The Aristobrats

  “And then after I hit that party,” Parker said, “I really wasn’t in the mood for another one—I mean, it was getting so late.” She laughed once (the perfect amount of times).

  “Oh, I know,” Kiki ran with it, “how many fabuloso parties can a girl do in one weekend?”

  “Hey.” Tribb walked up to the group. He was wearing his sweats and his hair looked recently slept on. He smelled less like Outdoor Fresh fabric softener sheets and more like socks.

  “Wow!” Parker acted like she was surprised. “So funny to see you here.” The store was filled with people their age and tons of Wallys. In truth, it wasn’t all that funny to see anybody you knew there. It was practically a hangout.

  “Yeah.” Tribb nodded. “I don’t even know why I’m here. I already own almost everything in here.” He laughed.

  She laughed.

  They all laughed.

  The Liam Davies video had finished playing on the Super-Screens and an old Rebels video came on. Sid Stryker hadn’t changed all that much in the decade he’d been renovating his mansion but Parker had. She wished she could turn back the clock.

  Tribb looked at Parker like he was about to ask her something. This is it! The big question—about to be popped! The rest of the Lylas turned away like they were instantly focused on something more interesting than Tribb asking Parker to Fall Social. (They weren’t.) Parker tried to hold her expression still but she kept blinking uncontrollably.

  Tribb nodded over to the Super-Screen like he’d only just noticed it was there. “The Rebels rock…” He pointed.

  Parker turned around. Sid Stryker’s face filled the screen. “The Rebels. Yeah. No. Totally,” she agreed. “Completely rock.”

  There was an odd noise in the background. Someone singing completely off tune. Parker looked past Tribb. James was standing there in the music player area trying out earphones. He was singing so loudly to the music he was listening to that it drowned out Tribb completely. His whole body bobbed up and down as if nobody else was there in the store. Parker laughed when she saw him.

  “The bootleg version of ‘Live Before You Die’ is so fresco…” Tribb kept talking even though Parker was losing it watching James. “I can’t even find it on Limewire…”

  Parker remembered Tribb was speaking. “It’s what?” She tried to focus.

  “Limewire,” Tribb repeated. “I can’t even find it.”

  “Apple bottom jeans…boots with the fur…” James sang.

  “Oh yeah?” Parker worked to key in on Tribb but it was pretty difficult given James’s performance. She bit her lip to keep away a laugh attack. Had Tribb asked her to Fall Social? “You what?”

  “Shawty got low, low, low, low, low, low…”

  Plum was laughing too.

  Tribb looked over at James. “Isn’t that the AV guy?” He seemed annoyed. James took his earphones off and checked the price tag. He didn’t see Parker or Tribb or any of the Lylas before he left. Parker tried to hold it together as Tribb continued. “Can you believe that toolshed?”

  Once James was gone, Parker suddenly remembered that Tribb was supposed to be asking her something. “What was that?” she asked.

  Tribb ruffled the top of his hair and looked back again at the front door. “So, I guess I better be going.” He put his hand in his pocket and locked his knees.

  Parker gulped down her disappointment. “Oh.”

  “I’ll see you at school.” He waved.

  “Sure.” Parker scooped the front of her hair and let it fall gracefully back down on the face. So much for the big moment. “See you at school.”

  Chapter 22

  The Wallingford Academy Today studio was starting to look more like a bustling frontline war room than the dark, heavily decked-out former language studies classroom that it was. Parker took over an entire corner for herself and transferred everyone’s show ideas from the Clipboard app onto two old giant chalkboards and a wall-sized cork board Arthur the janitor had found for her in storage. Parker could have used a Genius Pen and simply uploaded all the ideas into the air and let them dangle there like a virtual chandelier, but some things just made more sense when you could stick actual stickies all over the place (gasp!).

