Teen Idol (6 page)

Which made me wonder how Dr. Lewis had worked that—talked Mr. Hall into letting a guy who hadn’t even auditioned into his precious show choir, I mean—and if Mr. Hall had maybe been let in on the truth. Although it’s true that Mr. Hall is pretty exasperated with the tenors. Kind of like he is with my dancing.

It was at this point that Steve—the baritone who is so in love with Trina that he willingly sits through whole romantic comedies at the mall’s cineplex just so he can be close to her for ninety minutes—came up to us.

"Hey," he said. Steve is kind of on the skinny side, with a sticky-outy Adam’s apple. When he gets nervous, that Adam’s apple bobs up and down. It was bobbing like crazy as he came up to Trina and Luke. "What’s up?"

"Oh, hi, Steve," Trina said in an offhand way "This is Lucas "

"Hi," Steve said to Luke.

"Hey, man," Luke said back, outcooling Steve with just two words and a nod. Poor Steve!

"All right, people!" Mr. Hall came out of his office, which was attached to the choir room, and clapped his hands. "Seats, please. Take your seats!" Then his gaze fell on Luke. "You. Who are you?"

It was kind of funny to see him meet Luke Striker. It was obvious now that Mr. Hall had no idea who he was being introduced to.

But I mean, here was this guy who was a real actor—had made millions at it—and then here was Mr. Hall, who had told us that he used to work on Broadway, but who now directed a high school choir in southern Indiana.

And yet the choir director was acting way snottier than the actor. Mr. Hall immediately started going off about how he’d gotten the memo about Luke and all, but that he really resented the assumption on the part of the administration that just anybody could be a Troubadour, and that Luke (Lucas) should have had to audition like everybody else, and that Mr. Hall didn’t see why he should let him in without one, just because it was so late in the school year.

Luke didn’t so much as blink an eye. Probably because he’s used to directors and their absurd demands and all. He just went, "Oh, don’t worry, sir, I’ll just observe until I catch on."

I think it was the
sir
that really did the trick. Just like Trina, Mr. Hall was instantly charmed. He even let Luke sit by the accompanist and turn pages.

I have to admit, I was pretty impressed at how Luke had buttered up Mr. Hall.

But I didn’t have a whole lot of time during fourth period to think about Luke. That’s because Mr. Hall made us run through our Luers program three whole times. I mean, we had to stand up and do the arm movements and everything. It bummed me out that I couldn’t hide behind Karen Sue Walters’s hair and read anymore. It bummed me out even more that the arm motions were really complicated and hard to remember, and that I kept messing up and Mr. Hall kept yelling at me.

"You’re behind, Miss Greenley!" and "Stop sloughing off, Jenny!" was all I heard all class period.

Trina was really making me sweat it for those extracurricular points, let me tell you.

We altos don’t have it as bad as the sopranos, though. They actually have to DANCE. With HATS. Seriously. They have to do like a hat-and-cane routine to "All That Jazz" from
Chicago
, only without the canes. Which is actually fine by them, because the sopranos are all good dancers. But we altos have to pass them the hats from this stack hidden behind the risers. It’s super hard . . . you know, for somebody like me with no sense of rhythm. By the time the bell rang for lunch, I was exhausted.

But Luke, it turned out, was just starting to get revved up.

"You guys actually get school credit for that?" Luke wanted to know, as we were leaving the choir room.

It’s kind of funny that he figured out show choir was lame so fast I mean, I’d been in the choir for three whole months before I figured it out. It’s not just the padded bras "All That Jazz" is the coolest number we do. The rest of our program consists of what Mr. Hall calls Broadway show-stoppers, which include "As Long as He Needs Me" from
Oliver
(we altos especially like the line "As long as he needs me/I’ll cling on steadfastly." We sing it as "Klingon." So far Mr. Hall hasn’t noticed) and "Day by Day" from
Godspell
.

No, the lamest part is that Mr. Hall makes us travel around and perform in elementary schools and at Kiwanis meetings and stuff. I’m totally serious. I was horrified when I found out. I wanted to kill Trina But by then it was too late; there were no more spaces open in any other classes for Ms. Kellogg to switch me into.

