The Other Girl: A Midvale Academy Novel

by Sarah Miller

  “How’s Gid?” I asked.

  Nicholas shook his head. “He’s upset.”

  I had expected as much, but I still didn’t like hearing it. “When is he going home?”

  “Well,” he said, “apparently, the damning part of this whole thing is that Gid…”

  He didn’t want to tell me, but I already knew, and plus, it was gossip anyone who knew anyone could have had access to.

  “I know,” I said. “Gideon didn’t have any clothes on.”

  We couldn’t help smiling at each other. I guess we were both picturing Gideon in Pilar’s closet, naked and helpless with Cockweed’s flashlight on him. The only difference was that, through Pilar’s eyes, I had actually seen it.

  Nicholas smiled—and this was an expression I had never, ever seen on his face—affectionately. “You kind of got to hand it to Gid,” he said. “He comes here a virgin, and he ends up getting kicked out for being naked in the closet of the hottest girl on campus.”

  Nicholas went on, completely oblivious to the idea that I might not have loved hearing Pilar referred to that way. “Apparently there’s going to be some sort of a hearing. You know. The various parties give their sides of the story. It’s in two days. But at this point…” Nicholas looked down at his feet and shook his head. “It’s pretty much just a formality.”

  I looked around the ATAT practice room, at this depressing little place with its peeling-edged Klimt prints and a wall of boring, useless books. Edie and Devon were sitting very close and whispering, and Devon was so bummed out he wasn’t even bothering to look down her shirt. Sergei thumbed through The Lancet, a British medical journal, but I could tell he wasn’t reading. Mickey Eisenberg was rolling a joint, and Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan, sitting at a metal desk in the corner, grading papers, her mouth straight and stiff, didn’t even notice. Poor Dan’s hair looked even flatter than usual today.

  I could smell Mickey’s joint from here. It made me wonder how Cockweed could have avoided smelling the pot in the boys’ room.

  Then I thought about how some of that pot had gone missing.

  Finally, I remembered overhearing Cockweed talking to his friend on his cell phone that morning we were hiding out in the chapel. He’d said, “I’m not in the right frame of mind for thinking.”

  Because I thought Cockweed was so stupid, I hadn’t really thought about it. But Cockweed didn’t think he was stupid. And he clearly wasn’t going to brag about his own stupidity.

  Cockweed smoked pot.

  It was just a hunch.

  Bu considering my ability to know what people were doing and thinking, there had to be a chance it was a good one.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Pilar was sitting on her fancy sofa with her eyes closed, trying to pretend this was all just a dream. She opened them and saw around her the proof that it wasn’t—neatly stacked T-shirts, jeans, her stable of hotel-quality sheets and towels zipped inside their protective plastic sheaths. The white-hot fear she’d felt when she saw Cockweed standing outside her door, that stupid flashlight on his head, had lasted overnight. The next morning, when the drama was over and it was clear that she and Gid were just going home, it had turned into a dull, empty ache.

  Her life at Midvale was over. She would never walk up the stairs of Emerson, wrinkling her nose at the common smells of Pantene and White Linen, and make a mad dash for her room, where she would be so very relieved to find herself enveloped in the delicious scents of her far superior products, her Kérastase, her Jo Malone orange blossom cologne, the delicate rose scent of her Chanel lipstick. She would never go to the dining hall and make her special low-fat dressing out of vinegar, cottage cheese, and the chopped cilantro she brought in herself, or run around the track as the sun came up, cheering her, reminding her that her ass was growing smaller while the other girls of Midvale merely slumbered and thickened.

  Back in our room, I told Edie about my Cockweed pot theory. She jumped up in the air. “No way,” she said.

  “Why are you so excited?” I said. “I mean, we don’t know where he keeps it. We don’t know if it’s true. We’d have to follow him around and bust him, and we only have a few days before Gid and Pilar leave.”

  Edie looked at me and shook her head. “Are you dense?”

  How was I supposed to respond to that?

