The Other Girl: A Midvale Academy Novel (22 page)

I thought we were fucked, and Yates was twirling a pencil, winding up to give an answer, but Pilar shouted out in a rush, “Elia Kazan, and the film was allegorical for his involvement in HUAC.”

She pronounced this
Hoo-Ac,
and you could tell she had absolutely no idea she was talking about, but she
was
right.

One more question. Raines cleared his throat and gave a dirty look to Yates. He began.

“
The Titanic
—”

“White Star Line!” Pilar shouted. “I saw that movie, like, twelve times!’

“I didn’t even finish the question,” Raines said. But I knew from the way his face got all puffy and sort of ugly that we’d gotten the answer. We were tied.

We were tied.

We didn’t have time to gather outside. We just went in a corner. We were all quivering. The final round would be just one question, asked to the entirety of each team, and whoever got it would win.

“No matter what happens, you’ve done a great job,” Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan told us. “Just try to stay relaxed.”

We all sat down. The Xavier guys were kind of over Pilar by now. They just looked pissed. They would have totally destroyed us if we hadn’t had her at first and they knew it, and they knew we knew it.

Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan was the one who got to ask the final question. It was in a sealed envelope. She opened it and read the subject. “Math,” she said.

Sergei put his pen down at the edge of his paper, ready to write. “If object A is ten feet long, eight feet wide, three feet deep and weighs four pounds per square foot, and object B two feet long, four feet wide, three feet deep and weighs five pounds per square foot, which one is heavier?”

Before I could even start this problem, Pilar’s mind went off in mine like an explosion. This was just like the formula! The formula she used to see if a girl was as hot as she was! It was so easy. I looked over at her. Her eyes were closed. She didn’t even have to use a pencil. This formula was like breathing for her. In ten seconds, she shouted out, “Object B!”

“Yes,” Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan said, beaming and shocked at the same time.

We won!

We were in a massive crush of hugging. Dan was hugging Sergei, Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan was hugging Nicholas, Edie and Devon were dancing in a circle. Mickey sprinted around the outside of our mosh pile shouting, “In your face! In your face!”

And I was hugging Pilar Benitez-Jones. Her arms, fragrant and soft with verbena lotion, were wrapped tight around me, and mine were wrapped around her, and we were jumping up and down, both of us laughing and so full of exuberant relief.
I did it, I did it, I did it,
she thought, and pulled back, looking at me, transfixing me with that glorious smile.

In a rush, I remembered what she had promised to do when she won. “Excuse me,” I said. Pulling away from her and our group, I made a mad dash outside.

I gulped fresh air and tried to take in the day, the blue sky, the magnificent cultivated greenness around me. I had what I wanted now, I had what I had come to Midvale for. I just didn’t have Gideon. There was a chance I could wrest him away from
her, but at this point, what kind of person would that have made me? A person I couldn’t stand. Not that I was doing such a great job of standing being without him.

But it was probably better to be able to live with yourself than to just become anything, any kind of person, to get what you wanted.

I walked slowly to Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan’s powder blue car, thinking of the comforting, slightly sour animal smell of its leather seats. Speaking of animals, Edie and Devon were in back, making out. I opened the door and leaned in. “Uh, guys,” I said, “Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan’s coming.”

Edie blushed a little as Devon extracted his hand from under her shirt.

“We decided to go out until the end of the year,” Devon said, as if he could read my mind. “I’ve never gone out with a girl before. I’m probably going to get bored and want to have sex with someone else. But I won’t know until I try it.”

Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan came back and started to get into the front seat. “OK, Devon,” Edie said, “you go with the guys.”

Devon pouted. “I want to go with you.”

But Edie made a face. “Come on, Devon. I’ll see you back at school.”

He gave her a deep, long kiss.

“OK, Devon, that’s enough,” Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan said.

Devon slunk off to Nicholas’s car, blushing and looking over his shoulder at Edie.

I shook my head at Edie, impressed. “Wow,” I said, “you seem to have him wrapped around your finger.”

Pilar got into the front seat. She had a half smile on her face and was thinking about Gid.
Finally, we will have sex. And now I will have sex not just as someone worried about my stomach.
I wonder what sex ees like when you think you’re smart?
I wanted, truly, to reach up and grab her around the throat. But this was Edie’s moment. Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan smiled at Edie in the rearview mirror as we backed out.

“Yes, Edie, what’s your secret? I’m not sure I ever learned how to manage men.”

