Moby Clique (2 page)

Most girls my age have to worry about whether or not the boy of their dreams knows they exist. I have to worry whether or not my boy actually
does
exist. It’s a strange, strange world.

I put my hand to the locket I wear around my neck, the one that contains a bit of a page from
Wuthering Heights
. It’s the one thing that’s keeping Heathcliff in this world. If it were destroyed, he’d be sent straight back to his fictional universe. That he gave it to me speaks volumes about how much he trusts me—especially since Heathcliff normally doesn’t trust anyone.

The shop bell dings and my dad walks through. Reflexively, I frown. Dad and I do not get along. That’s because Dad has the emotional maturity of a fourth-grader. And I like to point this out. Often.

“There’s my baby!” he says in his exaggerated enthusiasm reserved only for Carmen. He gives her a leer, which makes him look like a lecherous old man. His bald head gleams in the pink fluorescent lights of the store.

“Honey bear!” she cries, and she runs over to give him a sloppy kiss. Tongue is involved, and I feel like I’m going to vomit. I long for the days when Dad and Carmen fought. That was before Dad dropped a hundred Gs on In the Puke. That’s paid for probably a lot more than French kisses. The thought makes me want to wretch. There’s only one thing worse than imagining your own parents having sex, and that’s imagining them having sex with someone else.

He doesn’t acknowledge my presence at all for a full five minutes while he and Carmen exchange sickeningly sweet baby talk. Just when I feel like I’m very close to putting my own eye out with one of Carmen’s pink fuzzy disco ball pens, Dad looks up and sees me.

“How’s my little
worker
today?” Even Dad can’t manage to keep the sarcasm from his voice. “She hasn’t caused you any trouble today, has she, Carmen?”

I haven’t caused trouble the whole freakin’ summer. Not that Dad would notice. Even now, he’s already distracted by the edible underwear display. He doesn’t even have the attention span to listen to Carmen’s answer. Not that I want his attention. If he’s not ignoring me, that means he’s threatening to send me off to juvie.

“She’s been fine, although you know she’s reading too much,” Carmen says. “It’s a distraction for the customers.”

“Oh yeah, and that isn’t?” I mumble, glancing over at the bachelorette section with the giant blow-up pink penis. You know, because little old ladies who are shopping for pink stationery and pink ballpoint pens are also in the market for a giant pink pecker. Only Carmen would think those two go together. And maybe for her they do. She was the one, after all, who would have sex with my dad on the office copier back when he was married to his second wife. Maybe she just associates sex with office products.

“Um-hmmmm,” Dad says, clearly not listening, as he picks up a packet of edible strawberry thongs. Serious ew factor. “By the way, where’s my other daughter?”

“You mean Lindsay?” I say. I wonder if he’s temporarily forgotten my sister’s name. I wouldn’t put it past him. He’s always forgetting our birthdays. Our names wouldn’t be much of a stretch.

“I thought she was with you,” Carmen says.

Dad shrugs. “She’s not with me….”

I sigh. “I don’t suppose
either
of you remembered to pick her up from tennis camp? It ended this morning.”

Lindsay had insisted on going to some tennis camp this summer. Lindsay had never hit a tennis ball in her life, but that didn’t stop her from signing up. Apparently, all the cool kids from her school went, because the most popular girl in her class also happened to be on the varsity team. Lindsay was always chasing after the popular kids. It was so sad and pathetic, really. She never really fit in, but that didn’t stop her from sucking up to them all the same. And that’s why they kept her around, as far as I could see. She was their personal slave—doing their homework, running their errands, at their beck and call night or day.

“Camp?” Dad echoes, memory starting to dawn. “Was I supposed to pick her up? Or was your mother?”

“Mom said it was your turn,” I say. I glance at my watch. If nobody remembered to pick her up, she’d been staring at empty tennis courts at Northwestern for close to five hours. Poor Lindsay. “Didn’t she call you?” I ask Dad.

“I haven’t had my phone on,” he says, shrugging.

Great. Am I the only adult here? If Dad hadn’t confiscated my phone as punishment for talking back to Carmen in June, Lindsay could’ve called me.

“I
told
you you were supposed to go,” Carmen tells Dad, who frowns.

