The Rise and Fall of a 10th Grade Social Climber

by Lauren Mechling

  Carmella and I were both surprised at how much less intimidating the girls are up, close and in person. Like take Vivian. The girl famous for her ultra-inaccessible musical taste also happens to carry a beat-up Carnegie Hall schedule in her handbag—how cute is that? I mean, even I know that’s compromising. (It popped out while she was fishing for her wallet. She looked around to make sure nobody had seen it. I think I did a pretty good job of playing dumb . . . and I think her inviting me to a party in Williamsburg that her sister’s throwing this weekend was her way of paying me back for it. Or maybe it’s just that I’m awesome. Ha, ha.) Much more to say, but I’m socially spent for the moment. Just take my word that everything’s going hunky-dory.

  The Contender

  THE NEXT MORNING I WAS FEELING PRETTY groggy. I squirted my dad’s Visine into my eyes, showered, and made it on time to the pre-Baldwin breakfast that Sam and I had arranged at the Yemenite café. “Better start drafting ‘Roses Are Red’ odes to Amanda,” I said with a smirk, handing over the notebook. “Less than a week, and I’m already miles along the road to eternal coolness.”

  “Whatever. Listen to this. It’s the most amazing thing since Michael Jackson released Off the Wall,” Sam said, handing me his headphones.

  “Did you order yet?” I said, ignoring his offer. I was too excited about my world-class triumph to concentrate on anything else. I spent, I admit it, most of that meal replaying every detail of the previous day: how instead of being dragged to Rikers Island, we ended up playing drinking games in Pia’s parents’ Columbus Circle Trump Tower penthouse until three in the morning. (When I’d called my dad to tell him I wouldn’t be coming home in time to catch Ninotchka on cable, he’d rather bemusedly expressed happiness that I was making friends so quickly.)

  The Pazzolinis were diplomats, which as Pia explained meant simply that her parents traveled a lot to countries I’ve never heard of and could murder people without getting arrested. After the lardy policeman had driven off, Pia had changed her attitude toward me 180 degrees. At one point she even said in private, “I have to tell you, Mimi, it’s a relief that the cute new girl at Baldwin is actually cool.”

  “So you can act like a dumb southern chick, big deal,” Sam said after hearing my replay of yesterday’s highlights, including Jess’s confession about how serious she and Preston were getting, Vivian’s repeated invitation to the party in Williamsburg, Lily’s comradely “Can’t wait for your article!” exclamation, and so forth. “You think the cool girls can’t act, too? They can act like they like you as long as it’s convenient, and I’d say escaping a night in juvie’s extremely convenient. Why shouldn’t they invite you to Trump Tower for a few bottles of champagne that the Italian government paid for? That doesn’t mean they’ll ever call you again. Or even say ‘hi’ in the hall.”

  “Sam, you are such a spoilsport,” I said. “And PS., I’d appreciate if you wouldn’t call them the cool girls. It’s really reductive.” Sam clearly hadn’t learned a single thing about women since the fourth grade.

  “Look, Mims,” he said, leaning toward me. “I don’t want you to get your hopes up, that’s all. I feel like I shouldn’t have even made that bet with you. It wasn’t fair. There’s no way the new girl could know that there’s no chance in hell of breaking through the iron gates that protect Nona’s crew from regular-guy riffraff like you and me.”

  “You’re just getting nervous because that’s exactly what is happening,” I shot back. “And you’re probably feeling a little antsy about becoming the squash team’s new mascot.”

  “Uh, not really afraid of that. Can we resume our friendship and talk about something else besides the brat pack?”

  “Like . . . ?” I tried to sound bitchy.

  “Like . . . how about . . . New York? There’s a fine topic for us. Let’s discuss.”

  I gave in and, haltingly at first, told Sam my opinions about the unspoken laws governing . . . the subway. “Tell me this. When people step off the train to let others out, why do they squeeze in on the platform so close to the door? They’re just blocking the people they’re supposed to be helping out. And why do people slide over every time the person sitting next to them gets up? How different can two seats really be?”

  By the time we’d paid for our teas and started strolling toward Baldwin, I was talking at a more speedy pace, railing on about the city’s cramped supermarkets: “If they can figure out a way to have such big gyms and restaurants, surely some genius can put in a Key Food with more than three aisles.”

