Best Kept Secret Read online

Then she flipped the laptop around for us all to see:

  Girls, please don’t ignore this request. Shut down the site, or you could get in big trouble.

  A Pink Friend

  “Maybe we should tell someone,” I said.

  “That’d the end of the PLS then. For real, this time. We’d never be able to restart it again,” Piper said.

  Kate agreed that it was too risky to tell anyone. I didn’t agree, but I wasn’t going to be the only one.

  “Let’s get back to business,” Kate said.

  “Question 4 … Wait a minute. I have something to say,” Piper said.

  We stopped and looked up from our notepads. I hoped she was going to reconsider and say we should tell someone about the threats, or maybe just shut the PLS down for a little while.

  “Forrest and me—I mean, Forrest and I … well, we aren’t going out or anything.”

  Piper let that hang in the air for a moment.

  “It’s over,” she said. “Like, it never really started in the first place.”

  Then she looked at me.

  “He’s weird, Jemma. Cute, but weird.”

  I had a rush of feelings that I couldn’t express. I was relieved that she and Forrest weren’t a couple. I was insulted that she called him weird. And I was a strange kind of happy, like when something big and scary threatens but doesn’t actually occur.

  Remember a while back, when a big asteroid was supposed to hit the Earth? People—my dad, for instance—were calculating the odds of where and when it might hit. But then it ended up landing in the ocean or breaking up into a million unthreatening bits or something. That’s what I was feeling, down in the school basement, looking at Piper.

  But in that moment, when we should have hugged, or at least shared a slight smile, I couldn’t do it. I felt a plume of anger that Piper had gone after Forrest in the first place, and I wasn’t ready to let it go.

  “That’s great, Piper,” Kate said. “So I guess you’re sort of apologizing to Jemma?”

  “Yes. I guess so. Sort of,” Piper said. “It’s just over and it’s no big deal and we need to move on.”

  It was a big deal to me. But I wasn’t ready to talk about it, so I did what any normal person would do. I changed the subject.

  “So what’s the next question?”

  Piper paused for a moment and then restarted. “Question 4: ‘My mom bought me one bra and now my dog has eaten it. Signed: Braless and mad at Buckeye.’ ”

  “Oh, I’ll take that one,” I said.

  “What’s your advice going to be?” Kate asked, smiling and about to burst with laughter.

  “Switch to a cat. My cat would never eat my bra,” I said.

  But I had more. “Do you think Buckeye the dog ate all the bra in one sitting or snacked on it throughout the day? Maybe he had a cup at lunch, then another at dinner?”

  “If it had been my bra, he’d be really full,” Piper said.

  “Yeah, he’d be burping up bra all afternoon,” Kate added.

  The thought of that dog chowing down had us all laughing now. I imagined the U of an underwire in his mouth, like a double smile.

  It felt good to be part of a conversation with Kate and Piper that didn’t involve Forrest and didn’t give me that tight, twisty feeling in my stomach. So I continued.

  “Might I recommend my bra if Buckeye is looking for the perfect after-school snack. Or appetizer. Ruff! Ruff!”

  So amused were we that we didn’t notice how our laughter rose above our usual volume level. That day’s creepy threat should have made us all the more cautious. There was an even more threatening message later in the queue. But we never got that far. We were so lost in our “dog eats bra” story that we didn’t hear a thing.

  Not the door opening at the top of the stairs.

  Or the clomp-clomp-clomp of someone coming down.

  One minute we were laughing uncontrollably, and the next minute, there she was—Ms. Russo.

  We swallowed hard, shaken by the sight of a teacher in our midst.

  “Are you going to tell on us?” I asked.

  “No. I’m going to help you. If you want my help, that is,” she said.

  Ms. Russo found a folding chair against the cinder-block wall and opened it with a squeak. She sat down with a “Phew,” the way you do after you’ve been on your feet all day.

  “Where to begin, girls? Where to begin?”

  Ms. Russo said she had met an actual former Pink Locker Lady. This source, who had to remain anonymous, said there was a lot we needed to know about the history of the Pink Locker Ladies.

  “She’s a cagey one,” Ms. Russo said, with a laugh. “And she knows who all of you are.

