The Rise and Fall of a 10th Grade Social Climber

by Lauren Mechling

  “What are you talking about?” I said. “At Nona’s party, you made it sound like they were cool—that you were friends with them, or at least wanted to be. What happened, nasty case of jealousy got you down?”

  “That’s it, Mimi, you got it.” Sam shook his head and turned his back to me. “I’m out of here.”

  “Oh, no, you’re not!” Before he could worm his way out, I leaped to my feet, running to the door to block it. “Listen, Sam, and I’ll say this once and only once: Just because a group of people who won’t give you the time of day happen to like me, that does not mean they’re shallow bitches. I’ll give you that they’re popular, that they get into trouble, that they’re intimidating, but you know what? They’re also really kind. So forgive me for hanging out with the only people at Baldwin willing to take me under their wing and be nice to me, because that’s exactly what’s going on here. They accept me for who I am, unlike some people.” I shot him a steely look.

  “It wasn’t supposed to get like this,” Sam sputtered, his face the color of a fire hydrant. “I wish we’d never even made that stupid bet. I wish we hadn’t ever—”

  “I wish we hadn’t either,” I cut Sam off, before he could voice the regrets I myself had been feeling so keenly these past few weeks. “I wish we’d never—done anything.”

  “Well, then why don’t we just call the whole thing off?” Sam asked.

  “Call what off?” I looked at him and realized that we had been talking about two different things.

  “The bet—what else? It’s ruined everything.”

  “The bet. Right. Yeah, definitely, let’s. I’m all for it. Fine.”

  “Fine!” Sam repeated, a bit overexuberantly.

  “Um, great,” I said. I faced him. I was about to ask him if there was anything else, but then I realized I didn’t want to know. “In that case, see you around?”

  Sam winced; his face hardened again. Brushing him off like that had not been the right move, but what could I do? I was, to tell the truth, getting a little sick of his theatrics. I was also having trouble making eye contact with him.

  “See you around,” he growled.

  “Yup.” I moved away from the door. “Buh-bye.”

  Sam took one step forward, but then, rather than grab the doorknob, he took me by the shoulders. I should have fended him off, but instead I found myself falling toward him. The next thing I knew, Sam and I were rolling around my bed, deeply involved in one heavy-duty kissing session. Though I remained pissed off at Sam and worked up about life in general, I have to admit that I was enjoying myself: Each kiss felt like a satisfying whack at a punching bag. Every time I pulled away to glare at him, anger would well right back up in me and I would slam forward again for another angry kiss. With Sam. Beyond weird. And it all seemed as natural as thumb wrestling, or skipping down the street arm and arm. What on earth was happening to my life?

  The two of us tumbled around like that for what seemed like hours, but in retrospect I have no idea how long the make-out session lasted—I was far too delirious to keep track of time. At one point, I rolled onto my side to face Sam. “No, no,” I said when he tried to kiss me for the millionth time, but I was too exhausted to fend him off, so on we snogged. I was emerging from some haze and was determined to set things right. I gripped Sam by the shoulders, hoping to shake some sense into him. That’s the last thing I remember.

  “Mimi.” Sam was shaking me. I had fallen asleep in his arms, clutching his freckled shoulders. “Look at the alarm clock.”

  It was five in the morning. I was a complete failure as a human. I had two hours to be packed and standing in the check-in line at La Guardia. Sam rolled over and dug his face into the pillow while I stuffed every semiclean garment of clothing I could find into the bag I had taken to the Hamptons. Most of the clothes were dirty and nicotine-soaked, but that was the least of my problems that morning. “I’m out of here,” I said to Sam without looking at him. “And FYI, I’m still furious with you.”

  “Yeah, I could tell,” he said. He didn’t lift his head. “But just one thing, before you leave . . .”

  “What is it? I’m running totally late—I’ve gotta get my dad up.”

  “Well, just that maybe you could consider brushing your hair? Right now it’s just screaming F. H. U.”

  “F. H. U.? What’s that, some kind of disease?”

  “Hardly.” He shook his head. “I’ll give you a hint. F is for ‘freshly.’”

  “Sam, no offense, but I don’t have time for word games. I’m on the verge of missing an airplane here.”

