Winner Takes All

by Jenny Santana

  Mari grabbed her spork and started digging around frantically at her lunch.

  “What did I say when I first asked you to do this, Mari? I told you I’d do all the work, didn’t I? So don’t worry so much. You’ll beat Laz, and I’ll make it as easy as possible. And you’re so talented, I know you’re up for the challenge of playing both these roles at the same time. Think of it as being in TWO hit Broadway plays!”

  “Double the fame and fortune…” Mari considered Celia’s argument. She shrugged, then took a bite of corn and said, “Just remember your promise not to—”

  “—not to leave your side. I won’t,” Celia said. “I promise.”

  Mari smiled at her. She had a piece of food stuck between her two front teeth. Celia pointed to her own teeth, and Mari knew exactly what she meant. Mari covered her teeth with her tongue and made a sucking noise.

  “Besides,” Celia added, “you can’t quit now, because that would mean that Laz wins automatically. Not exactly the definition of democracy, is it?”

  “Why are you so weird?” Mari said with a laugh. The piece of corn was gone. “Also, why are you doing that to your hair?”

  “Doing what?” Celia said. Only then did she notice her hand, which was tugging at a curl at the base of her neck. When did I start doing that? she thought.

  “You started doing that the first time you said Laz’s name,” Mari said, reading her mind.

  Oh no, can Mari read minds?

  Celia sat on her hand and started talking too fast, saying, “What? That’s odd. I don’t know why I would do that. That’s really weird. Whatever, let’s not talk about—hey, since when does corn go with pizza, huh? Am I right?”

  Mari sat back from her tray. “Oh no. You like him, don’t you?”

  She can read minds!

  “Wh-who?” Celia stammered. “Oh, Laz? Oh, no way. Noooooo way. He’s not for me. He jokes around too much. And his hair is stupid.”

  “What? He barely has any hair. He keeps it shaved close.”

  “Yeah, but in sixth grade it was longer and it looked better. Now he looks stupid.” Celia only half believed this, but she was desperate to keep from being found out. “And he’s—he’s way too dumb. I mean, not dumb dumb, but not for me. And he has no opinions about anything—people think that makes him nice, but really, he’s just not interesting; he has no ideas. How can you like someone who almost never has any ideas, right?”

  Mari sat quietly, thinking about this. “You’re right, sort of,” she said. “I don’t know if I totally agree with you—I think Laz is a nice guy, and really cute—but I can see why you don’t really like him too much. He’s definitely not like you. You guys are, like, really different.”

  Celia crossed her arms over her chest. Maybe Mari wasn’t a mind reader after all.

  “Don’t get mad,” Mari said. “What I’m trying to say is that I can’t see him being a good representative. Which is why you…I mean, me…I mean, I…I guess I need to stay in the campaign.”

  Whew, Celia thought. She uncrossed her arms and said, “Exactly.”

  “And as my official campaign manager,” Mari said, “you should know that Laz and his sidekick, Raul, have been staring us down from their table over there for almost the whole lunch period.”

  Celia started to turn in her seat, but Mari grabbed her wrist and said, “No, don’t look! I think Laz might be coming over here.”

  Celia felt her hands start to sweat and sat on them again. “What should we do?” she asked.

  Mari raised an eyebrow at her. “Some manager you are. I’m going to my locker to unload this heavy thing before next period.” She picked up the script and dropped it with a slap back into her bag. “You finish eating and tell me if he says anything interesting. You can tell him I said hi, if you want.” She slung her bag over her shoulder and picked up her tray, whispering “good luck,” as she headed for the trash line.

  A few seconds later, Laz’s voice came from behind her: “Celia! Just the person I wanted to see.”

  She noticed he said person and not girl—another piece of scientific evidence proving he saw her as just a friend—and she gave a sigh of relief that she hadn’t given away her secret to Mari.

  “You didn’t see enough of me yesterday morning?” she said. “What are you, a masochist?”

  Another awkward pause. He blinked and said, “Good one.”

