Cracked Up to Be (3 page)

“V-I-C-T-O-R-Y!”

Chris emerges champion of twenty-one and the boys start an impromptu mini-game, except for Jake, who doesn’t know I know he’s been watching me every chance he gets, these “subtle” glances out the corners of his eyes. He casually removes himself from the game and makes his way up the bleachers. Our impending encounter has already left me exhausted, but at least I look better today than I did Monday. Dress shoes on feet (they were under the bed), clean skirt and shirt. My hair’s brushed and in a tight ponytail at the back of my head. I slept well last night.

He sits down beside me. “We got off on the wrong foot.”

“Did we?” I inhale. “Ew. I hope you’re going to shower before class.”

“Or maybe there is no right foot with you.”

Silence. Jake shifts, laughs nervously and runs a hand through his hair. People always get uncomfortable when I decide to shut up. You’d think it’d be the opposite, but no.

After a couple of minutes, he bravely soldiers on:

“Chris told me I had better things to do than talk to you, but I kind of wanted to do it anyway.”

Oh, Chris. I owe him a thousand apologies, but I don’t have the time and he doesn’t want to hear them. Also, I’m not sorry.

“He said that because he’s not over me,” I explain.

“Oh.” Jake nods. After a beat, his eyes get comically wide.
“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

I stand and stretch and he does the same, shifting some more. I focus my attention on the cheerleaders. Becky is in her element now that she’s captain. She wants to coach professionally someday and the reality is she could do far worse and not much better. She shouts the girls into a ragged formation. We’re not going to win any awards this year. I’m gone, Tori’s gone and Jessie won’t be back for who knows how long.

“Anyway,” Jake says. I turn back to him. “I just wanted to start over on a good note, that’s all.”

I have to put this poor guy out of his misery.

“Look, Jake, I’m not in the market for—” I almost say
a boyfriend
, which is true, but this is even truer: “People.”

“The-that’s presumptuous of you,” he stutters because he hears the
boyfriend
of it anyway, like I knew he would. “I . . . I’m not—”

“Aren’t you?” I study him. I’m really not that presumptuous, but I need to kill this conversation. “Why else would you want to talk to me?”

“I was giving you a chance to redeem yourself for being such a bitch on Monday,” he says, turning red all over. What a saint. “I thought I’d be nice to you—”

“And get into my pants in the process, right?”

“HIT ’EM LOW AND HIT ’EM HIGH!”

He’s completely gobsmacked. Maybe they don’t talk so forward wherever he came from. And I’ve no doubt he’s probably a nice guy who poses no immediate threat to my hymen—if I still had one—but I meant what I said. I’m not in the market for people.

I want to be alone.

So I leave Jake on the bleachers.

After math, I’m due at the guidance office for my first of many sessions where I talk about my adventures on the straight and narrow and how I
feel
about it. Grey’s in a cheerful mood when I sit across from her. Cheerful for Grey, anyway.

“I’m glad you showed up,” she says. “Principal Henley and I had a bet on whether or not you’d skip and now I’m twenty dollars richer.”

“She underestimates how much I want to graduate,” I say.

“Well, I didn’t.” Grey smiles. “Let’s get started. I want you to be open with me, Parker.”

I take a deep breath. It smells suspiciously like bullshit in here.

“Open?” I repeat.

“Open. This is your space. Feel free to say anything. You have my word it won’t leave the room. I want you to trust me. In learning to trust me, I learn to trust you, and from that trust we go forward. You get your life back and you graduate a person everyone can be proud of.”

She looks over a piece of paper in front of her. I’m betting it’s some kind of Parker Tally Sheet.

“You did well this week, mostly,” she says.

It’s funny—I think I’d actually rather be learning right now.

“I guess.”

“You’ve done most of your homework. Good. Next week try for all of it, okay? Mrs. Jones informed me she’s willing to be lenient about math since you’ve managed to get behind an entire unit, but that’s not indefinite. I thought that was generous of her.”

“Oh yes.” I nod. “Very.”

We get quiet. Grey’s office is such a pit. There are no windows in here and some dumb ass thought fluorescent lights would be a great way to compensate. If anyone comes in here ready to die, they probably leave feeling that way, too.

