The Other Girl: A Midvale Academy Novel

by Sarah Miller

  I don’t know how long it took me to claw my way out of the tangle of his arms and legs, but when I did, I jumped up as if Gideon was fire. He fell on the floor, his limbs splayed out around him. “What?” he shouted, dazed, shocked, angry all at once. He grabbed at the blankets hanging off the edge of the bed.

  “Molly,” Gid cowered behind a sheet corner. “What the hell’s going on?”

  “I just felt really claustrophobic,” I said.

  “Claustrophobic? Molly, it’s not like we haven’t done that before.”

  I just looked at the floor, my face limp with sadness and defeat. I was miserable and I was going to be miserable for the rest of my life.

  “What?” Gid said, and he came over and put his arms on my shoulders. I shook them off.

  I gathered up my clothes—my cute T-shirt, my cute pajama pants, my silky pink underwear—and went to dress in the closet. I didn’t want him to see me naked. I had to get him out of here. I had about two minutes left before I would start to cry, and if I started crying, I might start talking. And I didn’t want Gid to know how I felt or what I knew.

  “I know it sounds really sudden,” I said. “I just have been thinking lately…and sometimes I just don’t see this going anywhere.”

  That was true. Sometimes, when I thought about the fact I was in his head, I thought about something like this happening, and it had just happened.

  Being in and out of Gid’s mind, and watching him think about other girls was bad, but it was bearable. But I never, ever thought I would find myself in bed with a guy and know for a fact that he was thinking about someone else.

  I could hear Gid getting dressed behind me. Get dressed slow, he was thinking, make it look like you’re doing what she wants but try to stay until she calms down. “What happened?” he kept saying. “What happened?”

  He didn’t know. He had forgotten about thinking about Pilar.

  I don’t know if that made it better or worse. I zipped up my pants with an air of finality.

  “Molly,” Gid said again, “can’t we talk about this? Are you really telling me that this is over, just like that?”

  “Yes,” I said. “That’s what I’m telling you.” My boyfriend had thought of Pilar Benitez-Jones in a white bikini while he was in bed with me. Even if he didn’t remember it, I would. And if it happened once, it would happen again. I wasn’t willing to take that chance. I remembered what Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan had said: “There’s nothing in this world more foolish than seeing a smart girl throw her life away for love.” I had thought she just didn’t get it. But maybe the one who didn’t get it was me.

  Chapter Five

  Friday a taxi came to pick me up and take me to the train station alone.

  The driver wore a beret and was blasting very cheery music with lots of drums and chanting. “Miss,” he said as he took my luggage from me, “are you all right?” He had a nice French accent.

  “Oh yes,” I said. Since Gid and I broke up I had been functioning, going to classes, taking exams, but I didn’t talk much and I moved as if in pain, like an old person. “I’m just a little tired.”

  “You are too young to be tired,” he said as he put my luggage in the trunk. He snapped it shut. After what seemed like forty or so minutes I had managed to ease my body into the backseat. We were about to leave when Edie came running down the Emerson steps holding the giant ATAT folder. “This says DO NOT FORGET TO TAKE HOME,” she called out. “So I didn’t want you to forget to take it home.”

  It was raining out. Edie was in slippers, holding a small blue umbrella. “Thanks,” I said.

  Her eyes were wide with concern. “Molly,” she said, “are you OK?”

  I had told her Wednesday morning that Gideon and I had broken up. We had spent the past two days in silence. I wanted to tell her what was going on, but it wouldn’t make any sense unless I told her everything.

  Everything not being an option, I told the oldest lie in the world: “I’m fine.”

  I added, “I don’t think anyone’s ever died of a broken heart.”

  Edie closed her sweater against the wet cold. “Well, yes, certainly, but I was just wondering if…”

  “Well, don’t wonder,” I snapped. “I mean, what the hell am I supposed to do? Can I sit in a cab and get out of it and then sit on a train and get out of that and walk across a station? Yes. I think I can manage.”

  Edie backed away. I knew I was being a bitch, but whatever. I hate it when people ask you if you’re OK. It’s such a meaningless question. Obviously on some level you are, because there’s not an arrow through your head, and on some level you’re not, because you wish there were.

