“Ouch,” Pia glowered. “Hittin’ where it hurts.”
“Pia got a 1580 on her SAT, thank you very much,” Viv boasted. “As a freshman.”
“What about Lily?” I asked. “Isn’t she way higher-ranked than me?”
“Yes, well, duh,” Ulla returned. “That’s precisely why she has her own pages to manage this week—she doesn’t have time to help—do you, Lily?”
“No,” Lily said, “definitely not.”
I saw no other exit. Q.T. with Ulla didn’t strike me as particularly heavenly, to say the least—or not until a vision of Quinn and I flipping through potential cover art possibilities flickered through my head. A full-time distraction could seriously save me right about now.
“Mimi?” Ulla squinted. “Hello?”
“Oh, sorry,” I said, snapping back to reality. “Sure, I’ll do it. When do we start?” I asked my boss.
I soon figured out that Ulla had recruited me not for my photo skills but out of sheer desperation, after the rest of the newspaper staff, Lily included, had flat-out dissed her. Because there were only two pictures running in the entire supplement, I mostly just copyedited, and while spell-checking my classmates’ names wasn’t exactly fun, the busy work did reduce my paranoia.
Ulla and I worked in the newspaper office until nine or ten every night that week, writing headlines for SAT horror stories and reformatting graph comparisons of Ivy League cafeterias (Brown’s wasabi mashed potatoes won hands down, but Princeton had the only decent espresso bar). Whenever I was in a room alone with her, Ulla would babble about her up-and-down relationship with Dr. Atkins while snapping the rubber bands on her braces. I didn’t mind this habit until an aquamarine rubber band landed on #4 of the “Top 10 Reasons You Know You’re Too Old For Baldwin” list that I was proofing.
“Oops,” Ulla said. “Can you pass that back to me? I need it.” My stare must have been mega-bitchy, because Ulla jumped up to retrieve the spit-soaked rubber band herself. “I’m so sorry. It’s for my overbite. See?” She stretched her mouth wide open for my viewing pleasure.
Ulla was inescapable, but I was in no position to complain. Whenever I left Rubber Band Land, even if it was just to go to the bathroom or the cafeteria, I seemed to run smack into Sam. He was everywhere I turned, leaning against lockers, splayed across U-Croft’s carpeted floor, just waiting for the perfect opportunity to ruin my life. Call me paranoid, but mere coincidence doesn’t explain the number of times we crossed paths that week. We never spoke: Sam preferred to glare every time I hurried past.
Late one night, about a week into my ultimate Ulla experience, I found Quinn in Dad’s darkroom, pouring chemicals from a white jug into a basin. “Hi there, lady,” he said. “Just in time to watch me readjust the fixer solution.”
I crept in, holding on to the publicity photo of the Great Walkway at U Penn that I needed him to enlarge. I thought of Max Roth suddenly: just as cute as Quinn, and a million times more age appropriate, and yet somehow less compelling. Or perhaps all those developing solutions were just going to my head.
“Listen,” I said. “I’m working on this photo project at school and I wanted to get your advice about a photograph.”
“Hold on one second.” Quinn turned from me to dilute the toxic liquid with water from a pitcher. “We’re almost done. OK. Where were we?”
“Yeah”—I took a deep breath—“I have this project where I have to pick a picture for the cover and I have this one, but I’m just not sure about the composition,” I said, thrusting the photo out at him. I was nervous, and my hands were unsteady, and so instead of gently handing Quinn the picture I whacked him on the stomach with it, sending him reeling backward, colliding into the chemical trays on the counter behind us.
“Oh my God!” Quinn shrieked, giving a little jump as one of the toxic mixtures splashed all over him. With a dismayed expression, he pulled his raincoat away from his belly button. “I spilled some fixer, damn it, and it’s bleaching my Burberry!”
Within seconds Quinn had vanished, off to bang down the door of the local luxury dry cleaner, while I remained alone and depressed in the darkroom. What was he doing wearing an expensive raincoat in the darkroom in the first place? Oh, well. So much for love under the red safety light.
That night, the girls rescued me from Ulla’s clutches and took me to a house party at Bridgid Krone’s. Brigid was a junior who lived in a brownstone on the Promenade in Brooklyn Heights. The place wasn’t that big, but the Manhattan panorama was thoroughly awesome. Her parents had gone to Argentina for some reason and left her in the care of her twenty-year-old brother, who apparently had been locked away in his bedroom with his girlfriend for the past thirty-six hours.
