The Other Girl: A Midvale Academy Novel

by Sarah Miller

  for prinessa (rory evans)

  Acknowledgments

  The author wishes to thank Josh Bank, Carina Feldman, Katie Schwartz, Bill Stavru, and Rochell Thomas.

  She also thanks all Millers, all L.A. Bears, and Robby.

  Contents

  Book One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Book Two

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Book One

  Chapter One

  There’s something about a prep school the week before spring break. The air is cold but full of bright magic. Of course, that magic could just be the sunlight reflecting off all the slush. Love is like this, I think. At least that’s how it felt to me with Gideon Rayburn. Yes, he was my first boyfriend and I know it’s hard to believe that true love could find me so quickly when the rest of the world waits forever, or in vain. But I swear if anyone felt what I felt for Gideon, and knew how real our connection was, they might understand. Sometimes it felt so strong. Like a wire, or a cable. Then again, there was the possibility that this feeling was like sunlight on slush. A banal thing, temporarily pretty, that was just about to melt away.

  Of course, a lot of times when we were having sex or even just fooling around I didn’t think about any of this stuff, because I would just stop thinking.

  Like this morning.

  Gid sat in a pew on the chapel balcony, and I sat wrapped around him. When I came up to breathe, I looked over his shoulder through the octagonal chapel window onto the splendor of the Midvale campus. A tree branch sprouting buds circled in the breeze. Beyond were the neat brick rows of dorms and classroom buildings. Manicured paths sparkled with tiny rivers of runoff, and brownish green grass was coming up in irregular tufts on the quad and beyond, where the playing fields stretched out to low hills. Mist crawled along the tree lines. The unheated chapel air was cold, and when I rested my nose on Gideon’s warm shoulder he leaned back, smiled at me, and caressed it with his warm thumb and index finger.

  He thought, I’m not going to tell Molly I love her unless she tells me.

  I waited to hear more.

  He thought, If she kisses my neck, I will tell her.

  One reason that I feel there’s something actually tangible between Gid and me is that I just adore him. I adore his wide mouth and his great teeth, and that the color of his eyes and his hair is exactly the same. I love how he is cool enough to act stupid and stupid enough to try to act cool sometimes. I love how, when winter kicked in here and he was shocked by the cold (he’s from suburban Virginia, which is cold, but not this cold), he got a fake fur hat with flaps and a chin strap, and that he named it the Hat That Changes Everything, and that he never took it off.

  But there was something else besides my love that made me feel literally connected to him.

  That is the fact that I am inside his head. I have been in his head now for just over six months. I remember the very first moments of being there. Gid was with his father, Jim Rayburn, a blustering, awkward guy in his midforties, embarrassed and heartbroken over his divorce and trying to make up for it with a lot of nervous laughter, mustache tugging, and a brand-new Chevy Silverado. Gid was on his way to Midvale for the very first time, and I just popped into his head. I had never met him, never even heard of him.

  And now I loved him. So it was kind of hard to think that I wasn’t supposed to.

  Being in Gid’s head, by the way…it’s different from being able to read his mind. I can read his mind, but I think of that as something you can turn on and off. I am inside his head every waking minute of our lives. If I’m awake and he’s not, I see what he dreams. If we’re both asleep and he wakes up, 99 percent of the time, I wake up too. If he’s awake and I want to go to sleep, forget it.

  When you’re inside someone’s head, you become an automatic expert at everything they want. If Gid was lonely, I was suddenly there. If he wanted to be with his friends, I made myself scarce. If some slut in his class wore a short skirt, I wore one the next day, and shorter, and with cuter kneesocks.

  Gid, of course, has never figured out I’m in his head, and I will never ever tell him. First of all, I want him to think I am just amazingly intuitive. And, perhaps more important, he just might consider my being in his head a small invasion of privacy.

  I would also never tell anyone else. I am proud Gid is my boyfriend. If people knew I was inside his head, they wouldn’t look at me the way that I want them to—There go Molly and Gid. What a cute couple! Instead, they’d think, I know how she got him. She’s cheating.

  So here we were, writhing half naked in an empty chapel, and Gid was caught in the classic romantic dilemma. He wanted to tell me he loved me, but he didn’t know if I’d say it back.

  But even knowing that, I wasn’t going to say it first. I wanted him to say it first. I wanted to be the winner.

  Gid thought, If Molly kisses my neck, I will tell her.

  Poor guy! He thought that he was putting his dilemma in the hands of fate. But what he was actually doing was warning his opponent of his next move.

  Of course I kissed his neck. Of course he thought, Wow, there it is, my sign from fate/the universe/whatever. And then, of course, he looked at me, his beautiful brown eyes wide, loving, trusting, and he said, “I love you.”

  I feigned innocent surprise. “Really?”

  “Yes,” he said. Oh God. “Really.” She better say it back to me.

  I didn’t say it back yet. Why not win big? Why not make him sweat a little?

