OK, so he’d made total fun of me. But every cloud has a silver lining: He’d called me Texas.
I was relieved when Lily returned right then. “No, thanks,” she said, when Max offered her the pot. “I’m pretty fond of my gray cells, actually. Listen, guys.” Wiping her nose with her sweatshirt sleeve (Margaret Morton’s daughter?! Up-the-nose drugs? I couldn’t help thinking), Lily looked at Pia and Vivian with a serious expression. “Preston called again and I lost Jess. I think she’s gone. She must have hijacked somebody else’s car service.”
“Talk about determination,” Vivian said.
“Shit,” said Pia. “You think she’s going over there? To his pad?”
“Well,”—Lily consulted her cell again—“you tell me. It’s a quarter to eleven. You think she’s going to the gym?”
Even while the joint continued to circulate, no one looked too happy, not even Viv, who had the cute fake rock star slobbering all over her.
“This is a mess,” Pia declared.
So she said, but pretty soon Mia, with a crowd of performance-artist friends, drifted over to kick off the evening’s next scheduled activity: walking through the desolate streets of Williamsburg and plastering cryptic flyers reading only NECK FACE on street signs and wooden posts and every abandoned storefront we could find. Which, all things considered, wasn’t that boring. I think I even had fun.
I got home around two-thirty. I wanted to watch TV, but not enough to wake Dad, so I settled for logging on. There were some e-mails from porn companies, an offer for a free diploma from an accredited university in Arizona, and an e-mail from Rachel: Mimi, it read, will you please come visit SOON? I’m DYING down here without you. Having a long-distance boyfriend sucks but having a long-distance best friend sucks even harder—
That’s as far as I’d read when an Instant Message from Amanda—electronically known as SqshGrl85—popped up onscreen.
SqshGrl85: Mimi! What’s up!
Fuck me. Would she ever go away? I double-clicked Amanda’s greeting into cyber oblivion and returned to Rachel’s message. The only person who would take your place in our “She Said/She Said” column was Sheila Hero, Rachel wrote. She agrees with everything I ever write and it’s so friggin’ boring people are starting to call her Sheila Zero.
SqshGrl85: U R quite the night owl tonight. What have you been up to?
Again I clicked Amanda out of sight. Back to Rachel. In other news, Aaron Traister has stolen one of his mother’s diamond tennis bracelets and has since disappeared. Some people think he got shipped off to military acad—
SqshGrl85: Listen, R U free next SatRday? Courtney + I are organizing a sailing outing for next weekend.
There was no getting rid of her. I’d have to finish Rachel’s letter some other time.
Mimicita86: Hey there.
SqshGrl85: So, R U in?
Mimicita86: I’m actually going out of town next weekend.
SqshGrl85: Awesome! Where 2?
Mimicita86: Hamptons. Pia’s having some people come out there. Small thing.
SqshGrl85: Glam!
The annoyingness of the word “glam” killed any concern about hurt feelings. (And the pesky “!” didn’t exactly help matters.) Amanda had no right to be mad at me—it wasn’t like it was my party, not that I would’ve invited her if it had been. I had been so overjoyed when Pia had mentioned it a few days before, it was almost embarrassing to recall.
Mimicita86: Glam? More like just old people.
SqshGrl85: Well, I’m still soooo J.
The screen went blank for a moment before the words “That’s J 4 jealous. C U soon XXOX” ended our online chat. I shut my laptop and thought about Amanda. Irritating, definitely, but not stupid. She knew that I’d ditched her and moved to more “glam!” horizons. Well, good. Why should I learn how to restring a squash racquet when I could party with the international jet set?
Give me one good reason.
Colloquium of Cool
THE NEXT WEEK AT SCHOOL PASSED WITHOUT much to write home about. The individual days blurred together, filled with playing hide-and-seek with Amanda (I was always hiding, she was always stalking), staring at Max Roth, making small talk with the Coolies, fine-tuning my next “Texan in Gotham” column for the Bugle, and, believe it or not, doing homework. For the first few weeks, I had dismissed academics at Baldwin as a joke, but even though the assignments were experimental, they were still, alas, assignments. And some of them—like my English assignment to write a personal letter to Gustave Flaubert about my reaction to Madame Bovary—took some serious thought. That, along with my mother’s insistence that I read a book about a former businessman’s spiritual self-discovery in Tibet, made it doubly hard to focus on my weekend in Bridgehampton.
