The world just seems to be teeming with holes. Needs so big, they can't ever be filled. I couldn't help all of those kids. Not if I worked day and night drenching people with perfume.
And then I thought of NHS. We did service projects a lot. This was partially because Ms. Ellis, our advisor, believed it was our civic responsibility to improve conditions in the world, and partially because we all knew community service looked good on college applications. It was also partially because—okay, I admit it—everyone figured it was just easier to agree to hold a fund-raising car wash than to hear me lecturing about the poor and downtrodden again; but the point is, NHS did service projects.
Why couldn't we do a something for the kids at St. Matthew's Elementary? Granted, we'd sold fruit shakes in the cafeteria at lunch for the past month in order to raise money to put on a winter dance, so probably no amount of lecturing would get the group to agree to another fund-raiser, but perhaps we could do a project for the St. Matthew's kids instead of the dance.
After all, the student body council were really the ones who were supposed to put on the dances. NHS only agreed to hold the winter dance because it was tradition. Years ago, the school hadn't had a winter dance, and then some NHS president decided to have one as a fund-raiser—thus proving smart people aren't necessarily good with finances. The dance never did much more than break even.
Why not put the funds to a better use? Besides, Ms. Ellis would probably jump at the chance to do something that was less work. She'd gotten engaged in October and was trying to throw together some huge wedding in January. She'd done nothing for the last few meetings but flip through bridal magazines and mumble about the cost of embossed napkins and centerpieces.
The longer I thought about it, the more certain I felt it would work. We could go to St. Matthew's principal and ask for a list of a couple dozen of the neediest kids. Then we'd buy them gifts and have Santa deliver them personally. Seeing their faces light up would be much better than paying some overpriced deejay to play dance music. I mean, who needed another dance anyway?
All I had to do was convince the rest of NHS to see it my way.
As it turns out, the rest of NHS has serious problems when it comes to seeing things my way. Ms. Ellis was only there for the first five minutes of the meeting, and then had to step out in the hallway to take a call from her caterer. She at least would have listened to my idea without the pained expression that showed up on most of the club members' faces.
I told everyone about T.J.'s jeans, and how Reese had tried to steal shoes for his mother, but she'd returned them so he could have shoes instead. There had to be so many kids at St. Matthew's Elementary like T.J. and Reese. Kids we could help have a good Christmas. I finished my appeal holding my hands out. "What do you think?"
Colton studied me with unblinking eyes. "You want us to give up our dance to buy presents for a juvenile delinquent?"
"He's not a delinquent. He's a little boy," I said.
"You said he almost stole some shoes. He tried to break the law."
I let out a sigh. "Well, yeah, but that isn't the point. The point is he did it for his mother."
Colton rolled his eyes. "Fine. He's a terrific kid, and one day he can grow up to steal a Mercedes Benz for her."
The rest of the group laughed. Colton shot them a smile to let them know they were together in this, and I was obviously out of my mind.
"This wouldn't just be for Reese," I said. "It would be for all the needy kids at St. Matthew's. You know, a service project."
Colton leaned toward me across the table. "Yes, we know what service projects are," he said, "because you keep making us do them. This year alone we've bought books for the library, done a canned food drive, and volunteered at a soup kitchen, where—I might add—some homeless women tried to hit on me."
"She was a harmless old lady," I said.
"She told me I was the reincarnation of her dead husband, kept calling me Phil, and tried to follow me home."
I held up one hand. "So she liked you. Most people would take that as a compliment."
"Not if most people had a crazy woman running after their car screaming, Thil, baby, I'm still here for you!'"
Harris, the NHS treasurer, tapped his pencil against his notebook while he looked at me. "And then there was the stint at the Esperanzo Centro de Los Ninos you made us do."
Colton nodded in agreement. "How could I forget about Los Ninos?"
I leaned back in my seat with a thud. "What was wrong with that? We gave out treats and taught little kids some games."
