All That Glitters (12 page)

“It's just—” I tried to think of a cool way to dress up what I wanted to ask Jade to do. I could see Feb's silhouette behind the Frank Lloyd Wright–style glass windows of the VIP room upstairs. Her arms were flailing wildly in the air, and I heard her shout the words, “We're just not going to pay that ridiculous price unless you can
guarantee
that people will
literally
feel transported to the south of France.”

I realized I might only have a few more minutes alone with Jade. Feb was the queen of storming out on a conversation if she didn't get her way.

“The thing is,” I said, “I just joined the field hockey team at school and we're in desperate need of new uniforms. And the first game is in less than two weeks. And we don't have a way to raise the money and have them ordered and shipped and—”

“And you were wondering if I would help you with your uniforms?” Jade said, crossing her legs.

I nodded sheepishly. It sounded a little preposterous to ask a rising design star for help with athletic wear, but Jade's face brightened as she seemed to think about it.

“
Chérie,
I will tell you a story. Last week, I sat in
on filming of American TV show with Heidi. I believe is called
Project Runway
? Wonderful people, you Americans. Get such a bad reputation.” She turned to face me. “What I'm saying is,
chérie,
your little favor reminds me very much of one of these … challenges? I like it. Maybe it will help me keep my mind off the Armory show all the time. A little fun. We can sit down next week and look at some samples—”

“Jade, thank you so much!” I said, resisting the urge to tackle her with a giant bear hug.

Jade held up a finger to stop me. “I will love to help you, Flan, on one condition.”

“Okay,” I grinned, knowing what was coming. “I'll be your model.”

Jade beamed, raised her martini to my Pellegrino, and said, “
Parfait!
This is good news. I will design skirts for hockey, you will do catwalk, and you can bring all of your friends to the show. Everything we do together is brilliant! You shall see …” But then she sighed and fell back against the bar in complete exhaustion after all that enthusiasm. “Yes,” she said, “so American, so brilliant …”

Speaking of brilliant, I had to pat myself on the back for this one. A French fashion designer to the rescue for our field hockey uniforms? The girls on the team would be
très
psyched about this one.

Have your secretary call mine

If there's one way to get a reality check that you are not, in fact, living the life of a professional model, it's sliding your tray along the lunch line in the Thoney cafeteria. On Friday afternoon, I was in line behind Dara, who was lamenting the fact that she'd just bombed a quiz in biology. When she sighed and nabbed the very last order of fries—the very last edible item in the line—I was left face-to-face with a lone hot turkey sandwich under the heat lamp. What Would Jade Moodswing Do?

For starters, Jade Moodswing probably wouldn't have been so late to lunch because she probably wouldn't have hung around after her English class was dismissed to talk to Mr. Zimmer about act structure. But I was still wigging out about how tough I was finding all this
Merchant of Venice
stuff and was looking for a way in with Mr. Zimmer. This was the
sort of thing my siblings would have made endless amounts of fun of me for. But while I knew they would have called it sucking up, I called it getting more accustomed to the Thoney way of courting favors.

Dara popped a fry in her mouth and turned to me at the end of the line. She said, “All I need is for someone to sit down with me, talk to me like I'm a four-year-old, and explain the difference between mitosis and meiosis.”

Gingerly placing the turkey disaster on my plate, I said, “I'll help you.” The words just kind of popped out—offering up my time seemed to be my first instinct these days.

“Seriously?” she said, holding out the plate of fries for me to share as we walked through the cafeteria together.

“Seriously,” I said. “I took bio last semester, and my teacher gave us all these mnemonic devices for keeping track of that stuff. It'd be easy for me to go over it with you.”

“You just totally made my day,” Dara said, laying down her tray on the table where she sat with Olivia and Veronica.

“What made your day?” Veronica piped in. She was chewing on the eraser of her pencil, furrowing her
brow over an open geometry book. “Ooh,” she said, looking up at us. “Fries. Way tastier than my eraser.”

