The Girl in the Park (2 page)

But I can’t help it. Today I’m distracted. Not by five million things, just one. Wendy.

Last night, on my way to the party, I wondered, Okay, what will Wendy do tonight?

Will she get bombed? Probably yes.

Say something outrageous? Pretty sure yep.

Take off all or most of her clothes? Always a chance.

Kiss, grope, or whatever, someone? Likelihood strong.

Chance that that someone will be someone else’s boyfriend? 99.9 %.

Then I thought about the particularly insane thing she had promised to do that night. And I wondered two things: Doesn’t she know how ridiculous she is? And what is that like? To have no fear?

My mom taps me on the leg. “We’re here.”

My grandmother lives in Litchfield, in a house some people would call a mansion but she would insist is just a house. My mom grew up here. She rode horses. It looks like the kind of place you ride horses. Lots of grass. Lots of quiet. White houses and American flags. It’s one of those drizzly, cold November days; when we arrive, my mom and I hurry from the car to the door.

It used to be when we visited my grandmother, she’d open the door herself, fold first me, then my mom in a big hug. “Glory be, you’re here!” Now the nurse answers the door with a big smile and calls, “Ms. Donovan, look who’s come to lunch!” Of course, my grandmother can’t look because she’s in the living room. In a wheelchair.

So my mom takes off her coat and asks the nurse, whose name is Gwen, how my mom is. Which means, Tell me what to expect. And Gwen murmurs, She’s fine, doing fine. Which means, No change. Meanwhile, I go down the hall, calling, “Grandma?”

Since her stroke, my grandmother can’t move her right side. As I come through the door, I see her sitting in her chair, staring out at the garden, as if something she wants is out there but she’s not sure how to get it. I hesitate, confused by her distance. But then she seems to recognize that I’m here. Her left hand rises and her blue eyes brighten.

Hugging her, I say, “Hey, Grandma, you look great.”

She peers at me. “… oo ook ike … oo.”
You look like you
.

“And that’s okay?” My hands go to the chopsticks in my hair. Most people make me feel self-conscious, but only two people have the right to: my mother and my grandmother.

“Gr-r-rand.”

My mom comes running in like she’s a teenager and her mom is her best friend who she hasn’t seen in forever. She gives her a big, long hug, then whispers, “Guess what I brought.” My grandmother shakes her head. “
Cheesecake
.”

Over lunch, which still takes place in the formal dining room at a table meant for twelve, my grandmother asks, “ ’ow’s sool?”

I catch a flash of anxiety from my mom; she has a hard time understanding my grandmother these days. “School’s hard,” I say, translating for her.

“Junior year is so much pressure,” says my mom.

My grandmother makes a face. “… ’oo serious. Have fun.”

“I have fun,” I assure her.

“Just last night, she went to a party,” my mother chimes in. My grandmother raises her eyebrow:
And what did you get up to?

“Nothing, Grandma. You know me.”

Can I make a suggestion?

Wendy transferred to our school in ninth grade. Right away,
it was clear she didn’t belong. First off, she was from Long Island. Her parents had split up a year earlier, and her mom had just moved back to the city. Rich city and rich suburbia are not the same. It showed in Wendy’s clothes, in her hair. You heard it in her voice. B&T, people sniffed. Bridge and Tunnel. And the fact that she wanted so bad to fit in just made it worse.

At our school, everybody is the child of a Somebody. That kid’s dad is a real estate mogul, that kid’s mom is a judge, that one’s uncle wrote the script for
Batman
. Wendy’s mom and dad were no one you’d heard of. Her grandparents were paying the bills for Alcott, and their money was something tacky like pool cleaner. For a while, Wendy had the nickname Pond Scum.

In ninth grade, I was feeling like I didn’t belong, either. My two best friends had left—one moved to Westchester, the other transferred. They’d been my islands of safety, people I could float to in class or the cafeteria. They never made fun of how I talked, and because of them, I rarely had to talk to people who might. Now I was starting high school lost in a sea of people who thought I sounded like the Elephant Man.

Not that they said so to my face. Anymore. Sure, some kids still wiggled their fingers in fake sign language at me in the hallway. (“Sounds so weird, she must be deaf,” ha, ha.) But most of it was more subtle. Like the first week of school when I had to ask Nora Acheson how many chapters to read for History of the Renaissance. She frowned as I talked, her mouth tight with embarrassment. Then once I’d ground to a halt, she said in a resentful voice, “I’m sorry, I did not understand that.
What
did you say?”

