Authors: S. Stevens
Tags: #General, #Fiction
(THE BUS GRINDS AND WHINES ITS WAY UP AND DOWN THE ROLLING HILLS OF SMALLTOWN.)
*
O
NCE WE REACHED the school parking lot, it was easy to ignore Alex because people swarmed around him like he was a new toy. At first, the other students stared, as if unsure who he was. Some of the soccer players spotted him and strode up, breaking the ice by grunting in greeting. More annoying, the braver of the brave girls, after whispering for a full minute with their eyes narrowed as if appraising whether he was worthy, forced their way through the defensive line and sidled up to Alex. Lucey, Jocelyn and Kristina led the attack, of course, with Lucey actually clutching his arm as she cooed, “Hey, Alex, is that you? Looks like you had a great summer.”
I smiled as Alex faked a shudder that shook off her hand and turned back to his soccer friends for the walk into school. Lucey caught me watching. “Gee, Sadie, no first-day-of-school costume today? You’re losing your touch.” She smirked and flounced off with her friends, blonde hair bouncing.
I hadn’t shown up for the first day of school with a new look since eighth grade, but Lucey never missed a chance to remind me of my weak attempts to create an exciting personality through my clothes and make-up. In eighth grade, I flirted with goth, showing up the first day with baggy black, multi-zippered trousers, a studded belt and black lipstick.
Seventh grade was the European look, with a beret and pouty, poppy-colored lips. My mother said okay to the lipstick after much pleading, but wouldn’t let me buy clove cigarettes to complete the look, even though I had no intention of smoking them. The Euro-look died a fast death because I got tired of re-applying my make-up every few classes. Without the red lips, I was simply a girl in a beret.
In fifth grade, I channeled Limited Too, dressing in flowery separates and headbands, but I still didn’t look like the eternally happy, frozen-in-time tweens adorning the store’s catalog. I rebelled against that experiment by going all sporty preppy in sixth grade. By then, everyone knew I sucked at sports but I could still look the part of the sports-obsessed fan with my Red Sox jersey and soccer ball hair bobbles. I fooled no one.
Despite these failures, I couldn’t help feel that somewhere out there was an image right for me – a persona in which I would be cozy, secure, and confident, regardless of how the other kids looked at me.
Not that Crudup was a hugely antagonistic or clique-y school. When you have the same sixty kids in your grade for ten years, it’s hard to be mean to each other, unless you’re a severely troubled or self-absorbed individual. So many people at Crudup crossed over between sports and art, or theatre and science club, that you couldn’t really peg people in one clique or another.
My attempts to find the right image usually fizzled by October, with me regressing to my regular old self. Alex humored these forays into fashion, even helping me put together my first-day outfits, but he refused to experiment or leave the safety of his trademark jeans and T-shirt. And he begged me each year to leave my long, light auburn hair alone, which I did except the goth year when I dyed some streaks purple. Semi-permanent.
How ironic that this year, Alex was the one who looked like a different person on the first day of school. Yet the novelty of Alex was soon pushed aside by a bigger buzz circulating through the hallways. A new teacher and a foreign exchange student were on the grounds. At Crudup High School, new blood was cause for celebration, especially if that new blood filled a male body. Or, miracle of miracles, two male bodies.
I had to wait until third period to see Mr. Lord, the new music teacher. Tony Lord had two claims to fame. First, he informed us, he was in a teen heartthrob movie more than twenty years ago. Second, he had a cameo in the movie
Twilight
, based of course on the biggest teen blockbuster book series of the past ten years. That alone made him the most exciting development at Crudup High in forever.
He insisted he originally had a speaking line in
Twilight
but it ended up on the cutting room floor. No one really cared. We just wanted to know what it was like working with Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner. After five minutes of dodging questions about the stars of
Twilight
, Mr. Lord turned to the DVD player for help.