"All of whom spoke nothing but Spanish," Harris said.
"So?" I asked.
"Charlotte, you're the only one of us who speaks Spanish."
"That's not true." I turned to Colton. "You've taken Spanish class for four years."
"Yeah, and apparently they've taught me a completely different language because I couldn't understand a single thing anyone said that day." He let out a sigh and shook his head as though reliving the memory. "I kept telling those kids to quit jumping on me, but none of them knew what I was talking about."
"They knew," I said. "They just didn't want to listen to you."
Colton put his hands on the table. "Yes, well, that's just one more reason why I'd rather have a winter dance than do a service project, but let's put it to a vote to make sure."
Before everyone could completely vote down my idea, I tried to come up with a compromise. "Okay, let's still have the dance. We can do that. But do we have to spend so much money on it? I mean, couldn't we cut back on some of the things and still do a service project for the kids at St. Matthew's?" Harris lifted up a list detailing our budget for the dance. "What did you want to cut?" I held my hand out to him, and he grudgingly forked over the budget. I scanned it for areas to chop. "The decorations. We don't need to buy those. The theme is Walking in a Winter Wonderland, and we all have extra stuff sitting around at home. Between us we probably have enough Christmas trees to create a small forest. And the deejay—do we really need to pay a guy to pick out songs for us? We can do that ourselves."
"We don't have the sound system," Harris said.
"I bet we could find someone at school who does." I turned to Colton. "Don't tell me that a guy who drives a convertible doesn't have a good stereo."
"Yeah," Colton said. "And I'd be thrilled to haul it to the auditorium so half the school can mess with it."
"No one will mess with it. I'll personally guard it, okay?" I sent a pleading look to where most of the girls sat, especially Kelly. We sat at the same table at lunch and therefore she had to support me. "Don't you remember how excited you got about Christmas when you were little? Don't you want to give that to someone else who might never have the chance to experience it?"
"It is the season for giving," Kelly said.
"Giving to others," I added. "Not squandering on a deejay."
Colton glanced over at the guys at the table, silently prodding them into action. Ben, a guy so tall he'd be great at basketball if he could only master that dribbling thing, shook his head. "We can't let the rest of the school down by putting on a crappy dance."
Wesley shrugged. He was the silent type who hardly ever said anything, but when he did, Kelly hung on his every word. She has, as we say at the lunch table, been Weslified. "Don't they have the Paper Angels program to take care of the poor kids?" he asked.
The guys nodded in agreement. "We vote for the dance," a couple of them said in unison.
I turned to the girls at the table in a plea for support.
Kelly shrugged. Most of the girls just looked at the table. Preeth, who sat on my other side, grunted and said, "I never go to the dances. I don't care what we do."
Preeth is one of those girls with an attitude.
Colton smiled benevolently at me. "So it looks like we spend our money on the dance."
I didn't reply. I also didn't say anything while Colton organized committees. Colton put Preeth and me in charge of refreshmen
ts, and then added, "Make sure you okay the menu with me before you buy anything so I can approve it."
Like maybe I'd be tempted to hand out popcorn and water to save money.
Which, now that I thought about it, wasn't such a bad idea. Popcorn was a holiday food. I mean, why else did people string it and put it on Christmas trees? And who liked drinking punch anyway? Punch is liquid sugar with food coloring. Water is refreshing, healthy, and free. Well, free if we got it from the cafeteria sink.
I smiled at Colton. "Sure. We'll let you know." In large letters in my notebook I wrote, "Popcorn & Tap Water."
Colton glared at me, but he didn't bring up refreshments again.
The meeting went on, but instead of listening, I thought of T.J. and Reese. I'd told them I knew Santa. I'd told them to come to the mall on Christmas Eve day. Would they tell their friends about this? I knew the answer to this question without even considering it. How many kids were going to show up at the mall, and how in the world was I going to find a way not to disappoint them?
