Furious, I hung up. I even called back, this time as actual Shallon, asking if I could cover it for my Glamour magazine blog.
“Hmm, nope,” said the same gay. “We’re all out of press tickets. You can cover the arrivals if you want.”
I snorted. The arrivals? That meant lurking outside with a recorder, begging to speak to Manhattan’s elite as they sauntered indifferently past. I’d rather eat my kitten.
I called Klo to whine and commiserate.
“Aw, that sucks you can’t go!” she said sympathetically. “We would’ve all had so much fun!”
“Wait,” I said, “who’s ‘we all’?”
“Well, Bob is going because one of his bands is—”
“Are you kidding me right now, Klo?” I fumed. “You’re going and I’m not?!”
I begged and pleaded for her to let me tag along, but her fiancé, Bob, had barely been able to snag her a seat. Seething and bitter, I blamed Klo completely—I’d think of a reason to justify my rage later. She was supposed to be the one hoping to get an invite, not me. She was tall and pretty and stayed thin even though she ate like she was going to the electric chair. Being socially connected was the one thing I had on her and it was slipping through my fingers.
So rather than be the better person and help her pick a dress, I decided to take the low road and get revenge. Sure, I loved her like a sister, but if she was going to deprive me of a glamorous evening with Xavier and not even have the decency to feel bad about it, then I was going to find something to lord over her too.
Swag!
I vowed to amass as much free stuff as I could get my grubby little paws on and rub it all in her face. I would hit up every event this side of the Hudson River until I had a treasure trove of goody-bag loot that would turn her green with envy. But not just any loot—it would have to specifically be stuff that she needed and I didn’t. Klo had four cats (I know, it’s a miracle she’s ever gotten laid, let alone engaged) and loved them like children. She was always volunteering at animal shelters and feeding strays. She even carries a baggie of kibble in her purse at all times in case a mangy kitten wanders into her path. Animals were her weakness and I was prepared to exploit it.
I scoured my list of upcoming parties but couldn’t figure out which ones might have cat stuff in their giveaway bags. So I worked backward. I called the ASPCA, Petco, even Fancy Feast and Whiskas, staying on hold for hours in hopes of finding out if they were sponsoring any events in the near future. Oh, and they were—horrible, unbearable events. But I would go to every one: a cat spay-a-thon in Yonkers? Weehawken’s third annual Guinea Pig Fashion Show? The Meow Mix make-your-own-litter party at a homeless shelter? Bring ’em on! Laughing like a madman, I triumphantly RSVP’d for each wretched fund-raiser I could find, as long as it had an animal theme. And of course, I made sure she knew about it.
“You bitch,” she growled into the phone when I called her from the Your Dog Can Draw! party in Staten Island. It had taken me almost two hours to get there, but I didn’t care.
“Sorry, Kloey, I can’t hear you over all of these adorable barking puppies!” I laughed cruelly as she hung up on me. They say that when you pursue revenge you dig two graves—one for your enemy and one for yourself. I couldn’t speak to the grave thing, but digging certainly seemed correct. I had accumulated so much useless swag in my studio apartment that I could barely get to the bathroom. Each morning required at least fifteen minutes of excavation and rearranging just to reach my coat closest, and don’t even ask what all I’d stuffed into the storage ottoman. With the trillions of condoms I had already squirreled away under my bed, I really didn’t have room for yet another hoarding obsession. I’d even converted the oven into cargo space, jamming it full of newly acquired men’s grooming products that I now refused to give my best friend.
But Klo was a worthy adversary.
“Oh, sorry,” she said when I arrived at her apartment for our weekly sushi and T.J. Maxx shopping date. “Just shove all that stuff out of the way.”
It’s not easy to make her two-story penthouse apartment look cluttered, but everywhere I turned, I was tripping over a swag bag.
“Is this … a case of Butterfingers?” I said incredulously. I loved Butterfingers. “And Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups?!”
“Mmm-hmm.” She smiled, clearly enjoying my brewing tantrum.
“But you’re allergic to nuts!” I yelped. “These should be mine!”
“Well, you’re allergic to cats, but that hasn’t stopped you from stockpiling cat food, now, has it?”
I scowled. I knew we should quit this arms race but I wasn’t ready to capitulate just yet. That’s when Klo upped the ante.
