by Rachel Vail
“I can’t just quit.”
When they raised their eyes back up to mine, first Allison and then Quinn, I could tell they both got it, they knew.
“Mom doesn’t want anybody to know our business anyway,” Allison said, then added quietly, “Baby monitor.”
“And why would she? I don’t want to be a spoiled brat,” I whispered. “But what am I supposed to do, realistically? I already committed; they said yes before they said no. And now, it’s the biggest party of the year. Everybody’s excited. There are rumors swirling—who’s invited, who’s not…People are totally kissing up to us trying to score invitations, even though we’re inviting everybody….”
“The whole grade?” Allison asked. “Why?”
I shook my head and picked up a pad of Post-its from Quinn’s overflowing desk. “Because, I don’t know, I thought I was, like, the mayor of the school and insisted we should. And now the only one in the known universe not coming is me.”
“The known universe?” Allison repeated sarcastically. “Please.”
“Seriously,” I insisted. “I heard one girl saying she heard what’s-his-name from the TV show with the football team? He’s supposedly coming.”
“The one with the cheekbones?” Allison asked.
“Yes! I mean, he’s totally not. I don’t think. But maybe Gabrielle’s dad asked him. He’s like the head of some…I don’t know! It’s crazy. This party is all anybody is talking about. So am I really supposed to just be like, Oh, sorry, changed my mind, count me out?”
“Well, obviously you can’t do that,” Quinn said, taking the Post-it pad away from me. Without realizing it, I had pulled off like fifty of the sheets and let them scatter.
“Right,” I said, kneeling down on the rug to collect the dropped Post-its. “So I’m thinking if I could just take out my own money, which I would totally earn back before college, somehow—but then I could call Kirstyn and say something like the bank is having a computer glitch and here’s cash instead. Otherwise, Kirstyn’s mom is going to call.”
“We’ll intercept,” Allison said, picking up Post-its with me.
“She has their cell numbers, too,” I told her.
Quinn took the papers from us and shoved them onto the already mountainous piles on her desk. She sighed heavily and raised her eyes to mine. “Maybe you should just confide in Kirstyn what’s happening. She’s your best friend.”
“Are you kidding me?” I shrieked. “No way would I tell Kirstyn. How would that even help? What’s she supposed to do, pay my share? Come on.”
“She definitely can’t tell Kirstyn!” Allison agreed. “Quinn!”
“I know it’s hard,” Quinn said. “But your friends love you, they—”
“No. Not anymore.” I could feel tears starting behind my eyes. “They don’t. Something happened.”
“Shh. Come in the closet,” Quinn said. We followed her across her room. Unlike Allison’s, Quinn’s closet was a tumbling mess. She shoved some piles over and we all sat down on whatever was there—sweaters, sweatpants, sports equipment, books, shoes.
“What happened, Phoebe?” Allison asked.
“I don’t know,” I whispered, collecting myself. “Okay. Gabrielle was planning to invite me and Kirstyn to her house in East Hampton this weekend, and I was all like oh, great, even though I was supposed to get together with Luke Saturday—”
“Luke Stoddard?” Quinn asked. “You’re back together?”
“Yeah, but I blew him off when Kirstyn said I was invited to Gabrielle’s.”
“You dumped him?” Allison asked. “Again?”
I nodded. “But then Gabrielle cancelled me.”
“No way!” Allison said, horrified.
“Yeah.”
“Why?” Quinn asked.
I shrugged. “She said her parents were being so annoying, not letting her invite as many people as last year. Remember when I went?”
“Oh, yeah,” Allison said. “It was a total mansion, right? Oceanfront, servants, live band…weren’t there violinists?”
“Up the steps,” I said. “Yeah. She was all, ‘so sorry, please don’t hate me’ and I was like, ‘no, no, I understand, no problem,’ even though I was like, hello, I just dumped the boy I might seriously love because I thought it was more important to be with my friends and now he totally hates me. Fine, whatever. If you can only take one guest and you asked Kirstyn first, fine. But then, here’s the bad part—”
“That wasn’t the bad part?” Allison asked, leaning close, her thick eyebrows scrunched together in concern.
I shook my head sadly. “Zhara let it slip at the lockers after seventh that she’s going to Gabrielle’s this weekend, too.”
