Carmen and Jamie exchanged hard looks. Alicia’s advice was sound, but neither of them had any intention of backing down. They were only just beginning.
After lunch, Carmen raced across the quad to her next class. She had so much to do that her head was spinning. There was a winter formal meeting at 3:15. Then, at 5:30, a meeting with the Reinoso cousins was on tap, and after that it was home to tackle a paper comparing identity and depiction of self in the poetry of Walt Whitman and Willie Perdomo. Just thinking about it all made her tired.
Somehow, she had managed to make it to her next class. But try as she might to pay attention, the exhaustion was just too much, and she let out a huge yawn. Unfortunately, it was at that very moment that her advanced biology teacher, Mr. Julian, walked by her desk.
“Am I boring you, Ms. Ramirez-Ruben?” he asked. “I do try so very hard to be interesting.”
Carmen sighed. If she had had a dime for every time a teacher used that Am I boring you? line, she’d have been as rich as a celebutante. Didn’t teachers remember what high school was like? How the mad rush of classes and papers and activities and a part-time job could run a girl ragged?
Obviously not. Carmen shook her head and smiled sweetly. “I apologize, Mr. Julian.” Luckily he seemed to be in a forgiving mood and simply nodded. He walked away, continuing his scintillating lecture on one-celled organisms.
When what seemed like eons later, the bell finally rang, Carmen snapped her book shut and took off again across the quad as fast as her legs would carry her.
The SoBees were sitting at the snack bar all dressed up in matching Palm Beach–style sundresses. Judging by the way they languorously sipped their lattes, it was as if they’d been sitting in the quad all afternoon without a care in the world.
“How’d you get here so fast?” Carmen asked, out of breath and feeling closer to gym-class sweaty than she would have liked.
The SoBees smiled pityingly. While Carmen was nearly six feet tall, the SoBees had a way of making her feel as if she were back in the third grade and the smallest kid in the class.
“We never sign up for a class during last period,” Maya explained, as she multitasked, reapplying a fuschia lip gloss while flipping through the pages of People magazine.
“But you’ve got to take something,” Carmen asked, confused.
“Duh. We have study hall,” Dorinda explained. “Two p.m. study hall is monitored by Mrs. Clarke, and she never takes attendance.”
April piped up. “That way, if we’ve got to bounce early—to go shopping or to spin class or to meet up with some hotties from another school, then we can be out, no prob.”
“Wow,” Carmen said, taking this information in. Some kids seemed born gaming the system, and clearly, the SoBees could count that among their many charming skills. “I’ll be right back.”
Carmen walked over to the quad snack bar and bought herself a soda. Not the healthiest thing in the world, but she needed the caffeine.
She rejoined the SoBees and took a checklist out of her oversize hobo bag. “We have a ton of work to do—”
“My thought exactly,” Dorinda said, taking the checklist away from Carmen and using it as a coaster for her latte. “First things first, though. Who are we going to support for queen?”
April looked up from her brand-new hot pink iPad and gave her friend a “duh” look. “Is there any question? Carolina. She’s pretty. She’s smart. She’s stylish. And she’s our friend.”
Maya nodded. “I couldn’t agree more. I met Shakira once at the radio station, and she looks a little bit like her. Carolina is right out of the C.G. handbook. She’s the definition of ‘queen.’”
Carmen, unaware that there was such a thing as a C.G. handbook, made a mental note to check it out. She moved Dorinda’s coffee and retrieved her checklist. “You guys, can we focus? There are about a hundred things to do on this list, and we’re only weeks away from the big event. I know I’m new at this, but it seems like we’ve got a lot more important things to discuss than who’s going to be queen.”
Dorinda, Maya, and April exchanged glances, then burst out laughing. Then Dorinda reached over and patted Carmen’s arm, as though soothing a crying baby. “Silly, the whole point of the winter formal is to elect the queen. We have to make sure the queen is as wonderful as the dance.”
