by Sophia Rossi
I said goodbye to Nicole and Jane and Drew after they dropped me off at my first cl—oops, session! Nicole looked down at my schedule and told me that I would be in good hands with Jamie Godfrey, or “God,” as he is better known around Pathways. He teaches my film course “Anxiety of Influence in French New Wave Cinema” and I guess is a big deal around here. I recognized a lot of the other students’ names listed on the roster, because their parents are the kind of people who get top billing when their films open internationally. I wondered if we were going to be graded on a curve, or if the fact that I couldn’t get someone who’d been on the cover of Vanity Fair to star in my final project would be counted against me.
I watched Nicole, Jane, and Drew walk down the hall to their first sessions. Alone and feeling a little panicky for the first time since the coffee shop, I took out my rose quartz crystal and held it to my chest, and tried as hard as I could to center myself. Then I took the deepest breath ever, and headed into God’s classroom.
A lot of Pathways sessions involve us students sitting around and sharing our feelings about various topics and theories. There’s also a lot of required eye contact with our “learning doulas,” which Nicole says is part of a very progressive learning style, but it’s definitely a little off-putting at first. During a science session called “Beyond Cosmos: The Exploration of Self and Space” (I know, every session name sounds like a TV show title!) there was one kid, the son of a famous musician, who said that his religion doesn’t believe in evolution, but rather teaches that humans first came down here in spaceships from Uranus four hundred years ago. It was really hard to tell if he was just messing with us, but Violet, our learning doula, just smiled and told Uranus Boy he was brave for expressing “such a unique perspective.”
Pathways is kind of strange. It’s a little like Hogwarts, I guess, in that everyone there is special and kind of an outsider. Plus, a disproportionate amount of students and faculty members seem to believe in magic. Also? There are a ton of kids in capes. Like, so many. My wings don’t even look that out of place in a school where half the kids seem like they are dressed up for some kind of cosplay event. Even though I was so happy I decided to wear them, I worried they were the only reason Nicole and her NAMASTE crew took any interest in me at all, and that instead of making me stand out, I’d need the wings to fit in at school. But maybe I wouldn’t actually need to wear them every day—maybe I’d be kind of like Dumbo with the feather, and it’ll turn out I can fly at Pathways even without them!
After my second session, Nicole picked me up outside class and took me during our fifteen minutes of “unstructured social time” to get a chai latte from one of the Vietnamese food trucks parked in the Pathways parking lot during the day. As we mingled amongst the foodies, we ended up actually having a pretty deep talk. One thing I liked about Nicole, or what was refreshing, I should say, is that she’s really about empowerment. I don’t know how to describe it, except to say that before Pathways, people would talk to me despite my awkwardness. Because they were friends with Harper, they felt like they had to be nice to me. Which was fine . . . I am not complaining at all. But Nicole is much more in your face about personal acceptance than Harper is. Like, when I told Nicole that I had recently retired Sir Zeus, my old imaginary friend.
“Wow, it sounds like your old school was really repressive,” she’d said. “Why wouldn’t they encourage you to talk more about him and keep him alive, rather than stifle your creativity and tell you to kill him?”
If she’d been there when I was making that decision, she told me, she would have prompted me with “Yes, and?” questions, which promote creativity and out-of-the-box thinking, and improv theater groups too, which Nicole also has experience with. She also said I should never think of myself as “gawkward,” because even if I came up with that description myself, it’s still pejorative, which means bad. Then, when she caught me mumbling to myself when we were washing our hands in the bathroom, instead of calling me a spaz, she started doing it too! And at the end of the day, Jane and Drew caught up to me and asked me to teach them how to chant and do mantras like the ones I’d done with Nicole. Well, that wasn’t exactly what I was doing—it’s more like whenever I’m embarrassed or nervous, my head starts going in loops and I won’t even notice I’m saying stuff out loud. The words wouldn’t even make sense if you heard them, they’re just sentence fragments, like the end of a thought, or a dream. Word salad. But I guess it’s sort of similar to a chant or a charm, which I’d never thought about before, so I just went with it.
