Friendly Face, page 14
Mindy, her pudgy cheeks puffed out even more than usual by whatever food she had stuffed in her mouth, looked up at Jessica. “Oh, hi.” She looked back down at the peanut butter and jelly sandwich lying on plastic wrap in front of her.
“Do you really think ‘Oh, hi’ is the appropriate response when someone says, ‘Excuse me’?” Jessica asked Mindy.
Cindy looked up from what smelled like a tuna sandwich. She glanced around at all the kids at the table. Her bug-like hazel eyes blinked several times. “What’s the matter?” she asked. “Did we break some rule?” She sniffled and pulled out a tissue to wipe her nose.
“Seriously, like what classes do you two take?” Brittany asked. “Eighth-Grade Oblivious? Junior-Level Rude?”
Jessica chuckled. She loved her friend’s sense of humor.
Mindy frowned and put down her sandwich. “I don’t get what’s going on.”
“That’s, like, duh, exactly my point,” Brittany said.
Jessica pointed at the two seats Mindy and Cindy occupied. “Those are our seats.”
Mindy raised an eyebrow. “They are?” She turned and looked behind her seat back. “I don’t see names. Did we get assigned seating?”
Jessica widened her eyes. “Are you for real?”
The girl sitting next to Cindy, a junior-varsity cheerleader named Valerie—a girl Jessica thought had a lot of potential—leaned over and whispered to Cindy.
Cindy screwed up her face, whether in confusion or concentration wasn’t clear. When Valerie leaned back, Cindy said in her ear-piercing squeak, “Really?”
Mindy looked at her. “What?”
Cindy pointed at Valerie. “She says that these seats were being saved for Jessica and Brittany.” She sneezed and then blew into her tissue.
Mindy glanced up and looked around the table. She zeroed in on the one empty place on the end. She stood and looked around. Spotting a single empty seat at one of the other tables filled with kids paused mid-lunch, still quietly watching the unfolding drama, Mindy strode over and grabbed the metal chair. Dragging it back across the linoleum floor with an annoying metallic scrape, she positioned it next to the single seat at the end of the table. She looked at Cindy. “Can you grab my lunch, please, Cindy? You and I can squeeze in here. There’s enough space as long as we don’t try to chair dance while we eat.” She laughed and plopped in the chair she’d stolen from the other table.
“Sure,” Cindy said. She sniffled, then gathered both hers and Mindy’s lunch boxes. She stood and carried them to the small open place at the table next to Mindy.
Jessica tapped her foot as she watched the girls’ audacious behavior. She glanced at Brittany, who was opening and closing her mouth as if she was trying to remember how to talk. For several more seconds, Jessica looked from the now-vacant chairs to the silly girls at the end of the table. They weren’t paying any attention to Jessica or Brittany. They were leaning toward each other, chattering away as if nothing had happened.
Jessica sighed and sat down. Brittany settled in next to her.
Jessica shrugged, and said, “Eighth graders. You can’t live with them, and you can’t, like … kill them.”
Everyone laughed and returned to their lunches.
Jessica shook her head and unscrewed the lid of her sleek silver insulated cup. It contained the fruit smoothie she always drank midday. It wasn’t like her complexion took no work at all, right? She had to take some precautions against breakouts. Consuming the right combination of fruits and supplements was a must.
Brittany agreed with Jessica about that, but usually she drank her smoothie in the morning. For lunch, she liked having a cup of vegetable soup, which her family’s cook prepared and placed in a thermal mug and tucked inside a small cotton-canvas-and-rattan tote. It was a stylish carrier, in a save-the-planet-chic kind of way.
Brittany pulled out her thermal mug and peered into the tote. “OMG, Frieda.” She sighed.
“She, like, forgot your spoon again, right?” Jessica said.
“She so forgot my spoon!” Brittany looked around as if she could summon Frieda from home to remedy the unforgivable error.
Jessica clicked her tongue, then looked down the table at Mindy. “Mindy!” She said the girl’s name the same way she said her dog Titan’s name when he tried to dig in her ficus tree planter at home. The tone was sharp enough to compensate for the fact that it wasn’t very loud.
