Tracy Flick Can't Win (Tracy Flick #2) (63)

Lisa got my point. Her face tightened with dis-may as Dino and his lackeys exchanged high fives, cel-ebrating his sudden ascension to the leadership of the Free World. I was pleased to see Paul Warren’s hand shoot up.

“Those Glen Ridge guys are scum,” he declared, si-lencing the room with the force of his judgment. “That girl didn’t deserve what they did to her.”

If I had to stick a pin in the map of the past and say, There, that’s where it all started, I guess I’d choose that moment.





PAUL WARREN




IT WAS LIKE I’d just opened my eyes after a sixteen-year nap and was wide awake for the first time in my life, seeing things for what they were. I’d check out the news, and where it just used to be a blur of names and faces, now it was like, “Holy shit, people are killing each other. Little kids are starving to death.”

Mr. M. was a big part of that. He wasn’t your ordi-nary teacher, slouching in front of the blackboard, dron-ing on about nothing for the whole period, the boredom thickening until it came to seem like a climate, the weather we lived in until the bell rang. He had a way of explaining complicated things so they made sense to you, connecting current events with familiar details from our own lives, asking questions that really made you think.

“You’ve all puked,” I remember him saying one day. “I know I have. It’s no big deal. People figure you’re sick, or maybe you drank too much. But when George Bush loses his lunch in Japan, it’s a national crisis. Now why do you think that is? What makes his vomit so different from yours or mine?”

Way more than Mr. M., though, it was the melt-down between my parents that snapped me out of my daze. There’s nothing like your mom kicking your dad out of the house to make you play back the tape of your existence and see it all in a whole new light.

I’m like, Okay, now I get it. Dad wasn’t working late. And Mom wasn’t crying over those stupid TV movies. Our life was a soap opera, not a sitcom. And that whole time, with the clock ticking and our house waiting to explode, I was living in a dream world, grunting in the basement with Van Halen blasting, trying to bench two-fifteen, or hiding in my room with the Victoria’s Secret catalogue, studying those pictures the way I should have been studying math. (Can somebody tell me why those women don’t have nipples? It kind of drives me crazy.) My sister thinks I’m a moron for not catching on sooner. She and Mom are pretty tight; they knew about Dad and Sarah Stiller months before the news trickled down to me.

In my defense, I was preoccupied by major life ques-tions. After football season, I took the PSATs along with everybody else in my class who wanted to go to col-lege, and thought I did okay. But then the envelope ar-rives and it turns out that I got the third-highest score in all ofWinwood High. At first I thought it must be some kind of computer error. I was just a B student, coasting through school with a minimum of pain and effort. For as long as I could remember, people had been saying that Tammy was the smart one in the family.

Those scores aren’t supposed to mean that much, but they changed everything for me. I started thinking that maybe I could get into a decent college; maybe I could even make it through law school. Maybe I don’t have to be a card-carrying corporate drone like Dad after all, another ant in the ant farm.

I’m sorry for Mr. M. I wish he hadn’t done what he did, especially not on my behalf. But I’m also eternally grateful to him for recognizing the change in me and encouraging me to act on it. The day he asked me to run for President was one of the proudest in my life.





MR. M




PAUL WAS THE perfect candidate-varsity fullback, National Merit semifinalist, a good-looking, genuinely nice kid without an ounce of arrogance or calculation. He was smart, but unlike his sister Tammy, he didn’t wear his IQ on his sleeve. In fact, if you didn’t know him well, you could have easily drawn the conclusion that he wasn’t the swiftest guy in the world, with that pumped-up body of his and those utterly vacant blue eyes.

I didn’t bullshit him about service to school or any of that. As faculty advisor to the Student Government Association, no one knew better than me that the post of President was entirely ceremonial. All you presided over were a handful of meetings and a couple of bake sales.

“You’re a smart guy,” I told him. “But the admis-sions people at the selective schools are going to notice the gap between your grades and your board scores. The only thing that’s going to convince them to take a chance on you is the right mix of extracurriculars.

Varsity sports look great on your application, but noth-ing beats President of your school. They really eat that up.”

Paul blushed-he did that whenever anyone praised him-and lapsed into his mild stammer.

“Y-you think I can really win?”

“I don’t see why not.”

“But what about Tracy?”

“I wouldn’t worry about Tracy. You’re a lot more popular than she is.





TRACY FLICK




ALL RIGHT, so I slept with my English teacher and ruined his marriage. Crucify me. Send me to bad girl prison with Amy Fisher and make TV movies about my pathetic life.

(If I’d been on better terms with Mr. M., I could have explained to him that my punishment for sleeping with Jack was having to sleep with Jack. It pretty much cured me of the older-man fantasy, let me tell you that.)