Pride and Prep School (5 page)

“Well, now you know! Your work here is done. But why—”

But Michael is out the door. It’s hard to imagine that he wants to know where Cassie and Jeremy did it for perverse reasons, like he wants to imagine my sister and Jeremy’s sexploits in as much realistic detail as possible.

Though, obviously, I don’t know him at all, really.

When I sit back down to my cup of tea, I feel like I did last summer at the beach at Gloucester when a huge wave knocked me down, pulled me under, and spat me back up, sputtering and scared and confused about what happened because it had happened so fast.

Michael Endicott, my one-time classroom nemesis, preppy and perfect Michael Endicott, had come over to ask me out. Michael Endicott “wanted to be with” me.

Me.

All through dinner and afterward, I feel like the earth has been shaken off of its axis. I can’t concentrate on my homework. I give up and log on to Facebook and find a direct message there from Michael. I hold my breath and click on it.

Hope you forgive me for my stumbling today

and want to assure you that it won’t happen

again. I was mistaken, obviously, in thinking

we had developed some kind of understanding and

you have made my misjudgment abundantly

clear. I was wrong, but I can assure you I never

make the same mistake twice.

I feel tears spring to my eyes again, and the crazy thing is I can’t even tell for sure if they are tears of anger or sadness. The message, like most things about Michael Endicott, is insufferably snotty, and that makes me angry. But he had actually come over to declare a romantic interest in me, and, if I were honest with myself, I had been looking at him with different eyes lately, too. Maybe being with Michael wasn’t the craziest idea since vegan haggis in a can. I usually enjoy talking to him, even if we are squabbling at the time, like in English class. And he can be pretty patient and understanding, like on New Year’s Eve. And he is actually pretty funny when you get to know him.

But these things hardly matter now.

I had never entertained the possibility of being with Michael Endicott until he came over to suggest it. That would have been like imagining marrying Prince Harry and being declared Queen of England just because the UK decided I am awesome enough to get that honor. And I had most definitely blown any chances of making it happen, this thing that I had never imagined until now: being with Michael.

And now, as I prepare to go to bed, I can’t stop thinking about it.

“What’s wrong?” Tori asks from her perch on her bed. Damn her uncanny ability to sense what someone is feeling, even when their back is turned.

“Want to read this message from Michael?” I offer.

She smiles, almost claps her hands like Mom, and skips over to read. Her eyes run across the lines of text and then she sort of gasps, “Ouch.” She sits on the edge of my bed and shakes her head. “What did you do, George?”

I start to protest her jumping to the conclusion that I’m the one who did something wrong but say instead, “It was probably the most twisted conversation I have ever had in my life. Really. It was like driving down a really winding road in the dark with only one headlight.”

She pats the open spot on the bed next to her and I take it. She puts her arm around me and says, “Tell me what happened.”

“Michael came over to tell me that he knew that I wasn’t at the CVS buying a pregnancy test kit for myself,” I begin. I had already told Tori last night about Cassie’s scare and her weird reaction to it and how Michael practically screamed and ran for the hills when he saw me holding a box full of sticks to pee on. “But that’s kind of insulting, isn’t it?”

“Why? I mean, I would think that anybody from our school who would run into you and Cassie at the drugstore would be able to correctly identify who needed the pregnancy test,” she says ruefully.

“Well that’s just it! Why? Why
wouldn’t
I need a pregnancy test?” I wail even as I realize how stupid this sounds and flop onto my stomach to shut out reality.

She presses her hand against the top of mine for an instant, like Mom used to when we were little and we’d had a nightmare and she would come sit on our bed. “It’s not that you wouldn’t need one. It’s that everyone knows what Cassie has been up to.”

“Okay,” I sigh. “But he was really insulting about her, saying that she’s basically a stupid slut who got what she deserves for skanking it up around town.”

I’m pretty sure Tori’s frowning but I can’t see her face. “Wellll … if he really said that, I can understand why you got upset,” she concedes after a full minute.

“He did! Basically. And then he wanted to know where Cassie and Jeremy were when they did it! How pervy is that?”

“That’s odd,” she admits.

“Wait. It gets odder. Because the whole reason he came over, after insulting me and our family, was to
ask me out
.”

“I
knew
he liked you!”

“You are missing the whole point!”

“Okay.” She pulls away and looks at me sadly. “So, what? Now you two are mortal enemies?”