  I shut the door and then remembered something. “Hang on,” I said to the cabbie.

  We’d gone about twelve feet. He stopped and I rolled down the window and called out to Edie. She came shuffling over.

  I handed her my phone out the window.

  “Take a picture of me,” I said. I held up the ATAT folder. “Get this in, and the taxi.” She snapped the picture.

  “I’m going to do you a big favor and not make you explain what that’s for,” she said, handing me back my phone.

  “I appreciate that,” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I thought you might.” I watched her pick her way through the puddles as she walked away.

  I e-mailed the photo to Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan, as promised. “I know this isn’t from the train station,” I wrote. “Extenuating circumstances.”

  Those being that the person who was supposed to take that photo would not be around to take it.

  We made the left out of the Midvale campus onto the road. I sat back and listened to the music and tried to absorb the absurd notion that somewhere, someone had once been happy enough to have written this song.

  Meanwhile, Gid was packing his stuff to go to St. John. He willed every step, mechanically placed items in his Fairfax Pee-Wee Hockey duffle: two white T-shirts, two red, two black, bathing suit, jeans, shirt with buttons. There were no words in his head, just a dull ache of pain and loneliness. He sat down on his bed and put his head in his hands. How I wanted to call him. I looked at his number in my speed dial. But as soon as I placed my finger over his name, the image of Pilar in that white bathing suit came into my mind.

  I knew that I could never look the way Pilar looked in a white bathing suit.

  That was just a fact.

  But what about everything else that I was? Did it really, for Gideon, not add up to Pilar in a white bathing suit?

  I’d handed him my heart on a silver platter, and he’d accepted it with one hand while keeping the fingers on his other hand crossed behind his back. If he hadn’t loved me at all, I could have forgiven him. But he did love me, just not enough not to think of a hot girl in a white bathing suit while we had sex, and that was…well, first of all, it was gross. And it left me with two choices. Hate myself, or hate him.

  I erased his number. Since I would never forget it, it was just a symbolic gesture. But it was a step. One small step away.

  Chapter Six

  When my parents pulled up to the Buffalo train station in their snow-caked 1993 Volvo station wagon and saw me standing there by myself, my father reached for the radio dial and I saw my mother’s mouth form the words “Where’s her boyfriend?” Even my brother, who was five and in a car seat, was alarmed. “Mom, why is Molly alone?” he said as I got in the car. He looked at me suspiciously. “You said you had a boyfriend,” he said. “You lied.”

  I’d recently read an article that claimed sarcasm makes young children feel unsafe and confused. That seemed like a satisfactory alternative to physical punishment. “Sorry to disappoint you,” I said. “But I killed him.” Indeed, his cherubic little face whitened with terror. Mission accomplished.

  I snapped on my seat belt in the backseat. “We broke up,” I said.

  My mother looked really sad. She’s one of those mothers who gets really sad when you’re sad, which is nice at times, but
at other times can make you think twice about being sad. She reached out and caressed my face, which just made me feel like crying.

  My father watched me in the rearview mirror, and then his eyes shifted over to my mother. He was concerned about me, but he was probably mostly worried his wife was going to freak out if I freaked out.

  I needed to say something. Something that would make them think I was all right but would also make them leave me alone.

  “I direct you to the adage ‘Time heals all wounds,’ and ask for understanding and privacy. No questions, please, at this time.”

  My parents kind of smiled at each other, relieved that I was the same old Molly.

  I wasn’t the same old Molly and didn’t know if I ever would be, but at least I still knew how to act like I was.

  My brother looked at my mother. She shook her head, and he busied himself with making his Mantax doll run up and down the window frame, making Mantax noises. That and the rain pattering on the roof were the only sounds during the short drive to my house.

  Our house is old and white with green shutters and a big porch in front, a small yard on the side and a big yard in back. It’s decorated with leftover furniture from my grandparents’ houses, some antiques, some stuff that’s just sort of plain and functional. It’s a cozy, unpretentious house, with a lot of hooked rugs and Afghans and lamps. It’s a nice place to sleep, so when we got there, I went immediately upstairs to my single four-poster bed, which was my mom’s when she was a girl, and that’s what I did.

