The Taming (4 page)

“Samuel Clements,” I said.

“No!” somebody screamed out. “No more guesses!”

Ms. Cooper smiled. “Do people want it to count?”

“Is he right?” that same girl asked.

Ms. Cooper just gave a bigger smile in response. “I’m not telling you if he’s right or wrong. You have to decide as a class: do you trust your new classmate?” She turned to look at me, as did every eye in the room.

“I’m right.” I said it confidently. I
was
right.

“Has anybody even heard of Samuel … Samuel … whatever he said?” the Emo-boy asked.

“Clements,” Ms. Cooper said.

There was more mumbled conversation as people were trying to come to some decision.

“It’s the right answer.” I paused. “Trust me.” I flashed my best smile.

“I believe him,” a girl said—a very pretty girl. “I say we trust him.”

I did have a way of getting pretty girls to trust me … at least in the beginning.

“That would be wise,” Ms. Cooper said. “It
is
in fact Samuel Clements, a.k.a. Mark Twain. Thanks to Evan, we will be dismissed early for lunch!”

There were cheers and hoots, and the guy two seats away leaned over and slapped me on the back.

“But first let’s accomplish a little bit of work. We are going to start reading one of the classics. It was written by arguably the greatest writer in the history of the English language.”

Oh, great, we were going to be reading
Romeo and Juliet
or
Hamlet
or—

The door opened. It was Danny!

“Good morning, or is it already afternoon?” Ms. Cooper said.

“Come on, I’m only slightly late,” Danny said.

“Slightly was over fifteen minutes ago. You know the rules. You have to provide either a valid and truthful reason for your tardiness, or perform a dramatically told, yet believable story, or you have to go to the office for a late slip.” Ms. Cooper gestured for him to come into the centre of the circle and she retreated off to the side.

“Okay, here’s my reason. I was heading outside for a smoke this morning and I ran into this guy, this guy I’d never even
met
, and he just handed me the keys to his car … an Audi TT … and he asked if I could drop something off in the car and return the keys to him later.”

“So far, what’s the opinion of the audience … the judges … is he telling the truth, or at least providing a credible lie?” Ms. Cooper asked.

People all around the circle, almost without exception, gave him two thumbs down. I didn’t do anything.

“Tough room. I’ll continue,” Danny said. “But this guy, he said that if I wanted I could even take his car for a little spin, and I wasn’t going to, but it
was
an Audi and I’ve never even sat in an Audi, so I took it for a ride.”

I couldn’t help but wince in reaction.

“And man, you wouldn’t
believe
just how fast that car can go and how well it corners and—”

“I think that’s about enough. Raise your hand if you think he’s lying?” Ms. Cooper asked.

Every hand went up but mine.

“I guess it’s unanimous … except for Evan.” She paused. “Evan, do you actually believe his story?”

“Well …”

“Could I at least
finish
my story?” Danny protested. He reached into his pocket and pulled out keys—
my
keys. “Here, Evan,” he said, and he tossed them to me.

“That story is true?” Ms. Cooper gasped.

Danny gracefully bowed from the waist. Ms. Cooper started to clap, and then the rest of the class jumped to their feet and began clapping and cheering.

“I think there is no point in us trying to top that dramatic presentation!” Ms. Cooper called out above the noise. “And because of that you are all dismissed—now—for a very,
very
early lunch!”

The cheering got even louder.

“But remember, I’ll see you all tonight, right after school, in the auditorium … 3:30 sharp, and no excuses from anybody!”

Chapter Five

T
he thrill for the day, probably even the year, was that we got a new guy in drama, a senior. It was a major topic of conversation in the cafeteria at lunch. Ms. Cooper’s class was pretty well divided between grade elevens and twelves, and the girls in our class went hormonal when they got within spitting distance of a male who showers. It was a nuclear blowback when Evan Campbell stepped into Room 273. Not that you’d have caught me looking. I didn’t play that game. What was the point?

But God, he was over six feet worth of wow.
And
apparently smart, too.
And
 … he drove an Audi! I’d spent the rest of the period looking, but not looking. Evan Campbell was yummy. Wait, who thought that thought? That wasn’t me. I didn’t think thoughts like that. This was where being invisible came in handy. No one could see me thinking thoughts that weren’t like my thoughts, and he certainly wouldn’t have even known I was in the room. I absolutely did not react to boys like that. And he was just another boy. But not.

I’d concentrated on Ms. Cooper with renewed intensity. She was my version of a cold shower. Then Danny entered with that too-stupid-to-be-true true story.

I couldn’t wait to tell Lisa. I mean, an Audi! Of course that in itself wouldn’t have impressed Lisa. Her parents had major money, and they would have bought her an Audi, or a small country, if she’d just promised to stay in therapy.

“My, my, what a wonder to behold,” Travis said as he plopped onto a seat at my table in the cafeteria.

“What’s a wonder?” I asked.

“The new guy … the one you’re staring at from across the room.”

“I’m not staring at anybody,” I said, as I stopped eyeballing Evan.

“Lie to me if you want, honey, but don’t lie to yourself,” Travis sighed.