Dara held out the fries to Veronica. “Flan's going to tutor me in bio. She took it last semester at Stuy and is going to save my life before I fail another quiz.”

Veronica closed her math book and sighed. “Any chance you also took geometry last semester? I'm literally drowning in the Pythagorean theorem.”

“Actually, I did,” I said, suddenly feeling a bit better about my Shakespeare woes. In a weird way, it helped to know that I wasn't the only one who thought the classes here were hard. “I got an A last semester in geometry. It's pretty simple once you get the hang of the formulas.”

“Whoa,” Veronica said, looking at me like I was suddenly speaking Latin. “I'd give anything to be able to put the words ‘simple' and ‘geometry' in the same sentence.” She put up her hands in a prayer pose. “Could we please, please do a joint tutoring session tonight—bio for Dara and geometry for me? Pleeease, Flan, you would
totally
be our hero.”

“You really would.” Dara nodded, her red curls bobbing at her shoulders. “We'd owe you big time.”

“Of course, you guys,” I said, shrugging. “You don't have to owe me anything. I'm happy to help you.”

Dara and Veronica were becoming my friends, so it seemed obvious that I'd be there for them to help with study questions, but when I thought about it, this would also probably bring me some good karma—and some secured votes—for Virgil Host.

Sure, Willa could hand out invites to some movie screening, but I was the one putting in quality study time with our grade.

“When should we do it?” I asked the girls.

“ASAP,” Dara said. “My next quiz is next week, and I need all the help I can get.”

Veronica thumbed through the screen of her iPhone. “How about today, right after school?”

I pulled out my planner too, and I tried to decipher my own handwriting to make sense of all my scribbled plans for the week. “I've got field hockey practice until five o'clock,” I said, although on my to-do list for tonight I'd actually written down: “Do homework” (something I probably shouldn't need a reminder to get done). I looked up at Dara and Veronica, who were waiting, iPhones poised, to plug me into their evenings. And once again, I realized that my own homework would have to wait until later. “Why don't I meet you guys at 71 Irving Place for a coffee and study break after practice?”

“Perfect,” they both said at once.

When I finally made my way over to the third table, Camille was standing up to clear her tray.

“Hey,” she said. “I was wondering where you were. I've been wanting to talk to you.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I had to stay late to help Mr. Zimmer with something, then I got caught up with Dara and Veronica, and now lunch is basically over and …” I trailed off, looking at my watch. “What was it you wanted to talk to me about?”

Camille blushed her classic tell-tale boy problem red.

“Ooh,” I teased her. “Do you have a date with someone special?”

“Ugh,” Camille groaned, turning even redder against her white cashmere turtleneck. “Not even. That's what I wanted to talk to you about. Either he hates the way I play field hockey or—”

“
Camille
.”

“Okay, okay, or both of us are just way too shy around each other. I like him so much—I mean did you see his haircut yesterday at practice, how it's all lopsided and adorable? Anyway, I just feel like nothing's ever going to happen.” She crossed her arms on the table and lay her head down so her long hair cascaded over her face. “Why am I so relationship challenged? Why can't Xander be like Alex and just ask me to hang out?”

I lifted the curtain of her hair so I could see her
face. “What if
you
suggest hanging out?” I said, knowing she never would. “Why does it have to be the guy who does it? If you want something,” I said, thinking at that moment about Virgil, “why don't you go out and get it?”

“Argh,” Camille squealed and hid back under her hair. “Way too scary.” She giggled. “You can say that because you're so much more comfortable with Alex than I am with Xander. I mean, I've liked him for
ever
.” I could tell she was working on an idea from the way her eyes scrolled back and forth. “Hey,” she said finally. “What if you … you know … what if we all hung out together?”

“A double date?” I said, picturing the four of us whirling around Wollman Rink. “That sounds like the perfect solution.”

“Yay!” Camille squeezed my hand. “When can we do it? This weekend?”

