by Sophia Rossi
“Hey look, it’s the NAMASTE girls!” A senior boy in a derby hat and suspenders shouted as he drove by in a vintage blue Mustang. A couple girls giggled in the backseat and waved. “Love what you ladies are into!”
“NAMASTE!” The four of us yelled back, as peacefully as we could.
“Is that David Copperfield’s son?” I asked, my eyes glued to the crystals hanging from the rearview mirror of the receding car. “The magician prodigy who froze himself in ice and then was dropped out of an airplane?”
None of my friends answered me, as they had all been busy getting into Nicole’s Roadster. I still had no idea what her parents did for a living, because at Pathways it was considered gauche to ask (though usually people ended up telling you within the first twenty seconds of meeting them, so I didn’t really understand that rule).
I tried to open the door to the roadster, assuming Nicole was at least going to give me a ride, but there was only a metallic clink noise telling me it was locked, and my stomach began to sink. Maybe she’d just forgotten to unlock the door? In the passenger and back seats, Jane and Drew were once again wincing into their electronics. Were they texting each other about me? No, that was an insanely paranoid thought. Though . . . why won’t Nicole let me in?
I walked around to the driver’s side door and knocked at the window.
“Oh, hello,” Nicole said, with a mischievous grin. I let out a long breath. Maybe it had been a prank after all? “Look, I would love love love to have you come over to help pick this year’s NAMASTE delegates—you know we need a rep from the freshman class—” Wait a second . . . I thought I had already been named the freshman delegate . . . “—but I totally understand that you had your heart set on that Walgreens game. Sorry! Tell Harper I said hi, though!” And with that, Nicole squeezed her little car out of the parking lot, peeling off with barely a final “NAMASTE!” out the window.
I was left in a cloud of dust, my mouth still hanging open. Nicole was going to take away my freshman delegate title? I was such an idiot! Why did I have to mention Walgreens?
But the worst feeling was yet to come. As I watched my new friends drive off, I realized I no longer had a ride. My parents were at work, and I didn’t know anyone else who could drive. Feeling like the actual worst friend on the planet, I took out my phone and texted Harper the bad news in the most cheerful way I could think of.
“So this is your fortress of solitude, huh?” Tim Slater stood next to me in the beauty aisle, shrugging his backpack up onto his shoulder over and over, only to have it immediately begin sliding down his arm again. “It’s awful . . . bright in here.”
He had a point. The fluorescent lighting in Walgreens, which I usually found to be delightfully crisp and no-nonsense, like in a library or supermarket, was today giving me a headache and making everyone around me look sickly-pale and pasty. I knew I probably looked super washed-out too in my white, fringed-hem minidress, and regretted not adding any colorful accessories, and then I freaked out a little bit because when did I start thinking like my mother?
Still, I really wished I had put on at least some lip gloss, but didn’t know why I even cared. It wasn’t like anyone who mattered was going to see me. Just Tim. Irked because I didn’t know why I was irked, I tugged at my loose braid and shook out my hair, glaring at my split ends and willing them to smooth out.
“You can leave if you don’t like it here,” I huffed, scooping up brushes, makeup remover, nail trimmers, a bag of gourmet sea salt caramels, body lotion, an eyelash curler, face primer, and a vampy Maybelline nail lacquer called “Green with Envy.” And then, because Tim still wasn’t getting the hint that I just wanted to be left alone to wait for Lily, I threw in a box of tampons for good measure.
“No way. I’m having a great time,” Tim said.
My phone buzzed with a text, and when I checked it, my heart sank.
Lily was bailing. Nicole needed her for something NAMASTE-related. Of course. Why was I surprised? Was I even surprised?
“What’s up?” Tim asked.
“That was Lily. She’s not coming.”
“Oh. Hey, I’m really sorry Harper. . . .”
“I’m done shopping,” I announced, putting my phone back in my bag. Now I was stuck with Tim yet again. At first I was happy that he caught me on my way out the door—I was that desperate for company—but now he was just getting on my nerves. Rachel wouldn’t be here to pick us up until after her community college class, but all I really wanted to do at this point was go home immediately and hide under the covers for the rest of my godforsaken life.
