Girls We Love

by J. Minter

  “Listen, Phil, the thing is…,” Stella began, jerking uncomfortably and twisting her head in a way that made the whole thing extra painful. “I’m a Barnard junior. I should be dating thirty-five-year-old women who, like, trade foreign currency and own boutique wine shops and renovate brownstones. I don’t want to be hanging around with a bunch of teenagers when I go out.” She made a face like she had just found a hair in her dinner. “That’s just not me.”

  Philippa felt like she had just been hailed on, and the stinging feeling wouldn’t go away. “We don’t have to go out with Mickey and Sonya tomorrow night,” she said in a very small voice. She wasn’t quite sure why she was arguing, but it just felt wrong, being dumped so far away from your turf.

  Stella stared at her coldly.

  Philippa shook out her hair and gave her jeans a pull upward, and then she collected her things and stood up. “Good-bye Stella,” she said with what she hoped was dignity, and then she walked to the door.

  When she got there, a slender boy in a cutoff T-shirt who was apparently working security that night, gave her a death glare. “What did you do to Stella?” he asked.

  Philippa turned to see what she could possibly have done to Stella, and saw her now definitely ex-girlfriend sobbing dramatically and surrounded by friends. Philippa rolled her eyes. “Oh, give it a rest,” she said, and then she walked out into the hot, slightly ripe-smelling Amsterdam Avenue night, and hailed a cab.

  She watched buildings go by, and thought about who her friends were, and then she started to cry. Big rivers of tears that she couldn’t keep from coming. Luckily, the driver was busy yelling into his mouthpiece, so Philippa had it out in the backseat and when she was done she was closer to a part of town that made some kind of sense. And by then, the only thing she wanted in the whole world was to talk to her best friend.

  Mickey.

  “Hey, buhbay,” Mickey said, when he picked up on the fifth ring.

  “Who do you think you are, Elvis?” Philippa said in a voice that couldn’t hide the recent tears.

  “You okay?” Mickey said.

  “Are you… in the middle of something?”

  “No.”

  “Oh.” Philippa took a deep breath and willed herself to say it without crying: “Stella and I broke up.”

  “Yeah, girls are mean,” Mickey said. “And mean people suck.”

  “No, she could be really great, she just—”

  “Hey, shut it, she sucked,” Mickey said. “Sorry, but it’s true. Now that she’s gone, you want to come over?”

  “Really?”

  “Hell, yeah,” Mickey said. “Just watching Braveheart and doing a shot whenever someone loses a limb.”

  Philippa giggled. “That sounds like fun. Wait, you’re doing this by yourself?”

  “No, stupid. I’m with Sonya.”

  Oh, right, her. Philippa mouthed a very bad word to herself three times, and then she told Mickey she’d be right over. “And Mickey?” she added. “Save me some tequila, ’kay?”

  liesel gets it done

  from: liesel@ddrpr.com

  to: vinky.morningside@vm.com

  subject: Leland Brinker

  Dear Vinky,

  I had such a good time at the Mother’s Day tea party you gave, and I know my mummy did, too. Anyway, I have a gigantic proposition for you. I’m working on the opening night party for this new club Candy, you’ve heard of it I’m sure, and I’ve GOT to have your client Leland there. It’s sweet sixteen-themed, and we have a birthday girl there and everything. She’s Patch Flood (the real Hottest Private-School Boy)’s little sis, Flan, and she’s adorable, and she’s a HUGE Leland fan. How great would it be if he showed up as her SURPRISE birthday date. Genius, right? Looking forward to your thoughts.

  Liesel

  from: vinky.morningside@vm.com

  to: liesel@ddrpr.com

  subject: RE: Leland Brinker

  Okay, he’s in, and I talked him into forgoing his usual appearance fee for the publicity opportunity, only because I’ve known you since you were a baby. I mean, you’re still a baby! But since you were, like, literally a baby. We’ll need wardrobe approval and a picture of this Flan person by tomorrow and, of course, he’ll only be able to fit in about an hour, MAYBE an hour and 15 min.