Allison gasped. Quinn shook her head. They couldn’t believe what a loser I was, suddenly, either.
“What did you do wrong?” Allison asked.
Anybody else, I’d be so mad and surprised if they asked that. But Allison really meant it in a helpful way, I could tell. She is nasty to me plenty, but right then her gray eyes were soft and I could tell she was mostly surprised. I’d never had friend problems before.
“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “I keep trying to figure it out. Maybe because I started liking Luke again? Or maybe I’ve been too stressed? I swear I didn’t do anything so awful that they’d…You don’t think they know, do you? About Mom?”
“No,” Quinn said. “How would they?”
“Definitely not,” Allison quickly agreed. “We’ve all kept it completely secret. It has to be something else.” She looked me up and down, appraisingly. “I don’t know. You’re still cute. But that sounds bad, Phoebe, it does.”
I nodded. “And now, if they find out we can’t afford the party…”
“We can afford it,” Allison said. “It’s just a temporary cash flow issue.”
“A what?” I asked.
Allison shrugged. “Baby monitor.”
“Whatever,” I said. “But, so anyway, I was just thinking maybe if I could just get some of my money out of the bank…”
“Never gonna happen,” Quinn whispered.
“I’ll lend you some,” Allison said, her lower jaw thrusting forward angrily at Quinn. “We’ll get it.”
“It’s thousands,” Quinn told her. “It’s not just this couple of hundred. That’s the deposit. You think you have thousands wadded up in old pocketbooks or something, Allison?”
“No,” she said. “But her friends are dumping her! She can’t call them up and say on top of whatever else, now I’m also poor! Don’t you even care?”
“Yeah,” Quinn whispered back, just as pissed. “I do. But what are you planning to do, just waltz on into the bank by yourselves and demand your money? Don’t you think Mom or Daddy would have to get it for you? Or even if you managed to withdraw it yourselves, don’t you see that you’d get caught eventually? And what will you say to them, then, when they’re doing everything they can to keep a roof over our heads? ‘We used our college money because we don’t want Phoebe to be embarrassed in front of her lousy friends who don’t even like her anyway’?”
My mouth dropped open and so did Allison’s.
Quinn turned to me. “No offense.”
“Some taken,” I managed. Hard to believe these were the people on my side. “You know what? Never mind.” I stood up.
Quinn yanked at my hand. “Sit down, Phoebe.”
“No.” I opened the closet door.
“Don’t be a baby,” Allison said. “Come on. We’re trying to help you.”
“I’m not a baby. You just treat me like one. But I’m not. And I don’t need your help. I came in here to ask a simple question—do you know how I can access my money in the bank. The answer is no, you don’t know. Fine. I’m not whining or crying or asking for anything. I never do. I may be a few months younger but I’m more independent and stronger than either of you.”
I stamped across the mess of Quinn’s room, grabbed the invitation off her desk, and turned
around when I got to the door. My sisters looked little and young, their faces peering out from Quinn’s closet. “I’ll handle this mess myself. I don’t need anybody’s help. I don’t need anybody.” I slammed the door behind me.
18
WHILE ANN WOBBLED ONTO the raft, frowning, I held it steady. It was Saturday, eleven in the morning, and I was not digging in dirt with Luke or lounging in the Hamptons with Kirstyn, Gabrielle, and Zhara. I was in my pool coaxing Ann onto a raft. I’d invited her over. Too bad if it was overcast and gray; we were going in the pool. I’d turned the heat way up so we could.
I flipped onto a raft and let myself drift for a few minutes. “You thirsty?”
“No,” she said. “You’re right though. This is relaxing.”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“Remember last year when we went, too, to Gabrielle’s?”
“Yeah,” I said, thinking, Can’t she just not talk about that? I am only barely holding it together as is!
“I was starving the entire weekend,” Ann said.
“Me, too!” I sat up cross-legged on my raft. My mood had suddenly lifted. “We finally got melon slices for breakfast at like noon?”
“I thought I was going to faint,” she said.
“I wake up hungry,” I said.
“Me, too.” Ann sighed. “Zhara said she wasn’t sure she wanted to go but then I guess she decided to.”
