The Aristobrats (10 page)

“And welcome!”
Courtney added dramatically.

The Crickettes laughed and then started whispering something to each other.

Parker blinked.

Hello? And Welcome?

What was that about? It must be a
seriously
super-bad feeling to think that somebody might wave and then start gossiping about you right behind your back and in front of your face at the same time. Parker felt sorry for people who'd do a thing like that. She looked down at the Crickettes again and tried to put it together. They wouldn't gossip about her…would they?

The bleachers filled up quickly as the game started. But, Parker noticed, it was like everything was upside-down. At the very bottom of the bleachers were the good people. People like Cosima, Suzanne, Felicia, Jake, Dylan, Brodie, Alex, and Sam.

People like that
never
sat in the front.

The Lylas had the top bleacher but then they were surrounded by the nobody people. The nobodies were sitting in the completely
wrong
place and now took up half of the second-to-top row.
(Ah, hello…where exactly were their shoes supposed to go now?)
Allegra Oliphant and the Einsteins blocked Kiki's view of everyone else—or more specifically, blocked everyone else's view of Kiki. And then all
those
nobody people were like invitations to more nobody people and soon every seat in the bleachers was filled. Good people at the bottom, bad people at the top, and the Lylas at, sort of, nowheresville.

“This is utter crap!” Kiki blurted. She stood up and marched down the bleachers. “Highly unamusing!” she mumbled as she went.

The rest of the Lylas followed her—mostly because none of them wanted to be left up there in North Kabumsville alone. They gathered by the water fountain around the corner of the school. Kiki huffed and puffed and scraped the mud off her heels. Parker slapped brown leaves out of Ikea's hair.

“The Big Game is so out,” Kiki proclaimed with a flick of grass and a clump of mud. “Can you
believe
the people sitting with us?”

The crowd screamed from the bleachers. The band burst into song. The Tigers had just scored a goal against Fox Chapel and Tribb and Beaver were doing the Hi-Fi-Ya in the field. Cricket waved. And Tinsley's whistle was hard to miss.

Parker took the Cherry Carmex out of her pocket and layered some on her lips.

“Are you going to kiss Tribb now?” Ikea asked with a mixture of hope and confusion.

“My lips are just chapped,” she stated as she squeezed more from the tube.
Unfortunately.

Something caught Parker's eye from down the stairs. It was James leaning silently beside a tree. His sweatshirt was zipped up close to his chin and his black jeans were worn out at the bottom edge where they dragged behind his shoes. It was really no different than how he usually dressed for school.

James would have blended into the scenery completely—nearly been invisible—if he hadn't been looking directly up at her. Parker could see those sharp blue eyes, even at fifty yards away. He peered out from behind the curls of his hair. He looked like he wanted something but she couldn't tell what.

Parker frowned. There was nothing high profile at all about James. He was
anti
profile, in fact. Just the kid who sat in the back of the auditorium. The kid who took weird photographs. The kid who had nothing to say. Just speaking to James knocked a person down a few notches on the populadder, if not off it completely. But there was something soft and comfortable about him. Something, Parker thought, that only she could see.

She didn't look away this time. Instead, she felt it all unraveling in front of her eyes. School. Home. Her seat in the auditorium. Her spot on the bleachers. Her first kiss with Tribb—the only one she might have. And now this.

“Check out the stalkarazzi.” Kiki nodded over toward James. “Does he take that camera wherever he goes?”

“What?” Parker flinched. She realized she was still putting on Carmex.

“
James!
” Kiki said again. “
Duh!
By that tree!”

“Oh…” Parker looked back down but James had disappeared. “Yeah.”

“Earth to space cakes!” Kiki said. “Come in!”

***

So far, the Big Game was not going
at all
the way Parker expected.

The Tigers were winning against Fox Chapel of course, but that wasn't the point. It was impossible to be a shining example of what an eighth grader could be when nobody saw you being anything. When no one noticed you tossing autumn leaves into the air or checked out your golden, streakless tan. And honestly, Parker didn't even care about being an example of anything—she just wanted to be her regular self, her
popular
self, wearing the softest, most unbelievably pettable cashmere sweater and a one-of-a-kind vintage belt and really approachable jeans, but there was just no opportunity for it. The Lylas couldn't even sit down because sitting in the
wrong
seats was worse than sitting in
no
seats. So they just had to stand in front of the Gatorade table the whole time.

