Poser

by Alison Hughes

  “He wasn’t great at hockey though,” she laughed, remembering. “He wasn’t much of a skater. Couldn’t really stop properly. But he was big.”

  “He skated beautifully,” argued Macy, who had very likely never seen him skate, “like a...like a...” She flailed a bit, trying to think of something that skates incredibly well. “Like a PRO!” she finished triumphantly.

  Mom shrugged, smiling.

  I swallowed.

  “That’s interesting,” I said loudly, “because I play hockey now too. On the school team. Defense. Just like Dad.” Strange how saying that actually made me proud.

  Mom and Macy erupted together.

  “You WHAT?”

  “Why didn’t you tell us?”

  “Do you have a proper helmet?”

  “Your face, Beauty Boy, your beautiful FACE!” This was Macy, of course.

  Are you beginning to see why I kept it from them? I thought of breakaways and slap shots. They thought of injuries and head shots. My whole life long, the threat of an accident had put so many activities out of bounds. Like going on a trampoline, tobogganing, rock climbing, even bike riding.

  Mom saw the look on my face.

  “Sorry, Luke. We should have said congratulations on making the team! That’s quite an accomplishment.”

  I didn’t think I needed to tell her that any breathing body made the team.

  “Thanks, Mom. It’s only for one tournament,” I explained, “and one game against the teachers.”

  “This is TOTALLY STUPID!” Macy burst out. “One puck in the face and POOF! There goes your whole modeling career! Ever thought of that, BB?”

  Oh, yes, Macy, I thought, as a matter of fact I have thought of that. I can only hope.

  “Look, it’s done,” I said. “Frey’s loaned me some equipment, and Chan and his dad are picking me up for early-morning practice tomorrow.” I pushed back my chair and got up. “And you know what? Even though I’m not much good, I love it! I love being on the team!”

  I ran to my room and slammed the door. Not very mature, I know, but sometimes a door-slam is very satisfying.

  * * *

  Macy cornered me in the hall just before bedtime. She gave me one of her smother-hugs, crushing me against her shoulder.

  “BB, I’m sorry,” she said unexpectedly. “Congrats on making the team, you superstar athlete you!” She sort of cuffed my head gently, then grabbed my face in her big hand.

  “Just take care of this gorgeous face.” She gave my face a little squeeze and a shake. “We have big plans for this face!”

  “Okay, okay,” I protested, squirming away from her.

  I watched her lumber back down the hall.

  Yes, Macy, I thought, I have big plans for this face too. And they don’t involve modeling. They involve pizza.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  MIDDLE-OF-THE-COLD-DARK-NIGHT HOCKEY PRACTICE

  I’m not a morning person.

  Early morning (any time on the clock that starts with a five or a six) is particularly horrible. It’s practically the middle of the night.

  Anyway, early-morning hockey practice sounded like much more fun than it was. Chan and his dad picked me up at 6:15 AM. It was still dark outside, and very cold. The kind of cold where you see every breath you exhale; the kind of cold that reminds you how often we really breathe. It seemed very heroic, leaving a warm house to crunch out to hockey practice in the middle of the night like this.

  Chan’s dad jumped out of the van. He’s got trendy glasses, a big smile and tons of energy. He made it feel like we were going off on an exciting trip.

  “’Morning, Luke! Hi, Kathy!” he called, reaching for my enormous bag of enormous equipment and stowing it away for me.

  “’Morning, Edwin!” called my mom from the door. “Brrr. What a morning! Hey, thanks for giving Luke a ride.”

  “Oh, no problem.” He looked surprised, like who wouldn’t want to be up at the crack of dawn, driving kids to hockey practice?

  “Yeah, thanks, Dr. Chan,” I said, “Bye, Mom.”

  “Have fun!” She gave a hurried wave and shut the door.

  The Chan van was wonderfully warm as I slid into the backseat. I had bed head and huge bags under my red-rimmed eyes, and I was barely thinking at all. Chan was completely awake, alert and ready to talk.

