Election, Page 2

“Come on, Tammy. Don't play games.”

  “I mean it. No cheating. Close your eyes.”

  I did what I was told. Tammy was younger, but she was always the one in charge.

  “Okay,” she said. “You can open them.”

  You have to understand that she isn't really that pretty. She's kind of mousy, and her body gets lost inside those huge sweatshirts she wears (they used to be Paul's, and some of them hang past her knees). Her hair is nice, brown with red-gold highlights, but she does it all wrong, this misplaced ponytail rising like a fountain from the top of her head.

  “What do you think?”

  Her hair was down and the glasses were gone. I knew from swimming that she had a cute figure, but the red silk heightened everything. Her skin seemed to glow.

  “Wow,” I said.

  “I know.” She bit her lip and looked bashful. “I stole it.”

  She turned around. The slip was so short it didn't really cover her butt. I couldn't believe I was looking at Tammy.

  “Go in my room,” she told me. “There's something for you on the bed.”

  The thing I found there looked like a transparent bathing suit, filmy black and weightless. Slipping into it was like climbing into someone else's skin.

  “Turn around,” she said from the doorway.

  No one had ever looked at me like that.

  “You're so pretty,” she said.

  My body felt hot, like there was this tiny sun burning in my chest, giving off light and energy.

  PAUL WARREN

  YOU WOULDN'T exactly call Lisa “cute.” She's sarcastic-looking and her hair's too short. She's almost totally flat-chested and hardly ever wears makeup. Until she became my unofficial campaign manager, it never even occurred to me to think of her as a potential girlfriend. She was more the sisterly type, someone to tease and goof around with. But something changed between us that day in the cafeteria, when she glanced up at me while signing the petition.

  “Paul,” she said, “I think you'll make a great President.”

  It was kind of informal at first. We chatted in the hallway, ate lunch together, discussed various strategies for defeating Tracy. Then she asked me to come home with her one afternoon.

  On her own initiative, she'd designed five sample campaign posters, each one featuring a pastel portrait of me, along with a slogan she wanted me to consider.

  —A WINNER FOR WINWOOD

  —A CHOICE, FOR A CHANGE

  —THE RIGHT MAN FOR THE JOB

  —TRUE LEADERSHIP

  —PAUL POWER

  The portraits were all slightly different. In one I wore a shirt and tie, in another my football jersey. “PAUL POWER,” my personal favorite, was designed like a baseball card. Here I was grinning; there I seemed to be gazing into the distance. In every version, though, I had these deep violet eyes and a superhero jaw. Lisa saw me the way I saw myself in daydreams.

  “Earth to Paul.” She waved a sheet of paper in front of my face.

  “What's this?”

  “A draft of your speech. The Assembly's only two weeks away.”

  “Wow,” I said. It was embarrassing to realize that she'd spent more time thinking about my campaign than I had. “I wish I knew how to thank you.”

  She touched two fingers to her mouth and gave it a moment's thought.

  LISA FLANAGAN

  TAMMY STARTED to scare me, or maybe I started to scare myself. It was like an undertow that kept dragging me farther and farther out to sea, away from normal life and other people.

  We'd agree to stop, but then it would start right up again. It was hard to stay away from each other after school, when both our houses were empty and the only alternatives were TV or homework.

  “When did you realize?” she asked me one day.

  “Realize what?”

  “You know. I've known for a long time.”

  I felt sick inside when she said that, like someone had accused me of a crime.

  “I'm not like that,” I snapped, my face heating with shame. “I don't even know what I'm doing here.”

  I moved away from her and began sifting through the tangled pile of clothes on the floor, trying to separate my stuff from hers. I spoke without looking at her. My voice shook.

  “You think I don't want a boyfriend? Is that what you think? ”

  She didn't answer, but I heard her sobbing as I slammed the door. A week later I was back, modeling this pink camisole she'd stolen especially for me from Hit or Miss.

