Snark and Circumstance (Novella)

by Stephanie Wardrop

  “The Pemberley School,” Darien answers for him.

  But Michael keeps his eyes on me when he says, “No. I don’t.”

  We seem to be locked in a creepy version of the elementary school staring contest, holding each other’s gaze until the other one cries “uncle” or something. His mouth twists slightly at the corner; otherwise his face is blank. I don’t know if he is challenging me to ask him why he left Pemberley or if he is inviting me to beg him for all the thrilling details of his first week at Longbourne. Either way, I don’t feel like playing. I just sigh and look away. This experiment is over and I just want to go home and eat some coconut milk ice cream right out of the carton and watch a stupid movie with one of the cats.

  As I am planning an escape, Tori asks to use the bathroom. Willow gives her directions, and then turns to me as Tori departs, saying, “Sooooo . . . Cassie? That’s the sister who’s joined the cheerleading squad, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Well, she certainly seems, um . . . perky.”

  “That’s what you want in a cheerleader, right?” I answer. I can imagine what Willow thinks of my boy-crazy, future-car-show-model sister. Same thing everyone else thinks of her, but no one outside the family has any business thinking it. And I don’t even want to imagine what they think of Leigh. But they’re my sisters, and no one else is allowed to say stuff like this about them.

  Michael asks me suddenly, “What school activities are you involved in, Georgia? Sports? Music? What did you do back in Colorado?”

  I wonder why he’s decided to be Mr. Conversationalist all of a sudden. I take a sip of my drink and say through the chip of ice that wedges between my teeth, “I was a rodeo clown.”

  “Really.” Willow crosses her arms and assesses my party attire. “You look like you should write for that alternative paper the administration is always trying to shut down.”

  “Sick!” Trey enthuses as he plunks some ice cubes in a glass and pours himself something brown.

  “It’s not shutting down. Mr. Mullin is going to be the faculty advisor,” I say. I don’t mention that I am working on an article for the first edition of the semester. There is no reason to let Willow know that she has pegged me so easily.

  “Maybe you should start a local branch of PETA, Georgiana,” Michael says as he rattles the ice in his glass. “I’m sure you could find lots of people who want to make the world a better place for earthworms.”

  “Earthworms?” Darien gasps, nose wrinkling, and Trey cocks his sandy head to the side like a puppy and asks, “You like earthworms? Wow.”

  “Yes. Georgiana likes earthworms. Even dead ones. She—”

  Michael is cut off by a piercing cry and I am so irritated by him that it takes me a second to register that the cry comes from the terrace behind us. Trey, on the other hand, is out of his seat and bolting toward Tori’s crumpled body in an instant, taking the wide stone steps two at a time. Soon I am there, too, beside Trey, leaning over her and looking down at her foot, which is already starting to swell around her sandals.

  “I fell,” she says with a weak laugh. “I’m such a spaz.”

  “Does it hurt?” I ask, but I’m cut off by Michael, who is climbing along the orange-and-rust colored mums over to Tori’s other side as agilely as one of those donkeys that climb along the sides of the Grand Canyon.

  “Don’t move,” he barks. “Don’t try to get up on your own.”

  Tori smiles grimly and nods. I can tell she is holding back tears.

  “Does it hurt bad?” Trey asks.

  “I’ll be okay.”

  “You should definitely have that looked at,” Michael tells her, then turns to Trey and says, “It’s probably a sprain but it could be a fracture. You should get her to the urgent care place in East Longbourne.”

  “Shouldn’t she go to the ER, just to be sure?” I ask.

  “No,” Michael tells me. “You don’t want to go into Netherfield tonight.”

  “Look,” I spit out, “I know everyone in Longbourne acts like going into Netherfield, the big bad city, is like a trip into downtown Kabul, but shouldn’t she see a doctor as soon possible?”

  Michael gives me a look that could curdle milk. “I am not passing judgment on Netherfield. You just don’t want to sit in the ER for hours while they take care of all the gunshot wounds and car accidents first. Or do you, just to prove how much more worldly and enlightened you are than the rest of Longbourne?”

