Firecracker Page 15

  “Nuh-uh,” I said. “You’re a bully. I’m a bully to bullies, and that is not a bully. That’s a hero.”

  “Then why should we help you?” Summer said.

  “Because,” I said, “I’ve had a change of heart about jerks. Everyone always thought I was a jerk, even me, but I know now that deep down, I’m not a jerk. Maybe deep down, there are very few true horrible jerks. So you should help me because we are alike. And neither of us wants to be thought of as an asshole forever.”

  Summer thought about this. “Not a good enough reason.”

  “Fine,” I said. “I also have presents.” I opened the door to the bathroom stall where I’d been sitting. There was a large bag hanging on the purse hook. It was the kind of bag that Santa Claus would bring around for Christmas if Santa Claus traded toys for favors. From it, I took out a robin’s-egg-blue box. “This is a necklace from Tiffany’s. It’s yours. And girls, if you want something from Tiffany’s too, I got lots. And I mean lots.”

  They glanced at each other, then glanced back at the boxes. Their decision had been made.

  “When it’s time, you’ll know.”

  >>>>>>>>>>>>>

  Kids smoked outside the fire doors at the end of C hall. That’s where I figured I would find Mason during the dance.

  I’d met bullies who were actual crazy people. There was a boy named Jacques Durang whose father was an international assassin. Jacques Durang was pretty much evil. When I was thirteen, I kicked him so hard he had to have testicle retrieval surgery. That was the first time anyone had ever asked me, “Do you know who my father is?” He said it as he was moaning on the ground. I did know who his father was, and I didn’t care.

  Mason wasn’t a fully realized bully. I mean, Jacques Durang would’ve never sold ice cream at a mall. Mason was an aspiring bully, and that’s why I figured he would be outside smoking with Melty. They must’ve thought smoking cigarettes fit the part. But they should have known that if they really wanted to effectively inflict pain on a victim, it would help if they didn’t get winded while chasing someone up a staircase. Don’t smoke because it makes it a lot harder to beat someone up. That’s my public service message.

  They put their cigarettes out quickly when I opened the door, and I could see the fear on their faces when they recognized me. “You,” I said to Melty, making a shooing motion with my hand. “Go away.” And he did. Fast.

  “You’re here,” I said to Mason. “I’m glad you see things my way.”

  “Yeah, I’m here.” Mason leaned against the wall. “What do you want with me? I have things to do.”

  “I don’t think you have anything to do. And you know what, I also don’t think you’re a bad person,” I said.

  “I am a bad person,” he said.

  “No, you’re not,” I said. “You’re an artist.” In addition to the mural hanging in the cafeteria, he’d painted some of the decorations for the dance. They weren’t really about Monte Carlo. They also weren’t about homecoming. They were mostly about bats. But they were good. I wouldn’t hang them in my rocket ship or anything, but I have specific tastes.

  “I do some stuff,” he said.

  “I know. Redeemable. That’s good. You’re not just going to be doing me a favor, Mason. I’m also doing a favor for you.”

  “Don’t do me any favors,” he said.

  “Nah. You’ll like it.”

  “What is it?” he said.

  “How would you like to fall in love tonight?”

  I stood in the back of the cafeteria and watched.

  The DJ played something that sounded very royal, with a lot of horns. An empty circle opened up in the middle of the dance floor. Ben, the student council president, read down a long list of local businesses who sponsored the homecoming dance and then a bunch of announcements about some boring lit magazine fund-raiser, and maybe he went through step-by-step directions for how to bake a strawberry shortcake. I have no idea. I stopped listening. That guy was boring.

  Then the music changed to a recording of a drumroll, and Principal Barth took the mic. He read the homecoming court and said something specific about each person. “She’s a math something” and “He’s a baseball something.” Whatever. It was nice. They were freshmen and sophomores and juniors and who cares. I mean, some people cared—they had friends watching—but I was only there for the main event. I couldn’t help but smile. I couldn’t wait to see everyone’s faces.

  What happened was this: homecoming king was awarded to Mason. Nobody gasped at that, I’m pretty sure, but most people thought it was some sort of joke. Homecoming king was never as big a deal as queen. The student body regularly awarded the title to burnouts, cartoon characters, or people who had graduated eight years before.

  The surprise was entirely because of the homecoming queen. Even I was a little surprised, and I had planned the whole thing. Principal Barth was surprised when he read it off his card, and I’m sure he was the one who wrote it down on the card in the first place.

  The most surprised of all was Lucy Redlich. She wasn’t even anywhere near that part of the floor. She was in the back with a handful of Cheez Doodles stuffed in one side of her mouth and a glob of hair in the other side. (Though I like to remember the moment without her having orange residue all over her face.) Principal Barth had to say her name three times before she could even figure out why her name was being amplified. But when she heard, her reaction was perfect. She didn’t shake with nerves or run away, or slouch and shuffle her body to the front of the room. She smiled. She showed her teeth. She straightened her back, and she practically glided onto the stage.

