Dream Girl Page 4

  After dinner, Ian walked me to the No Parking signpost I’d locked my bike to.

  “Too bad Nina couldn’t come,” he said when I was crouched down.

  My hands shook and I had to restart the combination. “Next time.” I turned the dial to its final stop. When I came back up Ian was looking at me with a pleading expression.

  “You know,” he said, “last spring I got stood up by somebody named Vera whose locker was also close to mine—or supposed to be.” He blinked hard. “I still haven’t met her. You wouldn’t happen to know her, too, would you?”

  And in one instant I knew that he was a whole lot savvier than he’d let on.

  “Oh boy,” I said after an awkward pause. “Don’t look at me for answers. I just came to have dinner.”

  “Fine, but I’m not an idiot. Who’s setting me up?” He shifted his weight to his other foot. “I’m not going to say anything. I just need to know.”

  I looked into his watery brown eyes and knew I could trust him.

  “It’s Sheila Vird,” I told him quietly. “Know her?”

  He gave a small nod and stuck his hands in his pockets. By the way he was looking at me, I thought he was about to say something else, but he just waved goodbye and wheeled his suitcase into the sunset.

  { 6 }

  Roll Out the Red Carpet for #6013V

  Our kitchen is too small to comfortably pour a bowl of cereal, but for some reason it didn’t feel so congested anymore. There was enough room for a deluxe kitchen island, and—get this—a number of trees bearing fruit were growing out of the floor. It was all so beautiful it almost didn’t matter that the color was missing.

  I was at the island, constructing a fruit salad that could qualify as high art. Suddenly possessed of fluent knife skills, I was hacking the gray strawberries into cartoony hearts and carving elaborate palm trees out of dull mangoes.

  From a line of strangers that wound all the way around the apartment, people came in one by one to relieve me of my sculptures. Domestic goddess that I was, I continued to shake fruit from the trees and carve edible sailboats and suitcases and cathedrals for my fans. It was amazing—all I had to do was think of something, and after a few deft knife strokes, I’d have a piece of fruit the exact same shape.

  I woke up on my first day of school a nervous wreck. It was a different kind of anxiety than I’d ever felt before—as if every cell in my body were ticklish. I nearly mistook Mom’s L’Occitane spray deodorant for my hair spray, and it wasn’t until my jeans were up around my knees that I realized I’d stepped into them backward. I must have tried on and ripped off every top I had while the ladies in the vintage Vogue cover posters on my wall looked down at me with compassion.

  Henry Hudson High School was much bigger than I remembered, a five-story concrete fortress that was covered in fresh-looking graffiti. Outside, the students milled about in a big noisy blur. I spotted a familiar group of girls clad in yoga pants and hoop earrings. They were standing at the top of the stairs by the entrance, calling everybody by their names and welcoming them with huge fake smiles as if they were a Hawaiian airport lei service. Steeling myself with a big inhale, I climbed up the front steps and, with lowered eyes, filed into the building and through the metal detector.

  “Everyone to your homerooms,” a stout woman in a security uniform bleated into a megaphone. “Transfers to the auditorium.” I followed her pointed finger through a doorway and down a hall with glass trophy cases and ancient dean’s list plaques.

  The auditorium reminded me of a cavernous old swimming pool, with its mulchy smell and peeling blue walls. I was terrified, though slightly calmed, to see that the other fifty or so transfers looked pretty scared themselves. Scanning the back row, I located one free seat on the end.

  The room was quiet, and it came as something of a relief when a man with an outrageous comb-over took the stage and got going on his welcome speech. He introduced himself as Dr. Arnold, the assistant principal.

  “Incoming sophomores, congratulations,” he said. If I couldn’t see I would have thought he was pinching his nose. “You all got into Henry Hudson, one of America’s most challenging high schools, land of the gifted and the brave. Give yourselves a round of applause.” He backed away from the microphone and waited for our clapping to trickle out.

  “Well done,” he said finally. “But let me remind you, for every Henry Hudson graduate who goes on to the Ivy League, there are twice as many students who don’t make it to graduation.”

