“Now there’s a thought,” I said just as the door popped open to reveal Dad and three overflowing grocery bags.
“Anybody order pizza?” Dad said, looking happier than I’d seen him since the breakup, which irritated me somehow. It didn’t seem right, that Dad should get a new lease on life just as I lost mine.
“Mr. Cheese,” said Quinn. And, with a sly wink, he added, “Mr. Cheese saves the day.”
Prozac, Anyone?
THERE’S ONLY SO FAR A BOX OF MAGNOLIA cupcakes and a stack of back issues of beauty magazines can do for a ruined existence. If you’re a pathetic, lonely pimple of a tenth-grader, taking the “What’s Your Kissing Style?” multiple choice quiz on some random Web site can only depress you more. I spent both days after the sudden termination of my entire life staggering around the apartment, alternating between numbness and sobs. Sunday night Dad knocked on my door. “I just invited Quinn, Judy, and Judy over for Indian takeout,” he said in a gentle voice. “How many samosas do you want?”
“I’m so not hungry,” I said from under my covers. Dining with a pair of overweight lesbians in homespun wools was bad enough, but Quinn—I couldn’t take it. If I had set out to ruin my life, I couldn’t have covered more bases.
“We can invite your friends, too, if you want!”
Wrong again: now I’d really covered them all.
“No, thanks.”
“You have to eat, Mims,” my dad insisted. “I refuse to let you get all Karen Carpenter on me.”
“Not to worry,” I pushed myself up and pointed across the floor to an empty box of cupcakes, then whimpered: “Can’t you just bring me a plate? I’m feeling antisocial.”
“I guess. You sure?”
“Sure.”
Once he was gone, I felt even lonelier and wished he would at least try to make me sit at the table with them.
You would think that with time, Dad’s single-parenting style would have hardened, grown a little more parental, but his extreme wishy-washiness remained the framework of our domestic constitution. I kind of wished he’d be slightly more normal, but I doubted he would ever develop a taste for discipline, at least not before my semester-end reports arrived. Still, right now I wouldn’t mind if he proposed a father-daughter walk again. This time, I’d definitely take him up on it.
Back from a long weekend in Guatemala, Judy and Judy were exceptionally garrulous—and loud. Because the laughter from the dining room upstairs was making me sick, I cranked up my MP3 player really loud and listened to Massive Attack with appreciation. But not even music helped, or not music that Sam had introduced me to. I rolled off the bed to turn the speaker’s volume knob all the way to the left. Off.
Off.
Why couldn’t I do that to my life, too? Without actually, you know, doing that to my life?
I looked at my electric alarm clock, hoping it would be late enough to disappear into sleep, but it was still only 9:18, exactly four minutes later than it was at 9:14, the last time I checked. But 9:18 was at least late enough to bury myself under my covers and fake sleep. Mom had told me once that pretending to sleep often led to the real thing. Wrong again. It took only about ten fake snores to remember that faking sleep is one of the least relaxing activities short of a root canal.
I shot out of bed and grabbed the cordless. It was 9:19, time to get things off my chest.
I started with Rachel. We hadn’t spoken since Thanksgiving.
“Mimi?” She couldn’t have sounded more taken aback if I’d been calling from the Afterlife. “What’s up, girlie?”
I wasn’t strong enough to confess that I’d turned into a monster, so I just said, “Just chillin’.”
Long silence.
“Oh. Can I call you back?”
“Why?”
“It’s lame, I know, but I taped the news this week and I didn’t get a chance to see it all weekend. I’ve been getting really into world affairs.”
“But Rachel, I—”
“What’s up? Is everything OK?”
“Yeah, I guess. Sure. Sorry to interrupt with my personal affairs. Later.”
Next up on my list was Amanda, who was apparently as forgiving as she was persistent. Since the broadcast of my shame, she never changed her behavior toward me, and maybe even became a little nicer when she saw how alone I was. When I called, she invited me to go ice-skating at Rockefeller Center, and I accepted eagerly. Friendship with the Squash Girls wasn’t sounding so terrible these days.
