Truth about Truman School Read online

  That girl really creeps me out. It’s not just her skin…she’s weird! She doesn’t ever say anything. If a teacher calls on her in class, she’ll just sit there and stare back at them. She won’t even get up and do a math problem on the board. But here she was hanging over my shoulder like it was any of her business what we were looking at.

  “Keep moving, Freak,” I said. Would you believe she stuck her tongue out at me? Real mature.

  “Whose website is this?” Reece asked.

  “Don’t know and don’t care,” I said.

  There was this list of stupid rules at Truman and you could write in and guess why the rule existed. Sk8terdude, whoever that is, said the reason we can’t use the north stairs is because the teachers hang out there and smoke between classes. And Sweetfeet said he or she saw our principal, Mr. Gates, smoking something, and it wasn’t a cigarette. I smiled. I didn’t have anything to add to that, so I moved on to the section where you could vote for Truman Middle School’s Absolute Worst Teacher.

  Oh, that was easy! I scrolled down the list and clicked on Mr. Reddy because he took a note Lilly and I were passing last week during this boring movie on the Aztecs. He actually shut the movie off, opened up our note (like it was his business) and read it to the whole class. It was all about Brianna’s new shirt and how yellow is so not a good color for her. As her friends, Lilly and I were going to tell her. Just … not like that. Not in front of the whole class.

  You should have seen the look on Brianna’s face when Mr. Reddy started reading. She was so embarrassed. Not to mention mad. So of course that started this huge fight between us.

  We made up pretty fast, but still. The whole thing was Mr. Reddy’s fault. He’s such a totally bad teacher.

  As soon as I cast my vote, I emailed all my friends and told them to go to this website and vote for Mr. Reddy for Absolute Worst Teacher.

  Lilly:

  Everyone thinks the whole thing started with Zebby and Amr’s stupid website. But for me, it started with an email I got somewhere around the time that website first went up. The subject line read: For Lilly. And it was from somebody who called him or herself milkandhoney.

  I had no idea who that was, but I opened the email anyway. There was just one line: Dear Lilly … you are going down!

  My first thought was, huh? Who is this?

  My mom wanted to know why I didn’t say anything about that email when I first got it. Well, it was just an email. No big deal. I hit delete and didn’t think about it again until I got another email.

  This one said: Dear Lilly … have you visited truthabouttruman.com yet? If not, you should …

  This email bugged me a little more than the first one. I guess because it was the second email from milkandhoney, and I didn’t know who that was.

  But there was no threat in that second email. Just a question: Have you visited truthabouttruman.com yet?

  I hadn’t. I’d heard of it. Hayley had sent me an email about it a couple days earlier, but I hadn’t gotten around to checking it out yet. After I read that email, though, I got on the Truth about Truman website to see what it was. It looked like an online newspaper about our school. There was an article about the math curriculum that looked kind of boring, so I didn’t read it, and another article about how five minutes isn’t enough time between classes, a list of Stupid Truman Rules, and a place where you could write about a bad teacher you’ve had. You could even vote for the worst teacher at Truman. Mr. Reddy was way in the lead. Big surprise. He was always yelling. And if your cell phone went off during his class, he took it away and didn’t give it back for like a week!

  It didn’t say anywhere whose website this was, but something like this had Zebby Bower’s name all over it. I should know; I used to be friends with her. We started like five different newspapers together when we were kids. Her, me, and Amr Nasir.

  The Truth about Truman.com looked all right. It looked better than the last newspaper Zebby tried to start. At least this time she’d managed to start something that people actually wanted to read. But I couldn’t figure out why milkandhoney, whoever that was, wanted me to see it so bad. It was just a computer newspaper.

  Then I got the third email.

  Dear Lilly … I know you’ve seen the Truth about Truman.com by now. You should know there’s going to be a special surprise on that website on Friday featuring YOU! Make sure you log on. You won’t be sorry. (Or maybe you will? Hahahaha!!!!)

  — milkandhoney

  Trevor:

  I’m a little surprised everyone’s making such a big deal about all this. So, a few people said and did some mean things to Lilly Clarke online. So what? I’ve put up with way worse things. I’ve had my head shoved in the toilet; I’ve been pushed down stairs; and I’ve had my butt super-glued to a bench in the locker room. I hang out in the media center for half an hour every day after school and shelve books for Mrs. Conway just so I don’t have to walk home when everyone else is walking home.

  Things got so bad for me last year that I actually went to see Mrs. Horton, the school counselor. Which turned out to be a huge mistake. She wanted me to name names. Yeah, right. Like I would really do that. Was she trying to get me killed?

  When I told Mrs. H. to forget it; I wasn’t going to tell her who’d been hassling me, she sat back in her chair and made a little steeple out of her two pointer fingers. “Well, then,” she said. “Maybe things aren’t quite as bad as you’re making them out to be.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that, because things were actually quite a bit worse than I was making them out to be. And unless you’re the kind of person who avoids going to the bathroom at school and/or has to hang out in the media center after school till everyone else leaves, you have no idea what it’s like. So let me tell you: NOBODY LIKES TO ADMIT THEY’RE GETTING POUNDED EVERY SECOND THE TEACHER’S BACK IS TURNED!

