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  As if that was not enough attention for the week, after French when I opened my padlock to get out my coat, Iknelt by my locker to tie my sneaker. When I stood up, Zane was standing next to me.

  “Are you going to the Halloween dance?” he said.

  I gave him a forced smile and surprisingly he gave me a huge smile back.

  “I know you despise me, but—”

  Yes, he was so shy. Yes, he was stupid enough to read my personal notebook. But he was really rather cute. But I had Vaughan to walk in with, ? have no regrets, I said to myself, remembering the Edith Piaf song from French. I just couldn't get myself too worked up over what might have been with a B-lister like myself.

  I remembered Paulette's words from a few hours prior. “Give your bad news as quickly as possible.”

  “I'm really sorry, Zane, but I'm already going with someone else.”

  His response, “Oh,” was only half spoken. “Did you get back together with Jeremy?”

  Now, how did Zane find out I had ever dated Jeremy? I was surprised that he knew this historical detail. My three-day relationship with Jeremy was still not widely known among my classmates. We'd never held hands in school. We'd done all of our kissing at each other's houses. So it was evident that Zane had actually discussed me with someone I knew well, maybe even Jeremy himself.

  “I'm going with Vaughan,” I said as nicely as possible, but there was definitely a little extra pride in my voice.

  The light from the hallway ceiling glared directly into my eyes as I waited for his response. There was no commentfor a long pause, so I assumed he wasn't taking this too well.

  I shifted a few inches away and I could see he was as red as a beet.

  “With Vaughan?” he said. “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “So your plan worked.” He didn't sound too happy about that.

  “You could say that,” I said, a bit meanly. He wasn't helping his cause.

  “Wow. Since when have you been a couple?”

  “It's new. Since Friday.”

  I shrugged. With the English prize still fresh in my mind, and the developments with Vaughan, I was very big on myself that afternoon. “He never read my notebook,” I joked. I emphasize, it was a joke. But it went down like jellied veal at a kid's birthday party.

  “Yeah. Have fun,” was all he could say as he made a quick dash to the exit. I wanted to call out that I was only teasing, but now I could tell by Zane's weird gait that he was fuming.

  He was moving so fast that he was almost running.

  During our evening phone call, I stupidly told Vaughan that Zane had asked me to the dance after him. Vaughan wanted me to replay the moment in great detail.

  “Did he seem cocky?”

  “No, he was very sweet about it.”

  “What did you feel?”

  I left out all the details about my notebook, of course. “He's so passive. I was so shocked that he'd worked up his courage. I hope he can take someone nice. He's really starting to break out of his shell these days.”

  “Hey, where do you get your name from?” Vaughan unexpectedly asked Zane the next afternoon in precalculus.

  Zane looked at him uneasily, and so did I. What the hell was Vaughan doing?

  “My dad is a big Zane Grey fan.”

  “Who?” Vaughan asked. There was something so fake about the way he said that, like he knew damn well who Zane Grey was.

  “My parents told me that he was a writer who pioneered the Western adventure genre back in the twenties. Did you ever hear of Riders of the Purple Sage?.”

  “Well, that's incongruous.”

  “How's that?”

  “Well, since you're so passive—”

  Zane's eyes flashed in anger. “Excuse me?”

  That comment was just so off. “Vaughan, that's …” I was so shocked, I couldn't even get any words out.

  My new boyfriend looked at my open stare and snapped, “You're the one who said Zane was passive. That you felt kind of sorry for him.”

  “I have to go,” Zane said. “Go” sounded like “g-g-g-o.” If Zane was any redder, he'd pass out.

  “I can't believe you,” I spat at Vaughan, but Zane sprinted out of the room so fast, I don't think he could have heard me say that.

  “Why are you looking at me shaking your head?” Vaughan asked.

  Our new twosome just stood there fighting. It took a very long time to calm me down, but eventually Vaughan made me agree to meet him at the coffee shop down the block.

  “I was just kidding,” he said, and then kissed my cheek.

