The Other Girl: A Midvale Academy Novel

by Sarah Miller

  Again, I had laughed in spite of how awful it was. And then I tried to think about the fact that although Cullen’s stupidity had bought me a couple days, the longer Gid and Pilar didn’t mess around, the hotter they would get for each other.

  I tried not to think about them having sex that was as good as the sex Gid and I had when we weren’t able to be alone for a couple days.

  “Pilar’s favorite food,” Edie reminded me. “I know she’s hungry. I can see it in her eyes.”

  At practice I was paired up with Devon. He was looking particularly fat today, wearing skintight vintage bell-bottom jeans and a yellow T-shirt that clung to every heaving slab of flesh. Poor Pilar, totally obsessed with a light fold of skin over the top of her jeans, while Devon wore his obesity like a badge of honor.

  The whole time we ran our drills—we were doing constitutional amendments, the years states were admitted to the Union, and various crap about Teddy Roosevelt—Devon had one eye on me and one on Edie. He had buggy eyes, and this divided attention made him look retarded, but, amazingly, very cute.

  Anyway, this is how our practice went.

  Me: “What amendment gave women the right to vote?”

  Devon: “The nineteenth. Duh. Was Edie always this hot?”

  Me: “I can’t answer that. What state used to be part of Massachusetts?”

  Devon: “New Hampshire. Did she, like, all of a sudden grow boobs?”

  Me: “It’s actually Maine. You can remember this because they both begin with M. And no, she didn’t all of a sudden just grow boobs. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with a little thing called adolescence, but—”

  Devon: “No, no, no, no. Adolescence happens earlier. I think she got a boob job.”

  Me: “Does it turn you on to think she got a boob job? Like, that means she is somehow, I don’t know, sending you a message? That as she lay there going under, she thought, I can’t wait for Devon to see these?”

  (Devon nods.)

  Me: “Devon, why don’t you just ask her on a date?”

  Devon (looking at his shoe): “I forget what we were talking about.”

  Poor Edie. Yes, boys were always a disappointment.

  At noon, pizzas arrived. “You know,” Devon said. “They delivered pizzas to the Marines the night before they invaded Baghdad.”

  Indeed, Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan stood up and announced we were going to be watching a video.

  “I hope it’s porn,” Mickey said.

  “Mickey, I generally enjoy your sense of humor, but today it’s a little tiresome,” Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan said. “Moving along. I have every confidence we are going to do extremely well at this round-robin. And I am fairly sure we’re going to win.”

  We all cheered.

  Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan made a grim face. “Now the bad news,” she said. “The very likely opponent in the finals is going to be Xavier Academy. Now, I took the liberty of driving over to Xavier Academy one evening and videotaping their team…”

  Edie looked at me and mouthed the words What the fuck?

  “You’re the man!” Mickey said.

  “We’re the New England Patriots of ATAT,” Devon said. Edie giggled. He winked at her and then whispered to me, “Uh, do you think that Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan is maybe, like, kind of fucking nuts?”

  It definitely was kind of strange how much she wanted us to win. She was like one of those weird mothers in Texas who kills her daughter’s rival so her child can make the cheerleading squad.

  “Say something,” Devon whispered. “I want to know what’s up her ass.”

  I raised my hand. “Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan? Did they let you videotape them?”

  Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan snorted. “Certainly not. I climbed a fire escape, went in a window, and hid in a crawl space.”

  We were flabbergasted. “Wow,” Devon said. “That is super hardcore, Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan.”

  “You’re not the only people in the history of civilization to attend prep school,” she said. “Nor the only ones to break rules. Well. Moving along!” She went to the TV/DVD player in the corner of the room and slipped in a DVD. “Watch carefully, because we have our work cut out for us.”

  The video started out as a rumble of voices, and light coming through slats. Then it focused in on a slightly grainy image of one boy and panned out to reveal eight other boys who all looked almost exactly like he did. They were all skinny and pale, and each had a very prominent Adam’s apple and an expression of total humorlessness. A slim man in a black suit who looked to be no more than a few years older than all his students paced, firing off questions.