  Sam was shaking his head and chuckling appreciatively, causing me to forget all about how annoying he’d been acting earlier. “Oh, wait,” he said, stopping about a half block from Baldwin. “Remember those pictures I was telling you about? From our end-of-the-year school play in fourth grade?”

  “Charlotte’s Web? Yeah?”

  “Well, I brought them,” he said. “Come here.”

  And so we sat on a bench and flipped through a whole stack of snapshots Sam had unearthed over the weekend: me in a pig costume and Sam all done up as Templeton the rat. The two of us stooped over the largest bowl of Cheerios mankind has ever known. Chasing a beagle in the dog run at Washington Square Park. Toting our matching lunch boxes to the first day of third grade. In the final picture, Sam and I are maybe five or six, and we are walking across the Brooklyn Bridge with our arms entwined—skipping, it looks like. I am wearing a Superwoman costume, cape and everything, and Sam is dressed as Spiderman, and together the two of us look fully equipped to rescue Manhattan from all evildoers.

  Wow. I felt overwhelmed and oddly moved, looking at these images for the first time (my mother’s way too disorganized to chronicle our lives in photographs). Sam and I really were best friends once upon a time. And my return to Baldwin was significant for that if no other reason. “Sam,” I started to say, glancing over at him and seeing how little he’d changed after all. “Sam, I—”

  But before I could finish my still unformed thought, someone called my name from across the street. I looked up and it was Jess, waving both arms above her head. I glanced at Sam, who shrugged. “A bet’s a bet—you’ve gotta prioritize.” And so I left the stack of pictures on the bench and trotted across the street to join my day-old friend.

  After school that afternoon, my dad, Quinn, and I had just settled into the couch for a “work break” to watch the director’s cut of On the Waterfront when the phone jangled. I was annoyed because a) young Marlon Brando—bubble butt notwithstanding—is the hottest man on the planet and b) the word waterfront reminded me of yesterday’s amazing triumph.

  “Hello?” I said in a not-very-excited voice.

  “Mimi?” Two innocent syllables made my temples throb. Downing crantinis the previous night had made for an extremely grueling day at Baldwin, and Amanda’s aerobicized voice was the last thing I could handle. “It’s Amanda! Hey! How! Are! You!” Every word hit my skull like a bullet and I thought of Sam’s taunt: “Mimi and Mandy, sittin’ in a tree . . .” As soon as Quinn left, I’d search the Internet and make up a mock wedding invitation with both their names on it. If Sam continued to harass me, maybe I’d even post it on Baldwin’s “Thoughts and Dreams” bulletin board.

  “Oh, hey, Amanda,” I replied in one of those parental please-can-you-lower-your-voice voices. “What’s going on?”

  “I HAVE THE GREATEST EVER NEWS OMIGOD YOU’LL DIE IT’S SO GREAT!” she bellowed back. “I MEAN, NOT REALLY GREAT BECAUSE COURTNEY’S YOUNGER SISTER HAS MONO, BUT FOUR HUNDRED NEW TICKETS WENT ON SALE AND I GOT TWO EXTRA TICKETS TO THIS AWESOME FOLK HIP-HOP CONCERT THIS FRIDAY NIGHT. THEY WERE SOLD OUT FOR MONTHS BUT OMIGOD OMI—CAN YOU TOTALLY NOT BELIEVE IT AT ALL?”

  There were two major problems with this invitation, not counting the volume at which Amanda issued it. The first was that Vivian’s sister’s avant-garde costume party in Williamsburg was also on Friday night. The second was that I’d sooner have all my teeth extracted with no anesthesia than hear live “folk hip-hop
” with Amanda.

  “Holy shit, Amanda,” I said, and at her gasp added, “pardon my—French? But Friday night, well, like, you know what I told you last week? About my dad and his . . . depression?” I turned up the juice here, pronouncing the word like “scabies.” “It’s getting worse. He’s beyond bummed about my mom, and I don’t know what he’d do if I ditched him. Gosh, I guess I could sneak out during Night News, but he’s just so lonely.”

  My confidence produced exactly the desired effect. “No, Mimi—gee, I’m the one who’s sorry, wow. That must be way tough. And I would never ask you to sneak out, gosh! That’d be awful—what if he woke up in the house and realized he was all alone? You’d be double dead, huh?”

