by Nancy N. Rue
“And that I can make more of a difference in a community with needs than I can in one that needs nothing.”
“That’s it,” she said. “Word for word.”
I looked at my father. “You haven’t changed your argument in a decade? Dad, that is sad.”
“The truth doesn’t change. Now, what about your campaign for more AP classes?”
“I’m presenting it at the student council meeting tomorrow,” I said. “I’m going to try to get student signatures on a petition —”
I stopped. Student council. Wonderful. Exquisite. All those kids I was hoping to get on board for more Advanced Placement classes were the same ones who’d nominated me for prom queen. The heat I thought had burned itself out returned to my neck. It was all I could do not to fan myself with the tablecloth.
My father, in the meantime, had already moved back to Sunny.
“How ‘bout you, baby?” he was saying. “What’s your challenge for tomorrow?”
How about Get dressed?
“I’m going to try to find a job,” Sunny said. “I need to save some money while I try to figure out what to do with the rest of my life.”
If Dad were prone to squealing, I think he would have done it then. As it was, he squeezed Sunny’s hand and looked at her like she’d just announced she was running for president.
“You want me to take you to the university?” he said. “I can introduce you —”
“No, thanks,” Sunny said. “I don’t want you to arrange anything for me.”
Okay, so she didn’t know him as well as I did. My father was an administrator at the university in Albany, but he always made it clear to me that I was going to have to make my own mark on the world just the way he had to. I felt a little smug.
“It isn’t ‘arranging’ if I just talk to a few people,” Dad said. Okay, so much for smug.
But Sunny shook her head and put down the fork that, as far as I could tell, she hadn’t really used. “I’m not even sure I want to teach on the college level anymore, I told you that. It just seems pointless to me — “ She pressed her hands on the edge of the table and pushed her chair back. “You know what — I’m exhausted. Good dinner, Rowena,” she said to Mom. “But I need to lie down.”
“You go ahead, baby,” Dad said.
Mom shot him a look and he shot one back, not something I saw often between the Couple of the Century. Seriously — I almost never saw my parents disagree over anything. As Sunny left the table, they were still bulleting each other with their eyes, and I felt resentment nettling at the back of my neck.
“I’ve got homework,” I said. “Excuse me?”
Nobody objected when I slipped out of the dining room.
I retreated upstairs to the window seat in my bedroom. It was the only thing I really liked about the hundred-year-old house my parents bought when we moved from Long Island to Castle Heights. Dad always told people it had “character.” It was a character all right — with a furnace that groaned like a dying elephant and pipes that complained every time anybody flushed a toilet and doors that swelled and shrank with the weather, so that in summer I could barely close mine and in winter it rattled with every gust of wind. I guess if you were the romantic, poetic type it would be a cool place to live. I was neither.
But the wide seat, padded by Mom and me in black-and-white stripes, curved into the bay window in my room and made a great place to sit and analyze. I conquered geometry on that seat. Analyzed Emily Dickinson and decided she was agoraphobic. Figured out what I believed about God, and what I didn’t. Tonight, I was going to sort through the prom queen joke and put it to an end. Period. How “challenging” could it be, considering who I was dealing with?
I arranged the black plaid, the white solid, and the black-and-white-striped pillows behind me on one end of the seat and tossed the pink one onto the floor. Mom had thrown that in to be cute. I kind of loved that about her — the way she knew just when to push my buttons so, as she put it, I didn’t take myself too seriously. The pink pillow. The amusing notes in my lunch bag. The random suggestion that I learn to make an angel food cake or try on a pair of stilettos. It worked. My IQ may have been the only thing I had going for me, but because of her, I didn’t really think it made me all that.
I squirmed against the pillow pile. I never thought it made me a laughingstock either, until today. What was with all the blushing and feeling like a pariah all of a sudden? I hadn’t felt that here since the first day when I saw how the school was structured and how I wasn’t going to find a place in it, so why try?
I might have made an attempt in a public school in Albany, if my parents had chosen to live there, which would have made more sense than Dad’s thirty-minute commute every day. But he and Mom wanted a small community, and they wanted to live close to Dad’s cousin, Lana Ellis, and her kids, just in case they needed help. Which they never did. And if Candace and Kenny ever did want for anything, they sure wouldn’t come to me. Even at Christmas they acted like I was something out of the Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum, because I got tickets to hear the New York Philharmonic and thought it was the best gift ever. Kenny actually wanted to know if Phil Harmonic was an old Motown singer.
So no, I didn’t fit in here and it had never mattered before today. It still didn’t. It just mattered that it mattered. And that had to stop.
I pulled a legal pad and a sharpened pencil out from under the seat cushion and made two columns. I headed one “what bothers me” and the other one “why it shouldn’t.” I didn’t get further than people actually organized my humiliation when my cell phone rang. It was Deidre.
“What are you doing?” she said.
It was what she always said instead of “hi,” but I covered the pad as if she could see what I was doing. Fortunately she didn’t wait for an answer.
“Get on your computer,” she said.
“Why?” I said.
