by Emma Mills
Paige speaks first. “We didn’t know anyone was in here,” she says, and she’s clearly putting effort into sounding something close to normal, though she doesn’t bother to wipe the tears tracking down her cheeks.
“I didn’t know anyone was out here. I didn’t hear anything,” I say, even though it’s a lie compounded by another lie.
The silence is unbearable.
So I do what I do best, or what I do worst, I suppose—my greatest strength is also my greatest weakness. I break it.
“I had the faucet on,” I say. “Really loud. And I pee pretty loud. I’m surprised you guys didn’t hear me, it was like Niagara Falls in here. Just really … very loud in volume. A lot of … liquids … flowing in a … noisy fashion.”
Paige blinks at me, clearly caught off guard, but Iris’s eyes only narrow, the rage intensifying.
I have to get out of here.
“I’ll just … leave you guys to it.… Not that I know what it is, not that I heard anything,” I say, and make to leave, but Paige moves to the door first.
“No, I’m going,” she says, and then quickly walks out.
Leaving me. And Iris. Alone.
Iris crosses immediately to me and holds a finger up to my face. She forces me backward, back into the bathroom, where I stumble over the rug and catch myself on the fancy towel rack.
“What did you hear?” she says.
“Nothing. I heard nothing.”
“You’re lying.”
“I’m not.”
“You are, you’re terrible at it. If you go back out there and tell everyone—if you tell them—” She falters. And I would hardly believe it unless I saw it myself, but Iris’s eyes swiftly fill with tears. Her lower lip quivers. It legitimately quivers.
Her voice is thick when she speaks: “I will ruin you.”
And then she turns and leaves.
two
I go to work at Pinky’s on Sunday. The day after Iris declared that she would ruin me.
When I rejoined the party yesterday, she was nowhere in sight. Paige had resumed her seat, but she was looking decidedly worse for wear and the rest of her table had clearly noticed. Sudha had one arm around her, their heads bent together in conversation, and Alicia Smith was kneeling at her side, holding up a pink patterned napkin so Paige could wipe her eyes.
Word would travel fast. I didn’t need to tell anyone what I had heard. Furthermore, I didn’t want to tell anyone. First, because it was no one’s business, and second, because I didn’t want the wrath of Iris Huang to befall me and my family.
I replay it in my mind as I pull a sub out of the toaster and deposit it on the counter in front of me (a little charred around the edges, but hopefully that would escape notice). No one had ever sworn my ruin before.
I would just steer clear of them both at school. I’ve managed to fly under the radar pretty effectively these last three years. It won’t be hard to pull off a fourth.
Stealth mode, I think as I cut and wrap up the sandwich in patterned Pinky’s paper.
Pinky’s is “home of the nine-inch sub.” Fifty percent more than a Subway sub! the sign declares.
“I don’t think that’s right,” I said to my manager Aaron on my first day. “Because Subway subs are twelve inches? So really it’s only seventy-five percent of a Subway sub?”
“They mean the six-inch,” he replied.
“So maybe they should say that?”
“Home of the nine-inch sub, fifty percent more than a six-inch Subway sub,” Aaron contemplated, and then shook his head. “That’s too much numerical information. It’s too cerebral.”
This was possibly the first time anyone had used the phrase “too cerebral” when describing Pinky’s advertising. Because someone somewhere in the Pinky’s marketing scheme had made the brilliant connection that sub sandwiches are vaguely phallic. And from that, all the penis-related Pinky sub campaigns were born.
Like the commercial where you see the guy standing from the back, and then a woman in front of him, and she says, “Nine inches????” in this insane lusty voice, and then they pan to the side and show that he’s holding a Pinky sub right at groin height? It’s the worst. It is literally the worst. I’m a cog in the world’s dumbest corporate sandwich machine.
But I needed a job. And Pinky’s was hiring. So here I am.
