Thursday, noon
ALEX
She gets into the car and then she can’t drive it. Can’t even start the engine for the gift of the air conditioner. She is a living corpse roasting in sun-warmed leather. She can hear the quick death march of her heart. Her cell phone is slick in her hand; at any moment it might squeak from her grasp like a bar of soap. She needs to make one phone call, and she wishes she could make it into her past. Into last year. Or two years ago.
The houses are brick or stone fortresses guarded by holly and boxwood. Not to shut out the neighbors but to discourage them. It works. Alex realizes that she’s never spoken with anyone from Round Hill Manor Estates. Not the people on either side of Camelot. Nor the people behind the hedges across the road.
In an emergency--short of screaming--she wouldn’t know how to get hold of a single soul.
She feels like screaming now.
Thursday, lunch
THEA
This story is nasty and everyone is spellbound and that’s power. They’re all hooked and I’m in focus, I’m mixing up this thing like I’m the smoothest bartender in the newest club for people who’ve all decided at this moment I’m one of them. And if there’s guilt down my spine, it’s nothing like the heat on my skin as I raise my voice to land it. Lies take nerve, which I’m working on. But nobody needs to know that.
“Don’t quote me, but it took Gavin a week to cut the bubble gum out of his pubes.” I paused. “Watermelon-flavored.”
A moment. My breath held and a drum of blood in my ears. Oh, come on. Please believe it. It’s way more fun to believe in it.
And then. Release. The table flooded over in laughter.
“Thea! Gross! That is so, so wrong!” The McBride twins were both buzzed on my words. Half-mast eyes while their minds writhed, thinking about who they should text or tell, and so what if my story wasn’t one hundred percent or even ten percent true?
There are icky things people don’t want to hear, like maybe if you peel some dead skin off the side of your toe and eat it. Nobody wants to know that. Then there’s a Nasty that people love. And I’m good for that. I can bring that--even if it half scares me. There’s a reward for the risk. Now all Emma--or was that her twin, Ali?--had to do was shift her chair so I could put down my tray.
The Figure Eight was made from two pushed-together round tables in the cafeteria, where the McBrides sat at opposite ends like Cloned Queens of Disdain. And if it was too crowded, which it always was, you squeezed for exceptions, right? Except that with every ticking second, I could feel my alter ego, the girl I called Gia, curling up and smoking off into nothing as my real self touched down. Gia was my Topshop mannequin muse. Which sounds ridiculous, I know. A plastic muse. But there was something about her. Even when we’d stripped her naked or tarted her up in some cheap knockoff trend, Gia somehow held on to her value. She was made from style and indifference.
She was the girl I wanted to be. Could be, with practice.
The verdict on my bubble gum story would come from a McBride. Who both were studying me like we hadn’t all grown up together. Hadn’t done bus rides and field hockey and detention since middle school together.
Maybe they were remembering bookworm Thea. Maybe they’d forgotten that I’d already sat at the Figure Eight a handful of times this year.
Give it up, McBrides. Give me a seat and I’ll invite you all to my house on Saturday night.
Give it to me and I’ll never give it up.
Maybe they did know this. Maybe that was why they were hesitating?
“Theodora Parrott?”
I whipped around and almost bumped against Mr. Quigley, school secretary–slash–walking fossil, standing way too close. Had he overheard me? No way. Q was 186 years old and deaf as a worm. But my defenses zipped to attention. Whatever I’d done, I didn’t need the blue slip.
“The front office wants you,” wheezed Q. “Outside line. It’s your sister.”
At the mention of my sister, everyone got sober. And now my chance to sit was officially shot. All eyes were on me--everyone was looking for my worry. I shoved my lunch tray at Q’s sternum. A little hard, for the joke. “Um, then, can you deal with this? Thanks.”
“Oh!” As he jumped back, his knobbed fingers reflexively took the sides of the tray. I spun off, loose and free. Style and indifference. Thankful for the easy laughter in my wake, and hopeful that nobody would talk too much about Alex behind my back.
Insufferable. Last week, Mom called Alex that. For missing school, which is Al’s new talent. Except insufferable means nothing, since we all had to keep right on suffering Alex no matter what she did.