“Because you need to see something. Go to Facebook.”
Between the verve in her usually I-could-care-less voice and the fact that she knew I felt the same way about Facebook as I did about poison ivy, I was immediately suspicious.
“Not until you tell me why,” I said.
Deidre sighed through the phone as only the people in her family can sigh. Her mother could blow out an entire cake full of birthday candles with one.
“Okay — the prom committee has its own Facebook page.”
“And I care about this because …”
“Because right now it’s all about you, and you need to get on there and see what you’re dealing with.” “I’m not dealing with it,” I said.
“Even if they’re saying —
“ “I don’t care what they’re saying.”
“Well, whatever,” Deidre said. “If it was me, I’d want to know.”
“Why?” I said.
“So I could come back at them.” She cackled. “I want to see you shut them down. I mean, seriously, they’ve got absolutely no game when it comes to debating you. Don’t you want to watch them fall all over themselves?”
“Not especially,” I said. What I really wanted was for the whole thing to die. At that moment I decided that was my strategy: to let “Tyler Bonning for Prom Queen” shrivel up from neglect. It might be my most challenging “challenge” yet: to just keep my mouth shut.
But that was what I was going to do.
Chapter Three
The student council meeting was during third block, which meant I had to take my pass to leave class to my English teacher, Ms. Dalloway. She seemed to like me well enough, because I was the only high school student she’d ever had who knew that her name was the same as a character in a novel by Virginia Woolf. Of course, she liked me in the same weary way she did everything else, from calling the roll to, at the moment, checking French Girl into our class. When I walked up, Ms. Dalloway was looking at the form like she was being asked to push toothpaste back into a tube.
“Oh, hi,” I said to French Gi
rl. “Are you in here now?”
She nodded her head of massive curls. “They put me in a regular class but the teacher said it would be more challenging for me in here.”
That seemed to be everybody’s favorite word lately. Ms. Dalloway’s Junior Honors English was definitely more demanding than Honors History, mostly because she gave pop quizzes and made us write critical essays. The Ruling Class was always complaining about those like they were lethal injections.
“Do you pronounce this Valerie?” Ms. Dalloway said. “Even though it’s spelled V-a-l-l-e-r-i?”
“Yes, ma’am,” French Girl said. “My mother’s creative.”
“I bet you can never find it on a keychain.”
“That’s okay. I don’t drive anyway.”
“Neither do I,” I said. “We might be the only two people in the junior class who don’t.”
“Here you go.” Ms. Dalloway waved the form in Valleri’s direction. “Sit wherever you can find a seat.”
Yeah, making a seating chart was way too much of an effort.
“Where do you sit?” Valleri said.
“Me?” I said.
“Yeah.”
I was oddly stunned. “Uh, third row over — there’s actually an empty seat behind me. But I’m not in here today. I’m going to a student council meeting.” I rolled my eyes. “I think the only reason anybody’s in it is so they can get out of their third-block class every other week. No offense, Ms. Dalloway.”
She just grunted at me. It must also be too much trouble to get offended.
“I have to take this form back to the office,” Valleri said to her.
“Do it,” Ms. D said.
“I’ll walk with you,” I said.
Valleri smiled, the way I guess we did back in kindergarten when somebody said, “Play with me on the playground.” There was something so innocent about her. It was sad to think what was going to happen to that after a week here.
“So — are you in it so you can get out of class?” she said as we headed toward the office, which was just down the hall from the library, where the council met.
“What? Student council? No. I’m just making a presentation. It is so not my thing.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s lame, in my opinion. As far as I can tell they do things like plan the best ways to make an idiot out of yourself during homecoming week. Which is too bad, because the kind of personal power those kids have? They could do a lot if they gave a flip about anything significant.”
“So you’re saying it could be effective if there was a good enough cause,” Valleri said.
I stopped in front of the trophy case and gave her a closer look. Had she actually just used the word effective in a sentence?
“Yeah,” I said.
She pointed to the folder in my hand. “Then maybe your cause will be the one.”
“Maybe,” I said.
She hitched her shoulders and smiled and bounced her curls into the office. What a strange child. Talked like an adult and thought like a ten-year-old who didn’t know yet that the world wasn’t fair.
She kind of made me feel like I might be the one who had it wrong.
A feeling which disappeared the minute I walked into the library and half the people at the round tables turned to the other half and whispered like the show was about to begin. Mr. Linkhart, the advisor, looked at me blankly as I handed him my pass.
“You’re not on the council,” he said. “No, she’s on the agenda.”
Patrick — that was what Matthew said his name was, right? — slid a piece of paper across Mr. Linkhart’s table and smiled up at me. He must grin all the time, seeing how the last time we’d talked I insulted him right to his face. Either that, or he didn’t know I insulted him. There was always that possibility.
“Why don’t we have her go first so she can get back to class?” Mr. Linkhart said, crumpling his eyebrows over the agenda.
I didn’t tell him I’d be staying to pass around a petition after my presentation. He was already going for a brown paper towel, his backup whenever the hanky lost its ability to absorb.
