Confessions of an Almost-Girlfriend (9 page)

It’s the guilt that makes all the pieces of the Deladdo puzzle
finally fall into place.
“Jamie, is that why you think you owe them? Because you
don’t. You
helped
them—”
He cuts me off without looking at me. “You deserve someone
who’s there for you. And that’s not me. Not now.”
I pull my hand back before I know I’m going to do it. As
soon as my fingers leave his skin, he slides back in his chair and
crosses his arms, his eyes searching my face. “I like you,” he says.
“I wanna make sure you know that.”
The sad thing is, I’ve played this version of events in my head
as many times as the other version, because in the daydreams
that my brain cooks up, things don’t always go my way. I pictured myself handling Jamie’s rejection with maturity, grace,
blah blah blah. But I never imagined it would come at the end
of what I thought was our first official date.
I say the first thing that comes into my head, even though it’s
pathetic. “Should I wait?”
He hesitates for maybe half a second. “No, Rose.”
Robert comes over and slaps the bill down on the table without asking if we want dessert. “Have a great night,” he says and
walks away.
Neither of us looks at him.
Jamie waits, but I have no response to what he said.
He stops waiting and reaches for the bill.

“How many of you people sitting here today know who Matthew Shepard is?”
It’s Monday morning, and Ms. Maso looks super intense standing on the auditorium stage next to Principal Chen, speaking
to the entire school. Some other faculty members are solemnly
sitting in chairs behind the podium. There are a few seats off to
the side of the stage, filled with some people I don’t recognize,
and one I do—Caron.
Great. My mom’s shrink is a spy for the Union High administration. That must be why she was asking me all those questions about the party. So much for patient-shrink confidentiality.
I thought about calling Caron yesterday. She always said I
could call her whenever I needed to, day or night, and yesterday, for the first time, I thought maybe I might need to. I had a
dream at Tracy’s after my non-date date with Jamie. It started out
as the movie dream about my dad, where I’m sitting in a theater
watching him on the screen. The movie always starts out fine,
and then he gets blown up. But this time, he didn’t get blown
up. Because Jamie was there with the gun, and he was shooting
it at my dad. The image played in my head all day.
The one thing that helped was singing—I could just close
my eyes and drift away. So I got in the shower and sang myself
hoarse until my mother knocked on the door and told me that
while I sounded nice, it was time to turn off the water.
I didn’t call Caron because I didn’t want to tell her about the
dream, or what happened with Jamie—especially the part about
him saying he doesn’t want to be with me. Or he can’t be with
me. I’m not sure which it is. Or if it matters.
“Union High, are you awake out there?”
Ms. Maso is in full-on fierce mode, which is what I like to call
it when she uses her superpowers to get a bunch of dumb adolescents to listen up and learn something important and possibly even life-changing. She’s sort of like a rock star when she’s
in fierce mode.
But people are sleepy. It’s first thing in the morning and they
probably haven’t had their bagels or coffee yet. The last thing
they want to do is learn about some guy. I happen to know that
Matthew Shepard isn’t just
some guy,
and I also know that the
student body’s general indifference to learning about him is just
feeding Ms. Maso’s burning desire to school us. If we don’t settle down and give her our undivided attention, she’ll figure out
a way to give the entire school detention and extra homework.
She stares at us for another second, and when some of the rustling around subsides, she picks up a clicker from the podium.
She presses a button and projects onto the screen above the stage
a picture of a young blond man in a sweater with light eyes and
just the suggestion of a smile, standing in front of a window. She
turns to look up at him.
“This, Union High, is Matthew Shepard.”
Even from where I’m sitting at the back of the auditorium with
the other students from my homeroom—which is basically everyone else in school whose last name begins with a “z”—I can
see that Ms. Maso is moved by this photo.
Movement near one of the auditorium side doors catches my
attention and I see Conrad being escorted in by a teacher who
has his hand on Conrad’s shoulder, as if he thinks Conrad might
bolt at any second. The teacher directs him to an empty seat and
makes him sit down. It’s not until Conrad sits that he looks up
and sees Matthew Shepard above the stage. I can sense his panic
from two rows away.
“If you don’t know who Matthew Shepard is, then you haven’t
been paying attention in your civics class. Recently, our president signed a major piece of civil rights legislation named after
this young man that makes it a federal crime to assault people
based on sexual orientation, gender or gender identity.”
She presses the clicker again and Matthew’s face fades to an
image of a split-rail fence adorned with flowers, out in the middle of a beautiful, wintery prairie.
