The Other Girl: A Midvale Academy Novel (20 page)

“How’s Gid?” I asked.

Nicholas shook his head. “He’s upset.”

I had expected as much, but I still didn’t like hearing it. “When is he going home?”

“Well,” he said, “apparently, the damning part of this whole thing is that Gid…”

He didn’t want to tell me, but I already knew, and plus, it was gossip anyone who knew anyone could have had access to.

“I know,” I said. “Gideon didn’t have any clothes on.”

We couldn’t help smiling at each other. I guess we were both picturing Gideon in Pilar’s closet, naked and helpless with Cockweed’s flashlight on him. The only difference was that, through Pilar’s eyes, I had actually seen it.

Nicholas smiled—and this was an expression I had never, ever seen on his face—affectionately. “You kind of got to hand it to Gid,” he said. “He comes here a virgin, and he ends up getting kicked out for being naked in the closet of the hottest girl on campus.”

Nicholas went on, completely oblivious to the idea that I might not have loved hearing Pilar referred to that way. “Apparently there’s going to be some sort of a hearing. You know.
The various parties give their sides of the story. It’s in two days. But at this point…” Nicholas looked down at his feet and shook his head. “It’s pretty much just a formality.”

I looked around the ATAT practice room, at this depressing little place with its peeling-edged Klimt prints and a wall of boring, useless books. Edie and Devon were sitting very close and whispering, and Devon was so bummed out he wasn’t even bothering to look down her shirt. Sergei thumbed through
The Lancet,
a British medical journal, but I could tell he wasn’t reading. Mickey Eisenberg was rolling a joint, and Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan, sitting at a metal desk in the corner, grading papers, her mouth straight and stiff, didn’t even notice. Poor Dan’s hair looked even flatter than usual today.

I could smell Mickey’s joint from here. It made me wonder how Cockweed could have avoided smelling the pot in the boys’ room.

Then I thought about how some of that pot had gone missing.

Finally, I remembered overhearing Cockweed talking to his friend on his cell phone that morning we were hiding out in the chapel. He’d said, “I’m not in the right frame of mind for thinking.”

Because I thought Cockweed was so stupid, I hadn’t really thought about it. But Cockweed didn’t think he was stupid. And he clearly wasn’t going to brag about his own stupidity.

Cockweed smoked pot.

It was just a hunch.

Bu considering my ability to know what people were doing and thinking, there had to be a chance it was a good one.

Pilar was sitting on her fancy sofa with her eyes closed, trying to pretend this was all just a dream. She opened them and saw around her the proof that it wasn’t—neatly stacked T-shirts, jeans, her stable of hotel-quality sheets and towels zipped inside their protective plastic sheaths. The white-hot fear she’d felt when she saw Cockweed standing outside her door, that stupid flashlight on his head, had lasted overnight. The next morning, when the drama was over and it was clear that she and Gid were just going home, it had turned into a dull, empty ache.

Her life at Midvale was over. She would never walk up the stairs of Emerson, wrinkling her nose at the common smells of Pantene and White Linen, and make a mad dash for her room, where she would be so very relieved to find herself enveloped in the delicious scents of her far superior products, her Kérastase, her Jo Malone orange blossom cologne, the delicate rose scent
of her Chanel lipstick. She would never go to the dining hall and make her special low-fat dressing out of vinegar, cottage cheese, and the chopped cilantro she brought in herself, or run around the track as the sun came up, cheering her, reminding her that her ass was growing smaller while the other girls of Midvale merely slumbered and thickened.

Back in our room, I told Edie about my Cockweed pot theory. She jumped up in the air. “No way,” she said.

“Why are you so excited?” I said. “I mean, we don’t know where he keeps it. We don’t know if it’s true. We’d have to follow him around and bust him, and we only have a few days before Gid and Pilar leave.”

Edie looked at me and shook her head. “Are you dense?”

How was I supposed to respond to that?

“You have a superpower,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said. “But I’m not in Cockweed’s head.”

Edie sat down with her pen and paper. She frowned over it for a while, scribbling down ideas. She wrote the word
superpower
. Then she circled it.