  “Owwww!” Tori wails, which at least turns Michael’s attention from me. He says in a voice that is surprisingly gentle, “Tori, can you wiggle your toes?”

  She gives toe wiggling a brave attempt but winces so hard Trey and Michael nod to each other. Supporting her under her upper arms, the three of us get Tori to the driveway and into Trey’s red convertible. Willow, meanwhile, is apparently still too absorbed in her conversation with Darien below to recognize that one of her guests is injured—or that Trey is leaving his own welcome party.

  “Tell Willow thank you,” Tori insists as Michael closes the car door for her.

  “I should go with you!”

  “You should stay,” Tori tells me. She hands me the keys to Mom’s car through the window and they drive off, leaving me to follow Michael back to the party on the lawn below, where he explains how Trey has taken Tori to see a doctor.

  “Well, why did Trey have to take her?” Willow splutters as I take a wary perch on the end of a lounge chair. Her look says she, too, would have preferred that I had escorted my sister.

  “He wanted to take her,” Michael says. “Her ankle needs to be looked at. Someone had to drive her.” He shrugs one shoulder to demonstrate how incredibly logical and simple the matter is.

  Darien and Willow give me a look that makes me feel guilty, somehow.

  “Where did they go?” Willow demands.

  Michael sighs, sits back on the chaise, and picks up his glass. “To the urgent care clinic on Netherfield Avenue. It’s the only place open besides the ER.”

  But I don’t quite hear them because I am imagining Tori stumbling into the doctor’s office without an insurance card and being turned away, forced to limp out onto the street, destitute and crippled like some waif out of one of those Victorian novels my dad gets so excited about. I don’t know that Tori doesn’t have her insurance card, but what if she doesn’t? What if they take a lot of x-rays and Tori can’t pay? I’m pulled out of my paranoid spiral when Darien asks Michael, “Isn’t your dad home?”

  “Your dad?” I ask Michael. “What does your dad have to do with this?”

  “Because he’s a doctor,” Darien informs me, as if everyone should know this.

  “Is he out of the country again?” Willow asks Michael, and Darien tells me, “Dr. Endicott volunteers with Doctors Beyond Borders.” I don’t know why she is so proud of something someone else’s father does, but she looks at me as if I should chip in to get Michael’s dad a medal.

  “No,” Michael says. “My dad’s in town tonight.”

  I wheel around to face him.

  “So then maybe he could have checked out Tori’s ankle? I mean, wouldn’t that make more sense than having Trey try to find this emergency medical place? He’s only been in town for a few weeks, right?”

  Michael looks at me with something like amusement in his eyes. “In case you didn’t notice, Trey seemed pretty eager to take Tori anywhere.” He looks so superior, so knowing, and Darien and Willow are nodding their heads in agreement with his judgment. Which is YOU DON’T GET IT. YOU DON’T BELONG HERE.

  “Besides, Georgiana,” Willow says, “Do you think Michael’s father should be at your beck and call, just to look at a twisted ankle? He has a life, you know.”

  “You’re right, Willow. I wouldn’t dream of pulling him away from the country club to look at one little old ankle,” I sigh. I know I’m overreacting but I am feeling so foolish and worried and so out of my depth with these people that I fear I might drown on dry land.

&n
bsp; Michael’s eyes narrow to ebony slits and Darien and Willow gape at me, then smile smugly as he speaks.

  “You’ve got this town and everyone in it all figured out, don’t you, Georgia? How clever of you.”

  I brave a look up from the pot of orange mums I’ve focused on to find the three of them standing there like they’re carved in stone, three figures holding up some ancient Temple of Major Disapproval. Then I grab my bag from under an Adirondack chair and say, “It was simple enough, believe me,” as I stomp away. Everyone is watching me—Michael, Willow, and Darien, who clearly never wanted me there in the first place—and even the hacky-sack players seem to have taken a break to watch me spontaneously combust in front of them.

  I practically break the land-speed record getting out of the Harpers’ driveway, but at least the tears don’t come while they can still see me.

