Election (3 page)

I felt so bad and weird that I actually made an appointment with the school psychologist. She's pretty, maybe thirty years old, with really great taste in clothes—silk scarves, Italian shoes, some kind of subtle perfume (most of the other women teachers smell like they're wearing Wizard room deodorizer). I remember walking into her office and wanting to
be
her, to skip ahead ten or twelve years to a time when I'd be poised and elegant and totally in control of my life.

“This is all strictly confidential,” she told me. “Feel free to say whatever's on your mind.”

“I'm in love.”

Just blurting it out was such a relief, I immediately burst into tears. She pushed a box of Kleenex across the table and watched me with a sympathetic expression.

“Take your time,” she said, pausing for a second to admire her enormous diamond engagement ring. “When you're ready, you can tell me all about him.”

That's when I realized how impossible it was, my
whole life. Talking about it wasn't going to change anything. I thanked her for her time, and got a pass back to study hall.

MY EX-GIRLFRIEND WAS
a kisser. I went out with her a whole year and never even unhooked her bra. She was perfectly happy to make out for three hours at a stretch, but if I so much as tried to untuck her shirt, everything came crashing to a halt.

“Paul,”
she'd say in this shocked voice, like I'd just whipped out a pair of handcuffs. “What are you
doing!”

I guess that's why I was so amazed when Lisa started unbuttoning my shirt after just a few minutes of kissing. Her mother was at work, and I realized pretty quickly that she wasn't fooling around. Her face was hot and she was breathing in these hard little gulps. She took my hand and pulled me toward her bedroom.

“Are you sure?” I asked.

She said yes. She fumbled for something in her dresser drawer and told me she'd be right back.

Time seemed to expand while I waited for her, but I felt totally focused, totally connected to the moment, the way I did sometimes on the football field.

“Close your eyes,” she said from the hallway.

I FOLLOWED THEM
to her house. I sat on my bike by the mailbox and waited.

Now I knew how Mom felt the day she found out about Dad and Sarah Stiller. It was a complete coincidence. She'd taken off the afternoon to drive me to the eye doctor. On the way home, we happened to pass the Arrowhead Motel just as Dad walked out of the office.

Mom pulled into the parking lot of Giant Carpet, just in time for us to watch them slipping into room 16. Dad held his hand on her big butt and glanced furtively from side to side like a criminal. He looked so pathetic, a potbellied guy in a tweed rain hat, about to do the nasty.

Our original plan was to wait there until he came out, but Mom changed her mind after a few minutes, maybe because of me, I don't know. We drove home and she cooked dinner, just like any other night. Dad got home at six-fifteen, kissed her on the cheek, asked me about school. They stayed together three more miserable months.

I didn't chicken out like Mom. I forced myself to stay and watch. Two hours passed before Paul finally emerged from Lisa's house, blinking like the sun hurt his eyes, but by that time, I'd already decided to run for President.

THE CANDIDATE ASSEMBLY
usually ranks as one of the duller rituals of the high school calendar, full of the windy rhetoric of commencement, but without the sense of festivity and true accomplishment that makes the excesses of graduation speakers so forgivable, and sometimes even touching.

I knew better than most people how little to expect because I had read and approved all the speeches in advance in my capacity as SGA advisor. I'm told that this custom of prior review dates back to the early seventies, when an honor student shocked the Administration by running on a pro-marijuana platform, and received a standing ovation.

“A joint in every locker!” he was supposed to have pledged. “Two buds in every bong!”

The speeches of 1992 looked to be nowhere near as interesting. Tracy Flick focused on herself, of course, her many talents and accomplishments, her proven ability to lead. Paul outlined a misty vision of a new kind of school, a cooperative, productive place without cliques or outcasts, an oasis of learning where students were equals in one another's eyes and teachers functioned as guides and helpers rather than narrow-minded disciplinarians. It was inspiring enough, but utterly beyond anything he had the power to achieve as SGA President.

Tammy was the wild card. On the morning of the Assembly, she submitted a woefully unfinished draft for my approval. It began with some interesting remarks about the school not meeting the needs of ordinary students, the ones who weren't academic or athletic superstars, but then it just fizzled out. The language was tentative and disconnected, and I remember thinking as I read it that she was in way over her head.

“Tammy?” I said. “Are you sure you want to do this? You can always try again next year.”

She studied me through her glasses, and I thought for a second that she was ready to back out. But then she shook her head.

“No,” she said. “I better go through with it. I think it'll be good for me.”

Up to that moment, I'd been baffled by her candidacy, unable to see what an anonymous sophomore had to gain from competing head-to-head with an older brother who was a star athlete and one of the most popular kids in the school. But now I saw—or imagined—that she was doing it as a personal challenge, a way to move out of Paul's shadow and emerge as an individual in her own right. I knew the feeling, having spent my own adolescence locked in psychological combat with an older brother whose charmed existence always seemed to diminish my own.

“Can you finish this by seventh period?”

She nodded. “I'll work on it during lunch and study hall.”

“Okay.” I initialed the draft and slid it across the desk. “It's up to you.”

I THOUGHT TAMMY WAS
a dweeby sophomore with some kind of weird death wish. From my perspective, she didn't alter the dynamic of the election at all. It was still me against Paul. Competence vs. Popularity. Qualified vs. Unqualified. Tammy was just a distraction.

I WAS SO NERVOUS
the day of the Assembly. It was my speech, after all, that Paul was going to deliver to the whole school. I didn't mind not getting the credit. Paul knew whose words they were, and that was enough.

In recent weeks, I'd become totally engrossed in the real presidential campaign and was learning for the first time about primaries, consultants, pollsters, spin doctors, all the behind-the-scenes players. I saw myself as Paul's strategist and chief speech writer, his girlfriend and secret weapon, a cross between Hillary and Peggy Noonan.

