I'm Not Your Manic Pixie Dream Girl

by Gretchen McNeil

  “Trying to fish something out of Spencer’s larynx?” Gabe asked.

  “Jesse and Toile were—”

  “What the fuck, Bea?” Spencer’s words exploded from his mouth. His face was pale, his lips pressed together until they practically disappeared. I’d never seen him that pissed off before, and it was so startling, I involuntarily took a step away from him. He pushed by me, heading for the door. “Leave me out of your bullshit. It’s fucking pathetic.”

  I should have gone after Spencer, should have stopped him and apologized and . . . Well, shit. What was I supposed to say? I’m sorry I kissed you. Let’s pretend it didn’t happen.

  Did I mean either of those things?

  The point was probably moot because at that moment, Principal Ramos took the stage and began introducing the candidates. Showtime.

  “You’re last on the list,” Kurt said, holding a crumpled piece of paper in front of Gabe’s face. “Right after Jesse. Is your speech ready?”

  Gabe patted him on the cheek. “I’m fine, Mom.”

  Kurt wrinkled his nose at Gabe. “You’re going to be zoopa,” he said, mimicking Gabe’s German accent to perfection.

  Gabe arched an eyebrow, then they both burst into laughter. I was glad they were so relaxed about the election. I wished I could feel the same.

  The speeches proceeded slowly. Most were met with polite applause from the audience, but as we made our way through the vice presidential candidates, you could feel the tenor of the room heighten. By the time the ASB president speeches began, even from backstage I could hear the twittering antsiness of the audience crescendo. Could it have been because of me?

  Jesse’s speech was pretty good, actually. Surprisingly. Not that I was hoping he’d stutter and stumble and look generally unpresidential. I mean, it wasn’t Jesse I was trying to ruin; it was Toile. But still, I wasn’t expecting that he’d take the stage and deliver his speech with such easy confidence.

  “In conclusion,” he said, folding up the paper in his hand and shoving it back in his pocket, “I just want to thank my amazing girlfriend, Toile Jeffries.” My stomach clenched and I felt every muscle in my body tighten with a mix of anger and disgust. “She’s the reason I’m here and she makes my life better in every possible way.” He turned toward the wings. “I love you.”

  Toile stood near the edge of the curtain, her face tinged with the glow of the bright stage lights. Her shimmering hair peeked out from the top of her newsboy cap, crowning her head like a halo, and her perfect alabaster skin practically glowed with happiness as Jesse strode across the stage, swept her into his arms, and kissed her.

  Once again, I fought the urge to punch someone, only this time, I imagined my fist connecting with Jesse’s crotch instead of Toile’s face.

  “And now,” Principal Ramos said, “our final candidate for ASB president . . .” She paused, and even through the haze of Jesse and Toile, I noticed that the entire theater quieted down. “Gabriel Muñoz.”

  Instead of applause, a subdued murmur simmered in the audience as Principal Ramos waited for Gabe to take the stage.

  “Why aren’t they applauding?” Kurt asked. “Wasn’t this supposed to be the big reveal?”

  “What do I do?” Gabe asked.

  “Gabriel Muñoz?” Principal Ramos repeated. She turned toward the wings, a plastic smile plastered across her face with eyes like daggers that said, What the hell are you waiting for?

  I ignored the nagging voice of fear in the back of my head that suggested I’d colossally screwed up this whole campaign, and squeezed Gabe’s hand. “I’ll fix this.” Then I took a deep breath and hurried onto the stage.

  The moment the hot lights blinded me, I heard a roar of applause in the audience. It took me several seconds to realize that they were reacting to me, Beatrice Giovannini. They knew who I was.

  “About time,” Principal Ramos muttered as she shoved the microphone at me, clearly not caring that my name probably wasn’t Gabriel Muñoz.

  “H-hi,” I stuttered, my voice booming through the speaker system.

  “Trixie!” someone shouted from the crowd, igniting a smattering of claps.

  I smiled. “That’s me!” Sorta. Whatever. It felt good to finally have a face at this school. “So I’m guessing that you’ve all seen the ads, hinting at a supersecret candidate for student body president? Well, I’m here to introduce him!”

