The Other Girl: A Midvale Academy Novel (17 page)

Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan was toying with her straw. “My, these are delicious,” she said. “Mickey, thank you so much for encouraging me to experiment with the Oreo. Now. As we saw demonstrated on the videotape earlier, Xavier Academy is really quite an astounding team.”

Nicholas shook his head. “They’re going to kill us,” he said.

“Yeah,” Dan said, and went to give him a high five.

Nicholas gave him a perfunctory high five back, then said, “I didn’t want to leave you hanging, but you should know that you high-five people when you agree with them about something, sort of, well, positive. You don’t do it to say, ‘Hey yeah, that’s exciting, I think we’re fucked too.’”

Dan nodded seriously. “OK, thanks,” he said. “I appreciate your help.”

“I refuse to believe we’re fucked,” Mickey said.

“Me too,” said Edie.

“I’m going to get another McFlurry,” said Devon.

“You’re not going anywhere,” Mrs. Gwynne Vaughan said. “We absolutely have to figure this out.”

“Besides,” Edie said, “you hardly need it.”

Devon looked at her, surprised. “What did you say?”

Edie waited until he sat down, and then she whispered, “You shouldn’t eat another one of those. I mean, you’re kind of fat.”

I couldn’t tell if Devon was mad or what. But he didn’t get another McFlurry.

I turned my attention back to the real problem.

“Look, Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan,” Nicholas said. “Facts are stubborn things. And we can’t deny—”

“We can’t deny that we have to win,” I said. Pilar was eating another
alfajor
. Edie was the best. She wasn’t even inside Pilar’s head, and still she came up with a better plan than I did.

“Those guys are such unbelievable geeks,” Nicholas said. “They study all the time. They know everything.”

Devon looked forlornly into the bottom of his empty McFlurry cup. “Well,” he said. “The good news about that is that we can just forget about actually trying to beat them.”

“What the hell do you mean?” Nicholas said. “Just because you’re lazy doesn’t mean the rest of us are.”

“Don’t put your negativity on me,” Devon said. “I am not a negative guy, OK? Negative guys do not wear barrettes, OK? I was just saying we can’t beat them on skill. So we need to think about secret weapons.”

“It’s kind of a drag that none of the girls on our team are hot,” Sergei said.

There was a silence as everyone waited to see how Edie and I would react. We looked at each other and burst out laughing. Then everyone else started to laugh. I laughed so hard my side ached. Sergei was such an idiot. Didn’t he know that was the worst thing you could say to a girl? Girls were all insecure
about how they looked, and to actually tell them to their faces, as if they didn’t already know it, that they weren’t the kind of girls who made boys stop in their tracks and rendered them absolutely unable to…

Suddenly I had an idea. Edie nudged me. “What’s up?”

“Edie, do you remember when you said before sometimes the stupidest ideas are the best ones?”

She nodded. I whispered in her ear. Her eyes lit up. “Oh my God,” she said. “Those girls are like…are like toy versions of her. But…is she smart?”

I didn’t want to admit this. “She’s not entirely stupid. She’s eager to learn.”

Edie nodded thoughtfully.

“It’s not such a dumb idea, right?” I asked.

She laughed. “It’s totally a dumb idea. But it seems like it might just work!”

As Pilar slept, her beautiful face glowed with well-sugared contentment. Her hand rested on her stomach, curled tenderly around it as if the cookies that Edie had sent to make her chubby and averse to sex were her friends. I slept well too, but at 3
A.M.
I woke up and couldn’t go back to sleep.

“Are you awake?” Edie said.

I was touched that we were back to a state where she could sense this, and care. “Yeah. I was just thinking how weird it is that Pilar is both the source of all my problems and possibly the answer to one of them.”

I think I could feel her smiling in the dark.

“Am I doing the talking tomorrow, or are you?” she asked.

“Hmm.” This was a good question. “I don’t know,” I said. “I mean, if I talk, I’ll be able to adjust myself to what she’s thinking, and that’s pretty helpful. I mean, I guess it could be pretty helpful.”

I was glad Edie couldn’t see my face. I felt like I had just practically admitted to her that I had been in Gideon’s head.

But she just said, “We’ll just see how she reacts.”

How she reacted in the morning is that she woke up and let out a loud shriek. I heard it in my head, but Edie heard it all the way down the hall.

“What the hell?”

I leaped out of bed and did a little dance on the cold floor. “Pilar is fat! I mean, for her, she’s fat. She is freaking out about her stomach!”

