Cinderland

by Amy Jo Burns

  THE DEFENDANT: There is no conspiracy in this community.

  THE COURT: So, Mr. Lotte, no fellow teacher, no friend, no associate, no former student, no member of this community should proceed on the belief that you are innocent in any way of these charges; is that correct?

  THE DEFENDANT: That is correct.

  Finally, the judge grants the parents a small victory, assuring the courtroom he will not be swayed by Mr. Lotte’s good deeds: “So the fact that you are very good and have done very good things in your community is neutral. It fits in with the profile.”

  “This is a great tragedy for everyone,” the judge goes on to say. “But there’s only one person who perpetrated the tragedy; it is you, Mr. Lotte.”

  After his sentencing, Mr. Lotte serves one year, one month, and eight days. I always knew he wasn’t quite right, some will say. No one will admit to being duped by the great and powerful Lotte, and many still won’t admit his guilt. An unspoken treaty seeps into our town, from the city limits by the McDonald’s to the flooded strip mines just outside of town where kids sneak off to swim: Never speak of this again.

  At the beginning, this truce seems easier to achieve than “forgive and forget,” and for the most part, it is. If there are two things people in Mercury aren’t good at, it’s forgiving and forgetting. We trade in grudges and well-worn memories; they fill in the space between Friday night football games and Sunday morning services. But as silence winds itself around lampposts and mailboxes, school desks and overturned basketball hoops, the words masquerading as a peace offering—Never speak of this again—reveal themselves to be a communal spell. No one in Mercury can find the words to speak about Mr. Lotte even if we want to, and nobody does.

  And what about us good girls? We’ve done our fair share in restitching the tapestry of our town. Distanced as we are from the drama, we can’t deny that our silence has rendered us accomplices. The prisoner’s dilemma is at it again—we didn’t rat out Mr. Lotte, and he reciprocated in kind. The old Mercury saying is turning out to be true: you’re only as good as the company you keep. Over time, our memories start to resemble a dead fire the morning after it burned bright. The matter of memory still exists, but we can’t even hope to reconstruct it from the cinder it has become.

  PART III

  All the Prettiest Girls

  Impostor

  MERCURY WAS A TOWN where repetition masked itself as tradition. Every hour on the hour, the courthouse clock in the center of town chimed. Every morning, a group of retired men known around Mercury as “the Romeos” dined on eggs and bacon at the local diner. Each February, Emmett the Elf appeared at the winter craft fair with rouged cheeks and jingling shoes. He always brought his flute and his bad attitude. And who could forget the she-minstrel at the artisan fest held on the courthouse lawn each summer? Every July, she wore a skirt made of men’s neckties and sang folk songs while sashaying around the yard. You could count on these people like the chiming of the clock.

  And each year in September, every blue-collar girl at Mercury High School who ever dreamed of becoming a princess finally got her shot. Like this: on the second day of the school year, the senior class gathered to cast ballots for the annual homecoming court. Six lucky boys and girls were chosen by their peers to become Appalachian royalty—the perennial sparks that flashed against our monochromatic backdrop. After five weeks of fame, the entire school would vote for one boy and one girl to rise above the rest and receive their reward: a sash, a crown, and a wildest dream come true.

  Homecoming queen. Just the sound of it made all the girls fawn.

  Don’t be fooled. Homecoming didn’t exist to welcome alumni back to their old haunts. Instead, it snapped a still-life of the town’s latest crop of kids before they ascended into legends (Remember Bobby? He could nail a three-pointer from midcourt) or descended into has-beens (That Cassie could have done something with her life if she’d never gotten herself pregnant). The significance was larger than tradition or title. For the girl on top, it was a destination. For everyone else, it became the jewel of envy—the private allure of fantasy and the menacing grip of the impossible.

  Homecoming in Mercury was a small-town album destined to repeat itself. Mothers in town had graced the court when they were students at Mercury High School, and the school kept pictures to prove it. Always a well-cut crew, the court consumed multipage spreads in every yearbook. Leafing through them in the library, you’d see them—every year, a new batch of girls. Glance at the photographs, and you’d see a string of paper dolls. Focus, and you’d discover the clenched muscles behind their smiles. Linger, and you’d see a group of girls taking what they thought they could get.

