Mayne Attraction: In The Spotlight (8 page)

It's amazing how many people you could be
friends with if only they'd make the first approach. But nobody
ever did, so I viewed everyone from afar. I would observe my
schoolmates and form opinions and preferences, identifying the
heroes and villains while perfecting the art of peripheral vision
observation. But it was all in secret and pointless.

It dawned on me, sort of belatedly, that
because I still didn’t have my license (something else I was going
to do this summer, but never did) that I would have to catch the
bus to school. I’d played the sympathy card the last several months
of my junior year, garnering car rides from one or the other parent
until school had let out, but I knew it was inconvenient for them,
so I considered that gravy train officially derailed. Being a
senior bus rider seemed more embarrassing to me now that I had
people watching. I wondered what they would think about that. Maybe
that I was grounded? No car, no friends, and no life…all summer.
Short of catching the library on fire, or engaging in grammatically
incorrect graffiti vandalism, I couldn’t imagine a universe where
Mom would ever be mad enough at me to shut down my whole summer
like that. Of course, giving off the false impression that I was
being punished because I’d been bad was exponentially cooler than
the truth of the matter: a case of terminal lameness.

I really needed to get my license. I already
had a car. My grandpa’s Jeep Cherokee was parked in the third bay
of our garage. It had been sitting there patiently waiting for me
since wintertime. I had gone with him to the dealership to ‘help’
him pick it out the previous spring. He always joked about the Jeep
belonging to me and that he was just borrowing it until I got my
license. So I was shocked when my mom showed me the title. She had
found it among other neatly filed important documents while she was
going through his things after he died. The Jeep had been paid for
in cash, and was registered in my name. Apparently it was no
joke.

Mom insisted on taking me school shopping;
an annual event that I was glad would be over after this year. We
began and ended at Old Navy. She wanted to hit every sale in the
mall but I assured her that a few new items were all I needed since
it didn’t appear I was growing anymore and my collection of new
school clothes from last year were still perfectly good. Appealing
to her practical side always yielded favorable results, especially
when money was on the line.

I enjoyed my last few days of sleeping in
and tried to prepare my mind for the new environment ahead of me.
This was my second year at this school, so at least I would know my
way around. It was large though, with about two thousand students.
On the first day of school the traffic out front was a nightmare.
The buses were able to go around into a separate buses only
entrance. If I had driven, and hadn’t shown up an hour early, I
would have been late. So my transportation situation wasn’t
completely without its benefits.

I could not have imagined the reversal that
awaited me in regards to mobility…and society.

Chapter 9
–
Goth

I was inordinately pleased with myself. I
had devised a plan to flush out a number of them—perhaps all of
them—in the same week. I’d be taking a big risk, of course. As a
result of this little series of maneuvers I was certain that
security would become far tighter, and that it would be
exponentially more difficult to pull something of this nature off
in the future, if it were to become necessary, that is.

I had wrestled with myself about the
advisability of moving forward with my plans when there wasn’t an
emergency or any real reason to do it, other than to satisfy my
curiosity and my desire to mess with them…just a little.

Because I was convinced that there was a
fairly large team, which must be organized into shifts, I thought
it would be most advantageous to perpetrate a double or even a
triple header: back to back incidents to expose the various
personnel assigned to my detail over the course of several
consecutive days. Of paramount importance, though, was the
necessity to insure that my actions did not appear to be the result
of pre-meditation or planning of any sort. They had to think the
breaches were unrelated, and completely their fault. It would ruin
everything for all of us if they knew the fault was mine.

My plan had taken form slowly over the
course of several weeks as I became acquainted with the most
ridiculous looking person I had ever known in real life. Her name
was Samantha Sun. She was into the Goth look: a style that suggests
horror and mystery. To some it is simply a mode of fashion, to
others an entire lifestyle. Either way, a gothic look involves very
black clothing and very white makeup with edgy, tough accessories.
Samantha also drew upon punk influences, incorporating a little of
both to create her own hideously ugly personal style that evoked a
frustrating but undeniable morbid fascination on my part.

