Vegan Virgin Valentine (2 page)

Yikes.

After we got home from the airport, my dad carried V’s duffel bags to the guest room and my mom heated up curry vegetables and basmati rice with lamb in a side dish for those of us who don’t want our food coming in contact with flesh.

V helped herself to a heaping pile of lamb and a small haystack of rice.

“You don’t like vegetables?” my dad asked.

V shook her head. “I’m all about baa-baa black sheep these days.”

“It’s lamb,” I said.

As V ingested a chunk of meat, she began humming “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”

She was totally doing it to piss me off. On the car ride home, my parents told her how I’m still a vegan. When she asked why anyone in their right mind would deprive themselves of hamburgers and pizza and ice cream, I said I’m grossed out by animal byproducts.

That’s partially true. I’ve never been able to get over the fact that meat is essentially roadkill with pedigree or that eggs are unfertilized baby chickens. But I have my secret reasons, too. Basically, after Travis Hart broke up with me, I couldn’t stop obsessing about him, about the rejection. Finally, after several hellish weeks, I decided I needed to obsess about something else. Something big. Which is why veganism made sense. It’s all-consumingly obsessive. You have to read ingredients on every food item and bring peanut butter with you when you travel and only go to certain restaurants. It can be a total pain, but it helps keep my mind off things.

Toward the end of dinner, my parents asked V whether she was nervous to start at a new school.

“No big deal,” V said. “This is the seventeenth school where I’ve been the new kid. It basically feels like … whatever.”

“Seventeen?” My dad raised his thick eyebrows. “Is that really how many it’s been?”

My mom’s hands were clasped around her water glass like she was restraining herself from saying something less than nice about Aimee.

V nodded. “At some point, they all blend together. Same locker, different combination. Different lunchroom, same sour-milk stench. Same snobs, same moronic gossip.”

My mom pushed V’s bangs out of her eyes. Her fingers were damp from the glass perspiration, so this time V’s hair slicked over to one side. V quickly looked down at her plate.

“Maybe Brockport will be different,” my dad said. “After all, you know Mara. And I’m sure she can introduce you to people. She’s involved in so many activities … I can’t even keep track.”

V and I caught each other’s eye and had this quick I’m-sizing-you-up moment. I could tell by her smirk that she was thinking I’m a hand-raising, teacher-hugging goody-goody. But I didn’t care because I’d already decided she was a class-ditching, chair-in-the-principal’s-office-warming deadbeat.

“I have an idea!” my mom exclaimed. “Mara, why don’t you grab a yearbook and we’ll give V a quick who’s who of Brockport High School.”

I pushed my plate away from me. “Can’t I just do the dishes? It’s my night.”

V smiled sweetly at my mom. “That’s a great idea. It would make me feel
so
much better to look at a yearbook, you know, to see who’s who.”

“You’re totally lying,” I said. “You just said it doesn’t matter, that we all blend together.”

“
Lying
is a strong word,” V said.

“You heard her,” I said to my dad. “She said it doesn’t matter who’s who.”

My mom and dad stared at each other like,
What now?
My parents and I rarely fight. Sure, we disagree, but it’s nothing that a few Family Meetings won’t solve.

My dad ran his hands through his hair. It’s mostly white and definitely in the Albert Einstein, out-of-control subcategory. I inherited his hair texture, but I always blow-dry mine into submission.

“I’ll take care of the dishes tonight,” my dad finally said.

“Great,” my mom said. “Mara, go grab your yearbook. Or do you want me to?”

I stabbed at my remaining piece of curried cauliflower. The tag team had just expanded from two to three.

My mom sat in the center of the couch with “Time of Our Lives” open on her lap. V and I sat on either side of her. “Time of Our Lives,” by the way, is the name of last year’s yearbook. I was the junior section editor but was attending a Model UN conference at Georgetown when they voted for the title. I think it’s an idiotic name for a yearbook. If you give people the notion that high school is the time of their lives, won’t it be depressing when they graduate and assume it’s all downhill? But the yearbook adviser was also the person who was writing one of my college recommendation letters, so I wasn’t about to argue it.

