скачать книгу бесплатно
I sigh. This is not the Ash I’ve known for ever. The Ash I knew used to be totally and completely in love with Jimmy—poet, guitar guy, future rock star. They went out for a year and a half, until he had some sort of schizoid butthead attack and cheated on her with a freshman girl with shiny Barbie hair and enormous Barbie breasts. Since then, it’s all she thinks about. How free guys are. How they go after what they want, how they get it, how happy they are doing it. How hooking up is so much better than having a boyfriend, how it can keep you from getting hurt.
But I know that’s not true, and I know better than to bring up Jimmy. After Jimmy, Ashley became Ash and Jimmy became a ghost. He might as well be dead, even though his locker is right down the hall from ours. “This particular prodigy doesn’t have time for Luke DeSalvio or any other guy,” I say. “This prodigy has to keep her grades up so that the colleges come knocking with the big bucks.”
Ash smiles. “My list is up to six now. I’ve got Rutgers, Oberlin, NYU, SUNY, Sarah Lawrence. I’m hoping that they’ll ignore my math grades. And my chemistry grades. And that D I got in cooking freshman year.”
“I still don’t know how you managed a D in cooking.”
“Mrs Hooper had us make mayonnaise. How is that cooking?”
“You said six colleges.”
“I’m also applying to Cornell.” She gives me a knowing look. “Bet that’s your safe school.”
I pull Ash’s cup out of the holder and take a swig of cold, gritty coffee. “Nothing’s safe.”
First-period study, and Chilly’s on an Audrey hunt. He lopes into the library and gives me a wicked grin. He sits in the seat across from me, his brows waggling, suggestive of God knows what. I ignore him, grab one of my books and flip it open without really seeing it. Shakespeare. Much Ado About Nothing. Blah blah blah, says Beatrice. Blah blah blah, says Benedick. Your lips are like worms.
“Nice party?” Chilly says.
“Fine.” I try to make my voice flatter than a robot’s in the hope that he’ll leave me alone. No such luck.
“Did you hook up?”
“You have sex on the brain,” I say.
“I have sex other places, too.”
“I don’t think you have sex anywhere, and that’s why you have to live vicariously through the rest of us,” I say.
“Vicariously,” he says. “V-I-C-A-R-I-O-U-S-L-Y. Is that one of the words in your SAT practice book? I bet you use flash cards.”
“Is there a reason you always have to sit near me? Isn’t there anyone else you can irritate around here?”
“You’re my favourite.”
He props his chin in his hands and bats his nuclear-accident eyes. Chilly would probably be nice to look at if he wasn’t such a jerk, but the jerkiness overwhelms every other thing, the jerkiness is like a great cloud of nerve gas that causes the eyes to roll and the knees to buckle and disgust to claw at the back of the throat. When he first came to our school from Los Angeles in the middle of sophomore year, the girls took notice. Tall, lanky, skin like coffee ice-cream, those freaky blue-green eyes, a movie-star strut—what’s not to like? I liked it, I’m embarrassed to admit. Oh, he started out great. Notes and gifts and all this attention that I’d never had from anyone. My mom called him “charming”. But then Chilly started feeling more comfortable. He started opening his big stupid mouth. He took all the same honours classes that I did, but while I did hours of homework and studied every night, he seemed content to do the least amount possible. He almost never had a book with him. At least not one that he was supposed to. He made fun of me for my study habits, my friends and my work on the sets of the school plays. He said that the only thing worth my time was him. I finally told him that if he wanted a pet, he should go out and get a poodle.
He’s never forgiven me for it.
Today he’s got some Japanese comic book that you read backwards. Not that he’s opened it yet, because he’s too intent on pissing me off. Sometimes he sat near Kimberly Wong and made her so nervous that she would forget which math problem she was on. And sometimes it was Renee Ostrom, sure to be voted most likely to become a starving artist, who would whip out a piece of paper and draw a quick sketch of Chilly with arrows sticking through his head, or a knife in his heart, or his face shattered in Picasso-like pieces.
