Beforehand, I write that day’s pink locker combination in the palm of my left hand. No one ever asks why I’ve inked myself with words like B-L-O-O-M, L-E-A-D-E-R, and T-R-U-T-H.

  In our headquarters, I grab the daily snack (the fudgy no-bake cookies are my favorite) and we take care of business. As predicted, PBBs account for most of our inquiries. But there have been other questions on the fringes. One girl asked about what to do if you’re afraid to get your ears pierced. And we’ve even had a couple questions from boys. They mostly want to know about girls and what to do if you like someone—so similar to the kind of questions girls ask!

  We’re getting so much “business” now that we’re working during every study hall and tapping away on the pink laptop during evenings and weekends. (Great, but not so great for my grades.) As promised, Piper rigged our laptop to buzz our phones with a special ringtone when we have a new question. For the ringtone, she recorded the three of us saying “Think pink!”

  I feel overwhelmed sometimes, but I still squeeze the PLS into my life, just like I squeeze in track practice (now that I’ve gotten used to running those endless laps and hilly trails). And also like track, being in the Pink Locker Society makes me feel good, as if I’m an important part of something. I love it when I hear people buzzing about the Web site or wondering who runs the Pink Locker Society. I’ve even seen “The Pink Locker Society Rocks!” written on the inside of one of the girls’ bathroom stalls. And I did eventually find a school library book that had one of those Pink Locker Society bookmarks inside. It said: “They’re cool and confidential. Ask and the Pink Locker Society will answer!”

  That’s me: I’m cool and confidential. It’s like an awesome secret, and even though I have had trouble keeping secrets before, I don’t mind keeping this one. But this secret would be more fun to keep if it were just between me, Piper, and Kate. If you ask me, Bet is a half-time, half-hearted member. (Which takes its toll on the rest of us, as if she doesn’t realize.) She misses a lot of meetings and has answered only a handful of questions from our readers. She barely says anything, just nods a lot and hangs close to Kate.

  Plus, Bet hasn’t really spoken to me since that day by the buses. I guess she has gotten used to being the new girl, so quiet you hardly know she’s there, always hanging on the outskirts. Even though I see her almost every day, I have to admit I have gotten used to something, too—not being Bet’s friend.

  Friday was always my favorite day of the week, but not anymore. Now we’re forced to watch Margaret Simon TV during last period. It was one thing watching Clem parade around during Clem’s Crib, saying things like “Here’s my shoe closet; here’s my at-home foot spa for pedicures. . . .” It was sometimes dull, but not the worst way to waste ten minutes of class time. But now that Taylor’s the anchor, everything has changed. Of course, since she’s Forrest’s girlfriend, I didn’t exactly long to watch her on TV. But my mood went from bored to electrified today when Forrest called my name on the way into class. I heard him say, “Jemma,” but by the time I turned around in my seat, Mr. Ford said, “Face front; let’s be courteous during Taylor’s broadcast.” When I looked back again at Forrest, he just laid his head on his folded arms, like he was going to take a nap.

  To prove something to Clem (or maybe all of us), Taylor had dramatically changed her approach to her broadcast. The kittens were definitely gone. Music boomed loudly in the intro to a new show she called Gotcha! It began with a scene from a recent football game, with the cheerleaders all posed in a perfect pyramid. Perfect at least until Marina Testarosa wobbled from her perch at the very top and they all came tumbling down. The class laughed a little, and the camera turned again to Taylor, who smiled in a pink turtleneck and said, “Gotcha!”

  From there the report went to a tape of Clem Caritas standing in front of the girls’ bathroom mirror, putting on lipstick and trying different smiles—the first one big and movie-star-like and the next one shy and closed lipped. Then she winked at herself. “Gotcha!” purred Taylor again, this time pointing a jaunty finger at the camera.

  And so it went on for ten uncomfortable minutes, showing people caught on secret videotape. Even though he said nothing, I could tell Mr. Ford was getting annoyed by the way he sighed and shifted in his squeaky desk chair.