And now she wanted me to come home.
“Are you high?” I pressed a finger to my ear as I shifted the chunky black men’s shoe of the school’s phone receiver. Alex once told me that some phones at Greenwich Public--including the wooden phone box in the front hall--would never change because they were “quirky comfort objects.” Preserved in amber, so that alums would be nostalgic and write checks at homecoming.
This quirky comfort object was complete with crackling static. “Alex, I can hardly hear you. I gotta go. I’ve got an orgo quiz next period.”
“You don’t get it. I’m stuck. I can’t . . . I’m stuck.”
“Call Joshua?”
“He’s at work. His mom would combust with rage if he took off.” Her voice was tin, a girl from outer space. Which she was, in a way. New Alex was a dried-up, lollipop-head alien of the big sister she used to be.
“Can’t I leave after my quiz?”
“I wouldn’t call unless I had to, Thee.”
“Right.” I’d lost. In fact, I’d already switched on my cell--an in-school no-no unless it was a 911--to text Mom in L.A. for official permission to leave school. But I wanted Alex to sweat.
She could suffer me a little.
Another five minutes and I was backing out of the student parking lot.
My Beemer stuck out like a show pony among the Rabbits and Beetles and wagons and Mini Coopers. I should have gone with basic black, not this hot villainess scarlet. It had been four months since I got it on my sixteenth, but the car seemed the least-mine object of anything else in the pork barrel of Mom’s remarriage. Less-mine than Camelot, less than my Gucci bag plopped like an overfed tabby cat on the seat beside me, less than my custard-blond highlights from the Marc DuBerry Salon. Maybe it’s because I don’t even really care about cars, outside of how much reaction I might jack from the fact that other people cared deeply about them.
Still, it was flashy. I should downtrade for a Jetta or something.
(Ouch, but that’d be hard. To that, from this.)
Another gilded day in Greenwich, Connecticut. Where even the birds sound like they get private singing lessons. Pulling through Round Hill Manor’s security, then burning it around the winding drive, I dashed inside with a shout to Lulette in the kitchen. “Only Thea!”
And then straight upstairs and down the hall to Alex’s room, knocking on her bedroom door. I was standing outside it when her text pinged.
in my car
Stuck in her car? Usually Alex was stuck in her room. Maybe stuck in motion was a good sign? Of improvement? I cracked the door to be sure. Uh-uh, no Alex. She must have seen me run into the house. I fled back downstairs and shortcut out the door. My footprints crushing an intruder’s path all the way across the velvety green lawn.
Sliding into her Audi. She’d gone with navy. But you can’t disguise that smug new-car smell. Same as mine.
“I’m here. What’s up?”
Silence. A profile of pale skin and hollow bones. The short story: too thin. Alex might even be in worse shape since last week. She was for sure in worse shape since last month. So I hated the shard inside me--the Gia-shaped shard--that was thinking she’d better not kill my party plans for Saturday.
Mom and Arthur rarely went away when they didn’t have Hector staying over to keep an eye on things. But this weekend Hector was taking off for his niece’s wedding in the Adirondacks.
Which meant it was all going down right here. Party at the Parrotts’.
“Okay. Here I am,” I said, a touch impatient. “I came when you whistled. I blew off science. I ran a stop sign. Will you tell me what’s wrong?”
But when Alex finally looked up, I was knocked speechless by how sad she appeared and how exquisitely beautiful her sad face was, and how complicated my feelings were about that. Alex has always been amazing-looking and never in a million years would I have thought it would come between us, and then I think maybe it did.
And I’m the worst kind of brat to admit that it was all over a guy.
But it was all over a guy.
Her guy.
There, out. See, when pressed, I can be exceptionally truthful.
Only I’d hardly had a chance to deal with that weirdness, because three months ago Alex went rogue, hyphy, off the rez. Whatever you want to call it, we all knew it had to do with Haute. Mom and I must have finished a hundred cups of tea between us, trying to crack The Mystery of Haute. Sometimes even poor old Arthur joined in, guilt pleating his forehead since he was the one who’d bought Alex the stupid fashion internship in the first place.
