Little Black Dresses, Little White Lies
Page 16
Donkey Mask pulls me out of the memory Kristina asked me to forget—“We don’t talk about them again, or think about them even,” she told me after her dad’s disastrous wedding; her bonding with Erik was short-lived.
“Wait, do I know you?” Donkey Mask asks. “I think I recognize you from somewhere.”
“I’m not sure. What with the . . .” I motion toward his hidden face.
“Whoops, forgot I was wearing that.” He fumbles with the full-head mask to reveal an oval face with wide-set eyes that I don’t recognize. “Ta-da!”
I shake my head. Definitely don’t know him.
“No? Are you a writer, too? Maybe I recognize you from your Twitter picture.”
Wait a second. Stop yourself from shaking your head again, Harper. Sit up tall and drink from your Mango Tango proudly as you announce that you are, in fact, a writer.
“I’m the summer dating blogger at Shift!”
“That’s it! You’re pretty funny. Harper something?”
Oh my God. Donkey Head knows who I am. I want to burst out a “Thank you!” but realize that that isn’t a sensical response. Instead I nod excitedly and take another sip of Mango Tango. Carter be damned. I should focus less on being noticed by boys (even though I suppose that Donkey Head does qualify in that department) and more about getting recognized as a writer.
“I’m Davie. I intern at deviant with Bosh.” He gives a little wave. “Are you staying at his place, too?”
Davie tells me that Carter—who is either harmlessly talking or shamelessly flirting with Gigi right now—has invited some deviant interns and other journalism friends to camp out at his dad’s compound for the weekend. Get out of the city. Breathe normal air. Buy groceries you don’t have to carry up five flights of stairs, cook meals in an actual rather than dollhouse-size kitchen, and eat the food in rooms big enough to hold more than five people at a time. (Not exactly my experience of living in Manhattan with Aunt Vee, but I get it.)
“I’ve realized that city people only go to the Hamptons so that they can have the basic experience of being in a house,” Davie says. “I could have done this at home in Topeka!”
“But in Topeka, can you casually go into a bar pretending that you’re Nick Bottom?” I ask, pointing at the donkey mask.
Most of the people at Castalia High would give me a confused look in response to my reference to Nick Bottom’s head turning into a donkey’s head in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, even though we all had to read the play sophomore year. But my nerdy Shakespeare joke isn’t lost on Davie. Maybe I’m finding my people.
“This donkey head wasn’t forced on me by an elf, though. My boss made me wear it.”
“Um, why?”
Davie shrugs. “He thought it would be funny to make one of the interns wear it for an entire weekend and then write an article about what it felt like to be an ass.”
“Again . . . why?”
“Because my boss loves torturing me?”
“Davie’s the deviant whipping boy,” Carter interjects. His pinkie is no longer close to Gigi’s. “His beat is shit.”
“I’m sure it’s not that bad,” I say sympathetically, still looking at Davie, whose mouth is now drooping grimly. Two can play at this game, Carter.
“No,” Davie admits. “It is. I write about literal shit.”
“Come again?”
“Human feces,” Carter boasts as Davie squirms.
My face scrunches up as Davie describes what writing deviant’s “Turd of the Day” column entails. Readers tweet in tips about where there’s stray poop around Manhattan, and Davie is tasked with going out, photographing it, confirming that it is indeed human, and then waxing poetically about its state.
“An editor joked about making interns do it last summer whenever we messed something up as, like, a fake punishment. As a joke,” Carter explains. “But then, this year, he realized that a ‘Turd of the Day’ column could actually be hilarious. Maybe get a cult following. I’m just glad I don’t have to do it. No offense, Davie.”
“That’s disgusting,” Gigi says, frowning as she takes a Mango Tango of her own. I can’t tell if she’s talking about the fact that Carter’s attention has shifted or the fact that Davie lives a life full of real-life poop emojis.
“Tell me about it.” Dejectedly, Davie puts his donkey mask back on. “I should probably go back out there.”
