Picture Perfect

by D. Anne Love

  The auditorium buzzed with sound as students from three different middle schools came in looking for seats. I found a spot on the center aisle and sat down, dropping my backpack onto the empty chair beside me. The lights flickered, like they do at a concert to tell you when intermission is over, and the school principal, Mrs. Cantrell, walked to the podium. “Good morning!”

  She waited for conversations to stop, introduced herself, and welcomed us to Eden High.

  Then a voice whispered in my ear, “Is that seat taken?”

  A boy with deep blue eyes, a killer smile, and a shock of black hair was standing there looking down at me. I grabbed my stuff off the chair and scooted over, and he sat down. “Thanks.”

  Mrs. Cantrell was going over the school district’s rules of conduct, as if we hadn’t had them drilled into our brains for eight years running. She asked us to take out our class schedules. Papers rustled. Somebody giggled. Somebody else coughed. The boy leaned toward me to take his folded-up paper out of his pocket. He smelled great. Like soap and spearmint gum. He unfolded his paper as Mrs. Cantrell, silhouetted in the light of an overhead projector, slid a floor plan of the school onto the projector and adjusted the image on the screen behind her. She pointed out the locations of the library, the cafeteria, the gym, the rest rooms, and the science labs. We followed along, figuring out how to get from English to algebra to science to lunch before the tardy bells rang.

  Then the back doors of the auditorium opened, and the band marched down the aisles playing the school song. The cheerleaders ran onto the stage, clapping and yelling. The head cheerleader grabbed the microphone off the podium and strode to the center of the stage, her white skirt swirling around her perfectly tanned legs.

  “Are y’all ready to learn a cheer?” she yelled.

  The boy beside me rolled his eyes, which made me like him right away, since I am not much of a rah-rah type person myself. My theory on school is get in, do the work, get out.

  “Okay, y’all!” the cheerleader yelled. “We’re gonna learn a cheer called ‘Blue and White.’ This is the one we’ll start with at all our pep rallies this season. Learn it now and be ready to cheer for the Eagles at our rally on Friday. First of all”—she strode to the right side of the stage—“this side of the room is the blue side. And this side”—she motioned to the left—“is the white side.”

  Behind her seven cheerleader clones lined up and clapped their hands. “Ready-o? Let’s go! It’s a blue, it’s a blue, it’s a blue, blue, blue!”

  They pivoted left. “It’s a white, it’s a white, it’s a white, white, white!

  “It’s a blue!

  “It’s a white!

  “Blue! White! Fight, fight, fight!”

  After we practiced yelling for the good old blue and white, the band played another song, and Mrs. Cantrell finally turned us loose. The boy beside me stood up. I remembered Shyla’s advice to be friendly to everybody, but before I could say anything, he disappeared into the crowd of people standing in the aisle. I headed for French One, my first-period class, where the teacher, Elise Hartwell Rochard, who had been only a couple of years ahead of Shyla in school, informed us that from that day forward she would be Madame Rochard and would respond to us only in French. Plus we would be graded not only on our written homework and class participation, but on the authenticity of our accents during a spring dinner to be held at L’Antibes. Imagine me attempting to pronounce moules àla béarnais or tarte au citron correctly and you can understand why I had no hope of getting an A in French.

  From Madame’s class it was on to English lit, algebra, and finally lunch. I bought two slices of cheese pizza and a soda and took my tray outside. The cheerleaders were running around acting as social directors, finding seats for everybody, making sure nobody was left to eat alone. One of them directed me to a table where two other girls, both blondes, had just sat down. Right away I could tell that they were best friends. They wore the same nail polish and lipstick, and they’d color-coordinated their clothes for the allimportant first day. Even though Shyla said it was dumb to try to look like a clone of somebody else, and that dressing like twins only showed a lack of imagination, I wished all over again that Lauren hadn’t moved away.

  Blonde number one said, “Hi. I’m Ashley, and this is Courtney. We went to West Middle School.”

  “I’m Phoebe.” I popped open my soda can and stuck a straw into the opening. “I went to Eden Middle School.”

