Little Black Dresses, Little White Lies

by Laura Stampler

  “Seriously?” I ask. Gigi and I have started hanging out after work in groups, but joining her on a trip for a whole weekend in the Hamptons is a whole new step in our relationship. “Are you sure it would be okay?”

  “No. I’m lying to you,” she says, deadpan. “Yes, obviously it’s fine. They probably wouldn’t even notice an extra person. The house is huge.”

  I spring out of my seat and give her a hug.

  “Don’t make me uninvite you.” Gigi wriggles her way out of my arms as soon as they wrap around her. “You can come too, Sunny. Save me from overdosing on Harper.”

  “I can’t,” Sunny says. “It’s Cassie’s and my twenty-second month-a-versary.”

  “Gag me,” Gigi replies with a scowl.

  There’s just one last thing to figure out. I look back to the Shift Girls and ask, “Do I tell Carter I’m going to be there too?”

  “No,” Sunny says. “You should surprise him.”

  Who doesn’t love a good surprise?

  25

  GIGI INSTRUCTS ME TO MEET her at penn station Saturday morning to catch the 9:35 train heading for East Hampton.

  “Maybe we’ll beat the rush,” she says.

  Considering that people in Manhattan think that three p.m. is an appropriate time for brunch, I think that Gigi’s prediction is plausible. But as soon as the escalator begins its descent into the depths of the underground train station, which entirely lacks both the gravitas and the elegance of Grand Central, it becomes painfully clear that we definitely haven’t beaten the crowds.

  People with carry-on bags are packed in like sardines, sullenly waiting in long lines around ticket machines.

  “Pray for me :/,” I tweet, along with a picture of the teeming hordes of weekenders.

  Gigi, who you can always count on to regularly scan all the necessary social media channels, quickly texts me her location.

  Gigi:

  Standing in front of the departures board. I’m wearing a hat.

  Unfortunately, that isn’t going to help me identify her. Hipster fedoras and oversize sun hats so big that you’d think one of the trains is going to a Royal Wedding fill the waiting area. Their brims tilted slightly upward toward the board, anticipating the announcement of what track they will be leaving from.

  (Note: Apparently a hat is a staple piece of the weekender’s wardrobe.)

  After searching through bronze-legged, lanky girls in immaculate outfits, I find Gigi hidden among the Lilly Pulitzer sundresses. She’s wearing a straw blue-and-white-striped boater’s hat and the same all-white ensemble she wore on our first day at Shift.

  We have come quite a long way.

  Gigi catches my squinting eyes probing the area where remnants of the soda stain would be.

  “Thank God for dry cleaning,” she says. “Otherwise I don’t think you’d be here with me right now. Actually, you might be dead.”

  I laugh like it’s a joke. Gigi doesn’t.

  Suddenly there’s a change in the atmosphere. Without warning, the people around us, once still and staring hungrily at the departures board, erupt into scrambling chaos.

  “What’s happening?” I ask Gigi, as someone elbows me in the side to move.

  “They announced the track number for the Hamptons train.” She throws her weekend bag over her shoulder. “Quick, let’s go.”

  Apparently everyone here is going to the exact same place. And since there’s a limited number of seats on the train, which will be a three-hour journey, there’s a mad rush to the platform.

  “It’s like the running of the bulls in Pamplona,” Gigi says as the crowd surges toward track 14, bottlenecking at the escalator down.

  “Or,” I reply, “like when Walmart opens its doors early on Black Friday.”

  Given that two Castalia Day moms were hospitalized (and later arrested) last Black Friday after breaking into a brawl over a discounted PlayStation, I’m worried that we’re at risk of getting pummeled by someone’s golf clubs on our quest to nab an elusive seat on the train.

  Gigi’s behavior quickly makes it clear that if anyone’s doing the pummeling, it’s going to be her. While I try to dart between empty spaces in the crowd, Gigi runs in a straight line, swinging her massive weekend bag to part the masses with violent determination.

  We swoop in and grab two seats—“Facing forward because I get nauseated,” Gigi says—from two girls whose bikinis are fully visible through their sheer tank tops. They fan themselves angrily with fashion magazines.