We'd arranged to meet outside the auditorium before seventh period so I could give him my good luck charm. As soon as I saw him, I knew we were in trouble. He was pale with dread, and his lips had turned an alarming shade of blue, as though he'd been swimming for hours in icy water.

Two years earlier, right after my parents' divorce, my dad brought me on a trip to the Bahamas. The second or third day, we took a boat out to this coral reef where there was supposed to be fantastic snorkeling, big neon fish that swam right up and kissed you on the mask.

There were maybe twenty people on board, and when we got to the reef, everyone jumped in the water
but me (I was mad at my dad and had decided to punish him by not having any fun). A couple of minutes later, this tall skinny man climbed back onto the boat and sat down across from me, still in his flippers and life jacket. He told me he was on his honeymoon and had had a panic attack the moment his face went underwater. His voice was normal, and I didn't realize how spooked he was until he tried to light a cigarette. His hands were shaking so hard he couldn't direct the match to where it was supposed to go. I had to do it for him.

Paul's hands were shaking just like that right before the Assembly. He reached up to fix his hair and almost missed his head.

HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS
are a notoriously tough crowd. They're suspicious of fancy rhetoric and sensitive to the slightest sign of self-importance. Raised on sitcoms, commercials, and MTV, their attention span for the spoken word is next to nonexistent. They arrange themselves in rowdy clusters and set their bullshit detectors on Red Alert.

Tracy understood this. Knowing she was a slightly ridiculous, slightly scandalous personage in the eyes of
her peers, she decided to neutralize potential hecklers by emphasizing rather than soft-pedaling those aspects of her reputation. Sheathed in a startlingly short, body-hugging red dress and black tights, she delivered an unapologetic self-appraisal that was as accurate as it was provocative.

“I know you like Paul better than you like me,” she said in summation, “and I don't really blame you. He's a nice, sweet guy and I'm a—well, I'm not nice and sweet, let's just leave it at that. But when it comes down to the wire, who do you want fighting for the students of Win wood High? Do you want Mr. Nice Guy?” She put her hands on her hips and smiled knowingly at the audience. “Or do you want me?”

I WATCHED PAUL
and Lisa outside the auditorium. She was talking in a low voice; he was nodding. She smiled and touched him on the shoulder. He looked at his feet, shook his head. In two seconds, a total stranger would have known they were in love.

She held out her hand, a jewel-like crystal—her good luck charm—sparkling on her open palm. I ducked into the girls' room, found an empty stall, and stood inside it for five, maybe ten minutes, wondering
if I would always feel this bad, every day for the rest of my life.

THE WHITE PAPER
fluttered in Paul's trembling hands. He stared down at the words with that troubled, mildly pained expression of his and spoke in a barely audible monotone, forgetting to look at the audience.

“When you think about it,” he whispered, “a school is more than just a school it's our second home the place where we spend most of our time and grow as individuals a community but is our school everything it could be let me suggest to you that it is not…”

He stuttered, lost his place, omitted key words, went back and read entire paragraphs over again. By the time he reached the conclusion, even his most ardent supporters were stupefied. Sound effect snores sawed through the thick air, but Paul read on, undaunted.

“I want our school to reach its true potential a radiant city … uh, citadel of learning and serving I mean service to humanity that is why I am running for President.”

The applause that followed expressed relief rather than approval, but I'm not sure Paul was up to making
that sort of distinction as he stood frozen at the podium in a post-oratorical daze, a grin of pure panic inching across his face as he tried to remember what to do next. The outgoing President, Larry DiBono, had to direct him back to his seat.

You had to feel for Tammy as she approached the microphone in a pretty flowered dress. The mob had grown surly after Paul's speech and was now eager for sport.

“Tammy! Tammy! Tammy!” they chanted, their wolf whistles and catcalls only serving to emphasize her plainness and obscurity. She had to climb onto a footstool just to see the audience.

TAMMY DIDN'T SPEAK
right away. She scanned the rows of seats spread out below her, as if trying to make eye contact with every single voter. I felt funny when she picked me out of the crowd and smiled. Suddenly there were only two of us present in that enormous room. I hated her for that, the way she still had of making everyone else disappear.

SHE MUST HAVE STOOD
there for two solid minutes, letting the idiots have their fun. It was an extraordinary display of patience, something you might have expected from a veteran public speaker. When she finally opened her mouth, she had the undivided attention of everyone in the auditorium.

“Who cares about this stupid election?”

There was another eruption from the crowd, only this time it was spontaneous, cleansed of sarcasm. She had put her finger on the pulse of the event, uttered the unspoken truth that was hovering in a giant cartoon balloon over the entire gathering.

From his post by the emergency exit, the Vice-Principal, Walt Hendricks, shot me a startled glance. All I could do was shrug. She wasn't reading from the prepared text.

“You think it really matters who gets elected President of Winwood? You think it will change anything around here, make one single person happier or smarter or nicer? You think the food will taste any better in the cafeteria?”

The audience was quiet now, but it was a charged silence, the kind you'd get at a wedding if someone rose to tell the assembled guests exactly why this couple shouldn't be joined in holy matrimony. Walt flushed a
bright dyspeptic pink and made frantic throat-slitting motions with his index finger, my signal to intervene. I rose from my aisle seat in the front row and began moving slowly toward the stage. I didn't want to pull the plug on the microphone, but didn't see much of an alternative.

“My opponents have a lot more experience than me,” she continued. “But since it doesn't really matter, you might as well vote for me. Your lives won't be affected one way or the other.”

I had my hand on the plug when she stepped down off her stool, crossed her ankles, and signed off, to a huge ovation, with a breathtakingly cynical little curtsy.