A girl raised her hand.
“Who are you talking about?”
Mr. Lutz narrowed his eyes as he sipped his coffee.
“Let me tell you something, O’Grady,” he said. “While I do believe there is no such thing as a stupid question, I also believe there are those that come awfully close. So with that in mind, your assignment, O’Grady, will be to write a three-hundred-word column on influential journalists of the modern age.”
“Dang!” said the girl. “I thought they were probably reporters.”
“A reporter’s job isn’t to think, O’Grady. It’s to find out.”
Mr. Lutz did something close to the impossible: He made it easy to get out of bed and get to school an hour before everyone else did. He joked and allowed you to joke back, and yet he made you want to work hard, made you think that gathering whatever was newsworthy in the halls of Ole Bull High was important.
“But,” he would remind us, “there is a wider world out there, as hard as it is to imagine.”
As editor in chief, Greg Hoppe was in charge of the assignment desk, which meant fielding and then okaying story ideas.
“I want to write about Doug Benson,” said a girl. “Did you know he got a perfect score on his SAT?”
“You wrote about your boyfriend last year, Pritchett. When he got a perfect score on the PSAT.”
“I’d like to write a piece about girls’ sports and how we always get the shaft,” said another girl. “I mean, it’s so unfair it’s unreal!”
“Sounds like it might work better as a commentary,” said Hoppe.
“How about a story about Gisela Brunhoffer, the new exchange student?”
“Go ahead, Myers. But don’t try to wangle a date out of it.”
I can’t remember if I volunteered to do the first “Roving Reporter” column or if Hoppe couldn’t get any other takers; either way I wound up asking students and teachers a pressing, probing, or totally inane question once a week for the rest of the school year. It was fun—it didn’t take a lot of thought on my part, plus it was a good way to introduce myself to cute girls. Shannon Saxon wasn’t in Kristi’s category, but she was cute enough.
“Thanks for putting me in your ‘Roving Reporter’ piece,” she said as we sat in a booth at Marty’s a few days later. “I didn’t come off stupid, though, did I?”
I shook my head even though I didn’t think she’d come across as smart.
“I thought it was a good question to ask right before homecoming,” she said. “I mean, this is one game we need to get fired up for.”
Our homecoming game was against Southwest, and Shannon, who was the Ole Bull mascot, was nervous.
“Southwest’s the worst,” she complained. “Everyone in the stands pretends they’re playing a violin and makes this really obnoxious noise.” Making a face, Shannon mimed playing a violin and made a screeching sound loud enough to be heard over the Troggs on the jukebox.
“You’re right,” I said. “That is obnoxious.”
“Then they shout, ‘Tora! Tora! Tora!’” She shook her head, disgust puckering her soft features. “Of all the dumb mascots in the world, I think ours has to be the dumbest.”
“Isn’t Roosevelt’s a teddy bear? That’s pretty dumb.”
Her lower lip jutted out in a pout, and if she thought the gesture was cute, we were poles apart in our opinions as to what constituted cute.
“The teddy bear is cuddly. A violin-playing bull is just stupid.”
“Okay, Shannon,” I sighed. “A violin-playing bull is stupid.”
She kicked me under the table, hard. “Thanks a lot, Joe. I thought you were on my side.”
As my shin throbbed, I stifled the urge to kick her back.
“I am on your side; I just agreed with you that a violin-playing bull is stupid. But what kind of mascot is a school named after an obscure Norwegian fiddle player supposed to have?”
Tears welled in Shannon’s cow-brown eyes. “I never even wanted to be the mascot—I wanted to be a regular cheerleader, but Kristi said I wasn’t the right body type. I guess she thinks I look better covered up in brown fur and horns.”
I laughed, but the glare Shannon returned showed me she wasn’t trying to be funny.
A couple of days earlier, Blake Erlandsson had pulled me aside after history class.
“I got a favor to ask you,” he’d said, and when I told him to fire away, he said, “Kristi wants you to ask Shannon Saxon to homecoming and then double-date with us.”