My mom was flipping through the pages, plunking her finger on various “nice kids,” as she called them. Translation: they are college-bound with professional parents. It was strange to see my mom point out “Mara’s friends.” Girls like Bethany Madison and Lindsey Breslawski. I ate lunch with them freshman, sophomore, and junior years, and we sometimes slept over at each other’s houses.

We’ve grown apart this year. For all of senior year, I’ve been leaving the high school at eleven-forty. I’m in this special program for honor students called 3-1-3. The point is to take three years of high school, one year of high school and college together, and—if you get enough credits—three years of college. I’m in the “1” part now, so I have college classes at SUNY Brockport every afternoon. Assuming I get accepted to the summer program at Johns Hopkins, I may be able to enter Yale as a second-year student.

All this to say that I don’t eat lunch in the cafeteria anymore. I do the high-school thing in the morning, leave for the afternoon, and sometimes come back later for meetings. I still chat with Bethany and Lindsey in school, but we haven’t talked on the phone or e-mailed in months.

My mom flipped through the “clubs” section and pointed out the myriad pictures of me. V kept making these snide little clucks. When my mom got to the Chemical-Free Fun Nights page and there I was—organizing Friday-night volleyball games as an alternative to killing brain cells—V actually snorted.

“Chemical-Free Fun Nights?”
she asked. “What do you do? Give out chlorine and krypton at no cost? What fun!”

“Lay off,” I said.

“I’m just teasing you, Mara. Chill out.”

I hate when people tell me to chill out. It’s just like when I’m walking down the hall and some cheese-ball social-studies teacher bellows, “Smile, Mara!” like I’m supposed to be perennially pumped on Prozac.

I think my mom was sensing the tension. She flipped the page but unfortunately landed on a spread of candid shots from last year’s Winter Ball. And smack-dab in the center was that picture of me in a spaghetti-strap dress and Travis Hart in a suit, our arms around each other, with a caption that read
Valentine and Hart: 2-gether 4-ever.
My cohorts on the yearbook staff, confident that we were a match made in Hallmark heaven, slipped that in as a surprise. Surprise, all right. Travis tossed me aside in late April, by which time the yearbook was already at the printers. So when “Time of Our Lives” came out in June, I had to weather the public humiliation that Travis and I were no longer two and four, but one big zero. Not to mention that in the month since our split, he’d transformed into a male slut and was sleeping his way through the sophomore class.

“Valentine and Hart,” V read in this singsong voice. “I didn’t know you had a boyfriend. And
four
-ever, no less!”

“We’re not together anymore,” I said.

I could swear I heard my mom whimper. It’s been more than eight months, and my parents still haven’t gotten over the fact that Travis and I didn’t work out. It wasn’t just the Valentine–Hart thing, though that was the icing on the cupcake. It’s that on paper Travis is the Man for Me. He’s over six feet, handsome, and my guy counterpart. Not the slut stuff, but on the overachieving front. We’re in the same accelerated classes. We do most of the same extracurriculars. And we’re currently in a heated competition for valedictorian of the senior class. With two marking periods to go, we’re down to the decimal point. It’s so insane because it won’t even affect our academic futures. Three days after I got into Yale, Travis got accepted early decision to Princeton. But it’s like whatever tension, sexual or otherwise, went on between us, we’re now dueling it out on the GPA – Grade Point Average – battlefield.

Sex, or lack of it, was our downfall. Travis treated our physical relationship with the cutthroat aggressiveness he applies to the rest of his life. It was all about conquests and scores. He was constantly pushing me to go further—second base, third base, that grand old slam. Early in our relationship, when he was trying to make it inside my bra and I kept shooing his hand away, he said, “What’s the big deal? It’s not like there’s much there anyway.”

Travis isn’t a total jerk. He was just a jerky boyfriend. The brainiac circuit at my high school is small enough that I had to let go of my hostility toward him almost immediately. It’s not like we’re friends, but we’re friendly enough. We’re both on student council. We’re co-chairs of Chemical-Free Grad Night, which is this no-alcohol all-night party that the school throws the night of graduation. We’re active in National Honor Society. We tutor sixth graders on Wednesday afternoons. Sometimes we even joke about our race for valedictorian, but I’m still determined to relegate him to salutatorian, to have the last and final laugh.