  “I wouldn’t have hit them as hard if they were carrying Shift,” Gigi says very matter-of-factly. I must look shocked, because she says, “Joking, Harper.”

  Our prize seats are upholstered in a plastic material that sticks to my bare legs whenever I readjust. It makes a snapping sound when I reach into my overnight bag for my bagel (I leave the Diet Coke carefully tucked inside for now), and Gigi pulls out a container with mango slices.

  Others on the train appear to be partaking in a liquid diet. Even though it’s not even ten in the morning yet, beer cans are cracked and paper Dixie cups of rosé, or as the loud group of guys wearing Ralph Lauren boat shoes sitting next to us loudly refer to it again and again, brosé, are clinked.

  For the young Hamptons-bound, apparently the party starts before the train even leaves the station.

  “Are we the only sober people here?” I ask.

  “I hate the Saturday morning train to the Hamptons,” she replies. “It’s far too early to deal with loud, binge-drinking miscreants. We could have come last night. We should have. But. I was supposed to meet up with this guy who went to my boarding school. He goes to NYU and I’m going to apply early.” She looks out the window, and I barely hear her say, “But it fell through.”

  “That’s annoying.”

  “It’s typical,” she says in a tone that makes me think there’s more to the story. Even though Gigi and I have gotten closer than I ever would have imagined when I first started at Shift, I realize that the love life conversations have been extremely one sided.

  “Was this just some college counseling, or maybe more,” I ask, “like a date?”

  Gigi throws her arms in the air. “It was nothing because he canceled on me last minute. In fact—”

  I’m excited to hear Gigi open up to me, but she doesn’t get a chance to elaborate. One of the brosé bros leans across the aisle, two Dixie cups in hand, and smugly asks if us “girlies” want to play a drinking game.

  “No. Us ‘girlies’ want to continue our conversation you so rudely interrupted.” Gigi snaps her head to the side and gives him a stare that would make Medusa proud.

  Feeling the glare’s full impact, the bro nervously retracts his cups and offers them to the bikini girls, who are sitting on their bags on the floor of the packed train. They are far more amenable.

  “That was awesome. I thought your stare was going to turn those guys into stone,” I say, waiting for Gigi to continue her story. But she doesn’t. Instead she is silently looking down at her white leather short-shorts I once marred.

  “You know,” I say, “this weekend doesn’t just have to be about me meeting up with Carter. If there’s someone you’re interested in . . .”

  “Stop with doing the love guru thing or I’ll turn you to stone,” Gigi says, popping another mango slice into her mouth and resolutely slamming the door shut on our previous conversation.

  My phone rings and I see that Kristina’s calling me on the drive to her Skinny B’s early shift.

  “Ignore it,” Gigi says at the second ring, putting away her mango slices. “I forgot that I have something to show you!”

  Harper:

  Talk later? On the train so can’t be loud.

  I realize that this isn’t exactly true. As I press send, the bros next to us are in the midst of a very loud disagreement over the rules of their complex drinking game, which seems to be comprised of pointing and making animal noises.

  Kristina:

  Kk. Call lat
er tho?

  “Helloooo,” Gigi says. “Attention, please!”

  “Done.” I put my phone down in my lap and try to tune out the bros, who are now flapping their arms and clucking. “What did you want to show me?”

  She’s holding up a white tank top in front of her torso that reads in block-print black letters:

  Don’t

  Worry

  Be

  Yoncé

  “Oh my God, Gigi, that’s perfection!”

  “I know.” She shrugs. “I got it at this great boutique in Soho. And, just so you don’t die of jealousy, I got one for you, too. Only with a different message, since I don’t want us to be like little girl twins.”

  She holds up a second tank that says:

  Fries

  Before

  Guys

  “No. Way.”

  She tosses it over along with one of two gold lamé bandeau bras so that we don’t expose epic amounts of side boob in the shirts’ deep armholes.

  “I remember you saying that to Sunny,” she says. I did. When I thought Gigi hated me.

  “This is really thoughtful, Gigi. Thank you.”

