Polly Read online

  POLLY

  a novel

  Amy Bryant

  For Bruno

  Contents

  one

  TOMMY

  two

  JASON

  three

  MIKE

  four

  JOEY

  five

  IAN

  six

  BRENDAN

  seven

  TODD

  epilogue

  POLLY

  acknowledgments

  about the author

  cover

  credits

  copyright

  about the publisher

  one TOMMY

  “MelissaSimpsonHeatherStoneTammyHardenStacyMetford…”

  The front office secretary hadn’t bothered to drum up any enthusiasm for the announcement of the drill team winners. The junior high school didn’t have tryouts; instead all the girls who were interested put their names in a box by the gym. Only twenty names (plus ten alternates) were drawn. I didn’t know any girls who hadn’t put their name in the box. My classroom was quieter than it had ever been. Even the boys were interested.

  “…AngelaDavenportChristySwansonPollyClark.”

  I thought maybe I had imagined the secretary had said Polly Clark, but then Mrs. Heath beamed at me. Mine was the last name called before the alternates, and the only name called in my classroom. I slipped out of my seat, suppressed a smile. I bent down and loaded my books into my backpack, conscious of my classmates’ stares. I had hoped Katie’s name would be called, too. Katie and I played soccer together. We went to the roller rink together. We hung around the mall together. But Katie didn’t even make the alternates list.

  The kitchen at the rear of the cafeteria was dark, and the lunch tables had been moved off to the side, the orange plastic chairs stacked on top of them. I perched on the edge of one of the tables, wondering if this was how the cafeteria always looked at the end of the day, or if it had been set up like this for the drill team meeting. All around me there were girls in bunches of three or four, but I didn’t see anyone I knew well enough to go up to.

  Mrs. Evans, who taught public speaking, was in charge of the drill team. She clapped her hands, and everyone quieted down. Mrs. Evans had big boobs and light, wavy blond hair that she kept off her face with large amounts of hair spray. She reminded me of a conservative Dolly Parton.

  “In the space of nine weeks you will be taught a routine by two cheerleaders from the high school,” Mrs. Evans said. “At the end of nine weeks you will perform this routine at a special assembly. There will be a second and final performance on the last day of school.”

  A few of the girls started to murmur and Mrs. Evans held up a hand.

  “Now, you ladies have been selected to represent this school,” she said, “and I expect you to take the work that’s involved seriously, and to conduct yourselves with maturity.”

  She went on to lay out our drill team duties. We were expected to buy the uniform pattern and get it made, and to stay after school for two hours every day except Fridays to rehearse. I grabbed my lip gloss out of my Le Sports Sac and ran it over my lips as Mrs. Evans finished up.

  The bell signaling the end of the day rang, and filed out of the cafeteria. “Congratulations girls,” Mrs. Evans called after us. “You’re going to work hard and you’re going to have fun!”

  I sent away for the fabric and the pattern for my uniform the next day. As soon as it came in the mail I begged Mom to sew it right away so I could wear it around the house. She had learned how to sew as a teenager before she had money to buy clothes off the rack. Mom made a lot of my clothes when I was little, but dropped off when I got older and made it clear I’d rather wear clothes from a store. I wanted Jordache and Guess jeans. I wanted Izod shirts and button-down oxfords by Ralph Lauren. Mom indulged me sometimes, but I didn’t have as many designer clothes as some of the other girls.

  Mom didn’t make clothes for herself anymore either. She loved to shop. She worked at a property management firm that was near the mall, and she spent her lunch hour looking for bargains. Once or twice a week Mom brought home bags of clothes that she tried on in her bedroom after work. She returned most of it. I liked to watch Mom try stuff on, guess at what she’d decide to keep and what she’d take back.

  “How about this?” she’d say, modeling a dress for me as I lay splayed out on her Navajo-style bedspread. “Is this the right color for me?”

  I’d wrinkle up my forehead like I was really studying her, but the truth was I liked almost everything. The stuff she decided to keep she hung up in the closet, and she draped the stuff she wanted to think about over the ironing board, which stayed unfolded in a corner of the bedroom. The clothes Mom didn’t want went back in the bag. I felt sorry for the stuff she returned.

  My mother was beautiful. Tall and curvy in all the right places, with the kind of coloring that people called striking. I inherited her pale skin but not her thick, black hair. Instead I got my father’s dull, light brown hair, along with his wide mouth. It was too soon to tell if I had her legs, but I had my hopes up. Mom had great legs. Everyone said so, especially my stepfather. William liked to tell Mom that she had the kind of legs that looked good in high heels.

  “I don’t technically need my drill team uniform right away,” I explained at dinner. “But it would be very good if I could practice wearing it.”

  William peered at me over the top of his glasses. “How does one practice wearing an outfit?” he asked.

  “You just do. It’s very important.”

  “And why is it important?”

  William did this all the time. He said it kept me sharp. Mom said he had inherited his father’s taste for ridicule and his instinct for being hard on people. Mom didn’t like William’s father, and I had the idea that he wasn’t too thrilled about Mom and me either. We’d been living with William for six years, but when his parents came to visit each summer Mr. Hessler would act surprised to see us.

