by Brodi Ashton
I’d had a job ever since my first paper route at age twelve. By the time I was sixteen, I’d earned just enough to buy a ten-year-old Toyota Corolla.
“I promise,” I said. “I won’t change one bit.”
We stood there awkwardly for a moment. I wasn’t sure where to go next, but Charlotte pulled me over to a laptop in the corner.
“I think we need a little bit of Post-Anon,” she said.
Post-Anon was our guilty pleasure. It was a website full of postcards that people sent in anonymously, revealing their deepest, darkest secrets. Things they would never dare tell anyone else but had to say somewhere.
Light things like:
I rationalize my Fig Newton binges because they are vegetarian.
And darker things like:
I fear something horrible happened to me as a child that I’ve blocked out and that my parents keep from me.
And:
I love you more than anyone I’ve ever known, but I still wish I’d never met you.
We always said someday we would send in a secret, but not until we had a really good one. Maybe I’d find one at Chiswick.
That Saturday, my gramma Weeza invited me over for coffee to celebrate. We sat in her tiny kitchen as she poured fresh brew into a mug in front of me and another one for her. She put a few drops of cream in the coffee, then added one . . . two . . . three spoonfuls of sugar.
“When,” I said, putting my hand out.
“Sorry, is that too much sugar? That’s the Danish in me.”
She always said that. Her own grandma came to America from Denmark in the late 1800s, and if there’s one thing those Danes like, it’s their sugar. Either that or Gramma Weeza just liked it and wanted to blame her addiction on an entire nation.
“How’s the plumber?” I said. Grandma had been seeing a plumber for a few months now, and by “seeing,” I mean they bowled in the same league two nights a week.
“Oh, he’s seasoned but sturdy,” she said. “And if my pipes ever get clogged . . . Know what I mean?” She did this exaggerated wink.
“Ugh, Gramma.”
“Well, dear, just because we’re old doesn’t mean we don’t have pipes.”
“Gramma!” I said, squeezing my eyes shut. “I prefer to picture you bowling. Not . . . cleaning each other’s pipes.”
“All right, have it your way. We’ll talk about bowling.” She grinned mischievously. “And I’ll tell you, he can sure knock down my pins.”
“Gram! How do you make even bowling sound dirty?”
“It’s a talent, dear.” Gramma refreshed my coffee and added another spoonful of sugar. “Now tell me, what have you been up to?”
I shrugged. “The usual. Reporting on stuff. Uncovering truths. You would not believe how the lunch ladies handle mayonnaise.”
“I’m referring to life outside the paper.”
“Is there . . . ? Life . . . outside . . . ,” I joked.
She laughed.
“I’m all for fun, but I’m not going to do anything to mess up my chance at college.”
“I know, dear. I’ve heard.”
That night, as I was watching the evening news, I made a chart documenting every time the anchors dropped the “to be” verb. It happens when they try to sensationalize a headline, like “DC Residents Waking Up to Icy Roads Today,” or “Government Employees Feeling the Pinch.” They said them as if they were complete sentences. But they weren’t, because there was no “are.”
It was a new trend in reporting, and I didn’t like what it was doing to the English language and the rules of basic grammar.
When the news was over, I got a text from Charlotte.
Charlotte: Male anchor, 22 drops. Female anchor, 17. Because girls are awesome.
Me: Much awesomer than boys.
Monday morning, I reached into my closet and took out my blue cardigan, then threw it on the floor. Too dowdy. I flung out the floral shirt I’d modified from the Salvation Army. Too obvious. I appraised the green skirt that I’d updated from a donation from Gramma Weeza. . . . I threw it over my shoulder.
“Hey!” Michael’s voice came from behind me.
I turned to see the green skirt on top of Michael’s head.
“Sorry, bud.”
“Why are you throwing green clothes?” Michael asked, as if he was personally offended for the color green.
“I’m just trying to go through my closet.” I settled on a red sweater and a gray T-shirt. I assessed the look in my mirror.