Davie gets up to mingle. Gigi and I are introduced to the rest of the table, also made up of deviant interns. I’m acutely aware of the fact that Gigi and I are the youngest in the group, so when we reach the point in the small talk when someone asks me where I go to school, I just say “Castalia.” It’s not my fault if they think I’m referring to Cal State Castalia instead of Castalia High.
“Gigi, you should meet Luanne. She also covers the arts, probably less pop culture news than Shift has you do, but still.” Carter lets the sentence taper off before seamlessly beginning a new one, directed at me: “And, Harper, it looks like you could use a refill. Come with me to the bar?”
“Sure.” I slam down my glass, which has a small melted pool of syrupy mango juice at the bottom, and get up quickly. Making sure to avoid eye contact. Because once our eyes catch, I don’t know if I’ll be able to pull myself out. My heartbeat quickens and I worry that I’m about to go into babbling overdrive. Because I don’t really know what it will be like to be alone with Carter. The only time it happened was brief and mostly consisted of me grabbing on to his face and kissing it. Tempting as that is—as his hand now touches the small of my back when we go to the bar, making every nerve ending of mine explode like fireworks over the East River—I think that I should probably hold off. For now. And actually talk. You know, talk outside of all the hypothetical conversations we’ve had in my head, outside of my very carefully crafted e-mails that have been analyzed for everything from extraneous punctuation (Is an exclamation point too obvious?) to appropriate sign-offs (“From Harper”? “Yours, H”? No name at all?)
“So, do you like the Hamptons?” I feel the jolt when Carter breaks the ice.
“It’s . . .” I search for a good way to capture the essence of this cool new setting, but instead land on the safe answer. “Nice.”
“Just nice?” He stops walking and turns me toward him. “Come on, something tells me there’s more in that mean little mind of yours.”
“I’m not mean.”
“I’ve read your blogs. Why so defensive? It’s not a bad thing.” The green in his eyes glints. “It’s one of the reasons why I like you. Who wants vanilla? What do you really think?”
What I really think is that the Hamptons are like the most luxurious parts of Manhattan without any of its grit. No hot dog carts or trash smell fermenting in the summer heat. And it feels exhilarating. Like everyone is at an exclusive playground. And once you have been invited, you’re taken in with open arms. Because while I was a little nervous when I was riding the train into town, so far everyone has been extremely nice.
But that’s not what Carter wants to hear. Like McKayla, he wants the edge. He wants the flash judgments I write in my notebook, which are just part of me but not the whole me. But maybe that’s a part I should be embracing more and more.
“Let’s put it this way,” I say, close to his ear, “when I walked in, I saw a guy wearing a Reagan-Bush ’80 bro tank walk by at the exact second the song ‘Gold Digger’ started blasting from the speakers. If a bomb went off right now, Goldman Sachs would lose an entire generation of its junior management.”
It’s a mean observation I’d write in my notebook but not necessarily say out loud. Carter claps his hands.
“And there it is. That’s why I can’t stop thinking about you.”
You know the thing that I said about getting stuck in his eyes? Well, I’m drowning in them.
Don’t lose your cool, Harper. He says he likes the edge. Be difficult.
“I mean, you stopped thinking of me for a little. Earlier with Gigi. The hand on
the back and whatnot. The flirting.”
“Come on.” He stretches out the word like it’s a piece of saltwater toffee. “You know that wasn’t me flirting with your friend.”
“Then what was it?”
“That was me flirting with you.” Carter inches closer. “The hot and cold and hard to get. Kissing me, then canceling on me. Ignoring my tweet. You play the game, I play the game.”
The way he says it makes it sound like poetry. Our moment is almost wrecked by a loud group of people who bump into us as they pass, but Carter grabs my elbow as I stumble and doesn’t let go. Once I’m stabilized, his pointer finger traces a slow line up my bare arm. Then, in a swift movement, he scoops the part where my scalp curves up from the base of my neck in his hands and pulls me in.
