by Sarah Miller
“Holy Virgin,” Mickey said.
Dan’s and Sergei’s mouths fell open. Dan’s eyes were big and fishlike. Sergei just looked like he was going to cry.
“Just picture them in their underwear,” said Devon, smiling evilly and giving a proud pat to his giant gut. He and Nicholas were unfazed. They’d had sex with pretty girls before. Mickey was certainly overstimulated, but he had a sense of humor, and he had experienced his dick being touched by something other than his own hand. But this was kind of a nerd nightmare. Dan’s and Sergei’s sexual frustration was literally seeping out of them. Sergei’s brow sprouted beads of sweat, and when Dan ran his hands over his Dockers, they left wet spots.
Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan gathered us into a huddle. “All right,” she said. “Is everyone OK?” She’s already told Dan he could go in this round, and considering his being upset before, she couldn’t very well change the roster now. But that was too bad, because he was a mess. So was Sergei, who was also in for this round.
“I don’t think they should be allowed to wear those clothes,” Sergei said. Dan’s livery tongue kept clearing gross white stuff from the corners of his mouth. Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan took a small bottle of water out of her bag and handed it to him.
Nicholas opened it for Dan, who seemed quite devoid of motor skills. “Drink this,” Nicholas said. “Then pour the rest of it on your penis.”
A nun—one of those sort of modern-looking nuns, in a habit, but wearing pants—approached a lectern a few feet away. “Are we ready?”
Dan looked fearfully at Nicholas.
“Just drink the rest of the water,” Nicholas said. “Let’s just get this over with.” He looked at Sergei.
“Are you all right?” he said.
Sergei made a sound kind of like a humpback whale.
Dan drank the water and handed the bottle to Nicholas.
“What the hell?” Nicholas said. “I’m not your mother.”
Dan made whimpering noises to indicate that the trash can was behind where the girls were sitting, five pairs of perfect round breasts and silky hair in a row. One of them crossed and uncrossed her legs. Another leaned over to whisper to another, and a strand of her hair swung between another girl’s ample cleavage.
“Wow,” Sergei said. “It almost looks like she was going to make out with her.”
“Don’t make me go over there,” Dan pleaded.
“Oh for Christ’s sake,” Nicholas said. “Give me that.”
He went to throw away the bottle. As he walked by, the girls all swiveled toward him. Dan and Sergei both caught it, and their faces went red with jealousy and rage.
“Life sucks,” Sergei said.
Thank god Edie was going first, up against one of the girls with the glasses.
“The Chicago Museum of Art is home to the great masterwork in the painting style pointillism…” the nun read.
“La Grande Jatte,” Edie said.
Glasses and Breasts pouted. Pants and Habit frowned. “Correct.”
Edie was similarly aggressive with the rest of the questions and won the round. I went up against a blond girl named Daphne. “Hi,” she gurgled at me. Her body looked like it was made out of tan Tupperware. “I love your earrings.” I thanked her and won the round handily.
Now Sergei went up. Sergei’s opponent pitched slightly forward on her toes as she shook his hand so that her cleavage found its way to just under his face. He didn’t really sit down so much as fall into his chair, casting a helpless look at Nicholas and Devon, who gave him a thumbs-up.
“Physics,” the nun announced.
“Physics,” Sergei repeated. It was the last word he uttered for the round. He just sat there with a sort of dumb, apologetic smile on his face until the other girl came up with the answers. When it was over he said, “Good job,” and went to shake her hand, but she pretended she didn’t see, and flounced back to her seat.
Dan was next. His mouth was still open in that weird gaping-fish-mouth expression. His opponent’s name was Ursula, and she was appropriately Bond girl-esque, tall and bodacious, with long coppery hair.
“Who missed a crucial ground ball in the 1986 World Series?”
Dan’s mouth widened and narrowed, as if he had encountered some plankton.
“Bill Buckner,” the Bond girl answered briskly.
“In what city was basketball invented?”
Even I knew this.
“Springfield,” said the Bond girl.
“You have a pretty voice,” Dan said.