“What are you thinking about, Parker?”

I’m thinking about Becky and Chris and how they’ve been making eyes at each other all day, and how in third period I realized by this time tomorrow both of us will have kissed him and how if they fall for each other, that means I’m replaceable. If I’m replaceable, if I step back and put something in the space where I was, I can probably get to be alone faster than I already am. Like, Becky and Chris get together and some new girl joins the squad and they forget about me. Next, I find someone who fucked up worse than I did, like some student prostitute who cuts herself, and that takes care of Henley and Grey and then—maybe I can convince my parents they need a puppy.

“I’m not thinking about anything.”

“Fine.” She purses her lips. “Let’s get back to the week. There were a few glitches. The nurse’s office. I don’t know what that was about. And you were late for Mr. Norton’s class on Monday. Mind telling me why?”

“I ran into the new kid. Jake something. He needed directions.”

“Oh.” She seems relieved. “So you weren’t—”

“Don’t worry, Ms. Grey. I wasn’t drinking, smoking, toking or snorting in school. I keep the recreational drug use at home where it belongs.”

“Parker,” she warns.

I lean back and stare at the ceiling. The first time I was in this office was the last time I was drunk at school. I was slumped over in the very chair I’m sitting in now and Henley and Grey discussed my “situation” right in front of me, like there was no way I could follow what they were saying or remember any of it in the morning, but I did.

This is sad; this is so sad. . . .

“So,” she says.

“So.”

“So . . . ?”

She’s superineffectual. I don’t see the point of being a guidance counselor in high school if you can’t have a gun. If you want a teenager to be open and
especially
if you want them to be honest, a gun to their head’s probably the best bet. It doesn’t matter, anyway. I decide to mess with her.

“Actually, I kind of liked getting back into the swing of things. Becky even offered me a position on the squad and that was
so
nice. Handing in my homework, talking to that Jake guy—it almost felt . . .” I insert a carefully calculated pause here. “Never mind; it’s stupid.”

“No, no.” She leans forward eagerly. “You can trust me, Parker.”

I stare at my hands.

“It almost felt like . . .
before
.”

Grey loves it. She almost falls out of her chair; that’s how convincing I am.

That’s great, Parker; that’s wonderful! See? We’ll get you back yet!
And then I clam up.
No, it’s stupid. You’re wrong. It’s stupid. Never mind
. Because there’s no qualifying exam to be a high school guidance counselor. All you have to do is watch a bunch of cheesy movies about troubled teens and take notes. This is how Grey expects the meeting to go down and I’m giving it to her because it might get me out of here faster or, at the very least, end this discussion.

“No, it’s stupid,” I repeat robotically.

“No, it isn’t. It’s not stupid.
Never
think it is.”

I offer a cautious smile. “Thanks.”

She creams herself.

The bell rings. I make a beeline for the door.

“Parker?”

I don’t turn, just wait.

“That was really good,” she says. “You know, I think there’s a lot more hope for you than
you
think there is.”

I roll my eyes.

“Thanks, Ms. G.”

Becky accosts me as soon as I step into the hall, waving a sheet of paper in my face.

“Here,” she says, as I take it. “I copied down homework for you. Lerner had a headache so he told us to read ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ again—”

“We read it before?”

“Yeah, in ninth grade. Anyway, he wants us to write a thousand words on how we relate to the story now, as seniors, compared to how we related to it as freshmen. It’s pretty half-assed, but like I said, he had a headache.”

“ ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ is the one where the chick goes insane and starts humping the wall at the end, right?”

She stares. “You might wanna reread it again to be safe.”

Pfft. “We’ll see. Ready for your date tonight?”

“Yeah, got my pink sweater dry-cleaned and everything,” she says, and then she puts on her fake-interested face. “How’d your meeting with Grey go?”

“It’s six o’clock, right? The date?” I ask. She nods. “Look, I’ve got to go. I don’t want to miss the bus.”

