by J. Minter
Inside the box was an assortment of jewel-colored satin eye masks that made Meredith's look like it was a blue light special from Kmart. Judith and I each thanked the flight attendant and took one.
Just then Mer tossed off her eye mask and turned to us. "I changed my mind. I'm way too excited to sleep," she said. "I can't believe a week ago I thought I'd be making green bean casserole with Grandma on Thanksgiving, and now here we are, en route to Paradise. What do you guys want to do first? I was reading a book about Nevis, and it said there are some really good cave explorations you can go on."
"Are you going to be in Vacation Dictator Mode all week?" Judith asked Meredith. She was wearing an eye mask on her head like Rambo and had pulled out the trig flash cards I'd forgotten to tell her to leave at home. By now she was arranging them by their color-coded tabs.
Meredith stuck her tongue out and said, "Are you going to study all week?"
"I think there might be some sort of bonfire on the beach tonight," I said, trying to lighten the mood.
"Cool," Meredith said.
"So, what kinds of people are going to be there?" Judith asked me.
As if on cue, a line of girls who looked our age boarded the plane and sauntered down the aisle right past us. Each of them wore a differently colored, wool woven poncho with a white tank top underneath. They all carried some variation of a Louis Vuitton travel bag. As they walked down the aisle, they looked painfully intimidating, like a skinny and perfectly blown out poncho force field.
"Who are they}" Judith asked me, as if I was expected to know everyone on the plane.
I shrugged my shoulders and tried to look disinterested. The truth was, the girls did look familiar. But there's a certain Manhattan private school girl look, so maybe I knew them, or maybe I just knew their type. There was something about the way they had walked onto the plane that unsettled me. If I had gone to Thoney, I probably would have known them, and the fact that I didn't made me feel on the outside of a social scene I used to be totally plugged in to.
"Are they part of our group, Flan?" Meredith asked.
"I don't know," I said, a tad more forcefully than I meant to. "I mean," I softened my voice, "there's a whole big group coming. I'm sure we'll meet everyone tonight at the party."
Meredith and Judith were both looking at me wide-eyed, like lost puppies at the pound. I didn't want them to stress about tonight, even though seeing those other girls made me a little nervous, too. It would be in my best interest to play happy hostess to my friends and make them feel totally comfortable.
"Don't worry, you guys, the trip is going to be amazing, I promise. We have a sweet bungalow all to ourselves, and once we get there, our biggest concerns will be which flip-flops match our bathing suits best."
Both of them nodded and looked so relieved that I wondered how much stock they put into what I said. Judith refocused on her cards, and Meredith even flipped through her in-flight magazine to find an empty crossword puzzle for Judith. The captain came on and announced that we were almost ready to taxi out and that they'd be closing the boarding gate in a minute.
Just then, I looked up to see a tall figure saunter onto the plane with a canvas bag slung over his shoulder.
"Sheesh," Judith said, glancing up. "You'd think if you were this late for a flight, you'd be in a little bit more of a rush. That guy looks like he has all the time in the world. Wait—isn't that—"
"Patch," I said, laughing. Of course my brother would be fashionably late to the flight and not even get the least bit riled up about it.
"Hey, kiddo," he said, reaching out to tug my ponytail as he walked past us toward his seat. "You girls ready for some fun?"
"I didn't know you were on our flight," I said. "Mom said you'd probably just meet us at the bungalows."
"Eh," Patch said, giving me a lopsided grin. "I was in the neighborhood." He winked and made his way back to his seat. I could hear some kids behind us calling out to him as he crossed the plane. Maybe I knew more people on this plane than I thought I did. My stomach did a little tap dance at that thought, but I wasn't sure if it was in relief or in dread.
A few minutes later, we were in the air. As we took off, we looped around the city and had a great view of the perfectly clear morning down below. Meredith, Judith, and I huddled over my window and tried to point out our apartments, our school, and the spot where we'd had a picnic in Washington Square Park last week, when I'd convinced the girls that it was too nice a November day to be stuck inside.
