Avalon high, p.7
Avalon High, page 7
I glanced at her. “What rumors?”
“You know,” Liz said. “About him cracking up.”
“Will?” I asked, startled. “Why do people think he’s cracking up?”
“Because he’s been going and sitting on that rock in that ravine in that stupid park all summer,” Liz said. “He’s even skipped football practice twice to do it this week. I heard he says he likes to go there to think. Think! Who even does that?”
I knew right then that Liz would never understand about the floating thing.
“But anyway,” she went on. “Some people are saying—”
“What?” I asked more sharply than I meant to.
“Well, some people say he goes there to get away from his dad.”
“His dad?” I feigned ignorance, not wanting to let on that Will had already confided in me about this.
“Yeah. On account of what he did.”
I stared at Liz, totally confused. “What his dad did?” What was she talking about? Will’s dad hadn’t done anything. Anything except try to force Will to go to the Naval Academy. But he hadn’t succeeded in doing that. Yet. “What did his dad do?”
“Killed his best friend,” Liz said matter-of-factly. “Some guy Will’s dad has known since basic training, or something. Admiral Wagner transferred him to a combat post overseas a year or so ago, and the guy got killed in a helicopter crash.”
“But—” I blinked. The truth was, I didn’t know whether to believe Liz or not. She liked to gossip. A lot.
But she didn’t strike me as a liar.
“That doesn’t mean Will’s dad killed him,” I said. “He didn’t do it on purpose. It was obviously an accident.”
“Oh, right,” Liz scoffed. “And I suppose it was just an accident then that six months later, Admiral Wagner married his dead friend’s wife.”
Whoa.
Apparently, I’d said the word out loud, though I don’t remember doing so, since Liz nodded, and went, “Totally. Anyway, now people are saying that Will’s dad transferred his friend to a dangerous post on purpose, because he’d been in love with the guy’s wife for years and years and was just waiting for a way to get rid of her husband before making his move.”
“Geez,” I said, shocked. Will hadn’t mentioned any of this to me. It wasn’t that, after a single dinner and a couple of lemonades, I considered us soulmates, or anything.
But…he’d told me so many other things. Like about not wanting to go to the Academy.
And the rose. What about that rose?
“So,” Liz went on, “you can see why Will doesn’t like to spend a lot of quality time at home. With his new stepmom and a dad who’d do something like that. Not to mention Marco.”
“Who’s Marco?” I asked, totally confused now.
Stacy, the girl who was offering us a ride, finally showed up, sauntering up behind us as if she had all the time in the world. Well, she was a high jumper. They can be that way. It’s not about speed with them, so much as defying gravitational pull.
“Oh my God,” she said, having overheard my question. She looked at Liz and laughed. “She hasn’t heard of Marco?”
“I know,” Liz said, rolling her eyes. “Well, she is new.”
“What?” I looked from one girl to the other. “Who’s Marco?”
“Marco Campbell,” Liz said. “Will’s new stepbrother. The dead guy’s son.”
“Town psycho,” Stacy said. She pointed her finger at her temple, then twirled her finger around. “Total head case.”
I knew I was fully gaping at them both, but I couldn’t help it.
“Marco lives with Will and his dad and stepmom?”
“Yeah,” Stacy said. “Though I’m sure they’d like to get rid of him.”
“Why? What’s wrong with him?”
“Stacy already told you,” Liz said. “He’s a total freak. He got kicked out of Avalon High last year, a month before graduation, for—get this—trying to kill a teacher.”
I’d been sitting on the curb in the parking lot next to Liz. Now I got up, and turned to face the two girls.
“This isn’t true,” I said firmly. “This is part of that—what did you call it? Oh yeah. My initiation. You guys are playing Trick the New Girl, or something.”
“Uh,” Stacy said, squinting at me, since I was standing with my back to the late-afternoon sun. “You wish. It’s true. They tried to hush the whole thing up—and I don’t know if there was ever enough evidence to press criminal charges. But the guy got expelled. It was all over school.”
