Charm and Consequence (2 page)

“I’ve never seen any of the Harry Potter movies,” Alistair informs us. “I avoid movies and books that glorify witchcraft.”

Cassie snorts so hard that the Diet Coke she’s guzzling almost bursts through her nostrils.

“Harry Potter’s about
magic
, not witchcraft,” she says, as if Alistair were an unusually stupid specimen of slug she found on the bottom of her rain boot.

“Witchcraft and magic are both the work of the devil,” he tells us, and I almost laugh until I realize he’s not kidding. Leigh is starting to flush a little bit across her cheeks and Cassie bursts into laughter. I guess it’s not often she can feel superior to anyone in their critique of reading material—my dad’s an English professor, so we talk books a lot in our house. But since few people around here bother to analyze
Cosmo Girl
, Cassie is usually left out of the discussion. She jumps in now with the enthusiasm of one of our cats finding a long-lost mouse toy under the couch.

“There’s no
devil
in Harry Potter!” she scoffs, tossing her blond hair for emphasis like a horse swatting a fly.

“And there is no
God
in Harry Potter,” Alistair responds. He turns to Leigh and asks suspiciously, “Have you read these books?”

“Just the first one,” she admits, though I'm pretty sure as they were passed down to her from me and Tori, years ago, that Leigh read all of them. At least once. .

Cassie gives up talking to this uniquely unappetizing member of the male species and turns to me with a roll of her gray blue eyes, saying, “Mom is at her Ladies’ Aid thing now so she says you have to drive me to the game. Ten minutes? I’m going up to change.”

When she leaves, I grab a cookie before they're all gone and take a seat, even though Leigh is pretty much begging me with her eyes not to.

“So is that what your family was doing in China, teaching the heathens in the field about the evils of teen movies?” I ask Alistair.

“In part,” he says, setting down his half-drained glass of milk. “American pop culture is taking hold in China very rapidly. They need to be warned.”

“Oh, no doubt. So you’re
not
just teaching them about virgin births and eating with forks, then.”

He sits back in his chair and looks at me carefully over the round glasses that give him an owlish quality. He says, “We were taking God’s word where it had not been heard, just as we are doing here in Massachusetts now.”

“That worked out so well for Cotton Mather, right? Please warn me before the next public burning so I can get out of town.”

Leigh jumps up to get the milk jug and says to me, “Not everyone is as cynical as you, George. Some of us believe there is a better life beyond this.”

“I’m counting on that, believe me,” I tell her.

Alistair sits up then and leans toward me. “So you are ready to be saved,” he announces, and actually reaches for my hands. I pull them back, fast, like his anointed fingers might singe my heathen flesh, and say, “Saved from the boredom and hypocrisy of this town? Hallelujah!” I wave my hands in the air in my best approximation of a gospel singer.

“Saved from a life of
sin
,” Alistair says patiently but I can hear an edge in his voice now.

“I honestly don’t think I sin that much, Alistair.”

“We have
all
sinned, Georgia,” Alistair says with a gnomish little smile that makes me feel like a spider is crawling across my shoulders. “But Jesus died so that we may be saved.”

Fortunately, Cassie bounces in at that moment and distracts Alistair with her short red skirt and tight white cheer sweater with the big black LHS on it. I pick up the car keys from the basket by the door, grateful to be heading anywhere else, even if it is the parking lot behind some other school’s gymnasium to drop off my sister. I can feel Alistair’s owl eyes on us as we walk out the door, and I'm pretty sure it's not the state of Cassie’s soul he's assessing as he does.

When I get home, Tori’s already out on her movie date with Trey and Leigh and Alistair are in the den watching something wholesome, possibly involving hand puppets, on television. For dinner, Mom makes enough spaghetti (with meat sauce) to feed a small nation, and gets so excited when Leigh mentions that the church is planning a Purity Ball for New Year’s Eve that she misses the crucial information that this event involves girls getting rings from their fathers and vowing that they will abstain from sex before marriage.

“So they basically pledge their
hymens
to their fathers?” I spit out, just to clarify it for my distracted mother. Her excitement abates enough for her to worry out loud, “I’m not sure your father will agree to that,” revealing her uncanny gift for understatement.

