Tracy Flick Can't Win (Tracy Flick #2) (46)

“Ouch,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

She shrugged. It happened; they’d survived.

“I confronted him, and he admitted it right away. He broke up with her the next day and fired her a couple of weeks later. She sued the company, and it turned into a huge mess. Kyle had to step down, and we decided to change our lives, and here we are.”

“What happened to Veronika?”

“Oh, she’s fine, believe me. She made a lot of money from the settlement. A lot of money. I’m not allowed to say how much.” She gave me a look, like it was just us girls up here. “I mean, I don’t know about you, Tracy, but I slept with a married man in my twenties, and no one gave me one point eight million dollars.”





Kyle Dorfman


I thought it was a joke at first.

“Come on,” I said. “Larry Holleran doesn’t want to be Principal.”

“Oh yes, he does,” Ricky insisted. “He got really excited when he heard that Jack was stepping down.”

“It’s too late,” I said. “He missed the application deadline by four months.”

“The timing’s unfortunate,” Charisse conceded. “But we can extend the search if we have to. We’ve done it before.”

It wasn’t just the timing, and they all knew it. Larry Holleran wasn’t Principal material. He’d been a notoriously lazy general science teacher back in the day, famous for napping at his desk while the kids watched Jacques Cousteau. He eventually rose to the rank of Assistant Principal—the job came with a nice pay bump—but it was widely understood to be an honorary promotion, a reward for all his championships. He didn’t work very hard or stay very long before ditching GMHS for Birchfield College.

“Can’t he just be coach?” I asked. “Does he have to be an administrator too?”

“He needs the money,” Buzz explained. “He’s not doing this out of the goodness of his heart.”

“Fine,” I said. “Then let’s just give him his old job back. Assistant Principal and Head Football Coach. That’s a pretty good deal.”

“We floated that,” Ricky said. “But he didn’t bite. He wants the big office. It’s not negotiable.”

“What about Tracy?” I said.

“What about her?” Buzz snapped. “She’ll still be the number two. She won’t be losing anything.”

Tell that to Tracy, I thought.

Charisse put her hand on my arm. Her eyes were wide and hopeful.

“Marcus would be over the moon,” she said. “To be able to play for Larry Holleran? That would be a dream come true.”

“It’ll be a new golden age,” Ricky told me. “Like the nineties all over again. Remember how great that was?”

I’d played trumpet in the high school marching band, and I remembered it well, the collective euphoria of those game days, back when the football team was awesome and the whole town came out to cheer them on. I loved being in the eye of that hurricane, blowing my horn, shouting, Hey! and pumping my fist in the air.

“It was pretty great,” I admitted.





Tracy Flick


I don’t know what came over me. I could’ve just smiled and let the conversation flow by, the way I always did. One point eight million dollars, what a crazy world. Maybe it was the heat, or maybe it was the expression on Marissa’s face, so open and unguarded, as if we were already friends.

“I was fifteen,” I said.

“I’m sorry?” She smiled uncertainly. “You were what?”

“Fifteen.” I was struck by the calmness of my own voice. I could have been telling her any random fact about myself. “The first time I slept with a married man. I was a sophomore in high school.”

We stared at each other.

“Oh,” she said, very softly.

“He was my English teacher,” I continued, in that same matter-of-fact voice, “and I was his favorite student. I wrote a paper on Ethan Frome, and he gave me an A plus, the first in his entire career, at least that’s what he told me. He said it was a college-level critical essay, and he wanted to know where I learned to write like that. Like an adult, he said. You write like an adult. That was how it started.”

This was all true—it had happened to me—but it was hard to believe, hearing it spoken out loud like that.

“He was married.” I tried to smile, for some reason, as if I were telling a funny story, but it didn’t quite work. “I was fifteen.”

“That’s too young,” she said.

“I know. But it didn’t feel that way. It felt like we were equals.”

“Okay.” She nodded, but not the way you nod when you’re agreeing with someone. “And how long did this—?”

“Not very long.”

I still had that unsuccessful smile on my face, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it. It was just stuck there.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry he did that to you.”

“I’m not a victim,” I said. “It wasn’t like that.”

She got up from her bench and sat down next to me. After a moment, she put her hand on my shoulder.