  “A masochist is someone who enjoys being miserable,” she said.

  “I knew that,” Laz said. He looked at the halfeaten pizza on her tray. “Like, people who eat cafeteria food are masochists.”

  She pretended to laugh at his joke.

  “Anyway,” he said, “I saw you talking to the Dark Side a minute ago.”

  “No, but I am now,” she joked back.

  “Oh, so I’m the enemy?” He raised his eyebrows at her and she almost fell off the table bench. “Well, this enemy,” he said, pointing to his chest, “has to talk to you about something.” He poked her in the arm and left his finger there for a second. “Can I meet up with you after school somewhere? Maybe walk you home?”

  She tried to keep from freaking out. Laz wanted to talk. To her. Outside of school. He had touched her arm for no reason. He wanted to walk her home! All of this was new evidence—evidence that suggested a different hypothesis: Maybe he did think of her as a girl he could like. It was, in a word, a miracle.

  “Um, sure. That would be neat.” She winced. Neat? “I mean, great. I mean, cool—”

  “I get it, Celia,” he laughed. He leaned back and wrinkled his eyebrows at her. “Hey, you don’t really think I’m the enemy now, do you?”

  “Laz, of course not. You’re—you’re just the best.”

  She couldn’t believe what she’d just said. Even more unbelievable to her was the fact that he was suddenly blushing. He looked down at his sneakers and started to mumble something about not being all that great. Quickly, she added, “Except, wait. I don’t walk home. My mom picks me up at the public library a few blocks away. Walk me there?”

  Finally, she’d said something smooth and almost flirty—with no mean undertone.

  “Can’t wait. Meet you at the front entrance by the palm tree?”

  “Which of the hundred palm trees outside might that be?” she said. Well, she’d come close to not being mean, which was a start.

  Laz laughed it off and said, “Right, um, the really skinny one that’s, like, to the right of the main doors.” He made a motion with his hands, turning them to the right out of some imaginary door between them.

  “Got it. So, see you later?” She shrugged her shoulders, and then, trying to seem casual, rested her elbow on the table. She felt the squish of leftover corn kernels beneath it. She looked at it and gasped.

  “Girl, you are so funny.” He was laughing as he turned away to leave, but it wasn’t a mean laugh. Celia figured she’d laugh along, too, and after a second, the corn on her elbow actually was funny. “Catch you later.” He walked away toward Raul, who was waiting for him back at their table, and then the two of them left the cafeteria.

  He’d called her girl. He’d said she was funny, laughed with her and not at her. Mari said he’d been checking her out all through lunch. And then there was that very un-Laz moment of blushing. Could her initial conclusions have been wrong—could it really be possible for someone like Laz to fall for a girl like her?

  Conflicting evidence, she thought to herself as she wiped off her elbow with a napkin. Only further observations would confirm or refute the new hope floating around in her head. And only a few more hours of school stood in the way of her chance to run this new experiment.

  Chapter Four

  That afternoon, Celia waited outside the school by the designated palm tree, butterflies swirling not in the air, but in her stomach. The fronds of all the other palm trees waved at her in the breeze. She’d tried leaning on the tree’s trunk to look cool and relaxed, but the thing was so thin that she felt it give a little under her weig
ht, and the mental image of the tree snapping or falling down completely made her stand up straight again. She plopped her book bag down on the grass and waited.

  She’d managed to push the meeting with Laz out of her head by fourth-period math, a class she had with Mari. Mari had passed her a note saying only Anything interesting happen? and Celia had passed one back that read With Laz? You wish. Her nervousness had ended with that, but now, standing outside alone and next to a very unreliable and not very noticeable palm tree, she felt it creeping back into her bones.

  She focused on breathing through her nose, having read somewhere that the filtration work done by nose hairs had a calming effect on humans. She breathed slowly and deeply, but it didn’t seem to be helping very much.