  We started to mess around and not think. Gid’s head turns off when he is really turned on, unless you count boring stuff like, I hope my zipper doesn’t get stuck, and I hate condoms but they’re better than no sex.

  We took a break while he looked at me with deerlike tenderness.

  “I just can’t believe I met someone who understands me so perfectly.”

  “Well,” I said, touching his forehead. “Maybe we just communicate well.”

  He shook his head. “It’s more than that.” He had a dreamy look on his face, almost like a girl. “I mean, you knew I wanted to do it in the chapel! And then today, it’s my birthday and this is my present? From the first day I got to Midvale, I’ve wanted to have sex in the chapel.”

  Yes, I remembered.

  I stared back with loving intensity, but I still didn’t say I love you. I felt a little guilty. I felt like I was cheating. In truth, the thrill of loving him was only slightly less than the thrill of having an extremely unfair advantage over any other girl whom he might like or who might like him. There would always be someone prettier, someone new, someone who could unwrap a Starburst in her mouth. But there would never be anyone who knew the location of every button on him and exactly when and for how long and how hard to push.

  “There’s no one like you, Molly,” Gideon said. “No one.”

  I was about to break down and say it when, just across the top corner of the
window, a troubling sight came into view.

  Pilar Benitez-Jones.

  Pilar Benitez-Jones was probably about the most beautiful girl in the world, and as luck would have it, she went to my school. She wasn’t just a lot hotter than I was. She was a lot hotter than everyone. And she flirted with Gid. A lot.

  She was coming out of the gym—she spent a lot of time there. The gym has big plate-glass windows, and once, during a particularly intense time of jealousy toward her, I am ashamed to admit I stood on a hill outside, watching her work out. She kept going to the mirror and putting her hand on her waist and kind of pushing on it, as if that might make it smaller.

  Today, she wore black stretch pants with blazing pink stripes down the side. She had her hair up, and she paused on the path and shook it out with cinematic gusto.

  “What is it?” Gid said, and because I didn’t want him to turn around and see her, I kissed him again.

  I had my eyes closed but I couldn’t help but peek: I could see her hips ticking back and forth under her tiny waist like a metronome.

  Looking at her filled me with panic, and then a sinking feeling, as if Gid and I were already over.

  Then Gid thought, I want Molly to unhook her bra under her shirt, and then take her shirt off over her head, but like when she already has her bra like, kind of like off, so that her breasts are like already kind of coming out of it…like I saw in this movie once, I can’t remember the name of it but…

  I remembered the movie. I remembered the scene. I knew exactly what Gid meant. Fuck Pilar, who was now gone from my view. She was hot, and she was a big flirt, but whether she really wanted Gid or was just flexing her sizable hotness muscle to see if he reached out to feel it was a matter of debate. But then again, not even worth debating, because she didn’t have what I had.

  I did the nifty little bra trick Gid was dreaming of, and he watched in awe. He stared at my breasts and the exciting, fancy thing I did with my bra that was so easy but looked so complicated to him, and how had I known that he thought that was so hot! And then he stared at me as if I were God.

  We were almost undressed when we heard the sound of footsteps down below.

  Like all good prep school students, we dove for cover.

  Someone whispered, “What are we going to do?”

  “Something good. Something Cockweed will remember for the rest of his pathetic, Cockweed life.”

  It was Cullen and Nicholas. They were Gid’s roommates and closest friends. Generally, they were all right guys. Well. That’s an exaggeration. They were both rich and handsome and what they principally suffered from was, quite simply, just too damn much good luck. Cullen was golden and hunky, Nicholas chiseled and tortured. Nicholas was always pissed about something, always dissatisfied. Cullen, on the other hand, was like a golden retriever puppy that chased girls instead of sticks.

  They put Gideon through the ringer when he first got here. Every day they made sure that he knew he was dorkier and less sexually experienced, and that he had less cool stuff than they did. But now they were his friends. In fact, because the two of them were such polar opposites—Cullen’s canine enthusiasm grated on Nicholas, Nicholas’s feline irritability confounded Cullen—at this point they definitely annoyed each other more than Gid annoyed either of them.

  Gideon and I watched them through the slats of the balcony railing. The chapel was a narrow, high space with two rows of pews down the front and the balcony hanging over it. We were in plain sight, but you would have to tilt your head back pretty far to see us. Nicholas sank into a pew and sighed elaborately. “Christ,” he said, massaging his head.

  “Dude. What is your problem?” Cullen bounded down the aisle and did a round house kick, his unlaced Timberlands coming within practiced inches of Nicholas’s chin. “This is, like, such an awesome way to spend the morning, and you look like someone peed in your face.”

  Nicholas glared at Cullen. “Look, just because I don’t want to jump out of bed every morning wanting to high-five God for making me me doesn’t mean I have a problem.”

  Cullen grinned. “That is so exactly how I feel! You’re a dick, but you get me, and I love that. OK! So. Let’s see. Cockweed. If I were Cockweed, what would piss me off? I know! I could take a huge dump in here!”

