inauguration...

It is the day before my speech, the day when the county contest to coronate a winner is set to transpire.  All over central Illinois District Managers are picking up their carriers to represent them at a luncheon for a contest that will indubitably change a life.  In D.C. it is the swearing in of a new president. Mr. Reents makes it a point to watch the inauguration in his class. Even though the election was over two months ago he is wearing his Clinton-Gore button as if he is a booster. I am shuffling my notecards cards. I am visualizing my speech. Somehow I can see the fellow finalists representing the county arrive and make small talk with the judges, pondering which scalp-shaped cutlery to employ to attack the salad, sweating when Kelli walks up to the skinny stalk of the microphone and states the name of the carrier who is to go first.

 

 

On screen the freshly sworn president states that today we do more than celebrate America, today we rededicate ourselves to the very idea of America, an idea born in revolution and renewed through two centuries of challenge; an idea tempered by the knowledge that, but for fate, we, the fortunate, and the unfortunate might have been each other; an idea ennobled by the faith that our Nation can summon from its myriad diversity the deepest measure of unity; an idea infused with the conviction that America's long, heroic journey must go forever upward.


With the exception of Coach Ricca and Mr. Reents I have told no one that I am in the contest. I have finals this week. Mrs. Peabody seems to keep stressing and reminding us that even though we are the so-called purported enriched and intellectually savant like students in the school we are 25 percent behind where we should be speaking at this time. I am heavily pondering jettisoning dropping out of Mrs. Peabody’s class, since she reminds us on a daily basis, that the highest student is still raking in a low B.

 
When I come home after school I begin to rehearse my speech for the final time in front of my parents'. I am enthusiastic. For the first time all year I shush the beige lids of the blinds in my bedroom as to thwart the oceanic waves of lust emanating from next door in the fashion of feminine shadows. I perform the speech for my parents a final time.  My looks at my notecards and has marked the word S-L-O-W in places where  she feels I am rushing.  I calculate in my head that I have rehearsed the speech close to 200 hundred times. Briefly I wonder if I  should jettison the notecards but fear doing so would prove vain. My mother is clasping her palms and smiling. The second I am done the  phone rings. My sister Beth tells me to take it upstairs insinuating that it is a female on the other end of the line.

I wonder if it is Dawn. I wonder if Renae somehow called me back, stating that somehow, yes, even though I was right and we shouldn’t be a bona fide couple at this time and place we can still be friends and occasionally go out to the mall or to movies as friends and occasionally have the hard-core backsliding make out session as friends.

 The moment I pick up the phone I hear my sister click the receiver off in the opposite room.
The voice on the other end is screaming at me. She calls me Dave who the hell do you think you are, said in exclamatory caps.

 I have no clue who I am talking with.

“Hello.”

 “ Dave this is Amy.”

"I have no clue who Amy is then I realize it is Amy Patrick’s ex-infatuation Amy.

“Oh, Renae’s friend Amy…”

 She is pissed. She is steaming. She asks me rhetorically if I remember that conversation we had about a month ago when I called her up after she broke up with Patrick by never calling him again.

I tell Amy I remember.

 “We,ll now we are going to have that same conversation again only know you are the one that’s getting dumped on since you broke my best friend’s heart.”

There is something about her that sounds like a black woman ready to chew my ass out for not paying child support.

Amy is telling me that I don’t understand, Dave. She is saying that I broke her heart, meaning Renae, Dave. She says the abbreviated form of my name every two seconds. She is stating that Renae missed two days of school. She is saying that she couldn’t keep food down. That she kept on throwing up.

I want to tell Amy I didn’t think it would hurt Renae all that much.

 "We’re only fifteen. I mean, it’s not like we were going to get married or anything.”

 Amy is pissed.

 “You don’t know how much she cared about you.”


I am trying to apologize to Amy. I want to tell Amy that in a way I was expecting our breakup to be friendly. In a way I think it will be kind of like when I broke up with Dawn and she was nonchalant and we didn’t talk for two months and then she called me one day out of the blue and all was right with the world.
 

 “Thank God for David Best. I mean, he has really been there for her. Thank God for Best.”

I want to tell Amy that the reason I felt compelled to break up with her stemmed from some weird vision I had when I was listening to Depeche Mode and I had this weird out of body experience where everything as far as religious verities were degreed false via the synthetic tonal alteration of a keyboard.

Amy tells me that I'm a fucking insensitive ass and then rhetorically asks me if I know that before slamming up the phone.


Later that night I will supplicate to the caps of my knees before reeling myself up, into my bed, orchestrating the speech to let my subconscious might feast on like a mobile.There is a black dome above my head.  My Green Gideon bible is next to me. I try to be confident. I try not to think what would happen if for a third consecutive year I were to fail. If I would lose myself behind the anemic chrome stalk of the microphone the slaved-over speech spilling out of my lips in verbal breast strokes finding myself in the humidor of the conference room at the Journal Star, rote plaques passed out, wondering if Lyle Anderson will utter the my name. I see the back of my head  from two years ago with the peach wintery light fizzle into the living room.

This is my third year. This is my final time.

 

I am trying not to think about what would happen if I would somehow fail.