Rules for Being a Girl

by Candace Bushnell

  Not just for a teacher. For a guy.

  I feel a blush creeping up my chest underneath my sweater, glancing over at the baristas behind the counter and wondering idly if they think Bex and I are on a date. And like, obviously I don’t think we’re on a date—he’s my teacher, and he’s like thirty years old—but as we sit here I can imagine dating someone like him. Someone who cares about what new plays are workshopping in Boston. Someone who knows the name of the Speaker of the House.

  I drink my coffee slowly on purpose, both in an attempt to keep Bex talking and because my hands are starting to shake from all the caffeine. Out the window it’s beginning to get dark. I know I should probably get back to the tournament, but part of me feels like I could hang out in this Starbucks all night. That’s when Bex’s phone dings in his pocket.

  “Holy sh . . . ,” he says when he looks at it, glancing at me and trailing off before completing the swear. “Is it really after four o’clock? How did that happen?”

  I shake my head. “I’m sorry,” I say, though I’m not really. “I distracted you. You didn’t get any writing done.”

  Bex shrugs. “Let’s be real,” he admits, “I probably wasn’t going to get any writing done anyway.” Then he grins. “Besides, the conversation was worth it.”

  He stands up and slings his messenger bag over his shoulder, lifts his empty cup in a salute. “Enjoy the rest of the weekend,” he says with an easy smile. “And send that admission essay off before you come into my class on Monday. Noodling time is officially over.”

  “I will,” I promise. I watch his back until Bex disappears into the crowd outside.

  Four

  My dad makes a double batch of chicken noodle soup for dinner on Sunday night, so on Monday after school I head over to Sunrise Senior Living to drop a container of it off for Gram. I know most people think nursing homes are totally creepy, and I guess they’re not wrong, but I’ve been coming here for so long at this point that the bleachy smell and occasional confused, wandering person don’t really bother me that much.

  “I mean,” I pointed out to my mom the last time the two of us came to visit together, “depending on your perspective, it’s not actually that different from high school.”

  I check in at reception before climbing the stairs in the atrium and waving hello to Camille, the nurse supervisor on Gram’s floor. She’s wearing scrubs printed with wildflowers and a pair of bright green Crocs. Camille has scrubs in a riot of different patterns and Crocs in every color of the rainbow; she’s wearing a different combination every time I see her, mixing and matching like she’s a walking, talking paper doll.

  “Hey, Marin,” she says, tilting the plastic tub of cat-shaped Trader Joe’s cookies on the counter in my direction. “All those college apps submitted?”

  “Yup,” I reply, reaching for a cookie. I took Bex’s advice and hit send over the weekend, dorkily emboldened by his pep talk. “They’re all in.”

  “And you’re going to bring me a T-shirt when you get into Brown, right?”

  “A T-shirt, a pennant,” I promise her. “One of those big blankets you’re supposed to use at football games, maybe.”

  “See now, you’re making fun, but I’m gonna hold you to it.” Camille grins. “Go on in, honey.”

  Gram’s door is propped halfway with a doorstop shaped like a Boston terrier, but I knock lightly to give her some warning before easing it all the way open.

  “Hey, Gram.”

  When she first moved into Sunrise back when I was in middle school, Gram still had way more good days than bad days, starting a little rose garden at the back of the building and organizing pinochle tournaments in the rec room. It’s about fifty-fifty now; she always remembers me, but according to my mom and Camille it’s better not to startle her.

  “There she is!” Gram says with a smile, setting her book—a thick, slightly grisly looking mystery—down on the side table. Gram has been a member of the Book of the Month Club since the seventies, and everybody says I get my book-nerd genes from her. “Come here, you.”

  I bend down to wrap my arms around her narrow shoulders, careful. Gram’s always been thin, but in the last couple of years she’s gotten downright fragile. She says it’s because she doesn’t like the food at Sunrise, so a lot of times Mom and Gracie and I will cook her old recipes—chicken parm, baked ziti, her famous meatballs—and bring them over. Still, she’s got to weigh less than one hundred pounds. I remember her swinging me up into the waves when I was a little kid at the beach on the Cape, how strong and tan her shoulders were. These days she feels like a bird in my arms.

