by Nancy N. Rue
“Is that what you do when your friends dump you and you’re about to go make an idiot out of yourself yet again and you can’t stop any of it?” I said. “You talk about it?”
She nodded, bouncing the curls.
“Does it change anything?”
She didn’t have a chance to answer, as Ms. Dalloway came up to us, looking at me wearily over the tops of her half-glasses.
“You’re wanted in the office, Tyler,” she said.
“Do you know why?”
“I didn’t get a memo. I hope they make it quick, though. You’re out of class more than you’re in lately.”
I could’ve argued the statistical accuracy of that, but Ms. Dalloway had already dropped the pass on my desk and was shuffling away. I stood up and leaned over Valleri.
“Lunch?” I murmured.
A delicate line appeared between her eyebrows. “Are you eating with —”
I shook my head.
“Shall I tell the office you’re too busy to get down there?” Ms. Dalloway said.
“Going,” I said.
A quick mental survey on the way to the office revealed no reason why I should be called in, yet my stomach was still wreaking havoc on the Pop-Tart when I arrived. The secretary pointing me to Mr. Baumgarten’s inner sanctum didn’t help, but when I saw Mr. Zabaski on the black-leather-and-chrome seat, I calmed stomach acids, half-eaten breakfast, everything. They wanted to know what I knew, and they knew I’d tell them. It was one of the few benefits of being a smart, honest kid.
Mr. Baumgarten’s scalp was already pink, and he didn’t give me any version of his smile, patronizing or otherwise, as he leaned against his desk, arms folded. Mr. Zabaski’s face said what it always did: follow orders and nobody gets hurt.
“Are we here about the incident in the lab yesterday?” I said.
“We are,” Mr. Baumgarten said. “What do you know about it?”
“Not much, although from what I could tell, they put sodium into the water instead of aluminum. It all happened too fast for me to see much more than that.”
Mr. Baumgarten crumpled his eyebrows at Mr. Zabaski, who was nodding at me.
“That’s entirely possible, Bonning,” Mr. Z said, “except that there was no container of sodium anywhere near Payne and Barr’s lab station.”
“Really,” I said. I could hear my father telling me to stay quiet and let them talk.
“And why would there be? I set up only the chemicals that were supposed to be involved in the lab at all the stations myself.”
Ah. So he was the one who was going to take the fall for this. Totally unfair in my opinion.
“He always does that,” I said to Mr. Baumgarten. “If anybody messed up, it wasn’t Mr. Zabaski.” “Nobody’s suggesting it was.”
“Then who are you suggesting?” I said. We might as well get to the Yuri/Matthew theory and get it over with.
“Actually, Miss Bonning,” Mr. Baumgarten said, “we’re suggesting you.”
All I could do was stare at him as my mind tried to rearrange itself. Nothing fell into any kind of order — because there was none. This made zero sense.
“Me?” I said.
“Mr. Zabaski says you’re the brightest student in that class. You yourself just demonstrated your understanding of what makes things go boom.”
I didn’t like the sarcasm in his voice, or the chill going up my backbone.
“Be that as it may, sir,” I said, “I was here talking to you when the lab started. By the time I got back to class, it was already in progress.”
“And who set up that meeting with me?” he said. “It seems to me you initiated it. And if you recall, I cut it short. You’d have argued all afternoon if I had let you.”
“If you’ll check with your secretary, she’ll tell you that I told her I didn’t want our meeting to take all period. I told her I liked Chemistry.”
“You certainly covered your bases.”
“Excuse me?”
“If I could interject,” Mr. Zabaski said.
He looked at Mr. Baumgarten until he nodded. The scalp colored a shade deeper.
“Look,” Mr. Zabaski said. “I’m aware of the undercurrent of tension between your friends and those of, say, Egan Owens. That would naturally indicate that you might know something about the situation.”
“And I’ve told you everything I know. I’d like to go back to English.” I looked at Mr. Baumgarten. “I like that class too.”