  So I just said, “Yeah, I guess not,” and then I started to get up. At least I’d already missed the first ten minutes of P.E. The other guys would already be in the gym, so the locker room would be safe.

  But Mrs. H. pointed to my chair. “Sit back down, Trevor,” she said. She seemed surprised that I was ready to leave.

  “Let’s talk about this some more,” she said, acting all concerned. “You’re clearly having some sort of issue with your peers.”

  Clearly.

  “Does it have something to do with your mother?”

  “No!” I said right away. Because not everything was about my mother.

  “Well, then why do you suppose you’re having so much trouble with the other kids, Trevor?” she asked, like this was some big mystery she just couldn’t figure out.

  Well, gee, Mrs. H., I thought. Could it be that this school is full of—never mind. I won’t say it. What would be the point? I bet Mrs. H. was popular when she was in school. That was why she said such stupid things sometimes. She just couldn’t relate to what kids like me go through sometimes.

  Finally, Mrs. H. leaned across her desk like she was about to tell me something that was going to change my life. “You know, Trevor,” she said. “Sometimes we do things without even realizing it that sort of … set us apart from the other kids. If you could just try a little harder to get along … try a little harder to be more like the other kids … maybe you’d be happier?”

  See what I mean about Mrs. H.?

  Basically, she was telling me to just do what everyone else was doing. Be like everyone else, then everything will be fine. Right.

  Fat lot of good all that did Lilly Clarke.

  Anonymous:

  Write two versions of what happened. That’s what Zebby Bower wanted people to do. Write the nice school version for language arts and then write the truth for the website.

  Wel
l, guess what? I did that. I wrote two versions. But I have to tell you, the version I turned in to Zebby still isn’t the whole truth. I couldn’t write the whole truth. Not even for her, because even though she’s going to change everyone’s name, people from Truman will still be able to figure out who I am, just by what I wrote.

  So I decided to write a third version. This version.

  You won’t be able to tell who I am by the things I write in this version. This version is going to be totally anonymous. Which means I can tell you things this time around that I couldn’t tell you before. The first thing I want to tell you is: Everyone’s making Lilly Clarke out to be this huge victim. Lilly wasn’t a victim. She deserved what she got. The second thing I want to tell you is: I’ve wanted to bring Lilly Clarke down for a long time. I thought I could bring her down by sending her a few emails now and then and scaring her a little.

  But then the Truth about Truman site came along. The Truth about Truman made it easy to bring her down.

  Lilly:

  My boyfriend Reece and I instant-messaged each other almost every day after school. (I LOVED saying that —“my boyfriend, Reece!”) Technically, I wasn’t supposed to be on the computer after school, but after school was the best time to be on the computer because my mom was at work. So I didn’t have to worry about her standing over my shoulder and watching what my friends and I were saying to each other.

  Almost every time I was on the computer, I had a conversation with Reece going in one window, a conversation with Hayley and Brianna going in a second window, and a conversation with somebody else going in a third window.

  Hayley and Brianna were always trying to get me to tell them what Reece and I talked about. Honestly, we never talked about anything very interesting. Most of the time we just did our pre-algebra together. Or we talked about weird things. Like vegetables.

  I remember once, Reece tried to convince me that ketchup was a vegetable. I said it was a condiment. We went back and forth for like twenty minutes. Reece was so funny! That’s why I liked him. (That, and he was cute!)

  But I couldn’t tell Hayley and Brianna that Reece and I were talking about vegetables. So I just said all mysterious-like, “wouldn’t u like to know … ”

  “Ooooooooo!” Brianna typed.

  I used to think my life was sooooooo great back then. I had good friends, a cute boyfriend, popularity … I had everything. But then it all went away. Just like that.

  Brianna:

  Hello? Had no one but me noticed that Lilly was a total boyfriend stealer??? Hayley and Reece used to go out in fifth grade! Everyone knew that. Even people who didn’t go to Central with us knew that.

  Okay. So maybe Lilly didn’t exactly steal Reece away from Hayley, but wasn’t there like a rule that said you don’t go after your friends’ ex-boyfriends? You didn’t see me going after Reece, did you?

  But Hayley never complained about Lilly and Reece. She was always all, Oh, aren’t they a cute couple? Which I thought was very mature of her. I’m sure deep down it really bothered her.

  Lilly did stuff like that all the time. She was totally selfish. In fact, maybe that was why this whole thing happened? Why people stopped liking Lilly, I mean. And why they posted some of that stuff about her online. If you’re the kind of person who goes after your friends’ ex-boyfriends, you shouldn’t be surprised if people get tired of you.

  Hayley:

  So why didn’t our group think about doing an underground school newspaper or website thingie? We’re the ones who really should be telling everyone about our school because, well, let’s be honest … we’re the ones who run things around here: Me and Brianna and Reece and Jonathan.

