by Sarah Miller
It can be pretty hard, Gid. I mean, I'm falling for you, but I'm not sure I'm normal.
"I'm Erica,'7 the blonde girl says, leaning across Nicholas. She's extremely healthy and Nordic-looking.
"Hi," Gid says. "I'm..."
"I know who you are," she says. "You're new. Madison talked to you on the phone. Madison's my best friend."
Gideon and I both think it's weird how girls are always identifying themselves as each other's best friends. Of course, I do it too. Hey! Maybe I just did.
Erica touches one of her blonde braids self-consciously and her blue eyes dart nervously in Nicholas's direction, but Nicholas appears to be daydreaming. She gives Gid a quick smile and takes off. Even just running to catch up with her friends, she has a studied, symmetrical athleticism to her gait.
Erica. "She's one of the girls from Liam's bet?" Gid whispers to Nicholas.
"Yep," Nicholas says. "She sure is."
Just as they're about to go inside, Cullen doubles back and joins them. "Whew, Lucy is hot. I'm hooking up with her later. Oh, and by the way, that dorm—" Gid follows Cullen's finger to a building at the far end of the quad, not unlike their dorm, but older. "That's Emerson...that's the weirdo chick dorm. The Virgin Dorm. See how it's all pretty and pristine? Unlike where our friends live." He turns around, showing Gid the dorm he pointed out before.
"White," says Gid, to show that he has been listening.
"We call it White Wedding," Cullen says, punching Nicholas on the arm. Nicholas doesn't react and walks a few paces ahead.
"Don't worry about him," Cullen says. "He needs more alone time than a community like this affords."
The dining hall is one vast space with maybe eighty round tables and two doorways—one where students line up and the other where they emerge with their trays. Gideon was really hoping for something more grand, maybe with higher ceilings, or more dark wood. It's not much nicer than his high school cafeteria, and the smell and sound—cheap wheat bread and bananas, clinking silverware and ice thundering into squat glasses—is the same.
"So this girl that you're hooking up with that you were talking about, Lucy," Gid says to Cullen. "Have you hooked up with her before?"
"No," Cullen says. "She's new."
"So you never talked to her before?"
I can see where Gid's going with this, and he's not going to like where it leads.
"No, not before tonight. Wait...I'll catch up with you in a second." Cullen takes off.
So wait a minute. Gid would never dispute that Cullen's better with girls than he is, but according to the terms of the bet, Cullen believes he can get laid sixty times faster than Gideon, and Nicholas, even worse, thinks Cullen can get laid two hundred times faster!
Gideon finds Nicholas waiting in the food line with his tray and silverware. He tells Gideon exactly what I would tell him if I could.
"I wouldn't think of it that way," he says, and, after accepting a scoop of rice, moves along.
Poor Gid looks miserably at a middle-aged cafeteria worker, with vapor covering her bifocals, poised to drop a greasy chicken breast onto his plate. He thinks she has some kind of weird skin disease. Gid, that's a hairnet. "How else should I think of it?" Gid says, out loud to no one in particular, nodding yes for the chicken, nodding again for rice.
Gideon finds Nicholas at the salad bar, where he is loading his plate with chickpeas and sunflower seeds. "Did you know," he asks, gesturing at the chicken on Gideon's plate, "that when an animal is slaughtered, it feels fear, and we're essentially eating that fear?"
I've heard this before and think that is total crap. But Gid thinks about the bet and how he never even asked out a girl in his whole life. Not even Danielle, who just wrote "I like u" to him on a Post-it note, then went to second base with him that very day. He throws the chicken away and decides not to eat chicken until the day he gets laid.
Gideon fills a beige plastic bowl with lettuce. "Put some beans in," Nicholas says. "You need some protein."
Now Nicholas is examining a bunch of bananas in a stainless-steel bowl, with oranges and some Red Delicious apples. "Don't eat those," he warns. "Nonorganic bananas are the worst." He takes an apple and smells it. "Pesticides," he says, putting it down. He takes an orange. "Look," he says. "It's all going to be okay."
Nicholas cocks his head and Gid follows him, wondering, exactly, as I am, What is so okay about this? Nothing could be further from okay.
They pass a table of plain brown-haired girls who look like they're actually in prep school to study, a table of foreign students arguing and holding straws in their hands like cigarettes, a table of pretty, thin girls who eat slowly and deliberately to make their tiny amounts of food last. Again, Gideon can feel people looking at him. He has never,
ever felt so visible.
