Virgin Territory (14 page)

Everything in the backyard is in its proper place—the hedge, the slope of the house next door, the scrabby patch of grass, the overly lush garden—but it’s all slicked in silver moonlight, giving every bit of it a diamond-like appearance. The breeze is madly tossing the palm fronds every which way, and bougainvillea blossoms are falling down onto the pavement like big red paper raindrops. Some of the hardier plants look to me as though they’re shivering from the cold, but this is Florida, and it’s just a warm night wind shaking everything to its roots. Overhead, the sky is heartbreakingly clear. A random cloud scuds by, and a few stars shine like dropped bits of glitter on a just-polished surface.
I think about Pluto and pretend to pick it out in a sky flooded with light.
It’s just up there
, I think,
doing its thing and unaware of its demotion
.

“You’re late,” I say when Angela finally appears.

“Yeah,” she replies as she breezes past me. “But we came. And that’s got to count for something.”

“We?” I say.

“Yeah,” she replies with the trace of apology in her voice. “And hold on to your hair. Desirée’s cooked up a whole new plan. And we’re all involved.”

Desirée marches in, turns on her heels, gives me a peck on the cheek, and continues into the living room. She doesn’t look that happy to see me. But when Crispy enters, I realize that he’s the cause of her unhappiness. She scowls at him and says, “Go ahead and laugh. Go on. But you watch. See if you’re laughing when I win.”

“Win what?” I want to know. “What’s going on? What’d I miss?”

“You better sit down,” Angela tells me once we’re all gathered in the living room. “Our lives are about to change forever.”

I perch on the arm of the sofa and brace myself for some kind of news, and I try to imagine how my life will be forever altered. Nothing comes to mind. Crispy stretches out on the carpeted floor and stares up at the ceiling. Occasionally, he erupts in a guffaw, but I need details.

“What?” I’m dying to know.

“Okay, so the Virgin Club needs a new activity,” Desirée begins. “Breaking into houses is obviously a thing of the past. So the other day, when I was tying up the newspapers for recycling at that house on Sweet Bay, I saw this, tore it out, thought,
Why not?
”

She hands me a scrap of newspaper torn from the
Jupiter Courier
. It’s a boxed ad for a local contest.

“It’s because of all the attention the town’s getting,” Desirée continues. “I thought maybe I’d enter myself as a contestant.”

Crispy is on the floor literally rolling with laughter. The fact that Desirée gives him a sharp kick on the leg might disqualify her as a model Christian teen, but it’s just what the guy deserves for being such a flat-out jerk.

“Let her say her piece,” Angela chides.

For the next ten minutes, Desirée defends the pageant and the possibility of her participation. She explains how it works, who is eligible, and she describes in agonizing detail what she wants to be wearing when she’s crowned the winner. In an effort to convince us that the contest is worth it, she lists the prizes she could win (a scholarship to Florida College, public-speaking engagements, jewelry, and cosmetics), and she describes the places she could go (Miami, the Epcot Center, Tallahassee, Tampa). We aren’t that impressed. I suggest that she’d do better to enter a contest where the prizes include actual cash and perhaps a car. Desirée shakes her head and says that I’m missing the point. She tells me that it’s easy for me to make fun and pooh-pooh the whole idea, because I’ve plenty of opportunity in my life, but what does she have?

“Nothing. Except this.”

She stands up and presents herself to us as though she’s on an auction block.

“Look at me. I’m not that smart. Not smart like you guys. But I can dance and sing, and if I put my mind to it and wear my hair right, I can look like a million bucks. That ought to be worth something in this world, right?”

She tells us that she intends to go to college with the scholarship she’s going to win. After that, she’s going to keep one foot in the beauty circuit, compete at the state level, possibly even rise to become Miss Florida. She’s got everything all figured out, and there’s no sense trying to talk her out of it, because (a) this is what she wants, and (b) she’s going to take a big risk to get it. And what’s more, we are going to help her whether we want to or not. Why? Because we’re her friends, and that’s what friends are for.