I was having a decent time chez Bridgid. More than a week had passed since Sam’s threat, and I was beginning to relax, to believe in his essential harmlessness again. He was way too dorky to ruin my life. I had wandered into the master bathroom with my third alcoholic lemonade and was thumbing Bridgid’s stepmother’s copy of InStyle. Suddenly there was a loud pounding on the door.
“Chill out!” I screamed. I flipped the pages faster, searching for the cover story on celebrity abdominal workouts. “I’ll be out of here in a hot sec.”
The banging continued, so I flushed the toilet for dramatic effect. I opened the door to find Lily in hysterical tears. She lunged at me, hugging me so hard I thought I might choke.
A gross senior guy in a beanie hat standing nearby entered the bathroom, grunting, “Don’t piss me off or you’ll get pissed on,” as he pushed us out of the way.
“Classy!” I shouted through the door at him. “Very nice!”
“I just got a call on my cell phone,” Lily sobbed. “They’ve been trying to—my mother—Utrecht—airport—” and she kept talking. The words were impossible to make out. I understood only that something had gone terribly wrong. I hugged her, rubbing the back of her hooded cashmere sweater with the palm of my hand.
Vivian glided over with my coat and, without saying anything, packed Lily and me into a cab. I had no idea what was going on until we were halfway across the Manhattan Bridge and Lily started to make a little sense. Her mother was scheduled to fly to Amsterdam that night to produce a Valentine’s Day special about old world flower arrangements, but en route to La Guardia she suffered a nervous breakdown. Instead of Dutch tulip fields, Margaret Morton ended up in St. Vincent’s psychiatric unit. Once Lily started talking, she seemed unable to stop.
Apparently, Margaret Morton—the world-famous home entertainer I still hadn’t ever met in person—had been more nervous than usual over the past few months. As always in these circumstances, she calmed her nerves by drinking—tons. I found it almost funny that the queen of mint yogurt smoothies and ginger honey peach-ade drank gin and vodka in her off-hours, but Lily sure wasn’t laughing right then. The other night, she told me, she and her father had to block the apartment door after Margaret Morton downed a pitcher of Hanoi martinis and tried to walk out of their Park Avenue building in her bathrobe and furry slippers.
“Lils, I had no idea,” was all I could say. I kept stroking her head and hugging her.
“If the gossip columns find out about any of this,” Lily said, “her career is toast. She’d lose her show, her magazine, her home products—I can’t think of what else.”
“It’s going to be OK,” I promised her. “I’m here for you.”
Once at the hospital, we had trouble finding Lily’s mother—the staff was protecting her like a state secret. Then, after keeping us waiting for eons, the burly receptionist, Tyrone, announced that he didn’t believe that Lily was really related to her mother. “You just don’t look like her,” he said again and again, a real Sherlock Holmes. “Where’s your hedge clippers? He-he.”
“Are you also her daughter?” he asked me after Lily’s identity was finally confirmed.
“No. I’m a friend.”
“Her son?” he said. I realized he had earphones on. “What’s that, a joke? What ki
nd of ride you kids trying to take me on?”
“Why don’t you just go ahead?” I hissed to Lily.
“No. I need you to be here with me. I can’t—”
Her voice cracked, and that was when it hit me. Out of all her friends, Lily had chosen me to help her through this. I shivered, simultaneously moved by the compliment and nauseated by my dishonesty.
After about an hour of trying to be heard over rap music, Lily and I were allowed onto the sixth floor, into the psychiatric unit where Lily’s mom was resting. Tim Something-or-Other, a bald doctor, greeted us in the lounge, where he described Ms. Morton as being in a “sensitive state” and then advised us to wait a few more hours before trying to see her.
Lily’s father sat on the other side of the room from us, reading the Goings on About Town listings in The New Yorker as calmly as if he were on the subway. Lily and I huddled together in silence on the other side of the room. There wasn’t much to say, and besides, we were tired. We must have fallen asleep at some point because all of a sudden Pia, Jess, and Vivian were standing over us, shaking us awake.