She gave him a sweetly insincere smile.
The last question was so fucking easy: who was the first American to win five medals in the winter Olympics?
“Uuuhhhhh,” Dan said.
“Eric Heiden,” the girl said, and her butt twitched triumphantly as she went back to her seat.
The match was in Mickey’s hands. I had confidence.
Until I looked at him and saw his glassy-eyed stare.
I leaned over Edie’s lap to get to him. “Get it together,” I hissed.
“Shit, guys,” Mickey whispered. “The one I am up against is the only one I think is really hot. I just see such pathos in her eyes, you know? And she keeps looking at me.”
“Oh Jesus,” Edie said, disgusted. “She’s looking at you because you’re her opponent.”
“Mickey,” I said. “Those two are freaks. But I know you can do this. I know you can.”
Mickey gave me a hopeful, sad smile, and then his eyes drifted up. I looked and saw his opponent lacing up her boot, bent gracefully over it like a deer rubbing its nose against its paw. “These girls look vulnerable, but they’re not. And even if Dan and Sergei probably will never get their hands on a piece of ass like that, you very well might.”
“Really?” Mickey said. “Even if I don’t grow a lot?”
“Yes,” I said. “You’re funny. Girls like this. We care about this thing that you have called personalities.”
Mickey nodded, mystified. Edie widened her eyes, encouraging me to give him more.
“Mickey, someday a girl like this—maybe even one of these girls—is going to drive you insane. You’ll be wondering how you can get rid of her. Or you’ll be in a custody battle with one of them. Or if you do marry one and stay married, she’s going to redecorate your house every time she gets her period. You think you want to take care of a beautiful girl, but you really don’t. They’re more trouble than they’re worth. Trust me. I know.”
Mickey nodded. I think he had drawn some strength from what I said.
The nun cleared her throat. “Are we quite ready?”
I can’t believe my college education hinged on whether Mickey Eisenberg was going to be able to resist getting a boner in the next five minutes.
He gave me a confident look as he took his seat across from one of the girls. She was blond with brown eyes, and her lower lip quivered with a vulnerable sensuality. “Hello,” Mickey said to her evenly. “How are you?”
“Fine,” she said. Her voice was bitchy and irritated. It was exactly what Mickey needed.
The nun cleared her throat. “Twenty-seven to the one-third power times sixteen to the…one-half power.”
About three seconds passed and Mickey said, “Three-quarters.”
The nun pressed her lips together. “You are correct.”
The next question involved finding the volume of a sphere. Mickey got it.
The last question was another math problem, harder, and Mickey got that one too.
We had won the match.
“Nothing says ‘You managed to keep your dick out of your brain’ like whipped fake ice cream and crushed cookies full of trans fats,” Mickey said. “I think I’m having a McFlurgency!”
It was ten on a Wednesday night, but the McDonald’s off 128 was packed. Tables were full of guys just off work, hunched over their burgers, their jaws working in unison. At other tables, little kids sat up on their knees and used their skinny little bodies like shields against their
brothers’ and sisters’ attempts to eat their french fries. When we walked in they all stared at us—a bunch of overdressed prep school kids and a lady in a skirt with tiny pink ducks, each swimming in its own tiny blue lake. After we’d gotten our McFlurries and Nicholas had paid for all of them, Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan touched her pearls, her nostrils flaring in instinctive reaction to the attention. “Let’s go outside,” she said. “And have a little chat about how the hell we’re going to beat Xavier.”
We sat in the McDonaldland playground, around tiny tables, our knees up in the air. My McFlurry was amazing, and made even sweeter by the fact that Pilar was back in her room at Midvale trying, and failing, to ignore her alfajores. She ate half of one and then sat on her bed, chewing it with tightly closed eyes, willing herself not to go back for the other half. She counted to ten. But she couldn’t stop herself. She ran over and ate the other half, and started in on another one.
“Oh my God,” I whispered to Edie. “It’s working! Pilar is totally chowing those alfajores.”
“Of course she is,” Edie said. “Because they’re alfajores, and she is Pilar Benitez-Jones.”
Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan was toying with her straw. “My, these are delicious,” she said. “Mickey, thank you so much for encouraging me to experiment with the Oreo. Now. As we saw demonstrated on the videotape earlier, Xavier Academy is really quite an astounding team.”
Nicholas shook his head. “They’re going to kill us,” he said.
“Yeah,” Dan said, and went to give him a high five.
Nicholas gave him a perfunctory high five back, then said, “I didn’t want to leave you hanging, but you should know that you high-five people when you agree with them about something, sort of, well, positive. You don’t do it to say, ‘Hey yeah, that’s exciting, I think we’re fucked too.’”
Dan nodded seriously. “OK, thanks,” he said. “I appreciate your help.”
“I refuse to believe we’re fucked,” Mickey said.
“Me too,” said Edie.
“I’m going to get another McFlurry,” said Devon.
“You’re not going anywhere,” Mrs. Gwynne Vaughan said. “We absolutely have to figure this out.”
“Besides,” Edie said, “you hardly need it.”
Devon looked at her, surprised. “What did you say?”
Edie waited until he sat down, and then she whispered, “You shouldn’t eat another one of those. I mean, you’re kind of fat.”
I couldn’t tell if Devon was mad or what. But he didn’t get another McFlurry.
I turned my attention back to the real problem.
“Look, Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan,” Nicholas said. “Facts are stubborn things. And we can’t deny—”
“We can’t deny that we have to win,” I said. Pilar was eating another alfajor. Edie was the best. She wasn’t even inside Pilar’s head, and still she came up with a better plan than I did.
“Those guys are such unbelievable geeks,” Nicholas said. “They study all the time. They know everything.”
Devon looked forlornly into the bottom of his empty McFlurry cup. “Well,” he said. “The good news about that is that we can just forget about actually trying to beat them.”
“What the hell do you mean?” Nicholas said. “Just because you’re lazy doesn’t mean the rest of us are.”
“Don’t put your negativity on me,” Devon said. “I am not a negative guy, OK? Negative guys do not wear barrettes, OK? I was just saying we can’t beat them on skill. So we need to think about secret weapons.”
“It’s kind of a drag that none of the girls on our team are hot,” Sergei said.
There was a silence as everyone waited to see how Edie and I would react. We looked at each other and burst out laughing. Then everyone else started to laugh. I laughed so hard my side ached. Sergei was such an idiot. Didn’t he know that was the worst thing you could say to a girl? Girls were all insecure about how they looked, and to actually tell them to their faces, as if they didn’t already know it, that they weren’t the kind of girls who made boys stop in their tracks and rendered them absolutely unable to…
Suddenly I had an idea. Edie nudged me. “What’s up?”
“Edie, do you remember when you said before sometimes the stupidest ideas are the best ones?”
She nodded. I whispered in her ear. Her eyes lit up. “Oh my God,” she said. “Those girls are like…are like toy versions of her. But…is she smart?”
I didn’t want to admit this. “She’s not entirely stupid. She’s eager to learn.”
Edie nodded thoughtfully.
“It’s not such a dumb idea, right?” I asked.
She laughed. “It’s totally a dumb idea. But it seems like it might just work!”
Chapter Nineteen
As Pilar slept, her beautiful face glowed with well-sugared contentment. Her hand rested on her stomach, curled tenderly around it as if the cookies that Edie had sent to make her chubby and averse to sex were her friends. I slept well too, but at 3 A.M. I woke up and couldn’t go back to sleep.
“Are you awake?” Edie said.
I was touched that we were back to a state where she could sense this, and care. “Yeah. I was just thinking how weird it is that Pilar is both the source of all my problems and possibly the answer to one of them.”
I think I could feel her smiling in the dark.
“Am I doing the talking tomorrow, or are you?” she asked.
“Hmm.” This was a good question. “I don’t know,” I said. “I mean, if I talk, I’ll be able to adjust myself to what she’s thinking, and that’s pretty helpful. I mean, I guess it could be pretty helpful.”
