The It Girl (11 page)

“E. Francis Walsh,” Dalton addressed him, eyeing his file carefully. “What do you want to tell me about last night?”

“With her here?” He pointed a thumb at Brett. “I thought these things were confidential.”

“I’m his assistant,” Brett jumped in quickly, sitting up straighter.

“She’s helping me with Disciplinary Committee procedures,” Dalton explained. “I think this qualifies.”

Easy looked back and forth between them. Whoa. Dalton was whipped—by Brett Messerschmidt!

“It says here that you’ve had quite a few problems with the rules over the last few years, Easy.” Dalton cleared his throat. “Disciplinary probation three times. Suspension twice. You were nearly kicked out once last year for not showing up to class after spring break. Countless arguments with teachers. Bad attitude.” He paused and flipped to a new page of the file. “Disruptive in class. Subpar grades. Almost no extracurricular activities. Caught with alcohol four times. Skipping sports practice. No team spirit …” He turned to another page.

Brett smirked.

“But …” Mr. Dalton held his index finger to the file and raised his eyebrows. He showed the paper to Brett and she cocked her head skeptically. Easy rolled his eyes. No doubt it was those fucking
PSAT
scores again. So he’d scored nearly perfect in all three sections—big deal. It was the kind of thing his parents salivated over, even though Easy couldn’t have cared less. Sneaking out of the dorm to watch shooting stars in the middle of the practice fields at two in the morning or walking barefoot in the creek behind the arts building at dawn—those were the kinds of things he cared about, things that he could remember when he was old and shaky. Not some stupid test score. Unfortunately, all the bullshit rules got in the way, when all Easy wanted was more perfect Waverly moments like those.

“You’re a legacy,” Dalton went on, glancing at his knotted cuff links. “But that shouldn’t mean anything. I mean, I’m a Waverly legacy too.”

“Really?” Brett squealed. “So am I!”

“My dad went here and my grandfather went here. And his brother too.” Dalton turned to Brett. “Basically, the Dalton men were Waverly Academy’s first graduating class.”

“As if I needed to know,” Easy muttered sarcastically. What was up with this teacher trying to impress Brett?

Dalton narrowed his eyes. “Look, I never expected to be treated any differently than anybody else. In fact, I think the teachers were harder on me because I was a legacy—they expected me to be an example for the other students.”

“Right.” Wasn’t
that
a load of bullshit. Easy gritted his teeth. He was a legacy, which was supposed to be this special thing, but he knew how it really worked: if your family had enough money to send successive kids (or generations) to Waverly, the administration would kiss your ass for the rest of your days. There weren’t any moral standards involved, just money. Heath Ferro was a goddamn legacy, after all, and look at all the shit he’d pulled!

Dalton leaned forward. “Scoff all you want, but you shouldn’t have been in Dumbarton last night, and you certainly shouldn’t have been … er … with that new girl Jennifer Humphrey.”

“Were you with Jenny?” Brett leaned forward, looking extremely interested.

“What did Jenny say about that?” Easy asked.

“She didn’t say anything.” Brett frowned. “She said she wasn’t ready to make a statement.”

“Oh.” Easy scratched his nose. He wasn’t sure what to make of Jenny and what had happened last night. After talking to her in the cafeteria, he’d convinced himself she was just a mirage. She didn’t look like she wore much makeup, if any, and she was tiny, where Callie was tall. She had miniature hands and feet, long eyelashes, and she carried around a bag that didn’t have big Gucci G’s plastered all over it. And she’d asked him about art. Callie wouldn’t dream of asking him about art. And last night—well that had been a mirage too—a drunken one. He’d been about to score with Callie and had wound up scurrying half-naked out of Jenny’s bed, with Pardee on his tail.

Now Jenny—pretty little Jenny—was in trouble because of him. But he’d needed to be near her. She looked so pink and new, sort of like that Botticelli painting he’d seen in Rome last year:
The Birth of Venus
, with the sexy chick coming out of the clamshell. He didn’t want her to be in trouble. But he didn’t want Callie to find out he’d touched Jenny, either. Easy gripped his head in his hands to keep his hungover brains from spilling out of his ears.