  Across the room, my father’s gorgeous assistant was swaggering toward me. He paused and held up a page of the Arts section with the word “PIZZA” written in red Sharpie. In the same instant, call-waiting beeped.

  “Amanda, I’ve gotta go,” I whispered, cupping my hand over the mouthpiece. “My dad’s just stumbled in from a bar, and I’m worried about what he might do.”

  “Oh, Mimi.” She gave a loud Hallmark-card sigh as I clicked over to Sam.

  “Uh, hey,” he said, sounding appropriately sheepish and apologetic. “Sorry if I was a little rude this morning. I was just sort of—whatever. Anyway, I thought maybe, to make up for it . . . Well, I bought some Ben and Jerry’s, and I was wondering if maybe I could come over to watch some movies? There’s this director’s cut on now? Of On the Waterfront? Which is one of my very favorite movies?”

  “Mine, too!” I exclaimed, though I doubted for the same reasons. “That’s exactly what we were sitting down to watch!”

  “Oh, great, great. Well, then, can I—I’m actually passing through the neighborhood. So maybe I could stop by sometime?”

  “Sure, why not? Come whenever.”

  “Oh, great. Great. How about, I don’t know, now? Because I’m actually, uh—” He stopped talking and the buzzer sounded. “Right outside.”

  Chubby Hubby Hangover

  THE VERY NEXT MORNING—not that I realized it was the next morning, since I was busy being sound asleep—the phone went berserk. ZZZ ZZZ. ZZZ ZZZ. If I could make the Zs any bigger, like the size of five pages, I would. Believe me: we’re not talking about just ringing, the sound most phones make. Ringing would be perfectly normal. Pleasant, almost. But Dad had gone out and purchased one of those techy phones with the megaphone buzz of a bloodthirsty mosquito. ZZZ ZZZ. ZZZ ZZZ. A mosquito the size of a beach ball.

  “Christ!” I jerked up. My stomach ached after the three pints of Chubby Hubby that Sam and I had inhaled into the wee hours of the night. Did Tasti D-Lite hurt Amanda’s tummy like Chubby Hubby did mine? Pia swore that stuff made people fart. ZZZ ZZZ. ZZZ ZZZ.

  ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ.

  Rolling over to yank the phone off its cradle, I saw Sam conked out on the floor. Late the night before—or should I say early that morning—he had fallen asleep by the foot of the couch, his hand draped over my ankle. The first time he’d placed it there, I’d assumed he was reaching around for something that he’d left on the couch—the remote control or an errant AA battery. But instead of fidgeting, he just curled his hand around my ankle, and there it remained, six hours later, in the exact same position.

  “Hello,” I groaned, kicking Sam’s arm down to the ground. He let out a megasnore. I noticed that the movie channel was still blasting at full volume.

  “Honey, good morning! Oops, are you still under the covers?” It was my mother, sounding totally unlike herself. “Wakey-dakey time!”

  I almost puked into the mouthpiece. Leave it to my mother to call ass-early on Wednesday morning, the one day of the week when I have two free periods in the morning and, if I miss assembly, don’t have to be at school until 10:35. “Ugggh . . .”

  “Now, honey, I want to check up on your outside reading and see if you’ve gotten a chance to look at that book about the Nepalese trekkers yet. It’s so arresting.”

  “Mom, do you know what time it is?”

  “I’m all too aware of it, sweetie pie. Remember, it’s an hour earlier here! Where does the time fly, right? I don’t have much time to chitchat. Maurice got me up at the crack of dawn to help him with his new stretching series, as a matter of fact. He really damaged his coccyx while building a doghouse last week.”

  A doghouse? What in God’s name—? “Did you wake me to talk about Maurice?”

  Another trademark Mom move: disturb a loved one’s slumber for no apparent reason. If she didn’t have time to chitchat, why couldn’t she wait an hour? And why did she always have to mention her disgusting new boyfriend—even the term made me sick—in the first paragraph of every conversation? I missed Texas less every day.

  “Well, in a way, yes. So listen up, sweetie, I couldn’t wait—I just had a bit of fun news.”

  “Mims,” Sam had risen with the imprint of a pizza box crossing his cheek. I made a chuckling sound, which my mother interpreted as encouragement. “I’ve gotta go,” he whispered. “My mom will kill me.”

