by E. Lockhart
Most young women, when confronted with the peculiarly male nature of certain social events—usually those incorporating beer or other substances guaranteed to kill off a few brain cells, and often involving either the freezing-cold outdoors or the near-suffocating heat of a filthy dorm room, but which can also, in more intellectual circles, include the watching of boring Russian films—will react in one of three ways.
Some, like Trish, will wonder what the point is, figure there probably is no point and never was one, and opt for typically feminine or domestic activities such as crumble-making, leaving whatever boyfriends they have to “hang with the guys.”
Others, like Star, will be bored most of the time but will continue attending such events because they are the girlfriends or would-be girlfriends of said boys, and they don’t want to seem like killjoys or harpies. If the boys are there, playing games on the Xbox (indoors) or letting off cherry bombs to make a big noise for no reason (outdoors), the girls will chatter among themselves and generally make a quiet display of being interested in whatever the boys think is interesting.
The third group aggressively embraces the activities at hand. These girls dislike the marginalized position such events naturally put them in, and they are determined not to stay on those margins. They do what the boys do wholeheartedly, if sometimes a little falsely. They drink beer, play video games, light off the cherry bombs. They remain alert during obscure Russian films. They even buy the beer, win the video games, and show up with an M-80, just when the cherry bombs are beginning to get old. If required by their social circle, they read articles on Andrei Tarkovsky.
Whether their enthusiasm is forced or entirely genuine, these girls gain respect from the boys—who are not, after all, cavemen, but enlightened twenty-first-century males who are happy to let females into their inner circles if the females prove their mettle.
As I said, most girls will engage in one of these three behaviors, but Frankie Landau-Banks did none. Although she went home that night feeling happier than she had ever been in her short life, she did not confuse the golf course party with a good party, and she did not tell herself that she had had a pleasant time.
It had been, she felt, a dumb event preceded by excellent invitations.
What Frankie did that was unusual was to imagine herself in control. The drinks, the clothes, the invitations, the instructions, the food (there had been none), the location, everything. She asked herself: If I were in charge, how could I have done it better?
A GARLIC KNOT
The next day, Sunday, Frankie woke to the sound of someone knocking. Trish was already out, so Frankie went to the door in her pajamas. There stood Alpha, wearing a dark red sweater with large holes in the elbows. He hadn’t talked to her since she’d met him in the gym. Even last night he’d done nothing more than nod at her as she stood next to Matthew on the lawn. “Come down,” he said now, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. “We’re going to get pizza.” What “we”? She and Alpha? Was he asking her out now? He must have known she had gone to the party with Matthew. Frankie stalled for time. “It’s only ten o’clock,” she said. “We’ll call it brunch.”
“Where are you getting pizza at this hour?”
“Luigi’s in Lowell is open twenty-four hours.”
“I’m not allowed off-campus,” Frankie told him, still turning over in her mind whether she wanted to go. Only seniors could leave without express permission or supervision.
“Who’s gonna know?” he asked her.
Alpha had a point. But such is the nature of the panopticon: most students at Alabaster didn’t leave campus—even though it was as simple as hopping over a low stone wall. “I don’t want to get caught,” Frankie said, wondering if her pajama top was see-through and crossing her arms over her chest.
“Matthew went to pick up his car in the lot,” Alpha told her. “He should be waiting for us at the gate in a couple minutes. He told me you’d be a sport.”
Oh. Alpha was here for Matthew. It was okay.
She didn’t have to choose.
“So. Are you gonna come get pizza?” Alpha asked. “Or are you gonna be a good little girl and stay on campus?”
“I’ll be down in five,” Frankie told him.
Matthew’s car was a navy Mini Cooper. It was already running when Frankie and Alpha arrived at the gate.
“Shotgun,” said Alpha.
Frankie felt a wave of annoyance, but it dissipated on seeing Matthew’s smile light up. “Hey there, Frankie. You ready for some serious pizza?”
