Best Kept Secret Read online

  But when my dad picked me up at school, something about the familiar comfort of our old blue compact car, and his jazz music playing when I got in, just made me lose it. I started crying before I could explain. Poor Dad; he didn’t know what to do. He had to pull over before we even left the school grounds. Eventually, I calmed down and explained what happened without sobbing. He couldn’t really hug me because we were sitting in the car. But he did give me some tissues and put his hand on my shoulder as I told my story.

  “The ambulance crew checked her out and she’s perfectly all right?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said, waiting for something worse to come.

  “Well, then I guess you all learned a valuable lesson that you won’t forget anytime soon.”

  He put his hands back on the wheel, put the car in drive, and that was it. Of course, he told my mother, and I worried she’d ground me. But by then, a couple hours had passed, and Mrs. Pinksy had called my mom to confirm that Piper was fine. While they talked, I half listened from my room. I heard Mom say, “For the love of Pete,” and I picked up on the general pleasant tone the conversation must have had.

  “Here,” Mom said, standing in my doorway. “Mrs. P. wants to talk to you.”

  I felt a little jolt of fear, but I took the phone. To my surprise, she wanted to thank me.

  “You should get a medal,” Mrs. Pinsky said. “You’re a woman of action, Jemma.”

  Twenty-four

  By Friday morning, I was feeling more normal. I could tell because the first thing I thought of was that Forrest would be at my house in thirty-six hours. And I then I started to stress over how Bet was going to broadcast her report on the Catch-It-in-Your Mouth Olympics when it had almost turned tragic.

  From there, my mind meandered to the Pink Locker Society, which had received a new threatening message.

  I know who you all are. Stop now or you’ll be sorry. Very sorry.

  It was not signed “A Pink Friend.” There was no signature at all, which made me worry. I mean, Ms. Russo wouldn’t just start sending us threats for no reason. Unless this was some kind of fire drill for us and she wanted to see what we would do.

  More than Ms. Russo’s “Pink Friend” warnings, this one creeped me out. I started wondering if it could have something to do with all the mystery that Bet had uncovered. What if we started getting more and more of these messages and had to shut down? I couldn’t bear to see the PLS out of business again and leave Queen Quitter and all those other girls without our services. But now that there was no Edith, I guess it was up to us to decide when and if we ever shut down the Web site.

  Principal Finklestein came up with 101 reasons why he was too busy to review part 2 of the You Bet! segment on the Pink Locker Ladies. Apparently, he was busier than the president of the United States. Or maybe he did watch it and was lying that he hadn’t. I, for one, was fine with him never seeing it. Then he would never be reminded of the PLS or check to see if we were still running the site.

  Meanwhile, Bet decided to give a few of us a private showing of part 2. She reserved a room at the local library for after school on Friday. This was right after MSTV aired her replacement show about the Catch-It-in-Your-Mouth Olympics. That report, too, might have landed her in Principal Finklestein’s office, but she had turned the whole messy affair into a public service report about choking. Who could argue with that? Quite accidentally, I was the star of this show.

  Bet dropped her camera only after I yelled for her to call 911. Then she started filming again once it was clear Piper was OK. So there’s plenty of footage of Piper just standing around looking dazed and exhausted. Later, she interviewed the school nurse who said it was “a tremendous blessing” that I knew the Heimlich Maneuver.

  Piper, as you might have guessed, told scads of people about what happened.

  “Jemma gave me the John Jacob Jingleheimlich Schmidt Manuever!”

  Piper had always done this—mishmashed her words. But with this one, it became clear to me that she did this on purpose, to make light of what was actually a really scary situation.

  And although Piper had told the story many times, my hero status didn’t really gel until everyone saw Bet’s report. Everyone else seemed to watch it with the calm of knowing that the story had a happy ending. But I had to look away. Thank goodness, from where Bet had been shooting, the camera couldn’t see that terrified look on Piper’s face or hear her struggle to breathe. I will never forget it. Mr. Ford had me stand up after the closing credits of You Bet! People clapped.

