The Next Best Thing Page 9

  That afternoon, for the first time, there wasn’t a sitter waiting for me when school got out. I was almost fourteen—old enough, my grandmother had decreed, to be home alone for the hours between when school got out and when she’d be there to start dinner. I waited for Sarah by the school doors, in case that morning had been an aberration, a cruel joke, a mistake. She was with Derek again, the two of them walking so close their shoulders were touching. This time I didn’t say anything to her, and Sarah, whom I’d seen naked, and crying, whose bikini line I’d helped wax, who’d slept in my bed and borrowed my pajamas and eaten a hundred dinners at my table, barely looked at me. I pulled my baseball cap low over my forehead (hats weren’t allowed in school, but I put one on as soon as the last bell rang) and went back inside. No way was I waiting for the bus and watching the two of them ignoring me, maybe even laughing about me. The late bus, for kids who had after-school activities, came at four. I’d ride that instead.

  I was wandering down the hall, looking for an empty classroom to sit in, figuring I’d get started on my homework, when Mrs. Seeley, my English teacher, called my name.

  “Ruth? Ruth Saunders, right? Are you here for the school paper meeting?”

  I shook my head. “I missed my bus,” I mumbled.

  “Room 112,” she said, as if she hadn’t heard me, and then stood there, watching, until I gave up and went across the hall to Room 112, where there were eight or nine kids who all seemed to know one another already. Mrs. Seeley followed me and shut the door. I looked around.

  “Okay, everyone, I’ve brought you a new recruit. This is Ruth Saunders. What are you interested in? News? Sports? Current events?”

  “We need someone to do the social calendar,” said a girl whose fine light-brown hair was coming loose from its ponytail. She wore hot-pink elastics in her braces, which matched her shirt. “It’s easy. You just talk about what’s coming up. Dances, football games, cupcake sales . . .”

  Great, I thought as she handed me a stack of announcements. So I’d join the school paper and spend my time typing up all the activities I’d never get to participate in or be invited to. On the other hand, Grandma had already started talking to me about the importance of extracurricular activities and how I should find something I enjoyed, something I was good at, something with writing, something that would impress the colleges to which I’d eventually apply.

  Room 112 was the school’s media room, with a dozen laptops on a long table against one wall. The ponytail girl, whose name was Brittany, helped me open a new document, gave me a word count, and showed me how to title the document, how to format the headline and the byline, and where to send it when I was through. I sighed, trying to put the image of Sarah and Derek out of my head, and started typing. The JV cheerleading squad will be holding a bake sale to raise money for the library every day at lunch the week of September 20, I typed. Don’t forget the Sadie Hawkins Dance on November 3. The Salvation Army welcomes your donations of winter boots and jackets. Please leave them in the bin outside the guidance office. And then, when I was done and no one was looking, I wrote, WHICH freshman has a zit on his or her forehead that rivals Mount Vesuvius, and WHEN will it finally erupt? Send your best guesses to the editor. Winner gets a cream-filled Hostess cupcake. I snorted and then hit SEND. A minute later, I heard Brittany’s shout of laughter from across the room . . . and, for the first time since that morning, I felt as if the world might be a place I wanted to live in.

  “We can’t print this,” Brittany said when she came back to my desk.

  “Why not?” I was surprised by myself. Normally I didn’t talk to strangers. I didn’t like them looking at me.

  “Because it’s illegal?” Brittany said . . . but she didn’t sound very certain. “Or libel. Or slander. One of those.”

  “Why? I’m not naming anyone. I’m not even saying if it’s a boy or a girl. It could be anyone, really.”

  “Hmm.” With the tip of her tongue, Brittany twanged the elastics that hitched her top braces to her bottom ones. “Let me ask Mrs. Seeley.”

  Mrs. Seeley, of course, put a stop to things, citing the school’s anti-bullying policy. “How would you feel if someone wrote that about you?” she asked. I hung my head, blushing, thinking that kids were probably thinking worse things about me, and saying them to one another, all day long. I could walk her down to the girls’ room at the end of the hall and show her what I’d seen on one of the stall doors. By 3:45 I’d turned in my copy, along with a typed-up list of the school lunches for the week ahead, and was trudging out to wait for the late bus when I heard someone calling my name.

