“Oh, well,” said Doreen, miserably.
“And I suppose you got your schedule? You should let me see it. I’ll tell you all about the teachers you have and if you want I’ll even show you where—”
“Don’t you want to be popular?” Heidi asked with a level stare at Doreen.
“. . . where your classes are, if you want. But the first thing you’ll need to do is—”
“Biz, hush. I asked your cousin a question. Tell us, darling, won’t you? Do you want to be popular? Here, at Chandler.”
“Heidi!”
Doreen’s expression, as she looked from Heidi to Biz, was an incredible mixture of eagerness and horror. A plan was beginning to unfold in Heidi’s mind as she watched a flush climb up the girl’s throat from her chest. “Do I want to be popular?” Doreen repeated dumbly.
“You don’t need to restate the question, dear, only answer it.”
“Don’t listen to her, Doreen,” said Biz. “Popularity is not as important to most people as it is to Heidi.”
“But it is to our Dorie, isn’t it? Which is why I proffered the question. Biz said that her brother had lived in West and that he’d been very popular, to which you replied ‘oh well,’ as if popularity, while something desirable to you, is not something you see yourself acquiring. And while I’ll admit respectfully that it is difficult to imagine popularity in your current state, I am a true American in the sense that I believe that one can achieve anything when one is smarter than everybody else.”
“Heidi! My cousin did not come all the way here from Wisconsin for the right to be insulted.”
“Indiana,” said Doreen, her eyes fixed on Heidi.
“Huh?”
“I came from Indiana,” said Doreen. “And I don’t feel the least bit insulted.” The girl’s spine had straightened. Hope came into her violet eyes. “The truth is—I feel kind of strange talking about it, but since you asked—I guess I would want that. I’d like to be popular. Who wouldn’t? I’ve never, I mean, in my old school—”
“Yes, Biz tells me you were very badly bullied,” said Heidi gravely.
“I’m sorry,” said Biz. “I shouldn’t have told her. It wasn’t my place—”
“That’s okay,” said Doreen. She reached out and touched Biz’s knee. “Hey, that’s in the past, right?”
“That’s right!” Biz said, aglow with her cousin’s attention. “Exactly.”
“What was it? Name-calling? Frogs in your locker? That sort of thing?”
“Heidi! Didn’t we just say it was in the past?”
Doreen shrugged. “No, it’s okay. Sure, yeah, name-calling. No frogs, but somebody did put a pair of bloody underwear in my locker once. Which everyone in the whole school saw flying out onto the floor.”
“Oh, Dorie,” said Biz.
“That was fine. I could take that. And the pushing. And the tripping. And the time someone put something in my drink so that I threw up during my biology midterm. I learned how to be careful. Eat in the library. Keep my head down. But then I got a message on Facebook. A boy.” Doreen paused and gathered her strength. “Judah was his name. He was new, or he was going to be new, moving from another town and he wanted to make friends. We got to chatting.” Her eyes welled.
“Who was Judah? Who was he really?” asked Heidi. She knew the old social media fake-out. She’d employed it herself, not directly, but through a minion or two, as a tactic for social maneuvering. But she was never cruel for cruelty’s sake. Nobody ever got seriously hurt. That made a difference, surely. But something unpleasant gnawed at her from the inside. Remorse? Guilt? No matter. She soothed herself with the satisfying pop of a splitting pistachio shell.
“A girl from school. Her boyfriend, I don’t know. A bunch of people. They started posting some of the stuff I’d written to Judah. But it was totally out of context, you know? So humiliating. My mom wanted me to transfer to a different public school, but I knew that was worthless. They would follow me anywhere. I deleted my Facebook account, I would get through it. But my mom . . .” Doreen swiped at her eyes. Her efforts to downplay how it had all affected her made the story even more heartbreaking. Heidi felt terrible for having asked about it. She should have minded her own business. She sucked the rough salty remains of the nut from the empty shell.
“Children,” said Biz. “They can be so awful. And for what? What’s the point? I don’t get it.”
“I’m so sorry,” said Heidi. And she really was.
