Living Dolls: The Director's Cut

"No, no, the nice bank stationery, Andrea," he said. "The mayor and I will witness it. Make sure you include all of our titles, particularly signatory's father and godfather. I'd hate to have this young man think my daughter wasn't serious."

Twenty minutes later, the trap was set, and two days after that, the bear walked right into it.

"Well, all right, how about Julie Pinsky?" Gordon asked.

We were sitting at our usual cafeteria table on Monday. We had changed the arrangements again, of course; Gordon now sat in the middle on one side with Karen and Sue on either side of him, and Gunner and I occupied two of the three seats on the other side. Gunner now sat across from Sue on one end, and I sat across from Karen on the other, leaving the seat between us unoccupied.

Karen had wasted no time.

"So who ya takin' to the prom?" she asked Gordon.

"Oh, for cryin' out loud," he moaned. "Last week that's all my mom talked about – the prom, the prom, the prom. Then this weekend, it was like she'd finally given up. I didn't hear a damn thing about the prom. And now you start. It's like frickin' tag team wrestling. I'm not takin' anyone. I'm not goin' to the prom."

"What about Alice Lincoln?" Karen asked.

"Too shy." Sue leaned over to talk across him. The two of them always had fun talking over Gordon. "That wouldn't work. How about Kathy Wilson?"

"Kathy Wilson would eat poor Gordon alive," Karen said.

"So now we need someone who's just right," Gordon teased them in his best Goldilocks voice.

"So you pick someone," Karen prompted him.

He picked Julie. I followed his eyes to see Julie enter the serving area.

"Julie Pinsky?" Sue said warily.

"Sure." Gordon laughed. "Look at this table. At the beginning of the year, three nerds. Now, three nerds, a gorgeous redhead, and a beautiful blonde. Why shouldn't I be entitled to a lovely brunette?"

"Exactly." Karen joined the laughter. "So ask her out."

"Karen," Sue started to warn her. Up until now, I'd suspected that Sue had been roped into this as well, but apparently she had no idea what Karen and I had done.

"No, no, no," she said, stifling Sue's protests. "He needs to ask her."

"Look," Gordon said with a sly grin. "Julie Pinsky may be the most beautiful girl in the senior class – sorry, ladies, I have a thing for brunettes – and she may finally be tired of dating Richie Rich for however many years and want to try her luck at the nerd table. But she's still gonna have to play by the rules."

"The rules being?" Karen asked.

"Signed, witnessed, and notarized," Gordon said. "I'm not askin' her out if there's even the slightest possibility of rejection."

"So if she manages to divine what it is that you want, and agrees in advance, you'll ask her out, right? Is that right, Gordon?"

"Absolutely."

"So explain to me, hypothetically, just how she's supposed to know that?" Karen asked. "Is there a sign somewhere? Something on your webpage, perhaps?"

"This is an awfully silly discussion," Gordon said, a little put out at the way he was being teased. "I told you I'm not going – "

"Hi, Julie," Sue said, looking over Gunner's shoulder. The most beautiful girl in the senior class had apparently snuck up on us while Gordon was arguing with Karen.

"Hi, Sue."

"Hi, Julie!"

"Hi, Karen."

"Julie," I grunted, followed by an equally monotonous grunt from Gunner. We knew that even turning around for another girl wasn't acceptable.

"Jason, Gunner," Julie said.

"OW!" Gordon said, giving Karen a dirty look. She returned his look in spades and nodded at the brunette standing across the table.

"Hi, Julie," he mumbled.

"Hi, Gordon," Julie said brightly. "Is this seat taken?"

"No, not at all," Karen said. "Stand up for the lady, you two goons."

Gunner and I good-naturedly stood to let Julie take the seat between us.

"So are you and Andy going to the prom?" Sue asked.

"No," Julie said, staring directly at Gordon. "I'm hoping I get asked by someone else."

Clearly confused, Sue looked over at Gordon as well. He remained stone-faced, but he was sweating. Sue turned back to Julie and sighed.

"I can't believe I'm going to ask this," she said, "but would you be willing to sign a –"

"No!" Gordon yelped.

"No what?" Karen needled him. "You just said no more than two minutes ago that if Julie Pinsky here produces a signed, witnessed, and notarized statement that she would accept a date to the prom with you, then you would ask her to go. I heard you say it."

"Karen," Gordon was turning beet red.

"Didn't you hear it, Sue?" she asked.

By now, Sue knew that something was up.

"I certainly did. Gunner?"

"Oh, yeah. Jase?"

"You bet."

Now it was Julie's turn to sigh.

