The Rise and Fall of a 10th Grade Social Climber

by Lauren Mechling

  I must’ve babbled for a full five minutes, but Lily never once looked up—she was too busy frowning over a headline sheet, murmuring different possibilities to herself. I felt like a human scab. Only after I’d edged to the door, mumbling, “OK then, glad we cleared that up” under my breath, did Lily drop her red editing pen.

  “So do you want to write for us or not?” she demanded.

  “Do I—? God, I don’t know. Sure?”

  “Great,” she said unenthusiastically. “What’s your journalistic experience, anyway? Do you primarily cover pet shows?”

  “Pet shows? Well, hmm, I’ve never—”

  “It was a joke, hello? The cat?”

  I was saved right then by the office door springing open behind me.

  “Hi, Lily, hey!” a girl bearing a remarkable resemblance to my new editor exclaimed.

  Lily’s eyes hit the page again. “Oh, hey, Tammy.”

  “Hey, Lily, I was wondering if you had any openings on the Features page yet? Like, I was thinking I could do love horoscopes or something? Because this summer in Provincetown, I read a whole book about it? On astrology?”

  This Tammy girl had the most annoying voice I’ve ever heard, plus she was very near panting.

  “Sorry,” Lily said, not sounding it. “All filled up again—better luck next year. Blame it on the new girl,” she motioned to me. “She snagged the last available space. She’s writing a column on outsider impressions of this crazy place we call Baldwin.”

  I beamed pathetically. I was?

  “Oh, OK. Shoot! I thought high school would be different, but I guess I’m still always one step behind, huh?”

  “You sure are,” Lily allowed.

  “C’est la vie, that’s what my mom always says! So what about getting a coffee, huh, Lily? A mocha frappe? Or, if you’re busy, I could just, you know, get you one?”

  “Actually, new girl and I—” Lily looped the table, then, laying her hand on my back, started to tell Miss Annoying about our longstanding plans. “We actually have appointments to get fake IDs this afternoon.” I looked at my new editor in disbelief. “We’re going to some NYU student’s lab. At four-thirty, so we should get a move on, huh, new girl?”

  I nodded, too thrilled to care that she had no idea what my name was. “Didn’t he say we should get there by four-fifteen?”

  “Oh!” Tammy simpered. “Fake IDs, how neat! Do you think I could get a fake ID, too?”

  “I am so sorry, Tammy. Unfortunately they don’t take walk-ins, so I had to make this appointment months ago. The waiting list is longer than Princeton’s, apparently—this place is so professional that they give you a fake blood type and everything. They even ask you about organ donation to make the licenses completely authentic.” Rather than deal with the wreckage of Tammy’s face, Lily turned to me. “Four-fifteen, did you say? Shit, we’re going to have to take a cab.”

  “A very fast one.”

  We hailed one on Clinton Street. I had no clue what was going on as Lily pulled her cell phone from her backpack and got to business.

  Identity Crisis

  OUR CAB BLAZED ACROSS THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE, bouncing between lanes like a little white ball at a Ping-Pong tournament. I was terrified, but I noticed that, no matter how wild the driving, Lily’s posture remained impossibly stiff. She wasn’t the most fashionable or beautiful of the girls, not by a long shot, but she was self-confident in a strangely powerful way. She had this talent for making me doubt my whole existence, even when I was sitting six inches from her, close enough to notice that she smelled icy, like expensive men’s deodorant. I made a mental note to chuck the geeky For-Teens roll-on I’d bought just before leaving Houston.

  “Got it? Good!” she barked, ending her second phone call.

  The cab screeched between a beat-up Miata and a red van and I flew forward, slamming my hands against the glass divider. To curb my dizziness, I looked down at the floor, the only thing in the cab (apart from Lily) not spinning at an insane speed. Then and only then did I remember the heinous burgundy cowboy boots I’d forgotten to remove that morning. For about the tenth time that day, I wanted to jump off a cliff.

  I had tried the boots on for my dad only out of pity, but when Quinn cruised into the apartment earlier than usual, wearing nothing but tight jeans and a muscle T that showcased his perfect six-pack, I got too flustered to deal and left for school. I hadn’t even noticed my fashion felony until World Civ.

