The Other Girl: A Midvale Academy Novel (21 page)

And then Pilar Benitez-Jones fell to her knees, placed her hands on Cockweed’s thighs, and gazed upon Cockweed’s meaty face with quite as much reverence as if she were Guinevere gazing for the first time at her Lancelot.

She forced herself to slide her hands up his thighs as she felt her stomach turn over.

Cockweed pulled away. “How do I know this is for real, Pilar? How do I know this isn’t some kind of trick?”

Pilar swallowed. She knew she didn’t have much time to think. The really obvious, cheesy stuff had totally worked with him, so she might as well just try more. “It would be your word against mine,” she said, “and I’m not wearing a wire. See?” With this, she whipped her shirt open. She was wearing a bra.

Cockweed leaned toward her.

“Would you like to see how a real man kisses?” he said.

“Oh yes,” Pilar breathed. She closed her eyes tight, and her whole body stiffened.

“She’s kissing him,” I told Edie. It was easy to guess what Cockweed was thinking right now, because he was staring at Pilar’s breasts:
Pilar has awesome breasts
.
I can’t wait to see them, Pilar has awesome breasts, I can’t wait to see them.

Her mouth was inches away from his when there was a sound of a key in the lock.

Pilar didn’t even think. She ran for the bedroom closet, diving behind a pile of coats. From behind them she watched as Cockweed hurried to straighten up the couch. When his wife came in, he was just plumping up a pillow.

She lit into him right away. “What the fuck are you doing, Gene?”

Wow
, Pilar thought,
Cockweed’s life sucks
.

Mrs. Cockweed was wearing a raincoat and a sort of silly, floppy rain hat. She disappeared down a hall, and Cockweed, scratching his head in panic, followed her.

“All you do is sleep,” Mrs. Cockweed railed from the other room.

“That’s bullshit,” Cockweed said. “I was just straightening up the couch because you’re such a terrible housekeeper.”

OK. Maybe I don’t feel so bad for him. I mean, not that I really did. Just for a second.

As the Cockweeds continued to bark and snipe at each other in the living room, Pilar inched out of the closet.

I failed. I didn’t get the pot. Molly and Edie are going to theenk I’m a loser. Who cares? They’re not that great. But I really wanted to find the pot. Look at Cockweed’s stupid shoe tree in his closet. His wife’s shoes are all so ugly. You can’t blame a guy for being mad when he’s married to a woman with such ugly shoes. Oh my God, his slippers are so gay. I guess I’m just going to wait een here? Maybe all night? No. When she goes to the bathroom. Except the bathroom’s een here, and if they’re married, she probably pees with the door open. I can’t stay here all night. His slippers are corduroy. They have, like, thees gross bow on them. Ew. Imagine having bows on your slip
pers. Wait.
She stepped forward and poked the bow with her finger. It made a crinkling sound. It was a bag of pot.

Cockweed appeared in the doorway. He hissed, “Get out of here! My wife’s making micro wave popcorn. You have two minutes.”

Pilar stepped out and started to walk around him to the front door.

“No way,” Cockweed hissed. “The window.”

The bedroom window was open, and there was a tree outside, the tree that was the twin, symmetry wise, to the tree that grew outside Proctor 307.

OK. I gotta get out of here.

“Come on, Edie,” I said. “We gotta go.”

Edie ran out with me and didn’t argue.

It was a good thing that even under all those layers of
alfajor
chubbiness her core muscles were still so strong, because Pilar needed them to get out of that window and onto that tree. It was easy enough to climb down, until she got to the bottom.

The lowest branch was fifteen or so feet from the ground. Pilar leaned on a branch at waist level. Her arms started to shake.
If I jump out of a tree, I’m probably going to break an ankle. Or a wrist. Or a knee.

“Pilar!”

Pilar looked down. Edie and I were standing there, smiling up at her, each of us holding two cushions that we’d grabbed off the sofas and chairs in Emerson.

“How deed you know I was—”

“There’s no time for that,” Edie said. “Jump.”

Pilar crossed herself and then jumped.

