Girl in the Arena - Lise Haines [5]
—I can’t believe you said no to Adam, Sam said. —Does anyone around here know how high up Adam’s father is in the GSA?
I didn’t say that my father Tommy outranked him. She knew that.
I watched her turn to Callie, who swallowed hard, as if she were washing her own little self down her throat.
—I wouldn’t have said no, Callie squeaked.
—Exactly. No sane girl would.
Sam couldn’t stand it when I just looked at her as I did then, waiting to see if she’d calm down. She had me pressed against a locker room stall. I was still slick from volleyball.
—Go ahead, screw up your life, she said.
—When he comes out of the gym, he smells like a Dumpster on a warm day, I said, hoping to put an end to the conversation.
—That’s disgusting, Callie said.
Sam gave her the eyeball and she was about to launch in again when I said, —Besides, the prom is a stupid waste of energy. All those silly little gowns and corsages and stuff.
—What are you, some kind of women’s power person? Sam asked.
—Wow, the curse of Cain, I said.
I didn’t say I think this whole concept of being a Glad wife is 1950s at best, because she’d tell her mother, who would call my mother. And it’s not that Allison doesn’t know how I feel, but she tries really hard to keep up appearances, and I have no reason to make things more painful for her. I know that gladiator sport blindsided her and that she stayed for survival’s sake.
—You know what my mother says? Sam went on, pointing her French manicure at me.
—I have no idea what Martha says, but I bet it’s good.
—She says Allison’s crazy and that it’s probably hereditary.
Then I lost it and said what I had been thinking for months: that I never had any intention of going to the GWC with her.
The GWC, or Gladiator Wives College, in Modesto, California, is where young women learn in two intensive years to be perfect Glad wives. At one time the three of us had talked about going together and sharing an apartment. Sam’s mother, Martha, who’s a lot younger than my mother, was one of their first graduates.
Sam shoved my shoulders against the metal stall. That was about the time when I first realized I might be a pacifist, so I kept myself from pushing her face in.
We stopped talking after that. Callie wouldn’t answer my calls because she was a hundred percent Sam’s now. My friend Mark asked me to prom at the last minute, thinking that’s what I secretly wanted. But I told him I just wanted to go paintballing and he was down with that so we suited up and drove over to Somerville. I never told Allison what Sam said, and how things unraveled. When she asks I just say we’re all pretty busy.
Allison holds out hope that I’ll come to my senses and pack my bags next month for the GWC. She says she’s talked to the president of the college, and that they’ll take me late because of Tommy’s standing.
As I back out of her room now, certain that the tranquilizer is starting to work, I shut the door without latching it so the snap won’t make her jump. She has a terrible startle reflex.
I know I have to move out soon, get my own place, my own life. But I stick around as long as I can for my brother Thad. I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately because they say tomorrow’s fight is the toughest one of Tommy’s career, and every time I think about that, I feel somehow displaced.
CHAPTER
2
Often, I’m at my fast-food job on Friday nights serving trans fat to the masses. But my boss, Sidney, is very big on Glad sport and Tommy in particular. He gave me a raise of fifty cents an hour the first day on the job when he figured out who I was. And this week he gave me the whole weekend off to be with my family after I gave him two tickets to tomorrow’s American Title match.
Once I tuck Allison in, I head for my bedroom and turn on La Bohème. While I send Mark an IM, I thumb through Glad Rag magazine, look at the crawl on a silent CNN, check the weather, download some