by Amy Jo Burns
At thirteen, I’d felt giddy when I saw the collection of all my idols in one picture. I couldn’t wait for the homecoming game. It would be my first time witnessing a new crowning. Though I wouldn’t get to vote until I was in ninth grade, I wanted Roxanna Ryan to win. She represented everything I hoped to be by the time I turned seventeen—tall, slender, beautiful, and captain of the dance line with the white pom-poms to prove it. When I looked at myself in the mirror, it was Roxanna Ryan that I wanted to see.
As there was every year, a lot of buzz surrounded the projections about who would win—Roxanna, or one of the other hopefuls. One girl on the court named Dana had been dating the same boy since seventh grade, and rumor suggested if she was crowned queen at the football game, Kurt was going to propose right there on the fifty-yard line. Some insisted it was just a propaganda tactic to steal votes away from Rachel Hart, the favorite to win. A Barbie-like girl with bleached blond hair, Rachel had bangs that spiked like an ocean wave. You could crunch her curls in your fist because of all the hairspray. The week before voting, Rachel skulked the lunch tables of swing voters, offering to take up their lunch trays. Her tactic worked, and that Friday night Rachel was crowned Mercury High School homecoming queen of 1993.
Five years after admiring these beauties for the first time, I walked past my own picture thumbtacked to the wall behind a glass pane. The main hall was crazed with kids waiting out the four minutes that hung between classes. I caught my own likeness in my periphery, but I didn’t stop to look at the picture. That picture wasn’t me, but what Mercury had fashioned out of me. Behind the glass display was a flat version of myself that everyone—even I—mistook me for. A girl with a soluble spine, a girl who wouldn’t cause trouble. A girl who looked like everyone else.
Just before I passed the glass case, I heard someone call my name. I turned and looked behind me, but saw no one.
“Hi, Amy!” The voice chirped again.
I tilted my head down and saw a small seventh-grade girl beaming up at me. I scanned her face, which of course I’d seen before. There were no faces in town I hadn’t seen a hundred times. But how did she know my name? I didn’t know hers.
“Hi,” I said back.
But as I returned her greeting, I saw it wasn’t quite me she was admiring. The girl looked just beyond my shoulder at the photograph of me in a black dress I’d never wear again with a pink scarf I didn’t tie around my own neck. Next to the photo, someone had taken the time to write my name in bold block letters.
AMY BURNS
So that was how she knew me. I’d just become this girl’s Roxanna Ryan.
Dressed in denim and diamond studs, this girl just looked like someone destined for the court five years from now. When I’d been in seventh grade, I’d been a bookish brunette with glasses and braces. A force, perhaps, no one had seen coming. Around here, people boasted they could predict the future homecoming courts ten years out, like hard winters in a Farmer’s Almanac. No one had any money to invest in anything, so townsfolk betted on the youth instead. If I were betting, I would have put my money on this girl in front of me, golden-eyed and giggling. Her blond hair would only improve her chances. Standing beside her, I was no longer myself. I was a surrogate for Roxanna Ryan, and soon, this girl would be a surrogate for me.
Behind me in the hallway, my name shouted itself to passersby.
AMY BURNS
Not just a name, it was also a sentence. Amy burns. Amy burns. Amy burns.
The girl looked slain, as if she’d just spotted a celebrity. And in this town’s crooked way, she had. In the glass case, a glimpse of our reflection: her infatuated gaze, my synthetic smile, and the photograph presiding over us like some kind of queenly impostor.
Here’s a secret from one royal impostor to another: our lies are turning us old. We are aging; we can feel it by the time we return to school in September after Mr. Lotte spends his first few nights in jail. Our faces still resemble baby peaches while our insides curl into tumbleweeds. Those of us entering sixth grade—the grade Mr. Lotte taught every year until now—hope that being the oldest kids in school will make us feel like queens instead of subjects.