“No.” I punch my pillow in an effort to fluff it up and make myself feel better. Neither work. “Michael Endicott and I live on different planets. Always have. I mean, how snotty was that message to me?” I say, nodding with my chin toward the laptop.

“He was
hurt
, George.”

“I think he was relieved to have dodged the bullet. Liking me enough to go out with me must have been temporary insanity. God, they’d kick him off the Social Register.” I sit up and kick at a sneaker sticking out from under my bed. “I need something good to happen for a change. With all the Cassie stuff and this …”

“Okay.” When I turn to Tori, she’s smiling. “Well, Leigh got the lead in the musical, of course,” she says, and that’s good news because freshmen never get the lead part, even when they’re as good as Leigh. “And today I found out I got into Williams.”

“What?” I almost scream and throw my arms around her. “Why didn’t you tell me? That’s wonderful! Not that I’m surprised.”

“There’s so much going on right now,” she sighs. “Plus, I wasn’t sure how you would feel about it. I know you know Williams is Trey’s first choice.”

“So?”

“So if I go there you will think about me the same way you think about Mom, like I’m just following some man through my life.”

“No I won’t,” I say sullenly, but neither of us is convinced.

After some more silence, I say, “You know, I am sloooowly starting to realize exactly what a judgmental ass I can be, and I promise to work on it.” I guess I haven’t even wondered about what was going on with Tori’s college applications because I was so sure she’d get in everywhere. But she must have been at least a little nervous about them. I put my arm around her waist. “Anywhere you go, anything you want to do, is okay with me. And Williams is es
pec
ially okay with me, because it’s not so far away, and I can still see you, if you’ll want to see me.”

“Of course I will want to!” she laughs and pulls me into a hug that reminds me how much I have missed having her around—and how much I will miss her next year, wherever she is.

“It’s a really good school, too,” I say. “It would be completely ridiculous to
not
go just because your boyfriend is going and you want to be independent. Or because your idiot sister wants you to be.”

“You’re not an idiot, George,” she says, pulling my hair into a stubby little ponytail and releasing it. “You just act like one sometimes,” she laughs.

Tori also has an uncanny knack for getting at the truth sometimes.

At school on the Monday before Winter Break, Cassie remains the main topic of conversation. She says everyone stares at her when she walks into class and down the hall; boys say rude things; girls eye her and cackle. At least she’ll get a break from all of that over break. That’s the only solace I can think of for her right now.

After school that day, I arrive at the front of our house just as Trey is dropping off Tori. He rolls down her car window, motions for me to come over, and says, “Hey, Georgia,” when I lean in to see them. “Want to come to Aruba for break with us? My family has a condo there and some other people are coming. My cousins are off from Princeton and Wesleyan at the same time we are.”

“That is
really
nice of you,” I say, and I am suddenly elated by his generosity.

“And Michael’s coming.”

My elation nosedives onto a rocky surface. I say, “Thank you, then, but no. I don’t think Michael will want me there.”

“Huh?” Trey looks confused by this and turns to Tori, who shakes her head subtly. “Are you sure?” he asks me. “Sun, surf, sand, far away from all this snow … it’ll be fun.”

“No, you two go—if Mom and Dad let you.”

“They’ve already said yes!” Tori cheers. “Isn’t it great?”

“It is,” I agree with a conscious squelching of the jealousy bubbling up from inside of me. “You guys go and send me back the cheesiest, tackiest, stupidest postcard you can find. Please.”

Trey laughs and assures me that he can do that. Then he leans across Tori to open her door for her. They kiss briefly and Trey says, “Love you,” as Tori slides out of the car while I stand there marveling at the sweet simplicity of their connection.

As she walks into the house in front of me, I also realize that I will probably never, ever have that. And I feel the loss of that much more than the chance to spend Winter Break somewhere warm and sunny and exotic.

***

It’s a pretty lonely Winter Break week with Leigh spending most of her time with her church group collecting donations for a school in the Honduras, and Cassie hanging out again with a couple cheerleader friends who remain loyal to her. I’m not entirely sure she’s given up her dream of recapturing Jeremy, but at least she’s not calling him anymore. In fact, she never even mentions boys at all.

On Wednesday, I receive the special honor of being able to work with my dad in his study while he’s reading student papers. He doesn’t usually let anyone in his office. He must have thought I’ve seemed pretty mopey lately so he extended me the privilege of working with him.

