by Aarsen, Zoe
Hannah shook her head. “No. He’s on the St. Patrick’s football team and they have their own game in Ortonville tonight. I might go to that instead of our game. I mean, if that’s okay with you guys.”
Consensus around the lunchroom table was that it was okay for Hannah to attend the game in Ortonville instead of riding to Kenosha with the rest of us. Before we cleared our trays and gathered up our books, Olivia patiently reminded us to vote for Homecoming Court. She and Pete wove their fingers together across the table, smiling at each other in a way that only the most popular kids in school can smile when they’re also in love. No one could ever be more perfect than Olivia and Pete, not even Candace and Isaac. I ventured up to the table where two sophomores were managing the ballot box with Candace trailing behind me.
“Check one box for Homecoming Queen, and one box for King,” the acne-faced sophomore girl who handed me my ballot instructed me.
Because our high school was so small, the names of every student in the junior class had been printed on the ballot alongside a checkbox, as if anyone other than Olivia and Pete would be receiving votes. As I checked the box next to Olivia’s name, I imagined the tiara that would be placed on her head the following night. Weeping Willow High School usually went all-out when it came to selecting tiaras for Prom and Homecoming Queens. Olivia would receive a tiered, bejeweled monstrosity to place upon her stiffly hairsprayed blond upsweep, and she’d undoubtedly receive an equally tacky crown the following year when she was named Senior Prom Queen. I felt a twinge of something distant as I folded up my ballot and handed it back to the sophomore at the table. Jealousy? Maybe. But it would be better to not even wonder what it might be like to get to wear that tacky crown and have confetti fall on me. That would not be my high school experience, not in this lifetime.
“Like it’s going to be any surprise who wins,” Candace smirked at me as she submitted her own ballot. There was just a hint of wistfulness in her smirk that made me take notice. For a brief second I wondered what it must have been like for Candace, living in Olivia’s shadow. I’d already put fifteen years behind me of knowing the futility of wishing one day I’d be the prettiest girl at school. For Candace, the unacknowledged loss of a competition that never ended must have been painful, even if she knew she’d forfeited the right to jealousy when she and Olivia had become best friends.
After eighth period, I rushed to my locker, eager to get the Student Government meeting with Mr. Dean over and done with. I still felt pretty anxious about the possibility of a dark horse entering the race and stealing my chance at victory. There were an odd handful of people in the junior class who could do exactly that; any number of guys from the basketball or football teams, one of Tracy Hartford’s friends from the softball team or French club. I didn’t want to simply assume I’d win, not even for a second.
Olivia appeared next to my locker, already carrying her books in her canvas monogrammed bag over one shoulder. “I talked to Mr. Dean,” she informed me. “He told me since I’ve already run for office before, I’m excused from today’s meeting.”
She was smiling like she had a wicked secret, waiting expectantly for something.
“Oh,” I replied, unsure of why she remained standing there, next to my locker, as I stuffed my backpack with books I wouldn’t touch again until Sunday afternoon.
“So,” Olivia said, dragging the word across an entire octave of notes, “Will you come to the mall with me?”
I closed my locker and twisted the lock. “Olivia, you’re excused from the meeting, but I’m not. I have to go if I want to run, even though it’s just a dumb requirement.” Under any other circumstances, I would have abandoned whatever plans I’d made for myself to partake in anything Olivia asked of me. But the strange note of sadness I’d observed in Candace’s voice in the cafeteria earlier that afternoon had made me the slightest bit wary about giving up all of myself in support of Olivia. Olivia had practically already won the election for Class President before posters were hung, before ballots were cast, before votes were counted. The same could be said about her Homecoming Queen crown, it was hers before junior year had even started. Olivia already had everything; she didn’t really need me to forfeit my shot at holding class office to go shoe shopping with her. Still, I felt like refusing to join her on her drive to Green Bay might jeopardize every element of my new life, including my plans to go to Homecoming with her brother in just over twenty-four hours.
“I know, I know. I really don’t want to drive to Green Bay alone, though. Please? We can drive down to Kenosha together and I’ll even buy you tacos on the way?” Olivia stared me down with those warm lagoon blue eyes of hers, quite clearly accustomed to getting her way. I felt my insistence on attending the meeting beginning to slip from my grasp. I couldn’t give into her will, I wouldn’t. If I folded on my intent to run for office, it would be a hasty decision that I’d regret all year.
I tried to suppress my rising annoyance with her for suggesting that her reluctance to shop alone had greater importance than my need to establish myself at school. “I would, Olivia, honestly, but I really want to run for Class Treasurer. It’s just one meeting. It’ll probably be over in twenty minutes, if you can wait.”
Olivia sighed, cross with me but accepting that I wasn’t going to cave. “Not even. Mr. Dean will blab for like, forty minutes, and make you all suffer through a lesson about the Electoral College and how our stupid Student Government elections at Willow High School compare to presidential elections in this country. I’ve endured it twice.” She dug the keys to her new car out of her pink leather purse and dangled them from one of her fingers. “Last chance.”
“Are you sure you want to go to Green Bay?” I asked suddenly, the strangeness of Hannah’s story at Olivia’s birthday party returning to me. “It’s just a little too weird, Olivia. Just like Hannah’s story.”