  I wasn’t a math whiz, but I had to wonder if that statistic was valid. I looked around and noticed that most of my fellow students appeared too scared to blink, let alone question his statement. I was pleased to see a pretty girl down at the other end of my row napping.

  “Nobody coasts through Henry Hudson,” Dr. Arnold told us, and rambled on about the “once-in-a-lifetime challenge” that lay ahead. I scanned the crowd in time to see the sleeping girl wake up and stare at him incredulously. My eyes raked her over. She had brown hair with bangs that came down to her eyebrows, and when she raised her hand to cover up a yawn, I saw she had a thick silver ring with a big old-fashioned airplane on it.

  “It’s up to you,” Dr. Arnold went on. “You can soar or you can fall. You can report to your homerooms.” Nobody budged. Dr. Arnold leaned into the podium. “That means you’re excused.”

  In no time, the other kids had pulled slips of paper out of their backpacks and pockets and scuttled off. I would have, too, if only I’d known where I was supposed to go. I’m not exaggerating when I say I was the only kid who didn’t have a homeroom assignment postcard. It must have been the missing piece of mail Mom had mentioned the day we came back from France. I wanted to kill her.

  I was left to wander the emptying halls, trying not to look lost. I rounded a corner only to nearly collide with a scary security guard who was yelling at the few stray students. Not wanting to get into trouble, I slipped into a stairwell. As I made my way up to the second floor, I saw the sleeping girl with the airplane ring sitting at the top of the landing. She was wearing the coolest pair of tall black boots with military-style buttons up the sides. I could tell she didn’t want to be bothered, but just as I was about to slip through the door to the second floor, we smiled at each other and I felt a surge of happiness. Even if we didn’t actually say anything, I’d take what I could get.

  I floated around the second floor until I found an administration office. It contained little more than two desks and a cheesy poster depicting three floppy-eared puppies in a hot-air balloon, with a series of clouds overhead spelling out LET’S LEARN! A far cry from the racy Paul Gauguin nudes that decorated the walls at Farmhouse.

  “Excuse me,” I said, edging closer to the sole person in the room, an old lady with a hearing aid and messily applied coral lipstick. She looked up from her New York Times Magazine and watched me dispassionately while I explained my plight.

  “Student ID number?”

  “I don’t know that either,” I said. “All I got from this place was a note about the new metal detectors.”

  She made a sucking noise while retaining her mouth’s tight scowl. It was quite the feat. “I’ll need your student ID number. There are more than seven thousand students in the system.”

  “Are you sure my name isn’t in the system?”

  “I can try,” she sounded exasperated. “Last name?”

  Even though my last name is only seven letters long, she pressed at least fifty buttons on her computer. I was growing more impatient by the second, and a few minutes into my wait I couldn’t resist gnawing on my fingernails. “Student ID number 6013V,” she said at last. “Homeroom 3P. Do you want me to write that down for you?”

  What a welcoming place.

  Homeroom 3P was on the third floor in a chemistry lab whose windows started ten feet from the floor. I wondered if this was to keep the rest of the world from looking in or to keep us from looking out.

  “Voyante?” asked the teacher, a t
all man with thin hips and an improbable potbelly. “We were wondering what happened to you.”

  The redhead in the back row turned around to stare right through me. Now I knew what it felt like to wear a bodysuit of goose bumps. But then Sheila’s mouth moved in what I could only interpret as a smile, and the world became a whole lot warmer.

  The teacher handed me student 6013V’s schedule. It was your standard sophomore-year fare: math, PE, homeroom, lunch, English, chemistry, global studies, French 2, and music appreciation. The classes met in the same order Monday through Friday—which meant I’d be sweating in gym class from 9:12 to 10:04 every single morning. Joy. Also, I only had five minutes to get to my next class, which meant there was no time for a postgym shower. Olfactory joy to the entire world. The final insult: I got dealt the earliest lunch period possible, at the ripe hour of ten-twenty-five.

