“You always said that you wanted to help me grow into the person I was supposed to become, not a fantasy of the person you wanted me to be. Well, I want to do this, Mom. I want to try it. And if you don’t let me, it will be what you want, not me.”
Tears sprang into her eyes. Still, she made a lame joke, saying, “Don’t be surprised if they offer courses in golf and wine tasting.”
But then she held up her hands in surrender. “Okay, okay, you win. You presented your case brilliantly, sweetheart, tying facts with heart. I’m proud of you.”
Later that spring, I was offered admission with generous financial aid, surely funded in part by years of donations made by Aunt Eve.
• • •
In terms of academics, I loved Coventry from day one. Most of my humanities classes were taught seminar-style, meaning we sat around a big, round table discussing whatever text we were reading as if our opinions really mattered. The setup for Algebra II and physics was more traditional, but the classes were so small that whenever I got confused the teacher was right there, ready to explain the equation again. And teachers had to stay in their classrooms for an hour after school was over in case anyone wanted to come by for extra help. Apparently I had actually learned a lot during my years in the Gifted and Talented program in the Atlanta public school system, because by the time midsemester reports came out I had some version of an A in every subject but PE, in which I had a B+.
Things were trickier socially. Though Anna took me under her wing the moment I arrived as a new sophomore on campus and even outfitted me in the right clothes (she was as generous with her wardrobe as she had once been with her Barbies), I felt like an oddball at Coventry from the very beginning. For one thing, I didn’t have a mom and a dad, as everyone else seemed to, and worse, my mother worked—and not at some cushy job like interior design. And I was attending Coventry on a need-based scholarship (a fact I mentioned to no one) and we lived not in Buckhead or Ansley Park, but in a small house in Morningside with a basement apartment we rented out because we needed the extra income. And I was not given a car for my sixteenth birthday, as Anna and her friends were. My mom could barely afford the upkeep on her own ten-year-old Toyota. Nor did we have a second home at Lake Rabun or Highlands or Sea Island. Mom reassured me that we did have a nest egg, thanks to the prudence of my father, but that it was reserved for my college education and Mom’s retirement and was not to be touched.
Anna welcomed me into her circle of friends, many of whom I’d already met at Anna’s birthday parties over the years. Some were cheerleaders, like Anna. All were pretty girls who wore real jewelry from Maier & Berkele, made good grades, and always seemed to be on diets. I didn’t click with any of them, not on any real level, but they were popular, and I recognized that there was a certain cachet to being seen with them. Still, after those first few months I found myself gritting my teeth every time I had to endure another lunchtime discussion concerning how many calories were in plain versus chocolate frozen yogurt. I would distract myself by watching Lizzie and Sake, who always sat at a table by themselves, best friends who didn’t seem to give a damn about what anyone else thought of them, a fact made especially obvious when their band, Ümlaut, played.
Ümlaut was the only girl band on campus. They were inspired by the DIY ethic of the punk scene—just grab a guitar and do it. Neither Lizzie nor Sake was particularly musically talented, but they made up for it with sheer nerve. Somehow they managed to perform at nearly every on-campus concert Coventry hosted. Actually, the reason was fairly obvious: Lizzie’s full name was Elizabeth Lee Calhoun, as in the Coca-Cola Calhouns, as in the Calhoun Auditorium, where all of Coventry’s plays and concerts were staged.
Lizzie’s family connections aside, Ümlaut rarely managed to stay onstage for long. Their acts were nearly always cut short due to “vulgar language.” At the Planned Famine Concert, during which bands played all day to distract students from the fact that they had skipped lunch in order to Think About Hunger, their mic was cut as soon as Lizzie started screaming the lyrics to “Fuck You, Peggy Sue!” And at Coventry’s Battle of the Bands, they earned a month of detention for their performance of “If I Had a Scrotum,” a song that began with an audience call-and-response: “You say ‘my’ / I say ‘scrotum!’ / My! / Scrotum! / My! / Scrotum!”
They were glorious.