  This was just great. Here I was, alone for the first time with Lily, the heiress to the most powerful finger food empire in America, and I was decked out in deep red cowboy boots that were several sizes too large for my already gigantic cruise ships (as my sister called them). I crossed my legs to hide one beneath the other—the best compromise I could manage.

  “Look, I know we weren’t planning on going until tomorrow.” Lily sounded really annoyed. “But plans change, all right?”

  She pressed her phone between her right shoulder and right ear, freeing her hands so that she could remove a black leather Filofax from her backpack. Without looking at me, she plucked a University of Delaware ID card from one of the credit card slots and tossed it at me. Though I tried to handle the laminated card as casually as possible, I’m sure it was beyond obvious that I’d never so much as touched a fake ID before in my life. Luckily, Lily was paying absolutely no attention to me.

  “Not bad,” I said, examining the picture of Monica Reubens, who looked exactly like Lily, only with chin-length hair and a huge zit on one of her cheeks.

  Lily covered the mouthpiece and shrugged. “I got it done eons ago—almost two years. With my birthday this weekend, I’ll be twenty-three, so I decided to get an updated version. Bouncers get suspicious when you get that old. Oh, hold on—” she said to me, cutting herself off suddenly to scream into the phone. “You call Jess, then! She’s probably doing something idiotic with Preston—but whatever, find her! She needs to come. No ifs, ands, or buts. Got it?” Lily snapped the phone shut in indignation. Her mother’s entrepreneurial gene was beginning to surface. “Jess has the worst taste in men,” she murmured afterward, more to herself than to me.

  We looked out the windows in silence for several traffic lights. By the time Lily remembered my existence again, we were already on the Lower East Side. “You know, I didn’t even get your name.”

  “Mimi,” I said, wishing my big red boots would evaporate like Monica Reubens’s zit had. “Mimi Schulman?”

  Lily scrutinized me. “Cool,” she declared.

  “Cool?”

  “Your name. Mimi. I don’t know any others.”

  Could’ve fooled me. When we stepped out of the cab at Comida de Maria, apparently the fake-ID bodega, Pia was already propped against the deli window, her face assuming the bored-looking scowl that I, in my brief time observing her, already identified as her trademark. Her long dark hair was arranged in some complicated-looking up-do, and her arms were crossed over a full-length black leather coat that must have cost considerably more than my parents’ car in Houston. She had on a pair of stiletto boots that made my Annie Oakley getup even more embarrassing.

  “I really appreciate your being here on time,” she said, greeting us with a grimace. “Thanks to you, I’ve been verbally molested by seven different guys.”

  “Oh, spare me, would you,” Lily said. “You wouldn’t be wearing that push-up bra if you didn’t love that shit.”

  Pia made a tsk-tsk sound and stomped after Lily into the deli.

  “We have to pretend we’re just regular customers,” Lily advised in a low voice. “They’re super anal about getting busted by the cops, so no loitering. Pretend we’re shopping for a dinner party.”

  “In this dump?” Pia curled up her lip in disgust.

  Muting the Spanish soap opera on TV, the man behind the counter carefully monitored our efforts to locate paper towels and American cheese. All three of us were relieved when the store’s sensor ding-donged twice, signaling Jess’s arriv
al.

  “Here we are,” called Jess from the other end of the aisle, breezing into the bodega with Vivian trailing a few steps behind her. Jess looked too fresh-faced and celestial for that grimy setting, but Viv was right at home.

  “Fresh from Rollerblading? Or was it Buffalo wings happy hour at Applebees?” teased Pia without breaking into a smile.

  Vivian smacked her lips and poked a twenty-five-cent bag of miniature cinnamon glazed donuts. “Mmph, I bet those are so good,” she murmured.

  Pia snatched the doughnuts and like a magician made them disappear into her purse. I gaped at her, and she seemed to notice me for the first time. “Who’s this?” she asked, not overly kindly.

  Viv, as if cued, glared at me from behind Pia.

  “Oh, this is the new girl,” Lily said. “Her name’s—”

  “Mimi,” I said before she could forget.

  “I remembered,” Lily said. “It’s a good name.”

