Mind over Monsters, page 1
For Mum
Ava Greene
Secret Fear:
Cutting a little toenail so short it’s gone
Outside Interest:
The nature of cheesiness
Tom Liu
Secret Fear:
Corn mazes
Notable Quote:
“Everything is research.”
Sofie Guerrero
Secret Fear:
Talking dolls
Outside Interest:
Finding a rolling library ladder to ride on
Lena Lennox
Secret Fear:
Not noticing her skirt is tucked into her underpants
Notable Quote:
“Worriers, attack!”
Sam Shah
Secret Fear:
Calling a teacher “mom”
Outside Interest:
Traveling back in time every morning to get more sleep
Catherine Llewellyn
Secret Fear:
Those old-timey bikes with the giant front wheel
Notable Quote:
“Where’s Owen?”
Owen Llewellyn
Secret Fear:
Awakening an ancient curse (also his secret hope)
Notable Quote:
“I’m not saying anything.”
CHAPTER 1
The Cranberry Bog Middle School mascot was, not surprisingly, a cranberry. They tried to make it look tough by drawing its fists on its hips and a snarl on its face, but in the end, it was still a cranberry: a small, sour, bog-based fruit.
The cranberry scowled down at Lena Lennox from a rumpled pep rally poster as she stood outside the main office pretending her right forefinger wasn’t tangled in her hair. Lena twirled her hair when she was nervous, and she was so nervous now that she’d gotten her finger good and stuck. This had never happened at school before, and she was starting to panic.
Facing the wall for a tiny amount of privacy, she did her best to appear fascinated by the poster, though the pep rally had come and gone a week ago, and Lena hadn’t bothered to go. She studied the cranberry mascot’s cartoon features as if there would be a test on them as she yanked at her finger, which only tightened the snarl.
The poster’s headline read WARRIORS, UNITE! Cranberry Bog Middle School’s official team name was the Warriors. Lena had no idea why, but they were Warriors with a cranberry mascot. She was sure every team that played Cranberry Bog made fun of this—if not to their faces, at least on the bus ride home. She couldn’t blame them.
Switching from panicked yanking to the slow but reliable reverse-twirl method, Lena freed her finger at last. She moved ever so casually in front of the school’s trophy case to check her hair using the glass as a mirror. Whoever had designed the case had been way too optimistic about how much space the school’s trophies would need. Lena was surprised there weren’t tumbleweeds rolling around in there.
The simple truth was that the Cranberry Bog Warriors weren’t good. At any sport. The sheer consistency of the Warriors’ ability to lose gave Lena a small stirring of school pride. Even puny Flounder Bay, whose mascot was a flounder with a goofy smile on its flat face, trounced Cranberry Bog every time they met. After which the flounder mascot would trounce the cranberry mascot, which was plain humiliating.
Despite the ridicule it invited, Lena appreciated the fact that the word “warriors,” if you mispronounced it slightly, became “worriers.” If there had been inter-school worrying competitions, Lena, who carried her load of worries around like an extra backpack, could have led her team to one championship after another. Cranberry Bog’s sad trophy case would have contained some serious hardware.
Right now, she was worried about why the vice principal wanted to see her. And why the vice principal even knew who she was. Before she’d sat down this morning, Lena’s homeroom teacher had told her—without explanation—that she was wanted in the office. Of course she was nervous about that. Anyone would have been. But this was Lena Lennox, champion worrier, so by the time she had arrived outside the office, not only was her hand stuck to her head, but she was convinced she was about to be expelled and possibly arrested.
As Lena gave up on her lopsided hair and turned from the trophy case, Sam Shah joined her, cracking his knuckles loudly. Then Sofie Guerrero arrived, gnawing her cuticles as if she hadn’t eaten in days. Four more kids Lena didn’t know lined up beside them.
What were they doing here—and what kind of trouble were they in?
Lena was about to ask Sam and Sofie what they knew, when Vice Principal Sanchez emerged from her office and beckoned the seven of them inside. Ms. Sanchez took a seat behind her desk. The school counselor, Barbara “Call Me Barb” Weller, was in the visitor’s chair, holding an enormous mug of coffee and smiling encouragingly. Call Me Barb’s resting face was “encouraging smile,” so this didn’t necessarily mean anything.
“Greetings, friends,” Ms. Sanchez said when they were arranged around her desk.
Ms. Sanchez’s lipstick was the exact same shade of red as the cranberry mascot. Lena wondered if this was on purpose and if there was such a thing as taking school spirit too far.
She glanced at the others. Fidgeting and nibbling and cracking away, they seemed as nervous as she was. A small, skinny boy gulped audibly, as if he were fighting a rising tide of puke and the puke was winning.
Ms. Sanchez appeared to recognize this warning sign. “No one is in trouble!” she reassured them. “Quite the opposite.”
Call Me Barb’s encouraging smile widened a notch.
“You seven,” said Ms. Sanchez, “have been chosen to participate in an experiment of sorts.”
