The Aristobrats

  Parker didn’t dare turn around and look at Ikea’s father.

  “For those of you who have no clue who these people are—and that’s most of you—I’d like to introduce them. Because, uh, hello, they go to school with you! And, if the administration is listening (you know who you are), there should be thirty-nine point six more of them here. At least. So—if you know me, you should know them too: The few, the proud, the shockingly outnumbered: The fourteen underappreciated students of color at Wallingford Academy!”

  The petrified, fidgety silence in the room was suddenly broken by Wallys’ screams and whistles. Fourteen Wallys to be exact. The under-appreciated fourteen that were each about to have their moment of Super-Screen glory: Kiki had done their outfits, Plum had done makeup, Kenneth hair, and Parker had coordinated the complex location scouting and studio schedule that allowed for each of them to have their moment in front of James’s camera at a location of his or her own choosing. Even with Advanced Geometry, it was one of the most complicated equations Parker had ever solved.

  “Divya Venkataraghavan!”

  McDweebs had cut away from the shot of Ikea standing in the studio. Divya marched into the middle of the screen, did a Top Model turn, snapped in a Z like Kenneth had shown her, and smiled proudly, her silver braces gleaming in the light. She wore a formal salwar kameez embroidered with gold, and a traditional studded nose ring with a long chain attached. James had filmed her in the ornate foyer of her parent’s home.

  There were hushed whispers around the room. Who was that? Did she go to this school? Do you know her? Do you?

  Divya was easily the most exotic and glamorous Wally nobody had ever seen.

  “Brooks Jenkins the Third!”

  Brooks wanted to be filmed in front of his father’s Lamborghini Countach—a car, Brooks had boasted to Parker, he’d inherit when his father croaked.

  “Ashanti Wiseman!”

  Ikea introduced them all one by one.

  “Lily Del Milagro Maldonado! Yu Chen! Diana Taylor!”

  The once-silent audience worked into a frenzy as the fourteen students of color took their moment of glory. They chanted Ikea’s name over and over again: “I-kay-ya! I-kay-ya! I-kay-ya!”

  But the cheers only made the real Ikea squirm in her chair. Parker put her arm around her friend and turned around quickly to see what Mr. Bentley was doing. His seat was empty.

  “He’s gone,” Parker told her gently. “You don’t have to worry about him anymore.”

  “He’s gone?” Ikea turned around. “My dad walked out?” She was outraged. The roar of the crowd nearly drowned her out. “He walked out on me?”

  “I don’t know that he walked out really…” Parker tried to sound sure.

  “He did,” Ikea murmured. “I’m such a total idiot!”

  “You’re not an idiot, Ikea.” Plum reached out but Ikea yanked her hand away.

  “You’re the smartest girl I know,” Kiki tried to console her.

  Ikea held down her puffy ponytails and ran out of the auditorium crying.

  Sometimes Parker could feel bad just because—like when something bad happens but deep down in your heart you know it’s not that big of a deal. This wasn’t that kind of “feel bad” for Parker—this was the kind that deep down in your heart made you feel terrible. Like you just broke something delicate that could never be fixed, not even with Crazy Glue. She sat paralyzed in her seat. She should have known better—she started out the year wanting to be a shining example for everyone and now she’d done the worst thing a person could do.

  She’d let down her friends.

  “This is all your fault, Parker,” Kiki declared. “You said Hotchkiss would never show it.”

  Parker saw her face on the Super-Screen again. She braced herself for the end.

  “This is Parker Bell signing off. Until next time—Stay pretty, Wallingford!!”

  Parker didn’t dare sneak a look back at Tribb as she ran out. She couldn’t look at anyone.

  Chapter 26

  Ikea wasn’t by the old phone booths. She wasn’t in any of the stalls in La Cachette. She wasn’t in the studio or Tea & Wardrobe. Parker even used the Spy Feed to try and find her. Ikea wasn’t anywhere in the school.

  Kiki wasn’t speaking to Parker, and Plum just decided she didn’t want to get in the middle of the whole thing so she wasn’t talking to anyone.