Sitting next to her in our shared Advanced
Program Senior English class provided a much closer view than would
have presented itself to me in the natural order of things. People
who looked like her frightened and repulsed me. Well, now that I
was older, what they really did was irritate me with such backwards
attempts to gain attention—something that offended me on multiple
levels.

Upon very close scrutiny, it was clear that
somewhere deep beneath the layers of densely over done black makeup
and jet black hair highlighted with random strings of white and
neon pink was a perfectly pretty girl. She had great bone
structure. Her eyes made me think she might have some Asian
heritage. She was tall and thin, willowy and graceful. Her bulky
black clothes (and platform shoes that made her nearly seven feet
tall) combined with her heavy, painful looking jewelry all but
obscured her true self. I imagined that was the point, though I
couldn’t guess why.

I was ashamed of my mental bigotry, assuming
that she was stupid, or insecure, or mistakenly vain. I would
never, ever say such unkind things aloud, but the fact that nobody
around me knew what I was thinking didn’t change the ugly truth
that I was being prejudiced and unfair. Who was I to judge this
book by her cover? Vowing to amend my ways, I decided to see what
it would be like to be friends with a person like Samantha. The
upside was that it didn’t seem like I would be in anybody’s way
trying.

It turned out that Sam was surprisingly
smart for someone who looked so stupid. Of course, she was in
Advanced English with me, but I didn’t think of that until later. I
had framed my introduction by informing her that my middle name was
also Samantha, not Velleity, as perhaps it should have been.

When we conversed before and after class, I
found her to be engaging and fun with a quick wit and a rather dark
sense of humor, which I enjoyed immensely. I think she understood
how hard I was trying and seemed pleased to be the object of such
effort. She was the only girl my own age that I had ever felt so at
ease around, which was ironic considering the normal effect Goth
looking people had on me. When I quizzed her on her likes and
tastes, she directed me to a whole new world of books, music and
movies I never knew I liked. I’d been avoiding entertainment of
every sort for a while and it was enjoyable to re-engage that part
of myself again, especially with the assistance of a knowledgeable
guide.

We only had one class together, and it
quickly turned into the highlight of my day. Before long I was
invited to join her for lunch, which was a huge thrill for me. The
joy was dampened, somewhat, though, when I followed her to our
table and realized we would not be eating alone. The dampening had
to do with the realization that she was part of a clan, and not my
exclusive property. I was sliding helplessly back into reticent
mode even before I sat down with them. But Samantha, who must have
anticipated such a reaction, was determined to keep me engaged, and
interviewed me like a talk show hostess, while the three other Goth
girls acted as the studio audience, keenly interested in hearing
what I had to say, and laughing at comments I hadn’t intended to be
received as funny. Much to my surprise and relief, they all seemed
to accept me with a degree of pleasantness and cordiality I would
not have expected. Once again, I was very happy to be wrong about
things.

One day, a few weeks into our friendship,
while we were waiting for class to start, I hinted that I was
curious how the Goth look would wear on me, and Sam nearly blasted
out of her seat with enthusiasm.

“Oh my God, Ellery! You have to let me do
you up! You don’t have to buy anything. You can wear some of my
stuff!”

Did they make Goth miniskirts? Anything else
of hers would drag the floor on me.

“I’ll do you up and then we’ll go out!”

Sam was elated. I was too. This promised to
be hilarious and I could feel that it was going to work like a
charm! My watchers would never see this one coming.

It seemed like everyone and her mother
(including my mother) was always trying to give me a makeover. So
it was ironic and hugely funny to me that the only person to get a
shot at it would be my very own ‘Gothy Kay’ image consultant.

I was pleased how it all came together.
Samantha was very solicitous and understanding of my reluctance to
be seen leaving home in Goth persona. Letting her work out the
cloak and dagger aspects of the operation was a stroke of genius.
It required neither effort nor explanation on my part. Her
motivation was to surprise her Goth girlfriends, while mine was to
elude a well paid and highly sophisticated group of surveillance
experts, so that I could conduct a little stakeout of my own.