  I was still fuming as I opened the glass doors of the coffee shop after school had ended.

  We sat at the only two counter seats that were available. There was spilled sugar and splotches of purple jam all over our section. Vaughan caught the eye of a waiter behind the counter, and then he apologized profusely after our table was cleaned. I remember three important words he said to me, that I was:

  Cute.

  Funny.

  Sexy.

  Sexy! This conversation was changing my sense of where I stood in the world, and it took all my willpower not to do a full-circle swivel in delight. I never thought anyone so desired by the entire school would or could feel that way about me.

  With that level of sweet talk, I forgave him.

  As Vaughan sprinkled vinegar onto my fries like he said they do in England—he'd been there once for a whole summer—he promised he'd apologize to Zane and say he had added words to our conversation.

  We kissed again.

  “Zane who?” I said out loud, and Vaughan grinned.

  A minute later we were happily planning our costumes.

  That Saturday, Vaughan came to my house four hours early so we could pull together our getups. I had begged my parents to go to a museum or a movie. Earlier in the morning my father poked his head in my room and announced, “I hope you don't mind, sweetheart, but your mother and I have decided we'd much rather see you squirm.” Even though he was razzing me, I shot him an evil look. I still don't know where they went, but the end result was that they were not in the apartment anymore. Vaughan and I were alone.

  “Can I get you anything to drink?” I asked him after a quick kiss hello.

  “You don't possibly have orange juice?”

  “I do.”

  I poured him a glass. “How's your little sister doing? Still slotting?”

  He snorted a little bit, but before answering he quickly checked out the living room CD rack—hopefully the Pop-kin selection didn't offend his sensibilities too much. “My sister is driving my parents crazy. They put her to sleep in her own bed but she sneaks between them in the middle of the night. Every time they wake up, she's right in the middle.”

  “It would probably be very calming to do that. Doesn't part of you want to do that a bit?”

  “Sleep between my parents?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No. That's kind of disgusting.”

  “Just on a really bad day. They'd be wearing pajamas.”

  “You forget, right now I live with my stepdad, not my real dad. To sleep with my parents would mean getting divorced parents in the same bed. They despise each other. The thought of sleeping between those two now is about as appealing as sleeping between scaly monsters.”

  I smiled.

  “So, you got the yarn, right?” We had decided to use white yarn as Charlotte's spider thread.

  I pointed to a shopping bag. “Right here.”

  “Didn't her web say things?”

  “Yeah,” I said to the God of Room 207 now seated on my couch drinking juice. “Templeton the rat brought her bits of garbage and she copied advertising words off of them.”

  “Like what?”

  “TERRIFIC!”

  “Anything else?”

  “RADIANT!”

  “I'm sure there was something funnier.”

  “Well, I think I know what you mean, but you're not going to walk into a d
ance with the words SOME PIG on your sweatshirt.”

  He smirked. “That would be so funny. That's exactly what we have to write.”

  I borrowed my dad's bottle of glue from his home office supply drawer. Vaughan painted the words SOME PIG on with glue, as well as a decent web design. We laid the yarn on. The strands dried pretty quickly, and then he pulled the black sweatshirt over his head.

  Once we'd draped sufficient extra white yarn all over the rest of him, careful not to block the all-important wording, we started in on my spider costume. I needed eight legs, and Vaughan had the brilliant suggestion of using three pairs of my black tights and pushing long cardboard tubes from cheap bulk wrapping paper into them.

  My mother is just the kind of consumer who never bothers with inspired presentations and buys just that kind of wrapping paper in bulk. I attacked her closet and produced exactly six long rolls that Vaughan slipped the cardboard innards out of.

  Vaughan had me turn around after I fit myself with the costume. “Something's missing.”

  I looked in my mirror. “I know.”

  “Think arachnid,” he said.

  We looked at a picture of a spider online and saw that the abdomen is the thing that sticks off the back. Vaughan said that I needed more bulk in the back to get that effect.

  “I'll give it a try,” I decided out loud.

