Luckiest Girl Alive

by Jessica Knoll

  “So you don’t have an incident to report?” Headmaster Mah practically panted, not even bothering to hide his relief. The Bartons had financed the new addition to the cafeteria, after all.

  I smiled and said I didn’t. The cut on my face was just barely covered in concealer. Headmaster Mah noticed it and did a poor job of pretending not to.

  “What happened?” Mr. Larson demanded in the hallway.

  “Can we just let it go?” I pleaded. I didn’t stop walking. I could tell he wanted to put his hand on my arm and stop me, but we both knew he couldn’t. I walked faster, trying to escape his disappointment. It filled up the hallway like cheap cologne.

  Now, all these years later, Andrew examined me like you would a new freckle on your chest. When did that appear, exactly? Could it be dangerous? “You need to give yourself some more credit, Tif,” he said. “You were just trying to get through.” Under the smooth bar lights, I could not detect a single flaw in his wide, handsome face. “You made something out of yourself, and you did it honestly. Unlike some people we know.”

  I seethed, “Dean,” even though sometimes I think we’re more similar than I’d like to admit.

  We sat in a dreamy silence for a few moments, the lights softening all our edges, filling in our holes. I watched, out of the corner of my eye, as the bartender noticed us again. Tried to will him away, but he asked, “Can I get you anything else?”

  Andrew reached into his pants pocket. “Just the bill.” My new martini glimmered at me, mockingly.

  “Maybe we can get lunch or something?” I tried. “When we’re both in town that weekend.”

  Andrew found the card he was looking for and passed it across the bar. He smiled at me. “I’d like that.”

  I smiled too. “Thanks for getting this.”

  “I’m sorry I can’t stay for another.” Andrew shook his watch free of his sleeve and raised his eyebrows at it. “I’m really pushing it here.”

  “It’s cool, I’ll just sit here, drinking alone”—I sighed majestically—“enjoying people staring at me and wondering who I am and what I do.”

  Mr. Larson laughed. “So I got a little saccharine. I’m proud of you, Tif.”

  The windshield cracked a little deeper.

  The bedroom door was shut, a shard of dark running parallel to the floor. Luke must have gone to bed early. I peeled off my leather dress and stood over the AC unit for a few moments.

  I washed my face and brushed my teeth. Locked the door and turned off the lights. I left my clothes on the couch and crept into the bedroom in my bra and underwear—I had worn the nice ones. In case.

  Luke stirred as I opened a drawer.

  “Hi,” he whispered.

  “Hi.” I unclasped my bra and let it fall to the floor. Luke used to tell me to just come to bed after I’d done that, but he didn’t anymore. I slipped into boxer shorts and a tank top.

  I climbed underneath the covers. The air in the room was arctic and artificial, the window unit growling aggressively in the corner. The lights were off, but everything was visible thanks to the residual lights of the Freedom Tower, the Patrick Batemans cursing off their computers at Goldman Sachs’s sprawling headquarters, and I could see Luke’s eyes were open. You can’t find a pitch-black room in New York, another reason I love it here—the light from the outside world streaming in at all hours, assuring me there is someone awake, someone who could help me if something bad were to happen.

  “Did you get what you want?” Luke asked, his voice flat as the running path along the West Side Highway.

  I chose my words carefully. “It was good to talk to him.”

  Luke rolled over, his back a judgment passed on me. “I’m going to be so glad when this whole thing is over and everything can go back to normal.”

  I know the normal Luke misses, I know the Ani he wants to come to bed. It’s the Ani after a night at the Chicken Box, the Nantucket bar famous for its long line of shivering girls in Easter-egg-colored Calypso shift dresses. There is a bartender there, Lezzie. Her name is really Liz, but when you resemble a younger, only slightly thinner Delta Burke, dress in camo, and sport a ring through the fleshy partition of your nostrils, douche bag blue bloods think it’s Louis C.K. levels of comedy genius to nickname you Lezzie.