When Saturday morning finally rolled around, I was beyond excited for my trip, which we’d all spent all of lunch on Thursday discussing. I’d already blow-dried my hair and set aside a discreet cosmetics bag. I must’ve logged on like fifty times since returning from school the previous afternoon, but beyond more special offers from Amazon.com and the usual bevy of Viagra alerts, I had No New Messages. Rachel hadn’t even written back to my long, heartwarming reply. Probably too busy with cozying up to Sheila Zero.
I had just closed my laptop yet again when Sam had another case of bad timing and rang our bell unannounced. No sooner had I opened the front door a crack than he stormed into the brownstone bearing fifteen varieties of Middle Eastern appetizers: hummus, baba gannouj, tamarasalata, the works.
“I got grub,” Sam said, shoveling a mega-proportioned glop into his mouth.
“None for me.” I shook my head. “My appetite’s taken a nose-dive.”
“Whatever—you’re always starving, Miss Piglet, and anyway you’ll need extra energy today, because I’m taking you to a special music conference, at the NYU gym.”
He looked so pathetically psyched. I hated to disappoint him, but I was going to turn into a whale if I didn’t watch it. “Sorry, no can do,” I said, going into the bathroom to examine the evenness of yesterday’s application of the self-tanner that Pia had recommended. “I don’t even have time to eat, much less hang out with any zit-faced music nerds—no offense. I was actually on my way out the door.” I squinted. Definitely un peu bronzée, and not in a zoological striped way, either. Pia really did know her products. Too bad I couldn’t afford this one more than once every five years.
“Oh, were you?” Sam said, his face appearing above mine in the mirror. “Whither, if I may be so bold to inquire?”
“Whither? Sam, you are such a loser sometimes.”
I peered at my belly closer, and yuck: my skin color actually resembled Sam’s ginger-colored ’fro much more than Bo Derek’s skin in 10, but maybe it was just the exposed light bulb that was doing such unflattering things to me.
“Yeah, well, what’s your answer, then?”
God, he stressed me out! Instead of answering, I pushed him aside and returned to the kitchen, where I yanked a huge bag of whole-wheat pita from the pantry. This was a situation that demanded some serious snacking.
“Yes? Ahem?” he said, tapping his Nike against our Persian carpet. “Your final answer?”
I ripped my pita into jagged pieces and drove them into the hummus. “I was going to go . . . out of town,” I said, my face stuffed with food. The hummus had red peppers in it—my favorite kind, and the hardest to find.
“Where? To a Tupperware party in Darien with Amanda?”
“What? No, to Bridgehampton, actually. Give that back!” I don’t know why, with a whole huge bag of pitas in front of him, Sam had to steal mine. “What are you doing?” I snapped. “That’s totally unhygienic and canine.”
“Chill, Mimi,” he said, inserting a piece of my pita into his mouth. “Isn’t it a little late in the day to go to Bridge—ah! You mean to the Pazzolini estate? Did you hear that they bought the house next door and demolished it, just because it ruined their view? How absurd is that?”
The absurdity of it almost brought tears to my eyes. It was nearly noon on a Saturday, and Pia hadn’t even called me yet. At first I tried telling myself that she was running late, but at this point, who was I kidding? Was it too late to be awaiting her call? “Yeah, I had heard that, thank you very much. Obviously.”
Sam detected the quaver in my voice, because when I looked up that same evil grin was playing across his features. “Oh—I see! Little Miss Popularity got dissed, did she? The Coolies are catching rays without her, is that it? Ah, yes, come to think of it, I did see Pia’s chauffeur fetching the whole crew yesterday afternoon. What, were you at the school nurse, missed your ride?”
I couldn’t believe that someone I had once called my friend—my best friend—was mocking my obvious, intense distress. It was too much, it was—inhuman. “I did not get dissed.” I thought hard and fast for an excuse, finally coming out with “I had to spend last night with my dad!”
