On ‘Plainview 5’ Love them or loathe them, you can’t ignore them. That’s teenage girls. Fortunately I was a late starter, so I got to pay attention during lessons rather than moon around like a love-sick puppy. There’s something quite awful about the whole situation. The girls your age don’t want to know: they’re after the allegedly more sophisticated older boys (the ones who grunt rather than remain in panicked silence), whilst the younger girls are still playing with Barbie and giggling a lot. Apparently, if you listen to my mother, I made up for lost time. So we’ll gloss over some highly embarrassing and acutely painful moments in my life and get you to read the story instead.   Plainview 5 - September 2005   Girls. Okay, it was bound to come up sooner or later. I was on course to get one of those letter jackets beloved of Jocks countrywide. Those linebackers in their senior year were twice my size. Twice my weight at least, and they acted like God’s immediate proxies on Earth. That, and the fact that I was the youngest first-team quarterback in the history of Plainview High School should have meant that I was a babe magnet. It would probably have helped if I’d known what I was looking for in a girl, but it would have helped a whole heap more if I’d had that special radar that could pick up signals from girls interested in me. I’m sorry, but I just couldn’t get it. How is a guy supposed to tell between feigned indifference and the real McCoy? Okay, so I could throw a pigskin further than almost anyone in school. It didn’t make me an expert in everything, and compared to the rest of the Plainview Pirates I was Einstein, Nobel and Hawking rolled into one. I was out by the bleachers with my lunch, sitting next to Pete, and chewing the fat. Pete and me, we’d turned into younger models of our fathers – which was strange considering that Chris Mayer wasn’t Pete’s real dad. It was as if the genes had drifted through the air down by the golf course and done some strange magic. Or that Pastor Brughouse hadn’t told me the whole truth. I wondered if Pete was related after all. I did Pete some good by hanging out with him. I was the mayor’s kid, and I was part of the in-crowd – the Populars. Nothing I did seemed to be able to dent that. Pete wasn’t Reconstruction, no matter how many times he saluted the flag. But he was left alone. "So how’s Plainview’s second-best thrower?" he said. He laughed, but he was right enough. I did say almost anyone; almost was Pete, but we both knew he’d never make the team. "Doing fine." I opened my lunch box, checked out the fillings in my bread and ripped open the foil packet of corn snacks. "Election fever grips the Sorenson household again." "Is it true? You’re going to take the State?" I looked around me, seeing who was near. Above and behind us were a couple of girls. They were looking at me, but giggled and looked away smartly when I turned. "Geez, what is it with those two?" I lowered my voice. "And less of the ‘you’re’. My dad’s the Party man. He says that the rural seats are sewn up. Lincoln and Omaha? They carry as much weight as the rest of the State put together." I shrugged. I didn’t rightly care. Not cussing didn’t seem that important. Pete’s dad had dropped the suit only for it to be taken up by some out-of-state civil liberties lawyer. Everyone was happy. "Won’t it be strange having your dad in the Unicameral? Full time politico, that’s a big step." "He could hardly be away more often than he is now. I can’t remember the last time we just did stuff together." "My old man’s always around," said Pete. Like I’ve said before, I had respect for Chris Mayer, but it’s hard on a kid trying to find his own way in the world if your parents are keeping a close eye on you. Dad was always at work, or meeting with the Town Committee, or campaigning for a seat in the Unicameral. Mom was cooking and cleaning like her life depended on keeping the house spotless. She yelled at me and Charlie if we got mess on the floor or didn’t take out the trash on demand, but other than that all she did was try new recipes and vacuum the already sterile carpets. So there were plenty of opportunities to be seen doing the right thing, and plenty more to do stuff that would have got me shot. I’d progressed from simple chemical explosives to some pretty impressive fuel-air mixtures, and I’d almost achieved perfection – that churning ball of fire that would rise up into the sky, fade and flatten, leaving behind a pillar of smoke to perch on. I’d known that I’d never get it with black powder mixtures the moment Dad showed me precisely what had happened at the mill. He’d put a spoonful of flour in an old syrup tin he’d dug out of the trash and previously pierced with a bradawl. Then he’d given it the most perfunctory of shakes and applied a lighted taper – on the end of Mom’s broom handle – to the hole in the tin. The lid had gone one way, the tin the other. The noise of the detonation had been tremendous, and that was one spoon of flour suspended in air. So I’d started experimenting: I was now a past-master at electrical ignition, and I’d progressed from particulates like flour and icing sugar to vapours like rubbing alcohol and gasoline. Sometimes I wondered how I’d actually made it to my Freshman year without being horribly disfigured or even killed. But I’d discovered an important truth in the last couple of years: as long as people have no reason to suspect you, you can get away with a whole lot more than if you snuck around and acted weird. I was expected to behave better than other children, to mind my p’s and q’s, and always be ready to lend a hand no matter how menial the job was. They saw a gangly youth with close-cut hair the colour of a ripe corn-cob, neatly dressed in a pressed jacket and slacks with sharp creases. Shoes were clean, belt buckle shiny, teeth never had creamed spinach in the angles. They looked at me and judged