We get what we want, as so many pretty girls do, but the sensation inspires more fear than euphoria. Even at eleven and twelve, it’s possible to feel old. It wasn’t so long ago that we moved from a one-digit age to two, and it doesn’t escape us that we might never experience it again. Does anyone live to be a hundred? The paradox of the young ruler is too quixotic to be real, and we soon realize that our youth has abandoned us.
After a few weeks in school, we start to suspect that a sixth-grade teacher named Mr. Westerly feels the same way. He testified at Mr. Lotte’s sentence hearing, stating that the two of them were as close as any two men could be. For decades, they have both been teachers, husbands, vets, and friends with each other.
“I was in war!” Mr. Westerly likes to say to his classroom, which some of us are in that year. “What war do you think I was in?”
“World War II?” someone in the back guesses, and Mr. Westerly sighs.
“How old do you think I am?” he asks.
The class looks around and shrugs; no one has any clue to his age, other than his salt-and-pepper hair and his thick glasses with the darkened lenses. But he has always looked this way (as evidenced in both past and future yearbooks), so much so that it appears he isn’t aging at all. But we know better than to judge by appearances.
“I fought in the Korean War,” Mr. Westerly tells his class after no one can guess correctly. “It’s also known as the Forgotten War, because no one remembers it.”
These are the moments that Mr. Westerly slips inside himself, and his class knows to stay quiet. Sometimes while his students read silently at their desks, he pens rough drafts of letters to his daughter. We know because we’ve spied his yellow legal pad over his shoulder, watching him strike through his own words with the same red pen he uses to grade our research essays on white tigers and automobile pistons. The tattoo coiled around his forearm bears the name of a woman who isn’t his wife.
“Who is that?” one of us asked him once. “That girl on your arm.”
“None of your business,” was his answer.
We share an odd kinship with Mr. Westerly, all of us haunted by events no one claims to remember. Does he or any of the other supporters ever visit Mr. Lotte while he serves his time, after all the fighting ceased? No one likes to be reminded of an indiscretion, and worse—no one likes to be seen loitering outside the jail with the wives who wait out in the cold to see their incarcerated husbands during visiting hours. For most of 1993, Mrs. Lotte is one of them, and she looks like she doesn’t belong.
She keeps her job at the school, though we don’t talk to her anymore because she doesn’t really speak to anyone. Her step has lost its spring, and her smile droops. She isn’t spotted with the rest of our town at the 1992 homecoming game, or any other homecoming after that, where each year the girls who had once been her husband’s piano students take turns prancing around the football field with the hopes of being voted queen of the senior girls.
We pretend to be young rulers with the same vigor we pretend to emerge unscathed from the Lotte scandal. The potency of innocence exists only in our imaginations, and there is no escaping it. Mr. Lotte has stained us all—his students, his friends, his children, his wife. Just like lies and forgotten sacrifices, the truth can turn a person old, too.
Paper Doll
IF HOMECOMING HEAT reached its climax at the Friday night football game, Spirit Week tendered the foreplay. Spanning the five days that led up to the evening of a new queen’s coronation, Spirit Week made itself new each day by featuring a different theme chosen by the cheerleading squad. Twin Day. 70s Day. Pajama Day. Blue-and-White Day was reserved for Friday every year; football players wore their jerseys, cheerleaders their uniforms, and someone always offered to paint an “M” on willing cheeks as an ode to our fearless mascot, the Mercury Mustang. T
hese themes complemented the week’s holiday festivities, which included—aside from the big game—a parade through town, a bonfire, a pep rally, and the court’s pregame jaunt around the football field.
As Spirit Week progressed, the school transformed. The cheerleaders hung banners with the star players’ jersey numbers painted on them. The homecoming committee strung streamers in doorways and tinsel and balloons in the long corridor leading to the cafeteria. Excitement infected everyone, even the staff. In the middle of Spirit Week, I paid a visit to the principal in hopes that the excitement had boosted his mood. For the second time, I spent my lunch period trying to coax him to approve my transcripts so I could send in my application to Cornell for early decision.
