The Rise and Fall of a 10th Grade Social Climber

by Lauren Mechling

  “Nothing personal, Mims. It’s just that . . . no, I don’t.”

  I had never been more insulted in my life. “This is unbelievable! You have no idea how cool I’ve become! You don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ll bet some of the biggest dorks at Baldwin come from powerful families with more country houses and tennis club memberships than you can count. But none of that automatically gets them past the velvet ropes. You can’t think I’m so stupid I’d believe that.”

  “Wanna bet?” Sam asked, an obnoxious grin spreading from ear to oversize ear.

  I leaped off the stairs and, thrusting out my arm at him, exclaimed, “As a matter of fact, I do.”

  “It was just a figure of speech,” Sam said, “but all-righty then, if you insist. You really think you’ll score an invitation to spend Christmas break with the cool girls—or, as everyone at Baldwin calls them, the Coolies? No offense, but no way in hell. Nope, I bet that Amanda ends up becoming your best friend and that you’ll never be able to give her the old heave-ho. You’ll spend Christmas locked up in a squash court!”

  “As if.” I never remembered hating him like this in the fourth grade.

  “But wait, what are we betting here, by the way?” Sam pulled his hand away abruptly. “What are the stakes?”

  While I was trying to think up a wager, Amanda and the rest of the squash team blazed into focus. Five blonde ponytails wagged in synchronized horror at Gayle Del Nino’s ritual champagne offering. I felt drunk, headachy, humiliated, confused. “Amanda,” I groaned. “Shit.”

  “You didn’t see her? She and her posse rolled in about fifteen minutes ago.”

  “Oh, no . . . Sam, I totally lied to her about tonight!” The old heave-ho, I was thinking, and then, suddenly, I no longer cared. Amanda might as well know, sooner rather than later, how much I disliked organized sports. An evil idea possessed me, and I was in no condition to reject it. “I bet you Amanda,” I said. “If you win, I have to spend two whole months being her best friend.”

  “Ouch, that’s a little harsh, but OK, fine. And if you win?”

  I rubbed my hands together, an evil scientist at work. “You’ll love this. You’ll have to be her boyfriend for two months. Not that you could get her if your life depended on it. But you have to try. And if she has the good sense to say no, you’ll have to ask her out every day in a place in Baldwin’s hallways where I can overhear it. All of it.”

  Sam’s jaw dropped. “That’s evil!”

  “What’s the problem, Sam—it’s not like I’m going to get invited on the winter break, is it? No way in hell, isn’t that how you put it? I might as well buy a squash racquet now, right?”

  Sam rocked with laughter again. “That’s true, I forgot . . . OK, then, you got yourself a deal.”

  “I already know that I’m going, but if you want to wait until I’m on the beach with them, or wherever it is they go, that’s cool by me.”

  Even as we were shaking hands, I became aware of the massive stupidity of my boast—the ridiculousness of our bet. My mother has always warned me that actions taken in anger lead to our undoing, but I have always had a nasty habit of ignoring my mother’s warnings. Before I could recant, someone pinched my elbow. “Mimi, hey!” It was Amanda, standing with her mouth approximately a millimeter from my eardrum and hollering right into it. It looked as if she was trying to figure out if her feelings should be hurt. “What’s up? I thought you were going to stay in with your dad!”

  “I was—uh, I did—but then, well, he likes to go to sleep right after News Night. Sometimes the issues really bring him down?” I refused to meet her expectant blue eyes.

  “Yeah, I know what you mean.” Amanda pursed her lips in sympathy. “That exposé on the lives of Russian mafia girlfriends was such a total downer, didn’t you think? I, like, practically burst into tears. Wasn’t it so sad?”

  “Yeah, totally. Totally sad.”

  “That’s why we decided to come, too, to boost our spirits! What a relief you made it, too! And how about a high-five, because guess what? Courtney went wild at Key Food and bought all the supplies to make fat-free ice cream sundaes! The girls are in the kitchen. Come on,” she said, tugging at my wrist. As I turned away from Sam, he mouthed something at me and winked. It wasn’t until I entered the kitchen and saw Ivy unloading a bag of fat-free chocolate syrups and low-carb whipped creams that I deciphered Sam’s silent message:

  SOCIAL SUICIDE.