Zoe comes over that evening when I get off work, and we ride our bikes to the Tropical Moose to get snow cones. The car is free—Alex is actually home for once—but I’m stiff from standing all day and I smell like Pinky’s. I want to ride, to feel the late summer air rushing through my hair, to pedal fast and feel the burn of it in my legs.
I get a piña colada–flavored snow cone, Zoe gets a bubble gum one, and we manage to secure a table out front, the kind with the chairs that leave waffle patterns on the backs of your thighs.
We’re settled in when two little kids pass by clutching blue cones. A woman follows close behind but veers toward our table as they pass.
“You have beautiful hair,” she says to Zoe, who smiles and nods in reply, her mouth full of slush. She pulls a face at me when the woman has passed.
Zoe does have beautiful hair. The rest of her is pretty magnificent as well—dark eyes with the longest lashes, flawless brown skin. One time a barista at Starbucks wrote your smile is gorgeous on Zoe’s coffee cup. I took a picture of her holding the cup, smiling wide, and we put it on Tumblr, and to date it has over fifty thousand notes.
It makes sense to me, knowing Zoe as I do. Her outside matches her insides. I know goodness doesn’t manifest itself as beauty—she’s not pretty because she’s smart, or funny, or kind—but it’s fitting. She’s my favorite person, and if one of us had to grow up ridiculously beautiful, I’m glad it’s her. It just makes sense.
“I have calc and lit with Kris,” Zoe says, continuing our previous conversation. “And AP Bio with Gabby, so that’s something. What’s your schedule like?”
I shrug. “What it’s always like.”
“Hey, how was the party? You never texted back.”
Now there is no way Iris Huang could be privy to this conversation. Zoe doesn’t even go to our school—she’s at Springdale, the public school in our generic Chicago suburb. We live in one of the neighborhoods that’s fare-and-a-half to get to if you take a cab from the city. PLSG is twenty minutes from Springdale, and most of the richest girls live even farther out. So the likelihood of Iris popping up and hearing me tell Zoe that I witnessed the Breakup of the Century (or at least of the Year to Come) is pretty slim. And usually I tell Zoe everything. But. Something in me just … doesn’t want to risk it.
So I just shrug again and say, “The food was good. There was a lot of talk of this year being our year.”
“Who did all the other years belong to?”
“Right? I asked Madison that. She looked at me like I was crazy.”
“Too bad she can’t buy a sense of humor.”
“I’d sell her mine.”
“You could buy another car with the money.”
“Do you think I’m funny enough for car money?”
“For sure. You’re minimum pre-owned Toyota Corolla funny.”
I grin.
It’s quiet as we finish our snow cones, but not a bad kind of quiet. With some people I feel the need to fill the space, but with Zoe, it’s okay. It doesn’t have to be constant. We can listen to the hum of crickets, the buzz of the tree frogs.
We ride back to my place when we’re finished. I ask Zoe if she wants to come in, but she shakes her head.
“I should get back. It’s officially a school night.”
“Ugh.”
“It was good while it lasted.” Zoe smiles—her radiant Starbucks cup smile—and all at once I’m struck with something Amber said at the party—senior year and all. How everything we do is sort of the last time we get to do it. Tomorrow is the very last Back to School for us. Back to high school, anyway. Meaning that today—tonight, right now—i
s the end of the very last summer of the way things are. Next summer we might go off to college at different times. To different cities. Different time zones. I can’t imagine it.
Or rather, I can. I just don’t want to.
I don’t say any of that. “Text me tomorrow,” I say instead.
“Will do.” Zoe gets back on her bike. “Night, Claude.”
“Night.”
I watch her pedal away.
three
My mom makes me stand on the front steps before I leave for school the next morning so she can take a picture. The annual first day of school stoop photo. Frames hang in the kitchen for each of us—a big print scroll across the top declaring My School Days with twelve little spaces underneath for pictures.
All of Alex’s spaces were filled as of last year, and Julia’s were finished long ago. Her frame doesn’t even match ours.
