Total Knockout Page 8

  An absurd thought flashed through my mind—I was glad Nicole wasn’t around to hear this. The last thing I needed was more bad publicity in View from Above.

  “Well,” I began, telling myself I could help the situation, and Ms. Jenkins. “I haven’t seen the sales stats yet. But I’m sure if we just give the machines—and the student body—some time, people will get used to them and see how great they are. They’ll see how much better they feel, how much more energy they have—”

  “I don’t have time,” she said, shaking her head. “I’m starting to think I made a huge mistake in doing this.” She said “I made a huge mistake,” but what I heard was “You made a huge mistake.”

  “Lucia, I called you in here to ask that you and your council come up with some possible solutions. The school board president is down my throat about this because it’s so costly.” I realized then that Ms. Jenkins might actually be freaking out. Which made me feel freaked out. “The school is losing money,” she said. “Vending machines are an important source of income for us. Do you understand?”

  I wasn’t sure that I understood, but what my mind told me was that if we—if I—didn’t come up with a solution, Ms. Jenkins would lose her job. All because of me.

  Two nights later, a new poll was on the school website:

  Which vending machine would you rather have in the halls of Angus?

  - The healthy machines. The food takes some getting used to, but it makes me feel great!

  - The old ones! With so little to look forward to at school, those Snickers bars really help get me through the day.

  The vote was 92 percent for the old machines. I wondered who the 8 percent was that voted the other way. Probably someone who had nothing better to do than skew the polls. And, okay, I admit I did vote more than once for the healthy food, but not more than five times, so it wasn’t just me who made up that 8 percent. I wondered if Cooper had helped, or maybe even Melanie.

  I clutched Paddy, my only source of comfort these days, willing myself to believe this.

  The next day, and for a week after that, I started using what was left of my meager chore money to buy food from the vending machines. It wasn’t exactly the solution Ms. Jenkins was looking for, but it was all I had at the time. I bought a carob-iced spelt doughnut first thing in the morning, and I always got carrot and celery chips on my way into the cafeteria. I’d ask to go to the bathroom in several of my classes throughout the day to buy a chocolate gilk (goat’s milk) or Sogurt (soy yogurt). I put the food in a cloth bag in my locker; by the end of one week, it was filled to capacity, and a month’s worth of chore money was already gone. I couldn’t keep it up alone. It was financially impossible.

  At home that evening, I sat on my bed and tried to come up with a game plan while eating some cheese puffs I’d found in the back of the pantry. As I wrote and ate I had to keep licking the orange flecks off my fingers. Even though they were loaded with trans fats, they were tasty, and besides, I couldn’t take any more health food.

  I sat on my bed with Paddy beside me and wrote and scratched out ideas. I wondered if I could hold some sort of boxing exhibition, maybe teach students the basic moves for a small fee, the money going toward the machines. No one at school except Cooper knew that part of me—I wondered what everyone would think if they knew? Would they think I was a freak? Would they think it was cool? As I pictured myself showing Lily Schmidt how to throw herself into an uppercut, and gaining more confidence as she did so, another image appeared of someone accidentally clocking sweet, quiet Lily in the jaw, sending her to the shiny wood floor of the gym, out cold.

  As I worked out other ways to make people use the machines and save my approval rating, Cooper called, inviting me to come down and box.

  “It’s weird,” he said over the phone, “but I feel great lately. Like, lots of energy, and my mind has been so sharp, like I could work all day. And the only thing I’m doing differently is eating from those vending machines.”

  Cooper was the worst liar, but I played along. Just knowing he was trying to make me feel good set me at ease, at least a little.

  Down at his house, I wrapped my hands, then started on Cooper’s. I turned his hand flat, working the fabric around his wrist, then up across this palm. As I worked the wrap through his fingers, giving him extra protection across his knuckles—even though he would never hit me hard—I realized that I probably knew his hands better than any other girl did. Maybe even better than he knew them. He always had rough spots across his knuckles, and his right index finger crooked slightly to the left from when he broke it in fourth grade catching a basketball. And like every time I wrapped his hands, we didn’t talk, but this time, up close, I noticed that he had a little splattering of freckles on his nose. They looked nice on him.

