Like Mandarin (12 page)

I still couldn’t guess what Mandarin was thinking—like when she’d asked me to run away with her to California.

I chased that thought out of my mind and closed the book.

On Monday morning, we arrived at school a few minutes early. Taffeta danced away into the throng of kindergartners. I stood in the cottonwood grove and scanned the lawn for Mandarin, although I knew I wouldn’t find her. She usually arrived late in the mornings, since she considered attending homeroom a pointless waste of sleep.

I adopted an insolent expression as I leaned back against a tree. Or tried to, because the trunk was a little too far away. I ended up practically diagonal. When I adjusted my pose, the bark made a crumpling sound.

I turned and found a poster for the cowboy dance stapled to the tree trunk.

I stared at it. In tempera paint, a hokey country couple danced in a swarm of musical notes. Every phrase was framed with exclamation points:
Come one, come all!! Kick up your spurs at the cowboy dance!! The greatest event of the year!!

The date: Saturday, May 19.

My birthday.

It was kind of like somebody sticking his fingers in his ears, wagging his tongue.

Despite myself, I sighed. Then I hiked my jeans down another centimeter or two, shouldered my tote bag, and sauntered toward the school building. But I got stuck halfway up the stairs, because Mr. Beck was standing on the top step.

Mr. Beck had a gray mustache and long ponytailed hair that was a timeline of his years: black at the tips, and fading to pure white at the roots. He wore jeans belted high on his gut, a suit jacket over a white shirt, and one of those wannabe cowboy bootlace ties, with plastic bear teeth instead of toggles at the ends. His high-heeled brown boots made him look forever on the verge of toppling forward.

I tried to go around him. But to my surprise, he stuck out his hand to stop me.

“Grace Carpenter?”

The loudspeaker voice sounded strange coming from a real person. Discreetly, I tried to hike up my jeans. “Sir?”

He grabbed both my hands. “I wanted to be the first to congratulate you!”

I glanced at the students around me. Staring, as usual—but now for the wrong reasons. Hanging out with the principal on the top step wasn’t exactly enviable. Like when I got caught looking at pioneer postcards with Ms. Ingle. I wondered what would happen if I screamed at the top of my lungs. Then I realized what Mr. Beck had said.

“On what?” I asked warily.

“On your trip to Washington, D.C.”

“Huh? Excuse me, sir, but I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I tugged one of my hands loose. But that was worse. Now it looked like the principal and I were holding hands.

“There were some unfortunate discoveries about Peter Shaw. Specifically, we found out his essay was plagiarized. That means copied, Grace. He cheated.”

Thanks for the vocabulary lesson
. “Okay, sure.”

Peter Shaw’s cheating wasn’t any big surprise. People claimed he’d won the junior-class presidency via devious tactics.

“So in that case, first prize—the three-week All-American Leadership Conference in Washington, D.C., plus a one-hundred-dollar savings bond—goes to our runner-up.”

I stood there for one silent moment before yanking my other hand out of his and slapping it over my mouth. “What do you mean?” I asked through the gaps of my fingers.

Mr. Beck withdrew a stack of pamphlets from his jacket pocket and offered them to me. “I’ve had a look at your itinerary. All kinds of field trips are included. The Pentagon. Arlington, and the cemetery. The monuments and museums. And of course, the White House. Maybe you’ll be lucky enough to meet the president of the United States! Wouldn’t that beat all?”

Alien places. Foreign words. Only a few of them made sense. I tried to wrap my brain around what he was saying.

“So I’m really going?”

“That’s right.” Mr. Beck beamed at me. One front tooth was the same shade of gray as his mustache. “And don’t forget the hundred-dollar savings bond. We’ll swap it for your fifty. I’ll call up 4-H and Kiwanis and let them know you’re in. All you need to do is fill out the paperwork and mail it in with your mother’s signature. Congratulations on your big win, Ms. Carpenter!”

The bell rang. Mr. Beck held open the double doors, and I stumbled into the hall. The white noise of the kids surging around me sounded like the roar of applause. In that instant, I forgot to saunter. I forgot everything.

I had won. For the first time in eight years, weeping was allowed.

I studied the pamphlets in my classes. Pretty quickly, I discovered the problem with leadership conferences: they were all about leadership.

My courses included:

The Fundamentals of Leadership

This course examines the philosophy of leadership, the difference between leadership and management, and the leader-follower relationship.

Leadership in the Political Sector

This course explores the nature of leadership in both traditional and contemporary politics. Guest speakers will include assistants to members of Congress and an associate Webmaster from a government website.

Leadership: the Musical

Once you have mastered the essentials of leadership, it’s time to perform! A requirement.

I wasn’t sure how I felt about that last course. Actually, I wasn’t sure how I felt about any of the courses. For now, I decided to concentrate on my victory. Everything that came with it could be put off until later—including telling Momma.

Because although Momma loved a good win above anything else, I suspected her reaction might be a little underwhelming, considering how busy she was preparing for the tri-county pageant. An essay contest couldn’t compare. Momma didn’t even read books for fun, let alone my school papers.