Alex wasn’t talking. But whatever happened at that magazine this past January is at least semi-responsible for what’s up now. Even I, with none of my big sister’s looks and charm, even I can’t wish whatever is happening to Alex on Alex.
“Don’t you have to hit the slums for SKiP today?” “SKiP” stood for Senior Knowledge Project. Also known as something better for spring Greenwich Public School seniors to do than cut class and go to the beach. By late May, most seniors hardly showed up at school. The rules got pretty lax. You could take off a week and still graduate. But Alex was hardwired to be more diligent than that. After dropping her internship at Haute, she’d switched her SKiP to Empty Hands--a tutoring center in the Bronx. One of the few things that still mattered to her.
“That was the plan.” She sounded physically shot. Like she’d been attempting to get there by dogsled.
“There’s time. I know you’re worried about blowing off that kid you tutor, uh . . .”
“Leonard. He must hate me. Should hate me.”
“He doesn’t hate you. But don’t focus on him right now. It only makes the pressure worse for you.”
She nodded in half agreement. Dug in her bag and pulled out a stick of Orbit. I could feel her considering the gum, the way she second-guessed everything she ate and drank these days. Even gum. “That’s like one of those sweet things you used to say, Thealonious.”
She was kidding me; she meant in my geekstery days. Before I began the painstaking reinvention of Theodora Parrott. But Alex wouldn’t have a clue how much effort Popular took. Alex never had to lift a finger to be adored. She’d have burst out laughing to learn how much I fret and fume to find the right anecdote for the Figure Eight. How hard I pushed to get myself to the best party on Saturday night.
“Let’s just remember who’s missing her organic chemistry quiz,” I said, “that I now get the thrill of making up after school.”
“I’m sorry.” I could hear that she meant it. “But the thing is, Thea, you’re the only one who knows . . .” She stopped. I tried not to look desperate for the payoff end of that sentence.
What? What could I possibly know? What was so special about me? I wanted it so badly. But my sister’s thoughts had gone traveling, touching off into distant places.
“Okay! Here’s the plan! Last time you got stuck”--my voice was loud enough to jog her back to me--“you said the first five minutes are the worst. When you’re overthinking it, you said.”
“So?”
“So underthink it. Start the car and I’ll drive with you five minutes. And then, if you can make it that far, let me out. I’ll walk the mile or whatever back to the house.”
“That’s too far.”
“It’s not. It’s no problem. Really, Al.”
Alex sagged forward. Rested her forehead on the steering wheel. Her dark, paper-smooth bob falling past her ears. “Look.” Without moving the rest of her body, she raised her arm to show me the huge flapjack of sweat stain underneath.
“Are your wet pits supposed to scare me? Drive, already.”
“I need to relax. Tell me something. Take my mind off my mind.”
My tale o’ the bubble gum might do the trick. The germs of truth, and there are always germs, was that I really had seen Gavin and Gabby at Mim Goldsborough’s party last Saturday. And Gabby really had been chewing watermelon-flavored gum in the kitchen. I’d caught the whiff. Then, when Gavin had blasted in with some friends, drunkly bungling through the cupboards for a snack, I’d seen Gabby’s eyes fixate on him. Watched him brush-pivot-rub against her as he went for the bag of Pirate’s Booty.
I hardly knew either of them. I’d barely spoken to Gabby Ferrell since sixth grade. Gavin Hayes, on the other hand, had always enjoyed his reputation.
The Nasty was like a pocketful of glitter in my closed fist. Too tempting not to toss in the air.
Days later, finessing the story, I swear, it was like it really had happened.
“So here’s something funny,” I began. “You know Gabby Ferrell? Well the way I heard it, last weekend at Mim Goldsborough’s, she got together with Gavin Hayes in the clothes closet of Mim’s little brother’s room. Big fat sloppy hookup. And the best part? The brother was sleeping six feet away.”
“Making out inside a clothes closet. So what.”
“Except it was a beej and they kept the door open. And, pause for effect--she didn’t even take out her bubble gum. The way I heard it? She used her tongue to wrap the gum so that it--”
“Wait--did you say Gavin Hayes?” Alex fixed her fawn eyes on me. “But Gavin’s been seeing that Russian girl for months.”