  I don’t think Lucy could hear anything but the music in her head. I don’t think she could see anything but what was right in front of her. She smiled, and it felt really good to see it. People talk about how it feels good to do good things, and they’re right: it feels great. It’s a little better than a lobster, though I’ve had better massages. But they never gave a masseuse the Nobel Peace Prize, so it’s not just the feeling that’s important.

  Mason stood next to Lucy. He didn’t smile in the same way she did when they crowned him homecoming king, but he seemed happy to be standing there. They blushed. They looked back and forth from the crowd to each other. Their fingers touched a little bit. It was kind of gross. But it also made sense. They were the number 1o.

  I tapped Lucy on the shoulder and took a tiara from my bag. It was platinum and covered in rubies. “This once belonged to the princess of Austria,” I said. “Don’t let them put that plastic piece of crap on your head.”

  “I can’t take your tiara,” Lucy said.

  “Of course you can. You’re the queen.”

  The crowd wasn’t as immediately taken by the moment. Some of them yelled and booed and someone screamed things like, “Your face is ugly,” to Lucy, but that lasted only for a few seconds. Eventually you couldn’t hear any boos at all.

  I didn’t understand Summer Wonder. I didn’t know why people cared about what she thought about things or why they decided that her weird eyes were beautiful. But when she had an opinion about something, a lot of the school decided to have the same opinion. So, when Summer Wonder and her friends cheered and clapped for Lucy, the school lined up behind her. Summer Wonder probably really wanted to be up there instead, but she didn’t want it nearly as much as she wanted Lisbet’s jewelry. Everybody has a price.

  A girl came up to me and said, “Summer said that you would give me something if I cheered.”

  “She did?” I said. I gave her a sterling silver baby rattle. I had no idea why Lisbet had been given one of those in the first place.

  “How many people did you have to bribe to make this happen?” Noah wanted to know.

  “Everyone but you.”

  “You solved all this with money.”

  “Nope. I solved some of this with money. But th
e real change happened with my people skills.”

  “What about all that Tiffany stuff?”

  “I didn’t buy that stuff. I took it. Big difference.”

  “Why didn’t you try to bribe me?”

  “What help were you going to provide?”

  He thought about it. “I mean, you’re never going to know until you bribe me.”

  “What would you like?” I asked.

  He got this kind of sneaky smile. “Dance with me,” he said.

  I said, “I guess that would be okay.”

  >>>>>>>>>>>>>

  They played a slow song.

  I don’t know what the song was. I remember that the song had a story, though it wasn’t incredibly clear exactly what was going on and it was a little creepy. There was this girl. And she had a lot of dreams when she slept. And so she preferred to sleep instead of being awake and she slept whenever she could. But sometimes, she had to be awake (to eat and to go to work or whatever). And then she met a guy and fell in love immediately, which I found a little bit rash. And then instead of sleeping, she only wanted to see him even though she was tired pretty much all the time. And then she wondered if maybe she had actually been sleeping the whole time and her love wasn’t real and what would happen if she woke up? And then they got in a car accident because she was so tired, and the guy died, and it proved that she wasn’t sleeping. But the guy was still dead, so she slept more so she could dream about him.

  “What are you thinking about?” Noah asked.

  “Oh. Nothing, really. Logic problems with this song, mostly.”

  “You know, when your grandfather said before that he was disappointed, I don’t think he meant—”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “It’s just that—”

  “No. Really. I don’t.”

  “It’s just that . . . he didn’t mean it in a bad way.”

  “Noah, he and I . . . we mean everything in a bad way.”

  Noah smiled a little. “No, you don’t. Not him either. When we were in the car together and you were in the hotel bar—he told me that you’ve turned out better than he could ever be.”

  “I’m not.”

  “You are. He believes it. I think so too.” Noah stopped talking, and I could feel his hand on my back, and it wasn’t a particularly bad feeling.

  >>>>>>>>>>>>>

  We sat down on the bleachers while Pierre was flirting with Ms. Sharp. He was doing as bad a job with her as he did with everyone else in the world.

  First, he asked her to dance.

  Then she said it wouldn’t be appropriate.

  Pierre said, “Why? I won’t be handsy if you don’t want me to.”

  “You’re a little young,” Ms. Sharp said.

  “Really? How old are you?”

  “I’m twenty-three.”

  “Ah,” Pierre said. “To be twenty-three again.”

  Pierre wasn’t really winning her over. “What are you doing in high school, then?” Ms. Sharp wanted to know.

  Pierre whispered, “I know where all the cocaine is.”

  He looked at me for some sort of approval, but I shook my head to let him know that he should give up.

  >>>>>>>>>>>>>

  Lucy and Mason could have been anywhere else in the world. They didn’t pay attention to anyone in the room. From where we sat, I could hear bits and pieces of their conversation. Mason asked Lucy if she liked the song that was playing, and Lucy said she didn’t know because she was tone-deaf. Then Mason said he was color-blind and that’s why he started wearing black. Then he realized it scared people, so he kept wearing black. Then Lucy asked Mason if he liked the song, and he said it sucked. But, also, that it was okay. Really romantic stuff, those two.

