Dyan Sheldon - The Crazy Things Girls Do for Love

In comparison, no one expects much of Waneeda, and they are rarely disappointed. Indeed, it’s fair to say that Waneeda could be the girl for whom the words “I can’t”, “But I’m tired” and “Do I have to?” were invented. Waneeda is here this morning only because Joy Marie slept over last night and was, therefore, in a position to make her come.

“Are we done yet?” Waneeda moans as they finally complete their circuit of the first floor. “I have to sit down. My blood sugar’s really low.”

Joy Marie gives her a so-what-else-is-new? look. Waneeda’s blood sugar is always in imminent danger of collapse. “Almost. I just want to put a couple by the restrooms.”

Waneeda sighs, but dutifully follows. Waneeda is not so much driven as pulled.

She shifts restlessly from one foot to the other as she holds yet another flyer up against yet another wall. “I don’t know why you bother,” complains Waneeda. “Everybody who’s in the club knows about the meeting. And nobody new’s ever going to join.”

“You don’t know that,” says Joy Marie. Joy Marie’s nature is basically a positive one.

Waneeda’s is not. “Yes, I do know that,” she insists. “Everybody thinks your club is the pits.” Even the über-hip kids who wear vintage clothes and drink Fairtrade coffee have stayed away from the Environmental Club the way you’d avoid a house where someone died of the plague. “They’d rather pick up litter on the highway with a toothpick than join.”

“We still have to keep trying,” argues Joy Marie. “They could change their minds. Rome wasn’t built in a day, you know. These things take time.”

“I thought time was the thing you don’t have.” Waneeda fumbles in her pockets, hoping to find at least an overlooked stick of gum. “I thought the end was nigh.”

“Well…” Joy Marie’s single braid bounces as she marches on. “You know what they say, Waneeda… It’s always darkest before the dawn.”

And it is certainly very dark at the moment. The club’s official enrolment (larger than the number of people who actually show up for meetings) has always hovered at the minimum needed for school support and funding, but that, unfortunately, is not its biggest problem. Its biggest problem is a greying and portly man who, besides being famous for his amusing and colourful ties, commands a great deal of authority and respect in the community. Although he likes to be seen to be politically correct, Dr Firestone, the principal of Clifton Springs High School, has never fully appreciated the club’s efforts to alert the student body to the many dangers facing the planet. The hundreds of plastic bags they dumped outside the main entrance… The posters of tortured animals they plastered through the corridors… Their picket protesting the sale of soda and water on campus… All of these things annoyed Dr Firestone, but it was last year’s infamous Earth Day Speech (in which Clemens Reis, co-founder and president of the club, suggested that his fellow students and their teachers were all complacent kamikaze consumers) that caused the principal to become openly critical. He said that the club, in general, and Clemens, in particular, lacked the delicacy and subtlety of the nuclear bomb.

This past November, things took a turn for the worse when Clemens began his current campaign to save the 500-year-old trees at the side of the tennis courts from being cut down to make way for the new sports centre. Clemens has written letters to the council, to the school, to the administration, to the school board, to the developers and to the local papers. More than one. Although these letters have proved no more effective than sticking a plaster over a crack in a dam, they did manage to alienate Dr Firestone even more. “Are you aware, Mr Reis, that you’re like Don Quixote, tilting at windmills and thinking they’re giants?” boomed Dr Firestone, running into Clemens in the corridor. “I suggest you stop wasting the club’s resources and address some real issues, not the fate of a couple of trees.” Clemens said he’d see what he could do.

And then, just before Christmas, Clemens took the mike at the end of the morning announcements, saying that he wanted to send holiday greetings from the Environmental Club to the rest of the school. What he did, in fact (as the few people who actually listened could tell you), was launch into a passionate plea on behalf of the ancient oaks and the inestimable value of the natural world. “If you eradicate a species or chop down a tree, it’s gone for ever,” he told them. “If you destroy everything, you’ll eventually end up with nothing.” If there was some eloquence as well as truth in Clemens’ speech, Dr Firestone failed to see it. Dr Firestone said it was a diatribe and summoned Clemens to his office for “a little chat”. Dr Firestone was decked out for the holidays in a Christmas-tree tie with tiny, flashing lights on it. Clemens was wearing a T-shirt he’d made himself that featured a photograph of the threatened trees and the legend: Where were you five hundred years ago? Where will they be next spring? Dr Firestone did most of the chatting. “You’re turning what should be an ordinary high school club into a gang of junior eco-terrorists, Mr Reis,” he accused. “You’ll be setting fire to SUVs and breaking into animal labs next.” Dr Firestone made it clear that if the club didn’t improve both its image and its membership, the school would have no choice but to shut them down at the end of January.