“Wanna go dress shopping with me?” she said casually over lunch. “I need something stunning for Saturday.”
I narrowed my eyes. I could smell a scheme.
“What’s Saturday?”
“Oh, ya know,” she said, tossing her long, dark hair breezily, “just the Rangers’ Casino Night at the Plaza.”
I made a sound that was somewhere between a shrieking goat and a car backfiring. Hockey? At the Plaza?!
“You … you can’t be serious,” I whispered furiously. Monopolizing gift bags was one thing, but going to a party stuffed to the gills with beefy, delicious hockey players was a blitzkrieg attack. I could hog all the cat events I wanted; she still had four at home to play with. But try as I might, I couldn’t find one single NHL star lurking underneath my couch.
“All right, you win,” I announced. “You don’t play fair, but you win.”
“I know.” She grinned triumphantly. “That’s why I always win!”
That night I turned over all my kitty paraphernalia and men’s toiletries and she in turn sent me home with a stack of peanut butter candies and even some Blonde Ambition shampoo that she’d been hiding.
I never did get to go to the Doctors Without Borders benefit, nor did I ever see future-husband Xavier again. But I did learn a few things from my brief cold war with Klo: One is that Bedazzling pooper-scoopers does not a party game make (animal charities, please take note). And two, if you’re going to mess with my best friend, do it in a city without an NHL team.
I Brake for Preppies
My hometown of Irvine, California, is the epitome of suburbia. Nicknamed “the Bubble,” Irvine is a shining example of uninspired urban planning. Each perfectly paved road leads to a mini-mall. Every lawn, tree, and park is impeccably maintained and manicured because it’s the law. The homeowners’ associations decide what color you can paint your house and what kind of front door you can have, and absolutely forbid incendiary propaganda like a VOTE MARGIE FOR PTA PRESIDENT! sign on your lawn.
There isn’t litter or graffiti or homelessness or black people. Instead, there are golden retrievers. Tennis clubs. Swimming pools. Manmade lakes kept at the ideal shade of blue and culs-de-sac brimming with happy, serene, upper-middle-class families.
The rarely used police have an adorable definition of crime and fill the blotter with calamities like THIEF MAKES OFF WITH BOTTLE OF DETERGENT AND FABRIC SOFTENER FROM ALBERTSON’S BEFORE FLEEING IN A MERCEDES and $10 IN CHANGE LIFTED FROM AN UNLOCKED CAR; IPOD AND CDS LEFT UNTOUCHED.
Growing up there, I had always self-identified as a preppy. After all, if Irvine wasn’t straight out of the pages of The Official Preppy Handbook, what was?
But despite my perfectly perfect town, my own homelife was rather alternative. Before having me, Mama had been like pre–Brad Pitt Angelina Jolie—globe-trotting, wild, man-eating, and fiercely independent. But like Brangelina, parenthood had mellowed her, so she moved to Irvine for the first-class school system. Still, she never could fully succumb to the banality of suburban life. When I was little, before she became a nurse, she worked as a flight attendant. So while most Irvine moms were carpooling to soccer practice, she was off chasing Parisian sunsets. My overprotective great-grandmother took care of me while Mama was away and would do things like pack turnips in my lun
ch box and lecture my friends on why poking too much at their belly buttons could kill them.
When Mama was home, we’d engage in all manner of subversive, bohemian activities, like visiting Buddhist temples and seeing jazz shows.
We didn’t even vacation like normal people. Because my mom flew outside the continental U.S. for free, I had visited more third-world countries than I had American states by the time I hit puberty. While other kids were lounging poolside in Palm Springs or Hawaii, I was gagging down malaria pills and trekking around Ecuador, Kenya, Bali, Egypt, Tanzania, the Amazon, and God knows where else. In a lot of ways, it made me compassionate and streetwise. But those traits took a while to ripen. At the time, it just made me skittish and Pavlovian—I associated packing a suitcase with nonpotable water and government coups.
Sure, our trips were exciting, but secretly, I longed for a normal, boring life. I wanted PTA meetings and minivans, not safaris and shawarma. As a teenager I had no real need for rebellion. Why bother being more alternative? I was already the girl with the jet-setting mother, no father, and an unnatural obsession with her cocker spaniel.
