“What do you mean?” asks Grimshaw.
“Mrs. Pentz doesn’t like Nanci Lee.” I think about the way she and Scot sat together on the bar stool in the Crossways Tavern, sharing music. “And Nanci Lee doesn’t like Mrs. Pentz.”
“How does that work in our favor?” asks Grimshaw.
“My mom has had to swallow a lot on account of Nanci Lee,” I tell her. “Even a Christian won’t pass up a chance to kick Nanci Lee in the teeth. I think she will back us up.”
“How?” Angel asks.
“It’s worth a try,” says Grimshaw. “What does that mean we should do?”
Rack and Angel are watching us. “Whatever you do, it’s gotta happen fast,” says Rack.
“Like, today,” says Angel. “She already wants your sweaters back.”
The plan we come up with is to take the legal approach: since we didn’t know about any policy, and since we already joined the squad, we should qualify as cheerleaders already and therefore have immunity from obscure regulations that Nanci Lee digs up out of the back pages of the school handbook.
Grimshaw snaps her fingers. “So we should go in in our cheerleading sweaters.”
Rack looks at her watch. “I don’t think we have time.”
“Wear mine,” says Angel. “I’ve got two.”
In town, we stop by the bridal shop to get Angel’s two sweaters and put them on. Once we get to school, Grimshaw and I go directly to Mrs. Pentz’s office. Grimshaw stops and looks through the window. Nanci Lee is already there.
“Shit,” she says. “She beat us here.”
“Looks like you have to get up early to get ahead of Nanci Lee.”
My mother sees us and waves us in.
“Don’t say anything when we get in there,” Grimshaw says to me. “Don’t argue. Let’s just see how it plays out.”
“Good morning, girls!” the principal says when we go in. “Thanks for coming in.” She’s holding a copy of the handbook. Grimshaw and I both say good morning, but Nanci Lee ignores us. The loudest thing in the room is my mother reading.
“First of all,” she says, “I really want to thank Nanci Lee for bringing this policy to my attention.” Another silence opens up. My mother frowns down at the policy.
“You’re welcome,” says Nanci Lee.
After another minute of careful study, Mrs. Pentz takes her glasses off, and with a look of deep concern on her face, clasps her hands in front of her. She starts talking about second chances and the importance of learning from one’s mistakes. I honestly don’t know which way this one is headed. But Grimshaw told me to keep my mouth shut. So I keep my mouth shut. “So,” my mother concludes, “I think this one is really up to Mr. C.”
“Excuse me?” Nanci Lee stands up. “What’s he got to do with it?”
“I’m thinking that if the girls can get a signature of approval from the teacher whose class they failed—”
“I’m sorry,” says Nanci Lee. “Can you show me in the handbook where it says anything about that, at all?”
“I think it’s all in the interpretation, don’t you?” my mother asks. She plays it straight. “Kids really need second chances, don’t you think?”
Outside the office, I hold my hand up for a high five.
“Not yet,” Grimshaw says. “We still have to get the signature. Just remember. He’s your dad.”
* * *
So at the end of the day, I prepare to broach the subject with Mr. C. Once again, he makes me stand there while he concentrates on his grade book. “Serena,” he says finally.
“I’ve been thinking about that independent study you wanted me to do—”
“So I heard,” he says. “Your mother told me.” He sighs and shakes his head. “All right. The independent study is no longer optional, not if you want me to sign off on the cheerleading for you and Melody Grimshaw. May I remind you, I expect attendance, every day. Class discussion and participation, every day. And for the study, I’m thinking I want you to take some of your ideas in that essay on last year’s final and use it on Colchis. An independent study on democracy’s effect on upward mobility in your own town. Go ahead,” he says, nodding to one of the desks. “Make me something I can sign for the principal.”