  Luke’s friends’ wives get all twitchy and uncomfortable around Lezzie, but not me. It’s become the running joke in our group—send Ani up to get the drinks, she’ll come back with at least one free Life Is Good (a disgusting combination of raspberry vodka, Sprite, cranberry juice, and Red Bull) because Lezzie loves her. Luke loves her too—inasmuch as she exposes the vast difference between me and the other girls, with their swollen pearl earrings and Patagonia fleeces, pretty but smugly sexless. Luke got the girl who doesn’t squirm in the presence of a tough box muncher, the girl who actually gets a kick out of flirting with her.

  “It’s my little Ani Lennox,” Lezzie says whenever she sees me. “How many diets?”

  I’ll hold up my fingers to indicate the number of girls who want their Life Is Goods with diet Sprite and light Red Bull, and Lezzie will laugh knowingly and say, “Coming right up.”

  While Lezzie assembles the drinks, Luke’s nose will brush the humid clump of my hair, and close to my ear he’ll ask, “Why does she call you Ani Lennox again?”

  And I always tilt my head, giving him more of my neck as I say, “Because Annie Lennox is gay. And if I’m gay then she can fuck me.”

  By the time Lezzie puts the cocktails on the bar, Luke is hard in his Nantucket red shorts, and I have to strategically walk in front of him as we carry the drinks over to the Booths and Griers and Kinseys.

  “Ones with lemons are diet,” I say to the girls, the lie bringing a sadistic smile to my face. Lezzie loves to serve “diet” calorie bombs to high-maintenance bitches in size twenty-six white jeans.

  We slurp a few down, enough to take the bite out of the air outside. Nantucket can get down to fifty, even forty degrees when the sun drops out of the sky, even in the fiercest crush of summer. Then we call up a cab and make our way back to the Harrison estate, where there are enough bedrooms to sleep the entire graduating class of Luke’s fraternity. Some people stay up to smoke pot, play beer pong, or microwave odd drunk person food combinations in the kitchen, but not me and Luke. No, we always go right to bed, my dress bunched around my waist before we even mangle the sheets. We decided long ago that I would always wear a dress to the Chicken Box, no matter how cold it is outside. Makes for easy access once we get home.

  I’m always fascinated by Luke’s face as he grunts above me, the veins that appear, the way the blood rushes to his cheeks, filling in the spaces between his freckles so that it appears he has none at all. He never tries to make me come on these nights— it’s like he’s decided this ritual is purely for him—but I always do anyway. And that’s because I’m remembering the night, almost two years ago now, when Lezzie followed me into the bathroom and backed me into the wall, her lips surprisingly delicate and nervous on mine. The way she pushed her meaty thigh between my legs as I started to kiss her back, giving me something to press into, a place to dull the ache.

  I debated telling Luke about it. Not because it was the right thing to do or any self-righteous bullshit like that, but because I couldn’t decide—would he be turned on? Or disgusted? Finding the freak sweet spot, that’s always been the perennial struggle with Luke.

  Ultimately I decided against it. Maybe I would have told if Lezzie looked more like Kate Upton, maybe if she hadn’t chosen to kiss me right around the time I began to spoil like a forgotten carton of milk in the back of the refrigerator.

  Still, I’m right there with Luke when he squeezes his eyes shut and howls his final call. I like when a guy stays inside of me after, but Luke shrivels up fast. Rolls on his back and gasps how much he fucking loves me.

  I may never fully make my way out of the bourgey pit, but that doesn’t mean I’m not a trophy wife too. I’m just a different kind.

>   CHAPTER 10

  * * *

  I felt very still and purposeful after I’d been excused from Headmaster Mah’s office. I may have let Mr. Larson down like he would never let me down, but I couldn’t dwell on that now because the next step was clear. Get to Olivia. Apologize for causing a scene and getting her into trouble at home. Do whatever was necessary to get back into her good graces. I felt this was possible because it served Dean’s interests to keep me happy. Olivia would follow Dean’s lead, I was sure of it.

  I tried to track her down before lunch. Looked under the door of her favorite bathroom stall, even. But no luck. My next opportunity was lunch. Which meant I had to get to her before the others sat down, which would be easy because Olivia was usually the first person holding court at the table on account of the fact that she never walked the lunch line. I found her in her usual seat, performing her favorite disordered ritual: shredding a Swedish fish apart at the tail¸ rolling the pieces into balls before popping them in her mouth. A half-moon bruise saddled the right corner of her mouth, and I felt sick. I wish I could say it was because the thought of what her father did to her roiled my stomach, but I was fourteen and selfish. That bruise was my funeral.

