Like Mandarin - Kirsten Hubbard [43]
Leadership: the Musical
Once you have mastered the essentials of leadership, it’s time to perform! A requirement.
I wasn’t sure how I felt about that last course. Actually, I wasn’t sure how I felt about any of the courses. For now, I decided to concentrate on my victory. Everything that came with it could be put off until later—including telling Momma.
Because although Momma loved a good win above anything else, I suspected her reaction might be a little underwhelming, considering how busy she was preparing for the tri-county pageant. An essay contest couldn’t compare. Momma didn’t even read books for fun, let alone my school papers.
My brain fog lasted until lunchtime, when I almost went to sit by Alexis & Co. Fortunately, Mandarin intercepted me just in time. She held a paper cup filled with grapes so purple they looked black. Only then did I remember she hadn’t been in geometry that morning. Mandarin’s missing class wasn’t anything out of the ordinary, but I had the troublesome sensation I’d forgotten something.
“How’s it going?” she asked.
“It’s going great!”
Before I could elaborate, Mandarin pointed at my tote bag. “What’s all that?”
I glanced at my bag. The leadership pamphlets stuck out like a peacock tail. “They’re—”
Now it doesn’t matter that you didn’t win that stupid trip, Mandarin had said in the cottonwood storm. We’ll be long gone by then.
And just like that, I realized what I had forgotten. But how? How could I have?
Because to me, it was never real.
I couldn’t let Mandarin know about the conference. Not yet. I knew she hated liars, but I had no other choice. “Stuff for the service project,” I said. “Just some ideas.”
“Boooring,” she drawled.
“Yeah. It is.” I started to ramble. “But it could be fun, if we do it together. We don’t have to whitewash walls or anything, like Tom Sawyer. I mean, really, the possibilities are endless. What about—”
Mandarin threw a grape at my forehead.
“I guess you’re right, though.” She bit another grape in half. “As much as I hate to admit it. I’d like to get the hell out of here respectably and all, so we should get that damn thing over with. How ’bout you come over after dinner?”
“Sure.” I adjusted the pamphlets so they fell inside my bag, and followed Mandarin out to our usual place at the lilac planter, that morning’s excitement already settling into something more like nausea.
To make matters worse, Mrs. Mack had lab groups planned—and she’d stuck Davey and me with Paige Shelmerdine.
Mrs. Mack was a gnomish woman who hadn’t even majored in science. She pulled all our experiments from an old textbook that varied wildly in its levels of difficulty, but she could never distinguish the basic from the impossible. One week we might be mixing two simple chemicals and recording the shifting colors. The next week’s experiment might require masses, microscopes, Avogadro’s number, and calculations so nuanced even I had trouble figuring them out. Frequently, foul odors were involved.
I expected that day’s lab to resemble the past week’s Identification of an Unknown Substance. (The substance turned out to be grape Kool-Aid.) So when Mrs. Mack said, “Today we’ll test properties of different rocks,” it seemed like God was trying to cheer me up.
Or to compensate for Paige Shelmerdine.
Paige wasn’t even supposed to be in our class, but her thrice-weekly remedial-reading appointments were scheduled for the same time as freshman science. Administration thought bumping her forward was preferable to holding her back. They didn’t consider how she’d hold back the rest of us.
“There’s so many,” Paige complained as Davey spread our identification charts on the lab table. She had a stuffed nose, and she kept turning her head to the side and wiping it on the shoulder of her blouse.
Davey and I tried to ignore her. “ ‘Igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic,’ ” he read out loud. “ ‘Split into hardness, composition, color, and grain size.’ ”
I pried open the yellow pencil box of rock samples. Most I could name right away. The local ones were all there: agate, quartzite, granite.