In a way show choir isn’t that bad, though, because it gives the school’s most sensitive artist types a place where they can feel safe. A bunch of Troubadours actually eat lunch in the choir room, just so they don’t have to face the Kurt Schraeders of the school down in the caf.

That isn’t why Trina always wants to eat in the choir room, though. She just wants to make sure Mr. Hall—who lunches in his office, instead of the teacher’s lounge, I don’t think Mr. Hall is very popular with the rest of the faculty—doesn’t hand out solos to some other soprano just because Trina had the misfortune not to be there at the time.

I told Trina that over my dead body was I going to allow her competitiveness with Karen Sue Walters to get in the way of my gastronomic choices at lunchtime, so we eat in the caf and not the choir room.

Luke had no way of knowing this, though. He looked over his shoulder at Karen Sue and the other people pulling their sack lunches out from beneath the risers as we left the choir room and went, "Isn’t class over? Why are they eating in there?"

"Oh, you mean, what’s with the land of misfit toys?" Trina laughed long and hard at her own joke, even though, given her druthers, she’d be right down there with them.

I was the one who had to explain. "They eat in there because they’re scared."

"Scared of what?" Luke wanted to know.

Then we walked into the cafeteria.

And for the second time that day, Luke went, "Holy . . ."

Only this time it was for a different reason.

Ask Annie

Ask Annie your most complex interpersonal relationship questions.

Go on, we dare you!

All letters to Annie are subject to publication in the Clayton High School
Register
.

Names and e-mail addresses of correspondents guaranteed confidential.

Dear Annie,

My boyfriend chews with his mouth open, and talks with it full of food. It’s so embarrassing! I’ve mentioned it to him a million times, but he won’t stop. How can I get him to have better manners
?

Say It, Don’t Spray It

Dear Spray It,

By refusing to sit at the same table with him until he learns to eat like a gentleman. A few meals on his lonesome, and he’ll swallow before he speaks, guaranteed
.

Annie

I
suppose to
the uninitiated, the Clayton High School cafeteria might seem a little intimidating. I mean, you cram six hundred teenagers—we eat in two shifts—into any room, and it’s going to be noisy.

But I guess Luke wasn’t expecting the eardrum-splitting decibels of the din.

Then there’s the fact that besides Glenwood Road—which is the main drag through downtown Clayton, up and down which people who have cars drive them every Saturday night—there is no other place that is more of a "scene" than the Clayton High School cafeteria. You can’t just grab your food and go and sit down at a table and eat at Clayton High.

No, you have to walk down this long aisle of tables to get to where the food is sold—even if all you want is milk or a soda or whatever.

And while you walk down that aisle, every eye in the caf is on you. Seriously. It is in the caf that reputations are made or broken, depending on how cool you look as you walk up and down that aisle.

Unless, of course, you’re me. Then, frankly, no one cares.

Luke, however, didn’t know that. He stood in the doorway, staring in horror at the aisle, down which Courtney Deckard and some of her posse were sashaying.

"My God," he breathed. It was kind of hard to hear him above the noise. "It’s worse than Sky Bar."

Trina piped up with, "We call it the catwalk. You ready to strut your stuff?"

Still looking stunned, Luke followed us as we made our way down the catwalk and toward the concession line. I didn’t exactly notice the din lessen any as we went by, but I was definitely conscious that we’d managed to capture the attention of every female—from the tiniest freshman all the way to the most senior lunch lady—in the room.

Luke hardly seemed aware of the buzz he was creating. It was like he was in shock. When I handed him a tray, he took it wordlessly. When the lunch lady asked him if wanted corn or green beans, he seemed unable to make a choice. I told her corn, since it seemed to me that Luke, as a visitor to our state, might want to try the vegetable for which it is best known.

Once our trays were full, we made our way to the cash register, where Luke was still apparently too stunned to fish out the two bucks his lunch cost. I paid. It’s a good thing I’m such a popular baby-sitter—being boyfriendless, I am always available on Saturday night—because, otherwise, if I have to keep paying for Luke everywhere we go, I might go broke.

Trina and I put our trays down at the same table we’d been sitting at every day since freshman year—exactly in the middle of the room between the popular kids—the trendsetters—and the kids who weren’t sensitive enough to have to eat in the choir room but weren’t popular enough to sit with the jocks—the trend followers.