Everyone at Pathways seems to like Nicole, even though she says high school is not a contest, and “popularity” is for “normals.” Normals are repressive, and keep us from being our best selves, and didn’t I agree? So I guess Nicole wouldn’t call herself popular, but she’s definitely well-known and respected, and I could tell no one wanted to let her down.
Like during lunch I maybe let it slip that I’ve hate-watched that show Fashion Police with my friend Harper, and Nicole literally stopped mid-chew. Jane and Drew gasped.
“You. Watch. TV.” It was not a question. “You mean you actually willingly consume entertainment from corporate conglomerates, whose only vested interest in its production of quote-unquote ‘culture’ is to exploit idiots for ratings and to reward the ideals of the existing patriarchal power structure with a prime-time lineup of insipid reality housewives and tortured male antiheroes?”
“Sure,” I said, immediately realizing that was the wrong thing to say. “Well, I don’t really watch it that often,” I stammered, trying to figure out the correct response that wouldn’t have Nicole giving me the same fierce treatment she had given to Leopard Print.
Nicole pulled a piece of fluff off my wings and frowned at it. “No,” she said. “Of course you don’t.” And then she smiled and kept eating and told the story about how last year Drew staged a monthlong naked protest at PETA headquarters for the way their ads sexualized women, like nothing had even happened!
“Don’t worry,” Jane whispered as we were walking out of the cafeteria. “We just end up streaming everything on our iPads anyway. Nicole is actually a gigantic Scandal junkie.”
“Oh,” was all I could think of to say.
Then, after lunch we had our Crafternoon session, where Nicole told our learning doula, Sarah Matheson, that she found our syllabus to be “unengaging and pedantic in its overuse of traditionally feminine looming methods.” At my old school, that would be enough to get you into real trouble. But not here, where even Sarah seemed worried about not meeting Nicole’s high standards. She just nodded and told Nicole that she “appreciated the thoughtful critique.”
Another thing I like about Pathways: Everyone really likes being creative, and the energy is for the most part really positive. At lunch, Drew brought out his guitar and asked to name a song, any song. I said “Team” by Lorde, and he just started playing it! (I’m obsessed with Lorde. My mom says it’s because she went through a big Kate Bush phase when she was pregnant with me, so I probably internalized a taste for strange, anachronistic songstresses with a penchant for dramatic choreography in utero.)
When Drew got to the line “Call all the ladies out . . .” I started to kind of sing along under my breath, but Nicole yelled “Get it girl!” The next thing I know we were all belting it out. Even kids I hadn’t met yet were coming over to join and it was like a big a capella chorus in the Lane, like something out of an old MGM musical where everyone breaks into song. Another freshman—the son of the monster movie director, The Purge or Paranormal Activity or one of the P-films, I think—pulled up some bongos and Jane filmed the whole thing for her blog and for a moment I felt like what other kids must feel when they score at lacrosse or take a bow after curtains close on their play, or form a formation during halftime at the Super Bowl. Like they were part of something bigger, but that the something bigger had a piece of them in it and you didn’t have to feel like su
ch an outcast anymore because here was everyone, singing the same song.
As soon as the song was over, the circle kind of dispersed and it was almost like it never happened in the first place, like it was a magical little moment that I’d just daydreamed up. It was like those flash-mob videos, where everyone coordinates ahead of time what they’re going to do, or something out of Glee right before a commercial break. I really wished I had asked Jane to send me the video, because Harper would die if she saw it.
Harper. From her texts I knew she wasn’t having as awesome a day as I was, and then I felt slightly guilty that I was having such an amazing time at school.
