Charm and Consequence

by Stephanie Wardrop

  Ignoring him, I ask her more gently, “Are you sure you get a ring, and not a chastity belt?”

  Alistair looks at me as if I have just revealed myself to be the town’s biggest slut and not the sad testament to a life of near-purity that I am and says, “I don’t see what is so wrong about a young woman taking her virtue seriously.”

  I tell him, “I just don’t see why it’s the girl’s job, entirely. What about a guy’s “virtue”? Why doesn’t a guy have to make a pledge, or control his own loins?”

  Alistair wipes his mouth with the white cloth napkin. “He does, too,” he says, and it sounds like an admission or a concession somehow. His eyes are on his plate now and his mouth is down-turned. All of the self-righteousness seems to have escaped him like steam from a teakettle.

  “Then why doesn’t he get a ring and have to make a deal with his dad?” I press but my mom springs into action.

  “Georgia,” she admonishes, reminding me with her eyes that Alistair is a guest and as Leigh’s first boyfriend,an especially honored guest, and I should, therefore, leave him alone. She turns to Leigh and Alistair, all smiles. “I think the idea of a ball is lovely.” She steers the conversation toward their classes at school like a skilled sailor navigating us out of choppy seas.

  After dinner I go up to my room and sit on my bed with Teeny, the semi-feral almost zebra-striped cat everyone else fears because she will bite without provocation. Hard.

  I kind of admire that.

  I try to read and forget the major feats of hypocrisy I’ve witnessed in the last forty-eight hours, from tree-huggers eating meat to Michael blowing me off after winking at me to Alistair preaching against lust and leering at my sister’s ass. I also try to shrug off the ironic awareness that while Alistair Colwin is obviously a sexist dork, he is downstairs watching a morally unobjectionable movie with his girlfriend, while I am doing homework on a Friday night, reading Hamlet, in fact, just to ensure that the whole night is a laugh riot.

  So which one of us is the dork, really?

  I wonder what Michael is doing tonight that’s so much better than sitting in a dark movie theater with me and Tori and Trey. And where he gets off blowing me off and acting like he’s the most important and upright person at Longbourne High School when he’s only at LHS because he got kicked out of the Pemberley School for some reason. There’s much speculation about it, but maybe it’s no mystery after all; maybe he became so insufferable that even the snottiest prep school in New England bounced him out on his preppie little posterior.

  Not that I think about Michael’s posterior, preppie or otherwise.

  Or any other part of his anatomy.

  I twist in my own psychic spin cycle for a while until I get up and go to the bathroom, where Leigh is brushing her teeth. She’s dressed like a sister wife again, in a flannel nightgown with her hair in a long braid, and she turns to me after she spits out some toothpaste froth like it’s poison.

  “You didn’t have to jump on Ali like that,” she says.

  “Come on, Leigh, you don’t really believe this stuff, do you?”

  “What ‘stuff’?” she snaps, one hand on her hip. She looks like a very angry little sparrow. “That people should only have sex in a loving, married relationship? Yes, I believe that ‘stuff.’ That I have more value as a female than what I can offer a male sexually? You believe that, too, don’t you?”

  “Of course I do, but this whole born-again purity thing, putting such a premium on your virginity—it’s medieval.”

  She turns back to the sink and rinses off her toothbrush, then shakes it out with surprising vigor.

  “I should have known you wouldn’t understand,” she says, and this makes me feel really bad.

  “I want to. But I don’t think virginity is something to be guarded or bartered.” I sigh because this is so hard to talk about. “I mean, come on, Leigh, the Taliban thinks like that, and they stone women to death!” She whirls around to face me and I notice the welt on her neck under the ruffled collar of her nightgown. “Leigh!”

  Her hand flashes up to cover the mark and when she pushes past me her face is as red as the hickey. I just stand there for a few moments, blinking at my reflection in the mirror, but I can’t see myself through the mental fog.

  When I stumble back to our room, Tori’s there in a pink nightgown, brushing her hair over her head until she looks up and sees my face. “What?”

  I just shudder.

  “What? What happened?”

  “Either Leigh had to pull a sea lamprey off her neck earlier or Alistair the minister’s son gave her an enormous hickey tonight.”