  “You have a superpower,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “But I’m not in Cockweed’s head.”

  Edie sat down with her pen and paper. She frowned over it for a while, scribbling down ideas. She wrote the word superpower. Then she circled it.

  “Pilar,” she said. “Of course.”

  I sniffed impatiently. “I’m not following.”

  “Pilar has a superpower, too,” she said. “Being hot.”

  I still didn’t follow.

  “Let’s just tell Pilar that we think Cockweed may have pot, and that we want her to stay.”

  “OK, but that means that we have to get Pilar to kiss Cockweed?” I said. “There’s no way that’s going to happen.”

  “Ordinarily, I would say that’s right. But you do have special powers,” Edie said. “That changes everything.”

  “Edie, just because I’m in someone’s mind doesn’t mean I can get them to kiss a gross pig like Cockweed.”

  Edie shook her head, like I was a child who had refused to learn to tie her shoes.

  “Molly,” she said, “if you’re in someone’s head, I think you can get them to do just about anything. OK. Pilar kisses Cockweed, and you get into his mind. That way, you can find out where he keeps his pot.”

  She clapped her hands as if it were all so simple.

  “Edie,” I said, “I hate to burst your bubble, but how do you propose we explain to Pilar that she needs to kiss him?”

  Edie thought about this. “That’s a good point. We don’t tell Pilar anything. We just tell her Cockweed has pot. We came to her because we want her to stay, and we thought maybe she would help us.” She raised her eyebrows suggestively.

  I thought about Pilar’s eagerness to be on ATAT. She felt like a useless ornament. She wanted to be useful. But the more we let her think things were her own idea, the better chance we had of getting her to do what needed to get done. “If we don’t tell her we need her to kiss Cockweed, she might kiss him.”

  Edie looked unsure about this. But she smiled confidently. “If Cockweed has pot, and Pilar gets any kind of significant time alone with him, I’m pretty fucking sure she can figure out how to find it.”

  Pilar was surprised to see us. The first thing she said was “I bet you’re glad.”

  She turned away from me and went and sat in a red velvet chair in the corner of her room.

  I guessed we were supposed to follow her in there.

  “Why would I be glad?” I said. “I thought you—respected me. I thought you…Oh, I don’t know.”

  “I do.” Pilar took a handful of her amazing hair and then looked at my hair. “Have you ever heard of lowlights?” she asked.

  “I have heard of them,” I admitted. “But I can’t say I know what they are.”

  “They’re…” Pilar shook her head. “They’re nothing. They’re not important. You can sit down, you know.”

  I moved a pile of cashmere sweaters and sat. “You’re a very neat folder,” I complimented her. “You know, you would have been very good at ATAT. Part of it is just keeping the question in your mind. Knowing what part of your brain the answer is in.”

  Pilar blinked a few times. “So like, eef you can keep your sweaters neat, you can do well on ATAT?”

  I nodded. “Something like that,” I said.

  “I am going to my aunt and uncle’s,” she said. “I am going to day school. Do you know what it is like, thees day school?”

  I shrugged. “It’s like when you went to school when you were really little, except you’re older now. You know, you go to school and you have your friends, and then your sleep at home.”

  Pilar pondered
this with visible distaste. “I don’t want to sleep at home. Or near my aunt and uncle. I hate sleeping in the same house as adults. You wake up, they are there, telling you must eat two eggs instead of one, asking you los questions.”

  I realized that Pilar was drunk. Well, not drunk. Drinking. How had I missed that?

  It was quiet for a moment, and then she said, “What are you doing here?”

  I said, “What if I told you I came up with a way you could stay here?”

  She looked unimpressed and drank her wine again. “What do you care? I mean, you want Gid to stay here. Why do you care about me?”

  I decided to tell her a reasonable version of the truth. “I want you on ATAT. We need you.”

  I had told Edie that we should try to act calm and casual, but I think we were both too tense about the stakes of the game and what Pilar would have to do to help us win.

