North Lake Academy was a small, progressive high school with the stated aim of “building well-rounded citizens of the world,” endowed by a Silicon Valley mogul who had retired at forty-nine to become a philanthropist and amateur BASE jumper. The campus was a collection of glass buildings surrounded by pines, tucked into a mountain valley within eyeshot of a ski resort. The Academy’s website was heavy on buzzwords—challenges, self-reliance, actualization, teamwork—and it also boasted that twenty percent of its graduates went to Ivy League schools.
The minute I walked through the front door of the school in my urban Vegas alterna-girl garb—the black-on-black palette of my wardrobe and makeup broken only by the magenta streaks in my hair—I knew that I was doomed not to fit in at the Academy. The kids thronging the halls were swaddled in Patagonia and denim, athletic gear dangling from their backpacks. The girls were all fresh-faced, makeup-free, their bare calves muscled and tight. There were more mountain bikes parked in front of the entrance to the school than there were cars. But sports were foreign to me; all the years of fast-food meals and sedentary reading had left me thick-hipped and soft in the face. I was a baby Goth with baby fat.
In first period, as we watched the teacher writing her name—Jo Dillard, call me Jo—on the white board, the girl in front of me turned around and smiled at me. “I’m Hilary. You’re new,” she said.
“I am.”
“There’s a new guy in the junior class, too. Benjamin Liebling. Have you met him?”
“No. But I wouldn’t know if I did. Everyone is new to me.”
She wrapped a curl of her hair around a finger and pulled it across her face. Her nose was peeling and her hair was crispy from chlorine; I could see over her shoulder that her binder was covered with snowboarding stickers. “What’s your jam?”
“I dunno,” I said. “Strawberry? I like apricot, too.”
She laughed. “I mean, what’s your thing. Do you board?”
“I’ve never been on a ski slope in my life.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Jesus, you really are new here. So, what then? Mountain biking? Lacrosse?”
I shrugged. “Books?”
“Ah.” She nodded soberly, as if this answer required deep contemplation. “Well. You really should meet the new guy.”
* * *
—
I didn’t meet the new guy for months, though I sometimes saw him in the halls—the only other person besides me who always seemed to be surrounded by a bubble of solitude. It wasn’t that the other students weren’t nice to me—they were always, like Hilary, pleasant in a wholesome, responsible-citizen sort of way. They invited me to study sessions and let me sit at their tables at lunch and asked me for help with their English papers. It was just that, beyond academics, we didn’t have much in common. My mother had enrolled me in a school that believed in the concept of the “outdoor classroom,” a school that planned kayaking adventures and overnight camping trips and mandated “stretch breaks” that consisted of wandering through the pines in the yard. We didn’t take tests; we went on ropes courses.
Most of the other kids had ended up here because they were that kind of kid—locals whose parents had migrated to the mountains because they wanted their kids to be outdoorsy individualists. My mother had selected this school, I suspected, purely because of the financial aid packages, the proximity to the South Lake casinos, and the Academy’s willingness to embrace a student who was more “promising” than distinguished. The Academy, in turn, probably looked at me—at my half-Colombian ancestry and my low-income single mother—and saw “diversity.”
Benjamin—Benny—Liebling was the only other kid at the school who didn’t clearly fit into the Academy’s outdoorsy vision of the world. He’d recently moved into town from San Francisco, I heard; his family was rich; they owned some fancy mansion on the West Shore. Kids whispered that he’d been kicked out of a much more exclusive prep school, and that’s why he’d ended up here. He stood out, with his flaming orange hair and his long, articulated limbs; a pale giraffe ducking awkwardly through the doors. Like me, he arrived on campus with a foreign aura clinging to him, although in his case it was wealth, not the urban stench of Las Vegas. His T-shirts were always pressed and spotless; his sunglasses had an unmistakable Gucci logo on the earpiece that he’d failed to disguise with duct tape. Every morning he unfolded himself from the passenger seat of his mother’s gold Land Rover and dashed to the front door of the school as if he thought his speed might make him invisible. Everyone noticed anyway, because how could you not notice a six-foot-two kid with hair the color of a jack-o’-lantern?
