by Gordon Jack
Dedication
For Kathleen
My tightrope and my net
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue
Nominations
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Campaign Ads
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Endorsements
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Opposition Research
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Bad Publicity
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Attack Ads
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Campaign Speeches
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Damage Control
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Protests
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Voting
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
New Administration
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Books by Gordon Jack
Back Ad
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue
STACEY SHOULD HAVE run as soon as she saw the security guard’s golf cart barreling toward her. That’s what fugitives do, right? They run. But Stacey didn’t feel like a criminal just yet. Her instincts were still those of a law-abiding citizen. Weird how your life can change in the matter of minutes, she mused. This morning she was the girl most likely to succeed. Now her name was trending with the hashtag #LockHerUp.
Sammy brought his golf cart to a screeching halt in front of her. What a ridiculous vehicle to give a man who was over six feet tall, and three hundred pounds. His hulking frame filled the two front seats, and he had to drive with his left leg dangling outside the cart’s floorboard.
“I found her,” he said roughly into his walkie-talkie. The thing looked like a flip phone in his giant hands.
Stacey had taken refuge on a bench outside the history building—a fitting place for someone with no future. These open spaces used to be ugly concrete pathways, the freeways of Lincoln High School, where students moved en masse from one class to another. It was Stacey who advocated that the school beautify these barren thoroughfares with trees, bushes, and flowers. Now the campus was filled with tiny parklets that provided quiet, contemplative spaces for students to reflect on the ruin they had brought to their lives.
Stacey stood up and attempted to repair her damaged appearance. After the wrestling match in the quad, her pale skin had the texture of a sneaker sole. There was a wad of chewing gum stuck to the back pocket of her shorts. Her blond hair could be cast in a Mad Max movie. She tried to fix these defects by giving herself a preemptive pat down. All that did was kick up the dust and debris that had settled on her skin and clothes.
She wondered briefly if Sammy would take her in cuffs.
“I’ll just get in the back,” Stacey said, walking around Sammy and hopping onto the back seat. She wasn’t going to fight this. She was tired of fighting. It wasn’t just the brawl at brunch either. The whole election had exhausted her. She didn’t realize how much until she had escaped to her bench after everyone had gone back to class. The quiet was intoxicating. She couldn’t remember the last time she had sat still like that and cleared her mind of every item on her to-do list.
The back seat of the golf cart faced away from the driver. Stacey watched her sanctuary recede into the distance as Sammy drove down the covered hallway toward the main office. The walls on either side of her were still decorated with campaign posters urging students to vote in today’s election. Stacey noticed that someone had torn down parts of the banner she’d hung next to the bathrooms in the English wing. Now instead of reading Don’t Waste Your Vote! Elect Stacey Wynn, it read Waste Stacey Wynn. That wasn’t very comforting. She pulled out her phone and checked the chatter on her social media feeds to see if anyone else was advocating assassination. Nope. Most were divided between calling her a bully and calling her a badass, but no one wanted to kill her.
The hallway dumped them onto the main quad, the heart of the campus, where the cafeteria, library, auditorium, and main office were located. The patchwork of lawns was still littered with debris, which the seagulls and crows huddled around like hungry Costco shoppers at a sampling tray. Along with the usual garbage that kids left after eating their morning snacks, Stacey saw a dropped poster with the words Amor sin Fronteras on the front. Someone from Julia’s crew must have abandoned it when the fight broke out, which would make sense. It wouldn’t look right to bash someone over the head with a sign saying love knows no boundaries.
A few feet away, Stacey spied that stupid astronaut helmet Tony wore over his cow costume. The cheap plastic orb had cracked down the middle; probably the result of Julia yanking it off his head and hurling it into the crowd. Stacey turned around to ask Sammy if he wanted to collect it as evidence, but then stopped herself. It’s not like the helmet was a smoking gun. If anything was responsible for the mayhem, it was these guns, Stacey thought, staring at her muscular calves. Ten years of Tae Kwon Do training had left her with beautifully toned legs. Even scraped and bruised, they were by far her best feature. And most lethal weapon.
Sammy parked in front of the administrative building and escorted Stacey to the principal’s office. Stacey had been in Buckley’s office plenty of times in her three years at Lincoln, but she was always invited in as a consultant, rather than perp walked in as a violent criminal. The administration had often asked Stacey to help organize or promote some school event, and she had always been happy to do it. She hoped Buckley would give her a pass in light of her good behavior. At the very least, she hoped Buckley wouldn’t call her mother and tell her what had happened. If Mom suspected Stacey was venturing into a life of crime, she might force her to live with her and her new husband, so they could instill more discipline into her upbringing.
Any hope that Stacey’s stellar reputation would win her a quick reprieve was promptly extinguished when she saw the principal’s secretary. Rather than greet her with her usual cheerful smile and offer of candy, Ms. Hollenbeck nodded in the direction of the principal’s door and scowled. “The principal’s on her way,” she said. Stacey had heard somewhere that jurors will not make eye contact with accused criminals if they are about to pass a guilty verdict. Hollenbeck didn’t avert her eyes from her computer screen.