I was glad Edie couldn’t see my face. I felt like I had just practically admitted to her that I had been in Gideon’s head.
But she just said, “We’ll just see how she reacts.”
How she reacted in the morning is that she woke up and let out a loud shriek. I heard it in my head, but Edie heard it all the way down the hall.
“What the hell?”
I leaped out of bed and did a little dance on the cold floor. “Pilar is fat! I mean, for her, she’s fat. She is freaking out about her stomach!”
I jumped on Edie.
“Help! Physical affection alert. Help.” But she was laughing.
I pushed myself up off my hands and landed on the floor. “Let’s go talk to her now. She’s feeling vulnerable. She’s going to want an ego boost.”
Edie was stepping into her jeans and socks and then, modestly, putting a bra on under her T-shirt.
I took a little care getting ready to talk to Pilar. I combed my hair. I wore boots instead of just boring clogs, and jeans that actually fit instead of the loose ones that felt comfortable. Edie took notice of my unusual attention to detail and put a little makeup on me—a smudge of dark shadow at the edge of my lashes and some lipstick.
The moment Pilar opened her door and saw Edie and me standing there, she commenced compiling a mental list of what we should change about our appearance.
Apparently, I needed lowlights. I think I kind of knew what lowlights were. Edie needed contacts. (Pilar, genetically perfect, had apparently never heard of LASIK.) I needed to work on my shoulder muscles because I slouched, and finally, Edie could be pretty if she would get her upper lip enhanced, but it would have to be done by someone really good.
Pilar opened her mouth to ask Edie if her mother knew a good plastic surgeon, and I figured this was as good a time as any to interrupt.
“We want you to be on Academic Tête-à-Tête,” I said.
Edie nodded enthusiastically. “We do. We all really do.”
Thees is a joke. They’re making fun of me.
With the fat freak-out this morning I should have anticipated this kind of insecurity.
But before I could say anything, Pilar jumped to her own defense. “I’m actually really smart, you know. I mean, Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan told me once even I was smart. I theenk I have one of her papers right here saying so.�
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I decided to totally ignore Pilar’s bout of insecurity and make myself look like the one who was insecure.
“So, Pilar,” I said. “You’re probably thinking, Wow, ATAT is for losers.”
Wow. Are they not making fun of me? Do they really want me to be on ATAT? Does Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan really remember that she said I had the potential?
“We have a lot of gaps in knowledge,” Edie said. “Like, you have traveled a lot and…you’re from another country. So you know different things about history…”
“And other kinds of wildlife,” I said. “Like…penguins! They have penguins in Argentina, right?”
Do they have penguins in Argentina? I can’t remember eef we actually have them there now or eef they just wash up on shore now because of the global warming.
Pilar’s eyelashes—which were long, lush and embellished with an amazing new mascara that was not paint, but in fact tiny black latex tubes—fluttered as she modestly bowed her head. “Well, I mean, do you think I could, like, try it out?”
“Sure,” Edie said. “Why don’t you come to a practice, and we’ll see how you like it. We wouldn’t want you to do anything you’re not comfortable with.”
I really want to do it. I know I was supposed to do my stomach first and then my mind, but as long as I screwed up my stomach, I might as well get going on my mind, right?
I couldn’t resist saying, “I think this will be really good for you, Pilar.”
To my surprise, she looked at me like I was her long-lost friend. Like I understood her as no one else could.
“Molly,” she began.
She was about to say that she really admired me.
“Excuse me,” Edie said, sensing we should be alone. She left. “So,” said Pilar Benitez-Jones.
“So,” I said.
She slipped one foot out of a rhinestone flip-flop and scratched the top of her other foot with her toes. It was the sort of sexy-casual thing that she was very good at and I was very bad at. “Is this…weird for you?” she said. “I mean, you must know I am going out with…”
I didn’t feel very professional about this, but I wanted to keep my dealings with her as clean as possible. It was already a little creepy that the whole reason we were having her on ATAT was that she was hot, but hey, I wouldn’t have minded being used for my body rather than my brains. For once.