But seriously, how did I get so lucky? Jane and Drew and Nicole are all juniors, but they walked me to each of my classes on the first day and said hi to all of their old teachers. That would be totally unheard of at Beverly High! Even the adults seemed impressed, and not one person asked me why I was wearing wings or hanging out with older kids, or if that was my real voice or why I was mumbling, or any of the things new people normally said to me. I guess these wings are making everyone like me. Even though I’d never really been hurt by the assumptions people usually made about me, it was surprising how nice it felt being able to engage people without feeling on guard, ready for some judgment. It wasn’t until the last class was over that I even noticed I had gotten through my first day of high school unscathed.
As I walked out the main door, I thought about the owl of Minerva that visited us on the Pier the night before. Maybe I was wrong after all, because from where I stood it looked like freshman year was going to be ah-mazing!
And then I saw the golden glint of Harper’s sister’s Prius.
The pact! Well, I hadn’t broken it yet, had I? Was it even supposed to be that serious, or was I over-worrying because I am a worrier who needs something to freak out about at all time? The best bet, I figured, was to let Harper take the lead on the divulging of our first-day ordeals, and I’d act like everything was normal until I could figure out exactly where she stood on the BFF Pact issue. Because I was so excited to talk about my new friends and Nicole and NAMASTE, but I was also worried that I’d already messed up. With my mind made up, I started toward the car, but immediately swiveled my head back toward the school. I swear I heard something that sounded a lot like an owl’s hoot.
By the time we got to Pathways to pick up Lily after school, I was in such a cloudy, quiet mood that even Rachel got bored of teasing me about detention pretty quickly.
I scanned the kids coming out of the big, Gothic main building to find Lily. Couldn’t we just go home already? I felt like my brain had just been beaten and fried and served on top of a bed of kale. Not only did I get detention on my first day, but being at school without Lily had been way harder than I thought. All my friends from middle school were gone now, either to different schools or just lost to the cult of posturing high schoolers around the world trying so hard to be way cool. No more hugs in the hallway—now we just have to nod to each other like “’sup?” I don’t know, man, nothing’s “sup!”
Rachel was tapping impatiently on the steering wheel when I caught a flash of fairy wings and rolled down my window. “Hey! Lily!” I shouted, feeling way too relieved to see those fluttery gawkward accessories because that meant that I had finally found my friend.
“Hey!” Lily waved back and did her little jiggle-dance, where she leans back and rolls her shoulders and goes “Woo—wooooot!” I did it as best as I could from the car seat and flashed her a thumbs-up.
But just as I was feeling good for the first time in like eight hours, Lily stopped in her path and stuck out her index finger, telling me to give her a second. She was walking next to this bigger girl with pink hair and a long, flowery skirt. As soon as she saw me, the pink-haired girl slung her arm over Lily and led her away from the car.
“Who is that?” Rachel asked, reading my mind.
“I don’t know.”
“Well, tell Flaky-cake that her ride is here, and that we’re not going to wait.” I jabbed at the radio to fill the silence.
“Au revoir, Nicole!” Lily called behind her when she finally got to the car. She tumbled inside, smooshing her wings beside her in the backseat.
“Bonne chance, Lily!” the pink-haired girl responded as she strolled toward the rows of gleaming Mercedes and Priuses that surrounded the school like an invading army. Lily immediately rolled down the window, still without yet having said hello even, and started waving crazily at the girl’s back. Rachel rolled her eyes and revved the engine. Unfortunately, the lot was so full that we ended up just idling in traffic.
“How was your day, Lily?” I asked. What I really wanted was for her to ask me how my day was, but Lily is sometimes in her own little world, and in that world there is no such concept as “reading a room.”
“It was, um, okay . . .” Lily looked at her feet as she shrugged off her wings and shoved them into her backpack, like she was hiding a dirty secret.
“Just okay?” Rachel and I shared a look. Nothing with Lily was ever just okay. It was either divine, inspired, obsession-worthy, or totally traumatizing. Either way, she was likely to talk about the scenario for hours. But now she seemed oddly closemouthed and subdued.
