Gotcha

by Shelley Hrdlitschka

  The lump in my throat has a stranglehold, but I pick up the knife and wait until I’m composed enough to speak. “First of all,” I say, “I wish we’d done this in a more private place.”

  Joel and Mariah both smile a bit, and Mariah wipes away some more tears. “Too late now,” Joel says. He rubs Mariah’s arm. I wish it was mine.

  I collect my thoughts and try swallowing the lump. “When I look back on that final night of the game, it’s like looking into the hazy distance. Nothing is clear. You’ve got to know that I loved you both for being there for me, but at the same time, it was me that was suspended from school, and me that wasn’t going to graduate if something didn’t happen. And of course, things were even worse than you knew then. I’d lost the money, and I was...I was hurting real bad from what my dad had done to me.”

  I take a deep breath and let it out slowly. Then I close my eyes and continue. “When Warren called, I guess... I guess I just fell apart and told him the truth. Not about my dad, but about losing the money, which I couldn’t tell you about because I didn’t want you to hate me. I didn’t care what Warren thought of me. When he assured me that he’d make me win, I latched on to that promise. It was like a life ring, and I was drowning. I had nothing else. I figured you’d understand once the game was over, which was going to be that night anyway.”

  I feel hands clasp around mine, and I open my eyes. Mariah and Joel are both squeezing my hand, which is still clutching the stupid knife. I let the tears flow. “If you guys could have seen what they did to Warren, how they did it...”

  I let go of the knife and drop my head to the table.

  A moment later I feel a body slide into the booth beside me. A hand is rubbing my back. I look up and see Mariah there. She gives me a hug. Across the table, a throat clears. Joel is holding the knife again.

  “If I’d known what you were going through with your dad,” Joel says, “I...things would have been so different. And believe me, Katie, I would never have hated you for what you did.” He shakes his head. “We do things for our parents. I’m sorry we haven’t talked about this before...all that time wasted.” He puts the knife down.

  I reach for it one last time. “I couldn’t talk about it.”

  He nods and picks up the knife again. He wipes his eyes with the back of his hand. “Katie, can we start again?”

  “The healing circle?” I ask, horrified.

  “No, silly. Us. You and me. And no Gotcha game.”

  Our eyes meet and hold, comfortably, for the first time all evening. I nod and smile and let Mariah rub my back.

  As I slip into my new shoes and check my reflection in the mirror, I notice that I can still feel twinges in my ankle, especially with these heels, but the healing is almost complete. It’s the night of the valedictory ceremony, and the robe will come off later. I’ll be wearing my new dress under it, and even without Paige’s help I think I’ve found one that suits me perfectly. It’s ivory, with a halter top, a snug body and a hem cut in a jagged pattern. Mom helped me choose it, and I was surprised that she had such good taste. It didn’t even cost a fortune.

  After the formal part of the evening is over, a bunch of us are coming back here to celebrate. Mom has promised to stay in her room. I smile, thinking of our conversation this afternoon when I caught her making cookies for my party.

  “Mom! We agreed. No more junk food in the house.”

  “But, Katie,” she argued, “there is only healthy stuff in these. Cross my heart.”

  That’s when I noticed the new blouse she was wearing. “More new clothes?” I ask.

  “Yep, celebrating another five pounds gone. Forever.”

  “Way to go, Mom!” I try to give her a high five, but she grabs my arm and pulls me into an embrace.

  I still find it awkward to hug her, but I’m trying. The morning after the Warren incident, after Fetterly left, we had a screaming match that probably echoed the fights she used to have with my dad. It started when she accused me of being weak, like him.

  “What are you talking about?” I’d asked.

  “That stupid game! You didn’t have the courage to say, ‘No, I’m not playing.’ And then you gave your father the money when you knew damn well it was wrong.”

  “You’re just as weak,” I said, wanting to hurt her back.

  “Really. How?”

  “Just look at you.”

  She stared at me.

  “You never go anywhere, do anything. You just make cookies and eat.”

  We screamed at each other some more before she stomped out of the living room, but I noticed she didn’t go to the kitchen as usual. After pausing in the hall, she turned and went out the front door.

  There was an icy silence between us for the next few days until, one night, she finally spoke. We were eating dinner, each of us with a section of the newspaper opened in front of us. It was the last day of my suspension, and the wall between us felt like a tower of cement. At some point during dinner I noticed she was no longer reading but staring at me. I glanced up.

  “Katie, whatever happened to us?” she asked. Her eyes were welling with tears.

