This choice: Pick an impersonation outside the cheerleaders circle • Go Back...Chapter #31Choices from Inside Other Boxes by: Seuzz   Your dad corners you when you get home, and asks about this "extra credit assignment." You reply that it's a "movie review video" for your Film class. He lifts an eyebrow at that, but lets you go after you say you've got some other homework to finish up. After transferring most of the junk on your desk to your bed, you settle in to do some math.
But you divide your attention almost evenly between calculus of the mathematical sort and calculus of the social sort.
It's an astonishingly complex series of diagrams that Fairfax has constructed, and it only looks more complicated as you study it, flipping back and forth between the various pages. But even for all his care, you can tell that he has only diagrammed a tiny fraction of the senior class, and has caught only a few names from the lower classes.
Naturally the diagram would be incomplete, since Fairfax and his friends can't possibly know everyone in the senior class, or have anything like a complete schematic of who hangs out with who. But it's enough to baffle you in a lot of places.
So there are a lot of names that you're not familiar with, for instance. Who are Brianna Kirschke and Susie Lekuawehe, and why do they share a circle with Gloria Rea and Maria Vasquez? There are also names you know but which are grouped in circles that you never suspected. You know Lin Pol and you know Danielle Davis, but you would never have identified them as belonging to a common group. But according to Fairfax they share a circle with Anne Starkey and Hermione Gilbert (the latter is new to you, at least as a name).
Now, you really like the idea of impersonating a cheerleader. At the same time you know from listening to -- okay, eavesdropping on -- Eva and Jessica and Lin and Yumi that the squad is riven with spite, hatred, jealousy, and mutual contempt. Your gang isn't going to be able to replace/impersonate the entire squad, which means that you'll likely be caught up in it. That doesn't really appeal to you.
So as you study Fairfax's diagrams, you start moving away from the center circle toward the outer rings.
The first place you look is at the girls who are connected to the cheerleader squad by sharing a circle with a cheerleader. Kelsey Blankenship, Rachel Burton, Olivia Byrne, and other AP snots, for instance, are in a circle that also includes the Garners. Kendra Saunders shares a group with Catherine Muskov, Anita Nuevo and Bonny Trask, among others, and Cindy Vredenburg connects the cheerleaders to a group that includes Jamie Borhnolm, Rachel Burton and Deanna Showalter.
So you start by copying down names that are directly connected to cheerleaders.
From that list you draw out a secondary list: girls who connect the first ring of circles to the second ring. Jamie Bornholm, for instance, belongs to a ring that includes Cindy Vredenburg -- connecting her to the cheerleaders -- but also belongs to a circle that includes many girls on the swim team -- Bethany Lewis, Christine Coolidge, and Andrea Varnsworth -- who themselves have no connection to the cheerleaders.
You then turn to making a list of girls that connect the second ring to the third ring, but after a thorough search find that there aren't many such names -- the third ring is mostly a free-floating set of groups that (you suppose) Fairfax and his friends know directly. You don't recognize a lot of those names, and the ones you do know -- like Molly Shaw -- have no appeal as people to impersonate.
After reorganizing the list of names a couple of times and in a couple of ways, you see a pattern emerging: a set of impersonations that could give Fairfax what he says he wants -- vantage points from which to study this "field of influences" he claims to be interested in -- while getting you away from the cheerleader squad. It lies with those girls who sit inside multiple, overlapping circles.
Fairfax sounded real happy about putting Carlos and Mike in for the Garner girls, for instance, because he said that would let him study how the center circle connects to some of the first-ring circles. You're willing to bet that Fairfax would let you impersonate someone who connects the first ring to the second ring, particularly if it was someone who would let him map some of the farther reaches of this diagram and could maybe open up additional connections and circles.
There are a couple of possibilities here, but the standout possibility is Rachel Burton. Fairfax has her listed as part of two "first ring" groups -- the AP crowd and a circle that includes Cindy Vredenburg and Anne Starkey -- and he's also listed her as part of the swim team. So that's three groups that you can spy out for him from under her face. Beyond that, you always see her around with Deanna Showalter, who is a notorious school gossip, so you could also improve Fairfax's "social map" by using Deanna as a source.