"I still can't believe you got Judith to skip class," Meredith said, nudging J in the ribs.
"It was so great," I said, as the park got smaller and smaller through the window. "Except remember when that little Chihuahua started terrorizing us?"
"I know," Judith agreed. "I haven't been so scared since that time Noodles jumped on my back at Flan's house, and I nearly fell down the stairs."
"You kind of did fall down the stairs," Mer said with a giggle.
"We should do stuff like that picnic break from school more often," I said, turning around to face my friends. "Sometimes I just need an escape from that place."
"What place?" Judith asked, tilting her head. "You mean Stuy?"
"Urn . . . " I had said the words before I'd really thought about them, but surely my friends thought high school could be a little suffocating too?
"I know exactly what you mean," Meredith said, coming to my rescue. "I mean, Stuy's a really good school, but sometimes the art program just isn't challenging enough. I should probably be at LaGuardia or some art school in Vermont to really, you know, hone my craft. But you know how my grandma feels about college applications. . . ."
"But Flan doesn't want to go to art school," Judith said. "I thought you loved the classes at Stuy? What is it you need an escape from?"
What would I say if I could be totally honest with her right now? That I sort of missed being in a place like Miss Mallard's where I could recognize everyone and feel recognized by everyone on campus? That last week, when some junior guy spilled his chocolate milk on my bag, he sneered, "Sorry, Princess" and all of his friends started laughing? That I often wondered what my old friends were doing in their classes at Thoney?
These were the things that were running through my head, but I knew, looking at my friends waiting on the edges of their cushy leather seats for my answer, that these weren't the kinds of things that Meredith and Judith would get.
"I just think the classes are pretty tough. I'm totally stressing over finals," I said at last.
Again, I saw relief cross their faces. "Yeah, me too," they both agreed.
"But," Meredith said, holding up a finger. "I have another brilliant vacation proposition. I say for one whole week, we're not going to think about that! This should be a no-study week to rejuvenate us for next week when we have to hit the books again. No talking about grades, no ragging on unfair teachers, no mentions of what we have to do before we get back to class on Monday. What happens at Stuy needs to stay at Stuy this week."
"Deal," I said.
"Speak for yourselves," Judith said, waving her note cards menacingly in our faces. "I, for one, plan to ace all my finals."
Luckily, before I could start to feel anxious about my own finals, our in-flight movie clicked on—which happened to be SBB's recent hit, / Do Till Timbuktu. We laughed at SBB's hopelessly befuddled romantic missteps as we munched on grapes and chicken caprese salad and cranberry juice spritzers. And before we knew it, the plane touched down in Paradise.
The three of us hurried off the plane so we could grab our bags and start vacationing. Standing at the baggage carousel, everyone around us looked visibly more relaxed than they had in New York. It was a pretty ritzy crowd, so it was funny to see all these uptight New Yorkers suddenly sporting wide-brimmed straw hats and Prada beach shorts. Patch had his arm looped around a couple of waifish girls I'd never seen before. Even the airport itself felt tropical, with palm trees lining the baggage carousel and a warm sea breez
e blowing in through the sliding doors. Catching a glimpse of some more exotic plants and tons of white sand outside, I started thinking that Meredith was right. It would be easy to forget about high school until Monday. I was with my two best buds and there wasn't a cloud in the sky.
"Okay, time for a kickoff round," Meredith said, as we waited for the bags to start coming out. " Would You Rather}" She slyly pointed a finger first at a bleached-blond all-American-looking guy who'd been on our plane, then at one of the very tan, very buff luggage attendants.
"Hmm," I said, smiling. "I might go with the local hottie."
Judith shook her head. "Not me. Blondie all the way."
"Well the nice thing is," Meredith said, as the baggage carousel started to move, "at least you won't have to fight over them!"
The first bag I spotted sliding down the claim belt was my new duffel, followed by M&J's luggage.
"Hey, this is a good sign," I said.
"Totally. It's like they knew we need to be on the beach ASAP," Meredith agreed.