I can’t believe I still hadn’t been able to talk about Friday night at Murphy’s Ranch with Lily. I shuddered as I remembered the whole scene again now. The worst part of that whole nightmarish scene? I didn’t even drink. I wasn’t drunk at all. I realized that wanting to get wasted just to show up Kendall would be just as silly as paying money to join a social media site. (Uh, it’s been known to happen. That’s why I stick with Facebook. And Instagram, and Twitter, but you get the point.) It’s so predictable and stupid, and as soon as I saw what was really going on I was like nope.
And it would have been great if I had actually said “nope,” and then just walked away, got on my bike, and went home. But what I did was way, way worse. Instead, I’d just put Kendall’s flask up to my lips and pretended to take a sip. Like when they gave me wine at my bat mitzvah. And then it all went downhill from there. . . .
“Hey, have you ever checked out the As Seen on TV section here?” Tim asked, pulling at my arm. “Come on, I’ve got to show you something.” The bright white ceiling tiles glared down at me and the narrow aisles suddenly made me feel claustrophobic. Maybe this was what a panic attack felt like? It was either that, or I was dying.
“It’s a Clapper!” Tim exclaimed, pressing a heavy hunk of beige plastic into my hands. “But for your remote control!” I knew he was just trying to distract me. At this point he knew more than Lily did about the night at Murphy’s Ranch—I’d already told him the whole humiliating story because I thought I was going to go crazy if I didn’t talk about it with someone—but there are just some things that boys aren’t able to understand. If Lily were here, she would have hugged me and told me that she was proud of me for not drinking, and that it didn’t matter that I had completely embarrassed myself, on camera, for the whole school to see.
“That’s pointless,” I told Tim. “Every time someone on TV claps, it’ll change the channel. How will you get through even five minutes of The Voice?”
“I don’t watch those kinds of shows,” Tim sniffed. “Still, I see your point.”
I turned away from him and closed my eyes. Stupid, stupid me: I’ve never actually been drunk, so I had zero real point of reference. But I’d figured it was like it was in movies, where college kids or high schoolers at house parties are jumping up and down with beers and going “Woo! Spring break!” I should have known something was wrong when Kendall kept shouting that someone should be Vining me. But I ignored her because I was in the zone. I was totally method acting, something I learned from when Lily and I made that movie, when I actually spent all this time researching ghosts and spirits and stuff, and I actually started to believe that I was this lost soul looking for her dead husband. I was so far inside the head of the character of “Wasted Chick” that I told Derek Wheeler I couldn’t feel my legs. Remembering that genius move, I groaned and buried my head in my hands.
Tim pulled a blue box from the bottom shelf, featuring a photo of a grown man with a creepy smile and a bushy mustache, dressed in pajamas and an old- timey sleeping cap, holding a gigantic pillow.
“‘Magic Pillow’?” I said, distractedly. “Is this, like . . . a sex thing?”
Tim read off the back of the box. “It’s a body pillow that has a ‘patented medical fill that stays cool and conforms to your exact individual needs.’” He waggled his
eyebrows. “But I’m pretty sure its most common use is as a sex doll substitute.”
I laughed. “Oh, well in that case, give it here.”
Tim turned around and put on the same creepster smile as the guy in the photo. “This one is mine, dearie,” he falsettoed while grinning lasciviously.
That was too much, and I laughed so hard that people began to look over to see what was wrong with us. Which made me immediately think of Lily again. Being here with Tim, her ex-boyfriend, felt wrong. But I’d known Tim all my life and it was still kind of weird and new for me to think of him as “Lily’s ex.” Or even as a guy, really. He’d always just been, like, this . . . creature. But now I couldn’t help but see that he was also a boy.