  “You guys are scaring me,” she said. “What do you want me to do?”

  I would have to just dive right in.

  “Cockweed has pot,” I said, “or we think he does. And we want to be able to blackmail him with that, to tell him that unless he backs off on his charges against you guys, we’ll tell Dr. Frye. And we don’t really know what to do.”

  But Pilar just snorted. “I do,” she said. “We have to find the pot.”

  I was annoyed that I thought she didn’t get that. “Right,” I said. “Finding the pot is crucial. It’s the how part that—”

  But Pilar cut me off, snorting again. “How? Ha. Cockweed loves me. I just have to make him think I want to sleep weeth him. He’ll tell me where it is. If I showed him my underwear, he’d tell me where was Hope Diamond.”

  Pilar crossed the room and lit a white gardenia candle. In her tragedy she was arresting. Dressed in a white sundress and a woven shawl and tan cowboy boots, she moved with a gentle grace, her soft hair floating down a back held straight and dignified against her recent and public humiliation. When she turned back to look at me, her dark eyes were both mysterious and vulnerable. I shouldn’t act like I am so sure of myself. Cockweed ees a deesgusting moron, but what if he attacks me? “I don’t know,” she said. “I am feeling that I am just going to take my punishment and go.”

  Edie looked at me and mouthed the word superpower.

  I decided not to focus on Pilar’s saying no, but on her feelings. “Why are you nervous?” I said.

  She immediately got an image of Cockweed bearing down on her with his tongue out. So she was nervous about the one thing that had to happen for this to even possibly work. And not without reason: Cockweed by himself was gross. Kissing Cockweed was unthinkable.

  “Look, I know the grossest thing when I think about Cockweed would be kissing him. I mean, when I think about having to even pretend to flirt with him, I just get this image of him, like”—I looked down modestly—“coming toward me with his tongue out.”

  Pilar grabbed my wrist. “Me too,” she said. “That is so weird, I was just thinking that exact thing. I swear!”

  “Really?” I said. “The other thing that would freak me out a lot…”

  I had nothing in mind. I was just waiting until she thought of something. I pretended to think as I watched her mind working. Now she was imagining Cockweed on the phone, telling his friends about her, how hot she was, how much she wanted him.

  “I just imagine him telling his friends I was hot for him. Like calling up his old buddies from here and being like, oh, I just bagged this chick.”

  Pilar looked as if she’d seen a ghost. “That is exactly what I was just thinking of.” She seemed to soften. “So you do understand—like, really understand—how hard it would be to even go near Cockweed. I mean, you really get it.”

  I put my hand over my heart. “Of course I get it,” I said. “I mean, I would do it myself. But I don’t have the same kind of feminine powers you have.”

  Pilar’s beautiful eyes sprang open. I had hit a nerve.

  “You really are so beautiful,” I said. “And there is so much power in that. Unfortunately, with power sometimes comes responsibility.”

  I kept my tone of voice as grave as possible, and I saw that I was really having an effect on her. She was getting tears in her eyes.

  “Molly,” she said, “people don’t get how hard it…” she faltered, embarrassed.

  “People don’t get how hard it is to be beautiful?” I said.

  Once again Pilar lit up with the spark of someone really getting her. “Yes,” she said. “You can’t stop comparing yourself to other people. And it’s not that you want to be better than they are…. Well, yes, you do, and maybe you even are, but that’s not the reason. The reason ees that you’re afraid every second that you don’t prove to yourself that you’re prettier than everyone, you’re going to get everything you have and everyone you know taken away from you.”

  I nodded understandingly. “And meanwhile,” I said, “people think, oh, she thinks she’s so great, and you don’t feel that way at all.”

  She was brimming with gratefulness. “I just don’t know how you get this.”

  “Pilar,” I said with as much earnestness as I could muster, “I am beautiful enough on the inside to understand people who are beautiful on the outside.”

  Pilar smiled, but she thought, Molly is really gay. “So,” she said, “you don’t know that he has pot, but you think eet?”