“I fear for the future under your generation, George, I truly do,” he says as he wipes his eyes behind the glasses perched on the end of his nose.

“What is it this time?”

“This one”—he waves some stapled pages at me—“argues that ‘Robert Browning Jr.
jurastically
changed the way we look at poetry.’”

I have to laugh at that one.

“Do they mean Robert
Downey
Jr.? Or Robert Browning? Still, I like the idea of change that’s so big it’s Jurassic. Like a T-Rex, I guess.”

“And this one,” he says as he pats the top of a stack of papers. “Well, this boy somehow misspelled his own name.”

“I’m sure it was a typo.”

“One can only hope so.” He sighs and leans back in his chair, rubbing his jaw as if he had a bushy beard, which he does not. Not even a sparse one, though there is a little stubble on his chin, mostly gray. “What are
you
working on?”

“A paper for history class on a figure from the French Revolution. I chose Charlotte Corday.”

“Ha! Leave it to George to pick a woman who stabbed a man in his own bathtub,” Dad laughs.

“Marat
was
a pretty bad man.”

“All men are, perhaps, given the power and the opportunity,” he says absently, and I have no idea how to respond to this, but it doesn’t matter, as he has no interest in pursuing this conversation and shifts gears abruptly on me. “So how is school going? I drove by the high school the other day and the parking lot looked like a Lexus dealership, except for the teachers’ section. Come to think of it, that’s how the lots at Meryton look, too.”

“There were people in Boulder with just as much money,” I observe, “but it was different there, somehow.”

“That’s because this is
old
money,” Dad tells me. “And the occasional parvenu, like Billingsley.”

“That doesn’t seem to bother Tori in the least.”

“No, she seems quite happy. But then Tori is content no matter where she goes. She has a sort of serenity about her … I have no idea where she gets that,” he sighs.

My dad stretches in his chair like a cat and I can see the top letters of his ancient Rolling Stones tour T-shirt peep out of his even older gray fisherman’s cardigan. The shirt reminds me that he was once young, despite the lines on his face that I swear weren’t there a week ago, and the increasing gray in his hair.

“And Cassie has obviously thrown herself with gusto at Longbourne society, at least that strata that sports jock straps,” Dad continues. He’s in a rare chatty mood. Maybe he’s trying to avoid grading more papers. “And Leigh seems to have found a happy little band of apostles to pal around with.”

“She’s blowing everyone away in the school musical,” I tell him. “She has a great voice.”

“Yes,” Dad agrees, but he sounds far away. Conversations with Dad are always sort of ponderous, often multilayered, but I was finding this one particularly alienating. “Now your mother, she loves it here. A town like Longbourne is exactly where she has always wanted to be. She grew up in a town like this, you know.”

“I know.” Of course I knew. I’d been going to Grandma and Grandpa’s house in Cheshire, Connecticut, since I was born. Usually we had to travel much further to get there, but now that we were closer I had seen them and Mom’s childhood home more frequently. Tori and I used to sleep in her bedroom when we’d fly in for a few days. Grandma had preserved Mom’s doll collection and most of her old clothes—prom gowns and formal dresses and dance costumes from years of ballet and jazz. We used to try them on and parade around in them, but that seems like such a long time ago. A jurastically long time.

Dad looks at me suddenly, as if remembering something.

“But are
you
finding your way, George?” he asks me.

“Sure,” I say, because I don’t know what else to tell him and I know that this is what he wants to hear. “I’m really liking the alternative paper, and the people who write for it.”

“That’s great,” he says, satisfied, and turns back to his work. So I go back to mine. But I can’t help wondering what he would think if he actually knew what was going on with us, if he knew that I had gotten drunk and sloppy and fooled around with a dubious boy and that that same boy had, weeks later, messed with Cassie and dumped her, and that because of this the kids at school were making Cassie pretty miserable. Or if he knew that my suspicious nature and so-called sense of humor, as caustic as his own, has caused me nothing but trouble in this town—and turned off a potentially pretty great guy in the process.

I go out to the kitchen to look for something to eat and find Leigh and Alistair at the little table eating soup out of big striped bowls.

“Hello, Georgia, please join us,” Alistair says, patting the chair next to him, and Leigh gapes at him, clearly surprised by this. “Your mom’s chicken noodle soup is delicious.”

