The Rise and Fall of a 10th Grade Social Climber

by Lauren Mechling

  I nodded. After wasting a whole week scouring old Seventeens for guidance, I had torn out only two pictures, a shoulder-length shag and a chin-length flippy thing. I showed Jean-Pascal his options. “Which one?” I asked, praying he’d pick the longer, safer one.

  I should’ve known better. As indicated by the spiky blond hair on his own head, which he rehighlighted practically every week, Jean-Pascal had a flair for the dramatic. “Eye inseest. Lez make today a very important day.” He crumpled both pictures and tossed them into a pile of my predecessor’s wispy blue-gray hairs on the floor.

  “Attends, ma chérie, attends,” Jean-Pascal rasped en route to the shampoo station. I froze when he whispered into the shampoo girl’s ear, then sighed in relief when I realized he was only giving instructions for an extended head massage.

  When at last he seated me to cut my hair, Jean-Pascal swiveled my chair around to prevent me from looking in the mirror. “Trust moi,” he assured me.

  It took like ten hours. All the other ladies in the salon watched from under their bubble-topped hair dryers as footlong hanks of my hair dropped to the ground. I felt like a circus freak.

  “Voilà,” Jean-Pascal said finally, and spun me around. “Magnifique.”

  I gasped. My hair fell around my face in dark chunks, exposing cheekbones I’d never known existed. It was amazing, really and truly magnifique. I looked, to tell the truth, exactly like an oversize Winona Ryder. I was, dare I say it, almost beautiful.

  “You look exactement comme, euuhh, euhh, comment elle’s’ap-pelle?” Jean-Pascal was both genius hairdresser and mind-reader: “Weenonah. Rydaair, c’est ça? Incroyable.”

  “Vrai,” I croaked out. Magnifique, incroyable, and then some. Maybe it’s uncool to base your mental state on your hair, but when Jean-Pascal and I locked eyes under the salon’s halogen lights, I knew that tenth grade in New York would work out just fine.

  Mimi Schulman, Meet Manhattan

  AFTER OUR “LAST SUPPER” BREAKFAST OF HERBAL TEA, fruit salad, and a multivitamin smoothie, I was off. Mom and my insane older sister, Ariel, who’s dating an aspiring rapper nicknamed the “Vanilla Gorilla,” brought me to the airport. Ariel spent the whole ride bitching about having to dump Vanny if she wanted to pledge Kappa at Texas that fall. Apparently, wannabe thugs who work as forklift operators and refuse to speak grammatical English just don’t cut it in the upper-crust sorority scene.

  “Life’s so cruel,” Ariel moaned. “I want to follow my heart, but Vanny’s getting in the way. I just want to kick his ass, you know?”

  Rather than answer Ariel, my mother shook her head in utter bewilderment and mumbled “hormonal distress” and “acting out” every few exits.

  I was hugely relieved to board that plane, delighted to ditch my nearest and dearest. Ever since February, when my mom revealed her “existential attraction” to Maurice and gave Dad the boot, I’d been living a TV-movie nightmare. Maurice had two passions: building furniture without using any nails, and detailing his medical problems. He also made strange gurgling noises when chewing. No bigger loser had ever lived. Ever since Maurice’s hideous seventeen-year-old daughter, Myrtle, and her hairball collection (she said it was an “art experiment”) came into the equation in the spring, I inhabited the most stressful household of all time.

  The flight to New York would’ve been noneventful if the airline hadn’t lost my luggage. The two suitcases containing my most treasured possessions had flown the opposite direction and were now making the rounds on a baggage carousel in Phoenix. The airline promised to deliver the luggage by the following Monday morning at the latest, but Monday morning wasn’t soon enough. The orientation meeting was on Friday.

  I might’ve burst into tears if Dad hadn’t been standing there. After a long traumatic summer, I was so happy to see him that I forgot to panic about my orientation outfit. Dad looked a bit pale and puffy, but I expected that, I guess. It was logical that New Yorkers sunbathed and exercised less than Houstonians. And besides, why else was I there but to get him in shape? I gave him another hug and he said, “Miss Mimi, we’re going to have a great time together!”

