Confessions of a Not It Girl

Confessions of a Not It Girl

Melissa Kantor

TO BEN

CHAPTER ONE

Some people probably waste a lot of time wondering if they are destined to lead fabulous and exciting lives. I am not one of those people. I need look no further than my first name to know the answer.

A Quick Renaissance Quiz

1.
Which of the following have you never heard of?

(a)
Michelangelo

(b)
Leonardo da Vinci

(c)
Jan van Eyck

2.
Jan Miller is named after

(a)
Michelangelo

(b)
Leonardo da Vinci

(c)
Jan van Eyck

3.
Jan van Eyck is a

(a)
town

(b)
woman

(c)
man

4.
Jan van Eyck painted

(a)
spectacular landscapes

(b)
magnificent frescoes

(c)
freaky, skinny giants with tiny heads

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If you answered (c) for all four, you're batting a thousand.

Welcome to my life.

Just in case you think things aren't bad enough, you should know that
Jan
is actually pronounced "Yahn." The only thing about my name I'm even remotely grateful for is everyone initially assumes it's pronounced "Jan," and I don't correct them. Well, I guess there's one other thing to be thankful for. My dad is an art history professor at Columbia University, and his all-time favorite painting is
The Garden of Earthly Delights,
by a guy named Hieronymus Bosch.

Jan
is bad.

But it's not as bad as
Hieronymus.

Walking home from the subway after school on Wednesday, I was so busy fantasizing about introducing myself with a normal name next year at college that I forgot to prepare for Brueghel's ritual assault. As a result, he almost knocked me on my butt when I opened the door. Brueghel, another hapless victim of my parents' nomenclature, like me and my brother Rogier, is a chocolate Lab and is without a doubt the dumbest animal in the entire world. People who come over usually try petting him for a minute because they're under the illusion it will get him to stop jumping, but it only works for as long as you're
actively
petting him. The second you stop, he just goes crazy again.

"Yahn, is that you?"

"Yeah, Mom."

3

"I'm just finishing up an e-mail, and then I'll be down. There's a message on the machine for you."

My mom produces documentary films, and for the past six months she's been working on one about teenage girls who got pregnant and decided to keep their babies. Last year when she started making the movie, we had this Big Talk, and she asked me all these questions about sex, and kept saying how she wanted me to feel I could come to her if there was anything I wanted to know, and how it was perfectly natural to be curious, and blah blah blah. The Big Talk took place right around the time
Chic
magazine named my best friend, Rebecca Larkin, one of Ten New York "It Girls," and so I made this joke about how if I got pregnant then my mom could put me in her movie, and I'd get to be famous, too.

Needless to say, she did not find this funny at all.

The message light was blinking on the answering machine in the kitchen. I hit PLAY, grabbed the seltzer out of the fridge, and took a swig directly from the bottle, something I do only when my mother is safely ensconced in her office on the third floor.

The first message was from my grandmother. "Hello. Hello?" There was a pause; my grandmother always sounds like she's never encountered an answering machine in her life. "Elizabeth, it's your mother. Are you there?" Pause. "So you're not there." Pause. "Hello?" Pause. "Okay, you're not there. Call me." Pause. "Okay." Then, as an afterthought, she repeated, "It's your mother."

It didn't seem as if there was another message on the

4

machine, and for a minute I worried my mom had meant for
me
to call my grandmother back, an activity about as enjoyable as retaking the SATs. But then there was another beep. "Hi, Jan, it's Sarah Gardner." My heart started to beat faster; Sarah Gardner is Josh's mom.

Josh is my new crush.

Well, I can't exactly say he's my
crush
because that would imply I only have one, and I do have a fairly significant crush on Tom Richmond. But lately, Josh has taken the lead in the Best Supporting Crush category.

I turned up the volume on the machine. "I absolutely
hate
to do this to you, but do you think you could
possibly
baby-sit Hannah Friday night? I know how
busy
you seniors are, and I know it's
completely
last minute." My mom says she can actually see the italics when Sarah talks. "But my regular baby-sitter's sick, and I have theater tickets I
hate
to lose. I think you have the number, but in case you don't, it's 555-9908."

Josh moved to New York from Seattle over the summer because his dad, whom he'd been living with, got a job in Tokyo. Well, he really moved
back
to New York, since he used to live here when he was a little kid. We were actually in the same first-grade class, but then he moved to Seattle. A few years later his mom and dad got divorced. When Sarah, her new husband, and their daughter, Hannah, came back to New York, I guess Josh didn't want to leave Seattle, so he stayed with his dad. Sophomore year I used to baby-sit Hannah every weekend, and whenever she talked about her brother in Seattle, I pictured some greasy guy in baggy jeans listening to

5

grunge music, who slept with a skateboard under his pillow.

I saw Josh the first day of school, but I didn't realize who he was at first. Not that it mattered. I was way too busy flirting up a storm with Tom in history to care about there being some random new guy in my English class. The second day of school Josh introduced himself, and we talked for a minute, and then he said, "So maybe I'll see you sometime when you baby-sit Hannah." I told him I don't really baby-sit anymore, and he said, "Well, then, I guess I'll be hanging out by myself on Friday nights."

"I guess so," I said, thinking,
What a loser.

But in retrospect there can be no doubt my usually accurate crush radar was malfunctioning when this conversation took place, because last Monday it suddenly began working properly.

