Among Friends

by Caroline B. Cooney

  My parents are absolutely thrilled. They can’t talk about anything except the Star Student Award. They never heard of it till now, but they don’t care about that. They keep hugging me, and laughing to each other, and saying, “Well, it finally paid off, didn’t it?”

  Like I’m a mortgage.

  They’re going to burn me to celebrate.

  Honestly, this school is sick for rumor—I just heard that Jared and I are breaking up! Over Paul Classified!

  Well, we were all having lunch—Jared and me and Paul and Keith and Jennie and Emily and Hill—it was egg-salad sandwiches, which I hate, so I was having a lunch of everybody’s potato chips and Hillary was lecturing me about nutrition and Jennie was staring wistfully at Paul and Jared said, “So, Ansley Augusta, what’s the truth in this?”

  I crunched a potato chip very loudly and said, “We’ve been having a mad affair, haven’t we, Paul?”

  Paul didn’t react at all. I thought he’d make some funny remark and we’d all laugh. But he just sat there. Everybody looked at him. Even Emily, who you would think a person could trust to be sensible, was all gaga over Paul. Honestly, I’d like to locate just one girl who doesn’t adore Paul Classified.

  “I think there’s something wrong with you, P.C.,” I said. “Maybe you should go see the school nurse.”

  Oh, boy, did Jared laugh then. “Ansley, people don’t have to see the nurse just because they’re not madly in love with you.”

  I said, “Paul Classified is obviously insane not to take advantage of me. I think the boy needs medication.”

  Paul roused himself. It took an effort, as if he had fallen into a trance. He said gallantly, “If I could be madly in love, it would be with you, Ansley. Unfortunately, I have no emotions left.”

  I thought about it all day.

  That’s his secret.

  He has no emotions left. Something drained them all out, and just his body is still there. That’s what’s classified. Paul is a shell.

  It’s so boring to make these entries.

  I’ve already told Emily everything, but now I have to set it down on paper as well. Emily says we should run a tape recorder while we talk and then just have my father’s secretary transcribe it into our journals. When is this dumb assignment due, anyway? Keeping a diary is a prison sentence.

  Mother yelled at me because I bit my fingernails down.

  I know my hands look awful, but why does every inch of me have to be perfect? I screamed at her, terrible things I never even knew I was thinking! All of a sudden my entire life seemed like walls: huge thick walls of stone that were tumbling in on me, crushing me, pressing my lungs until my ribs poked through. I said, “What difference does it make if my fingernails are ugly?” and she said, “Jennie, I can’t bear it when you don’t live up to your potential! There’s no reason for you to take up nasty habits. Anyway, we’re having a party next week.”

  A party next week.

  The best of food, the trendiest of clothing, the most interesting guests—and of course, their best trophy of all: their daughter. Who will be a shinier trophy if her fingernails are long and polished.

  I got 89 on my history test for the quarter.

  Daddy was bent out of shape because after he read my essay he felt I should have gotten 100. He wanted to call Miss Marcello up and argue with her. I said no, please don’t. He said, “How can I brag about an eighty-nine? I like hundreds.”

  And Mother said dreamily, “Star Student. I like it. My daughter. Gretchen Lowe says in school they’re calling you Star of the East, Jennie. Think of it—star of the entire east coast!”

  “Mother, they’re being sarcastic, and anyway they’re referring to the pageant.”

  My mother never hears the bad things. What I said didn’t even pass her earrings, let alone penetrate her brain. “They’re so proud of you,” she said, beaming.

  Right.

  When I knew nothing, I could laugh and shrug and think of other things. Now I think of Paul all day long: does he have enough to eat, is somebody paying the electric bill, how long can he go on like this? I want to ask how his mother is, if he has enough money to put gas in the car to visit her, does he want to come have supper at our house—but he won’t look at me.

  He’s afraid of me.

  It makes me feel queasy.

  Paul Classified—afraid of me, Emily Weinstein.

  Paul, I’m on your team. I really am. Please believe it!

