Weird Girl (12 page)

By the time Mae was able to re-establish herself as the
center of attention, Cleo was attempting to separate herself from the sticky
floor. As Mae began boasting of her past sexual endeavors, sprinkling in
explicit details of what she would do in the near future with Jackson, Cleo
crawled back to her darkened corner and quietly removed her body double. She
knew that she had to work fast because the dance would be over soon.

Running once again down the back hallway, she tried doors
until she found an unlocked office. Luckily, it was organized, and she didn’t
have to search for what she needed. Grinning to herself, she put pen to paper
and wrote two short letters.

Cleo was laughing as she put the cat costume back on. She
left the giant paws behind, because she was going to need dexterous fingers for
what was to come next.

Going back through the double doors into the darkened
gymnasium, she had to let her eyes adjust for a moment before she started
scanning the crowd for a particular person. Frustratingly, she couldn’t find
who she was looking for. And then his voice came from just behind her shoulder:
“Cleo, what were you doing down the hall?”

Suppressing a nervous laugh, she turned and looked up at Jackson through the giant mesh eyes of her cat head. “I had to go to the bathroom?” she
said. Unfortunately, she didn’t sound very convincing. Jackson tipped up the
brim of his hat and put his hands in his pockets, raising one eyebrow as an
encouragement for her to come clean.

It was hard to look contrite in a purple cat costume, but
Cleo did her best. “I wanted to write a letter to Mae,” she said. “I thought it
was time to be the bigger man, bury the hatchet, smoke the peace pipe—” A quick
glance up confirmed that now both of Jackson’s eyebrows were raised. Reaching
into the sleeve of her costume, she pulled out her letter to Mae and unfolded
it to show Jackson. She held it up just long enough for him to get the gist of
it in the dim light, and then folded it back up and did her best impression of
a pouty little girl.

“I’m just scared to give it to her,” she said. “She’s so
mean, and she’s always with her friends, and I’m just afraid that she’ll beat
me up or something.” She sniffled for effect and waited for his response.

“It’ll be fine,” he said. “Just give it to her now. I’ll be
watching. Nobody’s going to hurt you while I’m watching.”

Nodding her giant head, Cleo slowly walked past him toward
the bleachers. After four or five steps, she hesitated, and then walked back to
where he was standing. “I can’t do it,” she said, trying to put as much misery
and suffering in her voice as she could with the muffling effect of the cat
head. She started to cry (the good thing about a cat head is that you only
really had to
sound
like you were crying). Then, tentatively, she said,
“Umm, Jackson…do you think you could give it to her for me?”

He looked at her for a full thirty seconds before rolling
his eyes. “Sure, kid,” he said, exasperated. He held out his hand for the
folded piece of paper and then strolled over to Mae’s royal court. Cleo watched
him hand the paper to Mae and then shake his head and walk away. She allowed
herself a muffled maniacal laugh as she clutched her apology letter so tightly
that the paper corners made indentations in her hand.

It was beautiful. Fifteen minutes after delivering the
letter, Jackson exchanged a significant look with Ms. Adams, tipped his hat to
her, and then slipped out the side door. Ms. Adams smiled slightly, adjusted
her dress, and then went to the podium to officially close the dance and give
cleaning instructions to the dance committee. Mae was long gone, having run from
the gymnasium about thirteen seconds after reading Cleo’s letter.

The lights went on, Cleo waited until teachers were looking
to take her costume off (so there were witnesses), and Ms. Adams left the
building. Nobody could really say with accuracy what happened in the twenty
minutes that followed, but the rumors all agreed on three things: 1. Ms. Adams
found Jackson and Mae in her office after the dance; 2. Ms. Adams was livid;
and 3. Mae was expelled from the school, a mere six weeks before graduation.
She was thrown out in the middle of the night, with the assurance that her
belongings would be shipped to her (eventually). Details varied widely, from
the supposed position that Jackson and Mae were in, to the possibility that Ms.
Adams watched them do it before she hit the roof, or the story that it was a
three-way gone wrong. Only Cleo and Jackson knew the whole truth.

***

Jackson did not have sex with Mae. He had walked into Ms.
Adams’ dark office to the scent of an expensive, but unfamiliar perfume. A hand
trailed down his shoulder and arm, and then someone breathily whispered, “Happy
birthday to me.” Jackson jerked away and turned on the lights to see Mae,
gloriously nude and provocatively posed on Ms. Adams’ desk. Before he could
speak, Ms. Adams walked in, and hellfire rained down. Jackson insisted that he
had not invited Mae for a tryst. Mae insisted that he had. Ms. Adams didn’t
care.

