The Other Girl: A Midvale Academy Novel

by Sarah Miller

  “It’s a small school. We really want ATAT to win. I mean, it’s…important. To a lot of people. And I think if you join the team, we have a really good chance of winning the finals. I…Gid and I broke up. I mean, I did break up with him, so, I mean, technically, why would I be the one who is upset?”

  My voice wavered as I said this, because I knew I wasn’t telling the whole truth. But I managed to get it out, and she had no idea. It made me feel good to say it, even though it wasn’t true. I hoped she wouldn’t figure out the real reason we wanted her on ATAT. Then again, I don’t know why I cared. I mean, she was the one who thought that I should get lowlights and that Edie needed bigger lips.

  Pilar showed up at practice in a green mini skirt, white boots, a button-down lace camisole, and a motorcycle jacket. A subtle shadow hinted at vast stores of cleavage. Her beauty was electrifying—she was like a human disco ball. Everyone stared. Dan was the guy in the room who had probably spent the least time in any proximity to Pilar, and also, not coincidentally, the least likely to ever sleep with her or, for that matter, probably anyone vaguely attractive. He looked as if he were going to burst into tears. Sergei looked mad. Mickey winked at me and made an obscene show of adjusting himself in his chair. Even Devon and Nicholas, though too jaded and sexually experienced to be transfixed by Pilar (and also because they knew her, let’s face it), nodded admiringly.

  Pilar was like ten Holy Virgin girls. Those girls turned heads because there were so many of them together, but taken individually, they weren’t heart-stopping beauties, monuments to physical perfection, like Pilar. Plus, the Xavier guys would be seeing her for the first time. I thought about everything you had to process when looking at a girl like Pilar—her face, her body, the amazement that they went together, the fact that she was in front of you. Then, if you were a guy, you had to factor in the incredible thrill of seeing such perfection while simultaneously trying to process the horrifying fact that there was no way you were going to get to do anything but look.

  I took it upon myself to greet her. “Thanks so much for coming,” I said. “I think you know everyone.”

  “I’ve seen you,” Dan blurted out, “but never, like, right in front of my face.”

  Oh my God, Pilar thought, He’s so ugly. I don’t think he should talk about hees face! It makes people look at it.

  Pilar shook his limp hand and came away with her own moist and gluey. The only sound in the room was Nicholas and Devon, quizzing each other.

  “Gunpowder was invented in…China?” said Devon hesitantly.

  Nicholas frowned and went through his papers for a second. He looked up with a bright, fake smile. He wasn’t Pilar’s biggest fan, but he was competitive and he understood her importance as well as anyone. “Right you are. But do you know when Chang and Eng were born?”

  “Chang and Eng?” Pilar said. “Are they Siamese twins?”

  We were all surprised and impressed but tried not to show it.

  Pilar was very pleased when Nicholas said they were.

  She gave a modest shrug. “There’s a boutique in Shanghai called that. And their logo ees that. So…I figured.”

  “Pilar, keen instincts are very important. You should always go with your gut,” Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan said.

  “My gut?” Pilar had never heard this expression, and she wondered if Mrs. Gywnne-Vaughan was suggesting she was fat.

  “We are so pleased to have you,” Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan said. “Shall we begin with some recent history?”

  I assumed Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan was going to play to Pilar’s strengths.

  Pilar, why don’t you go up against…Dan?”

  Dan and Pilar sat in front of the room. Dan kept shifting in his seat, and I smiled to myself, thinking I should teach him Gid’s trick about the pile of gross food and the goat’s milk.

  Pilar closed her eyes in concentration.

  “Who shot Gianni Versace?”

  “Andrew Cunanan,” Pilar said. She smiled and added, “He was a gay drifter.”

  “Correct.”

  Dan snorted. Pilar clapped her hands together. “Yay!” she said.

  “Number two. How many ex-husbands does Elizabeth Taylor have?”

  “Eight,” Dan said, sure he was right.

  “No,” Pilar said. “Eight marriages. She married Richard Burton twice. Eight weddings, seven husbands.”