  I woke up just before noon. A third of the day, already gone. Good. The tree branches were still bare and grayish brown here. Out my window fell a steadily accumulating snow, which had already fallen on Boston, where Gid lay in a fetal position on top of a hideous hotel bedspread. From his window he saw white rooftops, antennas, and a sign reading DAYS INN SAUGUS LOGAN AIRPORT—NO VACANCY. Nicholas sat in a flowered upholstered chair by the window, reading The New York Times on his iPhone. The sound of a running shower came from the open bathroom door.

  “Wow,” Nicholas said. “The entire Eastern Seaboard is snowed in.”

  The shower went off and Cullen emerged from a cloud of steam, wrapped in a towel. He rubbed his hands together with relish. “And half of them are prep school hottinas and hottettas stranded right here!” Cullen grabbed a handful of ice cubes from a black plastic bucket, dropped them into a glass, and dumped in about a cup of Cutty Sark. Cullen had a real fake ID, with his picture and everything, that said he was thirty-four. He drank from the glass like he was drinking water, and then asked, “How’s the patient?”

  “He’s improving,” Nicholas said. “I got him to stop thinking about just jumping in a cab and taking a train to Buffalo.”

  You didn’t get me to stop thinking about it, Gid thought. I just don’t want to stand up.

  It was annoying to me that Gideon was so miserable I’d broken up with him when he was so obviously not completely in love with me.

  Gid turned away from the window, closed his eyes, and continued his systematic inventory of our last moments together to discover the cause of our breakup. He couldn’t make any sense of it. He just knew he wasn’t happy.

  Gid rolled onto his stomach. He whispered, “I will be OK.” He then rolled back onto his side because the bedspread smelled.

  Good for him. I was glad he was miserable. I was glad he missed me, even though I had no idea why, and he was obviously more interested in Pilar Benitez-Jones in a white bikini than reality with me. I was glad the bedspread in his room smelled like sweat and sag paneer, and I hoped he’d be there for his whole vacation, because that’s what guys who picture other girls naked while having sex with their girlfriends deserved.

  Suddenly, I felt hungry enough for toast.

  I didn’t expect to find anyone around, but when I entered the kitchen, there was my father sitting at the green Formica kitchen table, staring through frilly orange-sherbet-colored curtains at snow that was now falling in cotton-ball-sized clumps. He was doing bills: in front of him was a blue vinyl ledger book and in his hand was a black felt-tip marker. I thought about sneaking back upstairs. But our house was old and creaky and sneak-proof, and the second I set foot on the kitchen floor, my dad snapped to attention. He looked guilty, like I’d caught him at something.

  I learned long ago that your parents do not need to know how you really feel.

  “You have ink on your face,” I said, keeping it light.

  “Oh?” He dipped a napkin into a glass of water and rubbed where I was pointing. “I’m afraid that’s the least of my problems.”

  Generally I didn’t like it when my parents were upset. Their best trait was their stability, and when things were awry with them, I had the sensation that the world was about to go hurtling into space. But I was so glad he hadn’t asked me about me that I sat down.

  “What’s wrong, Dad?” I said.

  He winced a little. I knew he didn’t want to bother me, but I also could see that he needed to talk. “The stock where I put most of your money for college funds is…well, let’s just use the word underperforming.”

  I thought about my concrete-block dorm and the statistics requirement that Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan had warned me about. My parents would be devastated if I didn’t go to a really fancy college. It was their whole plan for me. I was their special weird little genius. “It’s OK,” I said, “I mean, I’m sure that everything will get better in the next few years.”

  My dad looked sad. “It’s not really OK,” he said. “Your sister is already in college, and we’re not going to make her go somewhere cheaper. And I think that she might use up a lot of what we already have.”

  My dad got up and sat back down again. He reminded me of a dog you’d just yelled at.

