Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board (Weeping Willow High) Read online

  On our way into the house, I overheard Evan tell Charlie, “She thinks she’s getting a car for her birthday tomorrow.”

  The Richmonds were wealthy, or at least financially comfortable to the extent that I was pretty sure Olivia’s mom didn’t clip coupons out of the Sunday paper for dishwashing liquid and frozen low-cal dinners like my mom did. It was safe to assume that there would be a cute economy car with a bow on it in the Richmonds’ driveway waiting for Olivia in the morning. I found myself fighting a sudden surge of jealousy. I’d turned sixteen in July, and I’d known with certainty even months before my own Sweet Sixteen that there would be no car provided to me by my parents.

  As the engine of Evan’s pickup revved behind us, Candace muttered, “When it’s my birthday, can Charlie be my present?’

  An hour later, as we all floated in the pool and conversation had once again returned to Homecoming, I watched distractedly as dark, angry storm clouds rolled in from the south. I was lingering in the deep end of the pool, treading water, keeping one hand on a pink floating lounger and one eye on the glass sliding door which led to the Richmonds’ living room. My friendship with Olivia was too fresh for me to ask for any information about her brother, and I was too insecure in my own new attractiveness to think I might stand any kind of shot with him. For all I knew, Evan had resurrected his high school relationship with Michelle Kimball, the girl he had dated throughout his junior and senior years. I had heard they’d broken up at the start of the summer, knowing they’d be going to separate colleges in the fall. Michelle was good friends with Amanda, Mischa’s older sister, so I assumed it was best to keep my interest in Evan suppressed.

  “We’re going to Bobby’s after Homecoming, definitely,” Mischa was saying, drawing my attention back to the girls in the pool and away from the possibility of the door sliding open and Evan and Charlie stepping out onto the patio. “Amanda and Brian are driving me and Matt. Is Pete going to have wheels?”

  Mischa was extremely fortunate in that Amanda was a senior who happened to be dating the captain of the varsity football team. Even though Amanda was always putting their shared car to use, Mischa never had to walk to school or ride the bus, because Amanda drove her everywhere. Amanda’s own popularity had poured the foundation for Mischa to follow in her footsteps. Amanda had been the captain of the Junior Varsity cheerleading team and that year was the captain of the Varsity team, as spry and athletic as her younger sister.

  “That’s the plan,” Olivia mused lazily, watching her own long, platinum blond hair fan out in the water. Pete was a junior, like us, and had just turned sixteen and gotten his license. His parents had bought him a black Infiniti and he rolled into the parking lot every morning at school like a king. Bobby’s was the one and only twenty-four hour diner in town, the place where cool high school kids aggregated after school and football games. Even the McDonald’s and KFC in Willow closed at ten o’clock at night. Before junior year, I had never had the nerve to step into Bobby’s other than on a weekend morning with my mom for breakfast.

  “So, what’s the plan? Should we drive together? My dad is going to be a freak if I tell him I’m driving with Isaac alone,” Candace said. She was sprawled on her back on the other floating chaise lounge, one that was an aquamarine shade of transparent blue, letting her arms drift across the surface of the water. Candace, for all her boy craziness, sort of had a boyfriend. Isaac, the guy who had been partially responsible for her sophomore year suspension, was a senior that year. He played defense on the football team and was a big guy with a booming laugh. I would have liked him immensely if it weren’t for the fact that as recently as five months earlier he had teased me callously about being a dog and a cow. So far, during my junior year, he hadn’t dared to utter a single insult at me. That was the power of being pretty, I was finding; not having to constantly dread childish insults being lobbed at me. Isaac wasn’t very bright, which seemed to bother Candace, even though she wasn’t exactly being invited to join National Honor Society, either.

  “Well, we have to figure out what these two nerds are going to do,” Olivia said, nodding at me and then at Hannah.