My brain fog lasted until lunchtime, when I almost went to sit by Alexis & Co. Fortunately, Mandarin intercepted me just in time. She held a paper cup filled with grapes so purple they looked black. Only then did I remember she hadn’t been in geometry that morning. Mandarin’s missing class wasn’t anything out of the ordinary, but I had the troublesome sensation I’d forgotten something.

“How’s it going?” she asked.

“It’s going great!”

Before I could elaborate, Mandarin pointed at my tote bag. “What’s all that?”

I glanced at my bag. The leadership pamphlets stuck out like a peacock tail. “They’re—”

Now it doesn’t matter that you didn’t win that stupid trip
, Mandarin had said in the cottonwood storm.
We’ll be long gone by then
.

And just like that, I realized what I had forgotten. But
how
? How could I have?

Because to me, it was never real
.

I couldn’t let Mandarin know about the conference. Not yet. I knew she hated liars, but I had no other choice. “Stuff for the service project,” I said. “Just some ideas.”

“Boooring,” she drawled.

“Yeah. It is.” I started to ramble. “But it could be fun, if we do it together. We don’t have to whitewash walls or anything, like Tom Sawyer. I mean, really, the possibilities are endless. What about—”

Mandarin threw a grape at my forehead.

“I guess you’re right, though.” She bit another grape in half. “As much as I hate to admit it. I’d like to get the hell out of here respectably and all, so we should get that damn thing over with. How ’bout you come over after dinner?”

“Sure.” I adjusted the pamphlets so they fell inside my bag, and followed Mandarin out to our usual place at the lilac planter, that morning’s excitement already settling into something more like nausea.

To make matters worse, Mrs. Mack had lab groups planned—and she’d stuck Davey and me with Paige Shelmerdine.

Mrs. Mack was a gnomish woman who hadn’t even majored in science. She pulled all our experiments from an old textbook that varied wildly in its levels of difficulty, but she could never distinguish the basic from the impossible. One week we might be mixing two simple chemicals and recording the shifting colors. The next week’s experiment might require masses, microscopes, Avogadro’s number, and calculations so nuanced even I had trouble figuring them out. Frequently, foul odors were involved.

I expected that day’s lab to resemble the past week’s Identification of an Unknown Substance. (The substance turned out to be grape Kool-Aid.) So when Mrs. Mack said, “Today we’ll test properties of different rocks,” it seemed like God was trying to cheer me up.

Or to compensate for Paige Shelmerdine.

Paige wasn’t even supposed to be in our class, but her thrice-weekly remedial-reading appointments were scheduled for the same time as freshman science. Administration thought bumping her forward was preferable to holding her back. They didn’t consider how she’d hold back the rest of us.

“There’s so
many
,” Paige complained as Davey spread our identification charts on the lab table. She had a stuffed nose, and she kept turning her head to the side and wiping it on the shoulder of her blouse.

Davey and I tried to ignore her. “ ‘Igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic,’ ” he read out loud. “ ‘Split into hardness, composition, color, and grain size.’ ”

I pried open the yellow pencil box of rock samples. Most I could name right away. The local ones were all there: agate, quartzite, granite. Some, like obsidian and pumice, were obvious. Others could have been a couple of different things.

“You know what that one looks like?” Paige’s hand darted in front of me to snatch a white stone. “A rock.”

“Hilarious,” Davey muttered.

“No, a rock. Not like a
rock
rock.” Paige smirked. “Like a
crack
rock. You know, like crystal meth.”

We stared at her like
she
was on crack.

“No way.” Davey blink-blinked at the charts. “It’s probably rock salt, or gypsum, or—”

“It’s got to be gypsum,” I said. “Scratch it with your thumbnail. If any comes away, it’s gypsum.” I reached out to take the stone from Paige, but she held it from me.

“I’ll bet you want it,” she said. “If it’s really what I think it is. Some of the guys my brothers know, they’re real meth-heads, the crazy sort. The kinda guys Mandarin Ramey runs around with. The kinda guys—” She snickered. “Well, y’all know what I’m talking about. Especially
you
, Grace.”

I felt my face heat up. “Paige, don’t be dumb.”

Truth was, I’d never even considered whether Mandarin did drugs. That wasn’t part of the rumors. I wondered frantically whether there might be a whole separate stratum of rumors passed around by the older kids, the kids who spent their nights partying instead of in their bedrooms, rereading paperbacks.

I glanced at Davey, but he was busying himself with his notebook, copying the parameters for gypsum off the charts. Unlike every other human being in the Washokey Badlands Basin, Davey didn’t like gossip.

I reached across him to grab one of the charts and my loose hair swept over his arm. He yanked it away and blushed.

“You know, Grace,” Paige continued, “everyone saw you acting all wild in the cotton that morning.”

Will you go with me?
Mandarin’s voice, shouting in the wind. I hid my wince by pretending to examine a chart.