Privileged (14 page)
(b) wedding dresses : Vera Wang
(c) boots : Prada
(d) bondage wear : Gaultier
(e) sweater-vests : Ralph Lauren
T
wo weeks later, I’d reached the halfway point of my now-extended tenure in Palm Beach—December 15—and things were going swimmingly. After a weeklong sojourn at Les Anges, Laurel had returned to France until the Christmas holidays, so I didn’t have her looking over my shoulder and bugging me about the twins’ study schedule. To my surprise, they were spending a bit more time with their books and with me. They were up to an hour or two after school and ditto on weekends. Sage—who was a lot nicer to me when her sister wasn’t around—told me that she was hedging her bets. Hollywood shut down between Thanksgiving and New Year’s, so there was no way they’d find a new manager or sign any deals. In that case, if the studying continued to be relatively painless, she’d participate.
The weird thing was, paltry as their efforts might be by Yale standards, they were actually paying off. Rose proudly brought home a test from Palm Beach Country Day that had asked her to compare and contrast various sets of characters in Bradbury’s
Fahrenheit 451
. Not only had she read the book, as opposed to doing what she and Sage normally did—watching the movie—she’d written a halfway coherent essay. Her teacher had written “Good job!” along with a circled B− atop the paper, and you would have thought Rose had been the recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. As for Sage, she’d pulled an actual C on a math test, and without Ari texting her the answers.
It confirmed a theory of mine about school. To do brilliantly, one had to be brilliant. To do well, all one needed was willingness to make the effort. Brilliance was absolutely not a prerequisite. Unfortunately, nothing I’d seen from the twins led me to think they were either hardworking or brilliant. But it was a start.
What was pretty brilliant, however, was what happened when someone knowledgeable like Marco took you shopping for lingerie on Worth Avenue. I was looking forward to James’s return to South Florida so I could,
ahem
, show him how I’d learned to take advantage of my assets and a growing collection of La Perla and push-up bras.
East Coast
shut down for the Christmas holidays, and he was flying down on Christmas Eve.
It was Sunday morning, and I’d just gotten off the phone with my parents, who’d told me it had been blizzarding all weekend and they were on their eleventh Independent Film Channel movie. It inspired me to find an art-film house in West Palm Beach, which was currently showing a double bill of Truffaut films—
The Last Metro
and
Small Change
—and I was dying to go. I knew better than to disturb the twins this early, so I read on the balcony and watched a couple of porpoises swimming in the breakers. At noon, I butterflied my book and made my way to the twins’ wing. If I could move up their study session, I’d be off to the theater.
“Sage,” I called quietly. There was no answer, which meant she was out cold, out, or putting on her game face at her vanity.
I tiptoed inside to discover that she wasn’t asleep and she wasn’t at her vanity, either. But then something caught my eye. Sage’s computer was booted up, and on the twenty-one-inch flat-screen monitor were four photographs: one of Sage wearing the same outfit that I’d seen her in the night before—a gold chain-link miniskirt with stiletto-heeled gold slouch boots and an off-the-shoulder black cashmere sweater. There were front, back, and profile shots, and a fifth thumbnail photograph that I clicked on to enlarge. It showed a front-view picture of her with Rose. Rose wore low-slung brown trousers and an aqua vest with nothing under it; she’d worn that outfit the previous night.
There were various other buttons on-screen. I clicked on one, and more images popped up. The first two were extreme close-ups of Sage’s and Rose’s faces, also from the night before. There was also a detailed food-and-weight diary of the day for each girl, complete with a bar graph at the bottom that showed daily weight fluctuations and could be manipulated to show change over a week, a month, or a year. Every morsel they ingested was recorded, right down to “one mouthful of mashed potatoes.”
Next I found a two-paragraph narrative report on the evening’s proceedings that covered who was with whom and who was wearing what. Turned out the twins had gone to a private party at the Leopard Lounge. Various friends’ names, like Suzanne and Precious, were highlighted. I clicked on Suzanne’s name and was taken to a page that listed her outfits from the last eighteen months, contrasted with what Sage and Rose had been wearing. One more button, called “history,” brought up a calendar with small thumbnails of Sage and Rose on each date. I clicked on the date, and it blew up to full size.