  Once, at the movies, we sat far away from everyone and held hands. Sometimes she slipped little notes through the vents of my locker. She kept inviting me to sleep over in her bedroom, insisting that no one would ever suspect. I couldn't bear the thought, not with Paul and her parents in the house.

  One day I noticed that a picture of me had appeared inside her locker, a snapshot from the previous Fourth of July. I was holding a hot dog in one hand and a burning sparkler in the other, looking happier than I actually remember being in my entire life. I ripped it off the door.

  “You can't just keep that there,” I hissed.

  “Why not?”

  “Someone might see it.”

  “So? It's just a picture.”

  “Tammy, please. Don't do this to me.”

  On Valentine's Day, when no one was looking, she gave me a red rose. She also placed an anonymous ad in The Watchdog.

  “L.F.,” it said. “Come watch Oprah with me anytime. Your totally secret admirer.”

  I have to admit, that made me happy. I must have read it a dozen times, thinking how nice it was to be remembered like that. All I gave her was a hard candy heart with a stupid message on it, “Sweet Stuff” or “Candy Girl,” something like that.

  Not long after that—I guess football practice got canceled or something—Paul walked in on us in the living room. We weren't really doing anything, just watching TV with my head in her lap. She liked giving me scalp massages.

  “Hey,” he said. “Look at the lovebirds.”

  I sat up like a gun had gone off. I thought I was going to die, but Paul just went into the kitchen for a soda.

  A couple of weeks later, somebody scratched the word “Dyke” into my locker. I remember staring at it for a couple of seconds, trying to catch my breath, feeling like someone had my head underwater and was holding it down. I knew we had to stop before something awful happened.

  My solution was clean and dramatic. That spring, I joined the track team. Instead of spending my afternoons with Tammy, I occupied myself by running laps around the football field. I was cold to her at school and said I was busy when she called me at night. Eventually she got the message.

  I liked running and turned out to be pretty good at it. The sunshine cheered me up and so did the fresh air and camaraderie of belonging to a team. Slowly, I started to feel like a normal person again, out of danger. Except sometimes, running in a meet, I had this creepy feeling she was chasing me, that I'd glance over my shoulder and see her bearing down, gaining with every stride.

  TAMMY WARREN

  I SAT in the bleachers and watched her run. She seemed so far away from that perspective, a total stranger, talking and laughing with her teammates, pretending not to notice me. They'd hug each other after crossing the finish line, three or four girls linked together in a private circle, sealed off from the world.

  I felt so bad and weird that I actually made an appointment with the school psychologist. She's pretty, maybe thirty years old, with really great taste in clothes—silk scarves, Italian shoes, some kind of subtle perfume (most of the other women teachers smell like they're wearing Wizard room deodorizer). I remember walking into her office and wanting to be her, to skip ahead ten or twelve years to a time when I'd be poised and elegant and totally in control of my life.

  “This is all strictly confidential,” she told me. “Feel free to say whatever's on your mind.”

  “I'm in love.”

  Just blurting it out was such a relief, I immediat
ely burst into tears. She pushed a box of Kleenex across the table and watched me with a sympathetic expression.

  “Take your time,” she said, pausing for a second to admire her enormous diamond engagement ring. “When you're ready, you can tell me all about him.”

  That's when I realized how impossible it was, my whole life. Talking about it wasn't going to change anything. I thanked her for her time, and got a pass back to study hall.

  PAUL WARREN

  MY EX-GIRLFRIEND WAS a kisser. I went out with her a whole year and never even unhooked her bra. She was perfectly happy to make out for three hours at a stretch, but if I so much as tried to untuck her shirt, everything came crashing to a halt.

  “Paul,” she'd say in this shocked voice, like I'd just whipped out a pair of handcuffs. “What are you doing!”

  I guess that's why I was so amazed when Lisa started unbuttoning my shirt after just a few minutes of kissing. Her mother was at work, and I realized pretty quickly that she wasn't fooling around. Her face was hot and she was breathing in these hard little gulps. She took my hand and pulled me toward her bedroom.