  In other words, the Lylas no longer existed.

  ***

  “Hey.” Tribb swaggered up to Parker’s locker at the end of the day. She didn’t do the by-her-locker pose or try and think of something clever. She just looked up.

  “Hey,” she replied.

  “That was sure a real…” Tribb tried to think of the right word, “…webcast.”

  “And I totally forgot about the bootleg recording,” she said. “I’m sorry I…”

  “Everybody’s talking about the show,” he interrupted. “I heard you guys already have fans everywhere.”

  “I bet.” Parker already knew about their fans. She grabbed her French book from the shelf in her locker and shut the door.

  “Oh, hey. I just remembered…” Tribb thought of one more thing in that way someone thinks of one-more-thing when that’s really what they wanted to talk about in the first place. “I didn’t want you to think that you…and I…like that whole Fall Sosh thing. Us and everything,” Tribb said with a funny look on his face.

  Parker wasn’t sure what Tribb was getting at but she could pretty much guess.

  “Nooooo.” Parker faux-laughed at the mere thought. “Me and you?” Pa-lease! “That whole azul dress with the neckline thing? Just JKing,” she said convincingly. “Totally,” she added. “Fall Sosh! Not at all.”

  “Because I’m just, you know,” he said, “doing my thang. Right?” That funny look still clung to Tribb’s face like a popped bubble of Bazooka.

  “Me too!” Parker agreed wholeheartedly. “My own thang.”

  The funny thing was, she should have felt terrible. But there was just so much terrible already hanging off of her, another backpack full of it didn’t seem to make much of a difference. The weirdest part? The thing she thought about most was not getting the gardenia wrist corsage. She’d wanted the smell of it to swirl around her all that evening. She wanted to go to bed that night with the flower next to her on her pillow. A gardenia corsage, she thought, meant someone really great kind of loved her. Or might love her. Or might consider loving her someday.

  “That’s great.” Tribb smiled. “Because I always want to be honest with you, Parker. I mean, we’re friends, right?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Absolutely.”

  “Sweet.” Tribb nodded as he popped his collar and headed for the vestibule.

  Parker looked up, halfway hoping that Tribb might turn around. That he might someday feel the same way about her that she did about him.

  She didn’t cry about it until she got into the bathroom.

  ***

  Parker went to Wallingford Towne Centre and tried on three different colors of Lipglass at World of Beauty but she couldn’t tell if any of them looked good on her.

  Ikea would have known, she thought. Kiki too. And Plum.

  She bagsied the comfy couch at La Coppa Coffee and tried to enjoy her half-caf venti mocha macchiato, but she couldn’t. All of the fun of a mocha mach was drinking it with her friends. (She didn’t even like coffee when she was by herself.) She tossed her full cup in the garbage and wandered over to the Orion store and tried out a few of the new gadgets. Fitz Orion (or actually the holographic likeness of Fitz Orion) was in the center of the store showing one of his newest creations, the Orion holoPod, a holographic music video player.

  Customers were standing around the ghost-like image of Fitz, grabbing at the vision again and again like they might scoop up a piece of him and stuff it in thei
r pockets. But they were all gathering up nothing—reaching out again and again for something that didn’t exist.

  Why do people do that? Parker wondered. Why do they keep thinking something will be there when it’s not and never will be? Why do they keep reaching with their fingers as if this time might be different—as if this time something real might appear right there in their hand?

  But Parker knew why. She knew that when you wanted something so badly you held out this endless bucket of hope. You believed in magic. You believed in wishes. You kept reaching out again and again, believing that someday you might open your palm and find something real in there.

  Chapter 27

  The five rules of Fall Sosh:

  Tiny totes are in for evening.

  Girls should not wear tuxedos, even in an ironic sense.

  No line dancing.

  No white, flaky deodorant.

  Never dance alone.

