by Tom Perrotta
He'd put on a lot of weight and looked pretty shell-shocked by his new life. He was back at his parents’ house in Union Village, sleeping in his old bedroom, helping out at his father's hardware store, trapped inside routines he thought he'd escaped forever the day he graduated from high school.
“It's weird,” he told me. “We eat the same food. The same shows are on TV. It's like science fiction or something.”
I brought him up-to-date on recent events at school, the ordinary gossip that had once been the meat of our friendship but now only served to measure out the distance between us: Art Farmer had announced his retirement; Gene Sperigno and Adele Massing, two legendarily unattractive math teachers, had fallen in love in an after-school teachers-only bowling league and were planning to get married; Walt Hendricks had gotten arrested again for DWI, but somehow managed to get the charges dropped.
“Fuckin’ Walt.” Jack drained his beer, then held the mug upside down in front of his face to signal the bartender. “He knows how to cover his ass.”
Thinking it might cheer him up, I told him about his replacement, a truculent ex-nun by the name of Marie Benson who had caused a mini-scandal by giving D's to half of her advanced sophomores.
“She has a bad stomach,” I reported. “The kids call her ‘Sister Mary Rolaids.’ ”
Jack didn't respond. He slurped the foam off his new beer and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. His face grew somber in the mirror behind the bar.
TRACY FLICK
MY MOTHER'S ONE of those “involved” parents. She keeps pretty close track of my grades and stuff. One day she was going through my desk and came across my essay on The Scarlet Letter. Jack had given me an A-, corrected my spelling, and scribbled a note in red ink on the bottom of the last page: “Why won't you talk to me? Do you think love can be turned on and off like a faucet? Why don't you just get a gun and shoot me?”
That night, very calmly, she slid the paper across the kitchen table and asked me to please explain.
“Don't be scared,” she told me. “I need to know the truth.”
I broke down and told her everything. She hugged me and we both cried. The next morning we were in Mr. Hendricks's office. The day after that Jack was gone.
I feel bad for him, but I don't feel guilty. He was the adult. If he hadn't acted like such a baby, everything would have been okay.
MR. M.
“SO,” HE SAID. “How's Sherry?”
“Okay. Things are still pretty tough for her.”
“She won't talk to me, Jimbo.”
“Can you blame her?”
He glanced up in surprise, stung by the sharpness of my tone. I wanted him to know that on this particular subject, I had no sympathy to offer.
“No,” he conceded. “I can't blame her. But I would like to get to know my son.”
I didn't know what to say to that. I'd held his infant son in my arms, changed his diaper, poked my finger into his plump little belly. I'd watched Sherry nod off while nursing and did my best to console her when she wept out of fear and frustration. Later on, I did even more than that.
“You made your choice,” I told him.
“It's funny,” he said, nodding in melancholy agreement. “I look at my life from this angle, and there's only one thing. All the college, all the teaching, all the years with Sherry, and all I was really doing was waiting for Tracy, so I could fuck it all up.” He made a scribbling motion, as though signing an autograph. “Slept with Tracy Flick. That's my whole résumé.”
I felt old when he said that. I looked at my tilted image in the mirror and had a strange premonition of my own doom.
“By the way,” he said. “How's Tracy doing?”
PAUL WARREN
AT OUR STRATEGY SESSION that night, Lisa told me not to panic. Despite our setback at the Assembly, she thought the race had changed in ways that might ultimately work to our benefit.
“With three strong candidates,” she said, “you don't need as many votes to win. We've got to shore up our base.”
“Our base?”
“The voters we can count on no matter what.”
“Who's that?”
“Jocks, cheerleaders, and wannabes.”
“What's Tracy's base? ”
“Not so broad. The AP crowd, maybe the band. But there are lots of people who think she'd make a good President.”
“What about Tammy?”
She frowned. “I'm not really sure yet. But I think she'll get the burnouts and benchwarmers and the kids who feel left out.”
Lisa was a natural at politics and the smartest person I knew (Tammy was a close second). I imagined her doing big things in the future, moving in important circles, worlds I would never know about. She'd be on a Sunday morning talk show, and I'd be sitting in my kitchen with a jelly donut, watching in amazement.
She said she loved me. We had sex every chance we got. But even so, there were times when I felt like her candidate first and her boyfriend second. She had this habit of floating away from me at crucial moments. A distant, distracted look would move across her face, and I could tell she'd forgotten me, and was thinking about the election.
TAMMY WARREN
PAUL LEFT for Lisa's right after supper, so it was just me and Mom again, as usual. Except it wasn't going to be a normal night. Mr. Hendricks had called her at work to explain about my suspension. He told me they'd had themselves “a nice little chat.”
That was one of my ideas of hell, being discussed at length by a leering, red-faced idiot like Mr. Hendricks. As far as I could tell, he earned his hundred thousand a year by wandering the hallway with a Styrofoam cup of coffee, smiling at the pretty girls and scowling at the boys who didn't play sports. Somebody should have stuck a broom in his hand and made him an honest man.