  “Come sit,” she says now, motioning to the chair across from her, a roomy upholstered holdover from her house back in Brockton. Her room at Sunrise is suite-style, with a sitting area, a bedroom alcove, and a private bathroom she’s outfitted with fancy hand soap from Williams-Sonoma and a curtain printed with arty pineapples. “Tell me about your day.”

  “It was okay,” I say, sticking the soup in the mini fridge and hooking my backpack on the coatrack. “Pretty uneventful.”

  “Uneventful!” Gram raises her eyebrows, which she fills in every morning with a dark brown Revlon pencil, before getting up and heading over to the tiny kitchenette at the far end of the sitting room, pulling a jug of iced tea from the mini fridge. “How evocative.”

  “Sorry, sorry.” I smile guiltily. “I guess it was just kind of tough to be back in school after the weekend, that’s all.”

  Gram nods. “You know, people always say that high school is the best part of your life,” she says, pouring me some without bothering to ask if I want it or not. “But that’s just baloney. You’re going to go to college, you’re going to find out just how much there is for you out in the world. You’ll see.”

  “I just scheduled my interview for Brown, actually,” I tell her, taking a sip of my iced tea. “So with any luck, you’ll be right.”

  “See?” Gram beams. “There you go.” She went to Brown herself—or to Pembroke, technically, which is what the women’s college was called before the university went coed in the seventies. She took me as her date to her fiftieth reunion a few years back, which is when I decided I wanted to go there myself. I still remember the look in her eyes when I told her, the way her whole face seemed to glow.

  Now she reaches up with her free hand, tucks my hair behind my ears. “You’re such a good girl, my Marin,” she says. “You don’t always have to be so good though. Lord knows I wasn’t.”

  “Oh no?” I ask, unable to hide a smile.

  “Don’t laugh,” Gram says. “I’m serious.”

  “I believe you,” I say, although actually I don’t. For all her style and sophistication, Gram is one of the most buttoned-up people I’ve ever met: she married my grandpa when she was twenty-two, then raised my mom and her brothers while working part-time as a bookkeeper for a discount mattress company and hosting Tupperware parties on the weekends. I’ve literally never seen her without lipstick; she’s been wearing the same shade of Clinique since at least the eighties. “I want to hear more about this wild and crazy past, Gram.”

  “Oh,” she says, waving her hand, the clear polish on her nails catching the sunlight trickling in through the window.

  “Oh,” she says again, and just like that I know her mind is wandering. The most surprising thing about Gram’s illness is how fast it can make itself obvious, like she’s walked out of the room even though she’s still sitting right here.

  “You want to see if Ina is on?” I ask before she can get flustered, reaching for the remote on the coffee table and clicking over to Food Network. My grandmother is obsessed with the Barefoot Contessa; my mom still buys her all the cookbooks on the day they come out, even though she only has a microwave and an electric kettle in her suite. Still, every once in a while we’ll come visit on a special occasion and find she’s made candied nuts or a specialty cocktail. I suspect Camille has something to do with it.

  “She’s not on unti
l four,” my gram says now, frowning; her voice has taken on a different quality, thinner and a tiny bit peevish. “And I don’t like this other woman with all the cattle.” Still, she settles in to watch anyway, her knobby fingers wrapped around her glass of iced tea. I lean my head against the back of the chair.

  My mom is prepping chicken cutlets for dinner when I get home from Sunrise late that afternoon, the kitchen warm and cozy even as the early dusk presses against the windows above the sink. The familiar smells of garlic and butter are heavy in the air.

  “How was chess?” I ask Gracie, plucking a grape from the bowl on the counter and popping it into my mouth.

  “Fine,” Gracie says with a shrug. She’s sitting at the peninsula, reconnecting my mom’s phone to the Bluetooth speaker my dad got her last Mother’s Day; no matter how many times Gracie does it for her, my mom always insists it doesn’t work. “I won my match.”

  “She beat the pants off that smug little fish-face Owen Turner,” my mom—who has never let anyone’s age keep her from declaring them a blood enemy—says gleefully.