He walks over to the window and looks out through the branches of the white pine. He has all the windows open, and a breeze blows papers off his desk, but he doesn’t move. I sit down and start, and as I write the proposal, it occurs to me that I don’t even like cheerleading—the clapping, the yelling, the tedium, my utter indifference to whatever is happening on the football field. Then I sign the paper on the bottom. When I hold it out to him, he draws a big slash across the bottom of it without even looking at what I have written and continues to look out over the yellowing leaves of the town of Colchis. I guess it’s his signature.
“Thank you.”
A few minutes later, I walk across the lobby with the signed piece of paper in my hand. I see Rack’s pickup truck waiting for me in front of the school. I don’t care about the class system, in Colchis or anywhere else, and I don’t like cheerleading. It gives me this feeling in my gut, this heavy, anvil-shaped feeling. It’s familiar. It’s how I used to feel all the time. But I haven’t felt this way a single time this year, not once. I go through the doors and then duck behind a pillar before they see me. How would I look if Mr. C. had turned us down? Resentful and sarcastic, how I always used to look. So I make sure I have my Serena-mask in place, but not too much, just kind of an average amount of Serena-tude. I go down the stairs, approach the truck, and knock on the window. They see my normal face and assume the worst.
In the passenger seat, Rack rolls down the window. “He turned us down?” she demands. “That son of a bitch.”
“What?” Angel sits up in the back. “But I thought your mom said…”
Grimshaw sinks down behind the steering wheel. “That’s it, then. I’m leaving for California,” she says with her eyes closed. “Mike wants to go, so here we go. Good-bye, Colchis. Thanks for nothing.”
I give Rack the paper. She sees Mr. C.’s signature. I smile at her and give her two thumbs up. She screams and leaps out of the truck and hugs me so tightly she almost breaks my neck.
“What happened?” Grimshaw looks dazed.
“You’re officially a cheerleader, babe,” says Rack. “Nobody can take it away now. So you better get used to it.”
* * *
The next morning in the cemetery, I put the question to them: “Do you guys think there’s a class system,” I ask. “Where your family’s economic situation defines you and determines your future?”
“It might influence you,” Angel observes. “But I wouldn’t say it defines you.”
“Yeah,” Rack says, brushing powdered sugar off the front of Junior’s football jacket. “Because you can always change.”
“That’s called upward mobility,” I tell them. “Mr. C.’s into it.”
“So is that what you’re doing for Mr. C.?” Angel asks. “Asking about the class system?”
“Aren’t there more rich people than poor people?” asks Rack.
“Not in Colchis,” says Angel. They both look at me.
“What are you looking at me for?” I ask. “I’m not rich.”
“You talk rich,” Angel says.
Grimshaw looks up and laughs. “She thinks her family hangs on to all their old rugs and furniture because they can’t afford to buy new ones.”
“Like, antiques and all?”
“Yes.” Grimshaw laughs even harder. “She thinks it’s because they can’t afford to go to Walmart and buy new stuff.”
“Serena,” says Rack, “for someone who’s so smart—”
“Don’t say it,” says Grimshaw.
Angel finishes Rack’s sentence. “You sure are—”
“I said don’t say it,” Grimshaw says again.
“Well, I’m not rich,” I say again. “The more land Scot buys, the poorer we get. Anyway, I always thought R
ack was rich.”
“Us, rich?” Rack hoots. “You know how my dad says grace every night? He thanks the bank for letting us eat one more meal.”
“Here’s how I figure it,” says Grimshaw. “The class system is mostly about people pretending to be what they’re not. Rich people pretend that they’re normal, normal people pretend that they’re rich, and poor people … just give up. They might be the only honest ones.”
I stare at her. I never knew she had opinions about this stuff. “So what’s the answer, then?” I ask her.
“There isn’t one.” She stands up on the Helmers and starts stretching. “We should go soon,” she says. “Or we’ll be late.”
“Well,” Rack proclaims, “my dad is definitely—what did you call it again?”
“Upwardly mobile.”