He played us his promotional DVD, which started with the entire
Twilight
trailer followed by his brief appearance, in the first hospital scene. His three-second appearance re-played in slow motion in case we’d missed it at normal speed. “You know him from
Twilight
,” a Darth Vader-type voiceover said, “but Tony Lord made his name in 1984 in
Blue Calypso
, as the spoiled, rich teenager stranded on a desert island.”
After two or three minutes of watching young Tony and his co-star flaunt their tan and barely clad bodies in context-less clips from
Blue Calypso
, Darth Vader came back to regale us with tales of Tony’s stage career, which consisted of two Broadway productions and lots of off-Broadway, off-off-Broadway, and so-far-off-Broadway-it-was-really-Connecticut shows. Everyone else stopped paying attention, but I perked up. He had played all the key Billy roles in classic American musical theatre: Billy Crocker in
Anything Goes
, Billy Bigelow in
Carousel
, and Billy Flynn in
Chicago
, not to mention a Harold -- Professor Hill in
The Music Man
.
I was spellbound, sucked in completely by Tony’s considerable singing talents, his dancing ability, his charisma and pizzazz. When I looked again, the average looking man in front of the classroom had grown several inches in my estimation. He still sported a slightly red nose and the beginning of a beer gut, but I saw the leading man in there, in the sweep of light brown hair gracing his shoulders, the strong jaw, and his Brad-Pitt-like blue eyes.
Even if I was the only one fully appreciative of the range of his career, everyone paid homage after the DVD because of the
Twilight
connection. The girls flirted and he flirted back, never mind the twenty year age difference. The guys showed him begrudging respect, mainly because of the gorgeous actresses he had shared the screen and stage with.
Mr. Lord ate it up. I didn’t understand why, but this fairly successful actor looked content to have a rinky-dink job at Crudup High and pimply teenagers fawning over him. He insisted there was nowhere he’d rather be than here, building a teaching career while nurturing our youthful artistic talents.
*
A
S IF THAT WEREN’T ENOUGH excitement for Smalltown, we welcomed our very first foreign exchange student, Nigel Leightly from England. Honestly, it was like we hit the big time for new and exotic species. It was almost enough to keep my mind off the bombshell Alex dropped on me that morning.
By lunchtime, I knew everything anyone knew about Nigel, but still hadn’t spotted him myself. Descriptions varied. He was tall or maybe average, black hair or maybe brown but definitely spiky, and beautiful brown or hazel eyes. Lucey and Jocelyn argued over this last feature during Spanish. Evidently Nigel had made a beeline for Lucey in between second and third periods, drawn no doubt like every other guy at Crudup by her Barbie-doll looks right down to the ample chest, tiny waist and inhumanly small feet. Or maybe the boys never looked past the chest.
Anyway, Lucey insisted she had drowned in his deep brown eyes while they spoke, but Jocelyn, who wasn’t distracted by his attentions and therefore was better able to focus, claimed his eyes were a gorgeous shade of hazel obviously characteristic of people from the British Isles.
Everyone agreed on his clothes though, which were a throwback to the punk era, with Doc Marten boots, black leather jacket, torn black jeans and shabby T-shirt. Personally, I thought the get-up sounded like a lame re-creation of a character from
Grease
or
West Side Story
, but I was intrigued anyway. At least he showed a flair for drama.
To my surprise, since Nigel was a senior, he showed up in my seventh period physics class. Like everyone else, I stared shamelessly. He was one of those kind-of-good-looking guys who made up for the slightly off features with a sexy smile and a lot of confidence. Mr. Kozinski tapped his ruler on his desk for attention and the girls around Nigel’s desk scattered. As I stared at his Buzzcocks T-shirt, Nigel’s eyes wandered to me and he winked, making me look away nervously. When I looked back, he made a face at me, as if questioning why I hadn’t beamed at him like all the other girls. My head involuntarily jerked up and I half-smiled, hoping I looked more mysterious than stupid. I turned away and pretended to listen to Mr. K.
Forty-two minutes later, as we left physics, Jocelyn grabbed Nigel’s arm and escorted him from the room like he was elderly or something. They were right in front of me so I couldn’t help hearing her inane babble as we turned into the hallway. “The principal’s never going to let you wear that shirt here, you know. No obscene stuff or profanities allowed under the Crudup dress code.”