  “Oh, that old building near downtown,” Courtneysaid. “My mom used to teach there. She loved it.”

  Courtney bit into her burger, but Ashley pushed her tuna sandwich aside. “I’m too stressed to eat. I can’t wait for this day to be over.”

  “Me either,” Courtney said. “Mom says the first day is the worst, though. She says high school will get easier once we learn the routine.”

  “I hope so.” I took a bite of pizza just as the boy from the auditorium passed our table. He was talking to a couple of other guys as a cheerleader guided them to a table under the trees, but when he saw me, he raised his hand and nodded.

  “He’s really cute,” Courtney said. “What’s his name?”

  “I don’t know. He sat beside me at the assembly.”

  “And you let him get away?” Ashley twisted around for a better look. “I know he didn’t go to West. I would have noticed.”

  “Hey, look,” Courtney said, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. “There’s Madame Rochard.”

  Our French teacher was standing near the door gnawing on a drumstick and talking to Mrs. Cantrell.

  “You have her too?” I asked.

  Courtney nodded. “Second period. She’s gonna be a major pain.”

  Ashley grinned at her friend. “Who did you get for world history?”

  “Don’t know yet. I have it next period.”

  “Me too,” I said, relieved that I would know at least one person in the class.

  We compared our schedules and discovered that all three of us would have PE together seventh period. “Thank God,” Ashley said. “Going into PE alone is the absolute worst kind of torture.”

  “Whoever gets to the gym first, save places on the bleachers, okay?” Courtney said. “I hate sitting on the floor.”

  The bell rang and we scattered. Ashley headed to English lit, Courtney and I to world history. The teacher, Mr. Clifton, handed out a five-page time line that included every event that had ever happened anywhere in the known universe, and spoke in a stupefied, gravelly monotone that put half the class to sleep. He explained that this year we would be reading about Goths and Visigoths, Byzantium and ancient Rome, Hitler and Attila the Hun and Mother Teresa. “In short,” he intoned, “the en-tire glor-i-ous tap-es-try of hu-man his-to-ry.”

  Courtney opened her notebook and started drawing cartoon characters and writing captions in the bubbles above their heads. I tried to pay attention to Mr. Clifton, but I just couldn’t work up any enthusiasm for that glorious tapestry he was talking about. My new sandals were pinching my feet and my head felt like it was about to explode. I glanced at the clock above the chalkboard. It seemed the day should be over by now, but it was only 1:25 and I still had science and PE to go.

  At last the class ended. I said bye to Courtney and headed down the main hall, past the glass trophy cases and the administration offices, to the science lab and slid into a seat just as the bell rang.

  The teacher, Mrs. Grady, had taught science at Eden High since the dawn of creation. I remembered her name because she was the only teacher who had ever accused my sister of not working up to her potential, all because Shyla was one day late turning in some dumb experiment. Mrs. Grady did not care one iota that Shyla was late because she had to go to Austin to accept an academic award from the Texas governor. Rules were rules, and Shyla would not get an A in chemistry even though she’d aced all the tests. Daddy was furious and complained to the school board, but Shyla had already been accepted to every college to which she’d applied; w
hat did she care about some rinky-dink high school science experiment?

  As Mrs. Grady began going over her rules, I looked around the room for a familiar face, and there he was. The boy from the auditorium, sitting three rows away, perusing his textbook. I couldn’t explain why looking at him gave me such a fluttering feeling in the pit of my stomach. I’d met tons of Zane’s friends, cute guys from the swim team who hung out at our house or at the lake. None of them affected me like this blue-eyed stranger. When Mrs. Grady called the roll, I learned that his name was Nick Harper.

  Mrs. Grady handed out the reading assignments for the first semester and assigned us to our lab partners. Miraculously, I was paired with Nick.

  “You’re Phoebe, right?” he asked after Mrs. Grady had told us to rearrange our chairs in pairs. “You’re the girl from the auditorium.”

  “Right.” My heart was racing. Stupid.