  Nicholas shook his head sullenly. “He’d just clean it up. We don’t just want to piss him off…”

  “Right, right. We want to fuck him up good. Hmm…it’s too bad, because I really have to take a dump, and it’s sort of like win-win—for my butt, and our hatred of Cockweed.”

  Both of them pursed their lips and stroked their taut abs as they thought about their options. To be accurate, Nicholas was thinking. Cullen was probably just imagining different girls naked and pretending to think.

  “Should we just tell them we’re here?” Gid whispered.

  “I don’t know. Up to you!”

  Gid stood. “Hey, douche bags!”

  Nicholas and Cullen looked up. They didn’t seem surprised.

  “Did you guys come in here to fuck?” Cullen asked.

  “Gross,” said Nicholas. Nicholas was weird about girls. He slept with them, but he always seemed to regret it.

  “Did you?” Cullen said.

  We nodded. Cullen smiled at me admiringly. “Ms. Molly McGarry. Always thought you only let Gideon have that provolone hoagie in bed. Didn’t know you were down with the to-go box.”

  “Hmm,” I said. “I guess I am just the kind of girl who doesn’t like to share everything with someone who refers to his penis as ‘the Monster.’”

  “Ha-ha-ha! It’s ‘The Old Monster’!” Cullen corrected me. “As always, the Old Monster salutes you.” He backed up so he could see us without craning his neck. “Dude, we came in here to fuck up Cockweed for the trustees’ meeting. You know how his lame-ass fake loser job is to set up all this shit? But we can’t think of anything to do.”

  Cockweed—Mr. Cavanaugh—was their house master, and he had gone to Midvale in the eighties. Back then, Midvale had a reputation as a top school. This reputation had waned in the last few years, with the economy sucking and all. Basically, if you had the money to pay for this place, they were happy to have you. The school used to kick people out left and right. But times were tough. Tuition was tuition. More and more, the administration turned a blind eye. Drugs and sex were definitely frowned upon and publicly punished, though even then you had to rack up a few offenses to get kicked out. Everything else was sort of, eh, slap on the wrist.

  Unless, of course, your parents were broke motherfuckers. Then they were only too happy to show you the door. But first they had to catch you doing bad things.

  Enter Cockweed, who was only here because he was friends with the headmaster. He taught a stupid class called Naval History and then, to pad out his basic uselessness, did stuff like set up the chapel and take care of the school’s sailboat. But his most important title was Dean of Standards, which meant that he tried to bust people.

  And, tuition being tuition, scholarships being their direct opposite, and Cockweed wanting to make himself look useful, he concentrated his “Standards” efforts on the scholarship kids.

  Like Gid.

  And me.

  From day one, Gid had been one of those pot-smoking, sneaking-around students who is ripe for trouble.

  I was not—until I met Gid and commenced my schedule of sneaking him into my room every night.

  At any rate, even if Cullen and Nicholas got caught flinging their own feces at faculty on the quad, they’d probably just get suspended. Gid and I, on the other hand, needed to watch ourselves.

  “Guys,” Gid said. “Don’t you think we should leave Cockweed alone? I mean, I know you guys are pretty safe, but let’s not forget that I’m just poor white trash, living off the kindness of strangers.”

  “Dude dude dude dude dude!” Cullen said. “We are doing this for you. You’re not involved. We are getting Cockweed for you. You don’t have to do anything except enjoy. And
help us take care of the amazing pot seeds we’re bringing back from our trip to the Caribbean.”

  He put out his hand and Nicholas, grudgingly excited, high-fived him. Gideon smiled at me, sad, also amused, also happy to be included. Probably also pretty psyched to have amazing weed growing right in his room despite the risk. Right now I could smell pot on the boys, even this early in the morning.

  “Our intention is clear,” Nicholas said. “Cockweed must be fucked with. The question now is just—”

  “I have an idea,” Cullen shouted, leaping into the air. “Ow. I think I just dislodged my dump over to the other side of my anus. Anyway. I could take a dump underneath the rug on the aisle! Cockweed by himself won’t see it. But when, like, twenty dudes in four-hundred-dollar shoes come tramping through here…”

  “Done,” Nicholas said. “That is gross and brilliant.”

  “I am gross and brilliant,” Cullen said.

  Gid thought, No, you’re just gross.

  Then I said, “No, you are just gross.”

  Everyone laughed. And Gid thought, Molly and I are, like, destined.

  Nicholas was smiling at my joke. He wasn’t smiling at me, but I’d known him for two years, been dating his best friend for four months, and he hadn’t, really, ever. “The plan. I will stand guard. Gid, Molly. You guys get out of here. Cullen, shit and shit good.” He saluted us and ran out the front door.

  “Sorry,” I said. “You didn’t get your sex-in-the-chapel dream.”

  “I got close,” he said. “And haven’t you heard it’s the thought that counts?”

  We were walking out and kissing at the same time, two annoying walking kissing people, when there was a tumble of footsteps below and Nicholas ran back in. “Cockweed!” he whispered loudly.