  I shoved a small couch pillow in the back of my own black sweatshirt. With both agreed that I now looked very spiderlike.

  The dance coordinators had rented a strobe light and a smoke machine, so it took a little while to make out what everybody was wearing, and who was with whom.

  Vaughan held my hand as we made our way to the back of the room. Since he mostly hung out with seniors, I'm sure he felt awkward, but not as awkward as I did.

  He reached for my hand to walk farther into the room, but accidentally reached for one of the fake spider limbs. His smile after his mistake was so infectious that I thought, We're going to have a blast. Stop being so nervous.

  There was a massive backdrop of ghosts and witches and pumpkins ahead of us.

  “Who volunteers for this crap?” Vaughan asked. I was silently angry, as I knew that Willie was one of the artists who did the work. I've always found knee-jerk cynicism so boring.

  Edward Carney had a big letter O framing his face, and I thought he was possibly dressed like an icicle.

  “What the hell is he?” Vaughan whispered to me.

  “A cold letter O?” I guessed.

  Vaughan took it upon himself to ask him.

  Before answering, I saw Edward look at my hand interlocked with Vaughan's. As he widened his eyes he said, “I'm absolute zero.”

  “Okay,” Vaughan said. “Explain.”

  “Absolute zero is the temperature so cold that nothing can move. It's the coldest temperature there is.”

  “Clever,” Vaughan said, and Edward smiled appreciatively.

  When he was out of sight, Vaughan said, “Jerk.”

  We moved on. I couldn't see any of my friends yet. Eventually Vaughan spotted Ben King, his fake ID connection, who was dressed as a vodka bottle that read ABSOLUT STONER.

  Vaughan whispered that Ben's homeroom teacher was continually trying to nail Ben, but he could never kick him out of school, because he rarely smoked weed on school property and had never been caught. “And furthermore, he is Carney's fiercest competition for valedictorian status.”

  “Get out of here! What's his grade point average?”

  “Four-point-oh.”

  I was astonished. “Ben King? So you think that Dr. D wants to keep him around just in case he gets an Intel award?”

  He nodded. “You know as well as anyone how she loves good press on her students.”

  Tara from Alabama was wearing a mask of big red lips. I didn't know too much about modern art junior year, but I did grow up in a city with great museums, so you pick things up. I correctly guessed she was referencing that famous painting of an enormous pair of lips. (Later on in the year I learned that an artist named Man Ray had painted it in the thirties.) I bet most of the guys never understood her costume, but the rest of her body was so perfectly packaged in a revealing black dress and slingbacks that even the adult punch servers kept sneaking looks. Who was her date? Perry, the editor/singer. So much for my coup—Tara had been asked by a senior, the most desirable senior, to come to a junior dance!

  Vaughan and Perry high-fived, and Perry greeted me warmly. Tara looked surprised to see me at Vaughan's side but said hi to me just as warmly.

  Was I now part of the “it” crowd? Was that what was going on here? Our cluster of people included four members of the ultimate Frisbee team coordinated as the quintessential seventies band, Kiss. You could tell they were fine-looking even under all that makeup, and you could also tell who their dates were—the ones with white greasepaint on their lips or cheeks from wherever they had been kissed.

  Ben King and Vaughan went to the men's room for a second, and I was left chatting with Ben's date, a pretty blond girl from another high school with no costume on, and also one of the Kiss impersonators. I saw Jeremy out of the corner of my eye. I half wanted to shield him from Tara and Perry, but he was grinning from ear to ear. He was with Blanca, a hookup that was his big surprise.

  Blanca was dressed as a ham. Have you ever read To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee? Even if your school doesn't make it a requirement, trust me, it's really good. It's one of those books that make you laugh and also get you livid about the world's wrongs, and inspire you to eventually do something about them. I loved it so much that I had asked my father to rent the movie from Netflix. There's a terrifying scene when the narrator, a white girl named Scout, who, while dressed as a ham, is attacked by the main villain in the book, the very racist Mr. Ewell. Atticus Finch is Scout's courageous father, a lawyer trying to prove a black man had not raped Ewell's daughter, but merely talked to her. When the slightly dim but kind town outcast, Boo Radley, saves Scout from the attack, she gratefully runs to Atticus in that ham outfit she'd been walking home in from a Halloween party. I think Lee's insertion of a bit of humor in the situation made the scene completely readable and even more compelling.