Chilly spends about five minutes trying to provoke me when the bell rings. I’m glad that we’re not allowed to talk in Mrs Sayers’s study period, and the room is silent except for the scratchy whisper of pages turning. We all hear Cindy Terlizzi’s phone when it starts to vibrate. In unison, everyone says, “Phone!”
“Miss Terlizzi,” says Mrs Sayers, who is shelving books in her persnickety way. The edge of every book touches the front of the shelf. “You know that phone is supposed to be turned off when you arrive at school.”
“Whatever,” says Cindy Terlizzi. When Mrs Sayers gives her a look, she says, “I know.”
“Well then, turn it off,” Mrs Sayers snaps. She picks up the end of her long scarf and flings it around her neck, waiting for satisfaction.
Cindy digs around in her bag for the phone and flips it open with a flick of her wrist. She presses a few buttons and the phone chirps like a sick bird. We all know she’s probably getting a text message and is counting on the fact that Mrs Sayers’s own phones are of the rotary or perhaps even the tin-can variety.
“Off!” says Mrs Sayers.
“That’s what I’m doing,” Cindy says, tsk-tsking, like Mrs Sayers is just old and grumpy and wrinkled and can’t understand modern communication devices. She glances back at the phone in her palm as if she can’t quite believe the message she’s reading and slaps her hand over her mouth. Then she looks up. Finds me. Smiles.
She’s too busy smiling to pay attention to Mrs Sayers, who, I have to say, is ferret-fast when she wants to be. She swoops down on Cindy, scarf flying like an aviator’s, and snatches the phone. “What a clever little gadget,” she says.
“Hey!” says Cindy. “Give that back!”
Mrs Sayers peers down, one eyebrow rucked up. She starts punching random buttons and the phone whirrs. “Very nice,” she says, passing it back to Cindy.
Cindy scowls. “You erased it!”
Mrs Sayers says, “Oh, my! Did I? I’m so very sorry. I hope it wasn’t important.”
Behind Mrs Sayers’s back, Cindy sticks out her tongue but says nothing. Mrs Sayers glances my way and I know that whatever was on Cindy’s phone was about me—probably about the party, about Pam, about Luke. Well, they could have him. They could all get in line.
Of course, Chilly doesn’t miss any of it. He’s turning from Cindy to Mrs Sayers to me, me to Mrs Sayers to Cindy. He opens his mouth to say something icky and nuclear and obnoxious, but I cut him off: “Speak and you die.”
Chilly gives me his signature “Who, me?” look and opens his mouth again when Mrs Sayers says, “Yes, Mr Chillman, please do spare us all. I can’t promise you death, but I can promise detention, which I’ve been told is a bit like dying very, very slowly.”
Everybody goes back to not reading, not studying and not thinking, except for me and a couple of other geeks who think grades are important. At first I can’t concentrate, but as the minutes tick by I settle into it, settle into me again: the me who thinks about grade point averages and college applications and various possible futures. I consult my assignment notebook and measure how many days till the final draft of my Much Ado About Nothing paper is due, worry about my history test, calculate how many hours I’ll have to study for the next calculus exam. It’s soothing, the measurements and the calculations and even the worry. Luke is still there, of course, in the back of my head, doing some sort of jock dance of the veils, but I know that he’ll fade eventually, taking all his hot boy voodoo into the past.
Finally the bell rings and I’m free of Chilly the Soul Chiller and Cindy Terlizzi, Demon Queen of Text Messaging. As I’m running to my next class, Pete Flanagan, one of football players, blocks my path.
“Hey, Audrey,” he says. His expression is weird, smirky and knowing, which is kind of funny, because Pete really is a rockhead and knows so very little.
“Hi, Pete,” I say. I sidestep to go around him, but he moves with me. I notice that there’s a bunch of rockheads piling up behind him, all with the same smirky yet stupid expressions, like a bunch of monkeys who’ve just figured out where all the bananas are.
“Want to go out sometime?” he says.
“What?”
“Go out. Come on, you and me.” He jerks a thumb to his friends. “Well, you, me and some of my boys.”
I’m at a loss. This kind of thing hasn’t happened in a while. When we were freshmen, clique warfare was rampant. It was considered necessary and maybe even fun to seek out and terrorise everyone who was not exactly like you in the school. I thought most of us, even the football players, had grown out of that. Guess not.
