Truth about Truman School Read online

  “Not a clue,” I said.

  Trevor:

  Okay. I’m kind of into comic books. Not just reading them, but drawing them, too. I had this one—well, it was about a math nerd named Nero. Nero was this eighth grader who didn’t have any friends. He got picked on and stuff because he was like a human calculator. But then one day he saved this homeless guy’s life, and the guy gave Nero super powers, so he went out and he saved the world and stuff. It sounds weird, I know, but it was actually pretty good. I mean, it had a good story. And well, the drawings weren’t bad, either.

  I just sort of wondered if maybe the people who were doing the Truth about Truman ever thought about having a comic strip on their website? The only thing was, I didn’t want them to know who I was because, well … let’s face it, I wasn’t exactly the coolest guy at school. We all know that, right? People would probably laugh if they knew I wanted to do a comic strip about an eighth-grade superhero.

  Of course, they’d probably laugh no matter what I wrote a comic strip about. Kids at school were always laughing at me. Half the time I didn’t even know why.

  But everyone likes comics. Even cool kids like comics. Have you ever met anyone who doesn’t like comics? It’s the most popular section of the newspaper!

  So I emailed the Truth about Truman about my idea. I scanned in a couple frames from Nero to show them I could draw and that I knew how to put a comic strip together. I told them a little about the story, but I also said I could do a whole new comic if they wanted. It didn’t have to be Nero. It could be any kind of comic they wanted. It could be a story or a single frame. Color or black and white.

  I didn’t know what else to say. That was probably good enough.

  I signed my email “Comicbookhero365,” which was also my email address. I was pretty sure nobody at school knew who that was. Nobody at school even knew I could draw. Then I grabbed my mouse and moved the cursor over to the SEND button. But I couldn’t quite bring myself to click on it.

  What was I thinking, trying to pass myself off as a comic strip artist? No way would these people who were doing the Truth about Truman, whoever they were, be interested in anything I sent them. For a middle-school website, or newspaper, or whatever it was, it was really professional-looking. There were probably ten other people lined up to do comics for them. And all ten of those people were probably way better artists than I was. For sure they were more popular than I was.

  But … what if no one else had volunteered to do a comic for them? What if they really wanted a comic?

  I’d never know if I didn’t send the email. So I clicked SEND before I could change my mind.

  Forty-five minutes later I had a response:

  Dear Comicbookhero365,

  The Truth about Truman is everybody’s website. That means anybody can post an article, a picture, a video, or a comic strip. We like your comic a lot, so we think you should definitely post it. Let us know if you need help.

  —Truth about Truman Webmaster.

  Wow! Did I read that right? They liked my comic strip? A lot? I got goosebumps when I read that! This was one of the best things that had ever happened to me.

  I started to imagine this whole big thing where everyone at school would be trying to figure out who comicbookhero365 was. Even the cool kids. And when everyone found out it was me, they’d come up and say stuff like, “Trevor! We had no idea you were so great!”

  Before I knew it, I’d be the guy everyone wanted to hang out with. I’d get invited to all the parties and girls like Hayley Wood would be all over me. I’d be so busy I wouldn’t even have time to be a comic book hero anymore.

  Lilly:

  So Hayley decided that if a bunch of kids at Truman could start an underground newspaper/website then she, Brianna, and I should be able to start a cheerleading squad. Well, first of all, I doubted “a bunch of kids” had started that website. Like I said before, I was pretty sure it was just one kid: Zebby. Maybe Amr was in on it, too. Amr was the one who knew all about computers. No way was it a “bunch of kids.” Still, I had to agree with Hayley. If Zebby and Amr, of all people, could start an underground newspaper/website, then we should totally be able to start an underground cheerleading squad. I just wasn’t sure we could do it by Friday.

  We knew there’d be a lot of girls who’d want to do it with us (like Cassie and Kylie and Morgan), but Hayley, Brianna, and I thought it should be just the three of us because, well … I don’t mean to brag, but we were the popular girls.

  Hayley also thought that whoever was doing the Truth about Truman could write about us. But if it really was Zebby’s website, I knew she’d never do that. She’s got a thing against cheerleaders (she’s got a thing about a lot of things!), and she sure wouldn’t write a story about us for her precious website.

  But I was a little surprised when she, or whoever the webmaster of that site was, said we could write one. And that we could even upload a video of ourselves. In fact, it made me wonder for a second if the Truth about Truman really was Zebby’s site.

  Brianna thought she could get her stepbrother to record us and send the video in for us.

  “So all we need to do now is learn some cheers!” Hayley said.

  We also needed to figure out what we were going to wear, and we needed to get some pompoms. I didn’t think we had any hope of being ready in time, but no one tells Hayley Wood she can’t do something.

  So we all stayed after school on Wednesday, and Mrs. Conway helped us find some books on cheerleading. Then we all got on a computer and looked up different cheers on the Internet.

  On Thursday we went to Brianna’s house and practiced everything we’d learned for like three hours straight. I was surprised how good we were! I think it helped that we’d all taken gymnastics.

