The It Girl (15 page)

Later that evening, before dinner, it began to pour. Jenny snuggled under the light blue mohair throw her grand-mother had knitted for her father when he was at college at Berkeley and read passages of
Madame Bovary
for English class.
The new boy had kept in the background, in the corner behind the door, almost out of sight,
chapter one began. Gloomy tears filled Jenny’s eyes. She’s read the book last year at Constance Billard and knew it wasn’t even about this boy—it was about Emma Bovary, who only wanted to go to parties and sleep with guys who weren’t her husband—but still, she empathized with this new bumpkin boy who was being taunted by prep school kids. She wondered if the bumpkin had ever been wrongfully accused and made to choose between popularity and having a big black disciplinary
X
next to his name.

A key jingled in the door, and Callie burst in, carrying a bunch of shopping bags. Jenny quickly wiped her eyes on the scratchy wool of the throw, making them even redder than they already were.

“Surprise!” Callie sang, pulling a vertical Louis Vuitton sig-nature leather makeup tote out of one of the bags. “I got new nail polish and a whole bunch of makeup, too. Are you going to be around for a while?”

“Uh, yeah.” Jenny paused, confused. Was Callie talking to her because Brett wasn’t here, or was this part of Callie’s little suck-up fest? Jenny had gotten another e-gift certificate from Callie that afternoon—$50 to iTunes. It was beginning to feel like the twelve days of Blackmail Christmas.

“Cool.” Callie stopped the CD player—Jenny had been listening to a dreary Yo La Tengo song—and put on Modest Mouse instead. “So, how was your first day of classes?”

“Um, good,” she responded mechanically, leaning back against the wall behind her bed.

“Look, I just want to thank you for saving my ass from
NASCAR
High.” Callie giggled, handing Jenny a pint of Ben & Jerry’s Phish Food, her favorite. How did she know?

“Well, I mean …” Jenny trailed off. “I didn’t say anything, one way or another.”

“I know,” Callie replied gaily. “And that’s okay. You didn’t have to say anything to Mr. Dalton. When did they say the DC hearing was, anyway?”

“Monday.”

Callie opened her own pint of Phish Food and dug into it with a plastic spoon. She cocked her head and studied Jenny carefully. “You know, your hair looks really cute like that,” she finally said.

“Are you crazy?” Jenny touched her head. It was raining, and her hair had exploded into a frizz ball. She’d tamed it into a ponytail, but curly wisps were sprouting out everywhere, dancing messily around her face.

“Yeah, I really like it. It’s like … deconstructed,” she said. “So, the meeting with Dalton was okay?”

Jenny grunted. “I guess.”

Callie tried to get a spoonful of ice cream out of the pint container, but the ice cream was too cold and the plastic spoon kept bending. “So do you think maybe you’ll cover for me in DC?”

“Maybe,” Jenny said. “I’m not—”

“Of course you will,” Callie interrupted. “And I need you to do me another favor. Well, it’s not a favor, really. It’ll be fun.”

Jenny stared at her.
Another
favor? Wasn’t Callie supposed to be kissing
her
ass? Sure, she hadn’t exactly given back the beauty basket or the iTunes gift certificate, but come on!

Callie stabbed her spoon into the ice cream, finally making a dent. “This might sound a little strange, but I’m wondering if you’ll flirt with my boyfriend a little.”

Jenny paused and sucked in her breath. “You mean … Easy?”

“Yeah. It’s just, for this to work, it needs to look believable that you guys like each other, you know?”

“You want me to … flirt?” Jenny repeated.

“Yeah. Like, I don’t know. Hang out during dinner. Maybe between classes. Nothing big. Just so teachers can see you.”

Jenny stared at her. She should feel pissed off—flirting with Easy would incriminate her more, wouldn’t it? But instead, her heart pounded feverishly.

“You don’t want to do it, do you?” Callie’s shoulders slumped. “So he drank a little too much, but he’s really sweet once you get to know him.”

“I—”

A knock suddenly sounded on the door. “Helloooo?” Benny Cunningham cried, bounding into the room. “Am I interrupting?”

“We’re just having some, um, ice cream,” Callie explained quietly. “I’d offer you some, but it’s still too cold.”

“Here’s the girl I want to see,” Benny exclaimed, pointing at Jenny.

“Me?” Jenny asked, pointing at herself.

“Yep.” Benny pushed up the sleeves of her Kermit-green thin-gauge cashmere sweater. “You’re playing varsity field hockey, right?”

“Yeah, I made the team today.” Jenny still couldn’t believe she was going to play field hockey for Waverly. It was so surreal.