“It really is true, Ellie,” Liz said, getting up from the curb as well. “Although Marco went around claiming it was self-defense, that the teacher—whoever it was—was trying to kill him, and he was just trying to save himself. Like anyone would believe that. He’s supposed to be starting college this year. That is, if he got in anywhere. Which I highly doubt, since his grades sucked. And not because he wasn’t smart, either. It was his attitude.”
I couldn’t believe Will hadn’t told me any of this. I mean, the thing with his dad wanting him to go to the Naval Academy, sure. That he’d mentioned. But that his dad had purposefully sent his best friend into a war zone, then snapped up his wife for himself after the guy had been killed? And that he had a stepbrother who’d been kicked out of school for trying to kill a teacher?
Well, maybe that’s not the kind of thing you tell a virtual stranger when you run into her in the woods. Even if she did let you have some of her pad thai.
Probably Will didn’t want to talk about it. I mean, it was the kind of thing maybe you’d want people to forget.
Still. It definitely explained that look I’d seen cross his face a few times.
My parents are going to be home. That’s what Will had said about his party. That his parents were going to be home. Not his dad and new stepmom. His parents.
“What happened to his mom?” I asked Liz, as we began following Stacy toward her Miata. “Will’s real mom, I mean?”
Liz shrugged. “She died or something, I think. A long time ago, I guess. I mean, I never heard him talk about her, anyway.”
So Will’s mom was dead. He hadn’t mentioned that, either, I noticed.
Maybe that’s why he liked sitting around by himself in the woods, listening to medieval music, so much. Maybe if your dad had killed his best friend, then scooped up the guy’s wife for himself, all the while insisting you have to go to military school to make a difference in the world, you’d feel like you had a lot to think about, too.
I was kind of glad right about then that I had been born Elaine Harrison and not A. William Wagner.
“Why are we talking about Will Wagner, anyway?” Stacy wanted to know, as we piled into her car.
“Harrison here scored an invite to his pool party after the Broadneck game Saturday night,” Liz crowed.
“Whoa,” Stacy said. “Looks like the new girl’s doing pretty well for herself. Hanging with the popular crowd already.”
“I’m not popular,” I said, because the way she’d said it made it sound like it wasn’t a good thing. “And it’s not like that—”
“Yes, you are,” Liz assured me. “If Will Wagner is inviting you to parties at his place, you’re part of the In Crowd, big time.”
“And I heard you have Lance Reynolds as your partner on Morton’s oral assignment,” Stacy said.
“It’s not like I had a choice,” I said. “Mr. Morton assigned us together.”
“Listen to her,” Stacy said, chuckling. “So outraged! Don’t you know how many girls would die to be in your shoes, Ellie? Lance Reynolds is the school hottie du jour. And he doesn’t have a girlfriend….”
“You have got to be kidding me,” I said. “That guy is a behemoth!”
“Behemoth,” echoed Stacy. “My, that’s a bit harsh.”
“Yeah,” Liz agreed. “For someone going to his best friend’s party on Saturday.”
“I can’t believe people consider Lance hot,” I said. I couldn’t believe it, either. Compared to Will, Lance was like…well, waffles with freezer burn.
“Aw, Lance is all right,” Liz said. “Kind of dopey, but nice. Like a teddy bear. The problem is, he’s chronically single. He just needs the love of a good woman to mold him into the man he has the potential to be.”
“I think that description fits Ellie perfectly, don’t you, Liz?” teased Stacy.
“Totally,” Liz declared.
Then both girls had a good laugh at my stricken expression.
I knew they were just teasing. And even if they weren’t, it was better that they suspected I had the hots for Lance than the truth…that the form I was warm for was Will. I had spent all day hoping to see him in the hallway between classes. I’d even rehearsed what I was going to say to him. I hear Broadneck’s 2 and 0. Guess you guys better do some serious playing.