  We filled out a worksheet, matching a set of vocabulary words to their definitions. With Nick looking up stuff in the glossary and me filling in the blanks, we powered through the list in no time, crossing off the words as we went: “magma,” “opsonin,” “rhizoid.” While we waited for the others to finish, Nick told me he’d moved to Eden from Houston because his dad got a new job at the electric company. His mom had been a nurse, but now she was staying home to take care of his little brother, Jacob. Like me, he had an older sister who was away at school.

  When it was my turn to talk, I told him my dad was a judge, my brother was a junior and on the swim team, and my sister was studying for law school at UT.

  “Wow,” Nick said. “You have a lot to live up to.”

  “Yeah, but my dad is pretty cool about it. He doesn’t pressure me or anything.”

  “What about your mom?”

  I toyed with my pen. “I don’t see her much. She’s the national spokeswoman for Bee Beautiful cosmetics. She travels a lot.”

  Mrs. Grady rapped on her desk. “Ten more minutes, people. Hurry up and finish.”

  Nick said, “Man, that’s tough. When I was a kid, my dad traveled for a while. Every time he called home, my mom cried.”

  “My mom will be coming home soon, though. For good.”

  I hoped that saying it aloud would somehow make it so.

  Mrs. Grady came around to collect our papers. When the bell rang, Nick slid out of his seat and scooped up his books. “See you.”

  I don’t even remember going to PE that day. Later Courtney told me that I came into the gym looking dazed, like I’d just survived a major earthquake. That’s how much Nick Harper had rocked my world.

  After PE, I met Zane in the parking lot, and he talked all the way home. His classes were okay. The coach hadn’t mentioned the incident with the mailboxes and the graffiti, and his first team meeting had been a blast. But the best part was that Ginger Threadgill was in his American history class.

  Then I told him about Madame Rochard and about having lunch with Ashley and Courtney. But I didn’t tell my brother about my lab partner. I didn’t even tell Shyla when she called home late that night to see how my first day of high school had turned out. Nick Harper was a wonderful secret I wanted all to myself.

  A coupleof weeks into the year Mrs. Cantrell announced that the traditional freshman shindig known as the Howdy Dance would be held a week from Saturday. It wasn’t really a dating event; people were supposed to mingle, eat pizza, and be home by 11 p.m.

  “It’s fun,” Zane said when I told him about it on the way home from school that afternoon. “Even though hardly anybody dances. It’s pretty much boys on one side of the room, girls on the other. Still, you should go.”

  We passed the fried-chicken place on the highway, and the smell of sizzling drumsticks wafted through the open car windows. My stomach rumbled. I’d waited after school for Zane to finish swim practice because the flag burners’ trial had opened that week. We hadn’t had any more hang-up calls, but Daddy didn’t want either of us to be home alone. Now it was almost suppertime and I was famished.

  “Ashley and Courtney are going,” I said. “We were talking about what to wear at lunch today. Ashley’s going to ask her mom to take us shopping.”

  “Great.” Zane braked for the stop light across from the courthouse. “Just don’t max out Dad’s credit cards. I need new stuff once in a while.”

  I glanced up at the second-floor windows in Daddy’s courtroom. The protesters had chosen to have a judge hear their case instead of a jury, and Daddy was hoping to wrap it up quickly. A TV news crew camped at the courthouse every day, waiting for Daddy’s decision. Today a young blond reporter in a red suit and black stilettos was standing on the courthouse steps sipping a can of cola and talking to her cameraman.

  “Maybe the trial will be over today,” I said as the light changed and we drove past.

  “The newspapers say the lawyers are calling so many witnesses it’ll go on until Halloween at least.”

  “I wish the papers would get off Daddy’s back about it. It’s not like he can send those guys to jail just because the town doesn’t like what they did.”

  “It’s more than burning the flag and setting the fire,” Zane said. “People are mad because the protesters endangered everybody when that gun went off. It was lucky nobody got shot, or trampled trying to get away.”

  “It was dangerous,” I said. “But nobody got hurt. Can you put someone in jail for scaring people?”

  “They’ll do time for setting the fire at the courthouse,” Zane said. “I hope that’ll be enough to satisfy the rednecks around here.”

