Ordinary Girls

by Blair Thornburgh

“Sorry,” he said again. He exhaled. “Shit.”

  “It’s all right,” I said. “I wouldn’t expect any less.”

  “Yeah.” Tate folded his arms. “I . . . uh, I mean, I have my stuff, but . . . I usually take a shower, is all. After practice,” he finished. “Can you give me, like, five minutes? You can wait in the TV room, if you want.”

  “Okay,” I said, and gathered my books.

  The TV was off, and even though I knew how to turn it on, I decided that wouldn’t be polite. Other people’s remote controls were always a festival of hieroglyphics, and the last thing I needed was to accidentally blast something indecently loud so that Tate came running out of the bathroom to make sure I hadn’t broken anything.

  So I sat, and listened to the rushing sound of the pipes.

  I imagined again this scene two hundred years in the past. Tate and Tommy and Stevie in shirtsleeves and cravats, freshly in from . . . something equestrian, I supposed, or a foxhunt. I wondered if women back then still found them unbearable. At least there used to be conventions, the kind of manners that would prevent men of good upbringing from saying things like “the freaky stuff.”

  My thoughts were brought to an abrupt stop by the banging of a kitchen cabinet. Ten seconds later, Tate reappeared, hair damp and in the same big P T-shirt as the other day, carrying a plate with a paper-wrapped sandwich and a half gallon of Wawa iced tea.

  “I have an extra pretzel,” Tate said, lifting the bag around his elbow. “In case you’re hungry.”

  “No, thank you,” I said reflexively. “Maybe we should just get started.”

  “Yeah. Let me just eat this.” Tate sat and started to unwrap his sandwich. He smelled like men’s body wash, probably one of those scents that are supposed to drive women crazy like in a commercial, and it amused me to think of Tate buying something labeled for men even though he was only sixteen. In fact, more likely, since he was sixteen, it was his mother buying it. She could have gotten something unscented, or with a neutral soap smell, but instead it was the babe-magnet fragrance. Here, she would think, I will select this so that my son Tate can continue to get girls.

  Not that Alicia Feingold would think like that. She was probably just trying to think of the best way to rid her teenage son of the typical smells of teenage boys. And not, of course, to imply that it was a bad smell. Tate’s, or the body wash’s.

  “Hey, sorry, I forgot about them,” Tate said, chewing. “Being back at school just threw me off.”

  “It’s all right,” I said.

  “They should be jealous,” Tate said. “I’m going to ace this thing, and they’re going to fail like assholes. Hey, maybe once I pass, you can expand your services. Get a whole cabin industry going.”

  “Frankly,” I said, “I do not want to spend more time with them.”

  “Yeah,” Tate said.

  “And it’s cottage industry, not cabin.”

  “Yeah.” He swallowed.

  “How was your New Year’s Eve?” I asked abruptly. I couldn’t say where the question came from, but there it was. Tate shrugged.

  “It was fine. Benj had some people over. Saw your sister.”

  “Ah,” I said.

  “How was yours?” Tate asked.

  “It was fine,” I said. “Just fine.”

  He hadn’t mentioned the text message. It must have been an accident.

  “Do you have your essay?”

  Tate wiped his hands on his sweatpants and dug in his backpack for a piece of paper. “Yeah. Here you go.”

  I smoothed out the essay and looked it over, marking with a pencil as I went. It was poorly punctuated, and he misspelled a lot of things, or used the nominal form when he should’ve used participial, or just swapped in homophones. But his observations matched his quotes, more or less.

  “This is getting better,” I said, when I’d finished.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yes,” I said. “You actually made a point and backed it up.”

  Tate licked his lips, nodding, and smiled. “All right.”

  “But your conclusion is vague,” I said. “You can’t just end by saying, ‘Brontë uses her language to highlight important themes in the novel.’ You have to say how the writer did it, and why it matters.”

  “Can I ask a dumb question?”

  “Can you ask any other kind?” I said, without thinking. But Tate smiled.

  “What is a theme?”

