The Other Girl: A Midvale Academy Novel

by Sarah Miller

  Cullen was already squatting over the rug. “Fuck!” he said, yanking up his pants.

  “Up here,” Gid said.

  Nicholas and Cullen ran up the balcony stairs as fast as they could and crouched down in the pew next to us.

  Footsteps grew closer and more menacing. Gid was scared. Please don’t let him catch us, he thought. We wouldn’t get kicked out for this, but we would get written up—students weren’t supposed to be in the chapel before 8 A.M., the assumption being anyone who was had to be screwing, partying, or, well, taking dumps. Cockweed was the guy on campus not to get caught by, because he wrote up everything.

  And scholarship kids’ write-ups had a way of being remembered when other kids’ weren’t.

  I inched up a little and looked over the pew and watched the much-hated Gene Cavanaugh/Cockweed move his hulking body down the church aisle. He stopped to the right of the pulpit, in front of a row of folding chairs stacked at least five deep. He walked over and stood in front of them. “Fuck,” he said in a voice raw with helplessness and rage.

  I forgot to mention that Cockweed had three bratty kids and a badgering wife and was essentially a broken man.

  Cockweed unfolded a chair and then proceeded to make a row in front of the pews. When he finished, he sat down in the last chair. “God damn it to hell,” he moaned. Then he put his head in his hands and looked up at the pulpit.

  “Hello?” he called out.

  We stayed very still.

  Cockweed’s cell phone rang. “What now, Maureen?” Maureen was his wife. She was tall and rangy with badly dyed red hair. Like Cockweed, she had a patchwork of jobs here, the most important of which was assistant to the school nurse and the least important of which was the fire marshal. “You take him. I can’t. No. I don’t have time. I have to set up the chairs for the fat cats. Fine. Call me after The View.”

  Gid squeezed my hand. Cullen and I caught eyes and he mouthed the word awesome.

  Cockweed set up all the chairs. It should have taken him only about three minutes, but it took fifteen, because every time he finished a row, he sat at the end of it and put his head in his hands.

  Gid whispered, “When the Cockweed species is alone, it ruminates on failure.”

  Cockweed’s phone rang again. He answered it, “What’s up, Dave? No, no, this is a great time.” He cleared his throat, stood up, pulled himself up straight, and walked to a wide chapel window that looked out on a parking lot. “I’m just putting the boat away. Yep. She’s a beauty. Thirty-two-footer. Yes sir.”

  This was so great!

  “Oh, yeah, life’s good. No complaints. Are you kidding? Hot sixteen-year-old girls everywhere. Action? Dave. Come on. Please. You got a campus full of young gorgeous girls. All the guys here are about three feet tall with zits. OK? You do the math! Ha. Action isn’t the word for it.”

  Something about “action isn’t the word for it” in reference to Cockweed’s life really got me. I inhaled a deep, dusty breath of hymnal. The back of my throat seized up, and I shut my eyes and tried not to cough.

  Then Cockweed said, “You know what, Dave? Actually, you better do the math because I am not in the right frame of mind for thinking in the morning, if you know what I mean.” Cockweed chuckled conspiratorially, like being a dimwit made him some kind of badass. “But seriously. The truth is that I got so many bitches on my jock here, I can’t even see it anymore.”

  This was pretty funny. And I was mentally patting myself on the back for not laughing at it when Cullen, the dumb ass, started to laugh.

  “You fuck,” Nicholas and Gid whispered at the same time.

  “What the…?” I heard Cockweed pacing the chapel, looking for a good angle. I held my breath, but I knew it was over.

  “I see you. Behind the pews. I’m coming up. You are in for it this time.”

  There was only one stairway out of here and Cockweed was on his way up it. We all stood up.

  “Sorry guys.” Cullen wiped his eyes calmly, like he’d just gotten off a chairlift. “It was just too good to not laugh. I mean, like, the idea of girls, like, on his crotch? I really am sorry, but we won’t get in that much trouble. I mean, it’s Midvale.”

