All That Glitters (9 page)

Finally, I spotted Camille, Harper, Morgan, and
Amory and gave them all a big smile. Even though the cafeteria was a flurry of activity—Bill Blass heels clicking, cell phones ringing, and one very insane-looking janitor gathering all the soda cans out of the trash bins and muttering to himself about who knows what—the third table felt like a total mecca of serenity. It was so great to know that I had thirty-five blissful minutes to just relax with my friends and chow down.

“How's it going, girls?” I said, plopping down in an empty seat next to Camille. Harper was dusting her eyes with gold shimmer, Morgan was tapping a beat with her fork on the table, and Amory was memorizing her monologue for the upcoming play tryouts.

“Well, I'm basically in awe watching you, Flan,” Camille said, shaking her head. “Here you were, all nervous about coming back to private school, and within three days, it's like you already know everyone.”

“I guess I'm just starting to feel more comfortable.” I shrugged.

Morgan put her fork down and laughed. “And is this newfound comfort making you bold enough to try the cafeteria soup? You just might be the bravest girl in this room.”

To show off my alleged bravery, I dunked my spoon into the mysteriously green soup and brought it to my lips.

“Actually,” I said, “it's pretty good. Anyone want to try?”

The soup was passed around the table and voted unanimously acceptable.

“She's in with the senior girls,” Camille listed on her hand. “She's expanding our horizons at the lunch line. What's next, Flan?”

Harper looked up from her Stila compact mirror and said, “You should buy a lottery ticket. This seems like your lucky week.”

“Actually,” I said, “I was sort of thinking about what you guys were saying the other day about the Virgil Host thing—”

“Ugh,” Amory interjected. She looked gorgeous as usual in a cobalt blue Marc Jacobs sweater with adorable square buttons. “This morning, I was in the bathroom rehearsing my lines for auditions and I totally heard Willa proclaiming her victory. She was talking about how she wants to implement a VIP Host's table where the Host and her guests of choice will sit at—get this—an
elevated
table so they can reign over the whole event. I can just see Willa and Kennedy sitting there glowering at everyone, making judgmental comments about what people are wearing, and hoarding all the boys.”

“Gag me,” Harper said, rolling her eyes before
adding another coat of MAC mascara. “There's got to be a logical way to thwart Willa's evil dominion.”

“Well, I started thinking about it last night,” I told the girls. “You know, about how brutal she was at practice—
so
not my style, by the way—and how she thinks she owns the school. And I don't know, I guess I started thinking that maybe there are benefits to having such a different way of being in the world. If Willa thinks she can scare people into voting for her so she can lord over us at Virgil, I figure I can try the opposite approach.”

“Kill them with kindness?” Camille said, digging her spoon back into my soup for another bite. A little dropped on the table, which she wiped up with her napkin.

“Exactly,” I said.

“Well, I know who I'm voting for,” Morgan said, sipping her Mango Kombucha tea and making a gagging face as she swallowed. “Please tell me—does anyone on earth actually
like
the way this stuff tastes? First and last time I'm buying it.”

Harper put her makeup away. “What you need now is a campaign slogan,” she said, pulling out a pen and a notebook to take notes. She was definitely proving to be the organized one of the bunch.

“And maybe some really hot ‘Flan Rocks' T-shirts?”
Amory added. “Costume always makes the character.”

“And a theme song,” Morgan said, forgetting the gross Kombucha and bobbing up and down in her seat like a little kid on her way to the Bronx Zoo. “Can I please, please, please be your music coordinator?”

“Of course,” I said, feeling a grin spread across my face. “I can use all the help I can get.”

“Ooh,” Camille said, “project! Way to step up the team effort, girls. Not that it'll be that hard to convince the school to love Flan even more by Monday, but it sounds like we have a busy week ahead of us.”

As we finished lunch and made our way to the exit, I could tell the girls were just as excited about this campaign as I was. Sure, it sounded like it might be a lot of work—on top of keeping up with my English work and field hockey practice, and was I
really
going to do this modeling thing for Jade Moodswing?—but everyone works best under pressure, right?

