Class Favorite

by Taylor Morris

  “I guess,” I said, considering that. “I just feel like everyone is watching me when I don’t want them to, and no one is looking when I do. That sounds dumb, I guess.” I took a last scoop of potatoes, then dropped my fork on the plate with a decisive plunk.

  “Oh, honey,” he said, pushing his finished plate forward and leaning his elbows on the table. Mom hated it when we did that, even if we were finished eating. “No one is watching you.”

  “Humph,” was all I managed.

  The dessert cart lady came rolling up to our table. “Y’all want something here?” She was old and looked way past retirement, and I wondered if she had to work at Luby’s or if she just liked being there. I wondered if, back when she was in high school, fifty years ago, she could have ever guessed that this would be her life. Was she disappointed now, or happy?

  “Want some pecan pie, baby?” Dad asked.

  I rubbed my hand across my belly. “No thanks. I’m full,” I said, even though pecan is my all-time favorite. I’d worked myself up so much that my stomach was in knots.

  “No, thank you,” Dad said to the lady. She smiled and rolled away. “We better get you home before your momma sends out an Amber Alert on you.”

  He reached over and patted me twice on my thigh—I could feel it jiggle even as I tried to flex it—and smiled at me.

  As we drove back past Jefferson Ford, I thought of what I might become if only I could de-geekify myself. I asked Dad, “So whatever happened to the Valentine King? He marry some hottie and grow up to be rich and enormously happy?”

  Dad smiled, his wrist resting on the steering wheel, gently guiding the car. “He did marry a hottie, yes. Grew up to be pretty dern happy. In high school, grown up is a long ways off, it seems. When it catches up with you, you know that those silly awards in school meant nothing.” He cocked his head and asked, “Do I still look like a Valentine King to you?”

  My dad. Who’d’ve thunk it? I could never imagine him as the catch of the county or whatever he was called back in the day, but he was certainly sweet enough. He hadn’t grown up rich at all, either. Gram and Gramps still had chickens and pigs and stuff when Dad was growing up, he’d once told me. It sort of shot my theory of the breeding aspect of things.

  When we pulled into the driveway, Mom’s car was there, and Elisabeth’s bedroom light was on. My belly was full, and my mind was feeling happy and relaxed again. Time with Dad always did that to me.

  “Before you go inside, there’s something I want to give you,” he said, reaching over to the glove compartment. He held his fist over my hand and said, “Well, here you go.” I opened my hand and in plopped a dusty red shotgun shell. “Remember how you used to love picking these things up? I grabbed one the other day, thought you might like to hold on to it again.”

  I squeezed the empty shell in my hand, feeling the ridges along the sides. In that moment, I think I knew that my dad was sad about the past. Not his high school past, but maybe the time with my mom. Holding the shell in my hand, I realized that things had been pretty easy. And I knew, without realizing, that from here on out, nothing would ever be that easy again.

  10

  Are Your Parents Totally Unfair or Are You Totally Unreasonable?

  Just as you’re heading out the door to meet Mara and Eileen at the movies, your mother stops you and says you have to do the dishes before you leave. How do you react?

  a) By refusing to do them until you get home—even if it means groundation

  b) By asking your mother if you could please do them as soon as you get home

  c) By doing them right away, even though that means missing the previews—your favorite part of any movie

  When I said nothing would be easy, I didn’t mean that things would get worse before Dad could even back out of the driveway. As I walked through the squeak-less door, I saw Mom, standing front and center in her boxy blue suit and navy pumps, fists on hips.

  “Young lady, just where have you been?”

  I rubbed my thumb over the red shell squeezed tight in my fist. “Dad was here. He took me to Luby’s.”

  “In this house,” she began through gritted teeth, “we ask permission before we go somewhere. Next time your father takes you out, you either call me or leave me a note. Understand?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She stepped closer to me, hands still propped up on her hips like she was about to order me to drop and give her twenty. “Anything else you want to tell me about?”

  I held on to the dim hope that she didn’t know about my leaving school early without permission. “No, ma’am.”

