Confessions of a Not It Girl (19 page)

I wasn't exactly under the illusion that one day was all it would take to turn me into the love of Josh's life, but the last thing I expected was for things between us to get weirder than ever.

I woke up just as Sarah was making the turn onto her block. Josh was already awake, but if he noticed I was up, he didn't say anything. As soon as Sarah stopped the car, almost before she had put it in park, he muttered something in my general direction that sounded like, "See ya," and practically leaped out the door. I was still half asleep, and my mom and Sarah had barely begun their epic good-bye when Josh, taking the stairs three at a time, opened the door to their house and disappeared.

Was there drool on my chin? I rubbed my hand over my face, but it felt dry. Had my sleeping given Josh the chance to observe my interview outfit in all its glory, thereby enabling him to realize I was part teenage girl, part circus act?

Was I doomed to spend the rest of my life trying to read the minds of schizophrenic boys who flirt with you one minute and run away as fast as they possibly can the next?

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Mark appeared on the stoop with Hannah, who immediately came bounding toward the car. She opened the door and practically hurled herself at me, yelling, "Jan! Jan!" I'd never known a human being could bear such a strong resemblance to a Labrador retriever.

"Hey, Hannah," I said. I was still groggy, and part of me kept expecting Josh would come back outside any second. Maybe he'd just had to pee or something.

"I want Jan to be my baby-sitter again," Hannah yelled at her mother. "I hate Margaret."

"You do not hate Margaret," said Sarah. "It's very sweet how much you love Jan, but it doesn't mean you can't love Margaret, too."

"Don't you want to baby-sit me anymore?" asked Hannah. She looked up at me with her enormous eyes, and I didn't know what to say. What I wanted was to be too busy going on dates with her brother to be her babysitter, but the odds of that happening appeared about equal to the odds of my imaginary life earning me a Tony Award nomination.

"Well--" I started to say. I knew I had to craft my answer very carefully. You don't have to take a psychology elective to know kids can be scarred for life if they feel rejected in childhood.

"We're getting a puppy!" Hannah said before I could explain how I think she's a really great kid and my not baby-sitting her wasn't because she'd done something wrong.

"You are?" I asked. Hannah wasn't snuggled against me anymore; she was struggling to get out of the car.

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"Oh, boy," said Sarah, leaning back against the seat and closing her eyes. "I was
not
prepared for this." I couldn't have said it better myself.

I couldn't call Rebecca to process what had happened until I escaped from my dad's how'd-you-like-Amherst "chat," which consisted of him hurling rhetorical questions at me.

"Isn't it a beautiful campus?"

"Don't you just love New England?"

"What a fabulous town, right?"

I nodded until I thought my head might drop off and then made a dash for the phone.

"Hello?" She picked up on the first ring, sounding like she had run just as fast to answer the phone as I had to dial it.

"It's me. You won't believe--"

"I got into Brown."

"Oh my God!"
Say something positive. Say something positive. Do not start bawling. Do not start bawling.
"That is so...
awesome!
" I was still in the hallway, where I'd frantically dialed her number. Pieter rubbed against my ankle and I picked him up and carried him into my room.

"Can you believe it?"

Normally Pieter doesn't like to be picked up. He prefers coming to people on his own terms. But tonight it was like he sensed what a horrible time I was having and had decided to make an exception.

"That's...that's incredible." I lay back on my bed, and Pieter sat on my chest.

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"Listen, I want to hear all about Amherst, but my dad's taking me out for dinner. He wants to talk about my going to
law school!
"

"But you just got into college."

"Tell me about it. Hey, do you want to meet me at Victoria's Secret in SoHo tomorrow? I need something for a"--she lowered her voice--"special occasion."

"Sure," I managed to say. "Sounds like fun."

"See you at two," she said. Then, laughing, she added, "It's all going according to plan."

I hung up the phone and closed my eyes, frightened about whose plan it was going according to.

"I've decided New Year's Eve is the night," she told me as we wandered through Victoria's Secret. "I know it's kind of cheesy, but still...." She held up a lacy red thong, looked at it, then shook her head and put it back on the rack. "I think it's a good idea to start the year with a life-altering action."

"When do you come back from Belize?" Rebecca would be spending the week after Christmas bonding with her mother at a five-hundred-dollar-a-night spa. I would be spending that very same week bonding with unfinished college applications and my grandmother, who in all my seventeen years had never said much to me besides "Get your hair out of your eyes."

"We get back December thirty-first," said Rebecca. "My plane lands at five, and I'm meeting Brian at eight. D-day."

"More like V-day," I said.

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She held up a black teddy with red feathers at the top and red pom-poms at the bottom. "Oh, yeah, something subtle," she said, laughing.

"Or maybe you'd rather go with a classic." I held up a leopard-print velvet bra and growled.

"It's so-o Lion King," she said.

I rejected a couple of tacky-looking black lace thongs. "Are you going to tell him it's your first time?"

"Are you
crazy?
A twenty-one-year-old virgin?" Rebecca checked the size on a pair of white silk underwear.

I handed her a dark blue bra with a little lace edging. "So I don't get it. What's the lingerie festival for if he's not even going to know something significant is taking place?" I had stopped trying to judge Rebecca's situation with Brian. Now I was just trying to understand it.

"It's
pour moi,"
she said, grabbing a pair of underwear to match the blue bra.

"So it's like you're kind of losing your virginity with yourself," I said.