Julia and Tony were already seated in front of Buckley’s cluttered desk. Sammy motioned for Stacey to take the empty middle seat between the princess and the cow. Stacey walked past Tony, exaggerating her limp so he’d feel bad for kicking her in the ankle. He was too busy playing with the udders on his costume to notice.
“Stop playing with those things,” Julia said, clutching the silky folds of her dress in obvious frustration.
“I can’t help it,” Tony said. “It’s like I have five penises.”
“You’re disgusting,” Julia said. Her tiara still hung askew on her disheveled light-brown hair like an ancient ruin, evidence of a once-glorious civilization. Even after a fight, she managed to retain her nobility. Stacey, in her spring hiking attire, felt like a stable boy sitting next to her.
Tony kept swatting his pink, plastic udders, mesmerized by their rigidity. Stacey reached forward and pulled a pair of scissors off Buckley’s desk and snipped one of the pink tubes from his costume.
“Hey!” Tony said. “That’s kind of emasculating.”
“Keep talking, and I’ll remove the other four,” she said, throwing the scissors back onto the desk.
Tony slumped in his seat, which made his udders protrude even more. Whoever designed his costume must have a sick sense of humor, Stacey figured. She grabbed a three-ring binder marked Board Meetings 2017 and threw it in Tony’s lap.
“I was just having some fun,” he said.
“It wasn’t time to have some fun,” Julia said. “It was a serious occasion.”
“You all looked so pretty,” Tony said. “Like a princess parade.”
“It was a protest, you idiot,” Julia said, her brown eyes shooting daggers. “Didn’t you read our signs?”
“I couldn’t see anything with my space helmet on,” Tony said. “Where is that anyway?”
“I saw it in the quad,” Stacey said, rubbing her throbbing ankle. “It’s busted.”
“Aw, man,” Tony said. “I got so high from smoking with that thing on my head.”
“You’re really not stereotypically Asian, are you?” Stacey asked, looking Tony squarely in the face. If he weren’t so obnoxious, she’d almost find him cute. He had the dopey eyes of a toddler.
“My people hate me ’cause I keep it real,” Tony said.
Principal Buckley burst through the doorway in her typical bulldozer style. The woman was a powerhouse. Prior to going into administration, she had been the athletic director for the school. She still approached every problem like it was a fat kid trying to climb a rope in gym class.
“Ladies and gentleman,” she said, throwing her large body into an office chair that creaked under her weight. “Can somebody please explain what happened?”
“I was attacked,” Tony said, holding up his torn costume as evidence. The hoof glove, torn from the sleeve, dangled limply from his wrist.
“Tony disrupted our peaceful protest,” Julia said, leaning forward. Stacey caught a whiff of hair spray from her tousled locks. Her brown skin was scraped from where she fell against the pavement.
“I don’t recall hearing about this protest,” Buckley said, looking at Julia’s overflowing pink gown. “Was it against evil stepmothers?”
Buckley was the only one who laughed at this joke. She hadn’t seen the solemn display. Didn’t realize how moving it had been.
“Be that as it may,” Buckley said, getting her chortling under control. “Someone better come clean and take responsibility for the fight.”
“Space Cow Massacre,” Stacey said.
“Excuse me?” Buckley said.
“That’s what they’re calling it,” Stacey said, holding up her phone so Buckley could see the Instagram story.
Buckley squinted at Stacey’s screen and groaned. “This is why we need to ban those things from campus,” she said. “We have a zero tolerance policy against this kind of behavior. So, whose fault is it?”
Stacey looked at her lap. She knew, just as the two people sitting on either side of her knew, that whoever took the hit for this would be suspended. And if they were suspended, they would be out of the presidential race. All the work they had done for the past three weeks would be for nothing. Their names would be removed from the ballot, erased from memory like some political rival in Soviet Russia. Or today’s Russia. Either way, they would never be heard from again.
“It was my fault,” Stacey said.
“It was my fault,” Julia said.
“Me too,” Tony said.
Nominations
1
15 DAYS TILL ELECTION DAY
DEBATE WAS RAGING inside room 401, meeting place of the Associated Student Body of Lincoln High School. Stacey sat in the back row of desks and tried to block out the discordant voices so that she could polish her acceptance speech, but it was proving to be difficult. Soaring, inspirational rhetoric wasn’t created in rooms filled with people yelling about how awesome it would be to stick kids in inflatable balls and roll them across the quad.
“Have you ever been in one of those bubble balls, Dave?” Brandon asked. Brandon was the current ASB president and wanted to end his term on a high note with human curling. “It’s like being stuck in a clothes dryer. Someone will hurl, I promise you.”
“Let’s hope so,” Dave said. “We could increase those odds if we made the contestants eat one of the reheated breakfast burritos from the cafeteria.”