Hey, it was the eighth wonder of the world that I had any friends, period. I sucked at the bonding stuff at the best of times. Yet Travis had been my best friend from the moment I came to the school last year in grade ten. He’d picked me out even as I was trying to blend into the lockers and even though he was a year ahead of me. We found Lisa three weeks before Christmas. Also new to the school, Lisa came from a number of places, the most recent being a boarding school called Rigby College. She’d had enough with the wilderness of Port Henry and the aggressive idiocy of entitled trust fund kids. She liked me and Travis better, way better. Go figure. So by early December of last year, I had a “group” and guaranteed survivability. It had been a long time since I’d had either. It took some getting used to.

Lisa joined me and Travis that day for a late lunch in the cafeteria, which was not so affectionately known as the Droopy Diaper Café. I wasn’t sure but I thought the smell of the place had a lot to do with the name. Even in the soup of what passes for your modern urban high school student body, my friends were noticeable. I was their beige-on-beige wallpaper; they stood out even more with me as their backdrop. Although Travis and Lisa would have hotly denied it, the two of them were as much “in uniform” as our site-specific crop of nerds, goths, preps, orange fashionistas, druggies, gangstas, band kids, jocks, players and that whole shambling army of kids called the silent majority. That’s probably where I would have belonged, except even
they
were too visible for me.

Travis doled out our lunches. It was his turn to wait in line. There was macaroni and french fries for him, and organic mystery meat for Lisa and me. Travis had been Emo-boy since grade nine. Danny—sitting across the way with Josh and Evan—liked to point out, on a daily basis, that “Emo is over,” but Travis insisted, on the same daily basis, that he was going to single-handedly revive the movement, skinny jeans, swept hair, foo-foo music and all.

Lisa was a different story altogether. She was barely civil. Somehow that added to her allure. Lisa’s “tell it like it is” method of communication had earned her respect and a fair bit of fear from her immediate peer group, us. I personally thought she slid somewhere onto the Asperger’s scale, but her folks had therapied her into what passed for almost normal. The other thing that got her respect was that she was smarter than anyone else in the school, including the teachers, and the teachers knew it. Lisa’s “uniform” consisted of some combination of a “this season” skirt her mother brought back from Bloomingdale’s mixed in with something from the Goodwill slush pile. Travis finished off Lisa’s look by colouring her hair a deep burgundy with brilliant fuchsia in alternating sections.

Uniforms aside, Lisa’s best feature, like Travis’s, was that she liked me. This year I’d really tried to accept that. Like I said, I didn’t “do friends” at the other schools. This was weird, but good weird.

I was probably smiling vacantly at the two of them as I tried to drown out Mom’s voice, which was Velcroed in my brain all day. Lisa called it my “middle-distance” look, the one immortalized by a hundred million girls’ junior fiction novels where the plucky heroine on the cover is looking stupidly into pretty much nowhere. Lisa said my stupid look intrigued her. She said she wanted to know where I go.

Trust me, she didn’t. I went to a lot of places, but lately, I’d been going to Mom with a can of hairspray in one hand and a scotch in the other. She’s smoking and spraying and she’s angry.

“You think it’s easy being a single mother when your kid keeps scaring off any half-decent prospect that comes sniffing around? Not this time!” She stubs out the butt like it has offended her and lights a fresh one. “When I say make yourself scarce in the evenings, I mean make yourself
God damned
scarce! We don’t want to see you, Katie. Joey is the real deal, I don’t want to scare off another one!”

“Our little girl is growing up,” Travis said to Lisa.

“What, puberty has finally struck?” She winked at me.

“No, no, no!” Travis said. “This is all
so
exciting. Now I know how a mother bird feels when its baby wants to leave the nest. Our child has developed herself a little crush on the new boy.”

“The new boy? Word is out all over the school, seriously hot. Is he here?” Lisa asked. “Can I see him?”

“Could you both just shut up … and sit down … 
please
?”

Lisa looked like she was going to resist, but she must have sensed how embarrassed I felt.

“Well, is he here in the café?” she asked.

“Over there,” Travis said. “With Josh and Danny.”

“Lordy, is that him? That’s got to be him.” Lisa elbowed me and let out a low, slow whistle at the same time.

“I rest my case,” said Travis, mumbling through a mouthful of macaroni.

“Okay.” She narrowed her eyes. “More than standard pretty, I’ll grant you. And definitely top-drawer private school type. What’s he doing in this hellhole?”

“Excuse me!” Travis flicked a noodle at her. “You’re in this hellhole too!”

“Completely different,” Lisa sniffed. “I made a conscious, classic, iconoclastic choice to be here.” She joined me and every other girl in the Droopy Diaper in locking on to Evan. “He, on the other hand, has a story. And I bet it’s a good one.”

He seemed to be having a great time horsing around with Danny and Josh. And I had a great time looking. Evan was like nothing and no one I had ever seen before. And, a handy little bonus of being invisible, I could look all I wanted and no one could see me looking.

Chapter Six

I
balanced my tray as we moved across the cafeteria. Judging by the smell this was just one more way in which my present school couldn’t hope to measure up to any of my previous schools. There was an aroma suggesting a fast food restaurant … correction, the dumpster behind a fast food restaurant.

“We always sit here,” Danny said as he settled at an empty table in the corner.

I sat down two seats from him.

“By the way,” he said, “I didn’t really take your car for a drive. That part was a lie. I’m just always late for class. I think they’d be surprised if I was on time.”