  “Just yesterday, she sent me this in the school’s interoffice mail. A note said to give it to you, Jemma.”

  Ms. Russo pulled out a brown envelope, the flap fastened by a red string wrapped around a pink disk. She unwound the string, opened the flap, and extended the envelope to me. I put my hand inside and pulled out what could have been a dry cleaning receipt or a restaurant check, but it was neither one. It was a folded and fragile square of paper bearing the number 261. It was a race number, the kind a runner would wear. But this race number looked worn and delicate, definitely old. It bore an autograph, too: “K. Switzer.”

  “Who’s K. Switzer?” Kate asked.

  “I don’t know myself,” Ms. Russo.

  “Who is your Pink Locker Lady? We promise we won’t tell,” Piper said.

  “Is it Edith?” I said.

  “Who’s Edith?” Ms. Russo said.

  “Nobody,” I said.

  Relieved that we now had someone to help us, I told Ms. Russo about the threatening messages we’d been receiving. She smiled as I spoke, which I thought was kind of rude. Those threats scared me.

  “Girls, I’m your ‘Pink Friend,’ ” she said, making air quotes with her hands.

  “You?” Piper said.

  Note to self: Be sure that all the threatening e-mails were signed “A Pink Friend.”

  “Some of us teachers—not all of us—knew what happened with the PLS Web site getting shut down,” Ms. Russo continued. “On a lark, I looked up the site and saw you guys were still operating it.”

  She went on to say that she initially thought we should shut down and stay out of trouble.

  “But then I talked to this former Pinky and she told me to help you instead of discouraging you.”

  “So who told you how to find us?” Kate asked.

  “Mr. Ford,” she said, seemingly proud of him.

  “Oh, jeez. Were we that obvious?” Piper asked.

  “I doubt it. He can be very observant, that man,” Ms. Russo said.

  She seemed to blush a little just mentioning him like that, then collected herself again.

  “My Pinky friend told me something of the group’s history, and I thought, Of course! Girls have to fly under the radar sometimes to get things done.”

  “So you’re going to help keep this a secret?” Kate asked.

  “Yes, but you need more than that. My Pink Lady contact says there are always opponents when you do this kind of work. People—and I’m not just talking about Principal F.—might not like what you’re doing,” Ms. Russo said.

  “But they can’t take us down that easily,” Piper said. “Hello, Internet.”

  “You’re right that you have more power to communicate than the Pink Locker Ladies did,” Ms. Russo said. “But you’re not invincible. You will have to show the pluck and courage of your forebearers.”

  Note to self: Look up the word pluck.

  “Who wants us gone?” I asked.

  Ms. Russo shrugged her shoulders and shook her head.

  “Viva la Pink Locker Society!” Piper said.

  We all smiled at that. I didn’t like thinking that some unnamed, unknown person (or group of people!) was out to get us. But I did like knowing that Ms. Russo was on our side.

  Eighteen

  Shock of all sh
ocks, it was me who convinced Piper and Kate that we should tell Bet. She already knew that the PLS was back in business, and I wanted to tell her about this latest twist that Ms. Russo was helping us. In part, I liked to be the one to tell her big news because I loved seeing her face and answering her excited questions. The girl has a “nose for news,” according to my mom. But also, I thought we could really use her help. She was smart and she knew how to do research. So here’s how that conversation went:

  ME (whispering): Okay, this is a secret, but Ms. Russo crashed our lastest PLS meeting and says she will help us. She also said she’s been talking to some older Pink Lady, who’s worried someone could try to shut us down. Just like they did in the 1970s.

  BET (whispering): Jemma, it’s as if you have read my mind. I just interviewed a former Pinky who told me some very deep secrets about the PLS. You. Will. Never. Believe. It.

  So much for surprising her. Bet’s nose for news had already led her to the big story.

  “I interviewed this woman—I wonder if it’s the same person Ms. Russo talked to—and she is just fascinating,” Bet said. “But she doesn’t want her face shown. I concealed her identity, like they do for secret witness testimony.”

  “What did she say?” I asked.