“So listen, I don’t know what’s going on here, but as your adviser, I have to warn you: this sort of offense, on top of your myriad other offenses, could lead to expulsion.”

Brett sucked in her breath and shook her head, pretending to actually care.

Easy barely blinked. “Okay.”

“Did you hear what I just said?” Dalton asked. “You might be expelled.”

“Yeah. I heard you.”

“If I were you, I’d spend more time thinking about why I was here,” Dalton suggested sternly, “and less time getting in trouble.”

That was the kind of dick thing one of his brothers might say. Easy was the youngest of four, and his three brothers had all gone to Waverly as well. Whenever Easy complained to them about it, they’d say that he wouldn’t understand the importance of Waverly until he got out. Which was one of those bullshit things people said when they got older and brainwashed. His brothers had already graduated from college and law school; two were married and the other one was engaged. They were pussy-whipped, boring adults and didn’t know a thing about
really
living.

“Fine,” Easy replied through his teeth. “You done advising me, then?” Without waiting for an answer, he stood up force-fully, yanked the door open, and strode out.

Outside Stansfield Hall, he felt suddenly light-headed.
You might be expelled
. Was he serious? If Easy got kicked out of Waverly, he could forget about his year in Paris. He’d be forced to live at home, alone with his crusty parents, where he’d be schooled by a private tutor and his only contact with the outside world would be the scary frosted-blond mail lady who liked Easy a little
too
much. Easy needed to sit down. Maybe it was the vodka from last night, but he felt a whoosh of nausea.

Hoot, hoot
.

Easy looked up into the trees. One of the great horned owls was watching him, its eyes round and yellow. Easy made a cooing sound at it, like the one he made when he needed Credo to calm down, and pulled a dented Sprite bottle out of his school bag. He took a swig of the remaining Ketel One from last night. Everyone was making their way to the first classes of the year, but Easy needed to think.

He wandered along the worn stone path toward the stables, wishing Callie would be there to lie down with him in a humid corral and make him forget all about Dalton’s threat. They’d stretch out on an old horse blanket and stay there all day, not caring about missing the first day of classes. But picturing Callie naked in the abandoned stable wasn’t getting him excited—he couldn’t stop Fantasy Callie from complaining about hay in her hair and imaginary bugs on the blanket.

Easy closed himself into the warm, slightly moist corral, and squeezed his eyes shut. But when he revisited his fantasy, it wasn’t Callie sprawled across the horse blanket, staring up at him.

It was Jenny.

Email Inbox

To:
Waverly Students

From:
[email protected]

Date:
Thursday, September 5, 9:01 A.M.

Subject:
Property defacement

Dear Students,

It has come to my attention that pony drawings have shown up around campus—on the sidewalks, on marker boards, and on the shower walls of the girls’ locker room.

Please know that defacement of Waverly property is a serious offense and will not be tolerated. A few students have anonymously reported emotional distress over them, as well. Please be advised that the mental health center is open twenty-four hours a day and that anyone seen defacing school property will face disciplinary consequences.

Enjoy your first day of classes,

Dean Marymount

Callie was spacing out through first-period Latin when Mrs. Tullington, the school’s administrator, interrupted class. “Ms. Vernon,” Mr. Gaston, the teacher, addressed her. “Your adviser wants to see you.”

Her adviser’s office was only one floor down from the Latin room. Callie nervously rubbed her palms together. She and Ms. Emory weren’t exactly buddy-buddy. Ms. Emory was a short-haired, middle-aged, dykey bitch from Connecticut who had gone to Vassar with Callie’s mother. The two women had been rivals, always vying for the highest
GPA
and admission into Phi Beta Kappa. They’d also fought for the same spot at Harvard Law—and Callie’s mom had won. Bitter, Ms. Emory had decided to forgo law school and instead had gotten her master’s in education at
NYU
. She’d made it very clear to Callie that missing out on Harvard had affected the entire course of her life, and Callie suspected she blamed this all on her mother. It was another a brilliant student-adviser match by the Waverly administration.