  Hannah and I exchanged glances across the length of the pool, both momentarily hating each other. Neither of us had a boyfriend, or any solid prospects for Homecoming dates. Because my attractiveness was so new, boys who had known me since kindergarten weren’t sure what to do with it just yet. To them, I was still McKenna Brady, the smart girl, the girl liked by parents and teachers, the girl with glasses and braces who had lived through that thing back in third grade. I could have no way of knowing if any of them were ever going to work up the nerve to be the first boy to acknowledge that I’d changed by asking me out, even though I was all too aware of their eyes on me in the hallways at school. I could have taken matters into my own hands and asked Dan Marshall, a somewhat friendly junior whose locker was next to mine, or Paul Freeman, who had offered me his algebra notes when I’d been out sick for a week at the end of sophomore year. But asking either of them to be my date would be like an admission of defeat.

  Hannah was a source of intrigue throughout the high school. While it was not uncommon for people to move away from town, like Emily, and disappear from the world of Willow forever—despite earnest promises to write letters and send emails—it was a rarity for anyone new to appear in the student body. Willow just hadn’t been the kind of town to attract new residents for at least a decade, not even after formally changing its name from the rather sad-sounding Weeping Willow to just plain old Willow, Wisconsin. It was far enough away from Green Bay that commuting was almost an hour-long drive for parents who had jobs there. For a long while in the eighties and nineties, there was a pretty big tourism business geared toward the nature lovers who wanted even more autumn leaves and clean air than was offered by Wisconsin Dells to the south of us, or by Door County, to our east. But there was no real reason for anyone to move to Willow. There was no major corporation offering high-paying jobs anywhere nearby. There wasn’t any big scientific research laboratory, attracting the families of high-profile scientists. The beach along Lake Winnebago was rocky and surrounded by woods, not anything at all like the white sandy beaches in Tampa near my dad’s place, although I guess one could make the argument that Willow was a decent place to live if you were really into boating culture and happened to live in Wisconsin.

  So the fact that Hannah was new in town was enough to make her an instant celebrity at Weeping Willow High School. The fact that she was also gorgeous only added to her fame. Hannah had a heart-shaped face with very wide-set crystal blue eyes, which looked eerily iridescent because the brown hair framing her face was so dark. She was porcelain pale in a town where every other girl made a point of showing off her summer’s worth of tanning efforts in September, pushing the limits of the high school dress code with short shorts and tank tops to expose as much bronze flesh as possible. Even two weeks into the school year, none of us knew her very well. She kept to herself and refrained from gossip, most likely because she didn’t know anyone at school well enough yet to contribute. She was a hair twirler, a lip biter, and seemingly a daydreamer, drifting off into her own thoughts often at lunchtime until she heard her name called as a command to rejoin the conversation. Everything about her was a little girlish and romantic, right down to the tiny but chic antique locket she wore around her neck.

  And the fact that she was new in town meant that boys refrained from approaching her, just like they shied away from me.

  “You should ask Jason,” Mischa told me when she surfaced from her underwater bolt across the pool. “He told Matt he thinks you’re hot. He’d totally say yes.”

  The Homecoming dance, and absolutely every detail related to it, was terrifying to me. I had never danced in public before, other than at my cousin’s wedding. I had never really fooled around with a boy before more than a little kissing, never had the blinding pressure on me to be asked out by a deadline, or else. In this case, I wasn’t even sure
what the else might entail if no one asked me to the dance. Olivia’s wrath? Banishment from the popular group? There was no way of knowing. There was only an increasing despair rising in my chest that the night of the Homecoming game would arrive, and I’d be walking alone through the stadium stands, still dateless. There was already a lavender cocktail-length strapless gown hanging despondently in my closet. I wouldn’t wear it to the Homecoming dance the following Saturday night, but I had no way of knowing that in Olivia’s pool the night of her party.

  “If he thinks I’m hot, then why doesn’t he just ask me? I don’t like the idea of doing the asking,” I grumbled.