Yes, geek that I am, I had looked up Broadneck on the Internet the night before, then practiced the line in the mirror a few times that morning. So it would seem like I knew something about football, when, in fact, I knew nothing.
But I’d never seen him. And now I realized it wasn’t just football I knew nothing about. I knew nothing about A. William Wagner—the guy I was apparently falling head over heels in love with—either.
But I did know one thing: Anyone who could joke around with a bunch of kids, the way Will had at that lemonade stand, or defend a geek the way he had that day outside Mr. Morton’s classroom, would have my good opinion forever, no matter what his dad—or stepbrother—was rumored to have done.
I knew something else, too: that anyone with as dysfunctional a home life as Will’s needed a laugh or two now and again. It was no wonder that he’d taken to hanging around me, the Queen of the Yuks.
And no matter what Nancy might think about guys not falling in love with girls who make them laugh, I wasn’t changing a thing. Because if that’s what Will wanted, that’s what I was going to give him.
Even if I broke my heart in a thousand pieces doing so.
CHAPTER EIGHT
There she weaves by night and day
A magic web with colours gay.
She has heard a whisper say,
A curse is on her if she stay
To look down to Camelot.
I’ve never been a very girly girl. I mean, I’ve never collected stuffed animals or cared too much about clothes. I’ve never had a manicure, and my hair is all one length because I’m too lazy to get it cut or styled regularly. I basically just slap it back into a ponytail most days.
But the night of the game and Will’s party, I really made an effort to look my best.
I don’t know why. I mean, it still wasn’t like Will was available. And even if he were, there was no reason to think he’d like me. I mean, sure, I was the girl who’d made him laugh—who’d sat on a rock in the woods and listened as he’d told me about his problems with his dad.
But he hadn’t been totally forthcoming with all the details about his dad. It wasn’t like I was his big confidante, or anything. I was just a funny girl he’d met. He obviously liked me: The day after he’d given me the rose—the day I made the track team—I got home to find an e-mail from him.
CAVALIER: Hey! Hope it went well today, and you ran like the wind. You’re a shoo-in, don’t worry.
He remembered. I’d only mentioned briefly, as he’d been dropping me off at my house the day before, that I was planning to go out for the track team.
And he’d remembered.
Because that’s what friends do. They remember things about each other. It didn’t, I told myself sternly, mean anything. Anything beyond that we were friends, I mean.
I wrote back at once, of course. Well, it seemed only fitting to share the good news.
TIGGERTOO: Hey, back atcha! I made the team. Thanks for the well wishes.
CAVALIER: See? Told you so. Congratulations. With you on board, the team’s actually got a shot at State, for a change.
Which is the kind of thing a friend would say. Because friends support one another. Just like friends say hi when they pass each other in the hallway (as Will always did). And wave when they see each other in the parking lot (ditto). It’s just what friends do.
And Will had a lot of friends. Everyone at Avalon High, it seemed, loved him. He was immensely popular, not just with his fellow jocks, but with the less athletically inclined kids as well. On Friday, when we were summoned to the gym for a massive pep rally prior to the Broadneck game, and Will’s name was read and he came running out onto the court, the applause for him was thunderous. Everyone in the entire school—including kids who’d been looking sullen about having to be at a pep rally in the first place, the skateboarders and punk rockers—leapt to their feet to give him a standing ovation.
Will, for his part, had looked embarrassed, and then, when the applause didn’t die down, he had to reach for the microphone that Mr. Morton, who was emceeing the event (and generating pep by making us practice the Avalon High rallying cheer, “Excalibur!” which is possibly the lamest cheer in the history of high school), was holding and say, “Thanks, everybody. We’re just going to go out there and play our best, and we hope all of you will be there to support us.”
The roar this statement provoked was far louder than any of the Excalibur!s Mr. Morton had elicited from us.
And when Will was handing the microphone back to Mr. Morton, and his gaze happened to fall on me—me, out of all the people in the bleachers—and he gave me a wink and a smile, I told myself that’s just what friends do. Even though both Liz and Stacy, beside me in the stands, glanced at me sharply, and went, “Did he just—?”
