Parrotfish (15 page)

“Why?”

“
Why?
Are you kidding me? It’s a famous line! I want to stand on a chair and say it. When will I ever have a chance like this again?”

“I didn’t know you were a frustrated actor,” I said.

“I didn’t either, but maybe I am.”

So we worked the ending around to conclude with Tiny Sebastian, balancing on his chair, demanding blessings for everyone. Dad would be glad we’d kept the finale too.

We’d just finished a decent first draft when Mom called upstairs. “Phone for you . . . Grady.”

I answered with my usual doubt. “For me?”

“It’s Kita!” Sebastian said. “I bet she’s calling you to ask you out again!”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. But as I headed to Mom and Dad’s room to get the phone, my heart began to thump. What if it
was
Kita? Who else would be calling me? Was it possible?

“Hello?” I croaked, my voice suddenly hoarse.

Sebastian stood so close to me I could hear him breathe.
Who is it?
he mouthed.

I turned away from him and tried to concentrate on the voice on the phone.

“It’s me,” the voice said. “Please don’t hang up!”

Eve. Damn
.

“I told you, we aren’t friends anymore. You have to stop calling me.”

“I know, but I have something important to tell you. Please—”

Sebastian was making all kinds of faces to get my attention and I finally just said, “It’s Eve,” to get him to back down.

“Is somebody there with you?” Eve wanted to know.

“Yes. Surprisingly, not everyone thinks I have a contagious affliction.”

“I don’t think that!” Eve said. “Who’s there?”

“Sebastian Shipley.”

“Oh yeah, you were with him the other day too.”

“Yes, Judas, I was.”

“Angela, I’m sorry—”

“Angela doesn’t live here anymore,” I said.

She sighed. “I know. I mean Grady. I really miss you, whatever your name is.” I could hear the tightness in her throat. If she started to cry, I’d be tempted to be nice to her, which I was not in the least ready to do.

“Look, Eve, I have to go. I’m busy—”

“No! Don’t hang up! I have to tell you something! Please!”

I was afraid to listen to her. What if I got all
confused about whether I hated her or not? It felt good to hate her at the moment. I needed to hate her.

“I can’t, Eve. I can’t talk to you right now.”

“Then, then . . . let me talk to Sebastian! Can I talk to him?”

That surprised me. “What do you want to talk to him for?”

Sebastian’s ears pricked up and he started pointing to himself.
Me? She wants to talk to me?

“Just for a minute, Grady, please.”

Her use of my new name softened me. I sighed and handed the phone over to Sebastian, who grabbed it excitedly.

“Hello?” he said. There was a silly grin on his face, and I wondered if he’d ever actually talked to a girl on the phone before.

After a few pleasantries, Sebastian got quiet. Eve was obviously telling him something complicated. Every now and then he’d nod and say “uh-huh” or “whoa.” His face began to tighten into a scowl. I couldn’t imagine what Eve’s news might be.

Finally he nodded gravely and said, “Don’t worry, Eve, we’ll figure out something. And we won’t say who told us either. Okay. Thanks for calling. Bye.” He handed the phone back to me and I hung it up.

“So?” I asked.

“I think you might owe her for this one,” he said.

“Are you kidding? She’s been rotten to me ever since—”

“Yeah, but this is pretty big,” he said. I followed him back into my room and he shut the door.

“Danya has a trick planned. An ingeniously sick plan, as you might imagine.”

“A trick on me?”

He nodded. “She figured out that you use Ms. Unger’s office shower after gym class. She has a study hall that hour, which is easy to get out of, so on Monday she’s planning to go there with her cronies and steal your regular clothes
and
your gym clothes while you’re showering.”

“What? That . . . that . . .” I was having trouble coming up with a name bad enough for her. What would I do if I came out of the shower and all my clothes were missing?

“That’s not all of it. She’s going to leave other clothes for you to wear instead, apparently some very sexy, revealing outfit of hers and a pair of high heels. Which she figures you’ll have to wear or go naked.”

There was a banging in my chest that felt more
like a wrecking ball than a heart. “Are you kidding me? What . . . I can’t believe it!” Except, unfortunately, I could. I could totally imagine walking out of the shower room wearing Danya’s slutty clothes, and just how horrible I’d feel, and what people would say, and how they’d look at me. How they’d laugh. And I was perfectly able to imagine the grin on Danya’s face. It nauseated me.

