Audrey, Wait!

by Robin Benway

  Sure enough, it was a grainy-and-obviously-captured-by-a-super-strong-camera-lens photo of me asleep in class, my head propped up on one hand as I dozed. (I honestly didn’t remember falling asleep in class, but really, our teacher, Mrs. Himkin, has a voice like a white-noise machine, so it makes sense.)

  And there was a very suspicious person in the background, smiling right at the camera. Sharon fucking Eggleston.

  “That girl,” Victoria fumed when I pointed out Sharon’s cameo in the picture. “She’s certifiable. How did she even know there were photographers taking pictures of you?”

  “She spends her entire life posing,” I pointed out. “It finally paid off.”

  Victoria just shook her head and continued reading the article. “’Audrey’s a great girl, but I couldn’t keep up with her,’ says nineteen-year-old bassist Simon, whose band the Lolitas is opening a string of dates for comeback kids the Plain Janes.” She shook her head. “Wow, what an asshole. You really need to start dating math nerds.”

  “I need to join a convent.”

  “No, I changed my mind. What you need is a spokesperson.”

  I looked up just long enough to glare at her. “Not helping.”

  “Seriously, Aud, you do. You need someone to spin this, to tell your side of what happened. A good publicist would’ve kept this out of the press.”

  I glared at her.

  “What?” she said. “I watch E! True Hollywood Story just like everyone else! These aren’t industry secrets!”

  The bell rang then and I took the magazine from her and stuffed it into my bag. “The fewer people who see this, the better.”

  Victoria watched, biting her lip. “Their circulation has to be, like, a million. Are you going to hide all of them?”

  “Not. Helping.”

  But of course there were already three copies of the magazine in my English class being passed around under the desks, and then four more in biology in the afternoon. Someone must have made a newsstand run during lunch, because while I tried to hide in the library, six different people came up to me with the magazine and ever-present Sharpie, saying, “Um, Audrey?” I signed because I didn’t know what else to do.

  For the first time in my life, I had absolutely no idea what else to do.

  Someone did, though. During biology, an aide came up from the office and whispered something to our teacher, who then motioned to me. “Audrey?”

  I went up, my face still flaming, my legs still rubbery, with—no surprise here—everyone watching me. “You’re wanted up in the office,” the teacher said quietly. “You can take your stuff with you.”

  “Oh.” Was it possible to be expelled for being in a tabloid newspaper? I wondered. Would this be on my college transcripts? “Okay.”

  When I got to the office, the secretary motioned to a chair outside of the principal’s door. “Go ahead and take a seat,” she said. “He’s in a meeting right now, he’ll be out in a minute.”

  “Okay.” It was becoming the easiest answer.

  The chair was uncomfortable and hard, and I shifted a bunch of times before noticing that there was a copy of the magazine on the secretary’s desk, buried between piles of paperwork. She saw me looking and gave me a half-apologetic smile. “My daughter’s a fan,” she said. “She loves the song. She’s mad at me for not getting Evan’s autograph when he went to school here.”

  I couldn’t even try to be polite. “Fantastic.”

  And then out of the corner of my eye, I saw red hair.

  James.

  He was back!

  He was standing in line at the front of the office, explaining something with a note in his hand, and he looked up just as I was beginning to stare. His eyes widened when he saw where I was sitting. “You? In trouble?” he mouthed.

  I shrugged and waved back, trying to look both cute and innocent.

  He walked over a few minutes later, once he was done at the front counter, and we both regarded each other. It was different to talk to him at school. There was no work to hide behind, no cones to scoop or sales to ring up. I didn’t know what to do with my hands or arms. Fold them in my lap? Cross them? Play with my hair? Then I realized that James was doing the same thing, too. It was Awkward City for both of us.

  “Hi,” he finally said. “What’d you do?”

  “I went to a concert on Friday night and made out with the lead singer from the Lolitas and their tour manager hid in the bushes and made a video of us and then sold it to the tabloids and now the principal wants to meet with me in his office.” Like he wasn’t going to find out in about three minutes, anyway.

