Girl Wonder (11 page)

Amanda made shooing motions with her hands. “You can leave now, Mom.”

After she left, Amanda said to Neal, “I think she wants you to be her snack. Her little cougar snack.”

Neal ignored this and said, “She trusts you to be alone with boys?”

Amanda folded her hands under her chin and screwed her face into this angelic expression. “Debate
is
the kind of activity good kids do.”

“If only she knew the shit that goes on at Whitman.”

“What kind of shit?” I asked.

“You'll see,” Neal said, nudging my foot and sending an electric current through my body.

“Count me in,” I practically gasped.

“Peterson looks the other way after hours. As do we with him.” Diego made a guzzling motion with his hand. “Let's just say he likes his vodka.”

“I like
my
vodka,” Amanda said.

We all laughed.

Once we'd finished cutting and clipping articles to add to our stock of debate evidence, Diego eyed us speculatively. “Hmm. There are four of us. We could do a practice round. Girls against boys?”

“Me say good idea,” Amanda said. “And—after each person's speech, we have to drink a beer.”

“If we each do two speeches that's
eight
beers!” Neal exclaimed. “You're crazy, Munger.”

“No. I'm
thirsty
. Are you afraid you can't keep up?” She raised an eyebrow. “Or”—she grinned slyly—“we could play strip debate.”

I didn't hear what was said next. My pulse was racing too hard. I was NOT taking my clothes off. Not with Amanda around, at any rate. I'd pale in comparison. Literally. But if I made a stink about not wanting to play, Amanda would tease me about being a prude—which was the last thing I needed Neal thinking about me if anything unprudish was ever going to happen between us.

Pretending that my phone was buzzing, I excused myself to the hall outside. When I returned, I made a show of acting ticked off. “I have to go,” I said. “Something came up—my parents want me home. I guess I'll have to practice some other time. Or wing it.”

“Practice speaking in front of a mirror,” Neal suggested. “It helps.”

Amanda waggled her pinkie. “Wing it on home, little birdie.”

It was dusk when I left. The sky was slate blue and pregnant with rain. By the time I reached the Burke-Gilman Trail, it had started to pour. Breezy gusts knocked my bike around as if it were but a wind chime. The trail was an eerie place tonight: the trees were alive and cruel, lashing around as if possessed. There were a couple of ominous cracks, followed by the sound of falling branches—or, God forbid, entire trees.

A few miles from our house, I hit a bump at the wrong angle and tumbled to the ground. Though I wasn't hurt, I'd landed in an enormous puddle of mud—more of a pond, really. After I'd collected myself, I discovered that the chain on my bike was broken. I'd have to push it home.

I tried to picture what I was missing right now at Amanda's. Were they all drunk and naked? Having an orgy? On second thought, maybe I didn't want a visual. I didn't want to admit that my feelings were hurt by how glib Amanda had acted when I left.

As I neared the end of the trail, I saw a bearded man wearing a black jacket. He stared at me with a cold expression, his eyes as opaque as nickels. I increased my pace as I passed him, and made sure the bike was between us. My heart beat wildly.

He started to wave and shout. “They've got chickens for sale at Safeway!”

Was he crazy? Was he insulting me? Or was this what ax murderers said right before they killed you?

Except for the green glow of the television, our house was dark when I finally arrived. I let myself in the back door and grabbed a towel from the laundry room. Water streamed from me onto the white linoleum.

“Hello?” I called out tentatively.

When no one answered, I wandered into the den. It was empty.

The music on the television was rising to a dramatic crescendo. In spite of my bedraggled state, I was sucked into the horror movie that was playing. A teenage girl raced across a desert on a full moon night, fleeing a masked killer. She searched desperately for shelter behind squat cactus plants and sage bushes, but always just missed making herself invisible. Finally, she reached a canyon. There was no place left to run or hide. The killer's knife flashed as he lunged toward her.

The girl leaped. A coyote howled.

Icy fingers grabbed my neck from behind. I screamed. James Henry and Milton high-fived each other and fell to the floor in laughter. I tried to speak, but my teeth were chattering too hard with fear. Milton suddenly noticed my waterlogged clothes. He stood up. He expression grew serious. “What happened to you?”

I crossed my arms in case my nipples were poking out. “You—” Unable to get out the words, I just shook my head.

“Mom and Dad went to the symphony,” James Henry said.

“So you called mushroom boy to entertain you? What—is he like your babysitter now?”