  Other students filed out from the big doors, some of them rushing to make it to the line of buses waiting to take them home. A few people waved at her, then looked confused, as if trying to figure out why she wasn’t dying to get away from the building that had held them captive all day. Horns honked from the street—parents signaling their kids to run out to the car so they could avoid the mess of the parking lot. That was the reason her mom picked her up at the library down the street: Her mom could stay at work a little longer while avoiding the craziness of dismissal, and Celia got to unwind for half an hour or so at her favorite place in the neighborhood—inside the cool, calm, book-lined walls of the library. Thinking of the library seemed to calm her down more than breathing through her nose did, so she focused on that—on the library’s tall front desk, on the sounds of pages turning, on her lucky worktable near the entrance where she’d come up with the topic for last year’s science project.

  “I see you found my tree,” she heard a voice say from behind her. It was Laz. He pushed against the trunk with both hands and they watched it sway. “Pretty crazy, huh? It survives all the hurricanes ‘cause it’s so flexible.”

  She hadn’t thought of it that way, and she said so. He gave her a toothy smile and said, “Let’s start walking and see what else you haven’t thought about.”

  She felt her face get hot. He tucked his thumbs under the shoulder straps of his backpack and turned on his heel, and she was relieved that his move made him miss the sight of her reddening cheeks.

  Laz didn’t offer to carry her bag as they walked, which was okay with her; it’s not like we live in the 1950s, she thought. Plus, that would be so obvious on his part—if he liked her, he would be subtle about it. As they walked away from the school, she listened to their shuffling steps and watched his sneakers glide over the sidewalk.

  They fell in step as they reached the crosswalk of the main intersection. She wondered what other people thought when they saw them: There goes Laz and that dork Celia? Or maybe, Celia and Laz are together? How did that happen? She wondered if anyone watching them might think: Look at Laz and Celia—they make a cute couple, don’t you think? Was it really such a crazy, impossible thing? Then Mari’s words floated into Celia’s head: You worry too much about what people think. She looked up from the ground and started walking a little faster, but Laz managed to keep up.

  They passed the 7-Eleven where people bought candy and chips in the mornings before school began, where the kids who skipped school altogether sometimes hung out.

  “Want anything from the store?” Laz asked her. “My brother tells me that place has the best Slurpee machine in the city.”

  “Your brother is some kind of Slurpee machine tester?” Celia teased.

  Laz grinned and said, “You know, you’re one of the smartest girls in our school. And you’re really cool, too.”

  She shot him a look and before she could think about what she should say, she let her default reaction come out: “Okay, Laz, what are you really up to?”

  He started to laugh and said, “See, you are smart.”

  Celia felt her feelings of hope deflate a little. She’d meant it as a joke. She hadn’t really thought he was complimenting her just because he was about to ask her for some kind of favor. She could see the library building a few blocks away and suddenly she wanted their walk to be over.

  “To be honest,” Laz said, “me and Raul were surprised you didn’t decide to run for representative yourself.”

  Celia sucked in her breath and held it, careful to keep her eyes on the library ahead and not look at Laz—what if he could see through her somehow and figure out her plan? Had she underestimated his powers of perception?

  “But since you’re not running,” he said, “I figured I could really use your help. Maybe you could be my campaign manager?”

  She started breathing again, relieved that Laz was just Laz. But then it hit her: Yes, clearly Laz saw her only as a friend. Oh no, she thought. She felt stupid for letting herself think that he could have seen her as anything else.

  But working with him on his campaign would give them the chance to get closer, and maybe he’d get to know her and start to like her as more than just a friend once he saw how many awesome ideas she had and how smart and funny and useful she could be. She imagined the two of them in her living room working on campaign posters, him complimenting her perfect handwriting, her mom inviting him to stay for a dinner of arroz con pollo. My favorite, he’d say; then when her mom left the room, he’d wink at her as he passed her a marker.

  It would have been the perfect opportunity for her to go from girl friend to girlfriend. But she was going to have to say no—and come up with some excuse that sounded realistic, too.

  “Celia? Earth to Celia? Hello? What do you think? Are you in or what?”