“Pilar,” she said. “Of course.”

I sniffed impatiently. “I’m not following.”

“Pilar has a superpower, too,” she said. “Being hot.”

I still didn’t follow.

“Let’s just tell Pilar that we think Cockweed may have pot, and that we want her to stay.”

“OK, but that means that we have to get Pilar to kiss Cockweed?” I said. “There’s no way that’s going to happen.”

“Ordinarily, I would say that’s right. But you do have special powers,” Edie said. “That changes everything.”

“Edie, just because I’m in someone’s mind doesn’t mean I can get them to kiss a gross pig like Cockweed.”

Edie shook her head, like I was a child who had refused to learn to tie her shoes.

“Molly,” she said, “if you’re in someone’s head, I think you can get them to do just about anything. OK. Pilar kisses Cockweed, and you get into his mind. That way, you can find out where he keeps his pot.”

She clapped her hands as if it were all so simple.

“Edie,” I said, “I hate to burst your bubble, but how do you propose we explain to Pilar that she needs to kiss him?”

Edie thought about this. “That’s a good point. We don’t tell Pilar anything. We just tell her Cockweed has pot. We came to her because we want her to stay, and we thought maybe she would help us.” She raised her eyebrows suggestively.

I thought about Pilar’s eagerness to be on ATAT. She felt like a useless ornament. She wanted to be useful. But the more we let her think things were her own idea, the better chance we had of getting her to do what needed to get done. “If we don’t tell her we need her to kiss Cockweed, she might kiss him.”

Edie looked unsure about this. But she smiled confidently. “If Cockweed has pot, and Pilar gets any kind of significant time alone with him, I’m pretty fucking sure she can figure out how to find it.”

Pilar was surprised to see us. The first thing she said was “I bet you’re glad.”

She turned away from me and went and sat in a red velvet chair in the corner of her room.

I guessed we were supposed to follow her in there.

“Why would I be glad?” I said. “I thought you—respected me. I thought you…Oh, I don’t know.”

“I do.” Pilar took a handful of her amazing hair and then looked at my hair. “Have you ever heard of lowlights?” she asked.

“I have heard of them,” I admitted. “But I can’t say I know what they are.”

“They’re…” Pilar shook her head. “They’re nothing. They’re not important. You can sit down, you know.”

I moved a pile of cashmere sweaters and sat. “You’re a very neat folder,” I complimented her. “You know, you would have been very good at ATAT. Part of it is just keeping the question in your mind. Knowing what part of your brain the answer is in.”

Pilar blinked a few times. “So like, eef you can keep your sweaters neat, you can do well on ATAT?”

I nodded. “Something like that,” I said.

“I am going to my aunt and uncle’s,” she said. “I am going to day school. Do you know what it is like, thees day school?”

I shrugged. “It’s like when you went to school when you were really little, except you’re older now. You know, you go to school and you have your friends, and then your sleep at home.”

Pilar pondered this with visible distaste. “I don’t want to sleep at home. Or near my aunt and uncle. I hate sleeping in the same house as adults. You wake up, they are there, telling you must eat two eggs instead of one, asking you los questions.”

I realized that Pilar was drunk. Well, not drunk. Drinking. How had I missed that?

It was quiet for a moment, and then she said, “What are you doing here?”

I said, “What if I told you I came up with a way you could stay here?”

She looked unimpressed and drank her wine again. “What do you care? I mean, you want Gid to stay here. Why do you care about me?”

I decided to tell her a reasonable version of the truth. “I want you on ATAT. We need you.”

I had told Edie that we should try to act calm and casual, but I think we were both too tense about the stakes of the game and what Pilar would have to do to help us win.

“You guys are scaring me,” she said. “What do you want me to do?”

I would have to just dive right in.

“Cockweed has pot,” I said, “or we think he does. And we want to be able to blackmail him with that, to tell him that unless he backs off on his charges against you guys, we’ll tell Dr. Frye. And we don’t really know what to do.”

But Pilar just snorted. “I do,” she said. “We have to find the pot.”