  “It’s funny, right? I think it’s really funny,” Taylor explained, live to the class.

  That seemed to give them more permission to laugh, and they did so with increasing volume with each new clip. The one of Mr. Updike, the janitor, chasing a groundhog around the front lawn drew a real hoot. Hardly anyone laughed, though, when the camera zoomed into the cafeteria, zeroing in on a long lunch table where Bet sat alone, eating delicately from her lunchbox.

  “Boo-hoo-hoo and . . . Gotcha!” Taylor said, rubbing her eyes and putting on a fake sad pout.

  Just as I was gathering some sympathy for Bet and despising Taylor that much more, I saw a familiar row of lockers emerge on the screen. Then the camera moved in close to catch me slipping out of my locker and stepping a foot gingerly on the linoleum tiles. My face couldn’t hide my surprise and, with cheeks flushed pink, I hustled by the camera until Tia could do nothing else but record my fast departure down the hall.

  Back to Taylor, who this time said, “Gotcha, Locker Girl!” and narrowed her eyes into a “Could she be any weirder?” kind of look.

  My mom often says that we don’t absorb difficult things all at once, but rather in stages. My first stage here was breathless shock. I would have gotten up to leave the room, but I was paralyzed in place. Everyone looked at me, some of them still laughing. I could not bring myself to turn around and look at Forrest. My worst fear had come true.

  The second stage for me was an incredible desire to just do something—anything. Running away wasn’t my first choice, once I had a moment to think. What I wanted to do most was lift Taylor—desk and all—and fling her like a whirlybird out the classroom’s second-floor window.

  The third stage was trying to make sense of it all. Of course (my brain finally reasoned), Tia had the camera rolling that day in the hallway when I caught Taylor and Clem fighting. And what it captured was not just the cat-fight between them but my odd reentry into the hallway. I was now officially the weirdest girl in school, worse than Bet eating alone or Clem smiling at herself in the bathroom. I was someone who spent time inside her locker with the door closed.

  Thankfully, Taylor’s segment soon ended, and Mr. Ford grumbled something about moving along because the buses were already lining up. I started to gather myself but I felt like I was moving in slow motion, having to think about each step I took: Pick up backpack, step with the right foot, now with the left. Kate and Piper ran up to me after class, but I couldn’t even talk.

  “What a beast, she is—like that Jerry Springsteen on TV,” Piper said.

  “It’s Jerry Springer. Springsteen is the singer,” Kate corrected. “Are you okay?” she asked me.

  “No,” I said meekly. I walked with great effort to my bus, like I was walking through deep, deep snow.

  To my surprise, someone was standing at the bus’s door, waiting for me. It was Forrest.

  If I told you that Forrest not only waited for me but that he sat with me on the bus, would you believe it? How is it that the very worst thing and the very best thing could happen to me within the same twenty-minute stretch of time?

  “I was trying to tell you before class,” Forrest said from the window seat.

  Taylor had showed him the tape, he told me, and he knew how embarrassed I would be, how embarrassed everyone in it would be.

  “She’s trying to prove she deserves to be the anchor this year,” he said, as if making excuses for her.

  “Well, whatever it takes, I guess.”

  “I know. It’s mean. I told her it was mean, but she said ‘that’s journalism’.”

  And then he looked off to the side and smiled a little bit, not a cruel smile, but the flash of a smile that told me how much he liked her. He smiled just thinking about her.

  I tried to talk more, but I was afraid I might cry—cry because I was so embarrassed and cry because I was sitting so close to Forrest and I wanted him to stay there forever. I stared ahead at the green vinyl seat and bit my lip. He was quiet for a long while, and then he said, “Can I ask you something?”

  I turned to him and watched a lock of beachy brown hair fall over his eyebrow.

  If I touched it, what would he do? Slap my hand? Let me?

  “Yes, you can ask me something,” I said.

  “Why were you in your locker?”

  How embarrassing. Of course, I knew I shouldn’t tell him. At this point, my bent knee was either touching his or the electricity between us was just making it feel that way.