Ms. Emory’s office was freaky. She had absolutely no books or personal affects on her shelves, and the only thing tacked to her bulletin board was the Waverly call sheet, which listed all of the other faculty members’ office numbers and extensions. A lonely flat-screen Sony Vaio rested on her dark wooden desk, and a shopping bag with the words
RHINECLIFF
YARN
BARN
across the front sat on a bare table behind her. Wooden knitting needles and some tan yarn peeked out from the top. Ms. Emory, a knitter? How random.

Callie sat down quickly on the black Aeron chair opposite Ms. Emory’s desk. Next to her adviser’s Spartan-looking all-black turtleneck and practical black pants, Callie’s sheer pink flouncy Diane von Furstenberg skirt and pink-diamondencrusted Chopard watch seemed ridiculous.

“You wanted to see me?”

Ms. Emory looked up from her computer keyboard. She squinted one eye and contorted her gigantic mouth into a sneer. She looked like a deranged female Popeye. Why couldn’t Callie have gotten a nice adviser, like Mrs. Swan, who took her advisees to the Metropolitan Opera three times a year, or Mr. Bungey, who threw his kids Scotch-tasting Christmas parties and listened to all their relationship problems? Oh no, she had to get the crazy Popeye lady, who probably used those knitting needles to poke her advisees in the ass when they misbehaved.

“Mr. Pardee told me I should talk to you,” Ms. Emory announced flatly. “He said that your boyfriend was caught in your room last night. After curfew.”

Callie took a deep breath to prepare herself. She’d had years of practice bending the truth for her mother, but it always made her nervous. “Well, that’s the thing,” she began. “My boyfriend was there, yes. But he wasn’t visiting me. He was visiting my roommate, Jenny.”

“And how do you know that?”

Callie furrowed her brow. “Because … because I wasn’t there.”

Ms. Emory gave her a look of disbelief. “
Umhmm
.” She began to type something on her keyboard. Callie noticed she had very stubby nails, chewed way down to the quick.

Shit. Did Ms. Emory’s
umhmm
mean Jenny had told on her? Callie didn’t think so: she’d seen the gleam in her eye—Jenny was hungry. Why else would she have shown up at the Richards dorm party, basically uninvited? If she didn’t care about the Waverly social order, she’d go and be friends with that dorky Yvonne girl. No, Jenny wanted more than that, Callie was certain.

“Look.” Callie shrugged. “I don’t know what went on. I was studying. It was right before curfew, and I came back and only Jenny was there. Easy had left. Mr. Pardee was talking to her.”

“Mmmm. So, then. You and Easy, you’re not a couple anymore?”

Callie winced. With that horrible
I love you
still hanging out there, unanswered, every second that went by without him saying it back made her feel ridiculously vulnerable. If they didn’t have sex soon and start talking about how much they loved each other, Callie might have to check herself into the mental health center along with all the girls traumatized by the ponies on their boards.

“No,” Callie lied. “We’re not together.”

“Really.” Ms. Emory stared at her over her square black glasses. “Because someone spotted you and Mr. Walsh at the stables only yesterday.”

“We … we were breaking up,” Callie managed to stutter, her voice dry. “I … I don’t really want to talk about it, if that’s okay.”
Damn that Ben!
Damn the faculty and staff for living with the students on campus and knowing every freaking intimate detail of their lives!

“Mm,” Ms. Emory replied, looking as if she didn’t believe Callie at all. “Well, behave. We haven’t forgotten about last year.”

“Okay,” Callie squeaked.

Then Ms. Emory began to type furiously. Generally this was Callie’s cue to leave. She badly wanted to crane her neck around to see what she was typing—probably a three-point plan for how to ruin Callie’s life.

She raced back to class, eager to be back in the soothing world of Latin verb declensions. Seated at her desk, she rubbed her hands together. If Ms. Emory found out she’d lied and that Easy had been there to see her, she’d definitely be expelled, especially after last year’s E episode. Then her mother would disown her and she’d have to go live with her fishy-smelling Aunt Brenda in the most boring suburb of Atlanta. She’d be forced to go to Catholic school with pale, zitty kids who thought a big night out was drinking Smirnoff Ice in the Dairy Queen parking lot and trading
NASCAR
cards. Callie’s stomach turned.

She had two challenges before her: one, making sure Jenny didn’t talk, and two, convincing Ms. Emory that she and Easy weren’t an item. Her life at Waverly depended on it.