  VM

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

  Life can change all of a sudden—one moment you’re just another eighth grader waiting for high school to come around, and the next you’re on the verge of being part of a whole scene. I could feel this happening to me, and I felt all excited and weird about it at the same time.

  And it happened so randomly. I was just trying to find a party that I could take an old friend to, and it ended up being this Florence junior Liesel Reid’s sweet sixteen and the next thing I know, I’m friends with a TV star and Liesel wants to be like best friends with me, too. She wants to throw me a sweet sixteen, even though I’m only fourteen. Not even fourteen, until Friday, when they are going to open a whole dance club with a party in honor of my birthday.

  I didn’t even meet Liesel at her party, she just called me up a few hours after I got home from school on Wednesday and told me she thought my star was on the rise, and that she wanted to throw me this party that was going to be huge. And then she went on about all these celebrities who were going to be there, like Cressida Murphy and Wil Trayheart. Which might have sounded bizarre, except that now me and SBB from Mike’s Princesses are sleepover friends, and all of that crazy party celebrity world doesn’t seem so foreign anymore.

  Liesel went on and on about how she worked for this public relations firm called DeeDee something or other, and so she had all these connections to turn my birthday into a huge event. And since her birthday party had been a huge event, I figured this was something she was probably right about. She said I should invite anybody I wanted and she’d put them on the list and that we could talk later about what I was going to wear. I asked if I could invite my whole eighth-grade class, and she said totally.

  Pretty blow-your-mind fabulous, right? Like something a girl one of my brother’s friends might love would do, right?

  So why, forty-five minutes later, do I feel so panicky? Like, mind racing and palms sweating, so much so that when I put my hand up to my bedroom window, to sort of remind myself of the big, real world out there, it left this funny, sweaty streak. I looked at the pictures of Leland Brinker above my bed, and it seemed to me like the handiwork of a much younger person.

  I decided to call Patch. He never seems to care one way or the other about being cool, so I thought he’d probably be a good person to calm me down.

  “Hey Flannie,” he said, after I’d said hello.

  “Where are you?” I asked.

  “At Jonathan’s.”

  “Oh,” I said. “What are you guys doing?”

  “Just chilling.”

  “Well, could you go in the other room? There’s something I want to ask you about in private.”

  “But they can’t hear you,” he said. “You’re on the phone.”

  “Pa-atch,” I whined, and he laughed and good-naturedly went in the other room. I explained the whole thing about Liesel to him, but he didn’t seem very impressed.

  “Just don’t grow up too fast, okay?” he said when I’d finished.

  “But Patch, you don’t understand, what if there’s nobody there? I mean, what if nobody wants to come to my party?”

  “Um, so what?”

  “Patch!!”

  “Okay, okay,” he said. “I just don’t see why you’re freaking about this. I mean, Liesel said she’s going to do a PR jobbie on your party, right? So lots of people will come. Probably way more people than you’d want to talk to in your whole life.”

  “But it’s not about want to talk to! It’s about quantity,” I said, realizing how pathetic I sounded. “Will you just promise me that you’ll come?”

  “Sure.”


  “And will you make all of your friends come?”

  Patch paused. “Which friends do you mean?”

  “I don’t know.” I was blushing even though nobody was there to see me. “All of them?” I said, even though we both knew that Jonathan was the one I really cared about coming.

  “Okay, I’ll work on it. Arno just left to go to Liesel’s house for dinner with the ’rents, so if Liesel is the one promoting this thing, it looks like he’ll definitely be there whether you like it or not.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Okay.”

  When I got off the phone, I lay back down on the bed with the intention of telling myself I was hot enough to carry a whole opening night at a club in Chelsea, but before I could get very far my phone rang.

  “Flannie, it’s Livvie,” Liv said. She was walking—I could hear all this chatter around her and the clicking of some sort of high heels. “I just got off the phone with SBB.”