  When I get home, I’m glad my mom and dad are out so they won’t ask any questions about why I am home so early, and alone. Tori gets in late and wakes me up as she comes in, sporting a smile and a boot brace on her foot. She tells me she and Trey went for pizza after the doctors had declared the injury a sprain. Then Trey had taken her home, practically carrying her up onto the porch where he kissed her goodnight. I’m sure the moon shone brighter and music swelled in the background as he drove away.

  Tori had managed to fall almost literally into the arms of her Prince Charming—and she hadn’t had to sacrifice a shoe in the process.

  I am pretty sure, however, that Willow and her friends will not be as happy for them as I am.

  And I am even more convinced that Michael loathes me with the quiet kind of intensity you can feel even if you don’t see it. Because in one evening I managed not only to threaten to ruin his lab grade but to insult his father, whom I have obviously never met and is probably a decent person if he does charity work, as well as the town his ancestors wrested from the wilderness. I failed miserably at my attempt to fit in as an even tolerable party guest, and I bombed big time as a psychological clinician.

  But at least Michael remained easy enough to diagnose: narcissistic personality disorder with delusions of grandeur.

  Textbook case.

  I’m in no hurry to see him again, that’s certain.

  Which is why I drop my groceries when he walks into my kitchen the next day.

  Chapter 4: Nobody Likes the Wife of Bath

  The next day, I go to the grocery store myself, which I discover actually has a decent amount of tofu on the shelves and a whole “natural foods” section. So my mom has been holding out on me for a year now, claiming there was no veggie food available except at distant health-food stores, waging some kind of war of attrition, thinking she could starve me into submission. When I get home, planning to veganize her spaghetti-sauce recipe to show everyone that you don’t need crumbled dead cow flesh to make it tasty, I am shocked to find Michael Endicott strolling into my kitchen through the door I had left open for one of the cats. So shocked that I drop the groceries I am putting away. I look like a character from a bad sitcom.

  “Hi, Georgia,” he says from the doorway. “I, uh, came to see if Tori is okay.”

  “Well, she and Trey are in the den.” I know I should be decent enough to turn around and face him, but I’m still embarrassed, so I act like it is extremely important that I pick up these groceries before the earth opens up and swallows them.

  “Oh, Trey is here?” Michael asks as he bends down and picks up some of the stuff that fell out of the canvas bag.

  “Yeah . . . Well, I’m sure you can see that Tori’s fine . . .” I say as I reach up to put some rice noodles into the cupboard, expecting him to recognize that this is his cue to go.

  He doesn’t.

  “‘Gimme Lean Soy Crumbles,’” he reads and the distaste is so evident in his voice that I ignore him. Honestly, you would think I had brought in a bag labeled “Bloody Pig Nostrils”—but if I had, he’d probably ask where we keep the forks.

  “What’s all this for?” he asks when I don’t answer him.

  “To eat, obviously.” I sigh and look at him at last. He has on his usual polo shirt—this one is forest green—but jeans that are actually faded. I guess a trip to my house must count as slumming for him. “I’m writing an article on veganism for The Alt. Because you’re not the only one in this town who thinks a meal isn’t a meal unless it once had a heartbeat.”

  He smirks and leans against the refrigerator.

  “Is that a line from your article? If so, are you trying to convert people or just bludgeon them?”

  I force myself to hold a cup under the faucet without my hand shaking too much. I even manage a sip from it before I say, “Well, you’ve seen that Tori’s just fine so, amusing as I find your ignorant comments about my eating habits, don’t feel you have to stick around here on my account.”

  “Right. Well, I just wanted to make sure Tori was okay. And see if you were still mad at me.” He kind of chuckles at that idea, peels himself off the fridge, and looks at me with one eyebrow crooked in amusement. “I’d better go hunt down some poor, unsuspecting farm animal and wrestle it into submission. Unless someone here has a crossbow I can borrow?”

  “You’re all out of luck,” I inform him, forcing myself to smile at his prodigious wit.

  He walks away, says something to Tori, and a few seconds later I hear the front door close.