We lugged our suitcases toward the line of Range Rovers that were waiting outside to take us to our bungalow.
I was just about to hand my new duffel over to a very burly driver when something made me freeze mid-step.
"Flan!" Judith said, nearly crashing into me with her suitcase.
"Are you okay?" Meredith asked, putting her hand on my arm.
Suddenly, I was very much not okay, but I couldn't find the words to tell my friends. What I saw before me was a disaster.
In that one instant, I felt every fantasy I'd had about our paradise vacation slip through my fingers like white Caribbean sand.
Chapter 7
OH NO SHE DIDN'T
What was Kennedy Pearson doing here?
In a flash, I was ripped away from the tropical island of Nevis and stuck back in the one place I'd banished to the recesses of my memory: the agonizing seventh grade. The scene of my great blowout with the enemy. The one moment that had probably shaped my teenage destiny more than any other. Anjelica Dawson's end of the year party.
The deal was this.
Growing up, I'd always had a lot of friends. I would share my pink feather pencil set with anyone in class, I knew how to read tarot cards before most of my friends even knew what they were, and I could hit a softball out of the park because Patch taught me how.
Around the sixth grade, when being "popular" became the singular focus of most of the girls at my school, I never had to try that hard. At the time, I didn't think too much about it—I was just being myself. But looking back, I think some of what made life easy for me had to do with Patch and Feb's influence. I guess from an early age, I'd been exposed to things like movie premieres, posh Hamptons pads, and hard-core partying. And even though I wasn't doing any of the actual drinking or red velvet rope line cutting, according to a lot of the girls at school, I was considered popular by my proximity to cool things. And so, rather than telling girls that they were thinking I was cool for all the wrong reasons, I kind of just didn't deal with it.
So girls came up to me in the locker room for kissing advice before I'd even had a boyfriend of my own. People I barely hung out with would ask for my opinion about the length and cut of their jeans. I got invited to the birthday party of every single kid in the sixth grade.
And wherever I went, so did my best friend Camille. Ever since the second grade, when we realized that we were both left-handed and that we both dotted our Fs in exactly the same way (with a diamond instead of the typical and frequently overused heart), Camille and I did everything together. And until the end of seventh grade, I thought it would be like that forever.
Then Kennedy Pearson moved to town.
Sure, she was beautiful. And confident. And her clothes were different from ours—cooler in a sense— because she'd just moved from Harvard Westlake in L.A., where no one cared whether they wore a black bra with a white tank top—and where life in general, according to Kennedy, was just so much more chill. Being chill was a big thing with Kennedy.
Right away, we inducted her into our clique. Camille and I volunteered to show her the ropes because the kids at Miss Mallard's followed a pretty strict protocol. But I realized soon enough that Kennedy was more interested in showing us her ropes than she was in learning ours. For six months, all I heard about was L.A.
In L.A., we only eat with chopsticks.
In L.A., everyone is so over emo.
People are still wearing Uggs here? Really? That never caught on in L.A. with the truly cool people—just the wannabe movie stars.
And one day, I couldn't help it. I just snapped.
"Kennedy, that's because it's eighty degrees in L.A every day. It's negative three in New York, where you live now, if you hadn't noticed."
We were sitting in the cafeteria eating our salads— with chopsticks—and suddenly things got very quiet.
"Whoa, check out the tight-ass," Kennedy said, laughing her throaty laugh, which I realized I was beginning to hate.
From then on, things between us were a little tense. I stopped inviting her everywhere I went and, even though I hated to do it, there were a few times when I even asked Camille to lie to Kennedy when I invited her to go to some new store opening or impossible-to-get-into cafe. I still remember the weekend of the Spring Break Hamptons Club Crawl and the after-party Patch threw at our Hamptons house when I was in seventh grade. I'd invited Camille out for the weekend, and we'd spent the evening embarrassing ourselves on my karaoke machine. Around midnight, when Patch and his friends trooped home from the Club Crawl and started a bonfire on the beach behind our house, Camille and I sneaked downstairs to get some sodas (read: spy on all the action outside).
