The Darlings Are Forever

by Melissa Kantor

  Do what you’re afraid to do.

  Jane stood up. “As a matter of fact, I am going to audition for the main-stage production. I’m just not making a major deal out of it.”

  The look Laurie gave Jane was one of sheer amazement. “You are?!”

  Mark’s look was significantly less excited, but he couldn’t completely hide how impressed he was. “Okay, well, that’s great.”

  “Yeah,” Jane said. She suddenly felt light-headed, as if there weren’t enough oxygen in the room. “Well, actually, I have to go.”

  “See you,” said Laurie.

  Mark didn’t say good-bye to Jane, and Jane didn’t say goodbye to Mark. Would they ever sit together at lunch again? Jane highly doubted it.

  Jane’s mom had texted her before she left work, and they’d agreed to meet at the restaurant right across the street from their Greenwich Village apartment building. Panne e Vino was the kind of neighborhood place where the maître d’ remembered your name and said “Good evening,” as though your walking into his restaurant was the best thing that had happened to him all day.

  When Jane told people her parents were divorced, they always responded as if it were a bad thing, and when they learned her parents were divorced and she was an only child, they acted as if she were some kind of ward of the state.

  But as far as Jane was concerned, being the only child of a divorced couple was the best. She loved flying out to LA by herself to go visit her dad. She loved meeting her mom for dinner, like they were friends, not mother and daughter. Natalya and Victoria talked about their parents as Their Parents—people who made decisions based on information their children had no access to. They didn’t mind, either—Natalya and Victoria were okay with sitting at the kids’ table.

  But Jane liked sitting with the grown-ups.

  Her mother had been listening to Jane’s story about Mark since she’d arrived, and now Jane was almost done. “So I signed up for a Tuesday audition slot,” she finished. “Needless to say, Mark’s name was nowhere on the list.” As she finished telling her mother what had happened, Jane ripped at a piece of bread as if it were something Mark valued that she was destroying.

  Her mom danced her long, elegant fingers through the bread basket, finally settling on a sesame bread stick. “Well, I guess you should thank Mark if you get a part.” She took a bite. “If he hadn’t irritated you so much, you might not have gotten the idea to audition.”

  Jane snorted. “Yeah, I can see that conversation now: ‘Hey, Mark, thanks for being so totally full of it. If you hadn’t lied about planning to audition, I never would have put myself out there!’ ” She had a sudden realization. “Nana would have hated him.”

  The waiter arrived with their drinks—a bottle of sparkling water for the table and a glass of red wine for Jane’s mom.

  Her mother pushed her black, fashionably short hair off her face, then picked up her wineglass. “Oh, I don’t know. I think Nana was pretty understanding in some ways.”

  Sometimes Jane felt as if her mother hadn’t known Nana at all, even though they’d been mother and daughter. “Mom, you don’t understand, Nana hated cowards. She believed in facing your fears.”

  Her mother laughed and sipped at her drink. “Jane, Nana had a lot of sympathy for all different kinds of people. Don’t turn her into Lady Macbeth, okay?”

  Touching the pearl at her throat, Jane knew her mother was wrong. Nana would have loathed Mark, she was sure of it.

  Still, her mother’s reference to Lady Macbeth gave her an idea, and for the rest of their dinner it percolated in the back of her mind.

  THE PEOPLE-WATCHING THAT Natalya did on the subway was nothing compared to the people-watching she did at Gainsford. It was as if she were an anthropologist and her classmates were a mysterious tribe she traveled to the Upper East Side to study.

  Her favorite place to observe her fellow students was the lunchroom; with its black-and-white marble floor, its tall chairs and heavy wooden tables, the room was without a doubt the most elegant place she’d ever eaten a meal. Sitting there watching her peers, it didn’t take long for her to see that the girls weren’t nearly as similar as they first appeared—tiny variations in their uniforms indicated enormous differences between them. There were the bags, for example. A few girls carried regular nylon backpacks, the kind most of the kids at One Room had, the kind Natalya still used. These seemed to be the girls who stayed after school for sports—familiar games, like soccer, and other games that were completely foreign-sounding. Hearing announcements about lacrosse and field hockey, Natalya felt as if she were in New Delhi or Oxford, not Manhattan. She wouldn’t have been surprised to see a cricket match schedule. Or Quidditch, for that matter.