“She won’t eat it,” Leigh tells him as she bites into an apple with a snap-crunch. “She doesn’t eat meat.”

“Really?” he asks, but conversationally. He doesn’t sound alarmed, the way most people do. “Seventh Day Adventists don’t eat meat either,” he tells Leigh, then turns back to me. “Are you a vegetarian for health or ethical and spiritual reasons?”

I look at his little owl face skeptically, wondering why he is so interested in this, and in me.

“All of the above,” I answer.

“That’s excellent,” Alistair enthuses. “You know, some people believe that Jesus was a vegetarian.”

“What about the loaves and fishes stuff?” I ask, and he seems pleased enough by my interest to launch into a lengthy explanation of various readings of Genesis I and II, and if man truly has dominion over all the beasts and plants, whether that really means you can just kill them and eat them.

“Wasn’t
Hitler
a vegetarian?” Leigh interrupts, looking at me.

I shrug and open the refrigerator to look for something edible and portable to take somewhere else. “I know he had a dog,” I say. I find a carton of raspberry soy yogurt and grab a spoon. Then I pause and look at Alistair, who seems to be watching me like a puppy who suspects he’s going to be taken for a walk.

“Is that stuff good?” Alistair asks.

“You get used to it,” I admit. “You know, I write about vegetarian and vegan issues for the alternative paper at school. Maybe an article about the spiritual or religious views on diet would be kinda chill.”

Leigh’s mouth drops open and Alistair’s whole face brightens, making him look much less pasty for once.

“I would be honored to help. I could supply relevant passages from Scripture for you …”

“I might take you up on that.”

He beams and Leigh looks at him as if he has just signed on with the devil. I can’t figure out why he’s paying so much attention to me either, unless he is planning on saving me and bringing me into the fold. But surely Leigh has told him what a hopeless cause that would be.

“Well, see ya, Georgia,” Leigh says pointedly, and I wave slightly.

“I’ll leave my email and you can write if you need anything,” Alistair calls after me, and I actually feel a little flattered. But halfway up the stairs it occurs to me that he might be angling for a Barrett girl who hasn’t taken a vow to save herself for marriage. And then I am thoroughly creeped out.

Still, when I’m in my room later, I consider the vegetarianism and spirituality idea and start writing down some ideas for an article. I’ve made no headway convincing the school administration to offer more vegetarian-friendly choices at lunch—they told me there is always a salad bar (at which the iceberg lettuce is always brown and the tomatoes are soupy). Maybe putting vegetarianism in a spiritual and historical context would make sense, so I look up some stuff online and jot down titles of books I should check out.

It’s just possible that telling everyone they’re misguided and unethical dupes of the meat industrial complex is not as effective as
showing
them that they are. And I’ll get the chance to feed people, too, in a few days, at the Pigs show, which might be the best plan after all. Maybe the best way to a person’s heart—and conscience—is through their stomachs.

I shut down my laptop, a little excited about my debut as a professional baker and secure in the fact that at least a punk rock show is the last place I’m likely to have another mortifying encounter with Michael Endicott.

But before the show that weekend, just to make my vacation truly unbearable, Mom announces one night at dinner that I’ll get to come with her on the Longbourne Jaycees’ Tour of Historic Homes tomorrow.

O, joy unspeakable.

“Your father won’t go, and you and I never do anything together anymore,” she insists, adding guilt to the invitation to make it nearly impossible to refuse it. At his end of the table, Dad doesn’t seem to hear her, and Leigh does not seem at all hurt that she was not invited. In fact, she’s smiling. Mom starts enumerating all the fabulous houses that will be on the tour and what they’ll be like, but I am too panicked to hear anything else she says because the Endicotts’ place is bound to be on the tour. The idea of running into Michael in his own tour-worthy home is even more horrifying than seeing him at an all-ages Pigs show.

Until I remember that Michael is in Aruba with Trey and Tori.

And suddenly the idea of getting to see his house seems absolutely necessary to me. Would his room be on the tour? Doubtful. But suddenly I really want to see it, so I can finally figure out once and for all who he is. What hangs on his wall? Is he as neat at home as his car would indicate he is, or is he a “secret slob,” as Holden Caulfield would say, with piles of clothes, dirty and clean, on his floor? Are there lots of books on his shelves? If so, what kind of books? Are there sports trophies on shelves on the walls? What kind?