  “No!” Tori gasps, clamping her hand over her mouth to stop the fit of giggles, especially when I tell her what a champion of women’s virtue Alistair claims to be.

  “Oh my,” she laughs and falls on her bed.

  “He’s a hypocritical little hobbit,” I fume. “Honestly! The whole time he’s lecturing us on girls’ needing to keep their legs crossed and their heads bowed, he’s planning an all-out assault on our sister’s neck!”

  Tori shakes her head at me and crawls into bed.

  “Well, I say good for Leigh, if he makes her happy.”

  “Whatever,” I sigh, falling onto my own bed. “If she wants to start some weird new Puritan sect that allows skin-marking foreplay but no technical sex, I guess that’s her business.” I roll over on my stomach and look at Tori. “And what about you and Trey? Do you need a cold shower and a lecture on the value of abstinence?”

  Tori allows, “Trey is a good kisser. And that is all I’m going to say.”

  “So smug.”

  She throws a pillow at me and then has to get out of bed to pick it up again.

  “Good night, Georgia,” she says, and, judging by the soft snores coming out of her a minute later, she’s quickly off to dreamland—which probably features another date with Trey.

  I turn on the little lamp on my headboard and make myself read more Hamlet because I’m pretty sure I’m not going to fall asleep anytime soon. I keep thinking of the way the word “No” cut through the air when Michael said it in the parking lot the other day, and of Alistair and how phony he is to preach bodily virtue and then suck a big old bruise onto my sister’s neck. I guess that kind of activity is morally acceptable to him and Leigh because it isn’t sex, exactly.

  And Leigh must have liked it. You wouldn’t let someone work on your neck like that if you don’t want them to do it. A hickey must take some time to produce in all its garish glory. I am only guessing, of course, because no one has ever done that to me. (Or “with” me. I’m not sure which is correct.) I’ve been kissed twice, once by a boy in third grade who pretty much ran around the playground kissing every girl he could catch, and whose lips tasted like grape jelly, and the second time by a guy in Colorado. I went to a spring dance with him in our last year there because everyone else had turned him down. I felt sorry for him and sort of obligated to, like it was a test of whether or not I was a good person. When he kissed me it made me want to wipe my lips right off of my face. It just felt so wrong, somehow.

  So what do I know about these things?

  Nothing.

  I will probably die a misunderstood virgin like Ophelia in Hamlet, only I won’t do it by floating down a stream, singing my own mad song. They’ll just find me here, on my bed, on a weekend night, my dead body slumped over a homework assignment.

  Hopefully they’ll discover me before Teeny eats my remains.

  Is That a D-Bag I See Before Me?

  On Monday, I decide to spend lunch period looking up some critical studies of Shakespeare’s characters for our next group project, even though it isn’t due for a couple of weeks. When I walk into the library, it seems nobody else is seated under the buzzing fluorescent lights; solitude and silent books seem like the perfect antidote to everything, so I smile in relief.

  Until I see Michael Endicott sitting at a table, bent over a notebook.

  Oh, joy
unspeakable.

  I duck into the stacks and look at a few books, estimating all the while how quickly I can get out of there without Michael seeing me. But he does. And he smiles—as if he hadn’t just committed a hit and run in the parking lot days ago. With a steamroller, no less.

  “Hey, Georgia,” he calls softly, and indicates the chair across from him. “Are you working on the character analysis already?”

  I walk over to his table and set my books and bag on it. But I don’t sit down.

  “Yeah.”

  He nods and turns a page in a thick book. “Who are you going to focus on?” he asks.

  “Ophelia.”

  He scowls.

  “What’s with the face?” I ask.

  He shrugs a shoulder under his toffee-colored Ralph Lauren sweater and says, “Nothing. I’m just surprised that you would work on that character, that’s all.”

  “Why’s that surprising?”

  He looks up at me and I can see in his dark eyes that he’s beginning to sense he walked into a trap of his own devising. He says, “She’s just not a very strong character, I guess, so I’m surprised you would pick someone like her.”

  “Well, why?” I run a hand along the edge of the table as nonchalantly as possible. “I guess I’m interested in your analysis of my character, which you seem to have drawn based on very little evidence.”

