The Rise and Fall of a 10th Grade Social Climber

by Lauren Mechling

“Then you mean we can’t admire your tacky neighbors getting all hot and bothered over C-listers?” Lily rejoined sarcastically. “What is this world coming to?”

  We indulged a collective sigh of despondency. It was the weekend before Thanksgiving, and we all wanted to rock out before holing up with our families for the holiday. I in particular wanted to have the time of my life, since that Monday morning, for the first time since moving to New York, I was going to Texas, where who-knows-what fate awaited me.

  “Harry’s in town,” Lily suggested. “Maybe he knows something?”

  “Harry who? Oh, you mean Blow Job Harry?” Pia grimaced, thinking of the senior with the totally mystifying Don Juan reputation. “Since when has Blow Job Harry known anything? Except, of course, where to find some hopelessly insecure fourth-grader to seduce?”

  “Ew, gross!” Lily screwed up her face. “Pia, why must you be so vivid?”

  “We’d have to be pretty desperate to hang out with Blow Job Harry,” Pia declared.

  “Yeah, it’s not as if any of us would be caught dead with BJH in the city,” Viv agreed.

  “Is there any reason you object to referring to him as just Harry?” Lily cringed. “That’s only his name.”

  Within the hour, Blow Job Harry had shown up at the Pazzolini estate. Out on the third-floor balcony, he busied himself pouring us goblets of delicious red wine as we watched the last soap opera antics in the adjacent backyard. The executive producer and his consort were eating Fudgesicles and playing canasta while we lay out on deck chairs, staying warm under cashmere blankets.

  “So,” Pia said, whipping toward me suddenly with a look that I recognized with a sinking feeling. She was like one of those Jekyll and Hyde drunks on television commercials for rehab centers, evil when intoxicated. “Any progress with What’s-His-Name?”

  “What?” Blood rushed to my cheeks.

  “Oh, you know, your dad’s employee, the one who made out with you so respectfully? Quinn, isn’t it?”

  “Mimi made out with her dad’s employee?” Blow Job Harry assessed me with new interest. He looked like a human carrot. “Excellent.”

  “Yeah, and isn’t he a bit old for you?” Pia pursued.

  “He is not old at all—he’s only twenty-six, and he’s extremely well preserved. Besides,” I told Pia, hoping to duck out of the spotlight, “it’s not as if you’re one to talk. Have you ever so much as held hands with any man under the age of thirty?”

  Lily, as usual, kept Pia at bay. “Well, I for one don’t get the whole older guy hang-up,” she said.

  “That’s just because you don’t know any better,” Pia said.

  The whole Quinn topic had wrecked my late-afternoon mellowness, so I was extremely relieved by the rustling noise from the main guest bedroom behind us. We turned to see a tiny, elegant woman in a houndstooth suit, a slick black bun planted on top of her head.

  Her diminutive appearance did not prepare us for her gargantuan voice. “Pia, come here!” she thundered. “This instant!”

  Pia, as timid as I’d ever seen her, slunk toward the woman she referred to as her “stepbitch,” answering the signora’s barrage of Italian insults in English: “We didn’t take any of the Shiraz! . . .Thanksgiving isn’t for another . . . cellar . . . Chardonnay . . . breadcrumbs . . . I’m not lying . . .” And so forth.

  Edging several awful inches closer to me, Harry grabbed my wrist and hissed some words in the vicinity of my ear, including “crazy” and “psycho.” I tittered uncomfortably and tried to scoot beyond Harry’s grasp, especially after Lily shot me a rock-hard glare, betraying an ugly streak of jealousy. Huh? Could Lily be lusting after Blow Job Harry? My first reaction—bewilderment tinged with pity—faded into a vision of Sam’s tongue poking into my mouth. The only thing grosser than fortifying Blow Job Harry’s reputation was hooking up with the person you played hide-and-seek with when you were three, so I guess I was in no position to judge.

  We frittered away the rest of the afternoon in the basement, playing with the air hockey and table tennis sets. Pia was held hostage the whole time by her stepmother, forced to study every movement of Clay Maraschino, the celebrity chef the signora had summoned to prepare the pre-Thanksgiving grouse. Vivian told me all about the signora’s obsession with teaching Pia how to cook so that she could be married off to some nice viscount within the next five years. The signora totally didn’t get that Clay was white hot, and that Pia was interested only in his abs, not his asparagus.