“My mom saw some stuff someone had written on one of my books. Nothing out of the ordinary. ‘Kill yourself, bitch.’ That sort of thing. ‘Nobody likes you, you should die.’ And that was it for her. She called my dad and made some serious threats if he didn’t get me in here. So that’s my story! The life and times of Doreen Gray.”
“Well, you’re here now,” said Biz. “Nobody has to know a thing about your old school. And listen, if you want to be popular, we can definitely help you. I have legacy here, a kind of built-in social status. And Heidi has the proper—”
“Cynicism,” said Heidi.
“I was going to say ruthlessness. To manage your, what would you say? Your rebirth.”
“Really? Thank you.” Doreen’s eyes lit up, hopeful. “Thank you so much!”
“You’re welcome,” said Biz. She blushed. “If it’s what you want, then I want to help you.”
“Yes! Okay, marvelous. Operation rebirth. Let’s begin.” Heidi paced around the room, her fingers in a dome under her chin, as if giving dictation. “Now, Doreen, as Biz will attest, I have made quite a little study on the subject and I can say with some confidence that being popular in prep school carries with it a number of requirements. For example, one must be thin. This is of utmost importance. And though a closet full of beautiful clothes is obviously ideal, one need only possess a single major piece from a recognizable designer—a bag for example. Louis Vuitton is the classic but not the only option, set off by simple, well-fitting black apparel. One’s complexion must be perfect, and one’s ponytail thick and long. If this last proves unobtainable, short and sporty might be passable, but such a coif carries with it the responsibility of joining a team, of which only soccer and field hockey are acceptable, of course. To be truly popular one must not only be on a team, but must either be the best one or the captain or both, and so, if achieving excellence in this regard does not seem likely, I recommend maintaining a long, lustrous head of hair.”
Heidi regarded the length of Doreen’s piteous appearance. “Had you begun as a freshman rather than a junior, I would have suggested dating a senior as a quick and painless way to make immediate inroads, especially if you break his heart without sleeping with him. As it is, however, to uphold unreasonable prudishness at your age would make you seem as if you were undesirable in your former school. I think it would be wiser to take an appropriate boyfriend right away and sleep with him late enough to avoid seeming desperate, but early enough to suggest a passionate appetite for sex. Giving a high school senior the best sex of his life is simpler than one might expect—assuming he never dated me,” Heidi added with a twinkle.
“But this is hopeless!” cried Doreen. “I don’t see how—I mean, I’m not any of those things, Heidi. Oh, this is impossible, just impossible. I knew that changing schools wasn’t going to make any difference.” She covered her face with her hands.
“It’s okay, Doreen.” Biz hunched by her cousin, rubbing her back. “None of that stuff really matters. Seriously. And most of the popular kids here are really boring so . . . I never really cared about any of that stuff, personally. I’m actually kind of relieved—”
Doreen emitted a single agonized sob.
“Nonsense!” Heidi declared. “True, we have our work cut out for us, I won’t argue that, but I believe we can launch you into Chandler, my dear, as a success. It simply requires a little art direction. Hair. Makeup. Lighting
. Props. And we shall begin with your GryphPage profile.” With that, Heidi disappeared into the bedroom.
“What’s a GryphPage?” Doreen asked Biz with a sniffle.
“It’s pretty stupid. See, our mascot is the gryphon. Do you know it? It’s a mythological creature from ancient Greece.” Biz rummaged through a desk drawer. “It’s got the body of a lion and the head and wings of an eagle. Here.” She handed Doreen a Chandler Academy notebook. The creature was there in the middle, standing on its back lion paws with its wings outstretched.
“Like a dragon,” said Doreen.
“Sort of. Interestingly, gryphons are said to mate for life. Even after one dies the other continues alone—they think that aspect of the myth was perpetuated by the church in order to support its view on marriage.” Biz would have been happy to continue on to more mythological details, but she could see Doreen looking around the room. “Anyway, GryphPages is a localized social network, strictly for students at Chandler.”
“Did you take all these pictures?” asked Doreen. She was scanning the photos on the wall. “Oh! That’s Heidi. And Addison! I remember him now.” She stepped closer to a photo of Biz’s brother in silhouette, driving golf balls off a cliff near their Connecticut estate.