  Nicholas smacked him on the arm. “Dumb ass! For you it’s Midvale. But what about our boy here?”

  Cullen looked guiltily at Gideon as Cockweed’s heavy footsteps came closer. “OK, I’m retarded,” he said. “I’ll do what I can to turn his Cockorific rage my way.”

  In the waning seconds before Cockweed got upstairs, Gid thought, The worst thing about getting kicked out of this school would be losing Molly.

  I couldn’t say anything. But I did look at him, and what my look promised was this: never.

  Cockweed stood in the doorway between the stairwell and the balcony for a few seconds, clearly enjoying how his meaty body filled up the space. He smacked his lips. “Let’s go, kiddies,” he said. “The real party starts now.”

  We crossed the quad. Nicholas and Cullen walked next to each other, with Gid and me behind them, and Cockweed five paces ahead, wearing an expression of bitter determination. The sun was high in the sky now, warming the grass and the mud-scented air. Airplanes soared—way overhead were the ones from New York going north, and lower, the ones from Boston going west. Our fellow students stepped over puddles, clutching books, bottled water, and bagels to their chests. Some stopped to stare.

  We climbed the marble stairs to the administration building. Midvale’s motto was carved across the top stair, a Latin saying that, roughly translated, meant “Study Forever.” Cockweed turned on us. “You guys are in a lot of trouble.” He went inside, letting the heavy green door slam shut.

  Nicholas held the door for us. As we passed him he whispered, “Look. It’s OK. Even you guys would still have to do more to get booted.”

  The administration building was the place where Midvale did its best to sell its identity to potential students and donors. It smelled of furniture polish. A center staircase covered with an Oriental runner in rich reds and blues led to a landing garlanded with portraits of men in clerical collars. Office doors were fashioned of carved oak, with brass placards denoting various locations: Dean of Boys, Headmaster, Office of Admissions, Alumni Relations.

  Cockweed fancied himself in the tradition of the school’s founding fathers, men of learning and breeding, even though he was just a slob. I saw him look at one of the paintings, and I swear he tried to imitate the subject’s austere dignity as he stared at us from under the meaty ledge of his brow and said, “You know what? It makes me sick what has happened to this school. When I was here, we were all boys, first of all.” He gave me a dark look of blame, I guess just in case I didn’t know that I wasn’t a boy, and went on, “We had to behave. Or else. Now, this place is like a…well, it’s just a goddamn free-for-all.”

  He shook his head in disgust.

  “Mr. Cavanaugh?” Cullen spoke up, as promised. “If you liked it so much when it was all boys, I wonder why you were just rhapsodizing to your friend about…I believe you used the phrase ‘action isn’t the word for it’?”

  Cockweed snarled at him. He jerked a thumb at the Dean of Boys’ office door. “Get in there. Tell Dean Paley your story. And you better make sure it squares with mine.”

  “Ooh,” said Cullen with mock terror. “Dean Paley!” Dean Paley was an old fumbling character in a bow tie who, in the muddy seasons, could be found with his pants legs stuck into the back of his Wellingtons. When his phone rang, he stared at it as if trying to figure out how to make it stop, and always seemed surprised and delighted that picking it up did the trick.

  But he was the dean assigned to the boys in our class, and Cockweed, having very little power at all, certainly had no power over that.

  Gid’s mind was still occupied with worries of eventually getting kicked out and us breaking up forever. I didn’t like to see him so upset, but it was cute that he was so upset about me. “Don’t worry,” I whispered to him. “We just have to ke
ep a low profile for a little while. We’re going to be fine.”

  My dean, Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan, was upstairs. I touched the back of Gid’s hand and turned to head up the staircase. Gid gave me a shy, vulnerable smile. There was something nagging and incomplete at the back of his mind. It took me a moment to figure out what it was.

  Cullen and Nicholas were right behind Gideon, waiting to enter the office. “Come on, dude,” Cullen said. “Move it!” But Gid’s eyes were locked on mine.

