by Aimee Ferris
“It’s Thursday morning, Anne. Twelve hours until impact. What am I going to do?”
I still didn’t have a copy of the speech. T-Shirt’s dad had sent him on a college-visit trip, probably to keep him out of town and away until the police mess died down. At best, all I could hope was the Rotary Club would have a copy for me to read from. Any time for practicing was long gone.
The other entrants probably memorized their pieces with a coach. Or practiced giving it to classes filled with students in preparation for the public-speaking stint. I knew I wasn’t going to win, but I really didn’t want to look like a complete fool while losing, or embarrass Mrs. Desmond, who seemed to really be pulling for me. I’d even confided in her about the developing-room disaster, and she’d promised to write a glowing letter of recommendation to offset the missing “teacher’s assistant” credit to supplement my college applications. With no proof of what happened, I’d just have to trust in karma to take care of David’s suspected role in the mess.
“Don’t blame me, Quigley. I’m not the one making T-Shirt blow off school. I know you’re bummed about Zander not showing again last night, but I’m sure it wasn’t anything personal.”
“This was the very last design class. I might never see him again. You don’t think it’s possible he ditched to avoid seeing me? ‘Doctor’s appointment’ is the oldest excuse in the book and two weeks in a row is more than a little suspicious. Did The Spikester say anything?”
“No, but he was too wiped out for much in the way of conversation. Something about his kid having nightmares about gummy bears coming to life and chasing him into a sea of milk to steal his Honeycombs. I should start paying more attention so when I get to hang out with”—she paused and mouthed “my sister”—“I’ll know what to do.”
“Good plan. But it doesn’t save me now.”
“Wait. Aren’t you heading to art class? Ask David. He can scoot over to T’s house and get it for you from his laptop. Their families know each other, don’t they?”
I laughed. “Sure. I’ll just do that. Because doing favors for me is what David likes to do best.”
Anne shrugged. “Maybe he’s over it by now. Bat your eyes and make nice until you get the speech. He owes you—use the loser and then lose the user. What other choice do you have?”
I waved to her and entered the art room to the annoying click-click-click of my former stool. I plastered a sweet smile on my face and bit the bullet.
“David, do you think you could do me a favor?”
He snorted in reply.
“Please. It’s just that T-Shirt has the only copy of my speech I have to give tonight on his laptop. He hasn’t been in all week and I’m screwed if I don’t have it to read.”
“What’s it worth to you?” he asked.
Mrs. Albertt walked in and flashed me a cheery smile. Very strange. I gave up on David and found my seat. I’d remained the class pariah since the reshoot/fire fiasco, which meant I had my own table to spread out on. This also meant no one was close enough for a high five when Mrs. Albertt made her announcement.
“We have a student of many talents in our midst,” she said, and walked over to a covered easel in the corner. “I present you with this year’s entry for the citywide art show … Voilà!”
I stared at the sketching couple, frozen in their intimate moment in time. The clicking of the stool stopped.
“Seriously?” I heard myself say aloud. David said something a little more colorful.
“Quigley, there was no question. The maturity of emotion shown through this piece, the technical ability, the nuance of effect you used within the development stage … it’s simply exquisite. I’m so proud. I think you’ve finally found your focus.”
On Mrs. Albertt’s lead, the class offered a begrudging and brief round of halfhearted applause. David chose not to join in. The taste of revenge was sweet, even though it meant I could kiss any chance of getting my speech from T-Shirt good-bye.
Anne’s phone rang on our way to the dinner. “Quigley, can you get that—I’m not allowed to talk while I’m driving.”
“Good for you!”
Anne’s return to mostly sane Anne had some perks. One was that her mom returned the use of the car to her as long as she kept up her responsible lifestyle. Another was that she was doing less than half the stupid things she used to do, so riding with her no longer served as the ultimate test of nerves.
“Hey—Anne’s phone.”
“Quigley?”
“David?”