Everyone in the school knew that the Mercury High School transcripts were a joke. Blotchy, mismatched quilts of information held together by Scotch tape, they were an embarrassment. I’d seen the guidance staff handle them before; they held them at arm’s length as if the papers were dirty diapers. I’d even heard that a girl had been rejected by William & Mary because the guidance counselor had left coffee stains on her transcript. Mercury kids, he was known to say, don’t go to Ivy League colleges.
I wasn’t about to let their apathy cost me the first true thing I’d ever wanted for myself. The week before school started, I’d started to create my own transcripts. With the help of a Mercury mother who had done the same for her daughter, I spent hours on the transcripts before printing them on fine linen paper. The first time I met with the principal, my transcripts were leagues ahead of the school’s cryptic, photocopied sheets. I knew it, and he knew it. Still, he scribbled all over them, demanding I change minute details like “German, Level Four” to “German IV” before handing the sheets back to me.
“Okay,” I said as I stood up from the seat across from his desk. “I’ll be back.”
“You do have a backup school in mind, don’t you?” he asked before I left. “In case you don’t get into Cornell?”
I looked him straight in the eye. “I’ll find a backup when I need it.”
Now in his office for the second time, he leaned back in his chair and stroked his mustache as he reviewed the material. Just outside his office, blue-and-white streamers hung in the main hallway as cheerleaders continued to paint banners for Friday’s big game.
“All right.” The principal sighed and sat up. “I’ll stamp it.”
As if Mercury itself somehow knew how badly I wanted out, Thursday night of Spirit Week was the last town fire I ever took part in. At dusk, the homecoming amoeba prepared to parade through town. Its course had already been set, and it was an expanded version of the path all the students took the day of the explosion at the McCandless car dealership: starting at the elementary school and ending at the high school where a homecoming bonfire waited to be lit.
In the elementary school parking lot, someone handed me a bucket of candy, and I had to pull my hands out from the cuffs of my sweater to hold it. The air was getting colder now. Inside the bucket, I found peppermints, Smarties, and butterscotch in golden cellophane, all the hard candy flavors I used to collect as a child when I’d stood on the side of the road, watching the floats as they passed by and dreaming of the day when I would get my turn.
First up was the band, always the band. I still loved the deep, rhythmic pound of the bass drum and the shallow smack of a drumstick against a snare drum’s rim. The sound seeped into my chest and spilled out of it at the same time. It made me think of autumn, of the spark that came from performing for a stadium against the chill of nightfall. My heart burned brightest when the rest of my body had grown cold.
The sun had started to set. After four blows of a whistle, the Mighty Mercury Mustang Marching Machine took off, turning the crisp corner one row at a time. Up next, the class floats fell in line behind the band. A series of gleaming fire engines followed next. The penultimate display featured the MHS football team and cheerleaders clumped together on hay bales that had been tossed onto a flatbed trailer. The boys looked so fresh in their jerseys paired with faded Levis and Wranglers, the girls in their MHS sweaters and turtlenecks. A small homecoming miracle: on this float, there were two boys for every girl.
Last, seven cars with their tops down formed a convertible convoy. When we pulled out of the lot, a crowd had already gathered. Lawn chairs flanked the sidewalk, and children jumped on top of gutters and flailed their arms. “Candy! Candy!” they shouted. Young mothers hung back, cradling babies wrapped in blankets. Fans bordered both sides of the route all the way from the elementary school to the high school. They made a tunnel of people, a preparation fit for hometown royalty.
As we snaked through town, my escort Luke and I tossed candy from the back of the convertible, where we sat enthroned, our dirty boots scuffing the backseat’s upholstery. We smiled and waved. I felt my steel heart melting. It hurt, how perfect this moment was. I knew it was real—I could feel the hard candy in my palm, the crisp wind on my face. I could hear the crowds cheer as we passed and the hypnotizing thump of the bass drum as we moved.
