Vote for Me! Read online

  She shrugged. “Well, if things are as bad as you say they are between you and Laurel—”

  “We had a fight!” I cried. “People fight all the time. It’s part of being in a family.”

  She shrugged again. “Okay. Forget I said anything.”

  But Beatrice’s “Forget I said anything” did not mean “Forget I said anything.” What it meant was, “You can sit there and try to fool yourself for as long as you want, but what just happened”—whatever “it” happened to be—“is not good.”

  “It’ll be fine,” I said with a lot more confidence than I actually felt. “We’ll make up.” Or we wouldn’t, and Mom and Alan would decide to send me off to boarding school because what would come out is that they loved Laurel more than me.

  Beatrice shrugged again. “Okay. Whatever you say.”

  That was another phrase that meant something else. In this case it meant, “Ha—you are so fooling yourself with that one.”

  “Let’s talk about the election,” I said quickly as we reached Hakim and his doughnut cart on Broadway and Eighty-sixth. One of my favorite things about New York City was that there was a food cart on every street corner. Some sold fruit; some sold hot dogs; and some—my favorite ones—sold doughnuts.

  I paid for a powdered-sugar doughnut and turned to Beatrice. (After the run-in with Laurel in the kitchen, I had been forced to leave the house without breakfast.) “I was thinking that after we get the posters done, I’ll order some buttons—maybe some pencils, too—we’ll bake some cookies, and that will be that.”

  “What do you meant ‘that will be that’?” she asked.

  I shrugged. “Back in Northampton, that’s how the elections are done. Buttons. Pencils. Cookies. Done.”

  She shook her head. “Yeah, well, you’re not in Northampton anymore,” she said. As if the tall buildings, honking, yellow cabs, and women wearing high heels didn’t give that away. “Here in New York, school elections are a lot different.”

  She opened her J’AIME PARIS book bag (J’aime is French for “I love”—Beatrice wants to live there when she grows up) and took out a folder that was labeled OPERATION ELECTION. As soon as I saw it, I couldn’t help getting a little sad. File folders = Laurel. Who I wasn’t talking to at the moment and therefore couldn’t text What have I gotten myself into?!

  She handed me a typed piece of paper. “Things to Do for Operation Election Over the Next Three Weeks,” I read aloud. “Put name on sign-up sheet. Prepare ‘What I’d Do If I Were Elected President’ speech.” I turned to her. “Wait a minute—a speech?” I cried. “No one said anything about public speaking! I’m awful at it. Every time I have to do it, I end up bloversharing!”

  “Of course you have to give a speech,” she replied. “Haven’t you ever seen the news? That’s pretty much all presidents do.”

  “Start meeting with as many Have-Nots as possible to hear their concerns,” I continued reading. I looked up at her again. “What’s a Have-Not?”

  “That’s what I thought we could call the dork population,” Beatrice explained. “Because it sounds nicer. And then we could call Cristina Pollock and the popular crowd the Haves. So it would be the Haves versus the Have-Nots.”

  Huh. That was catchy. So catchy that it almost but not quite made me excited to be running. I looked back at the page. “Set up website, complete with shopping cart so we can sell T-shirts and hats. Set up Facebook fan page and Twitter account. Put together video—” I looked up again. “Video?”

  “Every candidate can do a video.” She handed me a packet of papers with tons of tiny print. “See, because no one’s ever had the guts to run against Cristina before, except that kid from Singapore, there’s never been a real campaign part of the election. But the election rules are on the school website, so I downloaded them.” She pointed to a piece of paper. “See—right there. ‘Candidates are allowed to make videos, provided they are not used to say mean things about other candidates. Otherwise, first said candidate will be promptly disqualified from the race.’ ”

  “But I hate being filmed,” I said nervously. “I get all tongue-tied and sweaty. Sometimes I get nervous on Skype with Connor, and even Dad.” Not like I’d have to worry about that anymore. Dad would be so busy looking at the Babies R Us website he wouldn’t even be paying attention.

  “Look, Lucy, do you want to win this thing or not?” Beatrice asked. “Because if you do, you’re going to have to go all out.”

