The Other Girl: A Midvale Academy Novel (3 page)

He smiled back. “Hey, Molly.” Any other girl would have seen nothing but devotion in the look he gave me. It was pretty good. But his left eye, five or ten degrees off, was on Pilar.

“Oh my God,” Pilar said. “What is for that giant pile of papers?”

“Ugh,” I said. “Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan is having some kind of Mr. Chips meltdown and wants me to be on ATAT.”

Pilar just said, “Ewww, boring.”

I nodded. “Yup.” Fuck you, I thought, you’re pretty but you’re stupid, and you know it.

Gid thought,
Pilar’s breasts remind me of a poster I had in fifth grade with these kittens hanging out of a basket.
The Midvale bell sounded: the two-minute warning for the first class.

Pilar said, “Where are you guys going for Espring Break?”

“We’re going to Molly’s parents’ house,” Gid said. His hand now rubbed my back. I saw Pilar see it. I saw her eyes narrow just the tiniest bit.

“Ah,” Pilar said. “That sounds sooo fun. Where is their house?”

“Buffalo,” I said.

“Wow, eesn’t it really cold there?” Pilar shivered theatrically.

“Buffalo’s average winter temperatures are ten to twelve degrees colder than those in the greater Boston area,” I said, sounding like a loser weather nerd on purpose.

Pilar pursed her lips and shook her head. “I don’t understand why for when everyone wants to get warm, you go to a place that maybe is colder?” She looked at Gideon. Gideon looked at me.

“It’s where my parents live,” I explained.

Pilar didn’t seem to find this information helpful. “OK,” she said, “but don’t they have another house?”

It was hard to tell whether she was being mean or just honestly couldn’t comprehend—as so many Midvale students could not—how I didn’t have another house or know the difference between the Club 55 and the Le Voile Rouge in St. Tropez, or how I could in fact know that two-ply cashmere from Scotland was much softer that the $69 Chinese special at Nordstrom Rack but still buy the cheap one. But I wasn’t going to sacrifice any dignity by acting offended. “No, just one house,” I said.

Pilar didn’t know what to say, and she did something pretty girls do a lot when they don’t know what to say. They shrug and go up on their tiptoes.

Gid thought, Kittens hanging out of a basket with really big heads.

“Hi guys.” Madison Sprague came sauntering up. We exchanged weak smiles. Madison wasn’t my favorite. She was skinny and fashiony and vapid, but not bubbly vapid like Jessica Simpson. Mean, sneery vapid like a not-famous model.

“Hey,” she said, in her listless, over-it voice. “What’s up?”

“We’re just talking about Buffalo,” Gid said.

“Ohh,” Madison cooed. “Rust Belt chic.” She fluffed her hair,
which was dark and streaked with dramatic stripes of white. She toyed with one of her hoop earrings. “OK, bye,” she said to Pilar and walked away without even looking at me or Gid.

“I’m coming with you,” Pilar called after her. “We have a lot to do. Madison and I are going to California, yes?”

“California,” I said, “yes.”

Gideon gave me a “behave” look. Pilar didn’t notice and prattled on.

“We are trying to get a job. Well, an eenternship with a film producer. He went to Midvale and ees very, very cool. He has a lot of projects we can help him with.”

Internships. Low-paying or unpaid jobs that got you fancy jobs later. While people like me who had to actually earn that thing called money had to work selling concessions at the little park across from the Albright-Knox, the big art museum in Buffalo. And I wondered what kind of help Madison and Pilar could offer, other than maybe showing someone how to use express checkout on
Sephora.com
.

Pilar gave Gid a coy look. “You have a good vacation, OK?” She leaned in and kissed him on the cheek. Through Gideon’s own slightly quivering nostrils, into his mind, and then, unfortunately, into mine, traveled her heady scent, a mix of smoke, Creed, Crème de la Mer, and Frederick Fekkai Only for Brunettes conditioner. She squeezed her eyes at me. “Bye,” she said.

“Take care,” I said.

And she wandered off, Gid’s hand stayed on my back, and he thought,
Pilar is hot, it’s just a fact. It’s a fact, and it’s not a big deal.

Then he turned away and abruptly thought,
God, Molly is really cute.

“What’s wrong?” he said. “You don’t still feel weird around Pilar do you?”

“Oh,” I said. “No. She just bugs me.”

“She’s really not that bad. I think if you were friends with her you’d see that—”

I interrupted him. “That she was really nice and smart and cool? That’s OK. I think I’ll just live in ignorance and hatred.”

He laughed. I loved it when I made bitchy comments like that and he laughed.

