Rules for Being a Girl

by Candace Bushnell

  “Uh-oh,” I say with a laugh. “Sorry. Touchy subject?”

  Gray sighs, scrubbing a hand over his face. “Both my moms are lawyers, right? Or actually, it’s worse—one of them is a lawyer, and the other one is a law professor. And both of them went to St. Lawrence, and both of them want me to go there and play lacrosse, because they donate a ton of money there every year, so it’s like the one place I’m guaranteed to get in even though I’m an idiot.”

  “Stop saying that,” I tell him, kicking him under the table before I quite know I’m going to do it. “You’re not an idiot. What do you want to do?”

  “Paint,” Gray deadpans, his face heartbreakingly serious for a moment before it busts wide open into a goofy grin. “No, I’m kidding. I kind of don’t want to go at all, honestly. I had to volunteer at this after-school program in Fall River for community service last year—which, yeah, I’m not saying that everything you heard about my partying was a lie.”

  “Laundry detergent?” I ask, raising my eyebrows.

  “I didn’t tell anyone to eat laundry detergent!” Gray says, sounding outraged. “Like, Jesus, I’m the one with fucking ADHD, and even I know enough not to eat soap.”

  I snort. “Fair enough.”

  “Anyway, I had to go there three times a week and play games with these little kids, and at first it was a total drag, but I actually really liked it, so I still go, even though I did all my hours. And they like me too, I guess, because they offered me a full-time gig after graduation if I want it.”

  “That’s awesome,” I say—picturing it before I can stop myself, trying not to find it charming and failing completely. “But your parents—your moms, I mean—aren’t on board?”

  Gray grimaces. “Oh, no way. Not go to college? As far as they’re concerned I might as well sell my body for drug money. Or like, go work for the US government.”

  Gray finishes his burger-and-pancake feast, plus a slice of questionable cheesecake from the spinning case near the cashier; his shoulder bumps mine as we head outside into the raw, chilly night.

  “Can I ask you a rude question?” I say as we cross the parking lot. “If your grades are really that bad, what are you doing in AP English?”

  Gray snorts. “It was the only language arts requirement that would fit in my schedule,” he explains, clicking the button to unlock the doors to the Toyota. “They made an exception so I could play lacrosse. Which,” he says, obviously reading the expression on my face in the neon light coming off the diner sign, “I recognize is probably the same special treatment that makes it so the girls’ volleyball team doesn’t get a bus.”

  “Wait—” I start, remembering Gray wasn’t even there when we started talking about that.

  “I was standing outside the door before I came in,” he explains. “I was nervous.”

  I smile at that, sliding back into the passenger seat. “It’s a fucked-up system, that’s all. And for what it’s worth, I’m really glad you’re in that class with me. And I’m glad you came to book club.”

  “Yeah,” he says. “I’m glad I am too.”

  We ride to my house mostly in silence, just the sound of Gray’s tinny iPhone speaker and the slightly labored hum of the Toyota’s engine.

  “Thanks again,” I tell him when we pull up in front of my house. “You really bailed me out.”

  “Yeah, no problem,” he says. “I’ll see you Monday.”

  “See you Monday,” I echo, reaching down for my backpack. I’ve got my hand on the car door when he touches my arm.

  “Hey, Marin, by the way?” Gray clears his throat, like maybe he’s a tiny bit nervous again. “I, um. Really liked your article.”

  I laugh out loud, surprised and weirdly delighted, but then it’s like the laugh jangles something loose in me, and for a moment I think I might be about to burst into tears.

  Instead, I take a deep breath and smile at him in the green glow of the dashboard.

  “Thanks.”

  Fourteen

  Saturday night finds me sitting at my desk in my pajamas, trying to keep my eyes from glazing over as I scroll boringly through an ancient SparkNotes guide to the symbolism in “The Swimmer.” Chloe ended up spending the weekend with Kyra, so instead of hitting Starbucks or driving around singing along to her latest Spotify masterpiece like we usually would, I’m listening to Sam Smith, picking at my short-story paper for Bex’s class, and—okay, I can admit it—thinking about Gray. I’m not looking for a new boyfriend, obviously. But still. I liked talking to him. I liked the feeling that he actually cared about what I had to say.