  “I hope you’re around the next time I’m eating peanut brittle,” Mr. Ford said.

  Embarrassment was definitely my first reaction, but I also allowed myself to feel a little proud. Maybe I was a woman of action.

  Twenty-five

  Later, I had a date at the library to watch Bet’s top-secret part 2 “The Past Is Pink” report. I had to admit I liked the intrigue of it. In addition to meeting at a secret location, Bet created some code words for the occasion. We were meeting to discuss “the diorama,” she said. And she gave us all code names, like the Secret Service gives the president and his family. I was “Lifesaver,” Piper was “Lemon Drop,” and Kate was “KitKat.” Bet called herself “Duck13.” And then there was “Bride2Be.”

  Bet invited Ms. Russo to join us at the library. I was glad she did, because I wanted to speak with her right away about that new threatening message. I launched into it as soon as Bet shut the meeting-room door.

  “Before we get started, did you send us that message that said ‘I know who you all are. Stop now or you’ll be very sorry’? Please tell me that it was you pranking us or testing us or something.”

  “Which one?” Ms. Russo asked.

  “It was tray creepay, and you didn’t sign it ‘A Pink Friend,’ like usual,” Piper said.

  “I always signed them from ‘A Pink Friend.’ It’s a new message?” Ms. Russo asked.

  She knit her brow in confusion, so Piper called up the message in question and showed it to her.

  “That one is not from me,” Ms. Russo said.

  Me, Piper, and Kate all exchanged looks and made a silent pact to take up this issue later. Bet hardly noticed, so intent was she to show her report and talk about being censored.

  “I feel like I should say something important about prior restraint and censorship, seeing how we’ve been forced to meet in a clandestine location,” Bet said.

  We brought our chairs into a half circle around the table, where the laptop was open and the video was in freeze-frame.

  “Just hit play, Duck13,” I said.

  “Oh, all right,” she said, and did.

  The title crawled across the screen: “The Past Is Pink: What Happened to the Pink Locker Ladies?”

  “Those girls from Yale. Talk about in your face,” Patricia told Bet. She was still speaking in that altered voice, and her face was obscured by shadows.

  Patricia said it was 1976 and “the girls from Yale” were on the female rowing team, also called “crew.” Because women’s sports were just getting started at the university, they didn’t have their own showers or bathrooms at the boathouse. So both the men’s and women’s teams practiced about a half hour from campus, but only the men could clean up and warm up after practice. The women waited on the bus for the men in the dead of winter, ice crystals clinging to their wet hair.

  “One of those girls ended up going to the Olympics and won a gold medal,” Patricia said. “But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  “The female rowers had complained and asked for a locker room, but they kind of got the brush-off,” Patricia said. “That was until they decided to protest the situation in an unforgettable way.

  “So Title IX had been passed four years before,” Patricia said. “Remember, Title IX was the federal law that said girls and boys should have equal opportunities in school. That included sports.”

  I flashed a look at Bet. She had told me two weeks ago this had something to do with T
itle IX, back when I thought “Title 9” was only a cute clothing catalog.

  “So the nineteen female rowers decided they’d march into the office of the woman who was in charge of Yale’s women’s sports program. That would have had some impact, right? But then—you won’t believe this—they decided to write Title IX in blue marker on their bare chests and backs. They would go into the meeting wearing their Yale women’s crew sweat suits. But once they were in that woman’s office, they’d take off their shirts to reveal their statement. Which is exactly what they did.”

  Bet had not told me this part in advance. I was stunned and speechless. I didn’t even like to get changed in the girls’ locker room, and I was always wearing a bra. These girls went in a group and took off their tops in a school official’s office?

  Ms. Russo raised her eyebrows. Kate looked at Piper and me, and we just started laughing.

  “Shhh! Shhh! You’ll miss the best part,” Bet said.