I looked at Anne, who shrugged, her eyes still on the road.
“Yeah, I kind of erased your number, so T gave me Anne’s. I figured you’d be together. I’ve got your speech.”
“Really? I thought—”
“I know. I was just being a jerk. Do you want it or not?”
“Yes, that’d be awesome. Except we’re already on the way to the dinner, and I don’t think we can make it on time if we have to turn around.”
“No worries, I’m already here. Mrs. Desmond told me where the banquet hall is. The speech is in a black folder, and I’m giving it to the chick in charge now—she’s got a red suit jacket on. Cool?”
“Thank you so, so much!”
“Whatever. Have fun.”
I tucked Anne’s phone back in her purse. “You won’t believe this, but David dropped off my speech. This is great, now I can just sit and relax during the dinner. There was never any way I was going to win this, but I feel better knowing Mrs. Desmond won’t look bad.”
We found our seats, but the woman in the red blazer was nowhere to be seen. She finally made her appearance at the podium in front of the packed room. I gave her a little wave and she nodded, lifting the black folder and miming that it was there and accounted for.
I turned to Anne. “So much for a read-through ahead of time.”
“Don’t worry, you’ll be fine.”
The woman tapped the microphone, and the din of voices and clinking glasses died down.
“Welcome to the Annual Rhode Island State Rotary Club banquet. As you know, we’ve invited the winning students from regional contests throughout the state to share their moving and motivational speeches with us this evening. But first, I’m afraid they’ll have to bear with us as we get a little bit of business out of the way.”
Anne pulled out a notebook and started a list of movies to rent for our anti-promapalooza party. Knowing we were ditching the dance together soothed any bitterness over the Betterment Plan going bust. I tuned out the attendance and munched on my salad, spreading the roll with a tiny butter sculpture that looked like a seashell. After today’s news about the citywide contest, nothing could ruin my day.
“And our final bit of business is appropriate for the company we have this evening, allowing yet another deserving young person to jump-start his or her education with the help of a full year’s tuition and expenses while he or she adjusts and makes new plans for the future. The third annual Alexander Macintosh III Scholarship for Injured Athletes applications have been narrowed to three—”
“Quigley, isn’t that Zander’s—”
“Yes,” I hissed, looking around the dimly lit room for the familiar face I couldn’t get out of my head. Maybe he was here to hand out some award from his family. It must be fate.
“—and Bucky ‘Fastball’ Bauers in Appleton, seventeen, tragically snared in a piece of machinery on his family’s farm—which I would think might hold appeal, considering young Alexander’s memorable feats on the mound.”
“It must be a different Alexander,” I whispered to Anne. “He’s never said a word about baseball, or any sports, for that matter.”
The woman to my left leaned in. “You should have seen our Alexander in his day. I remember the first time he was in the paper. Tiny little thing back then, not even ten, but what an arm! The Macintoshes have been in the Rotary for years and years, but even if he weren’t one of our own, I’d like to think we’d still have taken notice. Those scouts sure did. T
hey were circling like wolves from his freshman year. He might have planned to go on to school and play, but people say the big leagues would have called him straight onto a farm team or better.”
“Farm team?”
“Where they groom the players to move up into major league baseball,” the woman explained. “Some people even said he might have been called straight up to the big leagues. I don’t know about that, though. That might just be the kind of romantic legend talk that happens after a bad accident. But no doubt, he’d have gotten there one day.”
“Accident?”
“Ohhh, Quigley.” Anne’s ashen face as she held out her phone.
I grabbed it with a trembling hand, making out random phrases as I scrolled through her hastily pulled-up news story. “Foggy spring morning … broadsided … missing stop sign … driver pinned by truck entering the unfamiliar intersection without slowing.”
The words registered, and blood pounded like a drum in my ears. I could have stopped at the story’s title, “Star Pitcher Survives, Career Over Before It Starts.” Ugly fat tears fell down my cheeks. It explained so much. Anne hugged her stomach before leaning her elbows on her knees, covering her face with her hands and giving in to her own guilt and shame at what her actions might have caused.
