The Julian Game (17 page)

 

On Friday afternoon when I stood in the wings preparing to walk onstage and read my CAFÉ essay, a two-page jumble of words about youth culture, an all-new dread began to spread from the pit of my stomach.

All week, I’d considered giving an excuse to Mrs. Field. But why? After all, I’d made a couple of assembly announcements in the past. And if I pretended to get gripped by some public-speaking phobia, she’d want to help me. Which was the last thing I needed: well-meaning teacher intervention. Plus it seemed I was past the worst of it. Nobody had bothered to bother with me these days.

All these thoughts were churning inside me as I sat in the iron folding chair in the wings. Drama club was the first assembly announcement. They performed a cute skit about why we all had to go see them overact in bad Southern accents in
Steel Magnolias
the following night. Girls were sounding cat-calls. Senior Lacey Towsend was giving her split-finger whistle that everyone envied. The skit ended in a splash of warm audience applause. Then there was another announcement to watch Fulton’s varsity lacrosse team smoke Episcopal High School that afternoon on the south field.

Next, Mrs. Field whisked up onto the stage and introduced me.

I walked out into a hush. I looked over the dark sea of faces. Imagining everyone in the audience in their underwear didn’t help, considering most Fulton girls owned the prettiest bras and thongs that I could ever dream to stock inside my dresser drawer.

“‘The German philosopher Immanuel Kant,’” I began in a scratch of voice, “‘once defined culture as “man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity.”’”

Staggering, echoing silence.

But I had to keep going. I stared down at my essay.

My two-page-long essay.

My three minutes, forty-six seconds’ worth of essay, when I’d timed it out loud.

I looked up, searching for Natalya. There she was, in her usual spot. Her glasses reflecting the light. My eyes didn’t want to let go of her.

Was the whispering louder? It was like the sound was hardening into something.

“‘Kant might have been surprised with today’s world,’” I continued, my heart at triple speed, “‘where a vital part of our culture is to embrace exuberance, and to celebrate—’”

Like a dirge, the sound was amplifying and radiating outward from its middle.

“‘And to celebrate our youthful status, even as we pass from childhood—’”

I lost my place and started again. I could hear my voice darting around, searching for its pitch. “‘As we pass from childhood—’”

I’d lost my place again.

And I was losing the battle. Whatever was left of my confidence was crumbling to ash. The chanting mushroomed.

Get off the stage. Go. This is not worth it.

They weren’t in their underwear. I was.

Every girl at Fulton knew about that stupid picture of me. Every girl at Fulton had seen me in the most embarrassing image of the year.

I kept reading. Mumbling. By now the student assembly proctor, Claire Neuhall, had jumped up. “Come on, everybody! Be quiet, okay? No tolerance for that!”

But it was like I was caught in a trance, like the dream of showing up naked to school but continuing that shameful, baffling walk down the hallway. I didn’t stop until there were no more words left to read. Then I folded the paper and turned and bolted off stage. All I wanted was to go home and hide.

Maybe I’d never come back.

Friday in bed. Saturday in bed. Sunday afternoon, Natalya
dropped by. “Grandma, what bad breath you have.” She wielded a picnic basket, which she dropped at my feet.

“Oh, thanks.” When I shifted up to prop myself against the headboard, I was light-headed. “You didn’t have to do this.”

“I didn’t. It’s from Mom.”

I unclasped the latch and pulled out a silver thermos and unscrewed the top. Heavenly. White borscht. “Thank you, Mrs. Z. This is a really, really nice change from Chex and Stacey’s fruit smoothies.”

“I’ll pass it on.”

I yawned and closed my eyes, dizzy again. “I had a terrible nightmare that I was reading my CAFÉ essay and everyone started chanting.”

Natalya dropped her hand to my knee. “Sounds awful.” Then she took the thermos, poured a cup and handed it over. “So what do your dad and Stace think about you lying up here all weekend?”

“They think I’m getting over my breakup with the extremely cute boy I’d been meeting in the library.”

“Well, that’s partly true.” Natalya scooped up to sit cross-legged on the edge of my bed. “If there wasn’t an extremely cute boy at the center, there wouldn’t be any of this.”

“The whole joke is that here I had to stand up and talk about how today’s culture wants youth to be fun and light-hearted,” I said, “when the truth is that if you make one dumb move online, it can hurt you forever. One stupid picture could swing back around and punch me when I’m thirty years old.”

Natalya pressed her lips together.

From over my steaming thermos cup, I gave her the eye. “You’re humming.”

She hesitated. “It’s time to go after Ella.”

“Oh, Tal.” I waved her off. “I’m sick of going after people.”

“But people are
really
sick of her.” She tapped her chest. “This person, anyway.”

“Okay. Theoretically,” I said, shifting up and stifling a yawn, “how would we even do it?”

“She’s got all these random habits.”

“Tell me something new.”

“I’m getting to that.” Natalya’s arms were locked around her knees and her body had gone heavy on the edge of my bed.

She had something. I focused my stare.

“On the first day of the new month, Ella Parker always changes her password to a word that she’s spoken out loud exactly ninety-four times the previous month. Plus the numbers nine and four.”

“How do you know?”

“Trust me. She’s been doing it since her first cell phone.”

