7 Clues to Winning You

by Kristin Walker

  “Spare me the dramatics, Blythe,” he said in a low, firm voice. “Families are not democracies.”

  I shot back, “Then don’t act so surprised to hear that it’s all your fault!”

  I never talked back to my parents. Ever. I don’t think Dad knew how to react. I’d never blown up and lost my temper before, not even when I was a toddler. Mom always said that I didn’t have terrible twos, I had tranquil twos. I just never got very upset about anything. Until then.

  Dad glanced quickly over my shoulder, then stepped around me to shut his office door. “Blythe, I know you’re upset,” he said softly, “but becoming superintendent would benefit all of us, not just me. It comes with a forty percent increase in salary. Forty percent. I’m talking a whole different tax bracket here. That money would improve our lifestyle dramatically. Hell, we could actually afford to send you to Bryn Mawr.”

  I gaped. He’d never mentioned the cost of college before. I never thought it was something he had to consider. “Gran and Granddad are paying for college,” I reminded him. “They’ve been saying that forever.”

  “I don’t want them to!” Dad patted his chest. “I want to be the one sending you to college! Not them. I want to give my family everything they need.” He turned away from me. His shoulders slumped. He watched his fingers lace and unlace. “I’m a grown man, Blythe. I’m done with taking handouts from them.” His fingers curled into fists. “I have to be.”

  I wanted to go over and hug him. Then I remembered why I was there. I forced myself to bring him back on topic. “You don’t have to be superintendent to give me what I need right now.”

  When he wheeled around to face me, he was Principal Mac again. Turns out, he was like the Incredible Hulk too. “What would you have me do, Blythe? Discipline the yearbook committee? Suspend Luke Pavel? Cancel the yearbook altogether?”

  I knew he wanted me to react as though those punishments were ridiculous, but I didn’t bite. “That’s a start.”

  He wheezed a high, sarcastic laugh. “A start? What else did you have in mind, exactly?”

  I drew myself up and set my shoulders back. I lifted my chin and said, “I think you should cancel the Senior Scramble.”

  It was Dad’s turn to gape. “What? Are you kidding?”

  “That’s where it all started, Dad. If it wasn’t for the Senior Scramble, that kid never would have taken my picture, and none of this would have happened. Look how easily the scavenger hunt can get out of hand. How mean-spirited the participants can become. Don’t you think it’s a bit heartless and irresponsible for you to let it continue? What will the school board think when they find out that your own daughter had been bullied at your school and you did nothing?” I was pretty sure that clinched it.

  Dad drew in a long breath through his nose and exhaled vocally, puffing out his cheeks. “I see what you’re saying … I just … it would totally alienate the student body. It’s a tradition that’s been around here a lot longer than I have. Some of those same school board members grew up here and took part in the Senior Scramble themselves.”

  “Yes, and that was back in the days before the Internet and before desensitization to violence. Back when bullying was written off with ‘kids will be kids.’ This is your chance to demonstrate the seriousness of your zero-tolerance policy. It would set a precedent. It would deter other would-be bullies. At the very least, it would send a message. In fact, it might send an even louder message if you didn’t do anything. ‘Ash Grove: where you can bully even the principal’s daughter and not get in trouble.’”

  I have to admit that I hadn’t planned to spin my argument quite that way. To make it such a big deal. To take a stand and challenge my father on such a serious point. The words had simply poured from my mouth, and I couldn’t deny a certain truth in them. Neither could Dad.

  He rubbed his hands up and down his grimacing face. “I need to think about this for a while.” He turned away from me. Fiddled with some papers on his desk. “I need to think.”

  “Okay,” I said contritely. Had I gone too far? If I was getting what I wanted, did it matter?

  He sat down in his chair and squeaked it back and forth a few times. He laced his fingers across his lap. I felt like he was waiting for me to say something more.

  “Are you going to Shady Acres today?” he asked.

  I gladly went along with the subject change. “I’m heading there now.”

  “Okay. I’ll see you later at home,” he said. “Drive carefully.”

  “I always do.”

  I was nothing if not careful.

