Exposed (5 page)

I rest my hand on the book’s worn cover. “I don’t
think it’s about putting pearls on titties. I think Emily’s trying to say Sue should be wearing pearls, that she’s fit for expensive things, deserves the best—that she’s classy.”

“Whatever you say.” Devin turns over a note card and writes down what I said. “Give me a calculus equation any day.”

“Forget that.” No way will I ever take calculus. Math class has got to be one of Dante’s Nine Circles of Hell. “Just let me handle the poetry interpretation, okay?”

“We so need to put this maybe-lesbian stuff in our paper. That had to be what Haggerty wants us to explore. Haggerty likes controversial.”

“I don’t know.” I rub my stomach, which is starting to hurt a little bit. “Using that stuff seems disrespectful. Emily Dickinson was so private.”

Like me, before my sex life became last year’s big news.

“Time for her to be exposed.” Devin grins. “Hey! We could write this like a feature exposé. The Wild Dyke of Amherst. That would totally get us an A from Haggerty.”

“Maybe.” I try to muster a big smile. “Let’s get all the note cards done first, okay? If Haggerty likes the Sue Gilbert angle, she’ll say so when she reviews the outline.”

Devin nods and scribbles some more, and makes me click an Emily-Sue-letters site so she can take more notes. Completely immersed, like when she twirls.

Devin lives for those twirling moments. All out, kicks
high, arms straight, eyes and smile shining. She probably can’t imagine somebody like Emily, who wouldn’t love all the gaping mouths and camera flashes.

As for me, without twirling, I’d just be
that girl with—you know
. Or on a good day,
spawn of that liberal-freak-woman who works for the Democrats,
or
daughter of that poor man.

Winning competitions erases every wrong thing in my life, every wrong thing about my body, my family—just, everything. When I win, I
know
I’m good. And I plan to be great on November 20, when I strike my first pose at Regionals.

Sometimes, though, the lights and cameras make me queasy.

I’m nobody, just like Emily, with all my secrets and private things crammed inside some drawer I never let anyone open. Not by
my
choice, anyway.

We work another half an hour before Devin’s dad shows up to take her home.

Of course we stall a few minutes, make some extra notes, and then Mom bangs on the door and Devin has to go. Mom insists on walking her downstairs and out to the car, and tells me to shut down for the night and go to bed.

She eyes the laptop as she pulls my bedroom door closed. “We might need some time rules for that machine,” she says. “You’re staying on it a lot lately.”

I snap the top shut to make her happy—but the
second her footsteps move down the hallway, I open the top and wait for the computer to come out of hibernation.

It gives me a logo picture, then a wait-bar, and I want to scream.

I have what, two minutes before Devin gets out the door and Mom comes back?

“Sometime tonight, pleeease.” I force my fingers to stay off the touchpad as the machine finishes waking up again.

The minute I can, I click the icon for my BlahFest homepage and go straight to my mailbox.

One message.

My pulse starts thumping, thumping as I click it.

Probably just spam.

But it’s not.

It’s from KnightHawk859.

At first, my heart plummets because the message is so short, until I read what it says:

Have to QFT. Sorry, Red. POS.

2morrow, 11P.

Under that’s a link that I recognize as a BlahFest private chat room. Embedded in the link was the name he gave the room—
paulandred
.

This time he didn’t sign his name, which I totally understand because of his message. QFT meant he had to quit f’ing talking because of POS—parent over shoulder. So he probably couldn’t sign his name without getting chewed out for breaking rules.

The P.S. says
They’d banish us, you know.

My mouth opens.

He
does
know the Emily poem I quoted in my profile.

Okay, this guy is totally better than any of the guys at West Estoria High.

For a few seconds, I let myself imagine him gazing at me with those dark, dark eyes and that silk-soft black hair curling around his handsome face as he recites one of Emily’s love poems, just for me.

My heart completely races.