me on what they saw. Of course, what they didn’t know was that I’d learned to play the game. I was smart – something else I’d discovered as I started to trounce the rest of the class in the end-of-year tests. "You in there?" asked Pete. "Yeah. Just thinking." I hadn’t told Pete anything. Absolute secrecy was one of the reasons why I’d got away with it for so long. "’Bout?" I dissembled. "There’s an inaugural Ball for the new session of the Unicameral. So Mom and Dad are going, and they want me to go too." "So? Sounds dull, but you know you got to do it." "I’ve got to find a date." Pete laughed out loud. "Can’t you just ask Charlie?" "She’s going anyway, and she has to get someone too. Except she’s on the phone to her girlfriends all day and all night getting their advice. If you can call anything a thirteen year old girl says advice." I finished the corn snacks and started on my bread. Peanut butter. I fished the lettuce out and threw it under the stand. "You know, out of all the dumb things I’ve been made to do, this has to be the dumbest. Why can’t they get a sitter and go on their own?" Pete thought about it, then made his pronouncement. "They probably think you’re gay." "What?" I managed to spread sandwich as far as the running track. Quite a feat, really. "You know, gay. Queer. Faggot." "Geez, I know what it means. You’ve got to be joking, right? This is some sort of test? No way." "Face it. How many times in the last year has your mom asked you if you want to take a girl to the movie over in Pierce? Even I’ve heard her say it." Funny how these things suddenly hit you. I buried my head in my hands and allowed myself an "Oh crap" which was borderline acceptability but frowned upon. "You got to help me here. What do I do?" "Pick a girl and ask her." He sounded half amused, half exasperated. "Yeah, but who?" "Marty, anyone in our year. Any sophomore for that matter. If I had a sister, you could borrow her, but hey, I’m an only child." He put down his lunch and turned round to the two girls behind us. "Hi." I really wanted to curl up and die, but I forced myself to smile. "My friend here has a problem. He needs a date for the Unicameral Inauguration Ball, but doesn’t know who to take. You fine ladies got any suggestions?" Pete didn’t seem to know the meaning of the word ‘shame’ but I went scarlet and so did the two girls. We just sat there, staring at each other, whist Pete alternated his gaze between us like he was watching some tennis match. Eventually, he broke the deadlock. "Okay. Maybe you could pass it around? He’ll be interviewing candidates in the next week or so, and we’ll post a shortlist on the year nine notice board." They couldn’t get off the bleachers fast enough, but Pete hadn’t finished my humiliation. Not quite. "Hey, don’t forget. If you don’t play, you can’t win." I tried to say sorry. I really did. But the words wouldn’t come out, and I ended up looking like a slavering idiot instead, face contorting into a series of grotesque masks. When I’d regained control over my muscles, I said: "You jackass!" "What? Your problem is solved! Those two are the biggest gossips in the eighth grade. By the end of today, you’re going to be beating girls off with a stick. You’ll need to hire me as a bodyguard, because you’re not going to make it home in one piece." "Yeah, and Charlie is going to hear too, and she’ll tell Mom." "Your mom’s cool. She’ll never let on she knows. She’ll just put it down to me being a pagan." He wolfed the rest of his lunch while I sat there, stunned at the turn of events.     But he was right. How, I couldn’t figure. The bell went for lessons, and I trailed in miserably, expecting laughter and taunts from every corner. I was all for pulling my locker door closed from the inside and staying there till long after all the students had gone home. The compulsion not to skip class was too great – I knew I’d get it in the neck when I got home – and I slammed my locker shut with a great deal more force than I’d intended. I made Jennifer Berglund jump like I’d just shot her with a .22. She had been standing right beside me, and was now trying to hold onto her armful of books. Some she managed, others crashed to the floor in a flurry of pages. "Sorry, sorry," I said, and dove down to retrieve them. I could have been shown a picture of a football right there and then and been so flustered as to have called it a seven-eighths wing-nut. She was as nervous as I was, and I still didn’t figure out why. I gave her her books back, brushing the covers free from dust, and just kept on apologising. Then I caught sight of Pete heading off down the corridor to his next lesson. He looked back once, gave an exaggerated wink and pointed his finger. Who’s the man? You’re the man. That was how I ended up twisting the night away with one of the most beautiful girls in High School. She was extraordinary. She had long, straight hair the colour of lovingly polished gold. It fell around her shoulders like a theatre curtain, and it was all I could do to stop myself applauding every time she turned around and gave me one of her flash-bulb smiles. She was tall and lithe. She moved like she walked on air. I still get goosebumps thinking about her, how she looked, how she sounded, how she smelled. That was the night she pulled me out of sight behind a pillar and kissed me until my lips were sore. That was the night when America changed forever; the Reconstruction Party seemed to come from nowhere and pick off states from coast to coast, from the coldest north to the desert south. Not everywhere, but enough. I knew sufficient math to work it out myself – I was even pleased when I showed my dad the workings – that they didn’t have to fool all the people all the time. Just a quarter of them. Half the people plus one in half the states plus one. The rest could go hang. There was a new President in the White House. That was the night they blew up Paris.