  I’m making zero progress on this paper, meanwhile. Part of me just wants to say screw Bex and go rogue and write it on the Hunger Games essay from Bad Feminist, but what good would that do? I’d just be hurting myself in the end.

  Grace knocks on my open door. “Will you do that thing with the flat iron?” she asks, holding it up and rotating it in a circle to demonstrate.

  “Sure,” I say, feeling my eyebrows flick before I can quell the impulse. She’s dressed in skinny jeans and a crop top I’m not entirely sure my mom is going to let her wear out of the house, plus a pair of wedge booties that are definitely mine. “Where are your glasses?” I ask, ignoring the petty theft for now in favor of getting up and rolling the desk chair in front of the full-length mirror on the back of my closet door.

  Grace shrugs, a quick jerk of her shoulders. “I don’t need them.”

  That is . . . some magical thinking if ever I’ve heard it. “Gracie,” I say, struggling not to laugh, “you’re basically straight-up blind without your glasses. You’re going to be walking into walls like Mr. Magoo.”

  Grace flops down into the chair, sighing loudly in the direction of the hallway. “Well if Mom would just let me get contacts, that wouldn’t matter.”

  “Why does it matter, huh?” I ask, frowning a little as I reach down to plug the flat iron into the wall. “Where are you even going?”

  “Just to the movies with some people in my class.”

  “Some people . . . ,” I echo, scooping my own hair out of my face and sensing there’s more to the story here. “Any person in particular?”

  Gracie tilts her head back, her long brown hair reaching almost to the carpet. “I mean, there’s a boy,” she admits grudgingly. “But it’s not a big deal.”

  “Oh yeah?” I gather up her hair in both hands, raking through the tangles and betting on the fact that she’ll say more if and only if I act like I’m not curious. “Grab me that claw clip, will you?”

  Sure enough: “His name is Louis,” she continues, handing it over; I divide her hair into sections as I wait for the iron to heat up. “And he’s so cute. And when we talk in Spanish I think he likes me—like, he’s always laughing at my jokes and stuff—but he’s popular.” She screws her face up in the mirror, or maybe she’s just squinting to try to see herself. “And just, with the glasses, and the chess—”

  “You love chess!” I blurt, unable to help it. “And you’re fucking amazing at it, so—”

  “That’s not the point!” Grace interrupts. “The other girls in my class . . .” She trails off. “They have boobs, and one of them has eyelash extensions. And I basically still look like a little kid.”

  You are a little kid, I think immediately, but at least I know better than to say it out loud. I gaze at Gracie in the mirror, her clear skin and straight eyebrows, the scar on the edge of her mouth from the time she took a header off her skateboard when she was seven. I want to tell her that Opal Cosare was the first person to get boobs in my class and the boys made her life a living hell over it. I want to tell her that getting older isn’t everything it’s cracked up to be. But I don’t want to scare her off.

  I’m quiet for a moment, clamping her hair in the flat iron and pulling gently. Chloe taught me this trick, I think with a tiny pang behind my rib cage, patiently doing it for me until I figured it out for myself.

  “Anybody who doesn’t think you’re ad
orable in your glasses isn’t worth it anyway,” I say finally, flicking my wrist to make a perfect fashion-blogger wave.

  “You have to say that,” Gracie retorts, rolling her eyes. “It’s like, in the big-sister constitution. Next thing you’ll be telling me is I’m perfect just the way I am.”

  “I mean, you are perfect the way you are,” I tell her. “But it’s not like I didn’t go through this exact thing in eighth grade. Remember when I begged Mom to let me get a belly button ring before that pool party at Tamar Harris’s house?”

  “Oh my god, I forgot about that,” Grace says, grinning goofily. “You kept threatening to do it yourself with a sewing needle.”

