The It Girl (4 page)

“Sure,” the guy answered, staring directly at her chest.

“What are you doing here, anyway?” Jenny looked around. “Does everyone have to hang out in the lobby before they get assigned rooms?”

“Nah, we’re just screwups, so we’re stuck here until they tell us where we can go.” He grinned, whipping a BlackBerry out of his khaki pants pocket.

Jenny sat down. “What did you do wrong?”

“Don’t listen to Heath.” Brandon shook his head. “The Waverly teachers are just assholes.”

Jenny started discreetly wiping the mud off her pink shoes as best she could. “So I’m a little freaked out. Something totally attacked me on my way over here. It was like … a giant flying cat.”

“Ohhh … That’s a great horned owl,” Brandon explained. “They’re all over the campus. Someone donated a pair of them like a hundred years ago and they spawned. But even though they practically kill kids all the time, the horned owl is our mascot. I guess it’s, like, Waverly tradition to have them around.”

“They crap all over the place,” Heath added.

“Oh, I like traditions,” Jenny exclaimed quickly. “But the thing swooped for me like it didn’t want to miss!”

“How
could
it miss?” Heath muttered, typing on his BlackBerry. He looked straight at Jenny’s boobs again. Old Jenny would have been embarrassed, she thought, but not New Jenny. She would call him out.

“Is there something wrong?” she asked politely, folding her hands in her lap.

Heath smiled wryly, then cocked his head. “Wait a sec.” He stopped. “You said you were from the city? As in, New York?”

“Yes. The Upper West Side.”

Heath’s eyes lit up like a slot machine. “Have you heard of a club called Hen Party?”

Jenny furrowed her eyebrows. “No …”

“Maybe I’ll take you some time.”

“Inappropriate,” Brandon muttered. Hen Party was some strip club in Manhattan everyone was suddenly talking about. He looked from Heath to the new girl. They seemed to be in some sort of force-field staring contest with each other. She looked smitten, but whatever. Heath might be Brandon’s friend, but he was the human version of a Monet—he only looked good from afar. Close up, once you got to know him, he was pretty … well, ridiculous.
Just wait until you find out that he has a bad toenail-clipping habit
, Brandon thought, gritting his teeth.
Just wait until you find out he gossips more than a girl. Just wait until you find out the girls call him Pony behind his back, because everybody has taken a ride
.

The staring contest continued. Then a little high-pitched noise rang out, and Heath’s attention quickly swerved back to his BlackBerry. Pop! Force field deactivated.

“
Mister
Jennifer Humphrey,” he muttered again, “from the Upper West Side.” He tapped out a few more lines and threw his BlackBerry back into his bag. Then he stripped off his T-shirt and rubbed his golden-brown, summer-spent-in-Nantucket chiseled torso. “I’m going to take a shower. Wanna come?”

Jenny opened her mouth to respond, but Heath wheeled around, found a fluffy white bath towel in his duffel bag, and sauntered off to the bathroom.

Brandon sighed and pulled out his silver Motorola Razr. He scrolled through a few e-mails—just some more welcome-back messages and speculative gossip about what had happened to Tinsley Carmichael. He could sense Jenny watching him and couldn’t help but get all tingly

“Are we allowed phones?” Jenny asked.

“Well, no. We can’t talk on them. But everyone texts and IMs on their phones. You just log on to Owlnet and use your Waverly e-mail address, which is just your first and last name, no spaces. It’s a loophole the faculty hasn’t figured out yet.”

“Shoot. I didn’t bring mine. The manual said no cell phones.”

“‘Waverly Owls must not use cell phones on campus,’” Brandon recited in a mock-serious voice.

Jenny giggled. “Yeah. I love all the Waverly Owls stuff.”

Brandon smiled. “Apparently one of the old Waverly head-masters wrote the manual right after the Roaring Twenties, maybe during, like, Prohibition or something, when manners and good behavior were really important. I guess owls were the mascots back then, too. It’s been adapted for modern times, with cell phones and stuff.”

“Funny.” Jenny felt herself relax a little. Her cheeks hurt from smiling so much already today.

“So there’s a party in this lounge tonight. Maybe you wanna come?”

“A party?” Jenny raised her eyebrows eagerly. “Sure.”

“I mean, it’ll be pretty casual, but it’s tradition, you know?” Brandon shrugged. He seemed less shy without Heath around.