  Other girls had actual leather briefcases. These girls were always pulling flyers out of their bags and tacking them up in the stairwells. Check out Model UN! and Robotics Club Meets Thursday in Room 4-3. They consulted tiny, laminated copies of their schedules, and hung out exclusively with each other. The artsy girls carried bags made of fabrics that had probably originated in Africa or Latin America—brightly colored cottons that clashed in an on-purpose way with the plaid of their skirts.

  Natalya had had lunch with Jordan every single day since their exchange in the bio lab, and she wondered if part of the reason Jordan and her friends seemed so familiar was because they all carried the same nylon backpacks as she did.

  “I can’t believe you got the mac and cheese,” said Catherine, who had long brown hair and played on the soccer team with Jordan.

  It was Wednesday, and Natalya had been psyched to see that they were serving elbow macaroni and cheese—one of her favorite meals.

  “Don’t worry, I know CPR,” Jordan assured her.

  Natalya swallowed the bite on her fork. It tasted fine to her, but she looked around and saw that all the other girls were eating sandwiches they’d made from the cold-food bar.

  “The hot food’s always super lame, but the mac and cheese is the worst,” explained Perry, another teammate of Jordan’s.

  “Sorry. I should have warned you,” Jordan apologized.

  “Oh, that’s okay,” said Natalya. “It’s actually not so bad. I kind of like it.”

  Jordan, Catherine, and Perry all looked surprised, but before they could respond, Perry whispered, “Oh god, here comes Her Majesty.”

  Natalya looked up. Walking down the center aisle was Morgan Prewitt, flanked by Katrina Worthington and a girl Natalya hadn’t seen before. The three looked like models in a photo shoot. Morgan’s long wavy blond hair was up in a loose ponytail, and Katrina’s dark, equally perfect hair framed her pale face. Did these girls have stylists or something? Even their uniforms, which were technically comprised of the same skirt and blouse every other girl at Gainsford was wearing, looked nothing like the other uniforms. Their white shirts were chicly rumpled, their shoes grown-up and sexy without violating the no-heels, no-open-toes rule. The third girl’s hair was strawberry blond, almost but not quite red, and it gleamed as if she had her own personal ray of sunshine following her.

  “Morgan and Katrina are in my English class,” Natalya said when the girls had passed. “They went to a really fancy party with some actors this summer.”

  “Let me guess.” Jordan pretended to consult a crystal ball, then closed her eyes and pressed her index fingers to her temples. “I see that one of their moms is on the board of The Public Theater.”

  Natalya could not have been more amazed if Jordan had turned her sandwich into a bird and set it free to fly around the high ceiling of the cafeteria. “How did you know?”

  “Please.” Perry rolled her baby blue eyes. “Their moms are like, on the boards of everything in New York.”

  “They pretty much run the city,” Jordan continued. Then she gave Natalya a significant look and said, “Morgan?”

  Natalya had no idea what Jordan was getting at. “Okay, you lost me.”

  “Morgan,” Catherine prompted. “Like, J. P. Morgan.”<
br />
  “Like the Morgan Library,” Jordan continued.

  “Sloane Gainsford,” added Perry. She gestured meaningfully around the room. “As in the school we are currently attending. Her like, great-great-great-something started it.”

  “And if you go to pretty much any museum in New York, you’ll find the Worthington Wing,” added Jordan. “Just so you don’t, you know, feel bad for Katrina or anything.”

  “Morgan Prewitt, Katrina Worthington, and Sloane Gains-ford,” said Catherine, her voice low and deep, like a radio announcer’s. “They don’t just act like they own New York.”

  “They do!” Jordan, Catherine, and Perry finished together. Then the three of them collapsed in laughter.

  Natalya watched Morgan, Katrina, and Sloane as they disappeared into the crowd around the salad bar. Morgan was related to J. P. Morgan? They’d studied J. P. Morgan in fifth grade, when they did New York City history. He was a robber baron. Or was he a steel magnate? Or was it railroads? She couldn’t remember; he got confused with Rockefeller and Vanderbilt in her mind. Still, J. P. Morgan had been in their history book. And someone related to that girl Sloane had founded Natalya’s school. That meant…

  Natalya stared around the table. “Her family must have lived here,” she informed them. “When it was a house.”