While Ms. Adams was screaming at Mae and chasing her, still
nude, from the building, Jackson glanced around the office until he spotted
Mae’s clothes. He quickly searched the pockets until he found a familiar folded
piece of paper. As he had begun to suspect, it did not have anything resembling
an apology for Mae. Instead, it was an invitation from Jackson to Mae. The
handwriting wasn’t his, but it did look distinctly male—not that it mattered,
because he had personally delivered it. He was simultaneously furious and
impressed with the little devil known as Cleo St. James.

Her sad act at the dance had distracted him from her hands,
or he would have noticed her pull a different paper from the edge of her
sleeve, palming the apology and giving Jackson the wrong message to deliver. During
the next three hours of his life, as he was begging, pleading, apologizing, and
arguing his defense with his lover, Jackson was mentally calculating the
magnitude of the debt that Cleo now owed him.

In the end, Mae was cast out, Jackson was in the doghouse,
but not out of the picture, and Cleo was the happiest she had been since arriving
at the school. Even better, without Mae’s leadership, everyone left Cleo alone.
She existed in a blissful world of her own creation, where she went to class,
chopped her vegetables, and retired to her private room each evening. It was
two weeks before her universe once again tilted slightly askew.

13

Cleo was on top of the world. She had just aced her French I
exam, it was one of her days off from the dining hall job, and she had successfully
stolen three reference books from the library to study in private. There was a
stash of cookies waiting for her in her room (one of the privileges of working
in food prep was the ability to stick food in one’s pockets). She rushed up the
stairs and into her room, slamming the door behind her just because it felt
good. And then she saw Jackson and screamed (just a little one).

He was sitting on her bed with his back up against the wall,
one knee up and the other leg hanging down to the floor, shuffling a deck of
cards and sucking on a piece of Cleo’s peppermint candy. He smiled at Cleo’s
reaction, and then he began to deal a game of solitaire on top of her coverlet.
After a solid minute of watching him lay out the cards, Cleo relaxed, taking
great satisfaction in the way that Jackson flinched when a book fell from her
person and thudded to the floor. Another one followed a few seconds later (Cleo
had discovered that, as long as you walked very carefully, you could hide books
up the legs of your shorts, hold your thighs together tightly, and walk right
out of the library). He looked at the books on the floor and raised an eyebrow
at her. She mimicked his expression and reached behind her back, extracting the
third illegal book from the waistband of her shorts and tossing it on the floor
with the others. He chuckled and said “Well, aren’t we the little klepto,”
before returning to his card game.

He made her wait until he finished his game. She watched.
She cleared her throat often. She tapped her foot on the floor. Finally, she
started “accidentally” dropping things. “Whoops! I’m so clumsy,” she would say
with a glance in his direction. Jackson didn’t acknowledge her until the last
card was played. It was really annoying.

First, he restacked the cards in a neat pile. Then, he stood
up from the bed and stretched, cracking his back and rolling his head until the
muffled popping sounds in his neck subsided. He removed his trademark fedora,
this one maroon with a black band, and ran a hand over dark hair, lightly
scratching his head and yawning. Finally, he bent over and picked up the three
books, investigating each one before tossing it on the bed.  Noting the subject
matter, he shook his head and then looked at her incredulously. “Explain,” he
said, pointing at the haphazard pile of books.

Lifting her chin, Cleo crossed her arms and stared off into
the corner. Without warning, Jackson made three quick strides, grabbed her
face, and turned it toward himself. Cleo’s eyes widened in surprise, and
finally, she started to recognize something dangerous in Jackson. Her pulse
pounded. “Explain,” he said again, very softly this time, his fingers hot on
her face.

Cleo swallowed hard before replying, “I just wanted to read
them in peace and quiet. I’m going to put them back when I’m done. It’s just
that hag librarian—“

Jackson cut her off. “I don’t care what you do with them,”
he said. “I’m just curious as to the subject matter.”

Cleo looked over at the books. “Oh!” she exclaimed. “Well, I
was reading
The Three Musketeers
for my lit class, and that got me
thinking about duels and swords and stuff, so I thought it might be interesting
to see if I could teach myself how to fence.”

Very patiently, Jackson let go of her face and straightened.
He put his hands in his pockets and tried very hard not to grin (but she saw
the corner of his mouth twitch anyway). “Cleo,” he said condescendingly. “Why
do you need to know how to fence?”

