Absolute Brightness (9 page)

She told us that even before she had become a professional beauty contestant and a former Miss New Jersey runner-up (she came in third), she had been trained to use her good looks, feminine charms, and power to please as means of getting ahead. She didn't come right out and say it, but I interpreted this to mean that she had slept around. Whatever she was up to, her behavior had cost her an unwanted pregnancy, heartbreak, STDs, abortion, disgrace, low self-esteem as well as the Miss New Jersey crown. At the mention of the crown, her eyes watered up and the tip of her nose turned a pretty shade of red. She pressed a finger to each of her lower lids in an effort to keep the tears from brimming over and ruining her mascara.

“Oh, phoo,” she said, when a single teardrop snuck through.

Her name was Bethany, and though she had the highly polished look of a J.Crew catalog model, the moment she opened her mouth, she seemed somehow less than camera ready.

“So I'm not out to win souls for Jesus or anything like that. And I'm no party pooper, okay? I like to have as much fun as the next person, believe me. Ask my friends. But I wouldn't be able to sleep nights if I wasn't out here trying like crazy to keep each one of you from giving yourself away to the first guy who comes along with a plan to get into your pants.”

She wore an ankle bracelet and it peeked out below her pant leg, shining like real gold just above her sport sock. I was sitting in the front row, so whenever she jiggled her foot nervously or shifted her weight from one leg to the other, I could watch the bracelet catch the light. I imagined that her new boyfriend had given it to her. I imagined his name was Brad, and when he presented it to her, I imagined, they had made a promise to each other to abstain from sex until their wedding night. I imagined that the bracelet represented a kind of chastity belt or a little ball and chain.

Bethany handed out a number of brightly colored pamphlets with cartoon drawings of teens of all races in jazzy outfits and with arms akimbo. Block letters spelled out what was on their minds.
How Does Saying No Protect Me from HIV? Does Abstinence Work? STDs, Oral Sex & Us. The Condom Quiz.

One of the pamphlets,
No Is a Complete Sentence
, outlined possible scenarios between a girl and a boy in which sex was the desired outcome for one but not the other. Another pamphlet (
How Do I Know I'm Ready?
) listed fifty telltale signs that might indicate that I didn't really want to have sex even if I said I did.

Bethany instructed us to go around the room so that each of us had a chance to read one of those fifty reasons aloud. Number 24 was mine; but when I opened my mouth to speak, I choked on a blob of spit that suddenly caught in my windpipe. I began to cough uncontrollably. Courtney Chaykin clapped me on the back, but that didn't work. Finally Bethany stepped forward, wafting her perfume in my direction, and offered me a sip of her Poland Spring. That shut me up. I shook my head no and abruptly stopped coughing. As soon as everyone was satisfied that I wasn't going to require medical attention, the litany continued.

“We may be animals,” Bethany told us after the list had been read straight through to the end, “but unlike animals, we have a choice. We don't have to give in to every feeling, every instinct. We can't let our animal natures lead us by the nose wherever they want to take us. Part of being a human being is being able to see the consequences of our actions. Can anyone give me an example of how they made a choice in their own life and then they saw the consequences? What I mean is, something you did and then saw how it wasn't such a good idea after you did it.”

No one moved. In fact, it seemed as if everyone had made the choice to stop breathing.

“It doesn't matter if the consequence was good or bad. Okay, just think of a situation where you made a choice and something happened as a result?”

More silence.

“C'mon, guys. Think.”

It was no use. There were no points to be had for speaking up. No one would go to the head of the class or get to skip PE. We all knew how it worked—there were no takers, no raised hands, and no pick-me-pick-me-pick-me people waving their arms from the unpopular back rows. We were all too old for that. If grades K through 8 had taught us anything at all, it was that Bethany would not be able to stand the silence. In two seconds she would lean forward, trying to read someone's printed name off their sticky
HELLO MY NAME IS
name tag, and that person would be elected to participate against her will. And no one in her right mind wanted to be that person.

“Phoebe?”