  Did I want to win? I didn’t even want to run. Right?

  I looked down at the list, which seemed to go on and on. “Prepare wrap-up speech,” I read. “Two speeches? That’s just wrong. We didn’t even have to give two speeches during the oral presentations part of English last year. We only had to give one.”

  “If you win, you’re going to have to do a lot of public speaking,” she replied. “That’s what happens when you’re famous. I mean, look at Laurel.”

  Great. After a Laurel-free brain for the last few minutes, now she popped back in and I had to think about her and how much I missed her. Even if I did think that the way she was handling this whole thing was really stupid.

  “But I don’t want to be famous,” I said. “I like being unfamous.” I hadn’t thought about all that. I mean, if I were president, I wouldn’t be invisible anymore. Which meant that if I was having a particularly bad hair or zit day, people would totally see it.

  I sighed. Forget about spending my afternoons for the next month until the election watching Dr. Maude and telenovelas with Rose. This campaign thing was going to be a full-time job. And I wasn’t even getting paid for it.

  To anyone else, it would’ve looked like the three girls standing in the lobby of the Center for Creative Learning were there to greet people. Dressed in identical pink miniskirts, white tank tops, and black cardigans, all lined up in a row with their hands on their hips, they looked like an ad for pretty, rich girls with pimple-free skin. But I knew better. They were Cristina Pollock, Tweedle Dee (her BFF Chloe) and Tweedle Dumber (her other BFF Marni). And I knew they weren’t there to greet me. Especially when, as we got closer, I saw the very unfriendly, ungreeter-like scowls on their face.

  And especially when a tall skinny blonde girl whose arms and legs were so long that she looked like a piece of human spaghetti came running up to us. “I hate to be the one to tell you this, Lucy, but Cristina sooooo wants to kill you!” she yelled through her mouthful of braces.

  I cringed. Alice couldn’t help the fact that she was deaf in one ear, but the way she yelled things could be very embarrassing.

  “Merci for the breaking-news special report, Alice,” said Beatrice. “Lucy already knows that.”

  I looked at her. Yes, I did already know that. But as my BFF, could she at least pretend that my life wasn’t going to end in five minutes?

  “I can’t believe my entire seventh-grade experience is going to be over before I even make it to homeroom,” I moaned.

  “It’ll be fine,” Beatrice promised me. “Just keep walking.” It was pretty amazing to me how Beatrice wasn’t the least bit scared of Cristina. She said that was because when you’ve seen someone in her underwear during sleepovers back from the days you used to be BFFs with her, it takes away any of the scary stuff. “Alice, get on the other side of Lucy and let’s all link arms,” she said. “That way we’ll act as bodyguards in case there’s anyone hiding in the shadows waiting to try anything funny.”

  I turned to her. “Okay, you really need to stop watching those detective shows,” I said. “Because that stuff is not helping.”

  “Hello, Cristina,” Beatrice harrumphed as Team Have-Not made our human chain stop in front of the Haves.

  “Beatrice,” Cristina harrumphed back. “You’re looking as dead as ever.”

  Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dumber giggled, while Beatrice’s pale white skin got all blotchy with embarrassment.

  This was why Cristina needed to be stopped—because of this kind of meanness.

  I
squeezed Beatrice’s arm in mine. As her blotches faded, Beatrice stood up a little taller. Which, because she was on the short side, didn’t make that much of a difference. “I was hoping with the new school year I wouldn’t have to listen to that again,” Beatrice said. “But I guess you were too busy copying Laurel Moses’s outfit and haircut to come up with original insults. Or original outfits.”

  So that’s why Cristina’s (and Tweedle Dee’s, and Tweedle Dumber’s) outfit looked familiar! It was the same one that Laurel had worn in the most recent episode of Madison. And Beatrice was right—Cristina’s long blonde hair was cut in the same bangs-and-long-layers way. Except Laurel was like a bajillion times prettier than Cristina. Probably because she was so much nicer. Well, when she wasn’t busy turning down my apology.

  Most people, if they got busted on something like that, would’ve turned red, too. But not Cristina. “So Lucy, you’re really going to do this?” she asked.

