A Month of Mondays Page 4

  “What’s that have to do with us?” she asked.

  “Well, there’s an odd number of students in both the Honors English Class and in Suze’s English class.”

  The stupid class was what he meant. The class where I was the only one who read the books, and the rest of the class found summaries on the Internet. The class where we’d talked about Great Expectations for so long I could’ve written the book myself. The class where everyone else slept, and I read my paperbacks.

  Until the year before there wasn’t an Honors Class, but Baker talked the school board into letting him try it, so then all the smart kids got to stick together and do more homework or whatever. It was supposed to get them ready for high school, but I was glad I wasn’t in it. From what Amanda told me, it was a ton of work.

  “I thought since you two know each other,” Baker continued, “maybe you’d like to work together on your project.”

  I sat up straight, alarmed. Do school work with Amanda? Was he crazy? His plan made it pretty clear he wasn’t in love with either of us. In fact, I thought he must hate me. Amanda wore this really skeptical look, and I couldn’t believe it. She didn’t want to get stuck with me? Well, the feeling was mutual. But apparently it wasn’t up for discussion. Baker had already decided.

  “Do we have to do the speech twice?” I asked.

  “Good question, Suze,” Baker said. “I hadn’t considered that, but we’ll figure something out.”

  “What’s the subject?” Amanda wanted to know.

  “That’s entirely up to you. But it needs to be something important. It should be a topic you feel strongly about. One that will affect you students, either now or in the future.”

  I didn’t say anything, because I was thinking the whole idea sucked, and Farbinger had banned that word from school. Probably because I used it too much last year.

  “It sounds interesting,” Amanda said.

  Suck-up works for describing Amanda, but I probably couldn’t get away with saying that either.

  “I hope you two will find it very stimulating to work together,” Baker told us. “There’s such a wide variety of issues to choose from.”

  “Yeah…I’ve already got a few ideas,” Amanda said.

  Who was she kidding? Sheesh! Even Baker hadn’t just fallen off the teaching truck. She was making me gag.

  “Suze? What do you think?” he asked.

  “I guess if I have to,” I said. “Sounds like you’ve already decided.”

  Amanda shot me a bug-eyed look, like she couldn’t believe I’d be rude to a teacher. I didn’t care. This was so unbelievable I couldn’t even bother to fake it. You’d think working with your friend would be cool, but Amanda’s a freak about school. She’s all straight As and school government and pep rallies. I like to do what needs to be done, lie low, and skip the whole school spirit thing. I knew working with her would end up being a huge production, and I couldn’t figure out why Baker was making us do it.

  After five more minutes, which felt like five hours because of Amanda gushing about how cool it would be, he finally let us go. But not before she’d invited me over to her house to discuss it. She did it right in front of Baker too, and I couldn’t think of any good excuse, so I said okay.

  By the time we got to the front doors of the school I was so angry I wanted to whack something with my backpack—maybe Baker. He really burned me up. What was he thinking? That I was a total moron? An idiot? A sucker? Just because I was getting a C in English didn’t mean I was completely stupid. I knew what he was up to. He thought Amanda could teach me something. Whatever.

  I stopped inside the heavy doors. “Just a sec.” I set my bag down and pulled my gloves out of my pockets. The wind whistled through the cracks around us. “Are you sure this is a good idea?”

  “What?” Amanda asked. “Working together?”

  “Walking all the way to your house. It’s freezing out there.”

  “It’s only seven blocks.”

  “Seven cold blocks.”

  “Well, if you weren’t wearing a miniskirt—”

  “This isn’t a miniskirt. It comes all the way down to my knees.”

  “In case you haven’t noticed, it’s winter.”

  “It’s not like we live in the Arctic. It’s just rain.”

  How she’d turned the conversation around from me saying it was too cold to walk to her house to making me defend the weather, I wasn’t sure. She’s good at things like that. But I knew why she was being so snarky. It was because she didn’t want to work with me, but we’re friends, so she didn’t want to admit it. I pushed past her and opened the door.

