Girls We Love

by J. Minter

  girls we love

  * * *

  an insiders girls novel

  by j. minter

  for MIG

  Contents

  my name is flan

  i start planning for a big saturday night

  everyone has to talk to the new girl, and tonight the new girl’s name is liv

  don’t look now … but is that lara-jess jennings?

  sad, but true: every girl wants to control her ex’s future love life

  liesel reid on the meaning of fate

  i meet a real-life party girl!

  where do those boys disappear to?

  it’s all about the girlie after party

  it’s so not about straining to hang out with oblivious older dudes … or is it?

  philippa has excellent taste

  all sbb wants is a normal life, like any normal girl, except with nicer clothes

  liv only overhears good news

  for liesel reid, work and social life are like the same thing

  sbb can’t stop the ideas

  love hurts when you love girls

  liesel gets it done

  confession: sometimes when i hear the phrase “older guy,” my ex-boyfriend pops into my head

  when parental approval is the last thing a girl wants …

  a little pr multitasking from our very own liesel reid

  a message to flan’s eighth-grade class

  even starlets have rocky love lives sometimes

  sbb is only good with her own secrets

  liv tries to be sly

  i break down in bloomingdale’s

  liesel reid, pr superstar

  checking in on the old new hot guy

  philippa isn’t kidding around anymore

  i have nightmares sometimes

  liesel gets an unpleasant phone call

  my big day. whoo-freaking-hoo.

  philippa just can’t muster any party

  tonight’s the night, for deluded girls on the lam

  liesel questions her fate

  everything is back where it’s supposed to be. for mickey, anyway.

  i’m all alone in the crowd

  sara-beth to the rescue!

  it’s not for nothing they call liesel no-nonsense

  i’m the new me, just like the old me, but a little bit better

  Also in this series

  my name is flan

  Summer is supposed to be about sunbathing in grassy parks or rooftop gardens and window-shopping in the West Village with your girlfriends and obsessing over that big crush until one day he shows up at your house with a pretty bunch of yellow lilies. At which point, summer becomes all about making time to do all those things with him. Right? So then why was I, just days away from turning fourteen and a few measly weeks from being done with junior high forever, looking at summer and fearing that it was going to be a total wash?

  Or, to put it another way, why had all my friends gone to Europe, or L.A., or suddenly decided that they were friends with high school sophomores who “really know how to party,” or realized that they were East Village punkettes and stopped showering?

  Or, to put it a third and last way, why, on the verge of what should be the most boy-packed summer of my life, was I sitting in my bedroom staring up at the wall collage of pictures of me and my very recent, very jerky ex, Remy Traubman? Remy was one of those guys who was six feet tall at eleven years old, and he has curly dark hair and olive skin, so he looks sort of like an Italian playboy or something even though he is so not. But you get the picture: He’s cute and he knows it, and he doesn’t bother hiding the fact that he thinks a lot of himself. All of which I realized after he stepped on my heart.

  So there I was, on a perfectly beautiful Friday afternoon, in the most exciting city in the world (that would be New York, of course) mooning over these pictures of this guy with a head of hair that wouldn’t be out of place on America’s Next Top Male Model, if there were such a thing. This guy who had just dumped me in the most painful way possible.

  Yeah, see, there was a real Italian playboy at our school this year, except that she was a play-girl, named Allegra Reggio, whose dad is like some international businessman or something. She’s already started to do some modeling, but her parents wanted her to stay in normal school until she turned fifteen, which is how she ended up blessing us all with her presence. She always looked kind of like a starved child to me, but I guess Remy thought she was more glamorous or wild or fun or something than I was, because at some point we weren’t going out anymore and it was obvious she was his girl.

  I guess if I were somebody else, looking in through my bedroom window at me looking at these old pictures, seeing how sorry I was feeling for myself and all that, I might not think I was glamorous or fun to be around, either.

  And just to really put some nail polish remover in that wound, as I was staring up at my unbearably dorky, and clearly made by a girl who was still thirteen, ex-boyfriend homage/wall decoration, I could hear the sounds of my older brother, Patch Flood, and his group of guys, having fun downstairs. They’re all juniors at different private schools in the city, and they are always doing wild guy things like going to parties at three in the morning and exchanging one beautiful girl for another.

  Oh, you’ve heard of them, right? Sometimes people call them the Insiders, but they always get all weird when they hear that.

  Patch is like the aloof surfer dude among them, and he’s the guy who—I swear I don’t think this just because he’s my brother—the rest of them kind of wish they were. Maybe that’s because he’s self-sufficient, or lucky looking, or because he has our family’s bone structure, but it’s just kind of true. Mickey Pardo is the crazy one. He looks kind of like a Cuban Jack Black, but he’s so charmingly screwed up that girls are always really into him. His father’s a big famous sculptor named Ricardo Pardo, and my parents have all of this work of his up at our house in Connecticut. Arno Wildenburger is the hot, vain, dumb one, and David Grobart is the nice, quiet one, who is actually handsome if you look at him long enough.

