by Nancy N. Rue
“Oops,” somebody said from the doorway.
I looked at her from the mirror. Alyssa Hampton. Pretty blonde girl, if you liked big teeth. Half the males in her senior class apparently did.
Another girl came in behind her and nearly plowed into Alyssa. Hayley Barr, a junior famous for her thick ponytail. The two of them were normally attached right about where their jeans hugged their hips. Jeans that cost more than the entire wardrobe of those six girls I’d seen in the hall. Combined.
“Hi, Tyler,” Hayley said, in a voice about two keys higher than her usual voice. “You going to lunch?”
She looked at Alyssa and, to their credit, they visibly stifled the laughter that was so clearly about to explode out of them.
“I usually go to lunch,” I said. “Why? Are they serving botulism again today?”
They did explode then, and I knew it wasn’t my humor that sent them diving into a stall. Together.
Seriously—what was making me such a source of endless amusement?
I transferred my bag to my other shoulder and hauled Andrew Jackson’s life story back into the hall, where I set out again for the lunch room. But when I saw my second cousin Kenny at the drinking fountain, I swerved and caught up to him before he could take off to join the other professional slackers at the Jiff-E-Mart.
“Do you have any idea why every girl in this school suddenly thinks I’m funnier than Tina Fey?” I said.
He raised his head and blinked. I could tell it took him a full five seconds to recognize me, which made sense. We hadn’t actually spoken since Christmas dinner.
“Who’s Tina Fey?” he said.
I should have known. Whenever I did try to have a conversation with the boy, he never had any idea what I was talking about. I’d suspected for some time that he was hatched from an egg every morning.
“I don’t think you’re that funny,” he said.
A girl materialized. Candace, Kenny’s older sister.
“Come on, Kenny,” she said, wrapping her fingers around his arm. “You don’t want to get into this.”
“Into what, Candace?” I said.
“Into nothing.” With her hands on Kenny and her eyes warily on me, she dragged him away.
All right. Enough. I charged down the hall, through the looks and the snickers and the snippets of conversation, like I was traveling in a tunnel. I headed straight to the table in the corner by the “salad bar” nobody ever ate from, and when I arrived, I knew at least things were still normal over here.
Matthew sat, as usual, with his enormous feet propped on a chair, which meant the teacher/cop of the day hadn’t been by yet to tell him to get them off. Scrawny Yuri was across from him, frowning at the ingredients printed on an energy drink bottle. Deidre, the only senior in our group of juniors, was standing up, digging through a vintage purse suitable for a bag lady, which probably contained items she hadn’t seen since seventh grade. She was talking. Nobody was listening. I sank into my plastic chair next to her and plunked my own bag on the table.
“Does anybody know what’s going on?”
“Are we talking globally?” Matthew said. “We’re pretty sure Pakistan’s harboring Osama Bin Laden. We have a black president—”
“Mercury’s in retrograde,” Deidre said into her purse.
“No, I mean here,” I said.
Yuri looked up from the drink bottle and squinted at me through his wire-rimmed glasses. “Who cares what’s going on here?”
“Not me, usually,” I said. “But people I don’t even know are walking up to me and losing it.”
Deidre dragged her eyes from the bottomless bag and pulled her dark I-refuse-to-tweeze eyebrows together over her yes-I’m-Italian-is-that-a-problem nose.
“They know something you don’t?” she said. “Hard to believe.”
“Maybe it’s about that,” Matthew said.
“About what?” I said. Matthew’s currently raven-black hair hung over his eyes, so it was hard to tell what, if anything, he was seeing.
“That.” He jerked his square chin toward the opposite wall of the lunchroom.
I followed his jerk. Our cafeteria was long and narrow and an even uglier green than any other part of the over-fifty-year-old school. To make it look even longer—and uglier—rectangular tables were placed in rows all the way from one end to the other. Green, yellow, and orange plastic chairs that always started out tucked into the tables at the beginning of lunch period were quickly scattered and regrouped and often overturned, until by the end the place looked like those prison scenes you see in movies where the inmates start banging their cups and somebody gets thrown into the chow line. One teacher-monitor was only enough to keep that to a minimum.