  “That’s Mr. Raines,” Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan said. “He’s their adviser. He’s written a couple of books on the War of 1812.”

  Of course he had.

  “OK,” Mr. Raines said, “who is A. Philip Randolph? ID, historical period, significance. Jones!”

  A short, towheaded boy stepped forward and announced, as if he were giving name, rank, and serial number, “A. Philip Randolph, 1889 to 1979. Head of the Brotherhood of the Sleeping Car Porters’ Union. African-American who, protesting unfair wages and treatment of his union in 1941, threatened to have African-Americans march on Washington. Considered to be the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement.”

  “Good,” Mr. Raines said. He pushed his glasses back on his head and all the boys who wore glasses, which was exactly eight out of ten of them, did the same.

  “The Crimean War. Historical period, significance. McCaskill.”

  McCaskill was one of the two not wearing glasses. He had a long nose and a querulous purse to his lips. He delivered his information as if he were angry. “Crimean War, 1853 to 1856, a conflict between Imperial Russia on one side and the Ottoman Empire, France, and England on the other. Principal conflict: control of the Holy Land. Florence Nightingale was a British nurse whose exemplary service—”

  “I thought Florence Nightingale was American,” I said to Nicholas, who was standing next to me.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I think even Florence Nightingale thinks Florence Nightingale is American. And the Crimean War, I’ve heard of it, but like…”

  “Right,” I said. “Me too.”

  Raines stalked across the floor and spun around. “Who is Herb Stempel? Tate.”

  “Henry or Alistair?” said two voices, presumably Henry and Alistair.

  “Henry,” Raines said crossly, as if this should be obvious.

  “The man who faked his loss on the quiz show Twenty One so that Charles Van Doren could become its new champion.”

  They moved on to math. They found volumes in their heads. They did quadratic equations on their fingers. They were asked how quickly a baseball, thrown at an arc of 30 degrees, might land in a catcher’s mitt 18 inches off the ground and 100 feet away when thrown with a velocity of 79 mph. Someone yelled out, “Point eight seconds.”

  “Very good, Tate,” Raines said.

  After this the tape went off.

  “Was that the end of practice?” Sergei asked.

  “No,” said Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan darkly. “That’s just when I had seen enough.”

  The day of the round-robin match, Edie and I were eating on the chilly marble steps of the Administration Building. The silverware clatter and yeasty smell of the cafeteria had made my stomach churn, and frankly, so had Gid, sitting alone in the far corner, thinking to himself, watermelon, tuna, gross cheese, yellow squash. He mentally piled them all up in a bowl and poured goat’s milk on them. I knew what he was doing. When he didn’t want to think about sex, he did a sort of food-aversion thing.

  His presence in my head and on this earth was a terrible weight. But I couldn’t not eat, because hopefully one day I would be over him and I didn’t want to be over him at a second-rate university, and I needed my strength for ATAT. All I could eat lately was tapioca pudding with almonds in it. The bland sweetness of the tapioca soothed me, and the crunch of the almonds kind of woke me up.

  “I don’t want to sit through that en
tire round-robin match today just to get demolished in the finals,” I said to Edie. “There’s got to be a way to beat Xavier.”

  “Of course there is.” Edie nodded with confidence. “We don’t know what it is yet. But it will come to us.”

  Just then, Gid clomped down the steps of the cafeteria and Pilar emerged from the library, and they started moving toward each other. What a vision she was, long hair flowing behind her, a short skirt baring the sheen of her legs, her butt perky on the pedestal of a pair of high-heeled boots. She waved, and as she lifted her arm, her shirt lifted up to reveal a patch of her stomach, concave, lightly muscled, golden, Mala Rodríguez perfect. They embraced but didn’t kiss. I couldn’t tell if Pilar turned away from him or if he turned away from her, or if they just happened to not kiss.

  Then Gid thought, Why didn’t she kiss me? Is she avoiding me? I’ll kiss her. I might as well.