Edie was thoughtful. “You just have to make them think you’re always busy,” she said. “He asked me out. And I was going to say, ‘Well, I’m afraid I want more than you can give’—girl stuff—but instead I said I was kind of into this guy back in Seattle, and we were supposed to hang out this summer. And he got all sad and was like, ‘Well, can we go out until summer? And see what happens?’” She shrugged. “I feel a little bad but…not as bad as I would feel right now if I’d listened to the big speech about how he doesn’t like to be tied down, and blah blah blah!”

Edie was absolutely right. If she’d said what was in her heart, he absolutely would have said that.

I regretted showing Gid so much love. Why was Edie so smart, and I so stupid?

At the very least, I was hoping I could have a nice nap, an hour or so of the empty rhythm of the road, before being forced to live through Pilar and Gideon finally having sex.

“Well, girls, congratulations,” Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan said. “And Molly, congratulations on your scholarship.”

Scholarship? What ees a scholarship? I’m too embarrassed to admit I don’t know.

Ha. Yeah. You should be. The inevitable was finally about to happen, and I wasn’t going to stop it. No matter how bad that moment might be, there had to be something on the other side that was better than waiting for it to happen. Mercifully, I slept my way through a little of that wait.

“So,” Edie said, “what are you going to wear?”

“A black veil,” I said.

We were getting dressed to go over to Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan’s. The party was mostly for winning ATAT, but of course we were also celebrating Gid and Pilar’s not getting kicked out of school, and the amazing humiliation of Cockweed.

Edie looked extremely cute in a gauzy yellow sundress. She even had some glittery makeup on her eyes. She planned on sleeping with Devon tonight, which meant that I was going to be sleeping in her old hangout, the closet. I put on a brave smile. “Wow,” I said, “it’s awesome that I’m going to get to go to college for free.”

I’d already got some weird videotaped congratulations e-mailed to me by Ross Volker.

“It is,” Edie said.

She could see that, behind my big smile, my eyes were sad.

“Are you sure you don’t mind sleeping in the closet tonight?”

“Of course not,” I said. “In life, we can expect our nights of wild passion, but we can also expect our nights on a closet floor.”

Meanwhile, Pilar was packing her stunning cleavage into a demi cup black and violet lace bra. She hooked it and stepped into a pair of matching underwear. As she let her recent application of pear blossom body butter soak into her skin she fluffed her pillows, straightened her duvet cover, and set some candles around the room.

“I really am trying to look on the bright side,” I said. “I’m going to have plenty of privacy to experience Gideon and Pilar’s first night together.”

When we arrived at Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan’s, she was sitting in a big green-and-white-striped chair, drinking an enormous cocktail.
Foyle’s War
was cued up on the television. “Everyone’s in the basement,” she said. “No drinking.”

“We don’t drink,” Edie and I chorused. We didn’t have a problem with it: it just made us both sick because we had nerd stomachs.

Dan and Sergei emerged from the kitchen, carrying cans of Coke and bowls of nuts and potato chips.

“What are you guys doing up here?” I asked.

They sat down on the couch next to Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan. “I love
Foyle’s War,
” Dan said. “I can’t believe she has season seven. She got it from a friend in England. You’re cool, Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan.”

“I don’t like parties with girls,” Sergei said. “They always talk about gross things.”

“Like their periods?” I couldn’t resist. Sergei stuffed a handful of nuts into his mouth and ignored me.

We headed downstairs.

Devon was sitting alone in a big chair watching
Battlestar Galactica,
and Edie walked over to him. “Hi,” she said. Very methodically she took off her shoes.

Devon pulled her into his lap. “You’re fat and scary,” Edie said. “But you’re hot.”

Devon laughed. I didn’t know if he was a creep or not, but I thought it was cute that her nerdy straightforwardness appealed to him.

In another room off to the side Cullen was unpacking the bar they’d brought. Liam was at a sink, washing glasses. “I can’t believe how dusty her glasses are,” Liam said. “She doesn’t seem like the type who has dusty glasses.”

“Duh,” Cullen said, dumping a fist full of ice into a very old, thick glass blender container. “She lives alone. What is she going to do, spend all her time polishing glasses she never uses?”

“That’s what my mother does,” Nicholas said. “Uh, douche. When you’re drinking and you don’t want someone to know, you don’t use a fucking blender. Or glasses. Or ice. I brought soda cans. Vodka only. It doesn’t have a scent.”

Cullen dutifully removed the ice, cube by cube.

“What does Nicholas’s mother do?” Gideon said as he walked in. God, he looked hot. He was wearing a blue faded T-shirt with a pocket, and with a terrible pain in my chest I remembered what it had smelled like, and how the cotton ribbing of it had felt against my cheek. For a brief, delighted second I thought he was alone, and I smiled at him, actually
using—without meaning to—the technique that made Pilar’s smile so dazzling: she held her smiles for longer than most girls. But you can never smile at a guy long enough. Or maybe you shouldn’t smile at him for too long. Who knew?

