Girl Wonder Read online

  Amanda was pissed at me.

  Neal liked me.

  A snake had pooped on my wrist.

  Neal LIKED me.

  I was no longer a virgin.

  NEAL! NEAL! NEAL!

  It was dark still, but you could tell it was morning now. The birds were starting to chirp. Someone struggled to start a car. The ignition failed to catch. There was another sound too, a strange rhythmic thumping. It took me a minute to realize that it was Baby, tapping her nose against the glass terrarium.

  “Let’s just keep this between us,” Neal whispered when he finally woke up.

  I studied his fingernails, massaging them with my hands. They were so smooth and pink, like tiny babies. “Even from Amanda?”

  “Especially from Amanda.” He rolled toward the wall.

  Trying to guess what he was thinking, I said, “You’re probably right. We wouldn’t want her to feel left out.”

  “Yeah. Poor Amanda,” he laughed. “If you’re really worried, we could include her next time.”

  Next time. NEXT TIME!

  I mussed up his hair. “Think again, buster. Best friends don’t share everything.”

  “Too bad. I guess you’ll have to be good enough for two.”

  Michael/Jesus knocked on the door. “Good morning, kids. Are you decent?”

  We got dressed quickly and hustled back to the hotel.

  Amanda sat next to me on the bus ride home. I guessed she was no longer mad about my debate performance yesterday. “I don’t know why I choked like that,” I said, apologizing again. “I talked to Peterson. Told him you should probably have a different partner. Told him how much I suck.”

  “I’m so over it, Char,” she said, resting her head on my shoulder. “You know how much I adore you. Now let me sleep. I’m exhausted.”

  She didn’t ask where I’d been the night before—which made me think that she too had been out all night. I knew that she and her boyfriend Boone had an understanding. But I couldn’t ask her about her evening without incriminating myself—though secretly I was dying to incriminate myself.

  Coach Peterson gave us the next week off for “mental rejuvenation.” Though I was delighted to forget my public-speaking debut/debacle, the forced break squeezed me out of Neal’s GATE-wing orbit. And since “we” were keeping “us” a secret, there was no one I could ask about what was going on with “him.”

  Especially not “him.”

  On Tuesday night I stayed up late studying. It was the end of the first quarter and I had a Chemistry final the next day. Because of all the time I’d been putting into debate and my new friends, I was nowhere near prepared.

  Around midnight, my bedroom door swung open.

  “I was out in the hall,” my brother said, his hair all messed up from sleeping. “I saw your light. How’s it going?”

  “Ever hear of a thing called knocking?” I asked, trying to hide the all-too babyish-looking chemistry flash cards that I’d had to make for myself.

  He scooped up the cat—sleeping by a heat vent on the floor—and sat down at the end of my bed. “Do you want some help? I could quiz you.”

  “Got it covered,” I said, trying to ignore the fact that he was frowning at me, and trying really hard to ignore the fact that my twelve-year-old brother had a better grasp of chemistry than I did.

  “You haven’t told me anything about your debate tournament. Was it cool?”

  “Yeah,” I said, dryly. “It was cool.”

  Now that I’d officially hurt his feelings, James Henry got up to leave. He paused at the door. “What’s your problem, anyhow? I was just trying to be nice.”

  “Go back to sleep,” I said with a lump in my throat.

  Wednesday afternoon, on my way to Chemistry, I spotted Neal down in the regular kids’ hall. “Hey, Neal!” I called, waving to get his attention, my heart racing full throttle.

  He brushed past me without acknowledging my existence. But—he’d pressed a note into my hand. The Back Forty. Now.

  The Back Forty was the lot where the regular students were supposed to park. It was unpaved and at least half a mile from the school—well out of range of Shady Grove’s fat security guards. I glanced in the direction of my class and bit my lip. Not that my teacher would care or even notice if I didn’t show. This was one of the perks of being in the regular classes. Our teachers bought whatever lame excuses we dished out for skipping. It was easier for them to do this than to fill out the convoluted discipline form. Hadn’t Miss Gordon told us that she believed in experiential education? What was going on with Neal and me was definitely experiential and educational.