  They kissed. It was a hungry kiss, and when it looked like it was over, it started up again.

  Every single notion I’d had that I was OK, possibly even over Gideon, that I didn’t want to be with him anyway, etc., disappeared when I watched him kissing Pilar. I tore my glance away to look at her stomach, to double-check if it was indeed approaching satisfactory proportions for her to have sex with Gid. Then I heard:

  I theenk it’s flat enough. I really theenk it is.

  No. Please, I thought, let me be hearing this through Gid somehow.

  Maybe we can have el sex tonight.

  No. It was unmistakably loud and clear. I was back in Pilar’s head.

  “Shit,” I said. “Shit, shit shit.”

  “What’s wrong?” Edie said.

  “Pilar’s thinking her stomach is flat enough to have sex,” I said.

  Of course, Edie didn’t know I had ever left her head and was confused. “She just all of a sudden thinks this? I don’t get it.”

  I threw up my hands. “I don’t know. I guess so. It’s not my fault. Blame her abs, not me!”

  Edie nodded understandingly. “OK, OK. Anything else going on? Anything at all?”

  “And now she’s…telling Gideon she has to go to the post office to pick up a package.”

  Edie smiled like she knew something I didn’t. “Keep going,” she said.

  We sat down on the steps and waited a few minutes for Pilar to pick up her package. Gid kissed her and went off to his class.

  How had I just gone out of his head into hers again?

  “Molly!” Edie interrupted my thoughts. “What’s going on?”

  “She has the package. It’s pretty big…like two large shoe boxes placed next to each other. She brings to it a little table outside the post office. She’s opening it with her keys. There’s an envelope on top. ‘Pilar—you’re beautiful just the way you are. Love, your dad. Enjoy.’ Now she’s taking out a couple layers of tissue paper. She’s reading: San Telmo Bakery, Boston. She…I’m reading something. Alfajores?”

  Edie smiled proudly.

  “What is an alfajor?”

  “It’s a cookie with dulce de leche and chocolate,” Edie said. “Pilar’s favorite.”

  “And how did you know Pilar liked them?”

  “I asked her,” Edie said. I’d never seen her look so pleased with herself.

  “You asked her? How?”

  “We were sitting around in the lounge in the dorm, chatting, and I said, ‘Oh, I love cream puffs,’ and she said, ‘Oh, alfajores are way better.’ And I said, ‘Really?’ and she described them to me and there was actually drool forming at the corner of her mouth.”

  I shook my head. “You’re crazy.”

  “Is she eating them?”

  Not just eating but wolfing. I hadn’t seen her eat a full meal in a while. She did kind of have to be starving. “Yeah,” I said.

  “Well,” Edie said, “then I guess I’m not crazy. We just bought ourselves a little more time. Until we can get you out of her head.”

  Then she frowned. “But wait a minute,” Edie said. “If you’re in her head, didn’t you see me talking to her? Or hear me, or whatever?”

  I knew Edie was just curious, but I had that feeling of angry defensiveness, as if I were being interrogated. I tried to sound offhand, “Hmm. I don’t know. Maybe I was asleep?”

  Edie nodded. “Hmm. Well, it was around three o’clock in the afternoon.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  But we both knew I wasn’t usually asleep at that time.

  Chapter Eighteen

  We took one of those campus vans to the round-robin. Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan drove. On the highway a giant splatter of bird shit hit the window. “Jesus,” Mickey said. “That’s not a normal amount of bird crap. It’s like the bird had, like, ten Oreo McFlurries and then crapped.”

  I laughed, and I think it might have been the first time I laughed out loud since Gid and I had broken up.

  “Oh my God,” I said to Edie, “those alfajores totally saved my life.” Pilar had been so full the night before she hadn’t even wanted Gideon to come over. And she’d gone online and ordered more alfajores.

  “Sometimes the stupidest ideas are the best ones,” Edie said.

  Devon was on Edie’s right, and he leaned into her. “Did you just say I was stupid?” he said.