I was annoyed that I thought she didn’t get that. “Right,” I said. “Finding the pot is crucial. It’s the how part that—”

But Pilar cut me off, snorting again. “How? Ha. Cockweed loves me. I just have to make him think I want to sleep weeth him. He’ll tell me where it is. If I showed him my underwear, he’d tell me where was Hope Diamond.”

Pilar crossed the room and lit a white gardenia candle. In her tragedy she was arresting. Dressed in a white sundress and a woven shawl and tan cowboy boots, she moved with a gentle grace, her soft hair floating down a back held straight and dignified against her recent and public humiliation. When she turned back to look at me, her dark eyes were both mysterious
and vulnerable.
I shouldn’t act like I am so sure of myself. Cockweed ees a deesgusting moron, but what if he attacks me?
“I don’t know,” she said. “I am feeling that I am just going to take my punishment and go.”

Edie looked at me and mouthed the word
superpower.

I decided not to focus on Pilar’s saying no, but on her feelings. “Why are you nervous?” I said.

She immediately got an image of Cockweed bearing down on her with his tongue out. So she was nervous about the one thing that had to happen for this to even possibly work. And not without reason: Cockweed by himself was gross. Kissing Cockweed was unthinkable.

“Look, I know the grossest thing when I think about Cockweed would be kissing him. I mean, when I think about having to even pretend to flirt with him, I just get this image of him, like”—I looked down modestly—“coming toward me with his tongue out.”

Pilar grabbed my wrist. “Me too,” she said. “That is so weird, I was just thinking that exact thing. I swear!”

“Really?” I said. “The other thing that would freak me out a lot…”

I had nothing in mind. I was just waiting until she thought of something. I pretended to think as I watched her mind working. Now she was imagining Cockweed on the phone, telling his friends about her, how hot she was, how much she wanted him.

“I just imagine him telling his friends I was hot for him. Like calling up his old buddies from here and being like, oh, I just bagged this chick.”

Pilar looked as if she’d seen a ghost. “That is exactly what I was just thinking of.” She seemed to soften. “So you do
understand—like, really understand—how hard it would be to even go near Cockweed. I mean, you really get it.”

I put my hand over my heart. “Of course I get it,” I said. “I mean, I would do it myself. But I don’t have the same kind of feminine powers you have.”

Pilar’s beautiful eyes sprang open. I had hit a nerve.

“You really are so beautiful,” I said. “And there is so much power in that. Unfortunately, with power sometimes comes responsibility.”

I kept my tone of voice as grave as possible, and I saw that I was really having an effect on her. She was getting tears in her eyes.

“Molly,” she said, “people don’t get how hard it…” she faltered, embarrassed.

“People don’t get how hard it is to be beautiful?” I said.

Once again Pilar lit up with the spark of someone really getting her. “Yes,” she said. “You can’t stop comparing yourself to other people. And it’s not that you want to be better than they are…. Well, yes, you do, and maybe you even are, but that’s not the reason. The reason ees that you’re afraid every second that you don’t prove to yourself that you’re prettier than everyone, you’re going to get everything you have and everyone you know taken away from you.”

I nodded understandingly. “And meanwhile,” I said, “people think, oh, she thinks she’s so great, and you don’t feel that way at all.”

She was brimming with gratefulness. “I just don’t know how you get this.”

“Pilar,” I said with as much earnestness as I could muster, “I am beautiful enough on the inside to understand people who are beautiful on the outside.”

Pilar smiled, but she thought,
Molly is really gay
. “So,” she said, “you don’t know that he has pot, but you think eet?”

I nodded and shrugged. I still needed to know one thing. “What if he won’t show you the pot? Like, you’ve flirted with him and told him you want to get high…but…he’s resisting you?”

“I am not going to sleep with him,” she said. “But I guess I could go through the motions of pretending I did. I could…I could kiss him.” She made a horrible face. “Once I kiss him, just once even, I know he will tell me anything.” She thought about her beauty. About Cockweed ravishing it. She took a deep breath and swallowed the fear as the bad taste of the Elias Ganz incident crept into the back of her throat.
My beauty is a sword, and it is also a wall. I will stand in it, and fight with it, and I will win.
“If he has pot, I will find eet.” Pilar nodded confidently, and I believed her.

