The Princesses of Iowa (21 page)

“Is that the hand you just sneezed into?” Lacey asked.

Later, Brenda appeared at my doorway, pale but composed. She stood for a moment with her arm, thin like a dancer’s, outstretched to hold the doorframe, and she surveyed the room. “It’s so good to have you girls all together!” She smiled widely at us, blinking her watery red eyes.

“Yeah,” I said. Nikki nodded. Lacey stayed still, staring at the TV, which was crowing about the Top 100 dance hits of all time. “Oh, I love this one!” Nikki gasped. She watched the screen with bright eyes, singing along. “Dancing queen, eat a bean off a tambourine . . .”

Brenda covered her mouth with a slender hand, just barely stifling a giggle.

“Those aren’t the words, Nikki!” Lacey snapped, ignoring her mother. “Are you even listening to yourself?”

Nikki stopped singing. “What?”

“Eat a bean off a tambourine?”

“Yeah, like, they’re in a band, so they just use their tambourines as plates,” Nikki explained.

Lacey rolled her eyes. “I don’t even know what to say in the face of such retardedness.”

Brenda moved into the room, picking up the trinkets on my vanity: a clay dish from third grade, filled with change; an empty mascara tube; an origami paper crane, slightly crushed; a framed picture of Nikki, Lacey, and me at the Iowa State Fair in ninth grade. “How great is it that you girls are still so close, after so long?” she asked, staring at the picture as if the happy girls smiling into the sun would be the ones to answer her. “And you’re all going to be on homecoming court together.” Brenda had been homecoming queen herself, of course. Lacey was following in her footsteps perfectly. I imagined them like snow prints across a yard, fitting together so exactly that they look like one set. Of course, Lacey’s prints would have a line of tiny cane holes alongside it, so maybe it wasn’t a perfect metaphor.

“Oh, I’m so sure everyone’s going to vote for the cripple,” Lacey said bitterly.

“Of course they will,” Brenda said. “They look up to you. You’re so strong and brave.”

My mother materialized in the doorway. It was like a convention of queens.

“You girls have been planning this since middle school, and here you are with all your dreams about to come true.” Brenda’s voice sounded watery, and I worried that she was about to start crying again. “How wonderful is it to be able to see your dreams become reality . . . all those years of hard work, and your whole youth . . . putting him through law school. . . .”

“It’s really great,” I said quickly. My mother shot me a look. “I mean senior year.”

Nikki nodded in agreement. “It’s so exciting!”

“So, what’s the gossip these days?” my mother asked, changing the subject.

Brenda’s eyes lit up. “Yes. Lacey never tells me the juicy stuff. What’s going on, girls?”

“Well, there’s a new English teacher,” Nikki said gamely, stretching her legs out before her. “And he’s totally hot!”

Lacey leaned back against my pillows, examining her nails. “Yeah, if you like that kind of thing.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“He’s totally gay.”

The mothers exchanged a quick look. Nikki gasped. “What? How do you know?”

Lacey rolled her eyes. “It’s totally obvious.”

Mr. Tremont wasn’t gay. Was he? He was perfect. He was clean lines and warm sweaters and freewriting. He was dark jeans and silver watch and Space Dogs and fine art. Most of the other male teachers wore sweatshirts and running shoes and . . . oh. Was he gay? He was awfully clean. . . . I shook myself. So what. So what if he was. He was still wonderful. “Even if he were, what’s wrong with being gay?”

Nikki said, “Yeah, gay guys are the best! They actually like to go shopping!”

“He’s a teacher,” Lacey said. “It’s just wrong.”

I opened my mouth but a look from my mother shut it. Mirroring her, I crossed my arms and frowned.

Lacey clutched her cross pendant and said, “The Bible says Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.”

“Ever since they passed the gay marriage thing, the gays have been overstepping their bounds,” Brenda agreed.

Nikki said, “I think it’s cute. When they had all those gay couples on the news, it was like, they all looked so happy! And they were so cute together!”

“Marriage is a sacred vow between a man and a woman,” Brenda said, blithely unaware of the irony of her comment.

“Anyway, he’s still hot, even if he is gay,” Nikki said.

Lacey raised an eyebrow. “Well, we all hate him.”