  James’s eyes widened and he swallowed hard when I said “made out.” “Oh,” he said. “That’s, um, yeah. That sucks.”

  “I know. Where have you been?” Oh, God, I’m a moron. “I mean, like, not that I was like, looking for you, but I was just … I saw that you weren’t here for a couple of days and … I mean, I just noticed, that’s all.” Jesus, Audrey, stop talking.

  He blushed crimson as I kept trying to explain myself. “I was sick,” he said. “Food poisoning.”

  “Oh. Gross.”

  “Yeah.” He shifted his bag awkwardly onto his back. “Are you still working this afternoon?”

  “Yeah, I think so. Unless the paparazzi stop me from getting into the mall.”

  James smiled at my lame joke. How polite of him. “Cool.”

  “Cool.”

  “So I’ll see you there.”

  “Okay.”

  But he didn’t leave right away. “The Lolitas are way overrated,” he finally said, almost as an afterthought. “They just don’t know it yet.”

  I tried to say something in response, but there were too many words for me to sort out in my head. And by the time I got it together, James was already walking away. “See you later,” he said with a wave.

  I was about to say goodbye back, but then the principal’s door opened and when he walked out to get me, I saw my parents sitting in his office, both of them wearing their work clothes.

  Definitely a nine out of ten on the “oh, shit” scale.

  “Audrey, why don’t you come on in?” Mr. Rice was smiling, but it wasn’t one of those friendly smiles.

  I went in and sat down next to my dad, who gave my arm a squeeze and said, “Hey, kiddo,” which was like the worst thing he could have done, since it made me totally want to start crying all over the place, but the day had been bad enough without me losing it in Mr. Rice’s office. I vowed to keep it together until I was safe at home with my stereo, Bendomolena, and the saddest, most dramatic mix CD I could come up with. The Smiths were already going to figure in heavily, I could tell. Sixteen, clumsy, and shy, that’s the story of my life. Word, Morrissey. Total word.

  “So,” Mr. Rice said as he sank back down, “there have been some developments recently, Audrey, and I’ve called your parents in so we could discuss the appropriate course of action in order to ensure the best educational experience for you.”

  If you don’t speak Adult, allow me to translate that sentence: “You’re fucking up and making us all look bad. Stop doing that so I can have an easier day at work.”

  But I just nodded and then glanced at the copies of the magazine on his desk. “I didn’t know about those,” I said quickly. “I just saw them today.”

  “Audrey.” My mother leaned past my father to look at me. “No one’s blaming you.”

  But my dad had other ideas.

  “Are you sleeping in class?” he asked, jabbing a finger at the photo on page 67. “Because to the untrained eye, my dear, it looks like you’re sleeping in class.”

  Cue the arched eyebrows from both parents. “Why are you sleeping in class?” my dad asked as my mom peered down at the magazine.

  “Uh, Dad?” I said. “Here’s a better question: Why are people taking pictures of me sleeping in class?!”

  And then Mr. Rice interrupted so he could detail everything that had happened over the past several days: the vi
deo leaking online; girls sneaking onto campus to see me; all the kids who had been asking me for autographs or talking to me in the halls, making me late for class again and again; the graffiti in the bathroom stall. Let me tell you, you haven’t yet plumbed the depths of embarrassment until your principal tells your parents about crude drawings of you performing sexual favors. That was a moment I could’ve lived the rest of my life without experiencing, and Mr. Rice can definitely expect to find my future therapy bills in his mailbox.

  But then he kept talking, and it turned out there was more. Promoters were sending concert tickets to the school with my name on them, and the mailman was delivering twice as many letters because people were starting to send fan mail. And then, halfway through Mr. Rice’s speech, his secretary knocked on the door and said, “These were just delivered for Audrey,” and brought in a vase of a dozen pink roses.

