Right above her lip, Vice Principal Oostergard sported a quivering red mole that reminded me of a ladybug. Let me rephrase. Say some Hollywood big-shots came up with a script for a horror movie about scientists who crossed killer bees with ordinary ladybugs—Ladybugzzzz!, or something like that—and they needed a model for the souped-up, fanged version? Specifically, a bulgy beetle with an enormous black hair sprouting from the middle of its back? I knew a vice principal with the real goods.

“Vickie?” If the sound of my name being mangled hadn’t woken me right up, the death rattle of the eleven-ten bell surely would have. The chairs in Oostergard’s office weren’t doing my butt any good, so I was glad to shift around and grab my backpack, ready to bolt. “You seem distracted.”

Oh, she had no idea. “It’s Vick,” I reminded her for the umpteenth time. “Rhymes with quick, slick, and chick.” Let adults have an inch, and they’d take a hemisphere. “It’s my lunch period now, so. . . .”

I don’t know how vice principals are made. Does anyone really wake up one morning and decide, Hey! I’m going to be a vice principal when I grow up! Woohoo! Somehow I didn’t think so. Wherever they came from, whether a Vice Principal Boot Camp or some kind of creepy bioengineering lab, all the vice principals I’ve known seemed to develop convenient Sudden Deafness Syndrome when I said something they didn’t want to hear. Particularly when it came to my lunch. “Don’t you like Vickie, dear?” No, I didn’t. My name was Vick. I didn’t like Vickie, I didn’t like Victoria. I didn’t like Vice Principal Oostergard’s bleached perm or her plastic orange eyeglasses, her hairy ladybug mole, or the way she kept looking at my file with bugged-out eyes like it was some kind of hot ‘n’ sexy novel and she needed a few minutes of alone time with it.

My backpack rested in my lap. My feet were in sprint position. My brain had already walked out of our new Vice Principal’s office and through the main door to take a breather on the front steps of Millard Fillmore High School. All I needed was an official benediction, and I could join it. Instead, my jailer leaned back in her chair and regarded me as if I was a sorry-looking papier-mâché volcano filled with baking powder and she was the science fair judge. “Vickie,” she said, rubbing her fingertip on the mole. That so squicked me out. “One of the reasons Mr. Dermot didn’t return this year is because the administration felt he wasn’t adequately addressing the school’s at-risk students. Your counselor, Mr. O’Doul, and I agree that one of my functions in this position. . . .”

Blah, blah, blah. I’d thought being a junior would be a breeze with Vice Principal Dermot finally out of my hair. During my sophomore year, Dermot the Doormat been the bane of my life, constantly assuming I was behind everything bad that happened at school. Okay, maybe there’d been a few things I might have had a hand in. Like when I’d broken the nose off the bust of President Fillmore. Or, you know, the afternoon I’d kind of invaded the boys’ showers while the guys from the softball team were lathering up. And the night when Rambo the Killer Mountain Goat, our school mascot, had gone on a rampage in the Doormat’s office and topped it off with a stinking giftie that only a goat with an intestinal problem could deliver? Yeah, I might have been somewhere nearby. But none of those things had been intentional. Sometimes stuff just kind of happens. Actually, that goat poo incident had happened in the very office I was now sitting in.

Ew.

Six weeks ago, when I’d walked through the front doors of Fillmore and had taken my first lungful of Dermot-free air, I’d felt like pounding my chest, Tarzan-style, and yelling at the glorious freedom of it all. If I’d known I would be spending Monday mornings in special sessions with the Oostermonster, I might not have been so hasty to see Dermot’s backside. At least his little confrontations had been short and sweet, and hadn’t made me long for something to take away the tedium. Anything would have done. Like, for example, Chinese water torture or bamboo spikes beneath my nails. Or Algebra II. “. . . remember what Mr. O’Doul has said about anger management techniques. Right?”

Uh-oh. A direct question. I wasn’t prepared for one of those. “Um, deep breaths, in with anger, out with love, can I go to lunch now?” I improvised. “I only get forty minutes.”

Simple yes-or-no question, right? Wrong. The Oostermonster let her fingers intertwine in one of those, here-is-the-church, here-is-the-steeple, open-your-mouth-and-bore-all-the-people gestures. “How are things at home, Vickie?” Oh, man. We were so not going there. I’m not a bad kid. I’m honestly not. I hadn’t gotten into a lick of trouble since the beginning of the school year. If old Dermot hadn’t fled the school and left on his desk a thick folder with my name on it, the new Vice Principal could have focused her attention on the smokers and bullies and stoners and cutters and hall-runners and cheaters and all the other kids who actually deserved to be sitting in that chair instead of on me, and I’d be a much happier Vick. My home life wasn’t any of this woman’s business. I let her know it with upraised eyebrows. “Is there any progress with your father, dear?”

Progress? As if my dad was an invalid or something! “He’s fine. I’m fine. Everything’s fine.” I looked at the clock on her desk. “It’s going to take me about six minutes to get to the cafeteria, Ms. Oostergard, and already I’m five minutes late, and if I don’t leave now, I’ll have less than a half hour to eat, and studies say mid-day nutrition is essential for student performance. . . .”

I stopped talking when, without warning, she unclenched her fingers and made a note on her pad. I would’ve given anything to see what she’d written. Defensive, probably. Maybe, Avoids the issue at hand. Or quite possibly, What a hog. Despite a stab of interest, I gritted my teeth and waited for the lecture that was surely going to follow. I got nothing, though, save for the sound of her pencil scraping against paper. “I’d like it,” she said at last, still writing, “if you would tell your father that I will be calling him soon. Just to check in.” Oh, creeping crud. What’d she want to go and do that for? Old, witchy Vick would’ve squawked her head off about that injustice, but autumn-fresh, magic-free Vick only smiled and nodded. Finally, after a lot more scratching, she looked up through her oversized clown glasses. “You can go,” she said at last, surprised to see me still there. Somehow she managed to make it sound like I’d been the one lounging around, taking up her time.

I didn’t need a second invitation. I scrambled the heck out of that office, with its motivational posters and lavender-smelling potpourri, with a cheery, “Thank you, Ms. Oostergard!” that made Mrs. Detweiler and the other school secretaries look up from their desks and smile my way. You see, there are some people in the world who don’t hold a grudge because you accidentally let the school mascot masticate their desk supplies.

I said masticate. It’s a verb. Look it up.

Anyway, if there was one thing New Vick still had in common with Old Vick, it was attitude—and plenty of it. My interior might have improved some from last year, when I had play-acted that I was a hex-casting witch when I was only a regular girl with mad sleight-of-hand skills, but my exterior hadn’t changed at all. I was still tough. Last year, once Dad and I had moved to this most pathetic of tiny cities out in the middle of the American Midworst, for the first time I’d dyed my hair as dark as I could and used the tip of my black-nailed finger to smudge penciled kohl around my eyes. When I turned and looked in the mirror, it felt like I’d finally found my real calling. Vickie the Timid, pushed around at school and after school, had become Vick the Dangerous, the kind of girl the other kids avoided. The kind of girl they scarcely dared to look in the eye.

 

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