The Test
Weird fiction piece by Clark Humphrey
9/27/94
Charlotte was the most popular girl in the senior class. Unfortunately, she knew it. Girls hovered around her, trying to join her inner circle. Usually she brushed them off. They needed her a lot more than she needed them. She was too busy impressing her teachers, collecting enough awards and endorsements to lock up an honors scholarship, to bother with the grossly immature sophomore and junior girls shoving their flat, fat, or pimpled selves into her perfect face. In class, or whenever an adult with authority was around, Charlotte made sure to be conspicuously nice to everyone; but in the locker room or at the Dairy Queen or on the street, she made it clear in no uncertain terms that she had a busy year and would have no need or use for new friends.
Just before Thanksgiving vacation, though, one particularly pesky junior named Cynthia approached Charlotte, alone, in an otherwise deserted hallway an hour after school; both had been working on some worthless after-schhool volunteer project that would earn them brownie points with the faculty. Charlotte tolerated Cynthia’s bright and bouncy chatter about meaningless topics like weather and clothes for more than five minutes. But as her migraine began to throb and Cynthia’s high-pitched drone seemed to make it worse, Charlotte interrupted Cynthia with a brash but not officially obscene hand signal. Charlotte took a hidden cigarette and lighter from her purse, took a relaxing puff, and laid down the law. If Cynthia wanted to be Charlotte’s friend, she had to do something for her. Something no other girl in school either could do or would want to. Something she couldn’t talk about to anybody afterwards. None of Charlotte’s warnings deterred Cynthia, who remained just as open-mouthed and enthusiastic as ever.
“Fine. We can’t talk about it here. Meet me under the Buckingham Hills sign at 10 tonight. Yes, I know it’s a school night. If you’re serious about doing this for me, you’ll be there. Good.”
Cynthia drove up to the front entrance to Buckingham Hills in her mom’s Reliant K. Charlotte was waiting by the ugly wood-carved beefeater statue. She got in the car and instructed Cynthia to drive to the back roads of the decidedly unhilly development.
The Buckingham Hills subdivision was still only half built up with big ugly two- and two-and-a-half-story houses, porticos and wings jutting out from homely-shaped central boxes for no apparent reason. The back streets and cul-de-sacs still had curbs with driveway dips that led only to vacant stretches of dirt and sand, filled in so long ago that wild grasses were sprouting in them. Only half the streetlights on these roads were operational. As instructed, Cynthia parked in one of these driveways to nowhere. When the motor had fully stopped, Charlotte repeated her demand that Cynthia never repeat a word about this to anyone. Cynthia unhesitantly agreed.
“Fine. I normally keep my private life private. I don’t hang out at the Dairy Queen, I don’t talk about any boys I might have slept with. I’m trying to get an early graduation and an honors scholarship that would get me out of this stupid school and out of this stupid town. But there’s one thing I’ve got to do before I go. You still willing? This here’ss the point of no return, hon.”
Cynthia nodded her perfectly-tossled head.
“Fine. What you’re going to do is help me and my mother. She’s done a lot for me. She’s worked hard to keep us living in this so-called upscale housing community.” Charlotte pointed to her house, in the middle of the front half of the subdivision. “She’s encouraged me in my studies, to make something of myself. And I know I’ve been a selfish little princess, not showing any appreciation. Well, now’s my payback time. My father’s taking his sweet time with the divorce. He keeps saying he wants to get back together with us. I played along with it for a while. I was selfish, I admit it. They like to give those student-of-the-month awards to kids that still have both natural parents. Some role-model thing. Family values in the age of broken families or some crap like that.
“But now I’m getting out of here early, so I don’t need him and neither does my mother. She’s had to put up with his badgering to let him back in the house for almost three years now. He’s always calling with another reason she should let him back in. He’s had another AA birthday; he’s had a safe driving record; he turned down a big transfer just so he could stay close to her.
“I’ll introduce you to him. I want you to wear my clothes and seduce him. Now don’t go looking weird on me. I can tell he wants me and not as a daughter. No, he hasn’t said or done anything about it. I can just tell. The way he first looks at me at our visitations, then he immediately corrects himself. The way he avoids ever touching me, even to shake hands. Don’t worry about me, hon: he won’t do anything to me. I can tell he’s repressing it and he’ll keep repressing it. I said don’t look weird on me! It’s perfectly understandable. He can’t have my mother anymore, and I look a lot like she looked five years or so before they met. But the way I figure it, if he can channel his frustrations into a nice healthy kinky affair, it’ll not only keep him from bugging my mother so much, it might even make him look bad when the divorce finally comes through, and maybe my mother will get some more money out of it. You’ll like him. He’s not that bad looking for an old guy, and he’s got money to waste on somebody like you. If you sleep with him you’ll be my best friend for whatever time I have left in that dump of a school and I’ll let all the teachers and administrators know what a great student you are and what a great person you are. If you keep playing your cards right, you’ll be a cinch to get next year’s honors scholarship. Don’t worry about getting a reputation; you’ll learn how to be discreet about it, and if anything does come out you’ll be my best friend and nobody thinks bad thoughts about any of my friends. So you’ll do it, right?”
Cynthia didn’t run away. She didn’t shove Charlotte out of the car and speed away. She didn’t hit Charlotte or cuss at her. She just stared at Charlotte with her perfectly made-up eyes, took a couple of deep breaths, borrowed a cig from Charlotte, and pondered the details of Charlotte’s unusual test.
