Pride & Princesses (8 page)

    
‘Oh my gosh, Phoebe, Mark would be an idiot not to fall head over heels in love with you. Sell yourself short and everyone else will be quick to agree. Just because our Daddies abandoned us doesn’t mean every other man will. Listen, I heard Teegan and Freya are drawing straws to decide who should ask the newbies to the Fall Fling. Mmm...straight guys don’t usually like dancing, unless they’re on drugs! I bet they don’t even want to go...we should get in first.’

   
‘So true.’

   
‘Geez, we have to learn to treat ‘em mean and keep ‘em keen. It says so right here in
A Ladies Guide to Adultery.
Anyway, that’s what my mom used to say...and she should know. Loads of men in aeroplanes hit on her. Perhaps we should cast our net wider than Sunrise High...’ Mouche said.

   
‘Or change the guys already there...’ I added.

    
For example, Alex Miller, the only boy who properly dated a girl at our school for the entire month of May last year, had a reputation for being a true man-slut whose older girlfriend cut school with him just to go watch midday talk shows on cable every day and indulge in his desire for a meaningless fling.

    
‘That’s so deeply unromantic,’ Mouche said. ‘I’m so over man-sluts.’

     
‘Yeah, I agree. Alex is just nasty. Girls are so taken in by him because he’s kind of hot-looking. Face it, romance has died and gone to heaven in our little satellite town.’

    
‘The boys at our school aren’t really into dating at all. It’s just hooking up. They’ll line up all weekend to go to the opening of some bromance but when the time comes to woo women they show zero interest. I think teenage girls have been sold a lie for centuries with all this romance stuff.’

   
Mouche argued on the side of Girl Rights: ‘Is there something in the water of this town?
 
Has
hanging out
replaced true romance? And have we, as pre-women, been lied to?’

    
Mouche had a point.

    
Observe the boys during sophomore year sitting in their packs at lunchtime; they’re hanging out playing computer games, the most athletic of them running on the track team in a pack or playing basketball; and we don’t dissuade them from that. Any smart teenage girl likes her man athletic as well as clever but (excepting Mark Knightly and Jet Campbell) the two don’t often form the complete package. Of course, there were a few mathletes in the library and a group of optimistically titled
musicians
creating noise pollution in the temporary classroom overlooking the playing fields, but women or teenage girls like us just didn’t seem to figure in their worlds.

   
Mrs Mouche once told us, ‘men don’t change and women always make the mistake of trying to change them.’ Perhaps she’s right. Perhaps the pre-men we have in mind are more open to negotiation.

  
‘You have to get them while they’re young.’ Mrs Mouche told us.

  
‘Get ‘em while they still have muscle tone,’ Mouche joked. ‘Past eighteen is
seriously
past it...’

   
Trey rolled his eyes.

   
‘Could my sister be any more sexist?’ Trey said proudly.

    
Although I’ve never been exactly boy-crazy, at sixteen, I was inclined to agree. Eighteen was plenty old enough for us and maybe even a little too old as I later discovered.

   
‘We have to psyche ourselves up for Fall Fling...’ Mouche said. ‘It’s the perfect place to network and prepare for the social event of the year, junior prom.’

   
We were determined not to be wallflowers for the ultimate social occasion; the school formal.

   
‘Fall Fling is just for practice. It is hardly social suicide for besties to attend together. As the social monitors of the Sunrise Blog, we will be armed with cameras,’ Mouche said, ‘though it would be nice if we could take along Jet and Mark...just to make the Princesses jealous.’
   

That night we finalized the rules for the Boy-Rating Diary:

THE BOY-RATING DIARY

This diary shall remain a secret. The object of the diary is for Phoebe Harris and Mouche Macintosh to create a dating manual that may be of use to future generations (and to have some serious fun in junior year).

1.
    
The boys of Sunrise need to learn what our heroes of yesteryear knew – respect for women.

2.
    
Therefore, a kiss is the culmination of the romance, not the beginning.

3.
    
A date must consist of a beginning, middle and end and we have to practise a few dates for ourselves before we encourage other girls (i.e. the Princesses) to embrace our personal philosophy of self-respect.

4.
    
Proof:
 
there needs to be proof of the date in the form of photographs, gifts (to be gathered via a treasure hunt – gifts of red roses are not permissible since they can signify a bad end to a relationship).

5.
    