  “A brilliant bit of civil disobedience,” Patricia said. “The girls read a statement that detailed their complaints. But here’s the clincher. We would not be sitting here today except for this, the pièce de résistance. The team invited a New York Times reporter to the meeting.”

  Bet elbowed me, pumped her fist in the air, and whisper-yelled, “Journalism!”

  We shook our heads at her and then turned back to the laptop screen. Her report cut to images of black-and-white newspaper clips from that time.

  Bet, in voice-over, said, “The team had found a way to spread the word. It was the very thing the Pink Locker Ladies were about to lose.”

  “We read the news stories just like everyone else,” Patricia said. “Some people thought it was unladylike to do such a thing. Other people thought they were heroes. But lots of people didn’t know what to think.”

  It was then that Bet cut away to a faded, bluish document that said “The Pink Paper” at the top. Then she zoomed in on The Pink Paper to a headline that read: THE PINK LOCKER LADIES SUPPORT THE WOMEN OF YALE!

  Below it was a column describing the event and saying, “We simply must support these brave women. Disagree if you will with their tactics, but they were brave and deserve an equal chance to excel in their sport!”

  “That was ‘all she wrote,’ as the saying goes,” Patricia said. “Right away, we started getting threats. There were rumors circulating that we were going to publish the actual photos, which was dumb because mimeograph machines can’t reproduce photos. They use a stencil-like thing. Anyway, we got out one more issue: PINK LOCKER SOCIETY IN DANGER! Within a week, our office was ransacked by Lord-knows-who and they took the mimeograph machine.”

  “This peculiar object,” Bet said in her voice-over, “is a mimeograph machine.”

  It looked like something you’d see in the Smithsonian. In the photo, the shiny, metal device was a cross between a big keyless typewriter and the meat slicer they use behind the counter at the deli. It had a hand crank on the side, Bet explained, so a person (in this case, a Pink Locker Lady) could spin it around and churn out the copies.

  “The Pink Locker Ladies had only one means of spreading their message in 1976, and this was it,” Bet said.

  The copies came out damp and the ink printed a periwinkle blue, but it was a lot cheaper than a printing press, Bet said.

  Patricia said the Pink Locker Ladies tried to find another mimeograph machine and come up with the money to take The Pink Paper to a printer, but to no avail.

  “We faded away, just like they hoped we would,” Patricia said. “But that one young lady from Yale—she did make it to the Olympics. And sports for girls finally did get up to snuff here and everywhere else.”

  From there, Bet closed out her broadcast.

  “The vandals who struck in 1976 broke into the PLS office with a clear intent to silence them,” she said, as a photo of an old Pink Paper dissolved into black on the screen. But just when you thought it was over, the black turned to pink. Pink Locker pink.

  After the report ended, we sat in the quiet for a moment, but then the comments and questions started flying.

  “Whoever shut them down could be the same people who are threatening us now!” I said.

  “You figured that out all by yourself, did you?” Piper said, falling back into our old habit of teasing each other.

  “That was an awfully long time ago,” Kate said. “Whoever they were are probably long gone—old or moved away to another state.”

  “I agree,” Piper said. “It was one message. Let’s keep on pinkin’ on.”

  “Our Pink Lady did tell me this,” Ms. Russo said. “You girls should keep on helping other girls. Keep working, but be careful.”

  Once again, I was trying to put together a puzzle. At least now, I had a few more pieces. Or maybe they weren’t pieces so much as branches, branches of our pink family tree.

  Twenty-six

  From the moment I woke up, my stomach did a back handspring every time I thought of it: Forrest soon would be inside my house. The parents would be off talking parent stuff, and the entire evening would stretch out before us. If I was a woman of action, I wasn’t when it came to Forrest McCann. Jittery as I was, I should have gone for a run before they came over, but we all overslept because the power had gone off in the night. We woke up to clocks that were flashing at us or no longer accurate by an unknown number of hours.