I knew it. I knew she was going to pick me. I can always tell when something like this is going to happen, because just seconds before, I am praying so hard that it
won't.
A nanosecond later my blood rushes up to my head, a wall of white sound fills my ears, my brain is flooded with adrenaline, and I'm making all kinds of brilliant connections about the nature of life itself. But I can't say a word. In fact, I can't move. To bide my time and avoid looking like a total retard, I play dumb.

“Huh?” I said.

“Why don't you start us off? Tell us an instance where you made a choice and there were consequences.”

Everyone was looking at me. I could feel their eyes on the back of my hair. They were all totally relieved that they weren't chosen by Bethany to prove her stupid point about cause and effect. They were all feeling superior. Oddly enough, I suddenly felt smart. I decided to go with it, ride the wave. I knew exactly what to say.

“Yeah, okay,” I said, straightening in my seat so I seemed responsive to the opportunity Bethany had offered me. “Um. Well, my cousin came to live with us a while ago, and right off the bat he drove me nuts. In fact, I hate his guts. Don't ask me why. I just do. So I thought to myself, how hard would it be to murder him in his sleep? I mean, really. But I haven't done it. Not yet anyway. So now I'm living with the consequences, which totally suck.”

Everyone laughed out loud. But the success of my performance relied on my ability to
not
play to the crowd. I had to make it look as though I had chosen this particular example without any idea of how funny it was, or how mean. I had to look all wide-eyed and innocent in order to put it over. Bethany just held my glance until the tittering died down, and then quickly—as though she were grabbing at the Miss New Jersey crown before it was snatched away from her forever—she reached for her bottle of Poland Spring and took a swig as if it were something stronger.

“Good,” she said to me.

She had decided to go with it. She probably figured that since no one else was going to volunteer, she might as well take my lame example, turn it around, and use it to make her point.

“So in your case, Phoebe, it was by
not
taking an action that you saw the consequences. If you had murdered your cousin, for instance, well, you'd be living a very different life. Don't you think?”

“Maybe not,” I replied. “Maybe I would've gotten away with it.”

More giggling from the peanut gallery. Bethany held herself in check. I saw the little twitch of a smile at the corner of her mouth. She was going in for the kill. I could tell.

“But even if you didn't end up in jail for his murder … What's his name?”

“Leonard.”

“Even if you weren't put in jail for murdering Leonard, even if no one ever suspected you of killing him, don't you think there'd be consequences? More personal ones? Don't you have a conscience, Phoebe? Just 'cause no one catches you doing something wrong, well, that doesn't mean you won't suffer consequences, does it?”

Point made. Score one for Bethany. Class dismissed.

As we were filing out of the auditorium, I saw Leonard leaning against the back wall. He was wedged between two well-known theater geeks. I had no way of knowing how long they'd been there, but it was entirely possible that Leonard had overheard the exchange between Bethany and me. I waved tentatively in his direction, just to gauge his reaction, but he just stood there, like a lump, staring straight in front of him at the empty auditorium stage. I could clearly see the hurt in his eyes; or rather I could see the effort he was making to cover up the hurt in his eyes, trying to prove that I was dead to him.

It was only after I was outside the school building that I began to wonder what the hell Leonard was doing with the theater geeks, waiting to take over the auditorium. That he was involved, even peripherally, with the drama kids was news to me, and I began to wonder whether maybe he hadn't overheard me after all. Maybe he was trying to go unnoticed, hoping I wouldn't see him and then report to everyone back home that on top of everything else he had become a thespian.

Every summer Ms. Deitmueller pulled together a group of misfits and freaks who had aspirations to be Gwyneth Paltrow or Tom Cruise. She called it Drama Camp, and for the theatrically inclined, it was a must. To be chosen for this grueling, six-week course that promised a sharpening of talents, a firm grasp of acting technique, and a featured role in an actual (though abridged) Shakespearean classic was an unparalleled honor. Kids I'd known who had been tapped to go through the summer camp program reported that there had been a lot of jumping around onstage, some hooting and hollering, a fair amount of pretending to be trees and bugs and machine parts, but it all came down to memorizing lines that basically made no sense unless you really thought about the words one by one. The boys got to wear tights and carry swords. The girls wore gauzy gowns with cinched bodices and hair extensions and were often killed, though not onstage.

