“Fine,” Shannon said with a huff as she slipped off her polished black shoes and climbed up on the porcelain sink directly below the bathroom’s security camera. She swiveled the small lens so it aimed at the corner of the mirror, which reflected a harmless view of the stalls rather than the prime real estate in front of the sinks and before the mirror itself. Sadie caught a view up Shannon’s skirt. She was wearing a white G-string underneath her uniform and …
“Oh my God!” blurted Sadie. “Did you give yourself a Brazilian wax?”
“Slut!” giggled Katie. The younger girls standing around them looked down in embarrassment.
Still perched up top, Shannon also unplugged the electronic smoke detector. “The things I do for my friends,” she mumbled.
“Friends,” said Sadie, “are God’s way of apologizing for our families.”
“I get by with a little help from my friends,” said Katie.
“I get high with a little help from my friends,” grinned Shannon as she hopped down to the floor. They looked at Sadie expectantly.
“Gonna try with a little help from my friends,” she deadpanned.
“Why so sad, Sadie?” Katie asked as she passed out Camel Lights. “Must be tough being such a hot little number, hmmm?” She spoke up so the whole bathroom could hear: “Don’t any one of you in here feel sorry for Sadie Sarah Chapman or any girls like her, okay? Oh, don’t worry little ones. You’ll know them when you see them. The boys may think you’re sweet, but girls like Sadie? They’re the ones they humiliate themselves for, the ones they fight over. The rest of us make do with compliments like ‘she’s got a great ass’ or ‘hey, decent set of tits,’ while the Miss Chapmans of the world get the nervous stammers and dinner invitations. You know, the kind in the outside world where the guys actually pay for you? But that’s just fine with me, Sadie, because the rest of us don’t mind having to hang out around the bar until closing time so some hammered guy can offer to take us home and grope us on the doorstep. And then we finally invite him in before giving him the ‘I normally don’t do this’ serenade before proceeding to do whatever ‘this’ is, like it’s the most normal thing in the world. No, I don’t mind it at all that the whole time you were tucked away in bed with your Prince Charming way before last call. At the day’s end, all of this song and dance,” she waved the hand holding her smoldering cigarette in Sadie’s direction, “your perfect face and body, those impeccable Chapman manners of yours—they only get you home maybe two hours before the rest of us on a night out. That’s it girls. Hear me? Two hours of extra sleep. So don’t go and give yourself an eating disorder over her, or whoever ends up being the Sadie Sarah Chapman of your class.”
“Actually, the med cycle makes it physically impossible for us to get eating disorders,” pointed out Shannon.
“I meant figuratively, not literally.”
“When did you get to be such an expert on the real world?” asked Sadie. “You’ve only been to like three bars in your life, Kat.”
“Hey, I’m a specimen. Which means I’m a quick study.”
“I am so going to miss you girls next year,” said Shannon. “There’s no way the girls at college are gonna understand us the same way, you know? It’s almost unfair that we’ve got to leave this place and—”
“Slum around with sorority sisters and outsider guys with nuclear-grade acne?” asked Katie.
“Yeah.”
After a few puffs, they were engulfed in a cloud of blue smoke. Sadie noticed that the younger girls were sticking around, not at all worried about the possibility that they might reek of tobacco afterward and get in trouble. Most of them were too young to really know that the security detail should scare the daylights out of them. Still, history showed they went easy on girls, and while by-the-book Goldsmith probably would not, they were safe because the valedictorian only craved the real challenges, the big fish, older guys like Cooley and his friends. Cooley spent his whole career at Stansbury analyzing the comings and goings of Captain Gibson and the detail, and as a result had gotten away with more than anyone ever thought was possible. Between Guernica and his hotly anticipated returns from illicit trips to the outside world loaded up with coveted black-market swag like cigarettes, candy, and music files, her boyfriend had become something of a local celebrity. He had told her the scary stories about peer reviews and solitary confinement and electroshock treatments, but after Goldsmith won the Selmer-Dubonnet exam that fall, he reasoned that she would never have to see that side of Stansbury. Cooley kept a close eye on the short list of candidates who could be his bête noire for the coming academic year, and out of concern for his girlfriend he had been particularly worried that Camilla 2.0 was going to win. Girls, he explained (with a savvy that she found endearing in a then-seventeen-year-old boy), were always harder on other girls than they were on guys. Cooley—bless his sweet, scrappy heart—didn’t know the half of it.
