The Pretty One(51)

“Okay,” I say, hurrying into class. Simon is already there but he’s not sitting in our seats. Once again, he’s sitting across the aisle in the far corner of the auditorium, directly behind Laura and Catherine. The minute I see him leaning over their seats, chatting with them amiably as if there is nothing odd about his behavior or seat selection at all, I feel a little sick to my stomach. I’m getting extremely tired of this.

I pick up my stuff and walk over toward him. “What’s going on? Why are you sitting back here?”

Out of the corner of my eye, I see Catherine shoot Laura a look as if to say, Well, look who’s here…Miss Attitude herself!

“I didn’t know we had assigned seats,” Simon says with a shrug, giving Catherine and Laura a little grin.

What? What kind of smart-alecky response is that?

“Good morning, class,” Mr. Lucheki says enthusiastically. I drop into the seat beside Simon as I attempt to focus my attention on Mr. Lucheki. Besides having been the stage manager for the Kennedy Center for fifteen years, Mr. Lucheki’s other claim to fame is his shiny, not a hair on it, bald head. Normally his head is so shiny it reflects light all over the place. But not today, primarily because he’s standing in complete and total darkness.

“Which is more important,” Mr. Lucheki asks. “Sound? Or…” He claps his hands and suddenly he’s bathed in an almost luminescent light. “Light?” he says silently, mouthing the words.

“I was waiting for you,” I whisper to Simon. “Jane said I could sit—”

“I don’t care about lunch,” Simon whispers back.

“So why are you mad? Is this about George?”

“George?” Simon says. “I couldn’t care less about George Longwell. I’m just tired of you making promises you don’t keep.”

Catherine glances back at me and sneers.

“What are you talking about?” I ask Simon, doing my best to ignore Catherine even though I’m really tempted to give the back of her chair a nice kick.

“What we’re talking about, Miss Fletcher,” Mr. Lucheki says, looking directly at me, “is the ability to attract attention. The ability to…” His voice fades away, replaced by static. He continues talking but all that is audible is a quiet mumble. He claps his hands again. “You see,” he says clearly again, “without sound, there are no stars.” He smiles, obviously extremely pleased with his demonstration. “I remember back in eighty-eight when Gypsy was in town. Tyne Daly was about to sing when…”

“You make plans, you cancel them,” Simon whispers. “You tell me you’re going to call, you don’t. I’m getting sick of it, that’s all.”

And suddenly I remember that I was supposed to call Simon last night.

“I forgot,” I whisper back. “I had practice after school and when I got home it was time for dinner and after dinner I had to study for the English test.”

“Whatever,” he says.

I’m silent for a few minutes as I turn my attention back to Mr. Lucheki. “Naturally her laryngitis made it difficult, if not impossible, to hear her,” he is saying. “So I decided to increase the volume on the…”

“Of course,” I say to Simon, “you could’ve called me.”

“That’s not the point,” he says.

“Since when do we keep tabs on who’s supposed to call who or who owes whom a phone call?”

“I knew you wouldn’t get it,” he says so loudly that Mr. Lucheki stops talking. Catherine rolls her eyes toward me and whispers something to Laura, obviously mocking me.

“What is your problem?” I scream at Catherine.

“Miss Fletcher!” Mr. Lucheki says.

Simon is staring at me, openmouthed. So is the rest of the class, including Catherine who is looking at me like I just doused her with a freezing pail of water.

“Why don’t you come sit down here?” Mr. Lucheki says sternly, pointing to a seat in the front row. I shoot Simon one last dirty look before grabbing my backpack and heading down the aisle.



Production class is right before lunch, and usually Simon and I walk each other to our lockers and go to lunch together, but not today. Even though I know Simon doesn’t want to go to lunch with me any more than I want to go with him, I hurry out of class, dump my books into my locker, and slam the door for emphasis before heading to the lunchroom where I plop myself down at my sister’s table as if I have been sitting there my entire life. As if I belong.

Maria and Jane look at me, but if they’re surprised, they don’t show it. The only person who seems surprised is Lucy, who greets me, once again, by asking me where Simon is.

“I don’t know.” Simon hightailed it out of class with his two little (in Catherine’s case, not so little) minions and I’m not about to chase him down again. If he doesn’t want to sit with me, then so be it.

The conversation stalls with my arrival, and I can feel Lucy’s eyes on me as I put my lunch on the table.

“Why did you pack my yogurt?” Lucy asks, pointing toward the nonfat lemon yogurt that I have just taken out of my lunch bag.

Up until I began my official “Lucy” diet, Lucy is the only one in our family who ate yogurt. “I just grabbed it out of the fridge,” I say nonchalantly.