by Beth Goobie
She had left yesterday’s Mr. Big wrapper stashed inside her knapsack at the bottom of her locker, having decided that to show up with it today would be an embarrassingly blatant plea for attention. But as the 9am bell sounded without Gene or Morey having acknowledged her, she began to wonder if blatant was the way to go. Silent and uncomfortable, Meredith endured the national anthem and PA announcements, trying out various possible conversation starters inside her head, then ditching them all as not only blatant but pathetic. As it turned out, however, there was to be no time that morning for home form chitchat, pathetic or otherwise. The instant the announcements ended, Mr. Woolger got to his feet and rapped his baton on his desk. In a monotone, his face devoid of interest, he said, “Yesterday, you were asked to think about whom you would like to be your class rep to Student Council. Are there any nominations?”
Mute and brooding, Meredith continued to slouch at the back of the room. She had heard yesterday’s PA announcement regarding the nomination of home form reps, but hadn’t given the matter any thought. As far as she was concerned, Student Council was something that went on in the stratosphere, sort of like NASA satellite launches or God—unarguably out there, but nothing that required her direct attention. Besides, Seymour had been the rep for several years running; with his established fondness for the institution, she had assumed he would want to carry the tradition through to graduation.
To her surprise, however, when Mr. Woolger glanced questioningly at Seymour, he shook his head. “Not this year, sir,” he said easily. “Too much homework.”
With a nod, Mr. Woolger scanned the rest of the class. “Any nominations?” he asked.
The response he received was one of categorical disinterest, the entire class simultaneously dropping its gaze to the floor and taking up an intense study of the linoleum. “Come, come,” said Mr. Woolger, irritably rapping his baton. “We must have a representative. Any volunteers?”
Again, the response was deadpan. Then, casually, Seymour raised a hand. “I have a nomination, sir,” he said, his voice smooth, almost purring. “I’d like to nominate Meredith Polk.”
Astonished, Meredith gaped at the back of his shaggy head. Mr. Woolger, on the other hand, looked distinctly relieved, and once again rapped his baton. “Do we have anyone to second the motion?” he asked.
All across the room, eyes rose from the floor and hands shot up, seconding, thirding, and fourthing Meredith’s nomination. “Anyone opposed?” asked Mr. Woolger, and then, without waiting for a response, he glanced for the first time in Meredith’s direction. “Well, Meredith,” he said, his expression returning to one of complete boredom. “The position appears to be yours by acclamation.”
Stunned, Meredith stared at him. Me, a class rep? she thought. A class rep to Stupid Council? What do they do, except vote on new team uniforms and ... and ... Well, what else?
At that moment, the end-of-period bell went off, and the class began clambering to its feet. Suddenly indignant, Meredith stood up, leaned around the drums, and poked a rising Seymour in the back. As he turned, startled, to face her, she hissed, “What did you do that for?”
To her dismay, he loomed annoyingly taller, even when standing one riser lower. For a moment, he stood gazing down at her, his expression remote and at the same time calculating. Then, with a twitch, his lips curved into something he probably considered a smile. “I thought you were big enough to handle it,” he said carelessly. “Eater of Mr. Bigs, and the progeny of a founding father and all.”
With that, he stepped off the second riser’s outer edge and headed for the door, leaving her open-mouthed and staring after him.
Mid-morning, Meredith sat on a wad of gum. At first she didn’t notice; she was in math class, Reb seated one desk ahead, and they were practicing their paper-airplane pilot’s skills, launching 777s and Airbuses at friends on the opposite side of the room. Then the class got underway, the teacher, Mr. Jiminez, scrawling a series of indecipherable algebraic equations across the chalkboard that, as usual, left Meredith drawing a complete blank. Scowling down at her notes, she doodled tentatively, trying to get this x to communicate with that y, and let her in on their unknown quantities. Unfortunately, today was a day when x’s and y’s appeared to be incommunicado; surrendering to the inevitable, Meredith leaned forward, intending to consult with the algebraically-inclined Reb, just as Mr. Jiminez raised his stick of chalk and pointed it at her.
“Meredith, would you come up to the board and work out equation number three?” he asked.