  My own mother had never been on any “court” since she grew up in a town even smaller than Mercury where, for a time, she only went to school four days a week. At age eighteen, while Mercury girls were primping and parading at homecoming, my mother was fashioning her plans for escape just like I was. Her cello, her ticket out, gave her a scholarship that brought her to western Pennsylvania. For the twenty-five years she’d lived here, she hated the homecoming charade. “If I were in charge,” she said, “I’d cancel the whole thing.”

  Fat chance. Canceling homecoming would be as un-American as canceling Christmas. None of us was immune to its power. Even my father had been named to the court back in 1973. I’d seen him in his yearbook, where he was remembered as a star wrestler and a football player. His hair was blondish-brown, hanging just below his ears. The yearly rite of homecoming had become impenetrable and mythic, sired long before my parents’ generation, and would survive long after I was dead.

  During early fall of my senior year, my familiar weakness remained closer to me than any confidante. I didn’t want to want to be chosen, and yet I wanted it still. Getting voted by my peers promised to be both the reward and the antidote for the choice I’d made so long ago to fall in line and stay silent. A validation of my lie and a remedy for the guilt. The paradox spun me around more times than I could count.

  On the second day of school, I joined my classmates as we clamored toward the cafeteria. About a hundred of us spread out among the tables; no one sat side by side. These were answers we wouldn’t dare reveal. It was time to do what all the classes before us had done, and all the classes after us would continue after we disappeared.

  I stared at my empty bubble sheet, looking back and forth between it and the corresponding list of senior boys’ and girls’ names. Carefully, I chose the names of six boys, most of them from church. Then I moved on to the girls.

  I was no stranger to popularity contests. They were a cinder block in the architecture of small-town life. Even local churches felt it necessary to rank their children. My first spar for supremacy occurred during Vacation Bible School in a neighboring town when I was only eight years old. The theme that year revolved around friendship, and at the end of the week a “best friend” was selected from every class by vote. The unintended lesson: Friendship was not laying down your life for someone else. Friendship was sizing up your competition.

  Our class of girls was small, no more than five, and three of the students abstained from voting.

  “This is stupid,” a girl named Mary said. “Why can’t we all be best friends?”

  That left two votes still in play—Carly’s and mine. We each wrote a name, folded our papers, and handed them to our teacher. We watched as she opened them. She smiled as she shook her head. “So sweet,” she whispered to the other teacher. “Carly and Amy chose each other.”

  I realized then that naiveté had the power to claim women as well as girls. The teacher thought we’d voted for each other, but we hadn’t. We’d each chosen ourselves.

  “Looks like we’ll have to have a tiebreaker,” the teacher said. “I’ll go around and ask some of the other teachers for input.”

  I wanted to object, knowing that many of the other teachers were Carly’s relatives and therefore biased. But if I called attention to it, the teacher would
realize that I’d voted for myself, so I remained quiet—something I was too good at, even then. During the final ceremony, the crowd clapped as Carly accepted the trophy.

  In the cafeteria as I rushed to make a decision, Carly’s young face flashed in my mind. Once a perfect archetype for the sickly myth of the good girl, she would have been a shoo-in for the court, had she been able to stay in Mercury. Had she never been accused of lying about Mr. Lotte.

  Where was Carly now? Some other town, some other high school, where no one knew her past and no one knew the friend who hadn’t stood beside her. Though I’d banished Mr. Lotte from memory, Carly remained there, just beneath the surface and beyond my reach. My ghostly obverse, Carly had chosen what I could not; she’d paid prices I would not.

  “One more minute,” the proctor said. Other students rose from their seats and headed for the door. Noise and murmurs slowly returned.

  You can’t vote for someone who isn’t there, I told myself. But as I filled in the circle corresponding to my name, I couldn’t help feeling that the spot rightfully belonged to someone else. Once upon a time, Carly and I had both wanted to woo the heart of Mercury. The difference between us: she hadn’t bowed to it, and I had fallen to my knees.