“This’ll have to do,” I muttered.
“It will have to do what?” Michael said.
“My outfit, bud.”
“What will it have to do?”
“It will have to do . . . fine.”
He shrugged and walked away.
Chiswick Academy wasn’t a very far drive. I lived in Arlington, Virginia, and Chiswick was in DC, which basically meant it was across the Potomac River. But when the school came into view, I thought I’d entered the nineteenth century. It looked like a Southern plantation out of Gone with the Wind. I followed the other cars up Cathedral Avenue and pulled into a cement roundabout, my Toyota sticking out among the dozens of long black sedans. Several of them were limousines with colorful flags sticking upright above the headlights.
The parking lot was only about a quarter full. At my old school, I had to arrive early to get a good spot, but at Chiswick, most students clearly had drivers. I was probably parked by the faculty and any other scholarship students who’d bought their own junky cars.
I stared at the students milling about in front of the main doors. They looked . . . different. I couldn’t exactly explain why; but something I couldn’t pinpoint made them seem more sophisticated. Their clothes were sleek. Their hairstyles seemed about two trends ahead of those at Clarendon. It all made them seem exotic. Older.
I glanced down at my red cowboy boots, and really noticed for the first time the cracks showing near the toes and around the ankles. Tiny flecks of red dye were peeling off the sides. I might as well have been wearing a billboard that said, Outsider here. Do not engage.
But really, what was the point of dressing nicely? My clothing choices wouldn’t affect my scholarship.
I cut the engine just as the gas light came on. I wasn’t sure where the money for the next fill-up would come from. I’d have to focus on the tip jar at the Yogurt Shop.
Right at that moment, the dark clouds that had earlier seemed so far off now blotted out the sun. As the first raindrops splashed on my windshield, I pulled my hood up and opened the door, acutely aware that I was taking my first official step toward the Bennington Scholarship. My ticket. My free ride. I tried not to think about it for my second and third and fourth steps, because that would seem obsessive, but I couldn’t help it. My breath made cloudy puffs in the air, which should’ve been a sign of what was about to happen, but I had scholarship on the brain.
I was almost to the steps in front of the doors when the smooth bottoms of my cowboy boots slipped and I careened sideways into the rosebushes, ass first.
“Owwwww,” I said. “Effing freezing rain!”
A dark hand shot into the bushes. “¿Estás bien?”
“Qué?” I said in response, using the one word I remembered from seventh-grade Spanish. “Um . . . oui.”
A chuckle came from somewhere above. “It’s okay. I speak French, too.”
“That makes one of us,” I said. I grabbed the hand, and whoever it belonged to pulled me out of the bushes. When I was once again upright, I looked at the hand’s owner.
And tried to keep my mouth from dropping open.
3
Standing before me was the most exotic, rugged, beautiful piece of personhood (of the male variety) I’d ever seen. I always got wordy in my head when I was caught by surprise, and the guy in front of me looked like the type who constantly caught girls by surprise. He must walk around thinking it was normal for people to pant. Tall, brown hair, gorgeous skin that covered
his whole body, top to bottom . . . Ah, crap, was I panting?
It took me a while to realize I was having this whole inner monologue right in front of him, but I had yet to say anything out loud.
“Uh, thank you.” I tore my eyes away and brushed some leaves off my shirt.
“Are you okay?” he asked, his voice rich and layered, with a Spanish accent.
I took a mental assessment of my body. “Yes, only my pride is wounded.”
He tilted his head and scratched his chin. “Hmmmm. That being the case, I hesitate to share some news with you regarding your appearance.”
My hands flew to my face. “What’s wrong? Do I have dirt on my cheeks? Are there rose petals in my hair? Oh my gosh, is it a booger?”
At the sudden movement of my hands, a man in a dark suit, with sunglasses and a coiled wire hanging from his ear, shuffled closer to the guy in front of me, like a Secret Service agent. Wait, this was Chiswick. He probably was Secret Service. So who was this boy in front of me? Why did he need protection? Was it from the likes of me?