“Why couldn’t
you
pick her up, then, if you remembered?” he snaps at her, his good mood suddenly gone. “How am I supposed to remember everything?”

“I’ve got a
business
to run, in case you haven’t noticed,” Carmen spits.

And then, while Dad and Carmen are arguing about who’s responsible for this latest child-rearing debacle (I swear, neither one of them is responsible enough to raise gerbils), I hear a tap on the glass at the front window.

I look up to see Lindsay standing there, looking peeved, her hands on her hips and her hair a bit of a mess. I don’t know how she got here, but chances are none of those popular kids gave her a ride. They usually just ask for favors, they don’t grant them. Maybe she took the el? In any case, I guess she got tired of waiting.

She sticks her tongue out at me, like she’s always done since she was five. Lindsay doesn’t like the fact that I don’t approve of her desperate attempts to be popular. That is so not my scene. I’m the artsy, thrift-store girl, not the buy-anything-with-a-designer-label kind of girl. Still, I keep trying to tell Lindsay she’s better off not being a popular drone, but she won’t listen to me. Even now she looks like she’s trying too hard in her head-to-toe Lacoste tennis ensemble. I don’t know how she ever convinced Mom to buy it. But Lindsay always gets whatever she wants, including a one-hundred-and-twenty-five-dollar tennis skirt that she’ll only wear once. Lindsay typically always tries to play the “good kid” card by pointing out how bad I am, and she usually gets the parentals to buy her whatever she wants.

She jangles keys in the window. They’re Dad’s spare car keys that he keeps in a magnetized tin box underneath his bumper. I’d recognize the key chain anywhere. It’s one of Carmen’s. It’s a pink furry slipper.

“Um, guys…?” I say, trying to interrupt Carmen and Dad, who are still going at it. Those two argue as crassly as they make out. It’s really kind of gross.

As I watch, Lindsay flips Dad off (although Dad can’t see) and then climbs into the driver’s seat of his brand-new shiny Land Rover. I don’t know what she thinks she’s doing. She’s fourteen. The most driving experience she’s ever had is playing Mario Kart.

“Dad,” I say, starting to worry now. She looks like she’s turning over the engine. I hear his Land Rover rev. “Lindsay’s over there. She’s in your car.”

“She’s
what
!” Dad shouts, just as Lindsay sticks out her tongue at the three of us, and then turns around as if she has the car in reverse. But she doesn’t. She’s got the car in drive, and faster than you can say “
The Fast and the Furious,”
she’s run straight into the window of In the Puke, shattering glass everywhere and nearly running over the little old lady by the sales bin. The front bumper of the Land Rover comes to a screeching halt about a foot from the counter where we’re standing. Lindsay has a look of surprise on her face, too. I’m guessing she didn’t quite mean to actually run through the store. She meant to steal Dad’s car, only she didn’t know which gear was which.

I’m the first to recover from my shock, and I glance over at Carmen, who looks like Macaulay Culkin from the original
Home Alone
movies. She’s got both her hands on her face and her mouth in a big, round O. Dad is turning various shades of red and purple. He can’t even form words he’s so mad.

This can’t be good.

“Uh, Dad, this is like
totally
Miranda’s fault,” Lindsay sputters, pointing to me. “She’s a bad influence!”

Two

“So what is Bard like?”
Lindsay asks me for the hundredth time since we started the trip to Bard Academy.

This was Dad’s idea of punishing her—sending her along with me to Bard Academy. Only it’s far more a punishment for me, because Lindsay simply will not be quiet. She’s literally not shut up since we got to the airport, and since then we’ve been on a bus and we’re now on a boat taking us to Shipwreck Island, home to Bard Academy. Of course, Dad knew it would suck for me. That’s why he did it. Lindsay did blame me for her little car stunt, and Dad, as usual, believed her. This is because Lindsay is the “nice” daughter and I’m the one with the “bad attitude.”

“I
asthed
you a
quethyon,
” Lindsay lisps. The lisp is from her retainer, which she wears twenty-four/seven. She’s the only person I know who actually
follows
her orthodontist’s instructions. She’s convinced that having perfect teeth is the ticket to being popular. She didn’t even really need the retainer, but insisted on one because one of the popular kids once hinted she had a bit of an overbite. Naturally, trying to explain that this kid was probably just trying to get under Lindsay’s skin didn’t fly.