On the ride home, I pass the time imagining their date. Chris will take Becky somewhere predictable and nice, even though he could take her Dumpster diving and she’d be happy because she’s wanted him so long, and he’ll spend the whole time trying desperately hard not to stare at her breasts, because that G-spot stuff is all bravado, but by the end of the night he’ll be feeling her up, telling her she’s pretty,
the prettiest
, and she’ll blush and say,
Oh, Chris
, and they’ll make another date and they’ll fall in love and she’ll be a cheerleading coach and he’ll be an heir and they’ll have two-point-five kids and, and, and . . .

“I think we should get a dog.”

It’s one of my better entrances. Dad lowers the paper and Mom drops the potato she’s peeling over the sink and they look at me like I’m certifiable, but I’d rather be certifiable than perpetually boring, which is my parents in a nutshell. If I had to own up to resembling either one of them, it’d be my dad. We both have brown hair and sharp features. Mom’s less sharp, more Pillsbury.

“A dog?” Mom says, retrieving the potato. “You think we should get a dog?”

“That’s what I said.”

Dad returns to the paper. “I’ve always wanted a dog.”

“Well, a puppy actually,” I say.

“I’ve always wanted a puppy,” he amends. “They turn into dogs.”

“What?” Mom demands, turning to him. “What’s that supposed to mean? We’re getting a puppy, just like that?”

“No, not just like
that
. We’d have to talk about it more. Figure out the logistics.” He glances at Mom. “It wouldn’t be so terrible, would it? Having a dog?”

She turns to me.

“Where did this come from, Parker? You don’t want a dog.”

“Yes, I do! Ms. Grey said it would be good for me to—to . . .” I chew my lip and start making faces that obviously indicate I’m in the process of lying, but my parents hate believing I do that. Lie. “She said it would be a good learning experience for me. By learning to nurture a puppy into a healthy dog I could . . . in turn . . . learn to nurture myself again!
And
I did all my homework this week, so I’d say I’ve earned it.”

“You couldn’t start out with a goldfish?”

“Goldfish die at the drop of a hat, Mom. It could die of completely natural causes after two weeks and I might think it was something
I
did and I wouldn’t be able to live with myself. Puppies are harder to kill and more challenging to take care of and I’m pretty sure that’s the point.”

Mom and Dad exchange a lo-ng look.

“We’ll have to talk about it,” Dad says, which means we’re getting a dog.

“Great. You two do that and call me when dinner’s ready. I’ll be in my room.”

“But don’t you want to tell us about the rest of your—”

I’m a bad daughter. I don’t go to my room at first; I hang back in the hall and listen. Mom and Dad are quiet for a little bit and then Mom goes, “Did you find that as oddly encouraging as I did?”

And Dad goes, “Yeah. She hasn’t really talked to us in a long time.”

“You think her guidance counselor really thinks she should get a dog?”

“It could be a lie.”

“And if it is?”

“We can check. But look, if she
is
lying it’s because she wants a dog. It’s not like she’s lying about where she’s been and who she’s been with. . . .”

My dad, the softie.

“And that makes it okay?”

“No, but maybe a dog could foster some kind of . . . sense of responsibility and . . . discourage her recklessness. . . .”

“So we should get a dog? That’s what you’re saying?”

“Who knows? But she talked to us, Lara. She asked us for something we can give her.”

“It would be nice to feel like we were doing something.” Quiet. Mom clears her throat. “Now come over here and taste this and tell me if it’s awful. . . .”

I check out at dinnertime. I mean, I’m there and I’m eating, but I spend the meal staring into space, nodding my head every time it’s clear my parents are talking to me and sometimes when it isn’t. When our plates are empty and we fall into that awkward silence that happens between digesting and clearing the table, I come back to myself.

“May I please go for a walk?”

It’s a big question because I have a curfew now, but my parents’ spines are so pliable I don’t think it’ll be a problem. Mom and Dad exchange a nervous glance and have a telepathic conversation about it. I hear every word.

Do we let her out? It’s past curfew
.

True, but look at that—at least she asked!

I know! I can hardly believe it!

She could have just sneaked out, but she asked!

I know! We’re good parents!

“What time will you be back?” Dad asks.

“What time is it now?”

“It’s seven.”

“Within the hour, I guess.”

“Where are you going?”

“It’s just a walk.” I make sure to look them both in the eyes. “That’s it.”