The boy put his hands out, palms down. “Calm yourself, it’s not a . . . booger.” He said it as though it was a foreign word to him, which it probably was.
“A booger is in this region,” I said, circling my finger around my nose.
He suppressed a laugh. “No, the problem is more . . . in the Southern Hemisphere.”
He seemed to be working hard to keep his eyes on mine. I looked down and caught a glimpse of familiar pink satin peeking through a fresh tear in my blue jeans right next to the front zipper.
I was wearing pink underwear.
“Ohmygosh,” I said. My hands flew to my crotch, but which would be worse? The new girl with the tear in her crotch? Or the new girl who couldn’t stop touching herself?
Other students filed past as if this were something they saw every day. “Desperate,” one of them said. I couldn’t see which one. My face burned.
The guy reached out for my hand. “Here. Follow me.” He paused. “Closely.”
I didn’t have much choice. First off, he was very strong. Second, he was blocking the view to my nether regions. Maybe I did look like a desperate scholarship student, but it was worth hiding the view. He dragged me behind him and kept me close.
“Just act normal,” he said.
“Sure. Normal. Because whenever I walk anywhere, I always spoon the person in front of me.”
He chuckled, a rich, smooth sound that didn’t resemble the word “chuckle”—it sounded more like “chocolat,” pronounced as the French do.
Thank goodness he couldn’t hear thoughts. At least, he probably couldn’t, unless he had superpowers. The man in the dark suit followed, about ten feet away.
“Since we’re basically twerking, shouldn’t we at least know each other’s names?” I said, gasping a little for breath. “I’m Piper.”
“Pipper?” he said as he darted around a group of students. “Nice to meet you. I’m Raf.”
“It’s not ‘Pipper’—”
“You prefer just ‘Pip’?”
I sighed. Maybe we should wait to discuss personal details until we had only the language barrier and not the wardrobe malfunction to deal with. Raf led us through the main entrance, down one hallway and then another, and finally to a darker corridor that looked as if it hadn’t been used since the Civil War.
“This is the least crowded toilet,” he said.
I raised my eyebrows. “This is a horror movie waiting to happen.”
He cracked a smile and pulled me toward one of the swinging doors. I could barely make out the remnants of a blue stick figure with a skirt painted on it.
Raf pushed through it and motioned me inside. “After you.”
“Wait, you’re coming in too?”
The man in the dark suit stepped closer. Raf held up his hand.
“Fritz, you cannot come in the girls’ bathroom. Remember what Papa said about not embarrassing me?”
I raised my hand. “What about embarrassing me?”
Raf pointed to his backpack. “I have the answer to your problem in here. Trust me.”
Before I could ask why in the world I would trust him, he pulled me inside and let the door swing shut behind us.
I thought about my recent decisions. In the course of ten minutes, I’d fallen into a thorny bush, torn my pants in an unmentionable spot, and then allowed a complete stranger to drag me to . . . What was this place? The Restroom of Getting Shivved?
“You look scared,” Raf said. “I told you I have something that can help.” He swung his backpack up onto the counter and opened the zipper.
Please don’t be rope. Or a gag. Or chloroform. Or a drink laced with a roofie.
He dug around and produced a roll of duct tape.
Or duct tape, I thought.
“Duct tape fixes everything,” he said.
“What?”
“Duct tape. It fixes everything. That’s what my grandmama always told me.”
I smiled. “My gramma Weeza says the same thing. Whenever I get a hole in the heel of my socks, she puts duct tape over it. She says it buys you an extra month of wear.” I had a drawer full of duct-taped socks to prove it.
“Your grandma is a smart woman,” Raf said.
I doubted someone like Raf had ever had to duct-tape socks in his life. He probably had a new pair each morning.
