looks great and everything, except that I don’t actually know who these women are, and if I don’t know, then it goes without saying . . .”
She waves her arm vaguely around, which I’m supposed to interpret to mean that if Sarah doesn’t know, nobody knows.
I take my list back and point to Hazel Pritchard’s name. “Mrs. Pritchard was very involved in the civil rights movement.” I pause, then say in a singsongy voice, “You know how much you like civil rights stuff.”
Civil rights is the one political issue the whole Lyman family can agree upon. Civil rights for all Americans = Good. And last year Emma got completely wrapped up in it. She’d read this book called Blood Done Sign My Name by Timothy B. Tyson, about the murder of a black man by a white man and the subsequent trial back in the 1970s, thirty miles north of here. She took a road trip to the town where the murder happened and wrote a forty-page paper about it, which her teacher wanted her to try to publish in an academic journal.
This gives me an idea. “What if we got Emma to help us? She might, right? Okay, probably not, but maybe. I mean, I know it’s a long shot and everything. . . .”
Sarah’s eyes widen. An Emma opportunity! Have I mentioned that both of us worship Emma as the Queen of Cool? Rest assured that the feeling is not mutual. It’s not that Emma’s rude or actively unkind; she just doesn’t seem to realize that either Sarah or I exist in any sort of meaningful way. If we were pets, we’d be goldfish; if we were a sport, we’d be Ping-Pong. No, we’d be a Ping-Pong table covered with folded laundry.
I watch Sarah working out the possibilities of my suggestion in her head. A civil rights project is right up Emma’s alley. You can even imagine Emma feeling a little jealous that it’s not her project. You can even imagine Emma looking up to us for coming up with such an amazing plan.
Okay, so you can’t really imagine Emma looking up to us. Neither can we. In fact, Sarah shakes her head a little, as if that little bit of fantasy has just occurred to her and she’s trying to dislodge it from her brain.
“All right,” she says after another minute. “The Mrs. Pritchard project has definite potential, I have to admit.”
“It really does,” I agree cheerfully.
“I bet there are old newspaper articles we could find.” Sarah plucks a pen from behind her ear and begins to fill up a new page of her notebook. “We’ll need to do interviews. Emma can take us.”
She says this matter-of-factly, as if Emma was always giving us a ride somewhere. Emma has never given us a ride anywhere, of course, even though she’s had her driver’s license for a year and a half. She has exactly the sort of car you’d want to be seen in too—a beat-up baby blue Volkswagen Beetle with cool political bumper stickers plastered across the back. Now I imagine myself in the backseat, the wind blowing through my hair as we drive off in pursuit of truth and justice and the American way.
It probably won’t ever happen, but a girl can dream.
We spend the rest of the period working out the fine points of our project. At five minutes before the bell, Marley Baxter yells out, “All right, folks, I’ll be coming around to pick up your project proposals, so have ’em ready.” Sarah writes our names neatly across the top of our paper, then nods approvingly at our work.
“This is important,” she declares. “From everything you’ve told me, Hazel Pritchard was a hero. People should know about her.”
“I bet doing research on Mrs. Pritchard will be a lot more fun than on Geraldine Ferraro,” I add.
Sarah looks at me as if to ask, Geraldine who?
And then she looks at her watch and grins. “Hey, hey, it’s Jeremy Fitch time.”
We lean toward each other and slap high fives.
Jeremy Fitch time is the highlight of our day.
Chapter Nine
Jeremy Fitch: An Overview
Jeremy Fitch came into our lives two months ago, the first day of freshman year. Sarah and I were rounded up with the rest of the ninth graders and herded into the auditorium, where we sat through a gamut of speeches from administrators about rules and more rules and the terrible things that would happen to us if we violated a single one of them. Following