The Julian Game (2 page)

I stared down at my wristwatch, noting every aspect of it, as they stripped off their lacrosse uniforms while discussing a party Lindy might be throwing on Saturday.

Alison, the Loud one, was dominating the conversation as she turned to Ella. “Get past it. If they come together, so what? Him and Mia McCord have been hooking up since kindergarten. It sucked what happened to you, but it didn’t suck anything special.”

“Are you still talking about Jay-Kay?” asked Faulkner. She was the Sweet one of the Group, the only one with classroom crossover appeal—example, she was our class president.

Jay-Kay was Julian Kilgarry, new VIP friend to Elizabeth Lavenzck. Though I’d never met him personally, girls gave his name when they wanted an extreme. As in, “The lead singer was amazing, like an older Jay-Kay.” Or “He was a hottie, but not
Kilgarry
hot.” My one sighting was last fall, when Natalya pointed him out at MacArthur’s Homecoming game. In a word: drool-worthy. Iron jaw, inky Irish curls, and eyes the precise color of a June sky at sunset. In the last picture I’d ever taken of my mom, framed next to my bed so I can see it every day, that same blue is diffused behind her.

After Homecoming, I’d become temporarily obsessed, clicking Julian’s “View My Complete Profile” on Facebook several times a week to see what he’d updated. I knew all his passions (lacrosse, chess, journalism), seen all his pictures and tags, and read every line of text he’d ever thought to post.

“Kilgarry’s like the king of hit it and quit it.” This from Lindy, the Ditzy one, the Party Girl, who never said anything unless it was a cliché.

“Oh, like you know,” said Ella, the Beautiful and Quirky one, which also made her the most Fascinating since I wasn’t as used to her peculiar habits as the rest of the class. For example:

1. On the first Wednesday of every month, Ella baked cookies for both sections of homeroom.

2. She owned at least a dozen pairs of paper-thin kid leather gloves, in an array of rainbow colors, that she wore to protect her hands from the sun.

3. She always claimed the third desk in the third row of every classroom she ever sat in. And apparently, she always had.

Ella’s oddness seemed as natural to her as her long legs and gold-link charm bracelet, but the real reason she got away with it was because she was so beautiful. You can’t be that strange unless you’re that gorgeous.

Now Jeffey—the Gazelle, tall and skinny, who was signed with a New York modeling agency—gave Ella a long blink, as if she didn’t get it. “Then why’d you ask him to Alison’s?”

“Because he’d dropped so many hints,” Ella answered. “It was more that he asked me to ask him.”

“Convenient.” Alison snorted. “Since you worship him.”

Ella, wrapped in a towel and on the way to the showers with the rest of the Group, had stopped to thumb through her cell messages. Suddenly she raised her phone and snapped a picture of their mirrored reflection. “So you claim.”

“Looze!” Faulkner squealed. “I hate having my picture taken. You
know
that.”

Ella clicked again. “Why? Because you’re secretly revolting?”

“Because I’m in a towel, for one. Dumbass.”

“One more,” said Ella. “I always end on odd numbers. It’s my thing. You
know
that, Useless.” Mimicking Faulkner as she clicked in her face. Mean nicknames was another Group trademark: Tard, Donut, Zero, Looza, Useless, Dumbass, Lardass, Dali Lardass. And if what Natalya said was true, the Group had secret nicknames for everyone.

“I know mine, but only because I’ve been here since kindergarten. I’m Zaweirdski and the Wad and Nub,” she’d once confessed. “One day I’ll tell you more about that last one.” She’d looked slightly flustered. “You’re something, too. Whatever it is, that’s the only thing they call you. Don’t worry, though. You’ll never find out.”

Tal was right. To our faces, the Group was vaguely, indifferently polite.

“Did you hear Julian’s father’s car dealership is kaput?” Lindy broadcast as I rapped on the door for Tal to hurry. I knew she was holed up on purpose, hoping to wait them out. So unfair. It was a hundred times more awkward to be here on the outside than safe in a stall. “Kilgarry Saab. Tragic. I hear they’re totally poor.”

“That’s a tacky rumor,” said Ella with chilly authority. “And you should shut up, Looze. People are listening.”

Instant silence.

Ella meant me. I was “people.” So I hadn’t been invisible to Ella. She knew I’d been eavesdropping.