Luckily, Mrs. Cockweed had study hall supervision on Tuesday and Thursday nights. The disciplinary hearing was Wednesday.

We only had one chance to get it right.

I instant-messaged Dr. Whitmeyer. I thought it would take a long time to figure out how to get myself into Cockweed’s head, but he wrote back:

I didn’t know what to say.

Pilar came to my room at 7:30. ETA at Cockweed’s was 8:00
P.M
, and she had two hours to get him where we needed him. Which meant that she’d either get him to bust out the pot, or if her charms weren’t working, she’d have to go the distance and start making out with him. That was unfortunate for her, very unfortunate, but at least we’d get the desired result.

She really nailed her Cockweed outfit. She wore tight jeans that were kind of high-waisted, a white tank top, and a pink sweater, unbuttoned to show off just a little cleavage, a pair of pearl earrings and high-heeled light blue espadrilles. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and she wasn’t wearing a stitch of makeup.

“Wow,” I said. “Seriously. You look like the girl Cockweed couldn’t get at Midvale back in 1985.”

She smiled shyly, glad she had impressed me. “I theenk I overheard Cockweed saying once that girls who wore makeup were whores,” she said.

“That definitely sounds like him,” Edie said. She was sitting on my bed, and she peeked around me. “You’re gonna do great, Pilar.”

“Thanks,” Pilar said. She shook out her hands, and I saw she had polished her nails a demure shell pink.

We both shook hands with Pilar and she left.

I started to straighten some books on the shelf, but Edie put her hand over mine. “Stop,” she said. “There’s nothing else to do.”

For the last twenty-four hours I had been incessantly cleaning and straightening the room in a desperate attempt to feel some control. But at this point, it was all in Pilar’s hands, and there was nothing left to do except sit and wait to see how she did.

I sat with my back against the door.

Edie lay down on her bed. Then she sat up and looked at me. “You know you could go sit under the fire escape behind Proctor. That way at least if something happens you can run in there and—”

“What?” I said. “Both of us can get sexually assaulted by Cockweed?”

“I don’t think he’s the sexual assault type,” Edie said. “I think our biggest fear is that, as stupid as he is, he’s actually not going to be stupid enough to believe Pilar wants him.”

I decided to stay. If things got fucked up—not that they weren’t already fucked up—I was going to need Edie’s advice.

Pilar smoothed her hair. She made herself a solemn promise that if this worked, she was going to stop just relying on her looks to get what she wanted.

She wasn’t going to ignore them, of course, or let them go to waste, but the full-scale exploitation thing, that was over.

She knocked on Cockweed’s door. When she saw his shadow move across the peephole she inhaled, thrusting out her cleavage a little, and let her lips part slightly into an inviting, appealingly nervous smile.

He opened the door. He had a sixteen-ounce Coors Light in his hand. He just looked at Pilar and didn’t say anything. She felt her knees start to knock together and her breath waver.

“Hi,” she said. “How are you?”

He still said nothing.

“I probably shouldn’t be here…”

Damn, this ees hard. If I could just get a sense that he ees at all happy to see me, I would know where to take thees
.

She was going to have to take it up a level.

“I probably shouldn’t be here, but I just found that I couldn’t…stay away.”

The wolfish glint she was waiting for came up in his eyes. He didn’t open the door any wider, but his stance relaxed a little and behind him, on the coffee table in the living room, Pilar saw a stack of Coors Lights. “Stay away…from what?”

The back of her neck started to sweat as she considered what she should say next.
Thank God he ees drunk. Men always have to have sex, which he is not going to have but he is going to theenk he have, when they are drunk.

“She’s almost in,” I told Edie. “She’s trying to decide whether to keep it cool or come right out and say it.”

“Come right out and say what?” Edie asked.

“That she wants his johnson. Duh.”