  As if on cue, my phone alerts me that the one guy I would deem worthy of forgoing fries for this weekend—thank God this is just a hypothetical—has replied to my tweet. Publicly. For the entire Twitterverse to see.

  From @CBosh:

  @HarperAnderson Hell is Penn Station. Where are you going?

  Yes. This weekend is already going according to plan.

  26

  IF BARBIE GREW UP, CHANGED her name to babs, ditched Malibu for Park Avenue, and married a Waspy investment banker named Kenneth Jr., then this would be her East Hampton dream house. I have never seen anything quite like this.

  The property is massive, with a sweeping lawn, Olympic-size pool, home movie theater, fully stocked kitchen, and prints with numbers on them so you know just how rare they are. The only perplexing detail is the human-size statue of the Pillsbury Doughboy in the backyard. (“People get weird when you ask about him, so just don’t,” Gigi advises.)

  The house belongs to the father of one of Gigi’s boarding school friends, who didn’t want to give it up when he was relocated from the Upper East to the Middle East. So on summer weekends when he’s not in town from Abu Dhabi, the mansion is occupied by a rotating group of ten to twenty of his daughter’s friends.

  Gigi and I are assigned to sleep in a closet.

  No, not a room so small that I’m likening it to a closet.

  A literal closet. (That’s actually pretty big, considering.)

  “There aren’t enough real rooms for everybody, unless you want to cram three people to a bed.” Gigi tosses her bag onto our air mattress. “Thankfully, this is a walk-in.”

  When we go to the backyard, it smells like summer. Hamburgers on the grill and coconut-scented suntan lotion. Gigi rushes up to her mishmash of boarding school friends lying on lounge chairs. At Castalia High, a jet-setting lifestyle usually means something like driving into San Francisco regularly to see plays and shop at H&M. For Gigi’s friends, jet-setting involves jets, which is how I’m guessing they got here from their assortment of home countries. I’m worried that they won’t even show me the time of day, but Gigi brings me into the cluster with ease. She’s not warm and fuzzy, but I’m starting to think that we’re actually friends.

  As the sun beats down and the afternoon wears on, more people emerge from the house to discuss our game plan for the day. (“Late nights, late starts,” says an English guy.)

  “Sloppy Tuna?” someone suggests.

  “Tell me there isn’t a real place called Sloppy Tuna,” I say to Gigi.

  “Oh, but there is, and it’s just as sloppy as you’d expect it to be. Where’s the Bosh heir?” Gigi asks, using her new favorite way to refer to Carter. She knows the mission of this journey and has promised to travel with me to wherever my love interest may be, even if it does have cheap lingerie hanging from the ceiling. (“I can’t take another week of you moping around the office about your missed connection,” she said.)

  “I’ve actually resisted contact. I didn’t even respond to his tweet asking where I was going!” I say triumphantly. I hope that pretending I’m uninterested will have its intended effect of making Carter incredibly interested.

  “I’m all for playing hard to get,” Gigi says, “but how will you know where to find him if you don’t contact him?”

  “You underestimate my stalking capabilities.”

  Twenty minutes ago Carter tweeted to complain that his nine-passenger taxi charged each individual fifteen dollars for the five-minute ride from his family’s house to a bar. (“Hamptons-cab cronyism at its worst!”) Then, a mere five minutes ago, Carter added video on his Snapchat Story of some guy walking around the back of some bar wearing a donkey mask, braying. (Could it be the bros from the train? Why is animal impersonation suddenly such a thing?) Corroborating Instagram evidence places both him and the donkey at someplace called Cecil’s Surf Shack, which according to the geotag locator map, isn’t too far away. If writing doesn’t work out, I’m considering joining the CIA.

  “You’re crazy. I love it.” Gigi jumps onto her lounge chair to get everyone’s attention. “Everyone, we’re going to Cecil’s. End of discussion.”

  * * *

  It turns out that Cecil’s Surf Shack is the place to be. Boarding school cliques and investment banking interns pile out of minivan taxis as if they were clown cars.

  I don’t have a game plan, other than to casually bump into Carter in an “Oh, you’re here? What a surprise!” kind of way. I feel nervous, but mostly excited. As if the past few weeks of e-mail flirting has been leading toward this moment. Gigi and I first inspect the front area, which is blasting throwbacks out of giant speakers. Lots of guys. No Carter.