And yet my constant sacrifice for this ultimate chance to put myself on a pedestal now felt like bleeding out on the inside. I faltered as we encountered all the stop signs and potholes and old houses I’d seen a million times. This is it, I said to myself. Twilight set in as we rode past the old graveyard where Simon’s engine had once idled and he told me he didn’t want any suitcases between us. Past the restaurant with the chameleon names, past the barren lot where the Mercury Diner once stood, past the bushes where Pete and I hid the first night we played Spotlight. Traveling my hometown’s geography at a crawling pace, I couldn’t deny my own reflection. I was the graveyard, the asphalt, the grass, the sky. We had done this together, the town and I. More than Nora, who rode in a convertible ahead of me, more than Pete or Simon, who had each performed their own homecoming rites, Mercury itself had been my most loyal accomplice.
Even with all our failings, I belonged to this town and these people in a way I wasn’t sure I could belong to anyone else. We shared the same illusions, and we harbored the same secrets. As we crept through town on the backs of American-made cars, the band playing, the kids screaming, the fire trucks wailing, the mania swelled. It was real but it was also a lie, and the whole town was besotted with it.
The only way a town of cinders could keep itself from dying out was to set itself on fire again and again. After the parade wound down in the high school parking lot, we gathered behind the school for the bonfire. The group shrank as the sky darkened; only the most ardent Mustang fans remained. By the woods, a heap of timber and cardboard had been piled atop a patch of scorched earth, begging for a match. The football coach held a megaphone to his mouth like a trumpet and yelled his muffled pep talk to the team huddled around the blaze. The fans, the court, and the town formed concentric circles around them. Somewhere, somebody beat a cowbell. One of the players struck the head of a match, and it burned as he tossed it onto the wood pile. In the deep heart of the fire, a flame glowed.
Out of the dark the cheerleaders emerged, sprinting toward it. Above their heads, they hoisted a life-sized cutout of a cartoon football player boasting our opponent’s team colors. The football boys, charged now, yanked the cardboard cutout to have their way with it. They punched it, kicked it, and then pitched it in. I felt the heat on my face and opened my mouth to welcome the smoke. Fire, a savage assassin, reminded us all that we still had life left to lose.
The boys assembled into a hive, jumping in unison and chanting together. “MHS! MHS! MHS!” Flames danced on their faces as they screamed. In daylight they would have appeared excited, but in the dark smoke and flickering orange blaze, they just looked terrified instead.
The heat in Mercury continued to rise. A half hour before the Friday afternoon pep rally, those of us on the court were excused from class to make ourselves presentable to the gathering crowd. I changed my clothes in a stall of the junior high bathroom down the hall from the gymnasium.
Hoping to approximate sophistication, I chose to wear all black.
Though classes were still in session, the whole school was too frothed to focus on academics. The other six debutantes from the homecoming court dressed themselves up as well, and a few escapees from class loitered along the perimeter. I stood in front of a tall, pocked mirror by the door and turned to the side.
“I look fat,” I said to no one in particular.
“Oh, my God,” one of the other girls on the court said. “Could you be any skinnier?”
I gave her a ready-to-wear smile before escaping to the other mirror above the bathroom sink. This one, also dented, showcased my face. I leaned toward my reflection, which looked as it always did. Brown hair, green eyes, pale skin. I brought along a small arsenal of makeup that I didn’t know how to use. Holding an eye pencil close to my tear duct, I paused, unsure what to draw first.
A fellow senior named Olivia—one who hadn’t made it onto the court—stepped toward me.
“Here,” she said. “Let me show you.”
She used one index finger to pull taut the skin at the edge of her eye. Using her other hand, she penciled a fine line just above her lashes before releasing her finger.
“See?” Olivia said. “Easy. Pulling the skin makes it much easier. My mother taught me that.”