  “Him?” someone near the front asked.

  I ignored the comment. “Your next president—the one you should all vote for—is . . .” I gestured to the wings. “Gabriel Muñoz!”

  Gabe trotted onto the stage to a round of polite applause, but mostly there was a rumbling of confusion in the audience. Gabe’s face looked pained as he took the microphone. “Thanks, Trixie,” he said, holding his prepared speech in his hand. I noticed that the paper was trembling. “My name is Gabriel Muñoz, and I want to be your president. Why? That’s a good question. I think Fullerton Hills is made of awesome and I want to show the rest of this city that we’re the best high school around.”

  I didn’t hear the rest of his speech. The only sound was the pounding of blood in my ears. You could feel the energy in the auditorium dissipate, draining away the longer Gabe spoke. He noticed too, because as the audience got quieter and quieter, Gabe spoke faster and faster, rushing through his speech like a movie on fast-forward.

  Finally, the bell. A reprieve.

  Principal Ramos took the microphone and reminded everyone that voting would be open until nine o’clock, then barren silence was broken by the rumblings of the entire student body exiting up the aisles.

  Maybe it wasn’t as bad as I thought it was? After ten speeches, everyone was probably bored. Maybe Gabe still had a chance?

  “Vote for Trixie!” someone yelled as students were filing out of the auditorium, followed by a few enthusiastic cheers.

  Yep. I’d completely screwed up.

  TWENTY-NINE

  “I DON’T KNOW what happened,” I said when we were all backstage again.

  “No big deal,” Gabe said, but his body language said otherwise. His shoulders sagged, his über-fey persona forgotten, and he was just my nerdy friend watching his dreams go up in smoke. “I can just rewrite the article, I guess.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said.

  He smiled sadly. “It’s not your fault.”

  “Oh my God!” Kurt cried. “Don’t defend her!”

  “Her”? Like I’m just some nobody in Gabe’s life? “I’m his best friend,” I said, “and I was just trying to help.”

  “Right,” Kurt said. “Like you ‘helped’ him become this flaming queen that all the popular girls fawn over? Like you ‘helped’ him get excited about this election, then stabbed him in the back?”

  Whoa. “Gabe asked me to help him be more popular. Okay? I didn’t put a gun to his head and force him to do anything.”

  Kurt’s face was bright red, a zit about to pop. “No, you just gave him his first taste of the drug, then let it do its thing.”

  “Hey,” Gabe said, laying his hand gently on Kurt’s shoulder. “Bea’s right: I asked for her help.”

  Kurt shrugged off Gabe’s hand. “And what did it get you, huh? Popularity? But what did it lose you?”

  I was officially confused about what was happening, though I got the distinct feeling that we were no longer talking about the election. “Are you guys together?”

  “No!” Gabe said quickly.

  “Exactly,” Kurt said, his voice catching. “Can’t let anyone see you with a nerd like me, right?”

  Gabe’s face paled. “Kurt . . .”

  Kurt drew his arm across his face, wiping away a flood of tears. “Leave me alone.” Then he disappeared behind the curtain.

  How long had that been going on? And why hadn’t Gabe shared it with me?

  “Why don’t you come over after school and I’ll see if I can fix this election thing?” I offered.

  Gabe didn’t look at me. “I can�
�t. I need to . . . I just need some time.”

  “About Kurt?”

  He glanced up at me, and what I saw in his eyes, a mix of confusion and hurt, told me that even though he said he didn’t blame me for this election fiasco, deep down, he did. “I need some time away from Trixie.”

  As soon as I got home from school, I morphed into damage-control mode.

  I plastered Gabe’s name all over social media. I replaced formula flowers with pictures of Gabe and a speech bubble that said, “Vote for me, Gabriel Muñoz!” and put them everywhere. That would do it. It totally would.

  It had to.

  Meanwhile, Gabe hadn’t responded to my texts. I’d sent a half dozen of them already, and I could picture him in his room, organizing his Warhammer armies, refusing to look at his phone. I hadn’t heard from Spencer either, but that was on me. I’d typed him twenty texts, then deleted them without sending. I still had no idea what I was supposed to say to him, and every time I thought about our kiss, a vaguely uncomfortable feeling stirred inside my stomach that I immediately suppressed. Whatever it was, I didn’t want to know. It couldn’t be good for our friendship.