  “Adios, suckers,” I said to no one in particular as I walked out the double back doors. My body buzzing with excitement and nerves, I tried to think of what Amanda would tell me to do.

  Just act like you’ve got someplace to be and a legitimate reason to be there.

  Neal was waiting for me at an old Buick, leaning against the hood with his arms crossed. I could hear Amanda again. Keep him guessing. Act a little bored.

  Though I wanted to ask him whose car this was, I studied the ends of my hair. “This better be good. I’m missing my Chemistry final.”

  He opened the back door, ushered me inside, and pulled off my shirt. “Consider this a bonus experiment,” he breathed into my ear.

  How could I argue with that?

  Helium. Neon. Argon. Krypton. Xenon. Radon.

  It hurt even worse the second time around.

  Third time was the charm.

  Oh, baby!

  We always met at a different car.

  Sometimes Neal would hide and make me guess his location, sending clues via text messages. If it was raining, he’d direct me to certain closets or locker rooms. If you dare, he always added.

  I dared.

  I double-dared.

  I double/triple/quadruple-dared.

  I never asked how he knew about these places. All that mattered was that I was the one who was with him now.

  ME!

  Not some prissy prep school girl.

  College applications?

  They could wait.

  Parental drama?

  Wasn’t any of my business, now, was it?

  Extracurricular activities?

  Got it covered, Dad.

  I doodled his name inside my notebooks, where no one could see.

  Charlotte and Neal.

  Neal and Charlotte.

  Neal. Neal. Neal.

  We did it in the bathroom in the library.

  Amanda was shelving books just outside the thin door. I could hear her popping her bubble gum and singing along to some song by the Violent Femmes. I take, 1, 1, 1 for my sorrow…

  “What if she hears?” I whispered.

  “Even better!” he whispered back, driving me delirious by kissing my neck.

  The secrecy was a thrill. But I wanted the whole world to know about us. Or at least all of Shady Grove.

  “What are we?” I asked.

  “We’re great,” he said. “Don’t you think?”

  “Yes,” I whispered. “We’re great.”

  I hope you know this will go down on your permanent record.…

  Neal. Neal. Neal.

  He was like a drug.

  He was better than a drug.

  Just say yes.

  Yes.

  Yes. Yes. Yes.

  Hello. My name is Charlotte Locke, and I’m addicted to Neal Fitzpatrick.

  So what if I wasn’t in GATE? So what if my grades were slipping?

  I was getting an A in life. An A-plus-plus, thank you very much.

  One plus one equaled us.

  Neal and me.

  It was winter in substance if not in fact. Sometime in mid-November the rain set in, moving over the landscape in great quavering sheets. If you lived in Washington, you inevitably became a student of precipitation. You learned to differentiate between a fine mist and a medium drizzle. You contemplated the great fat drops that blew
in from the Pacific and that sometimes smelled of fish. You began to realize that there were subtle variations to the colors of the clouds. The sky, in fact, began to seem like a living, breathing thing. Some days the weather felt personal. Most days the weather felt Biblical.

  Out here you learned how to put a positive spin on negative weather. The Saturday before Thanksgiving, all the ski resorts in the state opened. The forecasters were going nuts. “What a winter it’s going to be for skiers and snowboarders!”

  As usual, my brother had lucked out. Snowboarding was a go.

  Every Saturday now, James Henry, Milton, and a bunch of the other brilliant kids from the Barclay School would ride the ski bus up to Stevens Pass. Here they learned, competed, and generally had a blast.

  My brother—according to my brother—was a natural at snowboarding. “And you should see Milton!” he exclaimed one night at dinner. “He’s unbelievable. He could probably go pro.”

  “Lucky him,” I said.

  “I’ll probably be able to go pro in a few years,” James Henry added.

  “Lucky you.”

  Lucky lucky everyone.

  Unfortunately for me, they didn’t have lessons to help you navigate the kind of wilderness that I was braving. Debate. Shady Grove. Amanda. Neal. All I could do was stumble around blindly and hope for the best.

  Hope is a four-letter word.