"The things I won't do to get a date."

She reached into her purse and pulled out the bank envelope. Gordon simply stared at it as she held it out to him, so Sue reached out to take it instead.

"May I?" she asked with a big smile on her face.

"Please," Julie said.

Sue gleefully tore open the envelope and began reading.

"I. Julie Pinsky, hereby swear and assert that I will accept an invitation from Gordon Ackerman to the Hardwood High School prom. Signed, Julie Pinsky. Witnessed by Gene Pinsky, President, Hardwood National Bank, Signatory's father, and Frank Tonelli, Mayor, Hardwood, Pennsylvania, Signatory's godfather. And notarized by Andrea Ackerman. Are you related to her, Gordon?"

"Oh, my God," Gordon groaned. "No wonder my mother was so frickin' happy this weekend."

"Gordon?" Karen said, stern and sweet at the same time. "Don't you have something you need to ask Julie?"

Despite the fact that he practically had a red carpet laid out in front of him, Gordon still swallowed hard before he looked up at Julie.

"Julie Pinsky, will you . . ." he stammered. "Will you, um . . ."

"I'd love to go to the prom with you, Gordon," Julie finished for him with a smile. "What time would you like to pick me up?"

"Eight o'clock," Karen hissed.

"Eight o'clock," Gordon dutifully repeated, as all three women broke out in smiles.

It was actually five after when we got there, because Gordon's mom thought us incapable of explaining how to use her camera to Julie's father once we got there. That was the second time in a week that I'd seen Mrs. A flustered. Come to think of it, I think it was the second time ever.

Gordon disappeared inside while the rest of us – me, Karen, Sue, and Gunner – waited patiently in the limo. Sue and Gunner had been runner-up prom queen last year, and the prom queen was currently in seclusion, awaiting the imminent birth of her baby. So Sue would be crowning the new girl. After five minutes, Mr. Pinsky waved us all inside, and then sent me back out to the limo for Mrs. Ackerman's camera.

"I'm under very strict orders," he explained, lining us up for the photo. "By the way, I'm sorry about the campus center."

"The what?" I asked.

"The campus center," he said, "at the college? Where you were supposed to have your post-prom party?"

"What about it?" I asked.

"There was a fire. They said it'll take at least thirty days before it's useable again."

"Well, sh – oot."

"Exactly," Mr. Pinsky said with a smile. "However, I'm going out tonight, and I don't expect to be back until quite late. Quite. Late. So if you guys – and I mean just the six of you – want to come back here after the prom, feel free. Is that alright, punkin?"

"Thank you, daddy. It's perfect."

"Thank you, sir," Gordon said nervously. Well, of course; he'd said everything nervously ever since we'd picked him up. He went on saying everything nervously throughout most of the prom. When Julie Pinsky was named queen, we nearly had to scrape him off the floor to get him to take his position beside her as king. Her election had clearly been engineered by Andy before he learned, on the Thursday before the prom, that she wasn't going with him. Now he was furious at her, but even more furious at Karen, whom he glared at all evening long. Karen ate it up. Every time she caught the full force of one of those stares, she'd blow him a kiss, and fall into my arms laughing.

We dismissed the limo when we got back to Julie's. She assured us that when her father got home, she could drive us all back to our respective homes.

"And if he never gets back home?" I asked. "He's going to be Quite. Late."

"You're complaining, Thompson?" Sue grinned.

"No, ma'am," I said with a grin of my own. "Just establishing the ground rules."

"Rules?" Gunner was grinning, too. "We don't need no stinkin' rules."

"No, guys, Thompson's right," Karen the wet blanket said. "We're guests here. If there are ground rules, we're going to obey each and every one of them."

"The ground rules are as follows," said Julie, who'd popped into the kitchen while we engaged in what passed for witty repartee in our little group, and who returned with a grin even bigger than the rest of ours. "Daddy left me a message. He won't be home at all. So Sue and Gunner, you get the guest room down the hall. Karen and Jase, you get my older brother's bedroom upstairs. And as for you, tiger" – she pulled Gordon's bow tie loose and kept hold of one end – "I have big plans for you."

We followed them upstairs, and as Karen and I undressed, we could hear Julie in her room next door.

"Oh, golly," she said. "Looks like you have big plans for me, too."

I hope they didn't hear us laughing. Of course, a little while later they wouldn't have heard us if we'd started playing trumpets. Karen and I made love four times that night. We had to! Gordon and Julie made enough noise to wake us up three times after we finished the first session. And while Julie was instructing Gordon on some of the finer points of geekiness, Karen did the same in our room.

