Cycler (4 page)

“Right,” she says. “Good point. Anyway, here is the lovely and talented Alexis Oswell.” She clicks Play with a flourish, and Lexie’s grainy butt and legs begin moving in and out of focus through the crowded hallway near the art room at Winterhead High. “It’s a little jerky,” Ramie says. “A cinematographer I am not.”

We examine Lexie’s walk from a variety of angles and determine that there are exactly four main elements to her overall presentation:

That last element is the biggest challenge. I’m sort of bowlegged and my hips tend to sway of their own accord. To achieve Lexie’s snooty, stick-up-the-butt walk, Ramie has to grab on to both of my hips and hold them steady while I shuffle back and forth in front of her bed.

“Stop swaying!” she says.

But my hips won’t obey.

She lets go and says, “Watch me.”

She stands by the ancient hissing radiator under the frosty window and tries the walk herself.

“Ramie,” I say. “You walk like a trucker.”

She stops in front of the antique beveled mirror above her white dresser, backs up and clomps toward it again. “Mal,” she says. “You’re right. I never realized how unfeminine I am.”

“Yeah, well, your boobs make up for it. Anyway, let’s focus on me here.”

After several tries, I manage to tame my wayward hips by clenching my buttocks and forcing my feet to point outward like a duck.

Ramie sprawls on the bed with the laptop at eye level and checks my walk against the Lexie footage.

“No, no, no,” she says. “You look like Frankenstein. Your upper body is too stiff.”

I stop at her window and shake out my legs and arms. “I think I’m cramping up. Do I at least have the bottom half down?”

“Do it again!” she says.

I take a deep breath, clench my buttocks and duckwalk the three strides to her dresser, watching my reflection the whole way.

“Actually,” she says, “that’s not bad. You look constipated, but if you loosen up your shoulders and relax your face, it won’t be so mal.”

Mastering the upper body is much easier and comes with the discovery that “looking down your nose at people” is not a metaphor but an actual posture. With her cell phone, Ramie videos me walking a few short laps; then I join her on the bed and we compare it to the Lexie footage.

“Pretty good,” she says. “I feel myself hating you.”

“Yes,” I say. “But you respect me, don’t you? I intrigue.”

Ramie raises an eyebrow.

“What?” I say.

“Nothing.” She closes the laptop and sits up.

I sit up too. “Ramie!”

She sighs. “You’re not exactly approachable like this.”

“Do you have Alzheimer’s?” I say. “That’s the whole point. It’s not about being approachable. It’s about becoming a ‘high-status’ woman.”

“Right,” she says. But there’s doubt in her eyes.

“Ramie,” I say. “I need you on board with this. If you have concerns, I need to know them now.”

“Nope,” she says. “I’m on board. You become an uptight snob. Tommy is bound to want you.”

“
Aloof,
not uptight.”

“Right. You become an aloof snob, while I dig for signs that Tommy is growing wild with desire to hunt you.”

I drop my head into my hands.

“Well, I’m sorry,” she says. “But you have to admit this is a pretty non-sane philosophy.”

“Who cares?” I tell her. “As long as it works.” I pull myself off the bed and walk over to her assortment of vintage trench coats hung from a row of wooden hooks. Above them is a framed photo of Greta Garbo smoking a cigarette and looking all classy. Talk about a high-status woman.

“Look,” I tell her. “I’ve tried it the other way, being friendly, being approachable. It’s not getting me a date with Tommy Knutson, is it? Boys are different.”

“You sound like your mother.”

“Shut up,” I say. “It’s just a fact, Ramie. It’s science. If we want them to act on their natural male instincts as hunters, we have to play our part as—”

“Gatherers?” she says.

“No!” I say. “As prey.” I grab the belt from one of the trench coats and start fiddling with it. “I thought you were on board with this. You got the Lexie footage.”

Ramie cocks her head as she sizes me up.

“What?” I say.

“This isn’t just about getting a prom date, is it?”

“What do you mean?”

“You heart him.”

“I do not.” I look down and start winding the belt around my finger. “He’s just a decent prom prospect, you know, being new and kind of a loner.”

“Jill,” she says, “if it were only about getting a prom date, you could have said yes to Steven Price.”

“Are you psychoanalyzing me?”

Ramie nods.

I wrap the belt around my finger even tighter.

