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Authors: Meg Gardiner

Tags: #USA

BOOK: Crosscut
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I stopped. “Oh, no.”
On the wall behind the buffet hung a display of photos, blown up to poster size. Jesse was parked in front of it, shaking his head.
“Rock my world. Now I’ve seen everything,” he said.
The photo showed me standing on the football field at halftime of the homecoming game, wearing a fake ermine stole and a cockeyed rhinestone tiara. I was clutching the arm of my escort, Tommy Chang, and looking surprised out of my head.
Jesse’s mouth skewed to one side. “Evan Delaney, homecoming queen.”
“Can I get a drink before you start in on me?” I said.
“And you never told me. All this time I’m thinking of you as the tomboy, the sprinter, the outsider. . . .”
Abbie nodded.“Dirt biker, creative writer, girl gladiator ... ”
“He doesn’t need any help,” I said.
“Talk about a cover story,” Jesse said. “Did everybody in China Lake live a double life?”
“Yes. Like you.” I raised a fist. “Fight the power. Free Canada.”
He gazed at the photo again. “Who’s that in the background?”
“Valerie Skinner.”
“Your mortal enemy?” He leaned forward. “Why does she look blurry?”
“She lunged and knocked the tiara off.”
“She looks like a rottweiler. She really held the grudge that hard?”
Abbie grabbed a pineapple weenie. “Like a vise grip.” She looked at the posters. “I wish they’d put up the one of you getting the tiara back from her.”
Jesse looked at me.
“I tackled her,” I said.
“You speared her. It was majestic,” Abbie said.
I glanced around at the crowd.
“Don’t worry. Last time anybody saw her was graduation. You’re safe.” Abbie waved to a stout woman across the buffet table. “Hey, Becky.” Under her breath she said, “She’s still making those appliqué shirts.”
Indeed, Becky O’Keefe was wearing a pink sweatshirt with bobbles and glitter. Abbie trotted over and hugged her.
Jesse leaned back, shaking his head at the photo. “A coup attempt. Wild. Did you have Valerie flogged?”
“For your information, I made a damn fine homecoming queen.” I pinched the bridge of my nose. “And do not speak of my hair. If you compare me to Jon Bon Jovi I will dump you on your ass before you can shout.”
“I wouldn’t dare.” He thought about it. “Twisted Sister, maybe.”
I strode to the bar and asked for chardonnay. He followed, ordered iced tea, and sat tapping his thumb against his knee, wearing a cocky look.
“Tommy Chang isn’t anything like you described him.”
“Not a word, Jesse.
Nada.
Zip it.”
He glanced at the photo. “I pictured this ultracool rebel, Bruce Lee meets Clint Eastwood. But—”
“Tommy was
not
that short.”
His smile was dazzling to the point of infuriation. “I think it’s sweet. Frodo wins the hand of the queen.”
I took my chardonnay. “Don’t you have cows that need milking back in Manitoba?”
A woman walked up to the bar. “Evan?”
I set down my drink and shook her hand. “Ms. Shepard.”
“Shepard-Cantwell.”
She was in her early forties and looked ready for Wood-stock. Her dress may have come down off the wall at the Guggenheim, considering that it mixed newspaper headlines with fake fur and glass eyeballs. She smiled at Jesse with the oversweet gleam of the professionally condescending.
“Sorry that we never met when you were an exchange student.”
His tone was mordant. “That’s okay. My English is much better now.”
“It’s wonderful that you were able to travel all this way, considering.” She turned back to me with a brittle smile. “I hear you’re still writing. It’s great that you found an outlet for your imagination.”
“Thanks.” Nitwit.
“How are your parents?”
“Good. Divorced.”
“Oh. Well. That’s a shame.” She flipped her hair over her shoulder. “Your dad had such panache. Even when he was raking us teachers over the coals, we couldn’t help but be impressed. Give him my best, won’t you?”
She swanned away. I downed half my wine.
An outlet for my imagination
. Birdbrain.
Jesse said, “Let me guess. Art teacher?”
“
The
art teacher. It was her class where Valerie stole my journal.”
China Lake was a place where you had to make your own entertainment, generally involving sports, garage bands, and drinking. My hobby was writing. Valerie’s was revenge.
In high school I scrawled my own world in a journal containing every poem and hissy fit and spasm of lust that spilled from my pubescent soul, and one day when Ms. Shepard stepped out of the classroom Valerie took it from my backpack.
She denied it, vociferously. But she spent lunchtime reading sections aloud in the girls’ room, including my fantasies about Tommy Chang and Keanu Reeves, and how I considered her a crude, skank-faced, butt-scratching diva.
“Ms. Shepard asked the student teacher if he’d witnessed it. I can still see him, this prissy little guy going on like a howler monkey, telling her I was jumping to conclusions.”
“And Ms. Shepard thought you had an active imagination?”
Ms. Shepard saw surfaces, not subtext. First impressions were her thing, and she had drawn her first impression of me two weeks into my freshman year, the day our class took the field trip to Renegade Canyon.
“She called me an instigator.”
“So, on top of everything you were a troublemaker? What else are you hiding in your secret past? Animal sacrifice?”
“You really want to know?”
 