  September 23

  7:43 a.m.

  Dear Diary,

  Dear Diary? (“Dear Sam” is probably more appropriate, but I’m supposed to be keeping a diary, so . . .) Hmm. Is that how you’re supposed to start a diary entry, or is that just the way it happens on low-budget sitcoms? Does anyone even keep a diary in real life? I’m going to have to come up with a better sign-in. Starting off with “Dear Diary” is serious cruising for a bruising—if this notebook lands in the wrong hands, there’s no way its contents will go unread.

  September 23

  7:48 a.m.

  Hi.

  (How’s that? Any better? Not much.)

  What’s up, D-man?

  (Double lame.)

  How’s it hanging, Mr. D?

  (This is embarrassing. I haven’t gotten any sleep and I’m cracking bad jokes for my own benefit.)

  I’m supposed to scribble in here to keep track of my initiation into the Coolie crowd: Sam’s orders. You’d think he could come up with better reading material, but whatever. (Hi, Sam! Nice shirt! Ha!) In a way, I feel less self-conscious about the whole journal-keeping exercise when I know that someone else will be reading it. Just like writing letters, huh? Hmm. Not quite sure where to begin. It’s fair to say I’ve made significant progress. Just twelve hours ago, I was at a Joan Baez sit-in with Tasti D-Dork, and since then I’ve clinked champagne bottles with Albert Del Nino’s wife—not bad for my first twenty-four hours at Baldwin, right? Not that great, either. I now have three months to convince the weirdest, scariest, and coolest girls in New York City that they want me to pin their inner ring. Total cinch, right? Right? Hello? Come on, Dr. D. I need some support.

  The bet itself is a bit of a blur: Sam and I made it last night, at Nona’s bash. Jesus, I can’t believe I’m up so early. Is it possible I only got four hours of sleep? All right. No offense, but I’d better get this diary thing over with, so here goes. After long hours of tossing and turning, I’ve decided that the only way to crack this clique is to be incredibly systematic about everything. Sam agreed (hi again!). So, hmm, plan of attack. I guess my main goal is to remember who the Coolies are. What if there’s another group at Baldwin whose members look like a tribe of apes applied their eye makeup? That could get very confusing. Come to think of it, maybe I should spend this weekend learning how to wear eye makeup. Note to Mimi: Buy something black to smudge all over your face. But first shower. Or not (I doubt any of the Coolies are in the Clean Girl Club). No, first figure out why there’s an open bag of Fritos stuck under your pillow. Or no, even that can wait. Night, night, D-Lover. Or morning, morning. Or morning, night. Whatever.

  Civilization for Beginners

  PROUD TO BE ONE OF THE FIRST PROGRESSIVE schools in America, Baldwin is constantly reviewing its curriculum, hoping to stay one step more progressive than everybody else. They have an antigrading policy, which basically means that if you get a 45 percent on an algebra test, your teacher will pencil “Getting there!” or “Very interesting interpretation!” on your paper. In short, there’s no such thing as failure, only “room for growth.” Sam told me that the teachers’ “year-end reports” resemble those album reviews that spill a thousand adjectives without ever telling you if you should buy it or not.

  Sometime in the early nineties, the school combined the English, history, and fine arts departments with the intention of “debunking the Dead White Man Learning Curve.” As a consequence, most Baldwinites graduate knowing everything about Andy Warhol’s lovers and the best turpentine for thinning out oil
paint but nothing about the difference between Socrates and George Washington. I thought of my mother’s two-books-per-week workload with some gratitude right then.

  Presiding over our World Civ class was a man named Stanley. For a teacher, he was fairly young, in his mid- to late twenties, with a slim build and corn-colored hair that was already starting to thin on top. While his face was pretty nondescript (with the exception of sharp blue eyes that never blinked), his outfit was truly loud: an argyle cardigan, red bow tie, and construction-cone orange chinos. His speaking manner was gentle, sometimes inaudibly so.

  The class’s “agenda” involved our exploring a different “zone” every month (Stanley found the word country offensive). After learning about the zone’s history, poetry, and pottery, the whole class took a field trip to Montague Street to eat at the ethnic restaurant most similar to the featured zone. I was glad that September’s zone was China because I love, love egg rolls.

