by Sarah Bannan
I have encouraged Carolyn to get involved in extracurricular activities, in an effort to round out her applications for colleges.
All in all, Carolyn is a well-rounded and intelligent young lady, and a pleasure to have in class. As stated above, I am only sorry that we did not have the opportunity to meet in person, but I understand from Carolyn that you have a busy work schedule.
Yours sincerely
Stephanie Simpson
Chapter 6
The night after Shane asked Carolyn out, the Hot List was updated. The blog had been started four years ago, before we were in high school, and it ranked the ten hottest girls at Adams High. It was anonymous, of course, but everybody speculated about the identity of the blogger – we said it was like Gossip Girl, only this person seemed to have a more focused interest, and maybe a little less time on their hands – and we guessed and guessed and guessed, but nobody could say who it was for sure.
There were rules for the list, and these were up on the site: you had to be at Adams High, registered and in classes, you couldn’t nominate yourself, each email address could only get one vote. Pictures of girls were posted and within a twelve-hour period you had a chance to vote for who you thought was hottest. The blog had a Gmail account – [email protected] – so that people could send pictures, or add comments to their votes. The previous year, Blake Wyatt had tried to hack the account, to see what was sent, and who sent what, but Gmail’s security was too good and, plus, he wasn’t that smart.
The blog was updated all the time, but the list was only drawn up once a year or so and a bunch of us had subscribed to it as an RSS feed so we could vote and so we wouldn’t be the last one to know what was happening, who was up and who was down. Our freshman year, Brooke had been number one and this was weird, ’cause she wasn’t even a senior. Her picture was amazing, professional, sexy but not trashy: she wasn’t wearing a top, just covering her breasts with her hands – like some picture of Jennifer Aniston we had seen a few years ago, or like Megan Fox, only not so gross. Her hair covered one of her eyes, and the picture was in sepia – old-fashioned. Every curve on her body was shadowed just right and we wondered if she had had the picture touched up – but this was before the weight gain, and probably when she was still throwing up after every football game, after every meal, so she looked really good. It was probably the real thing. Everybody said it must have been Shane who took it. And that’s why people called her a prick tease – she’d do everything except for intercourse, that’s what she told Taylor Lyon, who told Lauren Brink, who told the rest of us. Brooke had taken the virginity pledge, after all, and if we knew what was right, we’d do the same.
Gemma Davies was on the list, too: she was number four. Her picture was plain, her looking straight into the camera, zoomed into her face, just a collarbone visible. Totally PG compared to Brooke’s, clearly cropped from a family candid, or from a school picture. There wasn’t anything about Gemma’s picture that made you think she cared about the list, and that’s probably why she always scored so high. Tiffany Port had placed at number three – she was just wearing her underwear, and she was smiling but her eyes looked scared.
That night, the night after Shane had crossed the cafeteria and asked Carolyn to hang out, we got a message to say there was new content and we got onto the site as soon as we could, as soon as our parents would let us be excused from dinner. We opened up the page and there were fifty pictures for us to vote for. And Carolyn’s was the only one that was new. Carolyn Lessing. A color picture of her, fully dressed, standing next to her locker, in jeans and an Abercrombie hoodie, laughing. For the first time, we noticed that her eyes were maybe a little too far apart, that she was maybe a little too thin. We put in our votes. We texted each other to make sure everybody had done the same. And we waited for the results.
The next morning, before seven o’clock, we logged on. The site was updated and there was Carolyn Lessing, at number one. The picture was huge, so you had to scroll down for forever to get to second place. And now that was Brooke.
Texts went around. “Brooke Moore has been DUMPED!” and “Brooke Moore #2.” Nobody felt that sorry for her, not really. She wasn’t nice like Gemma, and it was good for her to have to try to work for things, people said. The following day, she started walking a different way to her classes, and we knew it was so that she wouldn’t have to run into Shane. And when we were in Mr Overton’s office, we had to file her request to have her schedule changed so she could have a different lunch period – she even had a note from the doctor, saying she had low blood sugar. Despite all that, she pretended like it hadn’t happened, that she didn’t know anything about the blog – or maybe she didn’t care – but everybody talked about it, everybody knew.
With Shane, with the list, Carolyn was popular. People said she was cool, she was sick, she was beautiful. She made us want to be new, to move to a new town, to start over, completely, with new hair and make-up and new clothes and maybe even a new personality, if you believed that was possible – which we did. You could leave everything you didn’t like behind, and everybody too. We realized later it wasn’t that easy, that moving would probably be a pain, but she made it look simple and fun and she was protected, we thought, more than anybody else at the school. The cheerleaders were bound to come next, we said, cementing her popularity. And we were right.
