Luckiest Girl Alive

by Jessica Knoll

  Hallsy tucked her chin into her neck and muddled her voice. “I mean, I’d always sort of suspected”—she limped her wrist and looked around the table, making sure everyone caught her drift—“and someone recently told me it was true. He’d come out.” She shrugged. “So I sent Mrs. Yates flowers and my condolences.” She continued out of the corner of her mouth. “Course, then it turned out that he wasn’t actually gay.”

  Luke barked a laugh, dragging his hands over his face. He separated his fingers so that all you could see were his eyes. “Who else would this happen to?” he moaned, inciting laughter from everyone but me. The brownie had distracted me, made me alert to the wondrous and spooky, and I was mesmerized by what they call the Gray Lady, the thick blanket of dusty fog that rolls in when the sun sets on Nantucket. At that moment, the Gray Lady was everywhere.

  Hallsy swatted Luke’s shoulder. “Anyway, now she’s not speaking to me or my mom and it’s this whole thing. It’s like, I was just trying to be supportive!”

  Luke was laughing. Everyone was laughing. I thought I was, too, but my face felt numb in the fog. Maybe it wasn’t even a fog, maybe it was a poisonous gas and we were under attack, and I was the only one who realized it. I found my legs and stood, picking up my glass of wine as though I was going into the kitchen for a refill, which is what I should have done. Should never have said what I said next, which was “Don’t worry, Hallsy.” The laughter died down and everyone turned to look at me, standing, obviously about to say something of importance. “We’ll stick you at the flabby singleton table with the rest of your kind.” I didn’t ease the back door into its hinges, like I usually do. Just let it clap shut, sudden and mean as a Venus flytrap.

  Luke waited a few hours before he came and found me in bed. I was reading a John Grisham paperback. There were John Grisham paperbacks all over the Harrison house.

  “Um, hi?” Luke hovered over the bed, a golden ghost.

  “Hi.” I’d been reading the same page over and over for the last twenty minutes. The fog had cleared, and now I wondered how bad it was. What I’d done.

  “What was that about?” Luke asked.

  I shrugged. Kept pretending to read. “She said ‘sand nigger.’ She told one of the most ignorant stories I’ve ever heard. That didn’t bother you?”

  Luke snatched the book out of my hands, and the rusty springs in the bed crunched as he sat. “Hallsy is batshit crazy, so no, I don’t really let anything she says bother me. You shouldn’t either.”

  “I guess you’re just a cooler customer than I am then.” I glared at him. “Because that bothered me.”

  Luke groaned. “Ani, come on. Hallsy made a mistake. It’s like”—he stopped and thought for a moment—“it’s like if you heard someone had cancer and you sent that person flowers and it turned out not to be true. Like she said, her heart was in the right place.”

  I stared at Luke, slack-jawed. “The issue isn’t that she got her information wrong. The issue is that she thinks being gay is such a horrible ‘diagnosis’”—I bunny-eared the word, calling out Luke’s offensive analogy—“that it warrants flowers and her condolences!”

  Luke folded his arms across his chest. “You know. This is what I’m talking about. When I say I’m getting really fucking sick of this.”

  I scooted up on my elbows, the sheets rising, a white cotton drawbridge unlatching with the bend in my knees. “Getting really fucking sick of what?”

  Luke gestured at me. “Of this. This . . . this . . . poutiness.”

  “I’m fucking pouty for taking offense at blatant racism and homophobia?”

  Luke brought his hands to his head, like he was protecting his ears from a loud noise. He shut his eyes, opened them. “I’m sleeping in the guesthouse.” He tore a pillow from the bed and left the room.

  I didn’t expect to sleep at all, so I settled in on The Last Juror. I finished it by dawn, the sun filtering through the blinds in lazy yellow strands. I opened The Runaway Jury next, had read almost one hundred pages before I heard the shower start next door, Luke shouting to Mrs. Harrison that he wanted his eggs sunny-side up. He’d done that for my benefit, I could tell. He wanted me to know only a single wall separated us now, that he’d chosen to come in from the guesthouse and start his day without speaking to me. I hated myself a little as I bent the corner of the page, running my finger over the crease to seal the fold. Then a little more as the humid shush of the shower sounded closer. I pushed the curtain all the way to the right and stepped in, felt his hands forgiving on my hips, the hair around his erection wet and coarse.

