Cindy and the Prom King

by Carol Culver

  fifteen

  If you can speak three languages, you’re trilingual.

  If you can speak two languages, you’re bilingual.

  If you can speak only one language, you’re an American.

  —Author unknown

  Victoria smiled warmly, said she’d be his tutor, and she and the guy, whose name was Steve, went to another table. Soon Cindy could hear him trying to pronounce the Chinese words Victoria said, which made her giggle helplessly and made him try even harder to make her laugh. The instant rapport they had filled Cindy with envy, an emotion she fought with every fiber of her being, day in and day out.

  She tried to get back to her geometry problem but she kept glancing up and studying the two of them across the room. They made a really cute couple. Physically as well as mentally. Victoria could help him with his Chinese, and he could help her with her English. If she needed any help, which seemed unlikely. Cindy wondered if she’d ever make a cute couple with anyone or have instant rapport with a guy.

  What a contrast they were. This tiny, dark-haired, lovely half-Chinese girl in her expensive American jean jacket, short skirt and wedge high heels and a big, blond super-confident all-American jock in cutoff shorts and a tight T-shirt that showed off his all-American muscles.

  How would Cindy find someone to contrast with her tall, freckled self? He would have to be even taller, and not pale and anemic looking like she was. He’d have to have straight hair because hers was curly. He would have a big happy family because she had no one. It was hard to picture such a person.

  It was even harder to get back to work with the image of the mysterious opposite in her head, even work that she liked. Before she could force herself to write a single equation, she heard footsteps on the carpet.

  Her skin tingled and her senses went on alert, the way a person would feel if she got too close to the magnetic field of a nearby star, like maybe Betelgeuse. She raised her eyes and there he was. Her complete opposite. He was tall and olive-skinned. She was fair and freckled. He was rich. She was poor. He had a family, at least a godfather. She had no one.

  This time he was wearing a striped jersey, black shorts and shoes with cleats. His hair was damp and his skin seemed to glow with a bronze that didn’t come out of a spray can. The answer to every girl’s dreams. Not just hers.

  “Ciao,” he said with a dazzling smile. “I’m looking for my English tutor. I hope it will be you, say yes.”

  Say yes? How could she say anything else? “Yes, it is,” Cindy said as the heat rushed to her face. “I mean she’s me … her.”

  sixteen

  And that is how [the Italians] are. So terribly physically all over one another. They pour themselves one over the other like so much melted butter over parsnips. They catch each other under the chin, with a tender caress of the hand, and they smile with sunny melting tenderness into each other’s face.

  —D. H. Lawrence

  Marco pulled out a chair and sat next to Cindy. Right next to Cindy. So close she couldn’t catch her breath. She wondered if the cooling system had failed. All the air was being sucked out of the building. Instead of the smell of books, there was the faint smell of citrus and Italian leather in the air.

  With shaky fingers she pushed her geometry problem aside. But he’d seen the diagram.

  “What is this?” he asked, leaning toward her so that his arm brushed against hers. His breath was warm on her neck.

  “Nothing.” Was that her voice, that breathy, scratchy sound? “A geometry problem. I have to find the area of the square.”

  He traced the outline of the square DEFG with one finger. “You’re good at this? Yes, I think you are. Music and mathematics. They go together. In some people. Not me. Let me see how you do this problem.”

  “Now? It’s going to take a while.” A while for her to recover her brainpower. At the moment she’d have trouble solving Y plus X equals Z, even if they gave her the values of Y and X.

  “See,” she said, “the square DEFG is inside a right triangle, ABC. They give you AD and GC, but that’s all. I can do it later. It’s for extra credit.”

  “What means extra credit?”

  “It means you don’t have to do it. Only if you want to.”

  “You don’t have to do it? Then why?”

  “Why? Because I like to solve problems.” And get good grades.

  He shook his head. “I don’t like problems. I came to U.S. to get away from problems. But some of them, one of them is following me here.”

