Read Online Only Girls Allowed by Debra Moffitt - Free Book Online Page A

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.
    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.
    â€œI 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 carryit 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