  It was agreed that Kiki could hold the newly created title of Wallingford Academy Today Costume Designer. (The only way to get her to stop talking about outfits was to get her doing them.) She turned a large storage closet off the back of the edit studio into a room she called Tea & Wardrobe. She brought in racks of clothes, stacks of mags, a velvet curtain to get dressed behind, a tin of English Breakfast tea, and an electric teapot. She “borrowed” a small table from the library, a topiary tree from the foyer, and brought in the pink satin chair from her own closet to receive guests (namely Kenneth, who had nothing better to do after school than sit in Kiki’s pink chair and goss about stuff ’n’ junk while sipping tea from a dainty cup).

  Plum brought in dozens of paintbrushes, buckets of bright “door-hinge” paint, and a Prius-sized disco ball she’d made out of her mother’s Pilates ball, paper-mache, and glue-on mirror tiles. She’d found a kaleidoscope strobe light and a Halloween fog machine at Party Plus, a white plastic living room set at Ikea (the store, not the person), and two silver chairs shaped like huge hands in her grandmother’s basement.

  She’d also instantly become one of Ms. Fenderson’s favorite students by submitting a Librarian Research Inquiry into “discotheques.” It must’ve been the first Librarian Research Inquiry Ms. Fenderson had received since the discovery of the World Wide Web. Plum had never been anyone’s favorite student before and didn’t even get in trouble for chomping watermelon gum in the library.

  Being bad had its advantages.

  Ikea hardly took up any room at all in the studio. She sat cross-legged in one of Plum’s silver hand-chairs with a stack of Wallingford Academy yearbooks, her phone and a super-serious look on her face. Occasionally she’d walk back into Tea & Wardrobe, look through Kiki’s clothes racks, and come back singing to herself. If you asked her what she was doing, she’d say “Ohhh, nothing…” like the same way you’d say it if you just smooched off your Cherry Carmex with your EGB behind the gym (not that Parker would know—she was so busy with the webcast, she’d hardly seen Tribb much less smooched him).

  Neither James nor McDweebs cared about whether they were doing the old version of the show or the new one—neither of them really gave a flying flip about losing their Wally status because they had none. McDweebs was just excited to spend quality drool-time with the Orion 2000 XZ. He had become the hero of the GameCube Olympians just for touching the XZ. As long as it meant that McDweebs could flip the beepie-buttons, turn the thingamabobbies, fine tune the knoobly knobs on the million dollar machine, and be within ten feet of his quasi-wife, life was good by him.

  James, as usual, was working his own grind. He didn’t really care what the show was about; making it look cool on film was the only thing that mattered to him. He would try a thousand different test shots with the digital camcorder, then inspect the playback carefully with McDweebs. Sometimes he’d suddenly burst out of his chair, grab his camera, run back into the studio, and start filming something again.

  To Parker, it didn’t seem like James was trying anything different than he had just a minute before, but James would nod and tap his foot like he was keeping time with his explosion of ideas. He’d then race back to McDweebs in the edit suite with the memory card to see what he had done.

  But whatevs. Parker simply tried to keep the mission on track. The sooner they’d get kicked off the assignment, the sooner eighth grade (aka life) would get back to normal.

  Even though Plum’s set wasn’t finished yet, Parker was amazed at how James made it come more and more alive on the wide XZ Super-Screen monitor with each new pass of his camera. The set looked insane but Parker liked what James was doing anyway. It was weird spending t
his much time watching somebody create something. It was almost like being really great friends with someone…except not. He didn’t get that they were trying to sabotage the whole thing. Or did he?

  James’s face always lit up when he watched the footage on the monitor. His ice blue eyes scanned the screen from left to right as he studied his work. Even though envy was strictly against Lylas rules, Parker caught herself noticing how easy things seemed for James. He didn’t worry about how he dressed or what he said or didn’t say. He did whatever he felt like doing and never stressed out. He didn’t seem to care what anyone else thought. Parker couldn’t even begin to imagine what that feeling was like.

  ***

  “I really like the part where it looks like the chair is moving closer to the camera. It’s très cool,” Parker told James one afternoon. (Lavishly complimenting the other person’s new thing felt like it should extend to stuff besides clothes and totes.)