  Everybody in my junior class had to read To Kill a Mockingbird our sophomore year, so most people got it right away.

  “How come you're not Atticus?” a hairy guy named Kevin dressed as Marilyn Monroe said to Jeremy.

  True to form, Jeremy came dressed as the nerdy New York film director Woody Allen at a New York Knicks basketball game. Woody Allen is the Knicks' number one celebrity fan and gets about ten close-ups on TV every game. In addition to wearing a team jersey, Jeremy had tousled his hair and worn horn-rimmed glasses and loose brown cord pants. The freaky thing was that he looked just like a young Woody Allen. It was inspired.

  I was admiring the raging genius of both of my friends' costumes when Vaughan came back and slipped an arm around my waist. Both Jeremy and Blanca gasped.

  I was sure Vaughan smelled like pot, but I didn't say anything. I'm not from Planet Prissy, but for the most part I was just as much silently antidrug back then as I am now.

  That night, though, I imagined I was going to have to smoke a good deal of pot over the next year to stay on the A-list, and this is so weird: I quickly came to terms with that.

  This is also going to sound incredibly shallow, but suddenly I couldn't wait to see whom Clara would bring. Or not bring. We'd not really discussed the dance, which was unusual for us. She'd suggested we go together, and I'd fibbed and made an excuse, saying I'd see her there.

  Well, she came alone. I think she was supposed to be a sixties love child. Her costume consisted of a vintage white top with lace edges and denim landlubber bell-bottoms. But to tell you the truth, that's how she pretty much dressed every day.

  “Who did you come with?” she asked Vaughan.

  “Jordie.” He squeezed my hand.

  She looked at me and I nodded. Because of her ambushed facial
expression I was instantly sorry I had kept this from her. Meanwhile, Vaughan thought back to where he'd met her. “Were you in my English class?”

  “Yes,” she said, still with a bit of hostility toward me on her face.

  “You were an amazingly good writer.”

  Clara looked at him, and he smiled ever so charmingly.

  I interjected, “She still is. Clara got the New York Times internship.”

  “At the science section?” Vaughan said.

  Clara nodded. “It's my good luck.”

  “I'm sure luck has nothing to do with it. What sorts of things have you been working on?”

  “I've mostly been helping the editors with the research.

  There's a big piece on platypuses I was helping them out with this week.”

  “What's new in the world of platypuses?” I cracked, trying to regain the steering wheel.

  Clara answered Vaughan instead of me. “Did you know that the platypus has ten sex chromosomes? But the best thing is that they're allowing me to do my very own piece, an insider's view of Manhattan Science internships.”

  “Really?” I said, mostly delighted for her, even though she was doing that answering-Vaughan thing. I couldn't be too selfish, having so recently won that essay contest. “In print?”

  “In print,” she confirmed to Vaughan.

  “Really, Clara?” She had not breathed one word of this to me. But this time I playfully called her on it. “So, how come I haven't heard this?” And PS, how can you be mad at me when you're doing your own Miss Mysterious act?

  Her voice toward me had an unexpected sharp tone. “Well, honestly, it's a bit awkward. Of course I want to feature my best friends, but I know that your internship would not be appropriate for the science section. It's going to be a political nightmare to figure out which of the students to profile. Jeremy's internship is just not interesting enough and—”

  Luckily, Jeremy and Blanca were now dancing.

  “C'mon, get over the guilt. Jeremy and I wouldn't expect you to profile us. How about Vaughan? Vaughan's in the emergency room.”

  “That could work.”

  Vaughan smiled appreciatively at me. “What's wrong withjordie's internship?”