  Mom clenched her jaw before saying, “I’m going to ask you one more time. Is there anything else you want to tell me about?”

  I knew this tactic, but in the moment, I was too panicked. Mom hated lying more than back-talking or yelling. Still, I clung to desperate hope—it felt like that was all I had left. So I shook my head and said, “No, ma’am.”

  She rolled her lips in on each other and sucked in air through her nose, nodding her head knowingly. “Two weeks,” she announced, propping two fingers up in a gesture that definitely didn’t mean “peace.” “One class equals one week. And for the lying, that’ll get you another.”

  Apparently the school keeps careful track of these things and had called Mom as soon as they got word I wasn’t there. I could just hear Mrs. Nicholson saying to Mom, “We just wanted to make sure everything was okay.” Like she was doing me a personal favor.

  “But Mom, next week is spring break. You already said I could go skiing with Kirstie!”

  “Lower your voice,” she snapped. “You should have thought about that just now when you told me a bold-faced lie and decided to take an early dismissal from school. Do I look stupid to you?”

  “But they’re expecting me,” I cried. She couldn’t take this away from me—especially after what had been done to my locker, it was the only thing keeping me from going completely over the edge. I was the biggest laughingstock of Bowie Junior High—I needed this trip to make people see me as a sophisticated traveler with stories that would help erase what had happened that day.

  “Listen to me, young lady. You’ve had a poor attitude for weeks now. Now I’m sorry about the ski trip, but allowing you to go at this point is like rewarding you for your bad behavior.” Mom took a deep breath and slowly released it. “Sara, honey, I don’t know what’s going on with you lately, but whatever it is I want you to know you can talk to me about it—”

  “I want to go to Aspen!”

  “Forget it,” she said with a sweep of her hands. “Until you can stop acting like a brat, we’re not discussing this any further.”

  Unspeakably pissed, I turned on my heel and headed to the tiny comfort of my room. As I slammed my bedroom door shut, the framed picture of me and Arlene on the Judge Roy Bean ride at Six Flags rattled on the wall. I folded my arms across my chest, tears welling up in my eyes as I stared at the photo. I stuck my tongue out, then flipped it off. I knew it was childish, but I didn’t care. Thanks to Arlene, my life was an official nightmare.

  I wiped my face, picked up my phone, and dialed.

  “Hey,” I said when Kirstie answered her phone. “It’s Sara.”

  “Hey, girl. What’s up? I was just about to call you.”

  “Yeah? Well, I’ve got some bad news.” I could hear a TV in the background, something with laughing and music. I swallowed before going on. “I skipped last period, and my mom found out. She totally freaked and grounded me for the entire spring break. Aspen is out.”

  “Oh, my God, please don’t tell me this!” Kirstie said. “I was going to call you and tell you that Jason is going to be there too. The same hotel and everything.”

  “Are you kidding me?” I lurched to the edge of my bed. Talk about the opportunity of a lifetime—the chance to be alone with Jason, in another state no less, surrounded by fresh air and mountains, snowflakes dusting my cheeks that could be easily kissed away. Prime Jason ti
me gone, like a cold snap of the Rocky Mountain wind.

  “I feel horrible,” Kirstie said. “He told me when he walked me to my class after your locker. I wanted to do a little fact-finding to help you with your Class Favorite thing, so I started chatting and we ended up talking about spring break and what we were doing . . . oh, Sara. This is awful! And after the day you had.”

  “Tell me about it,” I said. I thought that once you hit rock bottom, things could only get better. I’d been hitting a new rock bottom for weeks now.

  “I’m coming!” Kirstie hollered away from the phone. “Listen, I gotta get going. Mom’s taking me shopping for some new snowboarding pants. Oh,” she said. “Am I so insensitive for telling you that? Should I have not said anything?”

  “No, it’s fine,” I told her, even though knowing about it only made me feel worse.

  After I hung up the phone, I tried to convince myself that this was my final rock bottom. I couldn’t get any lower than this. Right?