“Hi.” I smiled up at them sleepily. “This is like Fort Knox in here. We still haven’t managed to—”
My voice broke off when I saw how Pia’s lip was curled. Something was up.
“Excuse us, Lily,” she said, staring at me the whole time. “We thought we’d bring our friend Lily something,” she snarled, and tossed a ream of sheets at Lily. “Lily, the timing may be inconvenient for you, but we printed this out from the Web.”
Holy shit. I didn’t need to look over and see what the pages said. It was the Coolie Diary. On the Web, of all places.
My day had come. All my fears multiplied by about a million: Sam had posted the diary on his link from the Baldwin Web site. He had actually scanned the diary page for page, so that the printout was in my handwriting. There was no way I could deny ownership. Nothing, nothing, nothing could be worse.
“You guys,” I croaked. “I can explain.”
“I’m sure you can,” Jess growled. “But you couldn’t pay me to listen.”
“And speaking of money, my dad could make seven figures for a lawsuit of this caliber.” Vivian wasn’t looking much nicer. “You’ve libeled us on every possible level.”
“I have two favorite examples,” said Pia. “There’s your October tenth entry, where you describe the ‘interesting Jackson Pollock-like arrangement of moles on Pia’s back.’ That’s very poetic, Mimi—you really do have a flair. And I also liked the one from November twenty-seventh, most of all the part about quote-unquote Pia’s willingness to go to second base with anybody so long as his name rhymes with ‘Draino.’”
“Of course, I would never stoop to suing my friend. I doubt even my dad would,” Viv said.
“So-called.” Jess could hardly even glance in my direction. Her voice was wobbly when at last she started to speak. “How dare you say such obnoxious things about me and Preston? Just because he said ‘I love you’ in a public place does not mean it was for public record! And I’m sorry you think he’s a ‘total boob’ with a ‘subpar IQ.’ I’m sure your taste in men is much more sophisticated!”
To the left of me, Lily was frantically flipping through the pages. Her chin was tilted so far down, I couldn’t make out the expression on her face. Maybe she would hear me out. Or at least that’s what I thought until I heard her, in a flat, dead voice, read out: “The Mortons’ kitchen is as sparkly as on House into Home, but that’s because the only thing the counter’s ever been used for is takeout cartons. Who ever heard of a domestic goddess incapable of boiling water? Margaret Morton’s housekeeping habits make even Dad look good!”
Mr. Morton glanced up from his magazine to shoot me a deadly glare.
“Can I please—can I please tell—?” If only I could speak—if only I could say anything worth hearing. But what defense did I have? How could I possibly excuse my action—or even my existence? I was mute, my throat clogged with cotton balls. I wanted to breathe. I wanted to gag. “It’s not what it looks like,” I managed finally. “You guys are my real friends—I swear you are! I never meant to—”
Lily met my eyes at last, and when she spoke her voice was sweet, steady, lucid. “Mimi,” she began, and I just knew she was ready to hear me out, to compare my little mistake to all the far worse problems in the world, to forgive and forget and wipe the slate—or the Web—clean of my betrayal. “Can I ask you a favor, Mimi?”
“Yes?” I said, relieved beyond belief: Lily had intuition. A heart. She knew that I’d committed all my mistakes—the bet, the diary—long before I’d come to care about her.
“You can ridicule my sweatshirts and sex life all you want—believe me, I’m used to it. All I ask is that you keep my mother out of future publications, all right? Thanks a lot—I’d really appreciate it.” As she turned away, her puffy, tear-striped face displayed the most horrible hurt imaginable. “I think”—she paused to collect her composure, then continued—“I think I’d like to be alone now.”
“Yeah, could you leave, please?” Jess snarled at me.
“There are enough psychopaths on this floor as it is!” Pia couldn’t resist throwing in.
Vivian only narrowed her eyes at me, and that, as they say, was that.
A Tale of Two Mr. Cheeses
THE PREVIOUS WEEK, I’D BEEN SO HUNG UP with worrying about whether my friends would catch wind of the Coolie Diary that I hadn’t even thought about how utterly devastating it would feel when they did.
Now that everything was out in the open, and my dirty parachute pants were hanging out in front of all of Baldwin to dry, I descended into total abject misery. Whatever security I had in life had deflated like a defective air bra.