“I want to hear about your day,” she said, staring out the window.
“Look back at our texts,” I said, a little annoyed. I could tell my best friend’s mind was a million miles away. “Pick a topic.”
Rachel nudged me in the rib cage. “Come on, let Lily go first. We regular folks need dispatches from inside the walls of Los Angeles’s most expensive institution for creative talent. Give us the scoop! Is anyone already ‘the voice of their generation’ yet?” I rolled my eyes, but it seemed like Lily took the question seriously, her eyebrows furrowing together in deep thought.
“Well, everyone here is so cultured and sophisticated, you know? Nothing at all like Hollywood Middle. Like my new friend Nicole? She’s been to New York Fashion Week and she says the girls from Rodarte asked if they could base their spring collection on her style. And we have the craziest classes, like they are all about self-expression and self-expansion and the only gym we have to do is yoga or guided meditation, and this boy named Drew played guitar for me . . .”
“They should change the name of this school to Parkway,” Rachel interrupted as she tried unsuccessfully to both navigate out of the lot and make a joke. Rachel’s near-road-rage must have put a damper on Lily’s awesome-first-day high, because the rest of the ride out of the parking lot was silent, and awkward in a way I’ve never felt around Lily before. I pretended to be busy on my phone and sneaked a look at Lily in our rearview mirror. She was moving her mouth in these silent shapes, like she was talking to an invisible friend.
“What are you doing?” I asked, maybe a little angrily.
“What?”
“When did you start talking to yourself again?” Lily used to mumble a lot, just nonsense things you could only half-catch. But sometimes she’d say genuinely sad stuff, like she’d call herself stupid or an idiot. She started to do it less as we got older, but she had a tendency to revert back to it when she was really upset. My mom called it her “verbal coping mechanism.”
“Well, I’ve decided just to go with it if it starts to happen. Nicole—I mean, someone, I heard someone say—that talking to one’s self is crucial to communicating with your identity and your sense of self and maybe even your subconscious. Why, does it bother you?” Lily said all of this in that same under-her-breath voice.
I didn’t answer, just turned up the music instead, only to realize after about fifteen seconds that it was a commercial for Worthington Ford. Then I remembered: I had actually made a “First Day of High School” playlist to blast on the way back to the house to surprise Lily and cheer us both up. I had compiled our favorite songs from a bunch of High School Musical soundtracks (we were so dorkily obsessed whe
n we were babies), but for some reason I didn’t think that Zac Efron’s chirpy voice would really fit the mood right now. Looking back in the rearview mirror again, I saw that Lily actually looked totally happy and content to be sitting there quietly by herself.
I guess I was the only one who had failed the freshman first day test.
“So,” I said, turning around to face Lily instead of her reflection. “How did you meet Nicole?” Lily wasn’t the type to be constantly making new friends, and when she did she was never gushy about them. Usually people would approach her, thinking she was “interesting-looking,” and Lily would look right past them or smile for a bit and then walk away. It was hard for her to open up to people, and I wondered how Nicole had managed to get such a fast-track inside.
“Oh, she stood up for me in a coffee shop,” Lily said, leaning forward in her seat. “It was hilarious, she totally just told off this leopard-printy woman and her friends who were trying to get in my personal space—”
“I’ve never known you to have a hard time standing up for yourself,” I sniffed.
Lily looked hurt and tugged a little on one of her wings, like it itched. “Nooo . . .” she said. “I don’t. Usually. But it was more like . . . the way Nicole did it. She was just really intense and intuitive about the whole thing, and afterward she introduced me to her friend who’s a photographer and that guitar boy Drew, who was dressed like a doctor.”
“That’s cool,” I said, turning back around to face the front. I glared out the window at the big red Metro Rapid Line bus in front of us. “It sounds like you had a great first day, Lily.” I waited for her to ask me how my day had gone, but it was Rachel who broke the strained silence instead.