So, desperate to blend in, I dressed exclusively in pleated shorts, pastel, and anything caught standing still at the Gap. This dovetailed right into a worrisome Republican phase during junior high—my own personal brand of disobedience—which had my staunchly Democratic family more than a little concerned.
But still, my mom was determined to punk me up, so she took me to visit my godmother, Toni, in San Francisco. Toni announced that I was “square” and dragged me around the city, regaling me with tales of my mom and her as freewheelin’ hippie chicks lookin’ for “ass, grass, or gas.”
“You were looking for gas?” I asked. “What does that even mean?”
“It’s just an expression.” She sighed with exasperation. “C’mon, sister, we need to get you hip!”
Toni and Mama were delighted to prowl Mill Valley’s weed-scented record stores and sip espresso at coffeehouses staffed by real live lesbians, but I, on the other hand, was terrified. I waited in the car with my Rush Limbaugh autobiography.
Sure, San Francisco wasn’t exactly Beirut, but to me the alternative lifestyle I witnessed there was more disturbing than anything I saw abroad, precisely because it wasn’t abroad—it was here. Within driving distance of my home. I had no problem roaming the streets of Egypt after dusk or hitchhiking around Northern Ireland. But in California, the only place I felt safe was Irvine.
This provincial attitude displeased Mama greatly. So in tenth grade, just before the Woodstock-themed Sadie Hawkins dance, she decided to take matters into her own hands—and closet.
“Let me just try dressing you up for the dance,” she said enticingly. “I have a shirt that would be perfect!”
Now, despite being conservative and dorky, I had fallen in with the popular crowd, an enclave of rich, WASPy prepster kids with fleets of Suburbans and summer homes in Tahoe. They all knew each other from kindergarten, and I was one of the few “outsiders” to infiltrate their clique. This dance would be one of my first outings with the Preppy Spice kids (as my artsy friend Ellen called them), and I wanted to impress. Nonetheless, I relented and let my mom dress me; I was hoping I’d win some street cred by wearing clothes that were actually from the sixties.
Let me just say up front that as a fifteen-year-old student council nerd who’d never kissed anyone, I had no idea what a quaalude was. So I couldn’t possibly foresee the controversy of wearing my mom’s “Quaalude Queen” T-shirt to the dance. Given that the Preppy Spice kids were just as straight-edged—after homecoming we made s’mores and played spin the bottle—they didn’t know what a quaalude was, either. But my math teacher sure did. Same with Vice Principal Butell, Coach Cunningham, and Señora Sorey.
“Either the shirt goes or you do,” Coach Cunningham said, glowering, so I spent the rest of the dance in a dusty, XXL “UHS Trojan Football” T-shirt he dug out of his office.
Seething, I called my mom and bitched her out. She thought it was hilarious.
“Honey, this is great!” she cackled on the other end. “You’ll be the coolest girl in school!”
“Wrong,” I hissed, “the coolest girl in school is Elizabeth Link, and she’s a debutante who plays soccer and wears ribbons in her hair. Not T-shirts condoning drug use, Mom.”
Much to my ire, Mama was right—the whole school was buzzing over my quaalude kerfuffle, turning me into a minor celebrity. I began to think that I actually had a shot at ascending the Preppy Spice popularity ladder, and by senior year, I was on prom court and led the student council. Ellen even had an I BRAKE FOR PREPPIES bumper sticker made to commemorate my social victory. I had done it: I had conquered the preps. Not many teenagers can credit quaaludes with helping them dominate high school. At long last, I was ready for a big heaping helping of nonconformity. College was going to be a festival of weird, a myriad of alt-experiences! Ass, grass, or gas!
And it was … for lots of other people. Not me. Nestled in the Northern California countryside, Cal Poly wasn’t exactly a mecca for the unconventional. I’d never seen so many white people in my life. Cowboy hats, Wranglers, and F150s were as ubiquitous at Poly as herpes was at UC Santa Barbara, two hours away.
Okay, I thought, starting to twitch at the thought of four more years spent in neutral colors and silver Tiffany jewelry, I can do this. I triumphed over Preppy Spice, I can triumph over Cal Poly!