Pilar looked at Cockweed’s face. He still looked suspicious. It wasn’t the right expression for a come-on. She didn’t know what the right expression was. But that wasn’t it.

“It’s just that…I really want to talk about what happened. How you caught us. I want to know something. And I don’t know why, but I feel like you’re the only one who can tell me.”

I watched Cockweed through her eyes, very carefully.

I hoped she saw what I saw. His face softened, but his eyes
stayed hard. He thought she was the fool. He thought she was the one who didn’t understand the rules of this game, and that he was in control. He was just trying to look sympathetic.

Pilar thought,
So far so good.

“I hope you’re not here to try to change my mind about what happened,” he said. “Because what’s done is done. I don’t ask you kids to break the rules, but I can’t help but enforce them when you do.”

Pilar put her hand over her heart, consciously letting her wrist press against her breast a little so Cockweed could get a sense of how soft it was. “Oh no,” she said. “If there’s one thing about me people know, it’s that when I have been bad, I can take being punished.”

Cockweed made an involuntary squeaking noise in the back of his throat, like he wanted to speak but couldn’t.

He opened the door, and Pilar stepped inside. And walked past his arm, extended in invitation. As she got a few feet past him, she looked over her shoulder, ostensibly to smile at him, but he had to look up quickly to meet her eyes—he was, as she had suspected he might be, fixated on her ass. His eyes moved up quickly, his face doglike with unconcealed shame. Cockweed wasn’t smooth. He tried to look stern, and Pilar gave him a frightened, appeasing smile to make him think he’d gotten away with it, but she was thinking, Oh, I think I have him where I need him.

“Poor Pilar,” Edie said.

“What do you mean?” I said. “She’s kicking fucking ass.”

“Yes,” Edie said. “But what if she actually gets to the point where she has to kiss him? Can you imagine?”

But I had to put that out of my mind or I would feel guilty. I told myself that if I were in her place, I would make out with
Cockweed, and decided to remember this moment as the very last time I wished I were stunning and traffic-stopping instead of just kinda cute.

Cockweed’s apartment was cavernous and old, and like the boys’ room, which was on the same floor, sloped down at the edges. Furniture was functional, a futon sofa, a couple of old chairs covered with canvas slipcovers, a big, old television. The walls were covered with Midvale memorabilia.

“The baby’s asleep,” Cockweed said as he indicated that Pilar should sit on the sofa, and he sat in a recliner at the end of it. “And the kids are at their friends’ until ten—watching that
American Idol
nonsense. You don’t watch that, do you?”

Pilar loved
American Idol,
but she said that she didn’t watch it. “It’s a leettle childish for me,” she said. “I…know I’m only sixteen, but I feel that I have…well, we have an expression in Argentina. I have
el alma de mujer
…the soul of woman.”

She looked right at Cockweed with her giant brown eyes. He adjusted himself in his chair. Then a sour expression came over his face, and he said, “Look, Pilar, I don’t have all night.”

Pilar tilted her head girlishly. “Of course you don’t. Well. I guess I felt kind of weird about the other night. And I just…wanted to talk to you about sex.”

Cockweed made a fussy adjustment of the slipcover and then tugged at his pants again. He was definitely tugging at his pants a lot—nothing wrong with that. He coughed formally. “OK,” he said.

“I…oh, this ees so embarrassing,” she said.

She had him now. Naturally, I wasn’t in his mind, but it was clear that he was extremely eager to know what this absolutely gorgeous girl about a third of his age who wanted to talk about sex was so terribly embarrassed about.

“I want you to know that I am a virgin,” Pilar said. Her heart stopped beating when she said this. Could she hear his pounding? His cheeks looked as if they’d been injected with red pen ink.

“And why did you want me to know that?” he asked.

“Oh,” Pilar said. “I just didn’t want you to think anything bad about me. Because I always thought you were one of the cool teachers here. I mean, like, you could be a hard-ass, yes?”

“Yes,” Cockweed said, looking off into the middle distance with wistful self-importance. “That I can.”

“But, like, you are not full of yourself. You totally know who you are.”

Now he looked at her. “Really? Is that what people think of me?”

