One of these days before I graduate and begin what I hope will be a brilliant career at Georgetown University, I’m going to get dressed up in high heels and a short skirt and head down to that Chevy dealership on the Boule-vard. I’m going to ask for Mr. M. by name and make him show me all the shiny cars, the Camaros, Berettas, and Corvettes.
“What about gas mileage?” I’ll ask him. “Tell me again about the antilock brakes.”
I swear to God, I’ll make him suffer.
PAUL WARREN
YOU ONLY NEED a hundred signatures to put your-self on the ballot. I’d accumulated eighty-something my first half hour in the cafeteria when Tracy came charg-ing up to my table in those amazing black jeans.
“Who put you up to this?” she demanded.
Tracy’s kind of short and moon-faced, but some-thing about her gets me all flustered. It’s pretty simple, really: she’s got this ass. Just ask any guy at Winwood.
Conversations stop every time she walks down the hall. She wore these cut-offs last spring that people still talk about.
“What?”
“I asked you a simple question, Paul. Or do you ex-pect me to believe that you just woke up this morning and decided to run for President?”
‘’I’ve been thinking about it for a long time.”
She shook her head and smiled with pure contempt.
I felt like I’d turned into a pane of glass.
“You’re not a good liar, Paul.”
She surprised me then by plucking the pen out of my hand and signing the petition.
“I’ve been working toward this for three years,” she said, dotting the i in her last name with her trade-mark star, “and if you think you can just jump in at the last minute and take it away from me, you’re sorely mistaken.”
It’s funny. She was trying to show me she wasn’t scared, but the message I got was exactly the opposite. For the first time, I actually believed I might be able to win.
“Well,” I said, reclaiming my pen from her sweaty fingers, “I guess we’ll just have to let the voters decide.”
MR. M
THE ELECTION FOLLOWS an orderly, three-phase schedule. March is petition month. Any student can be-come a candidate simply by submitting a petition with the required number of signatures. The Candidate As-sembly on the first Tuesday in April marks the official beginning of the race. The next two weeks are devoted to the campaign. The hallways and bulletin boards are plastered with signs and posters. Candidates greet their fellow students at the main door, passing out leaflets, shaking hands. The Watchdog publishes a special elec-tion issue. It’s democracy in miniature, a great educa-tional tool.
It’s clear to me now that I was wrong to get so in-volved in Paul’s candidacy. I don’t think I admitted to myself how badly I wanted to see Tracy lose.
That girl was bad news, 110 pounds of the rawest, nakedest ambition I’d ever come in contact with. She smoldered with it, and I’d be a liar if I said I didn’t find her fascinating and a little bit dangerous, especially af-ter what I’d heard about her from Jack Dexter. She was a steamroller, and I guess I wanted to slow her down before she flattened the whole school.