  “Oh, come on, McKenna! It’s not the Middle Ages. You can ask a boy out,” Candace scolded me. “You don’t even have to ask him outright. Just linger around his locker and ask him if he’s going to the dance and if he’s asked anyone yet. He’ll get the picture. Boys are stupid but they just need to be pointed in the right direction.”

  “That’s not very romantic,” I said. Why couldn’t my life be just like Olivia’s and Candace’s, with boys approaching me? The fear of being rebuffed and maybe additionally even insulted was something neither of them had ever experienced.

  Hannah glared at me quietly from where she was treading water closer to the shallow end.

  “What about Trey Emory for Hannah?” Mischa suggested. Olivia squealed.

  I felt a chill run up my spine and sensed dread filling my stomach. Trey Emory was a guy in the senior class who might as well have been from another planet. He didn’t play on any sports teams, didn’t go to football games, and mostly kept to himself, other than his occasional outings with the skateboarder guys who often ditched classes to smoke cigarettes near the service entrance of the school cafeteria. He smoldered of danger and mystery; he had an actual tattoo, and it wasn’t some silliness he had given himself with a marker and a pin. Teachers despised him. His senior class schedule was a curious arrangement of the required gym class period, wood shop, auto body workshop, remedial English, and inexplicably, Advanced Physics.

  And he just happened to live next door to me.

  There was no particular reason why any of my new friends would have known where the Emory family lived, or that every once in a great while, Trey and I would exchange solemn waves from our bedroom windows if we just happened to catch a glimpse of each other before closing our blinds at night. Once, toward the end of sophomore year when I was still the old, unpopular McKenna, we stepped out of our houses in unison on a morning when it was pouring rain. He hadn’t even really asked me if I wanted a lift, he had just flashed his keys and then lingered in his driveway with his engine idling until I worked up the nerve to dash through the sheets of rain and climb into the passenger side of his crappy, banged-up Toyota Corolla. We had ridden together all the way to school in silence after I awkwardly managed a “thanks” as we’d pulled out of his driveway.

  “Oh my god, totally!” Candace agreed. “He’s a freak but a hot freak.”

  “Who’s Trey Emory?” Hannah asked innocently.

  “You know who he is,” Olivia taunted. “He’s that smoking hot senior guy with the dark hair who wears the green army jacket every day.”

  “That guy? He gives me the creeps. He looks like the kind of guy who’d come to school with a gun to shoot everyone,” Hannah complained, leaning back in the water to soak her hair again.

  Trey wasn’t the kind of guy who’d come to school with a gun, I knew. He was the kind of guy who offered his unpopular neighbor a ride to school in the rain. But I dared not leap to his defense and reveal that in some very strange and abstract way, Trey and I were kind of friends. I had a suspicion that an admission of our acquaintance would not be well-received.

  “Yeah, so? I still wonder what’s under that army jacket,” Candace continued. She really was incorrigible.

  One of Hannah’s slim, lily white legs kicked up, breaking the surface of the water and creating a little ripple that spread out in a circle around her, drifting toward the rest of us. “Whatever he’s got under there, I don’t want it coming with me to the dance.”

  Hours later, after pizzas brought home by Evan and Charlie and an ice cream cake served up by Olivia’s parents with a cheesy group performance of Happy Birthday, all five of us occupied the Richmonds’ basement in our pajamas.

  “Yawn,” Candace declared as we flipped through the pay-per-view movie options.

  It was barely eleven o’clock on a Friday night and we were already out of fresh gossip, Homecoming chat, and songs to which we could emulate moves from music videos. On the last two Friday nights at that hour, the five of us had been tumbling out of movie theaters, giggling and squeamish after watching horror movies.

  “What about Blood Harvest?” Mischa suggested. Mischa was the one who especially loved scary flicks. Vampires, zombies, werewolves… she loved being terrified out of her wits.

  “Bring it,” Olivia commanded from her blanket nest on the couch. One of her deeply tanned legs poked out from beneath the striped wool blanket she had spread across her body. The warm summer evening had turned into a chilly autumn night, and Mr. Richmond had come downstairs with us after pizza to light a fire in the fireplace. I sat on the floor closest to the fireplace, comforted by the popping and crackling of the glowing logs.