  “See the game last night, Spin? I had hockey practice, but we got home sort of mid-second period.” He rattled on about the game as the mindless morning radio blared. As we turned left onto the main street, I marveled, in a slow and sluggish way, at how many people were up in the middle of the night.

  Chan’s dad started talking cheerfully about some junior hockey player he’d seen recently for some disgusting rash. I only caught parts of it.

  “...raised and pus-filled...”

  “...had to cut his shirt sleeve right off...”

  “...creeping up his neck onto the side of his face...”

  Both of Chan’s parents are very enthusiastic dermatologists. You have to be prepared for rash-talk (and worse) when you’re with skin doctors. I looked at the back of Dr. Chan’s head as he chattered about boils, pus, rashes, sores and blood. My 6:00 AM Cheerios lurched dangerously around inside me. I looked out the window, and tried to tune out Mr. Chan’s rash-chatter.

  Finally, several scabby patients later, we pulled up at the arena across the street from our school. A black BMW slid in behind us. Shay and his dad. Shay has mentioned his dad’s Beamer about four thousand times at school.

  Mr. Chan was just finishing up his last story about a monstrous pustule that had required some totally putrid digging and draining.

  “...six stitches to close it!”

  “Wow! Six!” Chan squirmed excitedly at this disgusting fact.

  I looked out the back window at the Beamer. I’d never seen Shay’s dad before, and I was curious. He was just an average-looking guy in a suit, with slicked-back hair, talking on his cell phone. Who is he talking to in the middle of the night? I wondered. Shay got out of the car, walked around to the trunk and waited. And waited. Finally, he knocked on the trunk, just once, just one of those one-knock, open-up kind of things you do to let a driver know you need the trunk opened.

  The knock did not go over well.

  Shay’s dad swiveled around and glared at Shay before he popped the trunk. Shay dug his bag out, and the Beamer fishtailed off, his dad still glued to his cell phone.

  Now, I’m not expecting to see hugs and kisses every time a parent drops his kid off. Nobody wants that. But maybe eye contact? Maybe not letting your kid wait in the bitter cold until he has to knock? I knew my dad wouldn’t have dropped me off like that.

  Dr. Chan did one of those exaggerated oof sounds as he heaved my gigantic equipment bag. “What do you have in here, a body?” he said. We all laughed.

  Shay looked over as he walked by.

  “Hey, Shay,” I said.

  “Hi,” he said shortly, without stopping.

  I watched him walk toward the big white arena doors, just a little dark shadow in the gloom, getting smaller and smaller.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  TRUTH. HMMM, I’M NOT SO GOOD AT THIS.

  It was the night before the FUNdraiser. I imagined another day of avoiding Mrs. Walker’s increasingly obvious smiles and glances. Another day of trying to stop Shay from finding out that I was the fake-sick kid who started the whole thing. And if I lived through tomorrow, the next day was the Shiny, Happy Family shoot with Chad and Clarissa. My life was getting better and better.

  I lay in my bed trying to convince my body to become really, really sick. Getting really sick would solve all of my immediate problems. I wouldn’t get to play in the hockey game, but, to be honest, playing the first official game of my life in front of the entire school terrified me.

  Getting hot...

  Think feeevvvver...

  Think sore throat...

  I was interrupted by a soft knock on the door. Mom. When Macy knocked, she hamme
red so hard it sounded like a construction crew.

  “Come in,” I said.

  “Hey,” she said, coming into the room. “Whoa, it’s cold in here! Can I close that window? You’ll catch pneumonia!”

  That was the plan.

  Mom sat down on the side of the bed and smoothed my hair from my annoyingly non-feverish forehead.

  “Are you feeling okay?” she asked, looking concerned.

  “Yeah,” I said. She looked tired.

  “How about you?” I asked. “How’s work?”

  “Oh, all right,” she said. “New manager’s driving me crazy though.”

  Then I remembered about Red Plush. Mom and I hadn’t had much time to talk since I’d broken the hockey news, but I felt guilty that I’d forgotten to tell her what Frey said.

  “Hey, Mom,” I said, propping myself up on one elbow, “I know a place where you might get a job. One you’d like. It’s a really cool place.” I ended up telling her all about Red and the store, and how it was near the school and Frey’s family and the rink.