Carmen could barely suppress a groan. These girls were nuts. “I thought the whole point of the winter formal was to create a magical evening that our classmates will never forget.”
Dorinda placed her fingers, in the shape of a W, on her forehead. “Whatever. They’ll never forget the winter formal, because it’s when we crown the queen.”
Carmen took a deep breath. This was going nowhere. And even though Carmen was now as invested as the SoBees were in her candidate’s becoming winter formal queen, she knew from all her experience planning quinces how much work and coordination it took to plan for such a big event. The crowning was only one small piece of the puzzle.
But if all the SoBees cared about was the contest and the girl who wore the crown, then, fine. She would whip them into shape by speaking their language and would couch all of her requests in terms of the way it affected the crowning of the queen.
“O-o-o-o-kay, Dorinda,” Carmen crooned, in the calmest voice she could summon. “And do you care at all about what kind of decorations are on the wall or what kind of food is served when the queen is crowned?”
Dorinda shrugged. “Hmmm. Let me think about that.…Not really.”
Okay, so maybe there was no common language. Carmen was at her wit’s end. “Well, who do you think is going to pull all of this together?” she asked, jumping to her feet and waving the checklist in the air.
“You,” Dorinda replied, almost sweetly. “That’s why Ms. Ingber assigned you to be the project manager. She knew that you were the perfect person to get the job done. We always find a super-duper workabee to pull all the party details together for us.”
Dorinda stood up and threw her coffee cup into the trash. “Meeting’s over.”
April looked at her watch and grimaced. “OMG! We’re late. It’s the Last Call sale at Neiman Marcus, and there is a pair of sixty percent–off stilettos with my name on it.” She turned to Carmen briefly to add, “But good job on being so organized.”
Maya stood up as well, and she and April tossed their coffee cups into the trash with basketball player– like precision.
“I love you for being such a kick-ass project manager,” Maya said insincerely before giving Carmen a never-touch-the-skin air-kiss.
“That checklist is genius,” Dorinda added.
And with that, the SoBees walked off. For a few minutes Carmen just sat in the quad, stunned. How did they do it? How did they saddle her with all of the work and make it seem like they’d all just had a lovely afternoon tea? Before she’d spent any time with them, Carmen had assumed that the SoBees were like any members of a superpopular clique: self-obsessed, shallow, ever so slightly mean-spirited, and not very bright. But now that she’d gotten to know them a little bit, Carmen looked at the SoBees with newfound respect. They weren’t stupid. And they weren’t merely shallow. They were like the girls from the classic movie Heathers. Evil geniuses. More specifically, they were lazy evil geniuses who had somehow gotten her to do their bidding.
How many of her older brother’s comic books had she read over the years? Dozens, possibly hundreds. Really, having done all that reading, she should have seen the evil geniuses coming.
AT 5:10 THAT evening, Carmen sprinted from school to the bus stop and then waited nearly an hour for the bus to South Beach. She felt like the White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland. She was late, very late, for a very important date. Even though she was wearing heels, the minute the bus pulled up to her stop, she got out and sprinted toward Las Ramblas. She loved living in Miami, but without a ride from Gaz, her brother, her older siblings, or her parents—all the lucky people she knew who were old enough to drive and own a car�
��getting around town was sort of miserable. That was one thing she’d forgotten over the last year, while she was dating Domingo. He’d been a senior in high school (she was a sophomore), with a license and a set of wheels, a classic red and white Mini Cooper that he’d gotten for a steal because his brother-in-law ran a used-BMW dealership. She’d felt so cool in Domingo’s car. Running down Ocean Drive now at the speed of light? Not so much.
Her mood didn’t improve when she arrived at the restaurant. From the look of things and the icy stares the cousins were shooting at each other, it was clear that the Reinoso girls were still on the outs. Carolina sat next to Alicia and sulked. Patricia sat on the other side of Jamie, cross-armed and furious-looking. Who knew that party-planning could feel so much like combat duty, Carmen thought as she speed-walked over to the table. She slid into the booth next to Carolina. She knew that she shouldn’t choose favorites, but she had to admit that bookish Carolina was more her kind of girl than Patricia, the popular jock.