  He sighs and puts his pen down on his notebook. He’s been taking notes, but I don’t look to see what he’s doing.

  “I didn’t mean it as anything but a compliment. I thought you would pick a character who is less … weak and confused, I guess. You chose the Wife of Bath last time, right? Who was horrible, but she wasn’t a weak character, at least.”

  “You mean unlike someone strong and noble like Hamlet?” I shoot back, knowing that I should just pick up my books and leave, but I seem frozen to the spot. I must be running some kind of masochist marathon, to see how much pain or irritation I can withstand. Still, there’s something kind of exciting about talking to Michael. No one else has ever made me feel this weird mix of exhilaration and aggravation every time we exchange a few words. What’s wrong with me?

  “No, like Lady Macbeth, maybe?” he suggests. “She seems more your style.”

  “Because I would nag my husband until he kills somebody just to shut me up? You’re too kind.”

  “What? What are you talking about?” He catches himself and looks at me more coolly now. “As you point out, how could I say you’re like any character when I hardly know you? You seem like a strong person, though, and Lady Macbeth is a strong character and that’s all I meant–”

  Before he can finish, a male voice rings out “Endicott!” way too loud for a library. Michael glowers as we both turn to see who it is.

  It’s Jeremy Wrentham, whom I’ve noticed in the halls many times before. No one can help noticing him. He’s movie-star good-looking, all gold hair and green eyes; tall; athletic-looking without being bulked up; with cheekbones that curve and arch at the same time somehow … Let’s just say that if Cassie had the power of God to create man, she would have created Jeremy Wrentham.

  “Wrentham,” Michael acknowledges.

  Jeremy tosses his backpack onto the table and turns to me with a grin that could sell ten thousand tubes of toothpaste. “And who is this?” he asks.

  “This is Georgiana Barrett. Georgia, this is Jeremy Wrentham.” Judging from his grimace, the weight of this social nicety is pressing down hard on Michael.

  When Jeremy extends his hand to me and I take it, I feel a little jolt run up my arm like the time I touched the electric fence at my uncle’s farm to see what would happen.

  While I usually loathe preppie, entitled males—witness one Michael Endicott—there’s something wildly appealing about Jeremy Wrentham. Like Michael’s, Jeremy’s family is important in this town. They don’t have a street named after them like the Endicotts, but Jeremy’s dad is a corporate lawyer and his mom is on a lot of the town beautification committees that my mom wants to be invited to join. But Jeremy is more human than Michael.

  While Jeremy’s clothes are as expensive and classic as everyone else’s around here (maybe more so) he wears them in a way that announces that he doesn’t really care about that. Jeremy’s a study in slightly disheveled elegance every day, with the cuffs of his shirts slightly frayed or a tiny moth hole in the shoulder of his sweater, whereas Michael always looks like he’s just stepped off an ironing board, having just been pressed and starched himself. Jeremy seems so at ease in the world; when he’s sitting half sprawled on a bench in the cafeteria it’s like he’s lounging in the den at home. When he’s talking to someone, it’s so effortless, whether it’s a goggle-eyed freshman girl like Cassie or Vito the maintenance guy or the school principal. He always seems like he belongs wherever he is and with whomever he happens to be with.

  He’s smiling at me and his hand lingers in mine.

  “Endicott and I are both Pemberley School dropouts,” he says with the kind of smile that would make him a very successful serial killer. Anyone would follow him into the back of even the shadiest looking panel van, or down a dark alley. Anywhere, really, if he smiled at them like he’s smiling at me now.

  I fear I may be blushing.

  “We didn’t leave for the same reasons,” Michael says as he picks up the books from the table.

  “No, no!” Jeremy laughs. “You and I are not the same.”

  “No. We’re not,” Michael agrees. He gathers his things into his black messenger bag and says to me, “I want to make bio before the bell. Are you coming?”

  “In a minute,” I say. He hesitates for a second, then walks away.

  Jeremy shakes his head in amusement. “Same old Endicott,” he says.

  “I recently heard him described as ‘socially retarded’,” I offer and Jeremy laughs harder. “What’s with the ‘Endicott’ and ‘Wrentham’ stuff?”

