Snark and Circumstance (Novella)

by Stephanie Wardrop

  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 anyt
hing 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.”

  She smirks and says, “You may be the only vegan in town,” as she walks away.

  Gary shakes his head and laughs nervously. “That was unreal. Does she know she’s a cultural stereotype?” And for the first time since we moved to Longbourne, I feel like I have found someone to talk to. I smile and nod in agreement. Dave suggests that after I do the anti-dissection essay for the paper, I should do a whole “Ethics of Eating” column and I find myself smiling again because, I have to admit, that sounds like a good idea.

  ***

  On the way to Willow’s party on Friday, Tori and I drop Leigh off at her church in East Longbourne. East Longbourne seems to have started out as the working person’s Longbourne. Except for a handful of small, clapboard houses—old farms that have been swallowed up by the housing developments that make up East Longbourne—none of the homes seem to have been built before the 1950s. There are a lot of ranch houses with aluminum siding and strip malls and chain restaurants, which you would never see in Longbourne proper. In our town, there’s only a boutique selling Vineyard Vines clothing and expensive little wallets made out of quilted floral fabric, the aforementioned Starbucks, and a Brooks Brothers in a tiny shopping area by the only grocery store in Longbourne. Business is done elsewhere; Longbourne is for gracious living, I guess.

  And few live more graciously than the Harpers. Their house is three times the size of ours and looks like a French chateau that took a wrong turn at the English Channel and just kept going. As we pull into the smooth, black semicircle of the Harpers’ driveway, I force myself to remember the ideas I had come up with for being more social, many of which, I am embarrassed to say, I got from some of Cassie’s magazines. Though I am not, as Cosmo suggested, going to drop a pencil to bend down and pick up so that people can admire the view inside my strategically low-cut blouse. Instead, I am wearing a black denim miniskirt, my black Chuck Taylors, and my fox t-shirt again, for luck. But as we walk around the house to the party on the terraced lawns below, I start to regret my sartorial choice. But a glance down at the t-shirt reminds me of the psychology project Allison and I did as freshmen together and inspires a brilliant survival strategy. I am going to treat the party as an experiment: a field observation of Homo snobholus americanus in its natural habitat—the suburban garden party.

  The thought of taking mental notes throughout the party and reporting back to Allison has me momentarily cheered up. I will combine a clinical study with a test run of popularity-garnering tips from a random sampling of Cassie’s magazines. Maybe I’ll even major in sociology or psychology in college and use Willow and her friends as the basis for my thesis. I’m feeling kind of hopeful, even a little excited, because now I have a purpose.

  And then I get within view of the party.

  This promised to be an A-list party, and apparently the A-list at LHS is even smaller than I had imagined because there are only a handful of people there, all of them tanned from weekends on the Cape and wearing shirts and shorts the colors of Skittles. Some guys from the lacrosse team are attempting to play hacky sack with a hard white ball around the koi pond a few feet below the grey stone patio. A few people sit on teakwood chairs near a bar that looks like it belongs in some cheesy, tiki-themed, vaguely Polynesian restaurant. Among the guests I recognize Darien Drake, a senior whose sleek black hair, pale skin, and dark blue eyes allow her to look exotic even in a white polo shirt and a short pink skirt with green seahorses cavorting across it. She is sitting on the end of a chaise occupied by none other than Michael Endicott, who is sporting a blue Oxford shirt that looks as if the maid had pressed it for him minutes ago with a pair of similarly creaseless khakis. Michael and Darien look up as we approach, but then immediately go back to their conversation. The hostess, Willow, is in no hurry to greet us either, and instead trails her manicured hand along the arm of the blond boy she is speaking to. He, on the other hand, immediately breaks into a grin that spreads a patch of light freckles across his face.

  “Tori!” he calls. “You made it!” He rises and lopes toward us. “And this must be your sister. Hi, I’m Trey,” he says to me, extending his hand. We shake, but he’s still looking at Tori and smiling like he has just won a big stuffed dog for knocking over some milk bottles at the fair.

  Willow suddenly appears behind Trey, planting a hand on his shoulder to steer him back to the seated guests.