After school and after they’d practiced, the cheerleaders sat on the track and talked and laughed and choreographed routines to “Boom Boom Pow” and “Poker Face” and whatever other addictive song they were obsessed with. They played with each other’s hair and compared French manicures and the closeness of the shave on their legs and made plans for what they would do on the weekend. From the first day of junior year, Gemma and Brooke didn’t do this anymore. They spent more time on their own – just the two of them – away from the rest of the girls. As the days passed, this started to piss off Taylor and Tiffany and the others. But Gemma and Brooke would drive home together and go to Sonic instead of sitting on the track. They separated from the group. Taylor talked loudly about it in study hall. And Tiffany agreed with whatever she said.
“They want to get in with the senior girls.” Taylor had her Spanish book open, but on the final chapter in the book. She didn’t even try to look busy.
“It’s pathetic.” Tiffany had her head down, trying to finish her vocab or something but unwilling to let the opportunity to talk to Taylor pass.
“What do we care?” Taylor tossed her hair over her shoulder.
Tiffany did the same. “We don’t.”
“Well, forget them.” Taylor said “forget” in a whisper, as if she were saying something else.
“Yeah, forget them.” Tiffany took out her lip gloss, offered it to Taylor. We looked back down at our notebooks, kept ourselves to ourselves. We were sitting right behind them, but they didn’t seem to know we were there.
“Brooke and Gemma are so over anyway,” Taylor said. “Aren’t they.”
Tiffany knew this wasn’t a question. “Totally over.”
Maybe it was because of this, because of Brooke’s and Gemma’s departure, that Taylor was so excited to include Carolyn in everything. But we guessed it was because of Shane, because Carolyn was with a senior. Maybe it would have happened anyway, we couldn’t know, but by the end of September, Taylor had asked Carolyn to hang out with them after practice – we saw them sitting on the track, in a circle, Carolyn in the center, talking, smiling, fitting in. She sat with them at lunch too: they even found her another chair and squashed it in at the end of the table. And in between classes, they met each other in the halls, and they walked together, linking arms. Taylor and Tiffany and the rest of the cheerleaders said Carolyn would win “Friendliest” when we did Class Favorites, ’cause that’s how much people liked her, that’s how cool she really was.
On Fridays in the fall, our school looked like somebody had thrown up all over it: orange and black everywhere – on the walls, on our b
odies, on our faces. Pep rally days, that’s what Fridays were. And the cheerleaders were in charge of everything: of the color coordination, the structure of the event, the signs throughout the halls. The guys got their chests painted, keeping the same letter every week, spelling out “ADAMS HIGH RULES.” And their girlfriends volunteered to help paint the letter on or wipe it off.
The first Friday pep rally, Carolyn came to school in blue, not orange and black. At first we said it was ’cause she was conceited, thought she was too cool. But we found out later that she hadn’t known, and that Taylor Lyon loaned her an orange t-shirt of hers and Tiffany Port a black boyfriend cardigan, just so she wouldn’t feel left out. We saw them in the bathroom during lunch. They didn’t acknowledge us – we said later it was lame how hard they tried to forget us – and we went into the stalls and we listened to Taylor and Tiffany. Even though we couldn’t see them, we could imagine them touching Carolyn on the shoulder, talking to themselves in the mirror, just so they could watch themselves as their faces lit up. This is what we remember them saying:
“What about Blake Wyatt?” That was Taylor. We always knew her voice.
“No way – he’s too skinny for her.” Tiffany was whispering. And laughing.
“Which one is he?”
“No, Tiff is right. He’s not for you. “
“Dylan Hall?” Tiffany laughed again.
“Vomit.” And Taylor gave out a retching sound.
“Oh, I think I remember him – he almost has a mullet?”
“YES.” They spoke in unison.
And then we weren’t sure who spoke next – if it was Taylor, she had lowered her voice so much that we couldn’t recognize it. But it still seemed too deep for Tiffany. “Are you sleeping with Shane yet?”
There was a pause. Carolyn nodded, or shook her head: we weren’t sure.
“He’s way better for you,” Tiffany said.
“Have you told Brooke yet?”
“She’s going to freak out.”
Taylor laughed. “Well, that’s her fault. Anyway, she knows.”
Carolyn almost whispered. “I don’t really know her – I’d be afraid to say it to her.”
“Oh, don’t be afraid of her.”
“I thought you guys – y’all were friends?”
Somebody sighed and then Taylor said, “Oh, we are. She’s just – you know, kind of bitchy.”
“Shane said that they were never together.”
“Yeah, she just liked people to think they were,” Tiffany said.
Carolyn spoke again. “Well, I like him.”
And then Taylor laughed. “He’s HOT.”
And they all laughed and ran the water and the hand dryer blew. We walked out of the stalls to do the same and watched them leave as they fluffed their hair, putting on lip gloss, still talking as they walked out the door.
“You look great.”
“Totally great.”
“Thank you for these.”
“Can’t have you sticking out.”
Minutes later, in the gym, Tiffany and Taylor and the other cheerleaders ran the stage: “Pump up the Jam,” “Groove is in the Heart” – songs so old that we’d never heard them on the radio, but not old enough for our parents to know them either. Miss Simpson’s choice, for sure. The cheerleaders danced – movements sharp and in time – and we sat back and watched, wondering why this wasn’t lame, why this was okay: to dance and smile and look like you cared. It was okay if you were a cheerleader, we guessed, but that was the only way. Coach Cox came out – made another lame-o speech – and the football team ran onto the court.
