How to Win at High School (17 page)

“Still deciding,” Adam says. “Waiting for the right guy, huh?”

“Uh-huh. Know anyone who might be interested?”

“I might,” Adam says. “You know Wayne Tristovsky?”

Janie's smile disappears. “Wait, what? You want to hook me up with Wayne Tristovsky?”

“For me, Janie,” Adam says. “As a favor. I'll discount your next paper or something.”

Janie shakes her head. “I don't think so, Adam. Not even if
you
paid
me
.”

Leanne Grayson laughs in Adam's face. “I'm sure I could find someone better, Adam.”

“I'm sure you could, too,” Adam tells her, “but I'd be
so
grateful, Leanne.”

“Sorry,” she says. “Who are you taking?”

Adam shrugs. “Victoria, I guess.”

Leanne winks at Adam. “Well, if she's busy or something . . .”

“Thanks,” Adam tells her. “I'll keep that in mind.”

“Why are you so concerned about who your friend takes to formal, anyway?” Sam asks Adam, his voice tinny through the receiver.

“I just—” Adam wedges the phone against his ear. Studies his econ textbook. “Wayne's a lonely guy, you know? And I guess he wants to go to formal pretty bad.”

Sam's watching hockey in the background. They were supposed to watch together. Adam's calling to tell Sam he can't make it.

(Homework.)

“You're a good friend,” Sam says.

Adam thinks about Wayne. Poor, pathetic Wayne.

“Yeah,” he says. “I guess I am.”

“What about you?” Sam says. “Are you taking Victoria?”

“To formal?” Adam flips a page in the textbook.

Highlights a key concept—

(
market saturation
).

“I guess I hadn't thought about it,” he says.

“You should take her,” Sam says.

“She hasn't said anything about it,” Adam says. “I don't even know if she wants to go.”

“She wants to go.” Something's happening in the hockey game in the background. People are cheering. “A girl like Victoria?” Sam says. “She's just waiting for you to ask.”

“The formal?” Victoria says. “Really?”

“The formal,” Adam says. “You know, dresses, dinner, dancing. The formal.”

Victoria giggles. “I know what it is,” she says. “I just never would have thought it was your style.”

“Is it
your
style?” Adam asks her.

“Maybe,” she says. “Are you asking me on a date?”

Adam grins at her. “Depends who else I can find between now and then.”

“You loser.” Victoria punches him. “Maybe I'll just find someone else, then. Maybe Chad will take me.”

“Or maybe we should just go together and save ourselves the trouble of finding other people,” Adam says.

Victoria rolls her eyes. “
Such
a romantic.”

“I'll pick you up at eight,” Adam tells her. “In a month or so.”

Sam was right. Obviously.

Victoria's thrilled about formal.

(Hey, she's a freshman girl. She goes gaga over formals. Dresses, expensive hairdos, romance.

      It's like popular girl catnip.

      Plus, she gets quality time with Adam, which doesn't always happen when business is booming.)

(And business is booming.)

Wayne and Lisa and Devon are kicking homework ass. The gods are thrilled with their new A-plus standard. Pizza Man Enterprises has seven hundred Likes on Facebook. Adam himself has a thousand Twitter followers.

(#success)

(#godmode)

(#PizzaMan)

(#winning)

Brian's shipping IDs as fast as Bondy can make them. And Adam's taking a cut of the whole

fucking

pie.

Life is good.

Life is
very
good.

And then they catch the kid who swiped Mr. Powers's Applied Science exam.

The kid is a sophomore—a stoner named Ryan Grant. He wears weird punk-rock T-shirts and always reeks of weed. And Mr. Acton makes him for the exam fiasco.

“Hawksley identified him,” Darren tells Adam. “The old janitor, you know him? I guess he saw this Ryan guy in the hall yesterday and it triggered something.”

“Crazy,” Adam says. “What's the kid saying?”

Darren shrugs. “I heard him pitching a fit in the office when I walked past,” he says, “but you have to figure he'd deny everything anyway, right?”

“Right,” Adam says.

“I mean, it's cut-and-dried. Hawksley saw him. And he's in the Applied Science class to begin with.”