All his attention, all of it, was on me. I could feel it, I could see it. Not one corner of his brain retained even a memory of Pilar.

But it was awful seeing him look at her like that. I could make jokes about it, but it wasn’t a joke. Every time I saw her I felt afraid of what she could do to us.

I couldn’t help thinking about what Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan had said about girls throwing their lives away for guys. What if I loved Gideon with everything I had and he ended up dumping me…or worse, what if he dumped me for Pilar?

But…well. She was out of his head now. I was the one there now. I was the one there most of the time. I knew this. And it was not really all that big a deal, right? Noticing other girls was just what guys did.

“Gid, were you just checking out Pilar?”

Gid looked at me, like, are you crazy? “Molly,” he said, “Pilar’s pretty, OK? But I don’t…I don’t love Pilar. I love you.”

He believed himself so I had to believe him too.

Gideon could never be sure if Pilar Benitez-Jones was really into him, and with all I knew—which was, let’s remember, everything he knew plus feminine insight—I couldn’t figure it out myself.

Here were the facts: she had flirted with him a lot. They had spent a night in the same bed once, but it was at a party where lots of people were crashing all over the place. OK, his roommates crashed with their penises inside actual girls, but whatever—teenagers, especially drunk ones, often slept in the same bed with friends of the opposite sex without having sex with them.

The biggest moment in their relationship happened over Thanksgiving vacation. Pilar and Gid had ended up in the same bar together in New York. Drinks were consumed. Ultimately, Pilar had invited Gid back to her parents’ pied-à-tierre to have sex with him. Gideon was naturally thrilled until Mad
ison tumbled out of the closet with a camcorder. They knew Gid was a virgin, and they were taping his deflowering. If they were going to watch it themselves, maybe Gid would have been flattered. But they were only doing it for the expressed purpose of sending the tape to Madison’s ex-boyfriend, Hal, a minor rock star who liked to watch homemade porn of guys losing their virginity.

And this is when Gid came up to see me in Buffalo, and he lost his virginity to me. And I didn’t tape it, because I was just that classy.

Pilar and Gideon’s little flirtation died down for a while after. Understandably—it’s not easy for a relationship to recover from one party’s secretly videotaping the other. Every week or two Pilar and Gid had a little chat like they had this morning, and then I would think about it. A lot.

This time, I finally got sick of thinking about them sometime after dinner.

I took out a pile of all the tests and papers I’d gotten back over the past two months. Gid was asleep, dreaming of nothing very invasive. I thought about just how much our relationship had wreaked havoc on my life since the beginning of the school year, when he first entered my head. That was early September. By October I’d fallen in love with him. By December I’d managed to get us to go out. It wasn’t easy, with Pilar sort of after him. I had won. And I’d been winning for four months now. And let me tell you, if you graphed my grades around our relationship, you could see a very distinct pattern. When things were going well with him, and I wasn’t seeing much thinking-about-Pilar activity, I was in the low A, high B range. When things were weird, I tended to get B minuses. Worst of all were the weeks where
everything was super romantic lovey-dovey amazing. Those weeks were Cs.

I looked over at Edie, wishing she’d sense that I wanted to talk. But she was deep in her book. Edie and I had lived together since the second semester of ninth grade, and we had lived with this girl named Marcy Proctor, but she finally left last semester for her own single because we wouldn’t let her listen to music while we studied. Our room was sort of a monument to not totally uncool but not particularly cool intellectualness. We’d added more bookshelves to the ones already supplied by Midvale. Between our two beds were framed posters for our favorite movies—mine was
Chinatown
and Edie’s was
Anchorman
. If we’d gone to a bigger school with more normal people, we’d probably both be considered pretty. But here, at this quasi country club, I think being smart made us look uglier than we actually were. Though now that I was going out with someone sort of cool, I, and by association Edie, had status-jumped.

Edie was really small. She wore a size extra small and still had to have things taken in and shortened. She had dirty blond hair and bangs. Over enormous green eyes she wore enormous glasses that were that fine line between geek and fashionable. Edie truly didn’t give a shit about anything except her mind. Watching her right now, with her brow furrowed over her book and her eyes squinting in concentration, I thought of how I used to be exactly like her, and how that similarity made us become friends.

But now there was tension between us. It used to be so easy to talk to her. Now I was reduced to sighing really loudly, until she finally looked up and said, “Is something wrong?”

Her voice wasn’t that warm. It was as unimaginable to me
that we were not superclose anymore as it was that I was holding a lap of mediocre grades, but the evidence was just as concrete.