  I laugh, reaching out and tugging the end of Gracie’s ponytail. “Well done.”

  “Thanks,” she says, nodding with satisfaction as the speaker finally connects and the Italian opera music my mom loves fills the kitchen. “He said he was going to have to live the rest of his life in a remote village in Siberia to atone for the shame of losing to a girl.”

  “Well, fish-face Owen Turner is welcome to do us all a favor and pack his bags,” I say brightly.

  “That’s what I said!” My mom drops a kiss on my temple as she pulls a tub of frozen tomato sauce out of the freezer and sticks it in the microwave. “How was Gram?” she asks, once she’s hit the start button. Her voice is carefully casual, but she can’t disguise the flicker of worry across her face.

  “She was fine,” I say, leaving out that one weird moment where she seemed to lose her train of thought. After all, it’s not like there’s anything anyone can do about it, and there’s no point in worrying my mom for no reason. I open the door to the refrigerator, waggle a bag of lettuce in her direction. “You want me to make a salad?”

  My mom looks at me for another moment, eyes just slightly narrowed. Sometimes I think she’s psychic when it comes to me lying. “Sure,” she says finally. “A salad would be great.”

  Five

  Chloe wants to get an early start on her Christmas shopping, so we take the T into the city after school on Thursday to poke through the boutiques on Newbury Street. It’s feeling like the holidays for real now, the old-fashioned lampposts festooned with evergreen wreaths and all the store windows lined with twinkle lights and sprayed with fake snow. The dusky sky is a purple-blue.

  “Did you know Bex is writing a novel?” I ask as we wander through the huge Urban Outfitters, pawing through racks of fuzzy sweaters and scented candles. I pick up a giant pair of white plastic sunglasses with heart-shaped lenses and wear them around the store for a while, making dumb faces into every mirror we pass.

  Chloe looks at me over a display of coffee-table books. “How do you know that?” she asks.

  I raise my eyebrows. “So you did know?”

  “No,” she says, putting down the question-a-day journal she’s been considering and turning toward a rack of organic lipstick. “When did he tell you about it?”

  “I saw him at Starbucks in Harvard Square over the weekend,” I tell her—aware even as I’m saying it that it sounds a little bit like I’m bragging, and there’s a tiny chance that maybe I am. “We wound up sitting there and talking for, like, two hours.”

  Chloe looks surprised. “Seriously?” she asks. “What the heck did you guys even talk about for two hours?”

  From the tone in her voice I can’t tell which one of us she thinks would have dragged down the conversation, Bex or me.

  “I mean, I don’t know,” I say, suddenly wishing I hadn’t told her. “Random stuff, I guess. His novel, for one thing.”

  I fill her in on the plot points, which actually do sound a tiny bit ridiculous now that I’m the one doing the explaining. “He does a better job talking about it,” I promise finally, putting the sunglasses back on the rack.

  I’m expecting her to laugh, or at least be really into it, like she was back in September when we spent the full duration of a Harry Potter marathon on cable trying to figure out if he had a secret Instagram, but Chloe only shrugs, winding her scarf around her neck and nodding toward the exit.

  “Come on,” she says, “let’s go. They don’t have anything I want here.”

  “Okay.” I follow her out onto the bustling rush-hour sidewalk; it got all-the-way dark while we were shopping, a raw, icy snap in the air. “Who are you shopping for, anyway?” I ask her, tucking my hands in my pockets to warm them.

  “Nobody,” she says, and forges ahead of me into the crowd.

  Chloe’s weird mood lingers all through the hipster bookstore and the fancy coffee shop, though she perks up when we wander into the big mall on Boylston Street, her glasses fogging up in the sudden warmth. She leads me up the escalator and directly into Sephora, her expression faintly beatific as she weaves through the rows of mascara and bronzer, picking up my wrist and spritzing me with perfume samples until I cough.

  “Thank you for that,” I say, sniffling a bit in a slightly suffocating cloud of vanilla and jasmine.

  “You’re welcome,” she replies sweetly, breathing in deeply and setting the bottle back on the shelf. Sephora is Chloe’s own personal happy place. “Come on, I need new lip stuff.”

