Ten Miles Past Normal

Chapter Eight


It’s for a Good Cause





By the time I get to Great Girls and Women of American History, my last class of the day, I’ve made it all the way through Sarah’s note. I learn what the Lymans had for dinner Saturday night (extra-large take-out meat-busters pizza) and how Sarah got out of going to church Sunday morning (claimed to have cramps—total lie), which is her goal every week. She hates to miss the political talk shows, just in case someone mentions cocoa beans.

And then comes the shocking news: Emma has been grounded for curfew violations. I had no idea Emma even had a curfew. I always assumed that as long as she kept her grades up and stayed away from the long arm of the law, she was free to do as she pleased. Besides, people like Emma don’t get grounded. They get sent to the guillotine or military school. Getting grounded is what happens to normal people.

Todd dropped Emma off at three a.m., Sarah had written in her note. His Harley woke up the whole neighborhood. You should have heard my dad when he got outside. It was like an opera out there—Emma shrieking at my dad, my dad yelling at the top of his lungs, Todd revving his engine, all the neighborhood dogs barking. That’s got to be a violation of the neighborhood covenant. (Does Shady Woods have a covenant? And if so, is it constitutional? I’ll have to check.)

Sarah is sitting in a lounge chair at the back of the classroom when I get there. In Ms. Morrison’s classroom the desks are pulled together in a tight circle with a round, bright orange rug in the middle, and the corners are filled with various beach chairs and loungers for when her classes break into groups. Ms. Morrison is the sort of teacher who can’t go ten minutes without breaking her class into groups, which is why nothing ever gets done during class time. Ninety-five percent of the work done for Great Girls and Woman of American History is strictly extracurricular.

Sarah holds up her notebook when she sees me, and even from across the room I can see the pro/con line dividing the page into two neat columns.

“I think we’ve got to go with Geraldine,” she tells me when I pull up a wobbly chaise lounge beside her. “Her pros outweigh anybody else’s on our list.”

“Au contraire, Pierre,” I say. “I think I’ve got an idea you’re going to like even more than Geraldine.”

The bell rings, and Ms. Morrison breezes into the classroom, papers spilling out of her organizer, a sticky note stuck to her elbow. “Continue on, everyone!” she says. “Project ideas due at the end of class!”

Since no one actually stopped talking when she entered the room, continuing on is not a problem. In fact, two months into the school year, our small class treats Ms. Morrison as an afterthought. Even when we’re gathered together as a group, Ms. Morrison is rarely the center of attention. That honor goes to Marley Baxter, a radical feminist sophomore who on the first day of class wanted to hold a vote on whether or not the class’s lone boy, Wallace, should be allowed to stay. Sarah campaigned vigorously on Wallace’s behalf and he was voted in, 11–2, but Marley continued to behave as if the class were hers to lead, and after a while, the rest of us generally accepted her command. For one thing, she’s pretty free with the bathroom passes.

I pull my list from my notebook and hand it to Sarah, who quickly eyeballs it and shrugs. “It looks great and everything, except that I don’t actually know who these women are, and if I don’t know, then it goes without saying . . .”

She waves her arm vaguely around, which I’m supposed to interpret to mean that if Sarah doesn’t know, nobody knows.

I take my list back and point to Hazel Pritchard’s name. “Mrs. Pritchard was very involved in the civil rights movement.” I pause, then say in a singsongy voice, “You know how much you like civil rights stuff.”

Civil rights is the one political issue the whole Lyman family can agree upon. Civil rights for all Americans = Good. And last year Emma got completely wrapped up in it. She’d read this book called Blood Done Sign My Name by Timothy B. Tyson, about the murder of a black man by a white man and the subsequent trial back in the 1970s, thirty miles north of here. She took a road trip to the town where the murder happened and wrote a forty-page paper about it, which her teacher wanted her to try to publish in an academic journal.

This gives me an idea. “What if we got Emma to help us? She might, right? Okay, probably not, but maybe. I mean, I know it’s a long shot and everything. . . .”

Sarah’s eyes widen. An Emma opportunity! Have I mentioned that both of us worship Emma as the Queen of Cool? Rest assured that the feeling is not mutual. It’s not that Emma’s rude or actively unkind; she just doesn’t seem to realize that either Sarah or I exist in any sort of meaningful way. If we were pets, we’d be goldfish; if we were a sport, we’d be Ping-Pong. No, we’d be a Ping-Pong table covered with folded laundry.

I watch Sarah working out the possibilities of my suggestion in her head. A civil rights project is right up Emma’s alley. You can even imagine Emma feeling a little jealous that it’s not her project. You can even imagine Emma looking up to us for coming up with such an amazing plan.

Okay, so you can’t really imagine Emma looking up to us. Neither can we. In fact, Sarah shakes her head a little, as if that little bit of fantasy has just occurred to her and she’s trying to dislodge it from her brain.

“All right,” she says after another minute. “The Mrs. Pritchard project has definite potential, I have to admit.”

“It really does,” I agree cheerfully.

“I bet there are old newspaper articles we could find.” Sarah plucks a pen from behind her ear and begins to fill up a new page of her notebook. “We’ll need to do interviews. Emma can take us.”

She says this matter-of-factly, as if Emma was always giving us a ride somewhere. Emma has never given us a ride anywhere, of course, even though she’s had her driver’s license for a year and a half. She has exactly the sort of car you’d want to be seen in too—a beat-up baby blue Volkswagen Beetle with cool political bumper stickers plastered across the back. Now I imagine myself in the backseat, the wind blowing through my hair as we drive off in pursuit of truth and justice and the American way.

It probably won’t ever happen, but a girl can dream.

We spend the rest of the period working out the fine points of our project. At five minutes before the bell, Marley Baxter yells out, “All right, folks, I’ll be coming around to pick up your project proposals, so have ’em ready.” Sarah writes our names neatly across the top of our paper, then nods approvingly at our work.

“This is important,” she declares. “From everything you’ve told me, Hazel Pritchard was a hero. People should know about her.”

“I bet doing research on Mrs. Pritchard will be a lot more fun than on Geraldine Ferraro,” I add.

Sarah looks at me as if to ask, Geraldine who?

And then she looks at her watch and grins. “Hey, hey, it’s Jeremy Fitch time.”

We lean toward each other and slap high fives.

Jeremy Fitch time is the highlight of our day.