Looking out our kitchen windows, I'd caught a glimpse of a frightening sight.
Kennedy was on my pier dancing with my brother, wearing nothing but a bikini top, a grass skirt, and Uggs!
By the end of school, it was basically a cold war between us. The more I tried not to get involved with Kennedy, the more she managed to get under my skin. In fact, I almost didn't go to Anjelica's annual end-of-the-year-bash, but then I realized I wasn't going to let one person stop me from having a good time.
I wore a Lacoste sleeveless dress and my thickest skin and vowed to have as much fun as I had had every year up to then.
But all night, I felt on edge. I didn't want to bob for apples like everyone else. The hayride was making me sneeze. I'd forgotten to bring my iPod, so I was the only one who couldn't spotlight DJ when my turn came. And when Kennedy proposed that everyone gather round for a game of spin the bottle, I could feel my whole body tense up. There was no way I was going to have my first kiss take place in public under the direction of Kennedy Pearson.
I tried to convince Camille to ditch the party for a little while and go for a walk down by the beach, but her brand-new crush, Xander Ross, was hanging out, and I could tell Camille was dying to have the bottle point at him when she spun it.
"Come on," I pleaded. "Just grab Xander and see if he wants to go to the beach with us. I bet all the guys think spin-the-bottle is totally lame. You'd actually be able to talk to him for a change if it were just a few of us hanging out."
"Yeah right, Flan," Camille giggled, turning beet-red. "That'd be like asking him out on a date. I could never. Let's just stay here and play."
When she saw the negative look on my face, she pulled out the heavy artillery.
"Come on," she said. "Xander's friend . . . that tall guy . . . Alex Altfest will be there. Admit you think he's so cute—you guys would have the best-looking babies. What if you got to kiss him?"
I didn't realize Camille was dragging me by the hand into the living room where the game was about to begin, but as we came through the sliding door, I found myself saying, too loudly, "But I don't want to kiss anyone today. Not like this."
Just then, I noticed that Kennedy was standing two feet in front of us. She had one arm around Alex Altfest and moved to put the other one arou
nd Camille. As soon as she did that, I felt a draft of cold air wash between Camille and me. In that moment, I knew I really had lost her forever. She'd been sucked in like a magnet to Team Kennedy.
And then came Kennedy's nasally whispered words, which have been burned in my memory ever since:
"Too bad Flan can't ever just mellow out and be chill like Patch and Feb."
A rush of comebacks ran through my head: You don't know anything about my brother and sister, who are a million times cooler than you!
Is being a total backstabbing liar considered chill in L.A.?
Even, Hey everybody, is Kennedy so laid back that she doesn't even realize she needs the next size up in those Citizens jeans?
Any of those would have been perfectly acceptable . . . if not a little bit out of character and borderline bitchy. But what came out of my mouth was the lamest, most embarrassing line of all.
In a choked, hoarse shout that made me sound like a boy going through puberty, I shouted, "I can, too!"
With those three stupid words ringing in my ears, I fled the party in tears. I could hear the room erupt into laugher behind me, and I was sure I was the laughingstock of the entire evening. I spent the worst summer ever in hiding. Camille left a few messages on my phone, but I was too embarrassed to return her calls. Over the course of that summer, I started to worry that Kennedy had been right about me. Maybe I couldn't hang. Maybe I wasn't chill.
Eighth grade was no picnic. Hardly any of my old friends called me anymore. Even the girls who hadn't been invited to Anjelica's party seemed to have heard about my meltdown. Some steered clear of me as if I had a contagious disease. At first, Camille would wave at me tentatively from the table by the window where we always used to sit, but eventually, she stopped making the effort.
Finally, Patch and Feb came to my rescue, because they couldn't stand to see me commit social suicide weekend after weekend. I started hanging out with them more and more, and soon enough, I'd virtually disappeared from the scene at school. I started dating Jonathan, which was a blast on nights and weekends, but I still had to try to hold my head high at school. The truth was, a lot of the time, I was feeling pretty pathetic.