Charm and Consequence (3 page)

“Well, why?” I run a hand along the edge of the table as nonchalantly as possible. “I guess I’m interested in your analysis of
my
character, which you seem to have drawn based on very little evidence.”

He sighs and puts his pen down on his notebook. He’s been taking notes, but I don’t look to see what he’s doing.

“I didn’t mean it as anything but a compliment. I thought you would pick a character who is less … weak and confused, I guess. You chose the Wife of Bath last time, right? Who was horrible, but she wasn’t a
weak
character, at least.”

“You mean unlike someone strong and
noble
like Hamlet?” I shoot back, knowing that I should just pick up my books and leave, but I seem frozen to the spot. I must be running some kind of masochist marathon, to see how much pain or irritation I can withstand. Still, there’s something kind of exciting about talking to Michael. No one else has ever made me feel this weird mix of exhilaration and aggravation every time we exchange a few words. What’s wrong with me?

“No, like Lady Macbeth, maybe?” he suggests. “She seems more your style.”

“Because I would nag my husband until he kills somebody just to shut me up? You’re too kind.”

“What? What are you talking about?” He catches himself and looks at me more coolly now. “As you point out, how could I say you're like any character when I hardly know you? You seem like a strong person, though, and Lady Macbeth is a strong character and that's all I meant–"

Before he can finish, a male voice rings out “Endicott!” way too loud for a library. Michael glowers as we both turn to see who it is.

It’s Jeremy Wrentham, whom I've noticed in the halls many times before. No one can help noticing him. He’s movie-star good-looking, all gold hair and green eyes; tall; athletic-looking without being bulked up; with cheekbones that curve and arch at the same time somehow … Let’s just say that if Cassie had the power of God to create man, she would have created Jeremy Wrentham.

“Wrentham,” Michael acknowledges.

Jeremy tosses his backpack onto the table and turns to me with a grin that could sell ten thousand tubes of toothpaste. “And who is this?” he asks.

“This is Georgiana Barrett. Georgia, this is Jeremy Wrentham.” Judging from his grimace, the weight of this social nicety is pressing down hard on Michael.

When Jeremy extends his hand to me and I take it, I feel a little jolt run up my arm like the time I touched the electric fence at my uncle’s farm to see what would happen.

While I usually loathe preppie, entitled males—witness one Michael Endicott—there’s something wildly appealing about Jeremy Wrentham. Like Michael’s, Jeremy’s family is important in this town. They don’t have a street named after them like the Endicotts, but Jeremy’s dad is a corporate lawyer and his mom is on a lot of the town beautification committees that my mom wants to be invited to join. But Jeremy is more human than Michael.

While Jeremy's clothes are as expensive and classic as everyone else’s around here (maybe more so) he wears them in a way that announces that he doesn’t really care about that. Jeremy’s a study in slightly disheveled elegance every day, with the cuffs of his shirts slightly frayed or a tiny moth hole in the shoulder of his sweater, whereas Michael always looks like he’s just stepped off an ironing board, having just been pressed and starched himself. Jeremy seems so at ease in the world; when he’s sitting half sprawled on a bench in the cafeteria it’s like he’s lounging in the den at home. When he’s talking to someone, it’s so effortless, whether it’s a goggle-eyed freshman girl like Cassie or Vito the maintenance guy or the school principal. He always seems like he belongs wherever he is and with whomever he happens to be with.

He’s smiling at me and his hand lingers in mine.

“Endicott and I are both Pemberley School dropouts,” he says with the kind of smile that would make him a very successful serial killer. Anyone would follow him into the back of even the shadiest looking panel van, or down a dark alley. Anywhere, really, if he smiled at them like he's smiling at me now.

I fear I may be blushing.

“We didn’t leave for the same reasons,” Michael says as he picks up the books from the table.

“No, no!” Jeremy laughs. “You and I are not the same.”

“No. We’re not,” Michael agrees. He gathers his things into his black messenger bag and says to me, “I want to make bio before the bell. Are you coming?”

“In a minute,” I say. He hesitates for a second, then walks away.

Jeremy shakes his head in amusement. “Same old Endicott,” he says.

