Tessa Masterson Will Go to Prom (13 page)

If you’ve never been to a school board meeting, the one word that usually sums them up is “boring.” Mostly the school board works through funding issues, space issues like where to put the modular classroom so Brookfield-Mason can actually have a foreign-language program, or they nod as parents complain about the late bus that has to double back across two counties. It’s pretty much all monotone voices and the shuffling of feet, people who can’t wait to get out of the airless room and go home for dinner or to watch
Monday Night Football
. When my parents were contracted for providing dinner, back before there was even industrial food distribution around here, Danny and I were dragged to every meeting and left in a corner to do homework or fend off the urge to fall
asleep while the grown-ups talked. No one noticed we were there.

And now I’m the one everyone has come to see—the circus-sideshow freak who not only isn’t a cheerleader but is the cause of all things bad in this town.

A couple of nights ago the doorbell rang and I poked my head out of my room, sure it was someone picketing or burning something in our yard. But it wasn’t a burning that I smelled. It was pigs in a blanket, the kind we’ve grown up on because Giant Brooks makes them by the platter. Downstairs my parents had set out trays from each of the specialty departments of the store: deli, bakery, cheese case, fruits ’n’ veg.

“What’s the occasion?” Danny asked before I could. He swiped a handful of pigs in their blankets, disturbing the careful fan arrangement my dad had made.

“Well, it appears we’ve got a visitor!” My mom’s furrowed brow was accompanied by a smile as she let in a man in a suit that I was pretty sure didn’t come from Mr. Tux. He actually shook my hand, which no one had done in ages.

“I hear you’ve got a bit of a situation,” he’d said. I nodded. “I’m Bill Wekstein. I’m from the ACLU, the American Civil Liberties Union. We protect people’s constitutional rights.” He talked. We listened. I talked and he listened to me.

“So you’ll be at the meeting with me?” I asked, and Bill nodded. My parents signed some legal forms and for
the first time since maybe this whole thing started, I felt like we had a sort of team.

But tonight, I’m not so sure. The normally airy space is jammed with bodies, each one tense, the talk is heated, and it’s impossible not to overhear specific words: “ridiculous,” “troublemaker,” “sinner,” “ruining everything,” “dyke.” And it’s impossible to ignore that the words are meant for me.

How can I not feel crushed? These are people I’ve known my whole life. Lucas and I used to stack up all the cushions from his couch, gathering extra pillows from the bedrooms, blankets, anything, and see how difficult it was to stand on the stack, how much we could pile up. And it always felt good being crushed by the soft pillows, and even better to stand up out of them and feel free and light. Only this—the stares that pierce me, each face directing anger toward me, even formerly nice people like Misty Schiclione, whose locker used to be across from mine until she started avoiding me, and Topper Martin’s parents, who sold my parents their house—this isn’t the pleasant weight of blankets and cushions. This is hell.

My arms stick to the chair’s old wooden arms and I turn to peel them off, looking for my parents, for Danny, for anyone to give me reassurance. The local police are in full force, along with reporters and herds of gawkers. The double doors are open but so crammed with bodies that no one is getting in. Way behind, through the window, I
see Danny’s baseball cap and, next to it, my father’s ugly orange button-down, which he probably wore because it will never stain and because we always joke that it’s impossible to do anything but laugh when you see him in it. My heart crumples a little knowing he probably wants me to laugh, even when I want to scream. I stand up, waving to them, trying to ignore the fingers pointing at me as Danny finally notices me and waves. He mimes something but I can’t figure out what he means.

Only when the police officers begin to force people outside the room by closing the doors do I understand.

“Let’s get the meeting started!” The school board chair bangs his gavel.

The meeting is going to begin. And my parents are trapped outside the doors. Danny can’t muscle his way in even though I can tell he’s trying all his tricks. But even the side door is blocked by Mrs. Himmelrath, who probably slept here to be the first in line. My parents were late only because they were pushing their way through the store protesters and stopping to talk to reporters, constantly showing their support for me.

Then I notice him.

Lucas is only a few feet away from me, close enough that I can see his knee bouncing the way it always does when he’s anxious; his eyes dart left to right, and I realize he’s looking anywhere but forward. Anywhere but at me.

It’s impossible to feel more alone in a crowd than I do right now, even with a lawyer by my side.

“I’ll begin by making some remarks—you do not have to speak if you would rather the meeting progress without your direct involvement,” Mr. Wekstein says to me. Instead of finding someone I know, I now force myself to talk, this time to Mr. Wekstein, the ACLU lawyer who appeared in town as if sprinkled by unicorn dust. When he came to the house last night, he explained how the ACLU litigates and helps to educate communities about causes. “I’m a cause?” I’d asked as my mom handed out soy pigs in a blanket because it occurred to her that maybe he didn’t eat pork. Mr. Wekstein held his food on a striped paper napkin but didn’t eat. “It’s our job to protect each individual’s rights, Tessa. You have rights.” It was easier to believe it in the safety of my house. Now it doesn’t feel that way.