  “I wanted to get a feeling of movement without falling into the whole hand-held trap,” he said excitedly as he watched the playback, “so I changed the zoom setting—and tried the telephoto lens to see if I could get a compression effect without all that old school distortion.”

  Parker furrowed her eyebrows and laughed. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said. “But I still like it.”

  James smiled, pushing his floppy hair away from his eyes.

  “How about a quick reverse cut here without the fade?” McDweebs asked James. “Something like this…”

  With the push of a button McDweebs spliced two pieces of James’s footage together so that they became something new. The area James had filmed—the tiny, orange and silver set that was just a few feet away, Plum’s work d’art—now seemed like an endless world, like a faraway planet that no one had discovered yet. Parker’s heart beat fast as she watched.

  “Illmatic.” McDweebs admired the result.

  “Wicked illmatic,” James agreed.

  ***

  No one had any idea what Ikea was up to with her segment—it was top secret or something. Parker crossed her fingers that it wasn’t going to be so super-smart that it made everything else look too good. She sat in one of Plum’s silver hand chairs and scribbled on her Wallingford Academy notebook. The worst part of it? Parker had been so busy with the show she hadn’t even had time to plan for Fall Sosh. It was only a week away and she hadn’t practiced her updo or her walk down the stairs. She hadn’t even peeked out the studio window for weeks. She didn’t feel like herself anymore. Parker filled in the letters of the motto part of the school seal on the front of the notebook.

  “What about ‘Good night and have a pleasant tomorrow’?” She suggested a closing line for the show to James. “I think someone famous closed their show out like that.” Parker could already tell he didn’t like it. “Or maybe, ‘Stay tuned for more newsiness’?” she asked him. “Or,” Parker wondered aloud. “‘May the good news be yours’?”

  “I dunno…” James pulled up the other silver hand chair and sat beside Parker while they thought. “Nobody at Wallingford really cares about the news anyway,” he said.

  Plum tested the spin speed of her disco ball with a switch. The tiny mirrored lights swirled around the room. James’s eyes sparkled in their reflection.

  “How about just ‘Bye bye’?” Parker asked as she colored. “I mean, it’s totally to the point. Right?”

  “I guess…” James agreed (sort of). He pulled the hood of his sweatshirt over his head and rested his chin on his hand. He hated it. How obvs can you be?

  “But it’s a snooze cruise,” Parker admitted.

  “Z Town.” They both laughed.

  She looked at the letters she was coloring in. “How about Semper Veritas?” she asked as she filled in the oval inside the a.

  “Stay true…” He repeated the phrase in English. “You know, I don’t think anybody even knows what that means.”

  Parker nodded. “That’s what Plum said too.” Then she remembered Kiki’s suggestion. “But maybe I have a better idea” She grinned. “Excusez moi, all.” Kenneth interrupted the studio work.

  “Attention!” Kenneth repeated until everyone stopped what they were doing. Plum turned off the disco ball. Kiki stopped sewing. “May I introduce…” Kenneth said loudly, “the girl most likely not to be accepted at Yale…”

  “Or Princeton.” Ikea’s muffled voice yelled out from behind the velvet curtain in Tea &Wardrobe. “…But possibly still Harvard,” she added.

  Kenneth made a drum roll sound with his fingers.

  “The Fabulouz Ikea Bentley…” Kenneth announced.

  The curtain rustled, then opened. When Ikea walked onto the set it was as if an explosion went off, blowing out all the walls of the studio, the school, the doors, the ceiling…leaving only the bit of floor she was standing on.

  Parker’s eyes worked their way from the bottom up. Ikea’s knee-high, lace-up boots were rugged and thick and made out of the same kid-suede as the A-shaped mini-skirt that framed her sturdy hips. Her tight T-shirt (definitely not from Lilly’s in East Hampton) showed off everything there was to show. Over it, she wore an opened jean vest with a half-dozen political pins stuck to both pockets. Dipped in soapy water, her hoop earrings could have blown bubbles the size of pizzas into the air.