  CHAPTER 6

  I LEFT THE OFFICE FEELING DEFEATED. WHICH WAS odd, since I’d basically been victorious arguing my case. I needed to hear a friendly voice, so the second I was outside the school doors, I pulled out my iPhone and called Tara. She skipped the hello and got right to the point.

  “Oh my God, are you alive?”

  “Barely. It was brutal.”

  “I’m so sorry, B. I wish I was there. Imagine I’m giving you a big hug.”

  “I wish you were here too so you could give me a ride to my car. This parking lot is like five hundred square miles.”

  “Okay, now I know it’s bad because you only exaggerate when you’re upset. What happened?”

  “Oh, you know. The usual new-kid bloodbath.”

  “They were mean to you?”

  “Only when they weren’t ignoring my existence,” I said.

  “Those little white-trash bastards. Ugh, I can’t believe you have to go to school there! It’s like a bad dream.”

  “Tell me about it. Listen, T, I have to go volunteer. Want to get together later and I’ll give you all the gory details?”

  “Sure. Food court?”

  “Sure.”

  We set a time to meet at the mall and hung up. I climbed into my car and made my way over to Shady Acres. I’d been volunteering at the nursing home since I was a freshman. At first I did it because I knew it would look good on my college applications one day. And Shady Acres wasn’t too bad, once you got used to the pervasive odor of antiseptic and stale urine. My job was to talk to the residents or play cards with them, call bingo, wheel them around outside for a while, whatever. It was actually kind of fun.

  But the real reasons I kept volunteering all these years were Ms. Franny and Ms. Eulalie. Frances Calhoun and Eulalie Jones. Two crotchety, ninety-something-year-old roommates spending the remainder of their days bickering and pecking each other to death. They were a riot.

  Those two would argue about the color of the sky if they had the chance. Every Monday, almost without fail, I could hear them from down the hall, more than twenty feet before I reached their door. Today was no exception.

  “I’m tired of hearing about it every damn day!” That was Ms. Franny. “If I have to listen one more time to how you marched on Birmingham with Dr. King, I’m going to get out of this bed and march on your skull!”

  “Well, pardon me, your whiteness!” Ms. Eulalie had a thick southern drawl. “Excuse me if I happened to be proud of doing something to change this world for the better.”

  “Aw, you never changed anything but your big ol’ underwear. And even that you don’t do anymore. So tighten up your diaper and be quiet.”

  “I don’t have to be quiet! I don’t have to be quiet just because some white lady say I do! I don’t take orders from nobody.”

  “ANYBODY. Jesus H. Christ, will you learn to speak English for once before you die? Which I hope will be any moment now.”

  “Don’t you go taking my Lord’s name in vain, you she-devil! You leave my sweet Jesus outta your conversation. You sure enough leave him outta your heart. That is if you have a heart, which I seriously doubt that you do.”

  “Hello, ladies!” I sang loudly, peeking through the doorway.

  Ms. Franny threw her bony arms in the air. “Oh, thank the devil. Get your butt in here, Blythe, so I don’t have to listen to this broken record anymore.” She patted a spot her be
d and I plopped down on it.

  “See?” Ms. Eulalie gestured emphatically at her roommate. “See how she thank the devil? You’d think that someone who has everything but one toe in the grave’d be a little more polite to God. Not that she’s got much of a chance to get into heaven. Not at this late a date.”

  “If you’re going to be in heaven,” Ms. Franny said, “then I’ll pass.” She nestled back into her pillows looking satisfied.

  Ms. Eulalie clucked and crossed her arms. “You’re lucky I’m a merciful woman. Lucky I have Christian charity. Lucky I put your name on the prayer list down at the Baptist church every week. I get the message to Pastor Morris to say your name loud and clear every Sunday.”

  Ms. Franny wheeled around on her. “Will you stop putting me on that damnable prayer list? You only do it because you know it drives me nuts!”

  Ms. Eulalie smiled. “A woman got to do what a woman got to do.” She cackled with shameless amusement.

  I shook my head at the pair of them. “You two are worse than a couple of five-year-olds, you know that?”

  Ms. Franny sat up suddenly and squinted at me. “Wait a second.” She drew shaky circles in the air right in front of my face. “What’s going on with your eyes? Have you been crying? Look, Ukulele, our girl’s been crying!”