I jumped on Edie.

“Help! Physical affection alert. Help.” But she was laughing.

I pushed myself up off my hands and landed on the floor. “Let’s go talk to her now. She’s feeling vulnerable. She’s going to want an ego boost.”

Edie was stepping into her jeans and socks and then, modestly, putting a bra on under her T-shirt.

I took a little care getting ready to talk to Pilar. I combed my hair. I wore boots instead of just boring clogs, and jeans that actually fit instead of the loose ones that felt comfortable. Edie took notice of my unusual attention to detail and put a little makeup on me—a smudge of dark shadow at the edge of my lashes and some lipstick.

The moment Pilar opened her door and saw Edie and me standing there, she commenced compiling a mental list of what we should change about our appearance.

Apparently, I needed lowlights. I think I kind of knew what lowlights were. Edie needed contacts. (Pilar, genetically perfect, had apparently never heard of LASIK.) I needed to work on my
shoulder muscles because I slouched, and finally, Edie could be pretty if she would get her upper lip enhanced, but it would have to be done by someone really good.

Pilar opened her mouth to ask Edie if her mother knew a good plastic surgeon, and I figured this was as good a time as any to interrupt.

“We want you to be on Academic Tête-à-Tête,” I said.

Edie nodded enthusiastically. “We do. We all really do.”

Thees is a joke. They’re making fun of me.

With the fat freak-out this morning I should have anticipated this kind of insecurity.

But before I could say anything, Pilar jumped to her own defense. “I’m actually really smart, you know. I mean, Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan told me once even I was smart. I theenk I have one of her papers right here saying so.”

I decided to totally ignore Pilar’s bout of insecurity and make myself look like the one who was insecure.

“So, Pilar,” I said. “You’re probably thinking, Wow, ATAT is for losers.”

Wow. Are they not making fun of me? Do they really want me to be on ATAT? Does Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan really remember that she said I had the potential?

“We have a lot of gaps in knowledge,” Edie said. “Like, you have traveled a lot and…you’re from another country. So you know different things about history…”

“And other kinds of wildlife,” I said. “Like…penguins! They have penguins in Argentina, right?”

Do they have penguins in Argentina? I can’t remember eef we actually have them there now or eef they just wash up on shore now because of the global warming.

Pilar’s eyelashes—which were long, lush and embellished
with an amazing new mascara that was not paint, but in fact tiny black latex tubes—fluttered as she modestly bowed her head. “Well, I mean, do you think I could, like, try it out?”

“Sure,” Edie said. “Why don’t you come to a practice, and we’ll see how you like it. We wouldn’t want you to do anything you’re not comfortable with.”

I really want to do it. I know I was supposed to do my stomach first and then my mind, but as long as I screwed up my stomach, I might as well get going on my mind, right?

I couldn’t resist saying, “I think this will be really good for you, Pilar.”

To my surprise, she looked at me like I was her long-lost friend. Like I understood her as no one else could.

“Molly,” she began.

She was about to say that she really admired me.

“Excuse me,” Edie said, sensing we should be alone. She left. “So,” said Pilar Benitez-Jones.

“So,” I said.

She slipped one foot out of a rhinestone flip-flop and scratched the top of her other foot with her toes. It was the sort of sexy-casual thing that she was very good at and I was very bad at. “Is this…weird for you?” she said. “I mean, you must know I am going out with…”

I didn’t feel very professional about this, but I wanted to keep my dealings with her as clean as possible. It was already a little creepy that the whole reason we were having her on ATAT was that she was hot, but hey, I wouldn’t have minded being used for my body rather than my brains. For once.

“It’s a small school. We really want ATAT to win. I mean, it’s…important. To a lot of people. And I think if you join the
team, we have a really good chance of winning the finals. I…Gid and I broke up. I mean, I did break up with him, so, I mean, technically, why would I be the one who is upset?”

My voice wavered as I said this, because I knew I wasn’t telling the whole truth. But I managed to get it out, and she had no idea. It made me feel good to say it, even though it wasn’t true. I hoped she wouldn’t figure out the real reason we wanted her on ATAT. Then again, I don’t know why I cared. I mean, she was the one who thought that I should get lowlights and that Edie needed bigger lips.