  “No, I said stupid ideas are good,” Edie said.

  Devon tucked a stray piece of his hair under his barrette and looked at her approvingly. “Does that mean you want to smoke pot before the match?” he said.

  Edie rolled her eyes. “I won’t get high before the match, but I will some other time.”

  “Will you?” Devon said. “My, my, my.”

  “Have any of you ever had a McFlurry?” Nicholas said.

  All of us except Nicholas—all of us including Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan—had had a McFlurry.

  “You’re all disgusting,” Nicholas said.

  “Dude,” Mickey said to Nicholas. “If I can do a math word problem in my head at this match, you have to have a McFlurry.”

  “You have to get it right,” Nicholas said.

  “Of course I mean only if I get it right,” Mickey said. “Only the son of a very rich man could think of such a thing.”

  “Fine,” Nicholas said. “Ridiculous.”

  The round-robin ATAT match was at the Yarmouth School, which was a carbon copy of Midvale. Its student body was similarly made up of students too stupid to go to the best places and too in touch with reality and habits like wearing shoes to go to a place like Gates. It had a giant ugly modern library just like ours, a new theater designed by someone foreign and famous and pretentious, and the dorms were the same mix of turn-of-nineteenth-century charming and 1970s depressing. The round-robin was held in the chapel basement, a low-ceilinged place that was painted pistachio green with turquoise trim.

  “It smells like sheet cake in here,” Nicholas said as we settled into our chairs. There were eight different schools here. We were going up against three of them in five-round mini matches.

  “What’s wrong with sheet cake?” Devon said. His eyes were large and unfocused and bloodshot.

  Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan toyed nervously with the blue enamel beads at her neck and studied his face. “Devon, are you all right?” she said.

  “Of course, Mrs. G-dash-V,” he said, turning a lazy smile on her. “I’m just stoned out of my mind.”

  Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan shook her head. “Very funny. Are we all set here? Who is sitting out the first round?”

  Devon and Mickey both volunteered. As Mickey put his hand up I noticed him studying his fingers with undue fascination, and I realized he was stoned too. He winked at me and I smiled wearily, with affection. I didn’t care. Those guys played fine when they were stoned.

  Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan frowned. “Dan, you sit out this round. Next round, when we’re up against Waterford, you come back in and, Sergei, you come out. After that we’ll see where we are.”

  She smiled politely and walked away to join the other faculty advisers.

&
nbsp; “You know they really are stoned,” Dan called after her. “It’s not just a joke.”

  Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan didn’t turn around.

  Dan knew he was only going in for Sergei because Waterford sucked. She never took Sergei out unless she absolutely knew there was no chance of losing. And it wasn’t that Dan sucked. He was good. But everyone else was better than he was.

  We took our seats, Edie, Nicholas, Sergei, Mickey, and me. Devon went and sat on the bench and started to play some video game on his phone. Dan stood there complaining. “This is lame,” he said. “It’s not fair.”

  We beat Yarmouth, Tisdale Academy, and Thomas Paine Regional High—the one public school that was, for reasons unknown to me, in our conference. We had one team left, some Catholic girls’ school from Fall River called Holy Virgin. Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan checked her watch. “I just heard from Sister Martha, their adviser, and they’re just pulling in right now.” She lowered her voice. “So, I don’t anticipate any real problems here…. I don’t think these girls are all that brilliant, honestly. Now, you know if we win this, we’re in the finals, so if everyone can just keep their wits about them and—”

  At that moment, the door at the end of the hall creaked open, and the girls from Holy Virgin started to file in.

  All conversation and rustling of paper and scratching of pencils came to an abrupt halt as six of the most stacked teenage girls I had ever seen in my life came through the door. They were wearing long-sleeved white blouses, but they were tight and buttoned low, and their breasts burst out of them. Their plaid skirts rested high up on their butts. They were wearing stockings, but they were sheer and sort of shiny in this way that made the effect even dirtier, in a way, than bare skin. All of them wore black boots. Two of them wore glasses, like smart porn stars.