It wasn’t a jump worthy of crossing yourself. We each got
one of Pilar’s arms, and we all fell backward. The cushions went flopping off to the side of our ugly human heap, totally useless. It didn’t feel good, but none of us were going to die. We all lay there for a minute, and then we heard the sound of a window closing above. We looked up. It was Cockweed. He blinked into the darkness. “Stand up,” I whispered. “Wave to him.”

Pilar stood up. She waved. Cockweed waved back. The window closed, and Pilar turned away from us and vomited into the grass.

Before the hearing the next morning, Pilar came into the bathroom while I was brushing my teeth and looked at me in the mirror. “Hi,” she said.

“Hi,” I said.

She couldn’t not check me out—couldn’t not look at my hair, my mouth, even my ears, and to wonder if maybe Gid still loved me, if he still thought about me.

She decided that he probably didn’t.

“What are the chances that you’re going to be able to take care of thees?” she said.

“Hundred percent,” I said. “You don’t even have to go to the hearing. It’s not even going to happen.”

Maybe
, Pilar thought,
Gid liked Molly not just because of her body and stuff, but because she was cool
. This was an amazing thought for her.

“OK,” Pilar said. “I am going to stop packing. I will just relax. Maybe I will just watch
The Hills
on my computer.”

We just stood there. “I know you mostly did thees to get Geedeon back in school,” she said. “But I really like him. I know he…has feelings for you. But I think he has feelings for me too and…”

I set my toothbrush down. Pilar was afraid of me now, just as I had been afraid of her. “I promise I won’t fuck with you and Gid,” I said. I meant it. Pilar had been pretty cool to go through with what I wanted her to do with Cockweed, and I just wasn’t going to mess with her anymore. I had to get out of her head eventually. And Gid would pick who he wanted. There was nothing I could do about it.

She didn’t believe me.
Molly will do anything to get Gid back. She still loves him, and he ees everything to her.

“I know you don’t believe me,” I said, “because, yes, I do still have feelings for him. But I will be OK. I…what I really want more than anything right now is for us to win that match. That’s really what I want right now.”

Her face lit up. It was amazing how, when you knew someone’s fear and were honest about it and addressed it, they felt better. “I believe you,” she said. Then she frowned. “I don’t know how I am going to not be freaking out until thees is over,” she said.

“Go study,” I said. “Go study and just assume you’re going to that match with us.”

There was a rule at Midvale that, if you were going up against the judicial board, you were entitled to have any member of the community present at your hearing. So when Edie and I stepped out of Emerson that morning, dressed neatly in the same prim, preppy outfits we wore for Academic Tête-à-
Tête, we were quickly joined by Nicholas, Cullen, Devon, and Liam coming down the path from Proctor, all looking grim in sport coats.

“This is so gnar-gnar,” Devon said, touching what looked like a painful stripe of razor burn on his cheek. “It’s total Angnartica.”

Nicholas shook his head. “That’s a really bad one.”

“Gideon’s already there,” Cullen said to me. “He just went to the room where they’re having the hearing to just sit there, I guess. I guess he feels like he’s getting it over with that way.”

“I can’t believe it’s called a hearing,” Nicholas said. “Like anyone is going to hear anything. But I think we prepared a very good statement about why he should stay.”

“Dude,” said Cullen, turning to me. “We describe being friends with Gid and how when he first came here he was a chickenshit loser with, like, Dave Matthews records. And how he’s so much not that much of a fag anymore, and how Midvale made him kind of cool. I mean, we made him cool, but we say Midvale.”

Nicholas shook his head at me to let me know that the statement was only like that in Cullen’s mind.

Cockweed stood on the steps of the Administration Building, his chest puffed up with pride. A smile at the corner of his lips let me know that his magical evening with Pilar Benitez-Jones was dancing around somewhere in that monkey brain of his. The sun shone off the top of his head, and he was flanked on one side by the headmaster and on the other by Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan. Cockweed’s mouth was flapping, and the headmaster was nodding intently, but Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan wasn’t listening. Her eyes found mine across the quad, and she gave me a look of resigned sadness and defeat. I knew she probably
didn’t care that much about this except that she knew Pilar was probably our key to winning. I gave Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan a big confident smile and kept smiling that way until I had walked right up to all of them. Then I stuck my hand out.