I knew my mistake. I had dared to speak. The rule at Alcott was simple: if you are not okay, keep it to yourself. Do not inflict
yourself on those better than you. Stay silent. Keep your head down. Leave us alone—and we’ll leave you alone. Remind us of the depressing fact that you exist and we will punish you however we see fit.

Which was why what Wendy did that day in the hallway was so completely and utterly astonishing.

I had free study and I was headed to the library. As I walked down the hall, I noticed a girl standing smack-dab in the middle. I recognized her as the new girl, the one from Long Island with bad hair that nobody liked. She was pushy, was what people said. And I saw why. Every single person who passed, she yelled, “Hey there!” The more popular kids got a sad little body check and questions—“What’s up for the weekend?” “Could you believe that assignment?”

I slowed down, wincing at every Hey and How you doing? She was so wrong it was scary, and most kids brushed her off without a second glance. But she didn’t quit. I noticed that, too. It was horribly fascinating. Like watching someone pound nails into their skull, again and again, with a big crazy smile on their face.

Eventually the crowd thinned out and it was only us left. I stood there watching as Wendy paced back and forth. This girl was so out there. Even when she was alone, you could read every emotion. She moved her head from side to side, threw her hands in the air, folded her arms, unfolded them.

Then burst out with, “How am I such an
idiot
?”

I laughed. Because here I was thinking she was so different from me, so insanely confident. But she felt like an idiot the same way I did.

Impulsively, I said, “Can I make a suggestion?”

Now, this probably came out like “Shuh-gesh-on.”
T
’s and
s
’s still kicked my ass. And there was a moment before Wendy spoke when we both realized she had a choice. If she was a wannabe, she’d make fun of me. Clamp up her nose and say, “Yush?”

But instead she laughed. At herself, not me.

“God, yes, please. Anything.”

She was friendly. She was eager. She acted like I knew what I was talking about, so I acted that way too. “You’re trying too hard,” I told her. “And you’re going after the wrong people. Girls like Honor and Rima—forget them. They’re sophomores and they’re popular. You need to aim for their third-level friend. The girls that hang with top girls, but secretly? Resent them. You can be the outside friend they complain to. Then once you’re deemed okay? You work your way up.”

She came to stand next to me. “So, who should I be talking to?”

I thought. “Try Karina Burroughs. Maybe Colby Breslin. Jenny Zalgat.”

She took those names in, then asked, “How’d you figure this stuff out?”

“I’ve watched these people my whole life.”

“But …” She hesitated. “What? You don’t care if they like you?”

This had never occurred to me, that I could be the one to choose. That, rather than being rejected, I could just not care. “Kind of,” I said, trying to look bored by it all.

“That’s cool. I could never do it.” She grinned. “But it’s cool. Wendy, by the way.”

“Rain.”

*   *   *

“… ’ow are your friends?” my grandmother asks. “ ’aylor?”

Taylor. “Still writing for the paper,” I say. “Still crazed.”

I realize: Taylor stayed at the party after I left. I should have told Ms. Geller to call her. Except that Taylor would tell her the whole story, and I still wasn’t sure that was a good idea.

My grandmother asks about my singing, which I hate talking about around my mom because she always pretends I’m better than I am. I’m not terrible. But I’m not her and I know it.

“B-oyfriends?” my grandmother wants to know.

“I’m off men,” I tell her.

She leans in. “… Lucas?”

I roll my eyes. “Yeah—what did happen to Lucas, Grandma?”

“He was an actor,” says my mom dismissively. “
That’s
what happened to Lucas.”

“Do you think he’d go out with me?”

I had to look twice to make sure I was seeing the right person. Cam Davies? Was Wendy serious? We’d been friends for a month, and already I knew, you couldn’t always be sure.

Just in case, I shook my head. “Girlfriend.”

“Is it serious?”

“Wendy.” I looked at her.

She giggled. “I’m just asking.”

Just then, two girls walked by. They were second-level girls, not to be spoken to. But Wendy smiled, gave them a big “Hi!”

She’d broken the rules and I braced myself, knowing what was coming. The girls stopped. And stared. Then one of them, Gillian Lasker, made a flushing sound—the new joke was toilet cleaner, not pools. Laughing wildly, they hurried down the hall.