  “I never thought about that.” Catherine surveyed the palatial room.

  Jordan did the same, then arched an eyebrow at her friends. “Well, for their sake, I sure hope the food was better back then.”

  “Totally,” agreed Natalya, and this time she joined Catherine, Perry, and Jordan when they laughed.

  Natalya had English class right after lunch today. Morgan was sitting next to her again, with Katrina on Morgan’s other side, and Natalya found herself watching them, trying to see if there was a way she could have guessed how rich and powerful the girls’ families were if Jordan hadn’t told her. Where she lived, in Brighton Beach, people with a lot of money practically dripped diamonds, and even at One Room the rich students had way nicer stuff than the other kids—iPhones and Marc Jacobs bags and J Brand jeans. But except for Katrina’s plain bracelet, the only jewelry she and Morgan were wearing were simple earrings—Katrina’s were silver balls and Morgan’s were tiny silver knots. And they both had really ugly bags, big satchels in colors that were just a shade away from a nice color—Katrina’s near purple, Morgan’s near red. They looked like purses the old Russian ladies in Natayla’s neighborhood would carry.

  As Natalya watched, Morgan whispered something to Katrina, who shook her head. A second later, Morgan turned to Natalya. “Do you have an extra pencil I can borrow?”

  Natalya felt hot and cold at the same time, and instead of responding to Morgan’s question, she just stared at her. Morgan was practically a celebrity. More than a celebrity. She was history.

  When Natalya didn’t respond, Morgan held up her mechanical pencil and shook it ever so slightly, as if pantomiming to a non-English speaker what “empty” meant.

  “Do you have an extra pencil?” Morgan repeated.

  Natalya snapped out of her trance and flipped to the pencil case at the front of her binder. “Oh, yeah, sure. Here you go.”

  “Thanks,” Morgan whispered. “I’ll give it back at the end of class.” She turned to face the board, where Ms. MacFadden was writing Discuss the qualities of Othello’s that Desdemona falls in love with in two well-organized paragraphs.

  “Don’t worry about it,” said Natalya to the side of Morgan’s head.

  After school, when Natalya stepped out of the building, it was raining. Morgan, Sloane, and another girl were standing below her on the sidewalk with a group of guys from Thompson, their brother school. The boys were getting rained on, but the girls all held clear bubble umbrellas that came down over their faces, the kind Natalya remembered having as a kid. Rather than childish, the umbrellas—each of which had a stripe of color around the rim, Morgan’s bright green, Sloane’s orange, and the third girl’s red—made the girls look chic, as if they were posing for a photo shoot.

  Natalya realized she was staring, and she was about to turn away when Morgan raised her hand and waved in Natalya’s direction.

  For a second Natalya froze, but then she felt a surge of warmth run through her body.

  Morgan Prewitt was waving.

  Waving at her.

  What should she do? Should she stop and wave back? Wave back and keep walking? Maybe this was about her pencil and she should head toward Morgan.

  Hesitantly, Natalya lifted her hand to return Morgan’s wave. But just then, Katrina, who must have been standing right behind Natalya, and who had obviously been the person Morgan was actually waving at, shouted, “I thought you said we were meeting inside!” A second later, she dashed past Natalya and toward Morgan, opening her clear bubble umbrella with a band of white at the bottom.

  Natalya turned away as quickly as possible and practically ran down the steps, away from Morgan and her friends, into the street, where she stepped into the path of an oncoming town car. The driver blasted his horn at her before veering sharply to the right and skidding past. Natalya was too embarrassed to look back, but she wondered whether the crowd on the steps had noticed.

  SATURDAY MORNING, WHEN she came out of her bedroom, Victoria felt as if she’d gone to sleep in her apartment and woken up in her father’s campaign headquarters.

