“Oui,” Mom said, and Margot smiled. Now she measured me.
“Five foot six and three-quarters,” she said.
“Five foot seven!” She ignored my protest, wrote 5' 6 ¾" in the book.
“Thirty-four A,” she said, after measuring my chest.
“B!” I cried. Bitch is gonna cheat me out of a cup size?
But she wrote down 34A in her book.
“Waist twenty-eight, hips thirty-six, hair brown.” It all went in the book. I was starting to sweat, realizing that I was not a perfect size four, and we hadn’t even gotten to the really bad stuff, like my farmer’s tan and my scarred, muscular legs. Margot went to the back of the room and did her gazing thing, and Mom fretted beside her like a guy who had bet big on a bad horse and was now forced to watch the damn thing run.
“We can get her a push-up bra. And cutlets for the gowns,” Mom said.
“I’m not wearing those!” I said.
“And a spray tan—”
“Nope,” I said.
“A haircut and color and—”
“What’s wrong with my hair?” I asked, but Mom was ignoring me.
“We can get her eyebrows waxed and colored and maybe her lips dyed and—”
“Not gonna do it!” I cried out.
“This is how she is,” Mom said to Margot. “She’ll fight you the whole way and have something to say about everything.”
“Only seems fair,” I said. “I’m the one that has to wear this stuff so I think it’s pretty damn reasonable that I should have some say.”
“You see,” Mom said to Margot, who had been watching us intently.
“Lucy—I think there is a Starbucks in the mall,” she said. “Would you mind terribly going and getting me a small coffee?”
“Um, all right,” Mom said. “Just a coffee?”
“A venti macchiato with cream, light on the foam.”
Mom left to go get Margot’s coffee, and when she was gone Margot walked over and led me to a bench in the dressing area away from Julia, who made herself scarce by looking at dresses. She sat me down and held my hand.
“Megan, please listen to me now. Your mother has hired me, and is paying me, to style you impeccably, and I will do it. But the most beautiful dress in the world will look horrible if you are not comfortable in it. And yet there are a lot of parties and you must wear something, yes?”
“Yes,” I said.
“So please, you must trust me. I promise there is a middle of the road, a place where your mother is happy, but you are too.”
“Promise?” I asked. If I had to put myself in someone’s hands, better this French lunatic than my mother.
“I swear it,” Margot said, and looked as if she meant it. “You are full of fire, and we will find a way to bring that out.”
“Okeydokey,” I said, and Margot laughed.
“Now, what do you absolutely hate, the things you cannot wear?”
“Nothing pink,” I said. “And no bows.”
She held out her hand and we shook on it.
It turned out that Margot had a great eye and brought me loads of stuff over the next month that I would never have picked, in colors I would have shunned, but when I tried them on they looked way better than I expected. I relaxed a little, and she and Mom chatted the weekends away as the four of us stormed Neiman’s, Saks, Barneys, and Nordstrom in a blitzkrieg of eyeing and buying that soon approached the GNP of a modest European country. It was ultimately embarrassing, and exhausting.
“Did you like the lavender for the museum luncheon?” Mom asked a few weeks in, as I slumped in a chair. Margot and Julia and the salesgirl had gone off for the fortieth time that day.
“Mom, seriously, I’ll wear anything you want. Please just make it stop.” The room was littered with shoe boxes, and dresses filled several large metal racks.
“You must have some opinion.”
“My opinion is that you and Dad are spending way too much money on all this.”
“You girls don’t need to worry about that. Your grandmother left me a small trust specifically for your debut.”
“I don’t think a small trust is gonna suffice,” I replied, but I knew my grandmother would have been tickled that her girls were blowing her cash on hats, gowns, purses, and heels.
Just then Margot appeared with a crushing armload of cocktail dresses. The salesgirl followed with a stack of shoe boxes so high and so precarious I thought the Cat in the Hat had arrived.
“Lucy, wait till you see the Versace!” Margot crowed. She somehow found room for the dresses on a rack and started rifling through them.
Mom jumped up.
I slumped deeper in the chair.
“Please, Megan, can’t you skip this one game?” Mom begged me that evening. It was the night before Abby’s party.
“Mom, the party doesn’t even start till seven. That gives me three hours, which is forever for a low-maintenance girl like me.”
