An idea came to her. She knew how to get her wish. It was simple and yet completely effective. She fired off a quick text to her friends even though she knew they wouldn’t be up yet. She was too excited to wait. Now that she had a plan, she felt giddy about it. Councilman Kenneth Lonner had messed with the wrong kid.
The sound of an air horn rocked Martha out of a deep and blissful slumber. She bolted upright and searched for the source of the noise. Her phone usually made a soothing bell sound when she got a text, but someone had changed it. CJ, most likely. They’d been in a cell phone prank battle since summer.
The air horn sounded again, and Martha opened the texts while simultaneously plotting her revenge. Both messages were from Jordan.
I KNOW HOW TO SAVE THE PARK!
That councilman messed with the wrong kid.
After the text was a black fist emoji.
Martha didn’t respond. She padded into the bathroom and cringed when she saw her reflection in the mirror. She hadn’t bothered to wash her face last night, and her eyes were dark with smudged eyeliner. As she scrubbed her face clean, she thought about everything the developer had said at the meeting. And how convincing she’d been. She’d talked about how the new office building would create about three hundred jobs once it was built. How that would give the local restaurants a boost and bring in a lot of tax revenue. She said it would revitalize the neighborhood. She had facts and figures to back it up.
Face clean, Martha turned her attention to her hair. She never quite knew what to do with it. Her natural hair color was a mousy brown, but over the summer, Jordan had helped her dye it a shade of black called Urban Death. Her mom had cried when she’d seen it, which made Martha like it even more. She pulled it up into a messy bun. Three hundred jobs. Martha couldn’t stop thinking about that number. Maybe her dad could get one of those office jobs. And even if he didn’t, somebody’s dad would. Or somebody’s mom. Or somebody.
Martha hated that her dad had to work a crappy loading job. It hadn’t always been that way. Martha still remembered what it was like when he was a production supervisor at the Ford engine plant. The people who worked for him called him sir. He even had his own business cards. His name and title embossed onto a shiny white card. He’d given one to Martha to keep in her backpack in case she ever needed to call him at work. She took the card eagerly even though she knew the number by heart—still knew the number by heart. Then the plant closed in 2012 and Martha’s parents got divorced not long after that and she moved into this tiny two-bedroom apartment with the gray carpeting in the neighborhood that made Ava’s mom purse her lips together every time she drove into it. Revitalizing it didn’t sound like such a bad thing.
The air horn sounded again and Martha jumped. This time it was CJ.
I’m in.
CJ punctuated her statement with a fist emoji in her signature shade of beige.
Ava’s response came not long after that.
As long as I don’t have to talk in public.
She added a brown fist emoji.
Martha stared at the fists and wondered which was worse: letting her friends down or letting her neighborhood down. She only had to think about it for a second. She typed her response and hit send.
It was an extremely pale white fist emoji.
CHAPTER FOUR
CJ WAITED for her friends in the quad. Jordan had told everyone to meet there twenty minutes before the first bell, and as usual, CJ was the only one who was there on time. She was eager to hear Jordan’s big idea and hoped it wasn’t anything too extreme. There was no way in hell she was chaining herself to the park fence or doing anything else that might jeopardize her chances of getting into Stanford.
She checked Find My Friends to see where everyone was and saw that she had a new e-mail. It was from the school college counselor. SAT Sign-Up Deadline Approaching/FINAL CHANCE. CJ opened the message, expecting to find a general reminder to the entire class. The e-mail was addressed only to her.
Hi, CJ. I look forward to sitting down with you to discuss your college plans. In the meantime, I wanted to make sure you were aware that the deadline to register for the fall SAT test is quickly approaching. This is the last chance for your scores to count for this application year. Given your current score and your academic goals, I highly encourage you to sign up to retake the test.
Best,
Ms. Fischer
CJ’s cheeks burned. Did Ms. Fischer seriously think CJ wasn’t already aware that her SAT scores blew? She was aware. She was painfully aware. The first time she’d taken the test, she’d been shocked by her results. 1150. She assumed it must have been some kind of mistake, and if it wasn’t a mistake, then it was certainly an anomaly. Just a bad test day. Everyone had them. So she rallied and regrouped and studied harder and took the test again. 1150 again. When she saw her score this time, she was furious. Not at the SATs and not even at herself. She was angry at everyone who had ever told her that she was special, that she was smart, that she was gifted, that her hard work would pay off. Her parents, her teachers, her friends. They were clearly all wrong. CJ Jacobson wasn’t special. She was average.
She knew that this was her last chance to take the test. The date was circled in red on her calendar and seared permanently into her brain. She would need to score at least in the high 1400s to have a shot at Stanford. She was doing everything she could to get that score. Over the summer, she’d used almost all of her babysitting and birthday money to take an SAT study course. She’d quit cross-country so she could study harder.
“Hey, babe.” CJ turned and found a bubbly Jordan bouncing her way over.
“You’re late,” CJ said.
“And you’re grumpy. What’s up?”
“Nothing. I thought we were meeting twenty minutes before class.”
“When have I ever been punctual? Where are Ava and Martha?”
“When have they ever been punctual?”
Ava and Martha arrived a few minutes later with a trail of apologies. That only left a few minutes for Jordan to reveal her big plan. “I want to interview the councilman,” she said.
Ava, CJ, and Martha traded looks. Unimpressed ones. Although CJ was relieved that Jordan didn’t expect her to chain herself to anything.
“Um, you already tried that,” Martha said.
“I tried it as the editor of a high school newspaper. Not as an adult journalist.”
“Adult journalist?” Ava said. “Like porn?”
Jordan shot her a look. “I mean a journalist who is an adult.”
CJ had no idea where this was going. “But you’re not a journalist who is an adult.”
“He doesn’t have to know that,” Jordan said. “If I call and request a phone interview, he won’t have any idea how old I am. Once I get my interview, I’ll run it in the Blaze. He’ll be stunned when he sees how good it is. He’ll never underestimate a kid again.”
“And this saves the park how?” Ava asked.
“One step at a time,” Jordan said.
The bell rang and CJ tensed. She and Martha both had AP Physics. They had their first quiz of the semester and CJ was nervous. Math and science had never come easily to her, and she’d been lost and overwhelmed since the first day. Martha belonged in that classroom. CJ didn’t. She was a fraud.