“We’ve tallied the member votes, and Bucky Bauers will indeed be this year’s recipient. As tradition—and our Finance Committee—dictates, we have chosen to make one-thousand-dollar scholarships available to the two runners-up to help toward costs and what they have lost in athletic scholarships.”
I rose from the table, looking for Zander’s face in the crowd, and moved blindly toward the exit, dialing his number. Voice mail. I hit resend. Voice mail. Someone grabbed my arm as I passed. I looked up at the whole room staring at me.
“Ms. Johnson, you’re up. Quigley will be offering her essay, ‘Measure Twice, Cut Once.’ ”
A spotlight hit my face, and I put one arm up to shield my eyes from the light. Encouraging applause swelled in the room as five hundred expectant faces looked to me. I realized that reading the two-page piece would take a lot less time than trying to excuse my way out of the speech, and turned toward the stage.
I flipped open the folder and tried to focus on the title. I couldn’t even look in Anne’s direction, though I could tell she was still hunched over. I took a deep breath to steady my voice.
“Measure Twice, Cut Once,” I said loudly into the microphone. I noticed a faint note of hysteria in my tone, but I wasn’t stopping. “In life we must make choices. We must face challenges. The best way to overcome these challenges is to ‘climb every mountain’ to get the best view of our problems. We have to say, ‘So long, farewell’ to our insecurities.”
I didn’t remember a bit of it, but at least they couldn’t tell that from my reading. Something felt off. I glanced further down the page. When had I ever used the word byway before? I pushed the niggling feeling away. I just wanted to be done and on my way to find Zander.
“Good grades, art, grabbing for brass rings—these top the list of ‘my favorite things.’ I say aloud, ‘I have confidence’ in me. It’s as easy as ‘do-re-mi—’ ”
It rhymed. What the hell was going on? This was not my speech. I faltered, looking up for red blazer lady. The massive crowd looked back at me expectantly. A few people called out encouragement, thinking I had a case of the nerves. I flipped the page, confused.
“When I was ‘sixteen going on seventeen,’ I often felt like a ‘lonely goatherd—’ ”
Titters broke out, and it hit me where the vaguely familiar words came from—The Sound of Music. I stepped back and flipped to the final page, a bold and perfectly drawn Art King crown adorned the bottom. Something just snapped. I leaned into the microphone.
“You know what? High school is awful. It’s awful.” I reveled in the slightly shocked faces, looking to each other for cues on how to respond. “I know that’s not what parents want to hear, what you guys want to hear. But it’s the truth. You spend half your energy trying not to get trashed by some jerk who doesn’t like you, not because you ever really did anything to him, but because you are different from them and don’t want what they do. Or not different—maybe you have a lot in common, but instead of seeing that as a good thing, they see you as competition and have to spend all their time tearing you to pieces to make sure they look better.
“The other half of the time you spend trying to fit in. Why? I don’t know. Most of the people you are trying to fit in with aren’t the people you would want to hang out with, anyway. It’s the people you are afraid of who you spend most of your time trying to impress. Buying these jeans and that computer. Got to have those shoes and this purse. Got to get this cool job to afford those jeans and that purse. It’s a never-ending cycle of wasted energy. And then the good people trickle past, and you blow it. Because you’re too busy playing some stupid image game to remember to show your real self.
“Maybe, if we spent a little less time on all that useless drama, we would have enough time to do what our real jobs are—making big decisions wisely. Personally, I think it’s pretty insane to ask anybody my age to be wise when our heads are spinning in fifteen different directions. Maybe making big decisions wisely is just a matter of measure twice, cut once.”
I grabbed the microphone from the holder and strolled as I spoke, arm flung out at some invisible place outside the hall.