I had agreed to stay after school to help Mrs. O'Connor carry boxes from the science office to the physics lab, and the job was turning out to be a nightmare. The lab and the office are practically in different time zones, and the pile of boxes (filled with stuff Mrs. O'Connor had probably been collecting since Prohibition) was wedged behind a metal cabinet. It didn't help that after every trip, I had to lock the lab door and then, when I returned with the next box, I had to stand there with it wedged between my hip and the wall while trying to figure out yet again which of the hundreds of keys on Mrs. O'Connor's key ring would unlock the door. I was on what must have been my millionth trip,

6

searching for the key and hating Mrs. O'Connor, when a bunch of guys from the soccer team walked by. Some of them said hi to me, but in spite of the fact that I was about to drop a thousand pounds of equipment on my foot, they all kept walking. Except Josh.

"You need some help?" he asked.

"No thanks," I said. I was too angry at myself, Mrs. O'Connor, and the universe to say yes. In fact, I didn't even look up at him. I just kept searching for the right key.

"You sure?" he asked.

I found the key and opened the door. "I'm sure," I said, grabbing the box with both hands and glancing in his direction.

"Ah," he said, "what a girl won't do for a college rec." And then, just before he turned and walked away, he smiled at me.

And instead of thinking,
What a loser,
I found myself thinking,
What a smile.

I started dialing the number before Sarah finished saying it.

"Hi, Sarah, it's Jan."

"Oh, you are an absolute angel for calling me back. An
angel.
Margaret is sick, and Josh has
soccer
and he doesn't know
when
he'll get home,
plus
I swore to him that I would
not
use him as a live-in baby-sitter when he moved back. Mark and I have tickets to see
Phèdre,
and I
hate
the idea of giving them up. They're
sort
of a birthday present, which I say
not
to influence you in
any
way, because if you
can't
do it--"

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"It's no problem," I said. "I'm free."
Plus I think I might be falling in love with your son.

"Oh, you are
really
too good. Really. I'm
thrilled. Can
you come at six? We have six-thirty dinner reservations. If that's no good, I can
cancel
them with no--"

"Six is fine. I'll see you then."

"Terrific! Why don't you come over
early
so I can hear all about your life. I
miss
you." She whispered the next part. "Margaret's a
very
nice sitter, but she's just so
boring."

I promised to get there before six, and we got off the phone.

With only forty-nine hours to put together an outfit that said both "I am a responsible baby-sitter who will not abandon your child to pursue pleasures of the flesh" and "I am a sexual dynamo," I headed upstairs to evaluate my options. I tried on every single thing in my closet before settling on a see-through white shirt with a white tank top under it, and a stretchy red skirt. True, Sarah might be a little surprised if I showed up to baby-sit her daughter dressed like a hooker, but there was no reason not to push the envelope. Looking at myself in the mirror, I decided I had achieved the perfect balance of responsible citizenship and sizzling passion.

Plus, the ensemble did an excellent job of hiding my butt, which is my worst feature.

I called Rebecca to inform her of the latest developments, fashion and otherwise.

"No," she said when I described what I was wearing.

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"But it's perfect." I could hear techno throbbing in the background. "Where are you?"

"Barneys." Barneys is a department store on Madison Avenue so chic it makes Bloomingdale's look like a Wal-Mart. "My mom's going through one of her I'm-a-terrible-mother crises, so she gave me credit carte blanche."

The unfairness of life will never cease to amaze me. "God, I hate my parents," I said.

"Listen to me. You have to de-emphasize your sexuality Friday night. Wait, hold on....Do you have a liner with a little more brown in it?"

In my next life, I'm coming back as Rebecca.

"HELLO!" I shouted. There was no answer. "Hello! I realize I'm not the
Chic
fashion editor, but do you think I could have a minute of your precious It Girl time?"

"Sorry." There was a pause during which I could practically hear Rebecca looking at herself in the mirror. "Look," she said finally, "obviously you should do what you want, but I think you're taking the wrong approach. The last thing you want to do is be too sexy. You'll scare him off. You want to look pretty but subtle....No, I think that's a little
too
brown."

I looked at my see-through shirt in the mirror.

"Now, when you say
subtle ..."

"You need to trust me on this: pretty but not too sexy, then you wow him with your witty banter....That's perfect. I'll take that and the lipstick."

The see-through shirt looked really nice. And I couldn't help wanting to show off my little bit of tan left over from the summer. "Can't I wow him with my

9

uncanny impersonation of a scantily clad high-school senior?"

"Try your low riders and the white agnès b. T-shirt."

"I'll call you back."

I took off what I was wearing and pulled on the jeans and the T-shirt. I stared at myself in the mirror. Rebecca was right about it being a good combination. Plus the white of the shirt did wonders for the waning-tan situation. I called her back.

"Well?" Techno had been replaced by the ambient noise of Fifth Avenue at rush hour.

"I take back everything I said. You are a genius."

"I know, I know. Sometimes I amaze even myself."

I turned my back to the mirror and looked over my shoulder. "These are extremely butt minimizing. Plus, I have this whole outdoorsy thing going on. It's like I just stepped out of a J. Crew catalog. Very Seattle."

"That's what I pictured."

Neither of us had actually ever been to Seattle, but we read a lot of magazines. I took off the jeans so I wouldn't stretch them out before Friday night.