  “Following you?” Maybe it was true what her sisters had said about Marco and his Mafia connections. She looked out the window half expecting to see a couple of Italian men in dark clothes walking toward the library. But all she saw were freshmen tossing a Frisbee back and forth on the grass. Was it really the Mafia he was talking about? Or was it his pregnant girlfriend? Was he going to tell her? Should she ask? Did she really want to know? Wouldn’t she prefer to think of him as a fun-loving, easygoing Mediterranean without a care in the world?

  “Never mind. This is not your worry.” He reached over and smoothed the line on her forehead with his finger. Her vision blurred and her cheeks flamed. She told herself it was just a casual gesture and it meant nothing. But she blushed again anyway.

  “Right now I need to think about my terrible English,” he said, leaning back in his chair and balancing on the rear legs.

  “It’s not terrible,” she assured him. “It’s very good. Of course you have an accent. But you shouldn’t lose it altogether. It’s uh … nice.” Nice? It was seductive, it was sexy and it wrapped around Cindy like a warm blanket and left her tingling all over.

  “Nice? I don’t think so,” he said. “I wish I’d started English when I was a child, like you did.” He cocked his head and studied her face as if he was trying to picture her as a child.

  “I wish I could learn Italian,” she said. “It’s a beautiful language.”

  “Yes?” he said. “How do you know?”

  “Oh, I, uh …” Cindy couldn’t possibly confess she’d checked out some Italian language tapes from the language lab and had already learned how to ask directions to the bus station and how to say she was sick and needed to find a doctor.

  “You can learn Italian. It’s easy,” he said. “I can teach you.”

  “It’s probably too late,” she said. But her heart skipped a beat. She pictured Marco teaching her love songs in Italian. Like the ones in the operas her father used to listen to late at night.

  “Not for you. You’re clever. And you are very kind. I knew this when first I see you at your locker. You have a kind face.”

  Cindy didn’t want to have a kind face. She would have given anything to have a beautiful face, but that was not to be.

  “Look,” Marco said, pulling a book out of his backpack. “See what I have to do for my class—Rebels in American Literature. I think this sounds good, yes? So I enroll for this class. Because I love American rebels. Like James Dean, you know him? But then I get the books today for this class. Look.” He leaned forward, opened a bag and spilled some books out on the table.

  “Huckleberry Finn. The Awakening. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. How can I read all this in English? I don’t even know what is a cuckoo.”

  “It’s a bird. But there’s another meaning. To be cuckoo means crazy.”

  “Ah, slang.” He nodded happily. “This is what I need to know. What I can’t learn in books. American slang. What is this thing called a mixer I hear about? Is it slang?”

  “A mixer is a kind of dance party. Where they mix up the students.” She made a mixing motion with her hands. “So they can get to know each other.”

  “I must attend this mixer?”

  “Since you’re new, I think it would be a good way to meet people.”

  “The same for you. You are new too. So you will also be there? Then I will know someone at least.”

  Like he didn’t know anyone else? “What about the soccer team? You k
now them.”

  “Boys,” he said dismissively. “I prefer girls.”

  Like the girl he left behind in Italy? The one who was pregnant?

  “I… I’ll be selling tickets at the door.” That way she wouldn’t have to pay the fifteen-dollar admission. And she wouldn’t have to stand around alone looking like the outsider she was. She’d have a reason to be there. After she sold tickets she’d pour punch into paper cups and keep busy. Too busy to dance or talk to strangers.

  Cindy looked at her watch. “Maybe we should work on what you need for your class first before we do any slang.”

  “Yes, yes. First thing is I must write about myself. Everyone must do this too. How I am a rebel. If I am a rebel. What do you think?”