  “Well, look who’s here,” he’d say.

  “I have news for you,” I told my father on the phone. I kicked my leg up and rested it on the frame of my white iron bed. “I got picked to be on the drill team at school!”

  “That’s great, honey,” he said. “Can I drive up and see you perform?”

  I lowered my leg from the bed frame and kicked the other one up. “I guess so. If you want to.”

  I wasn’t sure parents would be invited to the drill team assembly. Even if they were, I thought I might tell Dad it was just for the students. I didn’t want to be in the same room with Mom and Dad if I could help it. I had only a handful of memories from when they were together, and they mostly involved whispering and then shouting and then whispering again. When he came to visit me Dad didn’t come inside, and Mom didn’t go outside. And Dad hadn’t met William. He didn’t even act like he knew I had a stepfather.

  “Now, what are you going to be doing, exactly?” Dad asked. “Will you be marching with flags?”

  I snorted. “No! That’s what a marching band does. We’re going to be dancing in special outfits.”

  “And you do this at halftime? I didn’t know your school had a football team. What’re they called?”

  “No, it’s just us. We’re inside. In the gym.”

  Dad cleared his throat. “Well, I can’t wait to see you in action, honey. Just get me the dates and I’ll take it from there.”

  “There’s only one date. Well, two. But the main thing’s in April. It’ll be at school during the day, so.”

  “Oh. You’d think they’d hold it on the weekend, to make it easier for parents.”

  I balanced the phone on my shoulder and scratched at a scab on my elbow. Charlotte was a seven-hour drive. He would have to take a day off work. I t
hought of Dad’s hands on the steering wheel of his Mustang. Dad had long fingers and thick palms, and dark hairs that grew just below his knuckles. Sometimes I had trouble picturing him, so I’d zero in on the parts of him that I remembered.

  I was five when Dad moved to Charlotte. He took only his clothes, his golf clubs, and his fishing pole. I often imagined him golfing or fishing in Charlotte, though he never mentioned either. After Dad left, Mom sold our house in Reston and we moved to an apartment complex called Twin Oaks, not far from our old house. I didn’t even have to change schools. I associated Twin Oaks with babysitters and microwave meals, and long afternoons in front of the TV. We moved in with William when I was seven, and Mom married him when I was eight.

  “Polly, come try on your uniform,” Mom called down the stairs a few days later.

  I was doing my pre-algebra homework at the kitchen table. I ran upstairs and snatched it out of her hands.

  “Come back and let me see you in it,” Mom said as I hurried down the hallway to my room.

  I studied myself in the full-length mirror. The uniform was beautiful: royal blue with white piping and pleated from the waist to just above the knee. I kicked first one leg out and then the other, imagining a crowd full of admiring faces. I thought of Tommy Ward in particular, watching from the back row.

  Tommy was in my second-period social studies class, which was held in a trailer beside the school because of overcrowding. He sat in the second to last row of the trailer and I sat in the middle, so I had to turn around in my seat to look at him. Tommy’s hair was longer than the other boys’, and he was skinny with pointy features and red lips almost like a girl’s. He didn’t talk to anyone in class, and he didn’t go to the roller rink on Fridays, so I couldn’t talk to him there either.

  Katie and I had been going to the Reston Skateway since the beginning of sixth grade. The Friday night seven to ten P.M. skate was for grades six through eight. Not officially, but that’s who was there. The Skateway was open during the day, but it was different then. The lights were bright and it was full of little kids. On Friday nights the roller rink was kept dark except for flashing disco lights, and the music was louder.

  Katie and I wore our tightest designer jeans and rugby shirts with the collars turned up. The boys wore the same shirts we did, but their jeans were looser and they wore gold chains around their necks. The girls wore their hair layered and curled back like Farrah Fawcett’s. The boys feathered their hair back, too, but they didn’t use curling irons. Everyone kept a comb in their back pockets. The girls wore white skates, and the boys black. Katie had blue and white pom-poms on her skates, but I didn’t wear any. That was the one thing Katie and I did differently.

  There were benches that lined the rink and spread into the locker area. A lot of people made out there. I never had. Neither had Katie. We waited for boys to come over, but the right ones never did. Katie said only the goobers liked us.

  There was a place in the center of the rink where the showoffs could skate, but most people just skated the regular way. The best skaters could skate backward and do spins and go down low with one leg stretched out. Sometimes I would skate really fast around a corner or go backward on the straight part and pretend that Tommy Ward was there watching.

  The DJ played Michael Jackson and Foreigner and Van Halen and Journey and the J. Geils Band. He played “Gloria” by Laura Brannigan and “Let the Music Play” by Shannon and “Don’t You Want Me” by The Human League. He sat in a small room at the end of the roller rink, behind mirrored glass. There was a sign on the door that said IF YOU DON’T WORK HERE, DON’T KNOCK. The DJ didn’t take requests, but he made announcements about birthdays sometimes. I pictured him old, at least eighteen, with high cheekbones and dark hair like Rick Springfield.