Tim was the one who called me up Saturday and told me that there was a new video on SchoolGrams, and that I was in it, and I could tell by the tone in his voice that this wasn’t good news. I’d seen girls get burned by these things before—the video of Jessica and Stephanie’s fight came to mind first—but I’d never thought that I’d be dumb enough to end up right there with them on the public embarrassment express after only the first week of classes. I wouldn’t have even gone to school that following Monday if Rachel hadn’t dragged me there, kicking and screaming all the way to the gates of hell. That whole first day back I felt like I was surrounded by emotional bullies shoving cell phones into my face, forcing me to watch my humiliation over and over again. And when they weren’t making me relive the American Horror Story of my faux pas, they were totally ignoring me.
How had I made such a mess of things in such a short time?
You’re only as vulnerable as your game face lets on, I’d kept telling myself at school as I tried to put together my features into something resembling a cool girl’s. Good posture is more intimidating than any threat. Ridiculous: Even at my most dejected, I was still giving myself MomTips.
“Harper, you shouldn’t worry about the SchoolGrams thing,” Tim said now in Walgreens, still holding the creepy body pillow box.
He’d told me the same thing on Monday morning after he saw me walk through a punishing gauntlet of kids staring and laughing behind my back. “It’s like a badge of honor. And you actually seem like you’re having a good time in it! You look awesome!” I’d just groaned and buried my head in my hands, trying to ignore the pointed comments Kendall was throwing from the other end of the hallway about “some people not being able to handle their liquor.”
I had been such an idiot on Friday night, stumbling around, pretending to be drunk and slurring like an old-timey hobo. I could feel my face getting red just thinking about it. Like when I kept trying to pick a fight with one guy’s skateboard, and the skateboard won. At one point Stephanie came over to help pick me up after one of my many falls, and I told her that she looked like Elsa from Frozen, and that she should just “Let it goooo!” I also gave a lovely impromptu monologue about how people are always insisting they have really unique spirit animals—like tamarinds or snow leopards or axolotls—but deep down most of us know we’d really be dogs. Because dogs are the best, and everyone always forgets about dogs, and everyone takes dogs for granted and leaves them at home all day or stops wanting to play with them as soon as they grow up and stop being puppies. . . .
All of that is embarrassing enough, but how was I to know that the night was going to take a turn when some good Samaritans overheard our little party and called the police? (Right? Like, who does that?) Suddenly the dark night was pierced by a bunch of flashing lights and screaming teenagers scattering in a million directions. I hadn’t done anything wrong (well, except for lying to a bunch of jerks and Derek about being drunk), but still I went right along with everyone else, ducking and weaving through the shrubs and tall grass, and then all of a sudden there’s this bright light on me, and I freeze. Like, complete deer-in-headlights freeze. But the cop’s flashlight wasn’t pointed at me—it was pointed at Derek, who was standing on the trail with his bike. He was kind of leaning into the frame like he was about to fall over, and another cop swooped in on the other side to hold his bike up and force a Breathalyzer in his face.
Who knew that riding a bike while intoxicated in California was illegal? I thought it was just douchey.
Obviously I needed to use some of my Empathy Superpowers on Derek. I knew that I needed to help him, the way I help everyone in peril, but that doing so was going to get me into a whole heap more trouble than I was already in. What I didn’t expect was that helping Derek would also result in the ruination of the rest of my life. Like, of course it had to be smelly Derek Wheeler—that walking, talking “Before” in a commercial for ADHD medication—who would go down as not only my first kiss, but the jerk who had videotaped my most humiliating experience to make me the laughing stock of the whole school. And he had to team up with Kendall to do it. After I tried to help him get out of trouble with the police. That’s what you get for trying to be the good guy, I guess. . . .
Before I could inwardly reminisce about the last and worst part of Friday night, I was startled out of my regretful reverie by an unfortunately familiar voice screeching down the beauty aisle.
“Hello? Don’t you carry MAC at this location? I’m out of Microfine Refinisher and I need more pronto!” It was Kendall, berating a hapless, patient-looking woman, who had the misfortune of being the closest person in her vicinity wearing a Walgreens employee smock.
