I'm from Nowhere

by Suzanne Myers

  But wait a minute—now that I see the letters spelled out like this, with so much space between them, and after hearing the way the Gibson family draws out their names (“Honor” sounds like it has about four syllables)—it’s so obvious. Lawrence, Ed’s middle name, is “La-Wren-ce.” How did I not realize that before? Of course I wasn’t named for a suffragette. Or maybe I was named for her too. I kick myself, at least metaphorically. A little late to the party there, Nancy Drew.

  I expect Honor to put on a very professional show at this event, but for the first time she looks really uncomfortable. Standing at her father’s side, dressed perfectly in elegant layers of camel and cream, her job is to pass out gifts to the first fifty shoppers. They are wrapped in Gibson’s signature apple green with matching bows. Perfume for women, key fobs for men. Kids who are tagging along with their parents get a swirly green lollipop.

  Ed is super at ease in this situation, chatting just the right amount without getting stuck in a real conversation, keeping the line moving. Honor smiles at everyone, but ignores the strangers she’s not interested in talking to. Most people lining up this early to shop, who care about being one of the first fifty, don’t overlap much with her world. There’s the exhausted dad with overweight, twin boys, both in Rangers jerseys and flammable-looking sweatpants; the elderly lady searching through her purse for her Christmas list; a woman on her cell phone, her hair in a rounded, shellacked mound, loudly complaining about how she has to be at work in fifteen minutes and why can’t André pick their kid up? Three giggling Japanese girls about our age in knee-high socks clutch little plastic manga-themed purses and jump up and down with excitement.

  Honor fumbles as she tells them, “Hi. Welcome. Here you go.” Her brief smile holds no promise of further chitchat. I’ve seen that before, but the way she keeps glancing at Eloise beseechingly as the next shopper steps up? I have never seen this Honor, this beleaguered, out-of-her-element Honor. When you think about it, how many sixteen-year-olds could do this well, other than professional actors?

  When it’s all over, Honor snaps at Ned. “I can’t believe you didn’t have to do it,” she mutters, brushing past him toward the exit. “Dad will make you next year. I had to do it when I was a First Year.”

  Ned shrugs. “Whatever, Ho-Ho.” If he does have to do it next year, easygoing Ned will be good at it and probably won’t even mind.

  “You were great,” insists Eloise, in her supportive best friend voice, but it falls a little flat. Honor remains in a funk—until she spots a beguiling leather bag. Honor and Ned get fifty-percent discounts, but their charge card bills go to Mr. Gibson anyway, which effectively makes anything they buy one hundred percent off.

  “Do you want anything?” Ned asks me, holding his card out.

  “Uh . . .” Oh my God, of course. Where to start? The store is like a six-floor luxury universe. I wish I could get something for Hannah, I think. “That’s okay. Thanks, though.”

  Ned gives me a look like I am crazy, or else he doesn’t believe me. “Really? You sure?”

  “Well, maybe I could get a sweater or blanket or something for my mom?”

  “Absolutely.” He shoots a glance at Honor.

  She rolls her eyes but turns back toward us, bringing the leather bag.

  All four of us head for the bedding department, where there are stacked piles of dreamy soft throws in every color and texture: cashmere, cotton, alpaca, mohair. I pick up a fuzzy, deep coral one and wish I could roll myself up like a sausage in it and never come out. I feel a tap on my arm and turn. Honor is holding up a pale linen throw with tiny dark brown flecks in it.

  “What about this one,” she says, not like it’s a question. At first I think she’s picking the drabbest one to make fun of me, but when I study it up close, I see that she’s actually picked something beautiful. The texture is like silk and water, but instead of being shiny, its surface has a subtle glow, like the moon. The rich coffee color specks add a landscape, like a map. Also, it costs as much money as Hannah gave me for the whole semester.

  But I know she is not suggesting I pay for it. Well, I’ll give Honor credit where it’s due. She’s got an eye.

  “Are you sure?” I ask. Honor nods impatiently, like it’s no big deal.

  Ned is already walking to the register.

  “How are you today, Mr. Gibson?” the salesgirl chirps politely to Ned.