Affording us some tradition, the boy needs to make an effort to impress the girl.

6.
    
The ultimate love token comes in the form of a love letter. Whoever gets the most love letters and shares the best advice as well as the date of her dreams for junior prom (i.e.: Mark Knightly), wins the competition and gets to keep the gifts we gather during our dating journey.

7.
    
All details must be shared in the old-fashioned form of a written diary; contributions to be made by both parties, with an overview and progress report due on the last Friday of every month.

8.
    
Remember, knowledge is power.

9.
    
The Dating Game shall remain a secret even if and when we decide to involve other people in our game.

     
It didn’t occur to us that night, after we swam in
Mouche’s
brightly-lit pool with sparkles of water playing on our skin, that our plan would drive a wedge between us as friends and highlight our competitive natures more than ever; a quality people don’t normally seem to approve of in girls. For example, Mr Sparks, my drama teacher, once asked me rhetorically,
‘Are you ambitious, Phoebe?’

    
‘Of course’, I thought, but I was too shy to actually say it. He seemed to be inferring that being ambitious for your life is not okay if you are a girl. How wrong was he?

Chapter 5

The Love Drug

    
The first boy I saw on Monday, the second week of junior year, was Joel Goodman.
 
Joel is dangerous and wild and I have it on good authority that he dated both Teegan and Tory at the same time. He managed to hook up with them at Sunrise Mall one afternoon last summer. Joel is known as the virgin-converter and has a network of older and more devious buddies and a slightly unkempt air about him. There is no denying he is good-looking but he’s known to be a very bad person, not that I’m trying to moralize, it’s just that people talk.
 

   
‘Whoa, he gave you such a nice smile,’ Mouche said as Joel walked past. We were on our way to the auditorium.

   
‘Please,’ I said, ‘he’s monosyllabic and barely grunts in class. Besides, I could never date a man who didn’t challenge me intellectually.’

   
Peter Williamson, who was a math genius as well as a dancer, was a rare combination. He walked past us on the way to class.

  
‘Looking fine, girls,’ he said as he rushed to Algebra.

  
‘Why is it all the best boys bat for the other team?’ Mouche asked confidentially, although it was hardly a secret around here.
 

   
And it was good to know a boy with awesome fashion sense had noted we were looking our best.

   
We’d planned new outfits for every day of the month. Our make-overs, along with our dating strategy, were sure to elevate us to a whole new level of social acceptance. We walked down the hallway with a unique resolve, like we owned the place. We were dressed very sharply in our new skirts and sweaters. Even our shoes had extra shine.

   
After all, we’d had the previous weekend to prepare.

   
‘We should definitely
start by wearing more appealing, feminine clothing
,’ Mouche had suggested after we’d finished our Sunday night swim. We’d dragged some old dating and beauty guides back with us from the library that weekend and had raided our mothers’ vast quantities of them. They had titles like
Sophia’s Pathway to Beauty
and
Ava Gardner’s Guide to Gorgeousness.
There was also
Marilyn Monroe’s Blonde Beauty Secrets
and basically the stories of all the great movie stars with beauty guides from the 1960s and beyond. (For example, did you know you can make your own lip balm with beeswax, rosewater and natural food colouring?)

   
I don’t want to sound shallow but we decided to start from the outside and work to within. Until midnight, we practised hairstyles and make-up. We even dressed up Wednesday. We made her look like a smurf, then she fell asleep.
 
I don’t mean to sound like a Princess but we really felt we deserved some fun after our daddies had dipped into our so-called college funds and we would be working every spare minute during future holidays just to have enough money to last even a week in New York. We imagined a future time, when drenched in French perfume and looking like movie stars, we resided in our own luxury apartments overlooking Central Park. Man servants doted on us. Boyfriends wept at our non-exclusive schedules.

   
Reality checked in along with dawn.

   
We were wearing pink gloss and oatmeal face masks. The pasty oats were moistened with warm water and mixed with Vaseline so they didn’t drop off in clumps into the pool. Wrapped up in bathrobes, heavy duty moisturiser smoothed over our elbows and heels (our ‘rough edges’ according to
Sophia’s Beauty @ p.29
), our feet dangled in the water making us seem like ladies of luxury.
 

   
‘I have a need for speed and a strange feeling I’m going to win this bet...’ Mouche said as she pulled her raisin feet out of the water.
 

    
I looked over at Mouche.