Mindy’s head shot up. She was chewing again, her round cheeks bobbing up and down in a counter rhythm to her dimpled chin. She looked at Jessica and pointed at herself.
Jessica rolled her eyes. “No, the other Mindy?”
Mindy looked around the table, as if searching for the other Mindy.
“OMG,” Brittany said again. This time, Jessica knew she was referencing Mindy’s complete ignorance.
“Yes, you.” Jessica nodded at Mindy. “Could you please get my friend here a spoon? Since you delayed our lunch, right? It seems, like, the least you can do.”
“It is, right?” Brittany agreed.
Mindy swallowed what was in her mouth and shrugged. “Sure.” She popped up. “Just a second.” She trotted off.
Jessica leaned toward Brittany. “Maybe we could train them to be like those, what were they called? The maids that helped royal women get dressed?”
“Ladies-in-waiting, right?” Brittany said.
“That’s it, totally.”
Mindy handed Brittany the spoon and returned to her seat. She went right back to her little-kid sandwich as if she hadn’t just been ordered around. Jessica smiled and imagined Mindy and Cindy scurrying behind her and Brittany wherever they went. It was a seriously sick image.
The rest of lunch passed without incident until Mindy and Cindy got up from the table just seconds after Jessica and Brittany did. All four girls headed to the cafeteria exit.
Because Jessica and Brittany had arrived late to lunch and had taken their time, most of the cafeteria had cleared out by the time they got ready to leave.
“Are they, like, following us?” Brittany asked Jessica, gesturing over her shoulder with her chin.
Jessica shook her head. “I think they’re too spacey to even know they’re behind us.” She could hear the eighth graders babbling away behind her. They were discussing something about getting a ride from their moms.
“Hey, babe!” Derek called from a couple tables away. “Hey, Brit!”
Next to him, Roman shot a finger at Brittany, then winked at her. He saluted Jessica.
Jessica and Brittany stopped to pose for their boyfriends. They did it as a matter of course. It was just what came naturally when the boys were looking at them.
“Burgers after practice?” Derek called.
Jessica and Brittany nodded and blew the guys a kiss.
Then they turned and glided toward the cafeteria exit. It was always important to leave while you still had them hanging on.
At the exit, Brittany suddenly lurched to a stop and almost fell over. Jessica grabbed her friend’s arm and kept her from going down. She also immediately saw why Brittany had almost fallen flat on her face.
Mindy was kneeling right in the middle of the exit, tying the rainbow-colored shoelaces on her sparkling purple shoes. As she tied, she babbled at Cindy, who stood next to her. “Mom said we can stay at the dance until eleven! I’m so jazzed. I had my dress out last night. The ruffles are so pretty!”
“Can you even believe that?” Jessica asked no one in particular.
Mindy popped up. “Believe what?” She looked from Jessica to Brittany, who was attempting to slice Mindy to bits with her icy look. “What? Oh, oops. I was in the way, wasn’t I?”
“Ding, ding, ding,” Jessica sang.
“Huh?” Mindy said.
Cindy, who had been a few feet from her friend, turned back. “What’s going on?”
Mindy shook her head. “I was being thoughtless.” She smiled up at the older girls. “I really am sorry, guys.” She turned to walk away.
Jessica grabbed Mindy’s arm and yanked her out of the doorway.
“Hey,” Cindy objected. Then she sneezed. She glared furiously at Jessica as she dug out a tissue.
Mindy didn’t say anything. She let Jessica pull her off to the side of the last few stragglers coming out of the cafeteria. Cindy immediately rushed to Mindy’s side.
Jessica let go of Mindy’s pudgy baby arm. “Tell me you were not talking about the homecoming dance just now. Because you couldn’t have been talking about that dance.”
Mindy grinned. “Sure, I was talking about the homecoming dance. Everyone’s talking about it. You’re going to look really pretty with the crown on. I’m sure of it. What color will your dress be?”
Jessica opened her mouth, then closed it. She turned toward Brittany. “Since when do eighth graders come to the high school dances?”
