Big Haired Bitches - 7. Sympathy for the Devil

By the time the dust settled on Tuesday morning, Homecoming was a week and a half away, but ballots were due out on Thursday. That meant that if I had any hope of tainting Tori’s image, I had two days in which to do it.

I expected everything to be different on Tuesday morning, but the truth was, nothing had really changed. The gossip surrounding Eric still circulated loud and clear, but for some reason my name wasn’t attached to it.

“I heard his sister caught him blowing a teacher and took pictures of it.”

“I heard Tori didn’t mean to send out the pictures. They were sent from her phone accidently.”

“I heard that Eric is trying out to be a Sean Cody model.”

“What the fuck is Sean Cody?”

“He turned to porn because his family is secretly broke and they don’t want anyone to know.”

At the heart of each piece of gossip were two constants: Tori Perse had sold her brother out and the two of them were no longer speaking. The other thing that people had heard and were spreading around was that I had dumped Eric because I knew about the photos.

“So your ex is a bona fide tabloid star,” Steven said to me as he walked me to the quad on Tuesday before lunch. He had no idea I was behind the press leak. “I guess that makes you… Samantha Ronson?”

“Funny,” I said, not particularly in the mood to socialize or joke. I was so stressed out about lunch, I couldn’t even focus. Tori had said ‘see you at lunch poodle’, but did that mean she’d be seeing me from up close or seeing me from afar? I couldn’t imagine her wanting to eat with me after my little stunt, but I had nowhere else to go.

“Is something bothering you?” Steven asked. “Did I do something?”

It was cute that he wanted to impress me 24/7, but I didn’t have time to stroke his broad shouldered ego and assure him that he was fine. And that’s when I had my first real thought of the day.

“Wanna skip lunch?” I asked. I pushed him roughly into a side hall away from the main hallway and against one of the blue floor length lockers.

“What?”

“Let’s skip lunch,” I said with a sexy grin. “I’m not in the mood to eat right now.” I grabbed his crotch through his jeans, looked around to make sure no one was coming. He got instantly hard in my grip and I smiled up at him.

“It looks like you’re in the mood for something else, too,” I whispered directly into his ear. I slowly licked from the base of his neck up to his ear, twisting my grip on his pecker while I did. He squirmed something awful, took hold of my shoulder and pushed me back.

“Follow me,” he said. Crisis averted. All I had to do was keep Steven occupied for forty minutes and I wouldn’t have to face my lunch dilemma for another day. By then, I’d have a plan.

Steven led me through the halls, flying past younger and smaller students. We went down a wing I wasn’t familiar with; we passed several classrooms I had never seen. Generally, I wasn’t too familiar with this area of campus.

As we got further and further from the junior hall, I started to faintly smell chlorine.

“We have a pool attached to the building?” I asked as Steven led me down three flights of stairs. He was racing as if he’d lose his boner and never get it back if we walked too slow.

“Just follow,” he grunted. When the smell of chlorine became too strong to handle, Steven opened a side door and led us under a rain cover to an adjacent building. The room he took me to was large and dim. There was a cat walk above and then a ceiling that formed a high point in the middle. It almost resembled an old chapel in how it was structured, especially with the series of windows that peppered the two longer walls. In the center, there was a large pool with a two planks bisecting the water into four rectangular sections. One two-man kayak was anchored and floating inside each of the four smaller pools.

“Welcome to the rowing stacks,” he smiled at me, turning around and hovering a few inches above me. His oh so kissable lips were inches away from mine and what started as a necessary getaway plan quickly turned into a rabid make out session.

Steven was the kind of guy you could spend all day kissing. He was so into it, it made you tingle. His tongue was magically long and refreshingly energetic. Every once in a while, he’d take his supple lips off of mine and flick his tongue at me with a wicked grin. Then he’d return, kissing just my top lip and making every single nerve ending stand on end. It was extremely sexy.

The other thing of note was his ridiculously jacked body. In the darkness of the stacks, with nothing but my hands to guide me, I felt up and down his barreling chest, his developed abs and his ripped arms. I had never found shoulders to be very sexy until I hooked up with Steven.

Finally, I loved how he hugged me close while we made out. It was like his mouth was the kink center, but his arms were the romance hub. He hugged me close, like he was protecting me, keeping me safe. Keeping Tori and her herd of bitches away from me. Nothing could touch me while Steven touched me. That’s how I felt.

I took pause from my sappy girlish reflecting and made a solid decision, right there in the stacks.