  “Gideon?” I said. “I love you too.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Cullen and Nicholas said at the same time. Cockweed sneered at us, sweat pooling under the arms of his Midvale polo shirt, his barrel chest heaving with fury. But when Gid and I looked into each other’s eyes, and it was as if none of them even existed.

  Chapter Two

  Like all of the administration offices at Midvale, Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan’s office looked like a set from Masterpiece Theatre. Polished wood shelves held books, books, and then more books, as if anyone might forget for a second that the person whose office it was knew how to read. Wholly unconcerned with facing any sort of real reprimand, I fought off boredom by chuckling my way through a stack of Midvale’s alumni magazines. I paused at a photo of a girl with short blond hair floating in a pool and surrounded by dolphins. The caption read: “I first began to love dolphins, and see their potential for advances in the fight against dementia, in Mr. Casey’s animal science class at Midvale,” said biologist Jane Anderson, class of ’91. Another featured a guy standing in the middle of an old farm house, surrounded by piles of rusting junk. He was Richard Dilworth, class of ’89, founder of the Museum of Colonial Farm Implements in Turners Falls, Massachusetts, and he said, “I love farm implements, and I want to share my excitement about them with other people.”

  “Good fucking luck,” I said. I so used to be destined to be one of these slobbering enthusiasts, desperate to seek and to serve. Study Forever. That was me. Love had shifted everything and I welcomed it. I was happier. I loved Gideon. I was no longer shut up in my room, imagining what I would be one day. I was enjoying life now.

  I knew I wasn’t supposed to think Gid was everything, but I still did. I know that sounds sick. All I’m saying is, if you don’t have someone to love, what is the point of the other stuff? Of course when you have someone to love, you don’t have time to do anything else anyway.

  Especially when you’re inside his head, seeing his every desire and thought, and making yourself available as needed.

  Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan came in the door of her office. She was also my English teacher. She was sixtyish, she kept her hair ash-blond and her tweed skirts snug enough to remind everyone that she was still vaguely hot. She held a travel mug from the Museum of Fine Arts gift shop and a giant Coach satchel overflowing with papers slashed with red ink.

  I set down the alumni magazine. “I was just reading about former Midvalians, saving the world, one dolphin and colonial farm implement at a time.”

  Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan hung up her bag and jacket on a coat tree and came to sit across from me on a gold brocade sofa. She sat back against the cushions and surveyed me for a long moment.

  “Molly, would I be correct in assuming that your reasons for going to the chapel this morning were of a carnal nature?”

  I nodded yes.

  “Splendid. Well, that conversation is over then. Now for part two. Tell me something, Molly. Do you want to go to a school with other people who are as smart as you are? Do you want to live in a charming room on a beautiful campus where you read Hegel as rain patters gently against your dormer windows? Or do you want to continue to be a little smug and dismissive, and end up struggling over your statistics requirement in a concrete-block dorm filled with puddles of vomit?”

  “Is that a trick question?” I asked.

  Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan plucked a stray thread off the armrest and set it in a silver-plated scallop ashtray. She was not amused.

  “Part three.” She stood up and smoothed her hands over her tweed skirt. She went over to her desk and picked up a stack of papers about two feet high. It was so big that as she walked back to me I saw the skin near the collar of her cashmere twinset turn rosy with exertion.

  “What’s this?” I said, as she set it down next to me.

  “Academic Tête-à-Tête,” she said, as if this were something fun.

  Academic Tête-à-Tête—Academic Head-to-Head—was a group that went around to other prep schools for scholarly competitions. Several students from each school faced each other while the hosting school’s adviser fired off questions about Prussian kings, 1982 Oscar winners, the theory of relativity, the arrival time of the train going from Peoria to Louisville, and so on. There was no buzzer—one student from each school went up alone and sat facing his opponent, so it wasn’t just a matter of knowing the answer but having the wherewithal to shout it out before the other loser did, or before you died from the terrible breath he had from pulling an all-nighter for his differential calculus exam. ATAT (as we called it) was so incredibly for dorks that everyone on it made the people I was just reading about in the alumni magazines look cool.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. But what I meant was, no effin way. Not only was Academic Tête-à-Tête a giant nerdfest, they also practiced, like, every night. I had better things to do at night. Like sneak Gid into my room.