  “I just keep looking at the numbers, expecting them to look different,” he said. “But numbers have a way of always looking the same.” He rubbed his temples. His hairline was receding, his crow’s-feet deepening. I felt a surge of something primal. I was young, and my aging father needed my protection. Or at least that’s my excuse for the really big lie I told.

  “I’m probably getting this really big scholarship,” I said. “Like, really big.”

  I thought of that colossal pile of ATAT facts and figures in my room and felt a little sick to my stomach. But my father’s face lit up.

  “Really? What is it?”

  Further description would have shed light on the highly fabricated nature of my claim. “It’s pretty complicated…” I said. He looked upset again, so I added, “But it’s pretty much a done deal. But it’s weird. I mean, you know how all that nutty skull-and-bones prep school stuff is.”

  This was complete bullshit, but my father nodded seriously. I was taking advantage of the fact that he knew nothing about prep school or the fancy world he worked so hard to have me live in.

  “Jeez, Molly,” he said. “I don’t want to pressure you, but that sure would be amazing.” He shook his head, as if he were waking himself up from a bad dream. “Can I tell your mother?”

  “Hmm.” I tried to think fast. My mother was a stress case, and I knew it would make life a lot easier for my dad to ease her mind about this. “Let’s just keep it our little secret. That way, we can really celebrate when I get the letter.”

  “You’re such a good kid,” my dad said.

  I nodded and hoped he couldn’t see my face turning red. “I’m going to go upstairs,” I said. I no longer wanted toast. “I have a lot of studying to do.”

  “Of course,” my dad said.

  I was halfway up the stairs when his voice stopped me.

  “Molly?” he said.

  “Yeah?” I turned around.

  Not only was my dad smiling, but he almost looked young. “Thanks for reminding me that I never have to worry about you.”

  The ATAT folder sat on my desk in my room, looming like an enemy tower.

  It hadn’t even occurred to me how my single-minded interest in Gideon might affect othe
r people. Here my parents were making all these sacrifices to give me a better life, and I was the worse teen cliché ever…a stupid boy chaser.

  I spread out the ATAT stuff on my bed. It was all divided into categories: history, science, math, literature, geography. This was all divided into subcategories: European history, American history, algebra, geometry, et cetera.

  It was a vast, intimidating field of information, and it did remind me that, even though my head was having a lot of trouble focusing on anything but one boy lying on a bed in an airport hotel, there was, nonetheless, an entire world beyond him, beyond me.

  I could try to join that world, if only for a second.

  I picked up a list of facts about English kings: Jameses, Johns, Georges, Williams. I studied the sketches of their faces and reminded myself: these were all people who had been born, lived, and died without ever knowing Gideon Rayburn. Amazing.

  Molly, Gid thought, far away in that snow-covered hotel. Molly Molly Molly.

  I thought of my father, looking at me with all that fatherly trust. And I just pushed Gid as far as I could to the back of my head and started to do something I hadn’t done in a long time. Work.

  I drew a crude map of Europe. Gid rolled over and I tried to ignore the feeling of his cheek on the cheap pillow. I made a list of all the English rulers from 1066 to 1848. I memorized the years of their births and deaths and the names of their wives and murderers. Gid picked out something to wear, and I tried not to notice if he was thinking about looking good and instead drew lines between the countries of their enemies in red, and their allies in blue. I didn’t feel cured, but entire seconds, then minutes passed when I was actually thinking of something else.

  By the time I had taken out a pink highlighter to signify any two countries joined by a royal marriage, I was actually moved by the idea that I could be strong. Sure, I was miserable and heartbroken. Yes, my head was utterly occupied with the comings, goings, and thoughts of another human being with whom I was obsessed, but I was going to smart my way out of it. No matter how much Gid beckoned, I was going to learn every single fucking fact and date and equation in this pile of data. I was going to face every single encyclopedic mind at every prep school from Baltimore to Burlington, and I was going to crush them for the glory of Midvale. I was going to snatch my family from the jaws of financial despair, and my parents would drive me to Harvard in the brand-new Prius I got them after I had not only gotten a full scholarship to college but also invented a light bulb that heats houses in winter and cools them in summer.