The Taming of the Drew

by Gurley, Jan

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  The Taming of the Drew

  Press for Change Publishing

  Chapter One - Stalking The Wild Drew

  Chapter Two - From Bad To Worse

  Chapter Three - I Do

  Chapter Four - Kill Me Now

  Chapter Five - Starving the Drew

  Chapter Six - Kate's Party

  Chapter Seven - Girl's Got A Point

  Chapter Eight - Ten Foot Limit

  Chapter Nine - Clothes By The Pound

  Chapter Ten - Never Dated

  Chapter Eleven - Brilliant Or Insane

  Chapter Twelve - Good Money In Trans Fats

  Chapter Thirteen - Bonus Material

  Chapter Fourteen - The Taming of the Shrew

  Chapter Fifteen - Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew

  For everyone who has publicly embarrassed themselves for a good cause.

  And lived to laugh about it…

  The Taming

  Of

  The Drew

  By Jan Gurley

  Press for Change Publishing.

  Publishers since 2005

  www.pressforchange.com

  www.tamingofthedrew.com

  www.legacylemurs.com

  Want to know how Drew got into such trouble? Check out the prequel the Taming of the Drew on the live Twitter feeds: @tamingdrew and @sixredwoods and @legacylemurs. Got a bicep shot of your own? A gender-defying outfit to share? Submit your pics to tamingdrew.tumblr.com. Everyone deserves an obsessively high-quality education - so donate to Legacy Lemurs’ favorite charity at http://oneworldchildrensfund.org/projects/global-chalkboard-project-victor-hugo-school/

  Copyright © 2012 by Jan Gurley.

  Please respect the work of the author by paying for your copy. Hey, it’s great karma (cheap!). And a portion of all proceeds goes to help schools in Haiti.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. Please respect the hard work of the author and do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events or locales is entirely coincidental. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites and their content.

  Cover design: Grace Linderholm/Jan Gurley

  Lemur logo: Amelia Gurley

  Website design: Owen Linderholm

  Copyedit: Grace Linderholm, Amelia Gurley, Elaine Borden-Chandler

  CHAPTER ONE

  Stalking The Wild Drew

  Chapter 1

  “No way. I don’t do naked.”

  Into a shocking split-second of entirely coincidental silence, just after the last dismissal bell rang, my voice blared like a vice-principal’s megaphone in the Legacy high school hallway. It didn’t help that I had my fist on my hip and Celia had five twenty-dollar bills in an out-stretched hand.

  A lightning bolt of embarrassment illuminated my face. The masses of students around me froze in space like a burned after-image on my retina: someone bent halfway, tying a shoe, a wheel on a skateboard gritted to a halt, a locker door stopped mid squeak, everyone breath-holding in shock.

  “How about $200,” Celia said, reaching for another wad of twenties in her purse, and my pulse shivered up my neck and into my ears. Then the massive wave of silence broke and shattered into pounding laughter all around me.

  I grabbed her elbow and dragged her away as I hissed, “Are you insane? Do you know how this looks?”

  She stared at my hand on her elbow and said “Ew,” but I didn’t let go. We formed a V shape, me leaning forward to drag her along through the crowds, her tilted back as she lurched after me, stiff-legged on stiletto heels. As we left the central, three-story, echoing atrium, boys from her pod yelled “Way to go, Celia! Girl on girl!”

  Entering my pod, voices hissed all around me, “Are you crazy? You can’t bring her in here!”

  See, our high school is so mega-huge (3,872 kids) that they subdivided it into four schools-within-a-school, each called a “pod.” And that’s exactly how the upper-class New Crew members describe it when you arrive for freshman orientation (“pods” with wiggle-fingers air-quotes). All New Crew leaders are from the University pod.

  In fact, all the beautiful people are from University (motto — and I’m not joking here — Center of the Universe).

  My pod, Academy, is the art school pod. We're everything University isn't. Taking Celia into our part of the school would be like inviting a shark into the guppy tank, so I turned around and started hauling her outside instead, into the open parking lot which all four pods shared.

  We were only fifteen feet away from No Man’s Land when Tio materialized in front of me, hands flapping in panic.

  “No. No. NO,” he said. “Not there. We’ve got a flash-mob candy sale going on outside that door. She’ll spook the customers.”

  I paused. “She’s waving twenties in the central atrium and talking about hiring me to take naked iCandy pictures of the Dog. In front of everyone.”

  “What?” Instead of being embarrassed by the shocked look that Tio gave her, Celia smiled to herself and traced an invisible symbol on the floor with the toe of her left Jimmy Choo.

  Tio leaned forward, arms crossed, so he could peer into Celia’s fake-blushing face. “Do you have a death wish?” He shifted imaginary bifocals and spoke in a clipped singsong voice, mimicking the last health assembly speaker. “Suicidal threats will not be treated as a joke. All incidents must be reported to the office.” He glanced down the hallway to our right. “If I hurry, I think I can still catch Dean Verona.”