  I made my way to the only free seat in the room, front and center. I tried to pull my chair out from my desk only to learn it was bolted to the floor. “Hudson’s no wrestling rule applies to the furniture, too,” the teacher said over his shoulder.

  And it probably also applied to faculty. Too bad.

  All day long I was waiting for something good to happen. And all day long it didn’t. The kids in the hallways seemed to be too preoccupied with being reunited with their old friends to acknowledge the new girl. And the teachers didn’t even ask us what we did over the summer. Instead, they filled the time laying out seating arrangements and formulas for our final grades.

  And then, at the end of the day, when I was getting my stuff from my locker and doing everything I could not to cry over my newfound invisibility, I heard the most beautiful sound.

  “Hey, Claire.”

  Sheila was standing just a few feet away, her hair shellacked into a tight bun. Her quartet of friends hovered behind her, staring at me with more interest than ever before.

  “Hi!” I had to struggle to hold back from thanking them for acknowledging my existence.

  “You feeling better?” Sheila asked.

  “Yeah, thanks.” I stuffed my French workbook into my black and white striped tote bag.

  “What was wrong with you again?”

  “Just a headache,” I fudged. “So how was the party? Late night?”

  I could hear myself talking at double speed, the way I always do when I’m keyed up.

  Sheila didn’t dignify my question with an answer. “I was just wondering something. I know you went home because you were feeling dizzy. What did you end up doing?” Her face was a funny shade of rose, and she wasn’t blinking. At all.

  I scanned the other girls’ faces and saw that they were wearing the same icy expression. My heart lurched to my throat. Just because I didn’t like them didn’t mean I didn’t want them to like me, and I certainly hadn’t made enough friends here to start collecting enemies.

  “At home? I don’t know.” I scrunched up my face. “I guess I just watched TV and read magazines. Why?”

  “Oh, well, my mom was over at your place Friday night, and she said she didn’t see you.” Sheila squinted at me. “And she was there until pretty late. So unless she was really drunk or something…”

  I laughed nervously. Not because she was right about her mom—though she probably was—but because I didn’t have an alibi. “Well, I didn’t go straight home. I—”

  “I see,” Sheila said sharply. “You didn’t want to hang out with us and you didn’t want to be rude. You’ve always been so conscientious about manners.” She turned around to whisper something to her posse, and they all wagged their heads. “You won’t have to worry about our feelings again…. We’re not really planning on inviting you to anything in the next little while. And by little while”—she paused, taking her time to bite back a smile—“we mean ever.”

  Sheila tapped her sneaker on the ground and glared at me. I needed to think of something good—and fast. But the only thing that came to mind was the word whatever, a rejoinder that wasn’t going to go the distance for me. And as if in slow motion, the girls removed their hands from their outthrust hips and turned around, leaving me in the dust.

  “Wait!” I said to the space they’d been standing in. “Aren’t you going to let me come up with a witty reply?”

  But they’d walked off so fast they didn’t even hear my lame comeback, if you can call it that. Demoralized, I leaned against a locker and started to slide down to the floor.

  “I wouldn’t worry about it,” a chubby girl said, crouching down to join me. “Anything you said would have been lost on them anyway. They’re a bunch of fools.”

  “I know.” I sank even farther. “That’s what scares me.”

  When I got home that day, I didn’t say a word. I just put my A Murder Is Announced DVD on in the living area and plopped down on the couch for a much-needed session of self-pity. Mom and Dad must have been able to smell my misery: they didn’t bug me about doing homework, and every so often Mom would come by the couch to make sure I hadn’t strangled myself with her crocheted throw.

  By dinnertime, they’d had enough of their own patience. They were ready to get the scoop. I was enjoying my first bite of creamed spinach and ham and cheese quiche when they launched their assault.

  “I can tell you’re not ready to talk, Claire, but the suspense is killing me,” Mom said. “How was it?”

  I shrugged.

  “Give it time, ma petite!” Dad cut in, tipping a bottle of red wine into his favorite mason jar. “This is going to be a banner year. Hudson is a first-rate school, and you will love it. Did you know that the secretary of defense is an alum and they have more National Merit Scholars every year than…”

  As Dad prattled on, citing Hudson’s “high-caliber” alumni and “unrivaled contributions” to the scientific community, I stared at my plate, watching my mound of spinach turn cold and waxy.

