Pennybaker School Is Revolting, стр. 31
“Where are we going?”
“I don’t know, but anywhere is better than standing around in flowery dresses in front of a bunch of high schoolers. Come on.”
We got to the bottom of the staircase and turned right. The hallway was even darker than the stairwell, but I had a hunch that if we followed it, we would come up on the other side of the field house. Maybe there would be fewer people on that side.
Sure enough, there was another stairwell at the other end of the hall, and we raced up, both of us hiking our skirts so we didn’t trip over them. I was starting to understand why Grandma Jo almost never wore dresses: it was really hard to accomplish anything in one. The crowd noise got louder again as we neared the top of the stairs, but it wasn’t as loud as before. We craned our necks, straining to look left and right. A custodian at the far end of the hallway was pushing a trash can away from us, toward a door.
“It’s clear,” I whispered. We crept the rest of the way up and peered through the small windows on the field house doors. The game was in full swing; it was only a minute or so before halftime. “Do you see him?” I asked.
“No,” Chip said. “Oh, wait. There he is!” He pointed. Up in the stands, about four rows from the top, a man in brown pants and a vest, very much like the Pennybaker uniform, danced in the aisle, shaking his hips wildly. He had a huge fuzzy beard and a wide-brimmed hat. “He’s awfully far away,” Chip said.
“Yeah. Maybe we can wait for him in the locker room.”
“Good idea.”
We each went separate ways, looking for a locker room door. I was just about to give up and turn around when Chip whistled at me. I turned back to see him holding open a door and pointing inside.
“Good work, Chip,” I said, jogging to catch up with him. We slipped through.
“Thank goodness,” Chip said. “I’ve had to go since we left the house.” He disappeared into a stall.
But something was weird about this locker room. I couldn’t quite pinpoint it.
“Hurry up,” I said. “We don’t want to miss him if he comes in after halftime.”
“Okay, okay, hold your horses,” Chip said. He sounded like he was wrestling with a feisty bear in there. “Corsets aren’t easy to undo, you know.”
“You’re wearing a corset?” I knew exactly what a corset was. Grandma Jo had one, and she called it a girdle.
“You’re not?” He sighed. “I told you, Thomas, I wanted to be as authentic as possible. I laid yours out on the bed next to your dress. We need to go home now and get it.”
“I don’t think so,” I said, but the words came out soft and slow as I scanned the room. It was gradually dawning on me what was weird about this locker room. “Hey, Chip?”
“Huh?”
“Is there a urinal inside that stall, by chance?”
He laughed. “Why would there be a urinal inside a stall?”
My eyes landed on a little sparkly pink bag someone had left on the edge of the sink. I picked it up. “Because there isn’t one out here.” The bag was open a little bit, and inside I could see a bunch of little tubes and bottles and brushes. A makeup bag.
The toilet flushed, and there was more fumbling and bumping inside the stall, and then the door opened and Chip came out. “What?”
I held the bag toward him. “Chip, I think we’re in the—”
Voices roared into the room as the door flew open and a whole bunch of girls poured into the locker room. They were giggling and talking all at the same time, just like girls always did, and they were wearing much shorter versions of the dresses we were wearing.
“Oh, no,” I said. “Hide.”
I reached for Chip’s arm, but I was too late. One of the cheerleaders had spotted us. “Hey,” she said. “What are you doing in here?”
“It was a mistake,” I said, or at least I thought I said, but my voice was really small and scared, because I was pretty sure I was about to get creamed by a whole bunch of girl pioneers.
“You missed the entire first half,” she said, paying no attention to what I’d said. I ducked my head so she couldn’t see my face under the bonnet. I elbowed Chip, and he did the same.
“Sorry,” I said, raising the pitch of my voice, hoping I sounded like a girl. While also hating it a little that it was so easy for me to sound like a girl.
She thrust her hand into the glittery bag and pulled out a tube of lipstick. She smeared it on her lips, gave her hair a quick fluff, and said to her reflection in the mirror, “Ready? Okay. The least you can do is get out there for the halftime show. We go on in thirty seconds.”
Sure enough, all the other girls were rushing around, grabbing new pom-poms out of their lockers and retying their bootlaces.
“Why are their dresses so long?” one of them asked when we walked by.
“New girls,” someone answered her. “I think they’re from private school.”
Well, at least they had that much right.
“They look ridiculous,” the first girl said. She didn’t know how right she really was. “We need to get them real uniforms.”
“No time,” said the girl ushering us out of the locker room.
“Well, at least put them in the back row,” another girl said.
“Fine, whatever. I assume you two know the routine? Coach Danner has caught you up?” She thrust pom-poms at us.
I was frantically searching my brain for an answer that would get us out of having to go on, when Chip said, “Sure we do!” I tried to shoot him a