  As soon as we were up and moving, my mother drafted me and my father into a housecleaning marathon. I swept out dust bunnies and sanitized bathrooms. My Dad vacuumed and uncluttered each room so that it looked nothing like it did on a typical day. And Mom, well, she did what she always did before guests arrived: She complained.

  “Why do I do this to myself, Peter?” she asked my dad. “I love to have a dinner party but I hate the prep work.”

  Mom was cutting vegetables that would be speared on the kebabs. She had already set out the s’mores ingredients in an artful fashion on a sectioned tray. And she set the table for seven—the three of us and the four of them. There were candles and, especially as orangey sunset light streamed in, our house looked about as good as it ever had. It even smelled good. I wish I could have said the same for myself. I was in a T-shirt and sweatpants that had a hole in the knee. I was barefoot, and the dirty bottoms of my feet told the story of how I had spent my whole day cleaning.

  They were supposed to arrive at seven, so when the clock read six, I wanted to start my beauty regimen. But while I was in the shower, I heard a knock-knock-knock from my mother.

  “Jemma, hustle-bustle in there. The clock we were looking at wasn’t right, and they’ll be here any minute.”

  Here was my choice—wash my hair and possibly be in the bathroom when they arrived or get out now and deal with my hair as is.

  I refused to give in to my panic. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe. At least I was clean, I told myself as I swept my hair into a ponytail. I dressed fast and flew down to the family room, where I had decided to locate myself for their arrival. Then I could avoid the awkward hellos. Downstairs, I swiped some lip balm across my lips as the doorbell rang. I heard the familiar patter of grown-ups greeting each other. There were hugs and adult banter exchanged.

  “It’s been way too long,” my mother told Forrest’s dad.

  “We’re getting old,” Forrest’s mom, Vera, said.

  Then they all laughed like parents do. I could hear my mom and dad asking questions of Forrest and Trevor. “How’s school and (insert-sport-that-you-play-here)?” I heard one of them mumble something. It sounded like Forrest. Then Trevor gave his mumble before they both moved in the direction of the stairs to the family room. I wanted to look occupied. But which pose to strike? Reading, maybe? Or in the midst of a craft? Watching TV would make me look lonely, so I decided to put my head in our game cabinet and make like I was looking for something. On the bright side, I could reorganize the closet while I was in there.

  Once I was in the closet, I couldn’t decide when I should pull out and acknow
ledge their presence. Should I turn around when feet could be heard hitting the stairs or beforehand? If I stood at the bottom of the stairs as they came down, I’d look as eager as a restaurant hostess, ready to serve.

  The staircase to the family room had eleven stairs, so I decided six stairs would be perfect. When I heard them come down six steps, that’d give me enough time without making me seem too anxious. The trouble was, with two boys hitting the steps at once, I couldn’t count the stairs being taken. It just sounded like a rumble of thunder. I turned around too late, and there they were, like alien beings dropped into my family room.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Hey,” said Forrest.

  “Hi, Jemma,” Trevor said in a bouncy voice. He had never quite gotten the message that I was not in love with him.

  “What games do you have?” Trevor asked me.

  “Why don’t you take a look and see,” I said, nearly shoving him into the game closet.

  It gave Forrest and me a moment alone.

  “No band practice tonight?” I said.

  “There might not be any practice, ever,” Forrest said. “A couple guys have quit.”

  “That stinks, but I’m sure you can find some new members.”

  “Yeah, but I’m not sure I want to. We might just keep it small. We’re changing the name, too.”

  “Good-bye Pythagorean Theorem?”

  “Yeah, we’re thinking either Flying Spleens or Merry-Go-Nowhere.”

  “Those are … memorable,” I said.

  I wanted to say something positive about his band, but I couldn’t think of anything. And I didn’t know that much about music. Should I say he had a good singing voice, or that the crowd at the dance seemed into it? They were, but only for a little while.