Full Ride (11 page)

I pull out the yearbooks from fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen years ago and sit down with them at a long table. I'm actually a little surprised that there
was
a Deskins High School so long ago, since everything in Deskins seems new. But I open the book from Whitney's senior year and find that I'm staring at a picture of a completely different building: a small, plain, brick structure. It's labeled, “Deskins Junior-Senior High School, Grades 7–12.”

They had six grades in one building back then?
I marvel.
And it's still such a small building—and such a small yearbook?

I feel a little like I've just discovered that Deskins, like me, has a secret history.

Then I turn the page and forget about Deskins. Now I'm staring at a picture of Whitney Court.

She's a pretty blond girl in a DHS cheerleader's uniform. The camera has caught her midjump, so the pleats of her white skirt are flared out; her ponytail bounces behind her. Her smile is a mile wide, and she's clearly so full of joy and vigor and, well,
life
, that even though I don't know the girl, tears actually spring to my eyes at the thought that, probably not too long after this picture was taken, she died.

Sitting at her feet in the picture is a cluster of younger girls, also in cheerleading uniforms. They're maybe sixth or seventh graders. Some of them are sitting awkwardly, their clothes too baggy or too tight—you can see that they're not quite comfortable in their own skins. But it's clear from their upturned, reverent
faces that they
adore
Whitney. They want to be exactly like her. She's apparently just showed them how to do a handspring or a cartwheel or a cheer—or maybe just how to be happy.

I almost feel like whispering, “Oh, please. Show me too!”

And I know that this is Whitney because some long-ago yearbook writer evidently thought it was clever to label the picture, “Whitney Court, holding court.”

The yearbook must have been finished before she died,
I think.
Because otherwise there'd be some mention of her death here. This would be a tribute page.

I feel a pang, not just for poor, dead Whitney, but also for those worshipful girls at her feet. They'd be, what, nearly thirty now? Can they stand to look at this picture knowing Whitney died? Maybe it would be like me looking at pictures of my life before Daddy was arrested. I know Mom has old photo albums stashed at the back of our hall closet, but I haven't looked at them once in the past three years. It would hurt too much.

Stop it,
I tell myself.
It's not the same. You didn't even know Whitney Court. She's nothing to you but a chance for money.

It's harsh, but I have to think that way to get myself to turn the page.

Whitney's there too. In this picture, she's wearing chemistry-lab goggles and making a comical face as a short, pudgy guy beside her prepares to combine two liquids in a beaker. He's laughing, too, and holding his nose. Behind them four or five other kids are cowering, their hands over their ears, their mouths open as they scream or shriek or call out warnings. I can almost hear them crying, “It's going to blow!” or “Duck!” or “Watch out!”

Evidently Whitney even had fun in chemistry class.

I keep going. Whitney is everywhere in this yearbook: in the musical, on the tennis team, on the science fair committee and the homecoming parade float committee and the teacher appreciation
committee . . . She's in a lot of the candid shots, too. Here she is hugging her fellow cheerleaders at their last football game together; here she is in a pile of kids crammed into a Volkswagen Beetle like so many circus clowns; here she is, her arm looped casually around the waist of one of the basketball players. She and that same basketball player, Corey Wisner, reappear together on the prom page wearing, respectively, a ball gown and a tux, and matching crowns: They're prom king and queen.

I turn a couple more pages and there Whitney is again, wearing a white cap and gown, speaking at a podium: She's one of the three valedictorians.

On top of everything else, she was smart?
I think.
A cheerleader, an athlete, prom queen, a girlfriend, and valedictorian, too?

Now I have to remind myself that Whitney died, that something tragic and awful and unbearable was waiting for her soon after the last page of this yearbook. Because otherwise I would be so jealous of Whitney Court.

She had everything,
I think.
She was so happy in high school.

I glance toward the newest yearbooks in the lineup against the wall. I've been at Deskins High School for the past three years, of course, but you could search the books from my freshman, sophomore, or junior years and not find a single shred of evidence that I ever stepped foot in the place. I'm not in any of the club pictures or the candids. I'm not in the cross-country team shot from freshman year. I'm not even in the class-by-class rows of pictures that should show every kid in every grade. Right before picture day my freshman year, Mom read a newspaper article that freaked her out, about how some yearbook company's records were hacked, and the hackers got access to the names and personal information of every single kid pictured in more than eight hundred high school yearbooks.

“If even one TV station tracked you down through the yearbook . . . ,” Mom said.

She didn't have to finish the sentence. She and I filled out all sorts of privacy paperwork with the school. Just as she'd made Dad's name “not applicable,” on my school forms, she turned me invisible in the yearbook. The few times anybody noticed me missing—Jala did, looking at the freshman yearbook; Oscar did last year—I just shrugged and said, “I guess there was a mistake.”

But looking at what was essentially the Whitney Court memorial yearbook makes me regret all that. What if I actually do want some of my classmates to remember me?

Reality check here,
I chide myself.
There would not be fifty kazillion pictures of you like there are of Whitney. It'd be two or three fuzzy, forgettable shots, and that's not worth getting upset about. Focus. Which of Whitney's classmates are you going to write about? Who's going to win your scholarship for you?

I know the answer instantly. Only one student who graduated from DHS fifteen years ago drew my eye again and again as I turned the pages of the yearbook. Only one student seems worth researching and studying and writing about.

My essay is going to be about Whitney herself.

•  •  •

When the bell rings for sixth period, I put the yearbooks away and stumble out into the hallway. My head is still full of the DHS of Whitney's era—a place with cornfields behind the school building and a Future Farmers of America chapter and a quaint tradition where the entire senior class worked together to serve their parents breakfast on the last day of school. It looks like Deskins itself was just a small rural town then, not an extension of greater metropolitan Columbus, not the glitzy new suburb that looks like it sprang out of the cornfields five minutes before
Mom and I arrived. Deskins evidently used to be the kind of place where everybody knew everybody, where people minded one another's business, for better or for worse. It was more like where Mom grew up.

