There was an awkward silence as Dr. Harland just stared at me.
“Well, not you,” I said.
“Let’s hope not,” Dr. Harland said pleasantly.
I took a deep breath. “Anyway, so I’ll probably conduct a survey or something on body image in adolescent girls.”
I had a whole other speech prepared, something about the way that magazines exploited low self-esteem in an effort to sell more beauty products and acne medication, but Dr. Harland just waved her bony hand. “How are you going to obtain this sample?” she asked.
I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought this far ahead. Oh, wait, that’s right. I had SIX whole semesters before I even had to declare a thesis topic, much less conduct the study. “Um…the mall?”
It was as though I had just announced that I was going to inject newborn babies with arsenic. “The mall?” she repeated incredulously.
My Bee’s Knees was starting to coalesce at the top of the glass, leaving a watery mixture of honey and nutmeg at the bottom. “Of course not the mall,” I quickly backtracked. “That would clearly violate standards of random selection and a representative sample.”
Dr. Harland looked partially mollified. “Not to mention ethics,” she said. “Don’t forget, Leigh—to study minors you have to go through their parents and possibly their schoolteachers as well. It’s not an easy process.”
Internet personals were starting to sound pretty good. Nobody tries to protect middle-aged perverts pretending to be Brad Pitt. “Well, I’ll make sure to prepare myself. You know, for my senior year. When all of this will be important.”
“Actually,” Dr. Harland began, finally looking somewhat pleased, “I just heard through a colleague of mine about this mentoring program at a local middle school. Not only would it be an excellent experience, but it would also give you the opportunity to work closely with your population of interest.”
Mentoring? I wasn’t so sure I was “mentoring” material. “I mean…” I started to say.
“Excellent,” she beamed at me. “Then I’ll give Linda over at Simms Middle your e-mail address. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you, Leigh, how important it would be to get your foot in the door of a school—both literally and figuratively—if you want to work with any school-age population.”
“No,” I admitted, although I desperately wanted to add the word ma’am to the end of that.
“You’re a smart girl, Leigh,” Dr. Harland said suddenly, as though it had just occurred to her. “It’s good to see you thinking about your academic future here at Stiles, and giving back to the community, as well.”
My smile was as weak as the Bee’s Knees, forgotten in my glass. “Yeah,” I said. “Well, it’s never too soon to start.”
Simms Middle School didn’t look anything like the middle school I had gone to. My middle school was very flat, a sprawling tan stucco building with marmalade-colored tin over all the walkways. It was, in a word, hideous. Okay, maybe two words—it was absolutely hideous.
But Simms was tall—three stories!—and painted beige with apple green trim. It had two enormous wings that were connected on the second and third floor by covered walkways that stretched across the space between them. While my mascot had been an annoying but hardly intimidating hornet, Simms was home to the proud mountain lions. The cafeteria even had a patio area with little round tables and umbrellas, just like the ones outside Taco Bell. I was so jealous.
I looked down at the paper in my hand. School got out at 3:30, and the mentoring program began at 3:40, which meant I had only a few minutes to find it. room 134a, the paper read. How would I ever find a room with a letter attached to the end of it?
“’Scuse me,” a little girl said beside me. Although I guess I shouldn’t say little. She was only an inch or so shorter than I am and had to be at least thirty pounds heavier, although most of that was in her chest. She had the hugest breasts I had ever seen. I couldn’t tear my gaze away, even though I knew I shouldn’t stare. This girl was thirteen?
She flicked her coarse black braids over her shoulder. “You go here?” she asked rudely.
Perfect. This thirteen-year-old candidate for breast reduction surgery was asking me, eighteen years old and still excited to fit into a B cup, whether I went to her middle school. “No,” I said, a little rudely myself.
The girl made some kind of smacking sound with her teeth and her lips. For a million years I could try to replicate that sound without ever approximating the utter disdain she conveyed in a single smack. “You don’t go here?” she repeated, the slight raising of her voice making it seem more like a disbelieving sentence than an actual question.
“Do I look like I go here?” I knew it was a mistake the minute I said it, but it was too late. That morning I had taken special care with my outfit, choosing a pair of chocolate brown pants in faux suede and a lavender button-down shirt with three-quarter sleeves. Hardly executive wear, but certainly not what I remembered girls wearing to my middle school.
“Kinda,” she said, squinting at my hair, which was pulled neatly back into a bun, and then at the toes of my shoes. I glanced down. I had completely forgotten that I had worn my Converse today—the ones that were faded black with frayed shoelaces and holes in the soft canvas. They were the only shoes I owned besides flip-flops, and I wasn’t so far out of middle school that I didn’t remember that backless shoes were footwear-non-grata on campus.
It must have been those shoes. “I’m carrying a purse,” I pointed out defensively. Okay, so I’d seen five-year-olds at the mall with purses, but I only started carrying one myself a year ago, when I realized I was always misplacing the crumpled money shoved into my pockets.
“So?” she sneered, holding up a purse of her own. And hers probably hadn’t been bought at Wal-Mart for $8.99 on sale, which meant that it was more expensive than mine. “Whatchu got in yours?”