Mom turned off the TV in the middle of Jeopardy! I knew better than to complain, even though it was my favorite show. There's something so encouraging about it, the way it makes you believe America's populated by these brilliant ordinary people, postal workers and data entry operators and office managers whose heads are somehow crammed full of information about Greek Mythology, Chinese History, and Voyages of Discovery. It cheered me up every night.
Mom took a deep breath but forgot to release it. Her eyes were shadowy with fatigue and her cheeks looked rubbery. It was almost like Dad had packed her youth in a cardboard box and lugged it off to that ugly little townhouse by the highway.
“Tammy,” she said, “I'm worried about us.”
I'd planned on going into a trance of agreement—total nodding mode—but her pronoun threw me off balance.
“Us?” I said.
“We're not a family anymore. We're all at each other's throats. Your father and me. Now you and Paul. I can't believe we've come to this.”
She hadn't really asked a question, so I figured it was okay to keep my mouth shut.
“Why are you doing it?” she asked. “Are you angry with me?”
“Doing what?”
Her shoulders slumped. She finally let go of that breath.
“Tammy, don't make this harder than it is.”
“I'm not. I didn't understand the question.”
“Okay,” she said, discharging her annoyance in a quick sidelong glance. “Let me put it this way. Why are you running against your brother?”
“I'm not running against him. I'm just running. Why can't people understand that?”
She shut her eyes, pinching at her forehead with two fingers like it was made of clay. She looked exhausted.
“Before you know it, honey, Paul's going to be leaving for college. And then you're going to leave, too. Do you see what I'm saying?”
I nodded, though it seemed to me we'd gotten a little off track.
“I'm going to be alone,” she said, in a voice so sad and puny it made me want to cry.
I reached for her hand, the one that still had the wedding ring on it, and gave it a squeeze.
“Don't worry, Mom. You'
ll be okay.”
“Be nice to your brother,” she told me. “He's the only one you've got.”
She tucked a piece of hair behind my ear with a melancholy sigh, then got up and trudged back to the kitchen. I didn't even miss Final Jeopardy.
After that I had three full days to watch soap operas, write in my journal, and explore the empty house. My brother, I discovered, kept his condoms in a hollowed-out paperback dictionary secured by a red rubber band. There were five of them, lubricated Trojans in blue foil pouches. For about an hour after finding them I felt sick to my stomach. Then I had this fantasy of pricking one of them with a needle, making this tiny imperceptible hole. It pleased me to imagine Lisa waddling through the halls of Win wood, pregnant with the President's baby. I wondered how Mr. Hendricks would feel about that.
The second afternoon I read one of those Sweet Valley High books I used to love so much. All through seventh grade I'd been captivated by the Wakefield twins and their many friends, perky California girls and hunky, well-to-do boys who cruised in fancy cars, kissed on the beach, and confronted the difficult dilemmas of growing up with dignity and courage.
It seemed like a total dreamworld to me now that I was in high school myself. I could only imagine Elizabeth Wakefield's shock—she was the good twin, the one I had the crush on—if she were to spend a week or two in the real world. She'd go back to Sweet Valley with cramps, a filthy mouth, and a bad case of acne. Not even her sister would recognize her.
PAUL WARREN
A PART OF ME—one I never expressed to anyone—thought it might be better if Tammy won the election. She needed the boost a lot more than I did.
If you're a guy who's good at sports, your social life just sort of falls into place. I never had to search too hard for girlfriends, people to hang out with, or places to go on Saturday night.
It wasn't like that for Tammy. She wasn't too popular or outgoing to begin with, and hadn't found any new friends to replace Lisa. Night after night she hung around the house with Mom, sulking in front of the TV. The phone never rang for either of them.
As far as I knew, my little sister never had a boyfriend, had never even been kissed. I thought about this a lot when I was with Lisa, who turned out to be so much wilder than you would have imagined from looking at her. It made me wonder if Tammy was the same way, if she had a secret life I was just too dense to notice.
One night, after Lisa and I had experimented for the first time with oral sex, I asked her point-blank: “Is Tammy like you?”
The question startled her.
“What's that supposed to mean?”
“Does she do stuff like this?”
Lisa seemed uncomfortable.
“Stuff like what?”
“Like we just did.”
We were sprawled out on her bedroom floor, naked except for T-shirts, the summer seashore taste of her still faintly on my lips. I'd been scared to do it at first, but now I was exhilarated, eager to try again. Her mother was at a singles' meeting, and wouldn't be home for at least another hour.
“Why are you asking me?”
“I'm just trying to figure out if she's as innocent as she looks. I thought you might know.”
Lisa didn't answer. I kissed the pale oval scar on her right knee. Aside from that small, eye-shaped blemish, her body was perfect, unmarked, as lean and smooth as a little girl's, except for the subtle curves of her hips and the unexpected fullness of her ass. She leaned back on both elbows and watched my tongue wander up her quadricep. Her legs were strong and sculpted from running, and she seemed to like having them licked.
“Oh,” she said, very softly.
It's funny about sex. Once you start, you can't remember how you got along without it. What did you think about? How did you fill up your day? You find yourself wondering why you'd even want to be President, when you already have this wonderful way of spending your time.
