The Taming of the Drew (37 page)

The recycling bin’s lid wouldn’t close.

It’s hard to take Mrs. Gleason after that kind of lunch break. She said, looking at a class roster, “Oh, how lovely! It’s time for our favorite football player to give us his speech for this unit!”

The entire class turned to stare at Drew. He sat slouched in his chair. Arms crossed, chin down, legs out front. When Mrs. Gleason spoke, it was like a tentacle wrapped itself around his ankles and began to pull him under the linoleum floor. Down, down, down. And he wasn’t fighting it.
 

Mrs. Gleason came and stood beside him. “Andrew, dear, posture is very important in making a good first impression. Up up!”

She pinched the fabric of his upper sleeve between two fingers and pulled it out into a triangle. He stopped his descent, turned his head and stared at her hand holding his sleeve. I suddenly realized that Mrs. Gleason had
years
of experience getting teenaged boys to stand up in front of a class and talk. Kind of made me shudder to think of the willpower and deviousness her kind of career required. Given the assignment, high school public-speaking teachers could probably have the Middle East sorted out before finals.

As the tense impasse continued, Mrs. Gleason said, “I’m surprised at you, Andrew, being
coy
like this,” (he flinched at the word, “coy”). “You were so great the first time you spoke in class,” (he flinched at the memory). “And if there’s anyone who’s going to be speaking a lot in their future career, it’s you!” (he looked like he’d been sucker-punched by the mental image of a never-ending series of Mrs. Gleason public-speaking experiences).

Drew was down for the count and he knew it. He slowly pulled his ankles free of the invisible tentacles, shifted up in his seat and stood. Mrs. Gleason held his little triangle of sleeve in her pinched fingers all the way to the front of the class.

“Oh, goodie!” she said, “I’ll just choose a topic for you, shall I?” and without waiting for an answer, she pulled a folded piece of paper out of her Garfield ceramic cookie-jar topic-holder. She unfolded it, said, “This is such a wonderful topic for someone like you, Andrew. Lets you stretch your wings a bit!”

She set the timer for five minutes, stage-whispered, “Now remember your structure: topic sentence, three points, conclusion!” She looked at the paper and said, “Your topic is…are you ready? Are you
sure
you’re ready? I’m just kidding you! Okay, here it is. It’s Cosmetics.
Go
!”

Have you ever seen someone walk on stage, in front of a packed auditorium. Maybe they’re wearing a sword, or carrying a butler’s tray, or standing on a taped X on the ground. And then a spotlight hits them. Their thoughts are turned inward, like all the other actors, and you see this initial movement of facial muscles, like they’re about to speak, but then,
whoom
. Stage fright. In an instant, like someone’s thrown one of those giant switches that resets the power, every brain cell scrambles. You can see it happening. Eyes wake and stare into the audience, the face loses all tone. Arms wilt, legs wobble. As the ominous silence stretches, getting tauter and tauter, the audience begins to twitch and shift, as though thousands of people are repressing the urge to shout “Wake Up!” but nothing stops the process, the eyes burn hotter and brighter, sweat starts to bead, and the face gets slacker and slacker until…

Ding.

“O — kay!” says Mrs. Gleason, “Not as good as your first effort, Andrew, but our motto is every experience is a learning experience!” She walked him back to his seat, still with the pinched triangle of sleeve, like it was a tiny cloth leash. “My tip for you next time is one word.
Enthusiasm
! It makes such a difference! If you charge into your assignments with
enthusiasm
, the momentum is your friend! It can start you going and keep you going.” She added, with an evil glint in her eye, “I’m betting we won’t be making that mistake again, now will we?”

For the rest of the class, no matter whose name was called, or what topic was chosen, their speech was an incoherent, but extremely enthusiastic, babbling.

***

Today’s Tweets:
Drew gives improv talk in Speech. Creates in the minds of his audience an unforgettable, haunting image.

***

Walking to tutoring, my steps got slower and slower. I didn’t even want to
think
about what it would be like, 45 minutes of being forced into that tiny cube with Drew.
 

My faint hope that Drew would still be stunned and recuperating from the horror of Mrs. Gleason crumbled. Except for muttering, “That woman is more evil than any coach, ever,” plus a tendency, because of the adrenaline overload, for his left leg to seize up, and a slight pallor to his skin, Drew seemed to have shaken most of the predictable after-effects in less than an hour. Which was a record for Academy students.