  “I can’t tell you,” I said, leaning in, “but someday soon I will show you.”

  Forrest looked at me quizzically. It was a little like the look Taylor shot at me in her Gotcha! tape, but it was so much kinder. Not to overanalyze the look on his face, but I wanted to believe that it said “We’re friends, maybe with potential for more.”

  All weekend, I thought of Forrest and how sweet he was to me and hoped that it was more than him just being a good guy. I wanted to know if he had tried to warn anyone else about Gotcha! If it was me and only me, then that surely meant something. I also kept weighing in my head the idea of sneaking him into the Pink Locker Society offices. I did say I would show him, didn’t I?

  My membership in the PLS is probably the coolest thing about me, so I really wanted him to know. And what an adventure it would be. We’d have a shared secret to tie us together always.

  Once inside I could show him how the Web site worked, offer him a snack from the fridge, and tell him how the society mysteriously ceased to exist in the 1970s. Wasn’t that a cool mystery to unravel? I saw us chatting together on the couch, and then maybe I would ask him about Taylor and why he was with such a miserable girl. Then maybe he would ask my advice, and I would say, “Why don’t you go out with someone who really cares about you?” And then he would figure out that someone was me.

  Of course, there were problems with my plan. I wasn’t supposed to let other people into the office. I could be kicked out of the PLS, which—even though only a handful of people would ever know—would be worse than getting caught climbing out of my locker. I can’t imagine the Pink Locker Society going on without me. And I can imagine all too well how angry Piper and Kate would be. Then there was the issue of me finding the courage to actually say that Forrest should be going out with someone else—ahem—me. With Forrest I usually stuttered and stammered and backed myself into dumb conversations. Remember the ski lift?

  But whether I could find the courage or not, maybe I should be more like Kate and stay on my best behavior. The rules were not to take anyone into the PLS offices or reveal that we were in the PLS. “Your clients—the girls who need help—require a certain amount of discretion and confidentiality,” Edith had explained to us.

  And what if Forrest told Taylor all about it? Forrest could be trusted, I was sure. But Taylor? No way.

  I was tossing and turning all this in my head on the way into school on Monday when Kate and Piper stopped me dead in my tracks. They pulled me into the back of the empty auditorium.

  “Look at this,” they said, and opened the pink laptop to reveal the Pink Locker Society Web site. Only now there were pop-up boxes crowding the page. And in the boxes there were comments, mean comments directed at the girls who wrote in to us.

  La-ha-looooooser! Boys will never like you. Good Luck! popped up right next to a question from a girl who was tired of having a small chest. It totally drowned out our kind and thoughtful answer about how puberty happens on its own schedule and that she should like and appreciate the body she has today.

  We kept on clicking through, and my stomach started to hurt. Our answer about freckles was paired with a pop-up that read: Lyssa Madurci, I know it’s you. You are like one big freckle, and that ain’t cool.

  Poor Lyssa. I had kind of suspected it was her, but I would have never said so.

  “This can’t be happening,” Kate said. “These poor girls.”

  “Who’s going to want to come to our site after this?” Piper said.

  The girl who wrote in to say she was in love with her older brother’s best friend was not spared either. We gave her our best advice on crushes and suggested she get to know him as a friend. But the pop-up blared: Boo-hoo-hoo! Older guys like hot girls, so give up!

  “Who would do this?” I asked, my voice shaking a little.

  I felt panicked, like that time I was boiling water for spaghetti and accidentally set a dish towel on fire.

  “Piper, what do we do?”

  Piper shook her head and said she’d have to call the computer woman.

  “We have to find out who’s doing this to us,” she said. “Who would hate the Pink Locker Sociey? We get nothing but fan mail.”

  “It doesn’t matter who, we just have to fix it,” Kate said.

  For weeks, we’d been finding our way and feeling proud of ourselves for helping girls. Now the day had come for a PLS-SOS. Kate whipped out her red phone and texted:

  Emergency!