Gid smiled back at me, and for about five brief seconds I felt that weird feeling of being alone with him, even though we were in a room of people—just like I had felt the morning Cockweed dragged us into the dean’s.

But then Pilar came in behind him. I knew she would, since, after watching her put on her matching underwear, I’d seen her put on her tight, knee-length jeans, black platform boots, a James Perse tank, and little white cashmere hoodie. I had seen her walk over here with Gideon, touching hands, their hips bumping, feeling, as I had felt so long ago myself, the velvety softness of Gideon’s ear as she whispered into it that she was psyched for the party but even more psyched about, well, the other thing.

“Hi, Molly!” she said. “Happy?”

It seemed like a trick question, but it wasn’t. “Very!” I said. “I am really glad that we won.”

“Me too,” she said.

“I can’t believe you guys care that you won at that shit,” Liam said. “It’s so gay.”

“Liam,” I said, “what are you even doing here?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “What else am I supposed to do?”

“Who wants a drink?” Cullen whispered, proffering soda cans filled with God knows what.

“I do!” I said. Why not?

“I do too!” Madison stomped in, skinny, hypertall in some very serious red boots, smelling of cigarettes. She licked the side of Cullen’s face.

I didn’t care what it was. I chugged it. As I did so, I watched Pilar take demure sips of hers, images of the Elias Ganz night floating through her head. She thought to herself, correctly, Molly’s probably never had an Elias Ganz–type night.

“Whoa, check you out,” Cullen said to me. “I don’t usually figure you for much of a drinker.”

“I’m usually not,” I said. “I just think that, considering how much we have to celebrate today, I can make an exception.”

I chugged the rest of it and put my soda can up on the bar for more. I tried not to look at Gid. After one drink I was already starting to anesthetize myself against the experience of seeing him, and seeing him with Pilar. A drink and a half and I figured maybe it would be possible for me to look at them as just some random people, without much connection to me. I would be able to think, What an attractive couple! No feelings of rage, animosity, jealousy, suicidal ideation…

Then Gid put his hand on Pilar’s neck and began to caress it. I could see the tips of his fingers under a curtain of her hair, near her ear. I couldn’t take my eyes off them.

“Whoa,” I said.

It was only when Pilar thought,
That’s weird that Molly just said whoa,
that I realized I had said it out loud. I went into the other room, sat on the couch, and smiled helplessly at Edie. She and Devon were holding hands.

“Are you OK?” Edie said.

Then Cullen burst in to the room, carrying a full blender. “All right, everyone! Drink up! We’re going to be playing spin the bottle! Can’t play sober.” He handed out anchor glasses to everyone and filled them up.

“Spin the bottle is stupid,” Madison complained.

“You’re stupid,” Liam and Nicholas called from the other room.

“You’re fags together,” Madison said, slumping next to me on the couch, hugging a pillow against her concave stomach. Cullen sat next to her, and she snuggled up against him like a cat. “Hey Pilar,” she called out. “Have you and Gideon slept together yet?”

Not yet,
Pilar thought,
but soon.

I stood up. “I have to go to the bathroom,” I said.

I had to get out of here. I would come back. I would maintain dignity. But I just needed a moment to pull myself together.

Cullen said, “We’ll wait for you. We’re supposed to be a unit.”

“You’re a unit,” said Liam, coming into the room as I left.

The basement was carpeted and heated, so I figured there had to be a bathroom somewhere. A door at the end of a short hallway looked promising, and I opened it, just ready to splash some water on my face and breathe for a few minutes. I pulled a string hanging from the wall, and a single lightbulb lit up not a bathroom but a storeroom, filled with boxes, all the same size and shape. One of them was open.

It was filled with blue pamphlets. Embossed across the top of them in gold was the title “Shared Consciousness.”

I opened up all the other boxes. They were all filled with pamphlets. One of them contained a packing slip: 1000 copies of “Shared Consciousness” sent to Mrs. Audrey Gwynne-Vaughan in 1979.

I went upstairs and stood in the living room doorway. Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan, Sergei, and Dan were all fixated on the
television. “Is that the person who stabbed the policeman in the barn?” Dan asked. And at the same time, Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan and Sergei went, “Shhhh.”

“Dr. Whitmeyer, I presume?” I said.

I thought Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan would be more surprised, but she just looked relieved. “Dan and Sergei,” she said, picking up her purse, “run down to the Cumberland Farms and get some ice cream.”