An older guy—a handsome older guy who plays in a jazz band and knows poetry—yeah.

Now
this
is what I was talking about.

This is exactly what I wanted.

Now he wants a private, unsupervised chat—totally against my PIRs.

At 11:00 p.m., an hour after my lights-out, computer-off time.

How can I pull that off?

Downstairs, I hear the front door close.

In a big hurry, I hit REPLY, type
B-there
, hit SEND, and close the laptop’s lid.

Before Mom makes it to my room, I shove myself out of my chair, strip off my clothes and hurl them in the closet, and grab a sleep shirt from my drawer.

Another few seconds, and I’ve got my notepad to write a few wind-down poems.

As Mom opens my door, I’m heading toward the bed.

“Everything okay, Chan?” Mom asks. “The paper going well?”

“Sure,” I say without sounding out of breath. “Everything’s just fine.”

“And your other homework?”

“Done.”

She gives me the funny-Mom eye, but surrenders with, “Okay, then. Don’t write too long.”

“I won’t.”

But of course, I do.

It’s all I have to bring to-day,

This and my heart beside,

This and my heart, and all the fields,

And all the meadows wide.

Be sure you count, should I forget,—

Some one the sun could tell,—

This, and my heart, and all the bees

Which in the clover dwell.

Emily Dickinson

Silent dawn

Holds me

Like an angry lover,

Feeding rage and passion

Into my pacing thoughts.

Dark mountains

Hold their thunder

But when it storms in the flatlands,

Lightning surrounds you.

I keep throwing the pieces around me,

Picking them up and rearranging them,

Trying to make the picture

Turn out

Differently.

Chan Shealy

KnightHawk.

What a great nickname. How did Paul think of that?

Thick black hair … those eyes.

Wonder what his tattoos are. I couldn’t see them clearly.

It would be a bad idea to fidget, so I force myself to be very, very still. My physics teacher assumes fidgeting equals a desire to answer questions like
How many angels can
really
dance on the head of a pin—if the angels have a width and depth of exactly one micrometer
? Or
If a tree falls in the forest and rolls down a hill, how do you calculate the coefficient of friction
?

I grip the sides of my desk and glare at the back of Ellis’s blond head, two rows up and one to the right, and wish I could flip a paper wad into all that golden perfection without getting forced to recite the metric prefixes. Since we both sit close to the front of the tiny box of a classroom, I leave that in the fantasy category. Along with Paul.

Well, I’m trying to quit thinking about him, but it’s hard.

I keep imagining his smile, his dimple—and those muscles.

The bell rings.

Ellis springs out of her seat, glances in my direction, and gives me a
very
nasty smile.

I hold back for a second, to let the witch-monster clear the room. No way I’m getting close to her, not after
that
smile. But a minute or so later, I’ve got my books in my bag and I’m off and running after waving at a couple of seniors who aren’t assheads like Ellis. I mean, not
everybody
believes Adam-P’s lies.

But a lot of people do.

They will, at least until some other girl catches cooties from him. And if there is any justice in the universe, or anything like God or karma or whatever, Ellis will come down with the worst case of itching, burning sores ever known to humankind.

I zip out of the building—and water slaps against the side of my head. A whole wave of it. In my eyes. In my hair. It’s all I can do not to drop my bag. I spin to my right just in time to see Ellis drop an empty water bottle into the recycle bin. Her friends are laughing so hard they can’t even get breaths.

“Oops,” Ellis says, all sweetness and sunshine. “It just … slipped out of my hand.”

Can’t win. There’s no way. If I go after her, I’ll get suspended. She’ll say she threw the water in self-defense, and her trained monkey-herd will back her up.

I turn my back to her so I can’t see her smirk, smear the water out of my eyes with my palms, smooth my hair as best I can, and walk away. My whole body feels like it’s sparking, I’m so mad. And wet. When I shake my head, I shower droplets like a dog that ran through a fire hydrant. I probably look that bad, too.