The younger specimens were still dawdling around, filing their nails and waiting for something to happen, not worried about being tardy or coming off as rude. They probably reasoned that getting a glimpse inside the glamorous world of upperclassmen was worth it. And hey, if the security detail came calling, they could always blame Katie for corrupting their fragile innocence. Sadie might have done the same if hers hadn’t been ruined long ago.
She wasn’t meant to end up at Stansbury. Sadie grew up in the Chapman family townhouse on 61st Street and Fifth Avenue in New York City, the only daughter of Margaret and Martin. While her father was busy making his fortune investing in pharmaceutical companies on Wall Street, her mother raised her to become the next in the family’s long line of blue-blooded debutantes. Unfortunately, Sadie’s fast track to a life of lunching with ladies and sensible marriage took a turn for the worse following nursery school. Her parents placed her name on the waiting list for the prestigious Saint Cecelia’s Elementary School at the right time (that is, six years before she was even born) and Martin Chapman was a known philanthropist who could be relied upon to generously donate to the school’s endowment fund for many years. Sadie’s admissions test scores were even above average, but still the unthinkable occurred. At the tender age of five, she was rejected for the first time. The Chapmans made numerous phone calls and appointments to demand explanations from Saint Cecilia’s admissions officers and even the school’s headmistress, but no one had a single answer that was deemed acceptable. Her father decided that, since they had covered all of the other bases in applying, it must have been her admissions interview.
“Not good in a room,” he fumed to Sadie’s mother over dinner. “Doesn’t matter how pretty the dress was, Madge. The girl’s just not good in a goddamned room.”
“Shhh … Marty! She’s sitting right here! Just because they didn’t accept her doesn’t mean she’s deaf.”
If Sadie was possibly not good in a room during her Saint Cecelia’s interview, she was certainly awful afterward. Her mother got some strings pulled at the Westerly School, where she herself had attended many years ago, and Sadie remembers very well even today that the interview portion of her application was doomed from the start. She spilled orange juice down the front of her Laura Ashley dress with blue flowers (to bring out the color in her eyes, her mother said) at the breakfast table and was so mortified that she neglected to inform Mommy because, at the time, having to change out of her special outfit seemed more terrifying than walking into the biggest meeting of her young life looking and smelling like she was bleeding citrus. Sadie was well aware that her tiny palm was cold and clammy when she shook the interviewer’s hand. It was an older, gray-haired woman named Mrs. Styne who was very thin and wore a tightly pulled back bun. Mrs. Styne discreetly wiped her hand off on her dress after they greeted each other. Young Sadie thought she looked like a pretty lady who had the misfortune of being born into a family of witches. When Sadie sat down in the big leather chair, the cushions hissed and groaned, making an embarrassing farting noise.
“Is something
wrong, Miss Chapman?” asked Mrs. Styne. She gave Sadie a thin, dry smile.
“No, ma’am.”
“Well, let’s get started, shall we? What would you say is your most distinguishing characteristic?”
“I’m bad in a room,” she blurted, not wanting to seem as nervous as she really was. “No matter how pretty the dresses Daddy buys me are, I’m just really bad in a room.”