As Lena reached for her hair and the puke-prone boy gulped again, louder, Ms. Sanchez added quickly, “More like a review panel. Does that sound better?”
A tall boy who was probably an eighth grader nodded eagerly, as if he were thinking, Yes, a review panel sounds great! Lena didn’t see much difference.
“We’re considering starting a mindfulness meditation series to reduce student stress,” Ms. Sanchez said. “In fact, CBMS is going to be the pilot school for a new program. Before it goes school-wide, we want to try it out on representatives from each grade: a Cranberry Bog Meditation Group. Your teachers recommended you because they thought you could benefit.”
Lena eyed the other experimental subjects with horrified understanding. In spite of their best efforts, their teachers had noticed them. Their teachers had noticed them enough to think they would benefit from stress reduction. This was even more humiliating than being trounced by an overly cheerful flounder.
“Starting Monday, every day for two weeks,” Ms. Sanchez continued, “the group will report to the small gym instead of homeroom for meditation training. We’ll supply yoga mats, but you’ll need to bring your own phones and download the app, which the school will pay for. Do all of you have phones?”
Lena nodded. Students were allowed to have phones as long as they stayed inside lockers during school hours. Being caught with a phone outside your locker during the school day was an automatic detention. Lena’s heart sped up unpleasantly as she pictured being caught with her phone. Especially by Ms. Campbell, school secretary, who had eyes everywhere and a pad of detention slips at the ready in her cardigan pocket.
Ms. Sanchez was starting to seem psychic when she said, “Staff will be alerted, and you won’t be given detention for having your phones with you during this time.”
The tall boy raised his hand.
“Even by Ms. Campbell,” Mind Reader Sanchez added.
The boy’s hand went down.
“If you have further questions,” said Ms. Sanchez, “Barb can talk with you individually. She set up the pilot program for us, and she’s going to take charge of the Meditation Group.”
Call Me Barb’s smile cranked up to high beam. “The company reached out to me personally,” she said. “They’re interested in expanding to group sales.”
Group meditation made about as much sense to Lena as group sleeping or group toenail clipping or—
“Here are the permission slips,” said Ms. Sanchez, handing out sheets of paper fresh from the printer. “Think of this as having om-room instead of homeroom,” she added, raising her eyebrows expectantly.
Call Me Barb alone chuckled.
“Tough crowd!” Ms. Sanchez said. Barb shrugged. “But I urge you to take advantage of this opportunity. Meditation is a proven stress reducer, and this app is supposed to have amazing results. And let’s face it,” Ms. Sanchez said. “Excellent meditation puns aside, it’s got to be better than homeroom, right?”
She had a point. Homeroom was no one’s favorite block of the day, and it was especially rough on those, including Lena, who didn’t like unstructured time at the mercy of their alphabetical peers. Lying on a yoga mat and surreptitiously checking her phone seemed like a pretty good trade-off, as far as she was concerned.
At least it did at the time.
CHAPTER 2
Lena and her best friend, Gina, always met at Lena’s locker after school and walked home or went to Climate Change Club together. This year was no different, though Gina was.
Almost everyone knows someone who has gone pretty. Going pretty is like going blond or going wild. It seems to happen suddenly, and often over the summer. On the last day of school, your best friend is the same kid you’ve known since pre-K. And then, after a summer at, say, horseback-riding camp, they come home and bam, they’re pretty.
This is what had ha
On the last day of sixth grade, Gina had looked a lot like Ramona the Pest. Or maybe Ramona’s older sister, Beezus. But then she went away to horseback-riding camp, where she met a bunch of girls with names like Pacer and Haverford. And when she got home, Regina looked like a character from a whole different series, one about a glamorous group of friends who spend the summer riding horses.
Regina’s bangs had grown out, and her hair was longer, with bouncy layers. She was taller but somehow less gangly. She wouldn’t admit she was wearing mascara, but Lena was sure that was the secret behind her newly dramatic eyelashes.
Some people can go pretty without realizing it. Even though other people start behaving differently around them, they don’t notice and their personality doesn’t change. Regina had started to notice.
“Hey,” Regina said as Lena arrived at her locker that Friday afternoon.
“Hey,” Lena replied.
“Guess who tried to push me down the stairs today,” Regina said.
“What? Who would try to push you down the stairs? Are you okay?”
“Relax! He was just joshing around,” said Regina. “In fact, that’s a hint: joshing around.”
Lena rolled her eyes. “Which Josh?” There were so many to choose from.
“Evans,” said Regina. “Although Miller was with him.”
“So two Joshes tried to push you down the stairs?”
“They were—”
“I know—joshing around. Cute.”
“Right? So cute.”
Gina had understood sarcasm a lot better than Regina did.
They left the building and rounded the playing fields, and as Regina eyed boys’ soccer practice, Lena said, “I got volunteered for a meditation group today. It’s a program we’re trying out, and if it works, the whole school will do it.”
“Meditation?” Regina asked. “Like ‘om’ and all that? Is there chanting?”
“I don’t think so,” said Lena. At least she hoped not. “It’s an app.”
