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“How's Tracy doing?”

PAUL WARREN
     
    AT OUR STRATEGY SESSION that night, Lisa told me not to panic. Despite our setback at the Assembly, she thought the race had changed in ways that might ultimately work to our benefit.
    “With three strong candidates,” she said, “you don't need as many votes to win. We've got to shore up our base.”
    “Our base?”
    “The voters we can count on no matter what.”
    “Who's that?”
    “Jocks, cheerleaders, and wannabes.”
    “What's Tracy's base? ”
    “Not so broad. The AP crowd, maybe the band. But there are lots of people who think she'd make a good President.”
    “What about Tammy?”
    She frowned. “I'm not really sure yet. But I think she'll get the burnouts and benchwarmers and the kids who feel left out.”
    Lisa was a natural at politics and the smartest person I knew (Tammy was a close second). I imagined her doing big things in the future, moving in important circles, worlds I would never know about. She'd be on a Sunday morning talk show, and I'd be sitting in my kitchen with a jelly donut, watching in amazement.
    She said she loved me. We had sex every chance we got. But even so, there were times when I felt like her candidate first and her boyfriend second. She had this habit of floating away from me at crucial moments. A distant, distracted look would move across her face, and I could tell she'd forgotten me, and was thinking about the election.

TAMMY WARREN
     
    PAUL LEFT for Lisa's right after supper, so it was just me and Mom again, as usual. Except it wasn't going to be a normal night. Mr. Hendricks had called her at work to explain about my suspension. He told me they'd had themselves “a nice little chat.”
    That was one of my ideas of hell, being discussed atlength by a leering, red-faced idiot like Mr. Hendricks. As far as I could tell, he earned his hundred thousand a year by wandering the hallway with a Styrofoam cup of coffee, smiling at the pretty girls and scowling at the boys who didn't play sports. Somebody should have stuck a broom in his hand and made him an honest man.
    Mom turned off the TV in the middle of
Jeopardy!
I knew better than to complain, even though it was my favorite show. There's something so encouraging about it, the way it makes you believe America's populated by these brilliant ordinary people, postal workers and data entry operators and office managers whose heads are somehow crammed full of information about Greek Mythology, Chinese History, and Voyages of Discovery. It cheered me up every night.
    Mom took a deep breath but forgot to release it. Her eyes were shadowy with fatigue and her cheeks looked rubbery. It was almost like Dad had packed her youth in a cardboard box and lugged it off to that ugly little townhouse by the highway.
    “Tammy,” she said, “I'm worried about us.”
    I'd planned on going into a trance of agreement—total nodding mode—but her pronoun threw me off balance.
    “Us?” I said.
    “We're not a family anymore. We're all at eachother's throats. Your father and me. Now you and Paul. I can't believe we've come to this.”
    She hadn't really asked a question, so I figured it was okay to keep my mouth shut.
    “Why are you doing it?” she asked. “Are you angry with me?”
    “Doing what?”
    Her shoulders slumped. She finally let go of that breath.
    “Tammy, don't make this harder than it is.”
    “I'm not. I didn't understand the question.”
    “Okay,” she said, discharging her annoyance in a quick sidelong glance. “Let me put it this way. Why are you running against your brother?”
    “I'm not running
against
him. I'm just running. Why can't people understand that?”
    She shut her eyes, pinching at her forehead with two fingers like it was made of clay. She looked exhausted.
    “Before you know it, honey, Paul's going to be leaving for college. And then you're going to leave, too. Do you see what I'm saying?”
    I nodded, though it seemed to me we'd gotten a little off