She nodded and squeezed past Alpha’s bulk into the backseat. Matthew put the car in gear.
“I would like to state at the outset,” said Alpha, lighting a cigarette and rolling down his window, “that anything made outside Italy or the five boroughs of New York City has no legitimate claim to be called pizza.”
“What should we call it?” asked Matthew.
“Call it a disk of dough with tomato and cheese. But it is not a pizza.”
“A DOD,” said Matthew.
“If you must.” Alpha exhaled. “We’ll go have a rubbery, bready DOD. And it will be better than the food in the caf, and it will be nice to have a big pile of grease and salt first thing on a Sunday morning, but it won’t be pizza.”
“You are such a snob, dog.”
“I am not. Pizza is a food of the people. It’s cheap, you can get it on any street corner in the city. It’s categorically impossible to be snobby about pizza.”
“Do you remember that Russian diner we stopped at in Chicago where that lady with the hair growing out of her nose wouldn’t let you put ketchup on your steak?” asked Matthew.
“Yeah, so?”
“So it’s possible to be snobby about anything. That wasn’t even a good steak,” said Matthew. “And she was not going to let you put ketchup on it even if it killed her.”
“What’s your feeling about pineapple?” asked Frankie from the back.
“On a pizza?” said Alpha. “Unforgivable.”
“How come?”
“Because it’s fruit. There’s no fruit on a pizza.”
“A tomato’s a fruit.”
“That doesn’t count.” Alpha took a drag of his smoke. “A tomato may be a fruit, but it is a singular fruit. A savory fruit. A fruit that has ambitions far beyond the ambitions of other fruits.”
“Really.”
“Sure. It’s a staple ingredient in Italian cooking. You put it in sauces, you put it in salad with a little mozzarella and olive oil, you make ratatouille. And what do you do with your average fruit? Nothing. You just eat it. No one is going to found a whole cuisine on a grape.”
“What about wine?” asked Frankie.
“Okay, okay. But grapefruit? No. Or pineapple? No. Can you imagine founding a cuisine on blueberries? Everyone would be so sick of them within a week, they’d starve to death. The blueberry has no versatility. The country with a cuisine based on the blueberry would be a country of lunatics, turned mad by the unwavering sameness of their daily meals.”
“Okay,” said Frankie. “But have you actually tried pineapple pizza?”
“I don’t have to try it,” said Alpha. “It’s disgusting.”
“How can you write it off when you haven’t tried it?”
“She caught you, dog,” laughed Matthew. “Pizza snobbery is coming out of your pores right now.”
“Oh, bull.” Alpha threw his cigarette butt out the window and pouted.
“You’re not a pie snob, I’ll say that,” said Matthew, consoling him. “Frankie, we drove across the country this summer for three weeks trying to eat as many different kinds of pie as we could—”
“I—”
“What?”
Frankie had been going to say, “I know,” but had thought better of it. “Nothing.”
“Anyway,” continued Matthew, “Alpha was a completely egalitarian pie lover. He liked everything. Whereas by like, day three, Dean had narrowed it down to only one ki
nd he liked enough to be eating every day.”
“Which was?”
“Lemon meringue. But then he’d only eat half of it anyway.”
“That was abnormal,” said Alpha. “I mean, I ask you: is it normal to eat only half a piece of pie?”
“I don’t think so,” said Frankie. “If it’s in front of me, I want it.”
“What about ice cream?” asked Alpha. “Or frozen custard?”
Frankie was speechless for a moment.
Alpha did remember her.
That day on the beach.
She had figured he did. Probably.
But it was good to be sure.
Though now, it wasn’t something they could talk about. Because she was with Matthew.
She had picked Matthew. Or he had picked her.
Or Alpha had picked the she-wolf. Or something.
“I’ve eaten half a frozen custard before,” Frankie told him. “But custard has a cold factor. It’s never too cold or too warm for pie.”