“Sure, guys,” I say. “Anytime.”
They all let out a whoop as I push past them. Morons.
I motor towards the gym. Out of the corner of my eye I see a finger pointing my way and hear someone laughing, but when I turn, all I see is a row of backs. I start to get a weird feeling, of the weight of eyes, of newly focused attention. In gym, as me and Joelle are pretending to concentrate on the basketball drills, Jeremy Braverman, who has said all of three sentences in three years, says, “I love how you dribble those balls, Audrey,” over and over again, until Joelle gets shrieky and hysterical and beans him in the head with one of them. I get a note in French class: “Sur vos genoux!” On your knees! I turn around to see who wrote it, but no one will meet my eyes. The French in my book blurs into incoherent babble. Did Luke blab to his stupid friends? Did he tell them what we did? No. No! He never talks about his hook-ups. Don’t ask, don’t tell, he’d say. That was always his deal. So what was going on?
By lunch I can’t take the snickering and the weirdness. I make Ash take us to the McDonald’s just to get out of the school. “I think someone’s spreading rumours about me. I’m getting all these looks. It’s making me crazy.”
Ash steers the car around to the drive-through window and orders us fries and Cokes. “Really? I haven’t heard anything,” she says. “Maybe Pam Markovitz is shooting her mouth off. You know what she’s like. And she was so jealous of you at the party on Saturday. Pathetic.”
“What should I do?” I say.
“Oh, who cares about a bunch of ho’s and dumbheads?” Ash tells me. “They’ll be babbling about something else by sixth period.” Because I forgot to bring cash, she pays for the fries and Cokes and pulls out of the parking lot.
Just as I’m about to open the white bag, my own cell phone buzzes and I scratch around the floor for it. I flip open the phone and check the screen. “Picture mail,” I say.
“Maybe Joelle is sending some of the shots she took at the party,” says Ash, smashing a fry into her mouth. “I don’t know why she bothers. They always suck.”
An image pops up and I scroll down to see it. At first I don’t understand what it is. And then my insides turn to ice.
“Ash,” I say.
“What?”
“Someone took a picture of me.”
“Yeah, so?” She looks down at the phone, frowns. “What is it?”
“It’s me, Ash. Me and Luke. We were…” I trail off, staring at the screen. Luke’s head is cut off, but the pale skin of his chest and hips glows in the dark, and his hands clutch fistfuls of the bedspread. Between his knees, a cascade of waist-length blonde hair striped with black.
Ash pulls the car over to the side of the road and slams on the brakes. She grabs the phone. “Oh, God,” she says. “Who took this?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where were you?”
“Upstairs in one of the bedrooms.”
“Audrey, why didn’t you close the freaking door?”
“We did!” I say. “Someone must have seen us go in. Someone must have opened it.”
“You didn’t hear anyone? You didn’t see anything?”
I try to think. The music was so loud—you could hear it coming through the open windows—and then there was the noise that Luke was making. “No,” I say. “I didn’t hear anything. And I had my eyes closed. I guess Luke did, too.”
“Schweinhund,” she says. “Do you think he planned this?”
“Who?”
“Luke!”
“What? No, I…” My head is shaking no no no, but I’m not controlling my own muscles.
And then it hits me all at once. Cindy Terlizzi’s slow smile in study. The pointing in the hallways. Pete and the rockheads. Jeremy Braverman, braver than he’d ever been before. “Ash, it’s the picture.” My stomach does liquid flips and I thrust the fries from my lap. “Someone’s been sending around this picture.”
The Gauntlet (#ulink_f9497ccf-cfc3-566c-a801-857aeaf7b19c)
The parking lot of the school. I don’t want to get out of the car.
“Look,” says Ash, “let’s skip the rest of the day. I don’t care if we get in trouble. We can hit the movies or something.”
Movies? I can’t think, I can’t concentrate. I can’t understand this. Who took this picture? Who sent it? The return-mail address on the message meant nothing to me. Ash says we can trace it, but I say, “Who are we? The freaking FBI?”