“Babysitter! I'm way too old—”

“It's not so funny to go around scaring people. Murder?” I sputtered. “It happens to girls. Haven't you heard of Jeffrey Dahmer? Ted Bundy? The Green River Killer?” I grabbed the remote and flicked off the TV. My hands were shaking.

James Henry muttered something about “people who need to be medicated.”

Milton tried to say something, but I stopped him with a glare. “Spare me.” Leaving them in the den, I retreated to the bathroom, where I filled the tub with the hottest water I could stand. It took a long time for the heat to penetrate my cold flesh.

Skimming my palm along the surface, I thought about my reason for leaving Amanda's. Had Amanda guessed that I'd lied about having to leave? Did she think I was a coward? What exactly was I afraid of? Getting naked? Or speaking in front of my friends? Public speaking wasn't just a part of debate—it
was
debate. I needed to get my act together fast if I had any hopes of doing well at Whitman.

I closed my eyes and imagined Neal's lips on mine.

Was he ever going to kiss me again?

There was a knock on the door. “Charlotte?”

“Why are you even here?” I asked Milton, not bothering to hide my irritation. “Do you and my brother have some kind of British schoolboy thing going on?”

There was a sound like muffled laughter. “I'm his mentor, remember? And we're neighbors. Your mom asked me to look in on him tonight. Plus—your brother's cool. You don't give him enough credit.”

“Trust me,” I said, flicking the water with my finger, “James Henry gets
plenty
of credit.”

“Listen. I just wanted to see if you're okay. You don't look so hot. Not that I can see you right now,” he rushed to say.

“You're saying I'm not hot?” I bit my lip.

There was a sound like a head banging against a wall. “Why don't you come watch a movie with us when you're done in there?”

“I don't think so.”

“Fine.” He sighed. “Have it your way. I'm sorry for scaring you. I saw a movie once about Ted Bundy.
The Deliberate Stranger
?

If you'd ever want to see it…Mark Harmon plays—”

I ducked my head under the water and held it there, trying to drown out the sound of his voice, the roaring in my ears, and the sudden confusion I was feeling at his kindness. “Milton,” I said when I surfaced, “can we talk about this some other time?”

“Okay,” he agreed. “But what exactly
are
we talking about?”

N
eal sat next to me on the bus ride to the Whitman tournanment. He was reading a book about quantum mechanics for his physics class and kept setting it down to talk about string theory and other complicated scientific matters. Every time we went over a bump, his arm jostled against mine, sending shivers up and down my spine. Too twitter-pated to talk, I kept nodding enthusiastically to keep the conversation going. Guys liked girls who were good listeners, right? I could practically hear Amanda scoffing at this. At present, she was asleep in the seat in front of us. I gazed absently out the window. Our bus had gotten off at the wrong Interstate exit, and we were passing through an area of defunct warehouses. Most of the windows were broken. I stared at the star-shaped holes, trying to picture the decaying interiors.

Neal waved his hand in front of me. “Earth to Charlotte. What's going on?”

Which is exactly what I was wondering but not at all what he meant.

“Oh. Um…what did you say?”

“I was asking how your parents get along. Was it weird for your mom to read
Lily at Dusk
? The book has some feminist critics up in arms—which I'm sure you probably know.”

“I think my dad's having an affair,” I blurted before I could stop myself.

Neal nodded, taking my outburst in stride. “I'm so sorry. Affairs aren't that uncommon, though. We place such a huge cultural taboo on them in America, but in other countries, like France, affairs are a way of life. In fact, I read an article once that said that affairs can actually help keep marriages fresh as long as both parties are honest.”

“I might just be imagining things,” I said, wanting to take back not only the confession, but the actual thought as well. I felt—disloyal. To change the subject, I asked Neal, “Where do you want to go to college?”

“I'm waiting to hear if I got into Stanford early admission,” he said, adjusting his expensive-looking watch. His arm was tan, which baffled me. As far as I could tell, there was hardly any sun to be had in the Northwest. “How about you?”

Shit. He wasn't supposed to ask me this.

“I'm still narrowing down my choices,” I said, picking at a hangnail. The truth was I'd been too busy with debate and my new life to give college a second thought. “I'm looking at some of the smaller liberal arts schools. Middlebury. William and Mary. Maybe Reed.”

It was true that I'd looked at pictures of these schools online. But they weren't places I had a chance in hell of getting admitted to.