  Our regular school paper, the Bugle, was so lame. Nobody ever read it. People were reading the Truth about Truman, though. They were posting on it, too. You have to admire people who get something going like that. Even if they aren’t in our group.

  So I got to thinking … maybe there was something else our group could get going at Truman. Like … a cheerleading squad! We didn’t have any cheerleaders at our school. None. Can you believe it?

  Last year I asked our principal, Mr. Gates, if we could start a cheerleading squad, but he said no. He said, “The school doesn’t have enough money for another activity.”

  I said it didn’t have to cost money. Lilly, Brianna, and I would cheer at all the football, basketball, and baseball games (wherever there were cute guys!) for free. But Mr. Gates still said no because “it wasn’t about paying us to cheer, it was about paying one of the teachers to be our faculty advisor.” And the school couldn’t do that.

  So no cheerleading squad.

  But the Truth about Truman didn’t have a faculty advisor, either. Those kids, whoever they were, ran that whole thing all by themselves. So, I got to thinking … why couldn’t Lilly, Brianna, and me start a cheerleading squad all by ourselves? All we had to do was buy some cute outfits and show up and cheer! We didn’t need an advisor any more than the people who started that website needed one.

  Lilly and Brianna were just as excited as I was when I IMed them my idea later that night. They were all, “yeah, we should totally do it! That would be so great!”

  So I said, “Maybe that website—the Truth about Truman, or whatever—would do an article on us? After all, they’re an underground newspaper and we’re an underground cheerleading squad.”

  “Maybe,” Brianna wrote back. “In fact, maybe they’ll even take videos of us cheering and post them on the site?”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  I waited for Lilly to say something, but she didn’t. Reece had probably IMed her, so she was probably writing back to him. He was cute, but he was boring. And he expected you to drop everything whenever he came online. That’s why I dropped him.

  Oh, well. I emailed the Truth about Truman and informed them our school now had our very own underground cheerleading squad and that they (the Truth about Truman people) should come to Friday’s game and write an article about us and shoot some video for their website. We could be like their next big feature!

  Zebby:

  Amr called me to tell me we had some email to answer. It was addressed to the webmaster for the Truth about Truman.

  Whoa! “Some email?” I asked. “As in ‘more than one’ email?”

  “Yeah.”

  I slipped on my crocs and hurried down the street. Imagine my disappointment when I saw that one of the emails was from Hayley Wood, and she was blathering on about some brand new underground cheerleading squad (give me a break!), and how we should cover it for the Truth about Truman.

  I plopped into a chair next to Amr. “Why didn’t you tell me one of the emails was from her?” I asked.

  “What difference does it make who they’re from?” Amr asked. “What’s important is they’re from people who are reading the Truth about Truman.”

  I just glared at Amr. He knew how I felt about Hayley and Lilly and that whole popular crowd. Didn’t he feel the same way? Maybe not. Boys didn’t get as caught up in stuff like that as girls did. Which was probably why I preferred to hang out with Amr instead of most of the girls at Truman.

  “The thing is,” Amr began, “like it or not, if people like Hayley and Lilly and Jonathan and Reece are reading the Truth about Truman, then their friends are probably reading it, too. And if all the popular kids are reading it, then everyone’s reading it.”

  “Yeah, but nobody knows it’s our website,” I said. “If people knew it was ours, do you think anyone would read it? Do you think Hayley would read it if she knew we were the ones writing all the stuff on it?”

  “I don’t know,” Amr said. “That’s why we have to think about how we’re going t
o respond to her email. We can’t cover her cheerleading squad. Not if we’re going to stay anonymous.” Amr paused. “We do want to stay anonymous, don’t we?”

  “We definitely want to stay anonymous,” I said. “Which means we can’t cover the cheerleading squad. Aw, darn.” I snapped my fingers.

  “No, but we could tell them they can write an article and post it themselves,” Amr said. “They can post their own video, too. If they can figure out how to do it.”

  I made a face. I did not want cheerleading stuff on the Truth about Truman.

  “We said this was everyone’s newspaper,” Amr pointed out. “Doesn’t ‘everyone’ include people like Hayley and her crowd?”

  I sighed. I wished it didn’t have to. But Amr had a point.

  So this is what we wrote to Hayley:

  Dear Hayley,

  The Truth about Truman is everybody’s website. That means anyone can post an article or a picture or a video. Feel free to write whatever you want about your cheerleading squad and upload your videos. (Email us back if you don’t know how to do it.) I’m sure everyone would love to hear how you started your cheerleading squad and see your video. Good luck!

  —Truth about Truman Webmaster

  Amr thought we should say that bit about how everyone would love to hear how she started her underground cheerleading squad (as if it were really that hard) and see her video to butter her up (and keep her and her friends reading our site). It about killed me to type those words, but I did. For the good of our site.

  “Now who’s the other email from?” I asked after I sent our response to Hayley.

  “I don’t know,” Amr replied. “Comicbookhero365. Any idea who that is?”