  I caught Hill and Emily after school and just climbed into Hill’s car so she had no choice but to give me a ride home. I decided just to attack the subject. I said, “Listen. It isn’t my fault. I was born this way. It’s not fair of you to be jealous.”

  “Jealous?” said Hillary in this soft, tight voice. “You think one of us is jealous of you, Jennie Quint?”

  I ended up apologizing to them. Telling them I’m sorry I said such a terrible thing, and yes, it was very conceited of me, and yes, I’m a very nasty conceited person who deserves to be lonely and friendless.

  They didn’t say good-bye when I got out of the car, even though I took a long time getting out.

  But if they’re not jealous—what are they?

  What am I?

  I’ve just figured it out.

  Paul Classified has watched The Awesome Threesome die.

  He knows I can abandon a friend.

  He knows I can plan how to hurt Jennie.

  So how can he count on me?

  He can’t.

  Oh, Diary, Diary.

  I am afraid of you.

  If I did not have to write this down, I could pretend it’s not true.

  But it is true.

  I have not been a friend.

  I asked Mom the scary, scary question.

  The one I’ve wanted to ask for two years now.

  “Are you jealous, too? Do you want a daughter like Jennie?”

  You’re not supposed to say things like that out loud. Because what if they’re true?

  “Not true,” said Mom, hugging me hard. “I adore you the way you are.” She let go of the hug after a while, and added slowly, almost sadly, “But I guess that nobody can help wanting to glisten and gleam the way Jennie does.”

  I was really taken aback. “You mean you would like to be like Jennie?”

  Mom kind of shrugged and laughed at herself. “Sixteen and doing things I haven’t done yet at forty? A person can feel old and dumb in a hurry next to Jennie Quint. I wonder how her teachers can stand it.”

  If Mom felt jealous, too, jealousy seemed almost okay.

  “Boy, do I feel good,” I said. “Let’s go out for dinner. Let’s try that new Mexican restaurant on Route One.” I was really in the mood for something hot and spicy and demanding. “You know what jealousy looks like?” I asked my mother.

  “What?”

  “It looks like a rat. Not a cute little white laboratory rat. A hideous evil city slum rat. Biting you.”

  We both screamed.

  Then my mother giggled. “The magazines say you should have meaningful conversations with your teenager, but I must say a meaningful conversation with you can wipe a mother out, Hill. Let’s go out for that Mexican dinner with dad and talk strictly about nonmeaningful things.”

  I am so lucky to have my mother. What if I had Jennie’s mother? Then she’d always be disappointed in me. What could be worse than a mother who doesn’t think much of you?

  This Mr. Lowe shows up out of nowhere, saying he’s got a son my age and he wants to help.

  I know he has a son my age. He has a son my age I despise from the bottom of my heart. (Such as my heart is.)

  And you know—I almost did talk.

  I wanted to talk so bad it was like starvation. I could taste it. I had a hard time breathing. Made me think of Jennie, and how her lungs collapse when she laughs. Great, I thought, I’m having a nervous breakdown. Two in one family. Wonderful success rate at coping.

  “Why not talk?” said Mr. Lowe.

  I a
ctually answered him. I said, “I might burst.”

  Mr. Lowe is rather heavy, not as tall as I am, wearing a dark suit and a heavy city-type coat. He doesn’t look one bit like Jared. Jared is thin and preppy, Mr. Lowe is old and tired. And in his speech, he pauses, just the way I do, thinking before he says anything out loud. “Like a dam?” he said slowly. “Too much pressure behind it?”

  But I had already said too much. I didn’t add to it.

  Mr. Lowe was looking at my sleeves. It was a parent look. Good grief, does this mean I have to get you yet another wardrobe? Didn’t I just buy you all new clothes? When are you going to stop growing? My mother used to say things like that all the time, but laughing, and then Candy and I would back up against the wall in our last house, and measure how much we’d grown, and when Dad came home, we’d show him how high the new marks were.

