Three Girls and their Brother. Theresa Rebeck

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СКАЧАТЬ thirty or forty of them waiting there, crawling all over each other and ready to commit multiple acts of homicide on the off-chance that it might net them an out-of-focus photograph of the fourteen-year-old girl who bit Rex Wentworth.

      I could see all of it from the third floor, where I was trapped in a Spanish lab. That dipshit Morton hadn’t even arranged for someone to come pick her up; it says in our files that we’re authorized to walk ourselves home, but wouldn’t you think he’d have a half a clue?

      The paparazzi went haywire. I mean, as upsetting as it had been to be mobbed by our fellow students all morning, they were rank amateurs compared to these bozos. They descended as one, shouting questions, grabbing, pushing, shoving their cameras right into her face, acting really like she was some sort of stupid animal in a zoo, instead of just a little kid. Amelia stood on the front steps of the high school, frozen, and then she totally just disappeared. I mean, one minute she was there, and the next minute she wasn’t. It was like they had eaten her.

      I bolted. I mean, what else are you going to do, just sit there and watch your sister get eaten? Señor Martine (his real name is Mr Martin, but he makes us call him Señor Martine) shouted something at me in Spanish, but I was truly in no mood. I made it outside in maybe ten seconds, but the situation was already way out of control. The shoving was unbelievable, it was like being at some insane British soccer match. Photographers were pushing and shoving and cursing wildly, and I had to literally pull at arms and legs and throw myself up against somebody to get him out of the way, just so I could clamber one or two inches further into the onion layers of photojournalists who had encrusted themselves around my little sister. People were screaming, “Fuck you, fucking asshole, get in line, fucker, hey who is this fucker?” while I pushed and shoved and yelled, “Amelia! Hey, Amelia, where are you?”

      By the time I got to her she was just curled up in a little ball. Seriously, she was like all folded in on herself, a little turtle of a person, crouched down over her feet, her arms crossed over her head, down on the cement sidewalk. You got to wonder what’s wrong with those guys, why they thought this would be a cool picture to take, a little kid so scared she’s doing something that spooky. I mean, I wondered that about a minute later, but while I was surrounded by the crazy people with her, I was mostly just screaming at them to get away. Amelia was crying and hitting at me, because she didn’t want to move, that’s how freaked out she was, but I was pretty sure they’d just start stomping on her if I left her there, so I started dragging her back toward the front door of the school. They of course kept taking pictures and shoving at both of us. It was a ridiculous mess.

      By the time we got back through the glass doors and into the security lobby, a whole bunch of teachers and students was gathering. Meanwhile, all those journalists were like in a feeding frenzy or something; it was like once they got started on the craziness they didn’t know how to turn it off, so they actually tried to come in after us. Which finally turned into a kind of a showdown. Señor Martine, Dean Morton and Luke, the black guy who sits at the front desk and makes you sign in if you’re tardy, charged the mob and started yelling at them.

      “This is private property! I am asking you to leave! You are not allowed entrance to this building! This is a private high school!” yelled Morton. He was actually holding his arms out, sort of like he was being crucified, but more like he thought those photographers were actually chickens or pigeons or something he could just shoo away. “If you do not leave this property immediately, we are calling the police!”

      This was not good enough for Luke. “Motherfuckers! Get out of here, you fuckheads! The police are coming to kick your ass—get out—GET OUT.” He grabbed one guy, a kind of short, fat guy with a big beard and a huge lens, who was shooting wildly at anything and everything.

      “Don’t you fucking touch me, man!” the short photographer yelled. “I can sue you! That’s assault!”

      “You take another picture of these kids, I’ll show you what assault looks like,” Luke told him, sticking his finger in the guy’s face. Meanwhile, two other photographers were deep in it with Morton.

      “The police are coming. You are not permitted in this building,” Morton droned. These idiots started to argue about freedom of the press.

      “You want to do that? Show these kids that the press can be silenced? What’s that teaching them? This is a free society. This isn’t fucking China, we’re covering a legitimate story.” Meanwhile the rest of the gang behind them kept clicking away.

      It really was enough to make you sick. Luckily Luke is rather large, and when he gets mad enough to yell it’s rather undeniable. “GET OUT OF HERE,” he yelled. “I DON ‘T GIVE A SHIT ABOUT FREEDOM OF THE PRESS, YOU SHITHEAD, YOU THINK I WON ‘T HIT YOU, YOU TRY IT, MAN, JUST TRY ONE MORE STEP IN THIS BUILDING, THESE ARE MY KIDS. MY KIDS, MOTHERFUCKER.”

      Dean Morton cringed a little at that; obviously he was not thrilled that Luke was cursing so freely in front of all us fragile teenagers, but there was no denying that it was an impressive performance. And all of us fragile teenagers were definitely stoked that our security guard was willing to slug it out with all of the representatives of the free press that New York could spare that morning. Truth be told I think Morton was impressed too. In any event, he didn’t say anything, and after they managed to get off another few hundred shots, the so-called protectors of all American freedoms finally took off.

      Everybody got sent back to class and I got sent to the nurse’s office, because I had a scraped-up face and a split lip. By the time they patched me up, Amelia had already been sent home, which really pissed me off. I mean, they couldn’t wait and let us go together? But people don’t think of these things. Anyway, the next day we all got the beginnings of a clue as to how serious the shit was that Amelia had stepped in. The many pictures taken by all those protectors of a free press were really quite impressive. And they printed all of them. Pictures of Amelia screaming, Amelia hitting photographers, Amelia kicking photographers, Amelia kicking me. Amelia curled up in a little ball on the sidewalk; they printed that one, too. A couple of those geniuses actually had video of the whole thing, which they showed on three local news shows, Entertainment Tonight and CNN, which, due respect to CNN, but there was in fact a war going on in Iraq at the time; you had to wonder why they actually cared about some kid who hit a couple of photographers in Brooklyn.

      In any event, they showed the footage on television quite a bit, and the story that went along with the visuals went something like this: “Pint-sized It Girl Amelia Heller is burning through her fifteen minutes as fast as she can. Recently showcased in the New Yorker magazine, the fourteen-year-old heiress to a major American lit legacy has been spending her nights partying with the likes of film actor Rex Wentworth, who she allegedly bit in a scuffle at a Manhattan hot spot last week. Here she lets the paparazzi get a taste of her teen angst. An unidentified fellow student comes to her aid …”

      The unidentified fellow student, that’s me.

      Polly and Daria were livid. Their moment in the sun had been completely obliterated by Amelia’s shenanigans. Our home life now veered between long stretches of sullen silence and endless hours of screeching female rage.

      “This is not about you, Amelia. None of this was ever supposed to be about you,” Daria would hiss.

      “I said, I didn’t want to do it in the first place!”

      “Do you know, do you have any idea of how long it’s taken me to get my career to this point? Do you even have half a clue—”

      “Oh, what career?”

      “Look, people say that no publicity is bad publicity.” This halfway optimistic opinion, or something like it, coming from Polly.

      “People СКАЧАТЬ