The Invisible Rules of Zoe Lama Read online

  The Invisible Rules of the Zoë Lama

  Tish Cohen

  To Max, Lucas, Marysa, Lachlan, Zoë, Jacob, and Olivia

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Name Names

  You Can Step in a Load of Crap, but a Smart Girl Doesn’t Put Up with Any

  You Can’t Polish a Poodle

  Even Bad Reputations Need Expiration Dates

  Never Argue When There’s Candy at Stake

  Smartin Granitstein Is Vile. There Are NO Exceptions to This Rule

  Keep Your Friends Close and Your Clients Closer

  Sometimes Death by Puckered Parrot Is Worth the Risk

  Sixty Seconds of Happy Kicks Jeopardy!’s Butt

  Never Lift for Yourself What a Fifth-Grader Is Willing to Lift for You

  If You Love Something, Set It Loose in Math Class

  Sorcerer’s Stands Require Written Permission

  He Who Swipes the Last Butterscotch Square Has Got to Go

  No One Can Ever Know Unwritten Rule #10. Ever

  Face the Jackals or They’ll Eat You Alive

  Never Trust a Snake

  Don’t Build Your Nest on a Flagpole

  Innermost Thoughts Should Always Be in Blue

  Libraries. Not So Hazard-Free Anymore

  It Ain’t Over till the Lady in White Sings

  Don’t Paint Spots on a Leopard

  If You Gotta Jump, Take No Prisoners

  Pay No Attention to the Unwritten Rule Behind the Curtain

  Sometimes Happy Comes in Extra Chunky

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Name Names

  I don’t like Mondays.

  It has nothing at all to do with the weekend being over before you really started having any sort of fun. And that you’re now stuck at school behind a desk with not one, not two, not even three, but four monster wads of gum stuck underneath it and one metal leg that is miles too short, so the desk wobbles every time you print your name, and the teacher squints and holds her finger to her lips.

  That’s not why.

  It also, in case you’re wondering, has nothing to do with hating to get up at 7:30 in the morning—especially after a weekend of sleeping until The Garage Girls comes on TV at nine. Okay, it has a little to do with that. But even if they canceled The Garage Girls—which they wouldn’t, since every girl at Allencroft Middle School watches it every Saturday—even then I would not like Mondays.

  When I’m a big yawner of an adult—although, really, I don’t know how “big” I’ll ever be since I’m the smallest person I know—I’m going to get a job where Monday is a part of the weekend. Then I could only go to work Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. It would have to be a short week because of The Garage Girls. And the place I work had better sell chocolate chip cookies, because I live on chocolate chips and my grandma once said you should have a job you love. And that’s what I love. Chocolate chips.

  The worst part of Mondays is that my mother goes to work crazy early. So I have to stand on a stool at the kitchen counter and line up Grandma’s seven hundred tiny colored pills and sort them into a plastic container divided by the days of the week. Mom always puts too many blue pills into Thursday or not enough pink ones into Tuesday because, she says, “I’m way stressed from the juggling act that is my life.”

  Don’t ask about my father. That would be rude, since I can hardly even remember when he was alive, and if anyone deserves to know anything at all about him, it’s me. He died when I was four and the one and only memory I have of him has to last me the rest of my life.

  So, anyway, that’s the problem with Mondays.

  This Monday happens to be Picture Day, which means I have more to do than usual. Not only do I have to sort out Grandma and worry that Mom will lose her keys again and be late for work and get fired so we’ll have to live under a broken bus until I’m old enough to go out and support the three of us…but I have to get a class of twenty-six twelve-year-olds ready for the school photographer. Last year, when I let them fend for themselves, Pamela Peterman wound up wearing the same blouse as Corinna Lynn Binns, and Tall Paul and Small Paul forgot to change out of their gym shorts.

  I didn’t care so much about Tall Paul—he’s last row, center, so no one can see his bony legs. But, since I’m not only shorter than any other human being in the seventh grade, I’m shorter than all of the sixth grade and exactly 76.6 percent of the fifth grade—because of that, Small Paul is always crammed next to me. And last year his scabbed-up knees took all the attention away from my sparkly hairband.