I muttered, “Jerks.”

Wendy didn’t answer. She just kept staring down the hall at Cam Davies.

Later, the rain clears and we take a walk around the garden. It’s beautiful with the fallen leaves and the smell of freshness in the air. My mom says to Grandma, “Give me a quarter and I’ll move in.”

From her wheelchair, Grandma waves her hand.
Forget it
. She hates having a nurse, hates being taken care of. A lot of her old friends she doesn’t see anymore.

My mom says she’s crazy. But I understand. My mom doesn’t know what it’s like to be less than perfect, how people zoom in on that until it’s all they see. Maybe because it weirds them out … or maybe because it makes them feel better about themselves.

People do pretty ugly things to make themselves feel better, this I do know.

“I jerked him off.”

The first party we went to together, Wendy slept over at my house afterward. When she said that, I leaned out of my bed to look at her. But I couldn’t see her face in the dark.

“Who and what are you talking about?” I asked, really, really hoping she’d say,
Just kidding. God
.

But she said, “Daniel. At the party.”

Then she laughed. “It shot straight across the bathroom. I left it on the towels.”

“That’ll thrill Evie’s parents.” Because I still thought about parents with these things.

“Oh, Evie’s a bitch, who cares?” She yawned.

Then I thought of something else: Gillian Lasker in the hallway. “Doesn’t Daniel have a girlfriend?”

There was a silence. Then Wendy said, “She should know to say hi when someone says hi to her.”

“ ’at goes,” my grandmother says, pointing to a dead bush.

“Tell the gardener,” agrees my mom. Walking up to the bush, she touches the dry, leafless branches. They snap right off, get tangled in the rest. It looks like a nest of bones.

“This was so pretty,” says my mom. “I wonder what happened.”

What happened? I think. That’s always what you ask. What happened with Lucas? What happened with Wendy?

She’s with Nico, I tell myself. And it’s a big drama and she’s the star. If she goes home, she turns back into plain old Wendy Geller, pool cleaner princess.

“I hate my mother.”

Wendy glared around her living room. “Look at this place. She gets everything wrong. But hey, she lives at the office, what does she care?”

For the first few months we were friends, I didn’t see Wendy’s apartment. We always went to my place. Finally, one Saturday after a movie, she said, “Come see the hellhole.”

Wendy lived in the East Seventies. “Fancy address, crap place,” she told me. It wasn’t a hellhole, but it was very different from my rambling, color-mad apartment, where you couldn’t walk without tripping over books, CDs, or carpet fringe. The walls in Wendy’s place were white plaster. No curtains, just blinds. The
couches and chairs were beige and oatmeal, the tables glass. There was one shelf of books, mostly self-help and dieting. The kitchen was bare, except for one plastic bowl with some dried-up lemons. The place was quiet, but empty quiet rather than peaceful quiet. A motel you stayed in for one night before getting where you needed to be.

We went to Wendy’s room. The furniture here was mostly IKEA, but she’d gotten a few bright funky things—a pillow shaped like a strawberry, a polka-dot lampshade. She’d covered the plaster walls with magazine cutouts. Glistening male bodies and girls with lots of hair and angry eyes. Flopping on her bed, Wendy said, “I should just go live with my dad. Of course, he now has Heidi, who I totally can’t stand. Uck—you’re so lucky having a cool family.”

I thought about my mom and grandmother. Also, about the dad whose name I knew but I’d never met. About the half brother who didn’t know I existed. About his mother, my dad’s wife. Was that cool? It was complicated. But I didn’t think Wendy was interested in that.

Rolling onto her stomach, Wendy said, “So—guess who I talked to today?”

“Who?”

“Seth. Cu-ute Seth with the shoulders.”

I nodded, even as I thought of Seth’s girlfriend Rima Nolan, one of those top girls who still thought Wendy was trash.

Wendy stared at me; she wanted more. Was I supposed to say, Yeah, cool? Bring up Rima? What?

Sometimes, when I didn’t know what to say to Wendy, I talked to her in my head. Now I thought, Well, gee, first you
went after Cam Davies. Then it was Daniel Ettinger. Last weekend, Malcolm Liddell. You’re not with any of them now. Their girlfriends—or ex-girlfriends—hate you. Every girl in school worries you’ll go after her guy.