Limos, Lattes and My Life on the Fringe Page 15

  Graham Fitzwilliam, who had probably climbed out from under his tuba to attend, bordered on hostile. I didn’t even see Kenny. Odds were he’d cut to go to the Jiff-E-Mart.

  The Ruling Class did a lot of whispering amongst themselves and a lot of trying not to show any emotion, as far as I could see. Alyssa was the exception; she clearly wanted to claw me with her fingernails, which was no surprise. And Joanna, who appeared distraught, the way you do when you’ve misplaced the paper due next block that’s worth 60 percent of your grade. A few of the RC girls, including Hayley, couldn’t seem to help gazing, enraptured, at Patrick. Yeah, now was the time to ask for those iPhones if he wanted them.

  But it was the kids I really wanted to get through to that I watched the most closely. The ones I, too, used to think of as the Kmart Kids because it was a convenient way to lump them all together. They weren’t a lump, though. Every one of them reacted differently.

  Noelle and Fred took every opportunity to catch my eye and give me thumbs-ups. Ryleigh sat with her arms folded, but her eyes focused on the PowerPoint, Patrick, and me. Izzy stayed awake, which was a statement in itself. Every kid whose father worked in the dairy or drove a truck or remodeled kitchens gave us a hearing in their own way, faces transparent, reactions real. I realized at one point that they were all a lot like Patrick. And it stirred in me how much I wanted them to know they were somebody, just like he did.

  When we were finished, Mr. Baumgarten led the applause, and Patrick grinned all the way to our places at the end of the front row.

  “We scored,” he whispered.

  When he held his palm low for me to slap it — and he held on again — I was almost convinced.

  Chapter Thirteen

  My parents went to a dinner at the college that evening, which meant I didn’t have to endure the third degree about the prom project. It also let Sunny off the hook, since she now knew about the whole plan but had promised me she would let me be the one to discuss it with them. I actually felt a little guilty about putting her in that position, but not enough to ask what she was doing for dinner. I grabbed a Pop-Tart and headed for my room to catch up on the homework I’d ignored the night before while Patrick and I were prepping our presentation.

  I found myself longing for a latte. Okay — so I was missing him.

  Which was absurd. Also ridiculous. And definitely ludicrous. I was not going to turn into a Hayley, making sure she was there every time he walked by, and pouncing on him when he did. Or a Joanna, who cried whenever she looked at him. Fat chance of that happening. Or an Alyssa, who acted like Emma in that Jane Austen novel — like she had the perfect partner picked out for Patrick, and it wasn’t going to be me.

  Well, of course it wasn’t going to be me. I didn’t want it to be me. Okay, so there was no doubt he actually kind of got me. But I wasn’t forgetting what Alyssa said: if a girl wasn’t interested in Patrick, he worked on her until she was.

  Enough with that. I grabbed my bag and took it to the window seat, where I planned to finish outlining the five chapters Sunny had assigned to us. Naturally, my phone alerted me to a text message.

  “I can’t work on the prom tonight, Patrick,” I said.

  But the message wasn’t from him. It was about him.

  STAY AWAY FRM PATRICK U DONT BELONG W HIM

  How many different ways did I have to tell these chicks I wasn’t after the boy they all claimed like they were part of a harem? Bizarre, too, that half of them weren’t speaking to him, and yet they didn’t want me to speak to him.

  Much less squeeze his hand when we high-fived …

  I shook that off and looked for the number on the text. There was one way I hadn’t tried. I punched the number in and waited for Alyssa or Joanna — who knew, maybe even Egan — to answer. The ringing stopped and a male voice said, “Castle Heights Towing.”

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  “Castle Heights Towing. You need a tow?”

  “No.”

  The guy grunted. “Well I don’t deliver pizzas, lady.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I got a text message from this number, and I —”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “No, seriously, it’s — “ I rattled off the number. The guy’s voice lowered to a growl.

  “Then something’s messed up, because I ain’t never texted in my life. We done?”