All last night while I tried to fall asleep I pictured this moment. The crowd (which is bigger than I imagined) and the murmurs (which are louder than I envisioned) die out and everyone focuses on me. Just one kid. Girl.

“I’m just a girl,” I say into the microphone, my voice catching on the reverb, startling everyone into total quiet. “I’m just a girl who wants to go to a dance.”

Last night, this was where I’d make the pretend crowd jump up and clap for me. It was easy in the half-dark of my bedroom to invoke the cinema-worthy drama—how rousing the cheers, how kind the smiles on everyone’s faces.

“You’re a girl who is corrupting this entire town!”

“Expel Tessa!”

This one catches on. “Expel Tessa! Expel Tessa!”

So much for the way I wanted things to go. I put the CD Josie gave me on repeat in my room, each song bleeding into the next, the words and music washing over me. My favorite one, albeit the most random, is some French punk song called “Ça Plane Pour Moi.” My basic French skills are enough to let me pick out bits of the lyrics from the jumping, thrashing beat: “It works for me, it works for me.” Maybe because nothing else is working for me at the moment. When I first met Josie, the thing that got us talking was music—how much of it she knows, how she quotes from songs all the time, mainly because I guess music was her comfort as she moved from town to town because of her mom’s job as a professor. “You have to follow the employment,” Josie had told me. “But music can be with you in any city or state.”

I look around the room now, hearing the pulsing French song in my mind as though it alone tells me there’s more to the world than this stifling meeting room. There’s more to the world—my world—than the bitter faces and glances thrust my way tonight. It’s hard to remember that. Almost impossible.

I picture being in my car, with Josie’s CD blaring, the windows down, spring heat wafting in, and wish I could be there, driving away from here. Who is in the passenger seat? Josie, knowing all the lyrics? Or am I alone? Used to be, Lucas was the one next to me, our fingers fighting over the radio dial until we’d finally settle for some lame
oldies station or Miss Kaboom. I feel the smallest of grins start to register on my mouth but still feel as though I am left to battle this one out myself.

Mr. Wekstein’s white hair grows in wisps around his head but the top is bald and as shiny as the gymnasium floor. But he seems comfortable, like he knows what he’s doing. Which makes one of us.

“Mr. Wekstein,” I whisper now. He instinctively covers the microphone with his palm. “I think this is a lost cause.”

As soon as the words are out I know it’s true.

This town is small. It is closed. It is not New York City or Boston or San Francisco, where you can maybe turn out to like girls and not be shunned. Not find another brick smashed through your car window like I did this morning, with “get” on one side and “out” on the other. The tiny glass shards were scattered all over the dashboard and coated the passenger seat. That’s what I have for company. Broken glass.

My feet bounce, nerves rocketing through me, and I chew on my lip, wishing I could be anywhere else.

That my simple plea would be heard.

That I could go to a dance with someone I like.

“Tessa Masterson has demanded this meeting,” Mrs. Abernathy says.

I shake my head and grab Mr. Wekstein’s gray suitjacket sleeve. “That’s totally not true,” I seethe.

“We demand to be heard, too!” Mrs. Himmelrath shouts, waving her number in the air. “We will not stop until this town’s values are restored!”

The entire room erupts in cheers and shouts, with faces I’ve known forever grimacing at me as I turn to look at the wall of people, the mass of bodies and feelings all swirling with hate and fear, and conviction that I am the single biggest issue ever.

Mr. Wekstein leans forward. “Tessa Masterson is challenging the school policy, which is directly in violation of her constitutional rights.”

Only two people clap.

I am one of them.

Here’s what I’m thinking. I’m thinking about how Tessa always had my back in every single playground dispute in elementary school. Four square, tetherball, “Your mom fired my big sister from the Giant Brooks bakery”—whatever the fight was about, I always had Tessa on my side. This meant a lot, especially in the early years, because she was taller and, I can admit this now, tougher than me until at least the fifth grade. Well, she’s still tougher than me, but I was talking about physically.

So as speaker after speaker gets up and drones on about immorality and family values and the homosexual agenda, I just remember Tessa on the playground. I remember when we were in the fourth grade and she stopped a bunch of our classmates from making fun of a second grader who had wet his pants.