“So how will they know if it works?” Regina asked.
Lena had no idea.
* * *
That night at dinner, Lena brought up the subject of the Meditation Group. She was sort of hoping her parents would judge it a waste of time and tell her she should be using homeroom period to check her Spanish vocabulary sheets. That way she wouldn’t have to say “om,” or cross her legs in a weird position she couldn’t get out of, or undergo any of the other embarrassments Regina had helpfully come up with on the walk home.
Unfortunately, Lena’s older brother, Spike, chose that moment to become interested in her life.
“If you ask me,” he said, though no one had, “I think it’s a great idea. The stress level at school has gotten out of control.”
Lena and both parents gaped at Spike. Spike was so relaxed he was barely upright most of the time. He could make a tuxedo look like loungewear.
“When have you ever been stressed?” their dad asked Spike.
Spike grinned. “Me? Never. I’m not the type to stress. But plenty of kids like Lena could stand to chill out.”
“What do you mean, ‘kids like Lena’?” Lena asked. Although she knew.
“I mean the type of kid that flips out over a B-plus,” said Spike. “And then immediately spirals into imagining themself spending their adult life in their parents’ basement. Not that anyone here has ever done that.”
Lena, who had pictured that very thing as recently as last week, retorted, “You’ve never gotten less than an A-minus in your life, so how would you know if you’d flip out over a B-plus?”
“I resent that,” said Spike. “May I remind you that I got a C in art in seventh grade? I was devastated.” He took a huge bite of salad. “Not really,” he confessed through his lettuce.
“Not at all,” said their mother, swatting his arm with her napkin. “I seem to remember you saying that grading art was fundamentally unfair.”
“Which it is,” said Spike. “Art is subjective. Ms. Marshall simply couldn’t comprehend my brand of talent.”
“I think Ms. Marshall comprehending your brand of talent is what led to the C,” said their dad. He low-fived Lena under the table.
“Getting back to Lena,” said their mother, who was a lawyer and an expert at keeping people on topic, “I think you should do it. Meditation is supposed to be good for concentration.”
“And chronic anxiety and irrational fears,” Spike added.
“I don’t have chronic anxiety and irrational fears,” Lena said.
Spike snorted.
“Of course you don’t,” said their mother.
“You have a bald spot from twirling your hair,” said Spike.
“It’s not bald!”
“Hurtful,” said Dad, who did have a bald spot.
“Of course it’s not bald,” said their mother. “But you could use some help getting control of your worrying, Lena. Try the program and see what you think. It can’t do any harm.”
CHAPTER 3
Close your eyes and imagine you are in your favorite place, said the gentle voice in Lena’s earbuds. The place you feel safest and most relaxed. Look around at the sights. Notice the sounds and scents. Now take a deep breath for a slow count of four… hold it… and let it out for a count of six…. Let the air fill your stomach first, then your chest. In… and out… in… and out…
Lena figured most of the kids around her in the small gym were picturing themselves on a beach, lying in the sand and listening to the surf, but she was in her backyard—or just past it. She was sitting in the woods behind her house, resting against a huge maple tree and gazing up at the leaves against a brilliant blue sky.
This was way better than homeroom.
* * *
Call Me Barb had welcomed them to the small gym that morning, had them sign an attendance sheet, and shown them where the yoga mats were stored in the equipment closet.
When they were set up, she walked them through downloading the app. “I’ve been hearing so many awesome things about this program,” she said. “Celebrities are endorsing it right and left!” She took a huge gulp from a mug with the Ralph’s Cran-tastic Ice Cream’n’ Coffee logo on it. “The app was created by a former student at CBMS,” she told them as if it were a secret. “So the company is charging us next to nothing to give it a whirl. We are so lucky to be the pilot school—and you seven are the luckiest of the lucky, getting to try it first!”
And with that, Barb was out the door, the aroma of coffee wafting behind her.
Alone, the seven members of the Meditation Group stood around uncomfortably.
It was Sam who put an end to the awkwardness. He cracked his tenth and final knuckle and asked, “How, exactly, did they choose ‘the luckiest of the lucky’ for this group, anyway? We look like someone’s attempt at a diversity ad.”
It was true. Lena knew from Celebrating Our Heritage Day in third grade that Sam’s parents were from India and Sofie was Mexican American. The older boy was East Asian. The older girl was Black. The two younger kids and Lena were white.
The older boy was rubbing the short hair on the back of his neck, and Lena recognized a fellow hair worrier. “Huh,” he said in response to Sam’s comment. “We do look like a representative sampling of some kind. Possibly by design, in terms of a pilot program review panel. I’m Tom Liu, by the way. Eighth grade.”
The older girl was motionless next to him. She seemed more glamorous than nervous, gazing into the distance. That faraway gaze and the artfully half-tucked shirt made her look like she’d just stepped out of a fashion magazine. Lena would look like she’d just rolled out of bed if she tried that with her shirt. Then the photo came to life. “Ava Greene,” she said. “Also eighth grade.”