The next morning, we were all gathered in the kitchen. Gunner and Sue and Karen and I were sitting sedately at the table eating Mr. Pinsky's croissants and drinking his premium coffee. Julie was sitting on Gordon's lap, feeding him little bits of pastry. At least when she wasn't kissing him. Ah, young love.

"I really ought to call home, though," Gordon said with a sigh as he reached across the beautiful girl on his lap for his cell phone

"Oh, I'm sorry, sir," he said when someone picked up. "I must have the wrong number."

He disconnected and grinned at us.

"Boy, that's weird," he said. "How do you get a wrong number on a speed dial?"

He tried again. Meanwhile, Julie had stood up and grabbed the receiver on the wall phone.

"I'm just going to try Dad's cell," she told us.

"Hi, mom," Gordon was saying. "I just wanted to let you know I was at Julie's . . . Yeah, everything was really nice. . . . Yeah, all right, you were right, I was wrong. Happy now? . . . Is that a cell phone?

"Hi, Daddy!" Julie started her own conversation.

"Who's there, Mom? I hear another voice."

"I hear a woman, Daddy! Anybody I know?"

"Have you got a guy there, mom? Mom?"

"Who is this?" Julie asked.

"This is Gordon Ackerman, who is this?" Gordon demanded.

"This is Julie," she looked up at him.

By the time Gordon and Julie stopped staring at each other and realized that theirs wasn't the only Ackerman-Pinsky party the previous night, the rest of us were rolling on the floor.

CHAPTER THREE

The wrath of Richie Rich was neither long in making itself felt nor particularly subtle. On Monday morning, Gunner pulled me aside in the hallway.

"Have you seen the picture?" he asked.

"No," I said. "What picture?"

"Here," he thrust it into my hand. "There are copies all over the locker room."

I looked down at a photograph of a naked girl with her head buried in Richie Rich's lap as the little scumbag gave the camera a thumbs up. The photograph was taken from directly in back of the girl, so that her only recognizable characteristic was her long, red hair.

"Holy shit!" I looked back up at him.

"Yeah," he said. "And, of course, the word is that Richie just smirks when you ask him who it is, and just smirks more if you ask him whether it's Karen."

"That little son of a bitch," I said. "I'm gonna kick his ass."

"Then everyone will think it's Karen," Gunner said. "I mean, it's not, is it?"

"Shit," I said. "The fucking little son of a bitch."

I was stumped. Somebody smarter than me was going to have to figure out how to deal with this. And that somebody was going to find out about it soon enough anyway, so she might as well hear about it from me.

I caught Karen before lunch, and dragged her out to the football stands with me. I don't know what I expected. Crying, wailing, gnashing of teeth, rending of garments. What I got was white hot fury.

"I'll teach that little son of a bitch not to mess with me," she growled.

I repeated Gunner's advice.

"Hell," I said. "He could have even worse pictures than this."

She looked back at me with an odd little grin.

"He could," she said. "I wasn't there. Shall we find out?"

I just started at her as she picked up her books and walked back with her toward school. She was back in the building before I found my legs and headed after her. I didn't meet up with her again, in fact, until we got ready to walk home after school.

"We have to wait up," she said.

"Why?" I asked her.

"We have to wait for Julie and Gordon," she explained.

"Okay," I said. "Because?"

"Because Julie's my running mate and Gordon's my campaign manager," she said.

"Uh-huh?" I cocked my head.

She flashed me a particularly bright smile.

"I'm running for student council president," she said.

I just stared at her.

"We turned in the papers not more than fifteen minutes ago," she went on. "The election's Friday. Did you know that today was the deadline for signing up?"

"No," I said. "I don't think anyone in school knows it other than –. This is how you're gonna teach him a lesson? By letting him beat you in a student council election?"

"See?" she laughed. "That's why you're not my campaign manager. You have absolutely no faith in the electoral process."

"In high school, no," I said. "In Hardwood, no. By Friday, no. Do you know how Andy got to be president in the first place?"

She shook her head. I started to explain.

"There's this rule, see, that says you can't have any written campaign material before the election. The penalty is supposed to be that you lose ten percent of the vote you get for the first violation, twenty-five percent if there are two violations, and one-third if there are more than two. So Andy decides, when we're all still just ninth graders, that he's gonna run and plasters the high school with posters."

Karen nodded.

"So the principal hauls him in – remember, he's not even in high school at this point – and explains the rule. And the next thing that happens is the principal gets a call from Andy's father, arguing that the rule violates Andy's right to free speech and the penalty violates students' rights to cast votes for the candidate of their choice, blah, blah, blah. And so the principal backs down. And then all the other candidates back down. And Andy wins, like, by default."