  “Are you sure?” I asked.

  She said yes. She fumbled for something in her dresser drawer and told me she'd be right back.

  Time seemed to expand while I waited for her, but I felt totally focused, totally connected to the moment, the way I did sometimes on the football field.

  “Close your eyes,” she said from the hallway.

  TAMMY WARREN

  I FOLLOWED THEM to her house. I sat on my bike by the mailbox and waited.

  Now I knew how Mom felt the day she found out about Dad and Sarah Stiller. It was a complete coincidence. She'd taken off the afternoon to drive me to the eye doctor. On the way home, we happened to pass the Arrowhead Motel just as Dad walked out of the office.

  Mom pulled into the parking lot of Giant Carpet, just in time for us to watch them slipping into room 16. Dad held his hand on her big butt and glanced furtively from side to side like a criminal. He looked so pathetic, a potbellied guy in a tweed rain hat, about to do the nasty.

  Our original plan was to wait there until he came out, but Mom changed her mind after a few minutes, maybe because of me, I don't know. We drove home and she cooked dinner, just like any other night. Dad got home at six-fifteen, kissed her on the cheek, asked me about school. They stayed together three more miserable months.

  I didn't chicken out like Mom. I forced myself to stay and watch. Two hours passed before Paul finally emerged from Lisa's house, blinking like the sun hurt his eyes, but by that time, I'd already decided to run for President.

  MR. M.

  THE CANDIDATE ASSEMBLY usually ranks as one of the duller rituals of the high school calendar, full of the windy rhetoric of commencement, but without the sense of festivity and true accomplishment that makes the excesses of graduation speakers so forgivable, and sometimes even touching.

  I knew better than most people how little to expect because I had read and approved all the speeches in advance in my capacity as SGA advisor. I'm told that this custom of prior review dates back to the early seventies, when an honor student shocked the Administration by running on a pro-marijuana platform, and received a standing ovation.

  “A joint in every locker!” he was supposed to have pledged. “Two buds in every bong!”

  The speeches of 1992 looked to be nowhere near as interesting. Tracy Flick focused on herself, of course, her many talents and accomplishments, her proven ability to lead. Paul outlined a misty vision of a new kind of school, a cooperative, productive place without cliques or outcasts, an oasis of learning where students were equals in one another's eyes and teachers functioned as guides and helpers rather than narrow-minded disciplinarians. It was inspiring enough, but utterly beyond anything he had the power to achieve as SGA President.

  Tammy was the wild card. On the morning of the Assembly, she submitted a woefully unfinished draft for my approval. It began with some interesting remarks about the school not meeting the needs of ordinary students, the ones who weren't academic or athletic superstars, but then it just fizzled out. The language was tentative and disconnected, and I remember thinking as I read it that she was in way over her head.

  “Tammy?” I said. “Are you sure you want to do this? You can always try again next year.”

  She studied me through her glasses, and I thought for a second that she was ready to back out. But then she shook her head.

  “No,” she said. “I better go through with it. I think it'll be good for me.”

  Up to that moment, I'd been baffled by her candidacy, unable to see what an anonymous sophomore had to gain from competing head-to-head with an older brother who was a star athlete and one of the most popular kids in the school. But now I saw—or imagined—that she was doing it as a personal challenge, a way to move out of Paul's shadow and emerge as an individual in her own right. I knew the feeling, having spent my own adolescence locked in psychological combat with an older brother whose charmed existence always seemed to diminish my own.

  “Can you finish this by seventh period?”

  She nodded. “I'll work on it during lunch and study hall.”

  “Okay.” I initialed the draft and slid it across the desk. “It's up to you.”

  TRACY FLICK

  I THOUGHT TAMMY WAS a dweeby sophomore with some kind of weird death wish. From my perspective, she didn't alter the dynamic of the election at all. It was still me against Paul. Competence vs. Popularity. Qualified vs. Unqualified. Tammy was just a distraction.

