Crowned and Moldering

I choked on a laugh. Her chin jutted defiantly, but even she knew she was being ridiculous. We’d already established that money meant everything to people like her.

I turned away. “See you around, Whitney.”

“You should do something with your hair.”

All the way back to my classroom, I imagined myself stuffing those pom-poms down her throat.

*   *   *

At the end of the last session, I thanked Judy Cummings for a fun day and then hoisted up my tool chest—why did it feel heavier at the end of the day?—onto the dolly, along with my laptop and briefcase, and trudged down the hall and out the door. I’d had a good time—no, thanks to Whitney—and I felt great. I’d given out my entire batch of business cards and had twenty-eight names on my list of teens who wanted to interview for one of our four paid internships over the summer. The internships were fun, sort of like being at summer camp, except no canoes or campfires.

We taught our interns the right way to use all the tools, even power tools. And then we put them to work, sometimes painting a room, sometimes helping raise a wall or hammering drywall. Over the years, several of our interns had gone on to work full-time in construction or related fields. A couple of guys ended up going into plumbing, another started his own masonry business, and one boy wound up entering college to study architecture, inspired after spending a summer with my crew.

Thinking about how enthusiastic the kids were today reminded me of Whitney’s stupid comments earlier. I wished it wasn’t true, but I still found myself shocked and offended by her statements.

I’d known her ever since she moved to Lighthouse Cove at the begi

My friends and I had tried to reach out, but Whitney refused to have anything to do with the kids she referred to as townies. Even though by then she, too, could’ve been considered a townie by kids who’d arrived more recently. Eventually she became friends with some of the other privileged girls whose parents had also chosen to move into the beautiful Victorian-style homes built along the Alisal Cliffs. Whitney would’ve been appalled to discover that her parents and those of all of her snooty friends, the ones who’d insisted on living in homes built by the best construction company in Northern California, were the ones responsible for making my father a wealthy man.

I shook my head as I crossed the central quad and headed for the senior-class parking lot, where I’d been assigned to park my truck. To this day, I didn’t quite know what I’d done to make Whitney hate me so much. Was it because I’d had the audacity to offer to be her friend, as though she were some yokel from nowhere? Or did it have more to do with the fact that Tommy was my boyfriend? But even after she’d won him over by sleeping with him and getting herself pregnant—something I had not been willing to do—she continued to hate me. Her digs were always personal and usually had something to do with my construction-crew wardrobe. I was a mess, she said. I dressed like a boy. My nails were too short. My hair was hideous. That last one was especially fu

I didn’t understand her contempt until years later. I boiled it down to a complicated mix of jealousy over my relationship with Tommy—the nicest, cutest boy in school and the star quarterback on our football team—and suspicion over my easy acceptance of my place in our small-town society. I’d grown up believing that everyone was my friend, and until Whitney showed up that had always been true. She especially hated my oddly buoyant personality that allowed me to bounce back from every sling and arrow she hurled at me.

It had taken Tommy tearfully explaining that Whitney was pregnant and they were getting married for me to face the ugly reality of Whitney Reid’s determination to hurt me, but I finally got it.

Eventually I learned to avoid her and, except for those rare moments like today, when I was forced into a face-to-face interaction, her anger wasn’t something I dwelled on anymore.

But in a small town, it wasn’t always easy to avoid her. We crossed paths regularly. I’d even saved her life twice, but still got no respect. That was because she’d considered it my fault that she’d been in danger in the first place. She was wrong, of course, but why would I ever expect her to face the truth?

“Sha

“What?” On the edge of panic, I whirled around to see who it was. I’d been so involved in my mental rant that I thought Whitney had followed me out to the parking lot. Talk about paranoia! But it was only Ms. Barney, the school principal, waving at me. I tried to calm my thundering heartbeat as she approached.

“Hello.” I made sure the dolly wouldn’t roll away and moved to greet her and shake her hand. “How are you, Ms. Barney?”

“I’m dandy,” she said, jovial as always. “I heard you had a good Career Day.”

“I did. The students were great. They had lots of smart questions and really good comments.”

“I’m glad to hear it.” She pointed toward the parking lot. “Well, the school board should be making their decision any day now.”

I smiled. “You must be getting tired of waiting.”

“You think?” She laughed. “Let me walk with you to your car.”

We made small talk as we went. Ms. Barney had become our high school principal at the begi

Since we already had a working relationship, it wasn’t surprising when, about three months ago, she had called me into her office to tell me about a new construction job that the school board was about to open up for bidding by local building companies.

That day, she had asked me to walk with her out to the senior parking lot, where she’d stopped and gestured at the crumbling, faded blacktop before us. “Pretty soon this will be a brand-new solar-paneled parking lot with a shiny new blacktop surface and space for at least five times more cars than we have now. The school board is taking construction bids and I’m hoping you’ll submit one. I would love it if they chose your company to do the job.”

I’d been pleased that she thought my company was capable of something like that. “It sounds interesting and I’d love to have the work, but I have to confess we haven’t done a solar-panel job like that before.”

“That doesn’t matter,” she’d confided, then gone on to explain why. “The solar-panel company has already been chosen. They sent a designer and a team of engineers to do a site analysis and survey last month.”

“So why would you need me?”

“The company recommended that we find a reputable local contractor to repave the surface of the lot and help with the installation of the canopies and the panels. They’ll have their own electrical engineer and a full crew, along with a project manager on-site to supervise the entire project. And they’ll take care of all the testing and maintenance.”

She pointed to a swath of pressed gravel that formed a wide walkway leading to the track field fifty yards away. “The plan is to tear up all of this old blacktop, along with the landscaping all the way to the te

“That’s a big area.” I pointed to an incline covered in agapanthus. “You’ll lose a lot of those plants.”