Girl Wonder Read online

  Amanda stopped and motioned toward one. “That’s my brother, Keith,” she said. “He’s the only person in the world who truly gets me. He works for the Peace Corps in Indonesia. Keith’s bipolar, you know. Mom pestered him to death about taking his meds, so he went someplace where she couldn’t bug him. It’s textbook.”

  In the picture, Keith was standing on a beach with his hands on his hips, smiling at the camera. In spite of the dreadlocks and goatee, you could tell he was Amanda’s brother. They had identical green eyes. He didn’t look unstable.

  “You can’t imagine how much I miss him. We’re like this close,” Amanda said, crossing her fingers.

  “My brother thinks I’m a flake,” I muttered.

  “I fell apart after Keith left,” she said. “I was a mess. God.”

  “What happened?” I asked.

  She shook her head, as if it were too painful to talk about. Amanda, I knew, saw a shrink. But like everything else, she made being messed up seem cool.

  Amanda had her own suite of rooms. Her bedroom was simple, elegant, and done all in white like a classy big-city hotel. Her closet, on the other hand, was as lavish and spacious as a Hollywood dressing room. It was decorated with old Wizard of Oz memorabilia. “Some of it’s from the original set,” she said. “My dad knows some movie people.”

  She tore through her closet and piled a bunch of clothes on her bed. “For you,” she said. “I don’t wear them enough. They’re too muted for me. But they’ll be great on you.”

  “You’ve got great taste,” I said, admiring the designer labels. I didn’t want to know how much her castoffs had cost. What would it be like to never have to buy stuff off the discount racks?

  “I have a whole philosophy on clothes,” she said, holding up a pair of big gold hoops to my ears. “The right clothing can help you tap into the more hidden parts of your personality.”

  “These are nice,” I said sincerely. “I like them a lot.”

  “Too bold for you,” she said, putting them away.

  “Isn’t that the point according to your philosophy? Maybe I secretly want to be bold.”

  “That’s not quite how it works,” she said. “You’re the kind of person who looks best in understated things and minimal makeup. As important as it is to experiment with your look, you also have to know what you can and can’t pull off.”

  What, exactly, had she just said?

  “Come in here.” She beckoned me into the bathroom. “I’ve got some lotion you might like.”

  The bathroom was like a spa, with an open shower, a Jacuzzi tub, and all kinds of fancy shampoos and conditioners. It smelled like an aromatherapy boutique. There were about ten different kinds of lotions on her counter, most with French labels. She handed me a bottle. “This stuff is great. It really softens the hands. You should use it twice a day.”

  “You’re giving this to me?”

  “Of course,” she said, smiling. “I don’t need it.”

  “Your house is really peaceful,” I said, feeling as out of place here as a black stain on a wedding dress.

  “My mom had this feng shui lady arrange the furniture,” she said. “It totally improves the chi. And twice a year we have a shaman come say a peace blessing.”

  Late that night, after we’d done our toenails, after we’d watched Love Story, after Amanda had made me over to look like the female lead of the movie—Ali MacGraw—she lifted up a corner of her mattress and retrieved a Ziploc baggie and a small silver pipe.

  “Pot helps me sleep,” she explained. “It gives me good dreams.”

  “Yeah. Me too,” I said lightly. Inside, my heart was pounding. My mind searched frantically for a way out of this that would leave me with my dignity intact. Not that I wasn’t curious. I was. But I was also terrified. “What about your mom?”

  “She takes her Ambien at nine. She’ll be out cold until morning.” Without bothering to turn around or cover herself up, Amanda stripped and put on her nightgown. It was the kind of thing you saw on Victoria’s Secret models.

  I went into the bathroom to change. Amanda teased me when I emerged. “Modesty isn’t a virtue, Char.”

  How could I explain myself to her? Nature got her body just right. She didn’t need to hide herself.