After school on Wednesday, I went shopping with Brianna, which was good, since it gave us some time to be normal friends. Things hadn't felt quite the same since the "Don't-make-me-choose" speech, even though neither of us had mentioned it again.
We went to the mall look for a Christmas present for Brianna's older sister, Amanda—only Amanda had recently decided everyone should call her Trinity. Not because she was Catholic, but as a protest that had to do with an atomic bomb site somewhere. I didn't really understand her reasoning and didn't want to ask, because Amanda/Trinity could go on about those sorts of things way past the time you stopped caring.
Despite her request for a name change, half the time Brianna called her sister Amenity, which means "pleasantness" and which really ticked off Amanda/ Trinity. I suggested calling her Enmity, which means "animosity" and actually fits Amanda's personality better, but in the end we both just called her Amanda behind her back and "Hey, you" when she was listening.
Brianna and I walked through the mall looking for gift inspiration, but we mostly just saw the latest fashions, which Amanda wouldn't wear anyway. She bought all her clothes at Goodwill as a protest against overseas sweatshops. Brianna and I went with her to a thrift store once and were both happily surprised to find designer jeans there. I mean, I just figured that anybody who paid that much for jeans would be buried in them; but apparently no, some people give them to Goodwill. Brianna and I both bought a pair, and then Amanda lectured us all the way home that we had missed the whole point of shopping at a thrift store and that designer jeans were a blatant sign of materialism.
So probably Amanda wouldn't want anything from the Gap, but we went in anyway because they had a killer sale going.
"You could just tell her you got it at Goodwill," I said while I took a shirt off a rack. "Probably all the people in sweatshops around the world wouldn't hold it against you."
Brianna tilted her head one way and then the other, looking at the shirt. "I don't know. I really don't. What do you get someone who hates capitalism?"
"A plane ticket to the third world?"
"Don't tempt me. I'd rather have her somewhere in South America than at home for Christmas."
I didn't answer, because I wasn't sure whether she was joking or not. Sometimes Brianna and Amanda fought long and hard over the silliest things. Brianna hadn't seemed sad at all when Amanda went off to college, which always bothered me. When I go to college next year, I expect my younger sisters to mourn for days before they start fighting over who gets to move into my room.
We left the Gap and wandered into a T-shirt shop. I flipped through a rack of shirts. "Maybe we can find one with an anticapitalism logo." "Yeah, I'm sure they sell lots of those." She sorted through decals on a table, then held up some iron-on letters. "Hey look, if I buy these and a plain T-shirt, Amanda will be able to make her own statement. She can write something like, Nukes make me puke."
"Or, I shop at Goodwill."
"Oh, she doesn't need a sign to tell people that. They know just by looking at her." We both laughed then, even though we shouldn't have, since Brianna was wearing her thrift store designer jeans at the time.
"You'd better buy her more than one set of letters," I said. "You know how Amanda likes to talk. She'll never be able to stop at one sentence."
Brianna picked up a stack of the letter decals, a red T-shirt, and then two more red T-shirts. "You know, I could make matching shirts for Bryant and me to wear to the winter dance."
I stiffened at his name, but tried not to show it. "What kind of shirts?"
"Like they could say, Two Turtle Doves."
Which just goes to show you that Brianna can be delusional at times because even I knew there was no way you would ever get Bryant, Mr. Superjock, to wear a shirt that read, Two Turtle Doves. "Cute," I said. "Or his could say, Naughty, and mine could say, Nice."
Which at least would be truth in advertising.
"You might want to ask him about it before you buy anything," I said.
She put the shirts under her arm and turned toward the cash register anyway. She shrugged as she walked. "If he doesn't like either of those two sayings, I can come up with something else."
I followed her up to the register and didn't make any other comments. Suddenly I felt like I couldn't say anything about Bryant that she didn't want to hear.