“I’m not really doing that well in school,” I said.

Edie looked back at her book. “Do you care?” she said.

I was hurt by her distance, but I couldn’t complain. Not when, two, three, sometimes four nights a week Gid snuck in and she dutifully crept down the hall with a pillow and quilt to sleep in the big closet off the common room.

“I think I care a little bit,” I said.

She appeared to be deep in thought. Then she said, “So try harder,” and went back to her book.

I really wanted to tell her I was in Gid’s mind. Edie wasn’t a judgmental person. I really shouldn’t be grouping her in with the rest of Midvale, all those people I thought would think less of me if they knew that I was inside Gid’s mind, that I had tricked him into loving me. Edie had been my friend long before I even knew Gid existed. But it was a secret I liked to hold close to my heart. If I told anyone, if any one person in the world knew the truth, then it would become real.

I’m not saying I ever tried to pretend this wasn’t happening to me. But it was like I had two lives. The one in the world, and the one in Gid’s head.

I sensed that a collision would be disastrous.

I tried to think of a way to talk more without mentioning the real issue. “There’s something satisfying about bad grades, isn’t there, Edie? I mean, they are very clearly a sign that something has gone wrong. They aren’t ambiguous.”

Again she didn’t look up from her book, and I thought I had blown it. But then she smiled. “Yes,” she said. “You can’t pretend you don’t know what’s going on,” she said. She shook her head
at the book. “Dostoyevsky is totally overrated,” she said. “It’s like, right, the guy’s a lunatic. I get it.”

I laughed.

“Is Gideon coming tonight? It’s OK if he is, I just want to know so I can charge my flashlight.”

I hesitated. On nights when I knew he’d been thinking about Pilar or seen her looking particularly hot I generally tried to get him to come over, to remind him of what he already had. But I did have a physics test tomorrow, and if I studied and got an A, that would be a morale booster. Plus, me here with my book, Edie alternately reading and bitching about her novel—it wasn’t quite like old times, but maybe it could get back there if I invested a bit. And though it didn’t feel as good as being with Gid, it was nice. “No,” I said. “No activities tonight. Just studying.”

Edie nodded. “I’ll just do it anyway,” she said. She rummaged in a plastic crate under her bed and plugged a metal flashlight into the charger on the wall.

“OK,” I said. “You don’t have to.”

I was so relieved when she smiled. “It’s fine,” she said. “I mean, I might as well charge it, right?”

We went back to our books.

It started to rain. It was cozy in that little room, me with my physics, her with her novel, and again Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan’s warning echoed in my ears.

Was I throwing my life away?

Maybe Gid should just come over two nights a week. That was still a lot.

But I shouldn’t think about him. I should study.

Which I did until I heard the thump of a lacrosse ball against plaster. It was a familiar sound in Proctor 307—the
boys’ room, in the biggest, rowdiest boys’ dorm, named for Jebediah Proctor, the great-grandfather of our former roommate, Marcy Proctor. Gideon was awake. The room took shape for him and, an instant later, for me: it was a large, pleasant space under the eves with wooden floors, single beds tucked into its shadows, and a row of desks along one wall. Outside one window was the tree that made Proctor 307 one of the most desirable rooms on campus—it was easy to sneak out of. Decoration was sparse: A Beyoncé poster over Cullen’s bed and a framed print of Jean Seberg in
Breathless
hanging on Nicholas’s closet. That pretty much said it all.

No posters for Gideon—just the photo of me that he reached for right now and smiled at. At moments like that, I think I loved being in Gid’s head, even more than I loved being in his presence.

Then a cell phone was ringing:
Apple bottom jeans and boots with the fur!
Cullen’s. “Hey, Pilar! You guys aren’t coming over tonight? You have to study? Whatever. That is such bullshit. OK. Later.”

Gid thought,
Wire and fruit
. He saw Pilar’s breasts. He shook them out of his head.
Whatever
. He pictured my breasts. My breasts were next to Pilar’s in his head for a second. He closed his eyes and threw hers away.

Cullen got off the phone with Pilar and started bouncing a lacrosse ball against the wall again. “I’m pissed PBJ and Mads aren’t coming over. I like hanging out with them. I feel like they’re always about to have a fight and maybe, like, rip each other’s clothes off.”

Gideon imagined Madison pulling Pilar’s shirt in such a way that those breasts were half exposed.
Put your shoes on, dumb ass. Shit. Where are my keys?
He tried to remember where
he’d put the keys to the BMW that he had kind of but not really won in a bet about his virginity. “Whatever,” he said out loud. He said this about Pilar a lot. Did it mean whatever for her, or did it mean that sometimes you just can’t get what you want? His thoughts never got worse than this. I kept waiting, but they just didn’t. He always whatevered himself before he thought something I really couldn’t bear.

