The Rise and Fall of a 10th Grade Social Climber

by Lauren Mechling

  The Mortons’ apartment left me speechless, and not in the way I’d anticipated. Sure, it’s probably unreasonable to expect a greenhouse and an apple orchard and a stove the size of Versailles on East Seventy-second Street, but the clutter and chaos of the place looked much more like my mother’s study than any of the “makeover mansions” featured on Margaret Morton’s hit TV show House and Home. The only person there to greet us was the maid, Thelma, who was sitting in the kitchen watching soaps and snacking on cheese curls.

  “I’m not allowed to set foot in here,” Lily said as she creaked the door open to her mom’s study, “but it’s my favorite room in the house.”

  So guess where we decided to hang out? The room was dark and leathery, like a psychiatrist’s office, except, instead of books, the shelves were crammed with videotapes, all of them labeled with the names of the extremely famous people who had given Margaret Morton invaluable entertaining tips, like “Boris Yeltsin’s Favorite Borscht” and “Elizabeth Taylor’s Low-Fat Picnics.” On every surface there were exotic imported flowers, but—unlike on TV—most of them were wilted and half dead, and the water in all the glass vases was a muddy brown. Settling onto a frayed Persian rug that stank of mothballs, Lily and I sipped some nasty-ass liquor that she said her mother reserved for very special occasions. Once we’d settled cozily into the room, we began to talk about guys—or rather, our lack of them.

  “You realize we’re the only ones in the group who don’t get action on a regular basis?” Lily said.

  At first, the bluntness (and accuracy) of the comment depressed me. But then it hit me that Lily had included me in her definition of “the group” automatically, as if I’d always belonged to it. It was maybe the biggest compliment of my life.

  “These things come in waves,” I said, trying to sound as if I believed it. And then: “You know that guy in our World Civ class, Max?”

  Lily nodded. “Yeah, what about him?”

  “Oh, nothing. But isn’t he so cute?”

  And so went our studies. Every half-hour or so, we’d get back to the business of reviewing words for our theatrical vocabulary exam. “Abject,” Lily said, and collapsed onto the rug. We were playing a game similar to “Roxanne,” which Ariel had taught me and Rachel way back when in Texas. Every time I pantomimed a word correctly, Lily gave me a sip of the liquor, and vice-versa. We soon introduced a new rule: If you got a word right you got a sip and if you got a word wrong you had to take two sips.

  In the early evening, we tried to raid the kitchen, but the lichen-covered takeout containers in the Mortons’ fridge made my dad’s meal options look fresh from the farm. We had no choice but to keep drinking and binge on dry fiber cereal.

  To make a long story short, by nine o’clock that night, I was pretty, shall we say, dizzy. Or, as Julia might prefer, vertiginous (picture me spinning around like a toy top, only to collapse onto one of Mrs. Morton’s stained custom-made ottomans). Somehow, I wound up in the back of a long black Town Car that Lily had ordered for me, assuring me that her mother’s account would be charged for the ultra-comfortable ride into the Village. When the car pulled up before my beloved brownstone, I thanked the driver, Bertrand, perhaps overenthusiastically, and implored him to add a 25 percent tip onto the receipt that I signed.

  After turning crazy circles in our entry hall, I squealed with delight when I saw Dad, Sam, and Quinn all squeezed close together on the couch, watching Jezebel. “It’s my men!” I exclaimed. “The Three Musketeers!”

  I was too drunk to wonder—it only occurred to me later: What was Sam doing there, and when had he become so chummy with Quinn? My dad had always liked Sam above all my other friends, ever since we were little kids in the city together, but now they were behaving as if they were the childhood best friends, instead of me and Sam. I know it’s bad karma to be stingy with friendships, but there’s something more than slightly unsettling about suspecting that two of your most prized friends are conspiring behind your back. The last thing I wanted was to be left in the dust.

  But whatever. There are worse things in life than seeing your nearest and dearest getting along so harmoniously. Also, Sam had mentioned that he wasn’t getting along so well with his parents, so it made sense that he’d seek refuge at my pad—who would choose bickering with one’s family over movies and takeout with another person’s family? Come to think of it, I hadn’t laid eyes on either grown-up Geckman since moving to New York.