“Hello—
earff
to Miranda!” she trills.

A bit of her spittle falls on my arm.

“You’re spitting on me!” I cry, wiping it away.

“Thorry,”
she says. “
Tho?
What’
th
the deal?”

“It’s a delinquent boarding school, so it’s got a lot of delinquents,” I say for the hundredth time. How else do you explain Bard? First off, I can’t exactly tell her what the school is really like. I can’t spill the big secret, which is that it’s actually a kind of literary purgatory.

“But what
kind
of delinquents?”

Lindsay is taking far too great an interest in the wayward brethren of the school. I’m going to have to tell Mom about this. Of course, I can’t believe Mom let her favorite child go in the first place, but she put up a minimal fuss. She’s been too distracted lately by her blazing love affair with Mr. Perkins, Lindsay’s math teacher.

“You’ll see when we get there. It’s Gothic and boring and strict, okay?”

“Like Gothic how? Like
Picture of Dorian Gray
Gothic?”

I glance at her. “You read
Picture of Dorian Gray
?”

“Duh—last year. I got MacKenzie an A on her paper.” MacKenzie is the queen bee at Lindsay’s school and Lindsay literally worships her.

“You shouldn’t write papers for her,” I scold. “You ought to let her do that herself.”

“She’s my
friend,
” Lindsay says, crossing her arms and jutting out her chin.

“She’s not your friend,” I snap. “She’s just using you.”

“What
ever,
” Lindsay says, sticking her lower lip out in a pout. She’s mad at me, but on the bright side, maybe she’ll be quiet.

“Do you think we’ll be roommates?” she asks after a second. There goes quiet.

“No,” I say. “You’re a freshman. I’m a junior.”

“So are there gangs at the school? And drugs? And fights?” Lindsay seems to really dig the idea of going to school with a thug element. I’m not sure where this is coming from. For most of her life she’s been safely tucked into her honors classes.

“Why are you so obsessed with delinquents?”

“Well, I don’t know any, except for you. I just think it would be cool to know some.”

I think about Parker Rodham, one of the richest girls at the school, who is also accused of poisoning her mother. There is nothing cool about her, unless you think ruthless evil is cool.

“Are you serious?” I ask her.

“Duh,” she says, rolling her eyes. “My old school was boring. I’m glad I’m going with you.”

I can’t believe this. My wannabe prom queen sister is actually stoked about being sent away to delinquent boarding school. Unbelievable. My dad thought this would be such a punishment for her, but she actually
likes
the idea of being a tough girl.

I look at her and I can’t believe we’re sisters. For one thing, we only share a passing resemblance. We have the same pale complexion, and nearly the same height, but beyond that, I’m skinnier and Lindsay has all the curves. The girl developed at thirteen, whereas I’m basically still waiting. And while I’m wearing clothes of the punk chick-meets-Sienna Miller variety, she looks like a car wreck between two warring prep gangs. Basically, Martha’s Vineyard meets Orange County, which is trademark MacKenzie style.

“Lindsay, there’s a seriously bad element at the school, you know,” I warn her. “You have to be careful.”

“I will,” Lindsay promises. “But you’re there to protect me, so I’m not too scared. Besides, don’t you have that boyfriend of yours? What’s his name? Heathcliff?”

“How do you know about Heathcliff?” I ask her sharply.

She shrugs. “I’ve only been reading your mail. And your password-protected blog.”

“Why, you little…” I can’t believe she hacked into my computer! I’d been keeping an offline blog of sorts, just to try to sort out my feelings. Besides, Ms. W said I should keep a diary or journal, to help me deal with life in general.

“But what happened to that Ryan guy? I thought you were gaga over him.”

“None of your business.”

Even I don’t know quite how I feel about my ex these days. Or about Heathcliff, for that matter.

“I thought you weren’t even
allowed
to date,” Lindsay says, referring to the fact that my parents forbade me to date at the end of freshman year when I snuck out of the house to meet a boy who tried to get me drunk.

The ferry horn blows, signaling the fact that we’re closing in on Shipwreck Island and Bard Academy. Lindsay grabs her massive backpack and pulls out a folder with printouts she’s made of her research of Shipwreck Island. She’s always well organized. It’s how she keeps all the papers she’s doing for other people straight.