“Steven, I have to ask you something,” I said, pulling away and wiping his Wrigley flavored saliva off my lips.

“Shoot,” he said, adjusting his crotch just little. Yeah, I felt that, I wanted to say. I felt it real good.

“What if… what if I was in a little bit of trouble?”

“What kind of trouble?”

I looked him deep in the eye. I felt bad playing him, but I needed him. And I wasn’t ready to tell him the truth.

“Never mind,” I said. I turned my head away for effect.

“Tell me,” he said, pulling me back by the chin. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, I just… I don’t want to ruin this. If you knew what I was mixed up in, you’d totally forget about me.”

I released the words one by one, milking them for good measure. He squinted at me, trying to get a read of what I was talking about.

“Look, Logan, I like you,” he said. “I’m not going anywhere. You can trust me.”

The fact that he felt that way after less than a week of seeing each other, two days in which overlapped with my last relationship, should have been at least an orange flag. He blinked his big blue eyes at me, and I decided to trust him like he said. He can handle the truth, I thought. He’s a big boy. Currently really big and less than a foot away from me.

I pulled him into one of the boats and sat across from him. I chose my words carefully, as not to make myself sound like a total jackass.

“I’m sort of involved in a social war,” I said evenly. “With Victoria Perse.”

“Tori?” he said. I didn’t need to explain who she was. Everyone this side of the Beltline knew who she was.

“Yeah.”

“What kind of war?” he asked. I literally just said ‘social war’, I thought. For a math genius you don’t pay attention too well.

“It’s a long story, but bullets: she totaled my car, had me beat up, tried to have me sent to rehab and basically wants me out of Dodge as soon as possible.”

Steven looked at me like he was looking at someone he’d never met. I may as well have been a stranger at an airport carrying a sign that said Steven and it wouldn’t have made much difference.

“Look, everyone knows Tori’s a bitch,” Steven said. “Why are you going up against her?”

“I don’t know,” I confessed, for the first time verbalizing my crazy desire to bring her down. “I guess at the beginning it was a pride thing. And then it became about being accepted. And now, it’s too late to turn back. Don’t judge me, please.”

“No judgment,” he said, turning down his lips. “I’m just trying to understand.”

“I’m a geek, not even a smart one. I was in jazz band, for crying out loud. And on top of that, I’m the new guy. A guy like you wouldn’t have given me the time of day at this school if I wasn’t friends with the upper ech. It sounds dumb, but when I tasted popularity, I decided it was worth fighting for.”

Steven didn’t respond right away. Instead, he looked at me like he was searching for the definition of a really big word.

“You’re right, it is dumb,” he said finally. “You’re a great guy and what makes you attractive is that you are different than the bitches that run up and down this school. You should know that.”

Great, I thought. I was hooking up with Maxwell Feelgood over here and he was about to give me a lecture on self-esteem, respect, and treating everyone how you would like to be treated. I wanted to skip the afterschool special, so I turned up the volume.

“I get that now,” I said. I slid my hand nonchalantly into his pleasure M that Cosmo had taught me was the most intimate part of a man’s body. From knee to thigh to crotch to thigh to other knee. It formed an M, and when casually stimulated with a finger or a slight graze, you could get your guy horny without him even realizing until it was too late for him to turn back.

“I do get that, but I have to finish what I started. And I don’t want to drag you down with me, ‘cause I know for a fact things are gonna get messy.”

I looked at him, trying my best to relay vulnerability. I saw his eyes soften and I knew I had him. I didn’t know quite what I was going to do with him yet, but it felt good to have him. We went back to kissing, only this time, I didn’t feel like I was harboring a secret in my throat. Instead, I harbored his tongue.

      **

I met with Taylor that night when I should have been studying my calculus and memorizing a map of central European countries. Both quizzes the following day took a back seat to our strategizing.

“So she has the guy she wants on court with her,” Taylor told me. He had showed up at my house under the cover of darkness, dressed stylishly in all black and looking around his shoulder like someone had followed him. We both knew she was on a date with Ethan Pepper, a junior running back, three time letter winner, and the undisputed reason why Summit Hill had made it all the way to state the previous year, despite losing seven senior starters to graduation. The two of them had two events scheduled before ballots dropped on Thursday. Both would be a shoe in.

