Free The Sound of Your Voice, Only Really Far Away by Frances O'Roark Dowell Page B

to punch her and yell, Get a grip! Earth to Marylin! These people are not your friends!
    “I don’t know, Marylin,” she said, trying to sound nice about it. “I mean, do you really want to hang out with people who treat you like that? And also, do you think it’s fair for someone who’s on Student Government to submit a proposal? Isn’t that, like, a conflict of interest or something?”
    Marylin shrugged. “There’s no rule that says I can’t. And Benjamin said it was fine.”
    “Oh, that’s right,” Kate said, and now she was totally unable to keep the sarcastic tone out of her voice. “I forgot your boyfriend ispresident. I guess you’ve got this one in the bag.”
    “Actually, he’s not all that crazy about my proposal,” Marylin said, sounding worried. “I called him last night to go over it with him, but he acted like he didn’t want to hear it. He probably just doesn’t want to seem like he’s playing favorites. Not that he actually has anything to do with which proposal wins. It’s a democratic process, right? One person, one vote.”
    “And you think people are going to vote for cheerleading uniforms?” Kate snorted.
    Marylin slipped the folder back into her back pouch. “I really do. You’d be surprised by how many students have true school spirit. Unlike some people I could name.”
    Kate took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. She hated the cheerleading side of Marylin. She hated how dumb it made her. Marylin could be goofy about a lot of things—that stupid flowered backpack she insisted on calling her back pouch, for example—but Kate liked Marylin’s goofiness. The cheerleading thing was something else entirely. Dumb. It was just dumb.
    They rode the rest of the trip in silence and didn’t even say good-bye when they got off the bus, which made Kate feel bad, but she couldn’t make herself be nice to someone whose big idea was getting more stuff for the kids who already had everything. How democratic was that?
    She headed for the audio lab as soon as she got in the school’s front door. Matthew would appreciate her proposal, she bet. He’d get how cool a school garden was. Matthew Holler was totally DIY.
    “You are exactly who I wanted to see at this exact very minute,” Matthew said when Kate found him working on his World of Noise recording. She felt her face flush and the tips of her fingers start to tingle. Really, she wished he didn’t have this effect on her. It made everything between them so uneven.
    “What did you want to see me about?” Kate asked, trying to sound cool. “Do you have a bridge you want to sell me?”
    Wow, she thought, that sounded so un cool. She gave Matthew a lame smile. “Or something like that?”
    “Something like that.” Matthew grinned. “I have a project I want us to work on together. I want to enter that What’s Your Big Idea contest and get some new gear for the audio lab. There’s a new version of Pro Tools I’ve got to have, for one thing. And the soundstage needs a total upgrade.”
    “Uh, that’s sounds really great and everything . . . ,” Kate said.
    “But?”
    “But I’m kind of doing a proposal with Lorna,” Kate told him. “For a school garden. So we can have—well, fresh lettuce at lunch and stuff like that.”
    Matthew looked disappointed, but he nodded at Kate and said, “Yeah, that’s a totally cool idea too. I definitely get it. I’m just bummed because I thought this was something we could work on together. I thought we could go over to my house this afternoon, and you could maybe stay for dinner. My mom said it was cool, if you like spaghetti and garlic bread.”
    “I love spaghetti and garlic bread,” Kate said, meaning it. She also loved hanging out atMatthew’s house, and she thought his mom was really nice, even if she had a rule about no girls in Matthew’s room.
    Matthew sighed. “Yeah, well, another time, right? So let me see what you wrote about a school garden.”
    “That’s okay,”