  With less than two months to go until people were nominated for Class Favorite (it happened a few weeks before the end of school so they could get the pictures in the yearbook), I realized I hadn’t been taking my mission of stepping out of loserville and into Class Favorite-ville seriously enough. I was tired of being laughed at, making a fool of myself and being a general freak at Bowie Junior High, so this is what I did:

  First, I wallowed. I wallowed, and then I fumed. Life was not fair. I had been a good person up to this point in my life. I never cheated on tests, and I never stole so much as a piece of Brach’s candy from the grocery store. I didn’t smoke or drink. I once called the city of Ladel to get them to come scrape a cat off the road, not because it grossed me out but because I didn’t want some kid to drive by with his parents and see his once-Fluffy turned to a pancake. I thought of others. I tried to be good. And now, this is where it’d gotten me: stuck home during spring break while Jason, The Boy Who Could Have Been, went skiing without me, the girl who might have been his Only. If I had been able to go to Aspen, not only would Jason have become smitten with me, but when we came back to school, me on his arm like Hollywood royalty, I could definitely have been in the running for a Class Favorite nomination. I mean, who else could go from feminine products–covered locker to Girlfriend of a God in two weeks flat? For now, there was just one person standing in my way of my dreams becoming reality: Mom. She was the last person I wanted to talk to at that moment, considering she was responsible for keeping me from my goals. Rage had me in its tight clutches, our fight and my grounding still fresh, open wounds. But this was the biggest battle of my life, and I had to suck down any pride I had left and go begging.

  Beg doesn’t seem sufficient enough a word to describe how I asked Mom if I could go to Aspen, despite being grounded. I pleaded with her. I even beseeched and implored. I’m talking on-my-knees, hands-clasped-to-my-chest, weepy-eyes pleading—the kind of begging that Mary did for Jesus. It was a Nicole Kidman kind of performance—a thing of beauty.

  I followed her into the kitchen and watched her drag a chair to the center of the linoleum, right beneath the frosted glass–covered light. “Mom, listen. Please. You can ground me for two whole months when I get back. I’ll do anything. I’ll cook dinner for a month. I’ll do the dishes for two!”

  “Sara, honey, I’m sorry. But when I say no, I mean no.” She did look sympathetic as she stepped up on the chair and unscrewed the cover, then stepped down to put the light cover on the counter. “I certainly don’t condone truancy, and you know how I feel about lying. That’s just something I can’t stand for. No, sir.” She screwed in the new lightbulb and looked happily at the fresh, bright light.

  Couldn’t she understand how important this was? Didn’t she have friends, a life when she was my age? To make things worse, I had this nagging worry that Kirstie and Jason would hook up in Aspen. It’s possible I was just being paranoid, but I thought about how she had pulled him away from me after the locker incident. If they came back as a couple, I’d die—probably just after watching them being nominated eighth-grade Class Favorites. I couldn’t let that happen. Losing the trip to Aspen felt like losing all hope.

  I decided to tell my mom about my locker not just as a way to score some sympathy, but because I wanted her to know that there were real reasons for the way I’d been acting. “Things have been pretty bad at school lately. Arlene and I aren’t talking. And then . . . well, someone did something to my locker. Someone put a bunch of . . . female stuff on it.”

  “Did you tell the principal?”

  I looked at her as she walked to the sink to wash her hands. She looked over her shoulder at me, waiting. “Mom, are you listening? I said someone put some things on my locker. Some woman things.”

  “Sara, if something’s going on at school, you should talk to your principal about it. Defacing school property is a crime.” She dried her hands on a clean towel, then dropped it on the counter. I couldn’t believe she didn’t get anything I’d been saying. Just a month ago she was paying too much attention to me—now she wasn’t even listening.

  “Mom, someone put a bunch of tampons on my locker—the outside of my locker.” Suddenly I didn’t have to try to force the tears—they came freely and fast. “And the whole school saw it. Do you know why someone did this to my locker? Because everyone knows about the period roses that you humiliated me with. The worst part is my own best friend did it to me. Now the only person who will talk to me is Kirstie, and you won’t let me do even that. I just want to get out of here—can’t you understand?” I turned on my heel and ran to my room, but careful not to slam my door—God forbid she tacks on another two weeks of groundation.