Brandon looked to Mr. Nichols for support, but their adviser was busy laughing at something on his computer screen. “Shouldn’t the goal of our activities be to bring people together in the spirit of healthy competition, not to publicly humiliate them?” Brandon asked. Stacey assumed it was a rhetorical question.
“Can’t we do both?”
“Let’s put it to a vote,” Brandon said. “How many people think we should do bubble bowling for this Friday’s brunch activity?”
Stacey paused in her editing to consider the word “brunch.” Why did their school still use this term to describe the fifteen-minute break between second- and third-period classes? Why hadn’t it disappeared like the many other elitist names Lincoln once used when it was largely white, affluent, and Christian? The school no longer called its February break “Ski Week” after all. Why hang on to “brunch” when it conjured up images of mimosas and scones and string quartets playing Vivaldi? Why weren’t they debating alternative titles right now instead of arguing about whether they should stick someone’s little brother in an inflatable hamster wheel?
Stacey looked up from her laptop to see how many hands were raised. Half the class had voted for bubble bowling. Damn it. That meant they’d have to spend more time on this pointless discussion. Why couldn’t Brandon just make the executive decision and tell people they were doing human curling next Friday? He’d been wanting to do that activity ever since he saw a YouTube clip of some poor freshman smashing headfirst into the side of a building. He should just tell people, “We’re putting kids on skateboards and rolling them across the quad this Friday” and be done with it. That’s the way Stacey would do things when she was the ASB president. People might not always like her top-down decision-making, but they would thank her for saving them so much time in pointless debates.
She watched Brandon now as he tried to moderate a conversation that sounded like the kind of “would you rather” argument people had in the cafeteria at lunch. “Would you rather be shot out of a cannon or flushed down a toilet?” This was the problem with having student government sixth period; everyone was tired and slaphappy. No one took anything seriously after sitting for six hours taking everything seriously.
Stacey glanced over at Nichols and wondered, not for the first time, how he earned his salary for this class. It’s not like he taught them anything about the finer points of government. That was done in the actual US Government class, the class everyone took their senior year. Until then, the students had to figure things out on their own, which resulted in a lot of time spent following complicated procedures to ensure no one’s feelings got hurt. God forbid little Annie Tompkins didn’t get to voice her opinion on any subject coming up for a vote.
Stacey watched as Nichols tipped his Starbucks cup back and sucked out the dregs of the coffee. Then he dropped the cup, traveler lid included, into the trash can next to his desk, and went back to scrolling through whatever social media feed he found so amusing. Stacey stared at the cup sitting atop the pile of trash and mentally sorted the detritus into three piles: waste, recycling, and compost. Then she env
isioned dumping all three on Nichols’s bald head and screaming, Reduce, reuse, recycle, asshole! She completed the fantasy with a roundhouse kick to Nichols’s gut, just to make sure he never made the same mistake again.
“Stacey, what’s your vote?” Brandon asked, staring at her intently.
Stacey snapped back to attention and took in the room. Brandon stood before her, smiling confidently. Jenny Ramirez, the current ASB secretary, was at the whiteboard waiting to record Stacey’s answer. The vote was split between the two activities, so Stacey’s choice would break the tie.
Stacey put her blond hair up with a pencil to buy her some time. As she twisted the strands around the back of her head, she calculated the advantages and disadvantages of supporting Brandon on this. What they were voting on might be pointless, but how they voted would be remembered. Brandon was president and had endorsed Stacey early in her candidacy, which was one of the reasons no one ran against her. But Brandon was graduating in two months, and his popularity had taken a recent nosedive after people learned that grad-night tickets were going to be three hundred dollars, a direct result of his fiscal mismanagement. Dave, on the other hand, was a junior and popular with the underclassmen. He could cause her trouble next year if he built a faction to oppose her.
“Bubble bowling,” she said.
“Yes!” Dave said, and high-fived the students around him. Brandon just stared at her, his eyes bulging in surprise.
“Sorry, Brandon,” Stacey said. “But bubble bowling is more of a spectacle, with or without the barf.”
Brandon threw an eraser at the whiteboard. It bounced and landed at Jenny’s feet, and she kicked it across the floor. It slid to the center of the room like a tiny demonstration of human curling.
“Nice job,” James said, sitting down next to her after the other students started work on their various projects. “I saw that moment you paused, wondering if you should throw your mentor under the bus. Your foot hesitated over the brake and then hit the gas pedal hard.”
“It’s just a brunch activity, James,” Stacey said. “Not a vote on health care.”
Stacey stared at her laptop screen, hoping James would take the hint and go find someone else to choke with his cologne. Is this what things were going to be like next year when he was vice president? Was she going to have to pretend all year that James’s nerdy glasses and bow tie didn’t drive her crazy? His geek-chic attire seemed designed to broadcast how smart he was to everyone. It was almost as bad as when he slipped James Baldwin quotes into casual conversation.