Outside tutoring hall, Tio wore a new pair of heavy-fabric baggy jeans and a faux-graffiti-ed tee-shirt, both clearly
not
from the boys’ department. And, in the bright sun, I saw stubble on his upper lip. Also a dime-sized patch on his cheek, like a seedling clump that would gradually spread in a few years into a lawn of shaved stubble. His forehead still seemed too big for his face and I realized his eyebrows had recently become sluggish, fat caterpillars.

“Yes?” he said to me, sharply.

Caught in the act, I had a momentary panic. Then I flicked my upper lip, like Tio had something hanging there. He wiped his lip with the back of his hand, looking grateful to me for letting him know. I felt a stab of guilt and caught Drew staring at me, that half-smile on his face.

“Yes?” I said to
him
, sharply.

Drew smiled wider, but before he answered, a teensy Uni girl, who looked like she really should be in sixth grade instead of ninth, grabbed my elbow and dragged me a couple of steps away. She had a thickly lip-glossed smile that didn’t reach her eyes. A horde of Uni-girls, all young, watched us from eight feet further along the path. She, clearly the spokesgirl for them all, said to me, “What’s his name?”

“Andrew. The Dog.”

“No, silly. Everyone knows
him
,” she said, shaking her head at my sub-normal mental abilities (why, I asked myself, was I standing here, being insulted by a baby-Uni?), “The other cute one. What’s
his
name?”

I turned to look. Curtis had arrived. “Curtis?” I said. “You’re too young for him.”

“He doesn’t look like a Curtis,” she said, eying me as though I was pulling some underhanded Academy trick on her. Her swarm of friends, also frowning, edged closer.

“I can’t exactly help that.” I’d had enough of disappointing the Uni-infants. “Take it up with his mom.”

When I returned, I noticed Curtis looked tense today, not as bad as if he’d been a victim of Mrs. Gleason, but definitely white around the eyes. His arms were full of books. Which, come to think of it, was a bit odd. When had Curtis or Nate ever brought books to tutoring?

I said, “Something on your mind, Curtis?”

He said, glancing around and lowering his voice, “Kate, would you say I’m a pitt or a depp?”

My eyebrows took flight. Before I could answer, both Drew and Tio said, without hesitating, in bored voices, “Pitt.”

Curtis stared at me, waiting for my opinion too, and I added, “Yeah, definitely pitt.”

“What do you think she likes?”

“Um, I never asked Bianca.”
 

Curtis flushed a deep, saturated red. By now both Tio and Drew stared at him, eyes hard with hostility. Curtis ooched closer to me and motioned.

We walked out of earshot of the others, but he still whispered, out of the side of his mouth, like we were spies and he was handing off the latest password, “Not Bianca.
Phoebe
.”

By now my eyebrows felt like they’d crawled into my hair in shock. I opened and closed my mouth a couple of times and finally said, “Definitely pitt. Yes. Phoebe’s a pitt kind of girl. I think. Maybe.”

Back straighter, Curtis turned and sauntered back to the others.

Tio and Drew eyed Curtis as he approached. Nate waited too now, and, in addition to his usual mega-expensive clothes, he wore an imitating-Alex fingerless black glove on his left hand.
 

“New look?” I said.

Nate tried to stare down his nose at me, which is hard to do when you’re both shorter and younger than the person to whom you’re speaking. “It’s a University thing,” he said. “You wouldn’t understand.”

I pressed my lips together to keep from smiling.

Curtis said, as we shuffled to the door of tutoring hall, “Listen, Nate, about this arrangement. I’m thinking I’m, well, I’m out.”

Nate turned, stopping Tio, Drew and me behind them. “You’re just going to throw in the towel? I never pegged you for a loser.”

Curtis shifted his jaw, “First, I’m too old for this. Second, I mean, face it, Bianca’s not exactly a one-man kind of woman.”

I could feel Drew leaning forward behind me, and with my elbow I poked him hard in the ribs. “That’s right,” I said, giving Tio, who looked equally enraged, a warning look to settle down, “Bianca’s been keeping
you all
busy.”