“Did I not call you on your tone yesterday?” he said.
“I don’t know what tone to use when I’m suspected of something I had neither opportunity nor motive to commit.”
“No motive? What about prom queen?”
“Are you serious … sir?” I said. “You think I would try to burn someone’s face to eliminate the competition for prom queen?”
“You were pretty adamant about your cause in here yesterday.”
“Adamant, yes. Violent, no.”
My heart was slamming so hard I had to take in huge breaths to get the words out. If this was what blowing your cool felt like, I was almost there.
“As for opportunity …” Mr. Baumgarten jerked his chin at Mr. Zabaski, who looked at me soberly.
“When I tested the containers on the lab station,” Mr. Z said, “I discovered that the one that should have contained aluminum had traces of sodium in it. Someone evidently tampered with that container and made sure it went to Barr and Payne’s station. There are only three people in the class who would know what would happen if sodium was used instead of aluminum in the experiment. I’ve already squeezed Marseilles and Connor every way I know how, and I’m inclined to think they had no hand in it. I watch them like a hawk, and I haven’t trusted them in the lab except during class ever since the incident last semester. You’re a different story.” His eyes bored into mine. “You, I could trust.”
“And now?” I said.
“You tell me. You come in and study, do extra work, help me out from time to time.”
“And you seriously think I would do something like this?” “I don’t want to.”
“Then don’t. Unless you have solid evidence, you can’t charge me with this. And since you don’t — because there is none — I’d like to go back to class. Please.”
Mr. Baumgarten’s arms unfolded. “You really don’t know when to back off, do you?”
But Mr. Zabaski put his hand up to him, still looking at me. “She’s telling the truth,” he said. “She can be dismissed.”
Mr. Baumgarten’s entire head went scarlet, but I was already on my feet.
“I’ll just have your secretary sign my pass,” I said.
I tried to talk myself down on the way back to Ms. Dalloway’s room. Mr. Baumgarten wanted me to be guilty because he couldn’t make me quake in my Nikes. Mr. Zabaski didn’t want me to be guilty, but it would be a whole lot easier for him if I was. But I didn’t do it, so I had nothing to worry about …
Except for the fact that I still didn’t know who did, and whoever it was obviously wanted everybody to think it was the Fringe.
I stopped outside the classroom door, hand on the doorknob. Could it be that Deidre was actually right? That they were out to take us down? There was no way, unless they’d become chemists overnight, and I just wasn’t seeing that.
And did I need to? Did I need to figure it out at all? I wasn’t involved. Period. That’s what cool-headed, logical Tyler would say. But with my hand shaking on the doorknob, I wasn’t sure I was her anymore.
Squaring my shoulders, I pushed the door open. I had to be her if I was going to get through the next “challenge” the Ruling Class had thrown in front of me — namely, the photo session after lunch.
I walked straight to my seat in front of Valleri, and Ms. Dalloway’s gaze only trailed across me as she went on about The Red Badge of Courage to a dozing class. Good. I could use this time to get my head straight and read up on Stephen Crane later.
I took out my n
otebook to at least pretend I was writing down her every word about the protagonist’s rite of passage — which had nothing whatsoever to do with any of us because we didn’t have rites of passage anymore, unless you counted getting a driver’s license or becoming drunk out of your mind on prom night. When I opened the notebook, I found a folded slip of paper. Nobody ever wrote me a note. Matter of fact, now that we all had texting capability, nobody wrote anybody a note anymore. The way this day was going, I was almost afraid to open it. Only the determination not to let the Ruling Class get to me made me unfold it.
Lunch, it said in the kind of pretty handwriting only librarians wrote in anymore.
It was signed Valleri.
That actually got me through a whole period of Stephen Crane without being jerked back and forth between visions of myself being photographed next to Alyssa Hampton and images of being placed in handcuffs for attempted eyebrow singeing. Without Valleri’s promise to sort it all through, I’d have come out of there feeling like I’d been shell-shocked in the Civil War Crane droned on about.