  In November, we went to two more debate tournaments—both as hellish for me as Whitman. At my second tournament, I started to develop a stutter. At my third tournament, my hands and legs trembled in every round. But because Amanda was such a force, and because Amanda overcompensated for my incompetence, and because Amanda was so lucky lucky lucky, we kept winning and winning and winning.

  At debate practice sessions I saw the other students shake their heads and wince when it was my turn to speak. A couple of times Mr. Peterson tried to work with me one-on-one. He’d give me a topic, say, for example, solar energy, and then he’d ask me to list its pros and cons. Simple. Easy.

  Except that it was impossible.

  “I do see that you’re trying,” he said. “But you need to relax. You need to breathe.”

  Amanda had no problems fighting off our blood-hungry opponents. She feasted on teams all across the northwest. The competition nicknamed her the Terminator. Her voice was her weapon, and what a weapon it was. So much of what she said was off-the-cuff bullshit. Like, for example, the time she argued that drilling for oil in the Arctic would trigger massive earthquakes that would ultimately cause the North Pole to melt, killing off Santa and Rudolph and otherwise destroying the world. And maybe Mars too, come to think of it. Who knew what she really believed about anything? But with policy debate, you had to take your own personal feelings out of the equation—while, at the same time, sounding utterly convinced of whatever point you were arguing. This was Amanda’s genius.

  “It’s a game,” Mr. Peterson reminded me. “It’s just a game.”

  “It’s a game,” Neal said. “Winner takes all.”

  “It’s a game,” Amanda said. “You have to play to win.”

  But during the debate rounds, when the opposing team members sounded so deadly serious as they attacked point by point your every last argument, it was hard to remember this. It was hard to remember this during the cross-examination period, when you were being questioned so harshly that you began to feel like the collapse of the entire world might well be your fault if you conceded your point.

  Every time we went into a round I felt dizzy with responsibility, so dizzy that I couldn’t follow through with the steps I needed to take—such as arguing, such as linking together evidence, such as finding the holes in the other team’s case, such as speaking in full sentences, such as breathing—to hold up the structure of the debate.

  I told myself that Amanda actually came to enjoy the added challenge of having me for a partner. Making up for my flubs upped the stakes of the game and became a test of her ability to prevail against impossible odds.

  Me. The impossible odd.

  To compensate for my incompetence, I was now doing the lion’s share of our research, filling our file boxes with brilliant evidence that I’d found on Google or in articles from Scientific American.

  “I’m not totally worthless,” I joked—feeling totally worthless.

  “No way. We’ve got a good system going,” Amanda assured me.

  But at a team meeting right before the Christmas holidays, when Mr. Peterson announced that he’d be switching me to dramatic interpretation after the New Year, I realized that she’d finally said something to him about me.

  Who could fault her? We both knew I was holding her back.

  Truth be told, I was relieved. But why, I wondered, hadn’t she said anything to me about it? Mr. Peterson went on to talk about other team changes, such as Diego wanting to switch to Lincoln-Douglas. Then he dropped the bomb.

  “Neal and Amanda will be our new policy dynamo.”

  So. This was why she hadn’t said anything.

  Mr. Peterson beamed at Neal and Amanda from behind the lectern. “I think we have a real shot at winning Nationals this year,” he said.

  In spite of my dismay, I made sure to be the first to congratulate them. Amanda hugged me. “Oh, Char! I was worried you’d be upset. It’s nothing personal. You know that, right?”

  A couple of our teammates were watching this exchange, not bothering to mask their curiosity. The only way to keep my dignity was to own up to my shortcomings. “We both knew this was coming,” I said, blowing my hair out of my eyes. “You deserve a better partner. Someone who knows how to argue without tripping over her tongue.”

  “That’s not why—”

  Neal gripped my shoulders in a big-brotherly way—you’d never have guessed what we’d been doing in the backseat of his car right before this meeting. “So can we count on you to help with research?”

  I forced a laugh. “Sure. If you pay me.”

  “We can work something out,” he said, giving me a knowing wink.

  Amanda was fiddling with her necklace, acting like there was some flaw in the design that she’d never noticed before. You could tell, however, that she was paying close attention to the look I was giving Neal, that she—for lack of a better phrase—smelled a rat.