  I agreed enthusiastically, especially after seeing the place Dad had rented, half of a quaint brownstone in the West Village. It was a total score: The apartment had two floors and was decently roomy, even by Texas standards. To get inside the house you had to walk up a stoop, so the main floor was actually the second floor, and all the bedrooms and Dad’s darkroom were on the ground level. My dad had real estate speculation in his blood, it seemed—his mother, the Jewish condo baroness of southern New Jersey, would’ve definitely approved. For a helpless, heartbroken bachelor, my dad seemed to be coping pretty well.

  He explained that the only other people in the building were a couple of lesbian documentary filmmakers, both named Judy; their daughter, Gilda, whom they had adopted in China a few years earlier; and Willa, their very expensive Labradoodle from the Falkland Islands. No sooner had I stepped into our apartment than our new neighbors appeared at our door bearing a plate of grilled “tempeh fingers.”

  “We just love your dad,” Judy #1 told me after insisting I take not one but three fingers off the platter. She was wearing a remarkable pantsuit straight off the set of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.

  “Adore,” Judy #2 echoed. Her burgundy chenille tunic swayed in the early-evening breeze. “If we’d met him a few years earlier, who knows what might have happened? We might’ve persuaded him to, har, donate!”

  “Rotten luck,” I said, nearly choking on my tempeh finger.

  “Could’ve saved us a few very expensive plane tickets, if you know what I mean!” said Judy #1.

  “But seriously,” said #2, “we’re flipping over with love for Gilda. Her new favorite words are, ‘Watch it, buster.’ How hilarious is that?”

  The Judys started laughing, gruffly and in unison. #2 clapped me heartily on the back, and when #1 said, “Welcome to the family—Barrow Street’s been waiting for you,” my eyes brimmed with tears.

  After the home tour and my tempeh force-feeding session with the Judys, who showed us clips from the movie they were working on, Under the Iron Ramp: Problems of Wheelchair Access in the Former Soviet Union, I could hardly walk for exhaustion. Between faking separation anxiety from my mother and haggling with the airline luggage representative, I had survived an extremely trying day. My dad proposed taking me on a stroll through the neighborhood, but I wanted only to crawl into my brand-new bed and sleep—after, of course, eating a real dinner.

  “I consider this my at-home all-you-can-eat buffet,” Dad said in the kitchen, rolling out a drawer stuffed full of takeout menus. I chose one near the top of the pile, an Indian restaurant on Carmine Street, The food came within five minutes. Also within five minutes, I efficiently inhaled my weight in saag paneer, tandoori chicken, aloo gobi, four different kinds of naan, and a bunch of other delicacies I was too delirious to remember. Around eight p.m., I passed out in the same clothes I had worn on the flight.

  My dad and I spent the following day shopping for new spiral notebooks and enough clothes to tide me over through the weekend, until the arrival of my luggage. With a supply of ballpoint pens, a few simple tops, a pair of black ballet flats, and a pair of prefaded jeans, I felt perfectly equipped for my new life.

  With Tenth Grade Comes Great Responsibility

  FRIDAY MORNING, AS I WALKED INTO ROOM U-3 of Baldwin wearing an inoffensively preppy outfit, the total, all-consuming fear kicked in. No one had told me that the U in U-3 stood for Undercroft, the basement, so I arrived at the orientation meeting nearly fifteen minutes late. I tried to ignore the thirty-six pairs of eyes that landed right on me, and tiptoed toward the back and crouched on the carpet near a bunch of guys who all seemed to have colossal backpacks and pimples of similar proportions. There was a frazzled, gray-haired woman at the front of the room, clutching a coffee mug. She was draped in a dirty V-neck T-shirt that not even my mom’s new paramour, Ma
urice, would’ve worn beyond the den.

  In the whole room, the only person who bothered to smile at me was this gorgeous blonde girl who was sitting half an inch from the teacher at the front of the room. She was probably making fun of me in some obscure way, and I felt a little sick. Where was Sam? Could he have changed schools overnight and forgotten to tell me?

  “As I was saying”—the woman by the blackboard cleared her throat in irritation—“middle school’s over, and you’re no longer the babies of the upper school, either. With the freedom of tenth grade comes great responsibility.”