  “Hey, Ruth! Wait up!” There was Brittany, with even more of her hair flopping around her flushed cheeks, and a boy, a senior, whose name I didn’t know.

  “We have an idea for . . .” The boy looked around, even though the halls were empty. “An underground paper.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Instead of the official paper, it’d be something we did on our own and distributed ourselves,” said Brittany.

  “That thing you wrote,” the guy continued. “About the zit. That was funny. We want to have a gossip column, and if we do them all as blind items . . .”

  “You know, where you don’t say anyone’s name,” Brittany said.

  I nodded. I knew what blind items were. I’d seen them in Suzy’s column in Women’s Wear Daily, to which my grandmother subscribed (she was, she joked sometimes, the only woman in our zip code, possibly our state, with a subscription). “‘WHICH very-married socialite was spotted on a very private Jamaican beach, cavorting with a man young enough to be her son, while her husband was stuck in Manhattan for Election Day?’” I quoted.

  This time, the look the two of them exchanged was puzzled.

  “Like that, but with kids who go here,” I said. “Like, WHICH going-steady senior was spotted at Howard Johnson’s sharing a sundae with a girl who’s definitely not his girlfriend?”

  “Who?” Brittany asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know. I just made that up.”

  “So you’re interested?” Brittany asked.

  I looked at the clock. There were five minutes until the bus came. “What if we get in trouble?”

  Brittany and the boy exchanged a smile. “We’ll cover our tracks,” said the boy. “If you’re interested, write something up, and give it to Brit by Friday. We’ll be in touch.”

  The bus came groaning up to the curb. I took a seat in the back, yanked my cap down again, pulled out a notebook, and opened it to an empty page. When you looked like I did, people went out of their way to not see you, to act as if you weren’t there. This was lucky—it meant that I could go almost anywhere, and that I saw and heard a lot that wasn’t meant for my eyes or ears. I uncapped my pen and began. WHO is the Goth girl who wipes off her black eyeliner and unlaces her Doc Martens once a week for Girl Scout meetings? WHICH cheerleader is doing more in the bathroom after lunch than freshening her lipstick? WHICH teacher, who’s been telling everyone she did Weight Watchers over the summer, actually had a gastric bypass operation over summer vacation? DID that varsity wrestler really get a fat lip during last week’s meet . . . or did he get his mouth stuck on his old girlfriend’s new braces? I was so involved in what I was writing that I almost missed my stop. It was mean, I knew. It made me no better than all the kids who called me Frankenstein and whispered about my face. But, I had to admit, it felt wonderful.

  The next morning, I gave Brittany what I’d written. At lunch-time, when I was preparing to buy some milk, take my book, and sit outside by myself again, she found me in the cafeteria and grabbed me. I saw Sarah’s eyes widen as Brittany whisked me past Sarah’s table and over to her own, which was in one of the prime spots, underneath a window, and filled with other juniors and seniors. “So how much of this stuff is true?” she asked.

  I squirmed, wishing for my hat. The Goth Girl Scout was Mandy Pierce, and I knew her secret only because we went to the same dentist and I’d seen
her there one afternoon in her uniform, sash and all. The teacher was Mrs. Gerlach, who taught typing. I’d heard her talking about Weight Watchers and getting to school early to walk on the track in the teachers’ lounge, where I’d gone to drop off that morning’s attendance count, but I’d seen a copy of Eating Well After Weight-Loss Surgery tucked in her purse, along with bottles of vitamins and a protein shake in a glass bottle. I didn’t know any bulimic cheerleaders, but I’d heard enough gossip to figure I was safe in what I’d written, because there had to be at least one; and the wrestler was Sarah’s older brother. I’d heard the story about how he’d hurt his lip from Sarah the week before, back when we were still talking.

  I told Brittany what I knew. “Can you do this every week?” she asked, and I pretended to think it over before answering with a casual, “Sure, I guess,” even though I wanted to jump up and down, to shout with joy, to march over to where Sarah was sitting, more or less in Derek Nooney’s lap, and tell her that maybe she had a boyfriend, but I had friends . . . and a job.

