Limos, Lattes and My Life on the Fringe Read online

  A small sea of people just getting in on the fun parted as I took the final steps. Nobody breathed a word, except the one girl who needlessly said, “Shh!” The silence had the clear sound of people holding back hysteria.

  French Girl had been right. It was the list of prom queen nominees, voted on in junior and senior homerooms that very morning and narrowed down by none other than the prom committee, a subset of the Ruling Class.

  Alyssa Hampton was the first name. No surprise.

  Hayley Barr was the second. To be expected.

  Joanna Payne, the third. Ya think?

  And there below them, in the same font, the same color, the same size — as if it belonged there — was the fourth one. Tyler Bonning.

  When the room could hold its breath no longer and ripped open in a roar, I realized I’d just read the name out loud.

  “Tyler Bonning?” French Girl half yelled to me over the din. “Is that you?”

  “Yes,” I said. “That’s me.” I turned to her and plastered a manufactured smile on my face. “Hilarious, isn’t it?”

  Chapter Two

  French Girl shifted her eyes from me to the list and back again, which gave me a chance to adjust my smile to something that felt a little more sarcastic.

  Amid the din of laughter that wouldn’t die, she said, “Why is this funny?”

  “You’re kidding, right?” I said. She shook her head.

  “How long did you say you were out of the country?”

  She opened her mouth to answer, but I turned to the mob. Although there was still some chortling around the edges, most of the faces were once again bright red from holding back, waiting for me to say something. And obviously hoping for it to be juicy and maybe even profane. The Ruling Class loved profanity. There were some words they could use as every part of speech.

  I had no intention of swearing at them. So not my style. The problem at the moment was that my actual style wasn’t automatically kicking in. It was, in fact, struggling to surface through a hot sheen of embarrassment. I hadn’t let myself be embarrassed since the seventh grade.

  So I stood there shaking my head at the list until I found a few words they probably wouldn’t understand. Just as the roar started to rise again, I turned slowly from the bulletin board and lifted my chin.

  “First of all, I’d like to thank the Academy,” I said. “It is such an honor to be nominated by my peers and to be placed among my esteemed colleagues. Whoever wins will be worthy of the title — because quite frankly, the title means absolutely nothing.” I smiled and waved. “Thank you. Thank you all so much.”

  Then, pretending to dab happy tears from the corners of my eyes with the pads of my fingers, I walked out of the cafeteria. The stunned silence I left behind was pocked with only a few giggles. Just as I’d hoped, half the people in there didn’t get what I meant.

  Good job, Tyler. Very effective.

  So why did I feel like I’d been slapped across the face with somebody’s pom-poms six or seven times? Since when did I care how the Ruling Class treated me?

  In case you missed it, that’s when things started to change.

  I started down the hall, not quite sure where I was going, and blinked back the tears that turned out not to be phony after all. I would analyze this later, of course, and come up with a logical explanation for myself. The only thing I could think to do at the moment was make sure nobody saw.

  The bathroom was out of the question — it would be teeming with RCs within the minute. Same with the courtyard, where the guys would go to yuk it up. I finally darted down the hall toward the office. Everybody avoided that area like the whole administration had H1N1.

  Everybody except the Fringe, who cut me off at the proverbial pass, just short of the trophy case. They must have ducked out the back door of the lunchroom.

  “You kicked some serious tail, Tyler,” Deidre said.

  She put her hand up, and I slapped half-heartedly at her palm.

  Matthew snickered. “I heard, like, three people say, ‘What academy?’ and some guy goes, ‘I thought this was a public school.’”

  Only Yuri was sullen. “I wouldn’t have wasted my time on those losers.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “That wasn’t my best stuff anyway.”

  “Think what you could’ve said if you’d had more time to prepare.” Deidre put up a hand again. “Not that you weren’t amazing on your feet.”

  I muttered a vague thanks. So far, nobody had commented on my wet eyes, or for that matter asked if I was okay. Which must mean I was successfully hiding the sting I still felt. That was a good thing.