  I smiled desperately at the four girls. None smiled back.

  “This had better be important,” Jess snapped, looking rumpled in a man’s undershirt and tight gray pants. “Preston’s parents are out of town for tonight only, and we were having a pretty good time.”

  Lily ignored her and accosted the guy behind the counter. “We’re here to see Hernan,” she announced.

  From his side of bulletproof glass, the potbellied man eyed us suspiciously. Once assured that we were authentic fifteen-year-old brats and not undercover detectives, he led us into the storeroom.

  “Try to look tired in your picture,” Lily told me as I stepped behind a curtain. “It ages you.”

  In the back of the dark corridor stood a little man—Hernan, I assumed—with a camera that looked exactly like Dad’s beloved 1976 Polaroid. Twenty minutes later, the five of us emerged with new laminated identities—all for the startling price of seventy-five dollars each. When I confessed that I didn’t have that much cash on me (I’ve never had that much cash on me in my life), Pia just shrugged and forked over the money for mine, too. She then looked at Jess—the only one besides me who didn’t have an ATM card—and asked, “Shall I?”

  Jess, sheepish, shook her head: “No, thanks, Viv’s covering me today.”

  Pia told me I could pay her back “whenever.” I felt awful, but I could tell Pia wasn’t even trying to be nice—she just plain didn’t care. Sooner or later, I’d have to hit Dad up for more lunch money and gently inform him that the fifty dollars a week allowance we’d previously settled on might have to be adjusted for teenage inflation.

  But the embarrassing loan was worth it. I was Carmella Rothman, hailing from Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Carmella Rothman looked exactly like an exhausted fifteen-year-old with two black eyes.

  “Lemme see that,” Vivian said, grabbing my freshly pressed card. “You know who you look like? It sounds crazy, but in this picture you sort of remind me of that Russian model who’s the next big thing.”

  “That is just so not true.” Pia looked appalled. “Hello, have you ever read a fashion magazine in your whole life?”

  My face burned. So this was how she extracted payment for the seventy-five-dollar loan, by humiliating me and saying I looked nothing like a professionally pretty woman?

  “I just read the new Loaded,” Pia went on. “She’s so not Russian, she’s Ukrainian.” She slit her eyes, looking from me to the picture. “But you’re right. There is a resemblance. And P.S., your boots are completely the shit.”

  “Oh.” I gulped.

  “That’s the highest compliment in Pia’s book,” Lily told me under her breath.

  And just like that Carmella Rothman’s cheeks matched her dark red leather boots.

  NYPD Blues

  WE WERE SITTING UNDER THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE, halfway through our third round of Corona Light, when the cops rolled up. Talk about unexpected guests. We didn’t even have a chance to toss our bottles into the river.

  The car door slammed shut and a very large law enforcement officer thundered toward us. My mind was reeling. One week in New York and I was going to court. Even if I stayed out of jail, at the very least I’d be shipped back to Houston, where I’d be forced to watch Maurice experiment with drywall solutions and sample nasal inhalants while my mother fretted about my superego. Myrtle would take over my bedroom and borrow my razor to shave her armpits. It was all over. And worse—I’d blown my one shot at big-city popularity. Sam would laugh in my face. My father would never forgive me. I might never see Quinn again. I felt a coma coming on.

  And I wasn’t the only one losing my shit. Pia’s Tupperware-tight jaw had dropped to her faux fur neckline. Vivian whispered, “I think I’m gonna pee.” And Lily actually moaned in distress. Only Jess was reacting calmly. From the corner of my eye I saw her rolling up her T-shirt to expose her impressive abdominal rack. I had to start working out, or at least getting off the subway one stop early.

  The cop was ugly and hairy and huge. Completely ignoring Jess’s superior midriff, he planted himself in the middle of our cocktail party. His partner leered from the passenger seat.

  “Afternoon, ladies—or should I say girls!” It wasn’t a friendly greeting. “Forgive me for crashing your party, but you should know better than to hold private meetings in public places. Especially in daylight. What have we got here?” He snatched my beer, sniffed at the bottle, screwed up his face in disgust.

  OK, we got the point. Light beer was nasty, but so was his waistline. He was a walrus on two legs.