  She stole a glance at his profile, his angular jaw and his slightly crooked nose. A rebel with a soccer injury? A rebel who’d left a scandal behind in Italy? She told herself to calm down. To quit thinking of Marco as a gorgeous prince or a movie star and more like just another student who needed her help learning English. She could do it. She’d tutored foreign students at Castle. Helped them with their grammar, punctuation and spelling. None of them had looked like Marco of course. She’d had no trouble keeping her distance from them. No trouble forgetting about them after their sessions together.

  “I don’t know if you are or not,” she said. “Let’s see. We could make a list. What makes a rebel? How do you fit in?”

  Cindy took out a sheet of notebook paper and drew a line down the middle—one side for the characteristics of a rebel, the other for characteristics of Marco Valenti. For the next hour they discussed Marco’s personality, his friends in Italy, his family and his dream of driving a Porsche Spyder across America like his hero James Dean. Or an Italian Lancia.

  At the end of the hour Marco had the first paragraph of his essay written in pretty much his own words, as well as an outline for the rest of the paper. At the end of the hour Cindy still didn’t know if he really was a prince, if he’d been in the Oceans Eleven movie or if he had a girlfriend back in Italy.

  But she knew more important things about him. She knew by reading between the lines that he had self-confidence, charm, kindness and honesty, and that she’d fallen head over heels in love with him. Or at least in lust, as her sisters would say. Not that it mattered. She would keep her infatuation to herself the way she kept everything else bottled up inside.

  Cindy was also proud of Marco for his rapid progress in writing his paper in English, while never giving up his seductive accent. She was proud of herself for not correcting his English any more than she absolutely had to. It would be so easy to just rewrite the paper for him. But that was cheating. And the final product wouldn’t sound like him.

  She was not proud of herself for falling under his spell quite so fast and so easily. But who could resist that accent, his European manners, the occasional low chuckle when she said something he thought was funny, and the touch of his hand on her arm to punctuate his words.

  Yes, she knew it was stupid and pointless to let herself get carried away like this. This was no ordinary guy. This was a foreign exchange student. Someone who’d be gone at the end of the school year, either returning to his country or going to college in the U.S., and she’d never see him again. Besides, she was not the kind of girl he would ever fall for.

  “About this rebel idea,” Marco said, leaning back in his chair so he was balancing on the rear two legs and surveying her with a curious gaze. “I’m not sure I understand. Tell me if you are one.”

  “Me, a rebel? Oh … I don’t think so.”

  Marco opened his English dictionary and thumbed through the pages. “Here it is. Rebel. I should have looked it up before. But I like hearing you explain things to me. I’m very lazy, yes?”

  A little smile tugged at the corner of her mouth.

  “It says here,” he said, “ ‘Rebel. Disobedient. Resists or defies authority.’ This is not you, is it?” He narrowed his gaze and kept it focused on her.

  “Oh, no. Sometimes I’d like to be a rebel, but I’m not. Not ever. I look up to people who stand up for themselves, like my father. He quit his job years ago to work for himself, and he rebelled against the system. Even though he knew independent inventors hardly ever make it on their own. Not many people quit a high-paying job to take a chance like that. He believed in himself. His wife, my stepmother, didn’t. She told him he’d never make it. She told him to get a real job. So he had to rebel against her too. She was so angry he’d forced her to be the breadwinner.” His puzzled expression caused her to stop and explain. “A breadwinner is the person who earns the money in the family, who brings home the bread.”

  “Ah,” he said with a smile. “The bread is very important in Italy too. As well as the pasta. Perhaps you have nothing to rebel against.”

  “Maybe not,” she said. But what about the pressure her sisters put on her and the lies they told about her? What about the job her stepmother made her do? Nothing worth rebelling against? “Anyway, I’m not the kind who’d rock the boat.” “What boat?” he asked with a puzzled look.

  “It’s just a saying. It means I don’t want to upset the situation the way it is. I sit quietly in the boat because I don’t want the boat to sink and me to drown. Does that make sense?”

  He gave her a long look before he spoke. “So you always do what you’re supposed to do. Like your homework.”