• • •
One day in December when Anna was out sick, I bypassed my usual seat with Anna’s calorie-conscious friends, thrust back my shoulders, and headed toward Lizzie and Sake, plopping down at their table rather than asking permission to join. Their heads were bent over a black-and-white-speckled notebook, and they were laughing. I spent a long time putting ketchup on my chicken sandwich, scrolling a loopy design on its breaded crust.
Lizzie looked up at me and smiled. “No, no, not another doughnut for me,” she said graciously.
I blinked. There were no doughnuts at the table.
“I can’t wait to run six miles after lunch!” said Sake.
“Wow,” I said. “Who do you have for PE?”
“Gosh, I found this morning’s devotional very inspiring.”
“The guy who talked about how our virginity was like an apple, and if you take a premarital bite out of it, the flesh turns brown and rots?”
“Oh, yes! So uplifting!” said Lizzie. And then she and Sake cracked up.
“We’re playing ‘Things We Never Say,’ ” Lizzie finally explained.
“Ha,” I said. “As in, ‘Gee, Miss Ellis’s hair looks different today’?”
Miss Ellis, the dean of girls, was known for her perennial hairstyle, with feathered bangs in front and a flip in the back that looked like a ducktail.
“Exactly,” said Lizzie, and just like that I was in.
• • •
By junior year, Sake, Lizzie, and I were a known trio. Anna and I still considered each other good friends—sisters, really—but we didn’t have any classes together, and we rarely spent time with each other outside of school, except for occasional get-togethers with our moms. We would smile and say “hi” when we passed in the hall, and we would sometimes sit together in the cafeteria, but our paths had clearly split. Anna had become really involved with Young Life, which was the mainstream, upbeat Christian group on campus, the other being the Agape Fellowship, which tended to fixate more on sin and the evils of abortion.
I did go to one Young Life meeting with Anna, after she told me how fun it was. The meeting was held at night, in the basement rec room of some cheerleader friend of Anna’s. All around me preppy kids scratched each other’s backs while listening to the devotional, which was given by the cute young history teacher, Mr. Woods, who told a story about being saved by Jesus during a fraternity prank gone wrong, when he and some other Phi Delts tried to steal the lion from in front of the SAE house. I couldn’t wait to get home so I could call Lizzie and tell her all about it. She immediately went to work on a new Ümlaut song: “Christ rescued me / from a pissed-off SAE!”
• • •
During the spring of my junior year, I began to worry that no one was going to ask me to prom. Prom was a Really Big Deal at Coventry that pretty much everyone went to, even the Doc Marten–wearing stoners who typically avoided doing anything that gave off the slightest whiff of school spirit. I wanted Dean to ask me, a track star who also happened to be crazy smart, but he was in a serious relationship with an artsy senior named Zoe (ugh).
“Boys are a snore,” Lizzie proclaimed whenever I moaned about how much happier Dean would be with me. Of course, her dismissal of boys didn’t stop half of the guys in our class from being in love with her. In fact, Lizzie was one of the first girls asked to the prom, by the captain of the soccer team, McKitrick Davis. Soon after, Robert Cho asked Sake, because at Coventry white kids and nonwhite kids didn’t really date. It wasn’t until a few weeks later that George Simmons, who was headed to UVA in the fall, approached me in the stairwell after fourth period and asked if I wo
uld go with him.
“Anna’s already going with Chip,” he said. “The four of us could go together.”
“So you already asked Anna and I’m Plan B?” I joked.
George looked so uncomfortable that I dropped it. The fact was that Anna already had a boyfriend, Stuart, who went to Episcopal, a boarding school in Virginia.
But surely George knew that. He and Anna had known each other their whole lives. Their moms played on a tennis team together, and he also lived in Ansley Park. I remembered playing Marco Polo with George and his brother the summer my dad died, when Aunt Eve took us to the Driving Club to swim nearly every afternoon, thinking that the sun and the exercise would be therapeutic for me.