“But we don’t want ice cream,” Sergei said.

“Yeah,” Dan said. “We’re not twelve. We want to—”

She thrust some money at them. “Go,” she said.

They went. Both shot me jealous looks through the window. She turned to me. “I left that door ajar. I knew you’d be led to it.”

“You too?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “When I was first here. It lasted about a year.” She smiled. “It’s how I met my husband. Of course, we didn’t have girls quite like Pilar back then. But I was very jealous. It was very hard.”

I knew we’d talk more about this, but now wasn’t the time. I had to get to that spin the bottle game. “I want to get out,” I said. “Why won’t you just tell me how to get out? I’m inside Pilar’s head right now, and she’s thinking about how she’s going to sleep with my boyfriend. I really would rather not be around for that.”

She smiled enigmatically, and I felt a surge of rage build up in me. “Look,” I said. “I don’t have a lot of time. I think if I can kiss Pilar I can get out of her head and back into mine. I think I just have to think what she’s thinking. But I just want to stay out for good. Oh God. Please don’t ask me why.”

The enigmatic smile again. “Why?”

They were getting loud downstairs, and I knew they’d start without me if I didn’t get down there.

“Because I don’t even really care anymore. I like Gid. I love him. But if he likes Pilar, well, fine. She’s actually not even that bad. I don’t want to be best friends with her, and I would much, much rather be me….”

“What did you just say?”

“I said I don’t want to be best friends—”

“No,” Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan said. “After that.”

“I said I’d rather be me.”

She smiled again, but this time it was warmer, even a little sad. “Remember I was inside someone’s head that I was in love with once too. And you said you wanted to be you, but how about all that time you spend just trying to do whatever you thought would make Gideon like you best? Was that wanting to be you?”

I shook my head. “No. I just wanted to make myself into whatever Gid was going to like. And I realize now I guess he’s going to like what he likes. He likes Pilar, maybe he likes me better, who knows? Just because you’re inside someone’s head doesn’t even mean you know them.”

She smiled. “Did you know we can have one thousand thoughts per minute?”

I nodded. “It’s in your pamphlet. When I read it, I was like, ‘That’s a lot.’ But I didn’t really get it.”

Sergei and Dan appeared at the door, but she held up a finger. “Do you get it now?” she asked.

“I think so,” I said. “I don’t need to know what Gid wants. I don’t need to know what Pilar wants. I just want to know what I want.”

She nodded sagely and beckoned for the boys to come in.

“What are you guys talking about?” Dan asked.

Before I could say anything, Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan said, “Our periods.”

I arrived just as everyone was arranging themselves in a circle on the floor.

“Gotta mix it up, gotta mix it up,” Cullen said, rubbing his hands together, the drinks warming him up to his role as master of ceremonies. “OK. Madison, you here. Liam, you and Devon next to each other. Pilar, you’re next to Gideon so you can paw each other while you’re playing. OK, Edie, you at a good angle where Devon can reach your tiny boobs, and, Nicholas, you’re making drinks and not playing because you’re gay.”

“Thank God,” Nicholas said. “I know that this is supposed to be sort of ironic that you guys play this, but it is so embarrassing.”

Cullen spun first. He got Edie.

“I don’t know, Edie,” he said. “I think the Old Monster might be a little big for you.”

“Are there
any
rules about commentary?” Edie asked.

“No, there aren’t,” Cullen said, and slipped a hand around her waist. “Wow. You’re just a little slip of a thing.” He kissed her, then winked at Devon. “Congrats. You can always spot the spinners.”

Edie was next. She got Madison. Madison sighed. They stalked to the center on their knees and gave each other a peck. “I don’t understand how you suddenly entered our social circle,” Madison said as she went back to her place in the circle. “It’s so weird.”

Edie gave me a look like, I always thought these people were freaks, but I had no idea how bad it was.

Madison spun. She got Devon. “I wish we were playing a game where we could just make the person we got go on a diet,” she said.

“I wish we were playing a game where we could tell the chicks we were playing with that they were annoying cunts,” Devon said. “Oh, I guess I am playing that game.”

He grabbed Madison and gave her a wet willy.

“You are disgusting,” she said.

“I’m not disgusting,” Devon said. “I am just fat and greedy and, sadly for all who come in contact with me, unbelievably sexy.”

Edie giggled. Devon actually got kind of sweet and blushy. He turned around and, from the top of a table, took a plastic flower and handed it to Edie. Then he took her tiny face in his fat hands and started to kiss her. They kissed and kissed. Then Devon whispered something in her ear and they got up and left.