I rummaged through the main pocket. “Money, old receipts, that sort of thing,” I said. How had I gotten myself into this?
“How much money?”
It was tempting to tell her to mind her own business, but I couldn’t very well back down now. “Five…fifteen dollars,” I said, fudging the amount a little. I didn’t want to look pathetic in front of a middle schooler.
“I’ve got thirty,” she boasted. “Any credit cards?”
This was starting to get really uncomfortable. “Uh…my debit card. But it has a Visa logo on it, so technically it can count as a credit card.”
She held up two plastic rectangles. “I have a real Visa card, ’cause it’s everywhere I want to be,” she said, paraphrasing the commercial with scary accuracy. “I also got a Citibank card for my rewards. What else you got?”
“A cell phone?” I offered, no longer sure of the superiority of my purse’s contents.
She dismissed my cell phone with a wave of her own. “Me, too,” she said, “with a Kanye West ring tone.”
Mine was a lame, tinny version of Für Elise that was one of the default ring tones. “Oh, yeah?” I taunted, fully caught up in our contest now. “Well, I have this!” I held up my container of birth control pills as though they were a gold medal at the Olympics. She had no way of knowing that they had been essentially useless to me so far.
The girl scoffed. “The pill? Please. I’ve been on it since I got my period two years ago.”
She had been on the pill since she was eleven? She must have been eating a lot of hormone-injected chicken. I read an article somewhere about how most meats nowadays are injected with so many hormones, girls start developing freakishly early. Meanwhile, I played with Barbies until I was almost fourteen, although I claimed it was only because the younger girl down the street forced me to.
Finally I stumbled upon it—my saving grace. The one thing in my purse that there was no way this little pip-squeak could even touch for several years. With a flourish, I brandished my driver’s license.
“Bet you don’t have one of these,” I said and smirked.
She snatched it from my hand and studied it for a long moment before handing it back with a shrug. “Whatever,” she said. “I just wanted to know if you knew where a room was.”
“What room?” I asked automatically, even though there was no way I would be of any help to this girl. That’s even if I wanted to, which I’m not sure I did at this point.
She squinted at a card in her hand. “Room one-thirty-four-A,” she read. “I’m supposed to go to some stupid mentoring thing there. The guidance counselor is making me.”
“Room one-thirty-four-A?” I repeated dumbly.
“Yeah, that’s what I said. You know it?”
“No…but that’s where I’m going, too. I’m one of the mentors.”
It was hard to tell which one of us was less thrilled.
The program was already in full swing by the time the girl (turns out her name was Rebekah) and I found the room. It met once a week and had been doing so for the past month, and so it was really in full swing by the time Rebekah and I joined the group. Total, I counted approximately ten other mentors and roughly the same number of middle school girls.
“Go ahead and take a seat on the floor,” a very large woman with very large curls said, smiling over at us. “Right now we’re just discussing teenage pregnancy.”
Great. I would have hated to miss the really good stuff. I sat cross-legged on the floor. Rebekah shot me one final snotty look before settling down across the room.
The large woman—I guess this was Linda—handed me a folded-up piece of paper. “What is this?” I asked.
“This is your life,” she answered cryptically before moving on to pass out more of the sinister little papers.
“What did you get?” one of the girls asked me. She was so tiny she could have passed for a seven-year-old with badly brushed red hair. “Mine says…something about a ffffff-d?”
I glanced at her paper. “PhD,” I corrected. “It’s a degree you get, in school.” I noticed that there were other things on her paper: the number 24, the word no, and the word yes.
“Like a grade?” she asked. When she wrinkled her forehead, her freckles bunched up together.
“Not like an A-plus or a C, no. But like a level of school, yeah.” I tried to think how to clarify. “You know how seventh grade is higher than sixth grade?” I asked.
She nodded eagerly. “I’m in seventh grade.”
Could’ve fooled me, but I moved on. “Well, getting a PhD is, like, the very highest level of all, after high school and college and even after more school. You have to finish”—I did some quick arithmetic in my head—“about twenty-three years of schooling before you get a PhD. And it’s a really cool thing.”
“’Cause it means you’re smart?”
I shook my head. “Because it means you worked hard.”
It was clear she didn’t understand the distinction. I guess it was a little too early to begin the lecture about innate characteristics versus behavior, and how it’s more positive to emphasize behavior because it, at least, can be changed. Maybe when she hits eighth grade I’ll try again.
“My name is Molly,” she said.
“Leigh,” I replied before realizing that it sounded like I was just repeating the last syllable of her name back to her. “My name is Leigh,” I clarified, giving her a smile as I unfolded my own paper. Mine listed: Master’s, 26, yes, and no. I totally didn’t get this assignment.
“Okay, everyone!” Linda clapped her hands together and twenty females turned to face her. “In this scenario, those papers are your lives. Imagine that you have an unexpected pregnancy, and you have to face the challenges that go along with a new baby. The first part is the amount of education you have. The second part is your age. The third part is whether your parents approve, and the last part is whether the father is involved with you and the baby. I’m also going to be handing out a worksheet to help you guide your responses.”
