Dyan Sheldon - The Crazy Things Girls Do for Love

Clemens gives a strangled laugh. “No, you’re making us look bad.”

Cody ignores him. “We’re going to lose everything here.” He has never sounded so passionate nor so sincere. “Dr Firestone’ll shut us down faster than you can say, ‘ecological disaster’. Don’t you care about the club?”

“Don’t you?” asks Maya. “OK, maybe you don’t want to get up there with Clemens, but you could at least give him some moral support.”

“Like what?” Cody’s laid-back charm has started to fray. “Hold hands around the tree with you guys, singing ‘We Shall Overcome’?”

“Don’t worry, you won’t be holding hands with me.” Although Waneeda has been described as a large and lumpen girl whose movements bring to mind the bear more than the chimpanzee, she suddenly grabs the lowest branch and swings herself into the tree.

“Or me!” Maya scrabbles after her.

“You guys aren’t leaving me down here.” Sicilee, the girl guaranteed to be voted most sophisticated of her graduating class, hauls herself up after the others in her one hundred per cent organic linen designer suit. The floral platform shoes fall to the ground, narrowly missing the head of Cody Lightfoot, the only one left standing under the tree.

“That’s it!” Dr Firestone comes running towards them, waving his cell phone. “Now you’ve really gone too far. I’m calling the police.”

“That’s fine by me,” says Sicilee.

“Me, too,” says Maya.

Each of them already holds her own phone in her hand.

“For God’s sake,” groans Clemens, “can’t you two go a few minutes without calling someone? What are you going to say? That you’re in a tree?”

Sicilee ignores him. “I’m calling my mother.” Her voice is loud and clear, and her smile is lodged on Dr Firestone like a laser beam. “She knows a lot of people in the media.”

“And who are you calling?” Dr Firestone demands of Maya. “Don’t tell me that your mother knows a lot of people in the media, too.”

“No, not one,” says Maya. “But her brother’s a lawyer.”

It is a bright and unseasonably hot afternoon. The sun shines down from a cloudless sky, making the noisy crowds below seem to shimmer. The blue and green balloons and flags that decorate Clifton Springs High School on this special day sway in a well-mannered breeze, and the sounds of people celebrating the existence of their planet fill the air.

Sicilee, Kristin, Loretta and Ash sit together at one of the tables set up in the courtyard, talking and laughing excitedly – and often at the same time. In honour of the occasion, each of them is wearing one of Clemens’ handmade T-shirts, and they all look as if they’re enjoying themselves. They are best friends again.

Cody Lightfoot was wrong. His prediction that the tree protest would destroy the Environmental Club, cause Earth Day to be cancelled and heap ridicule, embarrassment and derision on Clemens and anyone foolish enough to join him turned out to be so far from the truth it was in another country. Ms Kimodo, on the other hand, was right. Ms Kimodo, also summoned by the principal, arrived only minutes after Sicilee, Maya and Waneeda joined Clemens in the tree. Ms Kimodo, unlike Cody, immediately gave the tree-sitters her support. “I’m sorry, Dr Firestone,” said Ms Kimodo, “but not only do I feel that these students have both legal and moral right on their side, I think you’ll find that the community as a whole will stand behind them too. I know I certainly do.” Which is what happened. Thanks, in large part, to Mrs Kewe’s many friends in the media and Maya’s Uncle Fabio, the protest forced the tree-cutting to be abandoned, and made celebrities of Maya, Clemens, Sicilee and Waneeda.

The press arrived before the police – setting up their cameras and recorders, pulling out notebooks, sticking microphones in the faces of anyone who didn’t move out of the way. Dr Firestone, as unprepared for them as he would have been for the ghost army of Genghis Khan, was surprised to find himself cast as the villain. He was no longer, apparently, anyone’s pal. He was a man who broke promises. A man who tried to have students who had Law and Right on their side arrested. A man who showed no respect for either history or the environment. An Unlikely Group of Eco Warriors Puts Principles Ahead of the Principal read one headline. Brought Together by Love not Dogma read another. Clemens, Waneeda, Sicilee and Maya were treated as heroes – photographed, interviewed and even singled out for special praise by the governor of the state for their courage and character. Sicilee herself was featured on the six o’clock news, leaning comfortably against an ancient trunk and looking (as the reporter pointed out) not like a fanatical environmentalist but a model on a magazine shoot. “Is this the face of anarchy?” asked the anchor as he introduced the story. “Or is this the face of the next generation, demanding its right to a future?” All of which has made Sicilee even more popular than she was before. Celebrities are forgiven a lot.