  “Correct,” said Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan. “Number three. Who took over the House of Chanel in 1983?”

  “Karl Lagerfeld,” shouted Pilar, leaping clear out of her seat. “Wow!” she said. “This is, like, so amazingly fun!” She’d never cared about knowing the answer in class before, but this was different. It was like, everyone was watching her, and she had won. It felt like something else, she thought, knowing the right answer.

  “Pilar, you’re free to go,” Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan said. “We’ve seen enough. We’re happy to have you if you’re happy to have us.”

  “Oh, I am!” Pilar said. Being this happy made her look more beautiful than I had ever seen her. “Oh,” she said, before she left. “What should I wear to the match?” Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan’s eyes took in Pilar’s outfit from her spike heels up to her cleavage, and I saw a quiver of distaste across her lip before she said, “What you’re wearing is perfect.”

  After she left, we all stayed quiet for a minute. Seeing Pilar in action had made me feel very calm. I saw that Nicholas was looking at me with an admiring smile. So were Mickey, Devon, Sergei, and Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan, even Dan. It was Dan who started to clap, a slow, steady clap. Everyone joined in, filling the room with applause.

  “Brilliant,” Nicholas said. “I mean, I thought I was used to her, but that girl knows how to walk into a room.”

  “I’ll say,” Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan said. She wiped her glasses on the cuff of her sweater. “I’m a sixty-year-old woman, but I can see it. She’s an atom bomb.”

  Chapter Twenty

  After the practice, Pilar went back to her room and flopped on her bed and screamed with joy. She pressed her hands into her mouth and felt herself tingling all over. She rolled over onto her stomach and laughed into the mattress out of pure glee. She was smart! What did her mother know? She was smart and she was going to help carry the Midvale Academic—what was it called again? Well, whatever it was, they were going to win, and she was going to help.

  It’s amazing I decided to cultivate my mind and now I am actually going to get a real chance to prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I am not just hot.

  She sat on the edge of the bed. She wondered if she should study, maybe? Math? No. She needed help to study math. But maybe she could get out a history book or something and just look it over. She knelt down by her bookshelf. There was her pile of Italian Vogues, her pile of British Vogues, her Elles. Her textbooks looked lonely. She picked up her history text from last year. She opened it to a page of someone being tarred and feathered. Oh my God, I always thought that was just an expression, like it just meant to yell at someone. People actually did that?

  She ended up reading the entire chapter on the Revolutionary War. When she finished that, she saw that the next chapter was called “Trouble with Europe.”

  She wanted to know what this trouble with Europe was, and she started to read when she saw that she was late to meet Gideon in the dining hall for dinner.

  When she got there he had an empty plate in front of him and was holding the newspaper up in front of his face. She recognized him by his shoes, and she kicked one of them as she approached.

  “Hey,” she said. “Sorry I’m late.” Gid didn’t look right. He was distracted.

  “What’s wrong?” she said.

  “Nothing terrible,” he said. “It’s just that we had a bag of pot in our room, and it’s missing now. I don’t know. I mean, I think Cullen probably got really high and left it somewhere. But then I just worry.”

  Pilar nodded, but she didn’t care about Gideon and his pot. Boys just smoke pot to be cool. Pot’s not even that
fun. It just makes me paranoid I’m as fat as a whale. But eef Geedeon didn’t smoke pot, he might not be so cute. He might seem like he was too good. Anyway. We might as well talk about me.

  “I was studying,” Pilar said.

  “You?” Gid said. “Studying?”

  “Yes! I learned about the Stamp Tax! And the…uh…Old Eeronsee-days.”

  “I think you mean Old Ironsides,” Gid said.

  “I am on Academic. Shit. I can’t remember what it’s called.”

  Gid looked at her incredulously. “You’re on Academic Tête-à-Tête?”

  “Yes,” Pilar said. “Isn’t that just, like, the greatest thing! It is so fun. I knew who killed Gianni Versace. And I knew who Karl Lagerfeld was.”