Stifling a groan, Meredith fought the urge to crawl under her desk and got to her feet. Ahead stretched the empty aisle, and beyond it the unsolved, probably unsolvable, mystery of equation number three. Reluctantly, she started toward it. Within several steps, a gasp sounded behind her but she ignored it, her attention focused on the looming chalkboard and the incomprehensible equation number three. Seconds later, however, a scattering of cackles erupted, followed by a roar of mirth that swept the room; whirling, Meredith caught sight of the entire class, faces incredulous as they surged collectively to their feet. At first she thought she was about to be swarmed, then realized her classmates were staring at something approximately hip-high that ran the length of the aisle in which she was standing. Dropping her gaze, she saw it—a moist, elongated tendril of orange gum that stretched from somewhere directly behind her all the way to the seat she had just vacated.
For a moment, she stood gaping at the gum, not connecting its long, stretched journey along the aisle to her own butt. Then, abruptly getting it, she glanced over her shoulder, trying to get a look at the seat of her shorts and inspiring another wave of laughter. Quickly, Mr. Jiminez stepped in, shushing the hysterical students and ordering them back to their seats. Sheepish, Meredith stood at the front of the room, cautiously patting her butt, then wishing she hadn’t as her hand came away sticky with soggy gum threads.
“Well, Meredith, I guess you’d better get yourself cleaned up,” said Mr. Jiminez, his face simultaneously sympathetic and fighting off the chuckles. “Then come back to class.”
“Yes, sir,” said Meredith. Sidestepping the elongated gum tendril that had by now sagged to the floor, she made her way back down the aisle. The urge to cup both hands protectively over her posterior was enormous, but she fought it off, focusing instead on Reb, who was on her knees and leaning over the front of Meredith’s desk. “It’s a monster!” Reb hissed indignantly, pointing to the massive orange gum wad flattened across the metal seat. “It must be two or three gumballs.”
Which meant two or three mouths to chew it, thought Meredith, observing the wad—a conspiracy of mouths, conspiring that morning from the looks of it. Breaking off the tendril still stuck to her butt, she reattached it to the monster wad and headed out the door. Luckily the halls were empty, and she was able to make it to her locker unobserved. There, she pulled out a pair of gym shorts, then scurried to the nearest girls washroom, where she entered a stall and slid off the shorts she was wearing. Holding them up, she inspected the large orange splat mashed across the rear central seam.
Still sticky, the gum clung to the fabric—a mean, insolent presence. Heat flooding her face, Meredith stared at it. Who would do something like this? she thought. And why? That it had been an act of deliberate social sabotage, there was no question; monster gum wads didn’t materialize out of thin air, especially onto metal desk seats. But why my desk seat? she wondered. Who’s after my butt? As far as she knew, she had no enemies in math class; it was only the third day of the school year, and there hadn’t been enough time to create that much resentment. Ah, whatever, she decided finally, working the wad off her shorts. It’s just a random attack—could’ve happened to anyone.
Well, she could live with that—leaving a gum wad on a desk seat hardly qualified as a terrorist attack, and her shorts, being dark blue, wouldn’t show the stain. Still, it was unnerving, knowing there could be something moist, squishy, and massively full of germs, lurking on desk seats all o
ver the school. From now on, Meredith thought grimly, I am checking and double-checking every desk seat, chair, and bench before parking my butt. No one will catch me napping like that again.
Stashing her blue shorts in her locker, she headed back to class.
School had let out, the day was yet young, and the Philosophical Feet were wandering Polkton’s downtown core, T-shirt sleeves rolled up and enjoying the late-season warmth. Tucked under Dean’s arm was a set of pastel pencils she had just bought for her art class; errand accomplished, the girls figured they had ten, maybe twenty minutes to kill before they had to head home for various pre-supper chores.
“What d’you think?” asked Reb, as they meandered over to a large fountain at the center of the downtown intersection. “A soda at Murphy’s or a milkshake at McDonald’s?”
“Soda,” said Meredith.
“Milkshake,” said Dean, her answer overlapping Meredith’s.