  I can’t risk it happening again.

  I sling my backpack over my homeroom chair and pour a handful of plastic barrettes and colored rubber bands onto my desktop. The other kids will be here any second, and I’d like to be ready.

  This much I’m sure of:

  -Alice Marriott’s mother will botch up her French braids and make her wear the vest with the prancing kittens. If I don’t help Alice, her future husband will see this vest in a photo one day, and might think twice about reproducing with her. (And would you blame him? Seriously…prancing kittens.)

  -Martin Granitstein will have maple-syrup stains all over his shirt, so I’ll have to give him someone’s smelly gym shirt from the bottom of their locker. Thankfully, I packed antibacterial wipes so I can disinfect later.

  -Avery Buckner will have smeary glasses. Smeared with who-knows-what. I guess I should be happy he’s still too young to have dandruff, because when he’s older those glasses’ll be covered in white flakes. You can just tell. Again, the wipes will save me.

  —And, for sure, for sure, for sure, Sylvia Smye will have too many cowlicks in her hair. Cowlicks are nearly as cruel an act of nature as making innocent people so small that strangers stop to talk baby talk at them, causing a certain short person to yell back, “I’m Twelve Years Old and I Don’t Want Your Crappy Candy!”

  Okay, not all true. If Mom says it’s okay, I take the candy.

  The bell rings and kids start pouring into the classroom. A line forms in the aisle in front of my desk and one by one they move toward me, stopping to twirl just like I showed them on Friday afternoon. Approach, stop, spin, and await your instructions. I take a baggie full of chocolate chips from my desk and gather a few for my first client, my number two BFIS.

  Number Two Best Friend in School. Laurel Sterling.

  “Happy Monday, O Zoë Lama,” she says, making a big embarrassing bow.

  I make an I-hate-Monday face, mixed with my don’t-call-me-Zoë-Lama face. This basically involves mad eyebrows, scrunched-up eyes, and one side of my lip in a sneer. It’s not pretty.

  I actually don’t hate the Zoë Lama part as much as I pretend to hate it, even though I didn’t exactly sign up to be the ruler of nearly everyone around me.

  It started when I was just a kid. At home, it might have had something to do with not having a father around to do helpful fatherish things, like knowing when to up the bran in Grandma’s cereal or how to use clear nail polish to stop a run in Mom’s stockings.

  With teachers, it just sort of happened. Wa-ay back in kindergarten.

  Kindergartners, as everyone knows, are a mess. They’ve got runny noses, missing teeth, shoes on the wrong feet, and stubby bangs they’ve sawed off with safety scissors—just to see if it would work. Every time they pull off a boot they lose a sock, and if anyone, anywhere, is going to lick an icy handrail, you can bet your favorite underwear it’ll be a kindergartner. Not only that, but they talk with a lisp and fall in love with their teacher.

  Well…some do.

  It’s not that I t
hought Mr. Silverberg was going to leave his wife to marry me. I wasn’t stupid. Besides, I barely came up to his knees. I just liked being around him and invented all sorts of reasons to help him. I organized the washable marker bins, shined up the building blocks, and sorted my classmates’ boots from biggest to smallest to teacher’s.

  After a while he started to count on me to help and asked me to pass out papers, help on field trips, and, most importantly, watch the class while he popped out for a smoke—his one and only putrid habit. And when Ms. Narck, the elementary school principal, dropped by, I always had the perfect cover for him—he ran out of burnt-sienna crayons, he accidentally stapled his tie to his thumb, his wife drove her car into a pond.

  A six-year-old can dream, can’t she?

  I learned two things that year. First, even if your teacher’s wife’s Volvo lands in a pond, eventually she’ll probably dry off and go home. Second, if you know your way around a teacher’s ego, this whole school thing becomes a breeze.

  How I became Zoë Lama to the students is still something of a legend. It all started at the top of the jungle gym when I was still about the size of Thumbelina, and it involved Patrick “The Raptor” Hammens. Meanest kid in the school and, to me, about the size of a giant.