“Great!” Benny squealed. “We were wondering if you wanted to be part of our Black Saturday cheer. It’s usually for upperclassmen, but we pick some younger girls, too. You’re a sophomore, right?”

“Yeah.” Jenny looked at Callie. “Cheer?”

Callie flinched. When Jenny turned her back, Callie mouthed to Benny,
I said I didn’t want her.

Benny ignored her. “Yeah. It’s really fun. We make a new one up every year and torment St. Lucius with it. But it’s only a

certain group of girls, you know?”

“Jeepers.” Jenny’s face brightened. “That sounds really fun.”

“Jeepers?” Benny asked. “You didn’t honestly just say
jeepers
, did you?” She laughed, but Jenny sensed it wasn’t actually friendly.

“Um, I mean, cool,” Jenny corrected herself, embarrassed.
Jeepers!
How Old Jenny could she get?

“Yeah?” Benny raised her eyebrows at Callie. Callie scowled back. “Awesome!”

“Are you doing the cheer too?” Jenny asked Callie.

“Actually, since she’s captain, Callie writes the cheer,” Benny explained.

“Really?” Jenny asked curiously. It occurred to her now that being on the field hokey team would be like being in a sorority. She had a whole new family of sisters. It was kind of cool.

Callie swallowed hard. “I’m working on it.”

“Just get it done before Saturday,” Benny added. “Okay, so I have to get to the lit mag meeting. Just wanted to make sure Jenny was in. Bye-yee!” She slammed the door shut.

Jenny turned back to Callie. “You guys do really fun stuff here.”

“Yeah,” Callie answered quietly. “I wouldn’t take it too seriously, though, you know? It’s just a stupid cheer.”

Jenny shrugged and licked a tiny bit of too-cold ice cream off her plastic spoon. Slut rumors aside, the cool varsity girls wanted her to do the cheer with them. How cool was that?

The door flew open again and Brett strode in, her blue tweed Eugenia Kim cloche cap soaking wet and her bob-length red hair matted around her face. As soon as she saw them, a peeved look settled over her perfectly chiseled face. “I thought you guys were both studying tonight.”

“Nope,” Callie replied. “We’re having a makeover-ice cream party.”

“Oh.” Brett threw her cap on the ground.

“Why are you all wet?” Callie asked, sounding much bitchier than necessary.

Brett took off her khaki thigh-length Burberry raincoat and tossed it on the floor. “Jeremiah was here. We got stuck in the rain.”

“Jeremiah?” Callie straightened up, thinking about the IM she’d received from Sage earlier. “Did you guys have the big talk?”

Brett looked at her blankly. “Big talk? We … whatever. We hung out.”

Callie stared back, a half-smirk on her face.
Come on
. They were best friends. If Brett liked some other guy, surely she’d tell Callie about it. There were plenty of hot seniors at this school— Parker DuBois, for instance. Parker was half French, had large, piercing blue eyes, and was a photography ingénue, having spent the summer snapping shots of edgy, upcoming artists for the
New York Times
Sunday Fashion supplement. Callie could totally see Brett liking Parker. She waited, locking her hazel eyes with Brett’s green ones, until Brett silently looked down.

“Who’s Jeremiah?” Jenny broke the silence.

“I guess Jeremiah is Brett’s boyfriend.” Callie tried to catch Brett’s eye again but couldn’t. She sighed. “He’s gorgeous and athletic and sweet and throws the best parties at St. Lucius.”

“Jeepers,” Jenny couldn’t help exclaiming again, trying to hide her surprise. From the fawning way Brett had been acting in the meeting this morning with Mr. Dalton in his office, Jenny had just assumed she was single.

“Why didn’t you bring him over to the room?” Callie asked. “Or did you guys just do it in the rain in the middle of the practice fields?”

Jenny watched Callie talk at Brett. She was doing that thing some people do when they act nice and chipper and interested, while just below the surface they’re thinking really mean thoughts, and you can never call them on it because they’d just accuse you of being paranoid.

Brett rolled her eyes. “No, we didn’t do it anywhere. Why would anyone want to do it in a field? Gross. Do you and Easy do it in a field? Did you and Brandon do it in a field?” Brett stormed over to her closet and hung up her coat.

“Whoa. Someone’s PMSing,” Callie scoffed, examining her nails.

Jenny was still thinking about how Brett had flirted with Mr. Dalton when she heard Brandon’s name. “Did she say Brandon?” Jenny asked Callie. “Like, Brandon Buchanan?”

“Yeah. I went out with him for almost a year. He didn’t tell you that?”