  Once I was sure we weren’t going to fall flat on our faces Friday afternoon, I started getting really excited about this. I always wanted to be a cheerleader, and I always wanted to have a boyfriend who was on the football team (which Reece is!). Back when they were in high school, my mom was a cheerleader and my dad was a football player. I thought it would be so cool if they both came to one of our games. Maybe they’d even remember that was how they got together in the first place.

  I know … not likely, considering it had been like six months since I’d even seen my dad. And he only lives fifty miles away.

  We had so much to do to get ready for that first game that I didn’t have time to think about milkandhoney.

  Those days right before the game? That was the last time I remember feeling truly happy.

  Zebby:

  Amr is my best friend, but he’s Muslim, so he can never do anything right after school because he always has to pray for half an hour first. That’s why I sometimes stay after school and hang out in the media center with Mrs. Conway. I like talking to Mrs. Conway about books and stuff, and after school is usually the best time to talk to her because the only people who are ever in the media center after school are Trevor Pearson and Sara Murphy.

  But one day I went in there after school and Lilly, Hayley, and Brianna were sitting at three of the computers. You could smell their perfume all the way over by the door.

  What were they doing here? I wondered. Did they even know how to read? (Okay, that wasn’t nice.)

  I started to turn and walk away, but Mrs. Conway called me back.

  “Zebby, come here. That book I told you about last week is in.” I knew which book she was talking about—the one about women journalists. I was really anxious to read it, so I held my breath as I walked past those girls and went over to the checkout desk to get it.

  “I haven’t seen you in a while,” Mrs. Conway said as she checked out my book.

  “Yeah, I’ve been busy with
school and stuff,” I said. I was tempted to tell her about the Truth about Truman School. I wanted to tell her, See, it was okay that I quit the Bugle. Look at this! Look what Amr and I started. Don’t you think this is a way better newspaper than the Bugle?

  But if Amr and I really weren’t telling anyone the Truth about Truman was ours, then we couldn’t tell Mrs. Conway, either. So I took my book and left.

  Amr:

  Zebby and I were stoked. People knew about the Truth about Truman.com now. I even saw some seventh graders checking it out at the public library. Every time I saw our site up on some computer somewhere, I thought to myself, that’s our site. Mine and Zebby’s.

  “It was just like we said,” I told Zebby when she came over late Friday afternoon. “All we needed was one person to find our site.”

  “All we needed was for the right person to find our site!” Zebby corrected. She tossed her sweatshirt onto my bed. “Too bad the right person had to be Hayley Wood.”

  “Hey, look at it this way,” I said. “One reason you don’t like people like Hayley and Reece is you think they’re users, right?”

  “Yeah … ”

  “Well, for once we’re using them,” I said. “We’re using their popularity to increase the popularity of our site.”

  Zebby grinned. “That’s an interesting way of looking at it.”

  “So let’s see just how popular we really are,” I said as I turned on my computer.

  Zebby pulled up a chair and I logged in to the domain control panel.

  “Look at that!” I cried, pointing at the screen. It was even better than I expected. “We’ve had a total of four hundred and seventy-two hits since we launched!”

  Zebby’s eyes about popped out of her head. “That’s like half the school.”

  “Well, only if nobody ever got on more than once,” I said. “But still, it’s good! It’s very good.”

  Zebby grabbed the mouse. “Let’s see what all these people have been doing,” she said. “Have they just been reading, or have they been writing comments and posting new articles, too?”

  I watched as she logged onto our site.

  “They are commenting,” she cried, surprised. There were two or three comments under most of our articles, and seven comments under the Stupid Rules article.

  “And look. They’re voting, too,” I said, pointing to our poll. Mr. Reddy still had the most votes for Absolute Worst Teacher. But one of the math teachers, Mrs. Connor, was giving him a run for his money. (That bugged me a little because I thought Mrs. Connor was a pretty good teacher.) Even Mrs. Horton, our school counselor, had a couple votes for Absolute Worst Teacher.

  “We’ll have to get some more articles up so people keep coming to our site,” Zebby said.

  “We?” I groaned.

  “Well, maybe other people will start posting articles, too,” Zebby said, scrolling down the site. “Maybe that person who wants to do a comic strip will post the first installment soon.”

  “And there’s a football game today, so maybe this weekend Hayley will post her video.”

  Zebby wrinkled her nose at that idea, then continued scrolling down the site. “Hey, look!” she cried. “Somebody posted a new poll.”

  “Really?”

  “Uh-oh,” Zebby said.

  “What?” I said. “What’s the matter?”

  And then I saw what was the matter.

  Zebby:

  Who’s the biggest poser at our school?

  I read the new question out loud. But it wasn’t just a question. If you clicked on the question, you got a picture to go along with it. An old elementary school picture of a girl who was sort of fat when the picture was taken.

  Whoever posted this didn’t say who it was in the picture. They wanted people to guess who it was. That was the whole point to the poll.