  “Beware of her,” one of the pimpleheads rumbled in my ear, pointing at the droning woman at the front of the room. “Zora Blanchard. The world’s biggest ball buster, unless you’re into ceramics. She digs the arty chicks.”

  “Thanks.” I grinned gratefully. So this was Zora, the face behind the loopy signature on that postcard.

  “Baldwin sees education as a celebration of sharing and being together,” Zora Blanchard continued. She proceeded to launch into this War and Peace-length speech about honesty and community and respect and all those other topics that seriously get on my nerves. If there’s one thing that bugs me, it’s older people thinking that they can train kids to be nice. In my experience, if somebody’s a jerk, he’s a jerk, period, end of story, and no stupid “welcome home” speech is going to change that.

  I felt a burning sensation in my forehead, as sharp as a spitball. I looked up to see it was that same blonde girl, still smiling at me. When she yawned and rolled her eyes sympathetically, I was almost too overwhelmed to roll mine back. She was the most beautiful all-American girl I’d ever seen, a walking Tommy Hilfiger advertisement in her navy blue button-down and a gold-link bracelet. I could practically examine my reflection in her teeth, even from across the room. Thank God I’d gone conservative.

  “That was a very important point,” Blanchard was saying. “Just to double-check that you all understand it . . .” She scanned the room. “Nona, can you please sum it up?”

  “Absolutely” came a slow voice from the center of a cluster of five girls in the corner I hadn’t noticed up until that point.

  All five of these girls looked unkempt if not dirty, if not homeless then heroin-addicted. And still they possessed an undeniable magnetism: they were by far the most captivating group in the room. I don’t know how I overlooked them. They were pretty, actually, but by no means conventionally. I think their appeal had to do more with their energy or their expressions, which simultaneously projected messages of “Help me” and “Fuck off.” They didn’t make them like this in Houston.

  “Any day will do,” Blanchard said, shifting her weight from left to right hip.

  As we waited, I couldn’t help but stare. As a group they were fascinating. A tiny, pixielike girl, perhaps part Asian, with short hair, sky-high cheekbones, and black eyeliner thicker than my index finger, jabbed the girl next to her. This one had broad shoulders and sandy blonde hair and was wearing a thick heather gray-flecked sweatshirt that read NANTUCKET in big block letters. She looked athletic and serious, with open, easy-to-read features. To the left of the Nantucket girl was a flawless, olive-skinned glamour queen decked out in the kind of designer clothing people fly to Milan to scoop up. She had long dark hair and eyelashes and wore an extremely bored expression. She was slumped against a generically glossy preppy blonde—another Texas cheerleader type, but more intriguingly melancholy than the white-toothed blonde across the room. Though carefully dressed in a lavender cardigan and pearls, she appeared not to have slept in a week, with under-eye circles three shades darker than the rest of her face. The more I looked at them, the more entrancing they became. These weren’t the kind of girls you’d see in a teen-magazine fashion spread. Still, I had trouble averting my eyes.

  “Nona, ahem?” Blanchard shifted position again, thrusting her right clog forward and leaning her weight back into her left hip. She cleared her throat.

  The girl Zora kept calling Nona, next to the bedroom-eyed blonde, took her time answering Baldwin’s principal, probably because she knew she could. Nona was the most breathtaking of them all, with long dreadlocks pulled into a ponytail and skin the color of a nonfat latte. She was blinking her huge, dilated bottle-green eyes as if she had just been roused from a month-long coma.

  “You were saying that we should all, ah, you know, like . . .” Nona scratched her chin. After a long pause the haute couture-clad girl whispered into her ear, allowing Nona to continue: “We should all respect each other and, like, understand? Cultures and stuff?”

  “That will do,” an indignant Blanchard said, cutting her off. “Anybody else?”

  We were all shuffling our feet and coughing, unwilling to risk total geekdom so early in the year. At last a singsong voice broke the silence: “You were saying that we are going to have to challenge ourselves this year. That our fiercest critics come from within.”

  “Thank you, Amanda.” Blanchard gazed, enraptured, at the pretty blonde girl who had smiled at me at the beginning of the meeting.

  Blanchard then segued into a spiel about our being the captains of our own ships when it came to signing up for electives. At first I thought she was talking about a politics class.