  Maybe I deserved the silent treatment. I’d pushed them pretty far, I realized. I mean, they’d asked me to, but I do have a tendency to go overboard with things. It’s just that I want everyone to be happy. And I’d gotten so excited about the Formula, this amazing masterpiece that brought my love of mathematics into my everyday life. The siren song of the MIT scholarship was ever present. I needed Spencer and Gabe to gain popularity because of my calculations. I needed Trixie to be a success, to win back my ex-boyfriend in a sweeping display of mind over matter. But everything had gotten muddled.

  Spencer was right. I needed to ask myself what I really wanted.

  And on the eve of the election, that answer was simple: I wanted Gabe to win. Not for the Formula, not for his article, but because he really wanted to be president.

  I reloaded Instagram and posted another round of Gabe photos.

  It had to work.

  I was in homeroom a full ten minutes before the bell Friday morning, hands clasped in front of me so tightly my fingers had turned white. The seconds ticked by slowly, tortuously. I felt like an inmate on death row, waiting for a reprieve before the midnight deadline. Had I done enough? Had I reached enough people to undo the damage from my epic fuckup?

  Deep down, I knew the answer was “no,” but hey, a girl could dream, right?

  Spencer arrived a few minutes early, his head bowed as he entered the classroom. I half expected him to take a seat on the opposite side of the room, considering what had gone down between us yesterday, and I was pretty certain I detected a momentary pause as he stood in the doorway, as if debating where he should sit. But to my surprise and relief, he ambled around the back of the room and dropped into the seat behind me, as usual.

  “Hey,” I said softly, trying to sound contrite. I didn’t want to fight with Spencer, though it seemed like all we’d been doing lately. But if he noticed the olive branch I was attempting to extend, he didn’t act like it.

  “Hey.” He wouldn’t look at me, and the bite in his voice conveyed a clear subtext: I haven’t forgiven you.

  My stomach clenched. Okay, I probably deserved that too.

  To compound matters, Toile and Jesse arrived just seconds before the bell, hand in hand. She was laughing, as usual, a burgundy felt fedora perched jauntily on her head, and Jesse beamed at her as if literally the meaning of his life emanated from her lips.

  If he won the election, that would be it. Toile would have Jesse forever. It would be my own fault. I was too arrogant, too enamored of the glamour of being Trixie, of feeling important for once in my high school life, as opposed to just being the nameless Math Girl lurking on the fringe of society. I’d gone too far, trying to use the Formula for personal gain. Helping my friends was one thing. Selfishly helping myself? Yeah, the law of averages was not in my favor. And now I was dealing with the consequences.

  The bell rang, and everyone fell instantly silent in anticipation. Announcements. The Pledge of Allegiance. The room seemed to crackle with excitement as Principal Ramos took the microphone and began reading off the election results, beginning with vice president. I held my breath.

  “And for ASB president . . .” She paused, and I heard a rustling of papers. Fibonacci’s balls, get on with it already! “Well, that’s new,” she said, obviously surprised. “It appears we have a dead tie in this race. Have we done a recount already?”

  From the background, a muffled voice said, “Twice.”

  “Huh,” Principal Ramos said. More rustling. “But neither of these people were official candidates.”

  Shit.

  “Write-ins?” she said. “They can do that?” Whomever she was talking to must have giving her the affirmative. “Okay, then. It looks as if we’re going to have a runoff election for the first time in Fullerton Hills history. The two candidates who have tied with the most votes via write-in are . . .

  “Toile Jeffries and Trixie Giovannini.”

  THIRTY

  IN MY SEVENTEEN years on this planet I had never been as thankful for anything as I was that Gabe wasn’t in my homeroom when the election results were announced. I’m not sure I could have looked him in the eyes.

  Toile wasn’t so lucky.

  “I didn’t win?” Jesse asked, turning around in his chair to face her.

  She shook her head.