“Yeah,” Sebastian agreed. “Thank God Eve had the nerve to tell you.”

“The nerve? She has a nerve all right. She was probably in on the whole thing from the beginning.” I sank down on the bed while Sebastian paced.

After a minute, he pulled a roll of mints from his pocket and offered me one. “You do realize that Eve is terrified of Danya, don’t you? I mean, this is the kind of thing Danya does to people who get on her bad side. Eve is taking a big chance even telling you about it.”

I crushed my mint into dust. “Then why is she doing it? Eve has always been afraid of her shadow. What if her telling me is part of the trick? I don’t trust her.”

“I believe her,” Sebastian said.

“Why? Did she start crying? That doesn’t mean anything—she cries about everything.”

“No, I mean, I believe she really still wants to
be your friend. I believe she feels terrible about what’s happened. She’s not a bad person, Grady—she just didn’t know enough to steer clear of Danya and she got caught in her trap.”

Suddenly
I
felt like crying. Was I going to have to worry about every single thing I did now? Even something as simple as showering after gym class? Why couldn’t people just leave me alone? Who was I hurting, anyway? Why did I have to defend my right to be the person I was? I let my head sink down into my hands—it suddenly felt too heavy for my neck to support on its own.

Sebastian sat down next to me. “I know, it sucks,” he said.

I nodded.

“We’ll get her back,” he said.

“How?”

“I don’t know yet, but I’ll think of something.”

Which was good to know, but not immediately helpful. There were people who wanted to hurt me, to humiliate me, and maybe there always would be. I felt like crawling under a rock and staying there for the next few years.

“We need to take a walk,” Sebastian said finally. He put a hand on my back. “I know. Let’s go to the pharmacy and visit Wilma.”

*

“Hey, there!” Wilma called. “You boys back for more peppermint shampoo?”

You boys
. She said it so naturally.

Sebastian nodded. “It’s great stuff.”

“Oh, it really is,” Wilma said. “I got myself a bottle of it on your recommendation, and you were right. It smells good
and
it tingles. I was hoping you’d come back in so I could tell you.” She grinned widely.

“My friend, Grady, is getting some today too,” Sebastian said, handing me a bottle from the shelf.

I was? I stared at him, but I took the shampoo.

“Oh, you’ll love it!” Wilma said. As she rang up the sales, she continued talking. “You boys go to the high school?”
Boys
.

“We do,” Sebastian said.

“I got a niece goes there—a freshman. She says there’s a big dance coming up. She’s all excited about it. You two going to that?”

I cleared my throat to risk a few words. “We’re actually going to be filming it for the cable TV channel.” It was hard to gauge how masculine your own voice might sound.

But Wilma didn’t flinch. “You
are
? It’ll be on TV?”

“Not until after the holidays,” I told her. “We’ll have to edit it first.”

“Well, my goodness. Katy’ll be thrilled about that! If you see a tall girl with brown curly hair wearing a blue dress, you make sure to take lots of pictures of her, okay?”

“We sure will,” Sebastian assured her as we took our bags and headed for the door.

“Bye, boys. See you later!”

Yes, she would. In fact, I might become a Wilma groupie. As long as she kept calling me “boy.” Maybe I should ask Wilma to the Winter Carnival.

       WILMA: Oh, look, there’s my niece. [waves] Hi, Katy!

       GRADY: I must say, Wilma, without your name tag and red smock, you look just like a freshman yourself.

       WILMA: Aren’t you a doll to say so, Grady.

       GRADY: [leading her to the dance floor] Shall we boogie down, Wilma?

       WILMA: [snuggling up] Sure! Ooh, Grady, you reek of peppermint.

       GRADY: [copping a feel] I think that’s you, my dear.

       WILMA: [laughing] I think we’re the stinkiest couple here!

       GRADY: I hope so, Wilma. I hope so.

“So,” Sebastian said as he walked along, swinging
his shampoo, “I think I’ve got a plan.”

“A plan? Oh, yeah.” I’d almost forgotten about my forthcoming humiliation. Not everybody liked the boy as much as Wilma did.

“Ms. Unger is on your side, right? She lets you use her shower and bathroom.”

