To my positive delight, Gotcha! did not appear on MSTV after that first week. Principal Finklestein halted it—at least temporarily—and announced a plan to have a contest for the MSTV Friday-afternoon slot. That didn’t mean Taylor was out of the running, just that she had competition. All a student had to do was submit a video.

  I thought for a moment about submitting my own video. I would have loved to interview everyone who was embarrassed in Taylor’s first episode. But then I thought it would just draw more attention to stuff that everybody, including me, would have preferred to forget. Not that I had any time for another extracurricular activity. Even with the break from the PLS, I was still drowning a bit in my schoolwork, track, and everything else.

  Principal Finklestein said we’d see all the videos at a school assembly, where there’d be a panel of judges including him, Ms. Russo, and a couple of real journalists from the local TV station and daily newspaper. We students would have “input” into the final choice, he said. But it was clear the panel would choose the winner.

  Ordinarily, I would have been up in arms. After all, it’s our TV station; shouldn’t we students get to be the final judges? But in this case—suspecting Principal F. was no fan of Gotcha!—I was fine with it. In art class, I was happy to hear Ms. Russo say Taylor’s broadcast could have been “tweaked” to be more playful and kindhearted. But she also had us debate whether Gotcha! was “free speech” and protected by the First Amendment. This only served to annoy me, especially when Taylor pled her own case.

  “I have a right to say what I want when I want,” she told the class, predicting that she would win again in the end.

  I know that what I did wasn’t right. But the more I thought about the PLS, I thought it might not be so bad to let Forrest in on the secret, especially right now while we were on this forced vacation. Anna said she’d text us when the hackers had been stopped, but forty-eight hours had passed and we still had no idea how long we’d have to wait.

  To prepare myself, I wrote a script for exactly what I would say to Forrest about the whole thing. Memorizing my lines made me feel sort of confident. Of course, I had to guess at what he would say back, but I figured I knew him pretty well. After all, did anyone else know that his favorite jelly was the mixed-fruit flavor—the kind you usually find only in those packets at a diner?

  I planned it out like a crime and decided that I’d carry it out on Thursday during my empty study hall period. That morning, I even pretended to worry about where I’d go during study hall, now that there was no reason for us to sneak into the Pink Locker Society offices. It was just depressing to turn on our computers and see all the questions stacking up. Girls were already complaining: “Where are you?” and “Hello? Is anyone home in there?”

  Piper and Kate said they were going to spend their study halls in the library.

  “Me too,” Bet said, quickly adding that she needed to find a spot to study alone.

  I said (lied) that I had found an empty classroom in the art and music wing and that I too wanted to be alone to do those geometry proofs. I watched the three of them walk toward the library together and I prepared to spring into action.

  My head felt like a balloon filled with love, fog, and electricity. I held my hand out and saw that it was shaking a little. Fortunately, Forrest was easy to capture. He was at his locker, right next to mine, just before study hall started. He often spent his study halls in the gym working out. No one would miss him, I figured. When the hall crowds thinned, I leaned over to Forrest and spoke my first scripted line: “I can show you now.”

  Lesson number one to all you girls out there who really like a boy: Don’t count on him remembering everything you ever said to him. You may think you have inside jokes and your own secret code, but you probably don’t.

  Forrest just looked startled and said, “What?” And when I said it again—“I can show you now”—he said, “What?” again. Maybe I should have started with something like hi.

  Anyway, this led to me doing a lot of overexplaining, burbling on about our conversation on the bus and Gotcha! and how I said I would show him someday and now I was ready to show him. Finally, I saw a glimmer of recognition sweep across his face. I looked over my right and left shoulders, then motioned to the inside of my locker.

  “What?” he said, but he tipped his head in my direction and looked in.

  He squinted as if maybe something was wrong with his vision and took a step back.

  “What’s in there?” he whispered.

  I leaned into my locker and worked the combination dial. The combination hadn’t changed since the site had been shut down.