  “Fine, Bozo, here’s another hint. H is for ‘hooked’ and U is for ‘up.’ Now are you starting to get it?”

  Ugh. If I had eaten anything the night before, I would certainly have thrown it up on the spot. “Sam, get out of here,” I hissed. “If my dad gets up to find you in my bedroom, your touching little father-son relationship might sour a little. I’m counting down from twenty . . .”

  Well before I had even reached ten, Sam, his own hair a tousled reminder of how he had spent his evening, had sloped quietly out the door. I knocked on my dad’s door. He was in the kitchen within minutes, totally dressed and as good-natured as if he had already finished his third cup of coffee. “I’ll sure miss you, Mimi-bo-bimi,” he said. “It’s been so wonderful having you here with me, really wonderful.”

  I could tell from his trembling tone that he was about to tear up, so I made an additional effort to reassure him. “I know, Dad, it has. And you’d better believe I’ll be back before you know it! Now let’s go get me a cab, OK? We’ll both be in for it if I miss this plane.”

  We found a cab outside in a matter of seconds. “And while I’m gone, Daddy,” I said, as I climbed into the car, “promise that you won’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

  He held up his right hand and laughed. “Mimi, I promise—I don’t think I could if I tried.”

  In the dim light of the taxi, I pulled my powder compact out of my shoulder bag and examined my hair. Even in the murky three-inch area of the mirror, I could tell that Sam had a point. My bangs were matted against my forehead, while the rest of my hair stuck out skyward. Good God. I might as well have hung a JUST BEEN FELT UP sign off my nose.

  Lone Star Lame-O

  I CAN SUM UP MY TRIP TO TEXAS IN two words: “totally” and “sucked.” Stepping off the plane to find my mom racing at me like Old Yeller right before he’s shot, I immediately yearned for my father in our calm, quiet brownstone. What I wouldn’t do to be spending the holiday weekend watching TV with my poor lonesome dad. Having drooled on my sweaty shirt from the airport in Queens to approximately mid-Arkansas, I knew I needed to clean up before encountering my mom. I dragged myself to the economy-class bathroom and splashed nonpotable water over my face. Once fully conscious, I did my best not to think about what had happened the night before, and instead tried to concentrate on the mission at hand: keeping my cool. I closed my eyes, and when I opened them again, we were already taxiing down the runway.

  “Hey! Mimi! Over here!” My mother bellowed, as if I couldn’t see her jumping up and down right in front of me.

  I drew in a deep sigh and braced myself for my mother’s extreme, manic, low-on-meds hyperactivity. From a distance of half a continent, I’d forgotten the whole opposites-attract aspect of my parents’ relationship. Without my mom, my dad would still be working at a one-hour photo lab, and without my dad, my mom would still be revising the four thousandth draft of her dissertation. She motivated; he tranquilized. It worked. Or, I guess, it used to work, until she abandoned him for Texas’s number one hypochondriac. Could I ever get past Mom’s cardinal sin? Did I want to?

  “Well, brava!” Mom started clapping very loudly when I suggested we go straight to the parking lot because I hadn’t checked any bags. “If there’s one thing I’ve taught you in life, it’s never to give your possessions over to the airplanes.”

  “Doubles your travel time,” I muttered beneath my breat
h, in anticipation of her next comment. The fake Nice Daughter smile was applied to my face like a Band-Aid.

  “Doubles your travel time,” my mother said as we proceeded into the parking lot. We found her excessively sensible tan sedan with no difficulty, and my mother was still so proud about my carry-on-luggage foresight (to tell the truth, I hadn’t had time to pack anything more) that she almost forgot to nag me.

  But never for long. When we got to the parking booth, instead of paying the attendant, my mother turned toward me and began fiddling with the collar of the men’s shirt that I had spent my few sentient moments on the plane ride stuffing under my vintage lace sweater just so. “Darling,” she said, “is this what they call the new New York teen look?”

  The woman deserved the Nobel Prize of Annoying.

  “Mom, can’t this wait till after my nap?”

  “Honey, what’s gotten into you?” she said, pumping on the brake.