To his right, about five tables over, he sees the girls from earlier in the day. Molly and Edie. The blonde, Marcy, isn't with them. He guesses that Molly and Edie are those sort of pretty but not spectacular girls who prefer each other's company to all others.
Twenty paces ahead, under a round window looking out on White, is Cullen. In front of him is an ugly heap of casserole and he holds a large spoon in his hand like a child. And next to him is Liam Wu. Across from them is a chubby redheaded guy with a gap between his two front teeth.
Gid and Nicholas settle across from Cullen and Liam, next to the redhead, who, making room, gives Gid a heavy-lidded nod and a wave. Liam Wu's perfect head moves, almost imperceptibly, in greeting. If he remembers Gid, he's not saying so. Tm Devon," says the redheaded kid. He's wearing a Brian Jonestown Massacre T-shirt and smells like Fab detergent and pot.
Cullen picks up one of the four glasses of chocolate milk that he's got lined up on his tray. He presses a finger to his lips. Gid understands he's reminding him they're not telling Liam or Devon about the bet. This is a relief. Gideon tries to eat—the other boys aren't talking at all, just grimly bolting their food—but he can't keep his eyes off all these pretty girls. One with miraculously soft brown eyes, her pale hair piled on top of her head, stands ten feet away, looking for a table. Another, red-haired, in a purple halter top showing off freckled cleavage, stands up from her seat and waves to someone at the salad bar.
As gut-wrenching as it was for him to look at these girls this afternoon from the car, now it is much, much worse. What with the time constraints and "not doable" comments and all. He steals a glance at Liam. God, he's so handsome. It's not fair. Gid closes his eyes and envisions Liam handing him the keys to Nicholas's mother's car.
I wonder if this is another trick from Journal of the Zen Hut
"Olivia Hill is looking good this year," Cullen says.
How, Gideon wonders, is he able to pick one out for compliments? "A lot of these girls are really pretty," he says.
"They're not girls," Cullen corrects him. "They're opportunities."
Nicholas shoots him a look like, Don't give anything away.
Liam Wu picks up a glass of cranberry juice and drinks the entire thing. "I totally disagree on the Olivia Hill thing."
"What do you know, you have slanted eyes," says Cullen. "I bet you can't even see out of them."
Devon chokes on his food, laughing. Even Nicholas laughs. Gideon wants to laugh but isn't sure how to laugh at a joke like this. He can't believe it's allowed. He liked it, but it scared him.
"Don't eat too much," Liam says. "You don't want to get filled up."
"Why not?" Cullen says.
"You'll want to save some room," Liam says, "for my cock." He smirks and looks up from his tray. His handsomeness, the way his cheekbones pulse as he talks, hits Gideon like a pool cue to the gut.
After the laughter dies down, Gideon gets up the nerve to ask who Olivia Hill is. Liam Wu angles his head and says, "Orange shirt, two o'clock."
Gid finds the orange shirt in a sea of shirts, blooming with breasts and offsetting soft skin. Its wearer is a tall girl with dark hair and eyes; she's getting a cup of tea. She
looks English.
Gid wonders if this is perhaps just because she's getting tea. But she has rosy cheeks and light skin, and she appears reserved, in a sexy way.
"Jesus," he says, "I think she's gorgeous."
This hurts a little. I wish Gid would only look at me and think that.
"Start with something smaller," Nicholas says.
"You mean a smaller girl?" Gid asks.
"Smaller like a big cookie," Devon says.
"But not a chocolate cookie," says Liam, drinking another glass of cranberry juice.
Everyone except Gid laughs. There's clearly some chocolate cookie joke that Gid will never know about.
Liam guzzles another glass of cranberry juice. Cullen says in a girlish voice, "At first I thought...but then I thought," and everyone laughs again.
Except Gid.
Gid is hungry. What am I going to do without meat, he wonders.
"No," Nicholas says. "Seriously. What I meant was, a girl in your league."
What's really sad is that he kind of said this to be nice. He felt bad at all the inside joking, and he was trying to be briefly earnest about what he'd meant by starting with something smaller. Yes, that's what passes for nice around here.