  She moved around the bedroom turning off all the lights. Then we went outside to her balcony. It was a beautiful night. The moon was just a sliver. Stars glimmered like tiny fragments of glass. It was cold too; a thin layer of frost glazed the metal railing. Someone was burning a fire nearby, and the air smelled of wood smoke.

  With great concentration, Amanda packed a small clump into the pipe. I watched intently, too alert to even blink. “Here,” she said, passing the pipe to me. “You’re the guest. You get to go first.”

  “You know—I think I’ll pass tonight. I’m kind of in a weird head space.”

  “Suit yourself. You’re missing out, though. This is great bud.”

  I lay down on the stone balcony, wishing I had the guts to be carefree like Amanda. “My mom smoked pot,” I said. This was sort of true. My mom had told me that she’d tried it once and that it had made her really paranoid. “She was a hippie. Before she got pregnant with me.”

  “That’s so sad,” Amanda said distractedly, the pipe in her mouth.

  I closed my eyes and listened to the sounds of the night: the leaves rustling through the trees, the creek, a raccoon fight. I wouldn’t mind being grounded every day if I got to live like Amanda.

  “I could stay at your house forever,” I said.

  Amanda rolled her head toward me, her eyes enormous emeralds. “I can’t wait to leave.”

  Seattle University—where the debate conference was being held—was just a stone’s throw from Capitol Hill, the coolest neighborhood in all of Seattle. According to Amanda, fitting in here (where the locals sported full-body tattoos, multiple piercings, and sometimes whips and chains) was a real coup.

  Seattle University was also the school where my mom taught.

  “I’ll stay out of your hair this week,” she promised as she drove me to the conference. “You can pretend I don’t exist if we happen to run into each other. I won’t be offended.”

  Because of her class schedule, she had to drop me off a few hours early. “You can hang out in my office,” she said. “Or wander around. Or…never mind.”

  “Never mind what?”

  Mom concentrated on parallel parking into a space. I watched her glumly. Since the incident the night of James Henry’s birthday, I hadn’t tried driving once. Even the thought of it twisted my stomach up in knots.

  “I was going to say that you could come to my eight o’clock. But I figured you wouldn’t be interested.”

  I stared out the window. Students stumbled across the urban campus with coffee cups in hand. No one was socializing at this hour. “What’s your lecture about?”

  “Tess of the d’Urbervilles.”

  “We read that in school last year. It was so depressing.”

  “Wasn’t it though?” She sighed dreamily.

  “I’ll come,” I said, unhooking my seat belt. “Maybe the guys will be cute.”

  She shot me a look. “Think again, jailbait. If one of them so much as looks at you, he’ll be getting an F for the semester. Besides—don’t you remember what happened to poor Tess?”

  “Not one good thing, right?”

  “Exactly!”

  No doubt to make a point, she sat me next to one of her older students—a distinguished-looking black man with enormous biceps. When he reached out to shake my hand, I noticed that half of his other arm was missing. I couldn’t help but stare. The skin at the end of his stump was knotty, like a hot dog.

  “Somalia,” he explained. “I got caught in a crossfire.”

  My face burned. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude.”

  “Don’t you worry about it,” he said. “It gets me sympathy from the ladies.”

  Mom approached the podium slowly and wit
h confidence. She looked around the auditorium and smiled at her students as if she were genuinely happy to see them. “Good morning, class,” she said, her voice filling every corner of the auditorium. The students who had been talking went instantly mute. “What did you think of last night’s reading?”

  A guy in the front row raised his hand. “I didn’t know milking cows could be so erotic.”

  The class laughed, but not in an out of hand way. My mom laughed too.

  “I’m glad I didn’t live back then,” a girl behind me said. “I’d definitely be a fallen woman.”

  “You slut,” the guy next to her teased.

  “Play nice, kids,” Mom said lightly. “Most of us would be considered morally bankrupt under the social mores of the Victorian age. And if we weren’t, we’d be really horny.”

  Who was this woman who was cracking sex jokes like a comedian? I stared transfixed the entire lecture. So did most of her students, who obviously worshipped my mom. When the lecture was over, my new friend, the guy with the missing arm, asked, “Well, what did you think?”