Taylor gave me the rundown on the pick. Tori still thought she could get nominated, and according to her sources, she was tracking at just over sixty percent. Being related to a Corbin Fisher model had dinged her tracking numbers about fifteen points, bad but not devastating. I didn’t stop Taylor to ask him how exactly she conducted this polling, but the fact that her Homecoming campaign was so thoroughly run intrigued me.

“Do you know what you’re going to do with the intel I gave you?” he asked after the debrief.

“I have an idea,” I replied.

“If you’re hoping to impact her on Homecoming, I’d say you act fast,” he warned. “People start voting on Thursday and it might be too late to dethrone her by then.”

The fact that it was possible excited me just a little. We’d wounded the little lamb, but Taylor was right. It was time to take her to the slaughter.

“How do I play it?” I asked, not sure how to get the photos and information out in a way that would make for maximum impact.

“Look, there’s really no need to go stealth on this one,” Taylor replied. “She knows you pulled the Eric stunt and she’s pissed. She didn’t say much about it at lunch today, but she did say that your ‘sorry ass can have her cocksucking brother’. Her words.”

His tone stung just a little. I was public enemy number one. I had fallen from grace so quickly. At first when I had been relieved my name wasn’t attached to the gossip, it was because I’d forgotten one thing: they only talk about those they envy. No one wanted my position anymore. I didn’t have Eric—publicly, at least—and I didn’t have Tori. I was back at the bottom of the social food chain. I was high school chum.

And it was right in that moment that I came up with my plan. It was so crazy, it had to work. I told Taylor I would brainstorm what to do, not totally trusting him to be able to keep the plan quiet. I needed to wear this one close to the chest if it was going to unfold flawlessly.

When Taylor left, I used Steven’s notes to get through my calculus homework and then fell asleep, still unsure of where Prussia was on the geographical map I would be quizzed on in the morning.

The next day, I skipped lunch again, only this time instead of seducing Steven to pass the time, I went to the print lab on the second floor and found one of the assistants.

“How can I help you?” The assistant was a geeky looking twentysomething who probably worked part time at the Summit print lab in order to finance his degree at the ITT Technical Institute.

“Hey… Bill,” I said looking down at his name badge. I smiled up at him and he gave me an impatient smirk. “That’s a nice name… Bill… So the counselor sent me up here to get the prints for the image and body assembly tomorrow.”

“Which counselor?” he asked, peering at me through his thick and dated glasses that could have easily been purchased at a Kroger pharmacy turnstile.

“Counselor Becker,” I said confidently. She was the women’s issues counselor. One quick directory search and I had a name to drop.

“Listen, if they aren’t ready, I can always come back when they are,” I said as though I was in somewhat of a hurry.

“Becker doesn’t have any prints up here,” he said clicking hard on some ghetto keyboard and looking down on a screen that was installed directly into the desk.

“Are you sure?” I asked with wide eyes. I focused my gaze on his upper lip and then slowly bit down and licked mine. “She was confident that they were sent up earlier.”

“Hmm… nope,” he said. “Should we give her a call?”

“Not necessary,” I said. “She’s out to lunch with the vice-principal. She said ya’ll sometimes mix things up, so I brought a backup copy for you to print from. Just in case.”

I handed him my jump drive. He took it, eyeing me suspiciously.

“Bill, has anyone told you that you have the smoothest skin I have ever seen?” I asked. I took a hold of his arm softly and ran my fingers down it. I didn’t care if he was gay or straight. Either he’d be flattered by my flirting, or he’d be so uncomfortable he would want me out at any cost.

Either way, ten minutes and two arm rubs later, I had Bill printing my images and charging them to Counselor Becker’s account.

“I’ll come back right after school to pick these up,” I said with a wink and smile. “Thanks Bill.”

I took a deep breath as I left and counted down until I could pick up the prints, which I’d upgraded to marquee size, the largest posters they had.

      **

Homecoming excitement reached a fever pitch on Thursday. I overheard a pair of frosh talking about dress shopping at Neiman’s on Saturday, while I ran into a pair of sophomore girls who were crying because two of the three were on the ballot. Not surprisingly, the one with the most tears had the flattest hair. Homegirl never stood a chance.

The junior ballot didn’t have a single surprise on it. Tori’s name was followed by Giselle Stevens, a half-Brazilian part-time model and the daughter of a former Victoria’s Secret angel. The other girl on the ballot was Alexandria Pekov, a gorgeously pale transplant whose father owned the largest vodka distillery in Texas.

