The name on everyone’s lips at Camas High School that Tuesday was Tonya Harding. The infamous figure skater had been sentenced for assaulting her boyfriend back in February. Darren had forgiven her for punching his face into a bruised and bloody patchwork, and throwing a hubcap at his head. But despite his pleas for leniency, the judge had ordered a weekend in jail and 10 days of community service. Her first day on the work crew would bring her to the Camas Cemetery, just a few blocks from the school. And word spread quickly.
This was before Tonya Harding’s public rehabilitation. Before she would attempt to parley the publicity into a boxing career. Before she competed on Dancing with the Stars, or got the Hollywood treatment with a biopic starring an Australian starlet. Back then, she was just a figure skating instructor at a Portland mall. Until her arrest most people had forgotten Tonya Harding still lived in southwest Washington. Carly certainly had. Carly didn’t care about Tonya Harding, but she was all her best friend Nicole could talk about.
“She’s a total badass,” Nicole said. “I can’t believe she lives in our town.”
“You still coming over Friday to study?”
They took their seats at a vacant table near the corner of the cafeteria. Carly deliberately selected the table out of the natural view of the junior girls. Nicole had been hanging out with them with since their math instructor implemented an assigned seating chart. They’d invited Nicole to a party Friday night. Carly was not on the guestlist. When Nicole wasn’t talking about Tonya Harding, she was talking about the junior girls. Both topics had quickly grown tedious to Carly.
“Can’t. Got to get ready for the party.” Nicole smiled. “To make a good impression for both of us.”
Carly and Nicole had been best friends since they were in the same second grade class at Lacamas Heights Elementary. Initially, they bonded over the shared social inadequacy of parents unwilling to buy them American Girl dolls. Nicole could quickly overcome this status signaling snag by projecting the biggest personality in the room. No matter the situation, she had an anecdote, joke or smart comment. This was not a sustainable option for the introverted Carly, who relied on her friend for inclusion. For most of their friendship, Nicole had to convince other kids to include Carly in their activities. Carly was painfully aware of her status as an appeasement. She’d overheard the other girls complain that the only reason she’d been invited to a middle school sleepover was because Nicole insisted. “She may be your friend, but that doesn’t mean we have to like her,” one of the girls hissed in a hushed tone when Carly left the room to brush her teeth. She’d waited around the corner for them to switch topics before re-entering the room. This allowed everyone to pretend the incident had never occurred.
Usually, they spent their afternoons together. Nicole was a fixture at Carly’s house after school. Doing homework, listening to music as Nicole dished the latest gossip and they planned their future summers in Europe or Japan, and practicing soccer. But since the junior girls’ interest, she’d been less available, more distant, at least within the confines of school. The friends still hung out and studied together, just not where anyone of teenage social distinction could witness their interactions. When she did grace Carly with her presence, Nicole became more critical of her. With an affected tone, she would tell Carly that people would like her more if she spent less time studying and updated her clothes. Carly would silently argue the guys didn’t seem to mind attempting to sneak a peek down her overalls every chance they got, even though her tops were baggier than the tight stuff the other girls wore. She knew, however, that Nicole would deny this new dynamic to their friendship, so there was little reason to challenge the extra judgement.
All she could hope was that the junior girls would grow bored with Nicole, and she’d get her friend back. But as their conversations became more focused on the junior girls and Tonya Harding, and they saw less and less of each other, Carly couldn’t help but feel Nicole was pulling away. Worse, she began to wonder if Nicole was ashamed of her.
“It’s only temporary,” she said. “Until I’m established. Then of course I’ll introduce you. Insist even. You’ve got nothing to worry about. I’ll call you Saturday after the party, promise.”
“I understand.” Carly kept her eyes locked on the center of the table.
“I wish you’d reconsider letting them look at your homework.” Nicole rotated her Snapple bottle between her palms. “It’s what friends in a study group do. It’d probably get you invited to the party. What’s it really going to hurt?”
“It’s cheating.”
“Whatever.” Nicole scooped her uneaten lunch back into her brown paper bag and tossed it in the trash. Across the cafeteria, one the junior girls spotted Nicole and gestured for her to come over. “We’re going to see Tonya. I’d ask you to join, but it’s against the rules for sophomores to leave campus.”
Carly watched as Nicole crossed the cafeteria and stood at the upper-class table. She’d adopted their annoying habit of speaking not just with her hands but her whole arms. Nicole flailed like a baseball manager who’d forgotten his team’s signs. Everything about the interaction, Carly knew, was exaggerated for show. Her friend wanted to make sure everyone saw who she was with. Recognition would cement her new status. The group rose from the table in unison and headed for the exterior doors.