“Sorry I’m late,” Carmen apologized. She glanced at Alicia and was relieved to see that her friend did not look stressed by her tardiness.
“Don’t sweat it,” Alicia said. “The buses were terrible today.”
The girls shared a moment of commiseration about Miami’s atrocious public transportation.
“Quinceañeras are hot,” Jamie said, “don’t get me wrong. But I can’t wait until sweet-sixteen time, when I can get a real driver’s license.”
Carmen sighed. “I’ve been so busy that I haven’t even gotten my learner’s permit.”
“Which one of your parents is going to teach you how to drive?” Carolina asked, speaking up for the first time since they’d sat down.
“Well,” Carmen began—because the question really wasn’t as easy as it would have appeared—“I have four parents. My dad is a telenovela producer who gets driven to and from the set half the time by some hapless production assistant. So he’s out. The only reason he would teach me would be to turn me into his chauffeur. My stepmother, Natalia, is an actress and kind of a big star in Venezuela. She already thinks that my brother and sister and I are the hired help. She’d probably just teach us how to tip the valet at her favorite spas and salons. My stepfather, Christian, is British, and while he’s lived in Miami for practically forever, I’m pretty sure that just the way you can see my Grandmother Ruben translating from Spanish to English when she talks, Christian is mentally switching the road back and forth while he drives.…”
“So that leaves your mom, right?” Alicia said. She turned to the cousins. “You guys know Carmen’s mom?”
“Head of the math department, right?” Patricia replied, nodding. “I had her for integrated algebra, and I worked my butt off for a C-plus.”
Patricia was right. Carmen’s mom could be a taskmaster—in the classroom and at home. Which was why Carmen was just a little nervous about having her help teach her to drive. When Carmen’s older sister, Una, was learning how to drive, their mom actually made her take a tape measure and measure the distance from the car to the curb, the bumper to the fire hydrant, and one car to another when they were seated in traffic. Una and their mom barely spoke to each other for weeks after Una failed her driver’s test the second time. Carmen took a deep breath. All this talking and thinking about the learning process made public transportation look pretty darned good.
With the small talk over, the girls moved on to the next order of business: the menu. They ordered half a dozen small plates of various items to share at the table: fried calamari, garbanzo beans with chorizo, sautéed clams, seafood paella, and Spanish potato-and-spinach tortillas.
While they all sat starving and somewhat distracted by the enticing smells coming from the kitchen, Alicia used the lull in activity as an opportunity to get to the real reason they were there: the quinceañeras.
Amigas Inc. had planned so many quinceañeras that they had more than enough expertise to walk the birthday girls through the experience. The most important decision, the one that would affect everything, from the quince dress to the food and decorations, was picking a theme. That was what needed to happen today. Alicia passed out the folders with theme topics that Jamie and Carmen had compiled with their own original Amigas Inc. logo on the cover.
“This is exciting,” Carolina said, flipping through the checklist and the photos of former clients enjoying their special day.
“It’s pretty haute,” Patricia said. “Haute,” as in haute couture, was fashion-conscious South Beach slang for hot.
“So, let’s talk about your theme,” Alicia said. “What do you have in mind?”
Carolina and Patricia said, simultaneously, “I want a princess theme.”
Carolina added, “After all, I’ll be looking for places to wear my crown.”
And just like that, it was back to rough waters.
Patricia turned to Jamie. “Do you see what I mean?” she hissed. “Señorita Spoiled Rotten just assumes she’s going to win.”
You could practically see the steam coming out of Carolina’s ears. “No, what I assume is that if there’s something I really want, you’re going to want it, too.”
Carmen had had enough stress for one day. Trying to defuse the tension, she said, “Look, chicas, we don’t really do princess-themed quinces. So there is no reason to fight over that idea anyway. Not if you are going to stick with us.”
Jamie passed around the platter of salsa verde and chips. “Yeah, we kind of have a no-princess rule. It’s not creative enough.”
