My Perfect Life (10 page)

Morty and Farley rolled their eyes again.

Carla half-turned her head, in case there was any confusion about who she was talking to now. “I can’t believe you would do something like this to me, Ella.” Her voice trembled. “We’ve been friends for so long.”

Even though I knew it was an act, I felt guilt ooze through me.

Everyone was looking at me. I forced myself to speak. “I’m sorry, Carla, I—”

“Do something like what?” It was Sam again. Guilt isn’t in his genetic make-up. “That poster doesn’t
say
anything. It’s up to the reader to decide what it means.” He smiled broadly at Dr Alsop, who seemed to be sucking on his teeth. “Like beauty, it’s in the eye of the beholder, isn’t it, Dr Alsop?”

“In the eye of the beholder my Aunt Fanny’s curlers,” said Carla. She was close to letting Dr Alsop see her claws. “It’s a slanderous attack. It’s defamatory. It’s—”

“The McLibel Case all over again,” said Sam.

Dr Alsop rapped on his desk with his knuckles. Gently. “Carla, I’m afraid I have to agree with Sam on this. I don’t really think the poster can be considered slanderous.” He cleared his throat and smiled his chummy smile. “It’s seems perfectly within the bounds of a normal political campaign to me.”

“And is that what you think, El?” Carla was looking straight at me now. She was facing away from Dr Alsop so he couldn’t see the lack of girlish warmth in her eyes.

I opened my mouth and shut it again.

Carla smiled. There was no girlish warmth in her smile, either. Not until she returned her attention to Dr Alsop. “Well,” Carla murmured. “I guess maybe I have overreacted.”

I heard Morty or Farley say, “Uh oh…”

Dr Alsop leaned back in his chair. He looked like he was going to say something like “That’s the spirit, Carla,” but Carla hadn’t finished speaking yet.

“But I would like the chance to answer the question the posters raise.” She tilted her head to one side. “I do think I’m owed that much.”

Dr Alsop, having thought it was all over, was a little confused. “Well, Carla—” He tapped his fingers against his desk. “Did you have something in mind?”

What a question. It was like asking if birds have wings.

“Well…” Carla tilted her head the other way, considering. “I suppose we could have a debate… You know, in front of the whole school. Then we could discuss the issues clearly and openly. And I could, you know, correct any wrong impressions.”

So that was why we were there. Carla not only wanted to make sure that I couldn’t refuse to debate her; she wanted to make sure that the debate itself wasn’t the usual after-school affair where the only people who turned up were the candidates and their closest friends. If she was going to wipe the auditorium with me, she wanted to make sure that the auditorium was packed.

Dr Alsop popped out of his chair like a man on springs. He slammed his palms down on his desk. “That’s an excellent idea! Absolutely excellent!” He beamed. “I assume no one has any objections?”

“It’s all right with us,” said Morty.

“Can’t wait,” said Sam.

Dr Alsop had obviously given up waiting for me to speak. He clapped his hands together. “Then it’s settled. Shall we say a day or two before the election? Give you all time to prepare?”

I smiled, the way a body may smile when rigormortis sets in.

Two days after the apocalypse would have suited me better.

Alma left right after the meeting, but Carla stayed behind, apparently to give Dr Alsop some advice about organizing the debate. Morty and Farley, however, needed no prompting to make their exit; they practically ran out of the office. Sam and I were right behind them, Sam checking his watch to see if he needed to bother going back to class.

Lola was in the main office, passionately discussing genetically modified food with Ms Littlemoon, when we came out.

“How’d you get out of English?” asked Sam. “The class isn’t over yet.”

“Cramps,” answered Lola. “They were excruciating. What happened?”

Sam and I told her. In my version, Carla had engineered the whole thing just to get me to debate her because she knew it was my weakest point. In Sam’s version, I had risen to the challenge and clanked my blade against Carla’s with a merry smirk.

I don’t think Lola believed Sam, but it didn’t matter. She could only have been more delighted about the debate if she’d gotten me to agree to the idea herself.

“You’ll cremate her,” crowed Lola. “Maybe we could borrow your dad’s camcorder for this. It begs to be kept for posterity.”

I begged to be kept for posterity.

“You’ll be brilliant. You’ll be the Abe Lincoln of Dellwood. We’ll give Dr Alsop a list of the questions we want covered, and I’ll coach you till you could answer them in your sleep.”