  Which, by the way, was delicious—the asparagus, I mean. The whole meal was out of control, with about forty dignitary types all assembled around one obscenely long table. It was definitely the most glamorous occasion of my entire life—I’m talking harpsichordists in the corners, candles all over the place, and about six forks lined up at each plate. Annoyingly, the signora had put out seating cards and separated the gang. Lucky Pia was near the head of the table, yukking it up with Clay, who kept prowling the table to see how we were enjoying the meal (though I suspected he was more interested in showing off his form-fitting chef’s jacket, with good reason). Vivian and Jess got to sit next to each other. Only Lily looked even half as lonesome as me, but she at least was seated next to Tom Rubikoff, a totally cute New York Times reporter who had befriended the signora while working at the paper’s Rome bureau.

  My luck paired me with Saolo di Printopolous, an elegant businessman who had flown in from Milan and knew only one word of English: “fantastic.” I thought he was especially enthusiastic until I asked him how long he planned to stay in New York. When he replied, “Fantastic,” I accepted our insurmountable language barrier and turned to the superskinny lady on my left. The place card told me that her name was Fenella von Dix, and she supplied all remaining info. Fenella was a recently divorced, Tribeca-based artist working on a series of paintings that she said “fused renditions of lake life and Eastern typesetting.” The whole time she was talking, all I could think about was how her chin was fused to her collarbone. I swear, I’ve never seen a more nonexistent neck ever. Somewhere between the raw beet soup and salmon roulette, Fenella launched into her third anecdote about a spa she’d traveled halfway across the globe to patronize. It was clear the woman did a lot more jet-setting than typesetting. But surprisingly, Fenella seemed to know who my dad was, and even to like his photographs, so she couldn’t be that hopeless.

  I wish I could say the same about the food. It was very expensive, but also very slimy and alive-tasting. And Clay’s experimental cuisine wouldn’t quit. It kept rolling out of the kitchen, and, for the first time in my life, I found myself seated at a meal with far more courses than I could tackle. By my eighteenth piece of unidentifiable something-or-other, all I could do was poke at it with my lacquered chopstick.

  “Are you going to be here for Thanksgiving?” Fenella asked me.

  “No, I’m due back in Texas. I’ll be visiting my mother.”

  “Oh!” Her taut face lit up, the tendons in her overly tanned forehead straining like guitar strings. “Your parents are divorced? How terrible. Men are such absolute bastards, don’t you find? Rudolph, my God . . .” And off she went, railing on about her “ex,” as if I gave half a shit.

  It always amazes me how 99 percent of people in the world care only about topics that relate to them personally. Some people ask you questions, but it’s so obvious they’re only waiting out your replies so that they can begin babbling about themselves again. Herself recently divorced, Fenella von Neckless was clearly only asking about my dad’s marital troubles so that she could start complaining about her own. I swore to myself never to be this lousy at the art of conversation, even if one day I found myself a single woman with nothing to show for my life but a condo in Park City and an armload of jangly bracelets.

  “When did they get divorced?” Fenella asked, cutting short her monologue abruptly.

  “Separated,” I spat back. Forgive my brusqueness, but I was not ready to start using the D word. “They’re taking a break
.” I don’t know why I didn’t just leave it at that—maybe because I’d glugged enough Shiraz to fill Pia’s indoor swimming pool, or maybe just because I thought that if Fenella felt entitled to air her dirty laundry, then I could indulge a little, too: All’s fair in love and dinner parties or whatever. “I feel bad because I’m leaving my dad all by himself. He says he doesn’t mind, that he’s just going to watch Fritz Lang movies, but I don’t think he’s too thrilled. He hasn’t ever done Thanksgiving by himself ever. I mean ever—and he’s really festive.”

  I looked up, a little guilty, to see if Fenella was paying attention. Was she ever: before I could even lay down my dollhouse-proportioned fish fork (thank God for my Junior League lessons in Texas!), she had thrust her name card into my hand, a telephone number scrawled on it next to her last name. She was wearing, I noticed, large semiprecious rings on at least eight of her fingers.