  As I was leaving the room, Mr. Peterson stopped me. “I know this is hard for you,” he said. “Not everyone can do debate. George Bush, for example. And he still got to be president.”

  I didn’t thank him for the encouragement. Me and George Bush. What a pair.

  I made it to the bathroom before breaking down. Amanda followed me—blithely unaware that she was part of the problem. She was leaning against the sink when I came out of my stall, applying a fresh coat of ruby gloss to her mouth. Her lips were as moist as roses in the morning—unlike mine, which were perpetually chapped.

  She fished a packet of Kleenex from of her purse and handed me a couple. “Blow it off, Char. Everyone knows that Peterson plays favorites. I got lucky.”

  Lucky.

  “You could find another way to impress the colleges,” she said.

  I splashed cold water on my face. “Yeah. Like maybe I’ll join the math bowl.” I was not about to quit debate—my one ticket to the upper echelons of Shady Grove.

  “I need a cigarette,” she said. “Want to come outside with me?”

  I snapped my fingers. “That’s it. I’ll start a smoking club. Then I can be president of something. That’ll look good on my résumé.”

  “You’ll probably have to start smoking first.” She dabbed a lash out of her eye. “Let’s go have ourselves a meeting.”

  She dragged me out to the woods that bordered the edge of Shady Grove’s campus. It was raining, but the trees provided shelter. We shared a slightly damp stump that made up part of an old campfire ring. The moisture brought out the crystal flecks in the rocks. Amanda lit two cigarettes, then handed one to me. “Here,” she said. “Everyone’s got to start somew
here.”

  I pretended not to notice the lipstick smear on the filter, though it kind of grossed me out. But not as much as inhaling the thing did. It was like spraying a can of grit into my lungs. Amanda cackled as I coughed and coughed. “It gets easier,” she said. “Trust me.”

  Rain dripped down through the branches, a strangely soothing sound. I waited until I’d smoked half my cigarette before commenting on her new partnership with Neal.

  “You two will be great,” I said. Fanfuckingtastic, I didn’t add.

  “Char—I know,” she said.

  “You know you’ll be great?”

  She looked at me pointedly. “I know. I know about you and Neal.”

  I swallowed. “Neal didn’t want me to say anything.”

  “It’s written all over your face.” She flicked her hand dismissively. “I guess you’re not a virgin anymore?”

  “You thought I was a virgin?”

  “Duh. You were like the queen of virgins when we first met.” With a stick, I began demolishing the charred remains of a log. “If there’s ever stuff you want to ask me—” she offered.

  The air smelled bad, like garbage. Somewhere nearby, there was a dump. Amanda pulled a Twix out of her purse and offered me half. I shook my head. I hadn’t been hungry since I’d started seeing Neal. My clothes were getting baggy. In bed at night, when I traced my fingers over the contours of my body, I could feel the outline of my ribs.

  A crow swooped down and landed on a nearby log. It watched us with its beady eyes, and cocked its head as if trying to understand our silence. Amanda tossed it a chunk of Twix, and it flew off with a strand of caramel dangling from its beak like a worm.

  “Are you guys like boyfriend-girlfriend now?” she asked.

  “Neal’s never said…I don’t know. I think so. What do you think?”

  “Why does he want to keep it a secret?”

  I frowned. “He says it makes things more exciting.”

  It was raining harder now. I had to hold my notebook over my head to stay dry.

  “Hmm.” Amanda fiddled with a thread that was unraveling at the hem of her miniskirt. “If you want my opinion,” she finally said, “I think it’s weird.”

  It was Sunday. Christmas was less than a week away. Miraculously, my family was all up at the same time, congregating in the kitchen. Mom was grading papers, humming Christmas carols and drinking something called kombucha that looked and tasted nasty but was supposed to be some kind of miracle cure for everything. Dad was reading the New York Times. He’d just gotten a new pair of glasses and was very proud of them. He made a point of cleaning them every five minutes. James Henry was making blueberry pancakes, his one cooking specialty. He only made them on very special occasions. The very special occasion this time was that he was being considered for a full scholarship for a summer school program at Columbia. We were heading to New York for Presidents’ Day weekend so that James Henry could interview with the admissions committee in person.