  “Liv,” I said, hoping the sound of her nickname would soften her to me.

  “Huh?” she asked, as though she’d thought someone had said her name but she wasn’t sure. I sat down next to her.

  “I’m so sorry about Saturday.” I remembered what Dean said to me and added, “I should never smoke after I drink. It makes me so fucked up.”

  Olivia turned toward me and gave me a smile so eerie, so detached from human emotion that I still sometimes start awake in the middle of the night, haunted by the memory. “I’m fine.” She pointed at my cheek, at the cut covered clumsily with concealer. “We’re twins.”

  “There you fucking are, Finny.” Dean was next to me, holding a lunch tray overflowing with sandwiches and chips and soda. He slammed it down next to me. “What the fuck? I thought we had a deal?”

  I said I didn’t understand.

  “I just came from fucking Mah’s office,” he said. Then announced, loudly, to the group gathering at the table, that he had gotten a warning about an “incident” that had occurred over the weekend and that he might not be able to play in the big Haverford game this week. This aroused a scandalized gasp from all.

  “That’s fucking bullshit,” Peyton fumed, and Liam nodded ferociously even though he didn’t play soccer.

  “Well,” Dean mumbled. “I can play if nothing else happens between now and then.”

  (I always wished I’d said, Then, just don’t rape anyone in the next two days.)

  Dean gave me a withering look. “I thought we were cool?”

  “It wasn’t me,” I whimpered.

  “So you weren’t in his office earlier this morning?” Dean demanded.

  “I was, but I didn’t go there on my own,” I said. “Mr. Larson and him called me in. I didn’t have a choice!”

  Dean narrowed his beady eyes at me. “But how did they know to call you in if you didn’t say anything?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, lamely. “I think they just assumed.”

  “Assumed what?” Dean’s chest heaved with a mean laugh. “They’re not fucking David Copperfield fucking mind readers.” Dean crossed his arms over his chest to the chorus of group laughter. It was something I would have joined in on if the barb hadn’t been directed at me. There was something so bizarrely charming in the fact that Dean knew who David Copperfield was, referenced him like that. “Just get out of here, TifAni. Go bite Mr. Larson’s dick or something.”

  I looked around the table. At the smirks on Olivia, Liam, and Peyton. Hilary didn’t do that to me, but she didn’t look at me either.

  I turned and walked out of the new cafeteria, beneath the plaque on the last beam that bragged, THE BARTON FAMILY, 1998.

  I thought Mr. Larson would take it easy on me at practice later that day, after all I’d been through, but he was more ferocious than ever. I was the only one who couldn’t complete the mile test in under seven minutes and thirty seconds, and everyone had to run laps because of me. I hated him. Walked out on final stretch even though Mr. Larson once proliferated that old wives’ tale that our muscles would get bulky if we didn’t stretch them taffy thin after we ran. He called at me to come back, but I just said my mom was picking me up early and I had to go.

  I usually took the train home from school, but that day Mom was picking me up so we could shop the presale at Bloomingdale’s in the King of Prussia Mall.

  I never used the showers in the locker room after practice. No one did. They were gross. But that day I had to make an exception because I didn’t want to spend the next few hours shivering in my sweaty clothes while trying on wool peacoats. I quickly washed up under the water, which smelled neglected, like it had been sitting in the pipes since the place was a boarding school. Wrapped in a towel, I walked to my locker on the sides of my feet, trying to limit the amount of skin the gummy floor could contact. As I rounded the corner, Hilary and Olivia came into view. Neither of them played a sport or had to take PE, and I’d never seen them in the locker room before.

  “What are you guys doing?” I asked.

  “Hey!” Hilary said, her odd throaty voice peppier than usual. She’d thrown her hair into a high half loop since I’d seen her in Chem. One strand of bleached berry blond hair escaped, so brittle and overprocessed it pointed straight up in the air, a sharp spoke in her crown. “We were looking for you.”

  “You were?” My voice went up.