“Right. In a big way.” Rack knows all about it. “He grew up in a shack. He had ringworm, and nobody would talk to him. It makes your hair fall out in patches. They had a game they played, like cooties. Somebody would shove somebody against him, and then that kid would have to touch somebody else to get rid of it.” He spent his childhood chasing other kids on the playground and having them scream and run away from him. She tells us her dad worked on their farm, married her mom, and inherited the farm when it was about a tenth the size it is now and mortgaged to the hilt.
“It’s still mortgaged to the hilt,” comments Angel.
“I know”—Rack laughs—“but now it’s, like, mortgaged on a higher plane.” She doesn’t know anything about previous generations of her family and doesn’t care. The future is what counts, not the past. Angel doesn’t care, either. Ditto for Grimshaw. So that’s a start.
* * *
Despite my obvious deficits in grace and skill and attitude, everybody thinks being a cheerleader is good for me. My purple and gold sweater and earrings attract this positive energy from all directions, which I find disorienting. But for my upward mobility project, I find that people are a lot more willing to talk to a cheerleader about what their parents do for work, or don’t, than to a girl in a Red Army hat. I also get my calculus, French IV, AP English, and physics homework done every day. I get into the class discussions in Western Civ and even start to enjoy it. I get the best grade in AP English for a Gatsby essay. The teacher writes me a note on the bottom saying that it is one of the best high school papers she’s ever read, but my statements about God are too extreme, and I need to back them up with quotes from the text. I stare at that A like I have a vitamin deficiency. It inspires me. It isn’t throbbing and ugly and red, like one of my Fs. It’s small and black and elegant.
Even though the class has moved on to Shakespeare, I go back to the book and look for quotes, and I do more research on Fitzgerald, about his life, his books, his booze, his early death. I reread the book as I rewrite the paper, fixing and fiddling with the words. The only sound in the room is the quiet scratch of my pen on paper.
Days later, it’s two a.m. and I should be starting Othello when I come to the sentence that Fitzgerald wrote almost a hundred years ago, which my teacher said described the eyes of God: They look out of no face but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose. Suddenly, I feel a presence in the room, and I get a prickly sensation on the back of my neck, because I know who it is. I can even smell tobacco from his cigarette and a whiff of whiskey and hear the rustle of his white linen suit.
It’s him. It’s F. Scott Fitzgerald. He’s in my room.
He’s standing behind me, looking out the window at the Minnechaug Valley, just like Gatsby stood at the edge of his lawn and looked at the lights across Long Island Sound. When I turn around, he’s gone. He was just checking in. I put the book away. I like knowing that he agrees with me about God being nearsighted and depressed and too old to take care of his creation. He doesn’t think there’s anything extreme about my statements.
seven
Gold is our color
And purple is the other
So split the V
And dot the I
And roll the C-T-O-R-Y!
WITH THAT, OUR FIRST PEP rally is underway. For the Y, I lift Grimshaw, and she hits it like she was born to cheer, grabbing her ankle with one hand and extending her leg. She has the moves, all right. Everybody in the gym watches her. She is front and center on every cheer. She does a lot of flashy stunts because she’s naturally acrobatic, basically fearless, and a glutton for attention. I stand on the side, because of my “sore elbow,” rubbing it from time to time, in case anyone cares.
Then Junior Davis and the rest of the football team break through the paper decorated with their numbers in gold and purple paint, and the cheerleaders make a corridor for the boys to trot through while about ten percent of the gym claps. The football coach makes a speech about hope and promise and the crisp days of autumn. When everybody’s numbed out by that, here comes the marching band, and the same ten percent of the gym sings first the national anthem and then our alma mater, a song featuring the noble iris—which, come to find out, is our school flower—growing tall by clear waters. Then the cheerleaders bounce to the middle of the gym again and do a cheer for which I have developed a sharp antipathy.
Hey, we’re back
The best is yet to come
CHS! Look out for number one!
Excellence, perfection, teamwork, success
The Colchis Rockets
A step above the rest
Pride and spirit—need we say more?
CHS! We rock the floor
Rockets!