  I was stunned. It’s not like her to get all emotional with me. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean...” She thought about it, choosing her words carefully. “When you were just a little girl...we had so much fun, right here at the kitchen table, creating stuff with play dough that we’d made from flour and food coloring, or...or we’d be in the sandbox, building castles. You’d putter alongside me in the garden, your hair a mass of ringlets around your head. You never stopped chattering, asking me questions about everything, from bugs to where babies come from.”

  I was sent spinning back to a time long forgotten. I saw her in that oversized apron she wore for gardening, with gaping pockets for her gloves and small gardening tools. In the spring I loved digging holes with a spade, and she’d gently place her seedlings in them. After carefully packing the soil around the delicate roots, I’d fill my small watering can and sprinkle the baby plants. All summer we watched them grow. We were a team.

  Then Dad lost his job and Mom went back to work.

  “I was mad at you for leaving me,” I said, suddenly remembering the pain of being abandoned.

  “Yes, you were.” She nodded.

  More memories came flooding back. How I hated waking up and finding only Dad home. He didn’t understand that I wanted my egg soft and the toast cut in wedges so I could dip them in the mushy yolk. “Dippy eggs” Mom called them. And he wouldn’t wait until my favorite TV show was over before we left the house to do chores or go on an excursion. He thought TV was bad for me. I hated him for that.

  “You’d punish me when I got home,” Mom said, her elbow on the table and her head resting in her hand. “You’d either throw a tantrum, kicking and hitting me, or you’d give me the silent treatment. I never knew what to expect.”

  I nodded, sitting back in my chair, trying to recall the turning point when Dad and I became pals and set up our own routines. Then Mom became the enemy.

  “The other day you said that I never do anything,” Mom said, changing the subject. “What is it you think I should be doing?”

  I was embarrassed, thinking of that conversation, but I made some suggestions. “You know, walking, yoga, bike riding, Pilates.” I thought of the things that Paige’s mom was always doing. “You could take night classes. Maybe you could join a book club.”

  She thought about that. “Can you think of something we could do together?”

  “Well,” I considered it. “I’ve always wanted to try Tae Kwon Do.”

  She laughed. “Can you see me trying to kick anything? I’d fall over.”

  I laughed too. She was right. “Then why don’t we start with yoga and see where we go from there.”

  She thought about that, and I saw a spark in her eyes for the first time in a long while. She looked...pretty. “It’s a deal. I’ll check into classes.”

  We sat in comforta
ble silence for a few moments, the cement tower a jumble of rocks and dust at our feet. I didn’t understand what had just happened between us, but it was a relief, anyway. I felt like I was attached to a conveyor belt, and it was slowly but surely dragging me back up that water chute, bit by bit. Or maybe it was just a ladder that I had to climb, one rung at a time.

  “Katie?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t talk to you about your dad. I...I just didn’t know how.”

  I nodded. “I miss him.”

  She sighed. “I do too.”

  We stand in the hallway, in alphabetical order according to our last names, waiting to be marched into the theater for the valedictory ceremony. Everyone is chatting nervously. I get goose bumps just looking around at my fellow grads, some of whom I’ve known since kindergarten. It’s hard to believe we’re here, finally, wearing our matching robes and caps.

  I spot Paige, about ten people ahead of me. We make eye contact but she quickly looks away. She agreed to come to one last grad council meeting with Warren and me, but she won’t accept my apologies. I’ve come to accept that. I don’t need someone so unforgiving in my life. I realize that it was my dad who brought us together in the first place in an attempt to help me overcome my shyness, and it’s my dad’s behavior that finally tore us apart. Maybe, left to our own devices, we wouldn’t have been drawn to each other in the first place.

  The band starts playing “Pomp and Circumstance,” and now the goose bumps turn into a full-body rush as I follow the long parade of grads into the theater and to our seats on the stage. We rehearsed the whole thing this morning, but without an audience and the robes it had an altogether different feel.

  There are speeches, and I watch as my classmates, one by one, march across the stage and shake Fetterly’s hand. He hands them their diplomas, and various scholarships are awarded. As each person’s name is called, their baby photo is flashed onto a large screen, which then melts into their formal grad photo. How far we’ve come.

  Joel’s name is called. As he walks across the stage, he makes eye contact with me and winks. I look up to see his baby photo. He was as cute then as he is now.

  And then Warren’s name is called. At first the applause is polite, restrained, but it gradually increases in intensity, becoming harder, more enthusiastic. I see Mariah, on my left, stand up to give him an ovation. One by one, more grads stand up. By the time he is shaking Fetterly’s hand, at least half the grad class has risen to its feet. Only Warren could pull that off. He smiles and waves at us.