One of the advantages of being a junior or senior at Castle Heights High was getting to sit at the round tables that skirted the room. We—that would be The Fringe and I—had claimed ours in September, and like most groups we were pretty territorial about it. Which meant we seldom ventured to the other end where the bulletin board was hung. The Ruling Class had their three tables down there so they could preside over the significant events posted on it. Homecoming king and queen. Roles in the current theatrical production. Starting lineup for the next sporting event. If I’d had the slightest interest in any of that, I might have wandered past it now and then. Since, however, I could very possibly live my entire life successfully without ever going to a homecoming dance or cheering at a basketball game, I’d never even glanced in that direction.
But at the moment, everybody else in the student body appeared to be absolutely fascinated by it. The crowd in front of the board was four people deep.
“Let me guess,” Deidre said. “They posted the results of the ‘Most Shallow’ competition.”
“Oh.” Matthew sat upright in the chair. “Do you think I won?”
Deidre shook her head. “Although I have known puddles deeper than you, Matthew, I’m sure you didn’t.”
“Shucks,” he said to Yuri.
Yuri cocked a colorless eyebrow that matched his hair. “Define ‘shucks.’”
“That can’t be it,” I said. “If my name ever appeared on that board it would be for ‘Most Unknown.’”
“Isn’t that an oxymoron?” Matthew said.
“Is that what they call this?”
We looked up at a wildly curly brunette who’d appeared at the salad bar and was poking the tongs into a stainless steel pan full of brown lettuce.
I studied her for a few seconds. She didn’t immediately fall into any of the categories of people I passed in the halls. In fact, I didn’t think I’d ever seen her before. It had to be tough being a new kid in April, when all the friend slots had long since been filled. It had been hard enough for me at the beginning of sophomore year, seeing how most of the friend slots here had actually been filled back in preschool.
“Do you know what’s going on down there?” I said to her.
She gave the lettuce another dubious look and moved on to the anemic chopped tomatoes.
“I think they posted the nominations for prom queen,” she said. “I’m not sure—this is only my second day here.”
Yeah, I was good.
“How’s that working out for you?” Matthew said.
She passed on the tomatoes too and dumped a spoonful of grated cheese onto her plate. “Is there a microwave we can use?”
Matthew laughed out loud. Yuri scrutinized her as if she were speaking one of the few foreign languages he didn’t know.
“No,” I told the girl. “We’re lucky to have electricity. Where’d you move here from?”
“France,” she said.
Deidre stared. “Seriously?”
“My family lived there for five years.”
She brought her plate of cheese close to the table, and for the first time I saw that she had incredibly blue eyes, even though her skin was as dark as mine.
Deidre kicked Matthew’s feet off the extra chair. “Join us,” she said, “if yo
u can stand Mr. Crude.”
“My stuff’s over there,” she said. “Thanks, though. Most people here aren’t this friendly.” She glanced toward the bulletin board again. “They’re kind of mean, some of them.”
“What do you expect from the low end of the food chain?” Matthew said.
Yuri just glowered.
“No, seriously.” The girl lowered her voice. “A bunch of them are up there laughing their fannies off because somebody’s in the top four for prom queen that evidently isn’t queen material.”
“Did she just say ‘fannies’?” Deidre said to Yuri.
“Trust me,” I said, “nobody made it to that list that wasn’t supposed to be there. We have people who oversee those kinds of things.”
“The principal does that?”
Matthew snorted from under his hair. “He never comes out of the main office. Nobody’s seen him since the Clinton administration.”
I shook my head at the new girl. “A bunch of juniors and seniors run everything.”
“You’ll know them by the vacant look they get in their eyes when you use words of more than three syllables,” Matthew said.
“Except ‘Abercrombie,’” Deidre said. “They know that.”
Yuri was still glowering. “It’s all inbreeding.”
The new girl had yet to crack a smile. It was time to find out which way she was leaning before we said much more.
“Were you in student government at your school in France?” I said.
She shook her head and pushed a few strands of curly hair behind her ear. “I was homeschooled.”
