Michael got up and pulled on his pants. In the scant light from the fish tank, Michael looked around her room. Covering the walls were photos of Nicole as well as her various awards, plaques, citations, blue ribbons. Hanging over a chair was her Mensa T-shirt.
“It means that much to you.”
“Yes.”
She watched Michael move closer to inspect the photographs. There were a dozen of them. One caught his eye: the group shot of the Bloomfield Biology Club on a field trip to Genzyme Corporation. Seven kids were posing in a lab with company biologists in white smocks. At one end was Nicole; at the other end was Amy Tran.
“Aren’t you taking this a little hard? I mean, you’ve got a wall of awards. You’ll probably get early admission to Harvard and be in med school in four years. What else do you want?”
Nobody remembers seconds.
Nicole moved up to him. “Maybe I am,” she whispered. “But you have to do this for me. It means everything.” She pressed herself against his groin.
“I don’t think Mr. Laurent had this in mind,” he said.
“Fuck Mr. Laurent.” Her voice was void of inflection.
The Andrew Dale Laurent Fellowship was a prize that went to a member of the incoming senior class whose sheer determination and effort had “most demonstrated the greatest desire to succeed,” as the write-up said. It was the most prestigious award at Bloomfield Prep, not because of the thousand-dollar prize, but because the benefactors stipulated that it went to the student with the mathematically highest grade-point average going into the senior year. It was the only award based purely on grades. And although the school did not publish class rank, everybody knew that the recipient was the eleventh-grade valedictorian. Number one.
“Numero uno,” as her father said.
“Numero uno.”
“Never settle for second best,” Kingman DaFoe once told her years ago. And he had reminded her ever since: “Who remembers vice presidents? Who remembers silver-medal Olympians? Who remembers Oscar nominees? You’ve got number-one stuff, Nicole, so go for it!”
Daddy’s words were like mantras. And ever since she had entered Bloomfield ten years ago, they were scored on her soul right down to the DNA level.
Nicole DaFoe had a grade point of 3.92, and Amy Tran had a 3.93. She knew this because she got Michael to check the transcripts. If Michael gave Amy a grade of B in his U.S. History course, she would drop to 3.91, leaving Nicole in first place. Which meant the Andrew Dale Laurent Fellowship was hers. And everybody would know.
“Michael, I’m asking you to do this for me.”
“I’ll think about it,” he said, and headed for the window.
She pulled him back. “Michael, promise me.”
“Nicole, I think your obsession with grades is a problem.”
“Say you’ll do it.”
“This is bad enough, but now you’re asking me to compromise professional ethics and downgrade another kid so you can get an award.”
“It’s not just the award.”
“That’s what bothers me. See you Monday and get that paper in.” He pulled his arm free and slipped out the window.
In a moment, he was climbing down the drainpipe as he had done before.
“Fuck your professional ethics,” she whispered. “And fuck you, Mr. Kaminsky.”
When he was out of sight, she looked back in the room—at the bookcase on the far wall. She walked to it and reached up to the second shelf and moved aside some books to reveal the small wireless video camera. She rewound it, pressed Play, and watched the whole scene from the moment Michael climbed through her window.
Then she looked at the photos on the wall. The shot of the Biology Club on a field trip. There was Amy Tran with the flat grinning face, the greasy black hair and chipped tooth, the stupid slitted eyes, the breathy simpering voice and ugly ching-chong accent that charmed the teachers who thought it wonderful how she took extra English courses and worked around the clock because she was a poor and underprivileged foreigner.
Nicole hissed to herself and gouged out Amy’s eyes with a razor knife.
Nobody remembers seconds.
15
“Hey, look at the tiger,” Dylan hooted. On the far side of a small water hole was a long-legged cat pacing back and forth, his eyes fixed someplace in the far distance.
“That’s not a tiger, it’s a cheetah,” declared Lucinda, pointing to the sign in front of Dylan.
A couple of the kids giggled at Dylan’s mistake.
“C-H-E-E-T-A-H,” Lucinda said. “Can’t you read?”
“I can read,” Dylan said weakly.
“No you can’t,” Lucinda said. “You can’t read anything.”
“Besides, tigers have stripes,” said Lucinda’s friend Courtney.
Lucinda shook her head at him in disgust. “You must be taking stupid pills.”
Sheila and Rachel were maybe ten feet behind them, but Rachel heard the comment and instantly saw red. From the look on Dylan’s face, he was clearly wounded. Rachel’s body lurched, but she caught herself, exerting every fiber of self-control not to fly at Lucinda and smash her fat little self satisfied face.
“Lucinda!” Sheila cried and grabbed her daughter by the arm. “I don’t want to hear that kind of talk from you ever!” she growled, wagging her finger in her face. “Do you understand me, young lady? Do you? DO YOU?”
Lucinda’s face froze in shock at her mother’s reaction.
“You do not talk to other people that way,” Sheila continued. “I want you to apologize to Dylan right now.” Sheila steered her toward him.
Rachel half-expected Lucinda to begin crying at the humiliation, but instead she turned her face to Dylan. “Sor-reee,” she sang out.
Dylan shrugged. “That’s okay.”
But Sheila wouldn’t let go. She had taken Lucinda’s arm and pulled her aside. “Say it like you mean it,” she snapped.
“That’s fine,” Rachel said, wanting to stop her from dragging out the incident.
But Sheila persisted. “Say it properly.”
“I’m sorry,” Lucinda said in a flat voice.
Sheila started to insist her daughter affect a tone of remorse, when Rachel cut her off. “We accept your apology, right?” she asked Dylan.
“Sure,” he muttered. He was beginning to squirm from the attention. He also wanted to get back to the others enjoying the cheetah. Then in all innocence he added: “I am stupid.”
“No you’re not,” Rachel said. “You’re not … Don’t even use that word.”
He and Lucinda moved to the group of kids.
“I’m really sorry about that,” Sheila said. “Really. That was uncalled for.”
Rachel nodded and looked away, wishing that Sheila would drop the subject. Her overreaction was making it worse—as if Lucinda had called a paraplegic a “crip.” Because he was young, Dylan would repair. But on a subconscious level he must have absorbed something of the message. How many times must you be told you’re a dummy before you internalize it?
The rest of the morning passed without other incidents.
Later, on the bus, Rachel could hear Lucinda challenge the other kids to an impromptu spelling bee, then an arithmetic contest—mostly who could add or subtract numbers in their heads. She was clearly the Dells power kid, always pontificating, always needing to show how clever she was, how much more she knew than the others. And even though most kids were too young to rank each other, Lucinda had already established the mind-set that Dylan was at the bottom of the hierarchy: the one to pick on—the class dope.