Snark and Circumstance (2 page)

As a vegan, I am committed to nonviolence, in all aspects of life.

But I’d really like to kick Michael Endicott in the shins right now.

Chapter 2: Never Bargain with Your Mother

I tell my sister Tori all about him as we walk home together. Our younger sisters aren’t with us because Cassie stayed behind for cheerleading and Leigh has a ride from our mom to either her dance lessons in East Longbourne or something at her church. It could be a tag sale for the homeless, or a book burning. I can’t keep track of all her saintly endeavors.

Tori might not be a saint but she is almost annoyingly reasonable and suggests when I finish my tirade, “Well, it was his first day. Maybe he was nervous, too?”

“Yeah,” I agree as I hoist my bag onto my shoulder. “Maybe Michael Endicott—of the Longbourne Endicotts—has OCD and he really needs that particular seat to feel safe or something. Maybe he’s off his medication today. Maybe I induced some kind of episode in him, and now he’s home, frothing at the mouth. And beating his chest with one fist . . .”

I trail off as Tori shakes her head and ignores my delight in my own morbid imagination. “It sounds like he really cares about his grade and is worried about what your sitting out the labs will mean to it.”

“Some things are more important than grades. Like principles.”

“They’re not his principles,” Tori sighs as we arrive home.

Our house is a smaller version of the other old Victorians in the neighborhood. The front looks wrinkled from its chipping paint, like the one old lady on the block who didn’t get a facelift. I go right up to the room we share and log on to Facebook to message my friend Allison in Boulder about my first day and my encounter with the Seat Freak. Hours later, I haven’t even looked at my homework, and I am wishing I had come downstairs earlier and not been so caught up in my rant to Allison. Even if it meant an interrogation by Mom, I could have scraped together a better dinner for myself than the salad of bagged lettuce and pile of plain noodles sitting on my plate.

Leigh notices my plight and passes me the salad bowl before it’s all gone. She’s not in her usual jumper and white shirt—her own self-imposed parochial school uniform, I guess—but is still wearing a pink leotard and white shorts from dance class. She actually looks young and fresh and less like she’s auditioning to be somebody’s sister-wife.

“Are you still eating vegan?” she asks, kind of the way you would ask someone if they still had cancer or a broken arm.

“Yes,” I say, poking at my congealed noodles and looking at my mom. “It’s a serious choice I’ve made. It’s not a fad, not some phase I’m going through.”

Leigh nods and pulls her long braid over her shoulder, a gesture of hers that always reminds me of someone petting a little monkey who perches there. About three years ago, when we were living in Colorado, Leigh found religion. Don’t ask me where. Now she is the only churchgoer in the family and she’s taken to wearing shapeless dresses with little flowers on them like one of those refugees the FBI rescues from those polygamist camps in the Southwest.

Her twin and polar opposite, Cassie, smirks, swishes her dirty blonde ponytail, and passes the plate of chicken wings right under my nose. She asks, “When are you going to stop being a hippie freak, Georgia? We’re not in Boulder anymore.”

“Cassie, I know you don’t understand someone caring about anything besides American Idol and what’s on sale at Hollister, but some of us actually think about things and make ethical choices based on that,” I tell her. “And we’re willing to stick to them, even if we may get a bad grade in bio . . .”

This gets my dad’s attention, so I explain how Michael wants to trade me in for a new lab partner. When I describe Michael’s insistence on having a particular seat, I embellish it a little so that it sounds like he practically picked up the chair and dumped me out of it. My dad actually chuckles.

“Well,” he says as he picks up the platter of dead birds from Cassie, “it sounds like this boy has a real sense of entitlement. Typical for a town like this.” He looks at me over his glasses and says with a crooked smile, “You’ll set him straight, George.”

My mom, of course, interprets my story completely differently.

“The Endicotts are the oldest family in Longbourne,” she tells me. “I hope you weren’t too rude to him.”

Cassie, flushed with the triumph of her first cheerleading practice, laughs so hard I think the iced tea will come out of her nose.

“I’m serious,” my mom half-wails, as if any of us had thought she was anything but. “The Endicotts have done a lot for Longbourne—”

“Like run the first Indians off the land?” I crack.