  “I don’t even think there are any sewing needles in our house,” I say with a laugh. “Like, when was the last time you saw Mom sew something? But I just thought that belly button ring was the key to my glamorous teenage life or something, I don’t even know.” I remember the run-up to that party with a kind of visceral embarrassment—the girl who searched high and low for the perfect two-piece and attempted to contour a six-pack onto her stomach with makeup, wanting to prove how chill and fun and sexy she was on the eve of her middle school graduation—and at the same time I wish I could go back and protect her.

  “Anyway,” I say now, tilting Grace’s head to the side to get to the section of hair behind her ear, “if you honestly don’t want to be wearing glasses anymore because you personally like how you look better without them, I’ll help you pitch it to Mom for this summer. But if you’re just doing it to try to impress Louis—or anybody else—I can promise you that tripping down a flight of stairs at the Alewife multiplex is not going to get you the kind of attention you’re after.”

  “I guess,” Grace grumbles, visibly unconvinced.

  Then she turns her face to look at me. “I thought your article was really good, PS,” she says suddenly. “I don’t know if I told you that or not.”

  “Really?” I peer at her in the mirror, surprised. “How did you even read it?”

  “My friend McKenna had a copy,” she explains. “Her sister goes to your school.”

  “Oh.” I nod. “Cool. Thanks, Gracie.” I think about that for a moment, busying myself with the flat iron to hide my smile. Realistically, I know that my feminist book club and my editorials in the paper probably aren’t going to make a whole lot of difference to the world at large. But if they made some kind of difference to my sister, that would be something.

  “Promise me you’ll wear your glasses tonight, okay?” I ask her, pulling the barrette out of her hair and clamping it onto the pocket of my hoodie for safekeeping. “If only so that I don’t have to visit you in the ER instead of finishing this paper.”

  Gracie hums noncommittally, her fuzzy gaze flicking to the open laptop sitting on my desk. She doesn’t say anything, but for a moment I can see her thinking it, weighing the cost of everything I’ve been up to lately: no boyfriend. No plans on a Saturday night. Big-sister constitution or not, I’m half expecting her to tell me to mind my own business.

  “Fine,” she finally declares. “I’ll wear them.”

  This time I don’t bother to hide my smile. “Good,” I tell her, satisfied. “Now stop moving around so I can finish your hair.”

  Fifteen

  I drop my paper on “The Swimmer” on Bex’s desk on Monday, then spend the rest of class slouching silently in my seat while everyone else discusses the different point-of-view characters in As I Lay Dying, which we were supposed to finish over the weekend. I used to look forward to AP English all morning, but the last few weeks it’s like I spend the entire period holding my breath and hoping to disappear.

  Today I feel like maybe I actually have turned invisible, until nearly the very end of the period, when Bex catches my eye across the room.

  “Marin,” he says, “you’ve been quiet today. Any thoughts you’d like to share on our old friend Billy Faulkner?”

  “Um.” I swallow hard, my heart skittering like a mouse along a baseboard. I don’t like this version of myself. I don’t recognize her. “Nope,” I say, clearing my throat a bit. “I don’t think so.”

  “Really?” Bex raises his eyebrows in surprise that might or might not be genuine. “Nothing to add?”

  I shake my head. A month ago, I would have fallen all over myself to come up with something witty and intelligent and impressive. This morning, I can’t bring myself to try. “I think everybody else has pretty much covered it,” I manage to say.

  I’m expecting him to leave me alone after that—Bex has never been the kind of teacher who’s interested in embarrassing anybody for the sake of proving a point—but instead he keeps his gaze on mine, steady. “Did you not do the reading or something?” he asks.

  “What?” I ask, hearing an edge in my voice. “Of course I did.”

  “Okay.” Bex shrugs. “Then what?”

  “Then nothing,” I snap, suddenly out of patience for whatever game he’s trying to play. “I’m just saying, it’s hard to get worked up about the literary themes in a book where one woman character dies in the first twenty pages and the other one spends the whole time getting taken advantage of by creepy men while she tries to get an abortion, that’s all.”

  For a second the classroom is so quiet I can hear my own heartbeat. Then a chorus of laughs and oohs break out. Chloe whirls around to stare at me, her eyes shocked and wide-looking; Gray lifts his chin in a wry, delighted nod.