  “Thank you,” I whisper to him, feeling grateful and kind of like an idiot at the same time. “This is really nice of you.”

  He shrugs. The salesgirl folds and refolds the blanket on the dark wood counter and wraps it in crisp tissue. She hands it to me in an apple-green bag.

  I’m in a daze as we head back to Beekman Place, but not an unhappy daze.

  Back in my dove-gray room, I unwrap my luxurious gift, lay it out on the bed, and miss my mother.

  By Friday afternoon, the Gibson way of life seems almost familiar in a weird way. Here are the rules:

  Keep almost no food in the refrigerator, but always have a chilled bottle of very good champagne just in case something comes up.

  If you are hungry, order in.

  If you need something, it can be delivered or walked to, no matter what time of day, no matter what it is.

  You won’t need your own shampoo, because the guest bathroom will be stocked like a fancy hotel.

  No need to bring keys, because someone else will open the door for you, and another someone else will drive.

  Easy, right? Right?

  Then there’s a flurry of getting ready for the Assemblies Ball. Ned isn’t going, and I kind of wish I were staying home with him to watch TV or whatever. But Ed wants me to go, and Honor is willing to (i.e., being forced to) lend me something to wear. It revs up at about three o’clock. Nadia has pressed and hung Eloise’s dress, running the shower in the bathroom to steam out any lingering wrinkles. Honor’s dress has been delivered from the cleaners, professionally blocked and pressed to perfection. Even before she puts it on, you can see how perfect she will look in it. Its tapered waist and stiff, arching skirt and ballerina straps make you think of an Audrey Hepburn movie. Eloise’s is straight and elegant, silky and regal. Too serious a dress for me; I would feel like someone’s mother. But she looks great.

  Honor is a few inches taller than me, but if I wear something that isn’t floor-length on her, one of her dresses should be okay.

  With a lot of reluctant sighing to emphasize that she has many more important things to do, she leads me into her walk-in closet. It is about the size of my bedroom in Ventura, jammed with every imaginable texture: gauze to satin to suede in pearly, sophisticated grays, subtle taupes and of course blacks, punctuated by the occasional hot pink or lime green. (Is that what they call resort wear?) And a thousand shoes. No old, paint-splattered T-shirts or ratty shorts, though she probably has those stashed away somewhere too, for the right occasion. But no time to dawdle. She’s doing this because she has to, not because she wants to.

  Honor frowns as she pulls out a rich, satiny Prada dress. It’s clear she loathes the idea of my wearing it, but has resigned herself to getting this clothes-lending thing over with. “From last fall,” she clarifies, so I won’t get too excited. She holds it out to me, standing as far away as she can, making me step forward as if I’m a pet asking permission for a treat. It is a midnight purple-black with a big skirt that swirls and a fitted waist with a big open neck where the extra material kind of folds over and drapes. (“The cowl,” she corrects me after I tell her I love the “neck part.”) I hold it in front of me, sizing myself up in her full-length mirror. It is seriously gorgeous, last year’s model or not.

  I wonder how many times she’s worn it. I’m guessing once. Honor and Eloise want to do some elaborate Grecian thing to their hair, where it’s pulled back into a dancer’s knot but then spills down your neck in a jumble of curls. A stylist named Mel
ody from Honor’s salon arrives, and before I know it Honor and Eloise are whisked into Honor’s bathroom, where Melody rolls and unrolls their curls, paints on their lips, spritzes and dries and re-spritzes them from top to bottom.

  This movie-star treatment apparently is routine for them. Honor can sit still for this like I’ve never seen her in class or even on a horse. When Melody catches me peeking in at them, she offers to do mine too. I feel embarrassed and say, “Oh, that’s okay,” but Honor tells me to let her do it. Another command, not a question. I guess she thinks I’ll embarrass them if I go as myself.

  My hair is too short to pull off the Grecian look, so Melody instead bends and tucks it into an elegant bob with a swoop in front of one eye. She parts the hair into sections, flopping them back and forth across my head, spraying cool, seawater-scented hair stuff. With just her fingers, not even a brush, she pulls the ends back and under, and suddenly I am a new person.