  Well, I didn’t have to guess. I knew who it was. So did Amr. And so would anyone who had gone to Herbert Hoover Elementary with all of us.

  It was Lilly Clarke.

  “Wow,” Amr said. “Are we really going to leave that up for everyone to see?”

  I turned back to the picture of the unsmiling, fat girl with the greasy hair. And it was like our entire relationship—me, Lilly, and Amr—flashed before my eyes.

  I live three houses away from Amr. Lilly lives across the street and down two more houses from Amr. Our houses were all built right around the same time, so we all moved in right around the same time. The summer before kindergarten.

  From kindergarten through fifth grade, the three of us did everything together. We walked to and from school together, then spent afternoons running back and forth between Lilly’s swing set, Amr’s computer, and the old tree house we found in the woods behind my house when we were in first grade. Lilly wasn’t fat then. We spent summers at the pool, and winters building snow forts into the hill in Lilly’s backyard. We learned how to ride bikes together, we learned how to ice skate together, and we learned how to play T-ball together.

  Our parents were friends, too. So on the weekends, our whole families got together. In the summer, our parents would grill hamburgers and then sit out around the fire pit in our backyard while us kids ran around the neighborhood. In the winter, they’d order pizza and play games of … whatever it was they played while the three of us hung out in somebody’s basement.

  Then, when we were in fourth grade, Lilly’s parents got divorced.

  Lilly and her mom stayed in their house, but things were never the same with our families. The three of us stayed friends (for a while), but our families didn’t get together anymore.

  Lilly started to gain weight in fourth grade. And I mean lots of weight. She’d always been sort of pudgy before, but in fourth and fifth grade she was F-A-T.

  Amr and I never said anything about it, though, because Lilly was our friend. We didn’t care what she looked like. Besides, we knew she was going through a hard time.

  Then came the summer between fifth and sixth grade. Lilly went away to some camp for most of the summer and when she came back, she was suddenly thin! She was like a totally different person. She got a new haircut and new clothes, and she started taking gymnastics. That was where she met Hayley and Brianna. Hayley and Brianna came from a different elementary school than Amr, Lilly, and I did, but we all ended up at the same middle school in sixth grade.

  Most sixth graders still hung out with their elementary school friends. But Lilly started hanging out with her new gymnastics friends. And she made it pretty clear that Amr and I weren’t invited. Not that we wanted to be. The only thing those girls ever did was sit around and obsess over their hair, their makeup, and boys.

  “Zebby?” Amr elbowed me.

  “What?” I blinked.

  “What do you think?” Amr asked again. “Can we really leave this up?”

  Well … we said this was everyone’s website. Anyone could post an article. Anyone could comment on an article that’s already up. It said all that right on the front page. So how could we not leave it up? Aside from a few votes for worst teacher and a couple of comments on the articles we wrote, this was the first thing someone else—someone other than me or Amr—had posted. We couldn’t take it down. Even if it was a little bit mean.

  I shrugged. “It’s just a picture, right? It isn’t any big deal.”

  “Right,” Amr said. “No big deal.”

  “And it is the truth,” I pointed out. Lilly really did look like that in fourth and fifth grade. Plus if you asked me, she was a poser. Nothing about her was real anymore. Not since she started hanging out with Hayley and Brianna.

  So … we left the picture up.

  Brianna:

  My stepbrother was being a total pain. Mark was al
ways a pain, but he was being even more of a pain than usual.

  “I don’t even go to the high-school football games,” he said as shooting sounds came from his computer. “Why would I want to go to a middle-school game?”

  “So you can record me and Hayley and Lilly cheering, so we can put it up on this school website.”

  Mark finally killed whatever he was shooting at on the computer (that, or it killed him?) because the shooting sounds stopped and he turned to face me. “I suppose you’ll need me to edit the video and put it up on the website, too?” he said like it was this huge deal. Even though he practically ran the high-school video club single-handedly. He loved video/website stuff.

  “Well, if you showed me what to do, I could maybe do it myself,” I said in a small voice. Though I hated when Mark showed me anything. He always went through it way too fast and then made me feel stupid when I didn’t remember it all. Just because he was really smart and skipped two grades doesn’t mean I’m stupid.

  “Right. You’d do something by yourself. When have you ever done anything by yourself, Brianna?”

  If Hayley wasn’t counting on me to get Mark to do this for us, I would have walked away right then and there. Who needs the abuse? But I couldn’t go back to Hayley and tell her Mark wouldn’t help us.

  “Please, Mark,” I begged. “I really need you to do this. It’s important!”

  “Oh, I’m sure it’s very important,” he snorted. But in the end, he agreed to do it. As long as I took his dishwasher duty for the next week.

  Lilly:

  It would’ve been nice if we could’ve gotten pleated skirts and sweaters like the high-school cheerleaders wore. Not to mention real pompoms. Preferably navy blue and white, like our school colors. But there wasn’t time to get any of that, so we decided to wear our Truman T-shirts with dark blue shorts. And then we found some little blue pompoms on sticks at the mall. They were kind of sad looking, but at least we had something to wave around.