  Quinn wasn’t particularly slick about looking me up and down. I was enjoying the attention until I realized that he was only checking me out for damage. “You OK, Mimi?” he asked, peering at me like I was a lunatic on the subway.

  I stood there, trying to decide whether or not I should join them on the couch. It was a major Catch-22: If I disappeared they would want to know why; if I sat down, they would smell why.

  Before I had made up my mind, Quinn glanced at his wristwatch and catapulted up. “Mimi, please, have my seat. I have to dash. My friend Fiona’s having her opening tonight, and if I don’t at least make a cameo, my ass is grass.”

  “Who’s Fiona?” I felt a sharp stab of jealousy.

  “A chick I went to college with. No Michelangelo, but a great girl nonetheless.”

  “What’s she opening?”

  “You’re hilarious,” Quinn said, chuckling and patting my shoulder.

  I scowled in a way that I hoped showed that hilarity hadn’t been my aim. Dad seemed as upset as I felt by Quinn’s proposed departure. “You can’t leave!” he protested. “We haven’t even gotten to the red dress scene.”

  “Sorry, no choice. See you early in the a.m., all right?” Quinn zoomed out the door.

  My dad’s face crumpled as it had when Mom dumped him. The poor wonderful man, whose only sin was having loved her too much. I felt a little guilty just then: I had sort of lost sight of my salvation schemes since arriving at Baldwin. Dad had made all these great plans for us—visiting Historic Richmond Village in Staten Island one Saturday; riding the roller coaster at Coney Island; spending a tranquil weekend on the banks of the Hudson—but I had been too swept up in my own social experiment to take him up on any of his offers. I was a bad, selfish daughter: My daddy deserved only the best, and all I ever did was let him down. And, remarkably enough, he never once complained.

  My heart swelled in sympathy, and, forgetting my bourbon breath, I scrambled over to give my Dad a colossal hug. Then, not wanting to leave Sam out, I leaned my neck to the other side. He turned toward me so abruptly that his chin banged into my forehead. What I did next might sound really weird, but right as Sam said “Ow,” I opened my mouth and bit him on the neck. It came as a gut reaction—like something a shark might do during a feeding frenzy. I expected him to jump back, but instead he just remained in place, his neck pressed into my mouth, like in some vampire flick. Totally freaked, I shot back up and pretended to be fascinated by Bette Davis’s argument with her dressmaker.

  A few minutes later, Dad got up to place his daily pizza-delivery order.

  We watched Jezebel in silence, Sam and I both looking straight ahead, until the famous scene when Bette Davis’s red dress scandalizes le tout New Orleans. “Oh, shit!” my dad said suddenly, hitting his forehead with his hand. “My pictures must have been soaking in the fixer solution for about two hours now. Shoot!” He jumped off the couch. “I need to see if I can revive them. I’ll be in the darkroom—call me when the pizza gets here, OK?”

  “Dad, the red dress scene’s only just started!” I called back, but only silence answered me.

  And so it was that Dad left Sam and me in the shadows of the living room, perilously close on the couch.

  Feeling nervous and strange for no apparent reason, I sprang up and grabbed my backpack, into which Lily had inserted a “party treat”: a brown paper lunch bag with a fancy chocolate bar, a pack of gum, and an unsealed Evian bottle containing some of the amber-colored liquid we’d been drinking that afternoon.

  “Want some
?” I positioned myself a few more feet away from Sam and passed the bottle over to him. “It’s totally delish.”

  “Nah, that’s cool,” Sam said.

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah, I’m sure. And I’m also sure that you don’t like that stuff either—there’s no way. It smells nasty. Radioactive.” He took another sniff and made an ugly face. “Gross. Let me try.” He glugged at it, after which his face assumed the disgusted expression of somebody who’s just swallowed an eyeball. “Sha-weet,” he said.

  “Shut up, Sam—what do you know about anything?” I said, reclaiming the bottle. “It might not be your beloved Arabic iced tea, but someone really famous gave this to Margaret Morton, and I happen to think it tastes all right!”

  “Someone really famous, you say?” Sam looked at me sideways and shook his head. “You’ve really started to change, haven’t you? It was just an experiment at first, but your new friends are actually rubbing off on you.”

