Certain Girls Page 5

  In sixth grade, I graduated to the kind of hearing aids that sit inside my ears. I’m supposed to wear them every day and sit in the front row. But last summer Aunt Elle came to the beach for a week’s visit with the tiniest black bikini I’d ever seen and a canvas tote bag full of Elle and Vogue and In Touch and InStyle. My mother shook her head as Aunt Elle stacked the glossy magazines next to her chair and started smearing oil over her shoulders. We don’t have magazines like that in our house. My mother thinks they’re a bad influence. “Those are manipulated images,” my mom said, frowning at the beautiful, long-limbed models on the covers, explaining how the pictures are specially lit and airbrushed and edited. She even downloaded pictures on the computer to show me how the editors smoothed out wrinkles and slimmed down backs and arms and thighs and, in one case, even erased a model’s hand and made her arm longer.

  “For God’s sake, Cannister, it’s a frickin’ magazine,” Elle had said, and she’d slipped me copies when my mother wasn’t looking. After seven days straight of reading Vogue and watching my aunt, I’d decided that this year, seventh grade, would be when I would change. I’d ditch my hearing aids and my special seat. I’d straighten my hair and wear makeup and tuck in my shirts. Then people would see me differently from the way they always had; they’d see that I wasn’t the geeky girl with only two friends and crazy hair and a mother who treated her like a baby.

  So far, it hadn’t worked, but when I walked into homeroom that morning I had my first glimmer of hope that things might be changing. The first thing I saw was Tamsin and Todd huddled in the corner, whispering. A second later, I saw what they were whispering about: twelve frosted sugar hearts heaped on my desk. It was unbelievable. Not even Amber Gross had more.

  I checked to make sure I was in the right classroom. Then I counted to make sure I was looking at the right desk, the third from the front. I picked up one of the cookies, waiting for someone to say something, to tap me on the shoulder and say, “Um, sorry, that’s actually mine.”

  TO: Joy. FROM: Martin. MESSAGE: Happy Valentine’s Day!

  The only Martin in our school is Martin Baker, Amber’s boyfriend, who always wears his cleats to class so there’s no chance of you forgetting that he’s on the soccer team. I turned the cookie over in my hands, holding it carefully. “Gentle touches!” my preschool teacher would say during show-and-tell when we’d pass around the toy the kid of the day had brought to share. “Gentle touches” meant you could hold it, but it wasn’t really yours.

  I picked up another cookie. TO: Joy. FROM: A Secret Admirer. MESSAGE: I think you’re sweet.

  My cheeks flushed. A Secret Admirer. I had a secret admirer. I looked at the cookie, then, quickly, at Duncan Brodkey. Just as fast, I looked away.

  I shuffled slowly through the rest of the cookies until I came to one that made my heart stop thudding and skitter to a stop. TO: Joy. FROM: Amber Gross. MESSAGE: Happy V Day!

  Amber Gross. Amber Gross sent me a cookie. Amber Gross wants me to have a happy V Day. At any minute, the world will spin off its axis, hell will freeze over, and monkeys will fly out of my ears from where my hearing aids should be.

  Just when I was sure that the day couldn’t get any weirder, when I was positive that it was all a dream and I was going to wake up in my room underneath my flowered comforter and the stuck-on stars with my mother standing at the door asking about oatmeal, Amber Gross herself sauntered toward me with her thumbs hooked into the belt loops of her ultra-low-rise jeans. (“No, I am not buying you those,” my mother said when I pointed out a pair at the mall. “Why?” I’d been dumb enough to ask. “Because they’re obscene,” said my mother. “And you’d need all new underwear.”)

  “Hi, Joy,” she said. Hi, Joy. Like we were actually friends. Like we IM’ed each other every night and sat together on the bus in the mornings.

  “Thanks for the cookie!” I squeaked in what I hoped was a normal-girl voice. I couldn’t believe she’d said my name. I wasn’t even sure she knew it.

  “No prob,” she said. Her braces glittered as she smiled. “Hey, do you want to sit with us at lunch?”

  “Oh. Um. Sure, I guess,” I said. I thought that even if my voice sounded weird, my words sounded right. Very casual.

  “Cool!” she said, and walked back to her seat.

