Big Summer Read online

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  The girl blinked at me. “Drue Cavanaugh? Drue Lathrop Cavanaugh?” I stared. My new companion shook her head in pity at my ignorance.

  “If Drue actually forgot her money, which, PS, doubt it, the lunch ladies would just give her whatever she wanted,” she said. “Her mother’s family founded the whole school.”

  “Thank you for telling me,” I made myself say. I didn’t feel grateful. I felt angry. Maybe she hadn’t meant to, but the new girl had made me feel dumb.

  “Don’t worry. She’s a bitch. I’m Darshini Shah, but my friends call me Darshi. You can sit with me if you want to.”

  She pointed to a table in the corner. Other kids were already sitting there. One of the girls had pale white skin and a frizzy ponytail and a constellation of pimples covering most of her forehead. Two boys, one black and one Asian, had taken out a chess set and started a game. My people, I thought, feeling resigned.

  I followed Darshi across the room. We were almost at the table when I heard Drue call my name from a table in the center of the cafeteria, where she was sitting with two girls dressed the way she was.

  “Daphne? Hey, Daphne! Aren’t you going to sit with us?”

  I stopped and turned. Behind me, I could feel Darshi waiting.

  “I’m sitting here,” I said. “But maybe I can sit with you tomorrow.”

  A strange expression, surprise and anger mixed with amusement, moved across Drue’s face. The two girls at her table were easier to read. They both just looked shocked.

  For a moment, it felt like everyone in the cafeteria was staring at us. Then Drue stood up, unfolding herself gracefully from the bench. “Then I will sit with you!” She nodded at the other girls, and, after exchanging an irritated look, they, too, picked up their plates and followed Drue over to Darshi’s table. I ended up with Drue on one side of me, Darshi on the other, and the two girls from Drue’s table sitting across from us.

  Darshi introduced me to the curly-haired girl, whose name was Frankie, and to the chess players, David and Joon Woo Pak. Drue introduced me to her friends, Ainsley and Avery. The two of them looked like imperfect copies of Drue. One had blond hair, and one had brown, but they both sported versions of the same high, haphazard buns. They wore variations of Drue’s outfit: dark-rinse jeans, vintage tees, and Doc Martens boots. Ainsley’s face was long and rectangular as a coffin, and Avery had thin hair and squinty eyes. They made Drue look even prettier, like a stunning solitaire set off by a pair of smaller, flawed diamonds. I wondered, uneasily, if that was the point of the two of them, and if it was, what that might make me.

  Darshi’s friends were eating actual food, but all Drue and Ainsley and Avery had were Diet Cokes and plates of salad: iceberg lettuce, a sprinkling of fake bacon bits, a few chickpeas, and no visible dressing. I flashed back to the dry tuna on lettuce that my nana had tormented me with during the summer she’d stayed with me, when I’d been six and my parents had been working at a summer camp in Maine. Is this what girls here eat? I wondered. Clearly, not all of the girls: Frankie was eating a cheeseburger from the hot-food line, and Darshi had opened up a Thermos full of pale-brown pureed chickpeas over rice.

  I unzipped my backpack. It was a plain dark-purple nylon backpack, and I had spent a week before school started embroidering patterns on the back, starbursts and paisley swirls in threads that were orange and turquoise and indigo blue.

  “Ooh, whatcha got?” Drue asked, leaning over to look. Shyly, I unzipped my lunchbag and showed her what my father had prepared. There was a Tupperware container of poppy seed flatbread crackers, spread with cream cheese and topped with slivers of lox and circles of cucumber. There was a small bag of homemade trail mix with fat golden raisins, dried cranberries, walnuts, and coconut flakes, and a container of cut-up carrots with a cup of yogurt-dill dip, a hard-boiled egg with just the right amount of salt and pepper in a twist of wax paper, a pair of clementines, and a half-dozen Hershey’s Kisses.

  “Chocolate!” said Drue, helping herself to a Kiss. It should have been aggravating, but the funny, sneaky way she plucked just one foil-wrapped chocolate was instead endearing. “Nice lunch.”

  I felt like I owed her an explanation. “When I was little, I loved Bread and Jam for Frances,” I said. “Do you guys know that book?”