I glanced away, but when I looked back, she was staring right at me. My pulse points jumped. I’d never looked Ella Parker in the eyes, which were white-gray, almost a non-color.

Her phone was poised at me. She snapped. I flinched. She smiled, an uptick at the edges of her mouth. Like we were in on something together. It was a moment that felt as important as a kiss or a secret.

Then it was over. As Ella pocketed the phone and brushed past me toward the showers. Nearly bumping into Natalya, all pinned up and making a break for it.

My moment with Ella Parker wouldn’t have meant any
thing if Filthcrack hadn’t humiliated her the next afternoon.

But he did, which set the stage for everything that came after.

Filthcrack taught us Mandarin Chinese, and although I was in the honors section and Ella was in the regular section, both sections joined up on Friday afternoons for fifty tedious minutes of Filth-proctored “conversation.” With his lizard hips and pompadour, Filthcrack might have been greasily handsome back in the day, and he still thought he had some middle-aged game—you could tell by how he sauntered around the halls.

For the first few minutes, conversation was going okay. Beebee Bidell was leading it, explaining how she’d gone to the market and picked out a bag of rice and saffron and crab and put everything into her basket.

We’d all been chiming in with our simple syntax questions, and then Ella Parker accidentally asked, “Was the market very noisy, or very penis?”

Filthcrack, who’d been leaning back against his desk, snorted. Ella’d said
ying jing
instead of
an jing
. In Mandarin, the words for
quiet
and
penis
are almost identical.

But nobody else in the class got it, and I felt somewhat creepy-geeky that I did. It had been a trend in my old school to learn all the dirty words in Chinese, and then to use them liberally—preferably in front of our clueless parents.

“Miss Parker,” said Filth, in English and smirking, “you are confusing a noun and an adjective. Try again.”

“Was it penis in the market?” Ella asked carefully.

Now Filth laughed outright. Beebee had typed the word into her MacBook. “Ew, Ella, careful,” she warned. “
Ying jing
means ‘dick.’”

The class exploded. Expressionless, Ella stood and removed her petal pink gloves, slapping them five times into the palm of her hand. She always did things like that. Little touches and taps and knocks.

In the next second, she was out of there.

“Mr. Phillstack, can I follow her?” Beebee wasn’t in the Group, but she was captain of the varsity field hockey team, which made her Ella’s closest contact, status-wise.

“Why? So you two can jabber in the bathroom until end bell? Don’t think so.” Filth pointed. “Raye Archer. Go retrieve Ella.”

Me, because I was least likely to jabber with Ella? But I went. Checking a few places along the way—library lounge, soda pit, bathrooms, cafeteria. Ella had a thing for the cafeteria’s kitchen. I’d seen her zip in there for the Clorox spray to wipe down her table before eating at it, and sometimes to wash her hands under the high-pressure sink faucet.

That’s where I found her. Sudsing away.

“Filth told me to get you.”

“He’s such an ass. Laughing at me.”

“I guess he thought it was funny.”

“Let’s see if that old fart’s still jolly when I get him fired. Set his screensaver to porn or something.” She turned off the taps and wiped her hands. Up, down, up on a dishtowel. “He’s out for me. My last test looked like his pen had hemorrhaged red ink.”

“Everyone knows Filth’s an idiot. Honestly? I could teach you better with one arm tied behind my back,” I said on i mpulse.

Her answering stare flattened me. “Doubt it.”

“Well, okay, if Chinese isn’t your thing,” I continued quickly, “then what about Spanish? It’s way less—”

“Because my parents think I need it for college,” Ella snapped. “Even though I told them nobody else is taking it. They don’t get it’s like the hardest language invented.”

Nobody else
. She didn’t even hear how insulting that was. I decided to ignore it. “Yeah, the tonal stresses are tough for me.”

“Oh, shut up. You’re the Sophie Fulton-Glass Scholar. You go to Fulton for free. You get straight A’s. You’ve got your room all picked out at Princeton, right?”

“Ha,” I answered, though it was all true. Except the room at Princeton.

“And my parents won’t let me take Spanish—they think it’s a cop-out. They both graduated Harvard, and they’re clinging to this moosick fantasy that I might go there, too. My sister’s a junior.”

What did Ella want me to say? “I understand.”

“Except my point is that you don’t.”