Of course, she still needs to come up with the $175 application fee, a video presentation, an evening gown, a killer swim-suit, and a five-hundred-word essay on what Jesus means to her. But she’s passed the first test—we’re with her.

“I think it’s great,” Angela declares. “I really do. It fulfills both club requirements: (a) want something, and (b) take a risk. And the club needs a new challenge.”

Crispy raises his hand as if he’s in a Bible study class.

“Question: Why haven’t you mentioned Jesus? I mean, isn’t this supposed to be the Miss Jupiter
Christian
Teen Contest?”

“Oh, everybody knows I’m crazy about Jesus,” Desirée replies. “He’s my personal savior and all that. That’s where you guys come in. I need you to write me an essay that says it perfectly. But here—I’ve got my platform together.”

Platform?

She pulls a slip of paper out of her back pocket.

“Okay, I found this quote to use as a slogan for my campaign.
Found it in the Bible, naturally. Ready? ‘Good works work good.’ ”

We stare at her blankly, but she doesn’t seem to notice, because she continues reading: “ ‘Charm is deceptive, and beauty fleeting; but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised. Give her the reward she has earned, and let her works bring her praise at the city gates.’ ”

When she looks up again, we are still staring, still blank.

“It’s from Proverbs,” she says meekly. And then she adds, “Good works work good. What do you think? I mean, as a campaign slogan.”

“Good works work
well,”
I say.

“What?” she asks.

“Work
well
.”

Angela leans in and gets Desirée’s attention by gently touching her forearm. By way of an explanation, she offers: “His mother was a poet.”

“Was she famous?” Desirée wants to know.

Admitting that my mother was never recognized as a genius in her field makes her seem like some kind of a loser. But Kat never cared about other people’s opinions of her or their assessment of her work. She understood that being a poet was something she’d been called to do, not something she called herself. She wasn’t in it for the success or for the fame or for the money. As she often said, “Being a poet isn’t a career; it’s a life.”

Thanks to a citywide program that employed local artists, Kat got a job teaching poetry in the public schools, mostly in
the Bronx and Harlem, where poets were scarce. She convinced fifth and sixth graders that they had a third eye and then got them to write about what they saw with that invisible organ. She made them paper poetry crowns and had them speak their poems aloud like kings and queens. She gave them superpowers and coaxed their dreams out into the daylight of the classroom. She taught them to write and use language so they could express everything they felt for the rest of their lives. She encouraged them week after week, year after year, to describe the world into which they were born, the places they knew best, the people they loved. She made them the subject of their own sentences, she gave them verbs that had the power to move them out into the larger world, and taught them the difference between
good
and
well
.

“She’s famous to me,” I say to Desirée, and I leave it at that.

Desirée waves her hands as though she’s swatting away a swarm of grammatical gnats. She just wants to get on with it.

“Okay,” she says, “but ‘Good works work well’ doesn’t have the same ring to it. As a slogan.”

“Essssssactly,” Angela agrees, and then she turns to me and says, “and since you’re so smart with the words, you’re going to be in charge of writing the essay.”

“First things first,” says Desirée. “What am I going to wear?”

“Right,” Angela says. And then as she looks over the ad, she says, “Look. They judge you twenty-five percent for the opening-number outfit, twenty-five percent for evening wear.”

Crispy is rocking side to side, holding his stomach and making internal combustion sounds.

“Laugh, mister,” Desirée tells him, “but
you
are going be in charge of biblical insights.”

I hear Doug entering through the back door. He’s come home earlier than usual; maybe things didn’t go so well with Mary Jo.

Everyone stops breathing and turns to me for instruction. Should they make a run for it or play dead? I give my head a shake, which is my way of telling them just to be cool, not a word. We aren’t doing anything wrong; we’re just friends sitting around in the living room on a Tuesday night. We listen to the sound of Doug grabbing a beer from the fridge and snagging a bag of chips from the cupboard. When he comes bounding into the living room and sees us, he stops short and nearly chokes on a chip, but he’s quick to recover. As a way of demonstrating that he’s the boss, he plops himself down on the sofa right smack in the middle of the action. He pops a chip into his mouth and doesn’t notice the scowl on my face. Another chip, and then another and another. When he finally speaks, his cheeks are hamster packed.