Somebody from the jostling herd that filled the hallways between bells bumped into me.
“Shannon Saxon? I interviewed her for the paper. Well, I asked her a question.”
“She’s a good friend of Kristi’s,” Blake had said “I think you’d like her.”
“Why not?” I’d said, shrugging.
“You’re a good man, Andreson,” Blake had said, clapping me on the shoulder. “I’ll give you the details as they come in.”
Shannon and I had both slid into the restaurant booth with the semi-high expectations anyone brings to a first date, but after I delivered the seventh or eighth joke to the same blank face, I realized that Shannon didn’t have a sense of humor. She also had a worldview limited to Ole Bull sports and cheerleading, which sort of limited conversational opportunities.
The fog of boredom lifted, however, when Shannon mentioned Kristi and her views as to what constituted a cheerleader’s body.
“Why would she think you’re not the right body type?”
“Well, geez, everyone knows a cheerleader has to be just about perfect.” Shannon leaned over the table, the pillows of her big chest threatening to knock over her malt glass. “You know how Nancy Hasberg stays so thin?” Opening her mouth wide, she pretended to stick her finger down her throat.
Clueless, I held up my hands. “What, she’s sick a lot?”
Shannon smiled the smile of the old Cheshire cat. “She makes herself sick a lot.”
I knew Rod Westby, Granite Creek’s top wrestler, often made himself puke before a match.
“Cheerleaders have to make weight?”
“Well, not formally,” said Shannon, and with her straw she jabbed at the last inch of butterscotch malt in her glass before sucking it down. “But informally—well, that’s why girls like me can be a mascot but not a cheerleader.”
It wasn’t that Shannon Saxon was fat. She did have big boobs—always a plus, I figure, no matter what your weight—and her ass would be more comfortably positioned in a Buick than a Jaguar, but still, she had the kind of curves guys like and girls seem determined to Tab-and-hard-boiled-egg away. (How I knew this bit of feminine arcana was because Shannon had told me the butterscotch malt she inhaled was a reward for sticking to a three-day diet of nothing but Tab and hardboiled eggs. My turtle sundae, judging from the way she helped herself to it, was part of her rewards system too.)
“So Kristi makes the rules for the cheerleading squad, huh?”
Shannon shrugged, eying the melted puddle at the bottom of my dish.
“You are new, aren’t you, Joe?” With a half twirl of her long spoon, she scooped up what remained of my sundae and swallowed it, as quick as a salamander downs a gnat. “Kristi Casey runs everything.”
After our trial run at Marty’s, I knew that in the malt-guzzling, whining Ole Bull mascot, I had not found my heart’s desire. Not by a light-year. It wasn’t that I was looking—but still, dread is not something you want to feel when corsage-shopping for your date.
“Why didn’t you say yes to me, Darva?” I asked as we walked the narrow aisle through the refrigerated, perfumy air of the florist shop.
“Joe, you know I can’t lower myself to barbaric social rituals like a homecoming dance.”
“But it wouldn’t be barbaric with me. It’d be fun.”
Darva put her arm around a tall vase and leaned in to the lilies it held, closing her eyes as she breathed in their scent. She was wearing a gauzy Indian tunic thing under a leather v
est and earrings that jangled, and I was seized with the urge to take her arms and put them around me.
“Hey,” said the store clerk, a thin woman with a brown cloud of hair. “Don’t touch the flowers.”
“I wasn’t holding them,” said Darva evenly. “I was holding the vase.”
“Same diff,” said the clerk, and she snapped her gum so loudly I flinched.
“Where are your corsages?” I asked.
“For homecoming?”
She offered a sour smile as I nodded.
“You’ve got to order your corsage,” she said, pronouncing every syllable as if English wasn’t anywhere near my native language. “Then we can make them up with your school colors or to match your date’s dress.”
I looked at Darva, who rubbed one index finger on top of the other, as if scolding me for being naughty.
“Gee, Joe,” she said, “Don’t you know anything about barbaric social rituals?”