“I recently heard him described as ‘socially retarded’,” I offer and Jeremy laughs harder. “What’s with the ‘Endicott’ and ‘Wrentham’ stuff?”

“A Pemberley thing, I guess, to call each other by our last names.” He leans on the table and appraises me with a smile. “What year are you in, Georgiana?”

“I’m a junior.”

He nods as if this makes perfect sense to him and a bright golden bird’s wing of hair brushes across his eyes. “Well, nice to meet you, Georgiana,” he says and takes my hand for a second. “I hope I see you around more.”

I just nod dumbly and leave the library without checking out any of my books. But I feel a lot better suddenly. And I’m not sure why, because Jeremy is so totally not the kind of guy I usually like. And guys like Jeremy don’t usually pay much attention to me, to be honest. I have to admit it I like it. And the idea of Jeremy Wrentham actually being interested in
me
keeps my brain occupied enough so that I don’t think about Michael Endicott or what he thinks of me for the first time in days.

Even in bio class when he’s sitting right next to me.

***

November rumbles in with a series of thunderstorms and freezing rain, as if the gods of late summer and winter are fighting over who gets to control the weather for the next few months. I start working on a second
Alt
article, this time concentrating on the health benefits of going vegan, since no one else seems to find it an ethical dilemma at all; meanwhile, our group works on our next English class presentation. I do not consult Michael about my presentation topic, and we don’t talk much in bio, either. We still sit together and we have our I-draw/he-writes split for the last of the plant labs, but we haven’t really talked much since the library incident. If he’s at all interested in my “character” or whatever he was trying to tell me in the library, he has a weird way of showing that interest: by alternately ignoring me, glowering at me in homeroom, or giving me the fish eye in English class.

Not that I care.

***

My mom gets so excited I fear for her mental health when Tori mentions that Trey’s dad, a dean at the college where my father teaches, is planning to invite us to the Harvest Ball at the Longbourne Country Club. She warbles all through dinner about gowns versus tea-length dresses and what the décor of the club will be like and whether someone she met recently at a Ladies’ Aid meeting will be there. Personally, I think the concept of a country club is pretty loathsome. Any group of people requiring membership, anything that is set up to exclude other people from taking part, is not something I ever want to sign on to. Besides, the idea of a semi-formal dance at a country club just seems like fate’s cruel way of pointing out to me yet again that I will not have a date for it.

And then I realize that I can use this as my excuse.

“Can’t go,” I say, palms up as if my boyfriend has slipped out of my hands. “No escort.”

“Well, I don’t think any of us are bringing escorts, dear,” Mom says, with a pointed look at Cassie meant to convey that her football hero beau, Rick the Brick, will not be invited to join us. “We can’t take advantage of the Billingsleys’ generosity by bringing along guests of our own, sweetie.”

“Or risk making the wrong impression,” I mumble as I realize my lack of a dance partner is not going to cut it as an excuse.

“Well, if Brick’s not coming, I’m not coming,” Cassie declares as she stabs a mushy potato.

“All right, then,” Mom agrees pleasantly.

“I have to sing at church that night,” Leigh says. I can hear the relief in her voice.

“Well, Pam, that’s two fewer ball gowns we’ll have to purchase,” Dad says as he looks up from the draft of a conference paper he is reading as we finish eating. He sounds even more relieved than Leigh did.

“So Tori and Georgia and I will go shopping then, just the three of us. Or just the two of you, if you prefer that.”

“Who says I’m going to this thing in the first place?” I demand.

“You have no reason
not
to go,” Mom points out.

I groan.

“It will be fun,” Tori reassures me. “And you’ll get to observe the cultural elite of the Longbourne Country Club firsthand.”

But I think I’ve had about enough of Longbourne’s elite already.

***

I get another taste of it in the form of Lord Michael of Endicott on our second AP English presentation day. Shondra talks about Lady Macbeth, so I guess Michael approves of her part of the presentation, at least. She explains that a woman of Macbeth's time could only have access to power and position through her husband, so that’s why she had to goad Macbeth into killing the real heir to the throne to grab it for himself. Shondra sounds confident, but when she sits down next to me, she exhales as if she had been underwater and just burst to the surface.

“You were great,” I assure her.

