The Owl & Moon Cafe: A Novel (No Series) (41 page)

“Hi,” Lindsay said. “Good luck on your junk-food presentation.”

Belva looked at her dully, and then pointed to the salad dressing Lindsay had drizzled over the greens. “I bet you didn’t know that ranch dressing has wheat in it,” she said.

“Good thing I’m not allergic,” Lindsay replied. “So what do you use for dressing?”

Belva reached into her sweater pocket and pulled out the tiniest Tupperware container Lindsay had ever seen. “My mom makes it for me. It’s just plain vinaigrette.”

“Can you chew gum?” Lindsay asked.

“Not unless it’s free of starch and malt.”

“Toothpaste?”

“Thickeners. I have to buy mine at the health food store.”

“Ice cream?”

“Wheat by-products are everywhere, Lindsay.”

“Candy?”

“Wheat is the main ingredient in red licorice, the kind Dr. Ritchie eats.”

“Next year you should try making wheat-free candy in science. I bet you could. All you need to do is find a recipe and flavors.”

Belva stabbed at her salad and chewed a mouthful before nodding.

Lindsay looked down the table to where the two Cheyennes and Avril and Taylor were toasting their pizza slices by jamming them together. Sally came in just a second behind them, but in that second delay Lindsay saw how deeply bored Sally was with the posse. If they hadn’t gotten caught, if they hadn’t had to pretend, Sally could be sitting with her, and then Lindsay might not be talking to Belva. Somebody was always left out. Why did it have to be like that? She finished her salad, and helped bus the table. Then Sally waved at her and Lindsay knew it was time to bring in the dangerous stuff. She followed her to Gregorio’s truck, which was parked across the street from Country Day. He waved, and they hurried across the lane the minute traffic cleared.

He’d agreed to transport the “product,” he called it. But after helping them grow their crop, he’d moved his growing operation elsewhere. “Your mom’s been good to me,” he told them. “No way do I want to get her in trouble. I vacuumed each piece of gravel in that greenhouse,” he said. “You two keep your lips zipped about getting any help from me,
comprende
?”

“Duh,” Sally said. “We’re not complete morons.”

“Remember, this all started because of my
abuelo
’s rheumatism and your blackmail,
chica.
I’m not a pothead. I don’t go around selling drugs to anybody.”

“Blah blah, blah blah,” Sally said. “This is exactly what you told me yesterday. Cross my heart and hope to die, stick a needle in my eye, I will not mention your name even if they drive bamboo under my fingernails.”

“Thanks for everything,” Lindsay said.

“You’re welcome. Now go win that money!”

He drove off, and Lindsay picked up the box.

“Careful,” Sally said, picking up the shopping bags.

“Like I wouldn’t be,” Lindsay said, annoyed Sally would even suggest she wouldn’t be. “Omigod, I can smell it from here. There’s no way we’re going to sit in the greenroom for five minutes before someone figures this out.”

“Which is why we’re stashing this in the bathroom,” Sally said. “Follow me.”

They carried the bags and box to the bathroom at the far end of the hallway instead of the greenroom, where all the other girls were congregating.

“This is it,” Sally said. “All our hard work and your great paper. All that’s left is wowing them on stage. Did you write out the mission statement?”

“Of course I did.” Lindsay wanted it to be over, so she could go home and reread
The Dragons of Eden.
Maybe Carl Sagan would talk to her again. She’d like to hear his voice, hear him remind her that the world was very old and human beings were very young. Her prescription medicine settled her stomach, but sometimes a person needed reassurance medicine couldn’t provide. It was hard to sleep when your brain was the only part of you that got exercise, and it was hard to relax when all around you were the ways the world could fail you. “Who do you think will win?” she asked.

Sally unfolded the top of the bag she’d carried and Lindsay caught a breath of the cannabis plant, as her by and distinctive as newly mown grass. She wondered if Gregorio would get questioned, but had no doubt Sally would zip her lip at any cost, except maybe if her mom threatened to take away her horse. If that happened, Lindsay planned to take the blame. “
We’re
going to win,” Sally said. “How can you even doubt it?”

Lindsay was done with playing along with Sally’s bravado. “No, we’re not,” she said. “Taylor’s going to win. Did you see her display booth? It must have cost five hundred dollars to build. The letters on it are neon. And excuse me, but an aquarium on loan from Monterey Bay? What good are homegrown marijuana plants against that kind of technology?”

Sally reached into the depths of the bag and pulled out the electric clippers she used to keep Soul Man’s mane roached for horse shows. “We’re not going to rely
totally
on the plants,” she said. “
This
is how we’re going to win this stupid competition. We’re going to shave our heads in honor of your grandma, to whom, remember, we are dedicating this project. The judges are going to bawl like babies, and then they are going to give us the money.”

They hid in the bathroom until show time. Lindsay looked in the mirror, stunned. Her hair was shorn as close as a golf club putting green. She couldn’t stop running her fingers over the stubble, wondering what a phrenologist would make of the bump on the right rear part of her skull. Later she’d read that was the area allotted to cautiousness, but right now her heart was thudding in her chest and she was thinking about Carl Sagan’s bare head when he was trying to get better, taking chemotherapy or his sister’s bone marrow or interferon or whatever last-ditch measure there was to try. No matter what, in every picture his smile seemed happy. Was that because of pot, or did he just love the universe and all its secrets so much that cancer couldn’t erase that? In a way, this project had been about his struggle, too. Hair grew back, and who could tell, maybe hers might come in straighter, or she’d discover she liked it short, that it suited her better than the bushy mane of frizz, thanks to Ephraim Cantor, a man she decided she wanted to meet someday.