Cassie leans back in her chair and declares, “I heard Michael Endicott got kicked out of prep school. But he’s hot.”

Okay. The prep school expulsion is certainly intriguing, but I don’t want Cassie to know I think this, so I just roll my eyes at her. And as for Michael’s being “hot,” I won’t deny that. That crooked smile is infuriating, but there’s also something kind of attractive about it. Like he knows a really good joke and if you’re nice to him, he just might share it with you.

“There’s a newbie in the senior class, too,” Tori tells us. “His name’s Trey Billingsley.”

I immediately launch into a parody of an upper-crust accent to try to get my dad to laugh again—“Oh, I say! It is I, Trey Billingsley, here to play the grahnd pi-ah-no!”—but Dad doesn’t find this funny. He just looks uncomfortable.

My mom warbles, “Billingsley? Isn’t that the name of your new boss?” and Dad looks as if he’d be happy if a meteor hit our dining room and ended this conversation.

“He’s the new dean, Barbara,” he says as he pokes into his chicken with a sharp knife so that a trickle of reddish juice comes out, “not my ‘boss.’”

“Yes, Trey mentioned that at lunch today,” Tori says, and her robin’s egg eyes take on an extra sparkle when she says his name. Which means, of course, he will be devoted to her by the end of the week, because everyone likes Tori. She’s pretty, with big blue eyes and gold-blonde curls; she’s smart but she never shows it off; and she’s genuinely kind and thoughtful.

If she weren’t my sister and I didn’t love her, I would want to beat her over the head with a shovel.

“There’s a party this Friday, before the game, at Willow Harper’s house,” Tori says to me with a hopeful smile. “You should come with me.”

I tap a thoughtful finger on my chin, “Let’s see, which would be a more excruciating way to spend the evening? A football game, a party at Willow Harper’s . . . or gouging out my eyes with a rusty safety pin? Sorry. Not gonna happen.”

Tori knows Willow Harper is not the kind of girl I would choose to hang out with and, in truth, it’s not like Willow would give up an afternoon of mani-pedis and making fun of freshmen with acne to spend time with me, either. But Tori doesn’t let up.

“Come on, George,” she says, then adds more softly with a glance at our mother, “you agreed last night that you needed to meet more people.”

“You do need to meet some people,” my mother insists as if this were the first time the idea had ever occurred to her—or that she had ever harassed me about it. “Why don’t you go with your big sister to this party? It’s a perfect opportunity. And you can go shopping before it if you want to pick out something new!”

Cassie drops her fork at the sound of a bribe more appropriate to her, but decides to take the moral high ground.

“I don’t care,” she announces with a swish of her ponytail. “I’m going over to Jenny’s to get ready for the game. So, Mom, my Minutemen socks have to be clean. The home-game ones.”

Mom nods, ready to do anything in the service of socially acceptable teen activities and attractive footwear.

“Do I have to go to Willow Harper’s on Friday?” I ask and I look over at Dad, but he is looking out the window and thinking about something else.

“I think you should,” Mom says. “We had an agreement.” I must have looked potentially suicidal at this because Mom instantly switches to a more gentle tactic. “You’ll have a good time, you’ll see. The Harpers’ house is lovely,” she says, as if the architecture of the party venue is my main concern and not the fact that Willow Harper slices and dices girls who dress like me with the efficiency and showmanship of a hibachi chef.

Cassie snickers. “And you should buy something new. If you show up in a shirt like that, they’ll think you’re with the cleaning service.”

I look down at my t-shirt, which I really love because Allison, my best friend from Colorado, hand painted a little purple fox on it for me. The fact that the Willow Harpers of the world can’t see its fabulousness only makes it more special to me.

“I don’t think Willow shops the Sears Hoochie Mama collection, either,” I say with a pointed look at her striped halter top that covers just enough to have kept her from getting sent home on her first day of high school.

She just sniffs and gives me a superior look with her grey goggle eyes because she knows I’m going to spend the next few days figuring out a way to survive the soiree at Willow Harper’s.

After dinner, it’s my turn to unload the dishwasher. Mom comes into the kitchen and watches me for a few seconds, then decides to help by scraping the plates into the garbage can since the disposal is broken again.

“You didn’t eat enough, again,” she says.

“I’m fine.”