Silence ensued. Mrs. Styne went through the rest of the interview, asking the perfunctory questions and taking up another twenty minutes, but Sadie knew she was doomed. When the rejection became a reality, her father went on a lengthy tirade about the city’s private schools, raving about how he would spend five times the tuition on the famous (and famously high priced) Stansbury School, just so none of the ornery sons of bitches who ran the academic institutions so popular with his colleagues’ children would benefit. He made a single phone call to the head of the corporation that licensed Stansbury’s AIDS vaccine. Martin Chapman had become something of a finance industry legend back in 2020 when he famously worked his team of twenty-three men for two days straight in an effort to beat out his competitors for the deal. The vaccine was licensed for $2 billion and everyone came away happy and rich. Chapman himself was rumored to have come away with a 3 percent commission and secured Stansbury twice that sum. Three days after he made that phone call, Sadie was packing her bags for the long journey out to the California desert. The prospect of boarding school—even the most elite one on the planet—did not sit well with her. She felt that she had not only been rejected from Saint Cecelia’s and Westerly, but from her own home as well. In fact, her five-year-old brain had already reasoned that Daddy was so ashamed he was willing to spend five times the money on a school just to get rid of her. Sadie privately decided never to get rejected again, in the hopes that one day she could reclaim her rightful place at the dinner table inside the Chapman household at 2 East 61st Street.
It was as if with that resolution her body responded to the challenge. Eventually, anyway. Sadie was not always beautiful. For the majority of her early years she was plagued with so much baby pudge—from the ages of one to approximately eleven, and in spite of the Stansbury cafeteria’s intravenous nutrient diet and the med cycle—that she started to suspect she was simply and unavoidably fat. Then the chubbiness started to melt away and, like a science experiment gone wrong, her legs and arms would just not stop growing, until she started to resemble a bird with a frame elongated to such ludicrous proportions that flying wasn’t really worth the effort anyway. Then her vintage hit its ripe phase: sixteen years and eight months. It was February, and it was the eleventh grade. Less than two years to go at Stansbury and suddenly light started hitting her cheekbones differently. The black and white image of her senior page in the 2036 edition of the yearbook spoke most eloquently: A tousled, tangled sea of honey brown waves pulled back, restrained by some unseen rubber band, resting atop a long forehead with a single brown freckle a half-inch above her clean right eyebrow, off-center but somehow essential. Her blue eyes addressed the camera with the sort of earnest clarity and attention one would offer a lost tourist in a strange land. An army of tan freckles dotted her small nose and cheeks, barely perceptible but obvious; she had never and would never use makeup to cover them, and as a result they rewarded her, always making her seem amused and grave all at once. Like she had seen things in her day, given them the proper names and definitions and, most important, was not scared to see them again. Her lips were also small, but full, the top one just slightly curled upward more than the lower. It was a mouth that said—in this picture anyway—Oh yeah? Just try me. I’m begging you. I dare you. But, really, it was the way the light hit her cheekbones and gathered before rolling downward into two smooth, steep slopes shaped like a V with a barely rounded tip. People in real life, much less high school seniors—even Stansbury specimens—simply did not look this way.
During that same fateful February, Sadie found that when she donned her normal pair of black pumps and knee socks, her legs and feet looked just like the pictures in magazines (she didn’t even have to tighten her muscles and hold them just so). She also learned that she no longer had to contort her body in order to have the mouth-watering figure that became legendary in the halls and boys’ dorm rooms inside the tower. After all the years lived in fear of another round of rejections, the various crushes plagued by unrequited love, failed friendships, and generalized nonacknowledgment of existence on the planet Earth that accompanied aesthetic mediocrity (even by Shannon and Katie, girls who were always pretty, and didn’t allow her into their clique until her looks eclipsed theirs, as if their social lives were governed by the perverse Darwinian notion that if they were not the fairest of them all, they had better stick close to the girl who was, and pray for her leftovers), Sadie had adolescence at her feet. She didn’t quite trust the results of her overnight metamorphosis, half-suspected that it was a temporary state before regression to her old, familiar self; or worse, a step closer on the inevitable journey that ended with adulthood and her mother’s looks.