  When I finished we pulled on our gloves and set the timer, and Cooper bounced more lightly on his feet than usual. He cricked his neck as if he were about to fight for the heavyweight championship of the world.

  “You’re going down!” he cheered as we started the round.

  In the past, when I felt down about something, boxing helped get me out of the funk. I looked forward to shoving all that negative energy out of my body and getting my thoughts focused again. But that didn’t happen this time. I just felt tired. Cooper swung a lot of fakes at me, waiting for me to hit. I took a few swings, and even landed a couple of soft punches to his arms, but it wasn’t the same. I just went through the motions of pushing my arm forward and pulling my body away.

  “Come on,” he cheered, punching his glove just before my face. “Fight back!”

  In the middle of the second round, I lowered my gloves. I had worked up a mild sweat, but my heart wasn’t in it, and my head was somewhere else.

  “Oh, fine.” Cooper relented. “Want something to eat?”

  Ever since Mr. Nixon had started up his restaurant, their house always smelled of delicious, spicy foods cooking and simmering and baking. Their large kitchen, which was filled with top-notch appliances, spilled into the living room, so whenever someone was cooking, you always felt a part of it. It looked nothing like our kitchen, which was its own isolated room and had a broiler that hadn’t worked in months. It drove my mother crazy, but she said there were better things to be doing with our money, like trying to keep up with the mortgage.

  At the Nixons’ there was a counter between the kitchen and the living room, and Cooper and I parked ourselves at it on the living-room side and leaned over, watching Mr. Nixon stir something in a big, shiny pot. The scent alone made me glad I had come over.

  “How’s that coming?” Cooper asked his dad.

  Still stirring, Mr. Nixon turned to look at us. When he saw me, a smile as big as the pot spread across his face. “Well, hello there, Lucia. How are you, honey?”

  “I’m fine,” I said, feeling warm and relaxed. “Whatcha making?”

  “This here,” he said, “is a new tortilla soup I’m trying out.”

  “I had some yesterday,” Cooper said, “but I said it needed some honey and jalapeño in it.”

  “Yep,” his dad agreed. “Spice and sweet. Y’all ready to test this out?”

  “Sure!” Cooper and I cheered.

  Mr. Nixon’s name was John, and he always insisted that I call him that, but it felt funny, calling an adult by his first name, even if I had known him since I was born. I usually just ended up not calling him anything.

  Mr. Nixon set down two steaming bowls in front of us. “Now hang on,” he said, shuffling around in the kitchen. He turned back and placed a large soupspoon at the side of both of our bowls, then topped our soup with red, black, and yellow tortilla strips. “Dig in, and tell me what you think. Be honest! I can take it.”

  Cooper and I blew gently on the soup in our spoons, then delicately sipped the broth. It was wonderful. I think it was the honey that Cooper suggested that made it so outstanding—that little sweet kick made all the difference.

  Cooper and I looked at each other an
d said, “So good!”

  “Really?” Mr. Nixon asked. “You wouldn’t fool an old man, would you?”

  “No way, Dad,” Cooper said. “This is awesome.”

  “Okay, then. To the menu it goes!” Mr. Nixon said, reaching into his back pocket and pulling out his wallet. I watched curiously as he handed over a ten-dollar bill to Cooper. “Good job, son.”

  Cooper shoved the money into his pocket, telling me, “Consulting fee. Whenever I come up with an idea he uses, I get paid. Ten for food ideas, and five for in-house ideas.”

  “Wow,” I said, truly impressed. “Nice business skills, Coop.”

  “Lucia, how’s your daddy doing?” Mr. Nixon asked as Cooper and I continued to dig into our soup.

  I swallowed the bite I had just taken. “He’s fine,” I answered. I didn’t know if he knew that I knew about the job offer, but I sure wasn’t going to mention it, and I hoped he wouldn’t either. Thankfully, just then the phone rang.