“We’re just friends,” I said quickly.
“Sure,” Liz said, just as quickly. “Sure. Because, you know, Will and Jennifer—”
“They’re, like, the It Couple,” Stacy finished for her.
“Right,” I said. “Will and I are…just friends.”
“Wish I had a friend that hot,” Stacy said. “And nice. And smart. And funny.”
Liz smacked her in the arm. “What about me? I’m hot, nice, smart, and funny.”
“Yeah, but I don’t want to stick my tongue in your mouth,” Stacy pointed out.
Liz sighed, and gazed down at Will, who was taking a seat with the rest of his team. “True,” she said. “If Will Wagner and I were just friends, I’d make sure we didn’t stay just friends for long.”
“Oh, right,” Stacy said sarcastically. “Good luck competing with that.”
We looked where she was pointing. Jennifer Gold was doing a series of backflips up and down the gym, in time to the band that was playing a speeded-up version of “What I Like About You.” Her deeply tanned legs flashed like scissor blades. Every time she landed, her lustrous blond hair fell effortlessly back into perfect waves.
“I hate her,” Liz said, without any real rancor, summing up exactly what I was feeling at that particular moment.
But I knew these kinds of feelings were unfair. Jennifer wasn’t a bad person. Everyone liked her. I had no right to hate her. Sure, Will had confided in me, and even given me a rose, and invited me to his party.
But we were just friends.
But telling myself that over and over again didn’t stop me from fishing out my shortest skirt and using eyeliner and even mousse on the night of the Broadneck game—enough so that when my dad saw me, he went, “All I ask is that you stay away from downtown,” on account of the middies.
Then, when I ran out of my house to get into Stacy’s car—she was driving Liz and me to the game—both girls let out hoots of mock admiration, and Liz asked me if I would still sit near them, being such a glamour queen, and all.
I didn’t mind their teasing me, because I knew it meant I’d been accepted. And that felt way better than if they’d said, all politely, “You look nice, Ellie.”
I had never been to a football game before. My brother Geoff had been on the basketball team at my old school, so I’d been to quite a few games to cheer him on…not out of any sense of sisterly support, but because Nancy had always had a big crush on Geoff and had insisted on going to his games.
Nancy hadn’t had a crush on any of the football players, so she’d never made me go to any of those games.
I honestly can’t say I missed out on anything much—at least if the Avalon-Broadneck game was any indication. Oh, it was fun hanging out in the bleachers, under the vast night sky, eating popcorn.
But the game itself was way boring, and practically incomprehensible. And the players wore so much padding, you could only tell who anybody was by their names on the backs of their jerseys.
Still, I appeared to be the only person in the stands who was of this opinion. Everybody else—including Stacy and Liz—was way into the game, joining Jennifer Gold and the other cheerleaders in their chants, and screaming hysterically every time our team got a point or a down, or whatever they were called.
Liz tried to explain the finer points of the game to me. Will’s position, quarterback, was like the brains of the operation. His friend Lance was a guard, whose job it was to keep Will from getting flattened every time he was holding the ball—which was fairly often.
Apparently Avalon High had a good team—so good they had even gone to the state championship the year before. It was widely believed they’d go again this year, if they played as well as they had last year.
But we were not doing as well against the Broadneck Bruins as everyone had hoped we would. At halftime, we were down by fourteen points, and a lot of people in the stands were grumbling about it.
I have to admit, I didn’t much care whether or not we won. I hadn’t spent a whole lot of time watching the game. Mostly I just watched Will. It was hard not to notice that he looked very cute in his tight white pants while he was out there making up plays and telling everybody else what to do. There’s something sort of intoxicating, I guess, about a guy in a position of power…at least one with a butt that looked as good as Will’s.
I didn’t mention my crush on Will to Liz or Stacy, of course. I mean, for one thing, I’d gone to great lengths to convince them that Will and I were just friends (which, in his case, anyway, was actually true).