  “Do you have a title?” asked the guy I’d met the day before—he was the editor in chief of the school paper, and of this new, secret underground venture. His name was Joel Kingsbury, and he was handsome, in a thoughtful, pale, bespectacled way.

  “How about ‘Our Lips Are Sealed’?”

  “I like it,” Joel said, and smiled at me. Warmth rushed through my body, from my toes to the top of my head . . . and that was my A Star Is Born moment. Joel slid to one side, Brittany moved to the other, and just like that, like magic, there was room on the bench for me. It was like my dream of television: the glass softening and parting, so that I would have a place in the world.

  The underground paper was called Hellmouth, because Brittany was a Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan, and it came out every two weeks, unless Joel or Anita, who wrote columns about politics, or Sean, who drew the cartoons, got busy or sick. We’d type it up on a laptop and print it at Brittany’s, since her mother had a copier, and leave it in stacks in different places each time—under the bleachers in the gym, in the girls’ and boys’ first-floor bathrooms, in a corner next to the microwaves in the home-ec kitchens. We’d get to school at six in the morning on Drop Days, with piles of the papers in our backpacks, and creep around the building, delivering them, before piling into Joel’s car and going to HoJo’s for breakfast. In my four years of writing “Our Lips Are Sealed,” only one person ever figured out that the anonymous author who signed each column “Kisses!” was me.

  It was right before Christmas when I left my meeting at the official school paper, the Framingham High Observer, and found Sarah on the low wall where I’d been sitting when I’d first seen her and Derek. She must have been waiting for me. “You need to stop writing all that mean shit about Derek’s face,” she began.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said coolly. After my first Mount Vesuvius reference, I’d instituted a regular feature in the column called “ZitWatch.” When Derek’s forehead zit had finally exploded, I’d taped a Hostess cupcake to the locker of the person who’d gotten the date right, and then turned my attention to the pimple on his chin.

  “I know it’s you,” said Sarah. “You’re the only one in ninth grade who’d use a word like protrusion. You’re such a show-off.”

  I stared at her blandly. Maybe I was a show-off, but at least I didn’t stuff my bra. Which Sarah did. Maybe I’d use that in next week’s column.

  The bus pulled up to the curb, and I started to walk past her. My throat felt swollen, and my eyes were burning. I wondered what she’d done with that Tiffany locket I’d bought her. I’d saved for weeks to buy it, and when my grandmother had offered to chip in, I’d told her no.

  “You should cut it out!” Sarah’s voice was loud and shrill, and she sounded like she might have been crying. “He can’t help how he looks!”

  Oh, I thought. Like I can? I turned around.

  “You were supposed to be my friend,” I said. Sarah stepped back. Clearly, she wasn’t expecting me to say anything except that I was sorry, which I wasn’t.

  “You’re just jealous,” she retorted. “Because I’ve got a boyfriend, and nobody’s ever going to want you.”

  I felt my eyes flood, and blinked fast, so the tears wouldn’t spill down my cheeks. “I’d rather have no boyfriend than Derek Nooney,” I said. “How can you let him kiss you? Aren’t you afraid that one of his—what’s that big word? Oh, right. Protrusions—one of his protrusions is going to explode all over you?”

  “Bitch,” said Sarah.

  “Human Stridex,” I responded.

  Her face crumpled, and I could tell what she was thinking: that the next time she picked up a copy of Hellmouth, she might find herself on the receiving end of my attention, being called Human Stridex for all the world to see. Without another word, she turned, her shoulders slumped. Triumph surged through me, hot and heady. I’d won. It was undeniable. But it didn’t feel good. All I wanted to do was to run after her and ask her why: why she’d dumped me for Derek Nooney, why she acted like she couldn’t even see me anymore.