The weekend after George issued his invitation, Aunt Eve took Anna and me to Neiman’s to look for dresses. Anna immediately grabbed a scoop-neck dress embellished with thousands of tiny pink sequins. It was the perfect bubblegum-pink prom dress, short and fun, the sort of sparkly thing I would have dreamed of wearing when I was eight and loved nothing more than to braid my Barbie’s hair. While pink sequins were perfect for Anna, my style had grown more understated, and I filled my dressing room with black sheaths. None was cheaper than two hundred dollars, and the one I loved—a simple black dress, sleeveless with a high neck and low back, cost over three hundred. It was impossible. My mom had given me a hundred-dollar bill for the shopping trip and told me I could spend all of it. The corners of her mouth had turned up when she said that, and I knew that in her mind she was giving me a tremendous gift.
“Come out and let us see how pretty you look!” Aunt Eve called from the other side of the dressing room door. Anna’s pink dress was already sheathed in plastic and waiting for her, hanging on the rack by the cash register.
I walked out, shrugging.
“It’s perfect!” cried Anna.
“Oh, sweetheart!” Aunt Eve exclaimed. “That dress is gorgeous on you! And it shows off your lovely figure!”
“It’s okay,” I said, looking at myself in the three-way mirror, turning so that I could see the effect of the low-cut back. The dress skimmed my body, and the high neck was fluted so that my clavicle bones were visible on each side. I looked different in this dress, elegant, as if I should be wearing a tumble of pearls and clutching a cigarette in a long holder, like Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, a movie Aunt Eve had introduced to Anna and me, saying it had always been one of her favorites, even though she thought Mickey Rooney as Mr. Yunioshi was “a cringe.”
Aunt Eve stared at me for a moment. “Sarah, honey,” she said, her voice soft. “May I buy it for you?”
Of course I said yes. Of course I was thrilled. And of course I didn’t tell my mom that Aunt Eve paid for the dress. I thought of offering Aunt Eve the money that Mom had given me, but I knew she would refuse it. What was a hundred dollars to Aunt Eve? Instead, I cut off the price tag and told Mom I got the dress on sale. I was positive Aunt Eve wouldn’t mention anything about it, and I was right. She never did. I hid the hundred-dollar bill deep in my sock drawer. I felt guilty and I had no idea
what to do with it.
• • •
On the day of the prom, Anna picked me up early and drove me back to her house, where we would get dressed. Anna had spent the afternoon at Van Michael Salon, having her hair shaped into curls so fat and springy I could not help but pull one. “Quit it,” said Anna, playfully slapping my hand away. “You’ll mess them up.”
Mom walked out to the car with us, holding my makeup bag in her hand. “You two have fun,” she said. “And make sure you don’t do anything that could result in pregnancy.”
“Jesus, Mom!” I said. I rolled my eyes but did not state the obvious, that Anna was planning to save herself for marriage and I certainly was not going to have prom sex with George Simmons.
“Sorry, Sarah, but it had to be said.”
“Bye, Mom.”
“Bye, sweetheart,” she said, giving me a quick hug. “Be good.”
Mom would not be at Aunt Eve’s to see us off, though Chip’s and George’s parents would, drinking wine and taking photos. One of Mom’s clients had just had his execution date scheduled, and she was swamped with work on his appeal, was planning, in fact, to pull an all-nighter. But it wasn’t just work that kept her from the send-off party at Aunt Eve’s. Most Coventry parents made her uncomfortable. They didn’t share her politics, her frugality, or her sense of humor. Also, she would be the only one there without a husband.
• • •
After what seemed like hours of standing around and taking pictures—of each couple, of just Anna and me, of just Chip and George, and of the entire group—we finally piled into the limo the boys had sprung for and made a slow progression down Anna’s steep driveway. As soon as we turned off Anna’s street, George and Chip pulled out a plastic bottle of vodka, an engraved silver flask filled with bourbon, and a six-pack of strawberry wine coolers. Anna and I each took a wine cooler. George handed the limo driver a mixtape he had made for the occasion. As soon as the driver pushed it into the cassette player, the opening scream of Guns N’ Roses’ “Welcome to the Jungle” blasted out and Chip and George gave each other a high five. Anna and I laughed at what dorks they were.