  She listened. My mom was a good listener. She didn’t fidget or look away or bite her nails or anything. She just sat there, looking at me encouragingly.

  “This woman’s name is Red?” she asked. “Just Red?”

  “I guess she must have a last name,” I said, wondering what on earth it could be. Not Plush. Surely not Plush. Anyway, I had never heard it.

  “Well, thanks,” she said, smiling. “I’ve got a day off tomorrow. I might pop over to this Red Plush. Sounds fun.”

  She looked at me and then blurted out, “You want to quit modeling, don’t you?”

  I stared at her.

  “I know you want to quit. I don’t want you to think you’re letting me or Macy down. I want you to tell me the truth.”

  The truth.

  “I’m not so good at the truth, Mom,” I said.

  She laughed.

  “Try it,” she said.

  I took a deep breath. It was hard to get started. But once I did, I got going pretty quickly. I told her the truth. I told her everything.

  I told her that if I had to do one more stupid pose, I would scream the place down. I told her that I’d had it with fake-smiling, fake-laughing, fake-running and fake everything. I told her about Chad’s hair and Clarissa’s psycho-freakiness and lying to my friends and how frustrating it was to not have a real life.

  I told her how scared I was that Shay would find out about the modeling. I told her about letting her down by lying when she had trusted me. I told her about talking to the principal and how the monster lie was taking on a life of its own. And I told her I felt sick about the FUNdraiser the next day and the Shiny, Happy Family shoot the day after that.

  I looked away from Mom’s face as I talked. She wanted the truth. She asked for it.

  I talked a lot. Even for me. I talked until there was no more talk left in me. Finally, I lay back against my pillows and closed my eyes. Who knew telling the truth was so exhausting?

  “Well,” I said, “there you go. You’ll never ask me to tell the truth again, hey?”

  She sat very still.

  “Actually,” she said, “we’re going to have nothing but the truth starting now. Thanks for being honest, BB. Sorry. Luke. I’m so sorry you’ve been so miserable. You should have told me. I’ve noticed lately that you’ve been sort of moody and unhappy, but Macy and I thought it must just be teenage stuff. You know. I was a teenage terror, so I guess I thought all teenagers go through that.”

  “Well, give me time,” I said. “I’m not actually, officially, a teenager yet. Watch out though. Birthday coming up.” We laughed a little. Then Mom smoothed my hair.

  “Things will be different now, I promise. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said. But I wasn’t convinced. Macy the Tank stood in the way of our freedom.

  Mom gave me a hug. I felt a little better.

  I heard her and Macy talking in the family room. Soft voice, then big RUMBLE, then soft voice, then RUMBLE. They were still talking when I fell asleep.

  Nothing would change. Neither one of us was as strong or as determined as Macy.

  But at least now it was two against one.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  THE FUNDRAISER DAY OPENS WITH A BANG (BRACE YOURSELF. IT’S UGLY.)

  Mom and Macy were up and out of the house when my alarm went off. This was highly unusual.

  Mom had left a note for me.

  Luke,

  I have a bunch of stuff I have to do today, so thought I’d get an early start. Macy’s at a breakfast meeting with some client. Don’t worry about anything. We had a long talk, and it’s all under control. Talk to you later.

  Love, Mom

  ps: Eat some breakfast. Here’s money for lunch.

  Yeah, right. All under control. When had either of us ever been able to control Macy?

  It was one of those days when the weather doesn’t seem to understand that you’re very depressed and that your life is a tangled, stupid mess. It was a clear-blue, sparkling day with frost decorating every tree branch.

  I stared dully out the bus window at the winter wonderland and wondered how I was going to get through the day without being revealed as the phony sick kid, and how I was going to get through the next day fake-smiling with Chad and Clarissa.

  So I was totally unprepared for the bomb when it fell. To those of you literal kids who just jumped to your feet thinking, No way! A BOMB went off?!: relax. And sit down. This is not that kind of book.

  All I meant was that something really, really bad happened. And I wasn’t ready for it. We clear on that? No actual bombs.

