Personal Statement (14 page)

Calliope is on her way.

That’s what everyone is saying. The local news. National news. The Weather Channel. FEMA. Our internal guys.

Everyone but this pesky kid, this skinny little hipster in a Billionaire Boys Club jacket who’s been chirping in my ear all morning.

“Don’t trust those reports, little lady. I’m gettin’ tons o’ hits on Twitter sayin’ this baby isn’t following
any
of the models. Hashtag: MuchAdoAboutNuthin.”

I guess since I’m the youngest member of the governor’s team, this kid feels like
I’m
the one he should speak to
.
Lucky me.

Teddy keeps trying to usher the boy, whose name is Duncan Rodriguez, away. I only know his name is Duncan Rodriguez because he re-introduces himself every time he breezes through, saying something obnoxious and attention-grabbing. Then when you look at him like he’s nuts, he thrusts a hand out for you to shake, announcing, “Duncan Rodriguez—amateur weather enthusiast and Twitter sensation.” Teddy always shakes the kid’s hand and politely asks him to step off the stage. But ten minutes later Duncan’s back with a new Twitter report. “My boy in Southampton says no dice on Calliope. Nada, nil, zippo. Looks like another correct prediction for the D-man! What-
whaaat!
”

Finally Teddy doesn’t even bother to get rid of the kid. He just stares at me, eyes wide, silently asking, “Could it be? Could the storm pass us completely?”

I look at the governor on the other side of the stage. He seems remarkably calm. (He silently moved away from Teddy and the rest of us a few minutes ago, our collective nervous energy probably hitting maximum annoyance levels.) He isn’t pacing. He isn’t fidgeting. Just leaning against the stage right proscenium, arms folded, eyes glued to the Jones twins at their computers. He remains fixed on them even when they stand and leave the stage. (Presumably for a bathroom break; do twins generally get the urge to pee at the same time?)

I wipe my sweaty palms on the back of my jeans for the hundredth time, grab another eight-ounce Poland Spring and down it in one gulp. And it dawns on me that I’m not nervous because I’m worried about the hurricane or how the twin’s device will handle the gathering flood waters or how thousands of lives might be in danger or how my
own
life might be in danger. I’m nervous because it’s almost 11 a.m. and it’s not even
raining
yet. I’m nervous because… what if that annoying hipster is right? What if there’s no hurricane? No clean up, no Chris Christie moment for the governor (who was already planning what he’d wear to the press conference, something vaguely patriotic, with hints of red, white and blue, and a patch of the Connecticut flag on one arm: Presidential-Casual). And if he doesn’t have his big moment and isn’t thrust into the spotlight and the national conversation, where does that leave me and my hopes of landing a job in the White House before I’m thirty?

Just then the governor steps by us, absently handing his still full bottle of water to Teddy, who grabs him by the shoulder. “You all right, Chucky?”

“Yeah. Just need some air.” Governor Watson smiles at us both reassuringly and slips out an exit at the back of the stage.

“Glad
he’s
okay,” I mumble, “because I’m about to throw up.”

“Don’t sweat it,” Teddy says. “No matter what, this is a win. Storm hits and he’s an instant legend. Storm passes and, well… we were lucky, but wasn’t that governor prepared? And wouldn’t he be great leading us on the
national
level? Got it?”

Teddy sounds like he’s trying to convince himself as much as me.

“Yeah,” I agree. “It’s just…” I trail off, sort of laughing, and then scratch my arm, my neck, and my head. The itch seems to be traveling all over my body, constantly
just
out of reach. Teddy stares at me as one would stare at a crazy homeless person on the subway.

“You all right, A.J.?”

“Ah, you know. Just anxious. The whole thing—it’s nerve-wracking.”

“Better get used to it,” Teddy says, patting me on the shoulder. “Like Tiger on the seventy-second hole. Learn to love the pressure.
Thrive
on it.”

Before I can respond, Teddy’s phone beeps. Then the entire team’s. Then mine.

We all look down at our BlackBerrys and read the text from the National Weather Service. Oh my God.

Still glued to his screen, Teddy says, “A.J…. Find the governor. Tell him he’s needed right away.”

I nod and make my way briskly toward the stage door. My head is swimming and my steps echo as I move from the bright lights on stage to the darkened wings, feeling my way through black curtains and finding the fire exit push bar covered in glow tape. I lean into it and step outside.