  Tamsin whirled around, wide-eyed. “What was that about?” she whispered, exaggerating the syllables and adding a big shrug so there’d be no chance I’d miss her meaning.

  I’d just opened my mouth to say something—what, I wasn’t exactly sure—when Mr. Shoup dropped his briefcase on his desk. “Settle down,” he said. At least I thought that was what he said. Mr. Shoup had a mustache, and the longer it grew, the harder my life got.

  He turned toward the blackboard, and I bent my head, hoping nobody else could hear the way my heart was pounding.

  • • •

  “You’re not really going to sit with them, are you?” Tamsin said directly into my right ear four endless periods later, as I was collecting my lunch from my locker.

  I ducked my head and mumbled, “Dunno.”

  “She’s just using you,” said Tamsin. To make sure I’d heard, she shoved up the sleeves of her gray sweatshirt, stepped in front of me, and signed the words: “Using you!” (American Sign Language is one of the languages offered at the Philadelphia Academy, along with Spanish, French, and Latin. Tamsin has taken all four.)

  “Using her for what, though?” Todd said as he caught up to us in the hall. He was in his usual school uniform of crisp khakis and a button-down shirt that he’d ironed himself. His handsomeness and his height make him stand out among the boys in our grade, but because he’d rather sing show tunes than kick a soccer ball, his good looks don’t matter. Last October the boys on the lacrosse team wrote FAG on his locker, which meant that everyone in the school got stuck in an all-day seminar with a psychologist about the Importance of Tolerance and Understanding. It could have been worse, Todd said. It got us out of algebra.

  “Maybe she wants to copy my homework?” It wasn’t a very good guess, but, in four periods’ worth of thinking, it was the best I’d come up with—even though my grades had gotten so bad that Amber would have to be completely stupid to want to copy my work.

  Todd considered this. “Maybe,” he said, after what was, in my opinion, a way-too-long pause. “But I’m the best in English, and Tamsin’s best in math.”

  “Actually, I’m best in everything,” Tamsin said.

  “Well, maybe she wants to copy off someone who gets something wrong once in a while,” I snapped.

  “You won’t come back,” said Tamsin. “Remember Amanda Reilly?”

  Of course I did. Every girl in our grade remembered Amanda Reilly. She’d been just a kind of girl—kind of smart, kind of cute, kind of a lot of things. Then—shazam!—Gregory Bowen asked her to go to his high school’s homecoming with him. Suddenly, Amanda Reilly, or Manda, as she started calling herself, was installed at Amber Gross’s table. Aside from the new nickname, she hadn’t changed at all. No new haircut, no new clothes. Gregory Bowen’s attention was the magic pixie dust that had let her fly from being a kind of girl to a popular girl. I tried to remember if Manda had sent me a cookie.

  “I am not Amanda Reilly,” I said. I squared my shoulders and straightened the straps of my backpack as we entered the lunchroom. “I’ll be back.”

  First I walked past the table full of the kids who don’t really fit in anywhere else, the place I’d sit if I didn’t have Tamsin and Todd. Jack Corsey and his dandruff sit there, and so does Sally Cullin, who’s fat, and Alice Blankenship, who got sent home from school for a week last year after her English project turned out to be a bunch of poems about suicide.

  Next to the misfits are the boy jocks, the soccer and lacrosse players, then the girl jocks, the ones who tie their colored rubber mouth guards to shoelaces and wear them like necklaces around their necks. Then there’s a table of drama/music types who wear leg warmers and leotards
and act like they’re in High School Musical VI and try to dance in the lunch line. Todd and Tamsin and I normally sit at the end of that table: Todd’s a legitimate drama type, and Tamsin and I don’t really belong anywhere else.

  I held my breath as I passed the drama table, then walked by the hippie kids who smell like incense and play Hacky Sack and wear their hair in dreadlocks whether they’re black or white. I passed the grinds, the ones who will probably leave the Philadelphia Academy in ninth grade and go to Masterman, the city’s magnet high school, and on to the Ivy League.

  At the center of the room sit those certain girls, the girls who are jocks, or arty, or hippies, or smart, but first and foremost they are . . . easy, I guess. Not “easy” like “sex,” but as in everything they do comes easily to them, whether it’s wearing the right thing or saying the right thing or knowing the right thing to do. Amber Gross is their queen. She can even tease Mr. Shoup about his clothes. “Great tie,” she said once. “Did your kid knit it for you?” Which sounded really mean, except Mr. Shoup laughed. I’d said “Great tie” to him once, when he’d been wearing the same tie, but he’d just looked puzzled.