  “Listen, I’m sorry —”

  But he’d already hung up. I looked at the number again; it was definitely the one I’d just called. One thing was for sure: that guy wasn’t related to anybody in the Ruling Class. So how …

  I turned my phone off and pressed my hand to my forehead. I was starting to sweat again, and warmth was once more radiating from under the seat cushion. Could this night get any weirder?

  I pulled out the RL book, which, just as I expected, nearly melted in my hand. It wasn’t even surprising this time that when I opened it only one of the pages was warm. The one that said:

  So … you climbed a tree.

  In spite of the heat rising from the paper, I shivered. And yet I had to answer. So few people were talking to me right now.

  “I climbed a tree,” I said out loud. “How do you figure?”

  You got up high. You looked down. You saw things clearly.

  Before I could even think No, I did not, I had a flash of myself, standing on a table in the cafeteria watching the Ruling Class at work.

  Whoa.

  You got that story. Ready for another one?

  It didn’t seem like I had a choice. I propped myself on the avalanche of pillows and let the book warm my propped-up legs.

  This is one Yeshua told the same crowd that got ticked off when he invited himself over to Zaccahaeus’s place.

  So it was a parable.

  He said there is a man who has a birthright to run his town, but he has to go to headquarters to get the official okay. There’s paperwork for everything, right? Before he leaves, he calls his staff together and gives them each enough money to cover expenses while he’s gone and says, “Operate with this until I get back.”

  I knew this story. He gave them each ten talents. I had to grill my sixth-grade Sunday school teacher on what a “talent” was; I thought he made one a dancer, one a singer, that kind of thing. I even remembered the point of the parable —

  Who says there’s only one point? Besides, this is a little different version from the one you learned.

  By now I wasn’t shivering anymore when the thing read my mind. I was actually starting to dig the back-and-forth.

  “Okay,” I said. “Show me one besides, ‘Use what you’re given or it’s going to be taken away from you.’”

  The people in the town basically hate this guy, so they send a commission on ahead to headquarters to protest him taking over.

  Really. I never noticed that part in the story.

  See? So the guy goes to headquarters and he comes back with the necessary paperwork.

  Their petition didn’t work either. I could relate to that.

  The guy gathers his staff to find out how they did with the money while he was away.

  This was the part I knew, but I read on anyway. It couldn’t hurt.

  The first staff member has doubled the guy’s money. The guy likes that. He likes it a lot, so he says to the staff member, “Excellent. For that, I’m putting you in charge of ten departments. Major promotion.”

  Hence my practice of doing extra credit in every class. Was that biblical, then?

  The second staff member says, “Sir, I made a fifty percent profit on your money.” And the guy says, “Nice job. That earns you a promotion too. You’re now heading up five departments.” These guys are thinking, “Sweet.”

  That sounded so much like Patrick, I laughed out loud.

  And then he gets to the third staff member.

  If I recalled correctly, this was where it got ugly.

  This third person says, “Sir, here’s your money, just the way you gave it to me.
I kept it in a safe deposit box, because, to be honest, you scare me. I mean, you practically expect perfection out of us, and I’ve seen you go off on people that act like they don’t have a brain in their head.”

  So — was that like people who only did the bare minimum in class? Kept their heads down so they wouldn’t be court-martialed by Zabaski? Or called into Mr. Baumgarten’s office to watch his scalp scald?

  The guy seems to think so. He gets in the staff member’s face and he says, “You got that right. I don’t put up with fools. And, dude, you qualify. You couldn’t at least have put it in an account so I could earn a little interest on it?”

  This was where I remembered getting prickly with this story when I was in sixth grade. The guy didn’t say, “Make more money with this money.” He said, “Use it to run things while I’m out of town.” How were they supposed to know he expected a profit when he got back?

  Because they knew him. They’d worked with him. He trained them. These weren’t newbies he brought in off the street; he wouldn’t expect novices to understand how it worked. These were STAFF members, people who were paid to know what to do.