  “I’m just tired. I said nothing’s wrong—I’m just not in the mood to chitchat about it, as you would say.”

  “‘It’? What’s this ‘it’? If nothing’s wrong, then explain your ‘it’!”

  “Mom, sorry to interrupt this interesting conversation, but there’s a whole huge line of cars behind you. Do you think you could just pay the woman so that we could go?”

  It always boggled my mind when my mom chose to criticize how I dressed. Not only was she the most irritating woman of all time, but she was very probably the least fashionable. Nothing angered me more than her comments about my clothes, which had been much more stylish than hers even when I was in diapers. I found it bizarre to remember that only two days ago I had waved goodbye to the signora—a woman who dressed better for the gym than most celebrities for the Golden Globes. How abruptly I was tossed into the couture tsunami that was my mother. Above her black leggings—just tight enough to remind anyone who cared (and many who didn’t) that she, unlike the signora, didn’t believe in gyms—she was sporting the lamest shirt ever: I WASN’T BORN IN TEXAS BUT I GOT HERE AS FAST AS I COULD, it read, with a cartoon of a large-breasted cowgirl tipping her hat underneath. It was truly the worst. My mother should’ve stayed with my dad, if for no other reason than he would never allow her to leave the house looking like such a complete moron. “That shirt’s really something. Where’d you get it?” I asked.

  “Myrtle just got it for me—don’t you just love it? It’s funny—even though we’ve lived here for a decade now, it’s a different bag of beans cohabiting with natives. They’ve got such state pride! She also brought me an absolutely adorable ‘New Yorkasaurus’ T-shirt. I swear, that girl is too much. Oh, and by the way, I haven’t had a chance to thank you for the great time you showed her up there, Mims! She couldn’t stop talking about all the fun y’all had!”

  What was up with my mom drawling out “y’all” all of a sudden, a regionalism she had staunchly resisted throughout our years together in Texas? Was she morphing into Maurice in his nerdy pseudo-cowboy language, too? This was too much to bear. “So, uh, how’s Ariel? She back yet?” I choked out finally.

  My mother pounded on the steering wheel. “Oh, Ariel, don’t get me started. Still confused and underfed. Since moving to Austin, she’s even started visiting colonic salons, of all the suicidal pastimes!” She said this with a perceptible shudder, as others might say “shooting heroin” or “selling her body on the Internet.” “How on earth did I give birth to a girl who spends all her time trying to incorporate abdominal workouts into her mealtimes?”

  “Can’t wait to see her,” I said with something other than sincerity. “Well, what about Simon?” I asked. “Is he back to normal at least?”

  “Yes, he’s back to eating cat food around the clock. And no abdominal workouts for that one. Every day of the year is fat cat day in his book.”

  “I think fat cats are sexy.”

  “Mimi!”

  For the rest of the ride home, I focused on how happy I would be to see my big orange kitten, and vice versa. If not for Simon, I might never have made it on that plane at all.

  Much to my surprise, when I walked into the house to see an even tubbier Simon curled up on the couch and Ariel doing a shoulder stand in the living room, angled so that she could watch MTV in the inversion, I almost wept with relief.

  “Hey!” I called out to her.

  “Shh!” my sister reproached me. “I could really damage my neck if my jaw moves too much in this position.”

  Nothing had changed after all. I beelined for the couch and buried my face in Simon’s fur. He immediately started purring, my poor, neglected, adipose-laden sweetheart.

  Simon made it almost possible to face Maurice, who wasted no time in telling me more about “ergonomic construction,” his passion for building tables without measuring or using nails. “It’d be the perfect pastime if it weren’t such murder on my lower back. But Doc Rosen assures me that manual labor helps relieve my carpal tunnel.”

  A few hours later, at our “pre-Thanksgiving dinner,” Maurice was still rattling on about the same subject. “It’s the simplest of principles,” he droned over our nondairy stuffing (Maurice, big shocker, was lactose-intolerant). “All you do is eyeball the wood and get a theoretical idea of how it will fit together, and from that point on, it’s all a matter of adjusting your needs to the shape of the objects. Unfortunately, my spinal condition allows me to work on the projects for only a few hours a day.” And so on through the nondairy strawberry cheesecake. “I’m thinking about getting a customized brace.”