  “I’m sorry.” Beads of water gathered on my lips. It was a hard thing to do, apologize, but I’ve done harder things. I pressed my face into the crook of his neck, hot and steamy as a New York City sidewalk helplessly exposed in the thick of summer.

  CHAPTER 8

  * * *

  Mom grounded me for two weeks after Dean’s party. She’s fond of timing the statement, “That’s a riot,” to the corny punch lines of Friends, and that’s exactly what my punishment was, a riot. With the performance I’d given at Dean’s party, I’d grounded myself.

  Still, I was tolerated at the lunch table, and that was mostly thanks to Hilary and Dean. Everyone else just seemed relieved when I announced I was under house arrest for the rest of the month. Quarantined, they had time to decide: Were my missteps contagious?

  For whatever reason, Hilary had really taken a shine to me. Maybe because I aided and abetted her trashy teenage rebellion, maybe because she asked me to read her theme paper on Into Thin Air and I basically rewrote it into an A+ assignment. I didn’t care. Whatever it was she needed from me, I would give her.

  Olivia tried to act like she didn’t care when she found out about Dean’s party, like it didn’t bother her that I’d been invited and kept it secret, or that I’d hooked up with Liam, which she’d made clear was something she wanted to do. “Was it fun?” she asked brightly. Her blinking went rapid, as though it powered the phony smile on her face.

  “I think?” I turned my palms up, and that got a real laugh, at least.

  In the movies and on TV, the most popular girls in school are always gorgeous, with buxom curves scaled to impossibly Barbie proportions, but Bradley and other schools with a similar milieu defied this law. Olivia was pretty in the way that a grandmother would notice: “My, what a lovely young lady.” She had hair so curly it puffed up, frizzier and angrier when she turned a blow-dryer on it. Her cheeks got too pink when she drank, and blackheads pooled in the pores on her nose, collecting more oil as the day wore on. Liam wouldn’t come around to her on his own, the attraction had to be painstakingly manufactured.

  Nell later taught me to tone down my beer commercial potential rather than capitalize on it. Actively striving for the traditional markers of beauty and status—the blond hair perfectly styled, the tan skin perfectly even, the brazen logo stamped all over your bag—why, it’s downright shameful. This was something that took me years to learn, because Mom had been catching my chin in her hand and applying “a little color” to my lips since I was eleven, because preening was celebrated, never mocked, at Mt. St. Theresa’s.

  Like me, Liam was learning to see Olivia’s curls as charming, rather than kinky, and did her flat chest actually have more of a curve than he thought? I didn’t interfere with this. All my life, I’ve found it difficult to advocate for myself, to ask for what I want. I fear burdening people so much. I’d like to blame it on what happened that night, on what happened in the ensuing weeks, but I think it’s just part of my blueprint. Asking Liam to go with me to get the morning-after pill was about the boldest thing I’d ever done, and with that single word, “Friend,” scribbled slowly on the page like a fourth grader’s reminder to himself of the rule “‘i’ before ‘e’ except after ‘c,’” I remembered why I so rarely do it.

  Olivia just needed a little time to be sure that my retreat wasn’t a maneuver. To accept it was sincere. Almost three weeks after Dean’s par
ty, I saw her in the distant end of the Math wing. She paused as I advanced on her and said, “You look skinny.” It came out as more of an accusation than a compliment, the way even fourteen-year-old girls know to do. How did this happen? How did you do this?

  I lit up inside and chirped, “Cross-country!” But the truth was that ever since that night, the only thing I could stomach was cantaloupe. I slogged through my runs, my mile time worsening rather than improving, Mr. Larson shouting, “Come on, TifAni!” Not encouraging. Exasperated.

  When Hilary invited me to sleep over at Olivia’s house on Saturday, the last Saturday of my sentence, Mom said yes, like I knew she would. She said I’d been so helpful and well behaved that she would shave one day off my grounding. That was also a riot. She was obsessed with Hilary’s and Olivia’s parents, particularly Olivia’s mom, Annabella Kaplan, née Coyne, who was a descendant of the Macy’s family and drove an antique Jaguar. Mom knew not to interfere with that burgeoning friendship, the tuition’s true payoff the connections, not the education, the same way I knew to just look away when Liam looped his arm over Olivia’s ballerina shoulders, the acid charging up my throat like a linebacker.