  “Did the Ming dynasty come before or after the Ting dynasty?” Frank Abrahams called out, interrupting Stanley. (Stanley discouraged hand raising and the feudal ageism it connoted.) Frank, who had been preparing for college entrance exams since the womb, had a different binder for each of his classes and took at least a dozen pages of notes an hour. (There is one in every class, even at the most progressive school in the nation.)

  “Which one came before?” Stanley repeated in his radio therapist murmur. “I’m curious, Frank, why do you bring that up?”

  “I’m just trying to get it straight in my notes?”

  “Do we Baldwinites reduce history to dates?” Stanley scanned the classroom imploringly.

  “Uh,” Frank blushed, “no?”

  “No way,” a kid named Arthur Gray—I remembered him from the orientation meeting—added emphatically. Arthur was sitting next to the hottest guy in the class, a broody arty type named Max Roth.

  “Correct!” Stanley cheered, missing Arthur’s sarcastic eye roll. “Why worry about details when you can concentrate on . . . on? Anybody have an idea?”

  Even I knew that the correct response was “aura,” Stanley’s all-time favorite word, but before Frank could volunteer it, there was a loud clunk in the back of the room—a clunk that had nothing to do with either the Ming or Ting dynasty.

  Turning around, I saw Nona’s dreadlocks dangling like a waterfall over her desk. Vivian began hissing, “Nona! Nona!” so loudly that everyone except Stanley, who could lecture through nuclear fallout, was staring at the most popular girl in the sophomore class. Nona seemed to be unconscious, her face smooshed against the graffitied surface of the desk like a melting scoop of ice cream.

  Lily Morton, a model of efficiency in her Sacramento Kings sweatshirt, yanked at one of Nona’s dreadlocks. Then, receiving no response, she levered herself forward to hoist Nona upright.

  That was when we saw her face. Her beautiful face. But it wasn’t that morning: her skin was drained of all color, and her eyes were bugged open but rolled upward, with only disgusting egg-white blobs showing. Someone screamed. It was Courtney Sisler, second in command to Amanda in the Tasti D-Lite crew.

  “Stanley, Stanley!” She was totally freaking out.

  “Shh!” Lily made a slicing gesture against her throat, but it was too late. Chaos had erupted. Stanley knew something was up.

  “I’m going to get the nurse,” Courtney whined. “Please, can’t I? This girl needs help! I think she overdosed!”

  The rest of the morning was straight out of an emergency room drama, what with the stretcher, the sirens, and the weeping fellow World Civ students. Zora Blanchard even called a “crisis” assembly in the twelfth-floor gym (there was an African dance recital going on in the lobby), where she treated us to an improvised lecture on “communities of healing.”

  The wildest thing happened right after lunch. I’d been hanging out by the school’s entrance, answering the theater crowd’s questions about the drama in World Civ, since none of them got to see it in person. Though it was obvious that none of my interrogators had ever spoken to Nona before, they were all talking about her possessively, even competitively.

  “This summer was particularly hard for her,” one blobby girl observed. “With her parents splitting up and all. And that story they ran in all those magazines—that must’ve been really tough.”

  “My dad saw her in his AA meeting,” contributed a short girl with frizzy orange hair.

  “But tell us,” a kid named Nathan urged me, “is it true that Stanley thought she was dead?”

  “You should have seen Stanley—” I was about to elaborate when a screeching sound silenced me. The instant the white stretch limo squealed to a halt in front of the school, Gayle Del Nino materialized and headed straight for the main entrance. She was wearing a low-cut fringed suede dress that displayed her retired-supermodel calves splendidly, but her skin was drained of all color and it looked as if she’d smeared a marker under her eyes. Probably just waterproof mascara.

  “Hold on,” I said, and ran after Mrs. Del Nino. I had to see what was going on.

  She crossed the main lobby and burst into Zora Blanchard’s office. The door slammed closed just as Mrs. Del Nino began shrieking expletives about Baldwin and the irresponsible nitwits who ran it.

  School let out early after another crisis assembly, leaving Sam and me to analyze the Fall of Nona Del Nino over falafel.