  I was having major trouble paying attention. Myrtle looked completely checked out as well. Even my mom, who’d never cooked a day in her life (the kitchen represented an “oppressive parameter of patriarchal society”), kept finding excuses to jump up and refill the pitcher of tea, which no one was drinking, because who wanted to remain awake while Maurice was talking? Ariel was counting out loud how many times she was chewing every bite. She wouldn’t swallow before reaching fifty. “Forty-two. Forty-three. Forty-four.”

  “I’ve lost my appetite,” Ariel announced after she finally swallowed.

  “Pass it on over, then!” Myrtle exclaimed, reaching for Ariel’s almost untouched plate.

  Meanwhile, Maurice was still talking about a bird-watching tour that he was leading through Buffalo Bayou the following week, perhaps in a wheelchair. When Mom pressed Ariel to sample the baked brie, she looked appalled and jumped up from the table. A few minutes later, she reappeared in a black dress no larger than a hand towel.

  “I’m hitting the nail salon—thank God the immigrants keep them open on national holidays.” Ariel grabbed Mom’s car keys off the kitchen counter. “Mimi, you’re coming out with me tonight. I’ll be back in an hour, so get ready.”

  “What? Where are we—”

  The front door slammed shut, and seconds later I heard her little car start up. I was left to get dressed on my own and wonder what lay behind my sister’s sudden hospitality. Ariel had never taken me out with her friends before, but then again I had never had a fake ID before, either. But Ariel had no way of knowing that, and she wasn’t the type to feel guilty for ditching me with Maurice and Myrtle. Maybe it was something else, something new and flattering: Was Ariel finally beginning to acknowledge me as an adult? Ariel had always been slightly cooler than I was in a way that our age gap never fully accounted for, but that afternoon in her room, while she did leg lifts and asked me for my totally and completely honest opinion about which pair of jeans made her ass look hardest (she had like twenty pairs, all identical), I could tell that she was impressed by my big-city weariness, especially after I confessed that hooking up with a guy the night before had cut into my sleep schedule. Though Ariel’s response was limited to “Does this tank top make me look like Moby Dick?” I could still tell she was kind of humbled.

  I have no idea why it took me so long to get ready for a night on the town with my sister, but I found myself frantically pawing through her closet, trying on several combi
nations of tops and bottoms, all of which threatened to cut off my circulation. How bizarre that I shared DNA with a girl with zero appetite.

  Midway through this self-torturing process, I called Rachel and told her to get ready. She, too, was excited, but still tried to lay a guilt trip on me for not making time to see her alone. “I thought we were going to have We Time.” Can I just say, for somebody so self-absorbed, Rachel required an awful lot of one-on-one time. Or maybe that requirement was a direct symptom of her selfishness. Anyway, I managed to get her off the phone only by vowing to ignore everybody else all evening.

  “I promise not to pay anybody else any attention. Scout’s honor,” I said.

  “OK,” she said. “And don’t think I’m not holding you to it.”

  I was still changing outfits when I heard a car honk and my sister’s voice screaming my name. I had on a pair of baggy pinstripe pants (mine) and an embarrassingly snug tank top (Ariel’s). But there was no time to change, so I ran downstairs and hopped into the back seat of her friend Jocelyn’s red Jeep Grand Cherokee. I was seated next to an extremely tan blonde girl who resembled a department store mannequin. Her forehead took up the space of three normal foreheads and her blue eyes seemed in danger of popping right out of her head. She looked like some botched plastic surgery experiment: the kind of girl who all guys found hot, despite her obvious repulsiveness.

  “I promised Rachel we’d bring her, Ari!” I tried not to whine when I noticed that Jocelyn was making straight for the Marquis. “C’mon, it’s only two blocks out of the way.”

  This was not something I could afford to mess up. Rachel and I were still in touch, definitely, but if our unbreakable bond hadn’t exactly broken, it was certainly weakening. We talked on the phone all the time when I first moved to New York, but after about a month our conversations disintegrated into brief weekly check-ins. I sensed that Rachel blamed these lapses on me. And I couldn’t entirely disagree.