I turn to Leigh and ask, “Do boys make the same kind of pledge?”

“No,” Leigh says, hazel eyes dull now, like I’m about to slap her, and I feel sort of bad then.

“Just the girls,” Alistair confirms.

Ignoring him, I ask her more gently, “Are you sure you get a ring, and not a chastity belt?”

Alistair looks at me as if I have just revealed myself to be the town’s biggest slut and not the sad testament to a life of near-purity that I am and says, “I don’t see what is so wrong about a young woman taking her virtue seriously.”

I tell him, “I just don’t see why it’s the
girl’s
job, entirely. What about a guy’s “virtue”? Why doesn’t a
guy
have to make a pledge, or control his own loins?”

Alistair wipes his mouth with the white cloth napkin. “He does, too,” he says, and it sounds like an admission or a concession somehow. His eyes are on his plate now and his mouth is down-turned. All of the self-righteousness seems to have escaped him like steam from a teakettle.

“Then why doesn’t
he
get a ring and have to make a deal with his dad?” I press but my mom springs into action.

“
Georgia
,” she admonishes, reminding me with her eyes that Alistair is a guest and as Leigh’s first boyfriend,an especially honored guest, and I should, therefore, leave him alone. She turns to Leigh and Alistair, all smiles. “I think the idea of a ball is
love
ly.” She steers the conversation toward their classes at school like a skilled sailor navigating us out of choppy seas.

After dinner I go up to my room and sit on my bed with Teeny, the semi-feral almost zebra-striped cat everyone else fears because she will bite without provocation. Hard.

I kind of admire that.

I try to read and forget the major feats of hypocrisy I’ve witnessed in the last forty-eight hours, from tree-huggers eating meat to Michael blowing me off after winking at me to Alistair preaching against lust and leering at my sister’s ass. I also try to shrug off the ironic awareness that while Alistair Colwin is obviously a sexist dork,
he
is downstairs watching a morally unobjectionable movie with his girlfriend, while
I
am doing homework on a Friday night, reading
Hamlet
, in fact, just to ensure that the whole night is a laugh riot.

So which one of us is the dork, really?

I wonder what Michael is doing tonight that's so much better than sitting in a dark movie theater with me and Tori and Trey. And where he gets off blowing me off and acting like he’s the most important and upright person at Longbourne High School when he’s only at LHS because he got kicked out of the Pemberley School for some reason. There's much speculation about it, but maybe it’s no mystery after all; maybe he became so insufferable that even the snottiest prep school in New England bounced him out on his preppie little posterior.

Not that I think about Michael’s posterior, preppie or otherwise.

Or any other part of his anatomy.

I twist in my own psychic spin cycle for a while until I get up and go to the bathroom, where Leigh is brushing her teeth. She’s dressed like a sister wife again, in a flannel nightgown with her hair in a long braid, and she turns to me after she spits out some toothpaste froth like it’s poison.

“You didn’t have to jump on Ali like that,” she says.

“Come on, Leigh, you don’t really believe this stuff, do you?”

“What 'stuff’?” she snaps, one hand on her hip. She looks like a very angry little sparrow. “That people should only have sex in a loving, married relationship? Yes, I believe that ‘stuff.’ That I have more value as a female than what I can offer a male sexually?
You
believe that, too, don’t you?”

“Of course I do, but this whole born-again purity thing, putting such a premium on your virginity—it’s medieval.”

She turns back to the sink and rinses off her toothbrush, then shakes it out with surprising vigor.

“I should have known you wouldn’t understand,” she says, and this makes me feel really bad.

“I want to. But I don’t think virginity is something to be guarded or bartered.” I sigh because this is so hard to talk about. “I mean, come on, Leigh, the Taliban thinks like that, and
they
stone women to death!” She whirls around to face me and I notice the welt on her neck under the ruffled collar of her nightgown. “Leigh!”

Her hand flashes up to cover the mark and when she pushes past me her face is as red as the hickey. I just stand there for a few moments, blinking at my reflection in the mirror, but I can’t see myself through the mental fog.

When I stumble back to our room, Tori’s there in a pink nightgown, brushing her hair over her head until she looks up and sees my face. “
What
?”