  Jesse wasn’t getting it. “But you weren’t running, were you?”

  All Toile could do was to stare at him, dumbstruck. “I don’t know what happened.”

  You can say that again.

  I mean, write-in candidates? Seriously? In the last one hundred years of US history, only seven congressional races have been won by write-ins, establishing the statistical probability of a successful write-in campaign for the United States House of Representatives at approximately 0.03 percent, and yet here at Fullerton Hills High School, the student body overwhelmingly voted for not one but two write-in candidates for ASB president.

  What the hell was wrong with our school?

  “Will the runoff candidates please report to the school office?” Principal Ramos continued. Then she shifted away from the mic. “How the heck are we supposed to do this?”

  Toile slowly rose to her feet, her burgundy felt fedora askew, and walked out of the classroom in a daze. I followed, no less horrified but significantly less confused about how I’d gotten there. Michael Torres’s plan to sabotage me had backfired. But what about Toile? There was a piece of me that bristled at the idea that we’d gotten the same number of write-in votes. Shouldn’t I have won?

  One thing I knew for sure: I didn’t want to be ASB president.

  It was time to step aside.

  Principal Ramos was on the phone when we arrived, so Mrs. McKee, the school secretary, directed us to a couple of chairs outside her door. Toile sat down primly, with her back erect, and stared straight ahead.

  “So this is weird,” I said, breaking the ice. I wondered if Toile felt the same way I did about the prospect of getting elected. Maybe we could both drop out?

  “Yes,” she said without looking at me.

  “I really don’t want to be president,” I said, forcing a laugh. “And I was thinking that maybe—”

  “You should drop out of the race?” she suggested, glancing at me sidelong.

  “Me?” More like “we.”

  Instead of answering, she turned to face me. Her features were unreadable, blank and benign, the way my mom looked at me when she asked a question she already knew the answer to. But her eyes were cold and, just like in the hallway yesterday, totally un-Toile-like. “You don’t want the job. So why not?”

  She had me there. “Maybe we should both drop out.”

  Her upper lip flattened, her eyes pinched as she stared down at me with a seemingly limitless supply of contempt. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen a crack in her cheerful facad
e, but it was the first time I’d seen it up close and personal. And as she glared at me, I had the funny feeling that I was seeing something real, something that had been buried deep beneath that bubbly layer of whimsy.

  “You just don’t want me to win. You’re jealous.” Then she went for the jugular. “It’s not my fault people at this school like me better.”

  My temper ignited, and all I saw was red. Ten seconds ago I was ready to drop out of the race, and now I would have sold my soul to win it.

  I plastered my best manic pixie smile on my face and met her glare. “Let’s see if they still feel that way after the runoff.”

  Her nostrils flared, and she sucked in a sharp breath. I knew that look: anger. Toile, our resident happy-go-lucky sunshine-and-rainbows girl, looked as if she wanted to claw my eyes out.

  Was this the real Toile Jeffries?

  Principal Ramos opened her office door, breaking our standoff. “Toile and Trixie?” She sounded about as welcoming as a prison warden.

  “I’m Toile,” she said, rocketing to her feet. Her voice was perky and high, a complete one-eighty from the murderous glare that had been directed at me.

  Principal Ramos gave her the once-over then turned to me. “You must be Trixie. I assume that’s short for Beatrice? Since we don’t actually have a Trixie Giovannini registered at this school.”

  “That’s me!” I repeated my by-now-well-rehearsed line. “It’s a family nick—”

  “Don’t care,” Principal Ramos said, cutting me off. “I don’t know what you two pulled, but a runoff based on a write-in campaign is, in my opinion, a disgraceful miscarriage of democracy.”

  I cocked my head to the side. “Isn’t it actually the ultimate expression of democracy?”

  She ignored me. “So we’ll do a runoff at the waste of school budget and my time.” She raised an eyebrow. “Unless one of you would like to graciously step aside?”

  “Nope,” I said, smiling at Toile. “How about you?”

  “Jell-O monkeys!” she squealed, and wiggled her fingers in front of her mouth.

  “Is something wrong with you, Ms. Jeffries?” Principal Ramos asked.