Today is my last School Days picture. There is a 45 percent chance my mom will burst into tears before I leave the house. So I try to move the process along, shouldering my backpack, holding my lunch bag to my side, and raising one hand in a big thumbs-up. The traditional pose. The very last box to be filled.
“I just can’t believe it,” Mom says, tapping her phone screen half a dozen times, and the odds raise: 56 percent chance of tears now.
“We should get going,” I say, moving to step off the porch. “Where’s Dad?”
“Wait wait wait, let’s get one of you and your brother.” She turns. “Alex, get over here.”
He’s in the driveway, leaning against the car.
“I’m good actually,” he says, not looking up from his phone.
“One picture.”
He sighs, types one more thing, and then shoves his phone in his pocket and joins me on the porch.
“Closer together,” Mom instructs. “Alex, put your arm around your sister—it’s her last first day of school.”
“Come on, Alex,” I say, picking up his arm and slinging it around my shoulders. I poke his side, and he smiles for a second before twisting away. I hope my mom got the shot, because that’s the only opportunity she’s going to get this morning.
“No, one more with Daddy!” she says as my dad emerges from the front door, balancing a doughnut on top of a travel mug, but Alex is already heading back to the car.
“Who called the paparazzi?” Dad says.
“Excuse me, I am one photographer.”
“Who called the paparazzo?” he amends, and then strikes a pose next to me. “Make sure to get my good side.” And then, “We should take a selfie,” he says when my mom lowers her phone again. “And send it to your sister!”
Sending selfies to Julia is something we do at least once a week, if not more. Since moving to Indianapolis with her husband, Julia has gotten a surplus of Wallace family selfies. I’ve always wondered how she feels about them. If it comes off as “We wish you were here!” like my parents intended, or if it’s more like “We’re all here and you’re not!”
We take one regardless. I think Alex will just sulk in the background, but he tosses up a peace sign at the last moment.
“This has been great,” Alex says, “but some of us have jobs.”
“And some of us have school,” I say.
“And some of us have jobs at school!” Dad declares.
I watch Alex drive away in my car. The main reason I wanted that car so badly was so that I could drive myself to school. But going in on it with Alex was the only way I could afford it. And Alex apparently needs the car more because his schedule is “flexible” and there’s no point in it “sitting around all day” in my school’s parking lot when he could be doing “like, stuff, I don’t know, just stuff.”
So Alex gets the car during the day, and I drive in with my dad. It is not remotely fair. But Alex maintains that he’s way more experienced in the art of “not remotely fair,” so this is, in some ways, retribution.
It isn’t my fault that Prospect-Landower is a girls’ school. It isn’t my fault that our dad works there. And it wasn’t my idea to go there in the first place. I wanted to go to Springdale with Zoe and all our friends.
“This is an incredible opportunity,” my mom had said way back when, smoothing the hair off my face. “So many girls would be so happy for a chance to go to Prospect.”
“Then one of them should go for me,” I had mumbled, pressing a tearstained cheek into Mom’s shoulder.
It’s a privilege. I get that now. But it didn’t seem like one back then.
My dad parks in the faculty lot, and we part ways at the lit building. PLSG isn’t one big building but multiple small ones, like a tiny college. Brick buildings with black shutters and white trim. It’s very picturesque. I guess playing up curb appeal is part of justifying the price tag.
I haven’t checked like Zoe, messaging back and forth with friends to confirm who I have what class with. It doesn’t really matter much to me either way.
But I wish I had planned ahead—consulted some of the girls beforehand. Because then I would’ve been prepared to walk into British lit and see Paige Breckner and Iris Huang, seated at opposite ends of the room. Paige is in the back, buffered by Sudha and Alicia, and Iris is at the front, alone.
This might not be good, I think to myself, but there’s nothing to be done about it.
* * *
“Just please come with me, I don’t want to go by myself.”
Caris Pearlman corners me after lit. A surprisingly uneventful class, actually. We went over the syllabus. We got a Chaucer excerpt to read for Wednesday. All in all, pretty anticlimactic compared to the scenarios I had imagined in my head.