  And then there’s Jonathan. I don’t know which type he is, except that he always looks clean and put-together, and when his brown eyes look into your eyes, you feel like he’s actually seeing you, and he is kind, but not boring kind, because you can talk to him about all sorts of random stuff. And I guess I should also say that he’s the one who I kind of went out with for a little while way back at the beginning of the year.

  They were all in the living room, and all the windows were open—I could tell by the level of noise coming from outside and floating up the trellis along with the ivy toward my bedroom window.

  Me and Patch and my big sister, February, live in this really nice town house on Perry Street, filled with big, comfy, neutral-toned couches and lots of crazy modern art. Our parents live here, too, when they’re in town. I know that sounds weird, but I’m the youngest of three New York City kids, so I guess when they got around to me they felt like they’d already seen it all and maybe didn’t have anything to worry about so much anymore. So I kind of raised myself with help from Patch and Feb. Anyway, because our parents are up in Connecticut or traveling a lot, our house is perpetually the place to hang out.

  So I listened to the guys, shouting about girls and making fun of each other and talking about all the great things they were going to do when school was finally out. My ex-boyfriend was on the wall, and my ex-ex-boyfriend was downstairs, and they were both more fun than I was.

  I could have sat there feeling sorry for myself all day—if I’m being completely honest, it’s happened before. But instead, I made a decision. I took a deep breath, and I promised myself that somehow, someway, fourteen was going to be bigger and better and wilder and more fun than thirt
een. I swore to myself that once my birthday rolled by next week, I wasn’t going to be the little sister that one of the guys used to sort of date anymore.

  My name is Flan Flood. Don’t forget it, okay?

  I ripped down all those pictures of Remy. Surprise! It felt amazing. At first I was just ripping them off the wall, but then I got into it and started ripping them in half, and then ripping the half of the picture with him in it into smaller and smaller pieces. And, I’ll admit it, I even yelped a little bit while I was doing it. I might have gone on doing this for hours—in fact, it might have gotten sort of psycho eventually—but my cell phone interrupted me.

  See? You take one little self-respecting step like that, and all of a sudden you’re a person to call.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “Hey, Flan? It’s Liv,” the voice on the phone said.

  “Liv Liv?” I said. I could hardly believe it. Olivia Quayle was my best friend from elementary school, but I hadn’t seen her in two years because she went to this super-elite boarding school in Montana, called the Cattington School, for seventh and eighth grade.

  “Yeah, what other Liv do you know?” she said. Kind of sharply, I thought, although clearly I was in a sensitive place what with all the ripping up of pictures. “I’m coming back to New York. Tomorrow. Can I stay at your house?”

  “You want to stay at my house?”

  “Yeah, my parents don’t—I mean, they’re in the Hamptons,” she said, “and they don’t want me staying by myself.”

  “Okay, but my parents aren’t here, either,” I said. “They’re in Connecticut, I think.”

  “That’s fine. Just so long as they don’t think I’m alone.”

  “Oh, okay,” I said. My first reflex was to be bummed, because after my big resolution to be more spontaneous and fun, hanging out with a friend from sixth grade didn’t seem very bold, especially since Liv was kind of mousy when I saw her last. But then it dawned on me that, next to Liv, who had always been such a Goody Two-shoes—and I know this isn’t nice, but yes, honestly, this is what was going through my mind—I was going to look cool. Like, fourteen- or maybe even fifteen-year-old cool. “Well, I’m so excited!” I said.

  “Oh, me too,” Liv said. “I’ll call you tomorrow?”

  “Okay,” I said. “Kisses!”

  “Kisses.”

  Then I hung up, and I realized that the wall above my bed looked really bare now, especially with a guest coming. So I thought about all the things I could put up there that would represent the new me—the me I was going to transform into—and then I knew what I should do. I took the free poster out of my new Leland Brinker CD, and taped it up, and then I got sort of creative and cut pictures of him out of different magazines and stuff. He’s this really young singer-songwriter. Leland plays songs about staying up all night and then walking down New York City streets with the sun coming up and stuff, and he would be a senior in high school if he hadn’t dropped out when he was fifteen. And I suddenly felt that he sang about the kinds of experiences the new me might have.

  When I was done, I lay back on my bed and appreciated how much more sophisticated the room looked. I could still hear those guys, being all raucous downstairs, but I just lay there and smiled and waited.

  Because sooner or later, they were going to meet the new me. My name is Flan, and this time around, I get to tell the story.

  i start planning for a big saturday night

  For the old me, a movie worthy of my tears and mint chocolate chip ice cream would have been all I asked of my Saturday night. But since I was feeling a little sassy, and cleansed of the whole Remy thing, and since an old friend of mine was coming in from out of town in a couple of hours, I thought I’d ask my older brother, Patch, what was going on that night.

  Patch’s clique of guys gets talked about all the time, and invited to like every party worth going to, even though really he just likes riding the subway and seeing random stuff happen and eating real Mexican food in Queens and places like that. But because of his friends, and also because (I have to admit) he’s kind of magnetic, Patch is always being quasi-forced into Saturday night madness. I thought I’d try to get him to tell me where the party was going to be, so I could take Liv and the new me there.