“How come you and the Hart guy didn’t stay together forever?” V asked.

“We just didn’t click,” I said.

“What didn’t you click about?”

I glanced at my mom.

“Maybe we shouldn’t talk about this,” my mom said.

“Why not?” V asked.

“Because it’s over,” I snapped. “Besides, it’s not like he was anything to me. Just some guy.”

“Very interesting,” V said.

I reached over my mom and flipped the page.

Later that night, as I was flossing, V came into the bathroom and sat on the toilet lid.

“I can’t believe Aimee has exiled me to fucking
Brockport,
” she said.

I know I’m counting the seconds until I go away to college, but I was born and bred here, so I wasn’t about to let V trash it. “What’s so wrong with Brockport?”

“More like what’s
right
with it? It’s freezing cold. It’s in the middle of nowhere. And what the fuck do you do for fun here?”

“It’s not the middle of nowhere. Rochester is a half hour away.”

V peered up at me through her long bangs.
“Rochester?
Are you kidding? Please tell me you’re kidding.”

I turned back to the mirror and slid the floss between two molars.

“So,” V said, “it’s interesting to see where things stand.”

“Where things stand?”

“With your virginity.”

I yanked the floss so hard it cut into my gums. “What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about the fact that you’re still a virgin. That you’re going to turn eighteen in July and you still haven’t done it.”

I spat into the sink. There was blood in my saliva.

“Frankly,” V said, “I’m worried about you.”

“I don’t need your concern,” I said. “And, besides, you don’t know anything about me. Unlike you, I choose to keep some things private.”

“What’s there to keep private? You didn’t do it with that Hart guy.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“I could tell by the way you talked about him,” V said. “You did … let me guess. Second base? Maybe some haggling on his part to get to third. Oh, yeah. I bet you went down there once and got so freaked out that you vowed to never touch another dick for the rest of your life.”

How did V know this?
This is the kind of stuff I’d never tell
anyone
and here she was, banging the nail right on the head.

V was smiling. “I’m right, aren’t I? I’m so right.”

“Will you get out of here?”

V stood up and headed out of the bathroom, singing, “I’m so right. I’m so right. I’m
sooooooooo
right.”

I slammed the door and locked it behind her.

The next morning, I drove V over to the high school. We didn’t say anything about the night before. Actually, we didn’t say anything at all. I was silently raging at being trapped behind the slow-moving parade of buses that was turning the half-mile trip from my house into a hefty commute. And no matter how many times I adjusted the defroster, I couldn’t get the windshield to stop fogging.

V stared out her window at the icy soccer fields. She was wearing an oversize army–navy jacket and flicking a convenience-store lighter on and off, on and off. That was annoying me, too, but I didn’t feel like telling her to quit doing it and risk getting her started about something.

We didn’t make it into the school until the first bell had already rung. I walked V to the main office and introduced her to Rosemary, the administrative assistant. I’m frequently in the main office meeting with Mr. Bonavoglia. Otherwise known as Mr. B. He’s the vice principal, in charge of all student affairs.

“Vivienne Vail Valentine,” Rosemary chirped. She has curling-iron-shaped bangs and an unflappably sunny demeanor. “Your records got faxed over from California yesterday. With Mara’s reputation here, we are thrilled to have another Valentine at Brockport High School. And you’re both so tall! Do you play basketball?”

People are always asking me that, too. Just like how everyone always asks whether I’m a real heartbreaker because my last name is Valentine. I hate both of those questions. To set the record straight, the answers are
No
and
Most Definitely Not
.

“Just call me V,” V said. Her hands were rammed in the pockets of her jacket. As we were driving over to school, I noticed that the
fucks
on her fingers had faded since yesterday.

“V,” Rosemary repeated. “I’ll try to remember that. So remind me … how are you girls related?”

“V is my…” I paused.

“I’m her niece,” V said.

“Niece?”

“I have a sister who’s almost twenty years older than me,” I said quickly. “She’s V’s mom.”

“A sister by the same parents?”

Why are people so darn nosy? The obvious subtext to this is
Your parents were still doing it two decades later?
Gross.