Getting REVENGE on Lauren Wood (12 page)

Ms. Herbaut’s room was near the auditorium, and she’d decorated the walls with various playbills and those annoying kitty just-hang-in-there type posters. I wonder if adults really think we’re going to get to the end of our ropes, ready to hurl ourselves off a bridge somewhere, and the sight of a cute kitty will turn us around. Saved by big-eyed kittens. Speaking for myself, I don’t want to settle for just hanging in there.

Ms. Herbaut wasn’t in the room even though this was supposed to be her assigned office hour. I wandered around, stopping at the giant bulletin board at the back. She had pinned up pictures from the film version of
My Fair Lady
and slips of paper with the song lyrics. In the center of the board there was information about the upcoming auditions. I pulled a scrap of paper out of my bag and made a few notes. Brenda still wasn’t sold on the idea, but I was working on her.

“So, Lion, we meet again. What has you so far off the yellow brick road?”

I spun around and Christopher, the good-looking guy from this morning, was leaning against the doorjamb. I felt my tongue dry out and I swallowed deeply.

“I’m Claire.”

“Cowardly Claire?”

“Courageous,” I shot back. He gave a half smile and my stomach fell into a free fall to the floor.

“What makes someone move from New York to this neck of the woods?”

“How do you know I’m from New York?”

“I asked about you.” He took another step closer, and I felt my heart pick up its pace. It was slamming around in my chest like I was sprinting uphill.

“What else did you find out?”

“Not much.” Christopher motioned to the bulletin board. “You planning to try out for the play?”

“I’m more of a behind-the-scenes person. I was going to check with Ms. Herbaut to see if I could volunteer to stage-manage or something.”

“Ah, you like to be the power behind the throne, huh?”

I gave a high and squeaky laugh that made me sound like I’d been sucking helium. I cleared my throat and tried to say something smart. “I hear you’re a filmmaker. I wouldn’t think you’d want to be involved with a school play.”

“So you’ve been asking about me too?” His smile grew wider. “I’m going to do a documentary short on the play, a sort of drama-behind-the-drama kind of thing. I want to be a director.”

“You like Hitchcock?” I asked, hoping that he wouldn’t say something like “Hitchcock who?”

Christopher’s face lit up. “I love Hitchcock. The man was a master.
Strangers on a Train
? Brilliant.”

“I love the costumes in those black-and-white films.”

“Old movies are boring,” said a voice behind us, and we both turned around. It was Lauren, wearing a new pair of jeans.
She walked over and stood close to Christopher. She looked at me with her nose scrunched up. Her eyes were better, the puffiness was gone, but they were still red.

“What do you think?” Christopher asked me. “Do you have a Hitchcock favorite?”

“
Vertigo
. Hands down. Didn’t do well when it was released, but no doubt about it, it’s one of his best.”

Christopher gave a slight appreciative nod. “Some critics call it one of the best movies ever.”

“Did you know they only had like sixteen days of on-site filming?”

“That’s cool—I didn’t know that.” Christopher gave me an appraising look.

“More than just a pretty face,” I said.

Christopher opened his mouth to say something, but Lauren cut him off. “So, I thought you said you weren’t trying out for the play.” Her face was still squished up as if she smelled something bad. She took a slight step forward as if she were trying to use her body to create a wall between the two of us.

“You made it sound like so much fun, I decided to see if I could help out,” I said.

“Oh.” Lauren greeted the news that I would be involved with the play with the same level of excitement that others use to greet news of impending dental work. Her nostrils were flaring in and out. Mr. Ed grows annoyed.

“So you like old movies, huh?” Lauren’s eyes narrowed.

Uh-oh. Helen loved old movies. Claire was supposed to be a completely different person. Showing off for Christopher was going to cost me.

“No. I mean, well, yeah. I mean, I just like movies in general. An ex-boyfriend of mine was in film school in New York. I could take it or leave it.”

“Oh,” Christopher said, sounding disappointed. “Here I thought I found a kindred spirit.”

I shrugged, wishing I could throw myself under a bus. “Sorry.”