I stepped off the school bus that day into the heat, pulling a baseball cap low on my head. We were fifty miles down a deserted road on the far reaches of the naval base, on a field trip to study the petroglyphs, prehistoric art carved into the canyon walls.
Ms. Shepard waved to us. “Everybody over here. Bring your sketch pads.”
I shielded my eyes against the ferocious light, walking with my head down. The sunblock was hidden in my backpack, beneath my journal and a dog-eared copy of
Ender’s Game
. Pale skin, pale poetry, science fiction: Even I knew I was a geek.
The canyon gashed for miles through black rocks splattered crimson and yellow with lichen. Carvings covered the walls like graffiti. Snakes. Deer. Bighorn sheep. Weird human figures with spirals for faces and shock waves erupting from their heads, rising ghostly and vivid sixty feet above me. The light seemed to hum.
Ms. Shepard trudged through the soft sand, waving. “Imagine the young hunters hidden among the boulders. Picture the shamans carving these images to bring success to the hunt.”
I stared up at the figure of a horned human with feet like talons. Someone pushed past, knocking my shoulder. Her voice came as small and sharp as a needle.
“Watch it, Nosebleed.”
My hand shot to my upper lip. Valerie snickered and walked on by.
Ms. Shepard frowned. I found a wad of Kleenex in my pocket, but my nose wasn’t bleeding. I felt a zinging sensation along my arms. Valerie had gotten me again.
Ms. Shepard twirled in a circle. Her peasant skirt flared and her chandelier earrings danced in the sun. “When shamans drew the prey animal, they gave the hunter power. Look. Can’t you see it?”
I’ll say. The walls were covered with bighorn sheep. And hunters spearing sheep, archers shooting sheep, dogs attacking sheep. Plus creepy sheep: two-headed ones, and big ones with little ones inside. It was mayhem.
“And these symbols. The snake represents fertility. And the spiral is the Mother Earth navel from which man emerged.”
There were snickers and audible
ick
s. And behind me, whispering.
Valerie and Abbie and Tommy were inching back from the group. Shooting a surreptitious glance at Ms. Shepard, Valerie slunk between two boulders and took off. Abbie looked around, checking that the coast was clear, and spied me.
She froze. Behind her glasses, her expression said,
New girl, don’t rat me out.
Then she whispered, “Want to come?”
Tommy nodded beside her. He was a wiry kid with powerful brown eyes and a convincing aura of cool, and whenever he looked my way my stomach hollowed. He mouthed,
Come on,
and slipped between the rocks. I followed.
Abbie took off like a rocket, blond hair flying. Tommy and I sprinted behind. He shot me a smile. Exhilarated, I smiled back, thinking,
I’m in
.
The break in the rocks led up a trail. After a hundred yards we caught up with Valerie. She was laughing. Until she saw me.
“What’s she doing here?”
Valerie had hips and boobs, wore tight tops and her jeans slung low, and smelled of perfume and cigarettes. She was domineering, popular, and cruel, and after two weeks of high school she ruled the freshman class like a hegemon. I couldn’t figure a way around her, because wherever I turned she was in front of my face.
Like right now. “Why are you tagging along?”
Abbie shoved her glasses up her nose. “I said she could come.”
Valerie stepped up, inches from my face, and I felt myself shrinking. She tossed her brown hair over her shoulder. I was slow to recognize the deviousness behind her eyes.
“You can come on one condition. You answer this riddle.”
“Okay.”
“If you didn’t have feet, would you wear shoes?”
“No.”
“Then how come you’re wearing a bra?”
I blinked. A hot stone weighed on my stomach. Braying with laughter, Valerie ran ahead.
Abbie yelled, “That’s mean!” Taking my arm, she pulled me along. “Come on.”
I complied, legs watery, climbing up the trail through yellow light and a hot breeze. I hid my face from Tommy. Valerie said