“Look at you,” she says. “You’re in a severe state of Tommy positiveness. You’re Tommified. You’re a Knutsonian.”

“Are you finished?”

“Your finger’s purple.”

“Ow.” I unwrap the belt and shake out my hand. “All right,” I say. “Maybe I kind of, sort of heart him a little bit.”

“I knew it!” she says. “Well, this changes everything.”

“Why?”

“Because!” she says. “It’s not a lame prom strategy anymore. It’s a bona fide slurpy love thing.” Ramie smiles giddily and hugs her pillow. “It’s so cool.”

“It is not,” I say. “I have to act like he doesn’t exist, Ramie. Like he’s a black hole.”

“A deeply peculiar dilemma,” she says.

“Ramie, you can’t bail out on me. Not now.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” she says. With renewed vigor, she picks up the cell phone and points it at me. “All right, let’s do this thing.”

I back up to Ramie’s radiator, straighten my shoulders, tilt my head back and walk the Lexie walk.

Curse my stupid heart. It was only supposed to be about the prom.

Monday, March 19. Ninety-six days until prom night. Look out, Winterhead High. The new and improved, ingeniously rebranded Jill McTeague has arrived. Butt clenched, shoulders erect, I glide through the teeming hallways. Nose scornfully aloft, I make eye contact with no one. In fact, my gaze is so focused on the distance that I overshoot my homeroom door and Ramie has to drag me inside by the belt loop.

But by the time D Block Spanish rolls around, I am in command of the Lexie Oswell walk and am starting to feel the mojo of this new attitude. Mercifully, Tommy is absent, which means I have the whole day to practice my new persona.

To aid in the transformation, I have taken a page from Plan B and composed a new mantra: “I am a busy girl with a rich, full life. I am confident, strong and beautiful, and any man would be lucky to have me.” I repeat this silently to myself as I glide through the drab gray hallways of Winterhead High, where my graceless peers scurry to and fro. I am above them all. I am just out of reach. I am . . .

A being.

Like.

No other.

I’m so good at this act, I forget to turn it off when I meet Ramie for lunch and she has to whack me on the shoulder and say, “Snap out of it, bitch.”

You do not condescend to Ramie Boulieaux.

Day One of Project X swims along, well, swimmingly. But on Day Two, Tommy finally appears. It’s just after homeroom, and I’m heading to history class when I spot his pale chiseled face and brown shoulder-length hair in the distance behind a cluster of giggling freshgirls. His white button-down shirt is loose and open just one button at the collar, revealing, even from three classrooms away, the tender notch at his collarbone. I’ve never gotten close enough to smell Tommy Knutson, but I’m sure he smells like heaven. Angels do, you know. And the way he moves. He’s like a stingray—graceful and smooth amid the chaotic frenzy of dizzy fish all around him. He, not I, is the being like no other.

And I’m staring at him! I take a deep breath, close my locker and pull my pale blue cashmere sweater down over the waistband of my black jeans. Eyes on the distance, head tilted back, I shoulder my backpack and head toward him. My pulse races as I sense him getting closer to me. I clench my butt cheeks and focus more intently on the art room at the end of the hallway. But just ahead and to the right of me are Jed Barnsworthy and his cluster of toady boys loitering, per usual, by the special needs room for another round of teasing the developmentally disabled kids. Jed lives two houses down from me, but I don’t speak to him anymore unless absolutely necessary. Now, though, in a freak confluence of events, Tommy approaches me just as I approach Jed, and for a brief but tragic moment, we are all drawn into a hideous Jed Barnsworthy vortex.

“Hey, McTeague,” Jed says. “What’s with the stupid walk? Something lodged up your ass? Need me to dig it out?” He laughs like a hyena.

My heart races, but I keep my pace constant, eyes front. Through peripheral vision, I see Tommy Knutson stop and face Jed. Then I hear laughter. Snarling, toady-boy laughter. Plus laughter from other sources I’m too shaken to identify. Stifling the urge to run, I continue gliding away, past the trophy case toward the art room.

Does Tommy say something to Jed? Does he notice my unshaken calm in the face of social disgrace? I will never know. I duckwalk down the hall until there is nowhere to go but into the art room, despite the fact that I need to be in history class, which is on the other side of the school. The sophomore students gathering their India ink and styluses look at me in confusion, but I don’t care. I can’t risk having Tommy Knutson spot me peering out of the classroom like a scared mouse. I am above all this, you see. I am a high-status woman, and this kind of juvenile nonsense does not concern me.

