The question that begged was, of course:
Then why does Cam hang around with them?
But I just brushed it off. Who else was he supposed to hang around with—the chess team?
Locking my bike, I joined the crowd streaming toward the Dief.
Head up
, I reminded myself firmly as I flashed a practice mystery smile at a nearby garbage pail.
Remember—it doesn’t matter what the phone patrol is saying about you. What’s important is how kids
see
you acting. So make sure you look them in the eye, but not challenging or mad, as if you’ve got something to hide. YOU’VE GOT NOTHING TO HIDE
.
Still, when I pulled open the school door and stepped inside, I couldn’t help holding my breath. I don’t know what I was expecting—a horde of vampires coming for my throat or a herd of wild-eyed boogeldy bears—but to my relief as I started down the hall, no one, absolutely NO ONE, paid me the slightest attention. Everywhere kids were yakking at each other or walking along quietly, carrying gym bags and school band instruments, and no one was giving me a second glance. Or even a snickering first one. Either the phone patrol hadn’t reached that many kids last night, or most of the students at the Dief simply didn’t care what I thought about Len Schroeder’s dick.
“Hey Dylan, liked your library display,” called a voice to my right, and I turned to see Ewen Busse, the Dief’s yearbook editor, standing at his locker. “Can I get a picture of you with those censor strips for the yearbook?” he asked, focusing an imaginary camera on me.
“Sure,” I said, giving him a Kodak smile. “Just tell me when.”
“Lunch, 12:15?” he asked, and I nodded, then headed on down the hall, a grin ruling my face. Had I ever been wrong about
things? Like Joc said, so what if Julie never forgave me? I’d said something stupid, but I’d apologized. Temporary stupidity wasn’t a crime, there was no need to go on and on, banging my head against—
Turning into the hallway that led to my locker, I ducked a group of yakking second years and almost ran smack into Maria Gonzales and several of her friends. Maria was Rachel’s younger sister, and their personalities had definitely crawled out of the same gene pool. Huddled together, she and her friends were snickering among themselves as they stood observing a piece of foolscap that had been taped to someone’s locker.
No, not someone’s locker
, I realized, as cold dread oozed over me.
My locker
.
As if on cue, Maria glanced around and caught sight of me. With a smirk she elbowed her friends, and they whirled en masse to gawk at me. Then they all took off down the hall. Stunned, I watched them go, then turned slowly to face my locker.
This is it
, I thought, as my knees melted down my legs.
The phone patrol has figured out my secret and decided to announce it to the entire world on the front of my locker. It’s all over—Cam, Joc, life, the universe, everything.
Cautiously I took a few wobbly steps forward, then stopped about five feet from my locker and studied the piece of foolscap taped to the front. Across the top someone had written “VIRGIN QUEEN” in large block letters, then drawn a nun underneath with a giant censor strip over her groin. Disbelieving, I stared at the crude sketch. There was that word again—
queen
, but why “virgin”? The phone patrol knew that category didn’t apply to me. Was it possible they hadn’t figured out the truth, and had decided that I was just being frigid and uptight?
As I stood stock still in the middle of the hall trying to make sense of things, kids kept streaming by. Snorts and comments
floated back to me, and some guy patted my shoulder and said, “I can help you with that if you’d like, Dylan.” Stuck in a funk, my eyes glued to the sketch, I didn’t even bother turning to see who it was. Then, as I continued to stand, still frozen, a hand reached out from my left and started fumbling with the tape that held the sketch in place.
“That’s okay,” I said, snapping out of my funk and stepping forward. “I can handle it.”
The hand jerked back. “Oh, sorry,” said Andy Lambard, a guy whose locker stood two over from mine. “I didn’t see you there, Dylan.”
Andy was a minor niner, a shy skinny kid like Tracey Stillman. I’d seen him here at his locker almost every day this year, but so far I’d never spoken to him.
“I tried to take it down five minutes ago,” he stammered awkwardly, his eyes lowered as he turned back to his locker. “But they made me put it up again.”
“They?” I asked quickly.
Andy’s eyes went vague. “Uh, y’know,” he said. “Luke Pankratz and his friends. Those guys.”
Luke Pankratz was Gary’s younger brother.