  “She knows it all. Why the PLS got shut down in the 1970s is rather shocking, Jemma,” Bet said.

  “Shoot,” I said.

  “It’s just too much that I don’t know where to start. I shall show you,” Bet said.

  After school, in her video office, Bet popped in a video and showed me her latest report entitled “The Past Is Pink: What Happened to the Pink Locker Ladies?”

  “The Pink Locker Society has a long and complicated history—so complicated that it’s hard to find anyone who wants to talk about it on camera. Hard, but not impossible. Meet former Pinky ‘Patricia,’ who asked that I conceal her identity for this interview.”

  On screen, I couldn’t make out the silhouette of the woman’s face, because a lamp was set up behind her. Her voice had been scrambled a little, too. She sounded like she had sucked on a helium balloon and then spoke through a harmonica.

  “It was just chilling when it happened. Can you imagine us, the Pink Locker Ladies, causing such trouble? With our bell-bottoms and feathered hair, we got death threats and I-don’t-know-what-all. But it was the seventies and the times were a-changin’.”

  The woman—who was she?—went on to describe the morning in 1976 when they went into their Pink Paper office and found it ransacked. Chairs were turned over, papers and supplies strewn about. And something called a “mimeograph machine” was gone.

  “It wasn’t like today. People didn’t have computers. No copiers in the school. We had our mimeograph, this blue-ink contraption that stunk to high heaven. We used to crank out The Pink Paper one by one. Funny that it was called The Pink Paper, because mimeograph print is blue.”

  This “Patricia” paused a moment at the memory. She sure came across as a no-nonsense person. I studied her shadowy figure and, for an instant, almost recognized her. The rhythm of her speech and that clipped way of talking sounded like someone I knew, even with all that vocal masking. She spoke rapidly—rat-tat-tat-tat—like an old typewriter. Who? I was sure I knew, but between the shadows and the helium voice, I was temporarily stumped.

  “What can I tell you about 1976?” the so-called Patricia told Bet. “It was the bicentennial, the nation’s two hundredth birthday. Parades and patriotism were on the front page that year. So you can imagine the reaction when the Pink Locker Ladies printed what we did. But those girls at Yale—we just had to do something to support them.”

  Bet said the “girls at Yale” were members of the women’s rowing team, a group of young women who had been fighting for their own locker room. This sounded odd to me. Yale is an upper-crusty kind of place. It costs like a zillion dollars a year to go to college there, and I assumed they always had the best of everything, including locker rooms. I pictured their locker rooms, for both guys and girls, as spa-like with gold-framed mirrors, steam showers, and aromatherapy candles scenting the air.

  “It seems a small thing now,” Patricia continued, “but those girls had no place to change. Money for girls’ sports just wasn’t there at the time. Here at Margaret Simon—well, it wasn’t called Margaret Simon Middle School then—we didn’t have much in the way of girls’ sports. Hell’s bells, the first girls’ track team got started here in 1976, so that gives you an idea. There was a basketball team, but they didn’t travel. There was cheerleading, but it’s much more a sport now than it ever was then.

  “So there we were answering girls’ questions about body changes, brassieres, and what have you,” Patricia continued. “Things were looking up somewhat, and we definitely had some well-placed faculty members who helped the Pink Locker Ladies stay secret and get The Pink Paper out.”

  The camera switched to Bet, dressed in cool, casual anchorwoman attire.

  “What were you trying to do back then with The Pink Paper?” Bet asked.

  “Girls needed basic information, was our point,” Patricia said. “It wasn’t as easy to come by back then. But others were not so fond of our work. So when we starting crowing about Title IX, well, that was just not well received by a certain element. And, of course, those girls at Yale were quite provocative in what they did. It’s not every day a bunch of lady athletes make their point by taking off their shirts.”

  That last line got my attention. A U.S. soccer player had once taken off her shirt in celebration. I’d seen photos of that from an old Olympics. But she had a sports bra on underneath and it was no big whoop in my book. Finally, I couldn’t take it one more second and made the time-out sign so Bet would pause the video.

  “What is Patricia talking about?” I asked.

  “Just keep watching,” Bet said.