  Why had no one ever told me that? When I asked that same sixth-grade Sunday school teacher, he said that was just the way the story went. When he explained that the guy in the story was Jesus, my opinion of the Lord took its first downward turn. But this — this was different.

  So the guy says to the first staff member, “Take the money I gave this airhead.” And the other people standing there go, “But he already has double what you gave him!” And the guy says, “My point exactly.”

  “Wait, don’t tell me,” I said. To the book. Because my sanity no longer mattered to me. “You take a risk, for something important — not like a ride-your-skateboard-down-the-middle-of-Route-9 kind of risk — and you’re going to get more than you put into it. Right?”

  And if you play it safe?

  “Ya got nothin’. Maybe not even what you started out with.” I squirmed. “But I’ve always understood that.”

  There’s more. The guy knows about the people petitioning against him. Now that he’s officially in charge, he says, “Get these jackals out of here.”

  “No, he did not say ‘jackals’!”

  He did in YOUR mind …

  He’s not in my mind. Is he?

  Maybe that’s your next step. You climbed a tree, metaphorically speaking, so why not?

  Why not what?

  Did bucking the guy work? Trying to get him ousted?

  No.

  And being afraid of him? How’d that turn out?

  It was a bust.

  What about knowing the master so well that they knew what was expected of them AND had the confidence to go with it?

  You’re saying get to know … Jesus.

  That’s what I’m saying.

  The pillows suddenly started to annoy me. I pulled one out and tossed it. That felt so good, I pitched another one.

  Problem?

  Yes. My whole church life, people were always saying, “Invite Jesus into your heart. Make him Lord and Master of your life.” But nobody ever explained exactly how you’re supposed to do that. I didn’t doubt that some people did. I’d seen them speaking in tongues and heard them say how the Lord “put something on their hearts,” but when I queried them about the process, they always answered with things like, “Just open yourself up to him in prayer. Seek him in all things.” But seriously — what does that mean? It’s one of the many reasons I stopped going to church. I felt like it was a closed club that I didn’t have the right stuff for.

  “I don’t know how to get to know him,” I said. “You tell me, and I’m on it. Seriously.”

  What do you think I’m doing?

  I stared at the page. Its warmth eased up my arms and rested in the middle of my chest.

  It doesn’t get any plainer than this story, it said.

  The rest of the page was blank, which I knew meant that was all I was getting for now. The other pages were cold, and this one continued to stare back at me. So … take a risk? Make a lot out of what I had? Was that it?

  The answer didn’t appear in the book. But the heat still glowed in my chest. I had to take that as a yes.

  It was Valleri who met me at my locker the next morning, holding a gorgeous poster that could’ve been painted by Van Gogh or somebody. She watched, face pensive, as I looked at the girls depicted there, knee deep in a pile of fluffy, pastel gowns.

  COME PICK OUT YOUR PROM DRESS! it said at the top. Saturday, April 30, 10:00 ‘til 2:00. HAYLEY BARR’S HOUSE

  I stopped before I got to the address.

  “Hayley Barr’s house?”

  Valleri nodded her curls over the top of the poster. “Patrick couldn’t get ahold of you last night. He said your phone was turned off or something.”

  “Yeah …”

  “He talked the dress shop up with Hayley and she talked to her mom and …” She shrugged.

  “How does he do that?” I said. And then I felt my eyes start into slits. “Is he sure she’s for real about this? It could be a setup.”

  Valleri shook her head at me.

  “What?” I said. “Did he make her sign a sworn statement?”

  “Sometimes you just have to have faith,” she said. “Patrick says this is the perfect way to get the girls with the dresses to participate. It’s not us against them, right?”

  “It’s not supposed to be,” I said. “Do you think this is a God thing?”

  Something flickered through her eyes — that old look again. “I don’t just call everything that goes my way a God thing.”

  “Then how do you know what is?”