“Yeah. She’s not exactly my buddy, though.”

“Maybe not, but I’m betting she doesn’t care much for Danya.”

“Probably a safe bet.”

“Right. And that will work to our advantage.” Sebastian said. “Let’s go back to your house and place a call to the girls’ gym teacher.”

M
s. Unger was crazy about the idea. It helped that she disliked Danya as much as I did. Her exact words were, “I’ve been wanting to trim that girl’s sails since she first walked into my class.”

So on Monday, after the usual ball-bouncing in the gym, Ms. Unger told us to run three laps and then head for the showers—she had to go down to the principal’s office for a minute. I knew most kids wouldn’t do the whole three laps, but we’d still have enough time. I ran the laps, then slipped into Ms. Unger’s office quietly, as I’d been doing for several weeks. Some of the other girls had obviously heard about Danya’s plot—they giggled nervously as I walked by, but I ignored them. I didn’t close the outer office door all the way, just enough so that no one could watch me going into the bathroom instead of the shower room. As soon as I was inside, I knocked on the wall that separated the two spaces. The shower came on immediately.

When I’d gotten changed before gym, I’d left
my school clothes and a second set of gym clothes outside Ms. Unger’s shower, all in a heap as if I’d just dropped them there. As I put on the other clothes I’d stashed in the bathroom, I listened at the door. Danya was stealthy, but I could hear other girls’ voices, shrill with excitement, so I assumed the theft had been accomplished.

The shower in the next room went off. The curtain was flung back on its rod. Then: silence. I could imagine Danya, Melanie, Zoe, and Eve standing outside the door, listening for sounds of distress, waiting to erupt into laughter. Sebastian had called Eve to tell her what was going on so she wouldn’t worry, but I was still skeptical about her role in the whole enterprise.

Then came another knock on the wall. I opened the bathroom door and walked out of the office. Sure enough, the quartet was waiting, along with a locker room full of other girls. The hall door had been propped open, and several dozen guys hung in the doorway, George Garrison and Ben London among them, pushing to see over each other’s shoulders. Everybody likes a good show. So we gave them one.

“Hey,” I said. “What’s everybody doing here?”

Danya gasped. “How . . .?”

“I think they came to see me,” Ms. Unger said as she lurched out of the shower room in threeinch
pink heels, Danya’s short, tight black dress stretched to the ripping point over her hips. She walked out into the locker room so the boys in the doorway could get a good look too. “Thank you, Danya, for lending me such nice clothes. I’m afraid I may have gotten the shoes a little wet though. And this side seam is beginning to open up just a bit.”

For a moment no one said a word; then the boys began to hoot with laughter. The girls joined in too, and they weren’t laughing at Ms. Unger. The joke was definitely on Danya.

Who was furious. She turned immediately on Eve. “You did this, didn’t you? You little traitor! I knew I couldn’t trust you!”

Eve opened her mouth, but no words came out.

“Hold on there, cowboy,” Ms. Unger said, taking Danya by the arm. “I think you and I need to take that trip to the principal’s office I was talking about. Grady, you’d better come too. The rest of you, go to your next class. The fun’s over.”

Danya gave Eve a parting look that would turn most mortals to stone, but Eve was looking at me, her woebegone expression begging forgiveness.

I followed Ms. Unger, who was now barefoot, holding the wrecked shoes in one hand and Danya’s elbow in the other, as we padded down
the hall to Dr. No Way’s office. The kids we passed, late to class or clutching a pass of some kind, stared at Ms. Unger’s bizarre outfit, then at her two unlikely companions. I wondered how long it would take before the entire school heard what had happened.

Ms. Unger swept right by the secretary and straight into the principal’s office. I think he was playing solitaire on his computer, but he turned it off before I could be sure. He made us all sit down while Ms. Unger gave him the short version of what had just occurred and Danya interrupted with stupid excuses about how it was all just a joke and we were taking it way too seriously. I could see that No Way wanted to believe Danya—that would be the easiest solution. But Ms. Unger wasn’t backing down.

“This was obviously an attempt to humiliate Grady. There were students jammed in the doorway waiting to see him emerge in a dress.”

No Way turned his attention to me. “I was afraid something like this would happen if you perservered with this idea, Angela. I warned you.”