  “Yeah,” Olivia chimed in. Under the sallow laboratory-like lights, her nose appeared seeded with tiny black kernels. “What are, um. What are you doing tonight?”

  Anything you ask me to. “I’m supposed to go shopping with my mom. But I can do it another night if something is going on.”

  “No.” Olivia glanced at Hilary, nervously. “It’s fine, we can do it another time.” She started to walk away, and I panicked.

  “No, really,” I called after her. “It’s not a big deal. I can just tell my mom we’ll do it another night.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Tif.” Hilary turned, her profile practically samurai. There was something like remorse in her alien eyes. “Another time.”

  They hurried away. Damnit. I’d been too eager. I’d scared them off. I pulled my clothes on angrily, fought a brush through my wet hair.

  I was sitting on the curb outside the gym, waiting for Mom, when Arthur dropped his book bag on the ground next to my feet and sat down. “Hey.”

  “Hi,” I said, almost shyly. It’d been a while since we’d spoken.

  “You okay?”

  I nodded, and I meant it. That interaction with Olivia and Hilary had revitalized me. There was a chance still.

  “Really?” Arthur glanced up at the sun, his eyes turning to slits behind his glasses, the lenses smudged sloppily but somehow with intent, like graffiti on an abandoned building wall. “Because I heard what happened.”

  I twisted my head to look at him. “What did you hear?”

  “Well.” He shrugged. “I mean everyone already knows about the party at Dean’s house. What happened with Liam. And Peyton. And Dean.”

  “Thanks for listing them all like that,” I muttered sullenly.

  “And the morning-after pill,” he added.

  “Jesus Christ,” I groaned.

  “They all think you busted up Olivia’s party because you were jealous she and Liam were hooking up.”

  “People think that?” I buried my head between my knees, strands of wet hair sliding over my arms, snakelike.

  “Is it true?” Arthur asked.

  “Don’t people wonder how I got this?” I pointed at my cheek, which I hadn’t even bothered to cover up with concealer after my shower.

  Arthur shrugged. “You fell?”

  “Yeah.” I snorted. “And Dean caught me.”

  I spotted Mom’s red BMW pul
ling into the drive. It stood out like a sore thumb among the somber black and tan sedans and SUVs. Of course TifAni FaNelli’s mother drove a whore red car, her skank was genetic.

  “I have to go,” I said to Arthur.

  The morning arrived, brittle and bright. Fall in earnest, and I excitedly strapped myself into the new black peacoat Mom had bought me the night before. I’d found it at Banana Republic, and it wasn’t on sale like the ones at Bloomingdale’s. But Mom said I looked so sharp that she would get it for me anyway. She had to split the purchase between a credit card and cash and then told me not to tell Daddy. God, it grossed me out when she called him Daddy.

  On the train ride to school, hope was still a fat shiny balloon in my chest. Hilary and Olivia weren’t done with me yet. The air held a new charge, and I looked “sharp.”

  When I walked into school, I felt something else. A pulse. The hallways pumping, alive with it. That morning, a small crowd of freshmen and sophomores, outcast upperclassmen, clumped together at the entrance, rubbernecking something epic. I neared the Junior and Senior Lounge, a place where only juniors and seniors were allowed, a deadly serious rule that even parents and teachers respected. They’d hover in the doorway, calling the name of the student they were looking for rather than step inside and see for themselves.

  This time, when I approached, the crowd did part. A wide berth that formed in slow-motion-movie time.

  “Oh my God,” said Allison Calhoun, another freshman who’d snubbed me on my first day but started kissing my ass when she saw that Olivia and Hilary had taken me on. She giggled maliciously into her hand.

  When I fought my way to the lounge’s state line, I discovered what had drawn the crowd. My running shorts—the ones I’d worn yesterday for practice—were tacked to the bulletin board on the far wall beneath a handwritten sign that read, SNIFF A SKANK (AT YOUR OWN RISK . . . SHE STANKS!). The words were written in bright bubble letters, their color and shape as happy as a message for a bake sale to raise money for kids with cancer. Only a girl could have written them. A realization hardened in me as I remembered Hilary and Olivia, acting so oddly nice in the locker room the day before.