As a large object, like a mattress or boulder, settled in my solar plexus, I knew whom I had to call next: Sam. I actually sort of missed him, or at least I missed the pre-Hannibal Lecter/Benedict Arnold Sam. Over the last few days of utter isolation, rather than get angry at Sam for betraying me, I felt sorry for him instead, thinking about how much getting dumped must hurt. More important, if Sam had gotten me into this mess, maybe he could be a rocket scientist and get me out of it. Or, at least, be somebody to hang out with now that I wasn’t sure there was anybody else around to do that.
Sam, unlike me, was not pining away in bed, daydreaming about his funeral. No, he was with his friend Dave at CBGBs, that rock-and-roll club featured in all those nostalgic TV specials about seventies bands. Sam must have been standing inside a speaker, it was so loud. Background noise on the phone usually annoys me, but that night it cut out all those awful throat-clearing, heavy-breathing pauses.
“What are you guys doing there?” I shouted.
“WHAT?!”
“WHAT ARE YOU DOING THERE?”
“I’m at a trunk show!”
“A trunk show?”
“Hold on, Mimi.” The sounds were changing and Sam kept saying “Excuse me.”
“OK, I’m all ears,” he said, audibly at last. “I’m outside. Dave and I are at a punk show. This band we’re sorta into, the Suckoffs, are going on in a couple of minutes, but, uh, that doesn’t really matter. Sorry.”
I was startled by how clear his voice sounded. It was almost as if he was sitting there with me, stretched across my pinstriped sheets, his shoulders—Ack! Why did my mind have to keep returning to That Incident?
“Mimi, I . . . I—” Sam’s voice quavered. I could tell this was difficult for him, and I was glad. “I’ve been wanting to call you so much, but every time I pick up the phone, I chicken out.”
“Why’s that?” I said, trying to keep the anger level in my voice high. “To get more secrets for the sequel?”
“Come on, Mimi, you know why. To apologize. I can’t say I didn’t mean to do what I did, because, well, I did it and all, but when I, you know . . .”
“When you what?” No reason to make it easy on him.
“When I posted the diary on the Web, I thought it would only be a temporary thing, that nobody could get access to it without a password. It didn’t occur to me that Tilda and the hacker crew could crack it so quickly. I’m sorry. I never thought anything like this would ever happen, I swear. Please believe me, Mimi.”
“If you’re so sorry, Sam, why didn’t you tell me that before?”
“Because I know how you are. I knew you’d eat me alive.”
I took in a breath. “Yeah, and you’d deserve it, too. Do you realize what this has meant for me and my life? My nonlife?”
“Of course. And I wasn’t trying to sabotage anything, I swear. I just wanted to give you a scare, but putting it up on the Web was a lapse in judgment.”
“A lapse in judgment? That’s like saying Baldwin’s kind of weird.”
“OK. More than that. A five-alarm, double-whammy, triple-decker lapse in judgment. Look, I’ll be the first to admit it: I’m a jerk. A fool. A human mistake. I’m, I’m so sorry. I mi—” He stopped short. “I miss you, Mimi.”
I didn’t say a word.
“And there’s more,” Sam said. “You know how I was giving you a hard time for having poor taste in girls to hang out with?”
“Yes. You called them phony bitches. Godless lushes, too, if I remember corr
ectly.”
“Right. That. Well . . .”
“Well? Well, what?”
“I take it back.”
This was not anything close to what I expected.
“Huh?”
“You should see them. I didn’t realize how much you mean to them. They swung by a party at Don Hill’s last night, and they seemed so sort of lost without you—seriously. I know they put on a front, huffing and puffing in front of you, probably giving you nasty looks, but when you’re not around they look all beaten and depressed, worse than after Nona left. It’s like without you they don’t even know how to have fun.”
“Whatever.” Sam had a tendency to go too far.
“No, Mims, I’m not joking. Pia was so bummed that she probably only had like three sips of her whiskey sour last night.”
It was the first time that he had called me Mims since—since the shoulders and the night I refused to think about. “Well, that’s just great! Thanks to this disaster, Pia’s given up drinking and I’ve started doing it alone. Awesome. You’ve really dug yourself a hole, Sam, and groveling on the phone isn’t going to fix it.”