TAMMY WARREN
IT WAS SPOOKY to go back to school after my suspension and see these unreal color posters of Paul plastered all over the place, sporting these dopey slogans like “Paul Power” and “We Need Him.” Every time I turned a corner my big brother was watching me, gazing down from the walls and bulletin boards like some kind of puzzled blond god.
I knew from a single glance that Lisa had done the artwork. She liked drawing with pastels and had once done a portrait of me standing by a window, bathed in morning light, watching leaves fall from a golden tree. When she felt like it, she knew how to flatter a person.
Tracy had even more posters than Paul did. They were red, white, and blue, and looked suspiciously professional, like the signs you see taped to telephone poles during real elections. “Pick Flick,” advised one of them. “Tracy for Prez,” proclaimed another.
I didn't plan on doing any campaigning. I figured I could just coast into the election and lose gracefully, the one candidate who'd had the guts to tell the truth and had been punished for her honesty. It seemed like a decent way to go down in history.
The three days at home had been good for me. I'd discovered this great yoga program on cable, and had learned how to meditate along with the host, the calmest, most sweet-voiced woman in the universe. She told me to imagine my heart as a big red valentine throbbing in my chest, and advised me to release all the negativity I'd allowed to build up inside it. So I did. I let go of my jealousy and anger and need to hurt the people who'd hurt me. Once I did that, there wasn't much reason left for me to even want to be President.
But a funny thing happened that morning when I got back to school. Kids I didn't even know came up and shook my hand, telling me what a cool speech I'd made and how they were definitely going to vote for me. A girl in a wheelchair gave me a thumbs-up. This greasy-haired sophomore arsonist told me I kicked ass. Some of the nicer teachers flashed me sly, private smiles. Mr. Herrera even winked. These two weird freshman guys—bug-eyed Nintendo geeks—invited me to a party they insisted was going to be totally wild.
It was just like the yoga lady said: Expel the negative, and the positive will come rushing in to fill the void.
MR. M.
IT WAS THE MOST interesting election I'd seen in my nine years at Winwood. There was a buzz in the hallways, an excitement that couldn't be accounted for solely by the novelty of sibling competition. There was just this sense throughout the whole school that for once we had an election that offered a real choice.
Paul was running as a visual image—the Student as Hero. Idealized in pastel colors, he presided over our corridors like some kind of benevolent, otherworldly spirit. There was something at once comforting and unnerving about those portraits; you'd see people standing in front of them for improbable lengths of time, studying them like paintings in a museum.
Tracy had taken the opposite tack. She seemed to be running not as a student, but as a professional politician. Simple as they were—plain red letters on blue cardboard, the i in her last name dotted with a bold white star—her posters had clearly been designed by a graphic artist and manufactured by a printer at no small expense. You got the feeling she was running for State Legislature.
Tammy's posters weren't posters at all, just cryptic messages scribbled on notebook paper, affixed to unlikely surfaces—a file cabinet, the seat of a chair, the inside of a bathroom stall.
“Vote for Tammy,” they might say. “She's inexperienced and kind of lazy.”
Or: “Election? What Election?”
Or: “Go Ahead. Make the Stupid Choice.”
It got to be a little game. You'd walk into a classroom and see the words “Why Not?” scrawled across an otherwise empty blackboard. You'd unscroll your fold-down map of the world and not be surprised to find a pink index card taped to the Horn of Africa, bearing the following statistic: “Two out of three coffee drinkers prefer Tammy to fresh-brewed.” If you saw a wad of paper on the floor, you'd bend down and uncrumple it, just in case.
PAUL WARREN
THE BRUNCH WAS my father's idea. He'd been feeli
ng isolated and thought it would be good for all of us to get together on neutral ground to celebrate Tammy's birthday.
“We're still a family,” he reminded me. “Whatever happens, we can't let ourselves forget that.”
He told me this in the bedroom living room of his small, mostly unfurnished apartment in Rock Hill Gardens, an ugly complex overlooking the Parkway. I'd stopped in on my way home from Lisa's, as I often did, to watch the ten o'clock news with him on the tiny portable TV Mom used to keep on the kitchen counter.
We'd grown a lot closer since the separation. At home he'd been kind of distant, not really interested in talking about anything but sports. Here, though, maybe out of guilt or loneliness, he seemed to feel a powerful urge to explain himself, to make me understand the circumstances that had driven him out of our big, comfortable house into this garage-sized studio.
This new phase of our relationship had begun the day I helped him move, against my will and at my mother's insistence. For two hours we lugged boxes and suitcases and household furnishings from the parking lot to the apartment, communicating in our everyday language of grunts and gestures, with a few words tossed in to avoid confusion. We were grappling with the dead weight of his new mattress when he looked at me, his face pink with effort, and said something totally unexpected.
“No one knows what love is,” he told me. “If someone says they do, they're full of shit.”
I didn't reply. We steered the mattress through the doorway, letting it fall with a muffled whump to the carpeted floor.
“Some people think it's a plant you have to water,” he went on, checking to see if I was paying attention. “I believe your mother subscribes to this metaphor.” He hesitated. “You know what a metaphor is, right?”
“Yeah,” I said, a little surprised to hear a word like that coming out of his mouth.