How had this turned into a debate? I’d completely annoyed Ella Parker, and I hadn’t done a thing. But still I wanted to soothe her. “There’s more to smart than school smarts,” I said. “And you’re all over me on that.”

She looked at me hard. “How?”

“People watch you. You have a way of doing things.”

“What things?”

“I don’t know.” I stammered to explain it. “You’ve always got the best line.” She was waiting for an example. “Last week in chorus, you told that freshman Jillian Sweeney to move it, since her bad breath was bleaching your eyebrows. The way you said it made everyone laugh.” Except Jillian, who’d turned bright red.

“It did smell rank.” Ella shrugged, but I sensed that she was pleased. “And I like to tell the truth.”

“Exactly.”

She touched a finger to the spigot. Tapped it seven times. “But I’m an incredible liar, too,” she added. “You don’t want to be on my bad side. I can get people to believe anything.” There was something empty in her face as she told me this. A lack of . . . emotion, maybe? Conscience?

“At least you’ve got a bad side,” I said lightly. “Good people are so boring.”

She smiled, that tiny uptick. That sister smile. “Are you bad, Raye?”

“Sometimes.” I looked her straight in the eye. “Sometimes I’m treacherous.”

She burst out laughing. If the mood had been intense, it wasn’t now.

Later, I’d always think this was the moment where it started. Ella’s challenge. My answer. What we’d really meant, and what we’d unleashed in each other.

“So Uncle Freddie sent not one, not two, but three install
ments of
Midnight Planet
from London for us on Saturday night,” Natalya informed me excitedly in homeroom at the end of the day. “If we watch them all, we’ll be as caught up as anyone in the U.K. How cool is that?”

“Oh . . . great.”

“Raye, you
are
coming over tomorrow, right?” she asked a minute later. “As per usual?”

I swiveled my head to examine my Chemistry notes. Sometimes I felt a touch mortified by my friendship with Natalya. Maybe it wasn’t personal—maybe any best friendship would have been too intense for me. Last year, I’d hung in a relaxed, loosely defined group, but Fulton didn’t have anything like that. Its selective social circles were knit by girls who’d hit the slopes and the shore and played on the same teams together since kindergarten. The cliques were fixed and impenetrable, nothing loose about it.

Whereas Tal and I were friends because she was an outsider and so was I. Period.

“Paging Raye for confirmation on tomorrow night?” Tal asked, louder.

“Sure, I guess,” I relented. Anyway, Dad and his girlfriend were counting on it. It went unspoken that Saturdays were their night to be free of me.

Fridays had a way of making me self-conscious about everything I’d be excluded from over the weekend, but I listened in on what was happening anyway. Not only did I now know about Lindy’s party, but I’d also overheard that Sadie Nufer, a junior, was throwing one. Another group of juniors was planning to hit the midnight showing of the new Harry Potter movie at the Ritz, and some seniors wanted to check out an exclusive dance club on South Street.

Fun, fun, fun. All this activity, and I wasn’t part of any of it.

At last bell, I hit the library to finish all my weekend homework assignments. It was dark by the time I got home on the late bus. Dad’s girlfriend, Stacey, was in the kitchen, heating soup and blowing her nose. Usually Stacey reminded me of a spaniel—small and playful, warm dark eyes, always happy to see you. Today, between her mangy bathrobe and bad-hair-day frizzies, she looked more like a shelter dog. “Your dad’s still at the store,” she told me, with a sniffle. “Tal’s called the landline twice; she says she has a burning question about her Renaissance Art project. Oh, and another girl.”

The name on the scratch pad read “Ella Parker” plus her phone number.

“This girl? Ella Parker? Called me?”

“Yip.” She blew her nose. “She did.”

I walked upstairs. Was this a joke? But even as I envisioned the Group sniggering on the other end of the line, my fingers pressed the numbers like a trail of bread crumbs leading to Ella’s ear.

She answered on the first ring. “Let me guess, Raye’s cell? Thanks for getting back.” She sounded friendly. It didn’t feel like a joke. “Look, can I come over tomorrow night?”

“Come over where?”

“Your house?” Then she laughed as if I were already delighting her with my company. “Sorry. Do you have other plans?”

“Not exactly, but . . .” I stared over the banister into the living room. Noooo. Ella Parker couldn’t come over to my house. Not tomorrow night or any other night. It was too shabby here, too cluttered.