“But just so we’re all on the same page, I’ll assume you don’t
know, and I’ll tell you a little bit about him. Matthew Shepard
was a 21-year-old University of Wyoming student who was planning to major in political science with a focus on human rights.”
She waits a few seconds before continuing to make sure that this
information has registered. “In 1998, he was kidnapped from a
bar, beaten and tortured for being gay. His two attackers—young
men who were about the same age as Matthew—tied him to this
fence that you see here, and they left him there, battered and
bleeding, in the freezing cold. Matthew was discovered there
eighteen hours later with so much damage done to his face and
head that he was unrecognizable. He died several days after that
in a hospital. Today is the anniversary of his death.”
Ms. Maso turns back to us and seems to make eye contact with
every single student sitting in our huge auditorium.
“So why am I bothering you with this on a beautiful sunny
October morning, just a month into the school year?” she asks.
It gets so quiet that I can hear my own pulse. “Principal Chen
and I, and the rest of the faculty, are extremely concerned. We
feel that we have not been doing our jobs, that we have not
taught you to the best of our abilities. Because if we had, you
would know about Matthew Shepard. You would know about
hate crimes. You would know what tolerance means. And you
would not have allowed your classmates to throw a party during which a student was called ‘faggot,’ ‘fag’ and ‘homo,’ and
thrown into a pool multiple times, once while he was choking
on water that had been forced into his mouth from a hose!” she
says, pounding on the podium.
No one is rustling around anymore—I don’t think anyone is
even breathing. Conrad sinks lower into his seat.
“I can’t begin to tell you how disappointed I am in all of you.
But I’m just as disappointed in the grown-ups in your lives, including the ones up here today. If we had been doing our jobs,
you would have stepped up to stop this reprehensible behavior.
From what I understand, only one student—
one
of you—tried
to help, and she got pushed into the pool for taking a stand.”
A few heads swivel around, and that old familiar feeling of
wanting to sink into the floor surfaces. But this time—unlike
last year, when I was called out for supposedly saving Stephanie’s
life—I want to sink into the floor because I feel shame.
I am not proud of what I did, because I was not taking a stand.
I wasn’t trying to stop a hate crime. In fact, I didn’t even understand that what was happening could be considered a hate
crime. So in the context of what Ms. Maso is talking about, I
didn’t do anything at all.
I was just trying to stop Conrad—who I can no longer see,
he’s so low in his seat—from drowning.
“Think about it, people. Who do you want to be? Do you want
to be the coward who is so afraid of people who are not like him,
who is so narrow-minded and small, that he attacks out of fear?
Is that what we are teaching you to do here? Because if it is, then
we are failing you miserably and you should hold us accountable!”
At this point, Ms. Maso has left the microphone behind and
is yelling at us from the edge of the stage, leaning forward as if
she wants to leap into the crowd and shake us until we come
to our senses.
“Now. Am I comparing throwing a fellow student in the pool
and calling him ‘homo’ to the horrifying crime that was perpetrated against Matthew Shepard?” She thinks for a second. “They
are not the same thing, no. But they
are
on the same spectrum.
It’s the spectrum of hate. And you know what, people? This
spectrum of hate includes all sorts of terrible things, including
a crime you may remember from your studies of post–Civil War
America, known as lynching. All of these things that we are talking about today are related.”
She clicks the clicker again and an old black-and-white photo
of a man hanging from a tree by his neck appears. Students gasp,
unused to seeing evidence of lynching anywhere other than in
textbooks, as small photos barely big enough to show the person’s lifeless face frozen in terror or agony. Ms. Maso’s photo
seems about twenty feet tall and provides plenty of inescapable detail—the man’s hair showing from underneath his round
cap; his hands bound so tightly that the rope cuts into his flesh;
shockingly beautiful dappled sunlight shining on the trunk of
the tree that holds him; the stain on his pants.
The collective gasp of the student body causes Principal Chen
to look over her shoulder to see what’s on the screen. When she
turns back, she shoots Ms. Maso an exasperated look, calmly
takes the clicker away from her and turns off the projection
screen. Ms. Maso is not pleased, but she takes a few steps back
and gives the principal the stage.
“Thank you for making that connection for us, Ms. Maso,”
Principal Chen says drily as she leans into the microphone,
sounding like she’s already composing a letter to angry parents
in her head as she talks. “Let’s get back to present-day Union
High. Here’s the thing, folks. That party happened before school
started and it didn’t happen on school property, so we have no
recourse. However, it still provides a great opportunity to have
a dialogue about tolerance. This dialogue will take place publicly—in assembly and in classrooms—and privately, in my office. Over the next few days, some of you will be paying me a
visit so I can better understand what went on at that party, and
what we need to do to ensure that nothing like it ever happens
again, okay?”