  I carried my lunch over to their table, a row of girls in pastel button-downs and low-rise pants and boys in rugby shirts and jeans, holding my breath again, half believing that Amber would laugh and say, “You didn’t think I was serious!”

  Instead, she smiled at me. “We saved you a seat!” she said, and squinched herself over to make room.

  I put my plastic lunch bag on the table, slid my backpack to the floor, and eased myself onto the bench, with Amber on my left side and Duncan Brodkey on my right. I felt myself flush as our shoulders touched. I’d never imagined actually being this close to him, close enough that I could smell his shampoo and see gold hairs glinting on his forearms, above the rolled-up sleeves of his shirt.

  I pulled out my sandwich, sneaking little looks: his shaggy brown hair and light gray eyes and ears that are somehow more appealing than everyone else’s. Once, in gym class, he wouldn’t put his shorts on. “I’m a conscientious objector,” he told Mr. Huff, and I’d thought that was the funniest thing I’d ever heard, even though I’d never been able to figure out exactly what made it funny.

  “So what’s up?” said Amber. She wore a slim silver bracelet on her left wrist, a necklace with a silver heart around her neck, a pink shirt, and jeans. Her hair was dark brown with lighter brown streaks. Highlights, I thought, and wondered if my mom would let me get some, then instantly decided that she wouldn’t. “Did you get a date?” she asked.

  I knew immediately what she was talking about; she didn’t mean “date” as in “boy” but “date” as in “bat mitzvah.” “Next October. How about you?”

  “June,” she said. “Do you have a theme?”

  I squirmed on the narrow seat. “I don’t think I’m going to have a theme.” In fact, I was positive I wouldn’t. The one time I’d asked my mother about it, she’d raised her eyebrows and said in a very snotty and unhelpful tone, Um, God?

  Amber looked shocked. “No theme?”

  I shook my head.

  “Huh. Weird. Mine’s Hollywood. Hey, do you want to come?”

  Did I want to come to Amber Gross’s Hollywood-themed bat mitzvah? Was a bean green? “Sure,” I blurted.

  “Cool,” she said. I noticed Manda Reilly squirting her hands with disinfectant gel. My mom puts that in my lunch bag, and I usually ignore it, but today I pulled it out and squirted my hands, too. I ate quietly and watched people’s hands and faces as the conversation swirled around me. High, twittery girls’ voices talked about homework, soccer tournaments, babysitting jobs, a sweater at Banana Republic that would be on sale soon. Deeper boys’ voices rumbled replies. I was polishing my apple on my sleeve, feeling my skin flare every time Duncan shifted or took a bite of his pizza. My own voice sounded so different from these girls’ voices. Maybe that was my real problem: No matter how I dressed or how carefully I straightened my hair, I could never sound like them, and everyone would know I was an imposter as soon as I opened my mouth.

  Amber tapped my shoulder. “Hey,” she said. I wondered how long she’d been talking to me, how long it had taken her to realize that I needed to see her in order to know she was talking to me. I watched her sparkly pink lips form the words “Is Maxi Ryder coming to your bat mitzvah?”

  The breath I hadn’t realized I was holding whooshed out of me. So this is it. Mystery solved.

  “I don’t know,” I said slowly. “She’s busy. She’s shooting a TV miniseries this summer, so she might be on location.”

  “Oh, sure,” said Amber, helping herself to one of my blue-cheese olives. (She had a French manicure. I made a note to figure out how to give myself one.) “But she’s, like, a friend of the family, right?” I must have looked confused, because she said, “She’s in your mom’s book. In the acknowledgments.” She pursed her lips and stared at me. “You’ve read it, right?”

  Before I could answer, Duncan Brodkey put down his pizza. “Your mom wrote a book?” His body was so close to mine, his mouth so close to my ear, that I could feel the words more than hear them.

  I nodded again, then looked down at my apple. The table had gone silent. Every eye was on me. The truth was, my mother had written a bunch of books, science fiction adventures in the StarGirl series, but those were under a pen name. The book that they had to be talking about was the only one written under her own name. It had been published when I was three. “It was a long time ago.”