At the moment, Sicilee is sipping an organic tea, Kristin is finishing her veggie burger, Loretta is rearranging her environmentally friendly shopping and Ash is nibbling a vegan cookie that, against all predictions, doesn’t taste like sand.

Earlier, they watched the day’s first screening of a documentary on climate change, presented by Clemens (who everyone agreed was a lot nicer and far less creepy than they’d thought).

“That movie really makes you think, doesn’t it?” says Ash. “I never knew all that stuff about the glaciers and the polar bears and everything.”

Sicilee makes a face over her cup, though there is nothing wrong with her tea. “At least the polar bears weren’t hanging by one foot from a meat hook being clubbed.” Sicilee was on the committee that chose the films to be shown today and sat with her eyes closed or filled with tears through the one on meat production.

“Stop!” orders Kristin. “I don’t want to hear any more about that. It’s really gross.”

Finished with her cookie and her movie review, Ash sniffs at the plant she bought her mother for her birthday. “It reminds me of something.” She frowns, wrinkling her nose. A balloon that looks like the Earth seen from space waves above her head. “But I can’t think what.”

Kristin, too, is looking thoughtful. “You know, this burger isn’t so bad.” She sounds surprised. “I know it’s supposed to be really good because no animals were tortured and it saved the planet a ton of water and cow farts and everything, but it actually tastes OK. I mean, with the mayo and ketchup and pickles and everything, you wouldn’t really know it wasn’t real if no one told you.”

“Oh, um duh…” Sicilee rolls her eyes, but she is laughing. “Sweet Mary, what have I been trying to tell you guys?”

“OK, OK.” Loretta, too, is laughing. “I’m not going to, like, start eating tofu, but some of this Green stuff’s not so bad. It’s not all bean sprouts and Jesus sandals.” She pats the shopping bag (hemp, not plastic) on her lap. “I got some pretty awesome things today. That velvet top with the crushed flowers? It’s, like, perfect for Rupert’s party next week.”

“Merciful Mother!” shrieks Sicilee. “I haven’t even started thinking about what I’m wearing to that!”

“Well, you’d better.” Kristin smirks. “You want to look nice for Abe, don’t you?”

“Oh, please… It’s not a big deal,” says Sicilee, but she raises her cup to her mouth and swings her hair so the others can’t see the expression on her face. “It’s just a friendly date.”

Abe called her the night after the sit-in. Apparently watching her being led away by the police had made him see her differently. He said she was a lot feistier than he’d given her credit for and asked her out.

“Oh, my, my…” mutters Loretta. “What’s that old saying? Two’s company and twenty’s a crowd?”

Cody Lightfoot and a small herd of smiling girls from the year below are ambling across the courtyard together.

Sicilee watches them pass like someone watching a movie she’s seen before but doesn’t really remember. To think she tried so hard to impress Cody Lightfoot! She must’ve been out of her mind. It’s as if she’d been under some kind of spell.

“Hey, you know what this smells like?” Ash’s nose is still in the plant. “It smells like that plug-in air freshener my mom uses.” She gives another happy sniff. “I think she’s really going to like this.”

Waneeda and Joy Marie sit together in the shade of the T-shirt stall, which they are running while Clemens oversees the showing of environmental documentaries in the auditorium.

Waneeda makes a drain-like sound as she sucks up the last of her iced tea through the straw. “Look at him, grinning and shaking hands,” says Waneeda. “You’d think this whole thing was his idea the way he’s strutting around.”

The “him” Waneeda’s referring to is none other than Dr Firestone, and it is fair to say that, as he moves through the crowd in his summer suit and an eye-catching tie that features a picture of a gnarled oak very like the trees he was so eager to chop down, Dr Firestone is definitely enjoying the success of the day.

“At least he didn’t make us cancel the fair,” says Joy Marie.

Joy Marie is being far too generous. Dr Firestone had no choice but to let the Earth Day celebrations go on as planned. He’d already been presented in the press as less than honest, out-of-touch and unreasonable. After all the publicity and the governor muscling in like that, to cancel the fair would have been to add “vindictive” to the list of his faults.