  “Oh, I’m so glad you’ve already met Trey-eyyy,” she says to us over her shoulder. “He’s the guest of honor—I put this together for him, you know, since he’s new to Longbourne.” She takes a seat next to him and adds, “Oh, and help yourselves to drinks.”

  Tori thanks her and takes the chair on the other side of Trey, asking him about his first week at school. As I walk over to the bar, I notice Willow and Darien exchange a look. There are lots of fragile-looking glasses in different shapes and sizes and bottles of beer and wine and some things I would have to mix, which all seems too complicated. I decide to just pour a glass of soda and put some homemade-looking tortilla chips and salsa with huge chunks of tomato and jalapeno on a plate—a real plate, not paper. And then I make myself walk over to Michael and Darien, since Michael is the only person I know at all besides Tori. This thought does not exactly settle the tsunami forming in my stomach.

  “Hey, you’re here, too!” I say to him as brightly as possible.

  “Your powers of observation are formidable,” Michael says and Darien giggles behind one perfectly manicured hand, like some sort of preppie geisha.

  “I have a couple of ideas about the bio-lab thing,” I say as I sit down on a stray paisley seat cushion that is as thick as my mattress at home; so thick I almost topple off of it backward, getting salsa all over my face. I can picture this so vividly I cringe a little. So much for Cosmo tricks and clinical detachment.

  Michael raises an eyebrow and just looks at me. I assume this is an invitation to keep speaking, so I say, “There are these great apps now for dissection that could be used instead—”

  “What if someone wants to get into medical school?” he asks and takes a quick sip of his drink. “They need to do actual dissection, not move their finger across a screen.”

  Not in eleventh grade, I want to point out, but I don’t. Across the patio, Tori smiles at me as she pulls on one of her curls and then turns back to Trey.

  “I guess, but it could be an alternative for other, less ambitious people. Or, like I said before, I could do all of the write-ups and drawings. I can’t draw people at all—they come out all wonky, like monsters, somehow—but I am actually pretty good at drawing just about anything else.” I smile lamely and get no indication that he’s heard anything I’ve said, so I finish with, “I mean, I think I can handle drawing a frog intestine, if that helps. Assuming frogs have intestines . . .”

  I can’t be sure, but I am willing to bet that Darien rolls her eyes behind her big Chanel shades, and she says something to Michael too softly for me to hear. They’re a perfect match, those two, and they don’t need me to witness their patrician perfection for them, so I walk over to Tori and Trey and Willow and try my last magazine ploy.

  “Those sandals are gorgeous, Willow,” I coo as I set my plate down on the nearest hard surface. I am pretty sure I am going to spill it if my hand shake
s any harder.

  She smiles slightly and looks down at my battered high tops. I take a perch on the wide armrest of Tori’s seat and resolve to ditch the stupid Cosmo advice and try instead to maintain an objective eye for observation. But I can feel that clinical distance withering by the second.

  “This week has been really great,” Trey is saying. “Everyone has been so friendly here, I already feel like I’m part of things.”

  I say, “It must be hard, moving in your last year, as a senior. We moved here last year too.” I don’t say, though, that last year no one was throwing any parties for us.

  “Yes, where did you come from again?” Willow asks me.

  “Colorado,” I say. I can feel Michael’s dark eyes on me now as Darien leans in and whispers to him again.

  “Oh, that’s right.” Willow traces the rim of her glass with a long finger. “Well, we have a house in Vail.”

  “It’s beautiful up there!” Tori says and they talk for a while about the Rocky Mountains and how Willow finds them to be inferior to east-coast mountains in their shocking lack of vegetation, something she seems to take as a personal affront. Tori says how excited she is to see the leaves starting to change color again, since it had been years since we saw that before last fall, and I start to agree, but I feel Michael’s eyes on me again.

  It is truly disturbing that such a cool stare can make me feel like I’ve been singed somehow.

  When I can’t take his voiceless stare any longer, I ask him how his first week at LHS has gone. Maybe I can get him to reveal what a pompous snobhole he is. For research purposes, of course.

  “Fine,” he says.

  “You don’t miss your other school—what was it . . .?” I ask. Even though I can remember the name, I like the look of annoyance that crosses his face, as if I had forgotten the most obvious thing in the world, like my own name or the state capital or something.