  Patrick had cornered little pigeon-toed Leo Loomis at the top of the slide. Patrick had been stealing Leo’s popcorn-fund-raiser money all week and was giving him misery for having empty pockets—even though Leo’s pockets were only empty because Patrick had emptied them! Still, they weren’t any emptier than Patrick’s brain.

  A crowd of us had gathered at the bottom of the slide, hoping to catch Leo if Patrick got pushy. That was when Patrick said it. He asked Leo if Mommy tied his shoelaces together as a baby to teach him to walk like a duck.

  I was up that slide in half a second.

  “What do you want, Flea?” Patrick said to me, one hand still holding the front of Leo’s sweater. “You wanna lose your popcorn money, or just your life?”

  I ignored this and sat down. “I was just going to say…oh, never mind.”

  Patrick squinted at me through his evil slits for eyes. “What?”

  “Nothing. I can see you’re busy.”

  “Spill it or empty your pockets,” he growled.

  Dropping a pebble down the yellow slide and watching how fast it tumbled, I said, “It’s just that I guess you haven’t heard about the studies. What researchers are saying about kids who push around other kids. What it says, loud and clear, about their pasts.” I leaned down to swipe some sand off my shoe.

  By this time Patrick had let go of Leo, who was already sliding headfirst toward safety. Patrick squatted down across from me and sneered. “What do they know?”

  “Just that bully types come from families where they never feel heard. From parents who spend their every waking moment launching their new vitamin company and hire English nannies to pretend to love their kids.” Okay, so my mother gossips about the neighbors. A lot.

  It worked like magic. Patrick hid his face from me.

  “Some of these parents even forget the little things that make a childhood special. Like the tooth fairy during the agonizing molar years…”

  He sniffled.

  “Or that the bike a certain little boy wished for on his seventh birthday was a shiny red mountain bike with a water-bottle holder, not a crummy blue one with a banana seat and streamers…”

  He wiped his face with his dirty sleeve.

  “That this boy never cared about all those train rides to visit Grandma’s penthouse in New York with a spectacular view of the park, all he really wanted was to play Little Red Riding Hood with his dad in the basement.”

  The crowd below was silent, waiting for Patrick’s response. That was when the Raptor, previously known for crushing pop cans against his forehead and stuffing fourth graders through the basketball hoop, began to bawl.

  Not wanting to destroy the stupid oaf, I put an arm around his hulking shoulders and gave them a squeeze. “It’s okay, Patrick. Let it all out.”

  “Grammie was never even home,” he sobbed. “I had to play Scrabble with her veiny old ‘gentleman friend’!”

  “That’s right. Have a good cry. It’s how we heal.” Okay…so my mother had a few self-help books lying around. It wasn’t original, but it worked.

  He looked up, his cheeks soaked with tears, and sniffed. “You think I can? Heal?”

  “Absolutely. You know what you need?”

  He shook his head.

  “You need a safe place to fall. Someone to share your feelings with. Someone like me.”

  Kids started whispering and pointing like mad, and from that moment on, they looked at me differently. I had defused the Raptor and become a schoolyard celebrity all at once.

  And I liked it.

  “Wow,” said Miss Noonan, the playground monitor, from behind the seesaw. She wormed her way through the crowd of gawking kids and squinted up at me, still at the top of the slide. “You’re like a pint-size Dalai Lama. Bringing freedom and the right to coexist in peace and harmony to the peoples of Allencroft Elementary School.” She shivered and pulled her cardigan sweater tighter around herself. “You’re the Zoë Lama.”

  Of course, I had to race straight into the library to look up the word lama. First I spelled it with two l’s and thought Miss Noonan was calling me a “woolly beast of burden.” Naturally, I was a little upset. But then the librarian told me lama, in some other language, means teacher. It made perfect sense, since these kids really do need guidance.

  And so it was. The Zoë Lama was born.

  From that day on, requests came in almost daily for advice ranging from how to break in a new pair of flip-flops with minimal bleeding, to how to crush on a boy in a younger grade without destroying your reputation.