On Sunday afternoon, twenty-four hours after the confrontation in the hospital, I was sitting at the kitchen table, waiting for Dad to come back from the supermarket with the frozen pizzas I had requested. I didn’t feel brave enough to face even the Ray’s delivery guy. I had tried calling all the girls approximately a gazillion times each, but only once did anybody pick up my call. It had been Pia, who said in a faux-electronic voice, “We’re sorry, but this phone does not accept calls from losers, bitches, or fakes. And you are all of these.” Click. My eyes brimmed with tears, and I gazed despairingly at my saddle necklace, which was gathering dust next to my laptop.
When I heard the front door open and close, I got up and ran down the hall, and—I am embarrassed to admit—screamed, “Mr. Extra Cheese saves the day.”
“I’ve been called Mr. Cheese before, but not in a long time,” somebody replied.
It was Quinn, in a mysterious pair of sunglasses, yummier than ever. And there I was, in baggy jeans and a T-shirt, disheveled and disgusting. My Mr. Cheese witticism hadn’t exactly improved matters.
“Um, how’s your raincoat?” I asked him.
“My raincoat?” Quinn didn’t seem to know what I was talking about. “Oh, that old thing! Fine, fine, good as new, really.”
“That’s a relief,” I said idiotically.
“Isn’t it, though?”
This was my cue to run upstairs and brush some glossing drops through my hair in preparation for the world’s most gratifying consolation scene, but I was too transfixed by Quinn to budge. So, idiotically, I just stood there and watched him as he shucked his radioactive orange messenger bag off his shoulder and examined his delicious reflection in our hallway mirror. My mother would call my fixation on Quinn a sort of “transference” from the various other agonies afflicting my life.
I just stood there, watching Quinn watch himself, both of us slack-jawed as we stared.
“Mimi,” he said, turning to me and pulling his aviator sunglasses up until they rested on the top of his head. “Can you tell me something?”
Sure, I could tell him quite a few things. How about the fun fact that I had ruined my life in order to fine-tune my kissing skills?
“Uh, sure.” I tried not to look too long at him.
“Do you see something different about me?” Quinn leaned in nose-to-nose close to me. “My eyes? Do they look different?” I don’t know how this was possible, but he brought his face even closer to mine. So close that it would be safe to say that the airspace between us was no thicker than a grain of rice. “I took these drops,” he said. “I think I’m getting an infection from the darkroom, and I’m afraid I look drugged out and freaky.”
“You,” I said, my tongue tripping over the simplest words in the English language. “Look. Perfect.”
I was so worked up, I didn’t even bother to pull away far enough to see Quinn’s expression. I felt like I was going to fall over. Come to think of it, I hadn’t eaten since Friday night. Which is my excuse for my next, unplanned move: lurching forward convulsively and planting my lips directly onto Quinn’s rosy mouth.
But Quinn didn’t kiss me back. No, instead of the passionate response I deserved, he squealed, “Mimi!” He drew away. “You’re barking up the wrong tree there, girl.”
I took a step back, mortified and astonished.
“You don’t dig me? Am I too young or—” You know everything they say about desperation bringing out the utter, inner fool in you? It’s true. Trust me. I have evidence.
“I totally dig you,” he grinned. “But, well, not as much as I dig boys.”
Boys! I knew he was arty and fashionable, but who in New York isn’t?
“But I,” I started. “I. . .”
And then it all came back to me: The two-hundred-dollar jeans. The obsession with back-up bands. The resolution to hit the gym after every slice of pizza. Pia’s repeated avowals. My stubborn refusal to listen. My absolute heinous incomparable idiocy.
“It’s OK,” Quinn said. “It’s not the first time it’s happened. Hardly. I’m flattered, Mimi—you’re such a hottie! You’re the queen of pubescence!”
He gave me a quick, not particularly comforting hug, squeezed me, and let me go. Then, checking me off his list, he resumed squinting in the mirror. “You’re such a little diva,” he said, pulling down his lower lids with his pinkies, so as not to damage the delicate eye tissue. “What you need is a nice straight boy who can do all those things nice straight boys are supposed to do for their girlfriends. You know, like take you to the drugstore for sodas and to the drive-in for heavy petting. What about that Sam kid?”
The Rise and Fall of a 10th Grade Social Climber Page 21