A sound pierced the background, a male voice screaming, “Go home, will you! My curfew’s not till eleven!”
“Oh my God,” Sam said. “I’m sitting outside the club and there’s this kid whose parents followed him down here in their Lincoln Town Car.”
There was a knock on my door, and my father’s voice called out, “Mimi? You sure you don’t want to eat with us? There are a couple of mighty fine samosas bearing your name!”
“Leave me alone, Dad,” I answered without opening the door. “I’m never eating again.” I then returned my attention to the phone. “Don’t try changing the subject on me, Sam,” I warned him. “It won’t work.”
“Look, Mimi, I know this whole thing was partly my fault. I was talking to Vivian the other day and—”
“Partly? You’re the one who came up with the bet!”
“I know, I know, but I think I can help you out, OK? Will you let me? Just leave it up to me.”
Leaving things up to Sam was never the best idea, but at that point I saw no alternative. It boiled down to leaving things up to Sam or leaving New York.
“You’d better not mess up this time,” I said. “And this does not mean you’re forgiven.”
“I can stay focused. So long as you don’t even think about kissing me, baring your stomach, anything. You hear me, missy? No distractions allowed, you understand?”
“I’ll wear a burka. And pick my nose a lot. But you’d better get me out of this.”
“It’s a deal,” he said.
“Leave me alone! I already did my homework!” the kid in the background cried.
And I couldn’t hold it in: I let out a little giggle. This kid was killing me. Maybe I could handle some saag paneer and the Judys’ tales of Guatemalan macramé conventions. Just as I was thinking this, there was a knock on my door.
“Dad, I told you—” I began, but when the door opened it was Judy #2 who appeared bearing a tray of scrumptious samosas.
“Mimi, will this persuade you?” she asked, coming across the room with a tray of food.
I nodded and smiled at her. “You’re right,” I said, and followed her up to the kitchen. Food was the only friend I had left, so I’d better not abandon it.
Confessions of a Tenth-Grade Social Climber
THE NEXT MONDAY, I DECIDED TO ACT. I was in the Undercroft bathroom, in the same handicapped stall where the Coolies and I had once toasted, when I heard Vivian’s smoker’s voice. A chorus of three more voices, all achingly familiar, followed. Did they know I was in there? I couldn’t help wondering—I was wearing my red cowgirl boots, which poked out of even that supersize stall. As soon as I heard what they were saying, I stopped caring: I was too hurt, too hurt and numb.
Vivian spoke first. “How psyched are you for the trip? It’s going to be amazing.”
“But isn’t it kind of weird,” Jess asked, “to give our credit card numbers to Leila like that? I mean, we hardly know her. What if she goes on the Internet or something?”
“Oh, Jess, chill—what’s she going to do, subscribe us to some kiddie porn service?” Pia, who else?
“Yeah,” Vivian said. “How else is she going to book our tickets and keep it a surprise? If it makes you feel uncomfortable, Jess, we can charge the whole trip to my dad’s platinum card. He’ll never notice.”
“Neither would mine,” Pia said. “Now that I’m paying for my own clothes, I realize that he has never looked at a single statement—I should’ve gone the honest route years ago!”
Next I heard Lily sigh. “Too bad,” she said. “It’s usually five girls, but Nona’s not going to get out of Misty Acres soon enough,” she said after a moment.
“Not as if she’d be allowed to go anyway,” Pia said. “I hear they eat their breakfast cereal with the local rum down there. Not exactly the doctor’s orders.”
“Too bad. Do you have any idea where it could be?”
“My sister’s never breathed a word,” Vivian said, “but I have this feeling that it’s not a tropical island like we all seem to assume. We could be going to some small town in Nevada or New Jersey, for all we know.”
“Then how come they always come back with major tans, year after year?” This from Jess, the perpetually tan.
“They do have tanning booths in Jersey, you know,” said Pia. “Could be some big hoax.”