Curious, I looked up his family name on the computer in the school library, and the first thing that came up was a photo of his parents: a woman draped in white furs, neck heavy with diamonds, leaning on the arm of a bald, older man in a tuxedo, his fleshy face rubbery and sour. Patrons Judith and William Liebling IV attend the opening night of the San Francisco Opera.
I saw Benny during lunch sometimes, in the library, where I usually retreated to read after wolfing down my PB&J on white bread. He’d be hunched over a notebook, inking comic-book-style drawings in dense black ballpoint pen. A few times we’d catch each other’s eyes across the room, in our tentative smiles a recognition of our shared “new kids” status. Once, he sat in front of me at assembly and I spent the hour gazing into the magnificent nest of his hair, wondering if he would ever turn around and say hi; and even though he didn’t, his neck slowly flushed pink, as if he somehow intuited that I was staring. But he was a year ahead of me; we didn’t have classes together. And neither of us belonged to any teams that might force us to interact.
And there was this: His family was loaded, while my mother was struggling to pay the gas bill every month. There was no reason for us to talk, other than our mutual failure to be the right sort of wholesome, responsible citizens.
* * *
—
I kept my head down and focused on my studies; the years of bouncing from school to school had left me miles behind my classmates in most subjects and I had to scramble to catch up. Summer turned to fall and then winter descended, and with it came a kind of cloistering, the world bracing itself against the ice and slush. School to home and back again; heat blasting, mittens on. I sat on the bus twice a day, wearing my secondhand parka and leaky snow boots, struck dumb by the magnificence of the snowcapped forests, the achingly blue lake. It was all so foreign to me. I still dreamed in concrete blocks and mirrored skyscrapers.
My mother had settled into her job. She’d finagled her way into the high-stakes poker rooms, and even if they weren’t exactly the promised land she’d expected—hundred-dollar chips were still few and far between—she was happy to be there. In the evenings, I’d study at the chipped kitchen table while she clattered around the cabin in her heels, applying mascara, smelling like Shalimar and lemon verbena soap. The bills that I pulled from our mailbox didn’t have PAST DUE emblazoned on the envelopes anymore, which probably had to do with the extra shifts she was starting to pull. Sometimes she wouldn’t get home until I was waking up to go to school. She’d stand by the coffeepot, her sequins sagging and her hair tangled, watching me put books in my backpack with a dazed, complacent expression on her face that I interpreted as satisfaction, or maybe pride.
One day, I noticed that she’d taken her blond down a few notches, from Marilyn platinum to Gwyneth gold. When I asked her why, she just touched her hair and glanced in the mirror with a little smile. “More elegant, isn’t it? We’re not in Vegas anymore, baby. The men here, they’re looking for different.”
I worried that this also meant that she was looking for men. But as the winter went on, no one showed up in our living room at three A.M. and I took that to mean that things had changed for real. Maybe we really had gotten off at the right stop, for once. I imagined her working her way up the casino hierarchy, maybe to a floor manager,
or even into a bona fide day job at the hotel’s front desk. Maybe she’d take up with a nice guy, someone normal, like the genial café manager with the salt-and-pepper beard who gave us extra lox on our bagels when we came in together on Sundays.
The shield of vigilance that I’d erected for all those years was slipping. And even if I wasn’t exactly Miss Popularity at North Lake Academy—even if Harvard was still an awful long shot—I felt some measure of content. Stability can do that to a person. My happiness was so tied to my mother’s happiness that it was impossible to figure out where hers ended and mine began.
* * *
—
One snowy afternoon in late January, a day when most of my classmates had decamped to the ski slopes after the last bell, I climbed on the bus back into town and found that I wasn’t alone. Benjamin Liebling was sitting there in the back row, limbs splayed across the seats surrounding him. I saw him watching me climb aboard, but when I caught his eye, he quickly looked away.