“So what’d they do, invite you and then quote-unquote ‘forget’? Ah, the oldest trick in the book.” He wagged a reproachful finger at me. “Tsk, tsk, Mims, not telling me. You forget—you vowed to tell me every single detail of your path to popularity. How else can I keep my Coolie log? You haven’t written a single word since your NECK FACE exploits last weekend.”
“Whatever—as if you’re keeping a real log! And as if I’ll ever tell you anything ever again, if you’re always going to laugh at me. Honestly.” Hoping to terminate the unpleasant conversation, I popped four large kalamata olives into my mouth like aspirin.
“But, Mims, of course I’m keeping a log. How else can we track your progress?”
I hadn’t realized there were pits until I started choking.
Sam pounded me on the back and a kalamata pit shot toward the terrace, upon which I burst into tears.
“It’s OK, Mims. It’s cool, you’re all right. Danger averted—shh. Here, let me throw them away. Give them to me.” He took the half-masticated olive in his hand and held it there.
“It’s not that,” I said, snuffling, “It’s just that you’re so mean to me, Sam. Did—oh, I am so hungry. I really am hungry,” I said finally, burrowing into a large portion of pita. “You’re so mean, Sam, so mean!”
His face sank to the level of the kitchen island, and Sam became putty. A mere mention of his male insensitivity and Sam cut the crap—he was actually pretty liberated in a way. Before marrying the obnoxious Mr. Geckman and deciding to grow old at Metropolitan Opera benefits, Sam’s mom had been a big women’s rights activist, and she had trained Sam well in respecting the ladies.
An hour later, instead of sipping champagne on the shores of the Atlantic, I found myself trolling through a huge auditorium crammed with “listening booths.” The electronica convention was pretty much as I’d predicted, swarming with bald pariahs in torn undershirts and postal worker pants and huge firing-range headphones, all nodding their heads to some unknown melody. These were people who took their fun very seriously, as if they were going to be tested on it. Everyone in the convention hall looked as if they’d seen more than a few episodes of Star Trek, and I’d bet not a single attendee had ever been on a date.
Not that I had, but still.
Even though I was the only girl there without either dyed or shaved hair, I had to admit that my mood had improved a lot. At least I wasn’t staying in bed, drowning my sorrows in high-fat frozen desserts, my normal modus operandi on days like this one. I even sort of had fun just watching Sam have fun, if that makes any sense. “Hey, listen to this!” he kept crying out, or, “Omigod, look, that’s DJ Quicksand!” By the end of the day he had collected enough neon concert flyers to paper the Holland Tunnel.
The only weird incident occurred at the end of the afternoon, outside the Scrappy Sissy label’s listening booth. “I’ll go into my own,” I said while Sam jammed to the beautiful sounds of arrhythmic screeching.
“No, they’re all full—this one’s special,” he insisted, dragging me inside yet another booth. “Fallen Fauna’s totally indie, and they just got screwed by their biggest act, so they’ve only got this one booth.”
So we entered the booth and stood there, leaning toward each other, sharing the headphones with one ear each. I couldn’t make out any sounds over Sam’s breathing, but I wasn’t complaining: I’d heard enough simulated meows that afternoon to last a lifetime, and at that point I wanted only fresh air and the sweet silence of car horns and sirens. My mind drifted for I don’t know how long, because all of a sudden I realized that the song had ended and we were still just standing there.
“Uh, Sam?” I said, wriggling free of my earphone half. “Hello?”
He jumped as if I’d just thrown water on him, and our foreheads collided. Both of us out of sorts, we struggled to leave the narrow black booth at the same time. As we walked to the door, I noticed that the nine adjacent booths all had big placards reading SCRAPPY SISSY above them. I shrugged. I just totally didn’t understand anything about anybody.
We spent the rest of the afternoon chilling in Central Park. The zoo had already closed, so we settled for buying pretzels and lounging in the Sheep Meadow. Sam had dared me to stuff the entire pretzel, mustard and everything, into my mouth and swallow it in ten seconds while whistling the tune to “Dancing Queen.” I was about to win the dare when I heard “MIMI!!!! Omigod!”
