by Gurley, Jan
“Helena, thanks for the idea about positive PR tweets. If Mrs. Bullard goes for it as a replacement for her daily report, you saved me a ton of time. I think you’re right. If the Dog does something bad now, the PR tweets are like a buffer, they might still save the trees.”
“Hey, you’re welcome.”
Then Viola surprised us by squealing, “And Kate — wow — I’m so proud you listened to me! You’re really doing it!”
There was a brief moment of group-confusion.
I said, “What are you talking about? What is it that you think I’m really doing?”
She leaned forward and said, in a stage whisper, like somehow she thought someone might be spying on us, “You’re Pavloving the Dog.”
Into the horrified silence, I said, over-enunciating each word, “Did you say ‘Pavlov — ing’ or ‘Pav — loving’?”
Viola waved a hand, like she was brushing aside a cloud of dawn-gnats, “Either way. The important thing is that you’re doing a great job of it.”
So much for assuming Viola had something brilliant to say. “Viola, sweetie, honestly, this party wasn’t my doing. It was Bianca’s. And it isn’t to reward the Dog. It’s to distract him, which might, hopefully, fingers-crossed, delay him getting into trouble for one more weekend.”
I turned back to the others. “Gonzo volunteered to bring food.” A ragged cheer went up. “And I’m hoping some of you will bring stuff to do.”
Behind me, Viola kicked the base of the stump and said, half-under her breath, “I didn’t mean the party,” which only confused me. So I went back to acting like she hadn’t said a word.
“But before we go into who brings what, keep in mind we don’t have much time and we still need to talk about the camera.”
Tio said, “Yes. Why don’t we talk about the camera, Kate.” The entire group got quiet. This wasn’t a tone anyone had ever heard from Tio before.
“Did you find it?” Phoebe asked.
Tio said, stepping closer to me. “I better not ‘find’ it. I will kill whoever’s got that camera. Are you listening, Kate?”
Gonzo said, “Hey, Tio. Chill.”
A poison-ivy prickle rushed up my face. It was one thing to have my mom believe I was hiding things from her (well, in fact I was) and it was another thing altogether to be accused by my friend in front of everyone.
Worse yet, I realized they were all looking at me. Waiting for me to answer, instead of shouting, Tio, what are you thinking, Kate would never do that.
I had a funny hitch in my breathing, like a painful half-hiccup. I looked at all their faces, one after the other, like I was memorizing them, or trying to see who they really were.
Viola appeared at my side, and leaned her head against my shoulder. “They’re silly, Kate,” she said to me, “they’re worried you’re changing too fast.”
“But I’m not changing.” The words exploding out of me and the ravens outside the circle that had been stabbing the field grass for worms cawed and flapped away. “I’m the only one who’s not changing.”
At that, the awkwardness seemed to melt. A smile went around the group, passed from one person to the next, even Tio.
“What?” I said, resisting the urge to yank my hair like the Dog.
“You hang out with this University cool guy all the time and you make all these plans and you don’t tell us to do stuff the way you used to.” Alex, talking, picked at the bark of a tree.
“You guys called me controlling!”
“Of course,” said Phoebe, making circles in the redwood needles with the toe of her shoe, hands in her front pockets, “but now it feels like, like you might be ditching us. You know, moving on to bigger and better things.”
People exchanged sideways looks, like they were both embarrassed at what Phoebe said, but glad it was out there.
“You, Tio?” I asked, my arms crossed, “you think I’d hold out on you about the camera?”
Tio sat on the stump and leaned forward, his head in his hands. “I don’t know what I think any more. I guess the answer’s no. I don’t really believe you’d get me in trouble on purpose. But I don’t want to think about what you might do to save the trees. If you could keep the Dog from getting a felony conviction, at least until the end of school, I guess I could believe you might leave me dangling.”
Some part of my heart felt like it cracked. Mostly because I probably deserved every word Tio said.