Rachel's not bad looking, either. Swimming has kept her trim, and you've seen her around school lots of times in skimpy tops that show smooth, creamy shoulders and a well-shaped bosom, and her legs are long and well-shaped. Her nose might be a little big, and something about her smile suggests that either it or her mouth sits at an angle to the rest of her face, but she has bright blue eyes and shoulder-length brown hair that looks good whether it's draping loose or has been piled atop her head. She's on the short side, which makes her look more "cute" than pretty.
Yes, Rachel would be the "safe" choice, for lots of reasons. But there are two other, more radical options that you can't rule out.
One is Gillian Kiefer. Normally you would pass over her completely. You don't know her very well, for a start. And though there is something in her smile -- some glint of intelligent, puckish mischief -- that lights up her face in an adorable way, she is a little on the plump side. And if it were simply a matter of doing an impersonation, you would steer entirely clear of her because she has a boyfriend that you're not too fond of.
But the fact that she is Braydon Delp's girlfriend now causes you to linger over her. Delp has been after this book that Fairfax and his friends now have, to the point of tracking down its last owner and pressuring you for information about it. It makes you nervous. Gillian would be the perfect blind from which to spy on him and maybe trip him up if he needs it.
Of course, Delp himself would be a better choice for an impersonation if that's what you really wanted, but you're not sure that Fairfax would want to go that route -- he seems fixated on this "sociology" thing, and on cheerleaders. But Gillian, who Fairfax has placed in an isolated circle with Brianna Gould, Rebecca Sykes and Katie Byrd (none of whom you know too well) could help there as well by adding a lot of circles that lie beyond the boundaries of his current map.
And then there's the third possibility. The one that you keep playing with, then rejecting, only to take it up again to play with it some more.
It's Stephanie Wyatt.
You're pretty sure you wouldn't have paid any attention to her -- she'd be just another name like "Samantha Carpenter" or "Tara Weston" -- but for your recent hassles with her. That's why you keep rejecting her when your eye runs past her name. You're it's just resentment that keeps pulling your eye back to her name. If you told Fairfax to bustle her into cold storage so that you could take over her life, it would only be because you are angry at the serial humiliations she's foisted on you.
You know it's resentment because you recognize the hot feeling you get in the back of your head when you think of her, and when you think of putting yourself in for her. But curiosity gnaws at you as well. She is so superlatively confident in herself; what must it be like to be so confident? There is also curiosity about what makes her tick, and what appeals or doesn't appeal to her. She told you that you weren't "interesting." So who and what does she find interesting? Would you find them interesting as well? Could you learn anything by looking at them from her perspective? Or would you just discover that you and Stephanie really are a case of "same planet, different worlds"?
You could probably find an angle for selling Fairfax on an impersonation of Stephanie. Like Rachel, she inhabits multiple circles; and like Gillian she inhabits some outer circles that Fairfax hasn't mapped out very well. It's true that she doesn't share any circles with any cheerleaders, but that's probably only ignorance on Fairfax's part. You know that she sometimes hangs out with the Garner girls.
And there's one other mystery associated with her: the "black magic" that she and her friends seem to be interested in, and consulting Delp about. Fairfax might like to know about that as well.
* * * * *
You sleep on it. The next morning you are in a thoughtful mood as you shower and dress, and you find yourself doing it all very carefully and self-consciously. There's a moody expression on your face as you watch yourself brush your teeth.
It comes to you as you're walking out the door: When's the next time I'll walk back through it as myself? The doorknob is briefly very hot in your hand.
But the big jolt doesn't come until you're approaching the school gym. Fairfax is waiting, and he detaches himself from the wall to approach. "So what did you decide?" he asks.
Who are you going to spend the rest of the semester -- maybe the year -- impersonating?
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