Michael goes next, showing no signs of ever having had a moment of panic in his life. He’s chosen Hamlet, of course, and cites all sorts of evidence from the play that Hamlet was a genius, a man of the people, an ethical person forced into a terrible position what with that whole having to kill his uncle thing, blah blah blah. It’s very smart and very impressive and based on Aristotle’s definition of the tragic hero and will no doubt earn our group an “A” again, but something about the way Michael makes his case bothers me. He’s not just self-possessed. He’s downright smug, and it makes me want to throw my copy of the book at him.

“Hamlet’s more complicated than the average tragic hero,” Michael explains, “because his undoing is not just because of some tragic flaw, his hubris or something. But like Oedipus or other classic tragic heroes, Hamlet’s essentially a noble figure.”

Unfortunately, the snort I make at this is audible to Ms. Ehrman. She twists on the edge of her desk toward me and says, “Georgiana, would you like to say something about that?”

“I don’t see what’s so noble about Hamlet,” I say, albeit reluctantly. “I mean, he kills-what? three? four?- people. What’s so noble about murder?”

“Those people were trying to kill
him
,” Michael points out.

“Not all of them! Not Polonius- Hamlet kills him just because he’s so creeped out by the idea of a guy in his mother’s bedroom.”

Some of the class snickers and I feel my face get a bit warmer. I can’t tell if they think I’ve made a funny point proving that Hamlet is a bit of a wacko, or at least a mama’s boy, or that I have revealed myself to have a mind prone to finding weird sexual situations where they do not exist.

I really need to stop getting myself into these situations. But I’m in one now and there’s no graceful way out. And no wrecking ball to come and knock me safely into the next classroom, so I continue, “He’s a guy out for revenge who destroys a lot of people-himself included. But that doesn’t make it ‘noble,’ just because he takes himself out, too. I know she’s not a hero, and not ‘tragic’ in Aristotle’s definition, but Ophelia is tragic in every other sense of the word.”

Now Michael snorts a bit and his smile twists at this absurdity. He says, “She’s confused, and goes off the deep end– no pun intended.” Some of the guys laugh. “I’ll give you that.”

“Oh, thank you.”

Ms. Ehrman rubs her glasses on her sweater for a moment before prompting, “Okay, Georgiana, what is tragic about Ophelia?”

I sigh but forge ahead.

“She’s used by all the men in the play. She’s just a tool to them. No matter how she feels about them, they just see her as an instrument.”

“True that,” Shondra agrees and there are a few other murmurs.

“Her dad
does
seem to want to use her for his own political advancement,” Michael admits.

“He practically
throws
her at Hamlet,” Shondra tells him and I smile at her, a big sappy grin of gratitude, before I continue, reinforced.

“And her brother uses her, too. Ophelia and Laertes are all jokey, typical brother and sister making-fun-of-dad in Act One,” I say, “and then, when she dies, Laertes
might
genuinely grieve for her, but he seems more bent on getting revenge to prove what a noble guy
he
is. Just like Hamlet.”

“Hamlet doesn’t ‘use’ her, exactly,” Michael argues calmly. “She’s more like … collateral damage.”

“She
loves
him,” I practically cry out, too caught up in my irritation now to police my own response to Michael’s confidence in his own brilliant analysis. “That’s evident from her speech in – what is it? Act One? She calls him ‘the very mold of form and glass of fashion’?
She
thinks he’s noble, that’s true. And then he uses her to make his own `I’m-no-threat-because-I-am-a-mad-dog’ scheme seem plausible. She’s been loyal to him, it seems, cared for him as a person, loved him for who he is-then she gets placed in his path by her dad to be
used
by him, so he can shock everyone by calling her a whore! She’s a tool for her dad, maybe for her brother, and for the guy she loves. Who wouldn’t go batty after that happened to them? What else can she do? She’s a girl in medieval –or whatever – Denmark. She’s property, a pawn.” I finish with a sort of sigh. “Maybe she’s
not
crazy. Maybe she’s just
really pissed off
, but she can’t do anything about it. She’s not the prince of Denmark. She’s not a man.”

After a pause Ms. Ehrman says, “I think Georgiana makes a very compelling feminist argument.”

At the word “feminist” there are some hisses and hoots, as if I had announced my intention to castrate everyone in the room with a penis.