Not So Different

21. Hothouse Ghetto

Sonny couldn't understand why Principal Li was excited.

Grove Hills, an expensive private school which promoted itself on the basis of academic excellence, had invited some students from Lawndale High to visit. From their point of view it was a straightforward marketing exercise. But what was Li's angle? If the most academically capable students at Lawndale High were creamed off by Grove Hills, how would she benefit? Why were the invitations actually being channelled through Lawndale, with Li coming into study hall to announce them? Could it be something as crude as a cash payoff, a 'finder's fee'?

True, given their past interactions, Sonny could imagine the principal being glad to see the back of him, but not Jodie Landon, who was one of the other Lawndale students invited.

He guessed Jodie might be excited. That would make some kind of sense.

Personally he sympathised more with Jane's reaction to Li's announcement: 'I knew those straight Cs in math would pay off some day.' Sonny was already going to a school where everybody thought they were cooler than he was. Why would he want to go somewhere where people thought they were smarter than he was too?

His parents, naturally, did not see it the same way. They were thrilled about Grove Hills. Why wouldn't they be? Nobody was expecting them to go there. Except, that is, to accompany him for the weekend visit. At least he got to exact a cash bribe from them before acquiescing. And there was an unexpected opportunity to rain on Quinn's parade by reminding his parents of the last time they'd left Quinn alone in the house (she'd hosted a keg party and somebody had thrown up in the closet), and then to inspire Quinn with nightmares about the same solitary scenario, involving mass murderers, serial killers, torturers, and cannibals. Their mother didn't like the idea of Quinn alone at home anyway, and suggested that she stay at the Griffins, 'even if I have to call that witch, Linda'. (Helen Morgendorffer brought out the same viciously competitive streak in Linda Griffin that Quinn brought out in Sandi.)

Despite leaving Quinn behind, they were still four in the car on the way to Grove Hills, the fourth being Jodie. Her parents were attending a new members' brunch at a club they'd waited three years to get into, so the Morgendorffers had agreed to give her a ride (the Landons would meet them at Grove Hills later).

'Remember', Sonny said to Jodie before they left, 'no matter what happens on this ride you've already waived your right to sue me for confining you with lunatics.'

Sonny cautioned Jodie about his parents, but not his parents about Jodie. He thought, if you had to have somebody in the car with you, that Jodie wouldn't be so bad—not as bad as Quinn, for example. He had failed to think ahead to his parents' predictable reaction to Jodie's presence.

His mother started off by asking Jodie whether she belonged to any clubs. Sonny told her that she didn't have to answer, but Jodie naturally had no objection to listing her extracurricular activities, including tennis. At once, his father wanted to know why Sonny didn't join the tennis team.

What kind of question was that? 'Dad, it's not football, but it's still a sport.'

His father changed the subject by asking Jodie whether she had 'a fella'.

'Yeah, his name's Michael. But everybody calls him Mack.'

'But he wasn't invited on this trip', Jake continued, his voice hinting at the significance of the difference between the chosen and the rest.

Sonny had no trouble guessing what his father was thinking: his version of relationship algebra would be something like 'Mack is less than Jodie; Mack is less than Sonny; which two are closest in value?' I don't need this, he thought. Aloud, he said, 'I don't know how they picked the people for this. Mack's one of the better students in our grade. And he's a pretty decent "fellow" too, for the captain of the football team.' Let's hope that does it, he thought. With luck Dad isn't going to incite competition between me and the captain of the football team, not after what happened with the thug who captained the football team back in Highland. He winced in reminiscence.

'Captain of the football team?' said his father. 'I thought football stars usually dated cheerleaders?' Sonny saw Jodie wince, but he himself could see the segue his father was navigating towards, and how to steer around it.

'I told you, Dad. Mack's pretty decent.' That earned him a grateful look from Jodie.

With barely a moment's pause, his father went on. 'Speaking of cheerleaders, Jodie, do you know Brittany Taylor? Sonny did a science project with her, but we haven't seen much of her lately.'

Sonny intercepted again. 'It's just like you said, Dad. Cheerleaders mostly date football stars. Brittany's dating Kevin Thompson, the quarterback, and he takes up most of her time.' Sonny glanced for a moment at Jodie. She knew at least as much as he did about the instability and lack of sincere exclusivity in Brittany and Kevin's relationship, but he was confident she would be too nice to say anything about it where his parents could hear.

In fact Jodie crossed up his expectations by saying clearly, 'Yeah, Kevin's great' and then in an undertone pitched only to him 'at smashing beer cans with his head'. It was almost enough for Sonny to reward her with a smile.