“Those are great schools,” Neal said. “Reed is supposed to be very alternative, and Portland is a really hip town. Do you know what you want to study?”

No
. I felt a squeezing pressure in my chest. I didn't know what I wanted to study. I didn't know what I wanted to do. I didn't even know how to act without embarrassing myself most of the time. And with my test scores and mediocre transcripts, none of the schools I'd mentioned to Neal were even going to be long shots.

“How about you?” I asked, deflecting Neal's attention away from me. “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

“A grown-up,” he said with a straight face.

I punched his arm the way I'd seen Amanda do countless times. He made a face, like he thought the punch was somehow beneath me. Staring at my hands, I tried to think of a way to redeem myself. There was one thing…

“If you ever want to meet my dad—” I began.

Amanda whipped her head around. “This conversation is putting me to sleep. Let's play poker.”

How much had she heard? Had she interrupted to stop me from making a fool of myself?

Neal laughed. “Okay, Mandy. Let's hear where you're going next year. Have you hired someone to do your applications?”

“Very funny. You know I'm going to Harvard. I'm a double legacy. I'll probably go somewhere international for graduate school. Maybe Oxford.” She sighed as if having all of life at her fingertips was simply too exhausting to talk about any further.

We arrived at a classroom in the science building, where our first debate round was to be held. My palms began to sweat. My stomach was doing flip-flops. Although I'd just peed, I had to go again. I reminded myself of what Claire the coach had said—that she'd thrown up before rounds when she first started doing debate.

At the last minute, I decided to call home. I needed to hear my mom's voice before I faced the sharks. As luck would (not) have it, it was my dad who answered the phone.

“Debate isn't an activity for lightweights. This is the missing ingredient for you and the colleges. How are you holding up?” he said.

“I'm nervous,” I admitted. “I can barely breathe.”

“That's natural. Nothing worth doing is ever easy.”

This wasn't exactly the reassurance I had hoped for. I'd wanted him to tell me that he was proud of me and that he knew I was up to the challenge (since I didn't know this myself ). Instead, my dad wished me luck, and we hung up.

The opposing team was composed of twin Asian girls from a school in Portland, who wore matching navy blue suits, matching buns, and matching smug expressions. They kept staring at Amanda and me and whispering in another language. We were in a biology lab of some kind. Our audience—besides the judge—comprised of dead animals floating in jars of formaldehyde.

Their skin looked like it would squeak if you touched it. I felt like I owed them a good performance today.

Amanda was dressed in a formfitting lime-green dress that showed off her boobs. Our judge looked a lot like Jesus, with long hair, a long beard, and those funny leather sandals. He couldn't keep his eyes off Amanda.

“He wants you,” I whispered.

“Do you think he's high?” Amanda asked.

“Jesus would never smoke pot,” I said.

When we flipped for sides, Amanda and I won the coin toss and chose to argue from the negative point of view. As Twin One read her affirmative case—something about biofuels and tax credits—we “flowed” the points of her proposal onto yellow legal pads.

After this speech, Amanda rose for the first three-minute cross-examination period. Her recent interest notwithstanding, from the start I'd sensed that debate, for Amanda, wasn't going to be the most serious of endeavors. Unlike me, she didn't
need
to pad her college résumé. She got good grades without trying. And even if she got straight D's, all her parents had to do to get her into the school of her choice was donate a museum or something. Debate simply provided her with a nice escape from house arrest. I doubted Amanda would flop in an embarrassing way—that wasn't her style. She would simply make a mockery of the rest of us for caring.

This I was prepared for.

What I was not prepared for was for her to be dazzling.

Watching her interrogate Twin One was like watching a hard-nosed lawyer in a legal thriller manipulating a murder confession out of the defense. But unlike an actor, she was working without a script. Unlike a real attorney, she had no real-life practice. She was all improvisation, but her performance was flawless. She was having fun too. She reminded me of a cat toying with its prey. Twin One now looked anything but smug. I almost felt sorry for her.

“I think that went well,” Amanda whispered when she sat down.

I gaped at her. How could any one person be so freaking competent? It wasn't fair. It just wasn't fair.

As first negative speaker, my job was to present disadvantages to the affirmative's case that would explain how implementing the affirmative's plan would ultimately lead to the end of the world or nuclear war or something even worse.

But some key circuit in my brain was shorting. Though I had sheets of evidence opposing the affirmative's case in front of me, I had no idea how to synthesize the information. I couldn't think off the cuff. I couldn't seem to make my mouth form words.