  Only Bex’s face is completely impassive, and that’s how I can tell I’ve gone too far. Sure, we’ve always joked around in his class, made fun of the books we’re reading and the authors who wrote them, but this . . .

  This wasn’t that.

  I’m opening my mouth to apologize, but he holds up a hand to stop me.

  “See?” is all he says, and his voice is so, so even. “I knew you’d have an opinion.” He nods at the door as the bell rings for the end of the period. “Class dismissed.”

  My interview at Brown is first thing Saturday morning. I wake up as dawn is dragging itself blue and gray over the horizon, then spend close to an hour obsessing over my outfit: if I wear a dress, does that make me seem unserious? If I don’t wear a dress, am I saying something else? I finally decide on a pair of skinny black pants and a lacy blue button-down, plus an off-white cardigan that belongs to my mom. I add a lucky bracelet that used to be my gram’s, then steal my wedge booties back out of Gracie’s room and head downstairs, where my parents are drinking coffee at the kitchen table.

  “You look fierce,” my mom says with an approving nod.

  “‘Though she be but little,’” my dad says, raising his mug in a salute. “That’s Shakespeare, in case you want to work it into your interview. You know, show ’em how smart you are, tell ’em you got it from your old dad.”

  “She’s not so little anymore,” my mom reminds him, rolling her eyes affectionately before turning to me. “You ready to go?”

  I hesitate for a moment, all the uncertainty that has been building up the last couple of weeks cresting inside me like a wave. “I mean,” I say, and I’m only half kidding, “I don’t actually need the Ivy League, right?”

  “Get out of here,” my dad says, pulling me close with his free hand and dropping a kiss on top of my head. “No time for cold feet.”

  My mom pours the rest of her coffee into a travel mug before ushering me out into the garage and turning on both seat warmers. Theoretically I could drive myself—Providence is only about forty-five minutes away—but I’m happy for the company. I lean my head back against the seat and watch the barren trees out the window, listening to the hum of the college station out of Boston she likes to listen to.

  Eventually we pull off the highway and into downtown Providence, past the big mall and the river and the cute shops and restaurants nestled along Thayer Street.

  “I’m going to go find a Starbucks to read in,” my mom says once she finds a place to pull over near campus, leaning across the gearshift and wrappi
ng me in a lavender-scented hug. “Text me when you’re done.”

  She leans back and looks at me for a moment—tucking a piece of my hair back behind my ear, then smiling. “You nervous?” she asks.

  “Nah,” I lie.

  “Mm-hmm. Just be yourself,” she says—unfooled, clearly, and reaching over to hug me one more time. “If they’re smart, they’ll love you for it.”

  I can’t help but smile as I shut the passenger door behind me: after all, it’s exactly what I told Grace the other night, isn’t it? Just be yourself. Never mind the fact that lately I’m not 100 percent sure who that is.

  I’ve got a little time to kill before I meet my interviewer, so I take a lap around the bustling campus—I do find Beckett Auditorium, and my stomach turns a bit—before taking a seat on the student center steps to wait. I spy a girl in a head scarf with a guitar case strapped to her back and a dopey-looking white guy with an absurd hipster handlebar mustache and two pretty brunettes sharing a green-tea doughnut, their gloved hands intertwined. The best part is the way none of them are gazing back at me with any particular interest, like in this place I could be whoever I want.

  My interviewer is a Brown alum named Kalina who graduated a few years ago but stayed on campus to work in the admissions office; she’s tall and willowy-looking, her dark hair in long dreads down her back. We sit in the café on campus while she asks me about my classes and my extracurriculars, what projects I’d worked on that meant the most to me.

  “I read the piece you sent,” she says, taking a sip of her latte. She’s wearing a bright orange silk blouse and a slouchy pair of wool pants, and I immediately want to be exactly like her when I grow up.

  “‘Rules for Being a Girl.’ I have to tell you, I was really impressed.”

  I smile and duck my head, pleased but not wanting to seem too cocky—which, I think suddenly, is probably something I wouldn’t worry about if I were a guy. I force myself to lift my face again, looking her square in the eye.