  The light changed to green, but instead of turning toward home, Zane headed out toward the Dallas highway. “How about an early supper at Gus’s? There’s no telling when the judge will get home, and I’m starved.”

  “Okay.” I pulled the sun visor down to shade my eyes. “I just hope this whole trial thing is over soon.”

  Zane took his eyes off the road long enough to look at me. “Don’t let the gossip get to you, Phoebe.”

  “How did you know?” I hadn’t told anybody about the conversation I’d overheard on the day the trial opened. I was hurrying to get from my locker on the third floor to Mr. Clifton’s class when I heard a couple of boys accusing Daddy of being a traitor for not throwing the book at the flag-burning cowards, no matter what the law said. “A real patriot would find a way to make them pay,” one of them said. “Judge Trask is hiding behind this equal protection crap because he’s too chicken to stand up for the flag.”

  Now Zane said, “I hear what they’re saying at school about Dad too. They’re judging him before the trial is over. A couple of guys on the team rag on Dad when they think I’m not listening. Even my history teacher mentioned the trial in class last week.”

  He pulled into the parking lot at Gus’s, which was packed even though it was early. “We can’t let them get to us, Phoebe.”

  “That’s what Mama said on the phone last night when I told her about that newspaper article.”

  “Well, for once I agree with her. We just have to hold our heads up until the trial is over. Let’s go.”

  We went inside. People were standing three deep around the counter, shouting orders at Gus, who was flipping burgers as fast as he could. The whole place smelled wonderfully of hamburger meat and hot french fries.

  “It’ll be an hour before we get a table,” Zane said, looking around the room. “Let’s get the burgers to go.”

  He gave Gus our order, and half an hour later we were home. We pulled into the garage just as Beverly was leaving. She tooted her horn and waved as she drove away.

  We went inside. Zane got a couple of plates out of the cabinet. I poured some iced tea and got the ketchup out of the fridge, and we sat down to our feast. While we ate, Zane told me about the swim meet coming up on Saturday and about how one of the boys on the other team was a contender for the next Olympics. “He’ll be tough to beat,” Zane said. “I just hope he doesn’t embarrass me too bad in front of Ginger.”


  “Ginger’s going?” I added more salt to my fries. “That’s great! Her dad finally let you off the hook, huh?”

  “Not exactly. He still won’t let us go out by ourselves, but he’s letting her go to the meet with some of her friends.”

  “That’s better than nothing.”

  “Yeah.” Zane grinned. “I’m hoping he’ll let us go to a Halloween costume party next month. Ginger says some of the customers at the garage have been working on Mr. Threadgill, telling him what a great guy I am, softening him up.”

  He punched the remote on the TV and flipped through the sports channels while we finished our burgers. I thought about how Zane had always been the one living on the edges of our family, but he seemed to have more close friends than either Shyla or me.

  Since the school year started, I’d developed a tentative friendship with Courtney and Ashley; we hung out at lunch and made sure we chose one another when teams were formed in PE. Courtney had borrowed my homework one day, and Ashley loaned me a dollar when the snack machine ate all my money, but we weren’t yet to the stage of calling one another on a regular basis, of sharing our innermost thoughts and feelings. They were still each other’s best friend; I was just a tagalong.

  As for Nick Harper, he was Mystery Man. He acted like he liked me; he was always nice to me during science class, setting out all our equipment for experiments and letting me go first when we had to look into the microscope. The first time I wore the jeans I’d bought at Dazzle, he told me I looked great, but outside of class I ceased to exist. I wanted him to know I liked him, but I didn’t know how to tell him. What if I risked saying something and he totally rejected me? I’d still be stuck with him as a lab partner, and it would be just too awkward.

  Zane took his plate to the sink, ran some water over it, and said, “See you. I’ve got homework.”

  I had homework too, but I wasn’t ready to tackle it yet. I flipped through the channels, but there was nothing to watch. I checked out the Beauty Channel. A woman with vampire nails was selling a ponytail wig that you could wear a whole bunch of different ways. She claimed the Pony Partner would make anybody look instantly elegant, but the models were so pretty they’d have looked great even if somebody had snatched them bald-headed.