Daylight. Patches of sun. Not a breath of wind. A dumpster thirty feet away smells typically rancid. I hold one hand up to my forehead like a visor and squint around the alley behind the elementary school. But the governor isn’t here. I thought for sure he went this way to get some air.

Just as I’m about to slip back inside to alert Teddy, I hear soft groaning
behind
the dumpster. Maybe the governor is nervous and throwing up?

I step around the corner of the dumpster and for a split second I see it: Prayer Jones is leaning against the brick wall, her right leg dangling in the air, while Governor Watson crouches on the ground and sucks the heel of her right foot.

I’m going to repeat that because I needed to look at it twice myself. The governor of Connecticut. Is crouching behind a dumpster. Sucking the heel. Of a teenage girl’s foot.

I literally gasp and they quickly break it up, the governor slipping out from under Prayer’s leg and stepping away in one smooth motion.

“Alexis,” he says, trying to maintain some sense of decorum. “What can I do for you?”

Oh, no. No no no no no no no no no no no no. This did not just happen. There’s an instant pit in my stomach. The sky spins. My legs wobble. I brace myself with one hand on the side of the dumpster and try to breathe quietly through my nose.

“Uh…” I stammer, my mind reeling, unsure what to say first, wisely choosing to ignore the elephants in the alley doing weird stuff to each other. “They… need you inside.”

“Has it started? The hurricane made landfall?”

“Um…” I glance at Prayer Jones, her cheeks flushed as she discreetly slips on her right sandal. “I think Mr. Hutchins wanted to tell you himself—”

“
Just tell me,
” he barks. “Where’s Calliope?”

“…Not coming.”

Governor Watson blinks at me and then sprints back inside the auditorium. Prayer and I are left gaping at the exit door, which slowly drifts shut. After five paralyzed seconds, we also sprint back inside.

And everything slows down. I can hear my heartbeat. I can hear Prayer’s steps behind me, crunching the pebbles in the asphalt.

It all makes sense. Why the governor was behaving so strangely last night. Why he wanted to keep me at bay. Why he didn’t want to strategize about this morning. He has some bizarre fetish and wanted to scratch his itch. With a teenage farm girl! I feel like I’m going to be sick.

When I arrive on stage, time goes back to normal. I spot Teddy talking to the governor alone. I walk right over and join them, like it’s my job to be there. I want to confront the governor. Force an explanation out of him. Grab him by the shoulders and scream into his face,
“Are you insane? Sucking on some girl’s FOOT? What is that? Is she even 18? Not cool, asshole!”
But I say nothing. I’m speechless. Dazed. Eyes darting, thoughts cascading. Teddy and the governor barely register that I’m standing there. Too busy “frying bigger fish.”

“I’m telling you, Chuck, they’re
all
calling it. Even the guys at FEMA.”

“How is this even possible?” the governor asks.

“They’re saying the storm is following the Clipper model—one of the less sophisticated models developed back in the ‘80s. No one really pays it much attention these days. I mean, it had like a point-zero-zero-
three
percent chance. But it’s tracking along that line like white on rice, pushing dead into the Atlantic. Calliope’s gonna be a no show.”

Over my shoulder I can feel the auditorium go silent, the acoustics making Teddy’s private conversation more of a public declaration. I see Elijah standing by his computer, bewildered. He looks pleadingly at his sister, standing in the wings. She looks like someone just punched her in the gut, a devastating blow that’s more grief than pain. I turn to face the crowd, half-expecting to see smiles, cheers, waves of relief:
Disaster averted! There will be no flooding, no downed power lines or rooftop rescues. Calliope is no more!

Instead all I see is confusion, anger, betrayal. And I instantly recognize their disappointment because it’s partly mine as well. These kids are missing that sad, sick moment of
excitement
that comes during a disaster. That rush of being alive. That sense of purpose. The promise of recognition for a valiant job well done.

This storm was supposed to be my ticket to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. But it was supposed to be
their
ticket, too. Their ticket to a better college, a better life. These students left their homes and families to volunteer for forty-eight hours. They built levees, stacked sandbags, delivered fresh drinking water, evacuated the elderly, rescued stranded pets, spent their other waking hours creating presentations for the best disaster relief effort, collectively held their breath as the storm approached… And it didn’t come. And now they feel abandoned and betrayed. As if none of them were volunteering to actually help people. They were volunteering to help
themselves
.