Thursday, noon
ALEX
She gets into the car and then she can’t drive it. Can’t even start the engine for the gift of the air conditioner. She is a living corpse roasting in sun-warmed leather. She can hear the quick death march of her heart. Her cell phone is slick in her hand; at any moment it might squeak from her grasp like a bar of soap. She needs to make one phone call, and she wishes she could make it into her past. Into last year. Or two years ago.
The houses are brick or stone fortresses guarded by holly and boxwood. Not to shut out the neighbors but to discourage them. It works. Alex realizes that she’s never spoken with anyone from Round Hill Manor Estates. Not the people on either side of Camelot. Nor the people behind the hedges across the road.
In an emergency--short of screaming--she wouldn’t know how to get hold of a single soul.
She feels like screaming now.
Thursday, lunch
THEA
This story is nasty and everyone is spellbound and that’s power. They’re all hooked and I’m in focus, I’m mixing up this thing like I’m the smoothest bartender in the newest club for people who’ve all decided at this moment I’m one of them. And if there’s guilt down my spine, it’s nothing like the heat on my skin as I raise my voice to land it. Lies take nerve, which I’m working on. But nobody needs to know that.
“Don’t quote me, but it took Gavin a week to cut the bubble gum out of his pubes.” I paused. “Watermelon-flavored.”
A moment. My breath held and a drum of blood in my ears. Oh, come on. Please believe it. It’s way more fun to believe in it.
And then. Release. The table flooded over in laughter.
“Thea! Gross! That is so, so wrong!” The McBride twins were both buzzed on my words. Half-mast eyes while their minds writhed, thinking about who they should text or tell, and so what if my story wasn’t one hundred percent or even ten percent true?
There are icky things people don’t want to hear, like maybe if you peel some dead skin off the side of your toe and eat it. Nobody wants to know that. Then there’s a Nasty that people love. And I’m good for that. I can bring that--even if it half scares me. There’s a reward for the risk. Now all Emma--or was that her twin, Ali?--had to do was shift her chair so I could put down my tray.
The Figure Eight was made from two pushed-together round tables in the cafeteria, where the McBrides sat at opposite ends like Cloned Queens of Disdain. And if it was too crowded, which it always was, you squeezed for exceptions, right? Except that with every ticking second, I could feel my alter ego, the girl I called Gia, curling up and smoking off into nothing as my real self touched down. Gia was my Topshop mannequin muse. Which sounds ridiculous, I know. A plastic muse. But there was something about her. Even when we’d stripped her naked or tarted her up in some cheap knockoff trend, Gia somehow held on to her value. She was made from style and indifference.
She was the girl I wanted to be. Could be, with practice.
The verdict on my bubble gum story would come from a McBride. Who both were studying me like we hadn’t all grown up together. Hadn’t done bus rides and field hockey and detention since middle school together.
Maybe they were remembering bookworm Thea. Maybe they’d forgotten that I’d already sat at the Figure Eight a handful of times this year.
Give it up, McBrides. Give me a seat and I’ll invite you all to my house on Saturday night.
Give it to me and I’ll never give it up.
Maybe they did know this. Maybe that was why they were hesitating?
“Theodora Parrott?”
I whipped around and almost bumped against Mr. Quigley, school secretary–slash–walking fossil, standing way too close. Had he overheard me? No way. Q was 186 years old and deaf as a worm. But my defenses zipped to attention. Whatever I’d done, I didn’t need the blue slip.
“The front office wants you,” wheezed Q. “Outside line. It’s your sister.”
At the mention of my sister, everyone got sober. And now my chance to sit was officially shot. All eyes were on me--everyone was looking for my worry. I shoved my lunch tray at Q’s sternum. A little hard, for the joke. “Um, then, can you deal with this? Thanks.”
“Oh!” As he jumped back, his knobbed fingers reflexively took the sides of the tray. I spun off, loose and free. Style and indifference. Thankful for the easy laughter in my wake, and hopeful that nobody would talk too much about Alex behind my back.
Insufferable. Last week, Mom called Alex that. For missing school, which is Al’s new talent. Except insufferable means nothing, since we all had to keep right on suffering Alex no matter what she did.