  “Oh, really, what did she say?” For some reason, the way Liv was talking about SBB made me feel a little jealous or something. Which is silly, I know, but what can I say, it’s true.

  “Yeah, and she told me about this party of yours … ”

  “She did? Wow, Liesel works fast,” I said, marveling that the news had already gotten to Liv. “But it’s really exciting, don’t you think?”

  “Totally,” Liv said. “I’m on my way home now with a big pile of magazines so we can start thinking about what to wear. But I was just so excited and I had to call, because I really think that this will be the time for certain connections between certain older guys and certain, ahem, younger girls to come out.”

  “Come … out?” Sometimes Liv doesn’t talk all that logically, and I have to slow her down.

  “Yeah, you know what I mean. For those connections to be revealed, or become obvious, however you want to say it … ”

  “Wait, what?” I was so confused, but somehow I felt that Liv was telling me something very, very loaded. Not to mention how quickly we’d gone from talking about my party, which was supposed to be about me, to talking about something shady and Liv-related. “Liv, what are you talking about?”

  “Well, Patch … and all his friends are going to be there, right?”

  “Yeah, I mean hopefully … ”

  “So then it will be the perfect time to … ”

  A little electronic dying noise went whoosh and away, and then we were cut off. Liv had probably forgotten to charge her phone—she always hated doing menial things like that—and now for the first time I was really annoyed about it. I mean, how hard is it to plug that little thing in? Especially when you’re going to drop bombs on one of your friends like that.

  I mean, clearly when she said younger girl she was talking about herself. And who was this mystery older guy? And what did it have to do with Patch’s friends?

  As I curled back up in the pile of pillows on my bed, I realized something. I really was kind of jealous. Not of Liv being involved with my brother or one of his friends (apparently?), because that would be gross, but of all the attention Liv was getting. I mean, is that the only way to make guys notice you? Disappear for two years and come back with highlights?

  True, that thing she’d said about older guys was totally vague and unclear, but I couldn’t help but acknowledge that guys looked at her. All the time, wherever we went.

  It was so unfair. I wanted to be with somebody. She’s already had so many boyfriends, and I’ve really only had two. Remy was such a little jerk, I’m not even sure if that counts. And now she clearly thinks she’s going to be one of the Insiders’, or whatever they call themselves, girlfriends.

  So freakin’ unfair.

  As you can see, I had already been on something of a roller coaster when my phone rang again. I picked it up without looking at the number, and then I heard a very familiar voice say, “Hey Flan.”

  “Oh, hi Jonathan,” I said, so quietly, I should probably call it a whisper.

  “How you been?”

  “Okay, I guess,” I said.

  “I hear there’s a party in the works for you,” he said.

  “Uh-huh,” I said hopefully.

  “Just be careful. You remember how much I got burned by that whole thing last spring … ”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said. Was this what he had called me about?

  “Anyway … I was wondering. Is Liv around?”

  “No,” I said, my voice rising sharply. Crap! Why am I such a spaz?

  “Oh, okay,” my ex-boyfriend, who used to be such a loyal friend and was now calling for Her Hotness herself, said. “Could you just maybe tell her I called looking for her?”

  “Sure,” I said, trying to keep my voice level.

  I couldn’t believe how lame this was. A small voice in my head told me not to get crazy and think that Jonathan’s calling to talk to Liv had anything to do with that nonsense she had been talking on the phone—but then, some nauseating turn in my stomach told me that yes, these two events had everything to do with each other. Jonathan having a crush on Liv? I mean, how lame would that be?

  And why did it suddenly seem like the most important thing in the world for him to come to my party?

  when parental approval is the last thing a girl wants …

  “Arno … Wildenburger?” Jack Reid said, chewing over the name as he sipped from his glass of white wine. He was sitting in the sunken living room of his Fifth Avenue apartment. He was waiting with his wife, Meredith, and daughter, Liesel, for dinner to be served. They were all drinking white wine.

  “Yeah, Daddy, you know! Of the Wildenbuwgers,” Liesel said, gesticulating with her wineglass. “Yes, Daddy, those Wildenbuwgers.”