  Wasn’t it?

  “Okay, so it just proves what I’ve always thought about proms,” I said.

  “And what’s that?”

  I blinked at the Fringe for a second before I realized the question hadn’t come from them. I turned just as a tall white kid stepped up beside me in that cocky way that says, “Okay, so we’ve never talked before but I know you want to.” The only thing I knew about him was that he was a senior and that he hung out with the RCs. He obviously wasn’t there just to get to know me.

  “What have you always thought about proms?” he said.

  Brown eyes sparkled under a messy crop of blond bangs, and his mouth teased. I hated teasing almost as much as I hated — well, a lot of other things, come to think of it.

  He was still waiting, hands parked lazily in the pockets of his droopy shorts. Definitely a native New Yorker. The minute the temperature got above fifty degrees, these guys brought out the Bermudas.

  “What I’ve always thought about proms,” I said, “is that they make people do stupid things.”

  “Really,” he said. “Like what?”

  He leaned against the end of the trophy case like we were about to have a discussion. I opened my mouth to answer, but Yuri nudged me with the camera bag he wore as if it were a life-support system.

  “We gotta get to class,” he said.

  “We’ve got five minutes ‘til the bell,” the kid said.

  What was his name? I’d seen it during the Student Council elections last year. Sean? Kelly? Something Irish. Corrigan?

  “I’m sure this would be a fascinating conversation,” Deidre said, “but I’ve got to go floss.”

  She gave Irish Boy a long, dark-eyed, you-are-in-way-over-your-head look and drifted off with Matthew lumbering behind her. Yuri went the other way, mumbling something to himself. Probably, “That was five minutes of my life I’ll never get back.”

  Which left me standing there waiting for the kid to say something obnoxious and get it over with.

  “Like what stupid things?” he said.

  “I have a list,” I said, “but I could grow old naming everything on it, so let’s cut to the chase: nominating the most unlikely girl in the junior or senior class for prom queen just to try to humiliate her — which, by the way, it didn’t.”

  “I can see that.”

  Okay, so he was blind. But it felt good to be back on a roll.

  “I have to say, though, it took some real organization to make that happen. It was clearly no accident that I got the fourth-largest number of votes.”

  He shrugged. “Or there could just be that many people who think you should be prom queen.”

  “Uh, no, because I don’t even know that many people.”

  “Maybe they know you.”

  “Yes — as the girl least likely to be elected, which indicates to me that someone thinks putting me on the ballot gives her a better chance of winning.”

  His eyebrows went up and for a minute he looked older than seventeen or eighteen. “Interesting possibility,” he said.

  “Or they just wanted to make me look like the class idiot, which brings me back to my original argument — the prom makes people do stupid things.”

  “Why would they pick you, though?” he said.

  He’d almost had me until he said that. I felt my eyes narrow into the slits Deidre always said were
“deliciously demonic.”

  “I’m sure you’d get your kicks out of listening to me tell you why I am an aberration around here, but I’m not going to accommodate you. The joke’s over, so why don’t you just move on to somebody else that needs reminding that she is not, nor will she ever be, cool.” I smiled, and then I added what my father always told me to say at the end of a pointless debate. “It was a pleasure exchanging ideas with you.”

  It wasn’t, of course, but it caught him off balance long enough for me to turn on my heel and make a face-saving exit. Back then, I excelled at those.

  I was only ten feet down the hall when he said, “Just so you know, I had nothing to do with that.”

  “What a prince,” I said without turning around.

  I made myself wait until I was around the corner before I admitted that beneath my I-showed-him expression, my skin was burning.

  At least there was only a ninety-minute block to get through before the end of the day, and I spent all of that in History with Matthew and Yuri, working on our Andrew Jackson project. Just as I expected, my two smart-but-underachieving friends hadn’t seen the point in doing their share of the research, but that just meant I had something else to focus on besides Hayley and Joanna and their ubiquitous buddy Egan Owens continuing the lunchroom fiasco over in the corner. As usual Mr. Linkhart was oblivious to them — and all over us.