  “Speaking of lip stuff,” I say, following her through the crowded aisles, “you and Dean seem pretty friendly lately.”

  “Say what now?” She stops in her tracks beside a stack of metallic eye shadow palettes, her face crinkling up like I’ve lost my mind. “Me and Dean?”

  “What?” I ask, kind of put off by her tone—after all, it’s not like I’m pulling the idea out of nowhere. He was hanging around her locker literally this morning in an against-dress-code hoodie, munching a family-size bag of trail mix with M&M’s. “What’s wrong with Dean?”

  “I mean, nothing’s wrong with him,” Chloe concedes, shrugging inside her puffy black coat and turning toward the M•A•C display. “And yeah, I guess he’s been sniffing around or whatever since homecoming.”

  “Okay,” I tell her. “So?”

  “So, nothing.” Chloe turns toward the lipsticks.

  “Is this about Frank with the Sweatband from the Deli?” I tease. Chloe broke up with Frank with the Sweatband from the Deli back in the summer—which, come to think of it, makes this the longest she’s gone without having a boyfriend pretty much since we met. “I mean, sure, he always kind of smelled a little like Genoa salami, but I’m not judging. The heart wants what it wants, et cetera.”

  “Oh my god, he did not!” Chloe smacks me in the shoulder, but she’s laughing, which was the whole point. “And no, thank you, this is not about Frank with the Sweatband from the Deli. I don’t know. I just kind of feel like I’m over high school boys, that’s all.”

  “Oh yeah?” I say with a snort. “Gonna start trolling the Saint Xavier’s parking lot, maybe pick up a sixth grader or two?”

  “Wow, you are just on fire over there.” Chloe makes a face. “I’m just saying. We’ll be in college soon, and then . . .” She trails off, plucking a pot of lip stain off the rack and holding it up to the light. “I don’t know,” she says again. “Like, do you think you and Jacob will stay together?”

  “I—” Haven’t thought about it really, but it feels messed up to say that out loud, even to Chloe. “I guess it depends where we wind up going,” I hedge, examining a tube of concealer instead of looking directly at her.

  “You mean how close he is to Brown?” she asks with a grin.

  “Don’t even say it!” I make a face. “We don’t know that I’m getting into Brown.”

  “I know you’re getting into Brown,” Chloe declares, then ho
lds up two red lipsticks. “Which one?”

  I squint. “Those . . . are one hundred percent identical.”

  Chloe huffs. “They are not!” she protests. “Ugh, they have completely different undertones. You’re useless, you know that?”

  I hold my hands up like, What can you do? “You love me.”

  “I do,” she admits, linking her arm through mine and tugging me toward the checkout. “Come on. I’m getting them both.”

  Six

  I’m heading for my locker after the last bell on Friday when I pass by the newspaper office and spy Bex lounging cross-legged on the sofa.

  “Hey,” I say, rapping lightly on the open door.

  Bex doesn’t have an office, per se, but a lot of times he hides out in here if he’s got grading to do and doesn’t want to deal with the teachers’ lounge.

  “Hey,” he says now, struggling upright. He’s wearing khakis and a blue plaid button-down rolled to his elbows, glasses slipping down his face the slightest bit. “Headed out?”

  “Almost,” I say, pulling my ponytail down over one shoulder. “Although, actually, if you’ve got a minute, can I run an idea for an article by you really quick?”

  Bex nods, gesturing at the other end of the sofa before pulling a desk chair over to use as a footrest. “By all means.”

  “Thanks,” I say, reaching down and pulling my planner out of my backpack. “Okay, so I was thinking—” I break off suddenly as he lets out a giant yawn, dark eyes squinched shut and the pink flash of his tongue. “Sorry,” I say with a laugh, a little embarrassed. “Am I keeping you awake?”

  “No, no, no, I’m sorry.” Bex shakes his head, taking his glasses off and scrubbing a hand over his face before replacing them. “I just haven’t been sleeping much.”

  “Uh-oh,” I say, a sharp little thrill running through me. The word sleeping feels weirdly intimate coming from him, like even mentioning it opens some invisible door to the thought of . . . whatever else people do in beds. “Too many exciting papers to grade?”