  Technically it was still autumn, anyway. Sometimes Amanda is so smug it makes me want to puke. Her clothes are always spotless, and I think she even presses her jeans. And she always looks beautiful. That is, of course, because she is beautiful—the exact opposite of me.

  She’s got thick golden hair while mine’s wiry black, with bleached-out orange streaks thanks to me allowing Leigh to play hairdresser a couple of months ago. Like in the romance novels I read, Amanda’s eyes are pools of green. Mine are dull brown. And let’s not talk about her perfect skin or I really will hurl. Amanda’s got these really long legs, too, and she could be a model. Seriously. She really could, because her mother runs a modeling agency. Instead, she wants to be a professional baseball player.

  “So what’d you think of Baker’s idea?” she yelled over the wind.

  I told her it was fine, but that’s all I said. So what if Baker thought I was totally stupid? A real idiot. What did I care? There was no way I’d admit that to Amanda, though, because she’d probably agree. She yelled something at me, like “I think it will be fun to work together,” but the wind whipped her words away so I wasn’t sure what she said.

  It didn’t matter, because I knew what she was thinking. If she couldn’t work with Leigh, then I’d have to do. Just like I “do” every summer when Leigh goes off to Tennessee with her mother. Suze Tamaki. The good old understudy friend.

  Unlike the busy road I live on, Amanda’s neighborhood is something from an old movie or a Christmas card. Big trees, perfect front lawns, mailboxes painted to look like log cabins, or to match the house. A few of them even have those Little Free Libraries out in front with really nice books you can just take. I actually love her street a lot, and as we walked, the surroundings made me calm down a little. Maybe working with her would be okay. After all, I’d known her since kindergarten. We’d done other stuff together, and it hadn’t killed us yet.

  Amanda lived in the prettiest house on her street, white with green shutters, a red brick fireplace, and a stone walkway. Exactly like the kind of place I’m going to live in when I grow up. Unless I’m super rich and I can get a mansion. She flung the front door open and the warm air rushed out to greet us in a way it never does at my apartment.

  “Here,” she said, handing me a hanger.

  Designer coats hung neatly in the closet arranged by color, and gumboots lined the floor. Our closet was loaded down with fishing gear and hockey sticks, and most of the time we couldn’t even get the door closed.

  She started to hand me the red plaid slippers, but I stopped her. “Those are Leigh’s. Mine are purple.”

  “Oh, right.”

  I unzipped my boots and slipped on the pair of fleecy slippers Amanda’s mom, Heather, had bought me last Christmas to wear at their house, since no one’s allowed to wear shoes on their hardwood floors. Today, my frozen toes rejoiced and snuggled in.

  “Mom! I’m home,” Amanda yelled. “Suze is with me!”

  Her mother came into the room with her cell pressed to her ear and waved at us, smiling. She sets her own hours at the agency so she can be here when Amanda gets home—probably to keep her from accidentally killing herself somehow with a baseball and bat. After school one day last year, Amanda was
hitting the ball against the house, and it bounced back and wacked her in the face. When her mom and dad finally got home from work, they’d followed a trail of blood through the house to her bedroom, practically having heart attacks along the way. By then, Amanda’s nose had stopped gushing, and she was watching TV with an ice pack, but they worry about leaving her alone now. Sometimes she’s not as smart as she seems.

  We walked into the city dump, otherwise known as Amanda’s bedroom. “Good to see your room’s up to par,” I said.

  She threw her backpack down on a pile of laundry. If you could call it a pile. Mostly it was just scattered all over the floor. Amanda’s mess made Tracie look like an amateur. I spotted a bowl of soggy cornflakes on the dresser. Thank God my father put a stop to Tracie bringing food into our room. Of course, paying the exterminator a hundred bucks two months in a row had something to do with that.

  I cleared space on the rumpled bed and sat down. Amanda grabbed a few pairs of panties off the floor, unburied the empty clothes hamper, and dropped them in. Her face was red. It could’ve been the cold outside, but I think she was blushing. She has a problem with that, so I try not to tease her about it.