Jenny bit her lip, which Brandon found irresistible. She was so fresh-faced and seemed so excited to be there, different from all the cookie-cutter, Fair Isle sweater, Gucci sunglasses, Barbie-goes-to-boarding-school Waverly girls who took it all for granted. Now if only she could stay off the Pony ride before classes even got started… .

“Well,” Jenny interrupted his interior monologue. “If it’s a tradition, then I’ll have to come. Heath will be there too?”

Heath slunk through the lounge doorway. His shaggy blond hair was dripping water down his bare chest, and the white bath-towel was tied right under his chiseled hipbones. He wasn’t holding anything except for his BlackBerry, and he smiled at it as he spoke. “I wouldn’t miss it.”

Instant Message Inbox

HeathFerro:
I already met stripper girl. Twice.

RyanReynolds:
???

HeathFerro:
Dad gave her a ride to the front office. Then me and Brandon were sitting in Richards and she came in. She plays it cool, though. Real innocent.

But you can tell she’s naughty.

RyanReynolds:
She snuck into a boys’ dorm already? Did she show you her thong?

HeathFerro:
Not yet …

“Mom, can you please tell Raoul that he doesn’t have to come into the dorm with me? This is
embarrassing
.” Brett Messerschmidt tried to balance a cream-colored Chanel quilted purse and a black Jack Spade laptop bag in one hand and a giant Hermès shopping bag in the other while cradling her platinum Nokia against her shoulder. Her parents’ personal assistant, Raoul, who was two hundred sixty pounds and bald, struggled to lift some of her seemingly endless luggage without ripping his black suit. Finally he gave up and took off his jacket, revealing a perspiration-stained white shirt and a mountain of muscles.

“Honey, you need his help,” her mother cooed in her thick New Jersey accent on the other end of the line. “You can’t carry those heavy suitcases all by yourself!”

Brett groaned and slammed her phone shut. Everyone else carried their own stuff—no matter how loaded they were. Drivers just left their bags on the curb in front of the dorm. It wasn’t as if anybody was going to walk off with your shit. But her parents, Stuart and Becki Messerschmidt of Rumson, New Jersey, babied her as though she were one of their shivering Teacup Chihuahuas.

Her parents—
shudder
. Her father, the most prominent plastic surgeon in the tri-state area, was known for bragging about the highest percentage of fat he could lipo out of a patient in a single sitting. And the only time Brett’s mom had accompanied her to Waverly, when Brett was an eighth grader and touring the school, Mrs. Messerschmidt had told a particularly WASPy-looking mother that her chin was just
perfect
and had asked who she used. The woman had stared at Mrs. Messerschmidt blankly before finally getting it and storming away.

Ever since she’d started Waverly, Brett had straight-up lied about her parents. She claimed they lived on an East Hampton organic farm but summered in Newfoundland, that her father was a cardiologist and her mom threw small-scale Canadian charity events. She had no idea why that was the story she’d come up with, but anything was better than the real story, which was that her parents were nouveau riche and the tackiest people Brett had ever met. Everyone at Waverly bought it, except for Tinsley, who last year had answered Brett’s cell phone when she wasn’t in the room and had a lengthy conversation about leopard versus tiger prints with Mrs. Messerschmidt, who was of course calling from her Rumson, New Jersey—not East Hampton—home. That was one good thing about Tinsley not coming back: at least her embarrassing parents would remain a secret.

“You really don’t have to help me, after driving all this way.” Brett smiled apologetically at Raoul. She’d have to remember to send him some Kiehl’s All-Sport Muscle Rub for when he got home.

“It’s fine,” Raoul replied in his baritone voice, but Brett thought she detected a slight groan when he dropped her bags and headed back to get the next round from the car.

When she unlocked her dorm room door, her best friend, Callie, who had a perfect,
untacky
pedigree—her mother was Scarlett O’Hara incarnate and the governor of Georgia, for God’s sake—smirked as Raoul fussed over exactly where Brett’s oversize Louis Vuitton sweater trunk would go.

“Oh, wherever’s fine!” Brett said quickly. Then she turned back to Callie. “Hey.” “Hey, yourself.” Callie leaned against the window and crossed her arms.

She looked like she’d spent the whole summer getting twisted and prodded by her Pilates instructor, Claude, and eating nothing but Trident gum. Her hair was shoved into a messy low ponytail, and she had that slightly dazed, you’d-think-she-was-ditzy-if-you-didn’t-know-better look in her hazel eyes. A pale orange cotton skirt and top lay in a rumpled pile on the floor, and now she was wearing a faded baby-blue T-shirt, mini Ralph Lauren terry-cloth boy shorts, and gymnastics socks with little pink fuzzy balls at the heels.

