Miss Beadle’s room, where Lizzie spent most of her time, couldn’t have been more different. No windows. Big enough for the class to play Farmer in the Dell, but not much else. Shelves, yes, but fewer dolls and those in worse condition, with their arms or legs about to come off, or looking as though someone had tried to scalp them and almost succeeded. No clothes to change them into. Only one basic set of clothes to dress up in. A Raggedy Andy doll that smelled like cat pee. A checkers set with some of the pieces missing. Wooden puzzles with pieces missing. Wooden puzzles that a two-year-old could have solved in three seconds or so with pieces missing.
The murals on the wall in Lizzie’s classroom were of the scary bits of stories: Jack and Jill tumbling dangerously down a steep and icy hill, the Wolf Granny clutching Red Riding Hood in her ferocious grasp, the troll reaching from underneath the bridge to grab an unwary walker.
Was this memory possibly true? Surely not. There couldn’t have been one classroom with so much, and the other with so little, one so desirable and the other so desolate. And who decided which kids were assigned to which teacher? But that’s what Lizzie remembers, that sour teacher and that awful room.
The only good part of Lizzie’s whole year of kindergarten was that Maverick Brevard was also in her class. On one of the days they spent sixty minutes in Mrs. Jolly’s room, Lizzie pretend-baked a beautiful cherry pie and gave Maverick a piece, which he pretended to think tasted delicious and then pretended to kiss her cheek.
Much later Lizzie asked her mother how she happened to end up in Miss Beadle’s class. “I didn’t trust that other woman’s smile,” Lydia said flatly. “Or her name. What was it, Gaiety? Gaiety Jolly. Almost certainly an alias.”
*?The Quarterback?*
Of all the participants in the Great Game, the most worrisome for Lizzie to deal with was Ranger Brevard. Partly this was because he knew her as his older brother’s girlfriend, and she thought that he might not be as willing—nay, eager—as the others to participate. But mostly it was because Maverick’s depiction of her as the older-woman seductress of an innocent boy bothered her. A lot. So it was that on the Friday night of Ranger’s week, while they were lying underneath the stands by the football field and heading toward the final activity in the game plan, Lizzie said, as she unbuttoned her shirt and Ranger started taking off his pants, “So, have you done any of this sort of thing before?” She knew it sounded ridiculous—there were surely more elegant ways of asking if he was a virgin without coming right out and asking him—but she felt she needed to know. “What, you mean sex? Are you kidding me? Of course. Freshman year. Violet Burnett.” Lizzie was relieved. She wondered if knowing that would reassure Maverick (begone, O Lizzie the seductress!) or make him jealous as hell.
*?The Post (Great) Game Show?*
The postgame analyses began the very night the Great Game ended. There were two men in her head talking loudly to one another ostensibly about football, some random football game that they’d been the announcers for, but it seemed to Lizzie that she was the subject of the conversation. They were evaluating her, the quarterback of the Great Game. Some of the things the voices said made no sense. They commented on her throwing arm (“Her mechanics are awful”). The way she read the defense (“So-so at best”). The condition of the field (“Hard to get the running game going with all this mud”). The size of the crowd (“Who’d ever want to see her play?”). They analyzed dropped balls and muffed handoffs. “She’s a dead loss,” one said. “Can’t see how the team can win with her at quarterback. Thinks she’s better than she is.” They questioned incredulously why she’d juked left when there was a player open downfield on the right (“Throw the ball, you idiot. You’re not the running back, remember?”).
And often and often, she’d hear one analyst say casually to another, “She’s always been a loser, you know.”
“I do know. And I couldn’t agree more,” the other voice would reply. “It’s been one bad decision after another. Who’d ever want a failure like that on their team?”
For the first few years Lizzie just wanted the voices to stop, or, if not stop, at least to let up, to talk about something else, to take a break from judging her, to advertise Chevy trucks or Budweiser. She thought she might have borne it better—it would have been easier for her—if they’d ever talked about another player in a similar Great Game, but they concentrated solely on her. In her mind she saw a blackboard filled in with X’s and O’s in complicated patterns; the voices were charting plays in which she played some role that wasn’t clear but that she knew was something she never should have taken part in. As she and Jack walked through the Law Quad holding hands or sat together in the UGLI, or went out for pizza, or played a killer game of Monopoly or dirty Scrabble—or, worse, even when she was trying to lose herself in making love—the voices in her head kept on with their relentless evaluation of who she was and what she’d done.
Over the years those voices diminished to a low-pitched hum, a deep buzzing in her head, so that she couldn’t make sense of most of the words. But occasionally she’d clearly hear her name spoken. “Lizzie,” someone would say. She’d turn around quickly to see who was talking to her and find nobody there.
But when the post Great Game show began, the voices were maddening. Crazy-making. Frightening. She couldn’t imagine trying to describe them to a doctor, or really to anyone except Marla and James, who already knew she wasn’t nuts. What was so strange, and so difficult for Lizzie to understand, was that when she (and Andrea) first conceived of the Great Game, they saw it as good fun, a prank, an escapade, a joke, a jape, a hoot and a holler, a conversation starter when they got old, and the ultimate showstopper. She (and Andrea) even wondered if the Great Game of their adolescence might have a place in Ripley’s Believe It or Not!