But I didn’t want to. I wanted to take pills and pierce things and stay out all night and date dangerous boys! And it wasn’t going to happen, at least not yet. I kicked myself for not taking my mom’s advice and rebelling when I was younger.
So, six years later, after Alex plunged me into a black abyss of depression that sparked my emo revolution, part of me was secretly happy. At long, long last, I could seize dysfunction by the horns and dive headlong into self-destruction.
But after a year and a half of punk shows, black nails, and East Village dive bars, I was getting sick and tired of being sick and tired. Hoodies and skinny jeans were pretty uncomfortable during a sticky Manhattan summer, and guys never wanted to invite the brooding twenty-five-year-old in a My Chemical Romance shirt out to their Hamptons house. And I was over hooking up with wee little emo boys who weighed less than I did—it was like having a lesbian experience. I was ready to date men again—real men.
So when my friend Livingston—“Liv” for short—invited me to her parents’ beach house in Martha’s Vineyard for the Fourth of July, I took it as a sign from God that it was time to return to my preppy roots.
Despite her blue-blood name—Livingston Howland Potter—she and I had met in the least-upper-crust way possible: over the Internet. She had been an Ice Girl (a hockey cheerleader, basically) for the Boston Bruins and had stumbled across my hockey-centric blog one day.
We began corresponding and, each reasonably certain that the other was sane, met up at her place in Boston when I was there hosting a party for Trojan.
“This weekend is going to be so fun,” she told me. “Our house is actually on Chappaquiddick, but we go to Edgartown on the Vineyard at night to drink. You’ll absolutely die when you see all the guys in Nantucket Reds!”
I nodded eagerly but had no idea what she was talking about. Nantucket Reds? I hoped it was a hockey team.
“You don’t know what Nanny Reds are?” my roommate Marcia laughed. “Honey, you’ve been in emo town too long! You need a crash course in prepster.”
“Pffft, I do not,” I said, scoffing. “I grew up preppy.”
Pfeiffer and Marcia smirked.
“East Coast preppy is very different than West Coast preppy,” Pfeiffer explained. “Like, what do you know about boat shoes and needlepoint belts?”
I stared at her blankly. I knew each of those words individually—“boat,” “shoes,” “needlepoint,” “belts”—but as conjunctive items? No clue.
While I had been knee-deep in Warped Tour this and guyliner that, my
roommates had been enjoying a preppy renaissance. They turned to Facebook to illustrate just how much I had to learn.
“Okay,” Pfeiffer said, pulling up a picture of her friend Reyn—short for Reynolds, naturally—in a typically preppy outfit. “Notice the Nanny Red lobster pants and the—”
“Wait, lobster pants?”
“Yeah, they have little lobsters embroidered on them.”
I wrinkled my nose. “Why?”
“You know how black people wear shirts for the teams they like? Well, preppies wear clothes advertising what they like about the ocean—lobsters, sailboats, whales, et cetera.”
“This is a joke, right?”
“No,” Marcia said, “and trust me, you will be tempted to laugh at them, but just try to keep in mind that they’re worth jillions of dollars.”
As I looked at pic after pic of shaggy-haired guys in blue blazers and lank girls in pink and green dresses, I started to panic. This type of prepster was completely foreign to me. This had to be some sort of hoax.
“Yeah, but I strongly doubt Liv’s family is like this,” I said nervously. “Her brother Tripp just graduated from Texas, so—”
“Wait, her brother’s name is Tripp?” Marcia giggled.
“Yeah, I don’t know what it’s short for. Maybe Tripton or something?”
“Um, no, Shallon.” Marcia bit back a laugh. “It means he’s a third. Like, Something Something Potter the third—Tripp as in triple.”
Oh dear. “So then his best friend Quattro would be …?”
“A fourth.”
Oh. Dear. It was becoming clear that my transition back into preppiness would not be a smooth one. Frantic, I called Klo for help.
“Well clearly, you need to lie,” she said. “Just use my life as a template—say you went to the same boarding school that I did, and I’ll even give you some of my old Deerfield sweatshirts, and I have some embroidered belts too!”
But since I couldn’t exactly pair a whale belt with ripped, acid-washed skinny jeans, Klo and I headed to Bloomingdale’s.
Exes and Ohs Page 10