  “Y’all need to balance your report,” he said, hanging his bulging form over our circle of desks.

  “Define balance,” Yuri said.

  I tried not to look surprised. Yuri didn’t usually come out of his sullen-teenager coma around adults.

  “You have all this stuff about President Jackson being a bigot and a racist,” Mr. Linkhart said, “but nothing about the things the man accomplished in the White House.”

  Then he stopped to breathe and swab his sweaty forehead with the yellow-looking handkerchief he kept folded in his back pocket. Two sentences was the most he ever spoke without having to mop and wheeze, which meant he never lectured — probably a good thing — and basically made us read the textbook and do group reports. The title “Honors History” was definitely a joke.

  “We’ll be all about balance,” I assured him.

  When he’d huffed and puffed himself away, Matthew shook his shaggy hair at me. “How come you didn’t get into a debate with him?”

  “Because it would be a waste of breath and mental energy.”

  “So why’d you talk to Patrick Sykes?”

  I looked at Yuri, surprised for the second time in about two minutes.

  “Who’s Patrick Sykes?” I said.

  “That kid in the hall,” Matthew said. “President of the student council? Even I know that.”

  “I make it my business not to know.” I looked at Yuri again. “I didn’t waste that much breath on him after you left.”

  “Whatever.” He pulled his camera out of its bag and gazed at the digital screen. Once he started doing that … conversation over.

  I went back to Andrew Jackson.

  So, yeah, I was able to poke the prom queen thing into the back of my mind until dinnertime that night. Then there was the question of how I was going to present it to my parents.

  I would, of course. We talked about everything that concerned me, usually over supper in the dining room. I was sure we were the last family in America who sat down to a meal together every night, without a TV on. None of the three of us were allowed to bring a cell phone to the table, and any calls coming in on the landline went straight to voicemail. I’d had Deidre over once, and she completely lost her appetite because she was thinking about how many text messages she was missing.

  The only thing different lately was the extra place set across the table from me. My half sister had moved in with us two weeks before, but so far she hadn’t joined us at the dinner table. She was wrestling with depression, my father said, after she figured out that the doctorate she was earning wasn’t what she wanted and having her fiancé suddenly call off their wedding and move to Japan. Her name was Sunny. As far as I could see, it didn’t fit her anymore.

  As always, the minute the blessing was said, Dad spread his napkin on his lap and looked at Mom and me like a big, eager, curious kid. “All right, high point of the day. Who wants to go first?”

  I turned quickly to my mother and said, “Whose suffering did you relieve today?”

  Mom was a nurse practitioner, which meant we heard a lot about snot and vomiting when we got to the low points. If we let her go first on the highs, there wasn’t always time later for her to elaborate on people’s gross symptoms.

  “My high point,” Mom said, “was having lunch with Sarah Fitzwilliam.”

  Could I not win today? Mrs. Fitzwilliam was the mother of one of the African American males at Castle Heights High. I knew where this was going.

  “Let me guess,” I said. “You talked about Graham and me.”

  “Sarah and I do have other things to discuss,” Mom said, “but yes, you two did come up.”

  She smiled at me, displaying the deepest dimples that have ever dipped into a human being’s face. Mom was forty but she looked thirty. A petite, shiny-haired thirty. Too bad I didn’t get most of my genes from her.

  “Okay, just so you know,” I said. “There is no ‘Graham and me.’”

  “Not even as friends?” she said. “I mean, nobody’s saying you need to get engaged.”

  “You’ve got my vote on that,” Dad said.

  He was smiling too, although if he’d ever had dimples, they’d long since elongated into the lines on either side of his mouth. He was forty when I was born, so I’d never known him without them, or the crinkles around his intense dark eyes. I did get most of my appearance genes from lanky, bony, very-curly-headed him. It all looked better on his body, especially now that the hair around his temples was tipped in gray.

