Exposure (5 page)

As I packed up my army green corduroy messenger bag and headed for the exit, I heard my wannabe lover's voice echo behind me.

“I can't wait to see what
you'll
be wearing, Skye. Maybe Jenna'll lend you her protest ensemble for a costume?”

He meant to be flirting, I suppose, but poor Lenny didn't have the kind of face that made a comment like that permissible. Had Craig said it, I would have blushed and melted into a puddle before gushing about it in my journal. Coming from Lenny, it was ten kinds of wrong.

OUR AP CALCULUS TEACHER, MRS. SHERIDAN, was in a state of rapture as she scribbled out the solution to a function on the blackboard. Crumbling bits of chalk ricocheted off the board in her frenzied pursuit of mathematics ecstasy. Jarringly, she was dressed up as Raggedy Ann, wearing candy-striped tights, bloomers, a floral dress and apron, and a red yarn wig.

My classmates, too hopped-up on sugar to be paying any attention today, were focused on the clock, waiting for the trembling minute hand to click directly vertical. When it did, we immediately started loading up backpacks and raucously sliding our chairs back from our desks, unconcerned with the fact that Mrs. Sheridan hadn't yet finished her problem. Knowing it was futile to continue, she yielded to the mass exodus of costumed figures with an exhausted smile on her faux-freckled face.

“See you tomorrow, class. Don't forget about the quiz we have this Friday.”

Grabbing my cane and bowler hat, I funneled up the row of desks heading for the door but was stopped in my tracks.

“Skye. Question.”

I looked down at Beth, who was still seated at her desk and checking herself out in a powder compact. What was it about Halloween that gave every girl license to dress as slutty as possible? She was wearing a red bustier, shiny vinyl hot pants, and fishnet stockings. Two glittery horns protruded from her headband. You'd think she was lobbying for Playmate of the Year. Beth snapped her compact shut in a businesslike fashion and deigned to make eye contact with me.

“Did you read the next chapters for lit class?”

I'll admit that it was one of the facts about Beth that irked me the most: aside from being beautiful, popular, and the undeserving girlfriend of the only guy I'd ever cared about, she actually, I hated to confess, had a brain in her head. Shocking, I know, but we shared a lot of the same advanced-level classes.

“Yeah, I read it over the weekend.”

“Perfection. I was over at Craig's for a lot of the weekend, and so, as you can imagine, I just didn't have time to skim it. I was hoping you could give me the basic gist on our way to class. You know, in case Phyllis calls on me?” Beth had the insouciance to call our teachers by their first names.

“Well, I mean, it's
The Sound and the Fury
— William Faulkner is tough to condense into talking points. It's pretty enigmatic.”

“Never mind then,” she said, looking annoyed. “I guess I'll just fake it.”

It was something she was highly proficient in. Her whole high school career had been about faking it. Her popularity was built on an elaborate ruse to make people forget where she came from and force them to only focus on where she was going.

Certainly her looks and her attitude all screamed upper crust, but I knew better. She and I had gone to grade school together. We'd been in the same Girl Scout troop and the Brownies before that.

I'd seen the beat-up, hubcapless, seventies-era Chevy pick-up truck that her dad drove to the docks every day. He worked as a longshoreman when he wasn't out to sea for weeks at a time during crab season. Beth's mother had died when she was eleven, so now it was just her and her dad. It must have been lonely for her, in a lot of respects, but she never let on that there were any chinks in her armor. She was evidently a master at stretching a dollar, always coming to school looking polished and fashionable. I suspected she borrowed threads from more well-to-do friends like Kristy, and I'd even heard that she got a small stipend of spending money from her dad's brother, who owned a chain of movie theaters in Anchorage.

No one would have judged Beth for any of this. Seventy percent of the kids in school were from blue-collar stock, including yours truly. But she insisted on pretending that she was no different than any of the “black gold” crew: the kids whose fathers did big business for the oil companies. Craig's father was one of these men, having been transferred here to spearhead exploratory research while the Feds debated whether or not to allow drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Speaking of wildlife, Beth's furrowed brow and glowering eyes combined with her thick application of liquid eyeliner currently made her resemble a bird of prey.

“You know, Craig always tells me that you're a sweet girl, which is why I thought I could ask you for help, but I see that I was wrong. Or maybe
he
was.”

I so did not want to be having this discussion. I could tell that there was going to be no way to extricate myself painlessly from the conversation. Behind her on a bulletin board was a too-precious motivational poster of a kitten hanging from a tree limb. I took its message, “Hang in there,” to heart.

“Well, Craig
has
been known to have bad judgment about certain things, that's true,” I disingenuously replied. Beth's blonde head reared back ever so slightly, as if she weren't sure whether to take this as a personal affront or not.

“It's fine to have a crush on him, Skye — most girls do,” she sighed. “But if you're harboring any Disney-style delusions about being his hideous, taffeta-clad prom date come spring, you can purge yourself of those grand fantasies right now.”

First Lenny, now Beth. What was it with everyone and prom? “He and I will naturally be Prom King and Queen,” she said, glaring up at me. “So you'll just have to content yourself with being his fawning fool, which is pretty much what you look like whenever you're mooning over him from a distance.”