Pilar showed up at practice in a green mini skirt, white boots, a button-down lace camisole, and a motorcycle jacket. A subtle shadow hinted at vast stores of cleavage. Her beauty was electrifying—she was like a human disco ball. Everyone stared. Dan was the guy in the room who had probably spent the least time in any proximity to Pilar, and also, not coincidentally, the least likely to ever sleep with her or, for that matter, probably anyone vaguely attractive. He looked as if he were going to burst into tears. Sergei looked mad. Mickey winked at me and made an obscene show of adjusting himself in his chair. Even Devon and Nicholas, though too jaded and sexually experienced to be transfixed by Pilar (and also because they knew her, let’s face it), nodded admiringly.

Pilar was like ten Holy Virgin girls. Those girls turned heads because there were so many of them together, but taken individually, they weren’t heart-stopping beauties, monuments to physical perfection, like Pilar. Plus, the Xavier guys would be seeing her for the first time. I thought about everything you had to process when looking at a girl like Pilar—her face, her
body, the amazement that they went together, the fact that she was in front of you. Then, if you were a guy, you had to factor in the incredible thrill of seeing such perfection while simultaneously trying to process the horrifying fact that there was no way you were going to get to do anything but look.

I took it upon myself to greet her. “Thanks so much for coming,” I said. “I think you know everyone.”

“I’ve seen you,” Dan blurted out, “but never, like, right in front of my face.”

Oh my God, Pilar thought,
He’s so ugly. I don’t think he should talk about hees face! It makes people look at it.

Pilar shook his limp hand and came away with her own moist and gluey. The only sound in the room was Nicholas and Devon, quizzing each other.

“Gunpowder was invented in…China?” said Devon hesitantly.

Nicholas frowned and went through his papers for a second. He looked up with a bright, fake smile. He wasn’t Pilar’s biggest fan, but he was competitive and he understood her importance as well as anyone. “Right you are. But do you know when Chang and Eng were born?”

“Chang and Eng?” Pilar said. “Are they Siamese twins?”

We were all surprised and impressed but tried not to show it.

Pilar was very pleased when Nicholas said they were.

She gave a modest shrug. “There’s a boutique in Shanghai called that. And their logo ees that. So…I figured.”

“Pilar, keen instincts are very important. You should always go with your gut,” Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan said.

“My gut?” Pilar had never heard this expression, and she wondered if Mrs. Gywnne-Vaughan was suggesting she was fat.

“We are so pleased to have you,” Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan said. “Shall we begin with some recent history?”

I assumed Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan was going to play to Pilar’s strengths.

Pilar, why don’t you go up against…Dan?”

Dan and Pilar sat in front of the room. Dan kept shifting in his seat, and I smiled to myself, thinking I should teach him Gid’s trick about the pile of gross food and the goat’s milk.

Pilar closed her eyes in concentration.

“Who shot Gianni Versace?”

“Andrew Cunanan,” Pilar said. She smiled and added, “He was a gay drifter.”

“Correct.”

Dan snorted. Pilar clapped her hands together. “Yay!” she said.

“Number two. How many ex-husbands does Elizabeth Taylor have?”

“Eight,” Dan said, sure he was right.

“No,” Pilar said. “Eight marriages. She married Richard Burton twice. Eight weddings, seven husbands.”

“Correct,” said Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan. “Number three. Who took over the House of Chanel in 1983?”

“Karl Lagerfeld,” shouted Pilar, leaping clear out of her seat. “Wow!” she said. “This is, like, so amazingly fun!” She’d never cared about knowing the answer in class before, but this was different. It was like, everyone was watching her, and she had won. It felt like something else, she thought, knowing the right answer.

“Pilar, you’re free to go,” Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan said. “We’ve seen enough. We’re happy to have you if you’re happy to have us.”

“Oh, I am!” Pilar said. Being this happy made her look more beautiful than I had ever seen her. “Oh,” she said, before she left. “What should I wear to the match?” Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan’s eyes took in Pilar’s outfit from her spike heels up to her cleavage, and I saw a quiver of distaste across her lip before she said, “What you’re wearing is perfect.”

After she left, we all stayed quiet for a minute. Seeing Pilar in action had made me feel very calm. I saw that Nicholas was looking at me with an admiring smile. So were Mickey, Devon, Sergei, and Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan, even Dan. It was Dan who started to clap, a slow, steady clap. Everyone joined in, filling the room with applause.

“Brilliant,” Nicholas said. “I mean, I thought I was used to her, but that girl knows how to walk into a room.”

“I’ll say,” Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan said. She wiped her glasses on the cuff of her sweater. “I’m a sixty-year-old woman, but I can see it. She’s an atom bomb.”