All they did was watch the frupping game!

“My dad thinks I can do better,” Ikea blurted. She'd barely said a word since they'd gotten there.

“Pressure from the rental unit?” Plum questioned. “That's a newsflash.”

“I mean, I don't know how I could do any better than ‘Milestone Cases in Supreme Court History'…” Ikea fretted. She bit down so hard at the corner of her thumb, she nearly ripped her cuticle off. “I stayed up three nights in a row just practicing it.”

“You
can't
do better,” Plum assured her. “It was like the best webcast segment in the history of all webcast segments.”

“It was totally faboush, darl!” Kiki exclaimed. “I had
no idea that
Lovell v. Griffin
upheld the right of Jehovah's witnesses to distribute pamphlets without a license,” she admitted. “I mean, that's good stuff.”

“I hate the webcast,” Ikea snarled. “It's the most useless, dumbest, stupidest thing in the entire world. And…” she ranted, “I looked up ‘abecedarian',” she told them. “It means learning your
a, b, c
's. Like being in kindergarten. It means even Ms. Hotchkiss thought it was pathetic.”

“I hate the webcast too, Park,” Plum confessed. “It's so…brown.”

“I'm not doing it.” Ikea stomped her Eliza B. flat on the grass.

“What about Yale?” Parker asked. “What about your dad?”

“I'm sick and tired of caring what my dad thinks. And Yale is just going to have to find some other reason to accept me,” she said with a huff.

Parker stepped back. Ikea seemed so super-important right then. It was hard to imagine Yale, or any school, wouldn't accept someone with an amazingtude rating as high as Ikea's.

“If Ikea's not doing it…” Kiki looked at Parker but she didn't really have to finish the sentence. None of them did.

The sound of the cheers signaled another point for the Tigers. The game was coming to an end. The chances for the Acorns to recover were super-skinny to none (as if Parker even cared). Tribb and the rest of the team were doing spazzy victory dancing around the field: the Butter Churner, Tossing the Seeds, Raising the Roof, the Sprinkler. Parker was wondering why “not embarrassing” had never made it onto her EGB list
.

She tried to get Tribb's attention, but it was pointless. Tribb was in Tigerland. No one else but the team existed.

“The webcast is
so
over,” Plum said. Parker watched the game clock count down the last ten seconds. The buzzer signaled the game was done. “Isn't it, Parker?” she asked.

Tribb ran past them with the rest of the team. Parker pretended she was in the middle of a
very important
discussion (which was the truth) that couldn't be interrupted (which wasn't the truth). She did her I'm-here-but-I'm-not-desperate hair flip, but he was gone before she could tell if he saw it.

The webcast was ruining her life. She knew that for a fact.

“Somebody needs to tell Hotchkiss,” Parker said.

“Don't look at
me
,” Kiki declared.

“Hotchkiss gives me hives.” Plum crossed her arms in front of her new
product
.

“I'll tell her,” Ikea offered. “It's my fault we did it in the first place.”

“It's not your fault we did it in the first place, Ike,” Parker said.
It's my fault.
She knew what she had to do. “I'll talk to Hotchkiss on Monday.”

They say that right before you die your life flashes in front of your eyes. And whoever
they
are, they're right.

Parker sat in the waiting room of Hotchkiss's office thinking about that very thing. But it wasn't her life flashing in front of her eyes; it was the fictional life of Chingachgook, the last of the Mohicans—the theme of the day playing over and over on the Super-Screen across the hall. There was something about waiting to talk to Hotchkiss while watching hi-definition 3-D tomahawks come flying at your head that seemed so apropos.

Parker looked up at the old wall clock over Alexander's head. Alexander was Hotchkiss's assistant. He guarded her door like a three-headed dog. They both waited for the second hand to move from the ten to the twelve, the precise moment that Hotchkiss would see her.

Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock—

“Parker Bell!” Hotchkiss opened her office door with a glossy smile. “Come in. Come in. My door is always open.”

Ms. Hotchkiss's office was the most colorful, flowery, and cheerfully decorated spot in the school: taffeta drapes, butter-yellow walls with matching floral-print furniture, silk-covered Regency chairs, and a low gilt table with a vase of fresh flowers on it. The space was as confuzzling as say, Kiki shopping at Urban Outfitters—a type of environment and a type of person that just seemed so wrong when you stuck them together.