“I really hope you're not busy tonight,” I heard a voice say behind me just as I reached the hallway.

For a second I thought the person was talking to me, so I turned to say that I actually did have plans—skating with Alex and then meeting SBB for a shopping date in SoHo.

But when I realized that the voice belonged to
Willa—and that she wasn't talking to me—I quickly shut my mouth and turned back around.

“What's she up to?” Camille asked suspiciously as a small crowd gathered around Willa. Something about it made my stomach cramp up. I'd been feeling so confident during lunch, but seeing the student body hold court around Willa was a grim reminder that she definitely had some major sway at Thoney. After all, they
had
voted her class president.

“My father's screening a brand-new movie tonight at the Aphrodite,” she announced prissily. “Everyone from our class is invited.” Willa placed invitations one by one in the hands of her admirers. When she turned to me and my friends, she paused. “Whoops, well,
almost
everyone. Sorry, Flan. Coincidentally, I
just
ran out of invitations.”

It was all so pathetically staged, but the weirdest thing was that it seemed to work. All around me, freshmen girls were opening their invitations with universal
oohs
and
aahs
. Sure, I was curious about the screening, but I wasn't going to let Willa see it get to me.

“No biggie,” I told her, looking at her perfect blue eyes and trying to play it off. “I wouldn't have been able to make it anyway.”

Willa leaned forward, both arms crossed over her
chest. “Wow, lying about having other plans comes so naturally to you. You must be used to being excluded. Sad.” She put her finger on her chin in deep mock-thought. “Don't worry, you and your little friends can always Netflix my father's movies any Saturday night when you have nothing better to do.”

I opened my mouth to come back at her, but Harper grabbed my arm. “Don't waste your breath on rebuttal right now,” she said. “You'll get Willa back when it counts.”

I wanted to believe she was right, but in the face of Willa's icy stare, I started to wonder whether I was really up for this. Harper might be able to teach me every trick in the debating book, but Willa was out for blood.

The best place in Manhattan to Fall

Later that afternoon, I was standing in front of the full-length mirror in my bedroom wondering why there were never any wardrobe indecision scenes in fairy tales. I found it hard to believe that all these girls just knew what to wear to the ball with Prince Charming. Here I was, getting ready for my skating date with the Prince of New York, and feeling totally crippled by my lack of costume options.

This wasn't like me. Usually I just slapped on whatever I was most comfortable in, as per my mother's cardinal rule: In order to look comfortable in your own skin, you have to first feel comfortable in your clothes.

But now I was rifling through my closet, feeling absolutely certain that I had nothing at all to wear on this first date. I thought about popping down the street to Intermix or Marc Jacobs—but nothing I'd
seen in the windows recently seemed quite right either.

Was the Thoney preppiness getting to me already?

Or was it something about Alex that was intimidating me?

I'd first met Alex in the Hamptons a few Fourth of Julys ago. It was the summer between seventh and eighth grades, when my friends and I spent our time hanging out with guys who were constantly trying to outdo each other organizing late night parties on the beach.

I remember Alex stood out because he insisted that everyone go through this one private entrance behind Garrison Toyota's mansion. People were complaining about having to sneak in, about how the view from Alex's parents' private beach was even better than the one we were risking getting busted to see. The night I met Alex, I remember Camille summing it up perfectly by saying, “This guy must just get a thrill out of breaking every rule he can find.”

In a way, I sort of got that. I'd seen Alex at parties around the city after that, and I'd watched the way crowds of people parted like the Red Sea so that he could get to the front of the line to grab a drink or enter a club. He was the president of the sophomore class and the captain of the lacrosse team. Apparently,
he never even studied to get the elusive Dalton A. If everything came easy for him, I could sort of see why he might have to make his own challenges.

But when I applied that theory to his interest in me, it made me more than a little bit nervous. Was it possible that Alex saw
me
as some sort of challenge?