  Celia gave a deep, bored sigh. “Four hundred. And that’s my final offer.” She opened her purse to fish out another pile of twenties.

  I stared at the collected paper in her hand like it was a serpent. In a way, it was. Coiled and evil as greed, those lifeless bills glared back at me with mesmerizing snake eyes, whispering temptation. Four hundred dollars. This one iCandy pic would earn as much as four hundred used books in our book sales, as much as 1600 Flash Mob Snack sales. We’d be $400 closer to saving the trees. Saving my beloved, towering redwoods.

  My hand started to reach for the bills even as I heard Tio squeak, “Kate! Snap out of it!”

  He thumped me on the shoulder and I staggered to right myself, my head a little clearer. It’s always a shock when Tio thumps you one. He’s barely five feet tall. When the puberty circus came to town, he overslept the free hormonal roller-coaster ride. He’s got the voice, the body and the unshaven cheeks of a fifth-grader. Which would be fine, if this wasn’t eleventh grade. You never expect his thumps to make much of a dent, but they do. Even if you’re almost six feet tall, like me.
>
  We’re the kind of pair that makes adults smile. You know, that sickening, aren’t they cute kind of smile that makes you want to aim Tio and his right hook at them with the safety off. And then pull the trigger.

  Celia, however, was everything high school thinks is perfect. The perfect height (5’6”), the perfect bust (C-cup), the perfect waist (insectoid). And the perfect pod (University).

  I took a shaky breath. “Listen, like I said, I don’t do naked. I don’t shoot naked photos of anyone.” That’s when the negotiations commenced in earnest.

  Celia: “Towel only. Damp.”

  Me: “Bare upper chest. No showers. No steam.”

  Tio: “I repeat. Are you insane?”

  Celia: “Three–fifty, then.”

  Me: “Four hundred. Close up. Bicep included. Take it or leave it.”

  After that, it was all business.

  Celia gestured at herself. “My mother and father — both lawyers. So I’m going to need something in writing.”

  Tio made a sound like someone poked him with a metal kebab skewer.

  I sighed and pulled a page out of my blue checked journal from the dollar store, “Fine.”

  “Quality, too — I want you taking it,” said Celia

  See, my mom says everyone’s got a secret talent. Hers is parking karma. Mine is a gift for taking pictures with my arm outstretched. I’m the Annie Leibowitz of crap cameras. I don’t know how it works, but if I can think about the person enough — I need to study them for just a minute until I can imagine something I like about them — well, then it’s like the feeling runs down my arm and when I snap the picture there they are — sharp and fine, their real self, only better, even if the rest of the picture, the whole world around them, looks like it’s a tilting, blurred carousel.

  “Satisfaction guaranteed,” I muttered, scribbling on the paper, using my thigh as my desktop.

  “You’ve got to spell out that it’s a true iCandy exclusive. Take it, print it, then erase the file. I can scan the one print if I want a digital copy. But no one else gets a copy. No one.” Celia gave me what I think was supposed to be a threatening stare through the bushes of her mascara. “Or I’ll sue.”

  Tio snatched my notebook, “Do as adversaries do in law — strive mightily, but eat and drink as friends!”

  We both stared at him. “Tio, honey, you’re doing it again,” I leaned close to whisper, “Stop with the verbal ‘Spears.'”

  He frowned but let me peel his fist off the crumpled notebook spine. I smoothed it out on my thigh and kept writing as I muttered “Besides, there are worse things than being sued.”

  The real threat hung, unsaid, in the air between us. Forget about being expelled. Or even sued. The real threat was a criminal arrest. Not a week passed without some CNN or Fox story hitting the news about the FBI charging a high-schooler with felony sexting, or raiding a kid's home for child porn because of provocative pictures of girlfriends, friends, or classmates.

  And here I was promising, in writing, to take a semi-naked photo of our high school's football star without his knowledge or permission.

  All for money. Big money.

  Erasing this photo? That one, for sure, was so not going to be a problem. I tore the lined paper free with suddenly shaking hands and held it out to Celia.

  I don’t know how Celia got the folded piece of blue-lined paper shoved down into the one-molecule thick space available in the front pocket of her bikini-low Diesel Gallery jeans (jeans which, BTW, cost way over $400 a pair). As she poked the paper down with her talons, her eyes slid up from my unlaced second-hand Doc Martins over my vintage peasant skirt and crinoline underskirt, all the way up to my distressed Doors tee shirt. Her face looked like I was emitting some fashion smell. Finished, Celia twirled her shoulder bag and clacked out of the linoleum hallway.

  Probably, it should have bothered me more, how pleased with herself she seemed. But by that time, Tio had recovered and danced around me like the floor tiles were hot coals. “Hello? This is deranged. Suicidal!”

  “She's not going to out me. If I'm busted, she's in as much trouble as I am. Maybe more.”

  “She's got a pair of parental lawyers. And you've got…?”

  “Six redwoods to save.”

  “Biceps? Topless and close up? You took her money to do something impossible. And if you don't deliver the shot, Celia will destroy you.”