The men’s ballot had even less surprises. Ethan’s name was across from Tori’s in a less than subtle twist at poll manipulation. Under him was quarterback Jason Walker and basketball point guard Caleb Johnson, the only name of color on the entire ballot across all four grades.

The school was in a frenzy. Girls who thought they’d at least make ballot were eating their feelings between classes. The rest of us dissected every name to determine who to vote for.

Tori’s push to get Ethan Pepper not only on the ballot but on the court was valiant. I spotted them walking to both second and third period classes together. I even saw a quick kiss between the two on the way to lunch, before they separated and went to work their respective crowds. I almost choked at watching Tori get intimate with someone. Who wanted to kiss a snake? Someone who was desperate to get on the court, I thought.

As I walked towards the quad for my first lunch in three days, I took a deep breath to pause. I had three stops to make before I made my re-debut into high school lunch society, and I had to make them fast.

First I went to the art department and picked up the three easels I had reserved the day before, playing the same tried and true ‘Bill’ routine with a brooding James Dean-esque artist who day-lighted as an art assistant. He was cute in his melancholy. If Steven wasn’t so awesome, I would have taken that flirtation further, but I decided to stop at just the easels.

My next stop was the athletic department where I snagged a loud speaker from the cheerleading lockers without anyone stopping me. I walked out of the gym, speaker and easels in hand. I stashed my contraband right at the entrance of the quad.

Finally, I went to my car, and pulled out the enlarged photographs, charts and graphs of Tori before and after her surgeries. The pictures were gross on an 8x10 inch glossy. On a near life size, four foot tall poster, they were just simply alarming. I kept them turned around to the blank side so no one could tell what was on them.

As I walked through the quad, holding everything I had brought with me in an awkward way under my arms, the loudspeaker dangling by the wrist holder from my teeth, I saw all eyes on me. It wasn’t every day someone brought a traveling display to the quad. In fact, it wasn’t any day that someone brought a traveling display to the quad. But this was my master plan and I was sticking to it.

“Hello juniors and seniors of Summit High,” I said into the loudspeaker. The noise in the quad began to decrease as soon as my lips hit the mic. “Is this on? Can everyone hear me?”

“What the fuck is he doing?”

I could see people squint at me as I stood on the left edge of the quad, confident and ready. I set up the three easels with two photos on each, turning the first photo around so that all anyone saw to start was a white background. I had practiced my set up and big reveal the night before and I was more than ready.

Ready. I felt her eyes bore into me like she knew what was coming, but I didn’t hold back. Instead, I began my presentation with the confidence of someone who was either a crazy genius or just plain crazy.

“Ladies and gentleman, but especially ladies, this time of the year is stressful on all of you. In a week and a day, we will all be celebrating our football team’s homecoming and we all know what that means. The pressure is on to find a dress and a date and make sure that we look better than our best friends, because this is a day we will be looking back on for the rest of our lives.

“For those of you fortunate to make it to the court, the pressure is even greater. Which is why I have been asked by the counseling staff to share one girl’s story about childhood obesity and how she overcame it. This girl is now a name on the ballot, and while once her self-esteem was about as large as a peanut, now it’s as big as the trays of fat that seasoned doctors hauled out of the OR after her liposuction.”

I turned the first photo in a dramatic move, every single eye in the quad on me. Some kids had even moved around to see what I was presenting. I met her eyes and I swear fire flew from them as I revealed her first before picture.

It was a picture of Tori eighty pounds heavier in a pink bikini. The doctors had marked all over her body from head to toe with black lines.

“This brave face,” I continued, just as I’d rehearsed it. “Saw herself eating her life away and decided that she needed a change.”

I turned over the second photo which contained a side view of the husky heifer. By then, Tori’s hand had covered her mouth and some students had begun laughing.

“But she didn’t let her heftiness bring her down. When the doctors told her that extracting that much fat would be difficult if not impossible, this young girl looked into the face of the impossible and she laughed.”

“Stop it,” she hissed at me. I looked up to see her standing next to me. A single tear dripped down her face and her eyes were red with rage. “I will kill you.”

“Look at her folks, facing the past with such digni—“

Tori ripped the loudspeaker out of my hands and the quad went silent again. I stood there wondering what she planned to do next. She took in a deep breath, pursed her quivering lips and dropped the loudspeaker. A second later, she dashed from the quad, followed by Whit and a reluctant Taylor.

“Well, good luck eating after that one,” I said to close. “I’ll leave these up for you to check out as you cast your homecoming ballots.”