  “Oh, whatever,” Sam scoffed. “She’ll just be locked up in one of those country club rehab centers upstate for a few months, where she’ll get engaged to some recovering sex addict, and then, once the shrink breaks that up, she’ll reemerge just as fucked up, the only difference being that now she goes to an all-girls school on the Upper East Side. It happens all the time at Baldwin, Mims, a classic rite of passage around here. Regular as the changing of the seasons.”

  I was traumatized, but Sam kept insisting that Nona’s breakdown improved my chances with the in crowd: “They have an unexpected opening, so start scheming fast.”

  I thought him heartless to mention our stupid bet when the health of the most powerful girl at Baldwin was in jeopardy.

  “Sam, this is not the time for social scheming. If you were there in World Civ, you’d understand. I’m still totally shaken. In Houston a few years ago, Rachel overdid it on cocktails at a bar mitzvah. She had to go to the hospital, and we all thought she wasn’t going to pull through. But this is something complete—”

  I would have continued if I hadn’t looked across the table to see Sam smirking.

  “Sam, must you always be such a jerk?”

  To tell the truth, over the weekend I’d resolved to call the whole thing off, but right then, with Sam making fun of my distress, I had no choice but to grit my teeth and hold my tongue. The bet was on.

  But Nona’s collapse really had rattled me. Before the World Civ debacle, I’d felt ready to dip my toes into the mysterious waters of Baldwin, but a bona fide drug overdose was beyond my experience. Would I really find no niche at Baldwin—was I fated to pal around with Amanda, whose overdoses were limited to Diet Coke and fat-free marshmallows?

  When I came home from school that day, my missing luggage was waiting inside the entry hall, but I was too traumatized to unpack with any enthusiasm. The next morning in World Civ, my numbness persisted. As Stanley, pretending nothing had gone wrong the day before, lightheartedly impersonated a palm reader to enliven our discussion of Confucius, I felt incredibly sad. I wasn’t the only one to sense a void in the back of the class. Vivian’s eyes were more raccoonlike than usual, and Lily had worn a black sweatshirt. In Creative Writing that afternoon, I saw that Pia and Jess were somberly attired as well.

  “Mimi?” Kim came up to me toward the tail end of this extremely boring inner-selves-exploring session. Though she was approximately eighty-nine years old, Kim was another teacher who rejected “hierarchical dishonesties” by using her first name. “Can I have a word with you after class?”

  “Sure,” I squeaked, crimsoning as
every single person in the class turned to look at me. I had no idea why I was in trouble.

  “Mimi,” Kim whispered after my lucky classmates had filed out, “I just wanted to tell you how much I loved your prized possession essay—so original, comparing your cat to a cheeseburger like that! It was so clever.”

  “Oh, thanks?” I said. Was she joking? I had composed the essay about Simon in exactly twelve minutes the night before, while detailing the Nona episode to Rachel on the phone. “Is that why you wanted to see me?”

  “You have such a voice, Mimi, such a perspective. So, I hope you don’t mind, but I took the liberty of xeroxing your essay and passing it along to Lily Morton, who’s the sophomore editor at the Baldwin Bugle. They’re looking for new underclassman talent, and I thought you’d be absolutely—”

  “You what? You showed that essay—the essay about my cat—to Lily? Lily Morton?” Lily Morton, as in daughter of domestic goddess extraordinaire Margaret Morton? Cool-girl, Nona-intimate, no-nonsense Lily Morton? Lily Morton read my essay in which I compared my cat to a double cheddar cheeseburger—with a pickle on the side, no less? I blinked at the laptop-size amethyst hanging from Kim’s neck and considered all the ways I’d like to strangle her. “Why didn’t you just shoot me?” I muttered.

  “Now, Mimi, no need to be so modest! Embrace your gift of expression—use it, don’t abuse it! Lily liked your essay so much, sweetie, that she asked me to invite you to stop by the newspaper office after school today. Isn’t that wonderful?”

  An hour later, I was standing across a big drafting table from Lily, who looked, if possible, even less glamorous than she had that morning in World Civ. She had a pencil stuck behind her ear and red ink stains all over her fingers.

  “I’m so sorry,” I faltered. “I’ve never been more humiliated in my life. Kim’s a total freak show, and she feels sorry for me because I’m the new girl. I only wrote that stupid essay about my cat and the cheddar because I thought the whole assignment was so stupid . . .”