"That's a
lovely
image, darling," said Rebecca. She was carrying about ten different bra-and-underwear combinations.

"I think you can only take in six at a time," I said.

"So they'll arrest me." She looked at my empty hands. "Aren't you going to try on
anything?"

I kind of wanted to try something on, but it's humiliating to buy sexy lingerie when no one is going to see it. Given the trajectory of my love life, I should have been at

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Macy's, buying Lollipop underwear with little dancing bears.

Finally Rebecca convinced me to try something on just to keep her company, so I took one of the blue bras with the lace. We waited until we could find two dressing rooms next to each other and then went in.

The blue bra fit okay, and I actually thought about buying it. After all, how often can you find expensive lingerie that's as boring as your nonexistent sex life? But when Rebecca came into my dressing room, she vetoed it.

Actually, what she said was, "Yawn, Yahn."

"Yet that seems somehow appropriate," I said, taking it off. I still hadn't told her about the agony and the ecstasy of my day with Josh. I knew she'd be really supportive and take the whole thing seriously, but how embarrassing is the recap of a daylong he said/she said when the person you're talking to is shopping for virginity-losing lingerie?

"Try this one," she said, handing me a hanger and turning back to her dressing room. "It's too small for me." In addition to being thinner than I am, taller than I am, richer than I am, and more famous than I am, Rebecca, of course, has bigger boobs than I do.

Sometimes I think our friendship is nothing short of a miracle.

The bra she handed me was white silk with red piping. It looked cheesy until I put it on.

Then it looked
awesome.

Normally I wear crop-top bras from Banana Republic. They're really comfortable because it feels like you're just wearing a tight T-shirt under your real shirt.

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But this bra was a bra-bra. It had thick straps, and it kind of pushed my boobs up and together until there was a little V between them. I turned to the side. Somehow with my new boobs, my butt looked smaller.

"Let me see," said Rebecca, knocking. I opened the door.

"Va-va-voom," she said. "Jan, you look awesome."

I turned back to face the mirror. I really
did
look awesome. It was if I'd gone from Victoria's Secret customer to Victoria's Secret model.

"You
have
to get it," she said. "It's perfect."

She was right. It
was
perfect.

And tragically, nobody but we would ever get the chance to know that.

Christmas vacation, my sexy new bra notwithstanding, started out bad and got worse.

My grandmother arrived from Florida the same day Rebecca left for Belize. That meant right about the time Rebecca was settling into business class with her fruity cocktail and complimentary cheese plate, I was driving back from LaGuardia in a thunderstorm, while my grandmother described her newly diagnosed irritable bowel syndrome.

Some people worry about getting hit by lightning.

I longed for it.

Maybe I wouldn't have been so depressed about my train wreck of a vacation if the last few days of school Josh hadn't been totally weird, acting like Amherst had never happened. In English, I kept trying to make eye

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contact with him, but each time his eyes happened to drift my way he'd make sure they were focused on the clock over my head. I started to worry that my overactive imagination had invented our day together. By the very last day of school, when Josh zipped by me as we were leaving the Christmas assembly without so much as a "Have a great vacation," I was pretty sure I was bordering on complete insanity.

Actually, I wasn't the only one with a tenuous hold on her mental well-being. After twenty-four hours of my grandmother's complaining and criticizing, my mom started to lose it, pulling at her hair, rolling her eyes, and muttering things under her breath.

She was like a cross between a teenager and a homeless person.

"I don't see why Rogier had to go skiing with his friends. It's not like I come up from Florida every day." It was the second night of my grandmother's visit, and we were sitting at the kitchen table eating cheese and crackers and trying to decide if we should go out for dinner or order in.

"Ma, it's nice that he's made so many friends at school," said my mother, even though she'd been complaining to my dad about the exact same thing only two days ago.

"What?" said my grandmother. She doesn't hear very well, but she's too vain to wear a hearing aid. I don't really see what the point of being vain is when you're about a thousand years old, but my mom says maybe when we're that age we'll understand.

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My mom shouted this time. "I SAID IT'S NICE THAT HE'S MADE SO MANY FRIENDS AT SCHOOL."

My grandmother shrugged.

"We'll just have to have a good time without Rogier," my mom said loudly.
"He's
the one who's missing out." Her voice was cheery, but I caught her digging her nails into her palm the way I do when I'm trying not to strangle someone (usually her).

"We made a reservation for tomorrow night at that restaurant you liked so much last time," shouted my dad, opening a bottle of wine. His voice was unnaturally cheery, too.

"What restaurant?" asked my grandmother.

"The French one," said my mom. "The one with the blue tablecloths you said were so pretty, remember?"

"I don't like French food," said my grandmother, brushing some crumbs off her shirt. She looked out the window at the rain that was coming down again. "It's raining so
hard.
It was sunny and eighty in Florida when I left."

I caught my mom and dad rolling their eyes at each other. "Don't you remember Les Trois Canards, Mom?" said my dad. "You said normally you hate French food and then after dinner you said it was your new favorite restaurant? You had the roast chicken?"

My grandmother shrugged again. "I don't usually like French food," was all she said.

"Jan really enjoyed visiting Amherst," said my mom, changing the subject. She looked at my dad a little

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too gratefully when he handed her a glass of wine. I think if anything could turn my parents into alcoholics it would be my grandmother's annual visit. "We went up there a couple of weeks ago, and she had a very good interview."