  “I completely understand,” Fenella said, rubbing her sweater across my forearm. “Have him call me if he wants. I’m around. Busy as hell, but around.”

  “What? But I—”

  “After spending one nightmarish Christmas watching the Food Network and spitting out all the goddamned Godiva chocolates my friends so generously gave me, I’ve resolved never to let the holidays get me down again,” Fenella said, her chin bobbing to merge with her chest. “So now every year I go with a group of my friends to the Brooklyn Academy of Music. It’s very casual—they have reggae music and some decent food. He’s welcome to join. No big deal.”

  “Thanks,” I said, but before I could wonder why a total stranger had offered to babysit my dad, Saolo, the Italian man to my right, grabbed my wrist and interjected an ecstatic “Fantastic!”

  Not Again

  MOST OF THE DELUXE GUESTS AT PIA’S DELUXE house cleared out the morning after the pre-Thanksgiving party, including Pia’s insaniac stepmother, who had to rush back to the city for her private pilates instruction. Left alone, the five of us spent Saturday in dorky bliss, chilling out and doing homework in a den that looked like the Swiss ski lodge in the Audrey Hepburn movie Charade. At first I’d been embarrassed to read To Kill a Mockingbird in public, but I was consoled to discover that the other girls were doing assigned reading as well. (I so easily forget that the endpoint of Baldwin is the Ivy League.)

  For lunch, we scrounged up leftovers from Clay’s feast the night before. Unable to get too excited about cold oily fish products, I came very close to applauding when Lily invaded the Pazzolini freezer and unearthed a microwavable four-cheese pizza for the two of us to split. After lunch we went back to our original positions in the den. Losing myself in my book, I managed to forget where I was and fall completely in love with Atticus Finch (I’ll be the first to admit it: I’m a sucker for wonderful daddies). Vivian, on the other hand, remained restless—“I hate reading,” she sighed about a hundred times—and Jess grew more depressed as the day wore on. She had drunk-dialed Preston after the dinner party, and by six p.m. he still hadn’t called her back.

  Because we were such loyal friends, we decided to cheer Jess up by taking her to some model’s twenty-third birthday party that was held at an agent’s East Hampton spread. Simply because Blow Job Harry had told us about the party, Pia had predicted that it was going to be full of losers. She changed her mind as soon as we walked into the kitchen, where the gorgeous Clay Maraschino was holding court, talking to a group of twiggy blonde women while mixing Tabasco martinis.

  “Oh my God,” Pia gasped. “He’s still in his uniform. Sooo sexy.”

  Vivian and I distracted Jess while Pia loped over to the kitchen and wheedled Clay into whipping up a chocolate molten lava cake for Jess, who still hadn’t heard word from the evil Preston. “You should go eat it with her,” Pia told Clay, then whispered into his ear. A few minutes later, Clay, at Pia’s command, hand-fed Jess his masterpiece—without a spoon! You should have seen Jess licking the brown goop off her lips and sighing with every heavenly bite.

  We had planned to get up early the next morning and make it to the city by noon, but the party didn’t wind down until four a.m., and when at last we all straggled home, we slept like mummies. When we did finally get up, in the early afternoon, we unanimously voted to see a romantic comedy at the local movie theater rather than hit the road. Because I’d lived in Texas, I wasn’t that overwhelmed by the eighteen-screen cineplex in suburbia, but the other girls thought the Hamptons movie theater was as foreign and beautiful as the Taj Mahal. “Didn’t you love how there were no subway vibrations during the show?” sighed Jess, whose spirits had been restored 100 percent by the drunken message Preston had left just before dawn.

  “And the seats!” said Lily. “Wide enough to fit two people.”

  I didn’t make it back to Manhattan until ten on Sunday night. I’d planned on going straight to my room to pack for my trip back to Texas, but my dad had other ideas.

  “Do I hear the Lady of Long Island? Come on in here and give us some love,” he called out. I found him on the living room couch, watching an old detective movie with a silhouette that must have been Quinn the super hunk. All the lights were switched off.

  “What’s going on, Dad?” I asked. My stomach fluttered when the male silhouette turned out to be Sam. What was he doing there? Hadn’t the rules of the game changed since we’d you-know-what?