“Good morning, Dr. Frye,” I said.

The headmaster, a bald man in his fifties with watery eyes, shook my hand.

I nodded at Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan, and she nodded back and stepped away. I think she knew I needed my space.

“Mr. Cavanaugh,” I said finally, shaking his hand and holding it a little longer, looking him right in the eye. “I would be so delighted if we could have a word.”

Cockweed made a face: who is this lowly student who thinks she is going to talk to me?

“I really think not,” he said. “I am very busy right now, and Dr. Frye and I—”

“I really think you’re going to hear what I want to say. And actually, if you’d prefer”—I smiled sweetly at Dr. Frye—“I am more than happy to open this conversation up to Dr. Frye, because I am quite confident he too would—”

“All right, all right,” Cockweed said, interrupting me this time. He looked intently into my eyes, trying to convey intimidation, but underneath it was fear, plain as day. “Let’s step over here.”

The moment we were out of earshot, I said, “I know about your pot.”

He tried to roll his eyes, but they only made it about halfway around.

“You can forget about denying it too,” I said. “I know where it is. It’s in your closet. In your slippers.”

He opened his mouth.

“I’m not done,” I said. “I know you stole pot from the boys, too. So, while that might get them in trouble, it’s also really not going to look very good for you. At all.”

Cockweed swallowed once, hard.

“What do you want?” he asked.

“What do you think I want?”

Cockweed shook his head. “Absolutely not,” he said. “You know I can’t do that.”

“Do I?” I said. “I don’t think I do know that.”

I noticed that everyone was looking at us, whispering in their little groups. Cullen, Nicholas, Devon, and Liam were animated, all gathered around Edie and asking her questions, but she just kept shrugging, as if she knew nothing. The headmaster had his arms crossed over his chest. Then I looked up and saw Gideon standing in the window of the Administration Building. He looked scared. I looked up at him and smiled bravely, and a look of total bafflement came over his face.

Cockweed turned around and looked at everyone. The headmaster tapped his watch.

“What do I say?” Cockweed said, all attitude gone from his voice, completely helpless.

“You say, ‘I was mistaken.’”

“I can’t say that,” he whined.

“Try it,” I said.

“I was mistaken,” he said.

I nodded approvingly. I think Cockweed was so fucked up at this point that my approval actually made him feel good. “Now follow me.”

We walked right up to the headmaster. Cockweed lagged a few paces behind me. “Chop-chop,” I said. “OK. Now tell him what you just told me.”

Cockweed cleared his throat and said, “I was kind of thinking we should cancel the disciplinary hearing.”

Cockweed suddenly flushed, and I saw that Liam, Devon, Nicholas, and Cullen were coming toward us.

“Why is that?” Dr. Frye said.

“Well, the thing is, I’m not exactly sure that I saw Gideon in that room.”

The headmaster frowned and set an oxblood briefcase on the railing of the Admin Building. He took a document out of it and read it out loud. “Found Gideon Rayburn crouched naked in a closet in Pilar Benitez-Jones’s room.”

Cockweed nodded. “Right,” he said. “There are some inaccuracies in that statement.”

Dr. Frye’s watery eyes blinked. “In which part?”

“Uh,” Cockweed said. “Uh.”

Dr. Frye sighed and put the document back into his briefcase, closed it, and locked it. Glowering, he regarded the campus and the lines of students streaming out of their dorms toward the dining hall and classrooms. Then he almost smiled, and I knew what was going to happen—nothing. If Cockweed had done something stupid enough to be forced into retracting a disciplinary action, Dr. Frye figured it had to be unseemly. He would, very smartly, stick his head in the sand.

“Very well, Gene,” Dr. Frye said. “I do need a statement to put in the file.”

Cockweed didn’t know where to look. He finally tilted his head toward the sky, as if God might help him. “I was mistaken,” Cockweed said.