  “Can I call my dad?” I asked. “I’m almost out of minutes.”

  “Sure. The landline’s around here somewhere.”

  I pressed the pager button on the phone’s cradle, and the cordless handset beeped back at me. I found it under a pile of sports magazines and smelly T-shirts. Amanda went to get us a snack while I called, and Dad answered on the third ring. I was really glad it was him and not Tracie.

  He seemed distracted, probably by something on TV, so I told him I was having dinner at Amanda’s and left out the bit about doing homework. As long as I went to school, that was about as much energy as he could muster toward my education. He didn’t really care about my projects. Then, as we were about to hang up, he stopped me.

  “Oh, hey, Suze, Caroline called. Again.” His icy tone crawled through my ear and wormed its way into my heart. “She’d like to see you and Tracie this weekend.”

  Fat chance if she thought Tracie was ever going to give in. But me? I wasn’t so sure. I didn’t say anything.

  “Suze?”

  Still nothing.

  “Hey, no one’s making you see her.”

  “Dad? Can we talk about this later?”

  “Sure. See you in the morning.”

  God, doesn’t he ever listen to me? “I’m not staying over. I’m just here for dinner.”

  “Oh, right. Well, I’ll probably be at Bill’s anyway. Night.”

  He hung up the phone. Fishing, beer, house league hockey, basketball, and pizza. My dad’s whole life. Me and Tracie too, I guess. Yeah, I knew we counted for something, even if it wasn’t always super apparent.

  Amanda came back into the room carrying juice, vegetable sticks, and some sort of organic crackers that looked like birdseed. “Guess what?”

  “I give up.”

  “They want to fire Yoda.”

  “What?” This definitely got my attention.

  “And not just Yoda, either. Mr. Franklin and Morty too.”

  “Well, I can get with firing Franklin and Morty.”

  “Su-uze,” she said in that two-syllable way she uses when she thinks I’m being unreasonable.

  “Okay, okay. I’m joking. What’d they do to get fired?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “My mom just told me that the school board thinks they can save a bunch of money by eliminating all the custodians. And not only at the Junior High, but the whole district.”

  “So who’s gonna clean the schools?” A vision flashed in front of me of what detention would be like in the future—no more lounging in a desk and reading—I’d be cleaning toilets and raking leaves.

  “They’re going to hire some company that would do it cheaper.”

  “But Yoda’s been the janitor at Maywood for a million years. And he’s not exactly…well, you know.”

  Amanda nodded.

  Some kids thought Yoda spoke bad English because he was from Croatia and had never learned it properly, but my dad had gone to Maywood back in the dark ages, and Yoda had worked there even then. According to Dad, he had something wrong with his brain—some sort of learning disability. He could do his work, but rumors were that he would freak out if anyone asked him to vary his routine.

  His shift used to begin at one o’clock, but they changed it to three o’clock a long time ago. For ages he came in at the old time, even though they told him over and over he didn’t have to. I actually heard it was because he knew what bus to take and he liked the driver. On top of all that, he was kind of old to be looking for a new job.

  “What’s he going to do if they fire him?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Retire, I guess.”

  “That sucks.”

  “I know.”

  We sat there munching on the hard crackers for a while, and then I got one of my most brilliant ideas ever. “Amanda! I know what we can do for our English project.”

  “What?”

  “Save the janitors’ jobs!”

  “Seriously?” she asked.

  “Why not? Baker said it should be something that affects us now or in the future. This totally does.”

  “I guess.”

  “Come on, this is a great idea.”

  “I was thinking of something more…I don’t know…maybe about sports?”

  I forced myself not to roll my eyes because I knew I’d never win an argument that way. “Sports are good,” I said in my most diplomatic tone, one I usually reserved for talking Dad into something, “but I could use my Super Power on a project like this.”

  Amanda looked up from the carrot stick she was gnawing on and smiled. “Yeah…that’s true. You could.”