So
, I thought grimly,
the entire junior jock crowd has been sicced on me
. The ooze feeling in my gut was definitely getting oozier. Slowly I pulled the sketch off my locker.
“Virgin Queen,” I said shakily to Andy, making myself say the words out loud, feel them in my mouth. “What d’you think—is it me?”
Holding up the sketch, I tried to smile.
Andy’s eyes slid from the sketch to my face, then dropped to his feet. “I’m still a virgin,” he shrugged. “Most of the kids in this school are. If that’s who they want to pick on, they’ve got lots of targets.”
All of a sudden his skinny pimply face was the sanest,
wisest
thing I’d seen all week. “You are so right, Andy,” I said, crumpling the sketch into a ball. “This is prime bullshit, isn’t it?”
“Uh-huh,” said Andy, a flush of pleasure riding his face.
“And you tried to take it down, even after Luke told you not to?” I asked. Patting his shoulder, I watched his flush go into overdrive. “Y’know what?” I added, almost kissing him. “You’ve got guts.”
He shrugged again, trying to fake casual, but not enough to dislodge my hand from his shoulder. “Not bad for a Virgin King, eh?” he said shyly.
A shout of laughter came out of me. “Not bad, Andy,” I said. “Not bad at all.”
Grinning like fools, we high-fived each other, and then I ditched my jacket and the balled-up sketch into the bottom of my locker, grabbed my history books and headed for homeroom.
Fortunately Julie and Rachel weren’t in either of my morning classes, and I didn’t run into them in the halls. I did get a few smirks from some of Maria’s friends as I was heading to history, but after my conversation with Andy, it didn’t seem to matter. In fact, even seeing Gary Pankratz in algebra didn’t phase me—at least, not much. As soon as I sat down, he leaned across the aisle, locked eyes with me and said, “Seen any virgin queens lately, Dylan?”
But I managed to keep a grip, shrug and say, “I dunno. I don’t hang around with royalty.”
A blank look crossed Gary’s face and he just stared at me. Abruptly he swiveled around in his seat and started talking to the guy behind him. For a moment I continued to sit, staring at the back of his head, wondering if I’d missed something. Then a tiny grin crept onto my mouth as I realized that nothing was
missing, I simply hadn’t allowed something to happen. Andy Lambard, the Virgin King, was right—
this wasn’t important
. If I could just leave it alone and not let the phone patrol provoke me into picking up my end of the fight, the whole thing would have to die out.
For the rest of algebra Gary strenuously ignored me, which was fine with me. When the lunch bell rang, I headed to the library to meet Ewen and pose for my yearbook picture with the censor strips. After he left, Ms. Fowler asked me to fill in at the check-out desk because her regular Thursday lunch-hour volunteer hadn’t shown. So though I was getting anxious to see Cam, I settled in behind the desk. The library was the usual scene—kids yakking quietly across the work tables, the fluores-cent lighting buzzing overhead. Some guys came by with books to sign out, and one of them started bugging me about the censor strips, but I flashed my well-practiced mystery smile and that kept him at bay.
After he left, however, I started working my way into one of my funks, thinking about Cam eating lunch in the cafeteria without me. Was he sitting beside Len? Or worse, was he trapped between Julie and Rachel while the entire group made jokes about virgin queens? Biting my lip, I considered. No, Cam wouldn’t let them do that. He might moan about not having a sex life to Len and Gary, but he wouldn’t let anyone else joke about it. He would defend me, I knew he would.
But what if he got tired of waiting for me? Or what if he started to get suspicious? I mean, he knew what had originally been under those censor strips. Miserably I glared at the display case with its two multicolored figures.
Damn those censor strips
, I thought. If I’d just had some common sense and put
Anne of Green Gables
into the girl silhouette’s groin, none of this would have happened.
Turning toward the filing carts, I got to work, organizing them for reshelving. The library had hit the lull it often got into around 12:30—no one coming or going, everyone settled into research or a good book. On my knees beside a filing cart, I was alphabetizing the bottom shelf when I heard someone humming on the other side of the check-out desk. The tune sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place it, so I got to my feet to ask what it was.