Edie, Pilar, Dan, and I drove to Xavier in Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan’s powder blue ’70s Mercedes. Devon, Nicholas, Mickey, and Sergei were in the white BMW. They passed us on the highway at one point. Nicholas was driving, and the rest of them were passing a joint. Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan saw them, but they didn’t see her. She looked at me in the rearview mirror, as if for guidance.

“It doesn’t affect their performance,” I said.

“I don’t even know what you’re talking about,” Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan said, and smiled.

Pilar sat up front. She was rigid with concentration. Her head was full of dates and battles and abbreviations from the periodic chart. I looked for Gideon in there—I thought she might be hiding him behind some facts. But I didn’t see him. He had texted her after the meeting was over, and she had written back, “Getting ready for match. Let’s celebrate later.”

What would this celebration consist of? Well, I would find out soon enough. For now, I had a match and a scholarship to win.

As we pulled off at the exit to Xavier, Pilar turned around and gave me a tiny smile and mouthed, “Thanks.”

I smiled back but thought, the more she likes me now, the more she’s going to hate me if this is a totally humiliating experience. Basically, Xavier made Midvale look like a toxic waste dump. Midvale would have been considered well ordered for a campus, but Xavier Academy would have been considered well ordered for a French king’s garden. Buildings, paths, and rows of flowers were laid out in perfect symmetry. The brick of the buildings, all of which were old—no ragtag 1970s add-ons like we had at Midvale—was robustly red. The white trim at Midvale, which was cleaned and repainted yearly, seemed here to be removed hourly. The lawns were gleaming and velvety, and the sprinklers chugged efficiently under lush blooming trees. Discreet signs cautioned pedestrians against trampling the grass. The passing members of the all-male student body—in neat crew cuts, pressed khakis, and blue jackets with red and gold insignias and ties—were almost as indistinguishable from one another as were the red tulips lining the walkways. It wasn’t a military academy, it was only a Catholic school, but they naturally walked almost in formation, not looking down, not looking around, but looking straight ahead, as if the bright futures they sought lay precisely six feet in front of them. Books clutched tightly in their hands, they walked quickly, each with slight torque in his hips that indicated the sort of sexual frustration so deep that its sufferers had no idea there was anything wrong with them.

Pilar was wearing a paisley dress made of silk jersey—it wasn’t overly slutty but managed to cling in all the right places and provide a tiny, tasteful shadow of cleavage. The skirt swirled flirtatiously around her calves and over a pair of red T-strap sandals. The effect offered a nice combination of glamour, sexiness, and girlish approachability. It was a nice day, but when she stepped out of Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan’s car, it was as if the sun had risen again. Every boy on the lawn turned toward her. It was almost eerie.

The BMW pulled up and the boys got out, trailing a lightly herbal cloud. They tore across the lawn, laughing and hooting, totally oblivious to the staid atmosphere. Nicholas fell into step with me on the serpentine path to the Assembly Hall, which had a rectangular marble plaque on its side stating it had been built in 1876. We watched Pilar walk.

“She looks good,” he said. “If you go for that sort of thing. I wonder why she doesn’t turn me on,” Nicholas said, and I was about to feel all warm and fuzzy toward him when he added, “Maybe it’s because she’s fucking Gid. Or, I guess, as the case may be,
not
fucking Gid.”

“Nicholas,” I said, “I know you don’t feel sensitive, but could you at least act sensitive?”

“Hmm,” he said, as if this were an idea he was hearing for the very first time. “It never occurred to me that I could pretend to be different. That I could not say my feelings…. Shhh. Look!”

We entered a narrow hall with a stained-glass window at one end and long, multipaned windows on either side. At the far end of the room, two long oak wood tables were set up, facing each other. The Xavier team was already assembled and sat together facing the entrance, the power position. But then Pilar
entered, and just as she had had the effect of making the Xavier quad seem brighter and sunnier, she made this room seem vaster and even more elegantly austere. She led Midvale’s pack down the middle aisle, like a gorgeously carved masthead plowing through surf at the front of a ship. Her eyes were luminous but sharp, thick with dark makeup. A pleasant cross breeze moved through her banner of luxuriant ebony hair.