  Kiki carefully unzipped the blue canvas dress bag from Langdon’s and let it drop to the closet floor in a puddle beneath her brand new frock. The material of the ankle-length gown was a luminous, pale eggshell duchesse, ever-so-slightly ruched along the side, with tiny Swarovski crystals and pearls sewn in a swirl pattern around the bodice. The saleswoman at Langdon’s said it took three seamstresses more than a month to make it. Francesca Brandon, she’d said, had worn a similar one to the Emmys.

  The dress was, in a word, smashing.

  And Kiki had to have it. Her life depended on it. (At least it felt like it did at the time.) She’d used her jet-black Centurion Card to pay for it instead of her Langdon’s house charge. It was a good thing because the black plastic had no limit.

  Kiki unhooked the dress from its golden hanger, walked it carefully into the bedroom and laid it out on top of the lace coverlet of her princess bed. The layers of duchesse and tulle rustled as it all settled into place.

  In her fuzzy slippers and PJs, she stood above the dress on the bed and ate all the marshmallows out of her box of Lucky Charms. She was careful not to drop any of the pink hearts, yellow moons, orange stars, or green clovers down on the silky material. She pictured herself wearing it—her soft updo with little tendrils hanging down, her delicate, radiant-cut solitaire necklace, her matching Duvelle shoes and handbag, her pale, pretty makeup.

  Normally something like this would make Kiki so happy she’d be crawling out of her skin, counting down the seconds until she could zip it up along her back and ask Esmerelda to clasp the solitaire around her neck. Normally, she would’ve started the process already: getting the mani-pedi, soaking in the tub, texting Parker nonstop, posting shoe options on Facebook for everybody’s vote, and doing the Birdie so hard that lifting off and flying like a helicopter over her house was not as improbable as it sounded.

  Instead Kiki crawled back into her bed and hid underneath the covers. Her beautiful new dress laid in position on top of her as if she and the bed were wearing it.

  She turned to one side and held her downy pillow close to her body. She took off her friendship ring and held it up to the light. Friends Forever.

  Her life really didn’t depend on a dress. Or a pair of shoes. Or a radiant-cut solitaire. Or a soft updo with little tendrils. Without the Lylas, the dress was just a heap of material sewn together by a bunch of little old Italian ladies. Hair was just hair. The necklace was just a rock on a chain.

  Without her friends by her side, she felt deflated. Like a dress with no one in it.

  ***

  Plum plucked her eyebrows and listened to music as she got ready. The Black Daphnes was an all-girl emo group. All they sang about was hating boyfriends, hating super-perky people, and hating bands who sold their songs to be used in car commercials. Listening to all that depression always made Plum feel pretty good. It was like somebody she didn’t even know understood what it felt like to be her.

  She dreamed that she and the Black Daphnes could hang out.

  The sharp smells of her mother’s cooking dinner wafted up from the kitchen downstairs. Plum wasn’t going to eat a plate of cheese pierogi before the dance. Pierogi were good and everything, but Russian food was something you needed to eat when there was a lot of time to recover. Her mother’s cooking, she thought, rebuilt the ozone layer one toot at a time.

  Plum put the finishing touches of the black liner over her eyelashes with a small, sharp swoop up at the end, like a cat’s eye. She waved her hands in front of them so they would dry all the way before she blinked (made that mistake before).

  While her cat eyes finished drying, she pulled a photograph of the Lylas down from the corner of her corkboard: a picture of the four of them in third grade tobogganing down the big hill together in Shenley Park. Parker was first, Ikea second, Kiki third, and Plum was at the top. It was snowing and they were all bundled up. Their cheeks were pink. Hot chocolates were waiting for them when they got back home. This is the way they were supposed to be, Plum thought—the four of them stuck together like a train: the Little Engine That Always Could.

  Plum tacked the photograph back onto her board. The whole thing was just so stupid, she thought. It was supposed to be the best year of their lives, and instead, it was Fall Sosh and they weren’t even speaking.

  Kiki, Plum imagined, was probably in her closet stresserizing, frantically yanking expensive shoes off shelves, eating all the marshmallows out of a jumbo cereal box, and driving Esmerelda bonkies trying to figure out which handbag made her look the least fat. It’d be a miracle if Keeks made it out of the house before Fall Sosh was over. Plum had to laugh a little when she thought about it.