My voice burst out of me like pressured water. “What? Why?” My mother looked at me warningly.
Her father’s getting married. Don’t make it worse, Paige.

Brenda said, “Lacey, love the sinner, hate the sin.”

“I know, Mom. I do hate the sin, but he kicked Randy, Chris, and Brian out of class.”

“He did?” my mother asked. “Why?”

Lacey didn’t look at me. “For no reason. I think he’s just totally prejudiced against good-looking guys because he’s afraid . . .”

I pushed up from the high-backed chair. “Whatever,” I said, barely containing my anger. “That’s bullshit and you know it.”

“Paige.” My mother’s voice was sharp.

“I don’t know,” Lacey said, “Jake’s pretty worried that he’ll be next.”

“He’s not even in creative writing!” I said. But in the next instant it hit me — she wasn’t talking about getting kicked out of class.

Nikki looked extremely confused. “I don’t get it. What is he afraid of?”

“Now, Lacey . . .” Brenda said, sounding like a real mom for once. But her daughter ignored her. As usual.

“He’s afraid Mr. Tremont will fall in love with him, obviously. Just like he did with Chris and Brian and Randy.”

I laughed disbelievingly. “Fall in love?” The absurdity of it was too much. Brilliant Mr. Tremont, who talked like a professor and looked like a movie star, fall in love with stupid Randy Thomas? Or anyone else in Jake’s group, for that matter, even the girls? How could someone as intelligent and talented and perfect and
adult
as Mr. Tremont possibly have romantic feelings for a dumb teenager? The idea was absurd. Anyway, he was probably dating some Pulitzer Prize–winning supermodel. I was sure of it.

“He kicked those guys out of class because they were screwing around and being disrespectful, not because he was in love with them,” I said.

Lacey ignored me, looking meaningfully at Nikki. “Well, you know, that’s just how they are.”

“You mean gays?” I asked furiously. “Are you trying to say that all gay men want to fall in love with stupid, homophobic teenagers? That’s insane!”

“Well, yeah,” Lacey said, in her Lacey-explains-it-all voice. “So they can convert them.”

Nikki’s eyes were wide, tracking us like tennis players. Lacey’s mom smiled vaguely. My mother looked concerned, but she didn’t take her eyes off me.

“Convert them? So, what, so they can form covens?” I laughed bitterly. “Gays aren’t like vampires, Lacey!” My voice sounded painfully jagged in my own ears. I couldn’t help it: I was trembling with outrage.

“Well, I don’t think it’s appropriate to have such people in our schools,” Brenda said. “Teachers can be incredibly influential in a child’s life, and I certainly wouldn’t want our children’s moral values to be polluted by such an influence.”

Lacey looked happy for the first time that night. Any sympathy I’d had for her disappeared. So her father was getting married. That didn’t give her the right to be such a judgmental bitch. She didn’t even know Mr. Tremont. I wanted to scream. I wanted to punch her know-it-all face. I gripped my notebook and walked out the door, leaving everyone behind me. “I can’t deal with this.”

I sat on the back porch, in the dark, refusing to go back inside until everyone was gone. The stars were bright and thick above my head, but I felt mean and dark. Brenda shaking on the couch, Lacey’s tight, angry face. How could she spread such ridiculous rumors about Mr. Tremont? Did it take her mind off her own problems? Was she congratulating herself on having smaller problems than he? Was she telling herself,
Well, my dad’s getting married but at least he’s not gay
?
Maybe I walk with a limp but at least I’m not gay!

God.

She didn’t even know him. She didn’t even know who he was. All she had were rumors from Randy and Chris and Brian and maybe Jake, but not Jake, because he was better than that; he could be crude, but he was kind, better than his friends, and he was only spending time with Lacey because she needed a friend right now, because even her own father couldn’t stand her stupid bullshit and took off to find a new family, a better one.

I caught myself, shocked at the depth of my own malice. That wasn’t fair, I knew. It must be awful to have your family torn apart like that, and then to find out that your dad’s already getting remarried, that this is something he’s been planning for a long time? I couldn’t even imagine it.

Still, that didn’t give her the right to talk shit about Mr. Tremont.