Directly behind an old lady tossing stale bread to a flock of pigeons, who should it be but Amanda? Of course. I knew she played tennis up here every Saturday, but still, Central Park was a huge place: Why did my luck have to be so rotten? She was flailing her arms and bounding straight toward us like a lost child on the beach who has finally found her parents.
“Looks like you’re not so unpopular after all,” Sam snickered, savoring my misery. “Maybe there’s a round-robin tournament you can join.”
I was so annoyed—either by Sam’s sarcasm or Amanda’s existence—that a piece of pretzel caught in the back of my throat. I started to choke for the second time that day.
“Are you OK?” Amanda gasped as Sam began to pound my back again. My, he must be very adept at burping babies.
“Mmm hmm.” I nodded as another cube of pretzel roosted in my throat. I bent over and spat a mouthful of dough onto the ground.
“Hey!” Amanda backed away, careful to keep her pristine sneakers out of range.
“Hey!” the old lady bleated. I thought she was objecting to my public spitting, but when a cluster of pigeons descended at my feet, I realized I’d robbed her of all her companions.
“I thought you were going away this weekend?” Amanda said. “What about the party in the Hamptons? At Pia’s?”
In calmer circumstances, I could have spun a decent excuse, but with Sam and Amanda both staring at me and all the birds skittering around me like demented flying rats, I drew a blank.
“There was a last-minute snag,” I blundered finally. “My dad made me stay at home because, er, he had an unexpected houseguest.” It was so totally obvious that I was improvising, and not all that well, either. “He thought I could show her around,” I added in desperation. “Some girl he photographed for this fashion shoot?”
I hoped that would be enough, but Amanda was still watching me, her face as gray as an earthworm. Sam shot me a look of revulsion, as if he’d never lied in all his life.
“He’s a photographer,” I pressed on. “My dad. It’s his job.”
“Oh yeah,” Amanda said, kicking the ground with the toe of her squeaky-clean tennis shoe. “I think you told me that before.” And then she looked right into my eyes and asked, “So where is she?”
“Where is who?”
“The model? You know, your houseguest?”
“Oh.” I gulped, then pointed randomly toward Columbus Circle. “There.” My trembling finger stopped right on a four-hundred-pound woman in argyle leg warmers. “See her?”
“Wow, she’s a model?” Amanda gaped. “A fashion model?”
“Yeah, for some new, uh, �
��supersize it’ campaign? She’s supposed to look like that, can you believe it? Just think—if we all traded Tasti D-Lite for banana splits, we could also be supermodels!”
“Yuck-o!” Amanda shivered. “That’ll be the day!” She laughed delightedly. She must have really wanted to believe me, because she immediately proceeded to invite me to join the gang that night for a video slumber party.
“Can I come?” Sam said.
“Girls only—but you can bring that, uh, model, Mimi, as long as she promises not to eat my dad’s Spanish serrano!”
“Gee,” I said. “Sounds great, but I told my dad I’d meet up with him. We have to take our houseguest to this, uh, buffet. In Queens.”
Amanda shrugged, then glanced at her watch. “I’d better get running. I was supposed to be at my PSAT tutoring session ten minutes ago.”
She made the universal “call me” sign and started walking away.
“Can we just pretend that didn’t happen?” I asked as Amanda’s blond ponytail bobbed out of sight.
“No.” Sam shook his head. “I would ask you what that was all about, but I don’t need to. Now that you’ve gotten through your nervous breakdown, we might as well talk honestly about this whole deal. Am I to understand that the bet’s off and you’re playing by your own rules? Perhaps you recall that we’re keeping a popularity log?”
“Haven’t we already gone over this, Sam?”
“I was trying to this morning, but unfortunately you started choking. Now, listen to me. We agreed to keep a log, Mimi, so that’s exactly what we’re going to do. But you have to be straight with me.”
“But Sam—”
“Look, Mims, maybe you were right this morning. Maybe this whole bet thing’s stupid and mean. After all, given the way they treated you this weekend, it’s clear that you and the girls have developed a truly meaningful friendship, and I would hate to obstruct your blossoming intimacy in—”
The Rise and Fall of a 10th Grade Social Climber Page 10