  We move our search party to the actual party area out back.

  “Follow that donkey!” I squeal to Gigi, pointing to a familiar-looking guy in a mask walking donkey ears above the crowd.

  “And why would I do such a thing?” She crosses her arms, covering the “Don’t Worry” portion of her tank.

  But Donkey Head answers the question for me when he sits down with a group of lost hipsters at a picnic table.

  “Oh, I see.” A devilish smile cracks on Gigi’s lips. “Shall we?”

  And as we’re staring across the crowd of boarding school cliques talking in closed-off circles, Carter Bosh stares back. I’ve been spotted. And I’m not sad about it.

  “We definitely shall,” I respond. Fake the confidence until you feel it. Until you are it. I take slow, tempered breaths with each step through the crowd. I haven’t seen Carter since that one night in the gallery. In person, that is. But I feel like I have. I feel like I know him. His taste in literature, the fact that he calls it literature, his writing, and the fact that he thinks of me as a real writer. No question. No hesitation.

  Carter reveals a thin half smile as I come closer.

  “Harper, Harper, Harper,” he says smoothly. “We finally meet again.”

  That buzzing sensation that reverberated between our bodies at the gallery is still there, maybe even amplified.

  “Yeah, I decided to escape the city with a friend last minute,” I reply, trying to play it supercool. Like my being here is totally by chance, rather than very carefully orchestrated.

  We don’t say anything for a second. He’s gotten a haircut since the gallery. His hair is brushed back and shorter on the sides than in the middle. His signature glasses are the same. Carter breaks eye contact first. “Are you the friend?” he asks Gigi, who isn’t used to being ignored.

  “C’est moi. Just the friend. No name necessary.”

  Carter walks toward me.

  And then past me.

  “You should join me and my friends, No Name.” He puts his hand on the small of her back and leads her to his table. She doesn’t resist. Then, as if as an afterthought he adds, “You too, Harper. Nice shirt.�
��

  What. The. Hell.

  Have I been making up our flirtation? I get it in the sense that Gigi has a good seven inches on me and is show-stoppingly beautiful. But I really thought that things would be different. I’m used to playing sidekick. I want a new role.

  I can’t just stand a yard to the side of the table, analyzing if I’ve misread every interaction leading up to this moment, so I dejectedly drag my espadrilles and follow behind. Carter is already sitting next to Gigi, who gives me a little shrug (good) but then angles her body back in his direction (bad). I can’t tell if this is betrayal or just normal human behavior. Technically, Gigi isn’t doing anything wrong. What is she supposed to do? Ignore the guy? She’s just talking to him and taking his lead.

  I sit myself across from them and actively try not to notice the fact that his left pinkie finger is resting on the table, a hair away from touching Gigi’s right thumb.

  I feel another body plop down next to me, sandwiching me tightly on the bench. I’m barely looking, though. Still focusing on those fingers.

  “You look like you could use a Mango Tango,” the body next to me says with a muffled voice. “We got a ton extra.”

  I raise my head and can’t help but smile to see the guy in the donkey mask offering me what I’m told is Cecil’s signature drink.

  “Thanks.” I accept the cup and take a sip, hoping that the frozen drink will lower my body temperature and cool my burning cheeks. The Mango Tango tastes sweet, delicious, and totally nonalcoholic. Which probably means that it’s very alcoholic. Kristina and I learned this lesson on her faux family (plus Harper) cruise, when her cute, soon-to-be stepbrother, Erik, “accidentally” switched the “kids’ table” pitcher of virgin strawberry daiquiris with the adults’ spiked one. (“How else are we going to survive this?” he asked Kristina, nodding at their parents, who were getting way too handsy at the other table.) While I nervously took a few sips of the sweet concoction, terrified of getting caught, Kristina and Erik egged each other on, drinking glass after glass. Their parents didn’t notice the mistake until Kristina drunkenly started giggling so hard at Erik’s jokes that she fell off her chair and onto the floor. (Erik blamed the beverage mix-up on the waiter.)