. It was huge.

“Exactly. We need to have a three-way call and iron out our plan. You. Me. Rachel. Lucia.”

“Isn’t that a four-way call?” Rachel asked.

“Whatever,” Ava said. “Saturday afternoon, I’ll come to Lane’s house and we’ll call Rachel and Lucia and strategize from there.”

“I’ll ask my mom,” I said. But I wasn’t completely sure she’d say yes to this plan.

Then, as I was walking away with my friends, I felt somebody touch me. I was happy to see that it was Leslie. Because of all the Mint drama, I’d forgotten to look for them during lunch.

“Do you have a minute?” she asked.

Lucia, Rachel, and Ava waved to me. “See you in class,” Ava said.

They understood that they couldn’t hear us talk about important class captain stuff.

“I’ve got my cookies right here,” I said, handing them the Tupperware container. “Sorry I didn’t get them to you before school started.” I wanted them to know that I was totally on top of things. Even though I’d failed to deliver my cookies to them this morning.

“These are vegan?” Robin asked, peeling back the plastic lid to sneak a peek.

“They are,” I said.

“Nice job,” Leslie said. “My mom made vegan cookies once and they looked like dog crap.”

I was so happy I’d gone with the lemon-poppy-seed recipe.

“Now we have something else we need to talk to you about,” Leslie said in a very serious voice. “Your cousin.”

Robin raised her eyebrows and fixed her eyes on me in an intense way.

Great. Had Mint done something to upset the eighth graders? Robin took a break from staring at me in an intense way and glossed her lips.

“What’s her story?” Robin asked.

I didn’t know what they were after. “She’s from Alaska,” I explained.

“What happened to her parents?” Robin rubbed her lips together, smearing the gloss to distribute an even shine.

“What do you mean?” I asked. Did they want me
to talk about Aunt Betina’s divorce? Her deadbeat ex-husband? Her new husband, Clark? That seemed invasive.

“Why did she move here without any parents?” Leslie asked. “That’s weird.”

I nodded. I had to tell them something. But I really hated lying to their faces. “Her mom just got remarried. They couldn’t all move here at the same time. So they sent Mint first.”

That seemed to satisfy them. And it was a minor lie.

“We like her,” Leslie said.

“Oh,” I said. That surprised me. Had they ever talked? When? Why would Mint be talking to the class captains behind my back and not tell me about it?

“She’s so retro!” Robin said. “And I love how she trashes her clothes.”

I wanted to inform them that she had actually trashed some of my clothes, and it wasn’t cool.

“Well, that’s it. See you at class-captain meeting,” Leslie said. “Don’t be late.”

“I know,” I said. There was no way I was going to be late to my first official class-captain meeting. I was counting down the days. As I walked to Mr. Guzman’s class, Derek fell into step with me.

“She must be driving you nuts,” he said.

I didn’t say anything. Knowing that Leslie and Robin liked her, I didn’t want to complain about Mint to another class captain.

“If you need to vent, you should call me. All last summer
we had two of my cousins visiting from Peru. It was a nightmare,” Derek said. “Complete life disruption.” Then he made a sound like a bomb was going off.

We reached Mr. Guzman’s door and I stopped. Derek’s hair still looked incredibly plastic-y.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Class captains need to stick together,” he said, tapping me on the shoulder.

“Okay,” I said. I really wanted him to leave so that Todd wouldn’t see me talking to him and get the wrong idea. And Derek really needed to stop touching me. I didn’t touch him.

“By the way,” Derek said. “Your cookies look great.”

“Um, thanks,” I said, looking over my shoulder toward my classroom.

“They deliver the cookie basket to Ms. Knapp today. Hopefully, she doesn’t back out,” Derek said.

“Back out of what?” I asked.

“Being our faculty mentor. Apparently, last year’s crew and their luau were too high maintenance or something,” Derek said, leaning toward me a little bit.

I took a small step back. “Huh,” I said. I wondered what would be the fate of the class captains if we lost our faculty mentor. “That sounds bad.”

“Oh, it would suck. If we lose our faculty mentor, the school won’t give us a budget to plan the parties. We’d basically lose our status.”

“It would be totally rude of her to drop us,” I said. I really didn’t want to lose my status.

“I’ll do whatever I can to make sure that doesn’t happen,” Derek said.

Standing in the hallway, I thought I could hear Todd’s voice. “Bye,” I said, trying to encourage Derek to leave.

“I’m out,” Derek said as he flashed me a peace sign, and made his way down the hall.

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