Nigel shrugged.
“What is a buzzcock anyway?” she tittered on. “It sounds dirty, and painful.” She giggled and leaned into him.
I couldn’t take it. “It’s only painful if you’re a fan of George Michael and Wham!” I said, more loudly than I meant to.
Nigel twisted around, leaving a confused and disengaged Jocelyn in his wake.
“Hey, not bad. You know your music,” he said, standing too close and making my insides flutter. So much for British reserve. I backed up a step. “You’re a Buzzcocks fan?”
“Sure,” I squeaked, hoping he wouldn’t quiz me, at least until I had a chance to ransack my parents’ stash of seventies and eighties albums for more intelligence.
“I’m Nigel,” he said, holding out his hand.
“I’m Sadie.” I shook.
“Sadie.” His accent made my name sound pretty for the first time and I smiled despite my nerves. “Pleased to make your acquaintance.” He sounded so much like a character from
Mary Poppins
that I half-expected him to break into dance and sing “Step in Time”.
While I grasped for something witty to say, my friend Ben from CDC rushed up, all out of breath.
“Oh, there you are, Nigel,” he panted, pushing his glasses up with the heel of his hand. “I was afraid I lost you.” Nigel looked like he wanted to be lost. “Ready?” Ben turned to me. “Hi Sadie. Nigel’s living with us this year.” He sounded as proud as if he’d birthed Nigel himself.
“Really? When did that happen?”
“It was kind of last-minute. The home he was supposed to go to fell through for some reason.”
“Mm, yes, so here I am. Who needs Boston when you can be at merry ole’ Crudup High?” Nigel deadpanned. Now he sounded like Hugh Grant. Was he trying or did that come naturally?
“You were supposed to be in Boston? And now you’re here? I feel your pain,” I sympathized.
“Anyway, we have to go.” Ben grabbed Nigel’s arm possessively. “My parents and I are showing Nigel around.”
Nigel let Ben pull him away by one arm while reaching out for me with the other. “Sadie, until we meet again,” he said plaintively and cracked up. Yes, a flair for the dramatic. Interesting.
3: It’s My Turn
T
HAT NIGHT AT DINNER, my mother asked where Alex was. For years, he had joined us for dinner after the first day of school, so my mother could grill him, me, my older brother Jesse, and even my father, about every nuance of our first day back. Alex ate at our house at least once a week anyway, since his mother was never home to cook for him – he was practically adopted by my family long ago.
I hadn’t un-invited Alex, but I had given him the cold shoulder all day, so I wasn’t surprised when he didn’t show. We were part of his old life. His pre-California life.
Still, without Alex or Jesse, who was a freshman at UMass, our meal was a sad imitation of previous years. When I didn’t answer my mother, my father piped up.
“Alex is on the soccer team this year. And he’s the talk of the teachers’ lounge. Would you believe that boy grew six inches and packed on more than twenty pounds this summer?”
“Well, he was overdue,” my mother said, pushing an unruly piece of shoulder-length, auburn hair behind her ear. She looked at me. “You didn’t answer my question. Where is he?”
“I guess he had more important things to do. I really didn’t see him much today, except on the bus this morning.” I kept my eyes on my mashed potatoes.
She sensed my mood with her mother-powered radar. “Well, even if he’s playing soccer, you’ll still be together in this year’s show, right?”
“He’s not doing CDC this year.”
No one spoke. Even before CDC existed, Alex and I were theatre buddies. We made up our first show when we were seven years old. He was Paul Newman to my Joanne Woodward, Humphrey Bogart to my Lauren Bacall, Ben Affleck to my Jennifer Garner. Except that we weren’t romantic, of course. Unless you considered our love of theatre a romance.
“Sadie, I can see you want to get all dramatic about this.” My mother used the classic chin down, eyes peering up incredulously look that only works on small children. “Your friendship with Alex isn’t going up in smoke just because he’s doing soccer instead of CDC.”