  “I feel it,” she said. “And I know I’ve read it.”

  “Like, in the Bible?”

  “I know that sounds hokey to some people.” It couldn’t be any hokier than what I was experiencing with a hot book in my window seat.

  “Is that the poster?” Patrick said from halfway down the hall.

  He came toward us, grinning the wake-up grin and carrying yet another poster. When he turned it around to face us, Valleri read aloud the instructions for getting in on tux rental discounts and the contest for winning a free one for the night.

  Turn Your Entries for Most Creative Prom Invite in to the Box in the Office

  “Let me guess,” I said. “Mr. Baumgarten’s secretary.”

  “Exactly.”

  “She thinks he’s cute,” I said to Valleri.

  Valleri’s face clearly read, Who doesn’t?

  “I’m not hanging this next to yours,” Patrick said, looking at Valleri’s museum-worthy poster.

  “Stop it,” she said. “I’m gonna go hang both of them in the cafeteria right now. You coming with?”

  I started to nod, but Patrick caught my sleeve. “We’ll catch up,” he said.

  Valleri bounced off with a poster under each arm, and I felt a twinge of envy. I didn’t know if I’d ever felt lighthearted enough to “bounce.”

  “I got Egan to talk to me,” Patrick said.

  I flipped back to him.

  “Here’s the deal, and we have to keep this between us.” “Tell me what it is first,” I said.

  “He’s on our side, okay? He’s not going to do anything to take down what we do, and he’ll do whatever we need him to behind the scenes.”

  “What’s the catch?”

  “It’s not really a catch. He just can’t post any of it on the Facebook Prom Page because all those people are giving him so much grief.”

  “He’s not going to get any more grief than we’re already getting!”

  “You have no idea. What they’re worried about is that what we’re doing will make it impossible for them to get alcohol in. That’s like some people’s main goal in life, I guess. He figures if he —”

  “ — Keeps his head down, plays it safe, he can still have a prom and not be blamed if people don’t have a chance to get plastered.”

  Patrick nodded,
without the grin.

  “I hate that there even are ‘sides,’ “ I said. “That’s so not what this is about.”

  “Yeah, but you know what, it’s something. It’s like we have to take baby steps. And Hayley was a huge step.”

  “So how is she keeping people from giving her grief?”

  He didn’t have a chance to answer, because Hayley herself came around the corner like a cloud of bubbles and floated them around him.

  “Is the poster up yet?” she said. She was a veritable soda, for Pete’s sake, and she wasn’t sharing any of it with me.

  “We were going to check it out right now,” Patrick said.

  “You two go ahead,” I said. “I’ve got to …”

  I trailed off with, “… go defrost my locker.” Hayley never did acknowledge that I was there. Patrick may have looked back, but I was already making an exit. I couldn’t help wondering if Hayley had had her car towed lately.

  The announcement in the morning bulletin said that we were collecting not only dresses but jewelry, purses, and shoes, which could either be given away or just loaned. Patrick said Hayley promised him she would get plenty of donations from what he now also referred to as the Ruling Class.

  We decided that all the stuff should come to the school and then be transported to Hayley’s so we could go through it first, and on Wednesday morning Fred and Noelle brought in a neat rolling rack with hangers to keep the dresses on. His mom, it turned out, worked in retail. Between that and the two heavy cardboard “dressers” with drawers in them that Valleri provided for the smaller items — where did you get stuff like that? — we were set. Our only issue was where to keep them.

  “I only have so much clout with Miss Larrimore,” Patrick told us.

  I assumed she was the secretary who wished she were twenty years younger and would have installed an espresso machine if he’d asked her to.

  Valleri and I were going to approach Ms. Dalloway to see if we could use her room, but she was in one of her weary modes, and I didn’t want to mess up my status with her. Mr. Zabaski was out of the question, of course. Ditto for Madame, who barely had enough room for the desk, the listening stations, and the replica of the Eiffel Tower that took up one whole corner.