Trina and I aren’t the only ones at the middle table. There’s a bunch of other people who sit there, too. Those people include, but are not restricted to, by any means, most of the school’s Merit scholars, brainiacs, computer geeks, drama freaks, punks, and the staff of the Clayton High
Register
.

Geri Lynn nearly choked on her flat Diet Coke as Luke Striker sat down in the chair beside hers and stared broodingly down at his food.

"Oh, hi," she said. "You must be Lucas."

See? See how fast word travels? I hadn’t even seen Geri Lynn yet that day, and she’d already heard about the new guy. Could you imagine if word got out about my being Ask Annie? How short a time it would take to make it all the way around the school?

Luke didn’t even look at Geri. Instead, he picked up his fork and stabbed at the food on his tray.

"What
is
this?" he wanted to know.

"Salisbury steak," I said. I myself had gotten pizza. I probably ought to have warned him to order off the concession line and not get the school lunch. But I’d figured that maybe, in his eagerness to experience everything midwestern, he’d want to try the steak.

"I’m a vegetarian," Luke said, mostly to the steak.

"They've got a salad bar," Trina, who wavers between ovo and lacto, depending on her mood, offered helpfully.

Scott had brought his own lunch, as he does every day. It’s usually whatever he had cooked for dinner for himself and his dad the night before, neatly packed in Tupperware containers. Today’s seemed to contain baked ziti and garlic bread, which Scott had heated up in the caf’s microwave. It smelled really, really good.

"Are you going to eat that?" Scott asked Geri, in reference to the brownie in front of her.

"No, honey," Geri said, her gaze still locked on Luke. "You go ahead."

Scott picked up the brownie and took a bite. Then he made a face and set it down. The cafeteria staff’s culinary skills are not equal to his own.

"You eat here every day?" Luke asked, closely examining a piece of Salisbury steak he’d skewered.

"It’s a closed campus," I informed him. "Only seniors can leave school grounds at lunch. And even then, they only have Pizza Hut and McDonald’s to choose from. Every other place is too far to make it back before sixth period."

Luke sighed and scraped the steak off his fork.

"You want some of this?" Scott asked, indicating what was left of his ziti. "It’s got meat in it, but—"

Luke lowered his fork into Scott’s Tupperware container without waiting for further invitation. He took a bite of ziti, chewed, and swallowed. As he did so, I could not help noticing that the gaze of every female in the vicinity—from Trina to Geri to the Japanese exchange student, Hisae—was riveted on his manly jaw.

"Man," Luke said, after swallowing. "That’s good. Your mom make that or something?"

Scott isn’t at all sensitive about the fact that he likes to cook. Unlike some guys, he would never think to deny that he knows how to make ziti He didn’t do so in front of "Lucas" either.

"Nah, I made it myself," he said. "Go ahead, finish it up I’m gonna go get another soda."

Luke was scarfing down Scott’s ziti with an enthusiasm surprising for one who professed not to eat meat, when all of a sudden, the cafeteria erupted in moos. Seriously. It was like we’d suddenly wandered into the 4-H tent at the Duane County Fair or something.

Luke spun around in his seat, trying to figure out what was going on. But all he saw was what the rest of us saw every single day, Cara Schlosburg making her way down the catwalk from the concession line.

Poor Cara. It’s too bad she never made it into show choir. (She auditioned and everything, but didn’t get in. Some of the snottier sopranos said it’s because there aren’t any bras padded enough to mimic Cara’s chest and give us uniformity of appearance.) Because at least then she’d have had a safe place at lunchtime.

Instead, she tries to eat in the cafeteria like a normal person, and, frankly, that’s never quite seemed to work out for her.

Cara’s eves, as they always did, filled up with tears as the mooing increased in volume the farther down the catwalk she got. She was holding a tray containing her usual low-cal lunch—a plate of lettuce, dressing on the side, a few bread-sticks, and a diet soda.

But Kurt and his friends have no respect at all for the fact that Cara is trying, anyway, to lose weight. They just went on mooing, hardly even seeming aware they were doing it. I saw Courtney Deckard let out a moo, then go right back to her conversation with another cheerleader across the table from her, as if there hadn’t even been an interruption.