  As I turned down the hall to my classroom, Chan hurried up to me with a bunch of papers in his hand.

  “Not good, Spin, not good. In fact,” he added, shoving the papers at me, “probably really, really bad. I took down as many of them as I could, but look...” He gestured down the hall, where sheets of paper were taped to every locker, every door, every window.

  I looked down at the paper. It was a photocopy of one of my modeling shoots from about six years ago. It was for a bridal magazine, and I was a fake ring bearer. I was wearing fake glasses and a small (and, as I recall, too-tight) tuxedo with a fake flower in the buttonhole. I was holding a small pillow with a fake wedding ring stuck on it, smiling up at the women around me. The fake bride and all her fake bridesmaids were smiling down at me. It hadn’t been a bad shoot. Everyone had been nice.

  But let’s face it: it’s not the kind of thing you really expect to see papering the walls of your junior high when you are busy worrying about your fake sickness.

  Someone had written GUESS WHO?? at the top of the page.

  I looked around. The photocopies were everywhere.

  It had come.

  Doom.

  The moment I’d been dreading my whole life.

  Through the rising panic, I heard my brain say, You still have time to run! The bell hasn’t rung yet!

  But somehow, my feet started walking toward the classroom.

  What are you guys doing? screamed my brain at my feet. Crisis here! Run! RUN AWAY!

  My feet don’t hear very well, apparently. They walked all the way down the hall to the classroom. Past kids who were whispering and grinning and staring. Past nice girls looking sorry for me, past guys looking guiltily relieved that they weren’t going to be today’s victims.

  Frey swung around from his locker, saw me and said through the apple in his mouth, “Hey, Spin! Hockey today!” Apparently he hadn’t noticed the three thousand sheets of paper covering all the nearby surfaces.

  I managed a smile. Good old Frey.

  Hockey today. He was right. Today was my first hockey game ever. Coach was even buying us pizza after the game. In the midst of my life shattering and crumbling into dust, I’d forgotten that fact. It made me feel better. Frey caught up with Chan and me, and we all walked into the classroom together. Did they wait to walk in with me to help me out? Did they walk i
n with me because they knew it’d be hard? I’ll never really know. But at that moment, walking in with my friends was WAY better than walking in alone.

  Shay was waiting. The whole class was waiting. There was a stillness in the air.

  “Well, GUESS WHO’s here?” shouted Shay, his evil little face bright and expectant.

  “Hey, Shay,” I said casually, dumping my backpack on my chair.

  He frowned.

  Ahhh, I thought. The trick is to stay casual. Hard when your heart is pounding and your face feels hot.

  I pretended I needed all my concentration for unpacking my backpack. But ignoring Shay never made Shay go away.

  “Have you happened to notice this gorgeous photo, Spin?” Shay could barely contain his glee. He slammed one of the posters on my desk, right underneath my face.

  “Check out the little guy in the tux! He’s SOOOOO cute!”

  I turned and looked at him. What I saw wasn’t pretty. He was going to humiliate me as much as he could. He was going to torture me.

  And then something in me snapped.

  I’d had all I could take.

  Here I was, caught in this monster lie, doomed to model endlessly, and Shay was determined to humiliate me, to beat me to a pulp, mind-bully style.

  Well, it wasn’t going to happen.

  There’s a depressing song my mom used to play, and one of the lines is When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose. Or something like that. That’s how I felt. I had nothing to lose. Rock bottom. Maybe it sounds pathetic, but when you hit rock bottom, you realize there’s nowhere to go but up. All my nervousness and fear melted away. I felt oddly calm.

  I smiled, as if he was paying me a genuine compliment. It was one of those hard, stiff smiles that had no humor in it. It was a smile that said, Watch out, Shay, I’m coming for you.

  “Aw, thanks, Shay,” I said loudly. “You know, you just might fit into that little tux in a few years. Like, for grad or something. I can see if they still have it.”

  There was dead silence. Everyone looked stunned.

  Nobody talked like that to Shay. Even Frey stopped chewing and just stood there with a mouthful of apple.