Radar system in perfect functioning order, at that minute Carla stepped through the Principal’s door, Dr Alsop hovering behind her with a weary smile on his face.

“Lola!” called Dr Alsop. “Did you hear the exciting news?”

“It’s going to be as major as the Kennedy–Nixon debates,” Lola gleefully assured him.

From the expression on his face, I’d guess that he’d already figured this out.

Dr Alsop went back into his office, probably to collapse, and Carla rolled towards the exit. She stopped when she got to us and tossed her head in a regretful kind of way.

“You know, Lola, it really is a shame you’re not running yourself,” she purred. She darted a pitying glance in my direction. “You know how much I like a little challenge.”

Except
for Morty Slinger, whose campaign tactics couldn’t have been more laid back without the danger of putting himself to sleep, after the Showdown at Dripping Sink and the Flinging-down of the Gauntlet, we all threw ourselves into the battle with the zeal of kamikaze pilots.

There was nothing Carla did that we could top. Carla served hand-baked cookies and designer soft drinks at her after-school gatherings; we countered with organic juice and potato chips. Carla brought her portable CD player in and provided music for her admirers; we brought in Sam’s old ghettoblaster and played better music but with inferior sound quality. (Morty kept his door shut. He’d turned his headquarters into a computer workshop, filled with science geeks and gameheads who didn’t like to be disturbed.)

And, predictably, there was nothing we did that Carla didn’t top.

Carla’s new batch of posters picked up where ours left off. Each featured a picture of Carla doing something wonderful – accepting an award from the Chamber of Commerce, pushing an old lady in a wheelchair, picking up beer cans along a highway – and, tucked off to one side, a photograph of either me, Sam, or even Lola doing something far less wonderful (brushing grass off my skirt, picking his nose, and flapping her shawl, respectively).

We had a rally in the gym one afternoon, attended by such a modest number of supporters looking for food that I not only read my speech without any trouble, but received a round of applause as well (not all of it from Lola). The next day at lunch the cafeteria was overtaken by varsity cheerleaders screaming, “Give me a C! Give me an A! Give me an R! Give me an L! Give me an A! What’s that spell? What’s that spell?”

I left the house early every morning so I’d get to school in time to greet potential voters as they arrived. I returned late because, though Sam had to work, Lola and I spent most of each afternoon trying to entice people into our room to drum up support. After supper, Lola and I had long phone calls preparing me for the debate. All other time that wasn’t spent eating, sleeping, or doing homework, was spent in coming up with ways to make the students of Dellwood High feel that they were a part of a larger world without volunteering them all for the Peace Corps. We would raise money for worthwhile causes; we would adopt a family at Christmas; we would sponsor an exchange student from an underdeveloped country; we would organize volunteers to help junior high students with reading and maths.

Despite the fact that every major campus personality – members of the football teams, the basketball teams, the cheerleaders, and just about anyone else whose yearbook caption would include “sure to succeed” – was backing Carla, by the end of the first week of campaigning (or Round One, as Sam called it), Lola was convinced – either from her creative intuition or from counting badges, I wasn’t sure which – that Carla and I were neck and neck.

Personally, it felt more like my neck was broken. By the weekend, all I wanted to do was lock myself in my room and not speak to anyone until Monday morning.

Fat chance, with Lola around. She turned up first thing Saturday morning, ready to teach me how to win the debate. It was all uphill.

“The two most important things to remember,” said Lola, during our third break, “are, one: you don’t have to answer the question you’ve been asked and—”

“So what do I answer? The question I haven’t been asked?”

“Exactly. You answer the question you
can
answer. It’s what all politicians do. Someone asks the President about, say, national medical insurance, and because he doesn’t want to lose the votes of doctors or of people who want national medical insurance, he talks about all he’s done to fight pollution.”

It was starting to work; that actually made some weird sort of sense.

“What’s the second most important thing?”

“That nobody expects you to tell the truth.”

“They don’t?”

“Of course not. They expect you to tell them what they want to hear.”

“They do?”

“Absolutely. Look at George W. Bush. Look at Bill Clinton. Look at George Bush Senior. George Bush Senior was the best. He even said, ‘Read my lips: no new taxes’, and then the next thing anybody knew, new taxes. But nobody goes around saying, ‘God, what a liar!’ People still love him.”