I shook my head in disbelief. I was reasonably adept with my iBook, but inputting and maintaining the data of a relational database went far beyond my capabilities. The time it must take to maintain was staggering. And Sage had already made her entries for last night’s activities, which meant she’d done it either before she’d gone to bed or first thing when—
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
I whirled. There were Sage and Rose, standing in the doorway.
“Get away from my computer,” Sage ordered.
“I’m so sorry,” I sputtered. “I came in to see if we could move up our studying, and I saw the screen with your pictures . . . it’s just
amazing
. Why didn’t you tell me about it?”
Sage stared at me as if I’d lost my mind. “Are you kidding? Why would we tell you we had something like this? You’d tell someone, and before we knew it,
everyone
would make one!”
“Wait,
make
?”
“With Oracle,” Rose replied, as if making a freaking database were no more challenging than matching your foundation to your skin (natural light was the key, I’d learned from Marco). “It took a couple of weeks for us to put it together.”
Sage put her hands on her hips. “Which is why we don’t like anyone touching it. Or even looking at it.”
If someone had told me five minutes earlier that the Baker twins would be capable of creating and configuring a database like this, I would have bet my Yale degree that the person was lying. Or tripping. Or both. “How’d you think of it?”
Rose shrugged. “Clueless.”
“Come on, you had to get the idea from somewhere,” I prompted.
“Clueless?”
Sage yelped. “The movie?”
I had seen
Clueless
with my sister. There was a scene in which Alicia Silverstone used a computer database to help coordinate her fashion looks. But the
Clueless
database was to the Rose and Sage database what the Wright brothers’ first biplane was to the space shuttle. I couldn’t help my next question. “But how does it—”
“Work?” Sage filled in with an eye roll.
Rose looked tentatively at her sister. “I think it’s okay.”
“Fine. Megan, go stand in my three-way mirror. Rose, open a new page for Megan.”
I went to the dressing room. Sage followed me. I hadn’t noticed before, but there was actually a scale on the floor between the mirrors.
“Step on the scale. See the cord to your left?” Sage pointed. There was a thin white electrical cord dangling between the side-view and front-view mirror with a button at the bottom. As I looked up at the top of the mirrors, I saw three tiny cameras angled down at me. “Push the button, wait five seconds, then turn slowly left and slowly right.”
I did. I could hear the cameras whirring.
“Coming through okay?” Sage called to her sister in the other room.
“Yeah.”
“Okay, step off the scale, and let’s go see,” Sage instructed me. “And if you tell anyone—I mean
anyone
—that we’ve got this, I’ll kill you slowly and painfully.”
I held up a hand. “My lips are sealed, I promise.”
So this was how Sage and Rose made sure they didn’t wear the same outfit twice. It was totally ingenious. I was even more impressed when Rose showed me my own computer page, with the three different angles, a close-up of my face, all cross-referenced to the information picked up by the floor scale—both weight and BMI (
eek!
)—and somehow transmitted electronically to the computer.
“We’ve got a hookup from the mirrors in my room, too,” Rose confided. “WiFi. That was my idea.”
Back at Yale, I’d read Kuhn’s
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,
in which the author posits a theory on the nature of change. As I stood there, looking at myself from three points of view on their flat-screen monitor, Rose typing away at a computer program she and her sister had created, I experienced one of those paradigm-shifting moments. Everything I’d believed in was crumbling. In its place, as Kuhn had posited, a new and radically different paradigm was arising: Rose and Sage Baker of Palm Beach, Florida, were . . .
smart
.
Argument Essay—Write a response to the following statement:
Spending time with people from different socioeconomic backgrounds lends us insight and empathy for how others live.
O
ver the next few days, I don’t think the twins knew what had hit them. I couldn’t turn into a drill sergeant, exactly, but I did up study time from two to four hours a day and insist they not paint their nails while taking their practice tests. I told them it was because we were heading into the final month of prep—which seemed like a perfectly legit explanation—when the reality was the bright green dollar signs flashing in my eyes. The possibility, admittedly small, that I might actually be able to triple-dip—get these girls in to Duke, get myself seventy-five thousand dollars richer, and also get my story—had indeed proved a great motivator.