“Anyway, we do have till the end of the month.” Joy Marie snaps off a piece of tape and slaps it into position. “And it doesn’t say anything about trees on the announcement.”

Waneeda blows fluff from the Tootsie Roll she found deep in the pocket of her sweat pants. The Tootsie Roll looks as if it may have been washed. “Does Clemens know you left out the trees?” Unlike Joy Marie, Clemens isn’t intimidated by Dr Firestone’s threats. Clemens would argue with God, never mind a man whose tie lights up.

Rather than answer Waneeda’s question, Joy Marie says, “What I was thinking was that we should do a serious recruitment. We could set up a table in the main hall … and do an announcement at the next assembly … and even go around the homerooms…”

Waneeda’s expression, though slightly diluted because of the candy in her mouth, delicately balances disbelief and disdain. Joy Marie is too shy to make announcements or talk to homerooms. When forced to speak in front of a class, she turns the colour of tomato soup and talks so softly that even she can’t hear what she’s saying. “You’re going to send Clemens out to convince people to join?” Which would be like using wild bears and packs of hungry wolves to convince people to picnic in the woods. “Are you nuts?”

“I didn’t mean Clemens.” Joy Marie smoothes out the paper she’s half fixed to the wall. “I was kind of thinking of you.” Waneeda may be self-conscious about her looks, but she is less shy than an angry bull.

“Yeah, right,” snorts Waneeda. “As soon as I give up my part-time job as Peace Envoy for the UN.”

“I’m serious.” Joy Marie cuts another length of tape. “Why not?”

“Why not?” Waneeda widens her eyes. “Well, just for openers, I don’t even belong to your dumb club.”

“But you could join.” Needless to say, this is something Joy Marie has suggested before.

“Yeah, right,” snorts Waneeda.

“No, really,” argues Joy Marie. “I know you don’t believe me, but it’s really very inspirational.”

Waneeda laughs. The only thing the Environmental Club has ever inspired is ridicule. “You mean besides causing public outrage.”

“That only happened once,” says Joy Marie. “And anyway, the point is that it’d be good for you to join.”

Waneeda sighs.

Joy Marie is always coming up with things that would be good for Waneeda. Yoga. Swimming. Green vegetables. Jewellery-making. Scrap-booking. Gardening. You’d think she was a personal lifestyle guru rather than a best friend.

“So would be being adopted by Bill Gates,” says Waneeda. “But that’s not going to happen either.”

Joy Marie doesn’t laugh. “That’s not funny; it’s defensive,” she says, leading the way down the hall. “It wouldn’t hurt you to get involved in some kind of extracurricular activity, you know. You need to get some outside interests.”

As if Waneeda has any interests at all. She sighs again.

Joy Marie stops outside the girls’ bathrooms. “And a little work wouldn’t kill you, either.” As a general rule, the only part of Waneeda that’s ever seen to work is her mouth.

“What do you call this?” Waneeda waves the flyers over her head. “Chopped liver?”

“You know what I mean.” Joy Marie readies the tape dispenser for another assault. “Maybe if you really involved yourself you’d have some fun.”

Waneeda is about to amend the truth slightly by saying that she already has plenty of fun when something brightly orange whacks into her arm and her stack of papers falls to the ground.

“Hey! Why don’t you watch where you’re going, Princess Pumpkin?” screams Waneeda.

The other girl barely turns around. “Are you talking to me?”

“Yeah,” says Waneeda. “I am talking to you. Look what you did!”

“Waneeda, shhh,” warns Joy Marie. “Don’t start any trouble.”

“What do I care?” snaps Waneeda. “I hope her eyelashes fall off in her lunch. She is such a stuck-up witch.”

Meanwhile, in the virtually empty first-floor girls’ room, Maya Baraberra and Alice Shimon hug each other with the enthusiasm of people who have been tragically separated by a long war. (It has, in fact, been less than two weeks since they last saw each other, and it was distance that separated them, not heavy bombing.) Alice’s ethnic scarf gets caught on one of Maya’s crystal earrings, and Maya’s handmade backpack, heavily decorated with an intriguing assortment of iconic badges from EZLN and Che Guevara to Homer Simpson and the Sex Pistols, bangs against the sink.