Leveling her gaze first at Darva and then at me, the clerk jangled some change in her smock pocket and said, “There might be some left in the case over there.” She nodded toward the back of the store, her shellacked hair unmoving.
The pickings were slim in the refrigerator case: There was a red-and-gold carnation corsage, a white one made from roses whose edges were turning brown, and a grouping of daisies and small yellow roses on an elastic band.
“Take the wrist corsage,” said Darva, opening up the refrigerator, “and let’s get out of here. This place gives me the creeps.”
Snapping her gum all the while, the cashier gave me change and handed me the corsage in a clear plastic box.
“Aren’t you going to get him a boutonnière?” she asked Darva, her voice still coated with hostility.
Pulling out the Tootsie Pop she’d just put in her mouth and using it as a pointer, Darva gestured to me.
“You think I’m going to the homecoming dance with him? What would my lesbian lover think?”
The cashier’s mouth dropped open, revealing the pink gum wadded up on top of her molars. “Your lesbian lover…,” she began, as if by repeating the words she’d better understand them.
“Well, he hasn’t had the operation yet,” said Darva as I hustled her toward the door. “In fact, he wanted to quarterback the homecoming game before he starts his hormone treatment.”
As I opened the door, the cashier’s gum popped so loudly it sounded as if she had fired a gun at us.
“Say cheese!” said my mother again, throwing us into yet another half-second state of blindness.
She had been invited by Blake’s parents to come and record the happy couples before we skipped off to the homecoming dance.
“There’s no reason the girls’ families should get to take all the pictures,” said Mimi, Blake’s mother, who was wearing a hot-pink miniskirt and a black-and-white op-art shirt so swirly I could barely look at it. “I mean, we like our memories too!”
“Twelve scrapbooks of them,” said Blake in an aside to me. “One for every school year.” He was dressed in a well-cut suit that made the one I’d gotten at Granite Creek’s Dapper Duke for last year’s hockey banquet look like a suit I’d gotten at Granite Creek’s Dapper Duke for last year’s hockey banquet.
Shannon was wearing a green dress whose many tiers of ruffles didn’t do her any favors; really, she sort of looked like an upside-down artichoke.
But Kristi—well, as usual, Kristi was something else.
She wore knee-high black boots under a long red and black dress slit up the front to reveal a very short pair of red hot pants. It was scooped in the front, just low enough to advertise, Hey, boys, this way to Breast World! Her hair had been pinned up on top of her head, except for two little ringlets that zigzagged in front of her ears, and I thought having to deal with Shannon’s sullen mood (we’d lost the homecoming game that afternoon, 21–7, and she was rah-rah enough to still be carrying the burden of defeat) was a small price to pay for being in the presence of the gorgeous vision that was Kristi.
“Okay, you kids better get going,” said Mimi. “We don’t want to make the cutest couples late for the big dance!”
My mother had been willing to obey protocol, but when Mimi opened her arms to hug us all and wish us “a magical night,” my mother felt free to do the same. She was always hugging and kissing me at home, but I had long ago given her orders “not to make a public spectacle, Ma. I’m not kidding.”
Touching their triceps, she dipped herself politely toward each of my friends, saving her big embrace for me.
“Have a wonderful time, honey,” she whispered in my ear. “I love you!”
“You too,” I whispered, worming my way out of her arms and her suffocating momness.
As school mascot, Shannon had been given the honor of announcing the homecoming court. The rest of us serfs stood on the edges of the gym, watching the royal procession.
“I voted for you,” I whispered to Kristi, who didn’t seem to be clapping as enthusiastically as the rest of the onlookers.
“You don’t know how many people have told me that,” she said as she watched Blake, who’d been crowned king at an assembly earlier in the week, escort the queen up a paper walkway that was supposed to signify the red carpet. “If you ask me, the whole thing is rigged.” She offered Blake a sour smile and a slight wave as he passed, and then, taking my hand, said, “Come on, Joe.”
A surprised thrill—on the whole, not a bad feeling—zipped through me.
We cut behind the crowd of people and out a side door.
“Where’re we going?” I asked as Kristi pulled me down the hallway.