“I don’t know anything about the camera. I didn’t ask Gonzo to set up a photo shoot to fake anyone out. I don’t want to ditch any of you. You guys, you’re, you’re my…” my voice cracked.
From somewhere around my shoulder, Viola said, “Group hug!”
And we did, people drifting over, one by one. Then, when everyone was clumped but Robin, we looked around, right as Robin made a running slam into us, taking the all the Greenbacks down onto the redwood-needle-padded ground, toppling together like a rugby scrum.
As we laughed and untangled and climbed to our feet, Gonzo said to Robin, “Learned some stuff from the Dog, huh?”
Robin smiled, “Yep.”
Despite the hug, I just wanted to be left alone. I kept my eyes down in first period. At the end of second period, the dark cloud over my head parted for a second when I heard one of the Pottery girls say to Drew, as they left the class, “Nice centering today.” She said it off-hand and a little patronizing, like a third grade teacher telling you your cursive was nice.
“Centering?” I asked.
Drew turned pink along the edges of his ears. “Pottery slang,” he said, and speed-walked off.
***
Today’s Tweet: Drew explores his artistic nature.
***
Third period, Mrs. Broadstreet made us come to the front of the class and draw a piece of paper out of a box, show it to her, then return to our desk. The paper was the topic of our next project. It had to be secret because no one else in class was supposed to know what we got. In keeping with the kind of day I was having, I, of course, got Freudian theory (gag me with a spoon).
Mrs. Broadstreet announced that we were expected to apply some portion of our chosen theory to our lives, then report on the results. Great. I would get to spend the next weeks blaming everything, like Freud, on the women of the world. Gee, doesn’t that seem fair?
Brunch, no one talked, but it wasn’t a good kind of not-talking. Everyone shuffled, and the quiet was too thick. Drew leaned forward after Alex and Robin went to the girls’ bathroom and said, still staring after them, “Robin’s got lip fuzz.”
It somehow broke the ice. We all sighed.
Finally Phoebe said, “No more than I do. See?”
She tilted her nose up and Drew carefully studied her flattened upper lip while Phoebe turned her face a little to the left then a little to the right.
“Well I’ll be damned.” He gave a little tooth-sucking click of disappointment and leaned against the wall.
Phoebe sat back, satisfied, and everyone relaxed into a calmer quiet.
Right after the bell rang, we were jammed in the usual crowd trying to rush the band door, when I remembered how Mr. Whitworth had blown up at Drew yesterday. “Drew!” I said, trying to get his attention where he inched along ahead of me. “Drew! It’s important!”
He gave a shimmy and somehow moved in reverse until I was pressed against his back. I leaned forward and whispered against his neck, “Listen, the triangle…” The edge of his ear turned red again. “There’s got to be something like it in football. You must have to use timing in a play, or count out who does what, right?”
Tio, mashed against my right shoulder as we shuffled forward, said, “That’s it!”
Drew turned to stare at me and I got shoved from behind and ended up craning my neck up, pressed against his chest. Then we almost fell through the band doorway, like being born out into a giant space. Tio, behind me, and Drew in front of me, we all did a stumbling kind of sprinters’ start to get our feet under us, laughing.
Tio said, bouncing with excitement. “That’s brilliant. Don’t rush your snap, or leave the other guys hanging. Music’s like football. You’ve got to get the timing right. You’ve got to be together.” Tio ran off to haul out his bass sax.
Drew, his ears rimmed in scarlet, ran a hand through his hair and didn’t make eye contact with me.
Later in the period, when it was clear Drew had mostly got it, I turned to look over my shoulder where he stood, behind and to my left, standing in this no-man’s-land between the drummers and the trombones. “You did it!” I mouthed.
He stared at my lips and I raised two fingers to rub them. “Trombone mouth,” I stage-whispered. “Goes away in about an hour.”
Drew gave a sharp nod, then fixed his gaze down at his triangle.