  I nodded sympathetically and pointed at the phone, indicating that I was about to Kill My Mom. She hadn’t stopped talking and I hadn’t started listening. Until, that is, I heard the words “Maurice” and “Myrtle” and “moving” and “in” and finally, the clincher: “together.”

  “WHAT?!?”

  “I know, honey, sudden, huh? But we’ve been so happy together, especially since Ariel went to Austin. The rhythms are just jibing—what can I say? We felt it was the right time to make a few changes in our own lives, too, you know? A little tit for tatty?”

  Listening to my mom just then, I was amazed that she had finished junior high, much less become a tenured college professor. It sounded as if she were asking me if I wanted to go pee-pee. And I did not.

  “Tit for tatty? What are you talking about, Mom? You and Maurice are moving in together? And what about Myrtle? Are you going to get her monogrammed bath towels and put pictures of the three of you strolling in Hermann Park up on the mantel?”

  “Now, honey, you know I would never buy monogrammed bath towels! They cost three times the—”

  And then I lost it. Did I ever have any say in the earth-shattering decisions my mother was always going around making? “Mom, I’ve only been gone, like, five days! You just couldn’t wait, could you? How great! How terrific, Mom, how just fantastic!”

  This outburst was strange but unstoppable: Anger is totally un-me, especially at seven-sixteen on a Wednesday morning, but my mom really pushed all the buttons.

  Especially when she responded as if I’d just Fed Exed her three dozen yellow roses and a Ferrari with a NUMERO UNO MAMA vanity plate. “Oh, Mims,” she burbled. “Thank you for that—thank you so much. For your honesty. I am so glad to hear you owning your emotions. You’re so much more mature than Ariel—she just took her phone off the hook, can you imagine? And oh, speaking of Myrtle, she’s thinking of applying early to Barnard, so we were wondering if she could bundle up with you and your dad for a few nights next month? The Geophysics department’s having an open house over Columbus Day—”

  For all her superficiality, my sister was not without her moments of brilliance. I did what I should’ve done three minutes ago—what Ariel would’ve done immediately: I slammed down the phone.

  Half an hour later, Quinn found me at the breakfast table, spooning dry instant oatmeal into my mouth directly from the single-serving envelopes. I was so bummed, I didn’t even care what Quinn would think (but never too bummed to notice his sinewy forearms). The table was strewn with balled-up Kleenexes and another empty tub of Chubby Hubby, my fourth in the nine hours since Sam had arrived.

  “Mimi! What’s happened?” Quinn cried. Shit. Why didn’t I remember that I shared this room with a hunk before turning it into my personal disaster zone? Insult to injury, et cetera. “OK, let me guess,” he said. “I love a good puzzle.”

  “Be my gu
est,” I replied through a rather buglelike blow of the nose.

  Quinn wrinkled his nose at me. “Got it,” he said. “Brando.”

  “Huh?” What was he talking about? “Brando?”

  “Marlon. You’re devastated that he’s passed away, but there’s no use shedding tears. It happens.”

  “You don’t understand,” I struggled to explain.

  “I’m sorry for kidding around,” Quinn said in a more soothing tone of voice. “If you want to talk about it, I’m all ears. And eyes and intestines and butt cheeks.”

  I blew my nose, rubbed at my eyes.

  “Even if you won’t tell me, I do understand this: we are not letting you leave this house without a quick fix-up.” He pushed a knotty hank of my hair behind my ear, then flicked something away from my nose. “Look—an oatmeal flake!”

  This cheered me up for exactly one tenth of a second. Quinn was the last person on earth I wanted feeling sorry for me, to say nothing of picking oatmeal crumbs out of my snot. Cohabiting with the object of your affection isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, trust me—especially if said object of affection doesn’t know that he loves you yet. The whole setup can significantly reduce the chances of his spontaneously ramming his tongue down your throat while you’re sobbing at the breakfast table with oatmeal stuck to the mucus on your cheek.

  I buried my nasty red face in my palms. “I think I just need to be alone.”

  “I was the new boy at school once, too,” Quinn said. “I know it can be tough, especially when you’re a little different.” He walked behind my chair and started rubbing my shoulders.

  “It’s not that,” I balked. How mortifying—he thought I was having adjustment problems. My whole body was tingling. Quinn was touching my shoulders. It was indescribable. “School’s not the problem. It’s fine. I’m already popular. I’m writing for the newspaper.”