I looked down at the paper in my hand. This was my life? As far as I could tell, the only bad part about it was that the father was no longer involved. Although with the divorce rate being what it is, who knows—maybe that was for the best. At least I’d have complete control over my child’s upbringing. No father to undo my punishments and slip desserts under the table. If you looked at it in a certain way, it might even have been a really good thing.
And my parents approved? Uh, yeah—I’m twenty-six, with a Master’s. It’s weird, but I doubt that, in real life, my parents would bat an eyelash if I announced I was pregnant. My mom would just want to know what sign the baby would be born under, and my dad would start mixing up some crazy prenatal potions to increase my spiritual connectedness to the fetus or whatever.
I glanced over at Molly’s. She had even more education than I did, and she was two years younger! In order to receive a PhD when she was only twenty-four, she would have to have been, like…eighteen when she graduated from college. Which meant she was only fourteen when she graduated from high school. Which meant that, potentially, she could have entered grade school when she was a year old. And what, her parents don’t approve of her passing along her genius IQ to a baby whose father is, by the way, totally supportive and involved? This assignment was ridiculous.
“So…” I started to say, but Linda came by and thrust another piece of paper at me. I glanced over the questions before my hand shot up in the air.
“Um, Linda?”
She turned around, an inquisitively friendly but long-suffering look on her face. “Yes?”
I looked at the questions again. “It’s just that…I don’t understand how we’re supposed to answer these.”
Her smile was frozen on her face. “How do you mean?”
Rebekah and Molly were both staring at me, along with the rest of the mentors and the girls. Now that I was looking around the room, I vaguely recognized several girls among the mentors from school. Even Ellen, my academic archnemesis, was sitting toward the back in a crisp pinstriped skirt, looking at me as if I were insane.
(And if you’re thinking that two months is too little time to have an academic archnemesis, you should know that Ellen was the only person in Intro Psych who actually read the first chapter before the first class. Who does that?)
“Well…like, for example, the first question.”
Linda shuffled the papers in her hands, turning one right side up until she could read along. “How will you handle day care?” She blinked at me. “It’s a perfectly legitimate question, one which many new moms have to face.”
“I realize that.” I tried to give her my best I’m-not-being-difficult-I-promise smile. “But I have a Master’s, and I’m twenty-six years old. I’m sure I’ll just hire an au pair or put my kid in a pre-Montessori school. Or, hell, my parents approve, so I’ll just foist the ankle-biter off on them.”
I’m pretty sure I’m not supposed to say, “hell.” Or call children ankle-biters. Or, for that matter, express any kind of disenchantment with this mentoring program (at least not until the second or third meeting).
Linda’s mask was starting to slip. She was clearly not enjoying this.
The girls were, however. They were laughing and discussing their own fake lives with a renewed interest. A weird combination of their enthusiasm and Linda’s blatant disapproval really egged me on. I felt like I was back in middle school again.
Linda’s smile was completely gone. “Teen pregnancy is a serious issue,” she said.
“I know,” I stressed. “I saw Juno. I just think maybe we should stop worrying about whether Jennifer Aniston regrets not having a baby with Brad Pitt and focus more on the girl in the Lifetime movie Fifteen and Pregnant.”
Linda’s mouth was something right out of Honey I Shrunk the Lips. “I’ll tell you what…”
She paused expectantly, and it was a few moments before I realized that she was waiting for me to fill in my name. “Oh, it’s Leigh.”
“Well, Leigh, I’ll tell you what. Since you seem to know so much about the s
ubject, why don’t you take charge of the next meeting with what you think is an effective presentation on teen pregnancy?”
This was my punishment? Some people may hate public speaking, but not me. I really love it. It’s not that I’m super great at it—I just like the feeling I get when I’m winging it. I imagine it’s like the thrill thieves always say they get, when they’re about to steal a really valuable piece of art or something.
“Okay,” I said.
Linda blinked again. “Fine. Since that’s settled…I will see you girls next week.”
The room was a bustle of thirteen-year-old girls rushing toward the door. The mentors followed only somewhat more sedately, and Ellen stopped as she passed.
“Leigh,” she said. “Why are you here?”
I shrugged. “Just doing my part.”
“No, you’re not,” she spat. I had never seen her this openly hostile before. She always seemed so in control. “You don’t even care. You’re just here to goof off, while some people”—her expression made it very clear that she meant herself—“are here to develop crucial leadership skills and make a difference.”
And have something else to put on her college transcript, of course. “Whoa, Tracy Flick, calm down.” I held up my hands in what I hoped was a conciliatory gesture. “You do realize that it’s possible for both of us to be here, and for both of us to make a difference?”
She gave me a confused look. Clearly, she was not an Election fan. “Whatever. Just stop disrupting the group, and stay out of my way.”
She spun on her heel and slammed through the double doors. I couldn’t believe this. How had my extracurricular turned into twenty paces at dawn?
RELATIONAL AGGRESSION: A strategy for attaining social advantage by manipulating others’ social alliances. According to research, males tend to be more physically aggressive, while females are more relationally aggressive.
“I’M thinking about becoming a vegetarian,” Ami said, pushing a rubbery piece of chicken around her plate.
Psych Major Syndrome Page 4