“Iced ginger ale?” Hotchkiss offered.

“No, thank you.” Parker sat down on the striped slipper chair across from Hotchkiss. She felt a little Gretel entering a house made of gingerbread.

“And how
is
your lovely mother, Ellen?” Hotchkiss asked.

“She's lovely,” Parker said politely.

“How nice to hear.”

Hotchkiss took a sip of her own summery beverage, sat her endoskeleton back in her Regency chair, and waited for Parker to say something that might trigger the Terminator's internal programming to complete her mission of destroying the world one Wally at a time. She smiled.

Parker had spent the entire day Sunday practicing this speech in front of the mirror. But it really didn't matter because there was no way a person could prepare for the horror of the in-your-face, one-on-one moment with the actual living tissue. Plus there was nowhere to put her arms, because the slipper chair didn't have any. The Regency chair had all the arms a person could want. Hotchkiss was very calculating about the whole who-sat-where thing.

Okay. Now's the time. Just start talking.

“My classmates and I,” Parker began, “would like to
thank
you for the webcast assignment. Er…opportunity.”
Okay. Good start. Gracious. Smart. Responsible. Even the slip said Natural.
“We have
truly
learned so much about the world of online broadcasting and the internal workings of a production studio.”

Hotchkiss was smiling, nodding and sipping. All good signs.

“
And…”
Parker continued. (Never say “But,” no matter what you do. Parker read that in last month's article in
Lucky
on persuasive speaking. “But” was just an excuse. While “And” was filled with possibility. “And” was the word to use.) “
And
…”
she said, “with the immense workload we hope to take on as we prepare for our collective futures
and
with Ikea setting her sites on Yale in five years
and
with Plum and all her art stuff
and
Kiki and all her…studying and things
and
with me, of course, and my interest in…” Parker tried to think. The idea came flying at her like tomahawks from a Super-Screen. “My interest in the Native American Peoples—”

“Native American Peoples?” Hotchkiss seemed suspicious of that last part. “Really?” She poured a ginger ale, plopped in three ice cubes, and pushed it toward Parker. (Which was fortunate because all this speaking was making Parker insanely thirsty.)

“Yes.” Parker sipped the bubbly drink. “Native American Peoples…” She had to concentrate on swallowing. “Peoples whom I'm hoping to study more of.”
Wait. That was wrong.
“
Of
whom I'm hoping to study more,” she corrected.

“You can't get out of the webcast assignment, Parker, if that's where all this hoo-ha is headed,” Hotchkiss stated.

“But…but…but…”
Oops…oops…oops.

“You, Kiki, Plum, and Ikea,” Hotchkiss continued, “have been given this assignment—this opportunity, as you phrased it—with the expectation that you will complete it.” She made the word “expectation” sound like a poison that killed instantly upon contact. “And that
expectation
is non-negotiable,” she said.

“But…but…but…”

Hotchkiss stood up from her chair and smoothed out the hem of her skirt.

“Fitz Orion has very specific intentions for the endowment monies he has so generously given to this school,” Hotchkiss explained. So many of the words were sounding poisonous now, Parker thought she might just drop dead on the silk slipper chair. “So you girls are just going to have to live with it. And perhaps you'll find a way to incorporate your interest in the Native American Peoples.” Hotchkiss walked over to her door. The clip-clop sound of her chic but sensible high heels was noticeably absent on her carpet. “Or perchance any of your
other
interests?”

Parker stood up. She stifled a burp from the ginger ale. She suddenly wished she knew how to belch the Alma Mater like Graham Henry did. Her life was over anyway. Eighth grade was ruined. The Lylas would never speak to her again. She'd leave Wallingford without ever being anyone important. Might as well go out with a bang. And a burp.

“You're a leader, Parker. Nearly everyone in your class looks up to you, even your best friends.” Hotchkiss opened the door of her cheerful and sunny office. “A leader must decide what to do with her time. She can waste it wallowing in her problems. Or she can do something about them.” Hotchkiss raised her cyborg eyebrows. “I'm sure you and your friends will find a way to make Wallingford Academy proud.” (
We should have sent Plum
, Parker thought. At least
Plum
had the Hairy Eyeball.
She
only had indigestion.)

“Um…so—”

“Delightful of you to stop by.” Hotchkiss smiled. “And
do
say hello to your mother.”