Before his parents could say anything else humiliating, they arrived at Grove Hills. It looked like a manorial estate. Sonny asked whether they should just apply for jobs in the stables.

He was pleased, though, when the parents were separated from the children instead of the children from the parents. As he and Jodie walked up to the building with the big welcome banner, Jodie expressed slight puzzlement about the conversation in the car.

'I already told you, you waived your right to sue.'

'It's all right. I'm just … curious.'

Sonny gave a half-shrug, shoulders only, and explained. 'My parents would like me to be a normal high-school boy with a normal girlfriend—along with the normal 4.0 GPA, of course. And the absolutely normal display of extracurriculars that will guarantee admission to a first-choice college.'

'Your first choice or theirs?'

'They'd prefer not to think about the possibility of conflict. Anyway, here are the two of us on our way to Grove Hills, with our top grades—it's a match made in heaven. And you have all those extracurriculars, too!'

'Then what was that business about Brittany? Don't they know what her grades are like?'

'You know how and why Barch paired up Brittany and me for that science experiment, but my dad doesn't. The idea of my pursuing a cheerleader like Brittany is another way he can imagine me as like a normal high-school boy, and obviously if he imagines me pursuing her he wants to imagine me pursuing her successfully.'

Jodie nodded. 'So what do your parents think about Jane?'

'I'm not dating Jane. We're friends. I don't date anybody.'

'But you said your parents want you to have a girlfriend. Why don't they think of Jane?'

'To begin with, my parents were excited that I had a friend. I never had a friend before. But …', said Sonny, scratching behind his ear, '… what I like about being with Jane is that when I'm with her, I'm myself, only more so. My parents' wanting me to have a girlfriend, or even friends, is part of their wanting me to be a different person. They haven't exactly got anything against Jane, but she doesn't really do it for them.'

Their conversation was interrupted by the approach of one of the Grove Hills staff, who introduced herself as Marina. After Jodie and Sonny had identified themselves, Marina introduced them to three Grove Hills students—Lara, Graham, and Cassidy—and asked them to tell Jodie and Sonny about the advantages of Grove Hills.

'Well', said Lara, 'number one, you only have to put up with shrill recruiters at phony functions like this.'

To Sonny's way of thinking, the really interesting thing about this remark was that Marina exhibited no sign of offence at it. She just excused herself and left them to their own devices.

Cassidy took up Lara's theme. 'And you're not surrounded by nearly as many stupid people as you would be at home.'

'Starting with your parents', Graham said.

Lara, Graham, and Cassidy all laughed. More interestingly, Jodie did too. Sonny didn't know anything about Jodie's parents. He knew about his own parents, though. He allowed his face to alter imperceptibly with amusement. 'Maybe this place isn't so bad', he said.

They didn't have long to chat before Marina rounded them up again to watch a short film promoting the school. When your parent is a marketing consultant, you have an ideal opportunity to learn to be suspicious of promotional materials, so Sonny wasted no time trying to take the film seriously. As the narrator dilated lyrically on the uses that could be made of the luxurious facilities, Sonny whispered to Jodie about the suitability of the scenic bell tower for dumping bodies into the river. Jodie giggled, but the girl on the other side of Jodie shushed him. Evidently the Grove Hills screening process used academic ability as a criterion, but not immunity to marketing. Of course not. Why would it?

At the end of the film Marina got up on stage and asked people to say a little about their goals in life. 'Who'd like to start?'

Sonny was unsurprised to see Jodie's hand shoot up. 'Well', she said, 'some day I'd like to own my own business: maybe a consulting firm geared towards minority start-ups.'

'Excellent!' said Marina. Who asked you for an evaluation? thought Sonny.

Marina continued by asking Sonny about his goal, presumably on the inadequate grounds that he was sitting next to Jodie. Sonny explained that he didn't have any. Marina insisted that he must.

Right, both barrels, thought Sonny. 'My goal is to avoid getting any more of the beatings which have been a regular part of my school experience until now, but without compromising my personal standards to achieve that end.' Marina giggled nervously. Sonny felt confident she wouldn't bother him again and he was right.

With the shill now giving him the kind of wide berth he was comfortable with, Sonny decided to use the 'meet and greet' function to size up his potential future classmates a little more. His first impression had been somewhat favourable, but there was a seed of doubt at the back of his mind. When Lara said something about 'high school' and 'the happiest time of your life', was she ingenuous or sarcastic?

He tested the water by saying, 'Only if your life is extremely short.'

Graham laughed and told him he was funny, but offset the effect with an inappropriate clap on the shoulder. There was definitely something out-of-kilter about Graham, like a radio tuned just off the correct frequency. You've been bullied, Sonny thought, and you could never find just the right response, could you? It would be good to know whether the bullying was a feature of Grove Hills or of Graham's former environment—or both.