  “Just because somebody’s black doesn’t mean I have to be friends with them automatically,” I said. “Have you ever tried to have a conversation with Graham?”

  “I have to admit that I haven’t,” Mom said.

  “That’s probably because he always has his lips wrapped around the mouthpiece of his tuba.”

  My dad laughed.

  “I’m serious. He owns two of them. The last time I talked to him, he told me his parents refinanced their house to buy him the second one. He lives in the band room, and when he comes out … Let’s just say I can only discuss the glories of the brass section for so long.”

  I didn’t add that Graham once accused me of trying too hard to talk like my brainy parents. They were good friends with the Fitzwilliams, so why go there?

  “So your high today obviously wasn’t a chat with Graham,” Dad said, still chuckling in his husky kind of way. “What was it?”

  I had to grope for words. Totally unusual for me.

  “I guess … meeting a new girl. She seems nice, actually. A little naïve …”

  My voice trailed off, because my father was no longer hanging on my every word. He was gazing at the doorway behind me, face beaming the way it did when I brought home my report card.

  “Now, there’s my high,” he said. “You coming in to sit with us, baby?”

  I twisted around to see Sunny lurking in the arched opening, arms wrapped around her slim self, eyes huge in her face. She had barely come out of her room since she moved in, so I’d only really seen her a couple of times. She seemed a lot smaller here in the cavernous formal dining room than she did when we bumped into each other in the upstairs hall. She took after her mother, who was tiny like mine, but I was pretty sure it was the lack of food and sunlight and all human contact that made her seem about to disappear.

  “Your hair looks nice,” Mom said as Dad practically carried Sunny to the chair across from me.

  Okay, there was that. She’d arrived wearing a bandana on her head, and as far as I’d been able to tell she hadn’t taken it off. Tonight, though, she’d straightened her hair and
had it in a curvy bob that must have taken her hours to do. I’d given all of that up and let mine be its mini-Afro self. I was never going to look like Halle Berry anyway.

  “It is so good to see you up and around, baby,” Dad said to her.

  “Let me pop another potato in the microwave,” Mom said, already halfway out of her chair.

  Sunny shook her head. “This is fine. I’m not that hungry.”

  “Well, you’re here, and we’re good with that,” Dad said. “Ty, pass your sister the salad.”

  It still seemed weird, having him call her my “sister.” She was ten years older than me and I’d seen her, like, twice a year the whole time I was growing up, because she’d always lived in California with her mother and we were East Coasters. She’d never done the “let’s paint our toenails and I’ll tell you all about boys” thing, and I was more than good with that.

  “We were just talking about our high points of the day,” Dad said.

  Sunny gave him a wan smile. “You still do that, huh? I guess mine is that I’m vertical.”

  “It’s a start,” Mom said.

  Sunny prodded at a carrot curl with her fork and Dad nodded at her for no apparent reason. One thing was apparent: we weren’t going to be talking about our lows. So much for getting their opinion on the prom queen thing. It would seem sort of lame anyway, compared to Sunny’s entire life falling apart. Dad skipped to what was usually the final topic of a meal.

  “So what’s the most challenging thing you’re going to face tomorrow?” he said. “Ty?”

  “Challenging?” I said. “At Castle Heights High School?”

  “Here it comes,” Mom said, dimples fully operational. “There are no challenges there, right?”

  “Not without a debate team — an orchestra — an AP calculus class. My college applications are going to look anorexic.”

  Dad twinkled his eyes at Sunny. “We’re headed into the ‘why can’t I go to private school’ argument,” he said. “You want to take it from here?”

  “I went through it enough times with you, didn’t I?” Sunny said. Although she attempted another smile, her voice was flat, like every word was costing her energy. “I’d just give it up, Tyler. Because you’ll never convince him that a good education isn’t more about what you do than what’s done for you —”