  Ainsley blinked. Avery shrugged. Darshi said, “That’s the one about the badger, right?”

  “Oh, I remember!” said Drue. “And she wants to just eat bread and jam for lunch, and so her mother makes her eat it for every single meal?”

  “Yes,” I said, delighted that there was something Drue and I had in common. “My favorite part of the book was the description of all the foods the other badgers brought to school. So my dad made me this. He calls it a badger lunch.”

  Ainsley bent her head and whispered something in Avery’s ear. Avery giggled. Ainsley smirked. Drue ignored them both.

  “You’re so lucky,” Drue said. “God. I don’t think my father even knows where the kitchen is in our house. He’ll just hand me a few hundred bucks whenever he’s home and we’re both awake at the same time.”

  “Does your father work nights?” I asked. It was the only explanation I could imagine for a dad who wasn’t awake at the same time as his daughter. Ainsley tittered. Avery rolled her eyes.

  “Ha,” said Drue. She smiled, looking amused, the way I imagined I would look at an insignificant creature who had managed something surprising—a mouse that did magic tricks, a golden retriever who’d stood on his hind legs and burst into song. “No. He travels. For business.”

  “The Cavanaugh Corporation?” said Ainsley. “You know? That’s her family.”

  Drue swatted Ainsley’s shoulder. “It’s fine.”

  Except it wasn’t, I realized. I should have known that a girl with the last name Cavanaugh was one of those Cavanaughs, the same way I should have realized, somehow, that Drue’s mother’s family had founded the school.

  Drue picked up one of my clementines without asking permission. Darshi gave me a look from the side of her eyes: You see? I watched as Drue removed the peel in a single, unbroken curl, before turning to Ainsley and saying, “So, did you end up going to the thing?” Ainsley giggled. Avery twirled a piece of her hair, folding it over so she could examine it for split ends. The three of them launched into a discussion of a Labor Day party at someone’s house, laughing and picking at their salads, ignoring me and everyone else at the table.

  While Drue and her friends chattered and giggled and moved their food around, I answered Darshi’s questions about my previous school and doggedly ate my way through everything my dad had packed, without tasting any of it. At the bottom of my lunch bag was a note. I turned away, meaning to slip the note into my pocket, but somehow Drue, who’d been talking to Avery, was suddenly looking at me again.

  “What’s that?”

  “Nothing,” I said, and crumpled the note, which read Mom and I are proud of you and love you very much, into my hand until it was a tiny, hard ball. I pushed it into the very bottom of my pocket as the bell rang. Drue, Avery, and Ainsley rose in unison, lifted their trays, and marched toward the trash cans. I trailed behind them to toss my own trash and walked to my next class alone.

  * * *

  On my way to phys ed, my last class of the day, Darshi Shah grabbed me. “I need to tell you something.”

  “What?”

  Darshi pulled me into an empty classroom. A Spanish classroom, I guessed, judging from the posters of Seville and Barcelona on the walls and the conjugation of the verb that meant “to go” on the Smart Board. With a toss of her curls, Darshi said, “Drue Cavanaugh is bad news.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She uses people. She’ll make you think that you’re her friend, but you’re not.” Darshi pulled off her glasses, then put them on again. “She did it to Vera Babson in fourth grade, and she did it to Vandana Goyal in fifth grade, and then she did it to me.”

  I
looked Darshi over, her glasses and braces, her name-brand-less sneakers and her wild tumble of hair. I pictured Drue and her friends, their effortless updos, their beautiful clothes. I remembered something my father had told me over the summer, when we’d been talking about my new school. The friends you make at Lathrop will be your friends for the rest of your life. “Okay,” I said. “Thank you for telling me.”

  “You think I’m lying.” Darshi’s voice was resigned, her expression forlorn.

  “No!” I said, trying to sound like I meant it.

  “Just watch out,” she said as the late bell trilled. At my old school, the class changes had been signaled by harsh buzzers that gave the school the feeling of a prison. Lathrop had actual bells.

  “Okay,” I said, in a loud, hearty voice. “Okay, well, thanks again.” I hurried away from her down the hall, toward the sounds of a coach’s whistle and sneakers squeaking on hardwood floors… and there was Drue, in her Lathrop School T-shirt and blue and white cotton shorts, waiting for me at the entrance to the girls’ locker room, which had floors tiled in the school colors of blue and white, and skylights, and wooden lockers, and shower stalls with curtains.