  “Yes, of course, but also, I work for my stepmother after school. She’s my boss, both at home and at work. My stepsisters tell me what to do too.”

  “You have sisters? Do they look like you with the amazing red hair?”

  Cindy laughed. “No, they’re blond and beautiful. I think you know them, Brie and Lauren.”

  “Those girls are related to you?” He sounded incredulous. “Not really. Sort of. My father married their mother.”

  “Ah, I see. So you don’t rebel even though you would like to. I think you’re a very good girl.”

  Was that a compliment or was he thinking, You’re a very good girl, but good girls are boring and besides, you’re also a wimp of the first degree.

  When he left to play soccer a few minutes later, she put her head down on her loose-leaf binder and closed her eyes. She couldn’t move. Couldn’t speak. She was drained. It was exhausting trying to act casual and tutorial when she just wanted to sit there and stare at him, listen to him talk, giggle, flirt, repeat some Italian phrases and talk about herself.

  She’d talked too much about herself. As for flirting and giggling, she didn’t know how to do those things. Besides, it was not part of the job description of a tutor. She was there to help him with his English grammar. But she usually forgot to listen for grammatical errors when he talked. He could have read the phone book and she would have hung on every word he spoke in his seductive accent. Maybe working at the spa was easier than tutoring after all. Less stressful.

  seventeen

  1) For every action, there is an equal and opposite criticism.

  2) Odd objects attract fire.

  —Murphy’s Laws of Combat, Anonymous

  “My name is Newton Kavanaugh and I’m your new headmaster.” The man stood on the stage in the middle of the Michael P. and Emily C. Parsons Multi-Use Room, folded his arms across his chest and rocked back on the heels of his spit-polished black shoes. He surveyed the student body with the manner of a man speaking to his troops. One who was accustomed to being in command. He was not wearing a uniform, but somehow he gave the impression he was. In fact, he was wearing well-pressed gray slacks, a striped shirt and a blue blazer with brass buttons.

  “I’m a military man and proud of it. Always was, always will be. My father was a four-star general and I was an army brat. Of course I will never achieve his rank, and—ahem—at this point in my life, I have no need to. I served in Vietnam and retired with the rank of colonel. You can call me Colonel or Sir.” He gave a faint smile.

  Cindy realized he was the man who’d come into her
math class that first day. It was hard to know if he was serious about calling him colonel. Cindy looked around. There was more shock than awe on the faces of the students.

  From somewhere behind her a boy’s voice muttered, “Oh jeez,” but Kavanaugh showed no sign of having heard it.

  To one side she saw Marco surrounded by members of the soccer team. At least she thought that’s who they were. They all wore the same striped jerseys and the same blank looks on their faces. As if they’d spent too much time heading the ball instead of passing and kicking.

  Cindy had learned a little about soccer. She’d read that studies showed there was no link between lower intelligence and a tendency to “head the ball,” but observing the team members at Manderley, she wondered about it. Marco was excluded of course. He was smart, he was sexy and he was also suave and she was looking forward to their next tutoring session more than she should. She planned to surprise him with a few new phrases she’d learned in Italian, though at the last minute she’d probably lose her nerve. She didn’t need to know Italian to help him perfect his English, which was already quite good. She just wanted to be able to say something in that beautiful, romantic language.

  Kavanaugh’s gaze shifted from the students to the row of teachers seated in front of him.

  “I was proud to represent my country,” he continued, “just as I know you are proud to represent Manderley School. After my military service, I joined Cuthbert Military Academy as an instructor in military history, which is my hobby as well as my main academic interest.”

  He paused to let this information sink in. Cindy felt a wave of restlessness in the assembled academic body, but maybe that was just her being overly sensitive.

  “Eventually I became headmaster at Cuthbert for seven years until the board of directors here at Manderley convinced me I’d be the right man to whip this school into shape.” He smiled briefly. “After what one of them called an ‘era of laxity.’ If you know what I mean.”