Nicholas was using a Bunsen burner to make green tea out of distilled water. He was obsessed with health, fitness, and aging in a way that was amusingly female. “Madison and Pilar are nuts,” he said. “Did you know they’re, like, going to work together this summer? I mean, how much time can two people spend together?”

“We spend a lot of time together,” Cullen said, feeling Nicholas’s butt.

Nicholas just shook his head. He thought the best way to deal with Cullen’s idiocy was to ignore it, and he was probably right. “We should go soon,” he said. “I will be really pissed if they’re out of it.”

Cullen snorted. “Cullen, honestly, can you imagine the WMDT having a late-afternoon run on superglue?”

Vectors would have to wait. I couldn’t study with them going to the WMDT—World’s Most Depressing Target—for superglue. For something. What?

Gid picked up a blue T-shirt printed with red letters that said
SKI DEER VALLEY—BAKED
. Underneath the writing was a drawing of a pot leaf with a face, wearing skis, flying over a mogul. His keys were underneath the shirt. “What a surprise,” he said, throwing the T-shirt to Cullen.

Cullen took the opportunity to change, and ran his large
hands appreciatively over his muscular chest. “You’re a slob,” Gideon said.

Cullen pointed at Nicholas. “At least I’m not gay.”

Nicholas sniffed. “I don’t need to deflower poor unsuspecting Midvale freshmen to prove I am heterosexual,” he said.

“No,” Cullen said, “you just have to not be gay. And that’s freshwomen to you. OK. Fresh pussy!”

Gideon laughed out loud. “You are so fucking ridiculously stupid,” he said to Cullen.

“You’re right,” Nicholas nodded at Gid. “When you’re right you’re right.”

“Oh yeah,” Cullen said. “And when you’re a giant pole smoker with a picture of a dude on your closet, you’re a giant pole smoker with a picture of a dude on your closet. Look. If I’m so stupid, how come I’m the one who thought of the most amazing plan in the world to make Cockweed look like a douche bag and totally get back at him?”

“Jean Seberg,” Nicholas said haughtily, “is considered one of the most beautiful women in history.”

They all went into the hall and Gideon locked the door. Two freshman boys were sitting on the ground doing trig problems together. Star struck, they looked up at Gideon, Cullen, and Nicholas.

Cullen walked up to one of them. “What’s up, Ethan? Joe?”

“It’s Etan,” the kid said.

“It’s Giles,” said the other.

“Whatever, you’re both gay,” said Cullen. “OK. Someone with no tits and a shaved head is…fill in the blank.”

“A dude?” Etan bit his thumbnail.

“Yeah,” Giles nodded. “A dude.”

A few minutes later Cullen, Gid, and Nicholas were on the road that went from Midvale to the highway. It was a picturesque, tree-canopied, curving road lined with distantly spaced old houses. Very few cars passed them, but those that did were of a classy, expensive European sort, all with windows sealed up to keep in the climate-controlled air and the pure, dignified sounds of Mahler and NPR. Gideon drove five miles over the speed limit, whistling. It was quiet for a while, and then Cullen sing-songed, “I love you too, Gideon.”

I wondered when that was going to come up.

Nicholas snorted. “Yeah, I can’t believe you’re still going to lame-ass Oswego with the g.f.” This is what Nicholas and Cullen call me behind my back. It evokes perfectly the worst things they feel about me and our relationship. They like me, I guess, but nowhere near as much as they’d like Gid to be free to pursue idiocy with them.

“It’s not Syracuse, it’s Buffalo,” Gid said. “Oswego is in the Finger Lakes region and—”

“Did you just say the Finger Lakes?” Cullen said. “Because that just reminds me of all the girls you’re not going to finger in St. John.”

Gid said, with a patience cultivated from months of being in love in the presence of two heartless bastards said, “I have a girlfriend.”

As they continued down the road there was a lonely stretch of marshland, followed by a subdivision.

“Oh Christ,” Nicholas said. “Do you know that not only are you going to miss out on the best snorkeling ever—”

“And hot, sandy beave!” Cullen piped up.

“But that one day,” Nicholas continued, “you’re going to live
in one of those giant beige mansions with a highway sound barrier in your backyard. With Molly.”

This made me feel better. I can get to thinking that these two fuckheads know Gid better than I do. But we would never live in a subdivision.