  “Hey!” she cheered, and did a bouncy little dance. Her legs, I saw, were smooth and tan, unmarred by a single scab or scar or swath of unshaved hair. My own legs had pink, squiggly stretch marks around the knees and on my upper thighs, and I knew, without looking, that there was at least one patch of leg hair I’d missed in the shower that morning. “Will you be my partner? Please? I’m terrible at volleyball.” She gave me a dazzling smile, and I found that I was helpless not to smile back.

  “Ladies!” yelled Ms. Abbott, as I scrambled into my gym clothes. “On the court now, please!”

  Drue grabbed my hand and led me out to the gym.

  “Daphne’s with me,” she announced, and pulled me against her, into the zone of her protection and approval and everything that it conveyed.

  Chapter Five

  At seven o’clock, after both Dr. Snitzers had come home and the kids were washing up for dinner, I took the subway to the apartment that Darshi and I shared on the edge of Morningside Heights, not far from where I’d grown up. Darshi and I had kept in touch all through college and especially after the bar fight, so after I’d been back home for two years, and Darshini had returned to go to graduate school, we’d agreed to find a place to share. My mother’s starving-artist grapevine meant that we’d known about the listing a day before the rest of the world, and we’d scooped up a decently sized two-bedroom in a not-very-fashionable neighborhood. The apartment, a third-floor walk-up, had tiny, oddly shaped bedrooms, but also a good-size kitchen and a wood-burning fireplace, which I liked, and was quiet, which Darshi appreciated, and over the past few years, we’d made it our own.

  I looped the garment bag over my arm and started the climb. It was Tuesday, one of the weeknights that Darshi didn’t have class or office hours. Normally, I would be looking forward to our weekly ritual of takeout and bad reality TV, but that night, all I felt was dread. For more than a week, I’d been keeping my secret. Tonight I was going to tell Darshi that Drue Cavanaugh was back in my life—and, by extension, her life, too.

  As soon as I was through the door, my dog Bingo was scampering around my knees, her stocky body whirling in circles of delight: You’re back! You’re back! You’re back!

  I’d acquired Bingo a few days after the bar-fight video. I’d been plodding along Broadway, going nowhere in particular, mostly because moving through the real world reminded me that the online one was mostly an illusion—or at least not as real as it felt. Most of the people currently discussing my looks and my body were strangers, I would tell myself as I walked. Some of them weren’t even people at all.

  My father was at work—Lathrop’s spring break hadn’t lined up with mine. My mother was home for most of the day, teaching art classes in the afternoon and at night. I’d told her about the video by then, although not about Drue’s role in the whole affair, and she’d been fussing over me like I was an invalid, giving me teary, pitying looks, asking if I wanted tea or some chicken broth, or offering to let me use the gift certificate I’d bought her for Mother’s Day to get a massage. (“Do you think having a stranger touch me is going to help?” I’d almost snapped.)

  It was better to be out of the house. So I’d gone for long, rambling walks, sometimes spending an hour or two in a bookstore or a museum before returning home. That afternoon, I’d been on my way home when I had walked past a pet store on Broadway and noticed the sign in its window: Take Home a Friend.

  I considered the sign. I’d lost a friend, that night at the bar. Clearly, I could use a new one. Our building permitted pets, although we’d never had one. Mrs. Adelson at the end of the hall had owned a succession of Highland terriers, while the Johnsons on the fifth floor had a small, high-strung Chihuahua.

  The dog in the window had the stumpy body with the broad chest and corkscrew tail of a pug or a French bulldog, but instead of being flat and wrinkly, her face had a short snout, and ears that stood straight up in the air and swiveled at my approach. Her coat was brindle, russet brown with dark-brown bands, and her eyes were big and brown. Per her sign, she had just been spayed, and she wore a red knitted sweater and a plastic cone around her neck to keep her from licking her stitches. As I peered through the window, she was halfheartedly gnawing a cloth toy that she clutched between her front paws. The poster in her window identified her as “pug/terrier/?” and read “Hello, my name is BINGO. I was a stray in Georgia and was found wandering the streets. I’m a sweet, shy girl who has come up north looking for a furever home. I am a little anxious, but I’ll be a loyal friend once I get to know you! Please come in and say hello!”