“Glad that one’s solved,” muttered Reb, sitting down on the fountain’s curb and stretching out her legs. “A soda-milkshake would exactly hit the spot about now.”
They sat quietly, sun-dazed and watching the late-afternoon light spark the fountain’s falling water. “I wonder,” Meredith said idly, “what good ole Gus would think of this place if he could see it now.”
“As in Gus Polk, ancestor emeritus?” asked Dean.
“Ancestor Great Hand,” Meredith replied solemnly, and, following her example, the other two girls each raised a hand and shifted it back and forth until they had aligned their fingers with the five-cornered intersection in front of them. “Left,” said Meredith, staring through her fingers at the busy scene. “I’m sure it was the left.”
“Nah, Mere,” said Dean. “It was the right. The guy wouldn’t have founded a city with his left hand. It’s too ... nefarious.”
“Creepy,” agreed Reb. “Gothic. And Polkton is ... well, it’s McDonald’s and the Gap. Definitely right-hand stuff.”
They had rehashed this argument frequently over the years, and still hadn’t come to a collective agreement. Admittedly, Meredith had more invested in the subject than the others; it was her bloodline, after all—her poky-Polk surname, not theirs. The matter at hand, so to speak, was historical, a basic Polkton fact learned by every Grade 8 city resident—that in 1827, founding father Gus Polk placed a hand on the ground near Lazy Man’s River and drew a line around that hand with a stick, then used this outline as the center-point for the map of the town he planned to build. When Meredith had first heard this story, she had marched downtown to Polkton’s core intersection, a busy five-cornered junction that included Polk Avenue, Boggs Street, and a short two-block roadway called Dieffendorfer Boulevard, and had tested out the theory, taking up various positions around the central fountain and holding up first one hand, then the other. As far as she had been able to tell, her illustrious ancestor Gus Polk had fudged a little on what must have been his original map—Polk Avenue, which ran north-south, intersected the east-west Boggs Street at right angles, and a person would have to be double-jointed to accurately align every digit. But what had bothered her most about the story had been its egomaniacal aspect. Even now, almost two centuries after Gus had originally planted his hand in that long-ago dirt, she could feel the arrogance of that decision—five dark, gothic fingers rising out of the earth and reaching for the sunlight and life going on above it.
It is like the left hand of darkness, she thought. Creepy. Not as in the supernatural—a ghoul or a ghost, anything like that. More just human darkness, complete self-centeredness, as if everything Gus Polk saw had to have his name plastered across it—not just while he was alive, but even after he died. This entire city is sitting on top of his arrogant reaching hand. That definitely belongs to the left side of things, not the right.
“It had to be the left,” she argued, still observing her upraised hand. “Most people are right-handed, right? And if you’re right-handed, you’d put your left hand on the ground if you wanted to outline it. Gus Polk was probably right-handed like most people, which means Polkton was founded using a map drawn around his left hand.”
Triumphant, certain of her point, she turned to watch her friends’ faces twist into skeptical grimaces. “Maybe,” Dean allowed slowly, “if he was right-handed. You don’t know that. Anyway, so what if he was? That left hand-right hand stuff doesn’t mean anything. It’s just fairy tales, superstition.”
“The Exorcist,” agreed Reb. “Or Stephen King.”
Not quite sure how the conversation had arrived at Stephen King, Meredith was, nevertheless, unwilling to bypass the opportunity for a joke. Faking spasms in her left hand, she pretended to attack the other girls’ right ones. “Evil,” she intoned in a guttural voice. “My great-great-great-great-great-great-grandpappy Polk was evil, and consorting with Lords of the Underworld. That’s why Polk Avenue crosses with Boggs Street, y’know. Seymour Molyneux has Boggs blood, and he is of the nether regions.”
“Seymour is a Boggs?” asked Reb, hastily sitting on her right hand to protect it from further assault. “How d’you know that?”
“Aunt Sancy said so,” said Meredith, settling her left hand onto her knee and patting it gently to calm it down. “I showed her his yearbook pictures.”
