The Sound of Your Voice, Only Really Far Away (9 page)

“You better rinse that plate off and put it
in the dishwasher,” Kate warned him. “Mom’s going ballistic every time she sees a dirty dish in the sink or on the counter. She says she’s not our maid.”

“She’s not,” Mr. Faber agreed. He reached over to turn on the faucet. “The problem is, she cares more than everyone else about the house being clean. I keep telling her she just needs to lower her standards.”

Kate raised an eyebrow. “Yeah? And what does she say about that?”

“Nothing I can repeat in mixed company,” Mr. Faber put his dish in the dishwasher, then sat across the table from Kate. “You working on homework?”

Kate told him about the What’s Your Big Idea campaign and her and Lorna’s proposal for a school garden. “I don’t know if I should emphasize the importance of fresh food or tasty food.”

“Go with taste, definitely,” Mr. Faber advised. “I doubt kids care that much about freshness. You could take a ‘tired of bland cafeteria food’ approach, make everyone think about how much better their food could be. Don’t worry
about the vegetarians; you’ve got their vote already. Focus on the kids who have to eat cafeteria food every day. Would they rather eat some soggy broccoli or a great Caesar salad?”

“Do you think kids even care that much about salad?” Kate suddenly felt worried that no one would vote for her proposal because hardly anyone her age actually liked vegetables. She suspected that even the vegans didn’t really like vegetables all that much; they just liked having something to argue about.

“Probably not, but people like what’s new and different. You might also add a ‘stick it to the man’ element. Kids your age are starting to look for ways to rebel.”

“Salad as rebellion,” Kate mused. “I like it. You should have gone into advertising.”

“I thought about it,” Mr. Faber said. “I like messing around with language.”

“Me too,” Kate said. “I don’t know why, I just do.”

Kate’s dad pushed himself away from the table. “Well, let me know if you need any more help. In the meantime, I might just sneak an
extra slice of raspberry pie. Do you think your mom would mind?”

“I think if you put your dishes in the dishwasher, you can get away with murder around here,” Kate told him.

After her dad left the kitchen, Kate stretched in her chair. She felt relieved all of a sudden, but she wasn’t sure why. Because her dad had given her some good ideas for her proposal? She didn’t think it was that. Maybe it was because they’d had a conversation where Kate didn’t feel guilty or angry by the end of it. They’d had a conversation that had ended on a funny note instead of Kate’s dad walking out of the room with a disappointed look on his face.

Disappointed over soggy broccoli?
Kate wrote in her notebook.
Tired of depressed lima beans?

She wrote as fast as she could, the ideas coming at her a mile a minute. It wasn’t even that she was so excited about the idea of a school garden. It was more that she was excited about messing around with language. About making words mean what she wanted them to
say. There was a trick to it, Kate knew, and she also knew that sometimes she was magic.

The next morning Kate couldn’t wait to see Marylin on the bus. She thought Marylin was the perfect audience for her proposal—someone who was smart, big on school spirit, and okay with lettuce.

But before she got a chance to bring it up, Marylin was handing her a manila folder. “So I need you to tell me what you think about my proposal for the What’s Your Big Idea contest. Do you think it’s the sort of thing an average kid would vote for?”

Kate opened the folder and read Marylin’s title:
Why New Cheerleading Uniforms Affect Everyone!

She turned to Marylin. “You’re kidding, right?”

“I’m not kidding at all,” Marylin insisted. “Cheerleading uniforms matter. To everyone.” She began ticking off the reasons. “They’re important for school spirit. They’re important for school pride. Studies show that when the
cheerleaders are exceptionally cute, the teams perform better.”

“You’re making that up,” Kate said. “That’s totally bogus.”

“I’m not making anything up,” Marylin argued. “I might be paraphrasing a little bit, but that’s different from making things up.”

Kate handed back the folder. “This is so selfish! Nobody cares about your uniforms. And there’s nothing wrong with the uniforms you guys already have. They’re perfectly nice.”

“ ‘Perfectly nice’ isn’t good enough. Perfectly nice won’t win us the district cheering championship, will it?”

Kate stared at her. Even Marylin wasn’t this nuts, was she? “You’re doing this so Mazie won’t be mad at you, aren’t you? For not going with her to the mall Friday night?”

Marylin flinched, and Kate knew she’d hit a nerve. “So what’s she doing? Writing mean stuff on the bathroom walls?”

“She’s not doing anything,” Marylin said, examining her nails as though Mazie being mad at her wasn’t a big deal. “Well, she’s not
talking to me, that’s true. And some of the other girls aren’t either, but that’s just how they are. They’ll get over it.”

“Just as soon as you get them new uniforms, right?”

Marylin didn’t say anything, but Kate could tell the answer was yes. She had two simultaneous, totally opposite feelings. She wanted to give Marylin a pat on the shoulder, like,
There, there, everything will be all right,
but she also wanted to punch her and yell,
Get a grip! Earth to Marylin! These people are not your friends!

“I don’t know, Marylin,” she said, trying to sound nice about it. “I mean, do you really want to hang out with people who treat you like that? And also, do you think it’s fair for someone who’s on Student Government to submit a proposal? Isn’t that, like, a conflict of interest or something?”

Marylin shrugged. “There’s no rule that says I can’t. And Benjamin said it was fine.”

“Oh, that’s right,” Kate said, and now she was totally unable to keep the sarcastic tone out of her voice. “I forgot your boyfriend is
president. I guess you’ve got this one in the bag.”

