The Reinvention of Moxie Roosevelt (14 page)

It
took days and days for me to recover from my failed HHSE experience. It wasn’t so much the embarrassment stemming from my sweatpants malfunction with Luscious Luke so nearby, although that was excruciating, but the recollection of the way I’d felt when I thought I’d been busted. Granted, I’d only thought I’d been caught for about ten minutes before Spinky enlightened me, but the feeling of dread was still very fresh.

More and more, I tried to turn my thoughts to how to get myself out of the hole I’d been digging since arriving at Eaton. I thought of all the lucky, lucky people who get abducted by UFOs and whisked away to other planets.Why couldn’t that happen to me? Probably because aliens were telepathic and knew all about my personality-creation-disorder. My story was like a low-budget indie film nobody would go to see—
Moxie Roosevelt: Even the Aliens Didn’t Want Her
.

Algebra plus Kate plus my EE talent show requirement had been enough to flip me out. But now there was more. And to think, my piano lesson had started out so nicely.

“It seems crazy, and it takes up huge amounts of time, but I’m finding if I try playing all thirty variations straight through, it helps me make progress on Variation 28. Somehow tackling the whole thing helps me to get each part of it, if that makes any sense,” I told Mr. Tate.

He grabbed his white mop of hair with both hands, then shot his arms in the air.

“Miss Kippah, you have excessively good intuition. And you work harder than a bee in a sugar field.You will not be the least bit surprised, I suspect, when I tell you I can hear it. I hear it, Miss Kippah—the work you put in is clear as the summer sun in every note you play.”

I glowed. Beams of light were probably shooting out of my eyes. I loved that my hours of practice time were paying off in Mr. Tate’s view. Imaginary bluebirds soared merrily around my head. And then it happened.

“Miss Kippah, would you be interested in representing the music department in the New Student Talent Show?” Mr. Tate asked.

I would be more interested in hanging from Sage Tower by my hair while singing the entire score of
Lion King
.

“Definitely!” I lied brightly.

Mr. Tate rubbed his beard happily.

“I thought you’d say so. I’ll leave the choice of what piece you’d like to perform to you, Miss Kippah. I know you’ll pick something worthy of you.”

I gave Mr. Tate my biggest smile, but in truth I didn’t feel so good. I willed myself to keep it together. I had never thrown up at the piano, and I wasn’t about to start now.

Now I was performing
twice
at the New Student Talent Show? Musical Moxie had to mix with Not So Comical Moxie? How was that ever going to work? If only this was all I had to deal with. But I had other things on my mind too—a growing list of problems crowned by a brand-new Unfortunate Encounter with Kate Southington. The list went something like this:

Yeah, I saved the worst for last. There was no two ways around it. I could not find my Personality Log. I figured there were three possibilities. It was lost in plain sight in my room, and I’d find it at some point even though I’d torn the place apart twice already. Or, I had dropped it somewhere where no one would ever find or notice it, hopefully down a storm drain, and that would be that. Or, I had left it where someone had and would find it, open it, and read it. I was not ready to fully process what that could mean for me. Only that it would be the end of Moxie Roosevelt as Eaton knew her. As Eaton knew all of the different hers.

That is, if Kate Southington wasn’t the end of me first.

The latest Unfortunate and Unsettling Encounter with Kate had been over practically before it started, but it had rattled me, largely because I was already freaked about the loss of my log, and I had no idea what the encounter really meant. It took place at breakfast check-in, when Kate and I happened to be reporting our presence to the housemother on duty at the same time.

“Southington,” Kate had announced crisply to the housemother.

“Yes. And Moxie Roosevelt Kipper?” the housemother had asked, her pen poised next to my name on her clipboard.

“The one and only,” I declared, a little too loudly and cheerfully because Kate standing next to me made me nervous.

I thought she would speed away from me as we left the housemother’s table, because she always made a point of getting away from me as quickly as possible. But this time she matched my walk, and when I glanced over at her I was surprised to see an ugly sneer on her face.

“The one and only,” she said, imitating me in a mocking voice. “The one and only Moxie Roosevelt. What a stupid name.You know it’s a big joke in this school, right? People laugh at you. Everybody does. I almost feel sorry for you.”

“What are you talking about?” My voice came out in a croak.

“You know exactly what I mean. And you know what? I’m not going to tolerate it anymore.”

Then she
did
speed off, practically sprinting out the dining hall door.

I was horrified by the whole encounter, and especially freaked out by her last words. She wasn’t going to tolerate
what
anymore?

Wasn’t going to tolerate
what
?

“Moxie, did you hear me? You look like you’re on another planet!”

I looked up at Ms. Hay, genuinely startled. “I’m sorry, can you repeat the question?”

“I asked if you thought P. G. Wodehouse’s humor holds up in present-day culture. Did the Jeeves and Bertie stories make you laugh?”

I nodded, still unable to really focus on Ms. Hay, my brain still rehashing the events of the morning. My stomach ached terribly, and my heart was pounding. I felt like I was going to throw up. I started to get a terrible feeling that the thing with Kate and the disappearance of my Personality Log were in some way connected.

That’s ridiculous, I told myself firmly. It was bound to show up. I probably really had misplaced it somewhere in the mess of my room. As soon as EE was over, I’d tear the room apart a third time, and I would find the book. But between Kate and not knowing exactly where the log was, I was practically having a full-blown panic attack.