  “Haven’t heard from him in a few days,” he said, as if waiting for me to say more.

  “He’s always home,” I said, trying to sound casual. “Just come on down.” I could feel Cooper’s eyes on me, like he was waiting to see if I would explode or something.

  “Cooper!” his mom called from the bedroom. “It’s Melanie!”

  I turned my head to him. “For you?”

  He shrugged but didn’t look at me. He took the kitchen phone but walked around the corner, into their dining room.

  I stirred my soup, wondering why Melanie was calling Cooper. Maybe they had the same teacher for one of their classes and she was calling about homework? As I played with my food, I thought about the other day on the trampoline and wondered if they’d actually been flirting. I shook that thought out of my head. Besides, I couldn’t help but feel that Cooper was my friend, not Melanie’s.

  “School going okay for you?” Mr. Nixon asked as he poured the remaining soup into a storage bowl.

  “Yes, sir,” I said automatically. I tried to hear what Cooper was saying on the phone but could get only bits and pieces as he paced into and out of my view. When I caught a glimpse, he was biting his lip and muttering, “Uh-huh,” a lot. What was she saying to make him smile like that? And when did he get those calf muscles?

  “They say the friends you make in your teenage years tell everything about how you’ll be in life,” Mr. Nixon continued. “’Course, I don’t think we have to worry about you.”

  I wanted to say, Phew. If you only knew. Currently I’m totally messing up the biggest venture of my career with those vending machines—a prelude to my future in politics?—and meanwhile my two best friends are on the phone talking about God knows what, and I sort of want to kill someone because everything in my life seems to be completely out of order.

  Instead, I took another bite of the soup, but now I tasted neither spicy nor sweet. More like bitter.

  Finally, Cooper finished his call and put the cordless back in its cradle. He sat down next to me but didn’t look at me.

  “What was that about?”

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “Has she called you before?”

  He shrugged. “Yeah.”

  “Y’all call each other?”

  “Yeah, sometimes. Why? It’s not a big deal, Loosh.”

  “I know,” I said, feeling defensive, but all I could think was, What the heck? Trying to sound like I didn’t care, I said, “I just didn’t know y’all were friends, you know, outside the three of us. That’s all.”

  “Well,” Cooper said, “we are.”

  There was a bit of finality in that. He was telling me to back off. He’d never done that before.

  “Fine. Sorry I asked.”

  Cooper finished the last of his soup. “Thanks, Dad,” he said, setting it on the counter. “It was great.”

  “Yeah, thanks,” I said, doing the same. Mr. Nixon took our bowls and rinsed them in the sink.

  “I better get going,” I said to Cooper. Melanie’s call made me feel funny in a way I couldn’t—or didn’t want to—put my finger on. All I knew was that I needed to get out of there, go home, and be alone. I didn’t even want to go back to the garage and get my gear. I just wanted out.

  “Okay,” Cooper said as we walked to the front door. “Hey, you want to jump on the trampoline for a while?”

  “No, thanks,” I said. Even when Cooper was the one making me upset, he was still the one trying to make me feel better. “I should get home and shower.”

  “Yeah, I guess I should too,” he said at the front door. “Shower, I mean.”

  I started down the brick walk, past the just-planted shrubs. “Hey, Loosh?” Cooper called. I turned back to him. “Everything’s cool. Right?”

  I nodded, but I got the feeling that he was just saying what he thought I wanted to hear. Which meant that even he knew everything wasn’t okay.

  “I don’t think my life could get any worse,” I told Melanie on the bus ride to school. I opened a Pop Tart imposter and bit through the dry pastry. Not only had all brand names disappeared from our kitchen, but a lot of my healthy food had too. But that was the least of my problems. This whole thing with Melanie calling Cooper the night before had totally thrown me. Why did I care so much? Did I want him to grab my wrist the way he had grabbed hers that day on the trampoline? I wasn’t sure, but I thought if I confided in Melanie, she might confide in me.

  “Come on, Lucia. Things aren’t that bad.”