Old Deskins wouldn't have been a good place for Mom and me to hide.

I'm so intent thinking about all that, and Whitney's life, and however it was that she died, that when I get to AP lit, it takes me a few seconds to realize that Rosa is giving me the sad-puppy-dog look.

“Chica,”
she says mournfully as soon as I sit down. “Don't make me do this.”

“Huh? Do what?” I ask.

“You know how I hate getting people to make up,” she says, drumming her fingers on her desk. She turns to face me. “You want to teach Stuart a lesson? Fine, teach him a lesson. But don't take it out on the rest of us.”

“Teach Stuart a . . . ,” I repeat blankly before I realize what she's talking about. “Oh, you think I skipped lunch because I'm still mad at Stuart? That's not the reason. I just had something I had to do.”

“Don't we
all
have things we have to do?” she asks, frowning. “We only get one senior year of high school. It'll be over before we know it. Do you really want to spend the whole year just working and studying? Never having any fun with your friends?”

I blink. Has Rosa taken up mind reading? I could have shrugged off that argument without a second thought yesterday. But not today. Not after spending my entire lunch period looking at pictures of a girl whose life ended right after her senior year.

I put up my hands like I'm surrendering.

“Okay, okay, I promise. I'll be at lunch tomorrow,” I say. “I'll be
fun.
I'll even sit beside Stuart, if that makes you happy. But I'm bringing duct tape, so I can cover his mouth if he starts getting annoying again.”

“Now, that would be fun,” she says, nodding approvingly. “Even Stuart might like it, since it would give him some ‘suffering' to write about in his college essays. He'll turn it into, ‘How I overcame having friends who tortured and abused me . . .' ”

I groan.

“Can I take back my promise?” I ask. “Did Stuart spend the whole lunch today talking about how kids like him are at a huge disadvantage because they've never had anything bad happen to them?”

He'd been on that kick for a while last year, because someone had decided that junior English classes needed to work on preliminary drafts of college essays. Stuart maintained that, to have the right material for a good college essay, you had to have overcome something like cancer or incest or rape or, at the very least, parental divorce.

And the whole time I sat there thinking,
I am not writing about Daddy being in prison. I will never write about that.

“Stuart talked about other things, too,” Rosa says. “He invited all of us to go on a college-visit road trip with him when we have that three-day weekend in October.”

I snort.

“Hasn't he already visited every top school in the country?” I ask. Starting last September, Stuart and his parents began jetting all over the place, and he'd come back to regale the rest of us with so many pompous stories that even the teachers made fun of him. “What was it this weekend?” our AP lang teacher would ask him on Monday mornings. “The glory that was Stanford? The grandeur that was Yale?”

“He says he still wants to see a few more,” Rosa says. She has a hint of wistfulness in her voice. “In the South. He says his parents will pay for gas, so it won't even be an expensive trip.”

Vanderbilt?
I think.
Is Vanderbilt on his list?

I'm almost ashamed at the way my heart leaps at this thought. Could it be? What if this is just one of those days when everything goes my way?

It's about time,
I think.

Before I can ask Rosa for more details, Ms. Darien taps her desk to get the class's attention.

“Listen up,” she demands. “You're going to want to hear this.”

She starts passing papers down the aisles as she talks. I'm at the back of my row, so by the time I get a sheet, kids are already gasping in the seats ahead of me.

Ms. Darien has just handed out the Whitney Court Scholarship information to the entire class. I can turn my head to the right and see the same papers flowing down the rows in Mr. Techman's gov class across the hall. Ms. Stela was apparently more organized than I thought: All seniors must be getting this now.

“This is that scholarship I was telling you about,” someone hisses on the other side of the room. “They
are
doing it again.”

I look around—most kids in the class are wearing the same
Yeah, I knew that
expression they always keep on their faces in advanced classes, whether they understand what's going on or not.

But in this case . . . other kids would have known about this if they have older brothers and sisters. Or if they have friends who graduated already,
I think.

At least I'm not the only one who was clueless.

“Am I reading this right?” Tyler Marco asks, making a big show of holding his paper closer and then farther from his eyes.
What can I say—he's in drama club. “Does this really say the scholarship's a full ride?”

“I would hope, by the time you're a senior, you would be capable of reading those two one-syllable words,” Ms. Darien says drily. “If not, the Deskins school system has failed you. But I would hope that you could also read the three words before ‘full ride.' ”

Tyler immediately begins acting like a kindergartner struggling to learn to read: “Uh-uh-uh-ppp! T-t-t-o uh. . . .”

“Aw, fifty cents would count as being ‘up to' a full ride,” Shaquon James complains, throwing his paper down on his desk in disgust. “Why do you have to fool us like that? Has anybody ever gotten a full ride out of this?”

“Not that I know of, but this is only my second year at DHS,” Ms. Darien says. “I do know Emily Riviera got ten thousand dollars last year. Not a full ride, but nothing to sneeze at. Ten thousand dollars a year—forty thousand dollars total—that would have put a serious dent in
my
student loans.”

For a moment an awed hush falls over the class, which is impressive. Normally, Tyler and Shaquon never shut up.

“As you can see if you read this, the way to apply for this scholarship is by writing an essay about some DHS student who graduated fifteen years ago,” Ms. Darien says. “Want to brainstorm a little about how you might gather information for that essay?”

Nobody speaks. But the silence is different now—not awed, but anxious. Suddenly it's like we've all turned into that miser from
Silas Marner,
jealously guarding his gold. No one wants to share any brilliant idea that might help the competition.