The centerpiece of “Excellence, Perfection, Teamwork, Success” is Grimshaw’s aerial handspring, which Nanci Lee told her not to do because of insurance reasons, and then the cheer ends. They do this dance that Grimshaw has choreographed, the audience gets into it, and for Colchis, it’s pretty good. I stand to the side with my sore elbow and watch, until I feel a presence behind me, and I turn to see. It’s Mike Lyle. We stare at each other for a long time, and, okay, physically I have to admit I do see what she sees in him. His hair is slightly longer than it was the last time I saw him, and it curls a little bit.
“Couldn’t hack it out there, huh?” he says.
“I missed some practices.” Then I remember about my injury. “And I hurt my back,” I add, deciding on the spot that a sore elbow sounds kind of lame.
He laughs. “I bet you did.” I don’t know why everything he says seems like it insinuates something about me. We watch Grimshaw bouncing around and smiling like she’s the happiest cheerleader in the world.
“What’s your father do for work?” I ask without looking at him.
That gets his attention. “Why? Who wants to know?”
“Me.” We stare at each other. “I’m doing research.”
“He worked on a chicken farm.” His voice is so soft I have to put my ear close to his mouth so I can hear him over the marching band.
“A chicken farm? That’s really interesting. Does he still?”
He shakes his head. “He fell off a ladder and broke his back.” He reaches out for a lock of my hair and pantomimes that I should cut the purple ends off. I shake my head. I like the purple ends.
The squad is signaling to me, so it’s time for the pyramid. I get back in it, on the bottom.
As I’m bracing myself on my hands and knees, I look for Mike as he stands in the back of the crowd by the door. Even though it’s not a cold day, he wears his leather jacket zipped up and keeps his arms folded across his chest. I feel bad about his dad, like maybe that explains why he’s such a jerk. It occurs to me that if Grimshaw really likes him that much, maybe I should try harder to be friends with the guy.
The marching band comes out again, and the music director stops and makes a few remarks about freedom and patriotism and why it’s more important than ever to sing our national anthem at football games. “Why do we put our hands on our hearts?” he asks rhetorically, and takes ten minutes to answer his own question. Then finally,
it’s the last cheer of the pep rally.
* * *
That night, we’re at Angel’s aunt Teresa’s bridal shop, using the three-way mirrors in the back to get ready for a night game under the lights. While they’re putting on their makeup, I’m stuck on an extra-credit physics problem, which I always do because of my secret ambition to make the high honor roll this term. But there is no answer to this one. They didn’t give us enough information.
“Well, that pep rally was a blowout,” Grimshaw remarks.
“It’s always like that.” Rack is covering up her complexion with some tan goop from a tube. “Colchis has no school spirit. It was better than last year, though.”
“They liked your dances,” Angel says to Grimshaw.
“Until now, we always skipped pep rallies,” I chime in. I close my physics book and sweep it onto the floor, where it lands with a dull thump.
“Last year they booed and threw crumpled up Dixie cups at us. They planned it ahead of time.” Angel sucks in her cheeks at herself and gives the mirror her best angle. “Mr. Van almost had a stroke. Did you take your pill, by the way? You wanted me to remind you.”
“Yeah,” Rack says, stroking the goop on under her chin. “Thanks.”
“There is a solution, you know.” I look around. Grimshaw is looking at me in the mirror. “If you don’t give up on it,” she says, “you’ll figure it out.”
“Are you talking to me?” I ask her.
“No,” she says. “I’m talking to myself.” She has her hair pushed away from her face with a hair band. Her forehead looks big and luminous, and the eyeliner she puts on makes her look like Cleopatra. I watch her paint an inverse parabola onto her eyelids. At that moment, it occurs to me that my physics teacher did talk a lot about quadratic equations in physics class today. I sigh heavily and pick up the book again. I apply the quadratic equation, and the last physics problem melts away and solves itself. Vertical motion. It’s a parabola. It uses the quadratic equation. It comes so easily that I frown at the answer and scribble it out.
The Spaces Between Us Page 9