“So the Mol is a creature that crawled out of a bog,” mused Dean. “Figures. Crustacean brain, like I—” Interrupted by her cell phone, she pulled it out of her back pocket and held it to her ear. “Yeah, Mom,” she said quickly. “I’m downtown with Mere and Reb. I got my pastels. Yup. Okay. Bye.” Getting to her feet, she sighed, “I gotta go. I’m supposed to rake the lawn before supper. See you.” Long black hair floating out behind her, she took off along Boggs Street.
“I gotta go, too,” said Reb, standing up. “I promised Mom I’d get in a half-hour of piano practice before supper every day this week. She wants me to make up for missing out on it all summer. Not my fault there was no piano up at Kapuskasing.”
“Kapuskasing was probably relieved,” observed Meredith.
“Hey!” said Reb, bouncing a textbook lightly off the top of Meredith’s head. “Bach happens to flow off these fingers like water.”
“But actual music?” teased Meredith.
Feigning rage, Reb glared. “My mother likes it,” she pouted.
“I rest my case,” smirked Meredith. “You go home and play Bach for your mother, and I’ll go listen to my aunt rev her Harley.”
Reb looked wistful. “Your aunt is so cool,” she said. “D’you think, if she was my mother, she’d let me get a boob reduction?”
“If my aunt was your mother, you wouldn’t have boobs,” said Meredith. “Booblessness runs in the Goonhilly family.”
“Lucky you,” sighed Reb. “Well, Bach calls. I really gotta go.”
Without a backward glance, she headed south down Polk Avenue, shoulders hunched and books glued, as usual, to her chest. Watching her go, Meredith wished she could reach out an invisible hand and gently straighten her friend’s shoulders, somehow make her entire body relax. Reb was always so ... clutched up, bracing herself against the next glance or comment. Why did life have to be like that—overloading one girl with womanhood and leaving another practically prepubescent? Why not just make every female on the planet the same bra size? It would make things so much easier.
Meredith for God, she thought wryly. Yeah, if Meredith Polk was put in charge, she would have a few ideas to throw around the universe.
chapter 5
Later that evening, Meredith was lying on her bed, studying a picture in a book on local history that she had propped open on her chest. The image in question was a line drawing of a man from the early 1800s—her illustrious ancestor, Gus Polk, to be exact. Forehead creased into a frown, Meredith repeatedly ran her gaze over every millimeter of the sketch. Several years ago, she had bought the book at a library discard sale; she had long since read it, and this particular page was the only one that continued to draw her interest.
Nothi
ng in the man’s face—not a single feature—resembled her in the slightest. Tall and apparently fair-haired, broad-shouldered Gus stood in centuries-old dress, a rifle in one hand as he gazed off contemplatively into the horizon—a horizon that at that point was crowded with maples and poplars, but now was probably occupied by several blocks of Polk Avenue. Eyes narrowed, Meredith zeroed in on the man’s face. Is this really what you looked like? she wondered, observing the aquiline nose and high forehead. Or is this maybe Zeus, showing up a thousand years later in some kind of time warp? Because, truth be told, in the line-drawing Gus looked suspiciously Walt-Disneyish—as in too good to be true. A wart, a zit, some vampire fangs, thought Meredith, irritation curling her upper lip. Come on, Gussie—you don’t even look like a Polk.
Reaching out lazily, she picked up one of three framed photographs standing on her night table. Two faces gazed back at her—the beaming, laughing expressions of her parents, Ally and James Polk, caught on their wedding day. In their mid-twenties, they looked as if they were living at the center of the universe—as if the world, and everything life held in store for them, was just spare change in their pockets. Ally’s dress was frilly and white, her thick black hair piled up under the veil cascading from the back of her head. Prettier, sighed Meredith, as she usually did when studying this photo. Her mother had been prettier than her—Ally had had a smile that would light up any room, and she looked as if she knew it. James, beaming away beside her, was almost as good-looking, but other than the blond tint to his hair, he didn’t resemble the line drawing of ole Gus in the slightest. Well, maybe the shoulders, conceded Meredith, her gaze flicking between the two pictures. But Dad’s hair is curly where Gus’s is straight, and Dad’s nose looks like it lost an Olympic boxing match.