Every single member of the Academic Tête-à-Tête team was staring at her, their eyes buggy, their cheeks flushed. Only one of them seemed to be occupied, delicately cleaning the nails of his left hand with the nails of his right.

In a tense, ominous silence, we took our seats in a row: me first, then Edie, then Nicholas, then Sergei, then Mickey, and finally Pilar, who was, as is fairly typical, oblivious but not oblivious. She had that little buzz that she got when faced with undeniable evidence of her attractiveness. She wondered,
Have people at Midvale maybe forgotten how I am pretty because they see me all the time? It would be so great to go to a new school and just have everyone talk about how hot I was for, like, weeks
.

Dan sat behind us, scowling darkly at the floor and tapping his feet. Devon, sitting next to him, growled, “Quit it,” and he did.

Across from us, Xavier Academy’s ATAT team was tugging at their cuffs and collars, even at their trouser fronts.

“OK,” Nicholas said. “They are fucking freaking out.”

Mr. Raines, the adviser, wore the same sober outfit he’d worn in the video. Frowning, looking at his feet, he went up to a lectern between the two teams and flipped through some papers. Several times he pretended to look at the clock or to
inspect the far end of the room as if someone might be coming and he couldn’t quite make out who it was, but the extreme paleness of his forehead and a deep, dark line of worry down its center let me know that he too was distracted by Pilar, the slope of her feet in high-heeled shoes, the length of her leg, and the shadowed cavern between her breasts. “Take your places,” he said, and his voice caught a little. I went up and sat. My opponent wiped a little sweat off his lip and sat down. He too pretended to be idly looking around the room, but his eyes kept taking him back to Pilar.

I went up against the kid McCaskill I remembered from the video.

The question. “What is the surname of the family of the former Shah of Iran?”

“Pahlavi,” I said.

Oh my God
, Pilar thought as Raines frowned and tugged at his collar.
Molly is so incredibly smart. I know Iraq is that place with Saddam Hussein and Iran is that other place, but that is like, it
.

Raines glared at McCaskill, who reddened, looked at the floor, and, as soon as Raines turned away, looked right back at Pilar.

The next question, concerning the family name of the queen of England—duh, Windsor—I got as well. If you got the first two, you didn’t need to be asked the third.

Edie was next. Her opponent got the first question—How many football teams have bird names? Five. Edie got the second. And then Pilar yawned. It was an epic, sensual yawn for which she bound her hands together and twisted them behind herself as she let her neck fall back, and her breasts sort of floated in the air.

The kid started to sweat. He wiped sheets of water from his forehead, unable to take his eyes off her breasts. The next question was a calculus question, finding the area of a cylinder with a slice out of it. The kid put his pen on the paper, but that was as far as he got with it, and then Edie shouted out the answer and the round was over.

Raines snapped his fingers. “Team meeting.”

The guys on the Xavier team reluctantly followed their adviser into a corner of the room, casting wistful glances at Pilar as they went. Raines spoke in low, growling tones, and they looked at their feet as they shuffled back to their chairs.

Nicholas was next against that boy named Tate. Tate walked up with his hands over his eyes, like horse blinders, and a powerful erection pressed into the front of his pants. A math question: “What is the circumference of a circle circumscribed in a square with a diameter of x?”

“Pi X,” the kid said.

“Fuck,” said Nicholas. “Pi X. That is so fucking easy I couldn’t even do it.”

“Nicholas,” scolded Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan.

The next question—Who was the vice-presidential nominee to run alongside Adlai Stevenson in 1956?—Nicholas got. “Estes Kefauver,” he said triumphantly.

I squirmed excitedly in my chair. I really wanted to win.

The next question came. “President McKinley was shot in what city?”

“Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,” Nicholas said.

“Sorry,” said Raines. Not sounding sorry at all.

“Buffalo,” said Tate, shifting in his chair.

That should have been mine.

We were at 2-1 now. Then Sergei won his round, and Mickey
lost, to the kid who had been cleaning his nails. As he sat down, I saw something in him that made him seem older than the other students, something mature and disinterested. He looked right at Pilar, and he even smiled at her. Then he smiled at me, like he saw me studying him. What was his deal?