I wait for the late bell, then hightail it out of the art room. At the special needs room, which wormy Jed Barnsworthy has mercifully vacated, I turn right down the North Wing, skidding on my gold flats. Dodging other stragglers, I slip into history class just as Mr. Bennett is about to close the door.

“Thanks for joining us, Jill,” he says.

Do I respond? No. I take my seat and make eye contact with no one. Project X requires one hundred percent commitment. It is not for dabblers.

By the end of Week One, evidence of Project X’s success begins to trickle in. Lindsay Siggersall and her cheerleader pals are spotted mocking my new walk in the cafeteria to thunderous laughter from nearby tables. Daria Benedetti, my Spanish study buddy, pulls me aside after class to ask if I’m mad at her. At first I feign ignorance so as to keep up the act, because Daria has very loose lips. But it’s too hard to lie to a friend, so instead, I apologize profusely and explain Project X. She understands, having spent her entire sophomore year pining for senior basketball star Lawrence Fogerty, who wound up impregnating an Esswich girl and skipping town a week before graduation.

By the middle of Week Two, the evidence is overwhelming. I have replaced Alexis Oswell as the coldest girl at Winterhead High. There are even rumors that my new attitude has something to do with my “mysterious absences.” The words “brain tumor” are bandied about. But the full price of Project X doesn’t become clear to me until one day in chem lab.

Steven Price and I are heating a saline solution over our shared Bunsen burner when he starts swallowing compulsively, which is a nervous tic. I know from Wikipedia that you’re not supposed to draw attention to someone’s nervous tic, so I sigh happily and say, “So, how are things, Steven?”

He shoots me a frightened look, then scowls and returns his gaze to the Bunsen burner.

“Steven,” I say. “Look, I’m sorry if I’ve been—”

“It’s okay,” he says. “No biggie.”

He makes a big show of concentrating on the solution bubbling in the beaker.

“Steven, listen. There’s a reason I’ve been . . .”

He looks up and waits for me to finish. But I never do. Steven undoubtedly thinks my new frigidity is the result of his preemptive prom attack. I want to dissuade him, but I can’t tell him about Project X. He’ll think I’m ridiculous. Plus he’ll never forgive me for choosing Tommy Knutson over him.

“Nothing,” I say.

He looks down again and swallows three times in a row. For a short but desperate moment, I want to abandon Project X or at least make an exception for Steven. I want to throw my arms around him, hug all his nervous tics away and tell him how special and wonderful he is.

But that is not what a
Guide
girl does.

Instead, I stare at the bubbles in our beaker, then look up at the clock and pray for a fire drill to slice off the remaining twenty-two minutes of chem lab.

Like I said.
One hundred percent commitment.
Not for dabblers.

I have alienated everyone: friends, acquaintances, even a few teachers, who, it seems, are not above maligning me in the faculty lounge within earshot of chatty students. Project X is a success.

But (and yes, it’s a big one) Ramie has gleaned no news about Tommy Knutson. If my new status as aloof snob—I mean, a being like no other—is, in fact, driving him wild with desire to hunt me down like prey, the lad is keeping it to himself. He has asked no one why I don’t look at him in H Block calculus anymore. He has indicated to no one that he has noticed a change in my behavior. And, more critically, he has said nary a peep on the subject of the prom, which is beginning to loom like a storm cloud full of lightning. The boy is, to use Ramie’s term, “a total data abyss.”

So one day, I enter the cafeteria, doing my snooty walk, and approach Ramie and Daria, the only people I am permitted to speak with.

“My butt is killing me,” I say.

Daria makes room for me and I sit next to her.

“Yeah,” she says. “And everyone’s starting to hate you.”

“Really?”

Ramie pulls out her cell phone. “I can confirm new artwork in the North Wing boys’ room.” She shows me the picture—a graffiti drawing of a stick figure with what looks like a firecracker exploding from its butt. Underneath it is written “Her Royal Highness, Jill McTeague.”

“That’s good news?” I say.

Ramie snaps her cell phone shut. “They didn’t do it when you were nice.”

I take out my own cell phone, look at the date and do a quick calculation. “Eighty-seven days till zero hour,” I say. “I don’t know how much longer I can keep this up.”