We cruised all the way down West Plains Boulevard into Win wood, then took the familiar left turn onto Central. Tracy kept glancing at me as she shifted gears, checking my face for signs of alarm.
I knew where she was taking me, of course, and if my expression remained inscrutable, it was only because I was feeling so many different things at once, not all of them simple or unpleasant. We turned off Central onto Monroe.
“I hope you don't mind,” she said. “I have to get something out of my locker.”
We took the back way in, the route I'd driven every school day for nine years. We passed the athletic fields, the bleachers empty, the grass parched and trampled. In the distance the school squatted in all its flat stolidity, a dull, two-story structure with nothing to recommend it except the simple, crucial fact that in spite of everything, learning sometimes occurred beneath its roof.
“I haven't been back,” I told her. “Not since that morning.”
She nodded. “People missed you. Your replacement was a dweeb.”
We coasted to a stop at the corner of Sixteenth. The space between us filled with unspoken questions.
“Aren't you worried?” I asked.
“About what?”
“That someone will see us together?”
Her sidelong glance was rich with contempt. For the first time that afternoon I caught a glimpse of the old Tracy, the girl whose ballots I'd crumpled.
“I'm gone,” she said. “I don't care what anyone around here thinks anymore.”
Gene Sperigno and Adele Massing happened to walk out of main entrance as we drove past. They'd taught math in adjacent classrooms for ten years before falling in love and deciding to get married. I'd sprained my ankle dancing at their wedding. I slouched in the passenger seat, hoping they wouldn't notice me, but it's hard not to be noticed in a lemon-yellow convertible driven by a pretty girl in a blood-red dress. They waved in a puzzled slow motion, and I had no choice but to raise my arm in reply.
Tracy turned into the lot, and we bounced over a series of speed bumps before pulling to a stop in a No Parking zone near the side entrance.
“You can't park here,” I told her.
She gave me another one of her looks. “I'm the school President,” she said, shutting off the engine and yanking on the emergency brake. “Besides, I'll only be a minute. You want to come in with me?”
“No thanks. I'll wait here.”
She disappeared into the building, and I slouched even further in my seat, dreading the possibility that one of my former colleagues would spot me in that wildly conspicuous, illegally parked car, and feel an obligation to say hello. Tracy wasn't the only one who wished she'd brought sunglasses.
To distract me from the all-too-real prospect of a conversation with Walt Hendricks, my mind seized upon a more dramatic and wildly improbable scenario. A gun, I told myself. She's going to get a gun. She's going to close her locker, walk back out to the car, and start shooting.
I laughed at the thought, but then decided to run with it. Why not? This was America, 1993. All over the country, people were shooting each other for reasons less valid and interesting than the reason Tracy would have for shooting me. It gave me a certain grim satisfaction to imagine the look on her face as she pulled the trigger, to toy with the thought that this was how it might end for me, in a yellow convertible in a high school parking lot, a thirty-three-year-old car salesman dead at the hands of a girl he'd wronged. Great material for a TV movie.
The fantasy was so compelling I have to admit to being almost disappointed when she returned a couple of minutes later, carrying a white book in her hand instead of a weapon. She climbed back into the driver's seat, her expression hovering somewhere between sheepish and amused.
“It may seem strange,” she said, “but I was wondering if you would sign this for me.”
She held out the yearbook and I took it from her hand, the first Winwoodian in a decade that didn't contain my picture. A romanticized pen-and-ink drawing graced the cover, a dreamy vision of Winwood High floating on a bank of clouds, heaven as a school.
“Sure,” I said. “Where should I sign?”
She reached across the gearshift and flipped open the cover. Two blank pages stared back at me, a formidable expanse of white.
“Right here's fine,” she said, dropping a brand-new Rolling Writer into the crease between the pages. “Take as much room as you want.”
I picked up the pen and stared at the emptiness I was supposed to fill with ink, fighting an urge to flip through the book, revisiting the faces of the people who'd vanished from my life, catching up on a year's worth of Winwood history—who had fallen in love and who had broken up, who was going where for college, who said what crazy thing in the cafeteria.
“I really like yearbooks,” I told her.
She didn't answer. A minute went by, maybe two. I had no idea where to start or how to finish. It seemed to me then that I could cover every page of the yearbook with paragraph after paragraph of explanation and apology, and still not be any closer to saying the things that needed to be said.
“I'm scared,” she whispered. “What if I'm not ready for college?”
“You'll be fine,” I told her.
“You think so?”
“Tracy,” I said. “You were ready for college three years ago.”
More time passed. She drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. I thought of Stan and Rudy waiting in the showroom, pointing at their watches, snorting with delight at our continued absence. I thought of Ray sitting in front of his computer, and reminded myself again to bring him a picture of Jason. Then I uncapped the pen, took a deep breath to clear my head, and started writing.
Acknowledgements
I'd like to thanks Janice Shapiro, Albert Berger, and
Ron Yerxa for their enthusiasm and support.
Thanks, too, to Maria Massieand Christine Pepe, and, as always,
to Mary, Nina, and Luke.
About the Author
TOM PERROTTA is the author of five other works of fiction: The Abstinence Teacher, The Wishbones, Bad Haircut, and the New York Times bestselling Joe College and Little Children. Election was made into the acclaimed 1999 movie directed by Alexander Payne and starring Matthew Broderick and Reese Witherspoon. Little Children was released as an Oscar-nominated movie directed by Todd Field and starring Kate Winslet and Jennifer Connelly in 2006. Perrotta lives outside of Boston with his family.
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From the reviews of Election:
‘Election provides those gratifyingly exact and telling portraits of the kids themselves. Solid plotting guarantees that the reader really does want to learn who wins when the ballots are finally counted’
New York Times
‘A neatly written, nimble-witted novel. A good-natured, John Irvingesque portrait of the contemporary world … Seamless storytelling’
Washington Post
By the Same Author
The Abstinence Teacher
Little Children
Joe College
The Wishbones
Bad Haircut
Copyright
Harper Perennial
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Visit our authors’ blog at www.fifthestate.co.uk
This Harper Perennial edition published 2009
1
First published in the USA in hardback by G. P. Putnam's Sons (1998).
First published in paperback in the USA by Berkley (1998).
Copyright © Tom Perrotta 1998
Tom Perrotta asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are
the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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EPub Edition © MARCH 2009 ISBN: 9780007319411
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Tom Perrotta, Election
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