  “That’s what I want to show you,” I said as I swung open the pink door. “C’mon.”

  I went in, and once he saw me standing in there, he followed. He even pulled my locker door closed behind him.

  In my script, I was the one who closed the locker door, but no matter. I was having trouble sticking to my script anyway. It wasn’t that Forrest said anything so different from what I had guessed he would say. But once we were in the Pink Locker Society offices, he said nothing at all.

  Standing there, he looked a little afraid. I think he was mad at me. Later, I had to feel sorry for him. On my first trip into the PLS headquarters, at least I had a little warning and time to get mentally prepared. Forrest just got pulled in, kidnapped almost. His face started to soften after I explained where we were and what this was all about.

  “I’m the Pink Locker Society. I mean, I’m in the Pink Locker Society. This is our office. You know what the PLS is, right?”

  Now Forrest gave me a look of disbelief, but then I pulled him toward the loft to show him the computers. Then I whipsawed back to kitchen area.

  “Usually, there are snacks,” I said as I grabbed a box of crackers.

  “Want some?”

  “No,” Forrest said—his first word.

  “Well, maybe if I had mixed-fruit jelly for the crackers?”

  OK, girls. Have you heard me loud and clear? Assume no inside jokes or secret code. After that fruit-jelly remark, he looked at me as if I were wearing my underwear as a hat. Zero recognition. Maybe he had moved on to something more exotic in the jelly department.

  I turned and pulled him back up to the loft, where I continued to talk too fast and move too fast. Forrest seemed to wake up when I turned on the computer up in the loft and went to the Web site. Edith had left the home page up. A message apologized for the “temporary interruption.”

  “Oh, I’ve seen this,” he said. “Taylor goes there all the time.”

  Great. He’s said eleven words to me and one of them was Taylor.

  “What’s it all about?” he asked.

  You can imagine that my answer was a little awkward. I like Forrest a lot so I don’t exactly want to discuss PBBs with him. I mean, for me, he’s the second B, after all. What I did tell him was that girls need to know a lot of stuff as they get older, and the PLS helps them get answers to embarrassing questions.

  “Like about growing up, changes, and crushes and stuff,” I said.

  “Okay, so why did you bring me in here?” he asked.

  I knew the answer. In fact, I could have answered by describing all the layers of reasons I wanted Forrest to come to this place: to see something that mattered to me, something that made me special, and to see something that finally explained why I was climbing out of my locker in Taylor’s Gotcha! video. But I never got the chance to speak.

  Just then, we heard some noises from across the room. Ka-chink went a locker door, and then we saw a shaft of light. Before I could see who it was, Forrest was off down the stairs. I saw him head for my my pink locker door. I waited just a moment longer, long enough to see Bet land in the room.

  “Oh, Jemma. It’s you. . . . ,” Bet said, looking up to the left and surprised to see me.

  Did she see the back of Forrest flying out of there?

  “Uh, I have to go,” I said, bolting toward my locker door.

  I was momentarily crushed inside the locker with Forrest. He was jiggling the latch so frantically, I was worried about the noise coming through on the other side.

  “I’ll get it. I’ll get it,” I whispered.

  And then I paused just a few seconds before letting us out. I stopped to savor the smell of Forrest’s hooded sweatshirt. I inhaled slowly and deeply, and then Forrest said, “Open the door. I’m suffocating.” I let out my breath and let him go.

  My heart was pounding. After we stepped out of my locker, I wanted to explain that it was just Bet (though I could not explain why she was there). I wanted to finally give Forrest my layer cake of reasons why I wanted him to see the sacred offices of the Pink Locker Society. But Forrest quickly gathered his stuff from his own locker and, before I could utter a word, said he had to get going. I wanted a moment more to try to figure out if he was running off because he was worried about getting in trouble, or if he didn’t want anyone to see him alone with me. But he didn’t give me another moment. He turned, and I could only watch him hustle down the hall, cleats in hand, getting farther and farther away from me.