  “I didn’t realize she was so—” My hand flopped as I searched for the words.

  “Command presence,” he said. “That’s what your mother has. It’s a rare quality, hard to pin down, but you know it when you see it.”

  Could you have command presence and just not know it?

  I hoped so. I really hoped so.

  * * *

  The people who were running the debate conference—our coaches—were a mix of college debaters and law students. They were funny. Smart. They swore a lot. They talked so quickly it was impossible to understand them. When some brave kid in the front row asked if they could slow it down a little, they explained, “We’re training your ears. This is nothing.”

  Then they introduced to us the concept of spreading—a method of making as many arguments as possible within the given time constraints of a speech. One of the guys demonstrated the technique. When words exploded from his mouth like machine-gun fire, I slunk down in my seat. I’d never seen (or heard) anything like it. A girl could get hurt around here.

  I glanced around to see who else was freaked. No one else looked scared. However, I saw that the room was full of pen twirlers. I nudged Amanda. “I think we have to learn how to do that if we want to be taken seriously.”

  During the break, she tapped the guy in front of us. “How do you do that pen thing?”

  His eyes grew wide. “Amanda Munger?”

  When she looked at him blankly, he said, “I’m Eliot. Eliot Black. We had history together at Lake Washington?”

  Lake Washington High, I’d learned, was possibly Seattle’s toniest school, and was one of the schools that had kicked Amanda out. I’d never gotten the full story. Sometimes, with Amanda, it was better not to ask. Not that she was ashamed of her past. But she enjoyed having her secrets.

  “That year was kind of a blur,” she said to Eliot.

  “Kids still talk about you. That time you got caught in the lab with—”

  “Eliot,” she interrupted. “The pen thing?”

  “Oh. Right.” He brushed his hair out of his eyes. “It’s addicting,” he warned us.

  “Do all debaters flip pens?” I asked. “Is it like some kind of secret requirement?” Pen twirling. Bullshitting. Speed-talking. Debate was not at all what I’d been expecting—not that I’d known what to expect. Eliot shrugged. “Some people say it distracts the judges when the other side is speaking. I like it because it annoys my teachers.” He showed us how to use our middle finger to propel our pens around our thumbs.

  Amanda got it right away. She made it seem effortless.

  “You’re pushing too hard,” she said, watching my technique.

  That afternoon, when we’d all gathered after a quick lunch, we discussed the debate resolution at such length that I lost all sense of its meaning. It was like a cube drawing that suddenly shifts shape when you stare at it for too long. By the time the coaches dismissed us, I had a tower of handouts in my possession—data about everything you could imagine that might relate to energy.

  There were essays on global warming and the high price of foreign oil. There were abstracts of testimony from the Congressional Record for and against drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. There were articles about solar, wind, wave, nuclear, and hydroelectric power. There were studies of various government taxes and acts.

  Some of the readings downplayed the oil crisis. There were reasons to be hopeful. The world was on the brink of a new adventure. The bulk of the stuff, however, warned of an unfathomable global crisis. The world was fucked.

  “Just put this evidence in your files,” the coaches said.

  Evidence? Files?

  The other kids had come prepared. They dragged boxes of information around campus like pets. It seemed like Amanda and I were the only two people at the conference who hadn’t known that at the end of the week there’d be a tournament. Why hadn’t Mr. Peterson told us? Then again, Amanda and I spent so much time passing notes back and forth during debate that it was entirely possible we’d missed hearing him.

  “Shoot me now,” I moaned when we got back to our dorm room, collapsing on my tiny twin bed.

  “We’ll need ammunition,” Amanda said.

  “Uh—I was kidding?”

  She slung her purse over her shoulder. “What I meant was that if we’re going to do this debate shit, we’ll need supplies. Let’s go shopping.”

  “We’re not supposed to leave campus—”

  She started for the door. “Are you coming, or what?”