The fact that Leonard was in the auditorium was proof that he was hoping to be chosen for Drama Camp. What else would he have been doing there at tryouts? I suppose if I'd thought about it, all the signs had been obvious from the start—he loved makeup, gestured broadly, sang like Julie Andrews. Somewhere inside him he had been harboring the dream of becoming an actor, and now he was pursuing his dream. Ms. Deitmueller began the tryouts after Christmas break and extended the process over the course of several months. By the end of it, those who had the guts, the glamour, the stamina, and the pizzazz to be onstage in one of her productions got chosen for the camp. According to Ms. D she herself didn't have the proper training to direct one of the summer classics. So she left that part of the business to her old friend and former acting colleague, Mr. Buddy Howard. Everybody knew that Mr. Buddy was a big gay who lived in New York City and had once been in an actual Broadway musical. Rumor had it that Ms. D and Mr. Buddy were once lovers; but when they starred opposite each other in a college production of
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
and the reviews stated that, as a couple, they had “negative chemistry,” Mr. Buddy realized that this held true offstage as well. He broke down crying and confessed to Ms. D that he had been having same-sex sex with one of the toga-wearing chorus boys. Ms. D, who was known at the time as Sally Dietz, also cried and confessed that she was having an affair with the bisexual lady costume designer. Somehow their friendship survived their senior year. Buddy went on to become a successful director of TV soap operas, while Sally got a job teaching English at Neptune Senior High as well as heading up the Drama Club. Occasionally, the two would meet in New York for dinner and a show. And it was during one of those meals that they stumbled upon a plan to recapture the wonder of their youth by making their own ad hoc summer theater in Neptune.

Whether or not the stories about Ms. D and Mr. Buddy were true or just made up by Drama Club insiders who circulated them throughout the school was anybody's guess. What we did know was that Ms. D never married. She had a small head and tiny features that were all crowded into the center of her face as if each one wanted to take center stage. Her dyed-black hair was cut in a pixie style with mental-hospital bangs, and she always wore bright-red lipstick and a crisp, white, man-tailored shirt. If she happened to wear a skirt (a rarity), it somehow looked, on her, like a pair of pants. Her shoes were formidable and could be heard as clear as Frankenstein's monster when she walked. Her annual freshman production of
Spoon River Anthology
was legendary. When we were freshmen and it was our turn to speak the words of the dead Emilys and Benjamins in our own production of
Spoon River,
we cried our eyes out as we took our final curtain call and believed in our hearts that Ms. D was a kind of goddess.

About Mr. Buddy we knew less. He was off our radar for most of the year. If you were ever sick enough to stay home from school but well enough to flip between channels, you might get a glimpse of the name Bud Howard as the end credits of a certain TV soap scrolled by. Even though Mr. Buddy wasn't (thank God) you, or (God forbid) a friend of yours, seeing his name on TV made you feel as if you were connected to the WBN—the World Beyond Neptune.

Mr. Buddy himself was a big, bald-headed man with a baby's face. His look was what a mother might call cherubic, but according to Electra, who called things as she saw them, he seemed more than a little pervy. His beady little eyes were quick to size up the boys, his fat cheeks turned candy-apple red whenever he was confronted with a swimmer's build, and his large, sweaty brow worked overtime whenever he actually had to speak to a senior heartthrob.

Anyway, I had been hanging around by the side of the school building and waiting for Leonard to make an appearance. I wanted to find out whether he had actually heard what I said about murdering him or whether he was just embarrassed to be spotted at tryouts. All I would have to do was take one long look in his eyes to know the answer. But after an hour he still hadn't come out, so I decided to go in and find him myself.

There were about five or six kids standing in the hallway; each of them had a book in hand and they were all mumbling to themselves. They looked like insane asylum inmates who'd been let out of their rooms and told not to wander too far. Leonard was among them; he was facing the wall and speaking to the tiles. I came up behind him, and when I said his name, he literally jumped.