She takes a look at her watch, confers with the assistant principal, and then says, “Mr. Donnelly would like to make an announcement before we end.”
Mr. Donnelly walks to the podium slowly, as if buying himself some time before he has to speak. When he gets there, he
pauses as he looks out at all of us.
“Good morning, people. I have a special announcement that is
relevant to what we’ve been talking about. In honor of the commitment to tolerance we are making here at Union High and the
new federal legislation, the spring play will be
The Laramie Project,
a theater piece based on interviews with people who knew
Matthew Shepard. It’s a beautiful, difficult piece of theater that
asks hard questions, and I think it is very fitting, given what we
are currently trying to accomplish. On a personal note,” he says,
pausing, then exhaling into the microphone, “I have experience
with intolerance, and I would like to invite anyone who has suffered discrimination or harassment as a result of their sexual orientation to come talk to me whenever they’d like. Thank you.”
Mr. Donnelly steps away from the podium, ignoring a few surprised looks from faculty members as murmurs ripple through
the auditorium. Suddenly, he leans back into the microphone
and adds, “I almost forgot. The cast list for
Anything Goes
is now
on the board next to the theater.”
I can barely even process the announcement about the cast
list—or the fact that Mr. Donnelly basically just outed himself
in front of the whole school—because my head is spinning. Did
I witness a hate crime? Am I doing something wrong by not
talking about it? I didn’t think it was that big a deal—I mean, I
thought it was a big deal because Conrad was in danger, but I
guess I didn’t understand how big the danger was.
But I vowed not to embarrass myself again this year by running to the principal to tell on someone. Even if that someone
is Matt Hallis.
The murmuring in the auditorium increases as students sense
that the assembly is about to end. Should I go look at the cast
list before first period or just wait until somebody tells me who
got what, since I’m sure I’m not on the list?
The nice thing to do would be to go look at it with my friends
and congratulate them.
Do I feel like doing the nice thing today?
I’m focusing on the wrong issue, asking the wrong question.
The question should be, am I going to do the
right
thing today?
Do I even know what that is?
Principal Chen comes back to the podium. “Proceed to period one, which will end at the regular time. And thanks for
your undivided attention!” she yells with a sarcastic twinge as
the din becomes a full-on roar—the student body is officially
no longer listening.
I stand and look for Conrad. I need to see him before I get
dragged into Chen’s office—I need to know what he wants me
to say, and not say. But he’s already gone.
This school sucks. Don’t they realize that they are making the
situation worse for Conrad by doing stuff like this? First of all,
even though they didn’t say his name, everyone knew Maso and
Chen were talking about him. Also, it’s not like the swim thugs
are now going to apologize and beg Conrad to rejoin the swim
team. If anything, they’ll go after him more for possibly getting
them into trouble.
Dumb. Adults can be so dumb when it comes to stuff like
this. They should be able to figure out a better way to handle
these things.
I throw my bag over my shoulder and leave the auditorium
with the rest of the herd just in time to see Jamie. He lifts his
chin at me to say hi, and although I’m relieved that we’re not
ignoring each other, I have a hard time smiling. He points in
the direction he’s going, and I see Conrad slipping out a door to
the courtyard. Jamie goes after him, but he’s having trouble getting through the sea of students. We get swept along in different directions and he’s gone before I can make a decision about
whether I should go with him or not.
We hardly talked on the drive from Morton’s to Tracy’s. I was
too confused—I wasn’t sure what had just happened. It wasn’t
until later, when I was lying awake on Tracy’s trundle bed listening to her breathe the oh-so-peaceful slumber of a beloved
high school celebrity, that I started sorting through everything
he said and realized that it didn’t all add up. Jamie thinks he
owes the Deladdos, so he’s made them his priority. But for how
long? Forever?
And why does Jamie feel guilty about Mr. Deladdo, given what
he was doing to his family? If he was hurting them, aren’t they
better off without him?
What am I missing?
I get to the bulletin board by the theater, where Stephanie and
Holly are holding hands and jumping up and down with excitement as Robert, a giant grin on his face, talks to a glum-looking
Mitchell Klein. When Holly and Stephanie see me they suddenly
stop jumping and the smiles slide off their faces, which tells me
everything I need to know. I wave at them and say “Congratulations!” as genuinely as I can manage and I keep walking toward
the list even though I know I’m not on it.