  And her hair, her hair, was not shiny and straight at all. At first Parker thought it might be the hat from Langdon’s, but it wasn’t. Ikea’s hair was all her own. It was natural. Frizzy. Untamed. Massive. It circled around her head and shook like the fur hat had. It was an Afro in all its glory. Simple as that. And it was big enough to put any ’70s movie to shame.

  But it wasn’t the boots, or the suede mini-skirt, or the pizza-sized earrings, or the pins that were controversial enough to start a file on her with the FBI—or the fact that not one single thing on her was monogrammed or pink or made out of ribbon—it wasn’t even Queen Ike’s dangerously large new hairdo that caused Parker’s jaw to drop to the floor…It was the thing Ikea wasn’t wearing, well the two things, left and right, that made everyone just about lose the plot.

  “Is it too much?” Ikea asked.

  Parker blinked. She coughed. Nearly choked. But Plum stated the obvious for everyone:

  “Ikea! Your eyes are brown!”

  Chapter 23

  It was late and the studio was quiet. Everyone but Parker and James had gone home. James put away the last of the equipment. The sound of the locks closing on his camera case sounded so final. All that was left now was to turn it in to Hotchkiss and wait to get dragged into her office and get fired. By tomorrow this horrible chapter of eighth grade would be over—Parker just had to keep reminding herself that.

  “Here you go.” James handed Parker the copy of the webcast.

  The DVD seemed so small for something that took so long. Parker grabbed her tote and slung it around her shoulder. She tried to smile.

  James gathered his heavy backpack, his personal camera, and a flat box of photography paper. He slipped the box into his backpack and heaved the whole thing up over his shoulder.

  As he shut off the last of the lights and Parker locked the door behind them, she couldn’t help but shiver. The school was dark and empty. The sound of Arthur’s enormous floor-shine machine whirring somewhere above them was all they heard.

  “It’s so creepy in here when it’s late,” she muttered. She didn’t want to walk up to Hotchkiss’s door all by herself. Every horror movie that ever took place in a school filled her mind. Blood-thirsty vampires (not the cute ones) could be lurking just about anywhere.

  James lifted his hood up and nodded. “I was going that way anyway,” he said. Parker was über-relieved.

  Together they walked back down the hallway, past the dark row of Orion Super-Screens, past the bomb shelter entrance and the two old phone booths, past the nurse’s office and the lower l
evel of the Hunt Memorial Library, toward the stairwell that led up to the empty office and the door that the DVD would slide under.

  James stopped in front of the door to the stairwell.

  “Parker, I know you and your friends really hated doing this…” he said, “but I’m really happy we got the chance to work together. I thought it was really fun.” James gave her a warm, boyish smile, one she remembered from their dance together around the maypole. “But I know you’ll be pretty glad after tomorrow. Hey, you’re Parker Bell.” He pushed open the door. “You have better things to do with your life.”

  “I don’t have a dad, you know,” Parker heard herself admit. She wasn’t sure why she told him—she just felt like she needed to say the words, like she wanted James to know. “Sometimes it just doesn’t feel like I really deserve any of this….being popular, having a lot of people looking up to me,” she said. “I’m really just a nobody who pretends to be a somebody.”

  Parker took a deep breath. She smiled even though she felt like crying. James just listened. There was something about saying the words out loud to James that made it feel like it wasn’t as big of a deal as it was.

  James set down his heavy backpack on the landing.

  “And I don’t only know how to take pictures of the lunch ladies serving up macaroni and cheese, by the way,” he told her. Parker shook her head. She’d almost forgotten that question she asked him on the first day they were in the studio.

  James pulled out his box of photography paper, slid out a print at the top of the pile and handed it to her. Parker held the print carefully. Even in the darkness of the stairwell she could see.

  “That’s me!” Parker stared.

  Parker studied her own face. It must have been the split second after she noticed James standing beside the tree at the Big Game but before he’d disappeared. Her hair was swept across her forehead and framed her eyes like long tendrils. Her body was turned in a way where you couldn’t tell if she was leaving or she’d just arrived. She didn’t look perfect, like the cover of the magazine pose she’d practiced or the Academy Award acceptance speech—but it just seemed like James captured something private about her through his lens.