Before Brittany could answer, one of their fellow cheerleaders, Patrice, brushed past. “Oh, don’t get me started, you know? You didn’t hear that the principal said that as long as they’re in classes here, they should be included in the dances?”
Patrice flipped her shiny black hair and made a face. “It’s insanity.” She shrugged and strode away.
Jessica turned back to Mindy. She made a face when she got a whiff of Mindy’s peanut-butter breath. “You do know that you’re nobody, right?”
The pale skin between Mindy’s reddish-blonde brows furrowed. “Is that slang for something?”
Brittany snorted.
Jessica shook her head. “No, you poor pitiful thing. It’s fact. You’re nobody. You and your bug-eyed friend. You. Are. Nobody. You’re coming to the dance together? Because no one asked you out, right? Who would, right?”
“For sure,” Brittany said.
Mindy’s face flushed. Jessica waited for the tears to start.
But they didn’t come.
Instead, Mindy shook her head and smiled. “I feel really sorry for you.”
“What?!” Jessica gawked at Mindy.
“Really,” Mindy said. “I’m sorry. You must not like yourself very much.”
“What?!” This time Brittany joined in with her friend. Brittany’s what was even higher pitched than Jessica’s.
Mindy nodded. She turned to Cindy. “Remember what our moms said, Cindy?”
Cindy bobbed her head and sent her curls shaking. “Sure. When kids are mean to you, it’s because they really want to be mean to themselves, but they can’t. They’re … I think Mom said projecting.” She sniffed, then blew her nose.
“That sounds right,” Mindy agreed. She looked up at Jessica. “It’s okay. You can’t help it. If it makes you feel better to be mean to us, go ahead.”
“No one likes you!” Jessica practically screamed.
Mindy looked around at a couple dozen kids who had stopped to watch what was going on. She chewed on her lower lip. Then she shrugged. “Well, I don’t know if that’s true. But if it is, that’s okay, too. Because we like us, don’t we, Cindy?”
Cindy nodded. “We sure do.” Clutching her snot-filled tissue, she put her arm around Mindy. “We’re friends forever. We do everything together.”
Mindy nodded. “That’s enough for us.” She glanced up at the clock above the cafeteria door. “Sorry to be rude, but we need to get to robotics class.”
Mindy and Cindy turned and hurried away. Jessica stared after them, her mouth hanging open. She felt Brittany take her arm. “Come on, Jess. We need to get to robotics class, too.”
Jessica made a sound not unlike the one Titan made when he spotted a squirrel in his backyard. It was a cross between a growl and a groan.
“I don’t know if I can, like, look at those two for the next hour,” she whispered to Brittany.
“I know, right? Can you even believe what she said? It was, like, cray-cray.”
Jessica didn’t respond. She was too angry.
Projecting, she thought. The nerve of the little—
“Come on,” Brittany said. “We’ll figure out what to do about them later. We don’t want to miss robotics. Remember? Mr. Thornton is assigning our projects today. I don’t want something too difficult.”
Jessica sighed. “Good point. Let’s go.”
* * *
The robotics classroom was in a mostly deserted wing of the school. Jessica knew the wing still had storage rooms that were accessed from time to time, but the classroom that robotics was in was the only one being used. The school once had a very active art program and dance program in this wing, but budget cuts had shut down those curricula. Money was funneled into robotics and computer programming instead of the arts, and even that wasn’t enough money. The reason their class was using old, donated animatronics was because there were no funds to buy state-of-the-art robotic parts. The classroom didn’t get much attention from janitorial or maintenance, either. It was usually far too dusty to suit Jessica.
But Jessica didn’t care either way about the arts or robotics. She wasn’t particularly good at computers, painting, or dance. Her forte was form, not function. Oh, and that reminded her—maintenance should do something about the function of her locker.
The robotics classroom was a large warehouse-like room with tall ceilings guarded by exposed metal beams. The floors were covered with rubberized interlocking squares, and the metal worktables were bright red. Gray pegboards lined the walls of the room, and every robotics part you could think of hung on hooks from those boards. The room was far too industrial to suit Jessica’s tastes, but she tolerated it like everyone else.