Imagining ten different ways to dump buckets of stagnant putrid pond water on Ellis to get even, I round the corner, heading for fifth period. Even if I’m half-drowned, it’s time for in-class band practice, which majorettes have to attend before sixth period twirling—and oh, God.

All of a sudden, I’m face to face with … him.

Just … great.

Adam-P’s standing in front of my locker.

I stop so fast somebody bangs into me from behind.

Water drips from my ears to my shoulders, then splatters on my shirt.

My heart does something between a dive and the splits, and I can’t breathe. Everything feels hot and still and sticky even though it’s October and cool today and I’m drenched and people are whizzing past me on both sides.

My eyes dart around, searching the hall, which seems like one big blur.

Please, fate, please, universe, let Devin be late to practice. Let her float around a corner with that big smile and way-deadly whip kick.

But she’s not here, and I know she won’t be. I always get to the band room after her. Devin can’t save me from—from whatever Adam-P wants.

What’s he doing in this hall, anyway? He’s a senior and most of his friends revolve around the new lockers, the
good
lockers, up in the main hall. They don’t come slumming with us “underclass trolls.”

Adam-P’s keeping his head down, gaze cutting back and forth toward everyone else in the hall like he wishes nobody would notice him.

Yeah. As if.

He sees me. His blue eyes grab me even though he’s standing kinda far away, and I’m not moving on purpose, but people are shoving me forward to get me out of their way.

Closer now.

He glances at my wet head, my damp face, then gives me a nod like,
hey
.

Adam always looked at me like that when we were going out. It made him twice as—I don’t know—Adam-P or something.

Why
am I remembering what it felt like to kiss him? How it felt when he touched me, and we—you know.

I wish I could drop dead on the spot so I’d never have to remember that again, or see him again, or hate myself
this
much. I’m scared and sick and excited all at the same time. My stomach doesn’t know whether to grow butterflies or spit flames up my throat.

What does he want?

He comes toward me, and I realize he’s got something in his hand.

A book.

And now my heart’s dropping and splitting all over again, because I can see it’s my book—well, one I gave him. Emily Dickinson,
Poems of Love
.

God, I am a total idiot.

When he reaches me, Adam-P holds out the paperback with the sweet gray cover I inscribed just for him.

I make myself keep my head up. Try to find my voice, or get ready to throw my bag smack into his handsome face. Because, oh, yes, absolutely, every hour since we broke up and had the whole in-the-halls-screaming scene about who gave what to whom and who was a slut (him, him,
him
), I’ve been planning for this moment.

My chance to shout the dozens of things I forgot that day.

The thousands of insults I didn’t think of until later. Like, constantly, since the moment we had that last fight.

And now he’s here, and the noise in the hallway turns into background static, and the air smells like fourteen different kinds of perfume and cologne, and I’m not seeing anybody but Adam-P in his slacks and black
WEHS
letter jacket.

“You’re, um, soaked,” he manages.

I don’t answer.

He clears his throat, then shoves the love poems I gave him closer to me and mumbles, “Ellis found this. I didn’t want her to tear it up.”

Adam-P hesitates as he puts the book in my outstretched hand. (Is that hand part of my body?)

“Chan.” He clears his throat again. And looks at me with those blue eyes I want so, so, so badly to hate and scream at and
why
can’t I say anything?

I have a flash of what he used to call me.

Cutie
. And sometimes,
China Doll
.

My stomach spawns fire-breathing butterflies. I know my face has to be a shade of red not found on any color chart.

“Hey—oh, no way.” One of the sophomore majorettes, Carny Zin, seems to materialize at my right elbow. She’s one of the few people other than Devin who’ll stand up to Ellis and Adam-P, only usually not to their faces. This is surprising. This is good, right?

Because Carny’s glaring at Adam-P right now, through twisty brown curls that hang in her face. “What do
you
want?” she asks. “You lost or something, sleezebag?”