  I looked out the window as we left the neighborhood and entered the main road to school. When I got home from Cooper’s the night before, I’d even tried to kiss my elbow to see if I’d turn into a boy. Sad, right?

  “I know. But I mean, well—you’ve seen what they’ve done to the vending machines. Have you bought anything from them yet?”

  Melanie wore a green knit beanie with a little ball on top, and I wondered if there was anything she didn’t look totally adorable in. “I haven’t, but I swear I will,” she said. “I never have any money on me.”

  I held my tongue. Maybe if the machines took credit cards, she would have bought a ton by now. “So, what’s new with you? Anything exciting happening?” It sounded like obvious digging, but Melanie didn’t seem to notice.

  She shrugged. “I’m thinking about taking dance.”

  “Still just thinking?”

  “Well, not regular dance. More like Irish dancing. You know—like in those touring dance shows? Irish jig, that sort of thing.”

  I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I always was. “Why?”

  She pointed to her hat, like that solved everything. Then she said, “My mom was Irish.”

  I wanted to ask more, maybe just ask her directly if she had a crush on anyone, but I was too afraid of learning the truth. I knew I could never be a reporter. Nicole would have had an answer from her by the time the bus rounded the first corner.

  When we got to school, Melanie asked, “We still having a student council meeting after school?”

  “Yep,” I said. “Mrs. Peoria’s room right after last bell.”

  I watched Melanie walk away, her thick curly hair resting against her back, the beanie lying against it. She glanced back and said, “Later,” with the carefree breeziness that seemed to carry her through every day.

  “Lucia, we need to talk.”

  Nicole seemed to have poofed before me just as I shut my locker.

  “Oh, hey,” I said, trying to sound like I wasn’t alarmed and that I had no idea what she wanted to talk about—what she wanted to report on. “Sure, whenever. How about at lunch?”

  There was no chatting with Nicole; only interviewing. She had her lavender notepad opened, pen in hand, and she followed me down the halls. Everything that came out of my mouth would now be on the record. I wondered, not for the first time, if Nicole had it out for me. With her last couple of articles I thought her journalism was getting a little yellow, drumming up scandals to sell her stories.

  “I’m do
ing an investigation on the vending machines, Lucia.” The word “investigation” unnerved me. No—it downright scared me. “What’s going on with them? I heard from maintenance that they haven’t been restocked once. Are you aware that the coaches are allegedly selling illegal candy out by their offices? What’s your council doing?”

  “Look, Nicole,” I said, fully realizing I had to carefully choose my words. Even though my mom taught me to never assume anything, I did assume that Nicole was simply investigating the popularity of the vending machines, and not how they got in our halls in the first place. I said, “Why don’t you come to our council meeting after school today at five after three? Hear for yourself what we’re working on. Sound good?” I glanced down at her Tevas as she jotted this down, wondering if her toes ever got cold.

  “Fine. I’ll see you then.”

  As she walked away, I forced myself to take a deep breath. As long as I kept the press on my side, everything would be fine.

  After school, I headed to Mrs. Peoria’s room. I felt the weight of this year’s issues—the vending machines, the vote, Ms. Jenkins—and I knew how important this meeting was. It had to go perfectly.

  Mrs. Peoria left the moment I walked in the room.

  “I’ll be in the teacher’s lounge if you need anything,” she said, carrying a stack of quizzes and a paperback book. The cover was pink, and I wondered if it was a romance novel.

  I arranged the desks in a circle like always, adding a fifth so that Nicole could join us. When Cooper arrived he sat down across from me and pulled out a notebook and a pen. I noticed he’d gelled up his hair a little more than usual.

  Next Melanie arrived, yawning loudly, her Irish beanie still flopping perfectly to the side despite it being the end of the day. “Hey, guys,” she said as she sat down next to Cooper. Nicole followed closely behind her, and Melanie joked, “What up, Nicole? You finally decide to come to the dark side?” I cringed. I didn’t want Nicole to think we were not all on the same team. I laughed at Melanie’s joke—maybe a bit louder than I should have.