  One thing I didn’t think about was what I would do after Forrest and I had our pink locker moment. Fog, electricity, and love still filled my brain like a cloudy mess, but I started to feel more like myself. I wanted to tell Kate and Piper (especially Kate) what had happened. Had I made any progress with him? What did his actions mean, or how might we interpret them? But I had no one to overanalyze with.

  I couldn’t tell Kate or Piper anything without admitting that I lied. I took Forrest—a boy, no less—behind the pink locker door. I risked the future of the Pink Locker Society, all to make myself look good. It was like in a spy movie and I had become the weak link, blabbing about the secret stuff, endangering our mission. Before all this, I would have bet all the money I have (forty-seven dollars, some of it in quarters) on my belief that Forrest would tell no one. But after a week passed and Forrest had not uttered one word to me about the locker incident, I started to doubt him. Perhaps I had made a terrible mistake, and it would, sooner or later, catch up with me.

  It was nearly killing me that I couldn’t say anything to anyone about Bet sneaking into the Pink Locker Society offices. I mean, I could have asked her what she was doing in there. But then she might have asked me what I was doing in there. And that was a question I really didn’t want to answer. I knew that Bet hadn’t said anything to anyone so far about my being there, but I didn’t know if she was staying quiet out of respect for me or because she didn’t want to admit what she was up to.

  So since I couldn’t talk about Forrest or share my suspicions about Bet, I actually got caught up on my schoolwork. I even got an A on my English paper. That gave me something good to tell Mom. But before long, I started to focus less on school and more intently on the uncertain future of the Pink Locker Society. I had a long list of questions and complaints:

  Would Edith and Anna ever get back in touch to say the Web site was working again?

  Was the PLS gone forever?

  What are girls going to do without us?

  We are like doctors, and they have closed the emergency room!

  Who knows how many girls are waiting?!!!!!

  I wrote all that down in a note to Kate and Piper that I dashed off during geometry class. I probably shouldn’t have been so energetic about those last exclamation points. The pencil tapped loudly against the hard plastic of the desktop: Line-dot! Line-dot! Line-dot! Line-dot! Line-dot!

  As I finished that last exclamation point, Mr. Ford leaned down and said, “What are you working on, Jemma?”

  Great. I’m already annoyed at the whole world and Mr. Ford calls me out for writing notes in class. Worst of all, he took the note.

  With the note gone, I grabbed Kate and Piper after class and told them all my complaints about the Pink Locker Society. Turns out, they were getting pretty fed up, too. I don’t know if she was just trying to fit in, but Bet chimed in and said she felt “sick in my stomach” thinking about all those girls writing in and getting no response.

  “What if people think we wrote those nasty notes?” Kate asked.

  “They probably do, since we’re completely shut down right now,” Piper said, then threw up her hands in frustration.

  In a quiet voice, Kate said she was so upset that she turned to her mom for advice.

  This made all of us turn at look at Kate, because no one had told her mom about the Pink Locker Society. Remember the rules? Tell no one.

  “My mom was in the Pink Locker Society,” Kate said.

  Mrs. Parker?

  We exploded with questions for Kate.

  What was it like back then?

  What did they do when there was no Web site?

  Why were we picked?

  Does she have any idea who would hack into the site?

  Are we doing a good job?

  Did she always keep it a secret?

  Why did the Pink Locker Society shut down years ago?

  And who decided it should reopen?

  Can she help us get this junk off of the Web site?

  Kate tried to answer them all. Her mother told her it had been a great honor and she loved serving as a Pink Locker Lady. Mrs. Parker confirmed that girls have always wanted to know pretty much the same stuff, Kate said. She also confirmed what Edith had said about how girls used to submit questions through secret boxes hidden around the school.

  “Mom said they typed up the answers and published their own little newspaper, The Pink Paper. They left stacks of Pink Papers in the girls’ bathroom,” Kate said.