“So what are you guys up to?” he asks. And then he adds with mock surprise, “Wait. Did you break into this house, or did someone let you in?”

“Very funny,” I mutter in his general direction. “I invited them. They’re my friends.”

Before another thing can be said between us, Angela jumps in and offers Doug the ad from the newspaper. “Desirée is going to enter the Miss Christian Teen Contest. We’re going to help her.”

He scans the paper, but without his glasses he can’t make heads or tails of it. He hands it back to her and grunts to express the fact that he’s impressed.

“Sounds like a plan,” he says. Then he picks up the remote and turns on the TV. “Lot of commotion in this town, I guess. What do you kids make of it all? I mean, I hear that your mothers are involved.”

Shrugs all around. No one has much to say on the subject.

“Well,” Doug continues, “I think it’s a good story. They’ve got crowds of people saying the rosary and a sort of call-and-response thing happening. And people all over the country are taking notice.”

There are moans and grunts, just enough to convey that everybody is in the room with him. I know what Doug is up to: he’s trying to draw them in, gain their confidence. And I know that my friends are going to end up liking him because (a) he wants something, and (b) he takes risks. As soon as they find out that he’s taking time off from work to follow his dreams, he’ll become their new hero, a guy with plenty of get-up-and-go.

“But you know what I don’t get?” Doug asks. “Why hasn’t CNN made this a priority? Can you tell me that? I see the local affiliates covering it plenty. Well, I’ll tell you—I’ll be ready for CNN when they get here. Got
plenty
of footage. I mean, there’s
a story happening right here in this town. Finally, Mohammed came to the mountain. Am I right, or am I right?”

I can hear the echo of Angela’s question as it bounces around in my brain:
What’s he done that’s so bad?
How about we consider this evening Exhibit A?

Then he knocks back the rest of his beer and settles in to watch TV while occasionally leaning forward to change the channel.

The girls excuse themselves and move to the dining room table, where they can spread out and make a sketch for the dress that Desirée has in mind. Angela is helping her. I offer to help, but there isn’t a place for me at the table; everybody knows that designing dresses isn’t my thing.

Crispy picks up the video camera and turns it over, giving it a close inspection. Doug is quick to pick up on this. I think he always hoped that one day I’d get excited about his equipment or about the idea of film in general. But by now, I think he realizes that he’s out of luck, because film just isn’t going to be my thing.

“Go on,” says Doug to Crispy. “Try it. You’ll never know till you give it a whirl. Even Steven Spielberg started somewhere.”

“I’m just looking at it,” Crispy says.

“Look,” says Doug. “Look, look.”

Doug moves in closer to Crispy, and Crispy backs away, but I can tell he’s amused and maybe even flattered by Doug’s attention. They start fiddling with the buttons, and Doug is right there
giving him instructions and encouraging him to remove the lens cap and look through the eyepiece.

I’m just sitting there on the sofa like a lump of human cheese without a project, a loner in the middle of a party in my own living room. I start counting my heartbeats and feeling very sorry for myself. Nothing is my thing. My so-called best friend is in the Alps, my father is paying attention to some other kid, and the girl I’m in love with is in plain sight, but busy.

“Hey, Angela?” I say.

I’m thinking: (a) want something, and (b) take a risk.

She doesn’t even bother to look up from the drawing at the dining room table.

“Yeah?”

“How about we do something together tomorrow? Just you and me.”

“You mean like a date?” she asks.

“Yeah,” I reply. “Like a date. Like maybe I meet you at the hot-dog stand at noon. I’ll buy you lunch.”

Angela nods.

“Is that a yes?” I ask, just to be sure.

“Yes, lunch,” she says. “Hot dogs. Tomorrow. I’ll be there.”