  And at this very moment, Plum imagined, Parker was doing her mascara one eyelash at a time, fluffing bronzer onto every visible part of her body, and practicing kissy face with Tribb in front of her mirror. Parker might have been upset about how everything with the webcast had turned out, but at least she wasn’t going to the dance alone. Parker always landed on her feet.

  And Ikea—Plum thought—Ikea was just being confused. She couldn’t be exactly what her father wanted her to be, but maybe that wasn’t so bad. If every girl spent her life trying to be what her father wanted her to be the whole world would be filled with Yale lawyers, nuns, people who didn’t kiss until they were married, and first woman presidents. There were a few girls on the planet who needed to do something other than those things. Maybe Ikea was one of them.

  She wanted to tell Ikea that. She wanted to help Parker with her mascara and her terminal overuse of mineral bronzer. She wanted to assure Kiki that both sides were her good side. And she sort of wanted to tell them that she secretly liked Kirby Vanderbilt even though his one front tooth was bigger than the other and his neck was kind of skinny.

  Plum lifted her new bra out of the box from American Coquette. It was the Fantasia II, a new and improved version of the original Fantasia. It was the strapless model with Featherlift and Volumizer Inserts.

  She held it up to her body and looked in the mirror. She was finally developing, she thought. Sort of. Slightly. Maybe-possibly. Well, if nothing else, her bra was developing. At least it was something.

  ***

  Parker put the blow dryer on its coolest setting and aimed it at her eyelashes. She’d layered them lightly with two coats of mascara, wiggling the wand on the uppers and the lowers like Plum had once shown her. She wanted them to dry completely before she blinked (made that mistake before). She wanted them to look as good as when Plum did them.

  She got dressed faster than usual: underwear, dress, shoes, handbag, yada yada. It was easy to do things quickly when you didn’t care that much (which she didn’t). Care much felt like some emotion from the past. Definitely not meant for tonight. She’d spent so many hours dreaming about this moment and now it was here. And it sucked.

  She didn’t even look in the mirror at the pale azul dress with the really great neckline. She decided to go absolutely-no-j
ewelry even though she knew the corsage wasn’t coming. Jewelry was for celebrating.

  Completely ready and with nearly an hour to kill, Parker sat at her desk and opened her computer. She was tempted to go to the Wallingford Academy Today website and look at the show again. Tempted—like you’re tempted to scratch at a scab on your knee or bite off a hangnail.

  Instead she opened Facebook, a thing she hadn’t done in weeks. Her status was so outdated it wasn’t even funny. She couldn’t bear to read the comments on her wall or look at her honesty box or check out any of the graffiti anyone had done for her. And the only Friend request still pending was her mother. And that was still pretty icky.

  She scrolled to the section where you find people you know. For some reason she typed:

  James Hunter

  Hundreds of James Hunters came up. She skimmed through the first three-hundred or so, sure that the next page would be the one. There was a bald James Hunter from Minneapolis. A bunch from England. One from New Zealand. And there were tons of James Hunters with no profile pictures—but people with no pictures didn’t really count. She hoped the James Hunter she was looking for wasn’t one of them. He kind of counted. Even if he wasn’t on FB.

  She typed in Cricket Von Wielding’s name. There weren’t too many Crickets, and Von Wielding pretty much narrowed it down to one.

  Despite the invitation, Parker still wasn’t her Friend, but Cricket didn’t seem to need the help—she had five-hundred-and-eighty-two Friends. One hundred and eighty-four more than Parker. Many of the faces were familiar: the Crickettes. Once her Friends.

  The Lylas and the populadder. Gone for good.

  Parker shut down her computer. It was time to get the worst night of her life over with.

  ***

  Ikea’s mother, Sunday, poked her head into Ikea’s bedroom. Ikea was nearly finished getting ready—she just had to wrap the top part of her dress on and slip into the traditional sandals that went with it. Sunday came in and helped her with the knot.