What had I been thinking? The personality experiment in and of itself was bad enough. The log was a smoking gun—written proof of all the stories I’d made up, and who I’d told them to. Nobody who did not know me well could possibly understand why I’d done it. I had to find that book and get rid of it. It was time to start setting things right. I thought of the sausage-making-family sophomore who’d gotten mad at me when I mistakenly thought she’d appreciate my vegetarian talk. That had not felt good at all. Far worse was Reagan offering her steadfast friendship, so relieved I wasn’t one of the “fakers” she thought Eaton would be full of. What would Reagan think of me if she read what was in that log? What would Haven or Spinky think? Not to mention the others, girls whose last names I didn’t even know, like Guadalupe the Yankees fan, and Charnay from South Africa who was going to be a writer . . . Tashi and the Mavix and Dellarose from Philly who thought I could tango. So many people. So many personalities. And what had it all gotten me? I didn’t have an exciting new personality at all. I was on the verge of being nothing but a fraud and a failure!

I had to call it off. Not just the Personality Log, but all of it. The whole Reinvention of Moxie Roosevelt had to be abandoned, and somehow I had to find a way to come clean, especially with Spinky, Haven, and Reagan. If I was going to get by at this school with real friends, if I was going to deal with people like Kate, I had to be regular old me, I realized with twin pangs of misery and relief. I needed to go over my personality trail with an industrial-sized vacuum cleaner before my life exploded and created a mess so gigantic that nothing could fix it.

“. . . novels of this era, because the things we find funny in them are . . . Moxie?”

“Yes, I do,” I said automatically.

The silence that followed jolted me back to reality.

Ms. Hay was standing in front of the large desk by the blackboard, leaning against it.

“Are you feeling okay, Moxie?” she asked. She watched me closely.

“Yes,” I said, but then I shook my head.

“No?” she asked. Her voice was very quiet and compassionate.

“No,” I said softly. A tear rolled down my cheek before I could pretend that my eye was just itchy—or Amish—and needed rubbing.

“Moxie, you can trust me,” Ms. Hay said. “This is only EE, it’s just a pass/fail thing for credit. It’s not that big of a deal. But if something’s really bothering you, that
is
a big deal. You might feel a lot better if you just talked about it.”

I’m sure she was right. But where did I begin? That I had come to school to reinvent myself? That I had gotten a little bogged down in a number of different personalities that had turned me into a sideshow act—The Girl with a Hundred Faces? That I had unwittingly discovered an Undercover Heiress and had kept her secret even in spite of the fact that the girl was constantly horrible to me? How could I have been so stupid to think a person could reinvent themselves like this? It was insane!

“I’m not Amish,” I said, my head hanging low.

After a moment, I peeked up at Ms. Hay. She was clasping her little hands in front of her chest, a small smile on her face.

“I know that, Moxie,” she said.

“You do?” I said, catching my breath. Then I did a little hiccuppy thing and started blubbering for real.

Ms. Hay was the nicest teacher at Eaton, and in her own odd way, one of the most awesome people I knew. And I’d lied to her for a stupid reason, and I felt terrible about that. And still, she was being nice to me.

“I do. I knew the first day you said it that you weren’t Amish,” she said.

I blubbered a bit more, and through my tears mouthed, “How?”

Ms. Hay walked over to my desk and knelt down next to me.

“I knew you weren’t, Moxie, because I
am
Amish. You messed up on the secret handshake.”

My mouth dropped open in horror.

Oh no! Not only had I lied, I had insulted Ms. Hay’s religious freedom!

“You’re . . . Amish?” I whispered.

Ms. Hay gave me one of her wide hobbit grins.

“Nope. That was a
joke
, sweetie. Have you been paying attention at all in this class?”

I thought I was going to start sobbing again, but instead a different sound came out of me—the half-cry, half-laugh sound that has no name. It became all laugh as I wiped my eyes.

“That day on the playing fields,” I said, “I ran off because I thought you had come to confront me about the Amish thing. And when the dean showed up, I was sure I was being expelled.”

Ms. Hay changed her position from kneeling to sitting on the floor by my desk, and stretched her legs out in front of her.

“So that’s why you took off like that. I was just trying to tell you that—”

I smacked my forehead. “My sweatpants were ripped, I know,” I said. “Orange underwear.”

“Yep,” Ms. Hay said.

“Talk about being the butt of the joke,” I said glumly.

Ms. Hay snorted, then made a sound more like a cackle than a laugh. She smacked one little hand on her knee. “Eureka!” she shouted.

“What?”

She jabbed a finger in the air, gesturing at me.

“You just dealt with an embarrassing situation by making a joke out of it, Moxie,” Ms. Hay said.

Hey. She was right. I
had
.

“Which is the point of this entire EE.You are so passing this class.”

“I am? I’m passing?”

“
So
passing,” Ms. Hay repeated, looking supremely satisfied.

“So I don’t have to do the New Student Talent Show?”

She grinned. “Nice try. You
do
have to do the New Student Talent Show, and I can’t wait to see what you’ve come up with.”

Crud.

“And since we still have about fifteen minutes of class time left, what do you say you bite the bullet and tell me the whole story behind your suddenly becoming Amish on the first day of EE?”

I sighed, a smile still on my face. The thread was already beginning to unravel, so what did I have to lose by confiding the secret of my reinvention to Ms. Hay?

I took a deep breath.

“Okay. Do you ever wonder what goes through some people’s heads when they come up with names for their kids? Take my name, for example.”