The minute the bell rang, Valleri had me by the arm, pulling me out of Ms. Dalloway’s classroom.
“I’ll see you right after lunch, Tyler?” Ms. Dalloway said from her desk. “For the photo shoot?”
I paused at the doorway, Valleri still attached, and nodded.
“You are planning to change, I hope.”
I looked down at my sweatshirt.
“Oh, yes, ma’am,” Valleri said. “That’s where we’re going right now.”
“She doesn’t need a total makeover. Just — “ Ms. Dalloway ran her hand over the top of her head. “Lose the hood.” My mood plummeted even further.
“Is this why you’re so bummed today?” Valleri said when we were out in the hall.
“That’s part of it,” I said. “And it just got worse. I didn’t bring anything to change into.”
“I can do more than talk about that,” she said. “I have a couple of things in my locker.”
“Why?”
“Because sometimes I go straight from here to a church thing or something, so I change in the bathroom. You and I are about the same size.”
“Yeah,” I said, “but I’m not perky.”
She flinched.
“Not that that’s a bad thing,” I said. “It just isn’t me. Of course, at the moment, I don’t know what is, which is totally strange, since I usually do.” I stopped her at the end of the hall and waited for a bevy of girls to pass before I said, “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“Do I come across as, I don’t know, snarky or something? I mean, do I have a ‘tone'?”
Valleri looked at me so deeply I almost covered my eyes so she wouldn’t see too far. This moment had enough of the unknown in it already.
“No,” she said finally. “You come across as honest — as far as you know the truth to be, anyway.”
“What does that mean?” I said — but I closed my eyes and shook my head. “Never mind. I don’t even think I can wrap my mind around that right now.”
“I’m sorry —”
“No, it’s cool. I’m just freaking out because I hate to have my picture taken anyway. Throw in having to try to look like a beauty queen and I’m a nutcase. I never get this crazy about stuff.”
“You already are beautiful.” “And you are a really bad liar.”
“I’m serious.” Her eyes were, actually, pretty solemn. “In France they say every woman has her own beauty. She just has to discover what it is.”
“I don’t think I have that kind of time,” I said.
“Follow me,” she said.
Since I had no other options, I did. We made a stop at her locker and another in a restroom I didn’t even know existed, way down in the art wing. There was nobody in there, which gave Valleri room to spread out makeup brushes and blush and lip gloss in packages printed in French. She also hung up several wardrobe choices, all like nothing I’d seen on my shopping trip with Candace.
“You keep all this stuff in your locker?” I said.
“You just never know,” she said. “So is it okay if I —”
“Have at it,” I said.
While I watched in the mirror, Valleri gave me cheekbones I also didn’t know existed and found a curvy lip line I wasn’t aware of and coaxed my eyelids out of hiding.
“I know you’re not into anything fake,” she said as she worked. “This is all just to bring out what’s already there. Which is what your outfit should do for your body too.”
“So we’re going to accentuate gawky and awkward?” I said.
The tiny line appeared between her eyebrows again. “Is that how you see yourself?”
I gave a short laugh. “Actually, I don’t look at my physical self any more than I absolutely have to.”
“So how do you know what you are?”
“I never thought about it that way.”
“Don’t think about it,” Valleri said. “Just feel it.”
I gave a longer laugh. “If I have to ‘feel’ who I am, I’m never going to find me!”
“You don’t feel?”
“I’m just more of a thinker.”
“You felt that day I found you crying.”
I opened my mouth to argue — and closed it again.
“What are you feeling about the prom, for instance?”
“I think — “ “Feel.”
“I feel — uh — kind of angry, I guess? Like there’s an injustice and I have to correct it. I thought that was a thought, but if it’s a feeling I’d call it … conviction.”
“Passion, even?”
