Cloudburst (5 page)

“It's Shayne!” he cried, obviously upset that I didn't recognize his voice.

“How can I help you?” I asked in the most formal tone of voice I could muster.

“Huh? Look, my car won't start. Can you pick me up on the way to school?”

“No. I'm late,” I said. “Take a taxi.”

“Wait!” he cried, anticipating my hanging up. “Are you going to the game Friday? It's a home game, and I thought that after the game we—”

“I'm not sure. I have an opportunity to see
Madame Butterfly.
Box seats.”

“What?”

“See you in school,” I said, and hung up.

I had no opportunity to see
Madame Butterfly,
but the idea had just popped into my head. I smiled to myself as I got into my car. I could just imagine the look of surprise on his face, but I remembered the advice Kiera had given me about the boys in our school. “They like to take you for granted because they take everything else for granted. Make them work for every smile you give them, and don't give them many.”

I'll e-mail her about it later,
I thought. She loved hearing about my romantic exploits, especially when I appeared to be following her lead.

Alberto waved to me as I drove out and waited for the gate to open. From the outside, it looked like a solid orange wall twelve feet high. There were security cameras everywhere. One of my friends who came here, Jessica Taylor, said, “The only thing missing here is a moat and crocodiles.”

When I arrived at school, I parked in the student lot where all of us who had cars had reserved places. As I
headed for the front door, I saw Shayne pull in, driving his own car and parking in his spot.

His own car? Deception, I thought. So much for him needing me to pick him up. I wouldn't ever go out with him, since the only way he could get my attention was to try to deceive me. If it's there at the start, it will certainly be there throughout your relationship and at the end for sure.

Mama taught me that.

I felt confident that I could and would recognize it every time I saw it.

But I was still young and idealistic.

I had no idea what deception awaited me or the direction from which it would come—and certainly no idea about how close it was.

2
New Student

W
hen I first entered this school, I was nervous and self-conscious for many reasons, not the least of which was my limping. The injury I had suffered could have healed improperly because of how quickly and carelessly I was initially treated. I could have been limping all my life. One leg might not have grown as fast or as long as the other, but Jordan March brought in Dr. Milan, a top specialist who reset my cast, and after nearly a year, my limp grew less and less obvious, until eventually it was completely gone. Probably no other girl in the school took as much pride in her walk now as I did after that, although many interpreted it as my being snobby and absorbed with myself. I was simply grateful and more conscious of my posture and my gait.

I don't know how many girls can actually envision themselves when they walk or sit and talk, but I can. Maybe I'm thinking more about my mother than I am about myself, but I see a picture of a girl with a rich, unblemished
complexion and silky black hair to go with her black onyx eyes, small nose, and perfectly shaped slightly raised lips. She is lithe, with a figure other girls envy and boys dream of when they fantasize. I always focus ahead when I walk, no matter where I am, and so I seemed undistracted and unconcerned, an exotic statue of self-confidence. Kiera was the first one to mention this to me. She called it my “wow factor.”

“Every girl needs one,” she said. “Mine is the way I shift my eyes and turn my shoulders. I radiate sex. I can see it in their faces, women as well as men.”

I thought she was simply jealous of something else about me, but under the note of envy in her voice, I did hear an appreciation and respect for something I did on my own. Because of her, even though people couldn't tell, I was even more self-conscious about the way I walked and sat. Besides, in this school, I didn't lack reminders.

“You walk through the halls of this school as if you own it,” Ray Stowe told me earlier this year. I had stopped at my hall locker. He was one of the senior boys who were upset with my attitude toward them. Maybe they thought I should kowtow like some obedient Asian woman. “I know Donald March was one of the principal builders of it, but that doesn't mean you own it.”

Ray's father was a builder, too. I imagined there was some friendly and maybe not-so-friendly competition.

I looked first at my girlfriends who were standing by their lockers. They had overheard him.

“Don't slouch so much, and you can look as if you own it, too, instead of looking as if you're ashamed to be here
or don't think you're good enough,” I told him. Everyone around us laughed. Unable to come up with a good enough counter, he straightened his posture, looked at the smiling faces around us, and walked away.

Some of the girls who hung with me repeated the things I said all day, especially when I took down one of the boys who was so full of himself. The school had only three hundred students from grades seven to twelve, so having the whole student body hear something someone else said or something someone else did was not difficult. That was especially true for the senior high. We had only sixty-two students in the senior class. Our class sizes were a quarter of what they were in many public schools. It was difficult, even for some of the more modest students, not to feel extra special and not to have their voices drip with pride about being a student at Pacifica.

My memories of my public grade-school days were so vague now. It wasn't all that long after my father deserted us that it became more and more difficult to attend the school I was at. However, like most children that age, I was still excited about going there every school day. After the initial days, older students seemed to be generally blasé about it, but not me. I was still as excited as ever about going to school.