The three of us exchanged glances.
“What?” she said.
I cleared my throat. “Just a word of warning. Those kids aren’t usually outright mean until somebody does something ‘different.’ Otherwise, they don’t really have to be because they’re already in control.”
“So start by not telling anybody you’ve been home-schooled,” Deidre said.
The blue eyes blinked. “I don’t get that. And I definitely don’t get the prom queen thing.”
Deidre patted the empty chair. “You absolutely should sit with us. You’ve found your people, right, Tyler?”
“Huh?” I said.
I’d heard the words, but most of them hadn’t sunk in. My eyes and my mind and the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach had wandered back toward the bulletin board. Now that entire half of the cafeteria was alternating between ogling our end of the room and doing some variation on a disbelieving guffaw.
“Tyler?” Deidre said.
“Who is it—do you know?” I said.
The girl shook her head.
“Will somebody go look?”
“Oh, can I please?” Deidre said. “And can I also poke a fork in my eye?”
“Why do we care who it is?” Matthew said to Yuri, who answered, “We don’t.”
The new girl edged away. “Listen, thanks for talking to me. I better go eat.”
“I’ll walk with you,” I said.
“Oh, yeah,” Matthew said. “She could get lost in here. It’s a veritable labyrinth.”
He gave the whole table an elaborate shrug. I followed the girl down the aisle, past the freshmen and sophomores who had also sorted themselves into a caste system early on in their high school career—if not sooner, since they’d all basically been born in the same hospital. Normally louder and more obnoxious than the crowd at a tractor pull, they practically went into a coma as I went by.
What? I wanted to say to all of them.
But the closer I got to the board, the surer I was that I already knew “what.” My mouth felt like sawdust, and my stomach had completely shifted to the feeling I hadn’t had since my first day here a year and a half ago, moments before I made up my mind that fitting in was not my life goal. Even the cafeteria food couldn’t wreak this much havoc on my insides.
Still, I kept my head up and, as my father always said, my eyes on the prize. There was no doubt that the object of everybody’s attention was a pink sheet of paper stapled to the center of the board and surrounded by a frame of fake roses. Could they have made it any cheesier?
A small sea of people who were just getting in on the fun parted as I took the final steps. Nobody breathed a word, except the one girl who needlessly said, “Shhh!” The silence had the clear sound of people holding back hysteria.
The new girl had been right. It was the list of prom queen nominees, voted on in junior and senior homerooms that very morning and narrowed down by none other than the prom committee, a subset of the Ruling Class.
Alyssa Hampton was the first name. No surprise.
Hayley Barr was the second. To be expected.
Joanna Payne, the third. Ya think?
And there below them, in the same font, the same color, the same size—as if it belonged there—was the fourth one.
Tyler Bonning.
When the room could hold its breath no longer and ripped open in a roar, I realized I’d just read the name out loud.
“Tyler Bonning?” The new girl half-yelled to me over the din. “Is that you?”
“Yes,” I said. “That’s me.” I turned to her and plastered a manufactured smile onto my face. “Hilarious, isn’t it?”
Turn the page to check out an excerpt from the next Real Life book, Limos, Lattes & My Life on the Fringe.
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Motorcycles, Sushi & One Strange Book (Book One)
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Copyright
ZONDERVAN
Tournaments, Cocoa & One Wrong Move
Copyright © 2010 by Nancy Rue
This title is also available as a Zondervan ebook. Visit www.zondervan.com/ebooks.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rue, Nancy N.
Tournaments, cocoa & one wrong move / Nancy Rue.
p. cm.—(Real life; bk. 3)
Summary: When a knee injury and a subsequent mistake threaten to end her basketball career, athletically driven Cassidy finds support in the most unlikely places—including a room filled with juvenile delinquents and the pages of an old book labeled “RL.”
ISBN 978-0-310-71486-6 (softcover)
[1. Athletes—Fiction. 2. Wounds and injuries—Fiction. 3. Christian life—Fiction.] I. Title. II. Title: Tournaments, cocoa and one wrong move. PZ7.R88515TP 2010
[Fic]—dc22 2010023289
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