Jodie wasn't picking up on anything wrong. 'See what happens when you give people a chance?' she whispered to Sonny.

Sonny was saved the effort of a response when Graham decided to explain his vision of the happiest time of his life, which involved huge amounts of money and 'a model on each arm'.

'Gee, that's interesting', said Sonny. 'I guess you can be intellectually gifted and still be morally bankrupt.'

Graham laughed like a blocked drain. 'I certainly hope so.'

As Sonny glanced at Jodie and raised one eyebrow, Lara and Graham drew attention to, and directed contempt at, another Grove Hills student who had appeared at the punch bowl, within their observational range but outside conversational distance. Cassidy explained that this student had scored 'only in the ninetieth percentile' in a recent standardised test. This was what had reversed Lara and Graham's attitude from acceptance to rejection.

Immediately Sonny had a vivid flash of Jane saying 'I knew those straight Cs in math would pay off some day.' The image faded only to be replaced by an equally vivid flash of Quinn giving her unsolicited appraisal of Grove Hills: 'that place where they fence off all the geeks'.

If Sonny found himself aligning with Quinn it was a sign of something not right.

'Thank goodness for standardised tests', he said, now carefully not looking at Jodie and keeping his face in neutral. 'Otherwise we'd never know who our real friends are.'

'Right', said Graham, falling into Sonny's conversational trap. 'I mean … amusing', he said, trying to lever himself out of it. He turned and left, and Cassidy and Lara went with him.

Sonny fed Jodie's own words back to her. 'See what happens when you give people a chance?' Jodie, for want of a legitimate response, exclaimed Sonny's name in exasperation, and then sped after the others, calling them to wait.

Standing alone in a crowd and talking with nobody was one of the many things about which Sonny had nothing to learn from Grove Hills. He put in a little practice just to keep his hand in. Then he decided it might be interesting to find out whether there was some point at which Jodie would hear the clue phone ringing. He strolled over to where she was still talking with Graham and Lara. He didn't need to focus full attention to observe that Graham was more interested in talking than listening and that it looked as if the news bulletin was finally about to be received at Outpost Station Jodie. In passing he noticed Graham's reference to a quarterback who had told the whole school—presumably the school he was at before Grove Hills—that Graham (disguised by the second person pronoun used impersonally) showered in a towel.

That would do it, Sonny thought, his earlier hypothesis corroborated. He'd known more than one football hero like that himself. Graham was still on a futile quest for payback, and blood-blind emotion led him to put down Jodie, not yet bearing his Grove Hills stamp of approval. You may even find yourself one day with a model on each arm, thought Sonny, but you still won't know whether that quarterback's somewhere else with three models, all more attractive than your ones.

Meanwhile Jodie had finally worked up to the point of telling Graham off as the boring miserable myopic loser he was, regardless of his standardised test scores. Then she stormed off too quickly for his retort: 'I'll make sure you never set foot in this school again!'

'That's a relief', Sonny said. 'Can we have it in writing, please, and notarised?'

After that line, there was no more to say, so Sonny went outside to find Jodie sitting on a bench in the gathering dark.

'Admit it', he said to her. 'That felt good.'

'Well, a little.' She half-turned to look at him as he sat down next to her. 'Okay, a lot.'

'Busting on jerks like Graham is one of life's few pleasures. You should try it more often.'

Jodie looked away and down and said, 'Oh, shut up.'

Sonny looked down too. 'Um, good start.'

Jodie turned to face straight at Sonny and opened her eyes wide to look directly at him. 'You realise your negative approach to everything is self-defeating, right?'

'Well, it's nice to know there's somebody I can defeat.'

'I mean, you may spare yourself some pain by cutting everybody off, but you miss out on a lot of good stuff, too.'

Sonny scratched behind his ear. 'Jodie, when was the last time you were bullied? Because I'm thinking it was probably years ago—if ever. But when I told Marina that getting beaten up has been a regular part of my school experience, I wasn't just making something up to get her off my back. That's one thing Graham and I have in common, despite his being a jerk.'

Jodie's brow furrowed. 'He told you that?'

'Told me? I didn't need him to tell me. This is my area of specialist expertise. I've been directly acquainted with enough football stars like that quarterback he mentioned to connect the dots. To be strictly accurate, it's not an absolute certainty that Graham was physically bullied, just odds-on, but it doesn't necessarily make a lot of difference. I know what Graham came here to Grove Hills to get away from, and we both know that it hasn't worked for him. But I have an attitude that works for me now, even if it does mean I miss out on some stuff.'