“Sure,” Adam says.

“Of course he did it,” Darren says. “Ryan Grant is a loser
.”

Adam has his meeting with Mrs. Dubois—

(the guidance counselor)

—that afternoon. She's good-looking, for an older woman. She makes Adam call her Bonnie. She asks Adam a bunch of questions about what he wants to do after high school, gives him a career guide, and tells him to come back when he picks out something that interests him.

Adam takes the handbook. Thanks Mrs. Dubois—

“Bonnie,
please
.”

—and stands to leave. Then he stops.

“Bonnie,” he says, “what's going to happen to that kid who stole the exam last semester?”

Bonnie's face clouds. “Expelled,” she says. “Maryvale Tech.”

Whoa
, Adam thinks.

(Maryvale Tech is where they send all the problem kids. The supreme screwups. It's basically a holding pen where they keep you until you do something bad enough to land you in juvie. Or full-on prison. And pretty much everyone at Maryvale winds up in prison eventually.

It's just how it is.)

“There's a chance he could apply to come back here in the fall, if his parents are interested,” Bonnie tells Adam. “But I
don't think that'll happen, in this case.”

“Wow,” Adam says. “So that's it, then.”

“Yeah.” She smiles and shakes her head. “Some kids you just can't help, I guess.”

Ryan Grant.

Maryvale Tech.

Heavy shit.

“Good riddance,” Audrey Klein says when Adam hands back her history assignment. “He was a burnout anyway.”

“Yeah,” Adam says. “What if he was innocent, though?”

Audrey thinks about it for, like, half a second. “Who cares?” she says. “He was a loser. It's not like he was doing anything with his life.”

Adam thinks:
Maybe Audrey has a point.

                  
Adam thinks:
Maybe Ryan Grant didn't even like Nixon.

Adam thinks:
He'll fit in better at Maryvale, anyway.

But still
, Adam thinks.
Heavy shit.

Wayne's thinking the same. “What should we do?” he asks Adam.

Adam looks at Wayne. Adam shrugs. Adam's feeling guilty.

But Adam can't tell Wayne that.

“What should we
do
?” Adam says. “We should keep our mouths shut, Wayne.”

Wayne blinks. “And just let him take the fall? They're expelling him.”

“They're sending him to Maryvale,” Adam says. “It's not so bad. Maybe he'll fit in better there.”

“Are you kidding?” Wayne says. “I heard some kid got stabbed there last month.”

Adam knows this. Adam heard the same thing. “What do you want to do?” Adam says. “You want to walk into Mr. Acton's office and tell him
we
stole the exam? You want to book a ticket to Maryvale ourselves?”

Wayne shudders. “No.”

“I feel shitty about what happened,” Adam tells him. “But it's not like he was doing much at Nixon anyway. Those kids will worship him for stealing that exam. They'll make him a god.”

Wayne thinks about it. Wayne nods. “I mean, I guess you're right.”

“I know I'm right,” Adam says, and wonders if he means it.

“Anyway,” Wayne says. “You find me a date to formal yet?”

Adam hesitates. “I'm working on it,” Adam tells him. What Adam doesn't tell him is:
I'm striking out.

(With every girl who Adam thinks would be remotely interested in doing him a favor.)

“Who'd you talk to?” Wayne asks him. “You ask Sara Bryant yet?”

Adam sighs. “Wayne, you're not going to formal with Sara Bryant. Sara Bryant hates the ground we walk on. She—”

Just then, Sara Bryant walks by. “Are you talking about me, Adam?”

“Hey, Sara,” Adam says. “Just figuring out who's doing your next assignment. Nothing major.”

Sara frowns. “I didn't give you my next assignment yet.” She narrows her eyes at Adam. “What are you
really
talking about? Are you gossiping?”

Adam looks away. He still can't look Sara (
freaking
) Bryant in the eye when she's in full-on Beast Mode. “Wayne was just wondering who you're taking to formal,” he says.

Beside Adam, Wayne sucks his teeth. Sara blinks. “Who's Wayne?”