  “Well, what’s so wrong with that?” I violently shucked off my vintage loafers, which—like all shoes made for women and not professional logrollers—were about half a size too small for me. Rather than think about the blisters sprouting on every toe, I took another sip. “They’re totally cool and they’re really nice to me.”

  “Yeah, it was really nice of them to stand you up last weekend, wasn’t it?” Sam pursued. “You have a conveniently short memory,” he said, reaching down to the floor and pulling my black-and-white notebook from his military backpack.

  “How did you get that?” I snapped, fearing he’d been going through my room before I got home. “Does my dad let you go in my room when I’m out?” I was outraged.

  “Let’s just say Roger’s a man who understands free trade policy. Anyway, why do you care? Doesn’t it belong to both of us? Now,” he said, flipping my ridiculous pseudodiary open, “Wanna hear what you said about that only five days ago?”

  “No, I don’t, thank you very much,” I shot back, but Sam was already reading:

  “Dear Diary, I don’t think there’s anything worse than what Pia did: inviting me out to the Hamptons and then retracting the invitation for no apparent reason. If Mom ever met her, she would definitely say that Pia has a personality disorder: I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone so inconsiderate and ungiving. And bitchy—God is that girl bitchy—she makes Ariel look like Mother Teresa.”

  “Stop it, Sam,” I shrieked, trying to grab the diary out of his hands. “You made me write that, remember? After Central Park?”

  “One minute,” he said. “I’d just like to finish this spectacular passage, if I may. And let me just say,” he looked up at me from behind the diary, “this Coolie notebook contains some truly marvelous prose, Mimi.”

  My stomach was churning like a windmill. “Don’t call it that!” Sam could be a real smug fucker.

  “Now where was I?” he said, gazing back down at the page. “Pia might be a million times more popular than me, but at least I don’t have a mustache. Last week she must have slept through her regular waxing appointment because she was sporting some serious facial hair. Either that or she had a sip of chocolate milk and forgot to use her napkin.”

  “Stop it!” I snatched the book away from him finally. “You’re not supposed to use that stuff against me, especially when the whole stupid thing was your idea. I already explained it—Pia’s going through a lot of rough stuff right now, but she has a heart of gold, she really does. And so do Lily and Vivian—totally. As for Jess,” I said, letting out a low whistle. “Well, Jess just had a pretty big day, so we all had a lot to talk about. It really brought us closer, so I’m willing to leave that whole Hamptons misunderstanding behind me.”

  “Jess had a big day?” Sam broke in. “How so?”

  “I don’t think I should go into details,” I said, taking the remote off the coffee table and aiming it at the TV. “Oh, look what’s on, this one’s so sad!” It was E!’s True Hollywood Story: The Last Days of JFK Jr. “Not that I know what JFK Jr. has to do with Hollywood. Beyond the whole Marilyn Monroe/Daryl Hannah—”

  “Mimi, please don’t change the subject. You’re lying again, I can tell.”

  “I am not lying!” I said, tipping back my Evian bottle to polish off the remaining ounces of backwash. “It is weird that the Kennedys are all so—”

  “I’m not talking about the Kennedys, Mimi, and you know it. What about Jess, huh? You remember the rules: full disclosure . . . or else.”

  Sam grabbed me beneath my armpit, right where I’m most ticklish, which explains why, while John-John prepared for his bar exam, I lost my will and spilled the beans about Jess and the Big V.

  “Everyone’s had sex,” I pointed out.

  Sam’s reaction went all over the place: from riveted to confused to very uncomfortable. I felt strange, leaning so close to him, being tipsy, talking graphically about sex while Carolyn Bessette traipsed across the flat-screen in a series of ball gowns.

  “Mimi, you know as well as I do that that’s a load of crap. This is a big deal. Up till this point I don’t think anybody in our grade has actually gone that far, unless you count what Arthur Gray says happened on his summer abroad program—and it still has to be determined whether or not he made that whole thing up.”

  “Arthur Gray?” I said, “Really?”