  LISA FLANAGAN

  I WAS SO NERVOUS the day of the Assembly. It was my speech, after all, that Paul was going to deliver to the whole school. I didn't mind not getting the credit. Paul knew whose words they were, and that was enough.

  In recent weeks, I'd become totally engrossed in the real presidential campaign and was learning for the first time about primaries, consultants, pollsters, spin doctors, all the behind-the-scenes players. I saw myself as Paul's strategist and chief speech writer, his girlfriend and secret weapon, a cross between Hillary and Peggy Noonan.

  We'd arranged to meet outside the auditorium before seventh period so I could give him my good luck charm. As soon as I saw him, I knew we were in trouble. He was pale with dread, and his lips had turned an alarming shade of blue, as though he'd been swimming for hours in icy water.

  Two years earlier, right after my parents' divorce, my dad brought me on a trip to the Bahamas. The second or third day, we took a boat out to this coral reef where there was supposed to be fantastic snorkeling, big neon fish that swam right up and kissed you on the mask.

  There were maybe twenty people on board, and when we got to the reef, everyone jumped in the water but me (I was mad at my dad and had decided to punish him by not having any fun). A couple of minutes later, this tall skinny man climbed back onto the boat and sat down across from me, still in his flippers and life jacket. He told me he was on his honeymoon and had had a panic attack the moment his face went underwater. His voice was normal, and I didn't realize how spooked he was until he tried to light a cigarette. His hands were shaking so hard he couldn't direct the match to where it was supposed to go. I had to do it for him.

  Paul's hands were shaking just like that right before the Assembly. He reached up to fix his hair and almost missed his head.

  MR. M.

  HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS are a notoriously tough crowd. They're suspicious of fancy rhetoric and sensitive to the slightest sign of self-importance. Raised on sitcoms, commercials, and MTV, their attention span for the spoken word is next to nonexistent. They arrange themselves in rowdy clusters and set their bullshit detectors on Red Alert.

  Tracy understood this. Knowing she was a slightly ridiculous, slightly scandalous personage in the eyes of her peers, she decided to neutralize potential hecklers by emphasizing rather than soft-pedaling those aspects of her reputation. Sheathed in a startlingly short, body-hugging red dress and black tights, she del
ivered an unapologetic self-appraisal that was as accurate as it was provocative.

  “I know you like Paul better than you like me,” she said in summation, “and I don't really blame you. He's a nice, sweet guy and I'm a—well, I'm not nice and sweet, let's just leave it at that. But when it comes down to the wire, who do you want fighting for the students of Win wood High? Do you want Mr. Nice Guy?” She put her hands on her hips and smiled knowingly at the audience. “Or do you want me?”

  TAMMY WARREN

  I WATCHED PAUL and Lisa outside the auditorium. She was talking in a low voice; he was nodding. She smiled and touched him on the shoulder. He looked at his feet, shook his head. In two seconds, a total stranger would have known they were in love.

  She held out her hand, a jewel-like crystal—her good luck charm—sparkling on her open palm. I ducked into the girls' room, found an empty stall, and stood inside it for five, maybe ten minutes, wondering if I would always feel this bad, every day for the rest of my life.

  MR. M.

  THE WHITE PAPER fluttered in Paul's trembling hands. He stared down at the words with that troubled, mildly pained expression of his and spoke in a barely audible monotone, forgetting to look at the audience.

  “When you think about it,” he whispered, “a school is more than just a school it's our second home the place where we spend most of our time and grow as individuals a community but is our school everything it could be let me suggest to you that it is not…”

  He stuttered, lost his place, omitted key words, went back and read entire paragraphs over again. By the time he reached the conclusion, even his most ardent supporters were stupefied. Sound effect snores sawed through the thick air, but Paul read on, undaunted.