Like Mandarin - Kirsten Hubbard [7]
Washokey’s final claim to fame was Mandarin Ramey.
Mandarin appeared in the doorway of our geometry classroom. The noisy flux of students bottlenecked behind her. She paused a second, backlit, as if surveying her realm. Then she sauntered across the classroom and fell into her seat with a huffy exhale of breath, leaning back so the hem of her sweater lifted tantalizingly.
I kept one hand around the stone in my jacket pocket as I opened my notebook to last night’s homework. Although math was one of my best subjects, I made an effort to remain unnoticed in a class of sophomores and dyslexic juniors.
Mandarin was the only senior.
“We’re going to start our chapter on polygons today,” Mrs. Cleary announced, “which I know you’ve all been waiting for!”
Hunching over my desk, I began to draw a border of circles along the bottom of my paper and added freckles, stems, and leaves. Mrs. Cleary, a Washokey native, made math hysterical. Not like funny-hysterical, but hysteria-hysterical. She hopped around in too-tight pants with her granny panty lines showing and waved her arms like a cheerleader. She chirped on and on, transforming the most interesting stuff into nonsense.
I should have enrolled in precalculus when they’d given me the chance.
But I’d known that Mandarin was in this class.
I knew what and when all her classes were. I’d memorized the paths she took through the halls.
I knew where she lived (in the blue house on Plains Street), when and where she worked (Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays at Solomon’s, her father’s bar), and which foods she preferred at lunchtime (fruit, and only fruit—the more unusual, the better).
It wasn’t like I stalked her. I only observed, which was something else entirely. And everybody had some level of fascination with Mandarin Ramey.
Although I was pretty sure nobody else kept a mental tally of all the men she slept with. I could never be too sure, of course, because I based most everything I knew on rumor. And there were always rumors about Mandarin, though not all of them involved her men.
Like the one about her joyriding with a truck stop prostitute. And the one about her streaking through a baseball game during a breakout from the Wyoming Girls’ School, which she’d attended for three months during her sophomore year. And the one about her running a road-enraged bone-head off the highway in her father’s truck.
Mandarin denied or defended nothing. Which meant, according to the other students, that the rumors had to be true. Especially since she’d moved to town at age nine and had missed taking part in those formative childhood years when we’d memorized one another.
Mandarin’s scandals gained the most attention. But that wasn’t all I envied about her.
Her elegance. Her disdain. The subtext in every little thing she did. With Mandarin, the tap-tap-tap of a ballpoint pen against her desk was a come-on, a raised hand, a fuck you. Even her name was seductive: Mandarin, like the syrupy canned oranges I ate with my fingers. Because her mother was a mystery and her dad sure wasn’t talking, nobody knew where she’d gotten it—whether it was Native American, maybe from the Mandan Indians we’d learned about during our Lewis and Clark unit, or whether it involved the Chinese language. Everybody agreed it was impossibly exotic, like her cheekbones, her long black hair, and her gravelly slow-tempo voice.
“Mandarin!”
My pencil lead snapped. I covered my drawings with both hands.
“Come up here and do number three from the homework on the board,” Mrs. Cleary said. I noticed that her nails were painted pale yellow. It looked like she had some kind of disease.
Mandarin hesitated, eyebrows raised. Then, at her own insolent pace, she got up and sauntered to the front of the classroom. She tugged once at her low-slung jeans before selecting a piece of chalk. Washokey High was so backward only half our classrooms had dry-erase boards.
What is it like? I wondered as Mandarin began to sketch. To be the one the entire school talked about, lusted after? To serve as everybody’s favorite topic of conversation?