“Just a second,” I muttered, flipping through my papers. Glancing at the timer, I saw that I'd used one minute of my allotted eight. I sipped some water, cracked my neck, and cleared my throat—hoping that these physical actions might somehow dislodge my voice and thoughts.

Two minutes.

My arms and legs went numb. My vision blurred. My legs quivered like Jell-O.

Amanda coughed purposefully. I glanced at the timer. Three minutes used. Five minutes left. Time would pass in a blink if I only had five minutes left to live. Now, five minutes was an eternity.

Amanda scribbled something on a Post-it note.
Argue solvency!

More circuits were shorting.
Solvency
. That meant something, right? What?

Four minutes. WHAT DID SOLVENCY MEAN?

Another Post-it note, this one underlined twice.
SAY SOMETHING!

“The resolution is not…” My voice trembled. “Solvency is a word that means—” I cleared my throat. “Biofuels are bad because…” I massaged my temples with my fingers.

Jesus blinked at me dispassionately.

Let me pass out
, I prayed. What was that old saying? God helps those who help themselves? I closed my eyes and swayed a little, gathering up my nerve. It was time to fake a faint.

Suddenly, something was slammed in front of me. I opened my eyes. It was a script. While I'd stood there paralyzed, Amanda had written me a script on note cards, tying together the pages and pages of evidence about why biofuels were the Antichrist. Things I knew. The stuff I wanted to say.

Because of Amanda we won. In spite of me we won. Jesus awarded Amanda the highest number of speaker points. The twins refused to look me in the eye when they shook my hand. They saw me as a fraud.

I saw myself as something worse—a parasite. “I'm sorry,” I said to Amanda, after it was all over, my voice cracking a little.

Amanda shrugged. “You'll get better in time. It's just nerves. No big deal.”

Jesus stopped me as I was walking out the door. “It's really brave what you're doing,” he said.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

He tugged his beard. “It can't be easy…well, you know.”

What was he suggesting? That it couldn't be easy not being Amanda? That it couldn't be easy having a sudden onset of a speech impediment?

The rest of the day went more or less the same. In every round I was too nervous to talk. We made it through the tournament because Amanda kept feeding me things to say and writing out the words for me on note cards. And because she was more than good enough for both of us, we kept winning and winning and winning. With every round we won, I felt like more and more like a loser.

Mr. Peterson called a team meeting at the end of that first afternoon. He made a huge fuss over Amanda and me, and passed around our trophies for everyone to see. Neal congratulated me. “Guess you've taught Munger a thing or two,” he said. “Hope it wasn't too painful.”

Amanda left the room without speaking to me.

I approached Mr. Peterson afterward. “Can I talk to you a second?”

“You're talking to me now,” he said in this jovial way that made me think he'd gotten an early start on his vodka.

I lowered my voice. “I'm not sure policy is my thing.”

He peered at me over his glasses. “Your
thing
? Can you be a little more specific?”

“I get really stressed out,” I blurted. Suddenly, the tears I'd been holding back all day burst through the dam. Unfazed, Mr. Peterson handed me a tissue. When I finally regained control, I said, “I might be more suited for something that doesn't require you to think on your feet. Like humorous interpretation or original oratory. Or maybe I could be the team manager.”

Mr. Peterson smiled wryly. “Don't you think you're being a little melodramatic? You won today, after all.”

“Amanda won. I'm holding her back. I don't want this to ruin our friendship.”

“I hear everything around here,” he said. “I know how it went for you today. I understand more than you think. It sounds to me like you didn't do your homework and that Amanda had to argue for the both of you. Debate involves work. It's not something you can just put on a college résumé and forget. I'll consider moving you
after
I see some effort.”

He stopped me as I was walking out the door. “You're right about something. These debate partnership issues
can
affect friendships.”

There was a party that night at the student union. The room was decorated with streamers, balloons, and Christmas lights. There was cake, fruit punch, and a platter of cubed cheese. A giant disco ball spun lights across an empty dance floor. No kid would be caught dead dancing to the boy band stuff the DJ was playing.

I felt like a trespasser and kept to the margins, where no one could see me. I hadn't earned the right to celebrate. I didn't belong here.

Amanda was gesticulating before some kids that we'd beaten earlier in the day. Whatever she was saying was cracking them up. She didn't seem concerned that I wasn't around.