I just shudder.

“What? What happened?”

“Either Leigh had to pull a sea lamprey off her neck earlier or Alistair the minister’s son gave her an
enormous
hickey tonight.”

“No!” Tori gasps, clamping her hand over her mouth to stop the fit of giggles, especially when I tell her what a champion of women’s virtue Alistair claims to be.

“Oh my,” she laughs and falls on her bed.

“He’s a hypocritical little hobbit,” I fume. “Honestly! The whole time he’s lecturing us on girls’ needing to keep their legs crossed and their heads bowed, he’s planning an all-out assault on our sister’s neck!”

Tori shakes her head at me and crawls into bed.

“Well, I say good for Leigh, if he makes her happy.”

“Whatever,” I sigh, falling onto my own bed. “If she wants to start some weird new Puritan sect that allows skin-marking foreplay but no technical sex, I guess that’s her business.” I roll over on my stomach and look at Tori. “And what about you and Trey? Do you need a cold shower and a lecture on the value of abstinence?”

Tori allows, “Trey is a good kisser. And that is all I’m going to say.”

“So smug.”

She throws a pillow at me and then has to get out of bed to pick it up again.

“Good
night
, Georgia,” she says, and, judging by the soft snores coming out of her a minute later, she’s quickly off to dreamland—which probably features another date with Trey.

I turn on the little lamp on my headboard and make myself read more
Hamlet
because I'm pretty sure I'm not going to fall asleep anytime soon. I keep thinking of the way the word “No” cut through the air when Michael said it in the parking lot the other day, and of Alistair and how phony he is to preach bodily virtue and then suck a big old bruise onto my sister’s neck. I guess that kind of activity is morally acceptable to him and Leigh because it isn’t
sex
, exactly.

And Leigh must have liked it. You wouldn’t let someone work on your neck like that if you don't want them to do it. A hickey must take some time to produce in all its garish glory. I am only guessing, of course, because no one has ever done that to me. (Or “with” me. I’m not sure which is correct.) I’ve been kissed twice, once by a boy in third grade who pretty much ran around the playground kissing every girl he could catch, and whose lips tasted like grape jelly, and the second time by a guy in Colorado. I went to a spring dance with him in our last year there because everyone else had turned him down. I felt sorry for him and sort of obligated to, like it was a test of whether or not I was a good person. When he kissed me it made me want to wipe my lips right off of my face. It just felt so wrong, somehow.

So what do I know about these things?

Nothing.

I will probably die a misunderstood virgin like Ophelia in
Hamlet
, only I won’t do it by floating down a stream, singing my own mad song. They’ll just find me here, on my bed, on a weekend night, my dead body slumped over a homework assignment.

Hopefully they’ll discover me before Teeny eats my remains.

Is That a D-Bag I See Before Me?

On Monday, I decide to spend lunch period looking up some critical studies of Shakespeare’s characters for our next group project, even though it isn’t due for a couple of weeks. When I walk into the library, it seems nobody else is seated under the buzzing fluorescent lights; solitude and silent books seem like the perfect antidote to everything, so I smile in relief.

Until I see Michael Endicott sitting at a table, bent over a notebook.

Oh, joy unspeakable.

I duck into the stacks and look at a few books, estimating all the while how quickly I can get out of there without Michael seeing me. But he does. And he
smiles—
as if he hadn’t just committed a hit and run in the parking lot days ago. With a steamroller, no less.

“Hey, Georgia,” he calls softly, and indicates the chair across from him. “Are you working on the character analysis already?”

I walk over to his table and set my books and bag on it. But I don’t sit down.

“Yeah.”

He nods and turns a page in a thick book. “Who are you going to focus on?” he asks.

“Ophelia.”

He scowls.

“What’s with the face?” I ask.

He shrugs a shoulder under his toffee-colored Ralph Lauren sweater and says, “Nothing. I’m just surprised that you would work on that character, that’s all.”

“Why’s that surprising?”

He looks up at me and I can see in his dark eyes that he's beginning to sense he walked into a trap of his own devising. He says, “She’s just not a very strong character, I guess, so I'm surprised you would pick someone like her.”