  “It’s . . .” I chewed my lip. “It’s what a book is about—I mean, not the story, but the ideas behind it, if that makes sense? Something . . . abstract? Abstract but specific. A theme is . . . basically the point of writing the whole story. What you’re giving to the reader. Why the story’s worth reading.”

  “It was worth reading to pass English,” Tate said. “Is that a theme?”

  I opened my mouth to protest, but Tate shook his head. “No, I . . . I think I get it. Ish.”

  “Okay,” I said. “So that’s why you can’t just say that she’s using language to highlight themes. Because that’s what all good novels do. The specifics of this book are what’s worth analyzing.”

  “Maybe this is a bad novel,” Tate said.

  I gave him a look.

  “Yeah, all right. I know it’s good because they made us read it.” He took the paper back and looked at it. “You have nice handwriting, Peach.”

  I felt myself flush. “Thank you.”

  “Does that come with being smart?” Tate looked up at me. “Or does it come with being a girl?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve always written that way.”

  “So it just comes with being you.”

  “I . . . yes.”

  “Damn. Well, good thing I have lots of other redeeming qualities.” Tate folded the paper and, to my utter surprise, smacked it against my knee. “Right?”

  The paper was light, as paper is, but I still felt like I could feel the touch of it all the way down to my skin.

  “You’re very good at sports,” I said. “From what I hear.”

  Tate smiled. “Yeah.” He slammed his notebook shut. “Well, I’m done. You wanna watch something? Your boys are on at six.”

  “No, thanks,” I said.

  “You have to go, or . . .”

  “No, I just . . . am going to go.”

  “Oh,” Tate said. He didn’t stand up. His arm was over the back of the couch, the crook of his elbow slightly bent. “You sure? Doesn’t have to be basketball. We get, like, every channel.”

  “No, thanks.” I stood up. “I feel bad enough that I kept you from your friends earlier.”

  “Mm.” Tate nodded. “They’re just . . .” He glanced back into the kitchen. “You know how it is. Friends are jerks sometimes.”

  “I don’t have any friends who are jerks,” I said. Implication being, of course, I don’t have any friends, period. But Tate knew that.

  “You have me,” Tate said.

  I blinked.

  “I’m not your friend,” I said. “I’m your tutor.”

  I piled my books and proceeded to the kitchen, where Tate grabbed for something and held it out to me as I reoutfitted myself with boots.

  “All yours.” It was a white envelope with Plum written on it. “Don’t spend it all in one place, tutor.”

  Inside the envelope was a business card, a buff-colored note card with Alicia Feingold written in gold script at the top edge, and five twenty-dollar bills—this week’s worth of pay, plus either an advance or a bonus.

  Dear Plum, it read. Thank you so much again for your help finding us Mr. Andrews. And thank you for helping Tate—I know it isn’t easy work. :) Be in touch if I can ever help you with anything.

  The business card listed her name, email address, and job title.

  Alumni Relations, University of Pennsylvania.

  “I can’t get out of bed,” Ginny declared the following morning. Except, given that she was in bed, in her room, I had to go all the way upstairs to hear her decla
re it. And judging by her tone of voice, she’d been declaring it vociferously at length until someone came to attend to her.

  “Are you sick?” I said.

  “I don’t know,” Ginny said. “Maybe. Yes. I’m not getting out.”

  “But it’s a school day,” I said. “Don’t you have a midterm?”

  She rolled over.

  “How am I supposed to get to school?” I cried.

  She pulled the covers over her head.

  The bus not only got me to TGS earlier than usual, but it also provided a good chance to get a head start on the second-semester English reading. The English department always managed to wedge a little poetry into every year, sneaking it in between the novel unit and the Shakespeare unit like a pill coated in spreadable meat. I was not fooled, and I loathed it. Poetry was always about death or sex, and although I had not experienced either, I just didn’t see how much there could possibly be to say about it.