  Simple, but the kind of thing you could never recreate yourself. Then she pulls out a bunch of eye makeup—powders, creams, brushes and sponges—and goes to work implementing the “smoky eye.” I’ve seen it in magazines. It’s not the kind of thing I would try at home.

  “Eyes closed,” she says, brushing powders and cream across my lids and brow bones. “Look up,” she says, as the mascara coats my lashes. “Don’t blink.”

  Again, a look I will never be able to copy myself, even if I did wear makeup, but when she’s done, it really does look damn good. I peer in the mirror, trying to recognize myself somewhere under all this and think of Chazzy telling me to pack some Wren wear. If he saw me now, I wonder, what would he think? That I was a sellout? A fake? I emailed him right before Thanksgiving dinner, a short message: I was right. Advantage, Nancy Drew.

  And what would Nick think? That I actually belonged here? Or Hannah? Watching me do everything she turned her back on?

  No, I admit to myself, this is all strictly Cinderella. Although I do really like the dress.

  The cars pull up with our escorts, and there is a lot of complicated negotiation about who is sitting where. Honor works it out so that Tim Mabley sits with Eloise, even though he’s officially Honor’s date. Eloise’s other cousin, Griffin, who’s a year younger than her escort, Coleman, is taking me. Or whatever—sitting next to me so it isn’t as obvious that I’m alone and don’t know anyone there. Ned said he would go if I really needed him to, but I could tell he felt ill just thinking about it. Besides, there was a new surf documentary he really wanted to see.

  So I end up in a black car (that’s what Honor and Eloise call them. Never limousine, because that is “so tacky”) with Eloise, Tim and Griffin, while Honor rides with Coleman. Eloise and Tim chitchat about kids they know at other boarding schools, squash (which Tim is good at) and the summer finance program Tim is applying to in Hong Kong. Griffin is mostly quiet and looks intimidated, while I sit there and think, Sheesh, these people live like they are forty. I mean, squash? Finance in Hong Kong? The kids I know in Ventura work at the pizza place and surf in the summers and maybe go to movies.

  I stare out the window at the lamp-lit cityscape and drift off on my own tangent about the summer. What life will I be living by then? One where I help out in Jonesy’s bookstore? Locked up in Great-Aunt Helen’s spare room like some gothic ingenue? Or a Gossip Girl summer, where Ed—“Daddy” for sure in this scenario—gets me an internship at Teen Vogue or the Tribeca Film Festival?

  Mostly I wonder if Hannah will be there next summer. Walking and talking? If she’s better, maybe she’ll take me back to Greenland with her or on her next trip, wherever that is. Is she going to become one of those nomadic journalists who can’t turn down the next assignment, who doesn’t even have a home? Is she going to have a choice?

  Whoa there. I force myself back to the conversation in the car before all this speculation spins out of control and I end up needing Griffin to run out and find a paper bag for me to breathe into. When I tune back in, we’re onto the details of why Tim chose Deerfield over Exeter, even though the squash program at Exeter is really, really excellent, and why Hong Kong is so interesting right now. He hopes it won’t be overrated, like Shanghai.

  “Oh, wow. When did you go to Shanghai?” I jump in, trying to sound like I’ve been following attentively all along.

  “Oh, no, no,” says Tim. “My parents just came back from Shanghai. My father has some business there. It’s supposed to be the fastest-growing cultural center, but it’s, you know, really screwed up how they’re doing things. Like there’s no control, and the pollution is really bad.”

  I turn to Griffin. “What are you doing for the summer?” I ask, changing the subject away from something neither of us seems to know anything about.

  “Camp Tenakama. In Maine. My dad went there.”

  “That sounds fun. What do you do there?” I’m hoping for a less monosyllabic evening than what this promises.

  “You know, canoe, swim, campfires, sneak out at night. It’s all boys.”

  “Sounds a lot like boarding school,” I offer.

  “Yeah. Kind of.”

  Oh, boy.

  I can’t tell if Eloise likes Tim, though she’s listening attentively and laughing in the right places. She’s so very good at hiding her feelings. So good, in fact, I wonder if even Honor really knows her.

