Play Me Backwards (25 page)

“Want to go to Hurricane's or something?” I asked.

“You can't
afford
to go to Hurricane's,” she said.

“What the hell is your problem tonight?” I asked. “I thought we were done with all this fighting.”

She shrugged. “Sorry,” she said. “I know I'm kind of picking fights, but while I was sick and lying in bed, I just kept thinking about you, and it was awesome, except then I'd imagine what you'd be like when you're thirty or something if you don't shape up.”

“I'm wearing a polo shirt right now, aren't I?” I asked. “And I have a suit.”

“It's a start,” she said. “But you've got a long way to go. And it's going to be hard work.”

She sighed again and lay there quietly for a minute.

Love is getting a lecture from someone who could fart right on your bare arm at any second.

After I dropped Paige at home, I went to the Cave and sat in the back room with Jason Keyes and Amber Hexam, a couple of the local goths. When I checked my e-mail on my phone, I saw that Paige was sending me links about debutante balls. It was getting to be clear that it was a much bigger deal to her than she'd let on before.

I told Amber and Jason about it, and they laughed whenever I said “balls.” As one does. It's like with the Kum and Go. If I ever stop laughing when people say “balls,” I'll know my heart is dead.

The day of the debutante ball I got a six-dollar haircut (which I swear was just as good as one from the place Paige wanted me to go would have been), shaved, cleaned out my car, and put on my suit. When I arrived at Paige's house, she was wearing the gown she'd bought a month before, but hadn't let me see yet. It was silver, and flowing, and sparkled in the light of her foyer. Her hair was done up and curls dangled gracefully in front of her face.

She looked so good that she literally took my breath away for a minute.

I just stared at her for a second, then choked out a word. “Hi.”

“Hi, you,” she said. She gave me a quick kiss that sort of stuck to my lips, on account of the lipstick, when she pulled away. Then she smiled again.

“You look fantastic,” I said.

Her mom appeared over her shoulder.

“Well, look at you!” she said. “Someone here cleans up nice.”

“Thanks,” I said.

Autumn appeared behind both of them.

“You dried your forehead,” she said.

“Autumn!” said her mom. “That's not nice.”

“What?” she asked. “He has a really greasy forehead most of the time.”

“Autumn!” her mom said again.

Paige didn't say a thing through all of this, other than a quick “We'll meet you guys there.” She just looked at me and my dry forehead and smiled.

I escorted Paige to my car, the same way I'd be escorting her down the walkway, and for the whole drive there we just talked and joked and laughed, like we used to on Slushee hunts. We hadn't argued much since the weekend before. Things were getting back to normal, and I hoped a night at a ball would clear up any lingering resentment she might be nursing. Such was the power of a well-cut suit.

The ball was at this classy banquet hall in the Ruan building, one of the three or four biggest skyscrapers in Des Moines. I'd never been inside of it, and I was pretty surprised at how swanky it was. All the banquets and receptions I'd been to before were in places that just looked like bingo parlors with tablecloths. This looked almost like a ballroom from a Disney movie, everything crystal and glitter and mahogany. They sat Paige and me at a big round table with a few people that I'd never met before but that Paige knew from other Harvester Club events that she'd been dragged to over the years.

The fancy decor made me hope that the food would be pretty fancy too, but it turned out that it wasn't that great. It was Cornish hens, which are like miniature chickens, stuffed with herbs and
smothered in butter. I got the idea they'd probably been in cold storage while three generations of chickens lived and died. And they're a pain in the ass to eat; you really have to go picking and picking to get any meat off the damned things after you get the breasts out of the way, and half of the butter ends up on the table. Or on your tie. They look a lot classier than they are.

The conversation was light—I wouldn't have dreamed of bringing up poop, but it was pretty hard to resist the urge to talk in a fake British accent about playing badminton and rogering chambermaids. Honestly, doing anything else felt faintly ridiculous. After all, most of the conversation among the guys seemed to be about how much everyone's suit cost. The guy across from me paid so much for his that I wanted to ask him if it was woven from hairs plucked from the queen's butt, but I didn't.

We were just about done eating when Leslie came over, dressed in a long red dress.

“Oh my God, Paige,” she said. “Did you get Mr. Perkins's e-mail?”

“I haven't checked my mail in a while,” Paige said. “What's up?”

“The yearbooks came in, and when he was looking through it he noticed that one of the poems has a hidden Satanic message in it.”

I did my best to remain calm while Paige gave me a look that would have killed most mere mortals.

“Who wrote it?” she asked, without looking away from me.

“It was anonymous,” said Leslie. “And no one's sure who even accepted it. It's a lousy poem to start with.”

“Which poem is it?” I asked.

“Some stupid thing about ‘Sing a Song of Cornersville Trace,' ” she said. “Do you remember laying it out?”

“Vaguely,” I said. “I remember thinking it really sucked.”

“But you didn't notice it was an acrostic for SATAN RULES?”

“Well, no,” I said. “I didn't really read through them; I just took the ones from the box, typed them in, and laid them out.”

“I can't believe you didn't notice it,” said Leslie.

“It got past the proof page check too, didn't it?” I asked.

“Everyone had the flu that week,” Leslie said. “So they couldn't check it carefully. We're having an emergency meeting after school on Monday to decide whether to send them back and print up another run or what.”

“How much would that cost?” I asked.

“Thousands,” said Paige, whose expression had not changed.

“So why bother?” I asked. “If you don't make a big deal out it, no one's even going to notice.”

“People will notice,” said Leslie.

“Well, you have Christian poems in there sometimes,” I said.

“So what?”

“So don't you have to give Satanists the same right to express themselves as you give to the Christians?”

“Satanism's not a real religion,” said Leslie. “It's all, like, sacrificing babies.”