On the walk back to the room, Cullen starts talking to some girl with her hair tied up in a red bandana. They fall behind. Gid looks back forlornly. He knows that neither Cullen nor Nicholas has really decided to be his friend yet, but at least Cullen is easy to talk to. Nicholas is cryptic. Nicholas is intimidating. But Gid has to think of something to say to him. Shit, even his father would be able to think of something to say right now. It would be stupid, but it would be something. He thinks about Nicholas telling him what to eat. Could he start a conversation with that? He looks out onto the quad for inspiration. He sees a lot of bare legs. That works.
"Hey," Gid says, once again going for that intangible tone, interested but not desperate. "Why were you so concerned with what I was eating?"
Then there is a sound of hard plastic wheels scraping concrete, and Gideon feels a rush of air at his arm and shoulder. He jumps to the side, terrified, then ashamed to see the object of his terror, a ten-year-old on a skateboard.
"That's little Cockweed," Nicholas explains. "Tim." Up ahead, Tim Cockweed stares at them with dead brown eyes. He looks like something off a horror movie poster. "It's okay if he scared you. He scares me."
That Nicholas gets scared sometimes is the most reassuring thing Gid has heard all day. "But what I was asking," he says, feeling more at ease now, "was why you cared what I was eating."
Nicholas nods. "Well, first of all, I care about the planet, which, and I really feel this goes without saying, is rapidly disintegrating before our eyes."
Gid nods wearily. Eco-freaks. They had these people at his old school too. For selfish reasons, he's glad Nicholas is part of this movement. There's at least a corner of his personality that Gideon can dismiss.
"But more important, you and I start our workouts tomorrow, and you need a healthier diet."
"But I don't want to work out," Gideon says. Up ahead, Tim Cockweed is going down a set of stairs on his skateboard. The focus of his eyes and set of his jaw is indeed demonic. "I'm not very athletic, so..."
Nicholas puts his hand on Gid's arm, effectively shushing him. He says, "I have three things to tell you. One, Liam Wu drinks cranberry juice because when he has too much sex, like he did this afternoon as soon as he got back here and saw his girlfriend, Jordan, he gets a bladder infection—like a fucking girl. Second, you want to use the word gorgeous very, very sparingly around here. Especially in your position. Third, I am going to make you athletic, or you will never, ever get laid, except by fucking accident, which is in some ways worse than never." He fixes his cool blue eyes on Gid's warm brown ones.
When Nicholas goes into his evil honesty mode, he has Scary Husky Eyes.
"Wait," Gideon says. "Don't you want me to not work out, because what if I get this really great body? Then I'll get laid fast, and you'll lose."
Nicholas laughs. I don't blame him. Gideon could certainly improve his level of fitness, but he's hardly in danger of becoming an Adonis. "Yes, I want to win the bet, but I mean, every single interaction I have with you can't be about the bet. I want someone to work out with. Cullen won't. So I'll do it with you."
Not exactly a declaration of friendship. But not nothing either.
sneaking out
It's well past lights-out, and it just so happens that when Gideon is awake, I'm awake too. It's so quiet right now, and I can almost see his thoughts arcing through the darkness. Like most girls, I have spent so much of my life dreaming what it would be like to be close, really close, to a boy. And here I am, closer than I've ever been, and I'm not actually even there. I'm sure there's a lesson in there, but I'm not yet sure what it is.
Gid's thinking about Danielle. Not in a longing-for-her way. He realizes his story got only so far as his accident with the thong and never back to how it ended up in his possession in the first place. How, when Danielle said good-bye, she got herself looking all sexy in cutoffs and a little T-shirt and said things like, "Maybe you're too numb to cry," while Gid said things like, "Yeah." When all he could think of was climbing into the Silverado and peeling out down Christmas Park Circle, never to be heard from again, Danielle knelt down and fumbled in a black corduroy handbag (yuck) as Gideon (why not, one last time) looked down her shirt. Danielle stood up and handed Gid the brown bag.
"Don't open this until you get to school," she said.
It's not that Gid doesn't like Danielle. He does. And it's not that he's just not romantic. In fact, what I'm getting at is that he's very romantic. That's his whole problem. He suspects that there is someone out there who's way better for him than Danielle Rogal. He's even thinking that there's someone out there better for her than he is. So in the darkened quiet clarity of Room 302, Proctor Dormitory, he's cold not out of coldness but out of respect for the real thing.
Danielle really was a nice girl. But how did he know what was waiting for him out there? It wasn't as if he'd ever been anywhere. Well, except Florida.