  “Then I gotta get the shot.” I wiped my sweaty palms down my skirt three times before I realized what I was doing and made myself stop.

  Tio’s voice was muffled, speaking hunched over with his hands on either side of his head. “Oh my God — University. You can’t even go in there. You’ll stick out like a sore thumb. It might as well be the Oscars you're trying to break into.”

  “That’s why you’re going to grab me the newspaper camera.”

  Tio's head popped back up, “Mr. Chang would have a duck! It's school property — and it’s already too late for me to sign it out overnight, even if I had a good reason. And you don’t even know how to use it.”

  “It's the only way,” I said. “With a lens as big as a thermos, I won’t have to get close.”

  “Listen to me,” Tio insisted, grabbing my shoulder as I turned to walk away. “This is the Dog we're talking about. The Top Dog of University. USA/Today's Top 100? The guy every football team in America is recruiting. He could squish me with his pinkie.”

  I licked my thumb and started lining up the corners of the twenties. “Yep. That’s him,” I said, and pretended I wasn’t shaking inside.

  ***

  The Greenbacks crew lay propped at the base of my scraggly circle of redwoods. Okay, so the redwoods are not really mine. But I can’t help thinking of them that way. I found them the first week of freshman year, after a particularly brutal morning. You know what I mean. Everyone’s had one of those days. In the movies, that’s when you see someone eating a thin white-bread sandwich at lunch, sitting in a toilet stall.

  But I didn’t end up hiding in the toilet — I found the trees. They’re in the fat part of a little Y-shaped bit of land that borders Old Lady Hathaway’s house at the farthest corner of our campus, where the Academy field (which no one uses except for theatrical re-enactment day (we don’t do sports) meets the University field (where grass is pounded by athletes until nothing is left clinging to the packed earth but tough white dental-flossy strands). Sure, the trees are looking a little sickly-brown, and they seem to be dropping too many needles. But they're still beautiful. They stand in a perfect circle surrounding a flat-topped stump that's so big it looks like King Arthur’s table or something. The living trees around that stump are just babies, even though they’re so tall you have to flop your head back to see the tiny circle of pale blue sky way above. See, if you cut a mature redwood, sometimes baby trees will grow out of the roots of the original tree in a perfect hands-joined-together, ring-around-the-roses circle. It’s called a fairy ring.

  No, I’m serious, that’s the actual name for it. Is that cool, or what?

  When I found my trees, I lay on my back on the broad stump with my feet dangling down and an arm behind my head, watching the clouds try to sneak past me in the circle up above while I chewed my lunch. A breeze stroked my hair and all the high school sounds were far away and tiny, like they couldn’t really compete with something as important and majestic as the trees. I picked up a twig and the rest of the day, if someone slammed my shoulder in the crowded hall, or I dropped my stack of books or I couldn’t get my locker open, I’d pause, reach in my pocket and let the tiny finger-like leaves brush against my hand. Even my hair smelled like a forest.

  Right now every one of the magical trees had a person lying at its base.

  “Guys,” I said, “heads up. I landed a big money-maker.”

  From the corner of my eye, I could see Tio behind me, pantomiming a circle-around-the-ear cuckoo symbol and pointing at me.

  People started to snicker at that, so I took out the twent
ies and slapped them on the stump. “Think this is crazy?”

  Silence. Helena spoke first. “Tell me you didn’t sell any of your body parts.”

  “That’s like, all my lunch money so far this year…” Gonzo said.

  I said, “Gonzo’s right. Think about it. Every single one of us has given up our lunch money all year. Each week one of us has to drag food in for the whole gang.”

  Gonzo glared at Phoebe, “And some people bring in nothing but a pile of stupid bananas and a big jar of peanut butter.”

  “Hey,” said Phoebe, “no one forced you to make grilled artichokes and butternut ravioli. I don’t even like artichokes.”

  Gonzo looked like he was a balloon, filling up with air, ready to pop. “That’s why I made you — only you — a pesto panini.”

  I tried to get us back on topic before what passed for a food-fight broke out in our group (other people throw bread — we argue about arugula). I could hear the football game noise drifting from our high school stadium. This afternoon football game was my one, best chance to get a photo of the Dog, but I needed their help. Surely eight weird, quirky brains, working all together, could think of a way for me to do this. But the game was more than half over already. I flapped my hands, trying to get their attention.

  “Listen to me! I don’t have much time here. I love you guys, I swear I do, and if any of you needed a kidney, I’d give you one of mine in a heartbeat. But you know what happens when we get together– we just talk all over each other. I need you to focus. We’re running out of time.”

  Viola took a lollipop out of her mouth and said, “You’re selling your kidney? On eBay?”

  She was serious. That was the problem with Viola. She was the world’s bestest, truest friend, without a mean bone in her body, but almost everyone, at some point, had the urge to strangle her. Only a tiny part of the real world ever seemed to get through to her brain, and the part that did was usually mixed up. She even looked otherworldly, with spiky elfish hair and a very long waist.