Carly sat alone at the table. The room buzzed with students. She watched Nicole, surrounded by the older girls, walk straight out of the cafeteria. Her friend did not look back as they headed toward the cemetery. Carly wanted to scream, to run to the first staff member she could find and turn Nicole in. Let her sit alone in the office, she thought. Dalton eased into the chair next to Carly. She couldn’t say she was happy to see him, although she was glad not to be seen sitting totally alone. He leaned back in his chair, head tilted toward the high ceiling as though he were counting the pock marks in the tiles.
“How’s it going Goat Girl?” He brought the front legs of his chair down with an emphatic clap.
Dalton had dubbed Carly with this nickname in second grade when he’d found out she raised goats. He even attempted to convince their class that she smelled like one. To her relief, despite his fanatical devotion to the moniker, it had never caught on.
“What do you want, Dalton?”
He rummaged through his backpack and produced his red hunting hat. He jammed the wool hat, too warm for May, down on Carly’s head. Her brown curly hair stuck out in uneven clumps at the fabric’s edges like grass along a neglected fence line. “Think we passed our presentation?”
Their English teacher had assigned them a presentation together on The Catcher in The Rye. It was one of the few classes Carly didn’t have in common with Nicole. The teacher had saddled her with Dalton, the only other student without a willing partner. They’d planned for him to focus on the connotative meaning behind Holden Caulfield’s question “Where do the ducks go when the pond freezes over?”
But Dalton had wandered in just before the end of class, leaving her to stammer through most the speech alone. He was there just long enough to slap a red hunting cap on backwards, waggle his finger across the class, including their teacher, and declare “You’re a bunch of phonies,” to uproarious laughter as the bell rang. He stole the show, for their classmates at least.
Carly could only hope that their teacher had paid more attention to her carefully constructed points than his antics. The “pond” represented circumstances in a person’s natural environment. J. D. Salinger wanted his readers to consider what they would do when faced with uncertainty. Holden’s concern for the ducks in the Central Park lagoon revealed his fear of change. If the pond was lost, did the duck start acting like another animal? How could a person move on when everything she knew was lost? Did she abandon her plans when things started going wrong? Holden was unable to imagine the ducks adapting, and found himself unsettled at the notion of altering his life to survive. Holden, Carly explained to the class, was a human duck, struggling to find himself in a new habitat.
Carly wondered what Nicole’s obsession with Tonya Harding revealed about her struggle.
“No thanks to you,” she said. “But I think I did enough for both of us.”
He shrugged.
“You’re welcome,” she said. “Why were you late, anyway?”
“Lot of little things, really. Slept through my alarm. Woke up late. Missed the bus. Oh, and all my socks were in the wash.” He slapped his red Puma sneakers on the table. “Had to wear a moist pair straight from the dryer.”
“Don’t use that word,” she said. “It’s disgusting.”
“What word?”
“Moist.” She pulled the hat from her head and flung it on the table.
“Relax, it’s just a word. There’s nothing inherently disgusting about it. Whatever hang-ups you’ve got about it are entirely your own.”
“No, trust me, it’s a word to be avoided. Especially when you’re talking to women.”
“How do you describe cake, then? It’s so damp and delicious,” he said in a falsetto. “Sounds so much better.” Dalton grabbed the hat from the table. He started to stuff it back in his bag, but then put it on instead.
“Whatever, you’re a pervert.”
He shrugged. “Suit yourself, Goat Girl. Where’s Nicole?”
“Gawking at Tonya Harding with her new friends.”
“Can’t say I understand the appeal.” He leaned back and stretched, daring one of the lunchroom aides to tell him to take the hat off in the building. “Hey, remember pogs? I’ve got a Tonya Harding slammer from elementary school. It’s one of the heavier ones, meant to flip the cheap cardboard ones you were supposed to play with, as if anyone did anything other than collect ‘em. It’s got an outline of a leg bent at the knee etched in shiny, faux-metallic purple lines. A hand clutching a bat hovers above the kneecap, with jagged lines to indicate motion, force and collision. Below the knee it reads Why me? And TONYA SLAMMER wraps around the edge, just above the bat. Think I could sell it now that she’s infamous again?”
“Stop talking.”
“Sheesh, what’s gotten into you?”
Carly sighed and looked at the seat normally occupied by Nicole.
“That’s it?” he said. “Then just go gawk at Tonya Harding yourself.”
She started to object, but could think of no real reason she shouldn’t take Dalton’s advice and show Nicole she wasn’t socially hopeless. Still she hesitated. “Will you go with me?”
Dalton smiled. “Sure, why not.”
Carly matched Dalton’s confident, non-flinching stride through the hallway. She wished he’d ditched his hunting hat. To her the red and black flannel constituted an unnecessary risk.