bra
; she made him think about my . . . Oh, God.
He called to her. “Where is it?”
“Just ahead. My dad sets up targets out here.”
We squeezed through a crack between boulders and came out on the side of a hill, overlooking a valley. The sky was blue glass. Sand gleamed in the sun. Below, an access road ran to a complex of cinder-block buildings where Jeeps were parked.
Abbie put her hands on her hips. “We came all the way for this? That’s just, like, buildings. Where are the jets? There aren’t even targets set up.”
Valerie scanned the horizon. “I thought for sure . . .”
Soldiers in camouflage appeared outside the buildings. Some hopped into the Jeeps. One was talking on a radio. And one had a pair of binoculars to his eyes, sweeping the hills.
He called to his comrades and pointed. At us.
“Uh-oh,” I said.
Heads swiveled to stare. They began pointing and shouting. There was a flurry of movement, men running toward the Jeeps or back to the buildings.
“I don’t think we’re supposed to be here,” I said.
The flash lit the desert floor. White light wound with orange, fireballs erupting from the buildings. The boom hit us and echoed off the rocks.
Valerie clapped her hands over her ears. Tommy dropped to the ground with his arms over his head. Abbie shouted, “Oh, crap.”
Flames poured into the sky. The buildings disappeared, billowing black smoke. One of the Jeeps lay flipped upside down like a turtle, burning.
“I don’t think that was supposed to happen,” I said.
Flames and smoke towered into the sky. After a second I caught an acrid whiff. Down on the valley floor, soldiers ran to and fro outside the ring of destruction.
“Something’s wrong. Did they all get out okay?” I said.
One of the Jeeps swung around and began driving toward us, flinging up dust. The voice inside my head said,
This was secret. You weren’t supposed to see
.
“Oh, God.” Abbie sprinted away, back down the trail.
Tommy jumped up and ran after her. The Jeep lurched over the sandy ground below us and began to climb the incline.
I tugged on Valerie’s arm. “Come on.”
I ran. After a few seconds I heard her running behind me.
We pummeled back down the trail. The wind funneled between the rocks, blowing smoke over us. I breathed through my mouth to shut out the smell. The light smeared red, and I glanced up to see smoke dimming the sun. And then I saw something worse. Cruising overhead was a military helicopter.
I was so dead. Ms. Shepard was going to haul me away by the ear. And she’d call my parents. I streaked down the trail into the canyon, and stopped cold.
The helicopter sat on the ground, rotors blowing sand. Ms. Shepard was herding my classmates onto the bus. Soldiers in camouflage had pulled Abbie and Tommy off to one side. Abbie looked ashamed.
Busted.
Valerie pounded into me from behind. She gasped at the sight of the helo. A soldier walked toward us.
We were totally busted. Unless I could talk us out of trouble. And man, was I good at talking.
“I can explain. I . . .”
I felt blood running down my nose and over my top lip. I wiped it off and my hand came away bright red. Valerie gulped, looked at Ms. Shepard herding kids onto the bus, and pointed at me.
“Nosebleed said we’d see the best drawings if we followed her.”
My mouth fell open.
Heads turned. The soldier, Ms. Shepard, and my entire class stared at me. The rock in my stomach began to burn. Valerie hugged herself and started to cry.
“It’s not my fault.” She turned to me, lips quivering. “Why did you make me do it?”
My fist went into her face.
 
I swirled the wine in my glass. “Valerie blamed me for the face she grew into.” The one that ended up carrying so much weight. “Did I tell you she threatened to get a nose job and sue me to pay for it?”
Jesse looked wry. “You could have claimed sovereign immunity.”
A wolf whistle cut through the music. Across the room, a man stood with his hands in his pockets, grinning at me.

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