“Well, Lion, I’ll see you around then.” Christopher gave Lauren a quick smile and shuffled toward the door. He didn’t simply walk, he moseyed.

“Are you headed to gym?” Lauren called after him. Christopher nodded. “I’ll walk with you. I was going to ask Ms. H. a question, but I bet you can help me.”

Lauren was looking up at Christopher, and I could see it in her face. She was crazy about him. Over-the-moon crazy. Disney singing wildlife,
fa-la-la-la
kind of crazy. Christopher was everything that Lauren’s mother would hate—family from the wrong side of the tracks, earring, too-long hair, career plans that didn’t involve wearing a suit and earning obscene amounts of money. Even though they were opposites, it was clear from the way she looked at him she was head over heels. No wonder she wasn’t
that sorry about Justin. Maybe she thought it was time to throw caution, and herself, to the wind … and at Christopher.

Doing my best to woo Christopher away from her grasp wasn’t even going to feel like work. This wasn’t revenge; it was a public service. No one that good should be with someone so bad.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Grandma looked at the half-cooked carcass. She gave it a poke with her fork. “Do you think those onions are caramelizing? They don’t look caramel to me. They look soggy.”

I peered at the chicken that was squatting on a bed of sliced lemons, fennel, and onions. She didn’t really need my opinion; she could make a gourmet meal out of nothing but a soft carrot from the bottom of the crisper drawer, a slice of toast, and the spices no one ever uses, like coriander seed.

“I think the recipe called for too much broth. The onions are just boiling in there, practically floating.” She shook her head at the tragedy.

I gave a sigh. Chicken advice I didn’t need.

She looked at me. “Sorry about that. Tell me the problem again.”

“My friend Brenda doesn’t want to try out for the play.”

“Maybe the play isn’t her kind of thing.”

“It’s not. She’s not good at the spotlight. She’s more of a books and laboratories kind of person.”

“Well, then there you go.” Grandma drained some of the broth and chicken fat into the sink. “So if she doesn’t want to do it, why does that frost your cookies? Just because you’re doing the play doesn’t mean she has to do it with you. Friends can have different interests.”

I rolled my eyes. Grandma was usually pretty good at this, but every so often, usually if she had been watching too much
Dr. Phil,
her advice got all cheesy. Of course, I couldn’t tell her the real reason I needed Brenda to try out for the play. Grandma was out of the revenge loop.

“It’s not that. I can do the play on my own. It’s that I think she would be really good. It seems like a waste to have all that talent and then not use it.”

“Not like you and art.”

I sighed again. Grandma was on my case to pull together some kind of portfolio so I could apply to college art programs. It wasn’t that I didn’t like to draw, but I hated the idea of sticking my stuff in between plastic sheets so everyone could
ooh
and
aah
and decide if it was any good. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to go to college, which was fine with my parents who are all about “finding yourself,” but Grandma is all about the value of a college education.

Grandma had always been the sane one in my family. She stayed in the same house versus moving from apartment to apartment. She remembered to pay her property taxes, and you would
never catch her out in the backyard naked at midnight chanting at the moon. I loved that her linen closet was full of towels and sheets as opposed to ours, which was always full of plants and herbs my mom was drying out. I used to love to visit my grandma’s because it seemed like what a home was supposed to be, but now that we were living together, I was discovering the downside. Grandma believed in regular mealtimes and lights out by eleven. My parents never gave me a curfew because they felt that to learn responsibility I had to have freedom. Grandma was more of the “be home by midnight, Cinderella, or turn into a pumpkin” kind of guardian. She wasn’t keen on the whole “letting life unfold” thing. She wanted me to have a plan for my future. She was becoming borderline annoying about the whole art school thing.

“You can’t talk someone into something they don’t want to do,” Grandma said. “All you can do is point out what you think is in it for them. Not why you think they should do it, but what might appeal to them.” She brushed her hair out of her eyes and I laughed. “What’s so funny?”

Her hands must have had grease from the chicken on them because her hair now looked like she last took a shower in the early summer. I pointed at her head and she reached up, giving a curse when she felt the oil.