I turned off the speaker and walked out of the quad. As soon as I stepped into the hallway, I took a deep breath, slid down the wall, and asked myself if what I had done was worth it.

      **

By the time school ended, it was so clear that Tori wasn’t going to be on the court. Hilary Clinton could have called and told her to give up the race. It’s universal: people love a good high school humiliation. What they love even more, however, is humiliating someone who made a living making their lives miserable. I didn’t run into a single soul who felt sorry for her, probably because I spent the better part of the afternoon avoiding both Eric and Steven. I couldn’t face anyone who knew me after I pulled a stunt like that. Part of me was just slightly embarrassed for sinking so ridiculously low.

What surprised me, however, was some of the kudos I got for having the guts to stand up to her so publicly. One girl called me her hero, saying she didn’t know anyone with balls big enough to do that. Another guy told me that Tori Perse had ruined his life and he was so glad to see she had real people problems just like the rest of us.

Notoriety wasn’t my intention, but I took it in stride. If people wanted to congratulate me for doing what I had to do to bring down my mortal enemy, I wasn’t going to stop them. The reason I had done it publicly wasn’t because I wanted their approval. It was because I wanted the war to be out in the open, once and for all. I wanted to draw the proverbial line in the sand.

“A little extreme, no?” Eric said as I rounded the corner and saw him standing by the driver’s door of my Rover. “She’s been crying since lunch.”

“Yeah, well how long did you cry after she released those pictures of you?” I asked. I swallowed hard. He looked at me with clear judgment in his eyes. When he didn’t say anything, I continued. “Eric, she deserved that a hundred times more. She humiliated you in front of the whole school.”

“But what did she do to you, Logan? Bashed in your car? Allegedly.”

“She had me beat up,” I countered.

“You chose to make that phone call. Whether or not she set you up, at the end of the day, you chose.”

“She was going to have me sent to rehab,” I said plainly. “She’s evil, Eric, and a little public humiliation might be what she needs.” I paused, my voice rising and my voice getting hot. “I’m sorry, you people sit around here and let her dictate who’s in and who’s out. Why the fuck does she get to decide?”

“So now you do?” The question was plain. The congratulations, the cheers, the people knowing who I was as I walked down the hall. It’s what I had wanted. It’s what Tori had been. She gained hers by bullying and scaring people. I gained mine by standing up to her. “What you don’t see, Logan, is that you’re a clone of the very person you claim to be teaching a lesson. Put yourself in those shoes for one second and pretend that had happened to you.”

I had nothing to say. I tilted my head, wondering why, of all people, he couldn’t understand why I did what I did. I wasn’t going to stand there and be berated for punishing someone who had made every minute of my life at Summit a living nightmare.

“I can’t even believe I planned on helping you,” he said, bruising me just a little. I pushed forward, opened my car door and got in. I waited for Eric to walk away before I cradled my head and had a moment of regret.

My sympathy for the devil didn’t last long. I shook it off, told myself that she got everything she deserved with a heaping helping of humble pie. I backed out and I drove home.

“That was quite a performance today,” Steven said into the speaker phone. I had called him on the drive to see if we were still on for Calc tutoring, but really, I wanted to gauge his reaction to what I’d done.

“Yeah, well, you can go ahead and be disappointed in me too,” I sighed. “It seems to be the running emotion towards me.”

“Loges, I just… I think you’re too cute and too smart to get wrapped up in all of this,” he said honestly. “I wish you could see that.”

I wasn’t in the mood to deal with his disappointment when I had my own melancholy to wade through. With every new voice in my ear, my level of guilt rose that much higher. Maybe I wasn’t cut out for the big leagues. If I was, I would have been able to handle this without the desire to vomit at my own actions.

By the time I realized that I was tailspinning in the middle of the last intersection before my house, my airbag had gone off, creating a sweltering heat on my neck and face. I pushed forward as it deflated, watching my car spin over and over and over. I looked around but was unable to focus on one thing.

The crash sounded like they do in the movies. It was like someone had stepped on a packet of packing peanuts and it had erupted right into my eardrum. The force sent me reeling, the aftershock had me falling. The final collision with a street pole had me aching.

When it all stopped, I looked around and was taken over by an eerie calm. The last thing I saw was a black Iron Man Audi sitting to the side of my car with its own hood smashed in, smoke billowing from the top.

Behind the smoke, through hot tears of my own, I saw a big haired bitch leaning limply on her driver’s door, her big hair flopped to the side, and a thin smirk was penciled across her face.