I took a seat toward the front and opened up my algebra textbook. The doors clattered shut and the bus shuddered and heaved, snow tires scraping against the icy crust of the road. I sat there trying to wrap my mind around the concept of logarithmic expressions for a few minutes, acutely conscious of the only other student on the bus. Was he lonely? Did he think I was rude for never talking to him? Why did our non-relationship feel so awkward? Abruptly, I stood up and lurched my way along the rubbery mat to the back and flung myself in the seat in front of him. I swung my legs into the aisle and turned to face him.
“You’re Benjamin,” I said.
His eyes were a coppery brown, and up close I could see that his lashes were obscenely long. He blinked at me, surprised. “The only person who calls me Benjamin is my dad,” he said. “Everyone else calls me Benny.”
“Hi, Benny. I’m Nina.”
“I know.”
“Oh.” I regretted sitting there and I was about to get up and go back to my seat when he sat up and leaned forward so that his head was close to mine. He had a mint in his mouth and I could smell it on his breath, hear it clicking against his teeth when he spoke.
“People keep telling me that I should meet you. Why do they say that?”
I felt like he’d just turned a spotlight on, and shined it directly in my eyes. What was I supposed to say to that? I thought for a second. “It’s because no one else wants the responsibility of having to be friends with either of us. It’s easier on them if we just become friends with each other. It’s their way of pawning off the job. And they can still feel good about themselves for doing a good deed by hooking us up.”
He looked contemplatively down at his feet, the enormous black snow boots splayed on the mat in front of him. “Sounds about right.” He stuck a hand in his pocket and pulled out a tin and offered it to me. “Mint?”
I took one, put it in my mouth, and breathed in deep. Everything tasted so fresh and clean, our breath commingling in the freezing air of the bus, that I felt brave enough to ask the obvious. “So, should we be friends?”
“That depends.”
“On what?”
He looked back down at his feet, and I noticed that flush creeping up his neck from below his scarf. “If we like each other enough, I suppose.”
“And how will we know that?”
He seemed to like this question. “Well, let’s see. We’ll get off the bus together in Tahoe City and go get a hot chocolate at Syd’s and make some obligatory small talk about things like where we moved here from and how much those places sucked and how much we hate our parents.”
“I don’t hate my mom.”
He looked surprised. “What about your dad?”
“Haven’t seen him since I was seven. So I guess you could say I hate him, but it’s not exactly based on any current relationship.”
He smiled. It transformed his face, from a collection of unsettled features in awkward juxtaposition—freckles, beakish nose, enormous eyes—to something pure and joyful, almost childlike with beauty. “OK. See, look, we’re getting somewhere already. So yeah, we’ll go to Syd’s, and after about fifteen or twenty minutes of conversation we’ll either be bored to tears because we have nothing of interest to say to each other—in which case you’ll probably make some excuse about homework and ditch me, and we’ll spend the rest of the year avoiding each other in the halls, because: awkward—or we’ll find enough to say to each other to repeat the process a second time, and perhaps a third, thereby proving all of our classmates right. At which point we’ll have done our duty as responsible citizens, by making them feel good about themselves. A win-win.”
The conversation was so heady, so grown-up and frank, that it was making me feel dizzy. Teenagers I knew didn’t talk like this; they tiptoed around unspoken truths and let the unsaid mean whatever they most wanted it to mean. Already, I felt like the two of us had joined some secret society that none of our classmates would understand.
“So what you’re trying to say is that you want to go get a hot chocolate,” I said. “With me.”
“Actually I prefer coffee,” he said. “I figured you for the hot chocolate.”
“I prefer coffee, too.”
He smiled. “See, there’s something else. Maybe there’s hope for this friendship after all.”