  Her mother patted her helmet of whitish blond hair and smiled as best she could. Her face was looking pretty stretched out these days. “That’s wonderful, dear,” she said. “Perhaps we can have a triple date!”

  “Yeah, a little soon for that, Mom,” Liesel said.

  “Liesel, don’t be silly,” her father said, standing. His graying hair was slicked back and gray at the temples, and like all Reids, he was over six feet. He walked over to the platter of appetizers the maid had set up for them and artfully scraped some Morbier onto a cracker. “This is how the world works, my dear. This is how we do what we do.”

  “I’m not even sure we’re dating yet!” Liesel said loudly, so that they would get her point.

  “Oh, don’t be modest, my dear,” her mother said. She was wearing a white St. John knit suit with navy piping. “He’s a good little acquisition.”

  “Mmmm… the Wildenburgers represent several newer artists we’ve been thinking about investing in,” her father continued.

  “Yes, even Hermann says our collection is beginning to look too uptown,” said her mother, referring to their current art dealer. Hermann was seventy-six years old and always smelled like gin and toothpaste, even in the morning. “He allowed that we might want to consult some outside sources.”

  “Oh, I agwee with Hermann,” Liesel said. “I’m sure DeeDee would, too.”

  “There you go,” Liesel’s mother said. “You can see what a good thing this is for us, that you’re dating the Wildenburger boy.”

  Before Liesel could be exposed to more of this icky conversation, the doorbell rang. “I’ll get it!” she yelled, so that the maid wouldn’t even think about leaving the kitchen to let the guest in.

  As she hurried to the foyer, she tried to banish the foreboding creepy feeling her parents were giving her by being so into her latest hookup. Because that was just gross.

  “Awno!” she yelled, throwing the door open and pulling him to her by the shirt.

  “Hey, Liesel,” he said gloomily. He was wearing a threadbare button-down shirt with faint wildflowers on it, rolled to the elbows, and dark stained jeans with flip-flops. He brushed some hair out of his eyes, exposing his gorgeously angular features, bent his head, and attached his face to hers. She dragged him into the hall closet and they kept making
out. Her hands went all over him, his hands went all over her.

  When he pulled away, Arno said, “I don’t know about this.”

  “Oh, please,” Liesel laughed. She always laughed at things she didn’t understand, and right now, she definitely had no idea why Arno was acting so un-Arno-like. “Awno,” she said impatiently, “why do you think we’re doing this?”

  “Doing what?” Arno sounded genuinely confused.

  “What we always do! Look, you can’t even keep your hands off me!”

  Arno pulled his hand out of Liesel’s bra and sighed. “Don’t you ever worry that our relationship doesn’t have enough depth?”

  “No,” Liesel said, rearranging her DVF shirtdress. She wondered briefly if the brash, flirty Arno Wildenburger she had always known and heard about had been replaced by some morose, existential double. “I don’t.”

  “I do,” Arno said. “I’m trying to get more depth in my life, and I’m not sure that what we’ve got is up to that standard.”

  This time Liesel couldn’t stop laughing. This was too rich. She held up a long, French-manicured finger and managed to get out “Hold on!” ’ between guffaws.

  “No, seriously,” Arno said. “Like, I was just talking to my friend Patch about his ex-girlfriend Greta, who lives in California, and how crazy-intense their relationship is. They fight all the time about whether they should be together and how. It’s really, you know, heavy, and he’s just torn up about whether or not he can even be in a long-distance thing.”

  Liesel had gone from laughing to a simple smirk. “You guys sit around and talk about relationships all the time, don’t you? If only all those girls out there obsessing over you knew—you’re just like them!”

  Arno straightened. “Am not.”

  “Okay, fine. You’re not,” Liesel said, turning from Arno indifferently and fussing with her hair.

  “This is serious,” Arno said. “If I don’t stop my shallowness now, it could grow and grow and never stop. I mean, look how bad I looked after that whole Hottest Private-School Boy thing.”