They heard their names being called and looked at each other and smiled. “This is it,” Lindsay said.

“Don’t look at anybody until after you’ve read the mission statement,” Sally warned her. “After that, focus on the clock or the light switch or a bug on the wall. Above all, don’t look at your grandmother. Promise. Pinky swear.”

Lindsay said, “My great-grandmother always says, ‘All audiences are dead drunk and fifty feet away.’ ”

“Maybe,” Sally said. “But just to be on the safe side, don’t look at her, either.”

Lindsay hesitated before the open door. “I really liked being your friend,” she said. “I learned a lot from you.”

“I am
still
your friend!” Sally practically yelled. “After tonight it’ll all be out in the open. I’m telling you, Linds, we can go back to just like before. We’ll always be friends. Best friends. Even if I’m researching culture in Bolivia or swimming in the Amazon with white dolphins or writing in my Paris garret.”

Lindsay knew Sally meant whatever she said the moment she said it, but they would never be friends like that again. She wanted to try to be friends, but was it possible to make it all the way back to thinking the sun rose and set on Sally DeThomas? Not really. Lindsay pictured herself as a slab of steel that had tempered and turned stainless because the pain of what she’d gone through had so changed her.

Outside the curtain their families waited. Inside the greenroom, Taylor was rehearsing her sad plight of the fragile pink urchin, forced to feed in waters polluted by boat fuel and trash and reduced in numbers by the Japanese gourmet food import industry. Sally and Lindsay walked onto the stage with their bags and boxes, and grinned at each other when they heard the collective gasp of the audience as they took in the shaved heads. The girls proceeded to arrange Charlies one, two, three, and so on, poured the baggie of harvested marijuana in the glass bowl stolen from Sally’s mom’s studio, and laid out the carefully rolled cigarettes. Then they joined hands, and turned to “face the piano man,” as Gammy would say.

But neither girl had counted on cameras, or local news station KMSTV 67, or the reporters from
The Monterey County Herald
and
The Blue Jay.
Country Day was Pacific Grove’s gem, and people turned out in support for it. Sally was in her element. Lindsay stole one glance at the audience before she began the mission statement, and of course she saw Allegra, and this being all about her almost took Lindsay’s voice away. Make me proud, she heard a voice in her head say, and couldn’t tell if it was Carl Sagan or Dr. G. Sally elbowed her, and Lindsay cleared her throat, and began to read her piece without so much as a wobble.

“This is our mission statement,” she read. “A successful middle school science project isn’t about the hardest topic or the most meaningful issue. It’s about the willingness of scientists to be persecuted in search of scientific truth. If we could ask Frederick Douglass, Galileo, or Rachel Carson about that, they’d tell us stories of being mocked for their beliefs during their lifetimes. Today they are honored for their contributions. Studying their examples gave Sally and me courage to take on the subject of palliative care in cancer patients, like my grandmother, to whom—” she stopped and cleared her throat again. She didn’t dare look at her mom or Gammy, because she knew the shaved heads part was going to be hard for them to get over. She waited for her jaw to stop trembling before she went on. “That’s why we dedicate this project to my grandmother, who has leukemia. Statistics show, as our charts will prove, that smoking marijuana helps reduce nausea in a significant percentage of chemotherapy patients. There is a measure on the upcoming ballot to impose fines and prison sentences on people who grow marijuana for personal use, or sell it outside of government sanctions to sick people. Our project asks the question: Whose business is it if a sick person can be made well enough to eat by using
Cannabis sativa
? We respectfully submit it is not the government’s, that it is the business of science. Thank you for listening to our mission statement. I will now turn the presentation over to my partner, Sally DeThomas.”

Lindsay stared at her feet while Sally quickly explained that nobody had to worry, this was the entire crop and it was going into the trash the second the judging was completed. She made everybody laugh, and Lindsay thought of Gammy, who always said, “You catch more flies with molasses than you do with sauerkraut.”

When it was Lindsay’s turn to talk about the value of stringent recordkeeping, Sally handed the microphone back to her. “Sometimes the smallest observation turns out to be the most valuable,” she said, feeling the many moments of their project add up. “It might happen with any plant, not just
Cannabis sativa.
But if we aren’t allowed to study it, we’ll never know.”

It did seem as if she might go blind from all the camera flashes, but Lindsay didn’t really get nervous until the television crew moved through the crowd to get a close-up. The judges’ faces stayed stern-looking as they examined the display, and just when Lindsay thought she and Sally were dead meat, one of the judges winked at her, and she knew it, they’d won something, even if it only turned out to be honorable mention. Her heart felt like it had grown wings, which was scientifically impossible, but like something Allegra would say, and she bet Allegra was feeling the same way.

When she and Sally stepped down off the stage, they were surrounded. Lindsay actually felt a little sorry for Taylor, but only for a second. She caught her mother’s eye and saw her smile the “I’m so proud of you I can’t talk” smile, and she smiled back. Then it was questions and microphones and a couple of angry parents, one of whom had to be Taylor’s father, if only for having the whitest grown-up teeth Lindsay’d ever seen. Lindsay stood all that just fine. It was only when the cops showed up that she got so nervous that she felt light-headed, and the familiar crawling inside her stomach began, which meant she might throw up. Dr. G must have recognized that, too, because he rushed in there and caught her before her legs collapsed underneath her, and before Taylor’s dad insisted both girls be drug tested and their project disqualified due to its illegality, and furthermore, Sally’s mom’s farm inspected for breaking the law. Taylor’s presentation? Second place.