  I looked at Mr. Lowe’s shoes. Expensive, shiny shoes that commuters wear, not high-school kids. I’m down to one pair: high-tops I’m going to have to slit the toes on before long.

  “I’d like you to live with us, Paul,” said Mr. Lowe. “Until things are straightened out.”

  Me? Live with Little Yuppie Jared? Watch the Prep Couple of the Decade on their pin-striped couch together? Me—drive around in Jared’s little red Porsche, and help him fasten his little Rolex on his wrist?

  I walked away from Mr. Lowe.

  He’s a little more gracious than his son. He didn’t follow me.

  The school is providing Jennie Quint with a special tutor for the math section of the Star Student Examination. I could spit. Where do they get off, grooming her like some gymnastics star for the Olympics? Jennie’s family has tons of money, they can afford their own tutor! I absolutely cannot stand it that the school has already decided Jennie deserves more than the rest of us. I wanted to organize a protest, but everybody else said No, let Jennie hang herself. It’s about time anyway.

  Even I could not believe it, and I am definitely used to Jennie by now.

  I rank seventeenth in a class of 310, and I’m pretty involved. I’m the diving team captain and associate editor of the monthly paper. I’ve been in charge of the student Bloodmobile and the Student Art Museum.

  We get back from vacation, pretty much ready to be nice and kind and generous of heart—you know, all that Christmas stuff—and there’s Dr. Sykes telling the entire school that junior Jennie Quint is going to outclass every senior and every junior in the state of Connecticut, and set records, and be her own display case in the lobby.

  Jennie didn’t look at anybody else when the announcement came over the loudspeaker. I guess she figured there was nobody worth looking at.

  “If there were letters for academic and musical achievement,” said Dr. Sykes, “we would retire Jennie Quint’s number!”

  I’ve never been mad at Jennie for being Jennie.

  I’ve always been proud of me for being me.

  But where do they get off—making Jennie so special? And where does she get off—doing it?

  And in every single class I share with Jennie, the teachers announce their pride in her! In English, in physics, the teacher stands up and says proudly, “Isn’t it exciting?”

  No.

  It isn’t exciting.

  Every single kid here would like to kick Jennie Quint in the shins.

  The cafeteria was a mob again. Very different from the mob Paul faced. This was a mob against Jennie, and it was verbal, not physical, and it was girls, not boys.

  I could feel the mob forming and I just stayed out of it.

  I didn’t want to be part of that again.

  The top seniors are absolutely seething with rage. Going up to Hartford for two days for Star Student is a real prize. They take you out of class—it’s a Thursday and Friday, and you stay at the Sheraton, and you’re with another 150 of the finest Connecticut has to offer, and you put this on your college applications, and all—and a junior is going to outshine them. They know perfectly well they can’t win against Jennie.

  Amanda Hodges was maddest of all. “This is for seniors,” she snaps. Amanda is first in the class, but that’s all she does. She can’t win and we all know it. Amanda’s never even met the other kids in the class, let alone worked with them—she’s always home studying. “But when I went in to Dr. Sykes to complain, do you know what he said to me, Jennie Quint?”

  Jennie stared at her without speaking.

  “Dr. Sykes explained to me that dear Jennie is very precocious.” Her voice was thin and enraged and sliced across the room. Jennie flinched as if Amanda’s voice had actually hit her. “The school system, he explained to me, makes exceptions for quality students.” Amanda’s hatred could have been put on a plate and served. I suppose normal cafeteria food would taste pretty terrific after a portion of Amanda’s jealousy.

  Jennie was pale and shaken. “Star Student wasn’t my idea,” she protested.

  “Fine,” said Amanda. “Then why don’t you wait ’til next year? Several of us in the senior class have an excellent chance, and you know that each high school can have only one winner.”

  Paul Classified looked at me and said, “I don’t know how to rescue her.” I said, “She’ll have to rescue herself, Paul. The only thing she can do is agree to drop out of the running.”

