After a week goes by I’m feeling better, so I go to the bakery with Ro after school and meet Teddy, the manager, and stand behind the counter pretending I know what I’m doing while Ro sits at a table and sips cappuccino and makes faces at me because she’s enjoying this. Then I make them back at her, which makes Teddy mad because I’m not concentrating while he’s showing me all the cakes and cookies and telling me what they cost and showing me how to wrap them, blah, blah, blah. Then he covers my hair with a net and hands me plastic gloves.
“Am I handling plutonium?”
“This is a bakery,” he says, “you have to be clean.”
“I’m clean,” I say before sticking my tongue out at Ro. “I’ll start next week.”
“Fine,” he says. “Don’t worry. This a great place to work.”
“Umm, If you want to carbo-load and grow your ass.”
He shakes his head.
Back at school, the election is going to get ugly. In keeping with the tradition of Manhattan’s elite private schools, the race has nothing whatever to do with issues or values or ethics or how the school is run and everything to do with popularity.
I work at being nicer than usual to everybody. At lunch while we eat the gross chicken meatloaf, we pick out people and try to figure out who they’ll vote for so we can get some idea who is going to win and who they are going to wipe the floor with.
“The Tewl has changed her hair color,” I whisper to Ro.
She sticks her finger down her throat. “Yesterday it was light brown and now it’s bright red?”
That is off the charts weird in the middle of an election because you look like you don’t trust who you are and that you need help because you’re going through a serious identity crisis.
Jordan the jock is actually striding through the cafeteria working the room as if he’s relying on political advice about networking dating back to President Clinton’s campaign.
If all that’s not weird enough, even Domingo, the guy who cleans the cafeteria, passes my table and says, “you going to be the president?” And, whoa, I didn’t know even the kitchen staff is following this.
“I’m trying,” I say with an embarrassed laugh.
He smiles and picks up the trash on the table that people leave behind because some kids at Morgan feel they are so above carrying a single empty Arizona bottle to the recycle bin ten feet away in order to save the planet.
“President,” Domingo says again, like I’m in line for 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
I’d never admit it, but I’m feeling pretty good about my chances until someone comes up with the brilliant idea of holding a debate with the candidates to give the election more cosmic importance or something. I can’t exactly get to the bottom of who came up with that idea—because the school never did that before—but whatever, I can take the heat. Anyway, as everyone knows, I am a motormouth and good at thinking on my feet. They schedule the debate for an assembly that is only forty-five minutes long and everyone is invited to submit questions, which a committee of teachers will then sort through to pick the best.
Our next move is to prepare me, and Clive salivates at the thought. That afternoon instead of going home I get permission from my dad to go home with Clive who transforms himself into one of the more obnoxious kids in school and fires questions at me, pretending he’s holding a microphone:
“Gia, tell us in a sentence or two why you think you’d make a better president than anyone else in this school?
“What is the first thing you’d do if you became president?
“What do you see as the biggest shortcomings in our school and how would you address them?
“Our biggest strength?
“What qualifications do you bring to the job?
“Have you held office in other schools?
“What would you do to stop bullying in our school?
“How would you help make the school more diverse?”
If all that isn’t exhaustive enough, he goes on YouTube and gets a video of the Kennedy-Nixon debates like I could definitely apply lessons from those to what I would say at Morgan.
“Clive, you’re taking this pretty seriously.”
He takes that as a compliment. “I’m just trying to think of everything I can to prepare you, Gia, because you know how those people can get.”
“I don’t know, not really.”
Aside from Christy and her garbage mouth group, I don’t know what to expect, and anyway, I really can’t concentrate because my attention keeps flipping back and forth between reality and my fantasies of Michael Cross, who, of course, has not reached out and touched me and probably never will because Mr. Hot Cop is probably totally chickenshit.
But Clive isn’t thinking about Michael. He’s thinking about making me class president. So we drill and drill and drill until he thinks I’m ready.
“I’m surprised you haven’t rented out a TV studio to stage a mock debate on camera,” I mutter when it’s nearly ten.
“I should have thought of that,” he says.
I finally pack up and leave his building at ten thirty and while I’m going down in the elevator I’m not thinking about the election anymore or the stupid people or the questions they will throw at me, because on my phone I see something I’ve never seen before.
A text. From Michael.