Tio and Drew seemed to get the message — to remember that Bianca had agreed to intentionally keep Nate and Curtis distracted and involved so that Celia couldn’t rope the two of them into her plans for the missing felony-camera.
 

Which was apparently still missing. And in the hands of a now-enraged Celia.

Nate said to Curtis, “You’re not leaving me in the lurch. I pay you.”

“But for what?” Curtis said, “Listen, pipsqueak, I’m tired of this. Either we do some tutoring or I’m out of here.”

“Oh no you don’t,” Nate said as we went past the tutor-aide’s desk. Nate shot Tio a glare that would have impaled Tio if it had been solid. “I’m not throwing in the towel to that guy. You’re going to keep coming here every day and I’m going to keep paying you because I need an official tutor to get inside. Believe me, you break the rules here and you’re in trouble.”

Bianca arrived, and Tio and Drew stopped to talk to her in low voices. Curtis and Nate walked off, and, worried, I drifted behind to listen. I heard Curtis say, “This is screwed up. It’s supposed to be about
Bianca
, not some battle between you and
Tio
. And I think you’re overblowing the whole tutor situation. I’m sure I could duck out the last week of school and no one would notice you’re here alone. It’s not like they’re going to
expel
you for faking your way into tutoring hall.”

Nate said, his whispered voice harsh, “Oh
yeah
, give me a couple of days and I’ll
prove
it to you.”

All I could think about, right then, was the remembered image of Bianca, weeks ago, running with Tio’s forged tutoring form, back into Tutor hall.
 

Surely Nate couldn’t know Tio had a forged form. Could he?

If Nate did, there was absolutely
no
doubt in my mind that Nate would report Tio for forging a parent’s permission form and lying about his grades. Nate was just that obsessed with “winning.”

Bianca, apparently unaware, floated past Nate and said, “It’s math time,” and with an overhead wave of her hand, led Nate into the side tutoring room.

I didn’t think my nerves could take any more. I sat in my cube first, with my chair sideways and my back to Drew, nose nearly touching the styrofoam wall barrier.

Drew didn’t say a word. He slid into his forward-facing chair, his shoulder exactly between my shoulder blades, and turned on the computer.
 

Curtis asked Tio, in a hushed voice, “So you do pretty well in math, don’t you?”

My heart dropped, swan-diving into my stomach. Before I could stop him, Tio said, “I suck.”

Curtis said, “See, I told Nate,” with a huff, then both were silent.

I wanted to kick Tio under the desk, but it’s hard to do through a wall. My shoulders were hunched so high I think they may have looked like they sprouted out of my ears. I didn’t know how I was going to make it to the end of this torture — I mean
tutor
— session.

A hand appeared to my right. In it was a tiny white earbud.

I looked at the bud, and, weirdly, it was like I could already feel something inside me start to
give
a tiny bit. It wasn’t like I really relaxed, but instead, it was more a loosening of the pressure inside
just
enough so things might not, necessarily, shatter.
 

I licked my lips, reached over, and put the earbud in my ear. I tried to stay facing sideways, listening, but somehow I ended up watching Buffy clips, facing forward on a sideways chair, shoulders jiggling with laughter, half-leaning back into Drew.
 

At the end of the episode, when I realized what I’d done, I whipped the earbud out like it was electrified. I held it in my fist, face staring down at the desk.

See, I was afraid, afraid of all the things I’d done and how impossible it felt that I could continue to hide them from Drew. Even if it was all for his own sake. I had to make sure the camera got returned, that Celia didn’t do anything horrible. I even had to make sure that Drew didn’t learn that Bianca helped forge Tio’s form, or Drew would be furious at Tio and decide Tio was a bad influence. I had to stop Nate, and most of all, I couldn’t say a word about my trees, and I had to get the money from his mother soon, or the trees would be lost. In only a few days he would be gone and that was the idea, for Drew to float out and never look back. So I had to save the trees without him ever knowing, even though the trees were something I’d worked to save all year, a bigger part of me than anything else in my life.

It all felt like too much to carry inside. Every minute I spent with Drew, it felt like these things were going to rupture, alien-like, out of me, no matter how much I tried to suppress them. I wanted to flee, but at the same time, I’d never wanted anything more than to just hang out with him.