“Oh my god,” Olivia smiled, wrinkling her forehead. “You’re not afraid to go shopping with me because of some stupid ghost story, are you?”
I wasn’t, honestly. My real reason for not going to Green Bay was the meeting that was starting momentarily in Mr. Dean’s classroom. “No, of course not! That would be dumb. But you have to admit, it is weird.”
“McKenna, you are way too gullible. Hannah’s story was about a storm, and it’s perfectly sunny outside. Candace has been checking the weather report all week to make sure the game won’t be delayed. I will be fine,” Olivia rolled her eyes and swatted me on the upper arm. “No tacos for you, then.”
“I’ll see you tonight,” I said, hoping that I hadn’t genuinely infuriated her. Olivia could be sneaky with her fury. She wasn’t an outright mean or cruel popular girl, the stereotypical cheerleader-type portrayed in movies. On the surface she was good-natured and generous, but could turn in a second like an angry cat, whipping out claws without even giving any outward indication of her change in mood. If she was angry with me, she’d decide in her car on the way to Green Bay, and she’d strike at me later. As I watched her saunter down the long hallway toward the doors to the parking lot, her long pale blond hair hanging in a straight sheet to her waist, I realized there was a slim chance that Pete wouldn’t even be waiting for me after school. That was how Olivia operated. Like a queen, moving all of her pawns to suit her whimsy.
“The voting period will be held Monday and Tuesday of the week after next. All ballots will be counted next Tuesday night, giving you a solid week to promote your campaigns. The ballots will be tallied by a team of faculty members to remove any potential for cheating.”
Mr. Dean droned on and on, having documented and created a strict process for every single detail of our student elections. I seriously wondered if running for office at other high schools was such a rigorous affair, or if people literally just wrote down names on index cards and stuffed them into a shoebox in the cafeteria. At least I could relax a little now that I had seen the competition. No one was attempting to run against Olivia Richmond; that would have bee
n sheer madness. Michael Walton was being challenged by Nicole Blumenthal, who was also his only real competition for valedictorian status. I didn’t know Nicole well enough to be able to guess her reason for running; maybe now that we were juniors and college was a little bit more of a tangible reality, her parents were urging her to get more serious about putting experience on applications, too. Jason Arkadian smiled weakly at me across the aisle of chairs, and then proceeded to doodle in his spiral notebook throughout the entire meeting. I recalled sourly how Candace had told me the night we were in Olivia’s pool that Jason had a crush on me, and figured it was safe to assume that he’d been cured of his crush.
Outside the classroom, a story below, I could hear the marching band loading its equipment onto the orange school bus that would deliver it to Kenosha. I remembered back to Homecoming of the previous year, and how itchy and hot my navy color guard uniform had been in the atypical September heat on the night of the game. That game had been in Fond du Lac, not nearly as far away as Kenosha. I wondered if Kelly and Erica, the girls with whom I had been closest friends on the color guard team, were boarding the bus for the long drive. The other girl on the team with whom I’d been friendly, Maggie, had quit the team the first week of school, just as I had. She’d undergone her own transformation over the summer, from knobby-kneed nerd to a girl who wore a lot of eyeliner, had her lip pierced, and hung out with the burn-out kids from the drama club.
I stifled a yawn with the back of my hand. It was stultifying in the history classroom, and when I turned to see if the windows at the back of the room were even open, I was alarmed to see that storm clouds were rolling in. When I’d first sat down at the start of the meeting, the sky outside had been clear and blue. But now it looked unnaturally bright outside with a thick blanket of clouds covering the sun.
I immediately thought of Hannah.
Without wanting to attract the attention of Mr. Dean, I pulled my cell phone out of my purse and discreetly texted Olivia. Are you at the mall? Are you okay?
She texted me back five minutes later, when Mr. Dean was wrapping up the meeting, distributing hand-outs listing rules regulating in-school campaign advertising. Just got here. Took forever to find parking.
Posters, buttons, and stickers were permitted. Stickers found stuck on school property, like lockers, would be scraped off by the janitors. Posters defaming any other candidates would not be allowed. Advertising materials making mention of any school faculty or staff, or using profanity, would not be allowed. Sabotaging any other candidates’ advertising materials would not be allowed. It made my head spin to think that Mr. Dean had spent so much time imagining all the ways in which kids might underhandedly promote themselves just to win a school election.
Finally, the meeting came to an end. It was ten minutes to four, a full five minutes after Pete had said he wanted everyone to meet in the parking lot to depart for Kenosha. I was frantic with fear that the group had left without me, or that Olivia had instructed them to do so even though she had taken the time to answer my text. I rushed down the stairs to the ground floor of the school and pushed through the doors which led to the student parking lot.