  Jennie was thinking about it—you could tell—but Amanda went wrong. Raising her voice so that nobody in the entire cafeteria could possibly not hear, she said, “We’re just plain old ordinary seniors. Jennie, of course, is special. How stupid of us to think we could be special when Jennie is around.”

  Jennie’s chin tilted up and I knew right away that Amanda’s tactics were wrong. Attacking Jennie in public was dumb; Jennie wouldn’t be defeated in front of us. She would rather be dead.

  “The rest of us are only around for show,” said Amanda fiercely. “Dr. Sykes believes you have it all sewn up.”

  Jennie stood up and narrowed her eyes. Very softly, Jennie said, “Amanda, we’re all taking the same examinations, and we all fill out the same applications. Either you’re a star student or you’re not.”

  Paul whistled.

  I sighed.

  It was going to be war now.

  And I know Jennie doesn’t want war. She wants friends.

  Well, she chose it. She can’t pretend otherwise.

  Paul Classified is just the only one who admits it.

  All of us keep our thoughts classified.

  I have a cat at home. Isabelle. Once I had Ferdinand and Columbus to go with Isabelle, but Ferdinand ran away and Columbus preferred living at Hillary’s house. Hillary calls Columbus “Cat,” and Cat comes whenever Hill yells for him. Isabelle doesn’t have a hard time being a cat. You never see Isabelle lying awake all night biting her nails fretting about being a cat. But people—we spend half our lives figuring out how to be what we were born being.

  We are the only species that has a hard time being a species.

  Perhaps that’s why we are willing to write these diaries.

  We’re trying to declassify ourselves.

  I do not have a friend in the world now.

  It’s this math tutoring.

  I don’t know how to get out of it.

  I told my parents and I told Dr. Sykes it wouldn’t work out.

  But they think I’m just succumbing to peer pressure. That’s actually what they said to me. I tell them the entire school is mad at me over this Star Student thing and I want to pull out and they say, “Jennie, dear, don’t succumb to peer pressure.”

  Peer pressure!

  What a stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid phrase.

  They are my friends, my world, my life, and they hate me.

  That’s not peer pressure.

  That’s suicide.

  Oh, I don’t know what to do, I hurt so much, I hurt so much!

  It was war there for a while and I thought of joining Jennie’s team, but she didn’t look my way. She stared her enemies straight in the eye and she refused to surre
nder. I couldn’t just walk over to her; she didn’t want me. Ansley and I talked about it. Jennie’s made her first really major mistake, I think. You can outshine everybody only so long, and then you have to blend in with the crowd. Now they’re going to turn on her.

  It makes me sick, but I don’t know how to help her.

  Amanda Hodges doesn’t lay off.

  When we were going back to class after lunch, and I was trying to catch up to Jennie to tell her I was on her team, Amanda said something I couldn’t catch to Jennie. It must have been some blackmail, because Jennie said, “All right, I’ll go tell Dr. Sykes I’m going to withdraw.” She looked confused and unpoised for the first time I can ever remember.

  But Dr. Sykes was coming down the hall, and Sykes had no idea that anything other than his school’s record was at stake. He was terribly upset. “This is my high school’s chance to set yet another record!” he cried. “Think of the trophies you’ll bring home! Why, Jennie, the front lobby will have the Star Student award for two years running! We’ll all be so proud of it.”

  “Of it?” said Jennie. “Of it?” She was actually shaking, and then she laughed hysterically. “They bagged me in Africa, you know,” she said crazily.

  It was not like Jennie to be weird. Everybody just looked at her.

  Jennie turned to Amanda. “Or you could polish me,” she said, going on down the hall. “I might be silver. I might be gold.”

  Candy used to sing a song about silver and gold in Brownie Scouts. Make new friends, but keep the old, one is silver and the other gold.

  But Ansley thought she was referring to the trophies in the front foyer. You can polish trophies.

  Jennie, bagged in Africa? Silver and gold?

  For an entire half day, Jennie was the mystery, and not me.

  I wanted something to hurt me.

  It was so weird.