A bat swooped across the wide triangle of light from the garage, its path jittery like the lines of a heart monitor. Behind me, a tree shifted and sighed in a slight wind, and I wished that I could wash my mind like a chalkboard and scrub out all the black thoughts. I wanted to write but I wouldn’t go inside until I heard the
thomp-thomp-thomp
of three doors shutting, the growls of an engine turning over, the lonely noise of three people driving away.

Wednesday morning, I quickly typed the final draft of my essay from my notebook. It was about the day we found the bat in fourth grade, a story version, about a little girl standing up to the rest of the school just to save a little bat. Feeling as though I were flinging myself from the top of some enormous cliff, I typed my name at the top and printed it out. It would have to do.

The whole drive to school, I worried about creative writing.
What if they don’t like it? What if they read the bat story and know it’s really about me and remember what a nerd I was in elementary school? What if Mr. Tremont pulls me aside after class and tells me I’m not up to par for this class?
Finally, the fear and self-doubt got the best of me, and I made my way sheepishly to Mr. Tremont’s classroom. “Mr. Tremont —”

He was sitting behind his desk in a russet sweater-vest that shouldn’t have worked but totally did. The desk was covered with papers, books, and manila folders, and anchored by potted plants at two of its corners. “Morning, Paige.” He took a sip of coffee. “Rough night?”

“God, is it obvious?” I looked down at my outfit, old jeans with a T-shirt that had a picture of a little tiger and said
HUNTINGTON ELEMENTARY IS PURRRR-FECT!
I’d had to sneak past my mother while she was bringing my father his coffee; she would have had an aneurism if she’d seen me like this. “I didn’t get much sleep,” I admitted.

“Been there,” he said. “Is everything okay?”

“Um.” My hands fiddled with the straps of my bag. “I don’t have anything to turn in.”

“Ah.” He took another sip of his coffee. “Because you haven’t been writing, or because you’re afraid of what you’ve written?”

“Afraid?” I echoed. He shrugged but didn’t say anything. “I just can’t . . . I don’t have anything. I didn’t finish the assignment.”

Mr. Tremont nodded. “Okay. Well, we’ll just schedule you in for later in the quarter, I guess.”

“Okay,” I whispered. He was disappointed in me, I could tell. It was awful. “I’m sorry,” I said, my face flushing. I turned to leave.

“Hey, Paige?” Mr. Tremont asked behind me. I turned back. Lacey’s words from the night before swirled in my head like heavy clouds. Was he gay? Did it matter? Did he somehow know that we were talking about him? Did he think less of me for dating Jake, for being friends with the jocks he’d kicked out of class? Or was Lacey right, was he jealous of me for dating Jake?

Mr. Tremont smiled at me, among his plants and his books. “Go easy on yourself, okay?”

I’d discovered that I could fit quite comfortably beneath the carrel in the far corner of the library, and if I pulled the chair in after me, I couldn’t be seen. Maybe it was totally childish, but it reminded me of the forts that Miranda and I used to build with pillows and sheets and tables, and there was something strangely comforting and even defiant in it, like I was thumbing my nose at anyone who said I had to grow up.

At lunch Wednesday, I curled up with my notebook and my pen and filled five pages with freewriting when I should have been in the commons flirting for votes. It was strange: in all my anxiety about my creative writing assignment, I hadn’t even thought about the homecoming vote, and now I discovered that I could hardly make myself care. In the cafeteria, I knew, the members of the student council social events committee would be passing out sheets of paper with the names of every senior in the school, separated into columns by gender. “Circle five in each column!” they’d say perkily, handing out pencils and waiting patiently for people to make their choices. It was the same every year. The only difference about this year was that the names on the list were ours.

At the end of class that day, Mr. Tremont set two stacks of paper on the front table, instructing us to take one of each on our way out the door. He made no mention of the fact that there should have been three stacks, but I felt as though every eye in the room was on me, judging me, wondering why I hadn’t turned in my assignment. We were supposed to read and comment on each story in time for Friday’s class, Mr. Tremont reminded us. A tinny voice on the PA interrupted him, some reminder about the last chance to vote for homecoming court tomorrow at lunch, something about the bonfire Friday, something about basketball tryouts maybe. I wasn’t listening; I was focused on the stacks of paper. Mine should have been up there. I was such a coward.