It was up to Pilar to see if we would leave the half at a tie or win—a great advantage psychologically going into the next half. She was up against the kid they called Jones, that short, towheaded kid who was the first one we’d seen on Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan’s spying video. He was young and small, with pink skin just starting to sprout yellow fuzz. He got the first question—What do you get when you combine the element Sn with the element Cu? Bronze. She got the second—To whom was Mia Farrow married when she made
Rosemary’s Baby?
Frank Sinatra. The third was math, and the first step of the problem—just the first step—was trying to figure out the radius of a circle. Pilar was still trying to figure out if this was all the way across or halfway when Jones shouted out, “Four.”

It’s OK
, she soothed herself.
It’s just God’s way of telling you that you’re steell pretty far from knowing everything
.

Or anything.

We gathered on the Xavier lawn under the statue of a famous scientist who was an alumnus of the school. “We’re doing very well,” Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan said. “Better than expected.”

“I messed up,” Pilar said.

“No, no,” Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan said gently.

“We lost too,” Mickey said, “me and Nicholas.”

“That’s right,” said Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan brightly, “so…”

Dan crouched in the shadow of the statue, glaring. “Yeah,” he said. “Except she’s not supposed to be here.”

At first Pilar felt ashamed.
I could just run away from here
, she thought.
I don’t have to be here at all. What am I trying to prove
? But Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan was right. She wasn’t the only one who had messed up. “Dan, don’t you think you’re, like, hurting my feelings?” she said.

Dan picked the grass with his fingers, sulking.

“And I know why I am here,” she said.

Dan looked scared. “How?”

“Everyone understands who they are and what people want from them,” she said. “Not just smart people.”

Dan didn’t dare respond to this. “Do you want me to stay in?” Pilar asked Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan.

“Absolutely,” Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan said, and Pilar blushed at being the object of such confidence, even if the reason she had to stay in was so that she would remain in full, distracting view. “We need you front and center.”

When we filed back in, Pilar looked even sexier, even more in control. She sat down and tucked her legs demurely under her chair, but even the cross of her ankles carried an erotic charge. The Xavier team was still transfixed, but before, their interest had been sort of hopeful. Now they just looked angry.

I was still first. “Good luck,” Pilar said as I went up against Jones. He scowled at me with a tiny mouth as we sat down. As Pilar shifted in her chair, her bangles tinkled—a siren song. Jones put his hands over his ears and shut his eyes.

“What was the name of Thomas Jefferson’s mansion?” Raines said.

“Montebello,” Jones said.

I raised my hand. “Monticello,” I said.

But because sports just aren’t my thing, he got the second
question—Who was the first black MVP in football? Franco Harris.

The third question was so easy. “What was the first southern state to secede from the Union?”

I was just about to blurt out the answer when Pilar thought,
If we win tonight, I am totally going to sleep with Geedeon. It will be a sign that I am supposed to be with him, and I will sleep with him, and I will totally try to stay with him too.

The answer flew right out of my head.

“South Carolina,” Jones said, jumping up from his seat. “Better luck next time.”

It was the first ATAT round I had ever lost. But I didn’t blame Pilar, per se. If I was going to be in her head, it my responsibility to control the noise level. But the problem was, I still wanted to know what she was thinking.

I wouldn’t get out of her head until I stopped caring.

Then Edie lost her round. Nicholas, up against that Tate guy who had put his hands around his eyes, got the first question, lost the second, and then, on the third, the kid coughed, covered his mouth, and, having left his vision open again, saw Pilar and completely missed the last question. Sergei won, and Mickey lost again. We were at 6-5, with Xavier leading. Now Pilar was up against the blond kid, Yates. “Hi,” he said as he sat down. “Are those shoes pleather? Stella McCartney, right? They’re really quite lovely.”

He was gay. He gave Pilar an eat-shit grin as the first question was asked. “What’s the difference between ale and beer?”

“Ale uses yeast that gathers on the top, and lager uses yeast that ferments on the bottom,” said Yates.

“OK, whatever!” Pilar said.

Raines scowled at her and moved on. “Who directed
On the Waterfront,
and what is the historical significance of this film?”