The woman blinked back, unimpressed. “I’m sorry, but we’ve never carried that line of cosmetics.”
Kendall groaned as the woman turned her back and continued stocking mascara. “Are you sure?”
“You must be thinking of Sephora,” the woman replied, not even bothering to turn around. “That’s usually where whiny girls buy overpriced bronzer, right?”
The look on Kendall’s face was priceless, but I could only see half of it because I was still trying to chameleon myself into the aisle to savor the moment. Too late. Looking for a new victim to terrorize, Kendall’s eyes met mine, and her face lit up with something akin to savage glee.
“Well, if it isn’t good old Super Drunk Girl! And what do you know? She has Boy Wonder by her side! Why, this is a huge surprise . . . to absolutely no one.”
Tim shrugged with his usual good nature and offered out a hand, which Kendall completely ignored as she zeroed in on me. I felt myself start to sweat under the hot bulbs.
“Gee, things got kind of . . . sloppy the other night, wouldn’t you say? Looks like you’re doing a lot better today, though.” Kendall gestured at Tim. She kept advancing forward and I kept backing away until she bumped me up against a shelf in the Pets and Home section. My leg bit uncomfortably into a box of doggie pee pads, the kind you use to train anxious little terriers, and she had me cornered in there so forcefully that I accidentally kicked some off the shelf. Before I could catch them, a column of pee pad boxes tumbled down and skidded across the floor. Reflexively, I bent down and began picking them up, putting myself at direct eye level with the silver straps of Kendall’s high-heel sandals, the same ones she was wearing Friday night.
And to think, none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been trying so hard to help Derek. The cops didn’t hide their surprise when they saw the crazy girl in the kitten shoes stomping out of the shadows, screaming “Hey! It’s cool! That’s my bike! I’m not drunk! I’m completely sober! Breathalyze me! Breathalyze me!” And oh, god. The look on my face. A robust mix of sheer panic, desperation, and terror. I’m sure it was the same face I made the next morning, when Tim called to alert me to the video of my “drunken” ramblings all over SchoolGrams. It was posted anonymously, but it was pretty clear who the cinematographer was. Apparently, Derek’s film project was more of an unscripted reality series kind of thing than a stand-alone feature. Starring me.
“Hey. You down there,” Kendall snickered. “Um, Earth to BasicWear.” Great, a new nickname. I guess she was confusing the true meaning of
the term “basic” with the fact that I usually only wore “basics,” as opposed to her current ensemble: a hot pink mesh onesie and an oversized gold-plated shark she wore on a tiny choker chain. I’m pretty sure I knew who would win in a “being basic” contest.
“I said, I’m so glad to see you’re doing better after such a sloppy night.”
I wanted to respond with something vicious, like “Have you caught any fish in all that mesh you’re wearing?” Or something else that I could imagine easily coming out of Kendall’s mouth. But who was I to cast stones, when I could so easily see myself hiding behind those bushes with Kendall and her friends, shivering and feeling bad for Derek. Derek, who formerly held the title of Dirtiest Kid in Class, but who now seemed kind of sweet and maybe also a little bit sad in a way that I somehow found endearing.
Just then, a familiar voice sounded out behind me. “Hey, what the hell, Kendall?” For a second I thought it was Tim, but then I realized that he was bending down right there next to me, busy helping me clean up the aisle. I shoved one last box back on the shelf and stood up, turned to meet my savior . . . and grimaced in embarrassment the moment I saw who it was.
Derek. The same Derek who had studiously avoided acknowledging me in any way at school ever since he posted the video of my “performance.”
“Hey Derek,” Kendall cooed, immediately adopting a less sociopathic tone. “I was just saying hi to our friend here. We haven’t had a chance to catch up with Harper since . . . well, since after the police dropped by the ranch for a little visit!” She shot me the coldest warm smile ever. “God, I mean we were seriously wasted, weren’t we? Derek could barely work the video function on his phone. Luckily, he got some great footage anyway.”