Mr. Whitworth kept Drew after band to congratulate him on his “triangle breakthrough.” Drew looked like he would rather be doing one thousand three hundred and forty-five gut sprints.
***
Today’s Second Tweet: Drew gets his groove on in band. Shows he can lean into it with the best of them.
***
I was desperate for the day to be over. I was emotionally exhausted and I had a gazillion things to do tonight, because tomorrow I would wake up, go to Dino-Dog, and barely get home before the party started. But at lunch, as we straggled toward the circle, going slower than we ever had, like all of us were still uncomfortable about being alone together there, Celia materialized at the edge of the group.
“I should have known,” she said, like we’d been caught wood-chippering body parts. “I’ve gone to Academy at lunch three times this week — and let me tell you, the sight of that crowd, chewing with their mouths open — it’s enough to put you off food for a month. And the whole time you’re sneaking off campus. Does Dean Verona know?”
The Greenbacks around me were jostling, like cattle that might panic and stampede any second. And I knew exactly why. I had to fight the same urge. The idea of Celia discovering and contaminating the fairy ring made me want to run screaming in all directions.
“What do you want, Celia,” I said.
“What I paid for,” she said.
“Get in line,” said Tio, a bit loudly, from the back of the crowd. “Everyone wants it.”
“You want naked pictures of the Dog?” she said, baffled.
Tio’s face flamed like a lit torch.
“Naked?” barked Drew, pushing his way toward the front.
“Not entirely,” said Celia to him, without a trace of embarrassment. “Apparently Kate doesn’t do naked.” She said it like it was some obvious flaw. Like you would say apparently Kate doesn’t have real teeth.
Drew towered over Celia. “What the hell are you doing asking for naked pictures of me?”
There was a long and breathless silence. For once, Celia seemed to realize she may have said too much.
“I didn’t ask for them,” she said, like this made it better, “I paid for them. Ask Kate.”
Drew turned to me and a cold snap dropped the temperature 85 degrees. He said, too carefully, “You agreed to take naked pictures of me. For money?”
Celia leaned forward and said, “It wasn’t cheap” at the same time that I wailed, “I don’t do naked!”
In the Arctic silence, Tio said, “Dude, you were in the Dean’s office — didn’t you already hear about this?”
“You want to know what I was doing in the Dean’s office that day? I was thinking why do I have to sit here when I’m tired. I’m hungry. I haven’t done anything wrong. And I’ve still got a ton of homework to do. That’s all that I was paying attention to.” He took a deep and shuddery breath, “Besides, back then, I didn’t know who any of these people,” he looked at me like I was despicable, “were.” With that, he turned and stalked to the trees.
My fury roared through me and I couldn’t see anything but a narrowing strip of green field. I don’t know who I was angriest at in that moment, myself or Celia, but I certainly didn’t want to waste the chance of having Celia standing right there in front of me.
“You,” I said, one hand on my hip, one index finger poking her in the chest, so that she took a step back. “You’re going to tell me right now exactly why you wanted those photos. You hear me?”
The Greenbacks were jostling and bumping again like they might panic, and I knew in a moment of clarity that they were afraid of me, and what I might do, but I didn’t care.
Celia, her face tight with fear, blinked and said, “My parents are lawyers,” in a tiny voice.
I stood even taller. “YOU think I care? Go ahead, sue me. All you’ll get is my Dino-Dog uniform!”
She blinked in confusion, then said, “No. What I mean is that everyone in my family is a lawyer and,” (she held out a hand, palm up, to stop me before I could interrupt in my towering rage) “I’d rather die than be one.”
Okay. This was Viola-level confusing, and it threw me off my line of attack.
I stood with one hand on my hip. “What do you mean, you’d rather die than be one?”
As I looked calmer, Celia seemed to get more panicky. “I’ve got two older sisters, and an older brother, and uncles, and four cousins, and two aunts and they’re, they’re all…lawyers.” She said it like being a lawyer was some horror-movie, soul-destroying event, where you found a body-pod in the basement closet and knew the person you loved was gone forever. “I won’t do it. They can’t make me!”
