Election

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I swear to God, I'll make him suffer.

PAUL WARREN

YOU ONLY NEED a hundred signatures to put yourself on the ballot. I'd accumulated eighty-something my first half hour in the cafeteria when Tracy came charging up to my table in those amazing black jeans.

“Who put you up to this?” she demanded.

Tracy's kind of short and moon-faced, but something about her gets me all flustered. It's pretty simple, really: she's got this ass. Just ask any guy at Winwood.

Conversations stop every time she walks down the hall. She wore these cut-offs last spring that people still talk about.

“What?”

“I asked you a simple question, Paul. Or do you expect me to believe that you just woke up this morning and decided to run for President?”

“I've been thinking about it for a long time.”

She shook her head and smiled with pure contempt. I felt like I'd turned into a pane of glass.

“You're not a good liar, Paul.”

She surprised me then by plucking the pen out of my hand and signing the petition.

“I've been working toward this for three years,” she said, dotting the in her last name with her trademark star, “and if you think you can just jump in at the last minute and take it away from me, you're sorely mistaken.”

It's funny. She was trying to show me she wasn't scared, but the message I got was exactly the opposite. For the first time, I actually believed I might be able to win.

“Well,” I said, reclaiming my pen from her sweaty fingers, “I guess we'll just have to let the voters decide.”

MR. M.

THE ELECTION FOLLOWS an orderly, three-phase schedule. March is petition month. Any student can become a candidate simply by submitting a petition with the required number of signatures. The Candidate Assembly on the first Tuesday in April marks the official beginning of the race. The next two weeks are devoted to the campaign. The hallways and bulletin boards are plastered with signs and posters. Candidates greet their fellow students at the main door, passing out leaflets, shaking hands. The Watchdog publishes a special election issue. It's democracy in miniature, a great educational tool.

It's clear to me now that I was wrong to get so involved in Paul's candidacy. I don't think I admitted to myself how badly I wanted to see Tracy lose.

That girl was bad news, 110 pounds of the rawest, nakedest ambition I'd ever come in contact with. She smoldered with it, and I'd be a liar if I said I didn't find her fascinating and a little bit dangerous, especially after what I'd heard about her from Jack Dexter. She was a steamroller, and I guess I wanted to slow her down before she flattened the whole school.

My saving grace, or so I thought at the time, was simple: Paul Warren would make a terrific President. The office would be good for him, and he would be good for the school. And besides, he had as much right to run as Tracy did. Winwood High School was a democracy. The winner would be determined by popular vote, not my personal preference.

All the way through the last week of March, it looked like we would have a clear-cut, two-way race between Paul and Tracy, a race I had no doubt my candidate could win. So you can imagine my annoyance on March 29th when I walked into the cafeteria and saw Paul's little sister, a scrawny, morose-looking girl, standing behind a petition table, holding up a homemade sign.

“TAMMY WARREN,” it said. “THE PEOPLE'S CHOICE.”