He's still smarting from the twin bombs, the "doable" and "in your league" comments. In Gid's fantasies, Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue models fall in love with him because they have some transcendent mutual understanding. The bet has made official what he's always feared. Love is not about love. Love is a game. There are winners and losers.
Of course, he reminds himself, if he were definitively a loser, there would be no bet. No one would even pay attention to him.
This thought is comforting enough to put him, and thus me as well, to sleep.
A scant three hours later, he's being shaken awake. He's so far behind a wall of sleep that just the simple act of opening his eyes feels like crawling through packed earth. Cullen towers over him.
"What the fuck are you doing? It's 1:10." Gid could count on one hand the number of times he's been up after 11:30.
"Now it's 1:11, make a wish," Cullen says. If he notices Gideon's surprising tone of insubordination, he doesn't say so. "Here's mine. Fifteen minutes from now, I will be sitting in a girl's dorm with my good buddy Nicholas and my we-shall-see-how-he-works-out Gideon Rayburn, high as a kite and drinking expensive wine."
Outside their window is a sugar maple with a fat, straight, sturdy branch. Gideon watches as Nicholas crouches on the ledge. Holding on to the window frame for support, he extends one leg to the branch and anchors it there. Then, with one quick movement, he transfers all his weight out the window, setting down his other foot and grabbing another small branch, this one a little thin for Gid's taste, with his other hand.
Gid weighs the misery of a broken leg against chickening out. The campus looks beautiful at night, the buildings still and regal, the lawns and trees deep green even in the dark. Tingling with desire and fear, he eases himself onto the ledge and, with Nicholas's movements running through his mind, copies them exactly.
White is remarkably close. Plus the way the campus lights are set up, there's a dark patch of lawn from one corner of Proctor to a tree between them. A door on the back side of White has been left open.
Prep school has a lot of rules. But it has many more wily, horny, substance-abusing students who learn how to get around them.
They tiptoe through the halls. Cullen motions for him to crouch. "Mrs. Geller's apartment," he whispers. Mrs. Geller. She's the headmaster's assistant. Her name is on all his correspondence. It's incredible that she's a real person, with a dried flower wreath on her door.
In the boys' dorms, the doors are bare, or just carved up with words like prick, blow me, and so on. The girls' doors are covered, not an inch of wood remaining, with Polaroid photos, memo pads with messages like "I luv you," and magazine cutouts of hot young actors. Gid recognizes a guy from The O.C. and, weirdly, Mel Gibson. Cullen and Nicholas are as handsome as actors. I am normal, Gid thinks, I am regular.
Cullen taps lightly on a door marked 13. The door opens, revealing Madison Sprague, who is, in Gid's estimation, about nine hundred times as hot as her phone voice.
Madison is maybe three inches taller than Gideon, and she's wearing jeans tight enough to make her look taller, low across her hips, secured with a brass buckle that reads RIDE ME. Her white wife-beatertank top clings to braless, medium-sized breasts. She's not exactly stacked, but she probably should be wearing a bra. That's my opinion, of course. Not Gid's, though he does manage to force his eyes upward to settle on her shoulders, sparkling under some iridescent lotion. Gid doesn't know about iridescent lotion, so he just thinks she's touched with magic. Her hair, short and dark, is glossy and tight against her head, like a perfect little hat. There's a dark curl hanging over her forehead, and she shifts her hazel eyes upward and blows it out of the way.
She cocks her head to the side, and Cullen kisses her cheek. Nicholas allows his cheek to be kissed but does not kiss her back. Gideon just stands there. He can't look at Madison anymore so he looks past her, into the room. It's not as nice as the boys' room, really just a rectangle with white walls and that lentil-soup brown carpet. Erica sits on a bed covered with a shiny green quilt; the wall behind her is a riot of clippings, medals, and pictures of girls playing soccer. Next to her is another blonde girl. "Hi," she says. "I'm Mija." Mija, despite her glorious name, is the least intriguing of the three. She's small and blonde, and full of European restraint. She has a tidy air about her and pink, pensive lips. She's not hot like Madison and she doesn't seem like she could break you in half, like Erica (Gid finds this attractive), but she's definitely cute. "Get in here," Madison says, her tone impatient. "My God." Gid takes a step, and then, afraid to venture much farther, deposits himself on the floor, right against the wall.