  “Wow,” I said. My parents, who had been listening and nodding and saying, “Uh-hmm,” and glancing at me like I was a ticking time bomb, looked like their heads were gonna explode when the roses made their appearance. I picked at my well-worn cuticles and tried to look like a model student. “So,” Mr. Rice told them, “as you can see, we need to figure out a future plan going forward.”

  “Well, she still needs to go to school,” my mother said. She was holding the vase with the roses and finally just set them on the floor. “That can’t change, and homeschooling will not be an option.” I could tell from her voice that she was going all Mama Bear on him, which made me feel a little better.

  Mr. Rice nodded. “Well, for the time being, we were thinking about having her—”

  I cracked. “I’m sitting right here, okay? You don’t have to talk about me in the third person, I’m sitting right here. I can hear everything you’re saying.”

  “Aud.” My dad squeezed my arm again. “We’re just trying to keep you safe, that’s all.”

  “What I propose,” Mr. Rice interrupted, “is that Audrey does her classwork here in the office every day. That way she can still participate in the educational experience but the disruption will be kept to a minimum.”

  I was horrified. “Like a zoo animal?” I said before I could stop myself. “This is supposed to lower my profile?”

  Arm squeeze from Dad.

  And in the end, that’s what they agreed upon. Starting the next morning, my teachers would send my assignments up to the office and I would sit across from the secretary and do them. If I finished early, I could read. Joy.

  I was shaking by the time my parents and I got to the parking lot. “This is social suicide!” I gasped. “It’s inhumane! And it’s sexist, too! If I were a guy, they’d be having a pep rally for me!”

  “Get a grip, Susan B. Anthony,” my mom said. “Let’s just discuss this at home, okay?”

  But the discussion at home was no better. “Look, Audrey,” my dad said as he loosened his tie. He looked tired all of a sudden, and I felt kind of bad. “You could have mentioned this video to us. You could have mentioned that when you said were going to a concert, that ‘going to a concert’ meant kissing musicians backstage!”

  Both my parents crossed their arms and looked at me. The Great Wall of Authority.

  “I didn’t do anything wrong! I just kissed a boy I liked!” I remembered the graffiti in the bathroom. “And that’s all we did! I didn’t know that his manager was going to take pictures and sell them!”

  “You’re sixteen years old!” my dad said. “A lot could have happened to you that night! You’re lucky this is all it was!”

  “Lucky? You call this luck?”

  My mom inhaled through her nose. Total yoga breathing. “Audrey. There’s a lot of attention on you right now. A lot,” she repeated as the phone began to ring. “You live here: You know as well as we do that we’ve been getting calls for the past three days from every single news service in the country. And now we know why,” she added to my dad, who nodded and grimaced. “Some things are going to have to change.”

  “Like what?” I asked. Please don’t say curfew, please don’t say curfew….

  “Like you not going out as much. Like you going to work and going to school—”

  “And not sleeping in class,” my dad added.

  “—and then coming home,” my mom finished.

  “So now I’m grounded?!”

  “No, not grounded, just staying out of the spotlight.”

  “Um, hello?” I knew I was starting to push my limits, but these were desperate times. “I never wanted to be in the spotlight, remember? It found me.”

  “Audrey, we’re doing the best we can!” my dad interrupted. “You’ve kind of thrown us for a loop here! We read What to Expect When You’re Expecting, all right? Believe me, this is not what we were expecting!”

  “Yeah, I know, Dad, I wasn’t expecting this, either! And at least you got a guidebook, y’know? Parents have, like, a million books telling them how to raise kids, but there’s nothing telling me how to be a teenager! I’m doing the best I can too!”

  My mother stepped in. “Everyone’s on a time-out starting now.”

  For a minute, there was only silence as everything calmed down a little. I kicked my shoe on and off, and my dad took off his tie and sat down in a chair, still looking like a steamed lobster. “Better,” my mother said. “Let’s not become one of those Jerry Springer families, okay?”

  I didn’t have nails or cuticles left to bite. “Can I still call Victoria and IM her and stuff?”

  “Of course.” My mom sat down at the table and I followed her lead. “We’re not trying to ruin your life, you know.”