“Measure twice, cut once. I really want to go to the Art Institute of Chicago. But why? Because I’ve always wanted to? Is that as good as I can do? Because it sounded cool to me when I was twelve and it’s easier to just go with the flow? I never gave it a second thought. It was my first thought, and I didn’t have the energy to take a second look and find out if it still fits.
“Measure twice, cut once. I don’t tell my friend what she’s doing is stupid and dangerous—sorry, Anne. Why? Am I unsure whether it is stupid and dangerous? No, I just don’t want to rock the boat or cause her any more stress when she’s going through a tough family time. Maybe if I gave it a little more thought before deciding to keep my mouth shut, I’d see that the stress she’d have if things went bad could totally wreck her family and her life. And on top of that, what she’s doing could ruin someone else’s life!
“Do you think those kids who stole the stop sign at Zander’s intersection ever gave a second thought as to what might happen after their prank? I don’t think so. I know they didn’t. Because I go to school with those guys. Maybe not the exact ones who took that exact traffic sign, but they might as well be. None of them want to hurt anybody. They just never gave it a second thought.
“I know big decisions aren’t going away, and that learning to make those choices is part of growing up. But maybe learning to stop and give things a second measure should be just as important, before we cut our way into a consequence we just can’t live with.”
I clunked the microphone in its stand and left the podium, walking straight out to the parking lot, hitting resend again and again, not caring if Zander thought I was a crazy stalker chick. An echoing roar of applause erupted from the building a few minutes later. Probably for my having left. Anne ran out. We hugged and got into the car.
“Are you okay to drive?” I asked.
She nodded. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah. Sorry, I guess I sounded like a nut in there. It was all just too much. No wonder he never talks about his past.”
“I get it. And you didn’t sound like a nut to everybody. After you left, some guy walked up to the podium and handed something to the red blazer lady.”
“Let me guess—a note suggesting they do a background check on prospective speakers before handing them a mic?”
“No. It was a check made out to the Alexander Macintosh III Scholarship fund—to cover the full tuition and expenses of the other two finalists.”
I stared at Anne.
“What? Not just because of my stupid speech. Who on earth would do such a thing?”
> “T-Shirt’s dad.”
Chapter Eighteen
I had worked all night to finish the gift, but the end effect was worth it. I didn’t have the loaner camera anymore, so I took photographs from old shoots and morphed the focal point to leave a blank still spot of photo paper canvas in the middle of chaotic movement. I went back in my head to Ms. Parisi’s first class. Using long fluid lines, I sketched a fiery purple-and-red reproduction of Zander’s dress on a faceless model standing on top of a table in the busy school cafeteria.
The furry mohair couture appeared perched on a traffic island between lines of speeding cars. The Daughters of the American Revolution garden party dress donned a willowy figure riding a single falling leaf down from the branches of a sugar maple. Soon, I had a full portfolio done. I wrapped it and left the now framed print of the sketching couple loose on top. That one would come later.
I walked up the hospital corridor to the physical therapy wing, preparing myself to be turned away, or worse. Anne came through when she reached out to The Spikester for the details on Zander’s whereabouts. In my desperation to see Zander face-to-face, I had jumped at The Spikester’s suggestion to show up and surprise Zander but was questioning it with every step down the waxed floor.
A nurse walked me in and pointed out Zander, who was zoned out between reps while sitting on a piece of equipment that could cross as a workout machine or torture device. In the corner, the redhead Anne described from the parade helped a little boy lean on crutches and shift one ankle at a time down on a padded floor mat.
I averted my eyes as I came around the front of the therapy machine and realized Zander sat shirtless. I blushed dark red at the sight, half in awe of his well-defined and sweaty body, half in shock at the mass of swirling pearly-white scars thickly winding around his left shoulder and extending down like badly sewn seams. In the full minute it took him to register my face, I had to stop myself from sprinting out three times, longing for the safety of my car. Zander self-consciously jumped for a towel to cover his scars, then shrugged with a sigh of defeat and looked up at me, eyes hopeful for acceptance.