My Perfect Life by Dyan Sheldon

feet don’t show.”
    I used some toilet paper to lift the seat and stood on the bowl while Lola taped a sign to the door that said OUT OF ORDER. Talk about Watergate. All I could think about was the fact that if my mother were to see me she’d drop dead on the spot.
    Lola stepped back to admire her handiwork. “Perfect.” She looked at me. “You’ve got the camera ready?”
    I nodded. Sam’s Pentax was in my pocket. Sam set the aperture opening using the light in one of the boys’ toilets as a guide so I wouldn’t need a flash.
    “And you know what to do?”
    “I guess so.” I eyed the door with a certain amount of misgiving.
    “It’s easy,” said Lola. “You brace one leg in the corner, you hang on to the coat hook with your free hand, and you just pop up and take the picture. Got it?”
    I nodded.
    She took my book bag and slung it over her shoulder. “That’s it, then. I’ll see you in homeroom. Don’t forget to lock the door.”
    I’d forget my own name sooner.
    It felt as if I were in that cubicle for days before anyone came into the toilets. They were long, unpleasant days. There was nothing to do but listen to the leaky tap on one of the sinks and – once my feet had gone numb – try not to fall off the bowl. And worry. There was plenty to worry about. I’m not my mother’s daughter for nothing.
    What if…? What if…? What if…?
    Lola, of course, is never ever bothered by the what-if question. It never occurs to her that something could go wrong with her plans – which is pretty amazing in itself, since something almost always does go wrong with them. But as I crouched on the ceramic rim, the camera in my hand and a cramp beginning in my leg,
What if…? What if…? What if…?
marched through my mind like an invading army.
    What if I dropped the camera? What if I did fall off the bowl? What if someone told the janitor about the broken toilet and she came to fix it? What if I coughed just as I was about to press the button? What if my mother found out?
    But what worried me most was Carla. The sense of empowerment I’d felt when I hung the phone up on her had faded by then. I was back to being normal Ella Gerard, the one who didn’t like to make any waves or rock any boats. I knew that taking a picture of Carla putting on lipstick wasn’t exactly a major invasion of privacy or anything like that. (There couldn’t be many people in Dellwood who had never seen Carla Santini putting her face in place – in the carpark, on the train, in the supermarket, on the beach, even that time we visited her grandmother in hospital.) But I knew that Carla would act like it was the biggest invasion of privacy since the white man arrived in the Americas, and the simple truth is that I didn’t like people being mad at me – even people I don’t like. Carla being mad at me wouldn’t depress me the way my parents being mad at me did, but it would make me feel guilty. I was really good at guilt.
    What if…? What if…? What if…?
    I was just asking myself the question:
What if there’s a fire and the whole school’s been evacuated except me?
when the door to the toilets finally opened and a group of girls burst in, all of them talking at once. I didn’t recognize their voices.
    And then, a few minutes later, the door opened again.
    This time I had no trouble recognizing the voices. Or voice. I could tell that at least three more people had come in, but only one was talking.
    “I don’t believe it!” The room rippled with rage. Carla Santini was mad. “I don’t effing believe it.” I could practically hear her curls shaking, and see the way her lower lip trembles when she’s ready to roll a few heads. “Of all the nerve! Of all the gall! If they think they can treat me like this, they better think again.”
    Sam had obviously put the new posters up all right.
    “I just can’t believe it!” Carla continued to fume. “I really can’t believe it. They’re persecuting me, that’s what