Even though robotics was a required class for sophomores, and many of Jessica’s classmates groused about it, she secretly didn’t mind it. Most of the time she didn’t really understand what she was doing, but she did think it was fun. And it played into her other strength: control. Of course, she liked control best when she was controlling people, but controlling machines seemed to be a natural extension of that.
Even with all her beauty and social skills, Jessica never got everything and everyone around her to act just as she wanted them to. There was always someone who was saying the wrong thing or doing the wrong thing. Take the two redheaded morons, for instance. With her class popularity and physical presence, she should have been able to wrap Mindy and Cindy around her manicured finger. That they didn’t afford her the appropriate amount of reverence was like having a splinter stuck just under the skin. She hated when that happened. She hated Mindy and Cindy even more.
The room’s red tables sat in rows, three tables in each of the five rows. Jessica and Brittany took their seats at the middle table in the third row—not too close to the front so they wouldn’t appear to be geeks, not too close to the back where they’d be surrounded by outcasts. They always sat where their vaulted status could be recognized.
The robotics teacher, Mr. Thornton, a short twentysomething man with birdlike features—beady eyes, a pointed nose, and fine brown hair—strode into the class and set a stack of books and schematics on his desk. Jessica shook her head at the red-and-gold diamond-patterned sweater vest that hung loosely over Mr. Thornton’s narrow chest. Between the vests he always wore and his thick, black-rimmed glasses, Mr. Thornton was the poster boy for geeks everywhere.
Mr. Thornton looked askance at the class, as he always did. He had a little trouble with eye contact. He never faced straight at the class, and when you talked to him directly, he focused his gaze about a foot above your head. Jessica thought that was sort of endearing, in a lovable-nerd kind of way.
“Talk among yourselves for a few minutes. The shipment just came in, and I need to supervise the …” He trailed off and disappeared into the workroom adjacent to the robotics classroom.
That was something else Mr. Thornton did. He frequently left his sentences unfinished. It was weird. Once, Brittany suggested that Mr. Thornton might be an animatronic, one with advanced programming and a minor glitch that prevented him from completing his communications. Jessica thought that was hysterically funny.
“What do you want to do about them?” Brittany asked.
Jessica blinked and looked at her friend. “What? About who?”
Brittany nodded toward Mindy and Cindy, who were sitting in the front row. Jessica looked at the backs of the two redheads.
Mindy and Cindy had only joined the class a couple weeks before. Apparently, they were part of some gifted class that did robotics competitions. They even worked out of the robotics lab—meeting early each morning before the school day began. And now they were auditing the sophomore class. Little freaks.
Jessica opened her mouth to answer her friend, but before she could, a loud clattering and thumping accompanied Mr. Thornton back into the room. The racket came from the wheels of a cart he was pushing in front of him. The cart was piled with things that looked like they should have been either in old sci-fi movies, amusement parks, or circuses.
Momentarily forgetting Mindy and Cindy, Jessica sat up straight and leaned forward to see what was on the cart. She spotted a couple of silver robot skeletons, vaguely man-shaped gray robots that looked like aliens, and several mechanical animals. Many were dog- and cat-shaped, and a few looked like miniature barn animals and exotic animals. She spotted a cow, a horse, an orangutan, a black panther, a flamingo, and a huge pink pig. The pig was the only life-sized thing on the cart. The cow, horse, and panther were about the same size as the dogs and cats.
All the mechanical animals looked like they were designed to stand on their back two feet, and most wore some piece of clothing or accessory, reminding her more of sports team mascots than real animals. Jessica saw a couple bow ties and vests, two feather boas, short pants with suspenders (on the flamingo), a bowler hat, striped socks, and a pair of red gloves. The pig was the closest to being fully dressed; it wore what looked like a frilly waitress uniform in a shade of pink just a little darker than its fuzzy piggy skin. Atop its broad head sat a pillbox-shaped pink cap with a ruffled edge. Other than the outfit, and the fact that it had fuzzy pink hands instead of hooves, it looked a lot like a real pig.