We got off the bus in town and walked along the slushy sidewalks to a café on the main road. I watched him lope along in his giant moon boots, the scarf wrapped up around his chin and his woolen cap pulled over his forehead so that only four inches around his eyes were showing. He looked over and caught me staring at him and blushed again, and I realized that I liked how he wore his emotions on his skin. How easy it was to read him. There were snowflakes catching in his eyelashes and I found myself wanting to reach out and wipe them away. Something about us being here together felt completely natural, as if we’d already played through to the end of a game and had declared ourselves both winners.
“So why were you on the bus today?” I asked as we stood in line.
“My mom had another one of her meltdowns and couldn’t pull it together to pick me up.”
He said this so casually that it shocked me. “Meltdown? Like, what, she called the front office crying and told you to take the bus?”
He shook his head. “It was my dad. And I have a cellphone.”
“Oh.” I tried to act as if this was totally normal, as if I’d encountered lots of kids with personal cellphones in my lifetime. I wanted to pluck at him for the details of his world; pull out feathers until I could glimpse the naked shape beneath. “And he didn’t offer to send, like, a driver or something?”
“You’re awfully interested in my means of transportation. Kind of a boring subject, if you ask me.”
“Sorry. I just didn’t take you for a bus kind of guy.”
He looked at me, something sad flickering across his face. “So you know who my family is, I take it.”
I felt myself blushing now. “Not really. Sorry, that was presumptuous of me.” I’d never had a conversation with a rich person before. Were you supposed to gloss politely over the luxuries that they enjoyed and pretend you just didn’t see them? Wasn’t their wealth as obvious a part of their basic identity as their hair color, or ethnic background, or sports ability? Why was it rude to bring it up?
“No,” he answered. “It’s a fair assumption. And we do have a driver, but I’d kill my parents if they tried that. It’s bad enough…” He let this thought trail off, and I could see suddenly that the wealth that he wore was as alienating for him as my transient life was for me.
We were at the front of the line now, so we ordered coffees. When I went to pull out my change purse Benny put his hand on my arm to stop me. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said.
“I can afford a cup of coffee.” I felt myself bristling, suddenly wary, wondering what he knew about my backgro
und.
“Of course you can,” he said, and quickly pulled his hand away. Then he drew a nylon wallet from his back pocket and extricated a single, crisp, hundred-dollar bill. “But why waste the money when you don’t have to.”
I stared at the hundred-dollar bill, trying not to act like an idiot, and yet I couldn’t help myself: “Your parents pay your allowance in hundreds?”
He laughed. “God, no. They don’t trust me with an allowance, not anymore. I stole this out of my dad’s safe. He uses my birthday as the combination.” And then he offered me a big, conspiratorial smile. “For someone who thinks he’s so much smarter than everyone else, he’s really pretty stupid.”
* * *
—
Looking back at the beginning of our friendship now, I remember it as an awkward time, simultaneously sweet and bitter, as the two of us stumbled around the vast differences in the ways we’d been raised; finding common ground mostly in our mutual disaffection. We were a strange, mismatched pair. We began hanging out after school once or twice a week. Some days, I’d see the taillights of the Land Rover accelerating past me as I shivered at the bus stop by myself. But increasingly I’d find him there waiting for me inside the bus shelter, extra hand warmers in his backpack that he’d silently give to me as we huddled in the cold. In town, we’d go to Syd’s and do homework together. He loved to draw, and I’d watch him doodle comics of the other customers in his notebook. Eventually we’d walk down to the snowy lakeshore and watch the wind whip the water into froth.
“So, are you taking the bus with me because you want to or because your mom is having meltdowns all the time?” I asked him one day in February, as we sat on a snow-covered picnic table, nursing rapidly cooling coffees.
He broke an icicle off the edge and gripped it in his glove like a weapon. “I told her she didn’t have to pick me up anymore and she was relieved.” He examined the pointy end of the icicle and then pointed it toward the water like a magic wand. “She’s doing this thing she does sometimes, where she doesn’t like to leave the house.”
Pretty Things Page 7