As a reward for two bona fide Bs that the girls brought home on a biology test, we took off the fourth night of the nouveau regime. Sage went clubbing in West Palm with Suzanne and Dionne. When Rose told me that she’d probably be tagging along, I decided to take a drive down the coast to the town of Hollywood, just a little bit north of Miami Beach. I thought it would add texture to my exposé to compare Palm Beach with another area of South Florida that was geographically close and, at the same time, light-years away. Rose had told me Hollywood was the anti–Palm Beach—as in: “Darling, he dresses so Hollywood, I’m surprised they let him on the island!”—although I had noted a particular lilt in her voice as she’d described it.
It was nearly ten o’clock when I arrived in Hollywood, but there were still plenty of people around as I walked the boardwalk past the bandshell and all the way to the Ramada. They ran the gamut from déclassé to distasteful—an old man on Rollerblades with a white ponytail and a deep tan, a drunk couple arguing about their children, and a group of Russian tourists all wearing the same FBI: FEMALE BODY INSPECTOR T-shirt in different colors.
I hadn’t been sure what to wear for this trip, lest I seem too Palm Beach; I had settled on Prada jeans with flat sandals and a low-cut T-shirt Marco had purchased for “Britney: Before and After” night at his favorite South Beach club. (He also had a T-shirt with I AM THE GOLDEN TICKET printed on the chest, which was large enough to accommodate a pregnancy prosthetic. I turned that one down.)
I stopped for a drink at a beachfront place called O’Malley’s, an open-air joint with a rollicking karaoke section, cheap plastic tables and chairs, and a semicircular bar facing a bank of TVs tuned to ESPN. There were a few lone guys at the bar, mostly middle-aged, ignoring the karaoke and watching SportsCenter. I asked the chubby, balding bartender for a flirtini. He brought me a martini and a suggestive wink. “On the house,” he said.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“George. Yours?”
“Vanessa,” I replied. It was my go-to fake name, though I didn’t even like it. “Thanks for the drink. Can I ask you something?”
“Anything, babe.”
“What’s the hottest place for fun around here?”
He gestured at himself. “You’re lookin’ at it.”
“Ha.” I couldn’t help but laugh. I’d thought that with Christmas coming in under a week, the Hollywood social scene would be in full gear. Wrong. I drank half the martini in a couple of gulps and set the glass down on the wooden bar.
“I hear Palm Beach is pretty kickin’ this time of year,” came a voice from across the bar.
“Thanks, but—” I looked up and saw Thom, the handsome deckhand from the
Heavenly
.
“Hey, Thom.” I smiled as a very sunburned man peeled off his electric-blue FBI T-shirt and shook his man breasts at his friends. “You live around here?”
“Not far—I’m playing a show at a place down the boardwalk. But what are
you
doing here?” Thom looked around. “This doesn’t seem like a Megan Smith kind of place.”
Think fast, think fast.
“I’m, um . . . I was just—”
“Megan?”
I turned around.
“Rose?”
You’d have thought I was a security guard who’d just caught Rose pulling a Winona Ryder at Neiman Marcus. Her tanned face drained of color, which left it a sickly shade of gray.
“What—what are you doing here?” She was wearing a pink-and-green-leaf-print halter and white skinny jeans.
“I just bumped into Thom.” I smiled in a way that I hoped would be reassuring-slash-convey that I was definitely not doing anything sketchy.
“Hi, sweets.” Thom got off his bar stool and wrapped his arms around Rose. I looked on in shock. “Thanks for coming.”
I waited for some kind of explanation, but all I got was a pleading look from Rose.
“I’ll go find us a table,” Thom told her with a kiss on the cheek. “Nice to see you, Megan. Maybe you’ll come to the show, too?”
“Um . . . sure.” I hoped I didn’t look as confused as I felt.
Rose and Thom?
I never would have guessed.
As Thom settled into a corner booth, Rose pulled me to the other side of the bar and sat me on a stool. Then, staring straight into my eyes, she said to me: “You can’t tell Sage.”