Attending Pacifica was special for so many reasons. Few schools glittered and sparkled as much. Dr. Steiner, the principal, was obsessive about cleanliness. Our desks were actually washed down nightly with antiseptic soaps to prevent the spread of colds and flu. Vandalism here was equivalent to a capital crime. There were little signs warning about it
everywhere, especially outside. A student could be expelled for it, and his or her parents would forfeit the tuition, an amount that would surely keep some families in food and shelter for two years. We also had a security service to monitor visitors and protect the property at night.

I suspect that I would have done as well in my academics at a public school as I did here, but being in this environment was so safe and pleasant that I looked forward to schoolwork and assignments every day, just the way I had when I was six and seven. Our teachers were happy, too. They could maintain discipline easily and were paid better than public-school teachers. My music teacher, Mr. Denacio, was the only teacher I had who growled and looked dissatisfied at times, but I knew from the start that his bark was worse than his bite. I also knew he bragged about me and how quickly I had become one of his best clarinet players ever.

Despite the families and the wealth these students came from, the chatter in homeroom and in the hallways between classes was no different from the chatter that occurred at most public schools that were populated instead by mostly low- and middle-income students. All of my girlfriends were anxious to talk about themselves and about boys they liked or wished liked them. One other thing I had learned from Kiera was to let them all blabber first and then, almost as an afterthought, give my opinions and talk about myself. It always worked. It gave me that authenticity, that demeanor of an experienced observer. In their eyes, I had the patience and the wisdom. Sometimes I felt they were more attentive to me than they were to their teachers and parents and
would do whatever I suggested, even though their parents and teachers were dead set against it and the consequences could be severe.

After this particular school day began, I noticed that Shayne Peters not only avoided talking to me all morning but avoided looking at me as well. I didn't think anyone else noticed, but at lunch, Sydney Woods looked as if she had won
American Idol
or something when she came charging into the cafeteria. She was that ecstatic. She rushed over to my table and held up her right thumb. All of us stopped talking to look.

“You're da bomb!” she told me, while it was she who looked as if she might explode.

“Who set you on fire?” Jessica asked.

“Never mind. Sasha, what did you do to Shayne?” Sydney asked. Everyone turned to me.

“Nothing. Why?”

“He's telling his friends you treated him like . . . how did he put it? Like a nobody,” she said with glee. “You acted as if you didn't know who he was when he called you? Perfect. When did he call you, anyway?” she asked, obviously wondering if he had called while they were still technically a couple.

“Well, nobody called this morning,” I said.

“So, when did he call?”

“I just told you. Nobody called this morning,” I said. She stared a moment, and then she broke into a hysterical laugh, and so did everyone else. That, I knew, was going to be the quote of the day.
Nobody called this morning.
Sydney, who was a good student, especially in English, walked
around reciting Emily Dickinson's poem, especially when she was in Shayne's hearing range.
I'm nobody! Who are you? Are you nobody, too?

It was turning out to be another fun day for me. Any of the girls who hadn't heard the story caught up with me in the hallways between classes to find out what was going on. As casually as I could, I described Shayne calling me to pick him up and my refusal. I made it sound like nothing, which in my mind it was, but often the most trivial things became important at Pacifica. Maybe that was because most everybody had a father or a mother to solve serious problems for them.

In any case, it felt good to be the center of everyone's attention, the subject of all the busy-bee buzzing. I couldn't wait to get home and to my computer to describe it all in an e-mail to Kiera. I knew how much she would appreciate my actions and the results. I didn't know why it had become so important to me to please her. If there was anyone in the world I should enjoy displeasing, it was Kiera. Perhaps I was still trying to prove myself to be as exciting and as popular as she was. I suspected she didn't enjoy that. This was just another way to demonstrate it.

And then something happened that replaced the headlines about Shayne and me before the day had ended. That afternoon, there was a new buzz about two new students who were entering the school. Cora Hatch, who helped Mrs. Knox, Dr. Steiner's secretary, during her free period, was rushing around with the breaking news. It reached me at the start of chemistry class. Cora came right to me as I was taking my seat.

“Guess what? Bradley Garfield's kids are transferring into Pacifica,” she said, nearly out of breath. “One is in the eighth grade—his daughter, Summer. And his son, Ryder, is in our class, a senior.”

“Did you say Bradley Garfield?” Lily Albert, who sat behind me, asked. She had big eyes as it was, but at this moment, they looked as if they would pop and ooze all over her face like broken egg yolks.

“Yes.”

“
The
Bradley Garfield?”

Cora nodded.

I wasn't into soap operas the way most of the girls in my class were, but I knew Bradley Garfield was a lead on
Endless Days
, the top new soap opera. During his television acting hiatus, he starred in a big movie with Julie Thomas, who had been nominated for an Academy Award last year. The movie was a blockbuster love story,
Reflections of a Broken Heart
. There was already chatter about a possible Academy Award nomination for him, too.