  “What?” Ms. Eulalie clutched her chest. “Oh, no! What you been crying for, baby?”

  I shrugged them off. “Nothing.” I forced a smile and waved their question away with my hand.

  “Now you just tell us.” Ms. Eulalie gave me the Eye and spoke firmly in her no-nonsense tone. She had developed that tone over decades of raising many children, and not all of them her own. “You know we heard everything in this life there is to hear about. You tell us what’s wrong and we’ll tell you how to fix it. Something go wrong at school? Somebody not being nice to you?”

  Ms. Franny shook her head. “Better not be, or I’ll have to call up my old friend Joey Gambino.” She winked and placed her knobby index finger beside her nose. “I’m connected, you know.”

  I got up to straighten up the knickknacks around the room. “You’ve mentioned it before.”

  “About a thousand times,” Ms. Eulalie added under her breath. Then louder, “Watch that figurine, girl. My Josephina gave me that for my seventy-fifth birthday. God rest her soul.” Ms. Eulalie had outlived all four of her children.

  I planted one hand on my hip and cocked my head at her. “And you’ve mentioned that about a thousand times,” I teased. Ms. Eulalie was a robust woman. Her muscles might have slackened and left her skin looking slightly deflated, but there was no mistaking that Ms. Eulalie’s body had once been stout and strong.

  “Now, tell us what happened. Was it a boy, baby?” Ms. Eulalie gave me a knowing look.

  “Actually, it was,” I said. “His name’s Luke Pavel and he’s this jerk senior at Ash Grove who hates me for absolutely no reason besides the fact that I’m the principal’s daughter and I used to go to Meriton.” I’d already told them the whole moving and switching schools story.

  “Pavel?” Ms. Franny said with a humph. “Is he Polish?”

  Ms. Eulalie snapped, “You are the biggest racist I ever met in my whole living life.”

  “Calm down, Rosa Parks. I didn’t say anything bad about Polacks, I just asked about his heritage.”

  “See? You just called the boy a ‘Polack’!”

  “That’s not racism!” Ms. Franny cried. “That’s bigotry.”

  “Dear, sweet Jesus, why’d you put me in this room?” Whenever Ms. Eulalie’d had enough of Ms. Franny, she’d start praying to the ceiling. “I been good to you my whole life, so why, Lord, why? What terrible thing did I do to deserve this? Whatever it was, Jesus, please forgive me. Or call me home and end my misery.”

  “Yes! Pick that last choice, Jesus!” Ms. Franny interjected.

  “Don’t you get involved! Don’t you go trying to queer things ’tween me and Jesus.”

  Ms. Franny tried to rise up out of bed. “Oh, so it’s ‘queer’ things, is it?” She had a grandson named Darren who was a highly successful dancer-slash-choreographer on Broadway. Ms. Franny was fiercely protective of Darren’s sexual orientation. “How dare you use that word! Now who’s the bigot?”

  “I don’t mean it in that sense!” Ms. Eulalie waved her hands like she was erasing the air. “You know that I don’t mean it that way, woman. Now close your mouth and let baby girl talk!”

  They both shut up and looked at me expectantly. I began the story and told them every detail, from last year’s scavenger hunt to my conversation with Dad barely half an hour earlier, including how I thought I’d convinced him to cancel the Senior Scramble and possibly the yearbook. They sat silently, even after I finished. “What?” I asked them. “What’s wrong? You guys have a look.”

  Ms. Eulalie clucked and shook her head. “You going about making friends the wrong way, sugar.”

  “I’m not trying to make friends,” I said. “I’m trying to stand up for myself and for other victims of bullying.” It had sounded rehearsed. Maybe because I’d said it to myself so many times.

  “Oh, that’s horseshit,” Ms. Franny said.

  “Watch your language, you hussy!”

  Ms. Franny went on like she hadn’t even heard Ms. Eulalie. “Don’t try to blow smoke up our asses, cupcake. We may be old, but we’re not stupid.”

  Ms. Eulalie straightened her pajama top and nodded slowly. “Mmm-hmm.”

  “What do you mean?” I think, deep down, I already knew.