And then … what would a challenge wear on a first date?

When I finally did make it out the door to meet Alex at Wollman Rink in Central Park, I'd decided on the black leggings (of Kennedy infamy) and a long dark red sweater. Not exactly fairy princess material, but it did match my new red earmuffs, and I knew it was going to be freezing on the ice.

When I got to the park a few minutes after five o'clock, Alex was leaning on the railing that looked out over the rink. Against the backdrop of Central Park South's glittering skyscrapers, in his pin-striped blazer, orange scarf, and skates slung over his shoulder, he really did look like the Prince of New York.

“Ready to get klutzy out there?” he asked with a smile. Normally, I'd turn beet red if a guy I liked teased me about something as mortifying as my pizza party foul. But when I looked at Alex, he was smiling, and all of a sudden I didn't mind what he'd said.

“You don't even know what I'm capable of on the
ice,” I teased back. “Get ready to feel deeply jealous of my moves.”

“Actually, I'm already a little jealous,” he said, looking more serious. “You looked pretty smooth out there during field hockey practice. I guess you played on the team at Stuy?”

“Uh-uh,” I said, shaking my head. “That practice you saw was my first one.”

“You're kidding,” he said. “You were great.”

“Beginner's luck,” I said, feeling a shiver as Alex touched my back to lead me down the steps to the skate rental booth.

We found a spot on the bench and Alex helped me tie up my skates. It was no glass slipper, but it still felt sort of like a fairy tale to me.

Soon, Alex had taken my hand and was pulling me out on the ice. “I've never seen this place so empty,” Alex said, wrapping his arm around my waist. “It's like we have our own private rink.”

It had been a long time since I'd been skating. The last time Camille and I had made the mistake of going to Rock Center pre-Christmas, there'd been less actual skating and more shuffling against a thousand other people on a tiny fleck of a rink.

Today, though, Wollman Rink was wide open. The cold must have scared off a lot of tourists and little
kids. But I realized that as long as you had earmuffs and the warm hand of someone like Alex, it wasn't all that bad. In fact, as we whirled around the rink a few times to warm up, it was actually incredibly romantic.

“The most exclusive skating party in the world,” I said. “And we didn't even have to sneak in through Garrison Toyota's backyard to get here.” There was something about our rapport that made it easy and fun to tease each other.

“Hey—watch it there,” he said, giving me a squeeze. “Speaking of exclusive, how are you finding Thoney life?”

“So far, it's been fun,” I said, trying to choose the right words. “But sometimes I feel like everyone's playing a game that I didn't get the rule book for.”

“I don't believe in rules.” Alex shrugged. “Well, at least not the annoying ones.”

“I know,” I said. “And the Thoney rules are borderline ridiculous, but the girls seem to take them so seriously.”

“Like what?” He rubbed his gloved hands together.

I thought about Willa's Virgil campaigning and considered whether to bring up the whole Host thing to Alex. It did sound a little lame to say it out loud, but he was looking at me so sincerely with his dark eyes
that I decided to go for it. “Well, there's this … position I'm running for … to host this party—”

“Virgil?” he said. “Virgil Host is serious stuff. My older sister was super into it. You're going to run?”

“I guess so. I was kind of put up to it by my friends. But now it seems like there are all these things I have to do to win—all these favors I'm supposed to give, this whole strategy I'm supposed to follow.”

Alex seemed to think about this for a minute. “Hey, remember that surprise hip check you worked on the field yesterday?” he said.

“Yeah, I still have the bruises from the aftermath,” I said. “But what does that have to do with Virgil?”

Alex laughed. “Maybe you don't have to know
all
the strategies. Just pick the tricks that work for you so you can win the game.” He skated forward and gave me a light bump on the hip.

“You're doing it all wrong,” I said, laughing, then boldly taking a light bump back at his hip. “It's like this.”

“My bad,” he said, laughing too. “You know, I think you might be able to trademark that move: the Flood.”