“It’d better not be,” Lily said. “I did not spend three hours on the Internet shopping for a flattering one-piece for nothing.”
Silence. Was it possible they suspected I was there? But how? Still—their conversation was so scripted and stilted and fake. It made sense only as a ploy to get me to feel even worse about myself. And, I admit, it worked.
I was trying to figure out ways to sneak out the building through the toilet pipes when Jess spoke again. “It’s totally going to rock.”
“Yeah,” Pia said, “unless undesirables appear. Then the whole thing could turn into a nightmare.”
And on it went, bikini this and beach umbrella that and flip-flop this and snorkel that. Thanks, guys. I got the point. Why not send me a postcard from your blissful getaway, just to ram the point home a little harder? My former friends were off on the most glamorous vacation of all time, and I, Mimi Schulman, was cordially not invited.
I went straight from school to the Yemenite café, hoping to track down Sam. He was there, at the same grimy table, drinking the same tea, only instead of the Arabic newspaper he was leafing through Word Smart: Help Boost Your SAT Verbal Score. Underneath his gray hoodie sweatshirt he was wearing a Suckoffs T-shirt that depicted a poodle fending off a rapacious boa constrictor.
I stood half an arm’s length from his table and watched him memorize genuflect by lowering himself to his knees and chanting the word ten times. He was so absorbed in the ritual that he never looked up and noticed me.
“Hey,” I said. Things were still shaky between us, and I didn’t trust him, but I had no choice. I needed his help, and I needed it badly. “Nice threads.”
Sam looked down at his chest to remind himself what he was wearing. “Oh, hey,” he said, evidently confused by my sudden appearance.
Then, before I could change my mind, I told him how miserable I was, sparing no detail of my long lonely nights and predawn ice cream pig-out sessions. When I was done talking, I paused to catch my breath, then gripped the sides of the rickety table. “So,” I said, “what do you think I should do about it?” And right then I had it—a plan. The greatest plan ever. The only conceivable way I could undo my social demise. It was humiliating, but necessary. “Sam, you said you would do anything for me, right, to make it up to me?”
“I did?”
“Yes, dammit, you did. And so I know what I need you to do. I am going to write a letter, a letter of apology, and you’re going to post it on the Web for me, on the same page that you posted that awful diar
y. You will help, won’t you? You owe it to me, Sam.”
Sam could tell I was serious. “Fine,” he said. “I think you’re crazy to do it, but I said I’d help, and I will.” Without even finishing his tea, he got up, and the two of us hopped on the subway to his apartment on Riverside Drive. Nodding hello at the thousand-year-old doorman, I realized that I hadn’t visited Sam once since the fourth grade—bizarre considering that, these last few months, he was practically receiving mail at the Judys. “Is that the same guy?” I whispered in amazement as we got into the old-fashioned elevator. “Yep,” Sam confirmed. “Mr. O’Gorman’s been working that desk since 1962, and shows no interest in retiring anytime soon.”
The Geckmans, who were both serious workaholics, wouldn’t be back for another few hours, which was lucky because I was in no mood to deal with any reunion festivities. Sam and I went straight to his room. I sat in front of his computer and started to type while he reclined on his bed and pretended to study the Metropolitan Opera newsletter. Every few seconds, he would look up from one of the glossy graphics and beetle his brow in my direction. Twenty minutes passed. Sam hadn’t flipped a single page, but I was finished—in more ways than one.
Dear Friends (and Nosy Readers),
I hope I’m still allowed to call you that, because that’s how I still think of you, even if you can’t claim to feel the same. I’m not asking for your sympathy here, or even your kindness. And, trust me, I don’t expect to be invited to another party for as long as I live. All I need from you now is an ear (or pair of eyes, whatever).
I have spent the last four months lying, cheating, stealing—doing whatever it took to shimmy up Baldwin’s very slippery social ladder. Four months of mooching and misrepresenting myself. Four months of being a loser and an impostor. But over the course of those months, something amazing happened: I became friends with four of the funniest, cleverest, and kindest people I have ever encountered in my entire life. Seriously.
The Rise and Fall of a 10th Grade Social Climber Page 22