Maureen Johnson - Devilish

Even though they were self-chosen, the Junior Judges were hardly anonymous. This year’s group was a trio who called themselves the A3. The reason for this is so painfully pretentious that I can barely write it down, and if I really sit down and figure out how it is I even know this, something bad will happen to my head. So I won’t do that. I will simply explain that it comes from a size of paper in England called A3, which is really long paper. One of them went to England and discovered this, and they all started joking about how they liked ‘really long paper,’ as if that actually means something. Combine that with the fact that A generally means the best and the fact that there are three of them: Elsie Fast, Tracey Pils, and Lai Barden. It all comes together into one ready-made nickname. (Awful things like that tend to converge. Know that and you’ll be ahead of the game.)

These were the people digging up the past that I had worked all summer long to bury and cover in concrete. I had gone so far as to turn down a summer job helping to compile research data for my dad at his office at Brown, where he’s a professor. It had taken a lot for me to get that job in the first place — including a two-hour interview in which I had to prove that I knew enough math to handle it. And I gave it up. Instead, I made my money at the same summer job that Ally and I had always worked, scooping ice cream in a four-by-five foot fluorescent cell at Dibney’s. But this is what you do when your best friend needs you, even if it means chucking away an opportunity that could help you score a scholarship to college.

And the A3 may have just undone it all, simply by being their snarky, haggish selves.

My sister, Joan, was picking all of the green and orange pieces out of her bowl of Froot Loops when I came downstairs. Spread out in front of her were some books and papers. Joan never actually did her homework. I’m not sure Joan actually knew that she was supposed to do it — I think she may have been under the impression that she was just supposed to watch over it for the night and make sure nothing happened to it. Every morning, she took it out and checked to make sure that every page was as blank, every problem was as undone, and every answer was just as unwritten as when she’d first taken it under her wing.

‘What’s a parallelogram?’ she asked, peering at her textbook through two Loops she held up to her eyes.

My father was too busy poking at a Sudoku puzzle to answer. He couldn’t leave the house until he did one of the hard ones in under two minutes. My mother never joined our breakfast group because she was always asleep. She worked late managing a very fancy and very good restaurant in town called The Pink Peppercorn, providing us with the world’s best leftovers. Which is why I was having a bowl of cold sirloin tips for breakfast.

‘It’s a four-sided plane,’ I said. ‘The opposite sides are parallel.’

‘A four-sided plane?’ she repeated. ‘Okay, I am not falling for that one.’

Joan is two years younger than me. She didn’t get into St. Teresa’s Preparatory School for Girls. I’m completely used to her looking up at me with that lip-glossy stare of hers and asking questions like, ‘Is the Tour de France in Spain?’ or, ‘Do they make cotton out of plastic?’ This is a girl who I had convinced that Alaska used to be called Frigidaire. So sometimes she thought I lied to her.

My father smiled and shook his head. It never bothered him that Joan was like that. While she didn’t get my father’s savage intelligence or my mother’s dexterous common sense, she did get all the height, the muscle tone, and the strong and shiny brown hair. She was lovely and happy, even if she was as intelligent as a rubber band.

Whereas I, as the Junior Judges had so rightly pointed out, was four-foot ten and five-sixths inches (in school shoes) with blond hair, and I looked like an escaped street urchin from Oliver Twist. (The hair was dry and brittle because I dyed it with a home-brewed peroxide solution, which worked really well when I first started doing it as a freshman and couldn’t stop because if I used anything else on my hair, it turned a kind of moss-green color.)

Joan set her Froot Loops down and gazed at me evenly.

‘You have that look on your face,’ she said. ‘Are you thinking about Elton?’

My dad glanced up from his puzzle.

‘No.’ I gave her a silencing look, stiffening my jaw. She knew she wasn’t supposed to mention my ex in front of my dad because he would think I was still upset. It had been six months, three weeks, and two days since our breakup. I was over it.

‘It’s Allison, I said. ‘Today is Big-Little Day. I need to make sure she gets a little. This is the first big event since the prom. It means a lot to her. I can’t let anything bad happen.’

‘Allison will be fine,’ my dad chimed in. ‘Why would you need to worry about her?’

This was one thing Joan understood completely.

‘Ally needs to relax,’ Joan said. ‘Someone will definitely take her as long as she doesn’t get all… you know…spazzy.’

‘How do you keep someone from being spazzy?’ I asked, pushing aside some mushrooms that had attached themselves to the steaky goodness. ‘I know she’s great, but she’s going to be wound up today. She’s going to start breathing fast and get dizzy and scare away the freshmen.’

‘You can’t worry about something that hasn’t happened yet,’ my father said, turning back to his Sudoku. ‘You have to take life as it comes.’

This irritated me. When I worry about one thing, I frequently take it out on something or someone else. And the fact that my dad was offering stupid and totally untrue advice set me off.

‘Oh no?’ I said. ‘Isn’t worrying about things that haven’t happened yet the purpose of several major government agencies, like the army and FEMA? What about yearly checkups? Savings accounts? Tornado shelters? Earthquake-proofing?’

‘Moisturizer?’ Joan added.

‘You’re a math professor,’ I said. ‘What’s the study of probability? Figuring out what will probably happen. And then you dump all of that probability information into huge tables that insurance companies use. So they know who will probably crash their car, which places will probably get flooded, who might trip into the fireplace and set themselves on fire…’

‘I don’t think there’s a category for that, Jane.’

‘You see my point,’ I said archly. ‘Of course we know bad things do happen. And I know that Allison is probably going to spaz. She will probably start talking about her collection of Build-A-Bears or quoting entire episodes of Charmed, and while I think she’s cute, most people will think she’s insane and they will run.’

I was getting a little frenzied now. Joan was nodding away, like I was preaching and she had been infected by the spirit — but my dad was still back a few steps.

‘But she hasn’t done any of that yet,’ he said. ‘If you go into it with that attitude, there’s almost no point. Probability isn’t a guarantee. Give her some credit. You have to assume that she’ll do just fine.’

‘But she won’t.’

‘Well, then,’ my dad said, quietly folding his completed puzzle in half, ‘sounds like she had no chance in the first place. So I guess…’

He stood and flicked a lost Froot Loop over at Joan.

‘…you’ll just have to save her from herself.’

The sky was red that morning, which I think is supposed to be a sailor’s warning about something…storms, waves, sea monsters. It was a stupidly hot morning, too. October in Providence, Rhode Island, is not a hot time, normally. It’s New England — we like it cold and grim. We cultivate colds like some areas of the world nurture grapes and produce fine wines.