  When we get out at the Pierre Hotel, where the ball is being held, Coleman and Honor are already on the sidewalk, waiting. Coleman looks sort of light-headed and giddy, the way guys often are after direct exposure to Honor. From this distance, she does look perfect.

  I won’t make you sit through the whole evening, because you get the idea from the conversation in the car how much fun it was. In one way, it was amazing. Like, if I had watched it happening in a movie without having to feel so nervous and out of it and could fast-forward through the boring parts, I would have enjoyed it. The ballroom was a wintry white and filled with tons of tall candles and low bowls of gardenias and southern magnolias and other sweet-smelling flowers that don’t grow in the winter and never grow in New York.

  The food was beautiful, not actually that good to eat, but gorgeous to look at. The music was beautiful too, supplied by a real, live full orchestra. And when it was time for the debutantes to be introduced—to “society,” I guess was the idea originally, though in New York kids Honor’s age, and even Ned’s, have been out and about plenty, way before turning eighteen—they walked in one at a time, very slowly like a line of brides. They wore white dresses and carried bouquets made of flowers like the ones on the table. When they got to the center of the ballroom, their names were announced, and they did a deep curtsy before being joined by their escort and father, who walked them away to the dance floor.

  As I sat there, I tried to imagine what this was like back in the days when these girls had this one season to land a husband or they were over, tossed out while the next batch stepped up. I could not believe this still went on and girls signed up to do it. What was the point?

  Honor and Eloise giggled with Tim about a debutante last year who got so drunk before she came down to the ballroom that she slipped and slid all the way down the stairs on the skirt of her poof-ball dress, then staggered up, walked in and made a perfect curtsy. She spent the rest of the night in the ladies’ lounge throwing up.

  During dessert, there’s a lot of back and forth between the table and the dance floor and surreptitious champagne drinking. I’m half tempted to swipe someone’s cell phone to text Chazzy a picture of this lunacy. My eyes are on Honor’s purse when suddenly she wobbles towards me on her expensive heels and gazelle legs. She laughs loudly, a happy, expansive drunk. She beams a dazzling smile and says, “Come dance. You have to. It’s so fun.” For a second, I think she’s talking to me, and I’m sucked inside her circle, and I understand the pull of her orbit, what it must be like in there.

  Then I realize she’s looking past me t
o Griffin, my hapless escort.

  She’s really drunk, I realize. I’ve never seen her so off-balance. There’s a wildness in her eyes behind the regular prettiness, something unhinged that makes me nervous.

  At a certain point, I’m just ready for the whole thing to be over. I stop saying yes when Griffin or Coleman asks me to dance. Eloise and Tim dance a lot. I guess Honor has the setup eye as well as the shopping eye. Not surprising, although I can’t quite squelch the thought that Eloise might like Tim because Honor thinks she should. I end up sitting at the table by myself, in a sea of white napkins and tablecloths and heady, over-scented flowers and glowy candlelight, and I think, Okay, that’s enough. I have a twenty-dollar bill in my bag, which I use to take a cab back to Beekman Place.

  Ned greets me at the door, all smiles, just to make sure I get back in okay. But it’s clear he wants to get back to his room. He’s binge-watching John from Cincinnati—the HBO show about surfing that might count Ned as its only fan—and he’s in the middle of an episode.

  Once I’m alone in the tranquil guest room, I change into sweatpants and curl up with Hummingbird on the dreamy gray duvet, practicing songs for tomorrow quietly enough, I hope, not to rile the co-op board.

  Chapter nineteen

  The Show

  Saturday morning, Honor and Eloise are nowhere to be seen. Sleeping off their hangovers, I think. Ed presents me with his first official gift: an iPhone.

  “I should have given this to you last night,” he says in his easygoing way. “Ned told me you took a cab home with your own money. I apologize for that.”

  Then he hands me two hundred dollars.

  I am surprised and overwhelmed by all of it. But what mostly overwhelms me is the fact that he says “took a cab home.”

  I thank him, set up my new iPhone, and email Chazzy.

  Chazzy can’t make it down from the Berkshires until the afternoon, so I’m a little nervous that we won’t have enough time to rehearse. At the last minute, his sister decides not to drive down. He’s taking the bus.