  “Let’s see some identification!”

  This was getting really scary. We hadn’t had our IDs for an hour—we hadn’t even used them at night. No one moved. Someone had to do something. I wanted only to run for my life. My heart racing beyond belief, I opened my eyes huge and batted my lashes. “Mistah,” I drawled, switching on the Texan twang I perfected not in Houston but as a child in New York watching Dallas reruns with my dad. “Ah’m tahrubly sawhruh, but won’t ya tell us what on er-yuhth we’re a-doin’ wrong?”

  I actually said “a-doin’,” I’m not kidding. It was so un-me. Though of course I was shaking in my boots, a tiny part of me felt as glamorous as the star of every single thirties movie that my dad and I watched way too many times. I felt like Marlene Dietrich and Barbara Stanwyck and Mae West all rolled into one. I felt—drunk. What had I eaten that day? Could the answer really be just a pumpernickel bagel in the morning? “We were just having a nice cool refray-yush-munt, Officer—isn’t it so hawt?”

  “You girls aren’t from around here, are you?” Lieutenant Fatass asked, skyscraper shoulders sinking just a little.

  “Oh, no, suh, we’ve nevah be-en to a big city like this before,” I said. “We’re from Petunia, Texas—our glee club won a competition. A jambuhree?”

  Instead of chiming in, my new friends stared at me as if I’d dropped into Brooklyn Heights from Saturn.

  “It’s our church group,” I continued. “We just won a big statewide pageant. And this is our prize—an all-expainse-paid trip he-uh-ere, in the—the greatest citee in the greatest cuuhn-try in Amaireeca!” The more I slurred my words, the more terrified I felt, especially after remembering midway through saying “expainse” that Carmen Rothman hailed from Eau Claire, Wisconsin, not Petunia, Texas, and that Petunia, Texas, was not only not the name of a real town but didn’t even sound remotely—

  “Well, ladies, I hate to break it to you,” the officer interrupted, shaking his bloated head, “but we’ve got some stricter open container laws here than in, where’d you say, Tulip?”

  With a peaceful hand motion, the officer dropped his notebook—just like that. After that, the officer tucked our unopened six-pack under a chubby arm. Plucking our bottles out of our hands, he poured the contents out onto the sidewalk and tossed the bottles into a dumpster.

  “Welcome to the Big Apple,” he said, shoving his massive body back into the patrol car. “I’d stay with Coca-Cola if I were you.” After exchanging a few words with his partner—poof!—he vanis
hed. And that was it. Our criminal records remained clean.

  When I recovered consciousness, my palms were sweating and I wanted to pee all over the sidewalk. With a final tremor of fear, I raised my eyes to the shining faces surrounding me.

  “Oh. My. God.”

  “That was so cool.”

  “Mimi, you said your name was?”

  “Oh. My. God.”

  “You deserve, like, every Oscar there is.”

  “My sister’s having this performance art event on Lorimer Street this weekend. You have to come.”

  If real life had turned into an inspirational teen movie right then, I was playing the geeky bespectacled tuba player who miraculously puts on a strapless dress, picks up the electric guitar, and rocks out at the homecoming dance. The hot drummer would be checking me out with new ideas about my desirability, my working-class friends out on the dance floor would dissolve into tears, and the entire crowd would be repeating my name over and over like some yoga chant, and I’d live on in my fans’—and the hot drummer’s—hearts forever.

  It was that good, I swear. I couldn’t wait to tell Sam.

  September 20-something-or-other (Sorry, I am too tired to keep track.)

  8:55 p.m.

  Hey there, D-Baby. Can I just say, there’s nothing like a New York autumn? There’s something about the way the air smells, sort of like cinnamon. And people on the streets all look so nice, too, as if they’ve all just ripped off the tags of their new fall clothes and couldn’t wait to put them on. Tell me, D-Dogg, are you feeling the love out in Diary Land?

  Now, to get right down to business: It brings me great pleasure to report that, while I’m not exactly the Queen Bee of Cool just yet, I do know this chick by the name of Carmella Rothman who isn’t doing too badly for herself. She was invited by the Coolies to get her photo ID updated and didn’t faint once.