  “A Pemberley thing, I guess, to call each other by our last names.” He leans on the table and appraises me with a smile. “What year are you in, Georgiana?”

  “I’m a junior.”

  He nods as if this makes perfect sense to him and a bright golden bird’s wing of hair brushes across his eyes. “Well, nice to meet you, Georgiana,” he says and takes my hand for a second. “I hope I see you around more.”

  I just nod dumbly and leave the library without checking out any of my books. But I feel a lot better suddenly. And I’m not sure why, because Jeremy is so totally not the kind of guy I usually like. And guys like Jeremy don’t usually pay much attention to me, to be honest. I have to admit it I like it. And the idea of Jeremy Wrentham actually being interested in me keeps my brain occupied enough so that I don’t think about Michael Endicott or what he thinks of me for the first time in days.

  Even in bio class when he’s sitting right next to me.

  ***

  November rumbles in with a series of thunderstorms and freezing rain, as if the gods of late summer and winter are fighting over who gets to control the weather for the next few months. I start working on a second Alt article, this time concentrating on the health benefits of going vegan, since no one else seems to find it an ethical dilemma at all; meanwhile, our group works on our next English class presentation. I do not consult Michael about my presentation topic, and we don’t talk much in bio, either. We still sit together and we have our I-draw/he-writes split for the last of the plant labs, but we haven’t really talked much since the library incident. If he’s at all interested in my “character” or whatever he was trying to tell me in the library, he has a weird way of showing that interest: by alternately ignoring me, glowering at me in homeroom, or giving me the fish eye in English class.

  Not that I care.

  ***

  My mom gets so excited I fear for her mental health when Tori mentions that Trey’s dad, a dean at the college where my father teaches, is planning to invite us to the Harvest Ball at the Longbourne Country Club. She w
arbles all through dinner about gowns versus tea-length dresses and what the décor of the club will be like and whether someone she met recently at a Ladies’ Aid meeting will be there. Personally, I think the concept of a country club is pretty loathsome. Any group of people requiring membership, anything that is set up to exclude other people from taking part, is not something I ever want to sign on to. Besides, the idea of a semi-formal dance at a country club just seems like fate’s cruel way of pointing out to me yet again that I will not have a date for it.

  And then I realize that I can use this as my excuse.

  “Can’t go,” I say, palms up as if my boyfriend has slipped out of my hands. “No escort.”

  “Well, I don’t think any of us are bringing escorts, dear,” Mom says, with a pointed look at Cassie meant to convey that her football hero beau, Rick the Brick, will not be invited to join us. “We can’t take advantage of the Billingsleys’ generosity by bringing along guests of our own, sweetie.”

  “Or risk making the wrong impression,” I mumble as I realize my lack of a dance partner is not going to cut it as an excuse.

  “Well, if Brick’s not coming, I’m not coming,” Cassie declares as she stabs a mushy potato.

  “All right, then,” Mom agrees pleasantly.

  “I have to sing at church that night,” Leigh says. I can hear the relief in her voice.

  “Well, Pam, that’s two fewer ball gowns we’ll have to purchase,” Dad says as he looks up from the draft of a conference paper he is reading as we finish eating. He sounds even more relieved than Leigh did.

  “So Tori and Georgia and I will go shopping then, just the three of us. Or just the two of you, if you prefer that.”

  “Who says I’m going to this thing in the first place?” I demand.

  “You have no reason not to go,” Mom points out.

  I groan.

  “It will be fun,” Tori reassures me. “And you’ll get to observe the cultural elite of the Longbourne Country Club firsthand.”

  But I think I’ve had about enough of Longbourne’s elite already.

  ***

  I get another taste of it in the form of Lord Michael of Endicott on our second AP English presentation day. Shondra talks about Lady Macbeth, so I guess Michael approves of her part of the presentation, at least. She explains that a woman of Macbeth’s time could only have access to power and position through her husband, so that’s why she had to goad Macbeth into killing the real heir to the throne to grab it for himself. Shondra sounds confident, but when she sits down next to me, she exhales as if she had been underwater and just burst to the surface.