“You say one more word to him and you’ll all be singing soprano,” Tessa barked at the bullies. Which was kind of funny because it was the fourth grade, so they really were singing soprano already, but we had heard that line in an action movie and Tessa thought it sounded cool. The bullies obviously didn’t know what it meant either, because all they had to say was a couple of quiet “shut ups” as Tessa turned and put her arm around the kid—Stevie Allgier—and walked him to the nurse’s office.

I saw the whole thing too, and I wanted to step in, but I was afraid for some reason. I didn’t want those guys to turn their nastiness toward me. But Tessa just didn’t care.

Stevie Allgier is in the back of the room. I don’t know which side he’s on today, but if everybody Tessa had ever been nice to took her side, then she’d be going to the Prom with no questions asked.

Another speaker gets up. It’s old, white-haired Mrs. Thompson who worked at Hailer’s Drugstore for years before it closed. “I don’t think this girl is going to turn anybody gay. Let her dance, for Chrissake.”

Some woman I don’t even recognize stands up and yells, “Blasphemy!” at Mrs. Thompson, who promptly flips her the bird. The school board chair bangs his gavel and sheriff’s deputies escort both women out of the meeting. I hear cheers from outside the doors as they emerge, but I don’t know who they’re for.

Another person gets up and starts talking about how things were different when she was young, and what’s the world coming to, and values, and blah blah blah. It’s pretty
easy to zone out. I find myself thinking back to my first day of work at Giant Brooks when I was fourteen. I wasn’t really big enough to unload the trucks yet, so I mostly swept, dusted, cleaned, and occasionally bagged when it got busy. I mopped the floor in the meat department, which is just exactly as disgusting as it sounds. I’m pretty sure Mom made sure I’d have to do that as a kind of test to see how serious I was about working. It was gross, but I did it without complaining, and I’d already been cleaning my share of the apartment to Mom’s high standards for years, so the floor was spotless when I was done. My reward for doing a good job was to take out all the bloodstained butcher paper they’d gone through in the morning. This wasn’t bad at all because all the blood was in a big plastic bag, and a big bag of crumpled-up paper is pretty light.

I headed out to the Dumpster where three other teenage bag boys were passing a joint around. I threw the bag into the Dumpster and one of them held the joint out toward me. I was kind of stunned, and before I could come up with a response that would get me out of smoking without getting me labeled as some kind of goody-goody mama’s boy wuss, Tessa’s dad appeared.

“Boys,” he said. “Office. Now.”

He marched us all through the back toward the office. Only two people saw us, so it probably took five minutes for the news to reach every employee rather than the usual two.

Three guys had finished their interrogations and had come out of the office. The first one was hanging his head. The second one was muttering under his breath. The third one was crying. I was glad that I wasn’t going to be the first one to cry after getting fired. I hoped I was going to be able to convince Mom of my innocence.

It turned out I didn’t have to. Tessa came storming up the back steps to the office and went barging right into her dad’s office. “Daddy,” she said. “How long have we known Luke?”

“His whole life, more or less,” I heard her dad say.

“Do you think he’d do anything this stupid? This disrespectful? Is that the kid who’s been at our house like a million times?”

“No, sweetie, but this may come as a surprise to you—people sometimes do dumb things when they’re teenagers.”

“Well, not Luke. I can tell you right now what happened. He left the meat department with a bag of trash about ten seconds before you went out there. So how did he have time to get high?”

“Honey. I didn’t say he was getting high, but I have to at least ask him what happened.”

“You do not. You should trust him more than that.”

Tessa lost that argument. I did have to go into Mr. Masterson’s office and face him across his desk, which at that moment looked about five times bigger than it had ever looked before. And he did call Jim from the meat
department up to verify my story, which infuriated Tessa. She fully believed that my word should be sacred because I was the same person they had always known.

And now, at last, it’s my turn to speak. I suddenly realize how hot it is in here, as I approach the microphone. I can feel everybody looking at me as I unfold my little speech. “Ladies and gentlemen of the school board,” I say, “I have known Tessa Masterson my entire life.”

“Son, you get two minutes like everybody else,” the board chair says, and everybody laughs at me. And this pisses me off enough that I just drop my speech.

“Well, it’s not enough. Two minutes is not enough to sum up who Tessa is. While all kinds of people talked about values, I’ve been sitting here thinking about what a kind and loyal person she is. Aren’t those values too? Aren’t they important? And if they are, then why the hell aren’t more people in this town living up to them? I know damn well I’m not the only person in this room who has received kindness and loyalty from Tessa or her parents or her brother. And now what? Now we all know a little bit more about who Tessa really is than we did before, and kindness and loyalty are out the window. I guess those values don’t matter very much to people around here. Well, they should. Tessa Masterson and her whole family live those values every day. And charity? Is that a value? I don’t have enough time to call out the names of every single person who’s gotten a break from them when times were tough. But I’ll tell you this: I’ve seen some of them in
the Giant Brooks parking lot carrying signs telling people not to shop there. Some of them are in this room now. I don’t know how you sleep at night. Tessa is the same kind, loyal, charitable person she’s always been. She’s not different. We’re different. We’re worse than we used to be. And we should be ashamed of ourselves. All of us.”