“The key is looking like you don’t know you’re doing anything wrong,” he whispered. “That way you plead ignorance and ask for forgiveness if you get caught.”
She felt utterly exposed without the cloak of upper-class girls that Nicole utilized. They slipped out of the building into the late May sun. She felt her heart rate escalate and rise into her tightening throat with each step across the student parking lot. Carly was positive she hadn’t breathed until they were safely across the street and out of sight near the practice soccer field.
They took an unassuming place away from the others peering through the junipers that masked the perimeter of the cemetery. Carly and Dalton took shelter beneath the wide shadow the Doc Harris stadium scoreboard cast over the first stretch of graves and the single lane road that separated these elite markers from the rest of the cemetery. The other gawkers clustered like a swarm of bees searching for a spot to establish a new hive after the colony split. At first, Carly couldn’t see Tonya Harding among the orange vested work crew and armed guards. Then she emerged.
Tonya Harding walked between the headstones, slightly hunched by the weight of the gas powered weedwhacker slung over her shoulder with a black strap. Her blonde hair was pulled back into a ponytail with a scrunchy and a pair of aviator sunglasses glinted below her bangs. She wore a plain white t-shirt tucked into a pair of jeans and an orange safety vest. The sunglasses made it difficult to tell how much attention she paid to the gathering crowd. A mix of reporters, neighborhood busybodies, and giggling students on lunch break. But there could be little doubt they were all there for her.
But why were they all there, Carly wondered. To see Tonya Harding strike a guard? Abuse a reporter? Attempt an escape? Did any of them really expect her do anything other than mow the grass, weed flower beds and roughly edge the flat stones with the weedwhacker? Carly realized that for most of the onlookers, the answer was simple. They wanted to feel a part of something larger than themselves. Seeing a celebrity, even a diminished star like Tonya Harding, in the real world made their own lives seem just a bit more special. They’d all be able to talk about the day they saw the Olympic figure skater at their local cemetery.
While this scene was more perverse, it struck Carly that it wasn’t any different than when Dad recounted the time they’d seen Ken Griffey Jr. having dinner with his family at the Planet Hollywood in Seattle. His favorite part of the story was how he’d wished the Kid good luck as he left the restaurant carrying his young son in route to the ballpark. That alone made the overpriced hamburgers worthwhile to Dad. And she could picture him retelling it, for the thousandth time, when Junior got inducted into Cooperstown.
It was the same reason he’d taken Carly to school late one chilly fall morning after watching the Olympic torch run through Portland. And she had to confess that she’d felt special, waltzing into her elementary school classroom with only a few minutes left before first recess. She’d relished the jealous look on Nicole’s face when she’d explained her tardiness to the teacher in a mock bashful tone, though still loud enough for the whole class to hear. Everyone in class wanted to talk to Carly that day, and for once it had nothing to do with Nicole.
Slowly the crowd thinned out. The reporters had their shots and all the comments they would receive from the supervising officers. Nothing more appeared likely to happen. After all, in the end it was just a work crew. They’d finish cleaning the cemetery, put away their gear, and either be transported to another site or released after returning to the rendezvous point. The officers looked relieved as more people drifted away. No doubt they hoped everyone’s morbid curiosity had been satisfied. If Tonya Harding continued to turn work crew into a sideshow, they’d have to figure out some other way for her to complete her community service.
Dalton looked at his watch. “Seen enough, Goat Girl?”
“For now,” Carly said. As they joined the stream of students headed toward campus, she spied Nicole and the junior girls. They would be buzzing in math class that afternoon, especially Nicole. As far she knew, she was the only underclassmen to see Tonya Harding that afternoon. Carly imagined how dejected her friend would be when she realized they’d treaded on her privilege. Her friend probably wouldn’t speak to her for at least a week, as punishment for stealing this moment.
Dalton worked his way up the crowd, steadily gaining on Nicole. Carly hooked his elbow and settled his pace. They merged into the middle-back of the throng of students as they converged on the building. A pair on anonymous faces in the crowd that veered off away from Nicole’s locker. With his elbow, Carly steered both of them around the gym to approach the sophomore lockers from the cafeteria. To her surprise, Dalton didn’t resist. Nor did he say a word about Tonya Harding to Nicole or anyone else. He instinctively withdrew his arm, as they rounded the corner and Nicole, primping at her locker, came into view.
B. R. Lewis earned his MFA at Eastern Washington University's Inland Northwest Center for Writers in Spokane. He served as an editor for both Willow Springs and Sundog Lit. His fiction has appeared in Tribute to Orpheus 2, Gold Man Review, Cagibi, HASH, In Parenthesis, Defunkt Magazine, and con(text) quarterly. He currently lives in Roseburg, OR, where he teaches at Umpqua Community College.