  I gave a maybe, I’m-not-sure, why-not shrug.

  She leaned in. “Just remember—if you put your name on that sign-up sheet at the end of the day, you are so going to regret it,” she hissed before turning around on her heel so fast that her hair fanned out like Laurel’s did in the Gee Your Hair Smells Awesome shampoo commercial. It totally wasn’t fair that someone so mean had such pretty hair.

  I already did regret it. And I hadn’t even signed up yet.

  “If you win, I want to be in charge of the social stuff, okay?” Alice said later as we sat at our lunch table in Alaska. That’s what Beatrice called it because, according to her Googling, that was the farthest point north in the United States. A lot of the Have-Nots sat in the same area of the cafeteria. Mostly the drama club geeks, and the band geeks, and the normal geeks like us. In Hawaii, which was the farthest point south, were the gamers. Everyone tried to stay away from them, because of the B.O. factor.

  As for Cristina Pollock, her table was in Lebanon, Kansas, which was smack in the middle of the country.

  “If I’m in charge of the social stuff, I can plan a bunch of dances.” Alice said.

  “Dances? Who said anything about dances?” I asked. If anything, if I were elected I’d try to get rid of the dances at school—especially the Sadie Hawkins one. That was when the girls had to ask the boys. Because I was not going to have to ask a boy to a dance. Luckily our grade wasn’t part of it, but I was going to try to get rid of it entirely so I wouldn’t have to deal with it when I was old enough to go.

  I took out my latest notebook—Important Things to Remember to Do If I Am Elected President—from my tote bag. “Remember to GET RID of Sadie Hawkins Dance!!!!” I wrote.

  “And I want to be in charge of rewriting the school handbook,” Beatrice said. “Like how to behave and what’s considered rude and bad manners and stuff like that.”

  I loved Beatrice, but she could be what Mom sometimes called Alan when I was overlistening to her on the phone with Deanna: a “total control freak.” “I don’t think the students are in charge of the handbook,” I replied. “I think Dr. Rem-Wall writes it.” That was short for “Remington-Wallace,” our principal.

  She shrugged. “Well, the students should get to write it,” she said. “Like, for instance, me.”

  “Guys, I haven’t even officially signed up yet, let alone won,” I reminded them. I turned to Malia Nicolato, a tall girl with long, dark, curly hair who had joined our lunch table threesome and turned it into a foursome. Malia was the new New Girl at the Center. Because I had been the New Girl last spring, I totally understood how she felt.

  Which is why I had passed her a note asking if she wanted to sit with us at lunch, as my new teacher Mr. Eglington (aka Eagle Eye) went on and on about everything we were going to cover in English this year. I knew from experience that the kids at the Center never got the memo that asking New Kids to sit with you at lunch gave you good karma. I had spent my first two lunches last spring in the bathroom, and it had not been fun.

  “Malia, would you like to be part of my campaign for president?” I asked shyly. “If I win—I mean, I probably won’t, but if I do—you can be in charge of something, too.” Granted I had known Malia for only fifteen minutes, so for all I knew she could be completely weird, but it’s not like anyone else was running up asking to be part of my administration.

  She shrugged. “Sure. As long as I don’t have to do anything exercise- or math-related.”

  I smiled. I knew there was a reason I liked her right away. “Nope. None of that stuff will be involved. In fact, I was thinking that one of my campaign promises will be to try and get rid of gym class.” I would have liked to try to get rid of math, too, but I doubted the school would go for that.

  “That’s a good one,” Beatrice agreed. “Most Have-Nots aren’t fans of physical exercise.” She pointed at a table of particularly icky gamers over in Hawaii. “They tend to sweat enough without it.”

  Alice turned to Malia. “Lucy’s going to run against Cristina Pollock—can you believe that?!”

  “Who’s Cristina Pollock?”

  Alice pointed over to where Cristina was walking around to different tables in Hawaii and sampling whatever she wanted from kids’ lunches while they sat there paralyzed. Some kids—like Justin Wagner—were so scared of her that they literally slid down and hid under the table as she got closer. “See that really pretty blonde girl?” Alice asked. “The one who looks just like Laurel Moses? That one.”