“It’s never too cold for custard, either,” said Alpha. “Not in my universe.” He reached into the glove box and shuffled through the CDs. “If you don’t like food, you don’t like sex,” he continued. “I bet that’s Dean’s problem. His grades are so excellent because he’s completely repressed.”
“I doubt that,” said Matthew.
“Why do you think he’s going out with that ball of fluff half his age? Sorry, Frankie.”
“Star’s all right.” Matthew turned off the highway.
“You don’t like Star?” Frankie asked. She’d seen Star sitting at the senior tables more than once, talking and laughing with Dean’s friends.
“Oh wait, she’s not a ball of fluff, she’s a DOD,” said Alpha. “Like she’s fine, she’s okay, but she’s not— delicious. Which is perfect for Dean, because he’s so repressed anyway, he’s not interested in delicious.”
“That has nothing to do with her being a sophomore,” Frankie argued.
But she was out of her depth.
They pulled into Luigi’s, which turned out to be a dark place with red Formica tables and a pinball machine in the back, catering to the late-night crowd from the bar next door. NO PIZZA TILL NOON, read a sign on the counter.
“Is there really no pizza?” Matthew asked a busboy.
“The guy who makes it didn’t come in,” was the answer. “Sunday morning, nobody wants to get up and make pizza. We got soda. We got garlic knots.”
“I’ll take garlic knots,” said Alpha. “Let’s get, I don’t know, what? A dozen of them to go.”
There was a Ms. Pac-Man machine in the back of the restaurant. Frankie felt in her bag for some quarters and fed them in. While her little Pac-lady chomped energy pellets, she listened to the boys talk. They were sitting in a booth near the front.
“Those are like the ultimate DODs,” said Matthew. “All dough, no tomato, no cheese.”
“No, they’re BODS,” said Alpha. “Balls of dough. But”—he sniffed the bag—“these have got a serious garlic punch, I’d say. We shouldn’t underestimate them.”
“Lemme smell.” Matthew stuck his face in the bag.
“What do you want to bet your new girl doesn’t eat them?” Alpha said to Matthew under his breath.
“I don’t want to bet,” said Matthew, taking one out of the bag and popping it into his mouth. “I never bet on what girls will eat.”
“That’s the thing about women,” said Alpha, drumming his fingers on the Formica tabletop. “They’re not voracious.”
“You don’t think?”
Alpha ate another garlic knot. “Maybe they are, somewhere inside. But they don’t act on it. They’re always eating half the custard and then giving the rest of the cone away.”
There it was again. The custard. Alpha wanted Frankie to know he remembered. And that, somehow, he was disappointed in her.
Was that why he hadn’t pursued her? Because he could have, couldn’t he? Despite Matthew’s interest?
He thought she wasn’t voracious. That she didn’t go after what she wanted. That she was a girl who left the boardwalk as soon as her mother called her cell.
“That makes Dean a woman,” said Matthew. “He left half-eaten pie all across the country.”
Alpha laughed. “He is a woman. About some things.”
Frankie didn’t like garlic. It made her nauseated. But she forced Ms. Pac-Man to eat the last of the pellets in her video maze and left the intermission between levels to play on its own while she walked to the booth where Matthew and Alpha were sitting.
“Weren’t you getting those to go?” she asked, sitting down and pointing at the bag of garlic knots.
“Yeah, but where are we going?” asked Alpha. “They’ll stink up the Mini Cooper anyway.”
“Let me have one,” she told him.
He handed her the open bag.
Wincing only slightly, she ate the knot in two bites.
“Last night he said he wanted to show me around the Vineyard,” Frankie gushed, on the phone with Zada later that afternoon.
“Typical,” Zada said. “That’s a classic Matthew move.”
Earlier, Frankie had kissed Matthew good-bye in a haze of garlic fumes before he ran off to soccer practice.
Then the sky had cracked open and it began to rain. Now she was walking through campus on her way to the library, holding an umbrella and stepping deliberately in rain puddles. She was wearing red rubber boots.
“What’s typical?” Frankie asked her sister.