  “Mimi, here’s the thing. When somebody in that crowd goes and does something majorly out of control like that, it’s only a matter of days before the rest of the girls at school make sure they’ve caught up. Especially because it’s Jess. She’s the nicest of the group, as you know, and all the lonely girls in school sincerely believe that they’re friends with her, and so they’ll want to have something in common, see what I’m saying? Which means . . .” he trailed off, affecting a smirk. “Soon as word gets around, all the insecure girls in tenth grade are going to be giving it up, hoping they can keep up in Baldwin’s fast waters. In many cases they’ll slink off with seniors and this won’t affect me in the least. But, in at least one or two instances, they’ll be partnering up with—”

  “Guys in the tenth grade.”

  “Bingo.”

  I know this should have repulsed me, but for some reason all this talk about sex made me feel mad at Sam for leaping ahead of me, as if I were jealous of the experience he might obtain in the near future.

  “That’s pathetic if you need such circumstances to get lucky,” I said, trying to sound uninterested and condescending.

  “You’ve got to study your market, Mimi. It would be foolish not to.”

  “Whatever. You’re full of shit,” I said in conclusion, and after that we were just sitting there, millimeters apart, silent and awkward. I gulped, remembering Pia’s policy about experience and experimentation. And just like that I said it, the ghastly, horrible, life-ending thing:

  “I dare you to kiss me.”

  I don’t know why such an insane proposition ever occurred to me. Maybe it was how much I’d drunk at Lily’s, or how lame the “experience” conversation at Torre’s had made me feel that morning. Or maybe it was just how close Sam and I were sitting on the couch. Or maybe, just maybe, I didn’t like the idea of his kissing anybody else.

  And so, possessed by some demon, I said it again: “I double-dare you.”

  Sam gawked at me as if I’d encouraged him to run over a dog with his bicycle. “Whatever,” he shrugged. Then, before I had a chance to recant, he placed his lips against mine.

  And kept them there.

  The next few minutes were simultaneously the most slow-mo and frenzied of my life. I had no idea where to put anything and focused all my attention on not drooling. The lips felt sort of nice when I managed not to think about the person they were attached to. I couldn’t believe that my first-ever kiss was with—no, no, a racing mind never did anyone any good at all.

  We stayed like that for a while, eyes squeezed shut, lips exploring each other’s mouths, noses, eyelids, our tongues lapping and licking while our bodies
remained stuck in freeze-frame for several beats. It was pretty gross.

  But pretty nice, too.

  At some point, the doorbell started to ring, again and again, but the sound seemed to come from another planet. It took the pounding footsteps of my father, the slamming of the front door, and finally the “I hope you’re in the mood for magic mushroom pizza, ’cause I ordered the party size!” to bring me and Sam back to earth.

  By the time Dad swooped into the TV room with a large box and a fresh roll of paper towels, Sam and I were sitting on opposite edges of the sofa, looking anywhere but at each other, wishing we had about a gallon more of Lily’s special potion.

  “Mimi,” my dad said then. “I’ve been thinking—I don’t really know what’s going on in your life these days, so I was thinking—”

  “Nothing, Dad, absolutely nothing is going on in my life!” I kept my eyes fixed straight in front of me, and tried not to hear Sam shift on the other end of the couch.

  “How about we—oh, I don’t know? Go out to dinner sometime, just the two of us? Or take walks. How does that sound—father-daughter walks?”

  “Father-daughter walks,” I said, snuggling close to my father, “sound incredibly nice. Now pass the pepperoni, will you?”

  October 15 (or just about)

  I’m not sure who I’m writing this for, to tell the truth, but since Rachel hardly ever writes me back, this diary’s about my only correspondent, so I might as well keep up the habit. So, it’s been a big week for all the girls, especially Jess, who finally broke the seal with that lout Preston. The next time a guy confesses his eternal love in a crowded nightclub in the company of all his friends, remind me NOT to shack up with him right afterward. My idea of a romantic serenade has always been a little more, um, romantic, but Jess had no complaints about going all the way with Preston. Still, if I had the pick of any guy in school, he’d be pretty low on my list, but like they always say: there’s no accounting for taste. At least my mom left my dad and not vice-versa—otherwise, according to the girls, I might end up like Jess, completely starved for male attention, no matter how lame the male. Sorry to be so bitchy this evening, but, well, let’s just say I’ve had a challenging couple of days and leave it at that.