Where Callie was cute and pretty in a preppy way—she was captain of the girls’ field hockey team, after all—Brett was more unusual-looking. She had pale, milky-white skin and very red bob-length hair. Her green eyes were almond-shaped and both her nose and chin came to mischievous-looking points.

It was weird suddenly seeing Callie and comparing herself to her again. Last year, Brett, Callie, and Tinsley had been three peas in a pod. But then the E thing had happened and everything had changed. No one knew why Tinsley was the only one who’d been kicked out, but Callie had always had a particular talent for persuasion—freshman year, she’d convinced Sarah Mortimer to go out with Baylor Kenyon instead of Brandon Buchanan, all because Callie had wanted Brandon for herself. And last year, Benny Cunningham, their well-bred, beautiful brunette friend from Philadelphia, had wanted to go out with Erik Olssen, a pale, hot Swedish import, but he’d liked skanky Tricia Rieken—who’d had a boob job and wore the sluttiest, most dominatrixlike clothes from Dolce & Gabbana. Somehow Callie had managed to persuade Tricia to like Lon Baruzza, who was on scholarship but gorgeous and allegedly very good at sex, leaving Erik open for Benny.

Clearly Callie was good at getting people to do whatever she wanted, especially when she had something to gain personally. And in this case, maybe Callie was better off without Tinsley around: last spring, Tinsley and Callie’s boyfriend, Easy Walsh, had been spotted by the girls’ soccer team behind the row houses at night—alone. Both Tinsley and Easy had denied that anything had happened, but Callie could get pretty territorial when it came to boyfriends. It seemed crazy that Callie would get Tinsley kicked out of school for possibly hooking up with Easy, but, well, Callie was a little insane.

Callie squinted. “Did your hair get redder?”

“Kind of,” Brett mumbled. Her colorist, Jacques, had fucked up and used a blue red on her instead of a yellow red. She’d gone to Bergdorf’s to get it fixed but had managed to get the salon’s most punk rock stylist, who had told her it was perfect and that it would go against his artistic sensibilities to change it. Brett worried that she looked too much like Kate Winslet in that
Eternal Sunshine
movie, which was
not
a good look.

“I like it,” Callie declared. “It looks awesome.”

Liar!
Brett knew what Callie thought of fake-looking dyed hair. Brett slammed her bag down on the floor. “So what, you don’t call me all summer?”

“I … I called you,” Callie stammered, widening her eyes.

“No, you didn’t. You sent me one text message. In June.”

Callie stood up. “Well, you didn’t respond!”

“I …” Brett trailed off. Callie was right. She hadn’t responded. “So, did you hear from Tinsley?”

“Of course.”

Brett felt a stab of jealousy. “Me too,” she lied. She hadn’t heard from her glamorous best friend since she’d been expelled last May.

They both stared at Tinsley’s bare bed. Would it be empty all year? Maybe they’d use it for extra storage or cover it with an Indian batik bedspread and embroidered pillows from one of the hippie Rhinecliff stores. Or would Waverly stick them with some weirdo no one wanted to room with?

“Tinsley called me a whole bunch of times,” Callie continued, a little aggressively.

“Me too,” Brett lied again, removing some of her blouses from her cream-colored leather suitcase. “So, how’s Easy?” She changed the subject. “Did you see him this summer?”

“Um … yeah,” Callie replied quietly, a twinge of hurt in her voice. “Did you see Jeremiah?”

“Yeah, some,” Brett mumbled back.

“Still hate the way he says
car
?” Callie asked as she examined her clear lip gloss in a tiny black lacquered Chanel compact.

“Yes,” Brett groaned. Her boyfriend, Jeremiah, was the star lineman for St. Lucius and even though he was from an old-money family in Newton, a well-to-do suburb of Boston, he spoke with a Boston townie accent, omitting his
r
‘s like Matt Damon in
Good Will Hunting
.

“Did you visit him or did he visit you?”

“Well, I spent a week with his family on Martha’s Vineyard. That was really nice.” Brett liked Jeremiah, but she really loved his family. They were textbook New England wealthy—so understated and tasteful and the exact opposite of her trashy parents. It didn’t hurt either that Jeremiah was gorgeous, with an angular, square jaw, floppy reddish-brown hair to his shoulders, and blue-green eyes that drank her in.