I lay back down. Ann is great. I’ve always loved her, her sense of humor, her kind of vulnerable snarkiness. I just wasn’t sure I wanted to commit to being me and Ann, the not-as-pretty girls, the not-alpha girls, the girls who’d mope through high school complaining about how bitchy the most popular girls are. Not that I wanted to be bitchy—I just wanted to be happy again, happy and comfortable exactly wherever I was, not looking enviously out of the corners of my eyes.
“Kirstyn’s been really, like, hormonal lately,” Ann said. “Hasn’t she?”
“Yeah.”
“To me, anyway,” Ann added. “She’s been so…cold.”
“I know.”
We floated for a while, then. What neither of us was saying, or would say, in this fragile new alliance, was that if Kirstyn had been cold toward Ann lately, so had I. Before last night, it had been at least a month since I last called her, maybe more. When Kirstyn had said that thing about all of us growing apart lately, the only one it felt true about, for me, was Ann. We had so little left in common. Years ago we liked to imagine stuff together, adventures in her backyard or mine where we took turns being the tragically dying younger sister (she only has a younger brother) or back in time to prairie days (she’d been obsessed with the Little House on the Prairie books by Laura Ingalls Wilder, which I couldn’t get through at all; it just seemed like long stretches of weather punctuated by Pa making another chair). Eventually we grew out of that and kind of stuck together by habit and by being in the same group of friends. But over the past few months she’d been a downer and until the funk hit me, too, I wanted to steer clear of it. I didn’t want to be dragged down.
So much for that.
But it was kind of, well, relaxing, to be spending the day with her. She wasn’t judging my bathing suit or anything else. Mostly she was just agreeing with me.
It was a little awful, how good that felt.
“Anyway,” I said up to the gray-white sky, “it’s kind of nice to have a break from talking about the graduation party all the time.”
“I know it! Don’t even get me started on the party! It’s like it’s really all The Kirstyn Show and we’re her sycophants, paying to bask in her reflected glory.”
“We’re her what?”
“Sicko-phants? Psycho-fants? I’ve only read it so I’m not sure how to pronounce it.”
“Either way,” I said. “I never even read it. But anyway, exactly. And I for one am sick of being her, whatever, sick elephant.”
Ann laughed her burbling belly laugh. “You are so funny, Phoebe.”
She flipped over onto her stomach and her raft almost capsized. There was a bobbling moment when she almost went over the right side, overcompensated, dipped in on her left, then, I gotta figure, by supreme willpower, managed to stay on top of the thick blue float. She looked as surprised as I felt at the whole near-crisis, but quickly covered by launching into a whole long story about how Kirstyn was so critical of everything she had chosen from the Crazy Balloon Lady it was not even worth arguing about.
“I finally just started saying okay to whatever she wanted,” Ann said. “That’s where we were heading anyway. There’s just no winning with her, especially when it has to do with ‘style.’” Ann started to make quotation marks with her fingers but unbalanced herself slightly and ended up gripping the float instead.
“True,” I agreed. Kirstyn had told me about her discussion with Ann, of course, how shockingly tacky the arrangements were that Ann had chosen, how obviously the bargain option. “Too embarrassing,” Kirstyn had said, and I agreed. Now, in the pool, I agreed with Ann. Agreement for sale.
“I think Kirstyn only cares that something is the fanciest brand or the most expensive price point,” Ann said. “Not actually how it looks. Which is the definition of tacky, if you ask me.” Ann started to shrug but almost toppled herself off the raft again. If you just watched Ann you’d think we were shooting the rapids instead of lazing in my pool on a cool windless day.
“True,” I said. It was cheering me up, slightly, trashing Kirstyn like this.
“And don’t even get me started on the photographer,” she started, and her black curly hair bobbled around her pale face. “My mother thinks that is just obscene. A photographer and albums for an eighth-grade graduation party? She’s like, What do these girls think they’re planning? A wedding? She doesn’t want to be the one putting on the brakes but she feels like somebody has to. It’s out of control.”
“You’re right,” I said. Above me, the clouds were actually breaking apart, revealing a stripe of light blue sky.
“I am?” Ann asked.
“Absolutely.” A plan was coming to me, clear as that crack of sky. “I think we have to stop letting ourselves get dragged along like abused puppies. Or psycho elephants, or whatever.”
Ann smiled nervously.
“This isn’t even really OUR party,” I said. “Anymore. As you said.”