He peeled off a strip of the tape and ripped it, then handed it to me. “Overlap the two sides of the tear. Then put the duct tape on the inside. It will give you a little bit of time until you can get a needle and thread.”
I held up the tape on my finger. “That’s what all this superspy stuff was for? A square of duct tape?”
He raised his eyebrows. “You have something in your backpack that will hold it together?”
He had a point there. I ducked behind the door of one of the stalls and did as instructed.
“So, you seriously walk around with a roll of duct tape in your backpack?” I said from the safety of the stall.
“Well, it was left over from an experiment last week.”
“What kind of experiment?” Zipping up my jeans, I emerged from the stall and checked out my repair job in the mirror. No pink underwear to be seen, and the tear was barely noticeable.
“The very important experiment of seeing if we could duct-tape Chiswick Academy’s smallest cheerleader to the wall.”
I stared at him for a long moment.
“It turns out you can,” he said. “But the amount of duct tape used is proportionate to the weight of the subject you would like to attach to the wall.” He explained this as if he were debriefing a room full of scientists.
“You duct-taped a cheerleader to a wall?” I asked.
“Yes. But it wasn’t without her permission, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
At this point, I wasn’t sure what I was worried about. There were so many things.
“And now, Pip, since I have helped you,” he said, “I was wondering if you might be so kind as to return the favor.” His expression was super innocent, which made me super skeptical.
“How? You . . . person who tapes random cheerleaders to walls. How can I help you?”
“One cheerleader, and she was by no means randomly chosen.” Raf glanced at the door. “I’m a little parched, and I’d like to procure some libations, but I have this . . . constant companion.”
My mouth dropped open. “You want me to help you ditch your security detail so you can get booze?”
He scoffed. “You make it sound so pedestrian.”
I sighed and then thought about it for a moment. He had helped me. And it was just booze. For him, not me. “What would I need to do?” I asked.
“One of two things,” Raf said. “The first, less fun, way is to provide a distraction while I climb out the window.”
I glanced at the window near the top of the ceiling. It looked like it hadn’t been opened in centuries.
“A distractio
n? Like you want me to blow something up?”
“I was thinking more like you could run down the hall screaming, ‘Fire.’”
I frowned. “That doesn’t sound fun at all. What’s the ‘more fun’ way?”
This time his expression was decidedly mischievous. “Well, Fritz out there gets ruffled when in the presence of romantic liaisons. He is new to my security detail, you see. If we were to exit the toilets while kissing—”
I smacked my forehead. “Oh. My. God.”
“He would probably turn away, which would give me time to run out the side door. Provided, of course, that you can still make the kissing sounds and perhaps a soft moan here and there to throw him off.”
I pointed my finger toward his chest. “You are exactly the type of person I plan on avoiding here. I want to get into Columbia. I want to be a journalist. And I’m not going to let some Don Juan Casanova get in my way.”
“‘Casanova?’ Did you grow up in the nineteen thirties?”
“You’re a casanova,” I said definitively.
“A casanova who saved your honor today.”
“By dragging me to a secluded bathroom! On my first day!” I closed my eyes and shook my head, and when I opened them I gave him what I hoped was a determined look. “Raf, it was nice to meet you. Thank you for the duct tape. I will repay you by buying you a new roll. Not by kissing you.”
As I walked toward the door, he glanced up at the ceiling. “This is what I get for helping the less fortunate.”
“Who says I’m less fortunate?” I asked, indignant.
He just shrugged. It was probably written all over me. Not to mention the fact that I’d just admitted I get more wear out of socks by using duct tape.
I sighed, determined not to say anything else, and pushed through the swinging door, where Fritz was standing guard.
“You’d better go in before your boy slips out the window,” I said. I turned to search for signs leading to the front office and nearly ran into a woman in a brown pantsuit.
“What are you doing here?” she said, her eyes narrowed.
I was suddenly at a loss for words. “I . . . I fell, and then there was a tear . . . and I’m new here.”