Patrick banged a gavel on the table and most people got themselves to order. Especially the girls. You’d have thought he was Robert Pattinson the way they looked up at him. I resisted the urge to roll my eyes.
“We’re going to start with new business today,” he said.
A hand shot up. Alyssa Hampton.
“Lyss?” he said.
“Is the prom committee still going to make its report?” Her eyes glanced over me, leaving me feeling like I’d just been dusted with eye shadow.
“Yeah,” he said. “We’ll cover everything after Tyler speaks.”
The whole room giggled-snickered-whispered. I fought off the burn. This was about AP, not the stupid prom. I had to stay focused on that.
“Go for it,” Patrick said to me.
Taking in my perfected prespeech confident breath, I went to the podium, folder in hand, and made eye contact with my audience. Few of them could look back. The ones who did appeared to be about to cry, they were trying so hard not to laugh. Give it a minute, Tyler, I told myself. They’ll get that this is serious.
“You may not be aware of it,” I said, “because I wasn’t until I did the research, but only thirty percent of high school students take any Advanced Placement courses at all. And yet major studies indicate that good grades on AP tests significantly increase the chances of earning college degrees. In today’s economy, in order to compete for the shrinking number of good jobs, we need to have those degrees.”
I nodded at them, prompting them to nod with me. Some were actually nodding — off to sleep. Others’ eyes were turning to glass. That was okay. I hadn’t gotten to my punch yet.
“Statistics like these have led many public schools in disadvantaged neighborhoods to look for ways to increase the number of AP classes they offer. Disadvantaged neighborhoods,” I said, eyebrows reaching for my hairline. “Alyssa, Hayley, Egan — I’m sure you’ll agree that you are not disadvantaged. “
“Ya think?” Alyssa said.
She curled her lip as if I’d just suggested she had an average wardrobe. That was exactly the reaction I was going for. Encouraged, I moved on.
“And yet we have only four — four — AP classes in our current curriculum. The best schools in this country have as many as sixteen.”
I waited for that to sink in. A few more eyelids slammed shut.
“I propose that we, the voice of Castle Heights High School, speak out for enough Advanced Placement courses here to give us the same college-graduation rates enjoyed by students from the country’s wealthiest private schools and most selective public schools.”
Egan raised his hand. He was a junior who painted his face in Castle Heights’ purple and white for basketball games and had run the homecoming queen thing two years in a row. I always imagined him on the cover of GQ someday. Either that or selling cars on TV.
“I’m already going to SUNY in Albany. Why do I need to bust my tail in high school when I’m, like, already accepted?”
“You’ve been accepted as a junior?” I said.
“No.” He shrugged and grinned at Joanna and Hayley, who were, of course, on either side of him. “But I know people.”
“You wouldn’t rather have a chance at Harvard or Yale or Princeton?” I said.
“Do they have cute guys there?” Hayley said.
Alyssa leaned across the table. “They have rich guys there.”
“Well, there you go,” I said dryly.
“You need to wrap this up,” Mr. Linkhart said.
Wrap it up? I’d barely gotten started.
I pressed my hands into the podium. “All I’m saying is that we can be more than we are. We don’t have to settle for a mediocre education when we could have a great one —”
“Are you implying that the schooling you’re getting here is ‘mediocre’?” Mr. Linkhart stood up, simultaneously going
after his brow with the already soaking-wet paper towel. “Because if you are, I take exception to that.”
A couple of the people who had dozed off woke up as other people poked them and nodded their heads toward Mr. Linkhart and me. I had to take advantage of that.
“What if you had a more challenging class to teach?” I said to him. “What if your students were actually motivated because they were earning college credit for their work?” I craned my neck toward him. “Wouldn’t you enjoy that?”
He laughed — but it didn’t sound like he was relishing the prospect. He was laughing at me.
“Little darlin’,” he said, “where do you think you’re gon’ get all these teachers? Because if we add Advanced Placement courses, we have to subtract some of the regular classes that most of the students here need to take.”
“So what you’re saying is that the students here aren’t smart enough for college.” I cast my gaze around the library, eyes deliberately wide. But my “do you believe what he’s saying about you?” was met with glazed-over stares. It was like talking to a box of Krispy Kreme donuts.
“You’re bordering on insubordinate,” Mr. Linkhart said. “I think that’s enough for this item on the agenda.”
“I was just expressing my —”
“Let’s move on to other business, Patrick.”
Alyssa’s hand went straight up, but I turned to Patrick too. “I still need to pass around the petition.”
“You don’t know when to stop, do you?” Mr. Linkhart said.
He wheezed, reminiscent of the radiators in my house, and waved me on as he groaned into his chair. I took the petition and a pen to the first table, mind reeling. If this had been a discussion between my dad and me, Dad would be salivating at this point — not shutting me down. No wonder these kids were so brain-dead.
“All you have to do,” I said, “is sign this if you think you deserve the opportunity to pursue a higher level of education and, subsequently, a better quality of life.”
“Are you speaking English?” somebody said.