There was a pause while Jodie digested this. Then she said, 'Okay, you're an expert on your problems. Am I allowed to be an expert on my problems?'

'Yeah, sure.'

'At home, I'm Jodie. I can say or do whatever feels right. But at school, I'm the Queen of the Negroes. The perfect African-American teen. The role model for all of the other African-American teens at Lawndale. Oops! Where'd they go? Believe me, I'd like to be more like you.'

Jodie Landon wants to be more like me? 'You may never quote me, but there are times when I'd like to be more like you.'

Jodie looked as if that was the nicest thing anybody had ever said to her. 'Really?'

'I'm not saying all the time.' Sonny tilted his head to one side. 'Is that why you're always cranked up for maximum output, never relaxing, because you want to be a perfect example?'

'Well, not just for the sake of it. It's not just about the way I look to other people. When it comes time for college entry, I want to have the best grades and the transcript full of extracurriculars that will impress any admissions office. Sure, my parents are pushing for that, but I want it for myself, too.'

Sonny gave a quick shrug. 'I want to get good grades too. But I figure I'll get them by doing special projects when that's the way to get them, and I'll get them by coasting when that works. If I can coast and still get good grades, why not?' He looked around. 'Somehow I don't think that attitude would go down well around this place.'

There was little more to the Grove Hills trip. Sonny and Jodie had both decided, for their slightly different reasons, not to change schools. The next day they parted to travel home with their respective parents. On the drive back Sonny's mother tried to pretend that they were accepting his decision against their own preferences, but Sonny discerned that they'd heard things about Grove Hills at the parents' sessions that turned them off. It didn't really matter what.

Of somewhat more interest was the unusual turn of events which followed their return. They'd all got out of the car, and Helen and Jake had gone inside, when a defeated Jane came along the street trundling in front of her an oblivious unresisting Quinn, babbling non-stop fashion-related trivia. What had Quinn been doing with Jane?

Sonny didn't press Jane for details of her trauma. He already knew what it was like sharing quarters with Quinn. Jane just hadn't been case-hardened. He would wait till she was healed to compare scars.

He had no qualms, on the other hand, about extracting information from Quinn. He probably wouldn't even have had to threaten her to get her to talk, but threatening Quinn was fun. Sonny knew their mother would react unfavourably if she found out that Quinn had not stayed with Sandi, not after Helen had had to abase herself to the detested Linda Griffin. All he had to do was promise Quinn pointedly that their mother would never find out from him, so long as he got to hear the story.

The only tricky part was decoding the facts from Quinn's cloaking interpretations, but eventually Sonny was confident he had it straight.

Quinn had gone to the Griffins' according to plan, and she and Sandi had fenced verbally (with buttoned foils) as usual. What had made things turn seriously nasty was that Sandi Griffin's two noisy younger brothers had started fawning over Quinn. Piqued, Sandi had suggested that Quinn might be more comfortable at Tiffany's. In other words, she'd thrown her out.

Tiffany's only idea for relating to Quinn had been ceaseless requests for reassurance about her appearance: the arrangement of her features, the whiteness of her teeth, the possible tendency of any of her outfits to make her look fat. When Quinn's surprisingly large capacity for patient provision of the demanded reassuring responses had been exhausted, Tiffany's interest in her had been immediately exhausted as well. In other words, she'd thrown her out.

That left Quinn with Stacy, who was only too happy to have her as a guest. That was only too happy with the emphasis on the 'too'. Stacy was too happy to have outfits the same as Quinn's, accessories the same as Quinn's, make-up stylings, tastes, preferences, attitudes, … That was too much admiration even for Quinn, who had fled—and so wound up at the door of the Lane house, begging for shelter from the mass serial cannibals Sonny had told her about. Poor Jane.

He felt no sympathy for Quinn, whose chief voiced complaint about the whole experience was not the behaviour of her alleged friends from the Fashion Club but Trent's insistence on referring to her only as 'Sonny's sister' despite being reminded of her name (when she couldn't remember his, and could barely remember Jane's). Sonny pointed out that she owed her shelter from her night terrors to being the sister of her weird outcast brother, and added that if she ever forgot about her debt to her weird outcast brother's outcast friend, she could be sure that he would find a way to enforce payment.

The Grove Hills story ended where it began, in study hall (where Jane was spending her time drawing a picture of Quinn with a bullet hole in her head). Sonny stopped at the desk next to Jodie's and picked up her book to find out what it was: How To Win Friends And Influence People. Sonny sat down at the next desk with his book, Heart of Darkness. They exchanged a few words about their respectively chosen works, looked at each other for a long few seconds, and then began to read.

Some dialogue from 'Gifted' by Peggy Nicoll