  Through her eyes I saw suspicion cloud his face.

  “What is it, Geedeon? Aren’t you happy for me?”

  Gideon put his hand on his leg and smiled into her eyes, and I had the unpleasant sensation of feeling his loving gaze upon me without being its actual focus. “Of course I am happy for you,” Gid said gently. “I’m sure you’re a great addition to the team.”

  He stood up abruptly. Head down, he started to charge out of the cafeteria.

  “Where are you going?” Pilar called after him.

  “I have to go take care of something,” he said. He lowered his voice to a whisper. “Some bullshit with the missing pot.”

  “Oh, OK. Well, I’m going to be in the library later, so you might want to come find me.” She wanted to talk more about ATAT.

  Gid leaned over to kiss her good-bye, and from the light brush of his lips on her cheek I knew that he wasn’t really paying attention. I didn’t need to be inside his head to know he was coming to find me.

  I positioned myself at the bottom of my dorm stairs with a giant pile of ATAT materials. Gid walked in muttering to himself, “Look Molly, the thing is,” clearly practicing for our confrontation.

  As usual, when we were in the same room, I would feel like the air had suddenly been set on fire. Gid looked hot. It was clear, especially seeing him this close-up, that going out with Pilar—despite the obvious setbacks—had given him a great deal of confidence. Just being seen with her had set his shoulders back an inch or two, had lifted his head, and had brought a sort of lampish glow to his cheek, so that his extremely short whiskers were tipped with gold. He had that amazing hollow about two inches southwest of his ear. I swallowed as I felt my heart shudder up into my throat. The unfinished, frayed edges of ourselves were touching each other.

  He finally said, “What are you doing sitting there?”

  To which I responded, “I live here.”

  “No.” Gid scowled impatiently. “What are you doing sitting on the stairs?”

  “Nothing,” I said, my tone defensive. “I sit here a lot.”

  “You never sit there,” Gid said.

  “Gid,” I said, testing my luck, “did you come over here to argue about where I habitually sit?”

  He looked at me. “No. I came over here to talk about why the hell you put Pilar on ATAT.”

  “I didn’t put her anywhere,” I said. “Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan did. She thought she’d be good for the team.”

  Gid snorted. “That is just so much bullshit,” he said.

  It was both annoying and hot that he knew I was lying. “It is not,” I said. “You can go ask her.”

  This was just a ridiculous thing to say because we both knew it would be a cold day in hell before Gid stormed into Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan’s office and demanded to know why she’d put his hot girlfriend on ATAT, because let’s face it, she wasn’t a genius.

  “I just don’t know why you’d want to humiliate her like that,” he said. He shook his head. “I just don’t…I mean, I always knew you were jealous of Pilar.”

  I thought I was so good at hiding things. Being inside Gid’s head, and then Pilar’s, I forgot that other people had normal capabilities of perception, and that they could look inside my head as well.

  Gid continued. “But I never thought you’d go so far as to purposely humiliate her.”

  A lot of things could have come out of my mouth, but what did come out was “Don’t flatter yourself.”

  I didn’t know what this would do to Gid. I didn’t think it would be good, but I didn’t expect it to have the effect it did. “Flatter myself?” he said, and his face reddened and I saw his hands start to shake. “I am hardly capable of flattering myself. I mean, Molly, for Christ’s sake, you broke up with me without any explanation, when I was…when we were…Do you have any idea how humiliating that was?”

  “Humiliating?” I said. “That’s the worst thing you can say about it is that it was humiliating?”

  “What’s worse than being humiliated?” Gid said.

  I wanted to say, seeing your boyfriend get himself into a state of arousal by picturing another girl in a white bikini. But I just shook my head.

  “Look,” Gid said, and the sudden lowness of his voice, not quite intimate but around the edges, made my stomach turn over on itself. “Can we at least talk about what happened?”

  Gideon still had feelings for me. There was no way he really wanted to talk about my putting Pilar on ATAT. He wanted to know if I still cared.