  “Yeah. I know.”

  “Because if we ruin your life, then you’re going to be one of those kids that lives in the den and never moves out, and your father and I have plans to retire someday. It’s not in our best interest to ruin your life. We’d like to see Tahiti.”

  “Okay.”

  “Oh, c’mon, Audrey. I don’t even get a laugh for that one? That was good, I thought.”

  I gave a tiny smile despite myself. “Can I go to work?”

  “Absolutely,” my dad said. “We’re going to need every penny for the lawyer fees after I break this guy Simon’s manager’s neck.”

  “Um, can I go to work now?” I pointed at the clock. “I’m going to be late.”

  “Do you have a clean work shirt?”

  “Maybe?”

  Now it was my mom’s turn to sigh. “Laundry. Tonight. Starring you.”

  18 “So if you’re lonely, you know I’m here waiting for you. …”

  —Franz Ferdinand, “Take Me Out”

  THE SCOOPER DOOPER hadn’t seen this much action since there was a power outage last summer and we had to get rid of all the ice cream in the freezer. (Normal people + free ice cream = anarchy. I almost had to put on riot gear.) Now, even though we were going into December, the crowds were getting bigger and steadier.

  And they brought their cameras with them.

  In the first hour of work, I had my picture taken with two babies, someone’s rat terrier, four ten-year-old girls with braces, three guys who were dared by someone’s older brother, and at least five girls around my age and their mothers. “We drove two hours to come here!” one mother said as she fanned herself with a copy of the magazine. “She”—she pointed to her daughter—“read on the Internet that you worked here and she was so excited to meet you! This is her birthday present!”

  I looked to the girl, who was blushing. “Mom! Shut up!”

  “Can we get a picture?”

  “Um, sure, of course.” I stood shoulder-to-shoulder next to the girl and smiled so wide that my face hurt.

  We were both shaking from nerves when the flash went off.

  And if that wasn’t enough, these girls brought me gifts. Like, actual gifts. Arm huggies, stuffed animals, jingly balls for Bendomolena—someone must have leaked Bendomolena’s name on a website or message board or something—nail polish, homemade vegan cookies, et
c. One girl even brought in a picture she drew of me in her art class and it was actually good. “My mom,” I told her, “is going to love this.” (And she did. She ended up having it matted and framed and now it hangs in her office at work.)

  James was in the background in probably half of the shots, his hair falling over his face as he scooped and wiped down the counters and generally did all the work. In between photo ops, I crouched behind the counter and restocked the napkin holders, desperate to avoid all the people who kept walking past and staring. “So what happened?” James asked as I crammed a wad of napkins into a holder.

  “With what?”

  “Outside the principal’s office.”

  “Oh, that.”

  “Are you suspend—oh, crap.” He dropped a scoop of Root Beer Barrel on the floor and I passed him some napkins. “Thanks. Are you suspended?”

  “No. But get this. I have to do all my schoolwork in the office. I’m not allowed in class anymore.”

  “Really?” James knelt down and tried to sop up the mess. “Is it like solitary confinement?”

  “I don’t know. I guess I’m disrupting everyone’s learning process, or they’re disturbing mine. Whatever.”

  “That’s pretty stupid.”

  “Thank you!” For once, someone was on my side. “They might as well just start sewing scarlet letter A’s on all my shirts.”

  James smiled. His eyes got all crinkly in the corners when he really smiled. When he was doing his fake-customer smile, only his mouth moved. Like I said, I’m an observant person. “Or F’s,” he said.

  “F’s?”

  “Y’know. For ‘Famous’?”

  “I’m not famous.” I said it too quickly to be believable.

  There was a pause for a minute. The napkins were slack in my hand. “I’m not famous,” I said again. “At least … I don’t want to be.”

  He nodded and cleared his throat. “Before work, I, uh, I went online and saw that video? The one with you and, um, that guy?”

  Why did I feel like I had cheated? James and I weren’t even dating, but it was like I had been caught.

  “Do you like him?” James continued.