  I did a belly flop onto my bed, buried my face in my pillow, and cried. Mom came to my door and knocked softly, gently calling my name. I didn’t answer, and she left me alone. I could tell by the tone of her voice she was sorry, but I didn’t care—she should feel bad.

  I knew crying wasn’t going to get me anywhere. If I wanted to make changes in my life, I would have to make them myself—I couldn’t rely on Kirstie to take me to Aspen or on my mom to let me go. Sitting around and waiting for my name to magically appear on the Class Favorite ballot wouldn’t work. It was all on my shoulders, and I had to figure a way to make things right. After too much time wasted, I got down to work.

  With the theme music to Rocky playing in my head, I sprang out of bed and gathered up all my magazines, old and new, even the ones under my bed from almost a year ago. I got my Class Favorite Qualities list out of my messenger bag and smoothed it on my desk. I pulled my yearbooks from the last two years off my bookshelf. I opened up my spiral notebook, the magazines and yearbooks, and spread them all before me on the carpet.

  I got a pair of scissors and some blank paper, and started flipping through the magazines. I cut out articles like “Love Your Beautiful Self . . . Now!” for advice on confidence and ones titled “Find Your Foxy Physique in Five Fast Fitness Fixes” for help on my outward appearance. Then I went to the back of the magazines, where I knew all the fashion pages were, and cut out looks and outfits I thought I needed. I cut out pictures of Haden Prescott from the tabloids and taped them to my wall. I had one picture of her at the Oscars, and another shot of her from Demon’s Lover. I pasted them side-by-side to keep reminding myself that anything was possible.

  In addition to all the qualities on the Class Favorite list I had made with Kirstie, I knew there was one thing I needed to accomplish: I had to get them to come to me. I could talk to all the popular people I wanted—and I intended to approach them often—but they’d never see me as worthy until they actually liked me. Once they started talking to me in the halls, calling me on the phone and inviting me to their parties, I’d know I’d made it. So, I decided I needed to concentrate on three things: I had to look good, act confident, and be more social. These were the basics of any nominee, I realized—both Academy Award and Class Favorite. You had to put yourself out there and make people notic
e you. You had to charm them. And I intended to do just that.

  Next, while Mom was at the grocery store, I took my yearbooks to Jim’s Grocery, a small convenience store near our house, and made copies of pages with former Class Favorite nominees and winners, then pasted their pictures above my desk. I wrote below them certain vitals:

  ROSEMARY VICKERS

  HAIR: THICK; MAKEUP: MINIMAL; CLOTHES: CHIC;

  DEMEANOR: COMPOSED

  DATING HISTORY: ERIC GREENE (ABOUT 4 MONTHS), JEREMY DAHL (TWO MONTHS?)

  NICE?: ALWAYS!

  FRIENDS: TONS! WHO DOESN’T LIKE HER?!

  HOTNESS: 9.5

  X FACTOR: SHE’S UNDERSTATED? (ACK!)

  Then, after pasting pictures of great outfits from magazines onto blank pages and taping them next to the CF photos, I went to my closet and dumped just about everything onto my bed, shoes onto the floor. I picked through salvageable items, and put the rest into a huge Goodwill pile.

  I stood back and looked at the mess I had made, then I inspected myself in the mirror: my hair (straight, thin, dirt brown, and a boring, nonexistent cut); my clothes (jeans with a denim shirt—could I be any more generic?); my body (okay for now, but was my belly starting to stick out too much?). I shook my head at my reflection, disappointed. I thought about the kinds of girls who could get boyfriends in a heartbeat: Rosemary, with her thick, wavy hair the color of exotic fruit; Kayla, her perfect little body and so-confident attitude. I looked at the Class Favorite pictures and stats I had made: grades, beauty, friends. Glancing at myself in the mirror again, I noticed that my arms looked a little flabby. I quickly knelt down to the floor and did eight pushups, the most I could do. I stood up, looked at my reflection again, and sighed.