The tension immediately melts away and we are no longer in this crowded bar with sticky floors. It’s just us. Our lips. Our breath.
Carter’s kisses are confident. Purposeful. He switches up the tempo and dynamics like he’s playing an instrument. Fast and slow. Hard and soft. And I, the girl who’s always thinking, just get to turn off my brain and be.
Just as his finger traveled up my arm, Carter’s lips make their way to my earlobe, a body part that until this moment I didn’t realize served any purpose except as the canvas for earrings, and bites it. Light enough so that it doesn’t hurt, but hard enough so that it wakes something up inside of me.
“I told you I liked biting,” he whispers.
I don’t respond. Words aren’t working for me right now. Coherency is totally out of the question.
“You should come back to my place.” He gives my ear another nip. “See what else I like.”
And suddenly I’m thinking again.
Does he mean sex? Sunny would say he’s talking about sex. And Sunny would know.
If anything, my virginity has been situational rather than purposeful. I’m not opposed to . . . I’m not saving myself for . . . but . . . I don’t know how to finish that sentence. That thought. So instead my mind hopscotches to easier, more logistical questions. Would Gigi come to his house, too? Would we both have to spend the night?
“I’m here with my friend,” I reply. There. Not an answer, exactly. Not a yes or no. Just the simple statement of a fact.
“A ton of people are staying at the house. Two more won’t be a problem.”
“I don’t know.”
He kisses the side of my neck.
“Okay,” I say. “Maybe. Let’s go back to the group. I’ll talk to Gigi and . . . see?”
“Of course. No pressure.” He gives my hand a squeeze and I feel lighter again. “But I know you want to.”
We come back to the table with armfuls of Mango Tangos, giving way too many details about how long the wait was. Gigi, who has a few empty glasses in front of her already, raises an eyebrow and informs me that my lipstick is smeared. I squeeze in next to her on the picnic table’s bench. I want to pull her to the bathroom and gush about what just happened, but it turns out that Cecil’s makes all the prepsters use Porta Potties lined up outside, and there’s no way that Gigi would want to be dragged there. Besides, she has adopted Sunny’s Resting Bitch Face since I left. I just apologize for having disappeared for so long. She rolls her eyes.
Now that we have a new round of drinks, a girl with short hair and a septum piercing suggests we play a game. Specifically, Never Have I Ever.
I try not to look as relieved as I am when Gigi protests loudly, declaring the game “gauche.”
I very purposely haven’t played Never Have I Ever since Trisha Atwood’s slumber party in the eighth grade. I can still remember how I felt when I had to keep all ten of my fingers fanned out for the entire game while my friends proudly dropped theirs one by one, passionately debating what differentiated a make-out from a plain old kiss. (“It’s a make-out if your lips touch for more than five seconds,” Kristina explained with certainty.)
But Gigi’s request to nix Never Have I Ever goes ignored.
“I haven’t played that since I was a child,” I say.
“It’s so much better older,” Carter says. “There’s so much more juicy shit you can call people out on.”
Or not. Considering that Never Have I Ever done half the things I’ve claimed to have done as Shift’s teen dating blogger, this is so not the game I want to be playing right now. But it starts anyway.
Never have I ever smoked pot. (I have never tried Bobby McKittrick or anyone else’s pot. But I’m in the minority. Everyone except me, Gigi, and the girl who said it puts down their first fingers.)
Never have I ever had sex on the beach. (I decide to put my finger down for that one. Even though I’ve never had sex. Even though Castalia is absolutely nowhere near the beach.)
Never have I ever plagiarized.
“Now that’s the only thing I’ll judge people for doing in this game,” Carter says. The interns around him nod their heads solemnly, myself included. Passing off someone’s work as your own is a cardinal sin in the journalism world. Who would do that?
Uh, possibly someone who “borrowed” her best friend’s life to get an internship. Possibly me when I misappropriated Kristina’s hookup story in my application for Shift.