  Also, girls really love hanging out with Patch, even girls like Liv who wear turtlenecks and other lumpy clothing items, so I figured it would be kind of a treat for her if we ended up hanging out with him. He’s my brother, so I try really hard not to think about this, but lots of other people think he’s dreamy, too, so I’ve had to become immune to that kind of talk. It’s the same with my sister, February. People are always saying how totally bats she is and I’m immune to hearing that, too. But I do understand that she’s bats—the family doesn’t try to hide anything from me anymore.

  It was one of those lazy, almost summer vacation days, when nothing really happens until the sun goes down. Liv called at four-thirty, when she was in the cab on the way from LaGuardia, to make sure I was planning something. “Flan?” she yelled from her cell phone. “I forgot how freakishly ugly and untamed this city is. I’m so excited! We’re going out, right?”

  “Definitely,” I said, even though I still didn’t know where. I wasn’t worried, though. I figured just leaving the house and getting Mary’s Dairy frozen yogurt would be a trip, especially after two years in Montana. But I wasn’t going to settle for that just yet.

  I went down to the living room, where Patch was drinking beers with his friend Arno, who might be cute if he weren’t so full of himself. They were watching Kung Fu Hustle for like the zillionth time. They were both wearing T-shirts and jeans, although Patch’s looked like, you know, a T-shirt and jeans, whereas Arno’s outfit looked like something a team of stylists spent two days choosing for somebody’s first gig at the Bowery Ballroom.

  “Hey, Flan,” Arno said, cocking his eyebrow in my direction in this way that totally made me feel my age. Even though I know Arno is kind of a jerk, he’s still really pretty, and he makes me nervous even when I’m trying to force myself not to be. “You want a beer?”

  My older brother and his friends always let me have beers, but Arno has to do this whole show of teasing me about it first. I tried to give him a sarcastic little smile as I reached over and grabbed a PBR, but I’m not very experienced with that sort of thing yet, so it might not have worked.

  Patch gave Arno a don’t-be-a-dick face, and then he said, “What’s up, Flannie?”

  “Nothing much,” I said, sitting down on the floor with my knees tucked underneath me. As soon as I was sitting, I realized that this meant I was looking up at my brother and Arno, who were sprawled across the couch all guy-like. Mental note: When attempting to transform into a party girl, try not making yourself look so small all the time.

  “I heard you just broke up with some junior high kid,” Arno said.

  “What?” I said, really hoping that he didn’t notice my ears getting all hot and red. My dumping by Remy was absolutely the last thing I wanted to talk about with an older guy, even if I have known him forever.

  “Arno, shut up,” Patch said.

  “Sorry, Flan,” Arno said, and he actually kind of looked like he was. “I didn’t mean that to sound mean.” He sighed. “And I like your dress.”

  “Thanks,” I said, looking down at the yellow cotton sleeveless sundress that I’ve been wearing like every day since the weather got warm. I waited a minute, and then asked, “So … what are you guys doing tonight?”

  Patch thought about it, and then said, “Something, I guess, I don’t know.”

  “Yes you do,” Arno shot back.

  My brother gave his friend a blank look, and then Arno kept talking like he was telling Patch something painfully obvious. “Tonight is Liesel Reid’s sweet sixteen party, don’t you remember?”

  “Oh … that uptown girl you were fooling around with last winter?” Patch asked. Then he went quiet and we waited for him to say whatever he was going to say next
. He does this thing when he says people’s names—I don’t think he even knows he does it, but it always makes people feel special. He took a deep breath and said, “Huh. Liesel Reid. Why do we have to go to her sweet sixteen party?”

  “Because for some reason she invited me, and I said I would go, and then all of you promised you would come with me.” Arno slumped on the couch, letting his very expensively cut mop of dark hair fall in his eyes. “But if that’s too much to ask, whatever. I mean, I was trying to be a bigger person, but I guess nobody cares.”

  “Fine,” Patch said. “We’ll go to Liesel Reid’s sweet sixteen tonight.” He turned to me, and smiled like he was letting me in on the joke. “I guess we’re going to Liesel Reid’s sweet sixteen party tonight. It’s probably at the Boat House in Central Park.”

  “It is,” Arno, who was not yet totally out of pout mode, said.

  “Oh, perfect—I mean cool.” I tried to take a dainty sip of my beer, which is, by the way, a really tricky thing to do. “Can I come? And maybe bring a friend?”

  Both Patch and Arno turned in my direction, stared for a minute, and then said, “Okay.”

  “Great!” I said, clapping my hands together because I love the Boat House, and all of this sounded much more fun than some house party with loud music and obnoxious people. “I’ll go get dressed.” I put down the beer, glad that I had something to do, because I was sort of hating drinking it.

  “It’s not till, like, nine,” Arno said, sounding just like the pretty, not-very-bright guy who’d been teasing me about drinking beer a few minutes ago.

  “Oh, okay. Sure,” I said, and then they went back to watching the movie and I went out front because I heard a cab pulling up in front of the house.

  I stood on the stone steps and watched as the cabdriver took three really big suitcases out of the trunk and put them on the sidewalk. Then Liv got out of the backseat and paid him and came running up and threw her arms around me.