  I rolled my eyes. “I keep telling you, Alice,” I said, “other than the haircut, they really don’t look anything alike.”

  Alice turned to Malia. “If anyone would know what Laurel looks like, it’s Lucy,” she said. “They’re fristers.” So much for not being reminded of Laurel. And the fact that we were in a ginormous fight.

  “What’s a frister?” Malia asked.

  “It’s a combination of friend and sister,” I explained. “I thought it was a nicer word than ‘stepsister.’ You know, because when people think of stepsister, they think of girls who don’t really like each other and fight all the time. Also, our parents aren’t married yet.”

  “Kind of like how you and Laurel are fighting now,” Beatrice said.

  “Okay, changing the subject,” I said.

  “Ohhh. That girl. She had some boy put an uncapped red marker on your seat when you went to the bathroom in English,” she said.

  “She did?! I didn’t know that!” I cried.

  “That’s because I reached over and took it off before you came back.” She smiled.

  I smiled, too. Okay, seeing that she had saved me from severe embarrassment on account of the fact that if I had sat on it, it totally would’ve made it look like I had gotten my period, we were officially friends.

  “So what you’re saying is that Cristina is the Chiara Conticchio of the school,” Malia said.

  “Who’s Chiara Conticchio?” Alice asked, confused.

  “The most popular girl back at my school in Milan.” Malia had spent the last two years in Milan because her father, who was a famous painter, was Italian and needed to go back to his homeland for inspiration (“Well, that, and the fact that the rent-stabilized building we lived in went condo and my parents couldn’t afford to buy our apartment.”)

  Chiara Conticchio. That totally sounded like a Mean Girl’s name. “They have Mean Girls in Italy, too?” Alice asked.

  “Oh yeah. Tons of them. And when you’re being bullied in Italian, it sounds even worse than it does in English.”

  “That’s why Lucy’s running for class president,” Alice said. “To stop Mean People–ism and dork discrimination.”

  “Wow. That’s great,” Malia said, impressed. “I was discriminated against up until last year because of my weight.”

  I looked at her, confused. “But you’re so skinny,” I said.

  “And tall,” Beatrice sighed.

  “That’s because I grew six inches in fifth grade,” Malia explained. “Before that I was about your height and I was really f
at. Kids would call me all sorts of names.”

  “But now you look like a model,” Alice said.

  “And your hair is so curly without being frizzy,” Beatrice sighed as she ran her hand through her so-straight-it-tended-to-just-lie-there hair.

  She shrugged. “I may look different now, but I’m still a dork,” she said. “I mean, how many people do you know who know all the songs from Middle School Musical by heart?”

  Alice gasped. “I do! I do!”

  Beatrice and I looked at each other. If she started singing “Gym Class Blues” right then and there, I was going to crawl underneath the table like Justin.

  But that was the difference between Cristina and me. While I may have been embarrassed about my friend and her dorklike behavior, I wouldn’t be mean and say something about it because that would hurt Alice’s feelings. But Cristina—not only would she have said something, but she would’ve teased her about it for months. And probably given her some sort of nickname because of it to boot.

  We went back to talking about the best way to organize the campaign stuff. And I went back to missing Laurel, because next to being a superstar and the Most Beautiful Teen in the World, organization was her specialty. How was I going to get through this thing without her?

  I mean, I still didn’t want her involved because even if she didn’t intend to, she’d end up taking over the whole thing in her take-over-type way. But it would be weird to not have her around for this. It was kind of like ... peanut butter without jelly. Or hot cocoa without marshmallows. Or sliced bananas without maple syrup.

  Just then Jacqueline Mercier walked up to our table. Although not a dorky picked-last-for-volleyball-in-gym kind of Have-Not, she was a sci-fi-and-fantasy-reading Have-Not. “Hey, Lucy? Are you still keeping that crush log?” she asked.

  As I nodded, Beatrice turned to Malia and explained. “Lucy keeps this log where all the girls can put down their crushes.”