  Mom deposited me at the mouth of Olivia’s house at 5:00 P.M. on Saturday. It didn’t look like much from the front, you would certainly expect more from the granddaughter of the Macy’s guy. But it was just that it was so obscured by trees and vines and ivy, and once you walked through the back gates you realized that the house continued on and on, the yard opening up into an acre of land with a swimming pool and a guesthouse where Louisa, the Kaplans’ maid, lived.

  I knocked on the back door. Several seconds passed before I saw the top of Hilary’s berry-tinted bleached head bobbing toward me. I never once saw the Kaplans when I came to Olivia’s house. Her father had a ferocious temper, which Olivia wore in moody bruises on her wrists, and her mother was usually recovering from some kind of plastic surgery. This parental amalgam—abusive and vain—only further solidified Olivia in my mind as the glamorous, poor little rich girl I longed to be for so many years after I knew her. Not even what she did to me, not even what happened to her later, was enough to quench my bloodlust.

  Hilary swung open the door. “Yo, girl.” Hilary and Olivia called everyone girl. It took me years to break the annoying habit.

  My eyes lingered on the slit of Hilary’s flat stomach, exposed by her cut-off T-shirt. Behind her back, the guys called her HIMary, for her broad shoulders and athletic frame. But I found her toned muscles fascinating. She wasn’t Olivia thin, but there was not an ounce of fat on her body, and Hilary did not play a sport and her mother forged a letter from her “squash coach” to get her out of gym class. It was like she had a Pilates body before Pilates was even a thing.

  I’d been nervous to come. Olivia hadn’t invited me—Hilary had. Over the last two weeks, Olivia had really upped her game with Liam. I let him go without a fight. If it was between him and Olivia and Hilary as friends—we’d realized that with my name, our acronym was now HOT—well, I knew which one had more long-term potential.

  “Come on.” Hilary charged up the stairs two at a time, her hamstring muscles flexing with each push against gravity. Hilary always had to do everything a little bit weirder than everyone else. It was part of her schtick.

  Olivia had an entire wing of the house all to herself—a large, loft-like space with a bathroom separating her room from that of her little sister, who was away at boarding school. Hilary told me once that Olivia’s sister was the pretty one, the favorite one. It was why Olivia barely ate.

  Olivia was sitting cross-legged on the floor, propped lazily against her bedpost. Bags of Swedish fish and Starbursts, a bottle of vodka, and an overturned liter of Diet Coke surrounded her like sweet casualties of war.

  “Hey, girl.” Olivia pulled a Swedish fish between her teeth until the body snapped in half. She reached for the bottle of vodka. “Drink.”

  We chased the vodka with Diet Coke, sinking our teeth into the candy, wincing, trying to absorb the bite. The sun tiptoed away from the window, our pupils ballooning, but we still didn’t turn on the lights.

  “Let’s get Dean over here,” Olivia said, only when we’d put a safe enough dent in the vodka. When the goal is to get fucked up, Dean’s greediness must be considered.

  I was woozy with hunger and sugar. Olivia grinned at me, the seams between her teeth Christmas red. “He’ll come if he knows you’re here.”

  If only I could have liked Dean back, if his mere presence, the sensory memory of his sperm on my tongue didn’t make me heave, maybe everything would have turned out differently.

  “He’ll come!” Hilary rolled onto her back with a laugh, holding her knees to her chest and rocking back and forth. I could see her underwear. Radioactive green, this time.

  “Shut up.” I wrapped my lips around the opening of the vodka bottle and shuddered as the liquid trickled into my stomach, lava hot.

  Olivia was on the phone, saying, “Just wait until it’s dark, or Louisa will see.”

  If I had been with girls from Mt. St. Theresa, we would have all clamored to the mirror, feverishly rubbing our cheeks with blush, so much mascara on our eyelashes they’d look like hairy spider legs. But Olivia just pulled on the messy loop on top of her head, securing it closer to her scalp. “They have forties.”