  Last year, when I got in trouble for beating up John Boreman because he’d stuffed some grade sixes in garbage cans, Amanda had told me I had to stop fighting other people’s battles for them. And I’d told her I couldn’t help it, standing up for the underdog was my Super Power. After that, she and Leigh had called me SuperUnderdog for the rest of the year. It had died out over the summer, though, and neither of us had mentioned it in a long time.

  “SuperUnderdog lives again!” I said.

  Amanda jumped up and grabbed my arm, holding it up in the air like a winning prizefighter. “Able to save small boys from trashcans.”

  “To spot Kick Me signs from fifty paces away and destroy them!”

  “Able to fight the big fight so the little guy doesn’t have to!”

  “Yeah!” we both yelled.

  “We can do this,” I said.

  “I’m in!” Amanda threw her arms around me and gave me a bear hug, squeezing the breath right out of me.

  This was exactly what I needed right now to take my mind off Caroline. A cause. Someone else’s fight. Between us, Amanda and I could prove why the school’s custodians were so important. I was still mad at Baker for pairing us up like I was a dummy or something, but saving the janitors’ jobs…I could help Yoda. And if Mr. Franklin and Morty got to keep their jobs too—well, you couldn’t win ’em all.

  “SuperUnderdog and her faithful sidekick…” I paused for a minute, trying to think of a good name for Amanda, and then I got it. “Her sidekick, OverAchiever, to the rescue!” I shouted, jumping up and pumping my fist.

  “Hey?” Amanda said. “OverAchiever?”

  “It’s a good thing in this case.”

  She laughed. “Yeah, okay.”

  Maybe working with Amanda was going to be all right after all.

  Chapter 7

  On Saturday, I woke up at six-thirty as usual. I’d spent most of my allowance for the month already, and there wasn’t a lot to do that early, so I was snuggled under the covers reading a fantasy novel. It was kind of a lame s
tory, but sometimes you gotta make do.

  My back was aching from the lumps in the mattress, but it was way too warm in bed to get up, because the heat wouldn’t be on in the living room yet. We should’ve listened to Dad when we were kids, and he told us not to jump on our beds. They really hurt now.

  Tracie was still out cold. She lay on her stomach, her long, silky black hair spread out all over the pillow, drool running down the side of her mouth. Wouldn’t her friends love to see her now? My phone battery was dead, so I scanned the room for the old-fashioned film camera I bought last month with my birthday money from Caroline. Usually it’s on a hook by my wardrobe, but it was gone. No doubt Dad had borrowed it to take a picture of a fish or something and forgot to put it back. If he hadn’t lost it overboard, already.

  Before I could decide if it was worth climbing out of my toasty bed to look for it, the landline rang in the living room. Caroline hadn’t called in a few days, so Tracie had stopped taking the handset to bed with her. Answering it was up to me. Dad had undoubtedly left to go fishing already, and my sister doesn’t take calls before noon.

  I knew who it was. Aunt Jenny. She believes in getting up at the crack of dawn and she never pays attention to what time it is when she phones. Her day starts then, so everyone else’s should too. Luckily, I’m always up on Saturdays when she calls. I kind of wanted to ignore it because I was so warm in bed, but I figured I better answer, because I’d seen what we had in the cupboards, and, unless I wanted to go grocery shopping, we needed an invitation for dinner. She’s a great cook, and always sends leftovers home with us too.

  It had already rung four times when I found the handset in the kitchen behind the bread. “Hello?” I hopped up and down on the icy floor in my bare feet. The air was so frosty I could practically see my breath. That’s the problem with electric heat. It’s major expensive and you can’t afford to have it on when you really need it most.

  “Susan? This is your mother. How are you?”

  Oh, man. Since it had been a few days since she’d called, I had thought I was home free. Apparently she was back at it again. Now what was I going to say? Maybe I could start speaking a foreign language. I took French at school, but everything I knew had flown right out of my head. I knew a little from the Japanese channel on cable. Would she fall for that?