  As I watch him pose for a photo with the principal, I remember the day I went to his house to talk about what had happened in the park. I started by apologizing for letting the mobbing go on so long.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” he reminded me. “It was the Gotcha Gods.”

  I nodded and let it go.

  Then I told him how hurt I was that he’d set me up. He shook his head and threw up his arms. “At what point did everyone forget that this was a game of strategy?” he asked.

  I could only shrug. He was right.

  “Are you sorry for anything?” I prompted.

  He thought about that for a while. “I guess I’m sorry for some of the things I said to you that night,” he admitted. “I was way out of line.”

  “I forgive you.”

  He looked surprised. Then he said, “Thanks for calling the cops. I hate to think of how far it might have gone. I was so friggin’ cold!”

  I could only laugh. “I’m just glad it was you that night, and not someone else.”

  “Huh?”

  “No one else would bounce back so well. They’d be too mortified to go back to school, their egos crushed.” I shook my head. “It must be nice to be so confident.”

  “Confident? Yeah, I guess.” He actually looked surprised by that. “And I have a great body too, don’t you think?” Warren smiled, that same old smile, and I knew he’d be okay. Better than okay. He’d be back on top in no time. I talked to him about my idea for the valedictory ceremony, and when I got ready to leave, he hugged me. It felt like the embrace of a good friend.

  When my name is called, I’m handed my diploma and four scholarships, amounting to almost five thousand dollars. I look into the crowd, trying to find Mom’s face. For a moment I think I see Dad’s, but I’m mistaken.

  After all the diplomas have been awarded, and the vale-dictorian has given her speech, it’s time for grad council to do its thing. Part of it is expected, but part of it will be a surprise to the other grads. I’m nervous, wondering how they’ll react.

  We agreed to let Warren do the talking—after all, he has that voice. The seven of us approach the podium, and he waits until the theater is quiet before he begins. “As you know,” he says, “it’s a tradition at Slippery Rock High for the graduating class to honor the school with a gift. This year, those of us on grad council have decided to plant a young maple tree outside the front of the school. It is our hope that future generations of high school students can use it for shade on warm days and then enjoy the beauty of it in the fall, when its leaves turn to magnificent colors.”

  There’s a polite show of approval, but it’s really a most unremarkable grad gift, given what’s been done in other years, and everyone knows that.

  “As well this year,” Warren says, “the graduating class is taking something away from the school.” He pauses for dramatic effect. “We’re retiring a long-held tradition, with hopes that the students of next year’s graduating class will create something new, something fun and something safe.”

  Warren reaches into the hollow interior of the podium and pulls out the jar full of beads. He holds them up for everyone to see, and once again the glossy, multicolored beads slide across the smooth inner surface. “We’re destroying the beads instead of passing them on to next year’s class, as was the tradition. It’s in this way that we feel we can make the most positive contribution to future generations of this school.”

  The theater is silent for a moment as people absorb what he has said. Then the clapping begins, and it turns into a thunderous roar. I can’t see her, but I bet my mom is clapping loudest of all.

  The after-party at my house was awesome. We laughed and cried and tried to imagine what we’d each be doing in ten years. Phillip recorded our predictions on video tape, and we planned to watch it at our ten-year high school reunion. We ate tons of junk food, and I sent the leftovers home with everyone so my mom wouldn’t be tempted to cheat on her diet. Gotcha wasn’t mentioned even once. I think that was intentional.

  Joel was the last one to leave. He has completely forgiven me for betraying him in Gotcha. He helped me clean up, and then we chilled for a while. I felt...at peace. I didn’t want the day to end, but we planned a hike for the weekend. It will be my first one since I last went with my dad years ago.

  I’m too keyed up from the whole evening to go to bed. I turn on the computer and check my e-mail, an obsessive habit that I have to wean myself from. After all, it’s been months since I’ve heard from Dad.

  Tonight is no exception, but I’m feeling so mellow that I write him a note.

  From: kittiekat17@hotmail.com

  To: dannyo56@hotmail.com

  Subject: I DID IT!

  hey dad! i hope yur still checkin email.

  guess what!!!! i gradded 2night,+ I got $5,000 in scholarships! whoo hoo!! i wish u could have been there. mom and i sure miss u.

  xo

  ur kittiekat

  I shut off the computer and hope that wherever he is, he’ll know that he’s still loved. And forgiven. Well, maybe not completely, but I’m getting there. Joel has shown me the way.

  Shelley Hrdlitschka is the author of a number of best-selling titles for teen readers, including Sun Signs, Kat’s Fall and Dancing Naked. Shelley lives in North Vancouver, British Columbia.