  Of course I didn’t need to start on second-semester work before we’d even taken the midterm, but after learning all of first semester twice over in order to governess, I needed something fresh, something new. Not that my copy of The Selected Poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay was new, of course, but I was surprised to find that I didn’t loathe it. For one thing, Edna St. Vincent Millay was such an elegant name (unlike, say, Patience Mortimer Blatchley, which sounds as elegant as a cinder block hitting a driveway). For another, Edna St. Vincent Millay was one of several woman poets we would be studying in second semester and was, so far, the only one who used exclamation points.

  Oh world, I cannot hold thee close enough!

  Thy winds, thy wide grey skies!

  Deep penciled-in troughs dug underneath those lines. They were rapturous. I didn’t need to know what Edna St. Vincent Millay actually looked like to picture her: a wide hat, a lace collar, a skirt whipping in the wind as she strode through a field of heather and flax, throwing her arms out to embrace the everything around her. I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d seen a field, but in those words, Edna St. Vincent Millay made me feel it.

  The bus lurched, and then it was time.

  I had, of course, gone to school without my sister before in my life. But now it felt especially strange, as though, without her shadow to stand in, I was suddenly in bright daylight, intensely visible in a way I had never been before. In the crush of the cafeteria, I found myself looking to the customary space of the High-Strung Smart Girls before remembering she wasn’t there. It was just long enough for them to see me and wave me over.

  “Where’s Ginny?”

  “Is everything okay?”

  “Is she sick or something?”

  Lily and Lily and Ava and Julia leaned in, politely, smiling at me but eyebrows drawn in concern, carrot sticks abandoned on their table.

  Charlotte waited until last. “What’s going on?” she said evenly. “I’ve been messaging her all morning.”

  “She’s sick,” I said.

  “And she doesn’t have her phone?”

  “She might be asleep,” Julia put in.

  “Oh, right.” Charlotte considered. “There’s a midterm today,” she said slowly.

  “So?” Lily G. said. “She’ll make it up.”

  “True.” Charlotte laughed, her eyes still on me. “I was going to say that she’s really screwing herself over but . . . well, you know your sister, right, Plum? She’s probably going to wake up at eleven and watch House Hunters all day and still come in and ace the fucking thing.” She smiled, and it wasn’t a fake smile, although it wasn’t really a happy smile, either.

  “Is it the stomach flu?” Ava asked, blinking her giant eyes.

  “I think so,” I lied.

  Charlotte winced. “Ugh. The worst. I had that and it sucked.”

  Julia frowned. “You did?”

  Charlotte had started stirring her yogurt, staring straight down. “I missed three days of school.”

  “Tell Ginny I hope she feels better,” Lily S. said.

  “Same.” Charlotte jerked her gaze up from her yogurt. “Thanks, Plum.”

  Her tone was definitive; I knew my cue to exit. I left the High-Strung Smart Girls and their insulated lunch bags and wove past the Sporty Senior Boys and their paper bags of off-campus fast food and slipped past the Loud Sophomore Boys, none of whom noticed me and none of whom could be expected to.

  I ate my sandwich in the school bookstore, and while I did, the school secretary stopped in to give me information about a makeup exam for Ginny. Jeremy Beard didn’t even look up from Dungeons and Dragons.

  If I had stomach flu, I had to wonder, would anyone bother with any of this? Even if I missed three days?

  I took the bus home when the day ended and heated up some noodles Jefferson, waiting out the last few minutes before I was obliged to take Ginny her things. I was always obliged to Ginny, somehow. I would be Ginny Blatchley’s sister forever, even once she left the TGS universe and was no longer my lodestar. I would always have to be less, just a little less in the way that needing context makes you meaningless, that needing to be possessed to give you shape makes you formless on your own. I couldn’t claim myself. I would never know what it meant to be Plum. Just Plum.

  I had sat on the floor next to the cardboard box of our mother’s books. I set down my last mouthful of noodles Jefferson and lifted out a copy of Five Little Field Mice by the Seaside.