“Not really,” I said. “I mean, I'm not one myself or anything, but my boss says it's really just Ayn Rand's philosophy with a flair for the dramatic attached to it.”

Leslie looked off to the ballroom area, then back at me. “It's not like we have a Satanic community in the school,” she said. “You can't just claim freedom of religion on this.”

Before I could say anything, a woman with hair like you normally
only see on the Christian Big Hair channel came and tapped the girls on the shoulder, and they excused themselves to go get ready to be debuted or whatever it is they call it, leaving me alone with three guys in expensive suits who were all just sort of staring at me.

“Gentlemen,” I said, “if you'll excuse, I've got some work to do.”

I immediately pulled out my phone and started sending out text messages about what was happening with the yearbook. With a little effort we could have a regular Satanic rally at school on Monday; I imagined a whole herd of guys in devil horns crashing the yearbook meeting. I knew that ritual sacrifice wasn't really a part of the Satanism that Stan espoused, but I thought maybe we could make an exception for Mrs. Smollet.

Stan, of course, offered to help any way he could. Everyone I texted said they'd be glad to help.

I didn't expect it to
work
—my schemes pretty much never did—but maybe we could at least make the point that freedom of religion means freedom of
all
religions. Even the weird ones that some bald dude made up in the 1960s by copying Ayn Rand and H. P. Lovecraft, the ones students made up themselves, the ones based on long-disproven science, and the ones where you just pretend you worship the assistant manager down at the ice cream parlor.

This was
exactly
the kind of stuff we used to pull back in the gifted pool. Hell, after Anna started doing it, lots of girls in the gifted pool started wearing devil horns to freak Smollet out. It was time to break out the old horns for one last hurrah.

I was still sending out texts when some old guy in a suit went onto the stage and made a little speech about the Harvester Club's commitment to the community and youth development and shit. After him, the
big-haired woman, whose name looked like it was probably Althea or Hildegarde, came out and gave a pep talk about moral character, and the role of manners and grace in society. Then she struck up the band, stepped to the side, and began to introduce the debutantes.

One by one, the big-haired woman called out the girls' names, and the girls came onto the stage in gowns that probably cost more than my car. I probably would have felt dizzy and out of place, but knowing that I was plotting a sort of rebellion kept me grounded. My phone was buzzing in my pocket with texts and messages from people I'd contacted about the poem. I didn't dare pull it out to check it, and I turned it off completely before they could announce Paige, of course, but it was nice to know that things were off the ground already.

When Paige was introduced, I took the stage, held her hands, and walked her down the runway and onto the dance floor while people clapped. Paige's parents waved at me from their table, and Autumn stuck out her tongue and wiggled it more than was probably strictly necessary. Paige smiled and kissed me on the cheek and I had to admit that it felt pretty awesome.

“I love you,” I said, as we reached the dance floor and began slow dancing around.

“I love you, too,” she said. “But
please
tell me you didn't put that poem into the yearbook.”

“I put
all
of the poems into the yearbook,” I said.

“Then tell me you didn't personally plot for
that
one to be in there.”

I didn't want to lie, so I just didn't say anything. “Can we just dance?” I asked. “We can worry about this later.”

She kissed me on the cheek, then sort of looked off into space without saying anything.

“I puked again this morning,” she whispered. “I've puked a few times this week.”

“It's probably just nerves,” I said. “Or the residual effects of the flu.”

“I don't think I ever actually had the flu,” she said. “I think I'm just pregnant.”

You know how, when you're a kid and you have a babysitter coming for the night, and you plan on having a good time and staying up later than you normally get to? On those nights there's nothing worse than hearing the sound of the babysitter's boyfriend knocking on the door. The minute that guy shows up, you
know
you're going to bed
right
on time. The bottom drops out of all your plans, and your senses kind of get distorted while reality realigns itself in your head.

Hearing your girlfriend say the word “pregnant” is kind of like that, only on a much, much grander scale. All of the plans you've been making for your life suddenly seem totally irrelevant. Everything about the future suddenly looks totally different. You can actually feel the brain cells bouncing around, rebuilding all your images of yourself at thirty, of how you fit into the world, and all of that, even if you didn't think you even
had
any grander plans for the future other than just staying up later and eating a butt load of
gummy worms. Which pretty much
had
been my plan, both when I was a kid getting babysat, and now that I was a teenager getting ready to graduate high school.

Pregnant.

The word felt like it hung in the air behind my ear and followed behind me like a mosquito while we slowly danced through the room.

The center of gravity shifted in my body, and the sounds and sights of the ball around me became a total blur, but somehow I kept on dancing.

We moved slowly, rocking back and forth and holding each other tight, and in the static that the ball became, after a while all I was aware of was the feel of Paige's cheek touching mine. It was wet and slimy and I was probably getting her makeup on me. By the time the song ended, I felt like we'd been dancing in silence for hours. In reality it couldn't have been more than sixty seconds.

When the music changed, my head emerged from its fog enough that I could talk, though not necessarily enough that I could say anything intelligent. The first thing out of my mouth was, per my usual habit, probably the single dumbest thing I could have said.

“We always used condoms,” I said. “
You're
the one who always wanted me not to.”

“Do
not
throw that in my face,” she said. “And even
with
one, this stuff can happen. I'm late.”

“Has that happened to you before?” I asked.

“No.”

“Did you take a test or anything?”

“No. I'm kind of afraid to.”

I took a deep breath. I didn't blame her. I never looked up my grades online. It was better to just wait and not know for
sure
that I was screwed.

“What else can it be?” she asked. “I'm never late.”

For a loaded minute we just went back to dancing. Her face was frozen into a smile that didn't match her eyes at all. Her eyes and lips were so out of harmony that I had to look away. My vision cleared up enough to see that her parents were beaming with pride on the sidelines of the dance floor.