Now Pilar did something really brilliant. She pretended not to hear him, and stood up.
He wants something from me, and eef I try to go now, it will be almost like it was his idea for me to come over.
“Thanks for listening,” she said. “I just didn’t want you to think just because I had a guy in my room that I was, like, you know, totally loose like all of the other girls here. So. Anyway, it was nice knowing you.”

She started to walk out. A brilliant move. Cockweed stopped her with his voice. “I think it’s very admirable you’re a virgin,” he said.

His voice wavered a little. Now he was the one taking the risk. Pilar stopped and turned, dramatic, like a heroine in a telenovela. “Thank you,” she said. “Gracias.”

“I have to admit I am curious about how exactly…you’ve managed to preserve…?

“My maidenhood?” Pilar said.

His eyes glittered. “It’s just that I rarely get to know the kids one on one,” Cockweed said.

Pilar paused. “Well,” she said. “I guess we are having…one of those conversations that doesn’t really make any sense, you know.”

“Yes,” Cockweed said. “I don’t know if you know this word, because English isn’t your first language. But we Americans might call this an interlude.”

She returned and sat down. She took a deep breath. This was her moment, the crucial moment, and she knew it. She felt sick and she also wanted to laugh.
Who ees the dumb ass who doesn’t know what an interlude ees?

She sat down, crossing her legs demurely. “Well,” she began. “I guess I just find that young boys are just after one thing. You know? They just want to have sex, and you get the feeling that they just want to do eet so they can, like, say they did it, you know? I guess I have always been looking for more of a sensual experience.”

“Hmm,” Cockweed said, trying to keep his voice light and curious. “Tell me more about that.”

“Well, you know, they’re just dying to get your pants off. They don’t like to relax and share…casual
relaxing
times together,
unwinding
.”

It was a good hint, but Cockweed shook his head in an elaborate display of sympathetic disgust.

“Those boys,” he said.

She looked at the floor. “You probably think I am being really silly,” she said. “I get thees way sometimes when I am feeling uptight and need to just let my hair down.”

“No, Pilar.” Cockweed shook his head. “I think you’re just being very real.”

Pilar counted to ten, letting the silence, and the tension, build.

“It’s just lonely sometimes,” she said. “Feeling like a woman, but having to live in the rules of girls. I like adult things. I like to have a good time just like everyone else…but most of the things people do to have a good time here…it’s not worth doing eet with those people, right?”

Cockweed said nothing. He’s either onto me, Pilar thought, or he’s eating out of my hand. Either way…

She went in for the kill.

“I mean, Gideon Rayburn is a nice boy, and he’s cute, I suppose, for a kid, but he’s a boy, you know, and…”

Cockweed started to look angry, which basically meant that his head was going from a tender pink color to a vibrant red. Pilar’s eyes darted nervously around, looking for an escape if he blew up.

“Oh fuck,” I said to Edie. “He’s onto her.”

Edie put her hand over her mouth and we sat, not moving, as Cockweed stood from his chair. “Goddamn it,” he shouted. “I can’t believe this shit.”

Pilar looked at him imploringly and was about to open her mouth and say something, anything, when he spoke again.

“It makes me sick, sick to my stomach, that those boys get their hands on a girl like you.”

Pilar bowed her head so he wouldn’t see her smile. She said nothing.

“Oh my God,” I said to Edie. “I think she did it.”

Cockweed almost shook with indignation. He slowly lowered himself back to sit. He looked at Pilar. “I’m sorry,” he said. “That was inappropriate.” But his eyes got kind of puppy-doggish, like he expected her to say something.

“Oh no, Gene, but seriously, don’t you think maybe we should…take theengs down a notch here? Mellow out?”
Jesus. I can’t make thees any more fucking obvious. If he doesn’t fall for this shit, I guess I am just going to have to start getting him turned on and then say I like to do it on pot. And then I am going to have to run or something.

“Mmm,” Cockweed said. “Why don’t you show me what you mean by taking things down a notch?”

My beauty is a sword, and it is also a wall. I will stand in it, and fight with it, and I will win.