  “Wait. Are you going to show this to the whole school? It could really blow our cover.”

  “Let’s discuss,” Bet said. “Some stories demand to be told.”

  Classic Bet. I asked her to roll the video again.

  “There’s so much more to the story,” Bet told the camera, “that I felt it only fitting that I break it into two parts to do it justice. Please join me next Friday for part two of my report, ‘The Past Is Pink: What Happened to the Pink Locker Ladies?’ ”

  “You’re not going to tell me anything else, are you?” I asked.

  “Let’s get Piper and Kate before I say more.”

  Nineteen

  I wanted to call Kate and Piper, but it was time for track practice. Left-right, left-right. A run was a very good chance to think things over. Just what else did Bet know? And what did the Pink Locker Ladies have to do with girl athletes protesting at Yale thirty years ago?

  There was little chance Bet was going to let her scoop go to waste. But I was worried that the renewed curiosity about the PLS would tip off Principal F. Then he’d call my parents in, like, a second. It seemed like just a matter of time before someone noticed the Web site was running again. Or did grown-ups have so much on their minds that no one would bother to check? I wanted to keep on serving the world of girls. It made me feel good. And it wasn’t all “dog ate my bra” stories but really important stuff, too.

  Take Queen Quitter. I had struggled with my reply. It was a lot easier to give advice about stuff like smelly feet or hairy legs. With those kinds of questions, I always tried to put myself in the other person’s shoes. But Queen Quitter was a tougher case. I couldn’t imagine not wanting to do something I was great at. (I, for one, was still trying to find my special thing.) Kate was a brainiac, Bet had MSTV, and Piper had, well, everything. But I told Queen Quitter I understood the part about not wanting to disappoint people, and I told her to not—definitely not—let a car tire run over her toe, for heaven’s sake. She seemed grateful to get my advice, though her problem didn’t get solved so easily.

  Dear PLS,

  Thank you for trying to help me. Some days I fee
l like I’m sleepwalking through my own life. My coaches and my parents don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’ve seen the doctor for fear I had mono—the kissing disease!—but I don’t. I’ve also been checked for Lyme disease and a bunch of other things. Nothing is physically wrong with me, which is good. But it’s also bad because while they thought I might be sick, I didn’t have to practice.

  I’m starting to think that I just want to start making my own decisions. I don’t ever remember deciding that I wanted to do my sport. Somewhere back in time, someone dressed me up and pushed me out there and I was “a natural.” Was it ever fun? Sure, I guess so, at one time or another. My room is full of ribbons and trophies, and I have sport-themed T-shirts, tote bags, jewelry, and even ponytail holders. People always equate me with my sport. I am tired of it filling every nook and cranny of my day. My evenings, my weekends, even my summers are spoken for. It’s cold and hard and I’m sick of it.

  You haven’t lived until you’ve spent 7 weeks far from home at “sports camp.” Some girls were awesome and we became friends, but some were just awful, talking about you behind your back. If you’re an average athlete, you may think it’s bad when people say, “Oh, she’s just so-so.” But think of what it’s like when you are GREAT at your sport and everyone is whispering, “She’s got such a big head. She thinks she’s going to be on the cover of Sports Illustrated.”

  Your friend,

  Queen Quitter

  Meanwhile, the PLS continued to help girls with more common and easily answered questions:

  • I sweat, I mean really sweat. I’m so embarrassed. I hate when summer comes!

  • What do you do if a girl is following you around and calls you her best friend? I don’t want to be rude to her but I don’t want to be friends with her either. What do I do?

  • What do I do if I get my period at school? I know you’re going to say “Be prepared,” but what if my locker jams and my mom doesn’t pick up her cell phone and the school nurse is out and my teacher is a guy?

  No, I hadn’t gotten my period yet, either. But I had mostly gotten over my period-phobia. And by “mostly,” I mean that I accepted that the day was coming (soon I hoped). And yes, I was prepared (some pads hidden in a pencil case at the bottom of my backpack). But like that worried girl, I, in no way, under no circumstances, wanted this important moment of womanhood to strike at school. I didn’t think I’d be brave enough to go down to the nurse’s office with my jeans stained through!