Biz smiled. “Everyone here calls him Ad-rock.”
“Really? How stupid.”
“Thank you!” said Biz. “Right? Anyway, I didn’t take all of them. Some of them are just inspiration.”
“So you’re an artist.”
“I don’t know if I’d say—”
“Oh my god! This one of Aunt Gloria is amazing! The colors are so vibrant. Wow. Wow! I’m impressed. You are a great photographer, Biz.”
“I’m, you know, well, that’s nice of you to say.”
“I didn’t say it to be nice.” Doreen squeezed her cousin’s arm.
Heidi reentered the common room under an armload of clothes and deposited them with a grunt onto the sofa. “Everybody has a profile.”
“Not everyone,” said Biz. “I, for example, do not have a profile and I can assure you that I don’t believe myself to be at all lacking—”
“Right. Let me rephrase,” said Heidi. “Anyone who has any social aspirations whatsoever at Chandler has a GryphPage profile. Come over here, will you, sweetie? Let’s see what we can do.”
Doreen left Biz’s photo collage and stood awkwardly in the middle of the room, her body resigned to Heidi’s machinations. Heidi chose a black wrap dress from the pile and held it up over Doreen, studying the effect with a frown on her face. It was one of a few Mumzy purchased at Liberty of London in a panic, after Biz had arrived for a ten-day trip carrying only a backpack. “Too dull,” Heidi pronounced and snatched the dress from Doreen, replacing it with a yellow silk.
“This is nice,” Doreen offered. “I like the color.”
“No, no,” said Heidi. “It’s entirely too, I don’t know, Nantucket bridesmaid.” She flung the yellow on top of the black wrap on the reject pile and stood with her hands on her hips, her perfect forehead creased in concentration. Biz sat at her desk chair and opened her laptop. Clothing bored her.
“Isn’t there anything with a little sex?” Heidi complained as she picked through the pile on the sofa.
“Listen,” said Biz. She entered Doreen’s name on the GryphPage home screen and gave her account a password, cousin1. “If you don’t like the pickings, why don’t you go into your own closet?”
“Aha!” said Heidi. “Of course, the Dolce.” She produced a tiny scrap of shiny, baby-blue fabric from the pile and held it overhead like a captured flag. “I wore this to winter formal last year. Doreen, the boys were driven near to lunacy!”
“But—” Doreen protested as Heidi pressed the frock into her arms. “Isn’t it a little, I don’t know, small?”
“Try it on, won’t you, dear? We’ll be honest. Let’s just see what we’re dealing with, hmm?” Heidi ushered Doreen into the bedroom.
“I don’t know . . .” Doreen studied the minidress like she did not know what she was meant to do with it.
“It’s the kind of dress that looks better on. Trust me. You pull it on over your head.” Heidi closed the bedroom door.
Meanwhile, Biz had filled in Doreen’s GryphPage profile with information about her cousin that she remembered from their shared youth at the beach house. Under “Interests” she’d written, “Gardening, mosaic-making, sailing, and board games.” Now she was straining to remember something about Doreen’s musical tastes. Biz smiled to herself as she recalled playing the pieces she knew on the heirloom baby grand the family kept in the great room while Doreen hopped and twirled and flittered around like a fairy. Whenever the music stopped, Doreen would spiritedly demand more. “Mozart,” Biz wrote in the music column. “Bach, Chopin, Beethoven.”
“What do you think you’re doing?” Heidi asked. She bent over Biz and read what she’d typed over her shoulder.
“Huh? I’m helping.”
“Board games? Do you really think that is an appropriate interest for a high school junior? And classical music? She wants to be popular, Biz, not middle-aged.”
“You like classical music.”
“Of course I do, but I’m not going to advertise it on the Internet. Here, move.”
“This is my desk! I’m not going to—”
“MOVE!” Heidi commanded. Reluctantly, Biz complied.
“You’re so bossy,” said Biz with a defeated sigh, but Heidi didn’t look up from the screen. “Lie carefully!”
At last the bedroom door opened. “You guys?” said Doreen in a small voice. “Heidi? Can I take this off now?”