That’s all I can get out. I’ve seen enough movies that I kind of expect a slow clap at this point. I thought everybody would recognize how right I am, how stupid we’ve all been, and the whole thing would just blow over in a storm of applause.

Yeah, I’m stupid.

I turn from the mic and look at Tessa, but she’s talking with her lawyer.

I sit down and wait through the rest of the speakers. They continue to run about four to one against Tessa. Finally the time expires and the school board chairman takes the mic. “Ladies and gentlemen, I believe one of our own students at Brookfield-Mason Regional High said it best: ‘Our whole Prom is going to be about her instead of just being a normal dance. You don’t have to rub everybody’s nose in it and make people uncomfortable. Maybe some people won’t even get to go to Prom now because of their religion.’ Now it’s the responsibility of the school board to consider the rights and interests of all of our students and families, not just one. We now ask everyone to clear the room so that the board can meet in executive session”—Tessa’s ACLU lawyer pops
out of his seat, and the board chair continues—“which is permitted under Indiana’s open-meeting law, provided no votes are taken during the closed session. Following the executive session, the board will hold a vote. Thank you.”

It takes five minutes for everyone to file out of the room. I try to catch Tessa’s eye, but I can’t see her in the crowd. I see Mom and think about trying to squeeze my way through the sea of bodies to go talk to her, but I’m afraid if I do that, I’ll wind up talking to her and then I’ll wind up crying. My big moment turned out to be spectacularly useless. My speech didn’t fire up the sensible people that Kate Sweeney insists live in this town. And then they used my own words against me. I just feel like I’m never going to be able to make this right, and if I open my mouth to say anything to Mom, the whole thing is going to come pouring out of me in big sobs, and that is not something I want to do in front of the whole town.

So I stand and wait with everybody else. I have no idea what an executive session is or how long it lasts, and apparently nobody else does either. But after a half hour, people start grumbling about how they have things to do, and a handful leave. After an hour, about half the people in the room have left. And by the time two incredibly boring hours have passed, there are only sixteen of us still waiting.

The school board chair throws open the doors and announces that the board is ready for its vote.

After we’ve all gotten inside and taken our seats—Tessa
still won’t look at me—the board chair calls the meeting to order again.

“We have reviewed everyone’s testimony as well as the
very helpful
document presented to us by our
friend
from the
ACLU
. It is not a good use of the district’s money to fight nuisance lawsuits, and it’s not in the best interest of the students or the district to have what should be a wholesome student event transformed into a media circus.”

I wonder what planet this guy lives on, because if he lives anywhere near Brookfield, he knows damn well that the Prom is an event where teachers and administrators famously look the other way while drunken students grope each other on the dance floor before piling into cars to go to some after party where they can drink even more and hope they can manage to have sex before they vomit.

“We will therefore vote on the motion to cancel this year’s Prom. All in favor?” Nine of the eleven people on the board raise their hands and say “Aye.”

“Opposed?” One person raises her hand. “Abstentions?” Another raises his.

“With the vote nine in favor, one opposed, and one abstention, this board hereby votes to cancel this year’s Prom. This meeting is adjourned.”

The board members start standing up and shuffling papers, and those of us in the audience stare at them like we can’t believe they just did that. This is probably because we can’t believe they just did that. You don’t cancel Prom. Ever. The town still talks about the big floods
in 1997, when the gym and most of the halls within about twenty miles of here were under water in March and not ready for dancing by May. They held Prom on the roof of the school under a tent that year. Nothing stops Prom. Ever. Until now.

Mom stands up, her face beet red. “You’ve just painted a target on this girl’s back! Shame on you! Shame!”

The no and the abstention actually do look ashamed, but the rest of the board hold their heads high as they leave.

I wish I could do the same, but somehow I can’t bring my gaze above my shoes as I head to the back of the room. Mom tries to put her arm around my shoulders, but I’ve been taller than her for three years, so it doesn’t really work. “Come on, kid,” she says. “Let’s go home. It stinks in here.”

Outside, there is no crowd of sensible people ready to put me on their shoulders and carry me home. There are also no lunatics with signs screaming at us. It’s just another quiet night in Brookfield, except they’ve just turned Tessa from an interesting freak show into the most hated person in town. And I still feel like it’s my fault.