  Sitting at the little kitchen table that my mom has covered with home improvement articles and pictures from magazines, I turn a package of dried lentils over and over in my hands, trying not to grit my teeth so hard they break off.

  I don’t know why I let Michael get to me so much. Or why he said he was worried that I was mad at him, when he seems to be perpetually mad at me.

  In AP English class, Ms. Ehrman announces we will have a year-long series of projects that are supposed to “provide historical and social context” for what we are reading. Our first project will be about Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and we need to form groups of three. I know I’m likely to be the odd one out in group formation, and one way to keep that promise to my mom to be more “proactive” is to think ahead and reach out to another odd-girl-out.

  So I turn to the person next to me, a girl named Shondra. I recognize her from gym class last year and I noticed she hadn’t spoken to anyone today as class settled in before the bell rang. I ask Shondra, “Do you want to be in a group together?”

  “Sure,” she says with a nod that makes her myriad braids bounce.

  I grin at Shondra with some relief, and then we both sort of look around at everyone else as they band together.

  Ms. Ehrman waves her arm in the air, setting her silver bracelets jangling, and reminds us that we need to form groups of three.

  “Is there anyone who is not yet in a group?” she’s calling over the chatter and the grating squeals of chairs scraping against the floor tiles as people move together. “Are there any groups with fewer than three people in them?”

  Shondra and I raise our hands sheepishly and Ms. Ehrman says, “Great—that means you can join their group, um, Michael, right? Yes. Perfect!”

  Michael Endicott.

  Perfect indeed.

  I think I groan out loud, and when Michael cranes his neck around to see across the room to where destiny has placed him, he looks as if he has just been given a terminal diagnosis. But he marches over to Shondra and me dutifully, and I introduce them. We have the rest of the period to figure out what sort of background research we will do for our first reading. I know a little about The Canterbury Tales because my dad has taught classes on the early novel, and Chaucer’s as early as it gets. So since somebody has to start things off, I say, “I thought we could look into the role of women in Chaucer’s time.”

  “That sounds good,” Shondra agrees.

  Michael sighs wearily and studies his pen. “Why? There are only three women in all of Canterbury Tales.”

  I’m kind of surprised he knows that much about the
book, but I don’t want to let on. I mean, when I was really little, my dad read me to sleep at naptime with offerings from Alfred, Lord Tennyson; not Goodnight, Moon or Pippi Longstocking. But most people have more normal parents. I guess Michael’s superior prep school education gave him early exposure to the classics.

  “‘Why’ is because there are only three women,” I say. I can feel the bad taste of that garbled sentence on my tongue but I keep going. “We could explain why women would have been excluded from religious pilgrimages.”

  Michael sighs and says in a patient voice, “They were excluded because they were women. Because the church barely tolerated their presence on Sundays, let alone on spiritual quests. I mean, the answer is obvious.”

  I’ll give him this—he knows his Middle Ages.

  “Right, but what exactly were the reasons behind it?” I ask. “Were the reasons political or religious? Political reasons pretending to be religious ones? Why does the Wife of Bath go then?” I drift off because Michael is looking at me steadily, eyebrow cocked, waiting for me to finish so he can set me straight.

  He says, “Did you notice that no one likes the Wife of Bath? No one is happy she is there. Look, are you going to pick ‘backgrounds on women’ for every topic all semester, just because you’re a woman? Because if you are going to be on some kind of feminist crusade for the whole year, let me know while there’s still time to switch groups.” Michael stretches out in his chair, crossing his ankles. He flips a pencil in his fingers as he appraises me.

  “Maybe. Unless I do one on ‘pompous snobholes descended from British colonials.’ Are you available for an interview?”

  Michael’s gaze fixes on my battered, black Chuck Taylor low tops and he smirks again.

  Shondra shakes her head, smoothes out the edge of her turquoise t-shirt, and says, “Maybe we could look for all the black people in the texts. That won’t take long.”

  I laugh and she smiles back at me, but Michael just sighs again. He closes his notebook as if dismissing the whole conversation and says, “She didn’t say we all have to do the same thing. You look at women and I’ll look at the church hierarchy. It is about a religious pilgrimage, after all.”