And now she wanted me to come home.
“Are you high?” I pressed a finger to my ear as I shifted the chunky black men’s shoe of the school’s phone receiver. Alex once told me that some phones at Greenwich Public--including the wooden phone box in the front hall--would never change because they were “quirky comfort objects.” Preserved in amber, so that alums would be nostalgic and write checks at homecoming.
This quirky comfort object was complete with crackling static. “Alex, I can hardly hear you. I gotta go. I’ve got an orgo quiz next period.”
“You don’t get it. I’m stuck. I can’t . . . I’m stuck.”
“Call Joshua?”
“He’s at work. His mom would combust with rage if he took off.” Her voice was tin, a girl from outer space. Which she was, in a way. New Alex was a dried-up, lollipop-head alien of the big sister she used to be.
“Can’t I leave after my quiz?”
“I wouldn’t call unless I had to, Thee.”
“Right.” I’d lost. In fact, I’d already switched on my cell--an in-school no-no unless it was a 911--to text Mom in L.A. for official permission to leave school. But I wanted Alex to sweat.
She could suffer me a little.
Another five minutes and I was backing out of the student parking lot.
My Beemer stuck out like a show pony among the Rabbits and Beetles and wagons and Mini Coopers. I should have gone with basic black, not this hot villainess scarlet. It had been four months since I got it on my sixteenth, but the car seemed the least-mine object of anything else in the pork barrel of Mom’s remarriage. Less-mine than Camelot, less than my Gucci bag plopped like an overfed tabby cat on the seat beside me, less than my custard-blond highlights from the Marc DuBerry Salon. Maybe it’s because I don’t even really care about cars, outside of how much reaction I might jack from the fact that other people cared deeply about them.
Still, it was flashy. I should downtrade for a Jetta or something.
(Ouch, but that’d be hard. To that, from this.)
Another gilded day in Greenwich, Connecticut. Where even the birds sound like they get private singing lessons. Pulling through Round Hill Manor’s security, then burning it around the winding drive, I dashed inside with a shout to Lulette in the kitchen. “Only Thea!”
And then straight upstairs and down the hall to Alex’s room, knocking on her bedroom door. I was standing outside it when her text pinged.
in my car
Stuck in her car? Usually Alex was stuck in her room. Maybe stuck in motion was a good sign? Of improvement? I cracked the door to be sure. Uh-uh, no Alex. She must have seen me run into the house. I fled back downstairs and shortcut out the door. My footprints crushing an intruder’s path all the way across the velvety green lawn.
Sliding into her Audi. She’d gone with navy. But you can’t disguise that smug new-car smell. Same as mine.
“I’m here. What’s up?”
Silence. A profile of pale skin and hollow bones. The short story: too thin. Alex might even be in worse shape since last week. She was for sure in worse shape since last month. So I hated the shard inside me--the Gia-shaped shard--that was thinking she’d better not kill my party plans for Saturday.
Mom and Arthur rarely went away when they didn’t have Hector staying over to keep an eye on things. But this weekend Hector was taking off for his niece’s wedding in the Adirondacks.
Which meant it was all going down right here. Party at the Parrotts’.
“Okay. Here I am,” I said, a touch impatient. “I came when you whistled. I blew off science. I ran a stop sign. Will you tell me what’s wrong?”
But when Alex finally looked up, I was knocked speechless by how sad she appeared and how exquisitely beautiful her sad face was, and how complicated my feelings were about that. Alex has always been amazing-looking and never in a million years would I have thought it would come between us, and then I think maybe it did.
And I’m the worst kind of brat to admit that it was all over a guy.
But it was all over a guy.
Her guy.
There, out. See, when pressed, I can be exceptionally truthful.
Only I’d hardly had a chance to deal with that weirdness, because three months ago Alex went rogue, hyphy, off the rez. Whatever you want to call it, we all knew it had to do with Haute. Mom and I must have finished a hundred cups of tea between us, trying to crack The Mystery of Haute. Sometimes even poor old Arthur joined in, guilt pleating his forehead since he was the one who’d bought Alex the stupid fashion internship in the first place.