My heart skipped. “And how do you figure out the word?”

“It’s pretty easy. Suddenly she’ll start saying
bejeezus
or
catamaran
or
hell’s bells
, especially if she’s done something like scored a goal or talked back to a teacher. Any kind of triumph stunt.” Natalya looked at me sidelong. “It’s one of her compulsions.”

“So how many years have you been tapping Ella?”

“As if.” Natalya sniffed. “I tried it out a long time ago, to test my theory. I’ve never accessed her e-mails or voice mail or anything since. But it’s an old secret, and I can’t un-know it. Even after we stopped being friends, if I overheard Ella say some loony word, I’d think, aha. She’s rehearsing her next password.”

We both knew where she was going with this. Yesterday had been the first of May. “She might not do it anymore,” I said. The spark that had ignited inside me was tiny. But it was there.

“In the bathroom. That word she said.”

“It’s Chinese. There’s no English correlate. It sort of means ‘isn’t it?’ or ‘right?’”

“Well, the information’s yours now. And Raye?”

“Yeah?”

“If you decide to go through with it, make it good, okay?” Natalya raised an eyebrow, channeling Spock. “It’s probably time Ella got a little push-back.”

Right after Natalya left, I got out of bed and went to my
sock drawer to look at the gloves. I’d taken them on impulse Friday afternoon on my way out of Fulton. The single green finger poking out of Ella’s book bag had seemed to taunt me like a snake tongue. I knew she was at her lacrosse game, and by the time the game was over, I’d be long gone.

Why had I taken them? Maybe I’d wanted to strip her of something, put a chink in her armor. Or maybe it was for myself, a chance to slip beneath a second, thicker skin.

As soon as I’d pulled them on, I sat down, cracked the password, and entered Ella Parker’s world as Ella Parker.

My fingers rested frozen on the keyboard, all except the one that worked the touchpad. Most of her “friends” left Ella just the sort of fawning comments that I’d have imagined, but her inbox was another story.

I rummaged her messages like a thief through a jewelry box, my eyes feasting on the gossipy glitter of an apology to Jeffey:
sweetie-pie i wuz soo jk u r the byootifullest gurl on planet fult & I will kill that mofo 4 saing that I sed that
. And, even more delightful, a face-saving rant to Lindy about how Henry Henry had friend-rejected her:
rubbish rubbish blows—luv how he sux up 2 me in public & disses me on facebook.

“Yeah, right,” I whispered. I’d love to see the day Henry ever sucked up to Ella.

And here, another nugget, the last in a long sibling volley, from Mimi:
E, if you make me cover to the ’rents again that you’re roadtripping up to see me I will flat-out expose your ass. Fielding ur bulls—I can’t help wonder about other, better iterations of DNA that M + D might have created—but since I’m stuck with you, the least you can do is not piss me off.

Ouch.

I logged out and pulled off the gloves. Then I finished the borscht. I was petrified. Not only of what my next move was, but of my certainty that I’d be making it.

Back on Facebook, a surprise was waiting for me.

Henry Henry had asked to be friends. Two days ago.

Startled, I confirmed. Henry Henry, wow. Me but not Ella. Okay.

So there was at least one guy at MacArthur who didn’t think I was lower than a clump of dirt to kick off his lacrosse cleat.

He was also online now.
u c papillon?

ny
☹

Was he telling me or inviting me? Asking him to clarify seemed desperate.

ok gotta know,
I typed instead.
tell me smthng good about being named henry henry???

I hoped so. Henry’s upbeat disposition was always a touch contagious. And it was hard not to feel a mood uptick, considering my secret information that he’d rejected Ella, but friended me. I logged off again, and changed into my sneakers and track pants. Suddenly I was dying to run off some energy.

“That you, Raye? Reclaiming the land of the living?” Stacey peered around the kitchen throughway. “Dinner’s in an hour.”

“Yep. Back soon.” I slammed out the door. Rounded a lap of our street, then cut over to Walnut, down South Wayne Avenue, and across the intersection into town. Past the Exchange and down another five blocks to Avenue Cheese.

Julian stood behind the counter, on his cell phone. I slowed. He waved.

This was neutral turf. We weren’t at MacArthur or Fulton. Nobody was in the shop. They’d be closing in half an hour. He had nothing to lose, and he’d told me to drop by—even if he hadn’t meant it. I could take him at his false word and forge some kind of a fresh start. I could smooth and soften, make things better.

But he didn’t come out.

I waved and kept running. Past the next light and the next. Then I took a new path, hurtling the back streets, picking up pace until the burn was searing my lungs and sweat slicked me wet as a minnow. I didn’t break speed until I’d made the entire loop of North Aberdeen and crossed back onto my own lawn, where I fell to my knees and then flat on my stomach, motionless, letting the breeze cool me down.

The Julian part of this whole equation was a hurt that would keep hurting for a long time, and there wasn’t any quick solve, and I’d just have to deal with that.

I stretched out my hands, ten garden-green kid-leather fingers. Protected and anonymous, a ghostwriter without fingerprints. The right index finger was poised. In one press of the button, it would send out a venom as toxic as the atomizer that had misted over Ella’s little fancy ant. She’d be a pariah, and I’d be vindicated.