  From the dining room came the sound of what must have been fifty people having a heated debate about Facebook. As she put two scoops of sugar into her milky coffee, Victoria heard her sister’s voice. “Yes, but I’m not the only out-of-state college student who’s registered to vote in New York. So are a lot of my friends.”

  A lot of my friends. Of course Emily, who had started college one week before Victoria had started high school, already had a lot of friends. She’d probably also written a major exposé for the Princeton paper and been asked by a professor to help him with some groundbreaking research project. Emily was so good it was incredible. Even when she was bad she was incredible. When Emily wasn’t being perfect, she was being horrible—she’d failed the only class in which she didn’t get an A (a health course called Modern Teenage Ethical Dilemmas, which she’d described as “beyond a waste of time”). Junior year she’d lied to their parents and spent an entire weekend at her boyfriend’s apartment, and two summers ago, before she’d even had her driver’s license, she’d taken the car out one night when their family was on vacation upstate.

  It was as if Emily had two temperatures: boiling and freezing. Victoria, on the other hand, had one: lukewarm.

  A gravelly male voice—maybe their dad’s—said something Victoria couldn’t quite hear, and then Emily responded, “A few thousand kids is a few thousand votes.” Even from the other room Victoria could hear her sister’s confidence and poise. She didn’t sound like a kid sitting with a table of grown-ups, a table of professionals. She sounded like a member of the campaign team, someone who knew she had something worthwhile to say and wasn’t afraid to say it.

  Victoria knew she should probably say good morning to her father and welcome home to her sister, but no way was she going into the dining room; she’d rather walk into the lions’ cage at the Bronx Zoo. Instead she took her coffee over to the small table by the window, and as she drank it, she glanced through the Welcome Back issue of The Morningside Scoop. There weren’t many articles, probably because it was only the beginning of school. The middle of the paper was a two-page spread titled “ONE DOWN, ONE HUNDRED SEVENTY-NINE TO GO!” There were about fifty photographs jumbled together, but Victoria easily spotted the one of the boy and his backpack that Jack had shown her on his camera. The boy was jumping the last two steps, his hair floating up behind him, his feet almost but not quite touching the floor. It was cool how Jack had caught the boy just before he landed. Along the side of the photo was Jack’s name printed in small type. PHOTO: JACK HASTINGS.

  She read it again. Jack Hastings. She liked his name. Was
that weird? Was it weird to like someone’s name?

  No weirder than it was to stare at a person you never spoke to. Every day Victoria spent Biology with her eyes glued to Jack’s back, as if he were a magnet and she were a piece of metal. Each time he raised his hand, Victoria would feel her heart pounding in her chest until Ms. Kalman called on him, as if it were her hand that was in the air.

  It was cool how Jack talked in class—sometimes his hand was up because he had the right answer, but sometimes he’d say he was confused, or he’d offer his understanding of a concept and ask Ms. Kalman if it was right. He was never embarrassed when he did that. If Victoria didn’t get what Ms. Kalman said, she tried to make herself invisible, sitting as still as possible and pretending to take notes so she wouldn’t get called on. Jack seemed totally comfortable asking the teacher to explain what she meant.

  Victoria couldn’t imagine being like that.

  Whenever Ms. Kalman was speaking from the back of the room, Jack would turn around, and each time, Victoria let herself think that maybe he was looking at her and not their teacher. But the likelihood of his checking her out was pretty small; whenever she saw Jack around school, he was with a crowd of people, and they always seemed to be having a great time, as if they’d been best buddies for years. Yesterday she’d walked by him and his friends in the hallway just as one of the guys asked, “You coming this weekend, Hastings?” Jack had answered, “If I can,” like he had so many plans he really couldn’t commit to one more.

  The scenario in which a cute, popular guy like Jack was interested in the strange deaf mute at the back of the bio lab was hard to imagine.

  To get her mind off Jack, she flipped the page of the newspaper.

  “JOIN A CLUB!” read the headline. Below that, a smaller announcement read, “OR START ONE.” There was the astronomy club, the debate team, the rocketry club, the chess club (Natalya could join that), the video club, the mock trial club, and the science club. There were clubs for poets and actors (Jane!), future diplomats and entrepreneurs. Victoria skimmed the list, but there weren’t any cooking or baking clubs.