  I watched everyone’s eyes move across the table as Sasha Swerdlow started talking. “It’s called Big Girls Don’t Cry,” Sasha said. “You guys have all totally seen it. It’s got, like, gigantic boobs on the cover.” She held her hands out way in front of her own not inconsiderable chest. “And a hot-fudge sundae, and the cherry from the sundae’s sliding down the cleavage, and anyway, it’s about this girl who’s in love with a guy, but he dumps her, and they have all this sex, and she’s got this terrible father who’s, like, incredibly mean to her, and then she finds out her mom is gay . . .”

  Duncan looked impressed. “Hot stuff.” I winced and looked away. Woman with enormous bosom and a gay mom. That certainly sounded familiar.

  Sasha kept talking so loudly that I heard every word. “And then,” she continued, “she goes on, like, this quest to Los Angeles, and she meets a duchess in a casino and finds out she’s pregnant—”

  “The duchess?” asked Duncan.

  Duchess? I thought. The cramp of panic inside my chest eased a bit. My mom didn’t know any duchesses, and as far as I knew she had never been to Los Angeles. Maybe the book was nothing for me to worry about.

  Sasha giggled. “No, silly. Allie. The heroine. And she’s totally insecure about her weight and how she looks and everything, because the baby’s father dumped her when she was pregnant, but then she falls in love with this guy back in Philadelphia . . .”

  I stuffed the rest of my lunch into my plastic bag, forcing myself to smile, trying, even though it was hopeless, to look like the rest of the girls. Dumped her when she was pregnant. That sounded familiar, too. The truth was, I’d never read any of my mother’s books—not the StarGirl ones that were published under the name J. N. Locksley, and definitely not Big Girls Don’t Cry. I’d seen it, of course. There were different versions of it lined up on the top shelf of my mom’s study, hardcovers and paperbacks and versions in foreign languages. It’s for adults, my mom had told me once, a long time ago, and I’d never been curious enough to read it. Maybe because Bruce, my biological father, had given me a copy of his book, which was published by an academic press and was all about post-apocalyptic imagery in Doctor Who. It was full of big words like “semiotics” and “synecdoche,” with some pages that were one-third filled by footnotes. I’d always figured my mother’s book was just as bad.

  “Do you see Maxi a lot?” Amber asked.

  Part of me wanted to pick up my bag, get up from the table, and go. Tamsin was rig
ht. They were using me, and they weren’t even being subtle about it.

  But another part of me kind of liked sitting there, at the center of the table that might as well have been at the center of the world, with Duncan Brodkey, who had his eyebrows raised, like he was saying, Do go on.

  I shook out my hair and turned to Amber. “My mom and I were out in L.A. in December,” I said.

  Amber grinned at me. There was a piece of olive caught in her braces. “I saw pictures of her house in InStyle. Does she really have eight hundred pairs of shoes?”

  I nodded, and when I talked, I concentrated on making my voice sound high and light, just like theirs. “At least. But she keeps most of them in storage.”

  Tara Carnahan leaned toward me, her eyes sparkling. “Did she really date Brad Pitt?” she asked. “And what about that stunt man?”

  Cadence Tallafiero got up from her seat and wedged herself next to Tara. “I heard she had his name tattooed on her arm.”

  “On her butt.” Amber giggled in my ear.

  “She’s got a tattoo, but it’s half lasered off. On her ankle. It used to say Scott, but she changed it to a heart with wings.” I sat back, feeling pleased and slightly nauseated as Tara and Sasha and Amber clamored for more details.

  When the lunch bell trilled, I realized there wasn’t time for me to go back to Todd and Tamsin, the way I’d promised. I swung one leg over the bench, wishing I had twinkly braces, too, forcing myself to smile. “Gotta go!” I said, and hurried across the lunch room, trying to make it to my friends before the bell rang again.

  FIVE

  At two o’clock on a slushy gray February afternoon, Dr. Stanley Neville’s waiting room was full of pregnant women. Pregnant women with their bellies bulging under loose smocked tops or encased in skintight Lycra, pregnant women with their husbands’ hands resting on their bumps, pregnant women by themselves, working their BlackBerries while they waited. I could look at them only with fast glances—too long, and I’d find myself staring in a way that had to be a little creepy.