  I know I used to be a model Midvalian, all buoyed up by the magic of learning and immune to the distractions of vice. But now I just wasn’t.

  “Molly, why did you come to this school?”

  “I came here to get a good education,” I said.

  “You came here because you wanted to go to Harvard,” she said. “And I have some not-so-great news for you. At this point, you would be very lucky to get into…I don’t know…Wisconsin.”

  She herself had gone to Radcliffe, and from the way she said the word Wisconsin you’d think it was a 99¢ store instead of a perfectly decent university.

  “Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan,” I said, “I want to go to a really fancy college, the kind of college where all you have to do for the rest of your life is say its name and people pass out at your feet. I really do. But if it means sacrificing everything that makes me happy to do it, well…”

  Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan’s expression returned to its usual state of calm, administrative concern.

  “What makes you happy, Molly?”

  I saw Gideon’s face when she said this. His handsome, open, brown-eyed face with his sort of square mouth and the smile he broke into when he saw me.

  But I just said, “Lots of things make me happy, Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan.”

  She turned on me with those china blue eyes that die-hard New Englanders have. I can’t say she looked as if she were going to cry because I don’t think Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan did a lot of crying. But she looked upset and frustrated. “Molly,” she said, “teaching at this school is…well. Let’s just say that the level of intellectual engagement is underwhelming. You…you and your friend Edie are very smart girls. Of course, Edie is still doing very well. Surely she must have noticed you’ve been slacking off a bit.”

  Edie, my best friend and roommate. Roommate for sure. Perhaps erstwhile best friend. We hadn’t had a falling-out per se, but she didn’t know I was in Gid’s head, so there was only so much we could share, seeing as I didn’t care about anything else.

  “Has Edie not said anything?” Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan pressed.

  I really just wanted to get out of here and get back to Gideon.

  I made myself look as contrite and grateful as I could and said, “Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan, I am totally flattered that you would think of me, and I so totally promise—”

  “You so totally promise?” Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan asked. Her blue eyes were cold. “Ms. McGarry, I’m sure you’re aware that ‘I promise’ is a performative speech act and hardly requires adverbial qualification. But, as long as we’re speaking that language, I so totally promise that I am going to make you hear me ou
t on this, and I am going to so totally hope that just a shred of the importance of this makes it into your head.”

  Even though I was newly willing to make adults displeased with me, the good girl in me still squirmed when it happened. I turn my head away from her, and there, outside the window, stood Gid, hand shielding his eyes, the Hat That Changes Everything on his head but unbuckled under his chin, looking up hopefully. He was waiting for me. He thought, Molly is all I care about sometimes, and my heart flip-flopped, because that was great, but why didn’t he think that all that time, like I did with him?

  Then I felt that connection, that actual thing between us, like a wire. It was buzzing and warm and I loved it and I loved him, and Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan and ATAT could, with all due respect, suck it.

  I was seriously contemplating just getting up and running out of the room, but Mrs. Gywnne-Vaughan held me with her glance. In truth, she was staring at me, and she didn’t look frustrated or annoyed anymore, she just looked kind of obsessed.

  “Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan?” I said. “Are you OK?’

  She ignored the question. Maybe she was having one of those senior-moment things, but then the spell seemed to break, and when she spoke, her tone was brisk and businesslike. “Molly, there is a scholarship attached. There is always an ATAT scholarship…and I happen to know that if the team wins this year, Ross Volker, who used to be on ATAT, is doubling it. It’s worth four years of college tuition. The expensive, fancy, worthwhile kind.”

  I nodded with mild appreciation, as if she’d just said there was a nice print in the hallway and I should look at it on my way out. Ross Volker was a big computer billionaire. A nerd. I thought about his wormy face, his stupid letters to the alumni magazine about innovation and the importance of always pushing yourself.

  That dude was so clearly not getting laid.

  “Molly,” Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan said, “did you hear me?”