The phone is still open on my lap. Everyone who gets this picture will know it’s me. No one else has hair like this. I wish I’d hacked it off long ago, but I didn’t because it was the only thing that made me special. Real special, now. My stomach is locked down so tight that I can’t even throw up.
“Say something,” Ash says.
This is my private thing, and now it’s porn. I feel like someone stole my diary and read it out loud over the speakers. Except that I don’t keep diaries. I don’t even have a blog. “What am I going to do?”
She doesn’t answer, just takes my hand and squeezes it. I would cry if I had any moisture in my body. My throat is dry and scratchy, my tongue a dustrag.
“So do you want to cut for the rest of the day?” Ash asks me.
I want to cut for the rest of the day, the rest of the week, the rest of the year. I want to cut till I go to college. But I have a history test in the afternoon, and if I cut, I’ll miss it. The history test was important before, but now it seems like the most important thing in the world. I have to take that test. I have to ace that test. It’s the only thing I can do.
“No,” I say. “I’ve got a test.”
“Audrey, come on—”
“No,” I say again. “If I cut today, it will be worse tomorrow.”
“OK,” she says. “I’ll walk you to your locker.”
We get out of the car and walk to the back doors, the doors to the senior wing. The sun has stopped shining, but the air still feels oddly warm and heavy and damp. I’m slogging through molasses, or through dense foliage in some hot, stinking jungle. We push open the doors and immediately the eyes are on me again, the hands hiding wide, smirky grins. It must be all over the school, the bits and codes and ones and zeros flying from one phone to the next, assembling themselves into skin and hair, hands and knees. A hundred blondes between two hundred legs. Me. And me and me, and on and on.
The people part before us and line up on either side of the hallways to watch us go. I hear someone murmur something and Ash’s head whips around. “Shut up, Arschloch,” she hisses.
We get to my locker and I go through the motions of getting my books. Calc, English, history. We are doing the Constitution in history class and I run through the amendments in my head. First, free speech and freedom of the press; second, the right to bear arms; third, the right of a property owner to keep soldiers out of his home; fourth, the right of the people to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures. Unreasonable seizures. Is this a seizure? It feels like one. Someone has ripped my skin off and all my arteries are hanging out. I can only imagine what they’re thinking, what they’re saying. Her? Man, who knew the honours chicks were so easy?
There’s a collective hiss from the crowd in the hall. I hear “Luke! You didn’t answer your phone, dude. You have to check this out.”
I don’t want to look, but I can’t stop myself. I turn and see Luke surrounded by a clot of guys, one of them brandishing a phone.
“What is it?” Luke says. He takes a long, lazy pull on the milkshake he must have bought at lunch.
“Just look at it!”
Luke shrugs and takes the phone. One of the rockheads points at the picture helpfully. “This has got to be Audrey Porter,” the rockhead says. He says it loudly and clearly. He doesn’t care if I’m only metres away. He doesn’t care if I hear.
Luke suddenly stops walking and the rockhead rams into him. Luke blinks at the picture, his brows beetling as if he’s annoyed. Then he thrusts the phone back at the rockhead. “You don’t know who that is.”
“Come on! That’s Porter. Gotta be. Is that you with her?”
Luke walks quickly down the hall towards me. He’s not looking at me and Ash at all. His eyes are trained straight ahead at the doors at the end of the hallway. “You can’t see their faces,” he says. “That could be anyone.”
“No way,” says the rockhead. As the group passes by, he jerks his head towards me. “Look at the hair.”
“Whatever,” Luke says. He doesn’t turn my way, just keeps walking. He flicks a hand at the phone. “You guys can find way better stuff on the Internet, if that’s what you need.” The group floats down the hallway, around the corner and out of sight. I can still hear the gurgling sound of Luke’s straw as he polishes off his milkshake.
Pam Markovitz saunters over, with Cindy Terlizzi bringing up the rear like an overeager Maltese. Ash tenses up, waiting for one of them to say something, anything, so that she has an excuse to cut them down. But Pam tips her head, sucks on one of her incisors, and smiles with her kitty-cat teeth. “That was cold. Kind of makes you wish you were a lesbian, doesn’t it?”
