After lunch, while I got my English book out of my locker I saw Amy talking with a couple of guys, petition in hand. “But that’s the beauty of the democratic system," she said.
"You can make a difference.”
“Nothing ever changes,” one of the guys drawled back at her. “Student council does the same stuff every year. What does it matter who wins?”
“If you want a different agenda, treat this like a political race instead of a popularity contest. Vote for someone who actually knows what they’re doing.”
What kind of slam was that?
As if I didn’t know what I was doing. Well, okay, so I didn’t have any actual experience in student council, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t figure it out. This wasn’t the Supreme Court we were talking about. This was a school election.
Amy held out a pen to the guys. I would have loved it if they’d turned her down or at least made her explain why she thought she knew what she was doing, while everyone else was a bunch of clueless dolts, but the guys just took her petition and signed it.
I refrained from slamming my locker door.
I knew what I was doing. And I wasn’t about to let Amy beat me.
On Friday my friends and I stayed after school to make posters and assemble our petition lists. Since we’d made tons of posters for cheerleading, we had the system down to an art form. Rachel and I did borders, die cuts, and other miscellaneous decorations . Aubrie and Chelsea stenciled the lettering.
While I laid out the poster board and the other supplies I’d lugged out of my car, Chelsea looked through the petitions. She shook her head as she flipped from one page to the next. “I don’t believe this. Some of these morons signed more than one of our lists. What were they thinking? Like, duh, you only get one vote.”
Rachel smirked at us. “Did you guys hit up the remedial students or something?”
I nearly slipped up by adding an insult of my own but closed my mouth before the words came out. Instead, I said, “Obviously, some people are very enthusiastic about voting for me.”
“Well, because of their enthusiasm you now have only forty-six valid signatures instead of fifty.”
I sat down and pulled out the paper we used for borders. “We still have time. We’ll just watch for people as they walk by.”
Rachel picked up one of the petitions. “I’ll go find some people.”
She was entirely too eager to do this. I knew she just wanted to chat with people instead of making posters, but I didn’t stop her from leaving.
Aubrie sat down cross-legged in front of one of the poster boards and pulled the lid off a marker. “Guess who else I heard is running against you, Samantha?” Without giving me time to say anything, she said, “Rick Debrock.”
“Rick Debrock?” I repeated. “Why would he want to run?
Rick was one of those rebel students whose extreme haircut matched perfectly with his strange clothes. On occasion I’d even seen him wear a safety pin through his ear. As far as I could tell, he never took school seriously, let alone showed any interest in executive council. His only concern about classes seemed to be getting through them so he could party on the weekends. Last year I had a class with him, and every Monday he came in and loudly told everyone about his weekend exploits. Most of his adventures consisted of drinking beer until he passed out.
“Rick Debrock?” I said again. “Does he have a grade point average high enough to run?”
“He must have,” Aubrie said. “They gave him the paperwork. His campaign slogan is ‘Party, party, party with Rick.’”
I picked up my scissors but didn’t cut anything. “Do you think he’ll get many votes?”
Aubrie leaned over her poster board and stenciled in an S. “Most people won’t take him seriously. But then again, a lot of people don’t take executive council seriously, so they might vote for him just for that reason.”
“He’s not that wild of a guy,” Chelsea said, placing a stencil on her poster. “He just puts on the front.” We both looked at her skeptically, so she added, “My sister has gone out with him a few times. She claims he's actually really smart.”
Chelsea’s little sister, Adrian, was going through what we called a “freak-out” stage.
She seemed intent on piercing every single part of her body and had worn nothing but black for an entire year. Her going out with Rick wasn’t a ringing endorsement of his normalcy.
I laid a piece of border paper on my poster and cut it to the right length. “Well, I guess I can’t count on votes from the goths, partyers, or anyone-who-hates-school-just-on-principle crowd.”
“Maybe if we revamped your image a little you could appeal to those crowds.”
Chelsea waved her pen in my direction, as if she were a fairy godmother transforming me from a scullery maid into an acceptable candidate. “Try snarling a little, and repeat the words to all the heavy-metal songs you know.”
I returned my attention to my poster. “Most people won’t vote for Rick Debrock. He’s probably so inebriated he can’t find the school half the time, let alone try and run it.”
From behind me a voice said, “Would that be an insult?”
I didn’t have to turn around to tell Logan stood behind me. I clenched my teeth together. How long had he been lurking around, and more importantly, why didn’t my friends tell me he was there? I trimmed the corners of the border and kept my voice even. “That wasn’t an insult. It was merely an observation.”
Logan plopped his backpack on the floor and sat next to me, nearly glowing with happiness. “It sounded like an insult to me.”
“Well, I suppose that’s one more area in life we disagree on.”
He leaned toward me and, in a voice so low only I’d hear it, said, “Stop trying to weasel out of this, you cheater. You lost our bet.”
“It wasn’t an insult," I insisted. "Rick drinks a lot. It’s a substantiated fact, and one of his main campaign themes. So how can that possibly be counted as an insult? I didn’t lose the bet.”
I picked up a few star-shaped die cuts and glanced over at my friends. They quickly shifted their gazes from me to their posters, bending over them with intent concentration as though they weren’t eavesdropping, but I knew they’d grill me about this little encounter as soon as Logan left. It was just one more ray of sunshine he was adding to my life.
Logan tapped his fingers on the floor. “I suppose it’s possible you don’t understand the definition of an insult. After all, you’ve been hurling insults around for so long you probably don’t even notice them anymore. Sort of the same principle behind all that perfume you wear.”
“I see,” I hissed out. “Maybe you can clarify things for me then. For example, if I were to tell you . . . say, to drop dead, would that be an insult or simply an instruction?”
“See, you can’t even go three seconds without starting up again.”
“I didn’t lose.”
He held up one hand in protest and then let it drop back onto his lap. “All right. I’m willing to let this infraction slide, but you have to start all over again. You have to go a full week from today without insulting another person.”
“I’ll go two weeks,” I said, just because I hated his patronizing tone.
“Fine. Two weeks.”
I immediately regretted I’d volunteered for an extra week, but I didn’t try to take it back.
“Let’s set some rules,” he went on, “just so you and I agree on the definition of an insult. If it isn’t kind, and it isn’t something you’d want someone saying about you, then it’s an insult, and you lose our bet. Agreed?”
I wanted to tell him what he could do with his rules and his stupid bet, but he would never let me live it down if I did. He’d still be calling me a cheater and a weasel at our ten-year reunion. My pride was riding on this bet now. “Agreed.”