The halls are clearing out now, a steady stream of girls heading toward the dining hall.
“I just need to give him something,” Caris says, looking at me earnestly.
“But then maybe … I shouldn’t, you know, be there. In that case.”
Her cheeks flush. “Not like—that’s why I want you to go with me. It seems so illicit otherwise.”
I could see Caris Pearlman in Regency times, wearing an empire-waist gown, a long string of pearls around her neck, smiling behind a fan in some crowded London ballroom. She certainly fit the Regency romance sensibility. And I would know. My mom is an avid romance reader, and I snuck all kinds of books when I was younger—novels with women in satin dresses reclining on divans, or masked men in greatcoats on the cover, white shirts splayed open revealing bare chests. Always with titles like The Duke and the Devil or Passion Is a British Rogue.
Though I suppose Caris is the Before in the Regency romance scenario. Before the encounters with the British rogue and all that, driving the heroine mad with lust and whatnot.
Caris does not appear to be mad with lust in this moment. Instead, she is standing before me, clutching a cellophane-wrapped loaf of what she later informs me is zucchini bread, after I agree to accompany her, and we make our way to the Grove.
The Grove is a small stretch of woods that separates PLSG and the neighboring boys’ school, Danforth Prep. It’s back behind PLSG’s library, and Danforth’s athletic fields abut it. There was talk a few years ago about bulldozing the Grove and merging the two campuses, but there was enough outcry to stop that from happening. A lot of stuff about “maintaining the storied traditions of two treasured institutions.” Thus these treasured institutions remain separate.
Though not so separate that any PLSG student or any Danforth Prep student couldn’t just waltz through the woods to the opposite school. Or, as is the fashion sometimes, meet in the Grove itself and … I don’t even know. Make out up against a tree. Smoke drugs.
(“Smoke drugs?” Zoe said when I hypothesized this to her once. “Smoke. Drugs. Yeah, I bet that’s it. I bet they get high on that reefer. They smoke that Mary Jane. Maybe they even consume alcohol. Can you imagine?”
“Okay, I get it. That was stupid.”
“I’m not saying we need to corral your ass into this century, but we probably need to corral your
ass into this century.”)
Apparently, the Grove is also a spot where students occasionally meet to exchange first-day-of-school baked goods, as is the tradition between Caris and her boyfriend, Robbie.
Technically, we’re not supposed to be back here at lunch. But of course that’s never really stopped anyone.
I stand off to the side—glaringly superfluous now—as Caris and Robbie kiss and exchange snacks. If Iris and Paige are—were—the cutest couple at PLSG, Caris and Robbie are probably now the pair to beat for cutest in the PLSG–Danforth collective.
When Caris and Robbie start doing more kissing than talking (maybe she’s more mad with lust than I thought), I wander off. There’s no official path through the Grove, but one has been worn down over the years. A track cleared via repeated use.
I pull a sandwich out of my bag—it is lunchtime, after all—and start in on it as I meander through the trees. I hear voices up ahead, and I spot people as I round the bend leading down to Danforth’s fields.
A group has gathered at the base of one of the tallest trees, just at the edge of the woods. A few girls from my class—Lena Ideker, Sudha, and Alicia, as well as a couple of juniors—are joined by several Danforth guys.
I recognize one of them in particular. I don’t know Gideon Prewitt personally, but I know a good deal of him, because everyone knows of him. He’s an undeniable presence in the social media scene of PLSG. Constantly referenced, constantly tagged, constantly popping up in pictures to press kisses against the cheeks of girls who are usually smiling so wide their eyes crinkle with it.
Right now Gideon is leaning into Lena Ideker’s space. She’s smiling coyly up at him, her back resting against the tree trunk behind them.
I could never look so cool. So unaffected.
I watch as he says something to her. She responds with a nod, says something in reply, and he throws his head back in a laugh. It rings out—a bright, loud burst of laughter—reaching even me where I stand.
“There you are!”
I turn as Caris and Robbie approach, holding their baked goods and each other’s hands.