  My grandmother was, of course, thrilled that I’d joined the school paper, that I had an activity, that I’d made friends. She clipped each story I wrote and had them all laminated and then bound in a scrapbook. I never told her about Hellmouth, but I was pretty sure she knew—at least once a month, I’d host a staff meeting in my bedroom, with the door locked and four or five senior staffers gathered around Charlie McKenna’s laptop (his father worked in computer science, and Charlie was one of the first kids to have one). She would provide us with snacks—piles of sandwiches, bowls of popcorn, platters of cookies—and I’d hear her humming, moving past our room as we whispered and laughed. By the time I was a senior, editor in chief of both papers, I’d made up my mind: somehow I would find a way to write for a living when I grew up. I’d find a way to use my voice, funny-mean and observant, to earn my keep, to make my name, to carve out a place in the world.

  SEVEN

  The Monday morning after my conversation with Shelly, I pulled on my old navy-blue interview jacket—only by now I knew enough to pair it with jeans and a fedora, instead of heels and a skirt. I straightened my hair, painted my face, and proceeded, dry-mouthed and sweaty-palmed, to the Burbank offices of Two Daves Productions. I’d pulled into the lot a neurotic forty-five minutes early, parked my Prius, and established myself in the eighth-floor waiting room that, save for the Bunk Eight posters on the walls (tanned, white-teethed specimens of both sexes conducting a pillow fight in a picturesque cabin in the woods) and the copies of Variety and the Hollywood Reporter on the coffee table, could have fronted an insurance office, or a dentist’s, or a bank.

  I silenced my cell phone, crossed my legs, and opened up the folder containing everything I could find about the men I’d be meeting with, and began to reread.

  The Two Daves were David Lieberman and David Carter. Friends since college (Harvard, of course), they’d been staff writers all through their twenties before landing a development deal, during which they’d created the sitcom Bunk Eight. Shelly had told me that their previous assistant had just left under mysterious circumstances, and that the Daves were eager to replace her immediately, if not sooner.

  I was halfway through reading an interview the Daves had done with The Onion (they’d insisted on conducting the session in Big Dave’s hot tub—as you do, I thought) when the door swung open and a little black-and-white dog came bombing out of the office, zipped past the receptionist, and hopped smartly up into my lap.

  “Oh, hi there!” I said, startled. The dog looked at me with bright black eyes and then gave my nose a single lick and curled up in my lap as if it had known me all its life. One of its ears stuck straight up, the other flopped as it ran, and I remembered something I’d read somewhere—that when God sees a dog he likes, he folds one of its ears down to remember it.

  “Pocket, off!” boomed a voice from inside the office. The dog lifted its
head, sighed, and then hopped off my lap. I got to my feet as an extremely tall, handsome man stepped out of his office.

  “Sorry about that, Ruth. You’re Ruth, right?” I nodded, brushing dog fur off my legs.

  “I’m Dave Lieberman. You can call me Big Dave. It’s self-explanatory.” He raised his voice, shouting in the direction of a closed door. “Hey, asshole! Your therapy dog tried to hump our job candidate’s leg!”

  “Oh no it didn’t!” I cried as a calm voice issuing from behind a wall called, “Pocket, go to place.”

  The dog obediently trotted to a fluffy rectangle of padding in the corner and curled up. Big Dave winked at me. “It’s a she,” he stage-whispered. “You’re not allergic or anything, are you?” I shook my head. I hadn’t grown up with pets—my grandmother was not, as she put it, a dog person, and I’d never lobbied for a bird or a fish or a cat—but this dog, now regarding me calmly with its chin on its paws, seemed like an excellent example of its kind. Besides, plenty of showrunners brought dogs to work—it was one of the job’s common perks or affectations, depending on your attitude and on the dog’s behavior.

  While Big Dave fished a treat out of a ceramic jar labeled TREATS, I took a moment to consider my possible new boss. True to his nickname, Big Dave was over six and a half feet tall, and everything about him was large. He had enormous hands, and feet the size of loaves of bread. His nose was a generous hook, his teeth looked slightly larger what most men I knew had in their mouths, and his chin jutted heroically, like a little kid’s drawing of a superhero. Then there was his hair, a shoulder-grazing mop of glossy brown that he was constantly fussing with, combing with his fingers, pulling into an impromptu ponytail, and then releasing to hang in waves and ringlets against his cheeks.