But that didn’t stop her from systematically rejecting all the guys who sought to win her heart, slowly (but surely, of this she was certain) piecing together something that she—if she had had any prior experience with it—would have recognized as a sense of pride. She knew it seemed like a terrible cliché, the ugly-duckling-turned-swan gleefully relishing the rejection of so many who richly deserved it; but that was not what it was at all. The only thing Sadie despised more than being overlooked—and constantly living in fear of rejection at the hands of another Saint Cecelia’s or Westerly, because everyone and everything had a bit of those schools in them, as far as she was concerned—was the sight of spoiled specimen boys scrambling to cling onto a bandwagon when it rolled through town. She was satisfied with the feeling of all of those new, accepting eyes upon her in progressions, with her freshly minted girlfriends saving a place for her at their table in the cafeteria, with the way that dozens of heads would turn during a casual stroll through the atrium. Although this didn’t completely erase the memory of the previous rejection that plagued her early years, it did make her feel more prepared for the next time she might have to undergo the rigors of application for acceptance from any person, place, or thing.
And then she met William Winston Cooley. Actually made his acquaintance as opposed to merely having some random run-in inside an elevator pod or meds line. Sadie, like everyone else, knew of him. She was one of the specimens present during the Guernica incident freshman year. This was before she had become beautiful and had been quite used to being just another face in the crowd. Cooley had long been something of a phenomenon among the Class of 2036. The older specimens took him under their wings and included him in their inside jokes. He was quiet in progressions but always ready with a sarcastic quip if the occasion arose, and no one else had the spine to spit it out, lending the impression that every time he opened his mouth something charming or witty would spill forth. Even before Guernica, Cooley made waves. Like the time he brought an antiquated game called Spin the Bottle to this repressed school of theirs, a game that was, as everyone knew even back then, just a protracted excuse to provide himself, Bunson, and the rest of the guys the opportunity to say that they’d kissed girls for real, and likewise allowed the girls in question to make the same boasts about them. Spin the Bottle caught on like wildfire, and for about two weeks it seemed as if every specimen in the school was spending more time tracking down bottles and practicing kisses (with tongue, even!) than doing homework. As strange as it sounded, this delinquent orphan somehow ushered in the era of puberty and hormones for a large number of specimens who otherwise would’ve ignored their natural urges entirely. Predictably, the security detail found out about this and outlawed the games, and the headmaster probably gave Cooley the cursory slap on the wrist. But, nonetheless, his peers loved him for shaking things up a bit. And stories like this were what made all of the girls (except for maybe frigid lit
tle Camilla 2.0) hang on his every word and move.
When Cooley rescued Shannon by taking on those thugs outside the museum singlehandedly, Sadie, as well as the rest of the girls, silently reasoned that he did it because he had a crush on her. And although she never said it out loud, it was obvious that Shannon hoped this was true. She started wearing makeup around the tower and encouraged her circle of friends to spend more time with Bunson, Oates, Mancuso and the rest of Cooley’s loyal entourage. It was impossible for Cooley not to have known this, but he never treated her any differently than before, smiling in a friendly manner whenever Shannon tried to initiate eye contact in progressions, politely making small talk in the event that their friends just happened to leave them alone together near the digitized river in the atrium, discreetly excusing himself after a suitable amount of time.
Sadie first spoke with Cooley a few months into the new, physically stunning stage of her existence, around May of 2035 to be precise. She sat alone at a table in the cafeteria doing homework after dinner when he set his tray of food jars and laser syringe down next to her.
“You mind?” he asked, sitting down before she could even answer.
“No,” she replied, feeling a bit nervous. More nervous, anyway, than when any number of other prominent male specimens made similar overtures. His eyes were dark and calm, almost unnervingly so. He sat down in the steel chair and immediately started leaning back on its two rear legs, balancing his weight precariously against the slippery marble tile. The fact that at any moment it could slide out from under him created an aura of spontaneity that was very exotic inside the controlled environs of the tower. Still, she had an aura of her own to maintain, namely that of the unapproachable sort. It was, after all, easier to preempt rejection by enacting it rather than dawdling around waiting for it to find you. “There’s a seat open at Shannon’s table,” she said with a hint of sarcasm, gambling that he might get up and leave, but knowing the chances of him doing so were slim. (At this point Shannon and Katie were still in the process of recruiting her for their social circle.)
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