I share a gene pool with two of the people who still love George Bush Senior.

I rested on my elbows. In Lola’s bedroom, we always sit on the floor because her bed is piled with clothes and cookie boxes and stuff like that; in my room, of course, we sit on the floor because of my mother’s bed thing, and we don’t eat because of my mother’s thing about no food outside of designated areas (the kitchen, dining room, or patio).

“But I thought I’m meant to be the anti-Santini—”

“Oh, for God’s sake, El…” Lola went prone, decimated by the experience of trying to educate me in the finer points of political behaviour. “I’m not saying you have to
lie
.” She sat up, now leaning towards me with urgency. “This isn’t supposed to cause a moral dilemma, you know. It’s supposed to make things easier. All I’m saying is that you can lie if you need to. And that you don’t have to worry about not being able to answer a question, because you don’t have to answer anything you don’t want to answer – just answer something else. It’s really easy.”

Sighing, I lay back on the carpet. “I don’t know if I can remember everything. I’m exhausted.” My brain hurt from thinking so much, and my voice hurt from talking so much, and all of me hurt from the stress of keeping it all together. And I wasn’t sleeping that well, either. Everyone had always been amazed that my parents never argued, but after sixteen years of living with them I’d finally found out that they did argue – but only in the dead of night. I don’t know how many times in the past few days I’d woken up to the sound of shouting. I’d thought it was someone’s TV at first.

“Well, you can bet your last maxi-pad that Carla will remember.”

“Carla doesn’t have to remember. Manipulating the truth is second nature to her.”

“First nature,” corrected Lola. She straightened up suddenly, looking towards the window. “Did you hear a car?”

I didn’t hear a car, but now that I was listening I heard a car door slam shut.

“It must be my dad.”

“It’s a little early for Mr Darling, isn’t it?” asked Lola. “It’s still daylight.”

One of Lola’s theories about my father’s hardly ever being home was that he was a vampire and only emerged from his coffin when it was dark.

And then we heard my mother’s voice at the front door. She was gushing like a fountain. “Why, Carla! What a lovely surprise. I’m afraid you caught me up to my elbows in flaky pastry.” Carla laughed in delight. “I was just saying to Ella the other day,” my mother gushed on, “that we don’t see enough of you any more. I told her she should invite you over. We don’t see you nearly enough.”

I went rigid with attention. I didn’t like the sound of that. It was too effusive. And my mother’s voice was a little mushy. Could she have moved cocktail hour back?

“Good God!” cried Lola in a hoarse whisper. “It’s the Santini!”

I reached the door first. It wasn’t that I’d become a snoop; but I had to keep at least an ear on my mother. Just in case.

We tiptoed towards the head of the stairs.

“Actually, it’s you I came to see,” Carla was saying. “I have a really big favour to ask.”

Lola and I exchanged a look.

“Probably the head of her first born,” whispered Lola.

It was no time for joking. My mother had just invited Carla into the kitchen, where they could talk. And where the wine would be. All we could hear was: “Oh, please say yes. You know you’re the best cook in Dellwood.” Carla’s voice sounded as if her hands were clasped. “And it would be so cool.”

My mother laughed again. “I’m not sure Ella would think it was so cool…”

“Oh, Ella, won’t mind,” Carla assured her. “It’s not like we’re enemies, Mrs Gerard. We’re just opponents.”

“Yeah…” muttered Lola. “Like God and Satan.”

“Well…” My mother sighed as if she was weakening. “Are you sure it wouldn’t it be easier to have a barbecue?”

“Good Lord!” breathed Lola. “The brazen hussy. She’s hiring your mother to cook for her.”

“Shhh…!”

“That’s so boring,” Carla was saying. “I want something really special. Something that symbolizes my beliefs.”

Lola choked. “What’s she want her to make? A neutron bomb?”

This time I stepped on her heel. “Shhh…!”

Carla was now talking about spring rolls, samosas and tostadas. She’d already roughed out a menu.

“I want as many different countries represented as possible,” summarized Carla. “After all, we are a global village now, aren’t we, Mrs Gerard? I mean, we don’t just live in Dellwood, New Jersey, any more. We live in Calcutta, Beijing and Mexico City as well. Our culture stretches across the globe.”