Cory

Chapter. 11

I can understand some of what must have led up to the prom. Awful as it was, I can understand how someone like Clara Turner could go along, for instance. Tristan Hargens led her by the nose-at least, most of the time.

Her friends were just as easily led by Clara herself. Kelly Gaston, who dropped out of high school when she was eighteen, had a tested third-grade reading level. In the clinical sense, Stephanie Deighan was little more than an idiot. Some of the others had police records; one of them, Jessica Talbot, was first busted at the age of nine, for stealing hubcaps. If you've got a social-worker mentality, you can even regard these people as unfortunate victims.

But what can you say for Tristan Hargens himself?

It seems to me that from first to last, her one and only object in view was the complete and total destruction of Cory Anthony ...

"I'm not supposed to," Caleb Sanders said uneasily. He was a small, pretty boy with a billow of red hair. A pencil was pushed importantly in it. "And if Norman comes back, he'll spill."

"He's in the crapper," Tristian said. "Come on."

Caleb, a little shocked, giggled in spite of himself. Still, he offered token resistance: "Why do you want to see, anyway? You can't go."

"Never mind," Tristan said. As always, he seemed to bubble with dark humour.

"Here," Caleb said, and pushed a sheet enclosed in limp plastic across the desk. "I'm going out for a Coke. If that bitchy Norman Watson comes back and catches you I never saw you."

"Okay," Tristan murmured, already absorbed in the floor plan. He didn't hear the door close.

George Chizmar had also done the floor plan, so it was perfect. The dance floor was clearly marked. Twin bandstands. The stage where the King and Queen would be crowned

(i'd like to crown that fucking gray bastard and cory too)

at the end of the evening. Ranged along the three sides of the floor were the prom-goers' tables. Card tables, actually, but covered with a froth of crepe and ribbon, each holding party favours, prom programmes, and ballots for King and Queen.

He ran a lacquered, spade-shaped fingernail down the tables to the right of the dance floor, then the left. There: Charlene G. & Cory A. They were really going through with it. She could hardly believe it. Outrage made him tremble. Did they really think they would be allowed to get away with it? His lips tautened grimly.

He looked over his shoulder. Norman Watson was still nowhere in sight.

Tristan put the seating chart back and rifled quickly through the rest of the papers on the pitted and initialwarred desk. Invoices (mostly for crepe paper and hapenny nails), a list of parents who had loaned card tables, petty-cash vouchers, a bill from Star Printers, who had run off the prom tickets, a sample King and Queen ballot

Ballot! He snatched it up.

No one was supposed to see the actual King and Queen ballot until Friday, when the whole student body would hear the candidates announced over the school's intercom. The King and Queen would be voted in by those attending the prom, but blank nomination ballots had been circulated to home rooms almost a month earlier. The results were supposed to be top secret.

There was a gaining student move afoot to do away with the King and Queen business all together - some of the girls claimed it was sexist, the boys thought it was just plain stupid and a little embarrassing. Chances were good that this would be the last year the dance would be so formal or traditional.

But for Tristan, this was the only year that counted. He stared at the ballot with greedy intensity.

George and Frieda. No way. Frieda Jason was a Jew.