“Oh, dear,” said Heidi. “Oh no, that’s not going to work at all.” The dress hugged Doreen’s flesh in a uniquely unflattering way, emphasizing the lumpiness of her hips and tummy while flattening her chest. Heidi wondered if this project was beyond even her considerable powers.
“I told you,” Doreen sulked.
“Don’t feel bad, Doreen. That dress looks indecent on everyone. Even Heidi.”
“Hey! Yes, Doreen, you were right. Please take it off. We’ll think of something.” As Doreen disappeared to change, Heidi paced around the common room. “Sexy isn’t going to do it. We’re going to have to go for drama.” She spotted the Vogue magazine she’d purchased for the bus back to campus. “Hold on a second. I saw something in here.”
Heidi flipped through the pages. “Ah, yes! Here it is. This is perfect. Doreen?” she called through the door. “Honey, can I come in?”
“I really wish you wouldn’t.”
“She’s upset,” said Biz. “This is exactly what I was trying to avoid.”
Heidi waved Biz off. “That’s okay,” she told Doreen through the door in her sweetest voice. “But do me a favor? Go into Biz’s closet there, the one on the right. Toward the back you’ll find a red strapless dress. Do you see it?”
“I really don’t want to do this anymore, Heidi.”
“This is the last one, okay? I promise. It’s red and strapless and the label says Carolina Herrera.” She grinned at Biz. This was going to work, she was sure of it.
Biz plucked the open magazine from Heidi’s hand and regarded the picture. “Is this a joke?” she deadpanned.
“Shh! No negativity,” Heidi whispered. “Find the place where you keep your can-do attitude, Miss Gibbons-Brown. You’re going to need it.”
“Or what?”
“You know better than to cross me, Elizabeth. Or don’t you want your cousin to like you?” Heidi snatched the magazine back from Biz.
“Is that another threat? They’re really coming fast and loose today.”
“Just get your tripod, okay? And dispense with the histrionics.” Heidi rolled her eyes. It was tiresome, doing everything oneself. Finally the door opened again. Biz and Heidi stood up to behold their proj
ect.
“Well? What do you think?” Doreen asked.
“Perfection!” Heidi managed. “Yes, that’ll do just fine.” She spun Doreen around. The dress did not fit altogether perfectly—it tucked right under the fat part of Doreen’s armpit, and an inch or two of zipper remained open at the top because her back was too wide for the fabric. But it was a lovely dress. She did not look beautiful, but Heidi was sure she could work with it. “Next up? Makeup.”
The moon shining through the window gave Doreen’s skin a soft effervescence, as if she was a ghost or an angel. She’d scrubbed her face of the makeup Heidi had slathered upon it for the photo shoot, pulled the hair that Heidi had so painstakingly curled back into a messy bun, and reclothed herself in the green knit dress. So it was Doreen Gray as her natural, pimply, frizzy-haired self upon whom Heidi gazed so admiringly.
Perhaps it was the excitement of the day’s activities, or the comfort of a friendly welcome—or it may simply have been the night, coming through the window thick and velvety in the late summer, but Heidi saw majesty in Doreen. “You looked great, Doreen. I think you’re going to like the picture.”
“Really?” Doreen’s smile was full of gratitude.
Biz sat at her computer, hard at work. She uploaded the photos from that afternoon’s session onto her computer and clicked through, looking for the picture that best mimicked the one from Vogue that she’d torn out of the magazine and pinned onto the wall. One photo in particular caught her attention.
It was a medium shot, with Doreen gazing directly at the camera, commanding the viewer take her in, to feast on her beauty. It was a good picture—great even—and since she’d taken it herself, Biz was proud of the results. She checked it against the magazine picture and thought Doreen looked so much more vivacious than the dull model. Of course, Biz admitted to herself, you could see the imperfections of Doreen’s skin and the awkwardness of her body, but with her soul so available, what would that matter? Anyway, she could easily clean up the blemishes.
Biz pulled the photo into her design program. Just a couple little touch-ups here and there so that Doreen would be proud of herself. Biz wanted her to feel confident—to see the beauty that was so apparent to her but more hidden from shallower types like Heidi or Mumzy. She zoomed in on Doreen’s face and began to smooth and gloss her skin.
Doreen Page 2