  “Molly, talk to me.”

  I shook my head. “I can’t explain it right now. I have…I have a lot of studying to do.”

  He looked at the wall, about to punch it, but drew his fist back. “Fuck,” he said. “That wall looks pretty hard.”

  I wanted to say, this is what you get for not wanting me enough, but I couldn’t. So I just watched him stare at the wall until he walked away.

  Gid wanted to know if I still cared, and I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to be honest about the fact that I still did, or just keep it to myself. Now that Pilar was studying more, she was also eating more alfajores, and since they definitely weren’t going to sleep together today, well, as far as letting Gid know I still cared, I wasn’t about to decide today either.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  That night, Pilar and I were both in our respective rooms, both studying for ATAT.

  She had decided that tonight she was going to memorize facts about the Habsburgs, the Windsors, all the Louis and their wives, and I decided I would do the same. Whatever she read, I would read at the same time. “This is awesome,” I told Edie. “She reads slower than I do, so I take in the information and then take it in again just a few seconds later. It makes memorizing this stuff so easy.”

  Pilar was very excited by the fact that Queen Victoria, whom she had thought was somehow related to Posh Spice and still alive, had invented the concept of wearing white at weddings.

  White. Milk. Pilar wanted some milk to go with her delicious alfajores.

  Walking across the quad to the campus store, Pilar thought about how she had always imagined that white was her color and that she looked so good in it that no one else should wear it. With some shame she recalled the night that Madison had worn that nice white dress and gotten the job from that sleazy producer. It didn’t have anything to do with her dress, Pilar knew that now. Madison had just presented herself as a serious person. But maybe in a way she was lucky she had fucked that thing up, because Elias was a dick anyway. Maybe, she thought, now that I’m on ATAT, I could get a more serious job. Like not just for some gross person.

  Pilar was so busy having all these things in her head that she just forgot to think about whether anyone was looking at her. She thought about how she wasn’t thinking about how anyone was looking at her because she was thinking. She laughed and clapped her hand over her mouth. This was all surprising.

  Pilar had always held it in her head that it would have been better if she were more glamorous, but when you were glamorous, did there ever come a point where you stopped worrying about being glamorous and enjoyed it? I don’t think so, she thought. It seemed like maybe all the time you were thinking about being pretty you couldn’t enjoy it. Like her stomach, she hadn’t thought
about it all day, which was good because it was of course still fat and if she had thought about it she probably would have had trouble concentrating. But maybe first her mind and then her stomach was a good idea. Her stomach. Gideon. Sex.

  Why did her mind have to move that fast?

  I had been making that association, but I didn’t want her to make it too.

  She got her milk and went to her room and drank it and studied some more. She fell onto her bed, exhausted. She felt herself starting to fall asleep when there was a knock on her window. She sat up.

  It was Gideon. She let him in.

  “Pilar,” he said. He sat down on the bed. He looked uncomfortable. Scared. He looked like he had something to say. The second he swallowed and looked at her with pained eyes, she knew.

  Oh my God, she thought, he is going to break up with me.

  I think she was right.

  “Pilar,” he said again.

  No, no, no. He can’t break up weeth me. I thought I felt better because I was studying and stuff, but now I feel really bad. I feel better because I have a boyfriend who won’t break up with me, and now, he ees someone who would break up with me, and that can’t happen. Plus, I know that he still thinks he likes Molly. And even though she is thinner than me, my number is 9.87 and she is only a 7.2.

  A 7.2! That fucking bitch. I would have sworn I was at least an 8.

  She was thinking, It’s Molly. But she couldn’t admit that. It would make her look too insecure. “I know it’s been hard for you, me saying no,” she said. In the split second that it took him to even begin to respond to what she was saying, Pilar had whipped off her shirt and stood there naked to the waist. I had seen them—her breasts—before. But I had never seen a guy see them. I saw a glaze come over Gid’s eyes, and his hands left his side involuntarily and he reached out and felt them. “Oh,” he said.