"What a little shit." Karen smiled. Stop smiling!

"Last year and the year before," I continued, "nobody else even signed up to run, but all the posters went up just the same. I assume it was supposed to happen again today but now they have to fix the posters to take Julie's name off. I don't understand any of this. How is this going to teach him anything?"

"O, ye of little faith," she laughed. "Hey, Gordon. Hey, Julie. You guys ready to go?"

"Sure," Gordon said. "This guy's not on the ticket, is he? That'll make things much harder."

"Asshole," I muttered as he laughed.

"No," Karen joined him. "Julie's the veep, Kathy Wilson's the treasurer, and Scott Kamen is the secretary."

"Gordon's going to be your treasurer?" I asked. "And who's Scott Kamen?"

"He's this hunky ninth-grader who has a crush on me," she said. "Should be a good ticket, huh?"

"Oh, sure," I said, "you're appealing to all the groups. Cheerleaders, math nerds, and hunky guys with poor taste."

She slugged me in the arm. But she was laughing when she did it.

The posters were going up Tuesday when we got to school. All kinds of posters, some with pictures, some without. They'd been printed the week before, obviously, requiring a rush job to cover up the name Pinsky with a new sign for Ann Stoller, the sophomore girl whom Richie Rich had taken to the prom and had anointed to take Julie's place as his – excuse me, as the council's secretary.

Another publication came out on Tuesday, too. This one was a close-up of the same girl from the side, with a dick obviously inside her mouth. It was only a little bit more recognizable as Karen, but the warning was clear. Andy had no intention of letting a contested election take place.

"Did you see this?" I asked Karen at lunch.

"Yup," she said between bites of her sandwich.

"And?"

"I don't think he got my good side, do you?"

Julie and Gordon burst out laughing. Sue and Gunner joined me in staring at them.

As it became clear that Karen had no intention of withdrawing, the pictures became progressively more graphic. Until on Friday, the day of the election, the four of us arrived at school together to find a full frontal picture of someone who was very obviously Karen, facing the camera as she straddled someone who was very obviously Andy Richardson.

"Oh, my God," I said.

"Perfect," Karen said. "Here."

She took the picture and handed it to Julie, who immediately took off at a dead run with Gordon behind her. Karen turned to look at me.

"You're embarrassed," she said.

"Well, yeah," I said. "It's you."

"I need angry," she told me.

"Huh?"

"I need you to be angry at this," she said. "You know I wasn't there, right?"

"Well, yeah," I said. "I mean, sort of."

"So I'm angry about these pictures, aren't I?" she asked.

"Yes," I agreed slowly.

"And as my brother, and my boyfriend, you're angry, too, aren't you?"

Okay.

"Damn straight I am," I agreed, with considerably more enthusiasm than I actually felt.

"Good boy," she punched me on the arm. "Just hold on to that through fifth period."

"What's fifth period?" I asked.

"The debate," she said. "And the election."

We all piled into the auditorium for fifth period: the seniors, the juniors, the sophomores, and the freshman, for their first official visit to the high school. Hardwood tradition dictated that the candidates for student council president engage in a debate for the hearts and minds of the electorate. Without prior advertising – the supposed ban on written materials – kids were supposed to cast their votes based solely on the extent to which they were persuaded during the debate. It was an excellent theory.

The stage had three chairs. Karen sat on one end and Andy on the other. In between sat the faculty moderator. Usually that was the faculty member with the least seniority, the one least able to decline the principal's "request" to supervise the election. This year, it was Gail Dodge. All three of them sat there waiting, little portable microphones pinned to their clothing. To the left of the stage there was a podium, and as soon as everyone was seated, Gail stepped up to it.

"Boys and girls, welcome to this year's election for student council. There are two slates of candidates this year, and I'd like those running for office to stand when I call your name. Running for president on the first slate is Andy Richardson. His vice-presidential candidate is Bobby Parker, his candidate for treasurer is Fred Mars, and his candidate for secretary is Ann Stoller."

They had each stood up, Andy on stage and the others from the audience, as their names were called. As I looked around to find Ann Stoller, sitting in the back with the rest of the freshman, I saw a hand waving at me. My eyes widened. Mom and Dad. Sitting in the back. Sitting right next to Andy's father, in fact. Mom caught my eye and waved harder. I couldn't believe that Karen had invited them here to watch this slaughter. Oh, my God, what if somebody showed her the pictures? I slowly turned back as Gail began speaking again.