Chapter three of my mall dissertation: "Relationships with guys are a lot like shopping." Your purchase might look good at first, but this is often because when you step into a mall, you start to delude yourself. You want to believe those pants make your stomach look flatter, but no. You still look like you're smuggling a punch bowl out of the store. Reality hits sometime after you've lost the receipt.
Likewise, the typical teenage girl doesn't buy a guy what he wants. She buys him what she wants him to have. For some whacked-out reason she thinks these two things are the same.
When Brianna and I left the store, we ran into another group of girls from school. They weren't my friends, but they were Brianna's—because she is way more social than I am—so we all went around together. We looked at jewelry and shoes, and assessed the winter fashions. Pure, thoughtless mall shopping. Female bonding time. Only, I guess I don't know how to do it right, because I kept wondering if any of the girls would have spoken to me if Brianna hadn't been around.
Probably not, because they didn't talk all that much to me while Brianna was there.
Yeah, come to think of it, I learn a lot of stuff at the mall, but it's not necessarily good stuff. I may become one of those depressed college students when I write my dissertation.
Finally, after we'd tried on way more clothes than there were days left in the season to wear them, we bought what we needed. I went home with a cashmere sweater to wear to Candy's party. It not only felt soft against my skin, it felt full of potential, like it knew what I had to do on Saturday and wanted to make me look good while I did it. Even though I'd have to work for two days just to pay for it, I couldn't return it to the rack. After all, you have to buy a piece of clothing that understands you.
And no, this purchase, or any thoughts about using clothes as courage will not make their way into my dissertation.
four
At school, Bryant sent me the occasional scowl and suddenly wanted to talk to Brianna privately whenever I was around. She'd giggle and go off with him. She couldn't even see he was just trying to drive a wedge between us.
It was enough to make me wish the Two Turtle Doves shirt on him. In fact, I started helping her come up with more cute Christmas sayings.
Brianna asked me if I wanted to do something together on Saturday night, but I told her I was helping my mother put up crown molding in a client's house. I couldn't tell her I was going to Candy's party without her realizing I was trying to catch Bryant in a lie. I was not about to put myself in that situation again until I had cold, hard proof.
It's difficult for me to keep things from Brianna, part
ially because I'm used to telling her everything, and partially because I'm lousy at keeping secrets. My mind just doesn't function in secret mode.
At Brianna's house after school on Friday, I helped her with her Spanish homework and nearly spilled the beans half a dozen times.
BRIANNA: So dicho is the past perfect tense of decir?
ME: Right. Hey, do you know what a pashmina is?
BRIANNA, snapping her fingers like this will rally her brain cells into production: Is it a tense of pasmarl?
ME: No, it's not a Spanish word; it's a piece of clothing rich people wear.
BRIANNA: Then why do I have to know it for the vocab test?
ME: You don't. I just uh . . . never mind.
It was a relief when Saturday came and I knew it would all be over soon. I put on my new sweater and—in an attempt at chicness—brown leather pumps. I hardly ever wear high heels. It's not like I need the extra height, and wearing heels is about as comfortable as strapping two shovels onto your feet. Still, I shuffled out the door in them and followed Candy's directions to the club.
When I arrived, a valet insisted on parking my minivan—which I hadn't expected, and which did nothing to make his day, I'm sure. After all those Mercedes and Cadillacs he probably went into shock sitting in my minivan surrounded by Taco Bell wrappers and lipstick tubes.
I walked into the club. It was so ostentatious, it seemed to be a caricature of wealth. You know, the polished wood floor, gilded paintings of horses, and chandeliers so big that in a pinch they could be used as wrecking balls. A man in a suit—I'm not exactly sure what his official function was—directed me to the Condor Ballroom, where a hundred or so of Candy's close friends hung out.
In one corner of the room, a large Christmas tree stood decked out in as many lights as the Milky Way. On another wall an enormous bay window looked out over a golf course. I could see the dark shapes of couples walking across well-lit walkways. Everyone else stood around tables where fruits, veggies, and other unrecognizable stuff lay on large silver platters.