A flash of inspiration came to me. I stuck the chicken back in the oven for her while she went to wash up and hummed a victory tune. Grandma was still helping me with my revenge plan, even if she didn’t know it.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Brenda cared for our bacteria with a love and affection that some people don’t show their flesh-and-blood children. She would sneak in between classes to coo encouragingly at them, cheering on their growth. We had swiped two petri dishes per swab, and one of our dishes that had been swabbed from the girl’s bathroom had died after only two days. It wasn’t clear what had happened, but Brenda was devastated. She worried that it would throw off our entire paper. I pointed out that we weren’t trying to find a cure for cancer and that it is somewhat unnatural to be that upset over dead bacteria. I wouldn’t have been surprised to find out she had a small ceremony for them before she dumped the petri dish in the garbage.

A week after collecting the samples, we were at Brenda’s, working on our paper. Brenda sat at her computer, her face set in a serious expression. She was looking through the rough sketches I had done for our project. I was lying on her floor, in
theory studying for our test, but there is only so much information I can absorb about the life span of bacteria and viruses. In my mind I replayed the day’s victory. While Lauren had been in gym class, I went to the locker room and poured olive oil into her hair spray. Knowing her affinity for excessive product use, I had not been surprised to discover that her hair ended up with so much oil that it basically repelled water. It hung from her head in greasy clumps. She tried to wash it out, but she couldn’t get it all. As a result she had to go through the rest of the afternoon looking vaguely homeless and smelling like an Italian restaurant.

“I don’t think the color is quite right,” Brenda mumbled, breaking into my happy flashback. She was holding the picture close and then far away. “I think they look too pink.”

I rolled up into a sitting position and scooted over toward her desk.

“What’s wrong? Those are lovely bacteria. Did you see what I did with their tails? Very chic.”

“Tails?” Brenda raised an eyebrow. “Flagella would be the term you’re looking for.”

“Right.” I watched Brenda as she scrolled the mouse over the computer screen looking at the various shades of pink available in the color wheel and holding up the drawing to compare. She leaned back to get a better view. “You really like this stuff, don’t you?” I said.

“What, science?”

“Yeah. Who else cares what color pink their bacteria end up being?”

“What’s strange about liking science? I like knowing how things work,” she said.

“I can totally see you being a CSI, working in a swanky glass lab down in Miami.”

“That show is total bunk, you know. They make it look like you can run a DNA sample in the time it takes to do a Google search.”

“What? TV lies? Tell me it isn’t true!” I threw my hands up in the air.

“Ha ha. I don’t want to be a CSI, even if it means a fancy lab.”

“So what are you going to do with all this science know-how?”

“I want to be an astronaut,” she said with a solemn voice.

I started to laugh and then realized she wasn’t joking.

“Serious? You want to be a space ranger?”

“I was thinking more something with NASA but, yeah, I’m serious.”

“When you go to Mars will you paint my name on a rock up there or something? Maybe bring me back some kind of tiny alien I could keep in an aquarium on my desk?”

“I’m pretty sure NASA frowns on those kind of things, but I’ll see what I can do. What about you?”

“I could never be an astronaut. I throw up on roller coasters,
and I’m pretty sure being shot into space is more traumatic than that.”

“I was being serious,” Brenda said.

“So am I. When I was nine, my dad took me to Six Flags. I sprayed down a group of Korean tourists with half-digested Fruit Loops and soy milk. Trust me, those Koreans will always remember their American experience. I bet they never got the smell out.”

“I meant, what do you want to do for a living?”

“I don’t know,” I said with a shrug.

“You’re really good at art. You could do graphics or something.”

“Mmm, the thrill of designing ads for feminine products, much more meaningful than your shallow goal of exploring space for humanity.”

Brenda rolled her eyes and turned back to her computer. She chewed on the end of her pencil.

That was it! Grandma’s advice to the rescue again. Suddenly I knew my angle. “You know, I bet it’s hard to be an astronaut. I suspect NASA only takes candidates from the best schools and stuff, huh?” I asked.

“Well, it’s not like they recruit from the vocational programs if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Yeah, come to think of it, you never see any job postings for astronauts in the classified ads. No wonder you worry so much about your grades.”