Scrape, scrape.

“I wish you’d been nicer to the Endicott boy.”

I hold my breath for a second and resume stacking plates onto the bottom rack.

“I wish the Endicott boy had been nicer to me,” I say.

Scrape, scrape, scrape.

I look at my mom bent over the metal trashcan. When I was a lot younger, she would joke that when people saw us out at the playground or going for a walk, no one would believe I was her daughter, especially if my sisters were there with us. Back then, she meant because they’re all blonde with such pale-colored eyes. But when she says it now, she’s talking about more than my appearance, even if Dad still jokes that I’m the only black (haired) sheep in the family now that he’s gone grey. It makes me kind of sad. I feel like we get stuck in our own labeled boxes at an early age and spend the rest of our lives trying to crawl out of them. Tori’s the sweet one, Leigh’s the serious one, Cassie’s the boy-magnet, and me . . .? I’m the funny one. The smartass.

The black sheep.

“Look, Mom . . . I know Michael Endicott is the kind of boy you would have been crazy about, what with his starched polo shirt and his scuffless docksiders and all, but . . . he’s really . . .” I struggle to find the right word and settle on “obnoxious,” even though that’s not quite right.

She nods, bites her lip for a second, and closes the lid on the garbage.

“Just promise me—again—that you’ll try harder,” she says. “Maybe not with Michael, but with someone. Tori’s not going to be here next year and you will need—”

“I know. I know. I’ll try. I promise.”

She smiles and pushes some hair off my nose when I straighten up.

“This party will be a perfect opportunity to get to know some people outside of school,” she assures me.

I realize that we have very different definitions of perfection and opportunity.

Chapter 3: Epic Party Fail

In bio class, I’m still paired with Michael Endicott, who barely acknowledges me. And since we’re only learning about plant parts now, he could afford to be a little civil to me.

I have bigger problems to worry about. I have to figure out how to make it through Willow’s party without being the first person in three hundred years to be hanged as a witch just for wearing last year’s shirt or failing to own a beach house somewhere. The jury will be kinder to Tori than me. She fits in so much better, and she and Willow hung out at the pool a lot this summer. Tori likes everybody, and Willow has deemed Tori acceptable. I don’t think she’ll give me the same pass.

On Thursday, Willow actually marches up to my lunch table and looms over me like a white-haired Viking in platform sandals. I quickly scan her person for a hanging rope.

“So, Georgiana, I hear you’re coming to my house tomorrow with your sister—for my little get-together?” she purrs, strokes her hair, and smiles like she is showing off a really spectacular conditioner on an infomercial. “I’m so glad.”

I’d been discussing my dissection dilemma with two guys from my history class who suggested I write about it for the alternative newspaper they are trying to resurrect. Dave Watkins wears black horn-rimmed glasses and a kind of retro haircut, while Gary DeSantos sports a Mohawk and ripped t-shirts with band names on them like “Bad Brains.” These guys are clearly the most interesting people at LHS and I wish I had met them earlier. And now that we’re actually talking to each other, sharing lunch, even, and I’m actually liking them, Willow has to butt in and have them quaking in their Doc Martins. So instead of continuing with suggestions for the first issue, Dave pretends to examine his chemistry notes and Gary looks like he is afraid Willow will bite him. Really, for a pair of punk wannabes, they are pretty easily cowed by a girl whose brightest future lies in pointing to prizes on game shows. But then, I don’t really blame them. I have to force myself to look up at Willow too. I fear it’s a bit like looking directly at an eclipse. I could be blinded by her sheer fabulousness.

“Oh, don’t do anything special just for me,” I say as I pull a sandwich out of my bag, and Gary snickers a bit.

Willow steps back then, gaping as if I have just produced a slug from my lunch bag.

“Oh my God, is that a peanut butter and jelly sandwich?” she near-squeals.

I wave my offending lunch in her direction and ask, “Why? Do you have a peanut allergy? ’Cause you look like you might go into shock.”

She sniffs and her upper lip curls slightly. “No. It’s just that I have never seen anyone over the age of, like, five, bring a peanut butter and jelly sandwich to school.”

“Well, I’m the only vegan in my house, so sometimes in the morning there’s not much food available that didn’t once have a face.”