  At the end of the night the parents lined up in their cars out front, and Katie and I pretended they were limousines. Kids raced out in groups of two or three, piling inside the cars before the parents had a chance to get out. We all lived in fear of a parent coming inside the roller rink. People made out there, people swore. There were stories about couples doing it, but I didn’t see anything any more than heavy kissing or the occasional hand outside the shirt.

  Across the street from the roller rink was the bowling alley, where the high school kids hung out. When we wanted a break from skating Katie and I sat outside and watched the older kids going in and out of the bowling alley, laughing and shouting and pushing one another around. Sometimes couples came out of the bowling alley and got into their cars and stayed there for a long time. I couldn’t wait to be in high school. I’d have boobs and lots of friends and a driver’s license. Maybe Katie and I would be cheerleaders with boyfriends who were best friends, too.

  It turned out Katie didn’t care that I made the drill team and she didn’t. It was the least of her problems. Her mother had announced she was getting a part-time job. She was thinking about becoming a school bus driver.

  “I would die,” I said when Katie told me.

  “She said it would be good because of the hours,” she said. “I told her I’d quit school, and then she called me a snob.”

  Mrs. Ryan wouldn’t recover from a single trip on the junior high bus. She wore a long skirt 365 days a year and thought Katie’s eye makeup was shocking. She was not equipped to listen to kids cursing and talking about sex all the time. The boys on the bus were always taking some girl’s name and singing the same song: “Missy Flannigan is so tight, you can’t get in with dynamite.” The boys picked a new girl to humiliate every day. Katie and I didn’t really get the song, but we knew we didn’t want her mother to hear it.

  The first day of drill team practice arrived.

  “Maybe Tommy will see me when we perform,” I told Katie on the bus ride to school. I had my blue and gray pom poms with me. I liked the shoosh sound they made when they moved, and the way the other kids looked at me as I carried them down the aisle to my seat.

  “You have to act like you like him if you want Tommy to know who you are,” Katie said. She said this every time I brought Tommy up.

  I pulled at the dingy, yellowish padding that poked through the torn brown vinyl bus seat. “I can’t just act like I like him,” I said. “I’ve never even said one word to him in my entire life.”

  “Well, probably he’ll at least say something to you after the drill team assembly,” Katie said.

  I didn’t want to wait that long.

  Practice started out with a lecture from Tina and Michelle, the cheerleaders from the high school. We sat on the gym floor while they paced in front of us.

  “Don’t think that because we’re cheerleaders we don’t know drill team,” Tina assured us. “Drill team is focused on moving together as one symmetric unit to a song, and cheerleading is more about brief cheers that are a little more individual in nature. In cheering you create the song, and in drill team you complement a song that’s already there.”

  “But they both fall under the umbrella that we call dance,” Michelle said. She pressed Play on a giant boom box and the beginning notes of “Beat It” sounded. I nodded my head up and down. “Beat It” was one of my favorite songs to skate to.

  Tina and Michelle performed the routine that we would eventually learn. Their arms shot out; their heads snapped from side to side as they moved. They had smooth, thick cheerleader legs and long, glossy hair. I had skinny legs and shaggy hair that I was growing out. When Tina and Michelle finished performing they beckoned us forward, lining us up by size.

  “Perfect symmetry,” Tina said, switching two girls in line. “We need perfect symmetry!”

  Two weeks later, I wished that Michael Jackson had never been born. Tina and Michelle stopped the music every thirty seconds and singled out girls who were doing their steps wrong. They especially seemed to love correcting them in front of everyone.

  “Come on people, get it together!” Tina would say, as Michelle yanked the latest offender out of line. Whenever I got something wrong, which
was often, I shook with embarrassment as I was forced to try it again in front of the others on my spindly legs.

  Tina and Michelle played favorites with certain girls, especially Stacy, Tammy, and Meagan, who were obviously benefiting from years of ballet and gymnastics. They didn’t screw up any of their steps, and were pulled out of line only to show the rest of us how to do something right. All three of them could do the splits and kick their legs up to their ears. And unlike the rest of us, they didn’t sweat or get tired.

  My gym locker was next to Tammy’s, and every afternoon I struggled to think of something to say to her. She ignored me, and came to life only when Stacy and Meagan appeared at her side.

  “You seem like you’re good friends with Tina and Michelle,” I finally managed one afternoon after practice.

  I said it so softly that at first I thought Tammy hadn’t heard me. I tried again. “You seem like you’ve known those guys a long time!”

  A couple of other girls on our aisle looked over.

  “God, gimme a second, I heard you the first time,” she said. Tammy kept her eyes on the inside of her locker, where she was pulling a pink and blue sweat jacket from under her bag.

  “You just seem like you’re, you know, actual friends,” I said.

  “Well, my older sister is really close to Michelle,” Tammy said, a note of pride creeping into her voice. “They’re cheerleaders together and everything.” She still didn’t look over at me.