  “If you’ve already lost your course books,” she said, “you’ll be thrilled to hear I have plenty of extras in my office. And please take note, Gary in the English department has decided to take the year off to travel through South Asia, so those of you enrolled in his ‘Writing About Bollywood’ course are going to have to make alternate plans. Better news is that Ruth in the science department has agreed to lead a bread-making seminar. If you’d—”

  A curly-headed boy who had been waving his arm in the air for several minutes finally managed to capture Zora’s attention.

  “Yes, Frank?”

  “I just want to make sure before I join: Does a health club membership satisfy the gym requirement?”

  “Yes. Until we give our poor neglected gym a face-lift, that policy will remain intact. Yes, Arthur?” She pointed to a guy whose baseball cap was pulled down to obscure the top 90 percent of his face.

  “What if we don’t belong to a gym?” Arthur asked.

  “Then you can take tai chi, modern dance, or any of the stretch classes we offer,” she responded. “To name just a few.”

  “But isn’t that, like, discrimination against non-Crunch conformers?” a kid to Arthur’s right piped up.

  “We’ll talk about it in my office whenever you’re available, Andrew,” Zora answered sternly.

  After this endless Q&A segment, Zora called us up one by one to distribute our schedules. I remembered the admissions officer telling me on the phone that no two students at Baldwin had the same exact classes.

  “Yes!” shouted one of the jocks. “No classes till after lunch on Thursdays!”

  “Lucky bastard!” One of his friends high-fived him.

  No such luck for the transfer student: my schedule was jam-packed with courses. Besides all the usual suspects like World Civ, English, French, and math, I was taking puppetry, sculpture, and a “book-binding seminar.” On Wednesdays I had a two-hour yoga class.

  “I’d switch to squash if I were you!” I heard from behind me.

  I spun around and almost collided with that same gorgeous blonde girl. She was pointing at my yoga square.

  “It meets at the same time,” she explained. “And it’s much better for your cardiovascular system than yoga. You get a real adrenaline rush—plus, you get a chance to compete with the Manhattan leagues!”

  “Thanks,” I said, somewhat perplexed.

  “I’m Amanda.” She extended her French-manicured hand.

  “Pleased to meet you. My name’s Mi—”

  “Mimi Schulman,” she finished for me. Glancing down at her penny loafers, she added quickly, “It’s not every day there’s a new kid at Baldwin. In fact, it’s been”—she consulted her watch, a gleaming timepiece pricier than most package h
olidays to the Bahamas—“six years since we’ve had someone new who was at least sort of normal-looking.”

  Ouch. I clutched my notebook to my developing chest and stepped back.

  “No, no! Not that you’re only sort of normal-looking. It’s just that the last new kid we had was Ivan Grimalsky, two years ago, and he didn’t really count.” Amanda pointed down the hallway, where a lanky guy was doing handstands against a row of lockers. He was a freak.

  “He’s a freak,” she said. “It was a bigtime disappointment. We were all so excited about some fresh blood coming in here and . . . Let’s just say, we’ve all been looking forward to meeting you.”

  “We?”

  Amanda gestured with her shoulder, and, like Miss America runners up, four girls fanned out behind her. Their beaming smiles were so identical I wondered if they practiced in the mirror together.

  “She’s going to switch into squash,” Amanda said after introducing me to, from left to right, Courtney, Mary Ann, Ivy, and Sophie. “Aren’t you?”

  I opened my mouth, but no words came out. I was too stunned. I had been at Baldwin for less than an hour and already the popular girls—blonder and tanner than anyone I had known in Houston—had recruited me. I couldn’t wait to tell Rachel, who considered herself more entitled to live in New York than I was, being 100 percent Jewish to my half. She would never believe how un-Jewish and preppy the real Brooklyn was.

  “So, what are you up to now?” Courtney asked me on our way through the lobby, where I must have overheard the word Hamptons at least three times.

  When we got outside, I noticed a couple of the pimpleheads from the U-Croft huddled on a stoop across the street, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes.

  “Wanna grab some TD with us?” Sophie said. “It’s our daily tradition.”

  “Shorthand for Tasti D-Lite,” Amanda clarified. “The best frozen yogurt in New York City!”