  There had been a time in my life when these stories were as integral a part of our bedtime routine as brushing our teeth. Ginny always preferred Five Little Field Mice Have a Birthday, but my favorite was always this one—or “beach book” as I’d called it before I knew about titles. I loved that the field mice, who ordinarily went around in nothing but their fur, donned bathing suits when they went swimming. Mom had drawn them in little old-fashioned bathing costumes, onesies with navy and white stripes, their mousey mouths open with delight as they splashed.

  I turned pages back and forth. How many other kids got this as a bedtime story? Enough that Pamela Wills knew about it. Which meant that even Tommy Wills-Wyatt had had these books. And probably other kids at TGS, and definitely other kids elsewhere. If Mom had died, too, this would’ve been her legacy: mice in bathing costumes. Which felt embarrassing to think, at first, but when I poked at the thought, I found I couldn’t hold on to it. I loved those little mice. So many of us loved this small thing she’d made.

  I finished eating. Ginny wasn’t watching Home and Garden Television or watching Amadeus or even watching TV at all. Her bedroom door was closed, and only the faintest strains of something orchestral were seeping out. I raised my fist to knock, then thought better of it. Then I went downstairs and grabbed Five Little Field Mice Have a Birthday and a sticky note, which I then left leaning against the baseboard right outside her room.

  Everyone says get better (including me). Hi dee hi dee hi, sir.

  —Jeeves (Plum)

  When I went back up after dinner, the book was gone.

  Ginny got better, if she’d even been sick, thanks to a hefty dose of some probably expired prescription cold medicine Mom gave her, and received special dispensation to take her midterm the following day. Mom pointed out that we didn’t need to be sick to take sick days, the school builds them into the academic year, and I said no, that was snow days, and Ginny said shut up both of us, she was fine and had only briefly lost her grip on reality. Mom asked if it was about the interview, and Ginny did not answer.

  I knew what I had to do. I retrieved Alicia Feingold formerly Kurokawa née Tate’s business card and sent an email. Then I arrived at Tate’s house at the prearranged time, prepared to dispense with pleasantries.

  “We have two days until the midterm,” I said, as soon as he opened the door. “Are you ready?”

  “Man, you never waste time, do you?” Tate said.

  “I waste plenty of time,” I said. “Just not on this.”

  “Sure,” he said. “Why don’t you come in?”

 
I padded in, slipping off my boots in the customary way, putting them between the mud-flaked soccer cleats and the cracked galoshes just like I always did.

  We sat at the counter. Tate presented me with a rewritten essay. I made him tell me in detail about the varying linguistic styles of Brontë, Fitzgerald, and Shelley. I drilled him on the themes of each novel. I had him write six mock thesis statements for every foreseeable essay prompt that might be there.

  “You are determined, Peach.” Tate rolled his neck around. “You know you still get paid if I fail, right?”

  I refused to let myself blush. “This is not about the money.”

  It was about networking gracefully and creating a good impression upon my employer, i.e., Tate’s mother. It was about securing my sister’s future, securing all of our futures. And that was, in turn, eventually, I supposed, about the money.

  But it also wasn’t about that at all. I’d tricked myself into investing a grander nobility into this plan than was justified. And I wasn’t even making that much money.

  “Yeah,” Tate agreed. “It’s just about getting my mom to chill out.”

  I couldn’t disagree. Instead, I lied. “I think you’re making good progress. You should be proud.”

  “Thanks,” Tate said. “I don’t care about grades.”

  I shouldn’t have been surprised. “Well, of course you don’t. But your mom does.”

  “Yeah, I guess,” Tate said. “Mostly she wants me to not screw around.”

  “Screw around?”

  “Not like screw around with girls,” Tate said.

  “Did I say that?”

  Tate blinked. “No.”

  “This doesn’t count,” I said quickly. “Having me over.”

  “I know,” Tate said. “I mean, you were over here that one time, but we saved it with the tutoring stuff.”

  He looked up at me, and widened his eyes.

  “Jeez, Peach, you look like you’re gonna murder me.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, rearranging my face as best I could without seeing it. “It’s just . . . well, that was different.”

  “Do you remember why you even came over here the first time?”

  “Vaguely,” I demurred.