Election (2 page)

One of these days before I graduate and begin what I hope will be a brilliant career at Georgetown University, I'm going to get dressed up in high heels and a short skirt and head down to that Chevy dealership on the Boulevard. I'm going to ask for Mr. M. by name and make him show me all the shiny cars, the Camaros, Berettas, and Corvettes.

“What about gas mileage?” I'll ask him. “Tell me again about the antilock brakes.”

I swear to God, I'll make him suffer.

YOU ONLY NEED
a hundred signatures to put yourself on the ballot. I'd accumulated eighty-something my first half hour in the cafeteria when Tracy came charging up to my table in those amazing black jeans.

“Who put you up to this?” she demanded.

Tracy's kind of short and moon-faced, but something about her gets me all flustered. It's pretty simple, really: she's got this ass. Just ask any guy at Winwood.

Conversations stop every time she walks down the hall. She wore these cut-offs last spring that people still talk about.

“What?”

“I asked you a simple question, Paul. Or do you expect me to believe that you just woke up this morning and decided to run for President?”

“I've been thinking about it for a long time.”

She shook her head and smiled with pure contempt. I felt like I'd turned into a pane of glass.

“You're not a good liar, Paul.”

She surprised me then by plucking the pen out of my hand and signing the petition.

“I've been working toward this for three years,” she said, dotting the in her last name with her trademark star, “and if you think you can just jump in at the last minute and take it away from me, you're sorely mistaken.”

It's funny. She was trying to show me she wasn't scared, but the message I got was exactly the opposite. For the first time, I actually believed I might be able to win.

“Well,” I said, reclaiming my pen from her sweaty fingers, “I guess we'll just have to let the voters decide.”

THE ELECTION FOLLOWS
an orderly, three-phase schedule. March is petition month. Any student can become a candidate simply by submitting a petition with the required number of signatures. The Candidate Assembly on the first Tuesday in April marks the official beginning of the race. The next two weeks are devoted to the campaign. The hallways and bulletin boards are plastered with signs and posters. Candidates greet their fellow students at the main door, passing out leaflets, shaking hands.
The Watchdog
publishes a special election issue. It's democracy in miniature, a great educational tool.

It's clear to me now that I was wrong to get so involved in Paul's candidacy. I don't think I admitted to myself how badly I wanted to see Tracy lose.

That girl was bad news, 110 pounds of the rawest, nakedest ambition I'd ever come in contact with. She smoldered with it, and I'd be a liar if I said I didn't find her fascinating and a little bit dangerous, especially after what I'd heard about her from Jack Dexter. She was a steamroller, and I guess I wanted to slow her down before she flattened the whole school.

My saving grace, or so I thought at the time, was simple: Paul Warren would make a terrific President. The office would be good for him, and he would be good
for the school. And besides, he had as much right to run as Tracy did. Winwood High School was a democracy. The winner would be determined by popular vote, not my personal preference.

All the way through the last week of March, it looked like we would have a clear-cut, two-way race between Paul and Tracy, a race I had no doubt my candidate could win. So you can imagine my annoyance on March 29th when I walked into the cafeteria and saw Paul's little sister, a scrawny, morose-looking girl, standing behind a petition table, holding up a homemade sign.

“TAMMY WARREN,” it said. “THE PEOPLE'S CHOICE.”

I'M NOT SURE
what happened between Tammy and Lisa. They'd been best friends for a couple of years, but then they had a falling-out. When I asked Tammy about it, she screamed. I mean it. She threw back her head, opened her mouth, and shrieked. She couldn't have wailed any louder or more convincingly if a man in a hockey mask had attacked her with a meat cleaver. Mom came rushing downstairs like a maniac, holding the toilet bowl scrubber out in front of her like the Olympic torch, her right arm sheathed in an elbow-length orange rubber glove.

“Jesus,” she told me. “I thought you were killing her.”

Tammy likes nothing better than to persecute me and manipulate Mom. Now that she'd accomplished
both goals in one fell swoop, a smile of angelic satisfaction spread across her face.

“Mom,” she said, “would you kindly tell this
asshole
to get out of my face?”

Mom sighed, and I felt sorry for her, a tired-looking woman with a dead marriage who couldn't even clean the bathroom in peace.

“Tammy, do you have to use that word?”

“For him it's a compliment.”

“Hey,” I said. “Excuse me for living.”

“Gladly,” she said. “Just let me know when you get a life.”

I HONESTLY DON'T KNOW
how I let it happen. It was like this huge mistake I couldn't stop making. I used to walk home thinking,
That's not me. That's not who I am
.

We were watching
Oprah
the day it started, this thing about women with implants. Mr. and Mrs. Warren were at work, and I guess Paul was at football practice. I remember gazing down the front of my shirt, shaking my head.

“I wish mine were bigger.”

“Let me see.”

“What?”

“Let me see. I'll give you an honest opinion.”

Tammy and I had spent a lot of time together, slept over each other's houses, sometimes in the same bed. We'd seen each other with our tops off. It didn't make sense for me to be so nervous. I pulled the front of my shirt up over my face so she could look. She was smiling when I let it back down.

“You're okay.”

“You think?”

She shrugged. “That bra doesn't do a lot for you.”

“It's my mom's idea. She thinks it'll give me some shape. A little support. I keep telling her there's nothing
to
support.”

“I don't mean that. It's just so plain.”

“Who cares? Nobody sees it.”

She peered at me through her glasses, her mouth puckering into this flirty little pout.

“Somebody
might.”

“Tammy,” I said, my voice trailing off in a weird giggle

“Wait here,” she said. “I want to show you something.”

She was gone for a couple of minutes. I tried to watch the show but I was too distracted.

“Close your eyes,” she called from the bedroom.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.