I reassure myself that that wasn’t plagiarism. That was fictional redistribution. And I wrote every single word. But why didn’t I pick some other damned story to redistribute?
Good job, Harper. It wasn’t plagiarism. It was worse.
But you don’t get to mull things over for long in Never Have I Ever. Because the game continues.
Never have I ever been in love. Never have I ever hooked up with two people in one night . . . two people in twelve hours . . . two people in two hours.
But when it gets to be Gigi’s turn, she gets a weird look on her face and abruptly stands up and announces that she has to pee.
“Me too,” I say. “Gigi, wait up.”
Gigi doesn’t respond when I call after her, and it takes a bit for me to catch up. As was demonstrated in Penn Station, we have different tactics and levels of success when it comes to cutting through crowds. When there’s finally a clearing, I run around Gigi to physically stand in the middle of her path. I expect to be met with a typically Gigi surly mood. I expect an annoyed eye roll for whatever indiscernible reason. But what I don’t expect is the running eye makeup.
“Whoa. Are you crying?” Clearly I’m not winning a prize tonight for sensitivity or observational skills. “What just happened?”
Gigi covers her face with the palms of her hands. Her body stiffens when I touch her shoulder and ask, in my very gentlest voice, “What’s up?”
“You wouldn’t understand.” She wipes under her eye.
“Try me.”
“No, really you wouldn’t. It’s stupid. The game—it was my turn at the game and I just blanked.”
This is about a silly game? I don’t understand, but Gigi, whom I’ve never seen as anything other than composed, even when she’s seething, seems genuinely upset. So I pretend. “It’s not a big deal,” I tell her. “If you can’t think of something you haven’t done, you can just say something stupid. Like never have I ever been to Canada.”
“I’ve been to Canada.”
“Of course. Um, Uruguay?”
“I’ve been to Uruguay. Travel is the only kind of thing I have done. The other stuff . . . I haven’t done any of the other stuff. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
Oh.
Gigi cuts ahead of the Porta Potty line to grab toilet paper to blow her nose and then returns. “This is so humiliating. I go to boarding school in Europe for God’s sake! We’re supposed to be sexually liberated.”
“But didn’t you put your finger down for sex on the beach?”
“Yeah, because I’m a fraud. I’m a total liar,” Gigi chokes through her tears.
“You’re not a liar; it’s just a tiny white lie. We all tell them,” I assure her, although maybe I’m reassuring myself a little bit, too.
I want to tell her everything.
In that moment, I want to tell her that really, I’m a fraud, too. Nothing is easy. I’m pretending to be someone I’m not, and for some bizarre reason, people believe me. I’m letting them believe me.
I want to bond with her over inexperience and perception, but I can’t.
Gigi is a completely different person from who I thought she was. But in a good way. And I suddenly feel protective of her.
“Look,” I say, “why don’t we Uber back to the house, make some of the popcorn I saw in the kitchen, go to our closet, and binge watch Gossip Girl on Netflix?”
Gigi gives a small sniffle and asks, “But what about Carter? I can’t sabotage you twice in one night.”
“Don’t worry”—I sweep my hands dramatically over her torso—“Beyoncé.”
“That makes zero sense.”
“Just shut up and let’s go back,” I say.
Gigi sniffles again. “Okay. But only if you’re sure you don’t mind.”
On my way back to the table to grab our bags, break the news to Carter (I hope he meant it when he said he liked the chase), and request an Uber, I see a new text . . . make that texts . . . from Kristina.
Kristina:
I’ve texted you a million times.
Kristina:
Call me?
Harper:
Later. Friend’s having a crisis.
Kristina:
Oh.
Kristina:
Ok I guess . . .
She obviously wants me to respond, but I just can’t. I haven’t been the best about texting her back, I know it, but I can’t turn my back on a crying Gigi right now.
“Our Uber will be here in five.” I throw Gigi her purse, and she quickly takes out her compact mirror to assess the damage.