“Actually, he’s not all that crazy about my proposal,” Marylin said, sounding worried. “I called him last night to go over it with him, but he acted like he didn’t want to hear it. He probably just doesn’t want to seem like he’s playing favorites. Not that he actually has anything to do with which proposal wins. It’s a democratic process, right? One person, one vote.”

“And you think people are going to vote for cheerleading uniforms?” Kate snorted.

Marylin slipped the folder back into her back pouch. “I really do. You’d be surprised by how many students have true school spirit. Unlike some people I could name.”

Kate took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. She hated the cheerleading side of Marylin. She hated how dumb it made her. Marylin could be goofy about a lot of things—that stupid flowered backpack she insisted on calling her back pouch, for example—but Kate liked Marylin’s goofiness. The cheerleading thing was something else entirely. Dumb. It was just dumb.

They rode the rest of the trip in silence and didn’t even say good-bye when they got off the bus, which made Kate feel bad, but she couldn’t make herself be nice to someone whose big idea was getting more stuff for the kids who already had everything. How democratic was that?

She headed for the audio lab as soon as she got in the school’s front door. Matthew would appreciate her proposal, she bet. He’d get how cool a school garden was. Matthew Holler was totally DIY.

“You are exactly who I wanted to see at this exact very minute,” Matthew said when Kate found him working on his
World of Noise
recording. She felt her face flush and the tips of her fingers start to tingle. Really, she wished he didn’t have this effect on her. It made everything between them so uneven.

“What did you want to see me about?” Kate asked, trying to sound cool. “Do you have a bridge you want to sell me?”

Wow, she thought, that sounded so
un
cool. She gave Matthew a lame smile. “Or something like that?”

“Something like that.” Matthew grinned. “I have a project I want us to work on together. I want to enter that What’s Your Big Idea contest and get some new gear for the audio lab. There’s a new version of Pro Tools I’ve got to have, for one thing. And the soundstage needs a total upgrade.”

“Uh, that’s sounds really great and everything . . . ,” Kate said.

“But?”

“But I’m kind of doing a proposal with Lorna,” Kate told him. “For a school garden. So we can have—well, fresh lettuce at lunch and stuff like that.”

Matthew looked disappointed, but he nodded at Kate and said, “Yeah, that’s a totally cool idea too. I definitely get it. I’m just bummed because I thought this was something we could work on together. I thought we could go over to my house this afternoon, and you could maybe stay for dinner. My mom said it was cool, if you like spaghetti and garlic bread.”

“I love spaghetti and garlic bread,” Kate said, meaning it. She also loved hanging out at
Matthew’s house, and she thought his mom was really nice, even if she had a rule about no girls in Matthew’s room.

Matthew sighed. “Yeah, well, another time, right? So let me see what you wrote about a school garden.”

“That’s okay,” Kate said. “It’s not that interesting. I’m not even one hundred percent sure we’re going to do it.”

“So, then maybe you could work on the audio-lab proposal? I mean, at least help? Please?” Matthew made a face like a little kid pleading. “My mom makes killer garlic bread.”

Kate found herself nodding. “Yeah, okay. Sure. I mean, the garden was really Lorna’s idea. She can submit that proposal. They’re both great ideas.”

“They’re both awesome ideas,” Matthew agreed. “Too bad they both can’t win.”

Yeah, too bad, Kate thought, and then she thought how mad Lorna was going to be at her. How betrayed she was going to feel.

And then she thought about garlic bread, and how it was on her top ten list of reasons to
live. Number one? Well, he was sitting on that chair over there, grinning at her.

Really, how could Kate say no?

“You’re doing what?”

Lorna stared at Kate from across the cafeteria table. Her face was the shade of a homegrown tomato.

“I’m going to help Matthew with his proposal,” Kate repeated. She reached into her backpack and handed Lorna the school garden proposal. “I worked on ours, and now I’m going to work on his. Just give him a little help. He wants to get some new equipment for the audio lab.”

Lorna grabbed the proposal out of Kate’s hand. “Oh! More stuff for the audio lab! Which already has everything! Which already sucks up all the school’s extra money! And which maybe ten people use!”

“That’s not true,” Kate argued. “Everyone uses it. I had at least two audio-lab projects I had to do last fall.”

“Yeah, that you
had
to do. People only use
the audio lab when they have to.” Lorna rolled up the school garden proposal into a tube and smacked it against the table. “I’ve got a great idea—why don’t we split the money between new cheerleading uniforms and new sound equipment for the audio lab? That way we ensure the fewest number of kids will benefit. I love that idea! It’s the best idea ever.”

Kate didn’t even have to look up to know that people were staring at them. “Could you maybe turn the volume down to, like, nine? And could you quit destroying my proposal? I worked really hard on that.”

“You worked hard on it, so now you’re going to work hard on another proposal to compete against it?” Lorna asked in an only slightly quieter voice.

“They’re two totally different things. They won’t be competing against each other. If you’re the kind of person who wants a school garden, you wouldn’t even think about voting for the audio lab. It would be like the audio lab didn’t even exist.”

Lorna started packing up her lunch bag. “Do
you even hear yourself? You sound like—I don’t know, a politician.”

“Matthew’s my friend!” Kate protested. “You’re my friend. I just want to help my friends.”

Lorna stood up and leaned across the table toward Kate. “I can’t believe you don’t get how much cooler a garden is than the audio lab! It’s something a lot of people could be part of. Not just the kids who work in the garden, but the kids who would want to hang out there because it was a peaceful place. Or the artists, who could decorate it. It would be a place where people could play guitar or flute or whatever. Toss a ball around. It could be this great space in the middle of this crummy school. Not everybody would want to work in it or hang out there, but a lot more kids would want to hang out there than in the audio lab.”