Dante heads downtown. We stop at a red light and in the next lane there’s a bus and I look up and see a huge ad for Vogue and I realize that this is the new issue, and no, I’m not on the cover and was never supposed to be, but I am inside, at least I think I am.
“Pull over, pull over,” I yell. I make him stop at a newsstand and I buy five copies.
I look and look and then there they are, my pictures. For a few seconds I just stare because at first I don’t recognize my own face and I need to examine what’s on the page in front of me. It feels like one of those tests at the eye doctor’s office where they click, click, click, and things either get fuzzier or sharper and you raise your finger when everything is finally 20/20.
First is a full-page picture, the first of a series of portraits of us in a kind of portfolio with the headline: Underage and Over the Top. That had to be John Plesaurus’s idea, I realize, because he’s such a deviant. But whatever, the pictures are killers, and I show them to Dante, who looks and looks and says, “Holy crap, Gia, you look gorgeous.”
“We have to go home,” I say, so he takes me back, and I call Ro and Clive and Candy and show my mom, and everyone is like, “Gia, I’m running out right now to buy it.” And then I look online, and there it is too. At that moment there are only two people in the world I want to call up and tell.
Only I can’t. Which just sucks.
On the way to school the next day, all I keep thinking about is Vogue and the pictures and what people are going to say, but when I get inside there is this strange mood in the air and I can’t decide if it’s me or if something is going on. I wave to Clive and he comes over and whispers in my ear and I realize that no, it’s not me, there really is a creepy vibe.
No one is supposed to know but at Morgan nothing stays secret for long, and someone heard someone who overheard someone, and the next thing we find out is that the school paper has a story about it even though the administration didn’t want that. But since this is the USA and we do have free speech, they decided they couldn’t “curtail the school paper’s freedom to tell the truth.” So it says that Christy, Georgina, and Brandy have been “asked to leave”—otherwise known as being suspended—for an indefinite amount of time for “misconduct.”
Bottom line: They stole the ballots. And removed enough votes.
To make. Me. Lose.
Only why did they confess? I talk to Clive and Ro and Candy who spoke to other people who spoke to other people who saw stuff on Facebook, and the story is that Mr. Wright interviewed each of them separately and must have turned the heat up and brought in their parents and—bingo—Christy started crying and admitted everything.
After school Clive and Ro and I talk about celebrating but then think how lowbrow is that, so we hang out without exactly drinking Dom and reflect on the depths of their depravity or what have you while in our own quiet way we rejoice that they’ll be gone, at least until the beginning of the new school year. And from this day forward, Morgan will be a better place—or as Clive says, “a more noble institution.”
Ha ha ha.