Brimstone by Rosemary Clement-Moore Page B

index before the nineties?”
    “It was lost when they moved the journalism lab up here. They started again with the current year, and no one has ever had the time to replace the old one. There’s not that much call for old football scores and homecoming courts.”
    “I guess not.” I drummed my fingers on the metal cabinet.
    Mr. Allison came around his desk. “Something I can help you with?”
    “Maybe. I’m looking for record of any student who may have died here on campus.”
    “That’s grim.”
    “It’s for a research paper.” I was getting too good at lying. “Someone mentioned there was a kid who killed himself, maybe in the Band Hall?”
    “Oh yes. That was a shame.” He shook his head sadly. “I was in school here at the time.” He opened a file drawer and came out with a microfiche spool marked 1981–85. “Look through the spring of 1984.”
    “Thanks.” I went over to the projector. I wondered if someday, when all the archives in the world were stored on computer, microfilm projectors would be extinct. Even now, it’s a dying art. Like calligraphy and Morse code, and about that efficient, too.

    “Only one week until prom!” I’d barely set foot in the courtyard when a neon green paper fluttered before my face. “Have you voted for your Royal … Oh. It’s you.” My friend from Student Council snatched back the ballot. “I don’t have enough of these for you to wad up and throw on the floor.”
    “We’re outside,” I said, very reasonably, considering the neon green was hammering spikes into my eyes, which were aching from an hour reading little bitty backlit type. “There is no floor.”
    “Whatever. You can’t have a ballot.” She tucked the stack protectively against her chest.
    “Are you taking away my constitutional right to vote for a King and Queen?” I raised my voice in outrage.
    “Well …” She wavered as people around us turned to stare.
    “I demand the right to choose my own representation of all that is wrong with adolescent social hierarchy.”
    “Right on!” said a voice near me.
    “You cannot deny me a voice in the senseless aggrandizement of those already entitled by wealth and privilege!” Encouraged by cheers and laughter, I leapt up on a bench and orated with a fervor worthy of Patrick Henry. “No! I tell you, popular is not enough! They must be royalty.”
    A roar went up from the crowd. I grabbed a painfully green ballot and raised it in my fist.
    “For we hold these truths to be self-evident! That there is no greater embodiment of the American Way than the choosing of a leader based on their physical beauty and mediocre intelligence.”
    Cheers and whistles filled the courtyard. The Spanish Club shouted “¡Olé! Viva mediocridad!” from the breezeway. A Biff-like voice called out “Freak,” and then, over it all, the stentorian shout of the assistant principal.
    “Margaret Quinn! In my office, right now!”
    And that was how I ended up in detention for inciting a riot. I hoped that Syracuse wouldn’t revoke my acceptance without giving me a chance to explain.

    I didn’t mind spending lunch in detention, but I wish Halloran had seen fit to extend it through P.E. I would much rather have been studying chemistry than enduring the last day of swimming.
    But there I was, dragging on my swimsuit and stuffing my clothes into my locker. Jessica Prime passed behind me. “You are such a freak, Quinn.”
    “Thank you.”
    “It’s not a compliment, dumb ass.”
    Jess Minor followed, adding “Yeah, freak” as she walked by. The Jessicas seemed to have buried the hatchet. The upshot was, as Prime turned this way and that in front of the mirror, Minor was there to lavish attention on her, and the wannabes were once again pushed to the fringes of the queen’s court.
    Busy squeezing my fifty-pound backpack into the undersized locker, I rolled my eyes. I didn’t understand this constant need for reassurance. Jessica Prime had a beauty pageant