The thought of anyone giving a crap about wearing a fakey rhinestone princess crown in a badly decorated gym was laughable to me. I wished I could have delivered one of those cutting one-liners that I always managed to think up hours after the fact when I replayed the conversation in my brain. Instead, the left portion of my fake mustache had chosen that exact moment to slip down over my lips. I forgot I'd been wearing it and now felt even more foolish. Beth smirked, grabbed her plastic trident, and sashayed out of the classroom. As she exited, the red felt tail attached to her belt swung like a decisive pendulum.

• • •

Old Burny's ancient branches cast an appropriately eerie shadow over the quad as I made my way toward the school parking lot. I was eager to get home and see my baby bro, Oliver, dressed up like Yoda. My dad was a rabid
Star Wars
geek and had found the cutest pair of costume Yoda ears online, but I knew my brother was likely to keep them on for all of two minutes before he'd start to get fussy and recalcitrant about the whole thing. I wanted to get some pictures of him before that happened. The sky was beginning to turn the color of a bruise. Purples and grays swirled together as the sun glowed red behind the clouds. Already the days were getting shorter. By December we'd be down to only five-and-a-half hours of daylight. The wind cut against my cheeks and I pulled up the lapels on my oversized men's suit borrowed from Dad's closet. I think he'd worn it only twice: to a funeral and to a job interview. It still smelled new.

“Hey, tramp!”

I glanced over and saw Cat unlocking the trunk of her car. Tess and Kaya tossed in their boulder-sized backpacks. All three were wearing nylon witches' hats, the kind you might pick up in the costume aisle of a drugstore. Apart from that, they were decked out in their typical dark denim jeans and ironic T-shirts layered over thermals, the epitome of hipster nonchalance. I felt overdressed in my suit.

“Charlie Chaplin,” said Tess, grabbing for my pocket hankie and teasingly waving it at me. “Nice 'stache!”

“We're going to the midnight showing of
Rocky Horror
over at the Regent tonight,” said Kaya. “Want to come?”

“Thanks for the invite, but my dad is still into the militant curfew thing on school nights.”

“How charmingly provincial of him. Well, the offer's out there if you can bust outta Alcatraz.”

“Thanks,” I said with laugh, before retrieving my hanky.

As Cat shut her car trunk, a posse of our school's A-listers walked past surrounded by their various groupies and hangers on. Oh God … was Beth right? Did I look like those chumps fawning over Craig? In the middle of the pack, I noticed him, his hair combed into an outrageous pompadour. He wore a white bejeweled bell-bottomed jumpsuit with a huge collar, and he sported the trademark gold-rimmed shades.

“Hey, hey, li'l darling,” he drawled, pointing in my direction and striking a wide-legged stance. “Why don't you go on and make me a peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich?”

Tess and Kaya had already gotten into the car, and as Cat opened the driver's side door, she remarked on Craig's costume.

“Looks like we had you pegged. You
were
destined to be ‘King.' That Yup'ik mask, man — it doesn't lie. Let's hope, for your sake, the predictions end there.”

She entered the car, slammed the door shut, and all three girls gave us a friendly wave as they pulled out of their parking spot. They were still wearing their witch hats, which were bent over under the roof of the car.

Craig removed his sunglasses and watched them drive down the road. He didn't say anything for a few seconds, and since I'd already been feeling awkward about our last conversation in the darkroom, I tried to break the ice as his groupies slowly dispersed.

“Where's Beth?”

No answer. He was still looking off at where Cat's car had turned out of sight; Elvis rocking it pensive-style.

“Did she go to hell?”

Craig turned and looked at me, confused.

“What? Who?”

“
Beth
.”

“Why would you say something like that? That's not cool.”

“Uh, she was dressed as a
devil
. It was a joke, Mac, jeez!”

“Oh. Right. She actually went home sick this afternoon. She threw up in gym class.”

“Oh, that's too bad. I hope she feels better.”

More silence. This was weird. The sky already seemed darker now than it was five minutes ago. I peeled off my mustache and quickly stashed it in my messenger bag. Craig reached over and rubbed off some of the sticky residue from my upper lip, causing my face to instantly flush. Was he seriously wiping off my mustache boogers? I looked down toward the blacktop rather than make eye contact with him, but eventually glanced back up. I couldn't tell if the smile on his face meant anything other than, “You look ridiculous,” but it seemed like it could have. I blushed again, but thankfully he didn't notice. Duncan was yelling to us from across the parking lot.

“Yo, numbnuts! You want a ride or not?”

Craig's jawline visibly tensed. He and Duncan had become pals pretty quickly on the heels of his debut at school two years ago, but there was definitely a pecking order to this friendship. As much as Duncan seemed to enjoy Craig's company, he occasionally seized the opportunity to show him — and everyone else — who was the alpha male. Craig usually tried to laugh it off, but I think it bothered him more than he let on.

“What?” he yelled back. “Is your crap car going to turn into a pumpkin in thirty seconds?”

Duncan grinned and started casually striding in our direction, tossing his keys up in the air and catching them every few steps.

“Whatever, bro. I don't exactly see
you
driving a luxury vehicle and god knows your pops could afford it. Dude, I'm sick of waiting around for you to wrap up this session of ‘geek love' — no offense, Skye — so let's motor. I've got three hours of SportsCenter to veg on before my mom gets home and pries my ass off the couch.”

Craig gave me an apologetic look, then used both hands to mash my bowler hat down over my face. By the time I'd righted it and could see again, he was jogging in his white jumpsuit toward Duncan's car.