Varsity, then Junior Varsity, and they were like two versions of the same thing – one a size down, but still broad and big and stronger-looking than they were in class, in their jeans or in their khakis. They wore shoulder pads under their jerseys but there was something else too – they looked larger when they were on the court, when we were all looking their way.
The cheerleaders looked happy and clapped and gave spirit fingers and thumbs up – the lamest thing they did, for sure – and toe touches and back handsprings.
We watched Shane watch Carolyn and we were pretty sure we saw him wink. She was lucky. Brooke was on the edge of the court with her pom poms. She had stopped moving – she was staring at Shane and then back at Carolyn. Gemma turned to her and mouthed something and Brooke flinched and brought her pom poms back up to her chest. She did a toe touch. But she didn’t smile.
Coach Cox came to the microphone, told us about the squad, about the plan to make it to State, about how strong the boys were, how good they were, how they needed every bit of our support. He asked Shane Duggan to come to the microphone. As Shane approached him, people screamed, squealed, shouted, “DUGGS!”
Shane smiled, took the microphone: “Can y’all bow your heads and pray?” We did as he said. And he began the Our Father. We watched Carolyn out of the corner of our eyes, seeing if she knew the words – if this was a prayer that Catholics knew too – and her mouth moved along with the words, just a little.
Some parents were there – most of the guys’ dads had played years back, and they knew how important all of this was. When the prayer was over, when everybody was whooping and cheering and stomping their feet, we looked over at Mr Duggan, all tan and red-faced, wearing khaki shorts and a red polo shirt, his beer belly hanging over his belt. His legs were all muscle and toned, but when you looked at his stomach – he looked about seven months pregnant. And his face was Shane’s but not Shane’s. We wondered if he still threw the ball around, if he still lifted with Shane, if he still thought he could hold his own on the field. We watched as Mr Ferris walked over to him and, within seconds, Mr Ferris was all in Mr Duggan’s face, pointing at Shane, looking as if he might actually explode. Mr Duggan was laughing at first and then he got redder and redder and pushed Mr Ferris with one hand. Mr Ferris lunged forward and then Coach Cox got in between them. Mr Ferris walked away. Coach and Mr Duggan laughed.
Adams High School
PTA Meeting
30 September 2010
The meeting was called to order at 7.35 p.m., following the Pledge of Allegiance (led by Principal Overton) and the Lord’s Prayer (led by Reverend Davies).
There were 37 people in attendance (see attachment), of which 32 were parents of pupils at Adams.
The minutes of the last meeting were adopted, subject to the amendment of the Vice-President’s report, which should include reference to the proposed changes to the code of conduct in relation to the school’s athletics policy (as proposed by Billy Duggan and seconded by Bonnie Moore). Mr Ferris’s apology to the PTA and the relevant students was noted.
Committee reports:
Tammy Davies (President): Parent involvement in the Homecoming Parade, Game and Dance, is going well, with 18 parents actively involved in the preparations. Special thanks to Greg and Trish Hall for offering the use of their farmland for float making. Corsages will be sold on special offer from Celebrations! on Fifth Avenue. The theme for the Dance this year is Mardi Gras.
Concerns were raised regarding the suitability of the theme, and the connection between Mardi Gras and alcohol consumption. It was AGREED to purchase a breathalyzer for use at the dance, with a view to using this again at Prom.
Special thanks to Coach Cox and the football team for performing so well so far this year.
Melanie Grady (Treasurer): The balance of the PTA fund is $2,317, and the grapefruit and orange sale scheduled for November/December should lead to an additional sum of at least $2,000 being added to the fund. Parents are encouraged to participate in the fundraiser and sign-up sheets are available from Melanie.
Faculty reports:
Mrs Matthew (Guidance): Two college fairs have been organized for the second half of the year, with all major Alabama universities sending representatives, along with representatives from a number of universities from out of state.
A proposal was put forward (Abby Lessing) to extend the numb
er of out-of-state universities in attendance. It was AGREED, however, that budgetary restrictions and the overall level of interest in out-of-state schools meant that this would not be feasible.
Counseling sessions are now being offered to pupils on an “as needs” basis and a service is now offered for parents who wish to come in and talk to the Guidance Counselor in relation to behavior by their children which is of concern. A school assembly on bullying is scheduled for the second half of the year, and a new DVD on the same subject is being shown in Health classes across all years.
There was a general discussion regarding the recent suicide attempt at Lincoln High. Principal Overton noted that his report would include items that should address this, but that additional concerns could be forwarded to Mrs Matthew.
Principal Overton: Attendance at Friday football games is up 15 percent on last year. New weightlifting equipment was purchased last year thanks to PTA sponsorship, as well as new uniforms for both the football team and cheerleading squad. A proposal to contract additional training sessions with a college coach was agreed and would be implemented in the lead-up to State.