Carolina and Patricia exchanged glances, and for a moment they seemed to put their feuding aside. “But it’s our quince, right?” Patricia said, tentatively.
“Isn’t the customer always right?” Carolina added.
“Absolutamente,” Alicia agreed. “But if you really want something as basic as a princess theme, then you don’t need the Amigas, you just need an hour-long pit stop at any ol’ party shop.”
Carolina and Patricia thought for a moment, and then, with the quiet understanding that two girls who have been raised practically as sisters develop, they said in unison, “Nope, we give in.”
Patricia looked at her cousin tenderly, the earlier anger evaporating, and said, “We want it to be special.”
“We’ve been dreaming about this since we were little,” Carolina added. “We want it to be unique.”
“Okay, great, then that’s settled. No princesses. How many guests are you planning on having?” Jamie asked Patricia.
“I don’t know,” Patricia mused. “What’s average? A hundred guests?”
Everyone said that they wanted a small quince, but truthfully, a quince was one of those rare occasions when economies of scale dictated that it made as much sense to have a ton of people as it did to have just a few. As it was, if you had the traditional court, it was seven girls, seven guys, and the honoree made the fifteenth person. Even if you just added those in the immediate family, then you were looking at another five people. That was twenty people right there. And that was before you’d even included your dear old abuela, or your cousins on both sides, or your dad’s best friend from childhood, whom you called Tío because he was like the cool uncle you never had.
If you invited classmates, then social graces—and good manners—dictated that you invite the whole class. Whether it was everyone in your econ class or all the girls on your soccer team, that was another twenty kids, more if they brought dates. Which meant that at the end of the day, any girl whose family had made the financial commitment to a big blowout quinceañera was looking at inviting a staggering number of people. Patricia wasn’t far off—a hundred guests was just about right…as a starting point!
But there was one difference in this case. Alicia pointed to Patricia and said, “A hundred guests for you.” Then she turned to Carolina and said, “Plus, a hundred guests for you. That’s two hundred guests in total—minimum. Two hundred and twenty-five, if we leave ourselves some wiggle room for uninvited tagalongs and well-mea
ning party crashers.”
“There’s bound to be some numbers-swelling in a party this size,” Jamie noted as she took a sip of her Arnold Palmer, a lemonade-and-iced-tea drink (named after the legendary golf player) to which she’d become addicted since dating Dash.
“Exactly. Which means we need a venue—a big one,” Alicia said, flipping through the photo file of event spaces she kept on her iPod.
“If we weren’t holding the winter formal there, the New York Loft at The Setai would be perfect,” Carmen said.
Patricia looked interested. “I like the idea of a loft space. I want something a little dark, cutting-edge, cool.”
“I was thinking, if we aren’t going with a princess theme, a beach quince might be nice,” Carolina said tentatively. “Outdoors. Something tropical and sweet. Tiki lights. Lots and lots of flowers.”
The easy feeling that had settled over the table went away again as Patricia scowled. “A beach quince?” she scoffed. “Picture me trying to walk across the sand in stiletto heels. No way.
“It’s too bad winter formal isn’t sooner,” she growled, ripping a paper napkin to shreds. “That way, the queen could decide what kind of quince she wanted to have.”
Carolina snorted. “If the queen gets to choose, then not only would we have a beach quince, but I’d advise you to get a waterproof dress, because me and my damas might have to make sure you go for a little swim. You do like exercise, right, prima?”
Patricia stood up, looking as if she were ready to exercise more than just her freedom of speech.
Jamie, who knew a thing or two about losing your cool at inopportune moments, put a reassuring hand on Patricia’s shoulder. “Chill, chica,” Jamie said. “No vale la pena. It’s not worth it.”
While the primas hermanas bickered, Carmen was quietly going through winter formal files on her iPad, on loan from the school’s events office. Smiling, she looked up. “I’ve got it,” she said. “The solution to all of our problems.”
A Formal Affair Page 5