  The following day during ninth period, we all knew it was coming. The announcement. I waited in German class with Aaron, who couldn’t be bothered with popularity contests. When the loudspeaker crackled, the room silenced.

  “May I have your attention, please, for a special announcement,” someone said into a microphone. “The members of this year’s homecoming court are . . .”

  Every classroom door and window hung wide open. No one in the whole school made a sound. It felt just like that early afternoon so long ago when the car dealership near Mercury’s elementary school had its explosion, and Principal Mellon’s voice echoed on the intercom. It was right at the height of the Lotte scandal, not a month before he’d officially plead guilty to his crimes. We knew, then—even before Principal Mellon spoke—that something great or terrible, or something great and terrible—had occurred. The line between awe and horror was so fine we often had to straddle it.

  But today was a day of great and terrible things in the Land of Mercury. In less than a minute, my name was called, and I turned into one of the lucky ones.

  This year, seven boys and seven girls had been chosen instead of six. There must have been a tie. When the list concluded, the school awoke from its stupor. “Seven?” students whispered. “Did they list seven?”

  Frau Zimmer offered me congratulations.

  “Viel Glück,” she said.

  “Danke, Frau Zimmer,” I answered. The local fame I’d chased throughout my youth felt more like nakedness as the unchosen lifted their gazes from their desks and examined me. Now a member of Mercury’s most elite and long-standing clique, I’d been dubbed a girl who was “interesting to watch.”

  How many girls? Seven girls. Seven girls came forward, seven were separated from the crowd. Seven girls for Lotte, seven girls for now, and an entire town turned its eye.

  Even as I dove deep into the throes of homecoming, I still fought for a life raft. I knew I couldn’t remain one of the seven girls for that very reason—I was one of seven, a stand-in among a fan of paper dolls. That’s what a good girl was: one who folded in on herself. I needed to be real, sins and all, and I’d finally found my escape route.

  Last summer while school was out, I’d fallen in love with a staircase. Near the end of July, my parents and I took the six-hour trip to Ithaca, a hippie town in upstate New York, to see my first and only Ivy League university. We did it on our own; the guidance department at my school existed only to funnel students to local colleges. Pushing past the borders they’d set was not only arrogant; it was a betrayal of the worst kind.

  But Cornell was a place like no other. I saw for the first time the kind of access that stature can provide. In the center of its sprawling campus stood a tall, lean clock tower and, next to it, a library. This university, we soon discovered, had libraries inside its libraries. When I walked through the Andrew Dickson White Library, I fell for it harder and faster than for any boy in Mercury. The room looked just like the set of My Fair Lady. A bright red carpet stretched across the floor, leather couches with deep cushions and fancy buttons accentuated the bright windows, and marble heads perched on pillars. But the shelves. Three floors of wrought iron stacks rose before me, each flanked with a spiral staircase. I imagined myself climbing a ladder to the top row like Professor Henry Higgins, sliding from left to right in search of the perfect book. There were thirty thousand to choose from, and this was just one of Cornell’s twenty libraries. The stairwell, thin and dark, spiraled upward in a cloud of hardcover books, twirling like the hem of a dancing woman’s skirt.

  The odds were against me. When my parents and I met with an admissions officer, he frowned. The balding man with a mustache like a piece of white chalk remained stoic as I listed my accolades. Senior class treasurer, school newspaper editor, president of the chorus, president of the speech and debate team. I did my best to look him straight in the eye, as all good-girls-going-places should.

  “How are your grades?” he asked.

  “Good,” I answered. “Straight A’s.”

  “Class rank?”

  “Number two.”

  He raised his eyebrows as if I’d finally impressed him. “How big is your graduating class?”

  “One-twenty-five.”

  He let out a mild snort. “You need to find yourself a bigger senior class.”

  He laughed, but he wasn’t joking. I needed a miracle. But I’d always known I was the Queen of the Longshots.