“No.”

“Huh. I thought he told everybody. One time last winter, a whole bunch of us went to Park City to snowboard, and Brandon met a group of Swiss tourists and told them every detail of our tortured relationship, even though we’d already broken up by that point. And then he pleaded with me all night to go into the sauna with him.”

Jenny wrinkled her nose. That didn’t sound like Brandon at all.

Callie shook her head. “I know. Hello? Saunas are so germy. Nobody goes into them except old gay men.”

“Saunas are fine, Callie,” Brett contradicted from her closet. “Easy went in the sauna on that trip.”

Callie blushed and drew in her bottom lip. “Anyway,” she whispered to Jenny. “Where were we? Oh. Easy. So, what do you think?”

“Well, I guess …” Jenny began. She sort of wanted to ask,
Will me flirting with him freak Easy out
? But maybe that was an Old Jenny question. And he had touched New Jenny’s back… .

“What are you talking about?” Brett demanded, stepping out of her closet.

“Nothing!” Jenny and Callie responded in unison.

“Awesome,” Callie continued, turning back to Jenny. “It’ll be fun. Easy’s sweet. And it’ll all be over soon.”

Jenny bit her lip. Not too soon, she hoped.

A few minutes later, after the rain cleared and the late-summer sky began to turn a faded orange, students walked in cliquish groups from their dorms to the dining hall, and Brett strode down the stone path toward Waverly’s front office. A crisp wind suddenly lifted the edges of her dove-gray sheer silk Hermès scarf, which made Brett think of winter. Most kids hated winter at Waverly, because you were stuck indoors and there was nothing to do except watch old films at the library and go to class. But Brett loved it. The dorm mistresses lit fires in the common rooms, and the teachers canceled classes on the first day of snow. By four it was already dark, and she and Callie would drink peppermint schnapps-spiked hot cocoa while they gossiped about their latest crushes. Brett was pretty sure she wasn’t going to be drinking cocoa with Callie this winter—they were barely talking—but maybe she’d have someone else to drink cocoa with. Naked.

As she sidestepped a couple of fat brown squirrels fighting over a Cheeto, Brett’s cell phone beeped with a text message.
Sorry we got cut off before
, it said.
Luv you, Sissy!

Brett quickly called Bree back and got her voice mail. “I’m about to go out to dinner with a
Dalton
,” she whispered delightedly into her phone. “Be jealous. Be very jealous.” Then she pressed end.

Brett entered the front office, a giddy, sour feeling festering in the pit of her stomach. The lobby was empty, and
The New Yorker
,
The Economist
, and
National Geographic
were arranged neatly on the huge teak coffee table. A Vivaldi symphony was playing over the stereo. The old cherry floors squeaked under her three-inch black Jimmy Choo boots as Brett approached the fiftyish front desk attendant, Mrs. Tullington.

“I need a pass for the night,” Brett said casually. And, because you always needed an appropriate reason: “I’m accom-panying my uncle to a silent auction of ancient Russian artifacts and Fabergé eggs in Hudson.”

Brett knew that a lie sounded more convincing when you threw in a whole bunch of ridiculous details.

Mrs. Tullington eyed Brett over her tortoiseshell-rimmed glasses. The wrinkles around her mouth puckered in disap-proval. Brett wore a black chalk-striped, slit-down-the-side Armani skirt. Her Vincent Longo-painted lips were bright red, her pale arms were bare, and the V in her black silk shell top was so low you could almost see her black lace Eres bra.

Finally Mrs. T. wrote out the pass. “Enjoy the eggs,” she said primly. “And your uncle. Nice that you girls stay close with family.”

The thing was, if Mrs. T had bothered to look out the building’s bay window, she would have seen Brett get into a hunter green ’57 Jaguar—a car that most definitely did not belong to Brett’s uncle, a fortyish out-of-work-actor-cum-personal-trainer who worked out flabby new moms at the Body Electric gym in Paramus. Eric wore dark blue pressed True Religion jeans and a crisp tucked-in white button-down. Brett covered her knees with her skirt, feeling slightly overdressed.

“You look nice.” Eric grinned, gripping the gearshift sexily.

“Oh. Thanks.”

A Sigur Rós song played on the Bose CD player. The windows were down, and a cool late-summer breeze wafted in. As they swept down Waverly’s front hill past the practice fields, Brett felt a sudden, disorienting thrill. Maybe they were leaving the school for good—and never coming back.
Suckers
. She thought about everyone else sitting down to dinner right now at the dining hall. On Thursdays it was pasta with watery tomato sauce and nasty fried chicken.