Outside, I was stunned by the strange energy of the afternoon. The cloudy sky was bright with ultraviolet rays, and everything in the parking lot was at a standstill. There was an electric charge in the air as if something was about to happen, something static and coiled, waiting to be set into motion. I looked around wildly for Pete’s black Infiniti, not wanting to appear as if I was looking around wildly, and not seeing it in the first three rows of cars, I fished my phone out of my bag to pretend to look busy. In my head, I was in full panic mode. Would they really have left without me? Are they on their way to Kenosha right now, laughing because they know I’m probably standing here, looking for Pete’s car? Even without knowing where everyone was and whether or not Olivia had mandated that I be left behind, my heart was palpitating. I felt like I was breaking out into a light sweat. That might have been it, the end of my brief popularity, right there on that strange afternoon.
Suddenly the door behind me opened and I turned, expecting to see Candace or Jeff, but instead I was startled to see Trey Emory, wearing his usual scowl and army jacket. When our eyes met he looked as surprised to see me as I was to see him, and he straightened his posture. “Why aren’t you on your way to Kenosha? Aren’t you going to the big game?” Trey asked, sarcasm lacing his voice.
“I am,” I said nervously, wishing he wasn’t there right then, at that very moment. “But I think my friends might have left without me. I was in this meeting, and it ran kind of late.”
Trey studied me and shifted his weight from one ratty black Chuck Taylor to the other. “Well, leaving without you doesn’t sound like something real friends would do.”
I picked at my fingernail polish. “Not like they just left me, it’s more like, kind of a joke. Only I’m just not sure.” As I struggled to put my reason for standing there on the sidewalk along the parking lot into words, I realized I was vocalizing probably exactly what Trey was thinking. If I had reason to fear that Olivia would command Pete and Candace to leave me behind, and that they would do so without questioning her authority, they weren’t really my friends. I wasn’t one of them; I was simply masquerading as one of them. My temper burned with shame because I had put myself in this situation. My life had been much less complicated before I’d been inducted into Olivia’s world. I could have been in Cheryl’s mom’s car at that very moment, drinking milkshakes without worrying about calories, if things hadn’t changed before junior year. “Why are you still at school?” I asked him, wanting desperately to change the topic.
Trey shrugged. “Detention. We were changing the spark plugs and wires in Coach Stirling’s car in shop yesterday and… let’s just say she wasn’t happy with my work.”
I could hardly believe my own ears. Coach Stirling drove a legendary piece of junk, a 1989 powder blue Cadillac Fleetwood that was too enormous to even fit in one parking space in the faculty parking lot. The auto body shop class was always working on it, giving Coach Stirling much-needed free tune-ups. “Geez, Trey! You can’t just sabotage a teacher’s car!”
Trey smiled innocently. “I wasn’t intentionally trying to sabotage it. Maybe I just suck at fixing cars.”
I thought of Trey’s Toyota and how it was basically held together with a hope and a prayer. He was in the Emorys’ driveway almost every Saturday, working on it. “Yeah, right. You probably could teach auto body shop at this point.”
He looked at his shoes, quite possibly blushing, and then added, “Well, maybe I decided to use Coach Stirling’s car as the subject of an experiment because she doesn’t like my sense of humor.”
I was about to inquire further when suddenly Pete’s black Infiniti pulled into the parking lot, blaring music. Jeff sat in the front seat, with Candace and a girl I didn’t know very well, Melissa, sitting in the back seat. In horror I watched as the car looped around the parking lot on its way toward me, not knowing if they would continue driving right past me, cackling, to make sure I knew I was being left behind, or if there was a reasonable explanation for why they had obviously gone somewhere without me and doubled back. Either way, I was mortified that Trey was next to me, because whatever humiliation awaited me, he would witness.
“Are you ready, McKenna?” Jeff asked through his rolled-down window.
“Where were you guys?” I dared to ask.
“We stopped by my house to get umbrellas,” Candace said from the back seat. “It’s going to pour.”
I looked up at the sky. The clouds were darkening, looking much more like storm clouds than they had just five minutes earlier. “Do you think the game is going to be cancelled?”
“It’s not raining in Kenosha. I’m checking my weather app,” Jeff informed all of us.
Next to me, I saw Trey shrinking away toward his own car. I wanted to call after him, but hesitated for a moment, hoping he wouldn’t be annoyed with me f
or calling attention to him in front of the car full of popular kids. “Hey, Trey,” I called against my better judgment.
He slowed down just for a second and turned, but kept walking backwards, not wanting to slow his pace toward his car.
I didn’t really have anything to say to him, I just hadn’t wanted us to part ways without saying goodbye. “Are you going to the game?”
“Nah,” he said, stating the obvious. “I’ve got some errands to run, and besides. You know. I already used up all my school spirit this year just by showing up on the first day.”
“See ya,” I said, weakly.
He waved quickly without saying a word, his hand low, lifted out of his pants pocket for just a flash.
I climbed into the back seat of Pete’s car as Melissa moved into the middle to make room for me. “Hi,” I said to Melissa. “Melissa’s going to Homecoming with Jeff,” Candace said, explaining the presence of the girl with bright red hair and freckles.
“Has anyone heard from Olivia in a while?” I asked, just as my cell phone and Candace’s buzzed in unison.
“Speak of the devil!” Candace laughed. We both checked our phones to find that Olivia wanted our input on two different pairs of cream-colored pumps she had found at the mall. “Totally the first pair,” Candace commented, showing the pictures on her phone’s screen to Melissa for approval.