  We walked out to Amanda’s Jeep. She programmed her GPS. Then a computerized woman directed us to an office supply store just a short ways from campus. Within minutes, we’d filled our shopping cart with file boxes, folders, legal pads, scissors, tape, and pens. Amanda paid with her mom’s credit card, and we loaded it all up in her car. I stood at the passenger side waiting for her to unlock the doors.

  “I hate Walmart,” Amanda said, gesturing at the one across the street.

  “Me too. They’re really big in Florida.”

  “I keep forgetting that you’re Southern.”

  “I’m not,” I protested. “I just lived there for a few years.”

  She grabbed me by the wrist. “Let’s go,” she said, walking in the direction of Walmart.

  “Wait,” I said, jogging to keep up.

  “I need some makeup,” she said. “They have it there. Real cheap.”

  “You’re not making any sense. You just said you hated Walmart.”

  Her mouth twitched. “Ever heard of the five-finger discount program?”

  I froze.

  “Don’t worry, Char,” she said, linking her arm through mine. “It’s so not a big deal. Walmart is one of the most corrupt places ever. There’s a great documentary about the place that you should watch sometime. I do have principles. I’d never do this at Nordstrom’s.”

  The store was hopping with kids and moms. In spite of the bustle and noise, I felt removed from my surroundings, like I’d stepped into some alternate dimension.

  Attention Walmart Shoplifters!

  Amanda picked up a packet of eye shadow and admired the shimmery colors. “I could give you a makeover tonight,” she said. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed her tucking a tube of lipstick into the pouch of her hoodie.

  A sales clerk approached us. “Can I help you girls with something?”

  I couldn’t meet his eyes.

  Amanda crossed her arms and stared him up and down. “Where are the condoms? My boyfriend is coming into town next weekend and, well…you know.” His ears glowing like hot coals, he led us to another aisle. “Which do you recommend?” Amanda asked. “Ribbed? Or studded?”

  When the guy turned and fled, Amanda cackled like a witch.

  I stared at her, incredulous. “That was a ploy to get rid of him?”

  “Sometimes it’s like taking candy from a baby.” She bumped my hip
. “Hey. Earth to Charlotte! What’s wrong?”

  “My head hurts,” I lied, furious with myself.

  “Most stores budget for shoplifting,” she said reassuringly. “Technically, we’re helping them to keep their numbers normal. And as long as you take the cheaper things, you don’t have to worry about the sensors.”

  What was wrong with me? Wasn’t I supposed to want to do this stuff?

  Amanda grabbed a People magazine from the newsstand. “This we buy. It makes us look legit.”

  A security guard was stationed by the exit. I was so nervous I nearly choked on my gum. Amanda made some inane remark to him about the weather. If he was checking her out for goods, they weren’t the stolen kind.

  “Is your head still bothering you?” she asked as we walked back to the car.

  When I nodded, she tossed something at me.

  It was a box of Excedrin. Extra strength.

  She was impossible. She was magic.

  Stock issues. Paradigms. Inherency. Tabula rasa.

  My mind was reeling with these new debate vocabulary words and phrases. Every night that week I stayed up late trying to cram all the new information. I was mainlining coffee like it was going out of style. Next to the other kids at the conference, I was but a sapling in a rain forest. A grain of sand in the North Cascades. A pebble in the Puget Sound. And it was getting worse.

  “We’re going to play you some footage from last year’s nationals,” our coaches said on the fourth day of the conference, “so you can see how it’s really done.”

  The two two-person teams were murderous. They jabbed their fingers like darts. They lacerated one another with their wits. They tossed facts around like grenades. And they talked so fast I had no idea what they were saying.

  Something about Africa? Health care?

  Fact: Debate was the art of public speaking.

  Fact: I got nervous when teachers called on me in class.

  Yes—I’d known both of these things when I applied for the team. But I’d talked myself into believing that if I showed up to practice, did the research, and surrounded myself with other debaters, I would learn public speaking through osmosis.

  I reminded myself that there were good reasons for me to be doing debate.