I gave the longest laugh yet, but Valleri didn’t smile. It was another one of those moments when she seemed years older under all that little-girl hair.
“Okay, somewhere between conviction and passion,” I said.
“Then I think you should wear the red top.”
I saw my eyes widen in the mirror. “I’ve never worn red before.”
“Have you ever been passionate before?” “Uh, no.”
“Then there you go.” She picked up the red silk blouse and draped it in front of me. I was suddenly somebody I’d never seen before.
“What do you think?” she said.
“I thought I wasn’t supposed to think,” I said.
“Then how do you feel?”
I watched a slow smile ease onto my face.
“I feel passionate,” I said.
Chapter Eight
Of course, feeling passionate and — okay, a little bit beautiful — in an obscure restroom, and carrying that into a library swarming with the Ruling Class were two entirely different things. For openers, I couldn’t take Valleri with me; she had to go to fourth block. Ms. Dalloway was there for the shoot, but she didn’t have time to do more than say, “Glad to see you changed.” She did actually give me a second look, but by then Egan Owens had edged up to me like coming too close was going to put him in danger of contracting leprosy, and I could feel the lip gloss and the blush and the passion-red top not mattering at all.
“Could I go first?” I said. “I really need to get to class.”
“Of course you do,” Alyssa said, without taking her eyes from the fingernails she was inspecting. I looked at my own chewed set. Valleri hadn’t had time to give me a manicure. Yikes — were our hands going to be in these pictures?
“Oh. Wow.”
I glanced back at Egan, who had his head pulled back and was staring at me.
“What?” I said.
“Nothing. You look … good.”
“Nice, Owens.”
That came from an almost familiar voice. Patrick Sykes slapped Egan playfully on the back of the head.
“What was that for?”
“For making it sound like she doesn’t always look good.”
“Well …” Alyssa said. She pulled her made-green-by-contact-lenses eyes up to me, and I saw them startle before she recovered herself. “Oh. You put on m
akeup. What a concept.”
“You should do that all the time,” Hayley said, her own eyes wide, though whether that was from surprise or the amount of mascara she was wearing, I couldn’t tell. I did notice that her eyebrows were completely intact.
“Y’know what?” Patrick said. “Let’s get started before we have to call in a surgeon to get everybody’s feet out of their mouths.”
The grin was in gear, and the eyes were dancing. This boy had charm down to a serious art form. He’d just kept me from grabbing the nearest Kleenex and smearing all the makeup off my face, and yet all three girls were looking at him as if he’d already crowned each one of them queen.
“We’ll take you first, Tyler,” Ms. Dalloway said. She held a camera that looked almost as complicated as the one Yuri carried around, and she sounded a little less fatigued than she did when she was anesthetizing us with naturalistic literature.
“We thought we’d have her leaning against the shelves there with the books as a background,” Egan said. He looked at Hayley and Joanna, who nodded like dashboard dogs.
“Why?” Patrick said.
I stopped en route to the book shelves and looked at him. Could we not just get this over with?
“Because … she’s smart?” Egan said.
“Everybody knows that.” Patrick shrugged. “Show them something they don’t know.”
“Like what?” Alyssa said.
“I don’t remember you being on the newspaper staff,” Ms. Dalloway said to her.
“I’m not.”
“Then why are you involved in this discussion?”
I wasn’t the only one who looked at Ms. Dalloway like she was an imposter. Alyssa made a face behind Ms. D’s back and folded her arms.
“Go on, Patrick,” Ms. Dalloway said.
“I’m just thinking we should give people something to think about when they vote. Y’know, change it up a little.”
“I like it,” Egan said.
“You do?” Hayley and Joanna said together, at exactly the same time, with precisely identical inflections.
He nodded, but uneasily.
“Sure he does,” Patrick said. “He’s like this natural expert on pageants. He doesn’t want to just do the same old, same old.”
“Okay,” Ms. Dalloway said. “Think outside the box, Egan.”