All I remember about the dance itself was trying to avoid talking to any of the teachers, who were mandated to turn you in if it was obvious you had been drinking. Eventually, we headed to the official after party, a casino-themed extravaganza held at some rec center, with blackjack, poker, and craps tables. You played for lottery tickets, which you then entered into drawings for various prizes. Lizzie, who looked awesome in a floor-length yellow vintage dress, begged for my winning tickets. I gave them to her and she stuffed them, along with every other begged and borrowed ticket she could manage to get her hands on, into the drawing for a private flying lesson.
There was a DJ at the casino party, and when Tone-Loc’s “Wild Thing” came on, George pulled me onto the dance floor, his groin pressing into mine. He had taken off his bow tie and his eyes were red. He tried to kiss me, but I turned my head away and he did not try again. I scanned the crowd for Dean, my crush. The other day at school he had told me that I was the smartest girl he knew.
“Girl?” I had joked. “You have to qualify your compliment by gender?”
“You don’t understand,” he said. “I live with my mom and my aunt Linda. It’s a total matriarchy at my house. A smart woman is like the highest form of intelligence.”
I was flattered. Especially because his girlfriend, Zoe, was brilliant—brilliant and beautiful, with her black hair cut in a severe bob, her heart-shaped lips always painted bright red. Zoe starred in all of the school plays and was headed to Yale in the fall. I was looking forward to the following year, when she would be more than a thousand miles away. But that was months from now, and that night whenever I saw the two of them together they were touching, his hand on the small of her back, her arm wrapped around his waist. It occurred to me that not only had they surely had sex, but they were lovers.
At some point Lizzie won the flying lesson. At some point I went outside with George and Chip and drank bourbon from George’s flask. At some point we left the casino party and headed to someone’s house whose parents were out of town, the same place Lizzie and Sake were also headed. Maybe it was one of their dates’ houses; I don’t recall. All I remember is sitting on a well-worn couch with Anna in a basement with wall-to-wall carpeting. And then I looked up and saw Dean, sans Zoe, getting a glass of water from the little basement kitchenette and then walking down the hall toward the sliding glass door that led outside.
I nudged Anna and pointed to Dean. She looked at me with wide eyes. “Go get ’em, tiger,” she said.
“Grrr,” I answered.
“Dork!”
I stood and followed Dean down the hall and out into the fenced backyard. A security light spotlighted my crush. His tux fit him well. He looked comfortable in it, like a grown man at a wedding, not like a
kid playing dress-up.
“Hey!” I said.
“Hey,” he said, smiling at me. “Nice dress. Understated.”
“Thanks. Where’s Zoe?” I was drunk enough to be bold.
“Home. She’d had enough forced revelry for one evening.”
“She’s not going to the breakfast?”
There was a breakfast at six that morning, still a few hours away, an annual thing that the Coventry moms hosted. Aunt Eve would be there with her famous French toast casserole.
“Zoe doesn’t eat breakfast.”
I wasn’t sure, but it almost sounded as if he was mocking her.
“How sophisticated. Does she survive solely on coffee and cigarettes?”
He smiled. “Something like that.”
“I guess it’s going to be hard on y’all next year.”
“Well, she’s already told me that she doesn’t want to be attached to anyone when she heads to New Haven, so I wouldn’t worry too much about Zoetrope. She’ll find someone to keep her warm.”
“Oh,” I said, and I moved a little closer to him. “That sucks. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” he said, and he smiled, squeezing my arm for just a minute before he glanced at his watch and said he had to go.
“Wait, why? Aren’t you going to the breakfast?”
“Nope. I’m tired of being around drunk people. I’m going to stop at Waffle House on my way home, get an egg sandwich. Wanna come?”
I did. I really, really did. “Let me just tell my friends, okay?”
“Sure. I’ll meet you by my car. It’s the extremely sexy powder-blue minivan parked in front of the house, Gwinnett County license tags and all.”
We Are All Good People Here Page 22