  When I opened the clear plastic door to her cage, Bingo stood, gave my fingers a grave sniff, and allowed me to pet her. When I stopped, she nudged at my hand with her snout: Did I say you could stop? When I began to scratch behind her ears, she sighed, wriggling with pleasure. Her dark eyes were sad—I’ve seen some things, they seemed to say—but she seemed happy enough in my company. And the article I’d read that morning had said that one of the fastest ways to get over pain was to volunteer, to donate money or time, to do a good deed, or to help someone who needed helping. Maybe I couldn’t help someone at the moment, but maybe something would do.

  Thirty minutes and one large check later, I had a pet bed, pet vitamins, chew toys, poop bags, eight pounds of nutritious organic kibble in my backpack, and Bingo, on a leash, trotting politely beside me. She cringed at loud noises and large men, and, when a trash truck came rumbling toward us, she planted herself against my ankles and refused to move, so I was forced to scoop her up and carry her the length of the block, tucked underneath my arm like a football. “Don’t get used to this,” I told her, setting her down once the trash truck was gone. At 101st Street, I told her we were almost home. “So take care of business here.” Bingo seemed to have heard me, dropping into an obliging crouch, then vigorously kicking dirt over her leavings. I cleaned up the mess and brought her upstairs.

  “You got a dog?” said my mother. After one look at my face, she bent down to fuss over Bingo. “Hello there, cutie!” she said. Bingo toured the apartment, gravely sniffing at the rug and the legs of the furniture, peering underneath the couch. She allowed my mother to scratch behind her ears, then she hopped onto the couch, turned three times in a circle, and fell asleep with a contented sigh.

  It worked out well. Back at school, when my classmates asked “How was your break?” I could answer “I got a dog” instead of saying “I was in a viral video because some guy called me fat and I stomped on his foot.” Bingo proved to be an excellent companion, mellow and pleasant, easygoing, and extremely photogenic. My parents doted on her as if she were a grandchild. My mother knitted and crocheted her sweaters; my father used his air fryer to make her dehydrated meat snacks.

  “I just walked her,” Darshi called from the living room as Bingo raced fro
m one end of the apartment to the other, then back again. Workout completed, she stood at my feet, panting, tongue lolling as she gave me her best beseeching look. I rummaged in the box of Alpine Yum-Yums as Bingo’s tail revolved frantically and her eyes seemed to sparkle in anticipatory delight.

  “What do you think? Thai or Burmese?” Darshi asked. “Or are we going to keep scaling Mount Mahima?”

  The month before, Darshi’s older brother Charag had gotten married in a three-day-long, six-event celebration that had culminated in a hotel ballroom in New Jersey. The party had featured hours of dancing—first Garba and then, after midnight, the DJ had started playing Beyoncé and Demi Lovato. The lavish vegetarian buffet had been replenished all night long. At the end of the night, Darshi’s mother had stood by the door, piling each departing guest’s arms with food, neatly packed and labeled by the caterers. For weeks after the wedding, we’d gorged on dhokla and shrikhand and three different kinds of dal, and we’d still barely made a dent in the stash that Darshi had started to call Mount Mahima, in honor of her brother’s bride.

  We decided to heat up some of the khadi and order spring rolls and peanut pancakes.

  I tossed Bingo the treat and went to my bedroom, clipping my camera into the tripod that I’d affixed to the doorframe. I fired off six shots of myself holding the garment bag, chose the best one, cropped it, threw on my favorite filter, and added the caption that I’d typed up on the trip home: Wondering what’s in the bag? I can’t tell you lovelies what’s in store yet, but it’s going to be (pun intended) HUGE. Big things are happening, and I’m so grateful to each and every one of you for following along on this journey. I know you’ve heard it before, but I never thought I’d be in this place, where I’d be posting pictures of myself for the whole world to see. I thought my body was unacceptable, and that I had to hide. That’s what the world tells us, right? But now, maybe, if enough of us stand up and show ourselves, just as we are, if we post about our thriving, busy, messy, beautiful lives, our daughters won’t have to swallow the same lies.