“True,” she said softly. “My mom and I heard some guys talking about it in D’Amico’s the other night. High school boys. I swear I never saw these guys before, and they obviously had no idea I even knew about this fabulous party!” Her eyes scanned my face nervously. “But what can we do?”
“We can quit.” So easy; it was handed to me on a platter.
“What do you mean, quit?”
“I think you’re absolutely right, Ann. This party was supposed to be a celebration of our amazing friendship. The point was us, not trying to be all socialite Town & Country. It wasn’t supposed to be about only the most fabulous people, the most fabulous centerpieces, the most fabulous dresses…”
My voice caught at that. I cleared my throat.
“It was never supposed to be like this,” I made myself continue. “But Kirstyn’s got her own ideas and we’re all supposed to just go along so she can be the center of attention with a bunch of high school boys?”
“You mean those guys from D’Amico’s?” Ann asked. “Kirstyn told them?”
I shrugged. “You think that was a coincidence? Come on, Ann. Think! That’s who she really wants to come. You know, Justin Sachs, all those guys? Which do you think she wants, a graduating-from-eighth-grade party or a look-out-high-school, here-come-the-Pretty-Girls party?”
“Yuck,” Ann said.
“Exactly,” I agreed.
“And we’re all there to, what? Clap for her?”
I smiled. “I guess so.” She’s your best friend, one part of my brain was screaming. Are you really mocking her and betraying her and selling her out like this? Is this who you want to be? But another part of
my brain screamed back a picture of Kirstyn, twirling under the lights of Gabrielle’s fabulous East Hampton patio, surrounded by hot high school boys and laughing about her old friend Phoebe with her middle school bathing suits. Twirling in my green dress.
“Thanks anyway,” Ann was saying.
“I just don’t think that’s how we want to celebrate,” I agreed.
We both lay our heads down and let that sink into our skin along with the strengthening sun.
“So we’re just, what? Canceling the party?” Ann whispered after a few minutes.
I shrugged without opening my eyes. “I think we have to. Don’t you?”
“I already got a dress.”
“Ann!”
“I know, you’re right, but it’s really pretty, mango with ruching, and my mom says it gives me the illusion of a waist.”
“Oh, so then maybe we should just go ahead with the party,” I said, half sarcastic, half, well, hopeful.
“No, you’re right. I just never had the illusion of a waist before. What a waste! Ha!”
“Ha,” I tried to agree.
Her smile sank into her rounded chin and she started talking fast. “But like, how will we do it? What will we say? ‘Hey, Kirstyn, we decided your whole party is way too tacky so count us out!’” She was practically shouting.
“Something a little subtler, maybe.”
“Yeah. How long before it gets all over school?” Ann asked. “Five minutes?”
“Maybe less. By homeroom.”
“What do you think everybody will say?”
I shrugged. “Who even knows?” As long as they aren’t saying, Did you hear Phoebe’s family lost all their money and can’t afford to pay for the party?
“Kirstyn is going to be furious,” Ann whispered.
“She’s gonna hate me” slipped out of my mouth.
“Well, you hate her,” Ann said. “So you’ll be even.”
“I do not!” I yelled.
“Just kidding,” Ann said, looking away from me.
“I don’t!” I started shaking. Why was Ann of all people in my pool? Had I already wrecked everything by saying all this to her? Hate Kirstyn? No way; she’s my best friend! But no. This is the best way, I thought. If I didn’t cancel for a reason, there’d only be the truth, which would change everything. Not that Kirstyn would dump me or be like ew, well, if you have no money you’re beneath me. No. It would be so much more subtle. She’d be all like poor you, you’re poor! And she might be nice about it but she would pull away soon, I know she would, as if it were contagious. She’s already been pulling away from me, for nothing—but if she knew this, oh, she’d be sweet and generous, sad-eyed, pausing on her way down the hall linked-arms with Gabrielle to ask me, her poor charity case, if everything was okay. No! I think I saw a movie once when I was home sick in like third grade about a rich girl whose father died and then the fancy boarding school where she went found out she was poor and she had to dress in rags and be taunted by all her old friends—holy crap, that movie totally haunted my nightmares when I was younger and I had completely forgotten about it until this very second! No way was I turning into that poor taunted girl!