  “That’s classy,” Piper said.

  “Well, it makes sense. Girls would find them there,” Kate said.

  This was all a great history lesson, but Kate’s mom had no answers to any of our here-and-now questions about the Pink Locker Society. I could see Piper growing distracted. She picked up her phone and starting checking messages.

  “My mom doesn’t know why they decided to start it up again,” Kate said. “And she doesn’t know why they got shut down way back when.”

  “Sweet!” Piper said, raising her phone up high like it was a trophy she just won.

  We looked at her, waiting for the news. I figured it was yet another boy asking her out. They were getting hotter and older with each passing month of eighth grade.

  “The Pink Locker Society is back in business,” Piper said. “Anna just texted us. The hackers are gone, so let’s get to work.”

  I should have been happy, and I was. But something about passing through that pink locker door took me back to the last time I was in that office. I could barely concentrate as we waded through more than three hundred questions. We had received on average a hundred per week, even though we were shut down. And one of them, quite obviously, was from Taylor. Grrrrrrr.

  The message said:

  “Hey, secret Pink Locker people, you should SERIOUSLY consider putting that awesome show Gotcha! on this Web site!”

  Forrest did tell me Taylor was on our Web site a lot, but seriously? The Pink Locker Society site will NEVER broadcast Gotcha!

  I tried to put that out of my mind and dove back into embarrassing issues, starting with someone who was afraid to say she was scared to get braces. I could answer that one easily, having braces myself and knowing that it doesn’t hurt to get them on and it’s no big deal. But my mind kept drifting, drifting back to Forrest. I started to get really angry that he hadn’t said one word to me since that study hall in the PLS. I mean, what was up with that? I showed him something personal and really cool, and he doesn’t say anything? I wanted to poke him in the chest and, once and for all, get it on the table: I LIKE YOU FORREST MCCANN. DON’T YOU GET IT? ARE YOU BLIND?

  Ordinarily, Kate would talk me out of such foolishness. But there I was, locked in my own little head, unable to say anything to anyone. Even Piper would have talked sense into me, probably. But no, I forged ahead.

  I had no script this time, which turned out to be even more dangerous than having a script. Last time, I at least had the memory of what I wanted to say. This time I was just freestyling when I stopped him by the water fountain.

  “Don’t you have anything to say to me?”

  “Hey, Jemma. What?”

  His green eyes were so clear when you got to look at them close. I realized right then that I hardly ever looked him square in the eye. I mean I looked at him from afar, but not straight on like that. I had so much I wanted to say. I wanted to just unravel right there in front of him.

  First I said, “Um . . . Um.” Then I said the first thing that came to mind:

  “I saw someone throw up in that water fountain once.”

  “Nasty,” Forrest said. “It wasn’t today, was it?”

  Once I said no, he stopped and took a drink. Then he was gone again.

  Does it surprise you to learn how, that afternoon, a cold autumn rain poured down over Margaret Simon Middle School? What a perfect match to my mood. It rained extra hard when I was walking home from the bus stop—the kind of rain that gets you even under your umbrella. Thoughts of the restarted PLS Web site cheered me a little. But I couldn’t stop thinking of how I had just had an actual encounter with Forrest, and the subject I decided to discuss was puke.

  We truly were back in business. For a few days, we checked the Web site every few hours, like it was a sleeping baby. We wanted to be completely sure that the hackers were gone for good. Anna told us that she had to do a lot of patching, but she felt 95 percent confident that we were in the clear.

  “Not one hundred percent?” Edith had asked her on a recent conference call.

  We started to answer questions again, and our fan mail resumed. That helped us all to exhale and get back in our Pink Locker groove. During study hall, we answered question after question. And they just kept on coming. We started to think about fair ways of answering questions, if we couldn’t answer them all. I suggested a lottery, but Kate thought we should read them all and answer the most urgent ones. In the end, we resolved just to keep doing our best.