  I soon discovered an added bonus. Being the knower-of-all-unwritten-rules automatically provides me with an untouchable reputation—a happy side effect I’m thankful for every single day. As long as the Zoë Lama reigns, my status is safe. The day my reign ends is the day my peoples will drop the peace-and-harmony crap and eat me alive.

  Laurel’s skirt is pink corduroy. Her sweater is orange to match her tights, and her shoes are greenish with red laces. If it was anyone but Laurel wearing this rainbow of grossosity, I’d have told them to fake sick and go home. Fast. But Laurel is working hard to change, and when someone works hard at something, they need a reward, don’t you think?

  Laurel is obsessed with the color blue. Ever since I’ve known her, since we napped beside each other at Little Monsters Daycare, she’s worn head-to-toe blue. Always. Sometimes she even has to wear boys’ stuff, because the girls’ sections are mostly pink and red. Not only that, Laurel only eats blue stuff. The teachers at Little Monsters used to complain that they didn’t have blue snacks for Laurel, except in blueberry season. So Laurel’s mother brought snacks from home—blue, of course—in a special container. Blue.

  So you can see why I just offer Laurel some chocolate chips (which she refuses, but I have to offer) and nod. Laurel punches me in the shoulder—our secret sign—and sits down behind me, whispering, “Your hair looks good today, not too frizzy and extra chocolaty.” Every morning Laurel gives me the hair report, whether I want it or not. And since I happen to have especially curly, especially brown hair that happens to be long enough for me to sit on, and it happens to be right there in front of Laurel’s face all day long, she also tends to style it. Whether I like it or not.

  “Thanks,” I say. “You can braid it into ten braids, if you want. I’d like to look like a Caribbean princess today.” I pass back a few rubber bands to help get her motivated. “But not until after pictures, so I’m not a Caribbean princess forever in my mom’s wallet.”

  Next.

  Brianna Simpson is wearing white…when I told her specifically that it makes her look sick with her freckles. Now I’ll have to slap her cheeks before the camera clicks to make them look pink. Not too hard. Well, kinda
hard. But she’ll appreciate it when she takes home proofs that make her look like she’s just gotten off her steaming pony in the hills of Ireland. Not that she has a steaming pony. Too much dander.

  Next is my number one BFIS. Susannah Barnes. She looks great, as usual. She’s wearing big dark sunglasses and stops to lower them so I can see her eyes and know it’s her.

  Susannah is the perfect best friend. She’s a snarky, mocking, complicated drama diva. And don’t ever play with her hair or ask to try on her shades, because both are off-limits. But she’ll give you her last M&M, she’ll remember exactly what you wanted for your birthday, and she’ll phone you at 6 A.M. to remind you to wash your hair before school because today is the day Riley comes back from his two-week vacation in Cuba.

  We’ll discuss Riley later.

  “Be prepared for note launch right after the announcements,” Susannah whispers, giving my clean hair the thumbs-up. “Major news.”

  I pour her an extra-big handful of chips and wink. “Launch from the right. My left arm hurts from wrestling with Gram’s childproof vitamin jar.”

  Her mouth tightens into a little ball. “I promise you this—if I ever get offered a vitamin commercial, I’ll refuse to do it on the grounds of injuries like yours. You should sue.” She slides her sunglasses farther up her nose and swoops on past.

  Let me explain about the dark glasses. When Susannah was eight, she decided to become a World-Famous Child Star. Her mother thought it was an awesome idea, because everyone knows that World-Famous Child Stars’ mothers have nice cars and extra-slim thighs. So Mrs. Barnes got all these pictures taken of her daughter and Susannah got an agent—which is a special person who makes sure you get famous and get acting jobs and get to sign autographs. Sort of like the elephant keeper at the zoo on our third-grade field trip. He got the elephant all shined up and trained, and then took him out to get looked at and photographed by the public. Only, the elephant got paid in peanuts and Susannah got real coin.

  Anyway, the agent’s office is right above the doughnut shop, so every time Susannah has a meeting, she gets a Boston cream.