  Sam had a conniving side, scheming to weasel into the house when he knew I wouldn’t be there, and of course my dad had no idea that anything had happened between me and my ex-best friend. Guys can be really dense.

  “Hey, darlin’,” Sam crooned in a way that could have given away our dark secret.

  I repeat: guys can be really dense.

  “Quinn around?” I blurted out.

  “He’s at his parents’ house for the holiday,” Dad said. “So I’ve been here all by myself all weekend. Sam called a few hours ago, wondering where you were, and I said I didn’t know, as usual, but would he mind playing my surrogate son instead?”

  I knew it: Sam was capitalizing on my father’s feelings of abandonment to stalk me—or whatever. What could I do? Tell my dad I’d sucked face with his favorite substitute child? Not in a million years. Which explains why, when I went over to hug my dad, I decided to keep it cool by giving Sam one, too. Or a sort of hug—when I wrapped my arms around Sam’s neck, I pulled my body back so far that three linebackers could’ve fit between us. I hoped I wouldn’t feel like this with everyone I ever hooked up with.

  “Sorry I’m so late,” I said finally.

  “BMW traffic jam?” Sam asked.

  “Ever consider getting into standup?” I shot back. “You’re a regular riot. Actually, we just got off to a late start. We stayed up really late last night and we didn’t even get to eating breakfast until, like, three.” I paused to open my messenger bag and drew out the place card, which I passed to Dad. “This is your party favor. I met this woman who said you should join her for her Thanksgiving outing this year.” I realized this sounded like a setup, a prospect Dad totally shunned, so I added, “She knows your photography and is a big fan. She’s an artist. Fenella von Dix? Maybe you’ve heard of her?”

  “Maybe,” Dad grunted. He folded the paper and placed it on the side table with extreme care. He was modest, but he’d talk to anyone who had nice things to say about his work. I hoped Fenella would catch on.

  “Fun weekend?” Sam asked, clearing his throat.

  “It was actually really great,” I said, pointedly addressing my dad. “Sometimes being around so many people can be a bit tiring, but we all got along really well. It’s like we have a special rhythm worked out.”

  “So now you’re rhythmic?” Sam groaned.

  “I had a wonderful weekend,” I answered.

  “I was hoping maybe we’d get a chance to hang out before you left,” he said. “Maybe grab some Arabic iced tea or something? That place is open all night.”

  I looked at him incredulously. “Are you serious? You really think I have time to go al
l the way into Brooklyn when I haven’t even begun to pack? Dream on, Geckman.”

  Maybe my tone was a little cold, but it was true that I was completely unprepared to leave for Texas at the crack of dawn. But no sooner had I entered my room and turned on a new hip-hop CD than the door creaked open to reveal one very flustered Sam. He walked straight through the room, brushing past me, and plopped right onto my unmade bed. “We need to talk,” he said.

  I sank into my pistachio-colored armchair and mumbled a very unenthusiastic “So talk.”

  “You really think you know what you’re doing, don’t you?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Running around with the Coolies, having sleepovers with the Coolies? What else, making friendship bracelets with the Coolies? Swapping secrets and lies?”

  I thought of my backne with a secret smile. “Can we stop calling them that? They do have names, you know.”

  “Oh, do they?” This really seemed to tickle Sam. I can’t believe I just thought the word tickle, by the way; Sam totally brings out the dork in me.

  “Yes, as a matter of fact, they do. Look, they’re my friends.” I pronounced the last word with special care.

  “I can’t believe it,” Sam said, shaking his head, his floppy ginger hair going this way and that. “Those are not your friends. The only one of those chicks who’s halfway decent is Vivian, and even she’s a little sketchy by association. I repeat, those are not your friends.”

  “Sam, thanks for stopping by. Is that all?”

  “Rachel’s your friend,” Sam said. “Quinn’s your friend.” I looked down, hoping he wouldn’t be able to tell that the mere mention of the Q word rattled me. “I am your friend.” He let out a long, obnoxious sigh. “Look, this was supposed to be a fun back-to-school prank. This was not supposed to get all touchy-feely. Do you realize how stupid you are, thinking that a group of shallow bitches is actually going to come through for you? There’s no reason why a smart girl like you should be falling for them.” He stood up, clenching his jaw, and said, “This could get really dangerous.”