  Despite my intentions to get out of Mercury, my own affection for artifice threatened to turn my quest to become real into a fantasy. In the midst of the school’s homecoming preparations, I auditioned for the role I’d been waiting for. For so long I’d imagined playing the part of Rosie in Bye Bye Birdie, though I wasn’t fit for it. Rosie had dark skin and hair, while my skin was fair and my hair had golden highlights; she was a headstrong career woman, and I still looked barely sixteen. Even so, I had all her songs memorized, and I sang one for my audition.

  When I stepped into the music room to perform for the panel of judges, I was a different girl than the one who had auditioned for Anything Goes three years earlier. That girl had faltered on her high notes, stuck her hands in her pockets, and said she’d take any role available. This time, I strode in with polite confidence. This was my only shot, and I knew it.

  The one person who might have been more suited for Rosie’s role than me was the one person no longer around to claim it. Even at age ten, Carly had been an angelic vocalist. Though she’d been gone for almost seven years, at times I still found myself filling her shoes. But I didn’t let myself dwell on it. It would only ruin my chances to get what I thought I’d always wanted—a prime opportunity to act like someone else for all of Mercury to see.

  Even before she left town, Carly and I had been too alike not to resist each other. We fought over any opportunity to put ourselves on display. I had already fallen into Carly’s shadow during our kindergarten play—I was in the chorus of chicks and she was the miller’s wife—and when our second-grade class performed The Real Princess, I was determined not to let it happen again. I feared my future: some of us were destined to be millers’ wives, and some of us to be chicks.

  Our teacher, Mrs. Palmer, cast me in the role of the queen. The plot was what one might expect: the king and queen were on a hunt to find the perfect princess for their son to marry. Young, enterprising ladies came from near and far to audition for them, but the king and queen snuffed out the fakes. “She was not a real princess,” they said. At the play’s climax, the real princess appeared. When the queen placed a pea underneath a pile of mattresses, the real princess tossed and turned all night while all the other counterfeit princesses slept like rocks. Once her authenticity was verified, the princess married the prince,
and the two lived happily ever after. A “real” princess—the phrase was an illusion in itself.

  Who else but Carly could be the perfect choice to play the beautiful, youthful princess? I nursed my wounds by telling myself my role was equally important. “You have the most lines in the whole play,” Mrs. Palmer told me when I asked her why Carly had gotten the princess role. “And the first line, too.”

  On the day of the performance, our classroom was transformed into a stage with a seating area in front of it. Mrs. Palmer constructed a backstage area by hanging a large piece of felt from a rope slung from one wall to the other by the bathroom. Minutes before the production was about to begin, Carly and I started to fight.

  I stood with my hands on my hips, wearing a royal blue gown I’d gotten for being a flower girl the year before. “You might be the princess,” I said to Carly. “But I’m the star of the play.”

  She batted her eyelashes. “I’m the star. The play is named after me.”

  “No,” I countered. “I’m the star.”

  Carly’s tone matched mine. “I. AM.”

  “No, I AM!”

  Realizing we’d reached a stalemate, we called in Mrs. Palmer to settle the dispute.

  “Which one of us is the star of the play?” I asked. “Which one?”

  Mrs. Palmer smiled and placed a light hand on each of our backs. “Everyone here is the star because without everyone, we couldn’t put on the play.”

  In the backstage of all my performances, naiveté and cunning seemed to come hand-in-hand. I told myself that Mrs. Palmer didn’t want to injure Carly’s fragile feelings. I didn’t stop to consider she might not want to hurt mine.

  The morning after the Bye Bye Birdie tryouts, I went to the main office window to inspect the cast list. Rosie’s name was listed first. It was the role I was meant to play, personal appearance be damned, and I finally got it.

  It was a dirty business, getting everything I wanted. As homecoming hysteria ballooned, facsimiles of my face started to appear everywhere. The photographs from the annual homecoming photo shoot ran in all the local newspapers and were displayed behind a glass case in the main hall of the school right next to the gymnasium. Every day that fall, I beheld evidence of what I thought I’d always desired—my name listed in the annals of Mercury’s proud history. The first time I’d seen pictures like this, I was just a seventh grader still finding my way around a new school. The main hallway was always flush with people pushing and shoving to get to class on time. That fall, the court’s homecoming pictures graced the glass display case just as they would five years later.