In stunned silence they sit, staring blankly at the pull-down screen, watching the four static angles on the same patch of river meeting land, waiting in vain for the images to change, for rain to cascade down, for wind to rip the trees from their roots. But it’s simply a breezy, cloudy day. If I didn’t know better, I’d think it was a nice break from the hot, hazy summer we’ve been having, a brief respite from the norm. But the decent weather is not a welcome relief to these ambitious students, these rising seniors looking forward to standing out from the crowd, standing out from the throngs of ordinary college applicants. To these kids, it’s a harbinger of failure.

Just then, the doors at the back of the auditorium burst open with a bang.

“Whoo-hoo!” the skinny Latino hipster yells from the doorway. “Sayonara, Calliope!
Oh
yeah! Duncan: One. Rest of the stupid media: a big-fat-
nada
!”

At least
someone
around here is happy about the way things turned out: Duncan Rodriguez. I make a mental note to remember that name. I have a feeling he’ll be part of the media sooner rather than later. (Always good to have a friend in the press. And he could help sway the Latino youth vote, too!)

While Duncan makes his way down the aisle, high fiving anyone who’ll let him, the governor steps off the stage to shake Duncan’s hand, forcing a smile as if he’s thrilled Duncan was right.

“Well done, Duncan,” he says, giving his best Bill Clinton. “We
all
won today.”

“Some of us more than others,” Duncan quips, giving the governor’s shoulder a patronizing pat. And then he’s off again, collecting accolades from the crowd.

And while I’m sure everyone (somewhere deep down) is happy that the crisis was averted, it’s also clear (particularly as I watch Rani and Emily reluctantly high five Duncan) that part of them, a large part of them,
wanted
to be called to action—
wanted
to test their mettle and gain some real world experience that would make them feel alive and worthy, and, oh, yeah, by the way, also look amazing in a college essay. Their generation—and my own to some extent—seems destined to lack any real hardship. So we cling and rush to controversy, sometimes stirring it up unnecessarily. We need a Vietnam or an Occupy Wall Street or a massive hurricane to throw our collective energy behind. We need something to focus on other than ourselves. Otherwise our wheels are just spinning and it all seems so pointless: fighting to get into college for what exactly? So we can land a great job and make lots of money so our kids can go to college and land a great job and make lots of money so
their
kids can go to college… Where does it all end?

I don’t know. These kids don’t know, either. Our parents just taught us to fight. (That felt sort of like a campaign speech. Maybe I should jot that down.)

Duncan finishes his mini-gloating tour, exiting the way he came in, and the auditorium instantly feels like the loser’s headquarters at 11:30 on Election Night. Some students begin to trickle out; some hang around, not wanting to believe it’s over. But as the morning turns into early afternoon and the techies pack up their computer gear, the elementary school remains eerily quiet. There’s no driving rain on the roof, no high winds pounding at the doors and windows, no falling limbs outside. Calliope has taken a hard right turn off the eastern tip of Long Island. Montauk gets a passing shower. The storm wreaks havoc in the northern Atlantic, giving a few fish a bumpy night’s sleep. And that is all.

Not with a bang but with a whimper it ends. The goodbyes are brief and full of false promise. Appropriately, the governor shakes my hand without a word, just a sad, sheepish expression.

And I find myself at a loss for words, as well. My immediate shock at the governor’s actions turned quickly to anger, but that anger has already fizzled into disappointment. Not just because I saw Governor Watson in a rather uncompromising position. (
Heel-
sucking! I mean seriously, is that really a
thing?
) But because, quite simply, the governor abused his power. And he should know better.

And I’m also disappointed because the man I believed in, the man I thought was so different, turned out to be no better than the rest of the politicians out there using their authority to fulfill their fetishes and fantasies. (It’s like the Roman freakin’ Empire!) I thought politics was about helping people and getting things done. I thought it was about results, and character had nothing to do with it. But now I see that you can’t separate the man from the job. How you are in life is how you are at work. And it’s clear that what Governor Watson cares about the most isn’t the people of Connecticut. It’s himself. Because in the end, aside from being weird and sort of gross and recklessly inappropriate, what he did was extremely selfish. And when he officially gets caught (and he
will
get caught—maybe not this time, for
this
bizarre indiscretion, but he’ll screw up again and the world will discover who he really is—though I’m not going to be the one to rat him out), he’ll disappear for a while, but then he’ll bounce back. They all bounce back (see Spitzer, Weiner, Sanford). Yet his
staff
will be the ones who are outcast and unemployed.
They
will pay the price for
his
pathetic behavior. And screw you, Governor Watson, for almost putting me in that position and making me part of “your team.”