  “Who is it?” I waited, hoping to hear Liam’s name.

  “Dean, Liam, Miles.” She worked her jaw through a Starburst. “And Dave. Ugh.”

  “Fucking Dave,” Hilary agreed.

  I said I had to go to the bathroom. I stumbled down the hall and locked the door behind me, what I was about to do more shameful than clogging the toilet: make myself up. My cheeks were ruddy when I looked in the mirror; I splashed water on my face, trying to cool down, trying to ready my canvas. I scavenged around in the drawers for eyeliner, lip gloss, something. I found some crusty old mascara and plunged the brush into the tube over and over, trying to scrape as much out of it as I could.

  I heard the guys pounding up the stairs, and I locked eyes with myself in the mirror. “It’s okay. You’re okay.” I hadn’t bothered to turn on the light, and the sun’s last remaining thread fell across my face, bleaching any semblance of confidence I’d hoped to see.

  When I returned to Olivia’s room, I saw everyone sitting in a circle, drinking those forties out of sweaty paper bags. There was an open spot between Liam and Dean. I took it, edging as close to Liam as I dared. Dean passed a bottle to me. I didn’t understand the difference between a regular beer and a forty, and I pushed the paper bag down to read the label: malt liquor beer. I drank it without asking what malt liquor was.

  After an hour of brain-dead conversation, the words going wobblier and wobblier in my mind, Olivia announced it was safe to go outside and smoke.

  We crept down the stairs, filing through the kitchen and out the door one by one, like the most well-rehearsed fire drill. We huddled in a circle by the privacy garden shielding the kitchen’s windows, the arms of a small, plush maple tree stretching toward us, waiting for a hug. I hadn’t realized that was only the second kitchen. “The maid’s kitchen,” Olivia explained, which was bigger than the one in my modest McMansion. Olivia’s parents rarely used this side of the house, she said, and we would remain undetected so long as we stayed quiet.

  Dean extracted a joint from a pack of cigarettes, running a lighter underneath its belly before bringing one end to his lips and firing up the other.

  We passed to the left, Olivia and Hilary going before me, neither of them able to hold the smoke in, erupting into spastic coughing fits, the guys rolling their eyes and urging them in hushed whispers to hurry up and pass before it burned out.

  I hadn’t smoked pot since that night in the eighth grade, at Leah’s house. I was terrified of that feeling, the way the high slunk up from behind and closed its cape around me without any warning. Every vein in my body had engorged and pulsed, and I’d been convinced it would never go away
, that I would never feel normal again. But the desire to do better than Hilary and Olivia was greater than the fear. I pulled on the joint, the end flaring like a lightning bug on the first day of summer. I held the smoke in my lungs for a long time to impress Liam, blowing it out in a slow, graceful ribbon that curled around his face.

  “I need to meet more Catholic girls,” Liam said, his eyes sleepy.

  “I hear they use teeth,” Olivia murmured, low, as though nervous to see how the joke would land. It invited a robust laugh, which Olivia shushed frantically, her fear of her father temporarily overriding pride—she’d steered correctly.

  Dean clapped me on the back. “Don’t worry, Finny, you were pretty out of it.”

  It was one of those awful moments where you have no control over your reaction, when the pain is too exposed to hide. I laughed, the sharp contrast between the sound and the look on my face only making it worse.

  Once we wore the joint down to a nub, Liam said he had to use the bathroom and retreated into the house. I wondered if I should follow him as the conversation hummed on. I felt the consequences of what I’d just done, of my bravado in trapping the smoke in my chest for so long, close on my heels. My heart was marching in my ears when I realized Olivia was gone too, had slipped off without my even realizing it. I peered through the maple’s ruby leaves and over the flat green hedges guarding the windows, but the kitchen was empty.

  “I’m cold,” I said, panicking when I realized just how cold I was. I was shivering. “Let’s go inside.” I needed to move, needed to focus on putting one foot in front of the other, on my hand on the cool doorknob twisting, anything but the way my body was shuddering, like one of those plastic windup toys, candy red gums and stark white teeth on a pair of feet, chattering across the table, a cardigan-wearing uncle’s idea of a gag.