Alex wasn’t talking. But whatever happened at that magazine this past January is at least semi-responsible for what’s up now. Even I, with none of my big sister’s looks and charm, even I can’t wish whatever is happening to Alex on Alex.
“Don’t you have to hit the slums for SKiP today?” “SKiP” stood for Senior Knowledge Project. Also known as something better for spring Greenwich Public School seniors to do than cut class and go to the beach. By late May, most seniors hardly showed up at school. The rules got pretty lax. You could take off a week and still graduate. But Alex was hardwired to be more diligent than that. After dropping her internship at Haute, she’d switched her SKiP to Empty Hands--a tutoring center in the Bronx. One of the few things that still mattered to her.
“That was the plan.” She sounded physically shot. Like she’d been attempting to get there by dogsled.
“There’s time. I know you’re worried about blowing off that kid you tutor, uh . . .”
“Leonard. He must hate me. Should hate me.”
“He doesn’t hate you. But don’t focus on him right now. It only makes the pressure worse for you.”
She nodded in half agreement. Dug in her bag and pulled out a stick of Orbit. I could feel her considering the gum, the way she second-guessed everything she ate and drank these days. Even gum. “That’s like one of those sweet things you used to say, Thealonious.”
She was kidding me; she meant in my geekstery days. Before I began the painstaking reinvention of Theodora Parrott. But Alex wouldn’t have a clue how much effort Popular took. Alex never had to lift a finger to be adored. She’d have burst out laughing to learn how much I fret and fume to find the right anecdote for the Figure Eight. How hard I pushed to get myself to the best party on Saturday night.
“Let’s just remember who’s missing her organic chemistry quiz,” I said, “that I now get the thrill of making up after school.”
“I’m sorry.” I could hear that she meant it. “But the thing is, Thea, you’re the only one who knows . . .” She stopped. I tried not to look desperate for the payoff end of that sentence.
What? What could I possibly know? What was so special about me? I wanted it so badly. But my sister’s thoughts had gone traveling, touching off into distant places.
“Okay! Here’s the plan! Last time you got stuck”--my voice was loud enough to jog her back to me--“you said the first five minutes are the worst. When you’re overthinking it, you said.”
“So?”
“So underthink it. Start the car and I’ll drive with you five minutes. And then, if you can make it that far, let me out. I’ll walk the mile or whatever back to the house.”
“That’s too far.”
“It’s not. It’s no problem. Really, Al.”
Alex sagged forward. Rested her forehead on the steering wheel. Her dark, paper-smooth bob falling past her ears. “Look.” Without moving the rest of her body, she raised her arm to show me the huge flapjack of sweat stain underneath.
“Are your wet pits supposed to scare me? Drive, already.”
“I need to relax. Tell me something. Take my mind off my mind.”
My tale o’ the bubble gum might do the trick. The germs of truth, and there are always germs, was that I really had seen Gavin and Gabby at Mim Goldsborough’s party last Saturday. And Gabby really had been chewing watermelon-flavored gum in the kitchen. I’d caught the whiff. Then, when Gavin had blasted in with some friends, drunkly bungling through the cupboards for a snack, I’d seen Gabby’s eyes fixate on him. Watched him brush-pivot-rub against her as he went for the bag of Pirate’s Booty.
I hardly knew either of them. I’d barely spoken to Gabby Ferrell since sixth grade. Gavin Hayes, on the other hand, had always enjoyed his reputation.
The Nasty was like a pocketful of glitter in my closed fist. Too tempting not to toss in the air.
Days later, finessing the story, I swear, it was like it really had happened.
“So here’s something funny,” I began. “You know Gabby Ferrell? Well the way I heard it, last weekend at Mim Goldsborough’s, she got together with Gavin Hayes in the clothes closet of Mim’s little brother’s room. Big fat sloppy hookup. And the best part? The brother was sleeping six feet away.”
“Making out inside a clothes closet. So what.”
“Except it was a beej and they kept the door open. And, pause for effect--she didn’t even take out her bubble gum. The way I heard it? She used her tongue to wrap the gum so that it--”
“Wait--did you say Gavin Hayes?” Alex fixed her fawn eyes on me. “But Gavin’s been seeing that Russian girl for months.”
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