Again, I pulled out my planner and flipped through the scribbled-on pages. When I got to the weekend, for a second I couldn't believe how white and wide open the squares for Saturday and Sunday were. Then I remembered that I'd promised to join my mom up at our country house in Connecticut for a decompressing weekend—which I suddenly realized that I desperately needed.

“I'll be at our country house this weekend,” I told Camille, flipping through to next week's appointments. “But I'm supposed to meet up with Alex after practice on Monday night. You should stick around, and I'll tell Alex to make sure Xander comes, too.”

As I jotted this down, Camille laughed. “You really have an organized system going on there,” she teased.

“Hey,” I protested as we walked out of the cafeteria arm-in-arm. “Thoney life is hectic. There should be a class where they teach us how to keep up!”

In which the heroine takes a Breather

I didn't realize how badly I needed to recharge until Saturday morning when I came up for some country air. After the two-hour drive to our summer house in Connecticut, my mom and I were lounging around in our bathrobes on the loveseat in the kitchen. We'd picked up our traditional latte and croissant combo from Tartine and had the whole spread laid out on a silver tray.

“You know, darling,” my mom said, dipping a tiny edge of a buttery croissant into her coffee, “at first I was disappointed that your father forgot to mention his golf tournament in Maui this weekend. But now that we're here together, I'm so glad to have a girls' weekend with you.”

I squeezed her hand and watched an owl roosting in one of the giant pine trees on our property. It felt like it had been a long time since I'd been up here,
since I'd seen any bird besides a Central Park pigeon. I'd forgotten how good it felt to get away from the rush of city life and just chill out.

“I'm glad to have a girls' weekend, too.” I said.

“I wish February had been able to join us.” My mom furrowed her brow, which I knew was against her dermatologist's orders. “I worry about her, all of her undertakings. She's so passionate, but she over-extends herself.” Then her face smoothed out, and she turned to look at me. “I'm glad I don't have to worry about the same thing with you, Flan. You've always known how to take it easy. Sometimes I think the rest of us should take a lesson from you.”

For a second, I almost took my mom's words seriously—I almost said something like “I think I could squeeze you in for a lesson.” It was ridiculous, but I'd been so hung up on saying “yes” to everything anyone asked me to do this week that at this point it felt instinctual.

I started to laugh. “Oh, Mom, I think I might have left that Flan somewhere on the front steps of Thoney. Recently, I've been feeling a lot more like Feb.”

“What do you mean?” my mom said. “Are you falling under the spell of that Jade Moodswing, too?”

“Well,” I said, “maybe. She is pretty great. In fact, I might have made Ramsey's whole season when I
told her that Jade agreed to design our field hockey uniforms. And when I told the girls that they all could come see the fashion show, everyone was ecstatic.”

“It's fantastic,” my mom said. “Your father and I really can't wait for this fashion show. The idea of our two girls working on it together….” She looked at her watch. “Which reminds me, I've scheduled a little surprise in honor of your first catwalk appearance.”

Just then, the doorbell rang, and when I answered it, two blond women in white uniforms walked in without a word. Behind them, two blond men wheeled in contraptions that I soon realized were folding massage beds.

“Right on time!” my mom exclaimed. “How about setting those up here in the living room where we get the soft morning light?” She monitored the progress of our living room's transformation as the Swedish foursome arranged the beds, drew the blinds, and lit aromatherapy candles. “How's this for R&R?” she asked me.

“Redefined,” I said, shaking my head at the masseuse's silent diligence. “This is amazing, Mom.”

When everything was set up, the two men filed out the front door, and the women motioned us toward the side-by-side beds.

“Here,” one of them said brusquely. “You will lie down.”

I didn't argue, just arranged myself facedown on the table and let the relaxation begin.

“So,” my mom said, her voice slightly muffled by the headrest she was lying on. “How do you rate your first week at Thoney? Are you feeling settled yet?”

“I guess so,” I said as the verbally-challenged masseuse began working on a knot in my neck that I didn't even know I had. “But I think my calendar is booked for the rest of the semester.”