  His voice sounded far away, but suddenly, she was back on the sidewalk, the library right across the street. The reality of what she was about to say crashed down around her. She looked at Laz and saw his eyebrows wrinkle.

  “You’re not gonna say no, are you?”

  “I can’t help you, Laz. I’m really sorry.”

  “What?! Why not?” He sounded genuinely hurt. Celia thought then that if she hadn’t spent all of lunch convincing Mari to stay in the race, she might have been tempted to back out herself now. But she couldn’t do that, not after the promise she’d made to Mari.

  Laz wrinkled his eyebrows even more and said, “You’re not helping Mariela, are you?”

  Her heart started to beat harder. What if he figured out the plan now? Her saying no to helping him had definitely raised his suspicions—she knew how to read his eyebrows. She had to say no to Laz without giving away just how much “help” Mari would be getting from her. She needed to somehow distract him from this fact to keep him from asking too many questions.

  “Laz, I would love—and I mean love—to help you. But I can’t because I promised to help Mari a little with her campaign.”

  “Oh, come on,” Laz said, softly slugging her shoulder. “You can stop helping her and just work with me from now on. Don’t you think I have a good shot at winning?”

  “Actually, I do,” she said, and it was the truth. “I think you have a great shot.” That’s part of my problem, she thought to herself.

  “Then what’s the deal? Why can’t you quit Mari’s campaign and help me out? Me and you together, we’re a slam dunk!” he said.

  She tried to ignore the words me and you to keep from hyperventilating. Laz’s logic was right. She had to think of a better excuse, and fast.

  “I can’t help you because…because I think Mariela might like you, and I don’t want her to get mad at me or think I’m going behind her back.” What in the name of science am I saying? she thought. “If I start spending a lot of time with you, she might get jealous.”

  Am I crazy? I must be crazy.

  “Mariela likes me? Really?” Laz said in a surprised voice. A seagull squawked overhead and the sound was followed by at least another dozen seagulls squawking back. “Huh,” Laz said after a second.

  This was getting out of hand really fast, and their walk was almost over. Celia stopped on the corner in front of the library and turned to face him, slipping sligh
tly into Presentation Mode.

  “I said she might like you. A big Might. I don’t know for sure. You know how those drama kids can be—hard to read.”

  A tricked-out neon green Buick blasting a Spanish remix through its speakers rolled by them on the street. It stopped at the red light. The driver, a guy who seemed only barely old enough to have a license, looked through the window at the two of them standing on the corner for a second before facing the road again. He turned the volume up on his radio and his car started to rattle even more than before. Celia couldn’t wait to be inside the library, away from Laz and the Buick, smothered by the soothing silence.

  Once the light turned green and the Buick rolled away, Laz said, “Mari’s cute, but I don’t really know her that well.”

  “Seriously, do you not understand what might means? I’m only speculating about Mari having a crush on you.”

  “Well, I’m just sayin’ she’s cute. I mean, I’ve noticed her around school and in the plays and—”

  Celia couldn’t bear to hear anymore. She stomped away toward the library doors. He chased after her, saying, “Hey, what are you so mad about? I’m the one getting rejected here!”

  Celia spun back around. “I’m sorry I said anything about Mari. Please forget it, okay?”

  Laz nodded. They stood there listening to the passing traffic. Radios buzzed and engines growled.

  “And I really am sorry I can’t be your campaign manager, Laz. You have no idea how sorry.”

  “No, I get it. Mari’s your girl, I know.” He gave her a weak smile. He looked back over his shoulder toward the school. “I’m gonna go back and get my bike and then head home. You gonna wait for your mom?”

  Celia shrugged. “Yeah, she’ll be here soon.”

  “Cool.” He took a couple steps away from her and then said, “Are you talking to Mari later?” he asked.

  She felt her heart sink.

  “Maybe,” she said. “Probably.”

  “Tell her I said hi, okay?”

  “Will do,” she said. Will not, she thought.