  I nodded and shrugged. I still needed to know one thing. “What if he won’t show you the pot? Like, you’ve flirted with him and told him you want to get high…but…he’s resisting you?”

  “I am not going to sleep with him,” she said. “But I guess I could go through the motions of pretending I did. I could…I could kiss him.” She made a horrible face. “Once I kiss him, just once even, I know he will tell me anything.” She thought about her beauty. About Cockweed ravishing it. She took a deep breath and swallowed the fear as the bad taste of the Elias Ganz incident crept into the back of her throat. My beauty is a sword, and it is also a wall. I will stand in it, and fight with it, and I will win. “If he has pot, I will find eet.” Pilar nodded confidently, and I believed her.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Luckily, Mrs. Cockweed had study hall supervision on Tuesday and Thursday nights. The disciplinary hearing was Wednesday.

  We only had one chance to get it right.

  I instant-messaged Dr. Whitmeyer. I thought it would take a long time to figure out how to get myself into Cockweed’s head, but he wrote back:

  Wanting to know where he keeps his pot will probably be enough.

  How do you know that?

  Molly, I have read many people’s minds looking for no other information beyond this. This girl will really kiss him?

  She is prepared to go the distance. She is a seduction master.

  This is the same girl? The girl who stole your boyfriend? You are unlikely allies.

  I didn’t know what to say.

  I just want to take down this Cockweed. And between the two of us, I think we can do it. Shit. What happens if I get into Cockweed’s head. Forever?

  Let’s cross that bridge when we get there.

  Pilar came to my room at 7:30. ETA at Cockweed’s was 8:00 P.M, and she had two hours to get him where we needed him. Which meant that she’d either get him to bust out the pot, or if her charms weren’t working, she’d have to go the distance and start making out with him. That was unfortunate for her, very unfortunate, but at least we’d get the desired result.

  She really nailed her Cockweed outfit. She wore tight jeans that were kind of high-waisted, a white tank top, and a pink sweater, unbuttoned to show off just a little cleavage, a pair of pearl earrings and high-heeled light blue espadrilles. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and she wasn’t wearing a stitch of makeup.

  “Wow,” I said. “Seriously. You look like the girl Cockweed couldn’t get at Midvale back in 1985.”

  She smiled shyly, glad she had impressed me. “I theenk I overheard Cockweed saying
once that girls who wore makeup were whores,” she said.

  “That definitely sounds like him,” Edie said. She was sitting on my bed, and she peeked around me. “You’re gonna do great, Pilar.”

  “Thanks,” Pilar said. She shook out her hands, and I saw she had polished her nails a demure shell pink.

  We both shook hands with Pilar and she left.

  I started to straighten some books on the shelf, but Edie put her hand over mine. “Stop,” she said. “There’s nothing else to do.”

  For the last twenty-four hours I had been incessantly cleaning and straightening the room in a desperate attempt to feel some control. But at this point, it was all in Pilar’s hands, and there was nothing left to do except sit and wait to see how she did.

  I sat with my back against the door.

  Edie lay down on her bed. Then she sat up and looked at me. “You know you could go sit under the fire escape behind Proctor. That way at least if something happens you can run in there and—”

  “What?” I said. “Both of us can get sexually assaulted by Cockweed?”

  “I don’t think he’s the sexual assault type,” Edie said. “I think our biggest fear is that, as stupid as he is, he’s actually not going to be stupid enough to believe Pilar wants him.”

  I decided to stay. If things got fucked up—not that they weren’t already fucked up—I was going to need Edie’s advice.

  Pilar smoothed her hair. She made herself a solemn promise that if this worked, she was going to stop just relying on her looks to get what she wanted.

  She wasn’t going to ignore them, of course, or let them go to waste, but the full-scale exploitation thing, that was over.

  She knocked on Cockweed’s door. When she saw his shadow move across the peephole she inhaled, thrusting out her cleavage a little, and let her lips part slightly into an inviting, appealingly nervous smile.