“I’m not saying he’s a bad guy or anything. I like Matthew,” answered Zada. “I’ve just noticed that’s how he operates. Once he decides he likes someone, he’s like insanely welcoming.”
“So you’re saying it’s not just to me.”
“No, it’s not. But it is only to people he really likes. I think it’s a coping strategy to dissipate anxiety about his wealth and his family. Do you know what I mean?”
“Not exactly.” Frankie didn’t want to hear Zada’s interpretation of the Livingston psychology. She just wanted to be happy Matthew liked her and wanted to take her to his summerhouse.
“It’s like this,” explained Zada. “Matthew knows some people will back off from being friends with him because of his dad’s position in the world. Like they won’t invite him places or ask him to do stuff because they assume he’s always got somewhere better to be. Or ’cause they don’t think they belong in his exalted circles.” Zada paused. “Hold on. I’m in the coffeehouse and I just have to order. Can I get a carrot-walnut muffin, a fruit salad, and a soy latte?”
Frankie had reached the library and was standing outside under her umbrella, waiting for Zada to finish.
“Okay. Frankie. I’m back. What was I saying?”
“About Matthew.”
“Oh, yeah. Elizabeth Heywood told me that his Vineyard house had like six people sleeping in the guest rooms last summer. Matthew had invited Elizabeth when he barely knew her—just like a spur of the moment thing when they’d run into each other in a bookstore in Boston. When she went out there, there were all these people sleeping over. It’s a huge, huge house, and some of them were just random people Matthew had met that summer, guys who were waiting tables on summer break. His parents were living in the guesthouse.”
“That’s weird.”
“You want to hear my analysis?” asked Zada.
“I can’t stop you anyway.”
“Okay. Playing host—or promising to—is like how Matthew dispels anxieties people have about his social position. And—this is where it gets complicated— it paradoxically lets him solidify that exalted position.”
“What?”
“Because he’s letting people see the day-to-day workings of his super-privileged life. It lets him be the host, the most important one in the room.”
“Uh-huh.”
“What do you think?” Zada always wanted Frankie to agree with her insights.
“I think you’re reading too
much sociology or whatever.”
“Never too much,” said Zada. “I gotta go now. But think about it.”
She clicked off.
A TRIANGLE
The she-wolf turned out to be Elizabeth Heywood, the girl who’d been to Matthew’s Vineyard house. Frankie knew Elizabeth slightly through Zada. She wasn’t part of Alpha’s crowd, really—but she was still a strong match for Alpha in that she had spent her late-elementary and middle-school years as a featured actor on a popular sitcom, playing the cynical daughter of a famous comedian. She had started Alabaster as a freshman the year the show ended, but it was still in regular syndication. Part of any new freshman’s orientation the past three years was seeing Elizabeth across the dining room, looking older and a bit prettier than her on-screen character. Frankie knew that Elizabeth had earned the money that was putting her through Alabaster. She had also earned the money that paid for her red Mercedes, which she described as “payback for having spent my childhood working with a bunch of coke addicts and manipulative harpies”—so she differed from her fellow students in the way that new money differs from old.
She was extremely well known around campus— without being exactly popular. She was more of a floater, comfortable in a number of different social clusters but firmly ensconced in none. She had the wide, freckled face and big dimples you see so often in child actors who’ve been picked to look particularly all-American, and her hair, which had been dyed red on television, was brown. Her speech was spacey and slightly slurred, a trait that had made her Q-rating extremely high in the days of her show’s greatest popularity.
Elizabeth and Alpha were rarely seen together unless as part of a group, and they were completely unaffectionate. Although they’d been going out only a few weeks, they bickered at each other like old marrieds.
When you go to boarding school, and the usual obstacles of transportation and suspicious parents are removed from the equation, relationships can progress quickly. This truism applied not only to Alpha and Elizabeth, but also to Frankie and Matthew. Matthew was warm and publicly affectionate. In less than a week from the night of the golf course party, Frankie was a regular at his table in the caf.