  “I love Ryan Marten,” Candace commented during the movie’s opening sequence, during which Ryan Marten, a Hollywood heartthrob portraying a vampire, arrived at a farming community with his loyal clan just as the town was preparing for its annual carnival.

  “Can you imagine if vampires came to Weeping Willow for Winnebago Days?” Olivia asked. Winnebago Days was the weekend festival we celebrated in our own town during the second weekend in October, in honor of the Native American tribe that once occupied the land on which all of our aluminum-sided homes were now built. A rinky-dink touring carnival company set up rickety rides and dart-throwing games in the empty lot near the marina, and for three days our entire town smelled like fried dough and kettle corn.

  Candace reached into the bag of pretzels that Mischa handed her and popped a mini pretzel into her mouth. “I can’t imagine any guy as hot as Ryan Marten ever coming anywhere near this sad-ass town.”

  “Hey! Pete’s as hot as Ryan Marten,” Olivia objected.

  Candace dramatically rolled her eyes at Olivia across the couch. “Yeah, whatevs. Sure, he is.”

  I smiled nervously up at both of them, not daring to comment. In my own opinion, Pete Nicholson was every bit as handsome and sexy as Ryan Marten, and just as untouchable as the famous action star, too. Pete looked like an Olympic sprinter from Sweden or something. He was so tall, his facial features were so perfect, he seemed entirely out of place in our town, where most guys were built more like linebackers and were preparing for futures in which they would take over the failing family farms from their dads. Mischa’s boyfriend Matt was cute, but he was as tiny and compact as she was, herself. He wore baseball caps backwards and threw gang signs like a rap star, even though in our tiny town the closest thing to a gang was the Dairy Farmers’ Guild. Candace’s on-again, off-again boyfriend, Isaac, had a square jaw and probably would have been considered to be good-looking at any American high school, but it was easy to envision the kind of soft-gutted, sunburned farmhand he would be in as few as ten years. There were a lot of men in our town who looked just like Isaac some day would; with faces prematurely wrinkled from long days on a tractor in the hot sun, and dirt beneath their fingernails even at fancy restaurant dinners on Sundays.

  Hannah was looking down at her hands in her lap. She had rarely mentioned boys or contributed to conversations when boys were the topic in the two weeks since she had entered our world. I wondered for the first time if maybe she had decided that the only boy Willow had to offer worth her interest was Pete.

  “Were there a lot more cute guys in your old town?” I asked her suddenly, realizing I couldn’t even remember where it was she had told us she had lived before.

>   “Sure,” Hannah replied. “I mean, not so many. But my last school had three thousand students, so you know, it’s just simple math that out of fifteen hundred boys, there would be more than one or two cute ones.”

  Three thousand students. That gave the rest of us something to ponder for a few moments. Our high school had barely three hundred students. There were fewer than eighty kids in each class, with the most in the senior class and the fewest in the freshman class. This had a little to do with so many families moving away from Willow in recent years. At the elementary school, there were so few younger kids that the fourth and fifth grades had been combined and were taught by one teacher. It had made the front page of the Willow Gazette; our town’s population was dwindling. The town council had been trying to figure out ways to make the town more appealing to our generation in an effort to instill in us the notion that we should return to Willow after earning our degrees elsewhere in Wisconsin, and invest ourselves in the future of the town. Their latest implementation of this strategy was a youth center at the park district where teens could order fresh juice smoothies and use the workout equipment until ten o’clock every night, if we so wished. The fact that the five of us were instead hunkered down in the Richmonds’ fancy basement, with its plush wall-to-wall carpeting and suede couch, was testament to the failure of the town’s plan. I had never visited the youth center even once, despite the fact that my old friend Cheryl, with whom I had often gone to the mall before my induction into the popular group, had a part-time job serving juice there.