She didn’t have a good answer for that, so she kept quiet. Jackson nodded as though he could hear what she was thinking. “What are you going to do?
Hide in the bushes and jump out with a sword? Challenge somebody to a duel?
Stab somebody?”

“Only in self defense!” she retorted. Then she muttered, “Or
if they deserve it,” looking so superior that Jackson finally laughed out
loud. 

“Where are you even planning to get a sword?” he asked. Her
eyes slid to the left and she cryptically replied, “I have some ideas.” Jackson looked suspiciously at the closet and then walked to it and yanked open the door.
There was a metal meat skewer hanging neatly on a nail, right beside a
long-handled meat fork. Jackson decided that it would be prudent to confiscate
both of them, much to Cleo’s dismay. They argued, but he was bigger and
stronger, and so he won. The skewer and fork went into the trash chute at the
end of her hallway.

But a philosophical discussion about weaponry was not the
reason for Jackson’s visit to Cleo’s quarters. When he had disposed of them, he
came back in and closed the door quietly. “We need to talk,” he said.

“I’m kind of tired right now,” said Cleo. “Maybe some other
time.”

“Well, that’s too damn bad,” he said, his expression now
dangerous. As he came toward her, she instinctively backed up until her
shoulder blades met solid wall. Jackson reached over for a wooden desk chair
and dragged it to where Cleo was currently attempting to become one with the
wallpaper. She cringed at the sound of the chair legs resisting their journey
across the floor. He swung the chair around and pointed to it. “Sit!” he
commanded. She sat.

Jackson considered his words carefully before speaking. “I
seem to recall an incident with a keychain,” he began, holding up a finger in
warning when Cleo opened her mouth to speak. She stayed quiet.

“I could lecture you about stealing, since you clearly are
making a habit of it.” He gestured at the books on her bed. “But I really don’t
care what you do, as long as it doesn’t screw up my life. Unfortunately, you
seem to be very good at screwing up my life.” He looked at her to see if she
was paying attention.

She was trying to figure out how to escape. Her eyes darted
around the room, and he was pretty sure that she was evaluating her makeshift
weapon options. With a sigh, he reached down and unbuckled his belt. The sound
brought her attention back to him, as he had intended. Her eyes widened as he
drew the leather through his belt loops with a soft hiss. He squatted in front
of her, maintaining eye contact as he reached around her, binding her arms with
the belt and buckling it tightly enough that she winced in pain. They both knew
that it wasn’t a foolproof system, but it would certainly slow her down enough
for him to catch her if she bolted.

“Do you remember what I said to you after I saved your ass
with the keychain incident?” he asked.

“You said I owe you one,” replied the sullen girl in the
chair.

“Exactly! I’m so glad you were paying attention,” said Jackson. “Now, I know you’re pretty smart, so I’m going to give you exactly five seconds to
compare a fucking keychain to A STAGED LIASON!” He was leaning so close to her
that she could smell the peppermint on his breath.

“Ummm…I owe you two?” she said.

He was angry now. “It means you owe me BIG. It means I OWN
YOU until I decide otherwise. It means that you will do exactly what I tell you
to do, or I will make your life even more of a hell than it already is. Do you
understand me?” Cleo could only flinch and blink in response. For some reason,
her brain wasn’t successfully communicating with her vocal cords in this
moment.

Jackson stood and composed himself. “You know, it was a
pretty genius plan, I will give you that. And you got exactly what you wanted,
didn’t you? Mae is gone. But why did you have to bring me into it? Do you have
any idea what they’re all saying about me?” He pointed at the door as he said
this. “Do you have any clue what kind of hoops that woman is making me jump
through for this, even though I had nothing to do with it? Have you ever been
raked over the coals because somebody else decided to screw up your life?”

“Yes,” said Cleo without hesitation. “That’s how I ended up
here.”

They considered one another in silence. Finally, Jackson smiled. As he bent over her shoulder to remove the belt that bound her to the
chair, he said, “I like you, Cleopatra. And I sincerely hope you’re as smart as
you think you are.” He picked up his hat, flipped it in midair, and plopped it
on his head with a wink. “Because I’ve got plans for you.”

And then he strolled out the door like he owned the place,
leaving Cleo gaping at his back. “My name’s not Cleopatra, asshole!” she
yelled. She could have sworn she heard him chuckle as he entered the stairwell.