“But it’s the kickoff to the entire season,” Mom badgered. “You never—”
“Get a second chance to make a first impression. I know. Trust me, it’s going to be fine.”
The next afternoon I opened my locker and found my jersey, shorts, and socks neatly folded with my shin guards on the top shelf. But no cleats, no sports bra, and no underwear on the bottom. Instead, someone had left a Victoria’s Secret box.
I looked over my locker door and, sure enough, Cat and Lindsay and Mariah and Lachelle and half the others were watching, waiting for me to discover their latest “gift.” Since the tiara incident, I had been the victim of endless pranks. And they all knew today I was playing in an unusual doubleheader: starting striker against the Colorado State Rams in the afternoon, entitled fashionista at Abby’s party that evening. I tore off the ribbon with a flourish, opened the box, and held up a pink satin push-up bra.
“Cute,” I said, modeling it over my T-shirt to cheers and clapping.
“We knew you didn’t have one,” Cat said coyly.
“Actually, I do. In several colors.”
“No you don’t!” Cat gasped.
“I do. I’ve even got the chicken cutlet things you put inside. And tonight, I’m using them. That’s right, ladies, tonight, for the first time in my life, I’m gonna have”—I squeezed my boobs together and bent over—“cleavage!”
This brought on huge laughter, with some whistles thrown in.
“I’ll let you borrow them if you want,” I offered to Cat.
“Ewww, hand-me-down boobs—no thank you,” Cat said.
“Just rinse them off!”
“Okay, let’s stop talking about this now,” she said.
I smiled and realized that right now the other debs would already be deep into some serious primping—blowouts, massages, manicures. Mom and Julia were enjoying a spa day. I felt pretty certain I was the only deb strapping on shin guards right then.
Two hours later I bent over and adjusted those shin guards. We were now in the eighty-eighth minute, tied 3–3, and I had just earned a corner when, after a long run down the right side, a defender blocked my cross beyond the endline.
Strangely, though I’d run nonstop for an hour and a half, I wasn’t particularly tired. My legs felt strong and my mind clear. Jogging toward the edge of the goal area, I glanced back, saw Mariah would take the corner kick, and was suddenly overcome by a slurring of time and a powerful out-of-body sensation. This had happened before and I knew then, with absolute certainty, that I was just seconds from scoring.
Giving myself over to the flow, I stopped above the penalty area with my back to Mariah. I felt the tug on my jersey as the CSU girl marked me—she was now between me and the ball. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and started to follow a low, imperceptible-except-to-me homing signal that I knew, just knew, would end with the
ball in the net.
First, I threw the defender’s hand off my jersey and took two quick steps toward midfield. I felt rather than saw her confusion as she wondered why I was moving away from the goal. Then I whirled and started a hard run on the outside, toward the far post. She went with me, satisfied that she was still between me and the ball.
Stride for long stride we ran, then I planted hard and pivoted directly back toward Mariah. My defender tried to reverse course with me, but I picked her off with another girl and now I was free, running parallel to the goal mouth.
Mariah always hits the ball with a lot of pace, and I heard the thunk as she launched it, saw it rise into the air, curling over a defender’s head. I kept running as it continued to curve gently toward the goal.
The goaltender, to my left, sensed danger and angled forward. The ball was just too high for another inside defender, who jumped but missed, and I took one more step and now the goalie bolted forward, alarm bells ringing. Too late, I knew, but she was determined to try and clear it.
I leapt as high as I could and cranked my shoulder and hips, storing kinetic energy like a twisted rubber band. The ball soared toward me, and I hovered, waiting for it to arrive. When it did I gave it a clean, crisp flick with my head, turning my face directly toward the goal. I caught the blur of gold from the goalie’s jersey, saw the ball blast past her outstretched fist and into the white mesh, captured like an amberjack in a trawler’s net. Then, with more than a little shock, I saw the goalie’s fist. Having missed the ball entirely, her brick-sized clenched hand was now aimed at my very fragile and exposed face.