She suggested that we meet her friends at
Tinseltown Cineplex on Friday afternoon after class. That was
perfect for me. I wanted to get a good look at the chaos I was
about to cause and that would have been harder to achieve from a
distance at night. The icing on the cake was that a Friday matinee
was standard operating procedure for me. The surveillance personnel
would be on low alert, maybe even goofing off during the ninety
plus minutes of free time.

Hoyt was always home early on Fridays. My
mom, on the other hand, usually had to work late at the library on
Fridays. I wondered if it was truly mandatory or if it was a ruse
to facilitate stepfather and stepdaughter bonding time. It wasn’t
necessary. I was as bonded to Hoyt as I was ever going to be. I
really liked him. He was smart and soft spoken, calm and courteous.
He had no idea what to talk about with a teenage girl, though. That
was okay. I felt his pain since I didn’t either.

I think my mom had envisioned our time
together as an exchange of communication and the pursuit of common
interests. Well, we did spend the time on our interests…just not
together. He would drop me off at the movies and then head over to
the driving range. This had become a familiar routine for us. Then
he would collect me after my movie and take me out to dinner and we
would enjoy the illicit consumption of foods we couldn’t eat in
front of Mom. For Hoyt it was red meat, and for me it was anything
cooked in the deep fryer and Cherry Coke to go with it. Then we’d
show up at approximately the same time that she arrived home from
work, and she would be happy to see us together and pleased that we
had been working on our relationship. And so our allied objectives
to foil my mother’s wishes did build a certain sense of comradery
between Hoyt and me, and though she would have objected to the
means by which it was accomplished, she did ultimately get her way.
Though it had felt like work in the beginning, it eventually became
a high point of my week, and I think it was for him as well.

I was running slightly late when Hoyt
dropped me off at the box office. As I entered the theater it was
very dark, and I couldn’t see a thing. Someone grabbed my arm and
guided me to the center of the center row. Samantha was already
there with her other friends: Splash, Corey and Rachel, by name. I
didn’t have classes with any of them. It was good I hadn’t known
about them initially, or I might not have tried to make friends
with Sam, thinking she already had buddies. I was so grateful for
my ignorance in this instance. On account of my newfound friendship
with Sam, I decided to extend each girl a measure of credit,
despite the fact that they all appeared to be battling as perpetual
finalists in some kind of ‘World’s Most Obnoxious and Unsightly
Ensemble’ competition.

We watched a recently released action movie
that drew a few more people than was normal for this time of day.
That was good because it would make it easier to hide in plain
sight.

Just before the closing credits, Samantha
and I made our way to the restroom, ostensibly to get ahead of the
crowd, and hopefully to enter the handicap stall in the back
together without being noticed. From her cartoonishly large black
bag (inside which I literally could have hidden) she pulled out a
wig that had evidently been part of an Elvira costume in better
days and the equivalent of a doctor’s lab coat in black. She had
also packed her thigh high platform boots, which took me from five
feet even to something like five-eight or nine. I should have built
in some practice time with those; it was like walking on
stilts.

She wrapped a black belt with silver metal
studs around my waist and cinched it to the very last hole. It
still hung a little loose. Next she got to work on my makeup. First
was an expertly applied pale white foundation followed by tracings
around my eyes with a kohl pencil that looked like the fat black
crayons they use in kindergarten. To this she added a number of
heavy strokes of mascara and some insanely blue metallic-sheen
lipstick. Next came the clip-on version of Goth jewelry. Good for
trying out the look without committing to those pesky multiple body
piercings, she explained. It clipped onto my nose and was connected
by a stainless steel link chain to a row of studs that extended all
the way up the edge of my left ear. Finally she positioned the wig
and my new look was complete. I timed the transformation. She had
done it in just under five minutes.