Adam points to Wayne. Wayne kind of shrugs. “He doesn't have a date,” Adam tells her.

Sara cocks her head. “And?”

“And,” Adam sighs, “he was wondering if you're available.”

Sara stares at Adam. Adam shakes his head, thinking,
How the hell did I get mixed up in this?
Thinking,
My rep is
shot
the minute this gets out.

Sara looks Wayne up and down. “This is Wayne?” she says. “Does he speak?”

“Y-yes,” Wayne says. “I can speak.”

Sara keeps studying him. “I think formal is a waste of time,” she says.

“Oh, okay,” Adam says. “Well thanks anyway.”

“Hold on!” Sara glares at him. “What I was going to say,
Pizza Man
, is that I think formal is a waste of time,
but
Wayne here is kind of cute. In an anti-establishment, counterprogramming kind of way, obviously.”

“Obviously,” Adam says.

“It might be interesting to take him to formal,” she says. “Just to say ‘Fuck the popular kids. Fuck the cliques,' you know what I'm saying?”

“Sure,” Adam says. He thinks,
What the hell is happening?

Sara looks at Wayne again. Looks at him a long time. “I'll think about it, Wayne,” she says. “I'll tell Adam what I decide.”

Wayne nods. “Okay.”

“Okay,” Adam says.

“Okay,” Sara says. “I'm leaving.”

Then she
breezes
down the hall and is gone.

Adam and Wayne look at each other. “What the hell just happened?” Wayne asks Adam.

Adam shrugs. “She thinks you're cute,” he says. “In an anti-establishment way, of course.”

“‘Fuck the cliques'?” Wayne says. “I don't even know what that means.”

“Who cares?” Adam tells him. “Play your cards right and maybe you'll get to ‘fuck a popular kid' yourself.”

Adam buys two tickets to the spring formal the day they go on sale.

Two tickets. Seventy bucks.

A hell of a price to pay for a crappy dinner and some dancing, but Adam figures he can make up the difference in booze sales.

(Technically, it's a dry event. What that means is that everyone and their sister is going to pre-drink beforehand. And post-drink at after-parties. What that means is that flask sales are going to skyrocket.)

And anyway
, Adam figures,
maybe formal will finally convince Victoria Lemieux to sleep with me.

(Doubtful, but who knows?)

(Stranger things have happened.)

Adam takes Victoria to the mall to pick out a dress. They hit about a hundred little boutique stores and she tries on ten dresses in each store. It's a long day. Adam doesn't mind at all. He thinks Victoria looks hot in every one of them.

(And she does.)

Finally, she narrows it down to two dresses. One is tight and black. The other is short and red. Victoria comes out blushing. “You think it's too flashy for me?”

“Hell no,” Adam says.

Victoria looks at the price tag. “It's expensive, though.”

“Don't even sweat it.” Adam tries not to drool as he looks at her legs. “It's worth every penny.”

The next day, Adam goes back to the mall to pick out a suit. “Money's no object,” he tells the sales guy. “I want to look good next to my girl.”

The guy sees dollar signs. Hooks Adam up with a slick pinstripe suit, a pimpin' tie. It's not cheap but it's worth it. Victoria's hot. Adam's suit is so money.

The formal's going to be awesome.

Adam stops by the sporting goods store while he's at the mall. Picks up a Red Wings jersey, one of the official ones, the home red with the white trim.

Has it customized with Sam's name and his old jersey number—

(19)

(after Steve Yzerman, the guy who was captain of the Red Wings back when Sam was still walking)

—pays a shitload of money for it, but the jersey looks pimp.

Sam's going to love it.

Adam takes the bus downtown.

(Thinks,
How many homework assignments would a used Porsche cost?
)

(#TonyMontana)

(#PizzaMan)

Sam's watching a sports talk show on TV in his living room when Adam shows up.

“I can't stay,” Adam tells him. “So much freaking homework. I just wanted to give you this.”

He gives Sam the jersey. “Holy shit,” Sam says, grinning. “You even got my number on it.”

“Swag, right?” Adam says.

“
So
cool,” Sam says. “Here, help me try it on.”