As my head surfaced above the counter, I saw Joc standing with her back to me. She had obviously come in while I was crouched down behind the desk and didn’t know I was there. Dikker was nowhere to be seen, and she didn’t seem to be doing anything in particular, just standing around and humming.
Abruptly I realized that she was doing something, she was studying the two silhouettes in the display case. At the same moment I recognized the song she was humming—”Fear of Bliss” by Alanis Morissette.
The second I realized these two things, the entire universe seemed to suck in its breath. Sweet heat hit me like a blowtorch and I could have been in bed, doing you-know-what—the sensations were hitting me that hard, I was that helpless, that
gone
.
Foxfire
, was all I could think as I stared at the long gleaming fall of hair down Joc’s back.
Foxfire, Foxfire, Foxfire
.
Footsteps sounded to my left, and I jerked myself out of my massive moment of lust to see Tracey Stillman walking up to the check-out desk with a book in her hand. Immediately I realized that she’d
seen
. In the second I’d turned toward her, her eyes had darted between Joc and me, and a kind of knowing had flashed across her face. Instant panic swept me and I was hit with images of myself machine-gunning Tracey Stillman to bits, throttling Tracey Stillman to bits and machete-chopping Tracey Stillman to bits. That, or taking up life permanently as a carpet fiber.
Fortunately I managed to get a grip.
“Hey, Tracey,” I said, forcing a smile. “Look what you inspired—the October library display. I got the idea from that poetry book you showed me.”
At the sound of my voice Joc stiffened, then turned slowly to face me. Our eyes met, and to my surprise I found myself looking directly into fear. It was a soft lonely kind of fear, something I’d never seen Joc feeling, and it was only there for a second before she shut it down. But in that second I realized fear was always with her the way it was always with me, and she was as good at hiding it as I was. Better even.
Again, Tracey’s eyes flicked between us. “Yeah,” she said, so quietly I could barely hear her. “I like what you did. Except...”
She hesitated.
“Except what?” I asked, keeping my eyes fixed carefully on her face.
“Except...well...,” she mumbled, looking down, then glanced at me quickly. “Why won’t you tell anyone what’s under the censor strips?”
I could feel a major power blush coming on, but managed to keep my voice steady. “Because the titles I put up aren’t there anymore,” I said. “Brennan made Ms. Fowler take them down. The censor strips are covering the new titles she put up.”
“Oh,” said Tracey. She stood for a moment, studying her hands, then asked hesitantly, “Okay, so what
was
there, before Brennan made her change them?”
Without answering, I took the book she was holding and read the title—
Land to Light On
, another book of poetry by a woman named Dionne Brand.
“I haven’t been telling anyone,” I said slowly, “because that’s the point of censorship, right? When something’s censored, it’s gone. You don’t get a chance to know what it was. But since you inspired the display, I’ll tell you.
If
you promise to keep it to yourself.”
Tracey nodded, her eyes glimmering with interest.
“The book in the boy’s groin was
The Once and Future King
,” I said. “Ms. Fowler moved it to his mouth. And the book in the girl’s groin was
Foxfire
.”
For a second, after I’d said it, I just stood there in surprise. I mean, when I stopped fighting and simply let it, the title walked easily out of my mouth.
“Have you read it?” I asked Tracey.
She shook her head.
“It’s a damn good book,” I said, taking her ID card and signing out
Land to Light On
. “Read it sometime.”
“Okay,” said Tracey, a smile flickering across her face. For a moment she looked delicate, almost pretty. Then, as if this was too much for her, she flushed and ducked her head.
Andy Lambard
, I thought.
This is a girl for the Virgin King
. But then I thought,
Hey, who knows? Maybe she needs a Virgin Queen.
“Have yourself a truly superb day, Tracey,” I said as she pushed through the turnstile and headed toward the exit.
“You too,” she called over her shoulder, and then she was gone and there was no way to avoid it anymore—the gaze of my absolutely best, my
very
best friend.
Joc was still standing there, watching me silently, her purplish blue eyes flat on me. “So, where’s Dikker?” I asked, trying to keep my voice light.
“
Hamlet
shit,” Joc shrugged. “He’s decided now he’s going to spend his lunch hours helping to build sets.”