“To the car,” she said. “To get this party in gear.”
Opening the driver’s door of Mr. Erlandsson’s Lincoln Continental (“You can’t take those pretty girls in your dinky little Maverick!” he had said, throwing Blake his keys), she nodded at me to get in on the passenger side.
“Reach under your seat and give me that purse, will you?”
Obediently I did as I was told and watched as she took a joint out of the black satin bag and punched in the dashboard’s cigarette lighter.
“Sometimes they do random checks at the door,” she explained, lighting the joint. She took a long inhale and passed it to me.
“Are you sure this is okay?” I said, regretting my words as soon I’d said them.
“Oh man, don’t tell me you’re a wuss too?”
“No, not at all,” I said, taking a toke from the joint. I tried to hold in the smoke, but it tumbled out of my throat in a cough.
Kristi laughed. “Yeah, you’re a pro.” She took the joint and drew in a deep inhale. “But at least you’re a little open-minded.” Her voice strained through her clenched throat. “Blake’s so straight he won’t even try it. He says he doesn’t want to break team rules. Not like it’s even hockey season yet.” She exhaled and waved the rush of smoke out the open window. “God, he’ll be pissed if he smells dope in his dad’s car.”
“Maybe we should leave,” I suggested.
“We will, when we finish this,” said Kristi, handing me the joint.
The fact that I could count on one hand the times I’d smoked dope wasn’t because of ideology but availability; beer was the preferred party favor in Granite Creek, and weed was available only when Dan Powers’s brother was home from Iowa State.
“I mean, really,” said Kristi. “Colleen Whitley? Colleen ‘I’ve-got-a-mustache’ Whitley? Come on! I wouldn’t say she’s a dog, but I hear she enjoys a nice bowl of Alpo for breakfast.”
Proud of myself for not coughing, I exhaled out the window and turned to her.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“The homecoming queen! There’s no way I didn’t get enough votes to at least be a lousy princess, let alone the queen! It’s all rigged, I’m telling you—that skanky Miss Rudd is in charge of the vote counting, and she hasn’t liked me since I put too much food coloring in the Christmas cookies in her stupid hom
e ec class.”
I looked at her fingernails as she took the joint; they were painted the color of pink you see inside seashells.
“I wonder if I could hear the ocean if I listened to your fingernails,” I said.
Kristi laughed. “Oh man, you’re stoned.” She took another deep toke, and after she exhaled, I took her hand and held it up to my ear.
I made a slow shushing sound.
“I was right,” I said. “It is the ocean!”
I made the shushing sound again.
“The secrets of the Caribbean—all inside your fingernails!”
Laughing, Kristi pulled her hand away. “Not only are you stoned, you’re weird.”
When we got back to the gym, the band was doing a serviceable cover of America’s “Ventura Highway” and Kristi untied Blake from his knot of friends and dragged him onto the dance floor.
The phrase What am I—chopped liver? came into my head followed by a wave of marijuana-induced reflections: How did chopped liver get such a bad rap? Why doesn’t someone say, “What am I—minced beef tongue?” or “What am I—diced gizzards?” Or how about sliced head cheese? Wouldn’t sliced head cheese be the wallflower of the butcher case?
“So there you are,” said my date. I had heard friendlier voices.
“Shannon!” I said. “Tora! Tora! Tora!”
Her forehead crimped. “Is that supposed to be funny?”
“It’s supposed to be, but if you don’t agree, I won’t hold it against you,” I said in a fair Cary Grant impersonation. “I will, however, hold me against you. Come on, let’s dance.”
Shannon gave me the kind of look stoned blather like that deserved but let me take her hand, and surprise, surprise, we started to have fun.
She was a good dancer and, thanks to my mother’s lessons, so was I. When the band played “Colour My World,” she followed my lead, and we glided through the clumps of couples who thought hugging one another and swaying constituted slow dancing.
“The last time I got to dance like this was my cousin’s wedding,” said Shannon. “Not many boys know how to dance dance.”
The View from Mount Joy Page 3