  At 1:35, more than a little breathless, Kate and I rushed into the PLS offices. Still weirded out by what we had seen that morning, we overlooked our snacks and ran straight upstairs to answer the ringing phone. Piper and Bet were already there. Funny how Bet chose this particular meeting to attend.

  On the line were Anna Hansen, the computer consultant, and Edith, the grandmotherly woman who was our point of contact with the Pinkies.

  “Hiya, girls, what’s the emergency?” Anna asked.

  Piper’s words came out in a torrent, explaining what was going on and how we didn’t know what to do.

  “Someone has hacked into our site and they are saying such awful things.” Piper said. “There are probably a dozen girls crying right now. It’s revolting!”

  We heard the click-clacks of typing as Anna and Edith navigated to www.pinklockersociety.org. Edith gasped.

  “Oh, my Lord, what is going on?” Edith said.

  “Someone has really pulled a fast one here,” Anna said.

  “How are they doing this?” Bet asked Anna.

  “Hackers hack into Web sites in a buncha ways,” Anna said. It’s going to take some detective work to figure out how they’re gettin’ in—and to keep them out.”

  For a few moments, we just stayed quiet—all of us—waiting for a good idea to come to us. It was Edith who spoke first, and she did so in a quiet voice.

  “In the best interests of the Pink Locker Society—its past and future—I have no choice but to shut down the Web site,” she said.

  “Shut it down?” Kate asked.

  “Temporarily, I hope,” Edith said.

  “Let us see if we can get it fixed first. We can’t just give up,” Piper said.

  “I can get right on it,” Anna said. “Best case, we’ll have it licked in forty-eight hours.”

  “Yes, please. We don’t want to go out of business,” I said, sounding a little desperate.

  Again, Edith paused. I could almost feel her kindness through the phone. But she stuck to her decision.

  “I’m sorry. There’s just too much liability here,” she said. “I know you girls have worked so hard and were off to a promising start, but we can’t let other girls get hurt. It’s not the Pink Locker way.

  “Anna, please turn the site off until we can figure out what’s going on,” Edith said. “I’ll call an emergency board meeting to let the other Pinkies know. They will be more disappointed than you girls, if you can believe it.”

  I couldn’t believe any of it.

  “Dears, I will be back in touch as soon as it’s safe to restart the site. Stay positive,” Edith said.

  Just like that, Anna pulled down the entire Pink Locker Society site, and our pink world faded to black.

  Did you every worry that by wishing something, you made it come true? Confession: I loved the PLS, but before we were shut down, I had wished that it would slow down just a bit. The weight of everyone’s problems was sometimes too much. We received more and more questions each week, and it was tough to answer them—and answer them right—and still keep up with my schoolwork. I had a huge English paper that I hadn’t even started. And a ton of geometry proofs to do. Sometimes I turned off my phone so I wouldn’t have to be bothered with new alerts from our PLS mailbox. But now, after of few days of never hearing that “Think pink!” ringtone, I felt guilty.

  In our downtime, Piper, Kate, and I talked about whether we should try to keep up with the questions, just so we’d be prepared for the moment the site turned back on. But in the end, we decided that made no sense. People asked us questions in the moment, and by the time we were back in business, their problems might have been solved or changed. It wasn’t long before I started to miss the PLS. I liked being needed. And I was ready to tackle more questions in my “area of expertise,” which turned out to be embarrassing stuff.

  So far, I had done especially well with questions about bad breath, stinky feet, and accidentally tooting in class. After the Gotcha! incident, I guess I was the school expert on humiliation. Actually, I couldn’t have answered these questions without our school nurse, Mrs. Wolff, who must be starting to think I’m a pretty odd girl, to be worried about so many things at once. Somehow it wasn’t embarrassing to ask an embarrassing question when it wasn’t really about you. It was easy for me to ask questions about periods, for instance, since mine was still totally MIA. On that subject, there was no end to what girls wanted to know: Can you swim with your period? Do periods hurt? Should I eat certain foods during my period? I got answers for every one.