  Lucy had said she wanted to be in love, and there they were, the two of them. Were they in love? Who knew. But they looked happy.

  “They look happy,” Noah said.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “You look happy too.”

  I had to laugh at that because, I don’t know, I’d never thought of myself as a happy person. When I saw people like Lisbet walking around with their big goofy smiles all the time, I didn’t think of that as a look I wanted for myself. I pretty much just saw that as the look someone had when they didn’t realize they were about to get hit by a train.

  On the other hand, I felt happy then, and it was nice. It was a little because of Lucy and Mason. It was also partly because of Noah. And then there was some part of me that just felt content in a way that I can’t really explain.

  Noah and I just sat there for song after song, until the dance was over. We just sat there until it was time to go, and then we left.

  The walk that Noah and I took from the front of the estate across the lawn and past the main house felt like hours and miles. It was probably only twenty minutes, but I was feeling a little dramatic, and twenty minutes still happens to be a long time to walk from the end of a driveway to a house in most situations. Noah and I had a lot to say on that journey. Here’s some of the stuff I remember us talking about:

  Noah used to do spelling bees when he was a kid. He was very competitive and, as he said, he did “very well.” I told him it was actually impossible to do “very well” at a spelling bee because even if you won the thing, you were probably way worse off than if you’d never been involved in a spelling bee in the first place. He kind of agreed.

  Noah said that the one thing he was more afraid of than anything else was mice. I laughed at him and said that mice don’t do anything. He disagreed. He said that they carry a lot of disease. And I said that everything carries a lot of disease, and so what, you could use a disease or two.

  So he asked me what I was afraid of, and I said nothing. And he said I was lying, and I said, “Well, I guess you’ll never know.”

  Noah had had a girlfriend for a year. I was very surprised. I kept telling him how surprised I was. He said, “You’re that surprised that I had a girlfriend before?” And I said, “I’m surprised that you’ve met a girl before.” And he said, “You’re kidding, right?” And I said, “Sure, right, whatever.”

  Her name was Julie and she was ugly. He never said that, but it’s how I pictured her. I pictured her as ugly with a messed-up hand.

  Noah has this website where he dresses his cat up as literary characters. This was also a reason that I was surprised he’d ever met a girl.

  We then talked about how some gorillas know sign language. I am not positive how we got on the subject. It was an interesting thing, though.

  Noah got quiet for a long time, and then he started saying a bunch of words that made no sense together, but I knew exactly what he was trying to say. If you spend any amount of time with a boy, you are bound to have a conversation pretty much exactly like that one. I’d managed to avoid getting too deeply involved in those sorts of things, but that’s because I had always been pretty good at identifying exactly when it was happening. With Noah it began like this: “You know,” he said. “You know how when two people, um, when they know each other. When a guy and a girl, they, um, they sometimes, they . . . You know, when . . . I’ve been. Here’s the thing . . .”

  That’s people for you. They almost never say what they mean. Sometimes, a boy would much rather wander around whatever he wants you to know instead of saying exactly what he’s thinking. Noah was no exception there.

  I felt comfortable with Noah. It was what made him different. I’d never felt comfortable with Pierre. I’d never felt that comfortable with Louis Pamelville, who also once called me his girlfriend.

  I wasn’t comfortable with Noah just because he was weird, and I knew that I could take him in a fight with my left hand even if I had to do something else (like carve a turkey or dig a hole) with my right hand. The feeling of comfort made me want him to kiss me. I wanted No
ah to kiss me.

  Noah was quiet, staring at me like he was trying to stay completely still lest his brain explode in a giant blast of blood and skin. He leaned in just a little bit. He was close enough that I could smell his hair, which was vanilla-y. His mouth smelled like wintergreen gum. I may have closed my eyes at that point.

  Noah moved in to kiss me. I don’t know what it was exactly, but it suddenly did not feel right. It wasn’t graceful. It wasn’t perfect. He leaned in, and I took a step back.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “For what?”

  “I get it.”

  “You get what?” I said.

  “You want to be friends or something?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I do want to be friends.”

  “I know. I get it. I’ve heard that song and dance before.”

  “I don’t think you have,” I said. I was feeling light-headed and shaky. My stomach was moving independently of my body. It was weird.

  “I’m just sorry that I even put you in the position where you had to make that clear. Of course you just want to be friends.”

  “I don’t just want to be friends.” He was misunderstanding me. I hated being misunderstood. It’s one of the best reasons not to talk to people. “It’s not a second prize. I don’t hand that out to everyone like it’s money. I don’t . . .”

  “You don’t what?”

  “I never had any friends.” That was probably the truest thing I’d ever said.

  He was quiet for a moment. We turned to the side of the hedges that camouflaged the rocket ship from the rest of the estate. “Why me?”

  I think what I said was, “Because I know you.”

  I saw him shake his head, and I think he said, “You don’t know me at all.” He looked off into space. “Astrid, I’m a liar.”

  And that was when I heard the splash. It was loud and angry. Like a piano falling into the middle of the ocean right next to me. Somehow, I knew what it was. I ran toward it as fast as I could.