Helena, Phoebe, Viola and I exchanged glances. I felt my rage crash away like a wave, leaving a gritty, smelly residue, like sand in my mouth. No one could fake this kind of fear.
“What’s all of this got to do with the photos,” I asked.
“I took,” Celia looked embarrassed, “see, I took one of those Cosmo quiz kind of things and it said I wasn’t good at anything except, well, gossip. And celebrity news. So I thought if I started early, and there are lots of places like teen mags and online sites that’ll pay a lot for a candid photo of a famous hot football player. That’s how you break into the business.”
There was a mushroom cloud of horror that detonated and rose over our group. Finally Tio said, “Let me get this straight. You mean, you actually want to be, as a career choice, one of those slimy, scum-sucking…paparazzi?”
Celia blinked, then said, “Better than being a lawyer.”
No one knew how to argue with that, and no one knew where to look. The silence got deeper and more miserable, and Celia’s face got redder, until Gonzo blurted from the back, “Hey, leave her alone.”
It looked, though, in the next moment, that Gonzo had mistakenly said absolutely the worst thing possible.
“Listen to me, you Academy freaks,” Celia said, vibrating with fury. “You’ve got no right thinking you can feel sorry for me. Those pictures are mine. I will find those photos, or I’ll have somebody’s head on a plate. That’s my last warning.” She turned and stomped her way back to University.
We headed across the grass and I drifted farther behind everyone else. I realized halfway there that I couldn’t face Drew and all the Greenbacks, waiting in the trees. Maybe on a better day I could, but I’d already taken too many hits, and had too little sleep. Stress hummed inside me like an overtuned violin string, ready to snap. I turned and hurried back, to hide in the girls’ bathroom.
***
Tutoring was, well…let’s just say that I realized halfway through that somewhere in San Quentin, there was probably at least one death-row inmate who, at that exact moment, had both more personal space, and a better attitude about life, than I did.
Thirty minutes of sub-zero rapid-chill had passed when the Dog said, his face pointed aggressively at the computer monitor, “You took photos of guys in the locker room.”
Then I, channeling some insane Celia-instinct, blurted, “I wasn’t actually paid.” I saw his jaw clench and I said, “I mean, Celia’s parents kept the money, I don’t know why she still thinks the pictures are hers.”
It was
horrible.
Another ten minutes passed, me sitting twisted on the edge of my folding chair, the tip of my nose almost touching the styrofoam wall barrier of the cube. Curtis and Nate were whispering again (probably having a repeat blame-fest) while Bianca and Tio were in the side study-room.
The Dog said to the computer monitor, “She paid you to take a picture of me. So why snap all the other guys? Are you starting some high school porn industry?”
I couldn’t help it, I gasped, loud enough to attract attention from a circle of surrounding cubes. I stood, my chair collapsing in shock and clattering over. The Dog kept his shoulders hunched, his chin forward and his eyes on his monitor. I spoke to the back of his head. “I told you, I don’t do naked. Are you listening? NO ONE was completely naked. Not you, not the other guys.”
A shocked silence filled the tutor hall, but I didn’t care, I blinked hard to clear the suddenly swimming image of Drew as he half-turned in the chair for the first time.
I kept going, unable to stop, not sure what was driving me, or why it was suddenly so important to get it out, to make him understand. “I didn’t know which one was you — that’s the only reason I went after the whole football team.”
There was a quiet yikes behind me and I whirled to find Tio staring, wide-eyed at me.
“I don’t think,” Tio said to a quiet so profound you could hear a distant rattle of a ventilation shaft as the air-conditioning kicked on, “that’s how you really want to phrase it, now is it, Kate?”
I held my paperback against my chest and looked around. Faces topped cube walls in all directions. One guy elbowed another guy and gave a leery snort.