  I just had to take matters into my own hands. I could run away and join the circus—maybe there was an opening for a nonbearded lady. I could buy an armful of creepy self-help books. Or I could bite the bullet and make a friend or two.

  Kiki was always encouraging me to stop waiting for people to introduce themselves to me. “What’s the matter with your generation?” she’d say. “Introducing yourself is the easiest thing on earth. Just say, ‘Hello, I’m Kiki Merriman and I’m a friend of Trudie’s,’ or, ‘Hello, I like to eat lobster thermidor in the nude.’ It doesn’t really matter how you break the ice so long as you break it.”

  Assaulting strangers wasn’t exactly my thing, or at least it hadn’t been back when I’d had a choice. But I had to accept that that might not be the case anymore. Right then and there, as I glanced up at my parents’ pitying looks, I resolved to change my tack.

  At lunch the following day, I hastily scanned the cafeteria for the girl with the airplane ring before sitting down with three other girls.

  “Hi,” I said. “My name is Claire and I just transferred here.”

  “Hey,” said a pretty girl with long hair and an eyebrow ring. She gave me the once-over before turning back to her friends and resuming their conversation. I knew I should have said something else—I could have asked what their names were or even for some advice about Hudson—but I was too uncomfortable and embarrassed, and I finished eating quickly and spent the rest of the period in the bathroom, pretending to fix my hair while working out a very important calculation.

  Only 1,095 days until college.

  { 7 }

  A Curious Incident on the Thirty-eighth Floor

  “I’m sorry I’m late!” I rasped when I hustled into Kiki’s apartment on Saturday, twenty minutes behind schedule. I’d run all the way from the subway station—and not only because Kiki hated it when I was late. I’d barely made it through the week at Hudson, and never had I been so desperate for a visit with my favorite person on earth.

  Someone had left the door open a crack, and through a forest of balloons I saw my grandmother and her four best friends clustered on t
he damask couches in the back of the room.

  “The F train got messed up,” I explained, preemptively thwarting any guilt trips. “Some lady tried to throw herself on the subway tracks.”

  “Life can be overrated,” Kiki’s friend Clem Zwart sighed. Clem is a melancholic man with a long white beard and a soft spot for silver biker jewelry. He used to be the errand boy at Andy Warhol’s silver-walled Factory, and now he works as an interior decorator for Fifth Avenue ladies. His specialty is silver bathrooms. Clustered around Clem was the rest of Kiki’s gang: Edie Wilcox, Kiki’s oldest friend; Edie’s unbelievably boring husband, John; and George Jupiter, who used to be the hotel’s resident piano player.

  “The subways are such an inconvenience—I don’t see why anyone bothers with them!” Kiki hollered. She didn’t sound too mad at me. My heart swelled with relief. Kiki rose to her feet and raised her arms. “Well, what are we waiting for, mademoiselle? Come and let me see my favorite grandchild up close.”

  I shrugged off my jean jacket and smiled at the ground, trying not to let it show how great it was to hear, for the umpteen-thousandth time, that I was her number one. It made her feel a little guilty to prefer me to Henry, and she often made sure to justify her favoritism by saying I was her only grandchild who will sit pretty while she drinks cocktails and gossips about dead people. “Boys are hard,” she’d say. “They become interesting around their sixty-fifth birthday.”

  I started my approach, but it was cut short. “Fix yourself a drink, dear,” she instructed.

  So I turned back around and headed for the sideboard. Next to a pile of newspapers whose typos Kiki had corrected in red ink, I saw an ice bucket, a crystal glass, and a bottle of Orangina—my favorite.

  Drink in hand, I joined the gang. The sun was sitting low against the skyline, and the silhouette of Clem’s beard blended in nicely with the clouds. It had been a while since I’d seen Kiki, and she looked exactly the same, with her blond bob and a hint of a smile that suggested she was up to no good.