  Ms. Franny leaned over and snatched her knitting out of the wicker basket on her bedside table. She unwound the baby-blue yarn from the needles and set into knitting a row. The aluminum needles clacked together rhythmically. “What I mean is, you’re not interested in standing up for any victims. All you’re interested in is getting even.”

  “That’s right.” Ms. Eulalie rocked back and forth slightly. She drummed her fingertips together in her lap. “Ain’t nothing good going to come of that.”

  I couldn’t stand the thought of Ms. Eulalie and Ms. Franny thinking I was a spiteful person, even though I recognized the complete hypocrisy in that. I tried to deny it, though. My feelings had been hurt, I explained, and I was only looking for justice.

  They saw right through me.

  “You done got justice mixed up with revenge, baby girl,” said Ms. Eulalie. “You need to stop and think on things for a spell.”

  “Now, Blythe, we’re all in favor of being strong and not letting bullies win,” said Ms. Franny, “but you’re going about it all the wrong way. What’s the best-possible situation that could come out of this? You think everyone’s going to realize they were wrong, call you a hero, and throw you a ticker-tape parade?”

  “Mmm-mmm.” Ms. Eulalie closed her eyes and calmly shook her head. “Lord, no.”

  Ms. Franny’s hands moved the yarn and needles like a shuttle on a loom. “Here’s what’s going to happen, best-case scenario. So make sure this is what you want. The seniors won’t like you because you ruined their turn to be on the fun end of the stick for a change. The juniors won’t like you because you came out of nowhere and took away a tradition they’ve been waiting for all year. The sophomores won’t like you because they know they’ll never even have a chance to look forward to it. And the freshmen won’t like you because freshmen do what everyone else does.”

  “But …” I began.

  Ms. Eulalie pointed her finger up in the air to stop me. “Oh, she ain’t done.”

  “She’s not?” I said.

  “No.”

  I searched Ms. Franny’s expression for confirmation. She kept her eyes on her knitting. “No, I’m not. That was the best-case scenario. Now here’s the worst. All of that stuff still happens but on top of it, your father loses his job, your brother has to live down your reputation when he gets to high school, and you continue to get bullied, more than before. But that isn’t even the worst of the worst.”

  “
It isn’t?” I asked. “What’s the worst of the worst?” I was thinking maybe she meant I would get beaten up or something equally horrific. But I was wrong.

  “The worst of the worst,” Ms. Eulalie answered, “is that everyone finally come to realize that the biggest bully of all is you.”

  Her words halted my breath. That couldn’t be true. Could it?

  Ms. Franny stopped knitting mid-stitch and peered over the stilled needles at me. “That’s the worst,” she said. She waited a moment, and then her hands went back into motion. The needles clicked and clacked.

  “So what am I supposed to do?” I asked. “Dad always said that the only way to stop a bully is to stand up to him.”

  “Standing up to a bully,” Ms. Franny said, “is not the same thing as becoming one.”

  “Amen,” Ms. Eulalie agreed. “You have to try to find a peaceful, non-violent resolution. You know, back in Birmingham, Dr. King said—”

  “Oh Christ, here we go again.”

  Ms. Eulalie slapped both hands down on her mattress. “I already said! Don’t you take the Lord’s name in vain!”

  “Aw, somebody make her stop. Make her stop!” Ms. Franny threw her head back on the pillows. “I can’t take it anymore!” She grabbed both knitting needles in one fist and pretended to stab herself repeatedly in the neck.

  “Ladies,” I implored, “please!” I heard shoes squeaking on the floor behind me and knew who it was before I even had to look: Darlene, the head floor nurse. She was overweight, middle-aged, and seemed to have gotten sick of nursing about twenty years ago. I never had a conversation with Darlene where she didn’t complain about something. She was that type of person.

  “What on EARTH is going on in here? Why do I have to come in here every SINGLE day?” She glared at me. “And why is it always worse when YOU’RE here?”

  Ms. Franny bolted upright and brandished her knitting needles like a sword. “You lay off her!”

  Darlene sneered and hitched her thumb at the door behind her. “Blythe, go in the common room and call bingo. They’re ready to start. Go on.”