In that split second I remembered the day my high school physics teacher took us outside to demonstrate Newton’s second law: force equals mass times acceleration. We all put trash bags over our clothes and adjusted our goggles while he put a cantaloupe on a metal table beside two hammers. He first tapped the melon with a ball-peen hammer—nothing happened. Then he hit it harder and faster—more acceleration but still low mass—with the same hammer. It barely dented the surface. Then he took the sledgehammer—more mass—and he tapped the melon. It bulged but remained intact. Then we stood back, and with a mighty swing he crushed the cantaloupe with the sledgehammer, sending pulp and rind and juice across the assembled class.
I hadn’t thought of it since, but staring at that fist it came rushing back and I realized that if force did indeed equal mass times acceleration, this was going to hurt.
Seven
In Which Megan Finds the Best Defense Is a Good Offense
I SAT AT THE KITCHEN TABLE, A BAG OF FROZEN PEAS pressed against my face.
“Let me see,” Mom said.
I removed the bag.
“Oh dear God.”
Her hand went to her mouth and she squeezed out another tear. Not exactly sure why she was crying, as I was the one who’d taken the heavy overhand right, but whatever—it was something to see. My right eye, purple and swollen half-shut, provided the centerpiece, but the entire right side of my face was puffy and mottled blue. The right side of my upper lip was so large it looked like I’d had a haphazard and badly aimed collagen injection, and it was bisected by a nasty split that still oozed blood, despite two very painful butterfly stitches tacked on by the trainers.
I pressed the frozen peas back on my face, more as a kindness to Mom than for the healing effect. After two hours, whatever swelling could be prevented had been. Still, probably best not to remind her of that just now.
“Look on the bright side, Mom. I didn’t lose any teeth,” I said through the bag.
“No jokes right now, please.” Mom emptied her glass of chardonnay, and refilled it.
Who was joking? If she’d hit me an inch lower I would have been in dental surgery right now.
“I don’t know how I’m going to tell Camille,” she said, more to herself than me.
“Tell her what?”
“That you’re not going,” Mom replied.
“Who said I’m not going?” I asked. Honestly, it hadn’t actually occurred to me that a black eye and a probable concussion gave me a “Get Out of Debutante Jail” card for the evening, or I might not have been so quick to answer.
“Megan, you can’t go to this party like . . .” She trailed off.
“Yes?” I offered, baiting the trap.
“Well. Like that.”
“Why not?”
“What will people say?”
Typical. While I was sweating the little things like keeping all of my teeth and if it was safe to go to sleep, Mom was focused on the more important issues of my appearance and how it would affect her socially.
“Oh, I’m going,” I said, suddenly feeling a rush of energy. I chucked the peas in the garbage can. They landed with a satisfying thump. I stood and poured myself a glass of wine.
“Are you sure you feel well enough?”
“Never better,” I said, heading upstairs. “Besides, no sense in wasting the dress.” I took no small pleasure in the fact that I was now defying my mother by attending Abby’s party.
Once upstairs in my room, however, I had to reckon with reality. My eye throbbed, my jaw ached, my lip was on fire, and a clutch of drummers had taken up residence in my right temple. Stef, the head trainer, had given me eight hundred milligrams of Tylenol, and then, as I left, a single Vicodin—just in case. I reckoned if hours of dancing and revelry didn’t count as “just in case,” I didn’t know what would, so I washed the pill down with chardonnay. Alcohol and pain medication: that should liven things up a bit.
In the large upstairs bathroom Julia sat in a director’s chair facing the mirror. The theme of Abby’s party was “Hollywood’s Golden Age,” and Margot had channeled young Grace Kelly with simple, dramatic makeup that brought out Julia’s classic features.
She let loose a single giant curler from Julia’s hair, and it fell to one side in a beautiful curve. She brushed it vigorously until it glowed like warm honey, then cupped it with her hand and shellacked it.
“You look fantastic,” I told Julia.
“So do you,” she replied, eyeing me in the mirror.
“Right?” I said. We all laughed.
“C’est le pied,” Margot said to Julia, and then turned to me. To her credit she didn’t flinch as she held out the chair. I sat. We looked at each other in the mirror.
I took a healthy swallow of wine and set the glass on the counter.
“Do what you can.”
The four of us sat in the living room, dressed and ready, in stony silence. Mom’s anger at my condition, and my decision to go anyway, hung palpably in the air.
The doorbell rang.
“I’ll get it,” I said, anxious to escape. I strolled in the general direction of the front door. For some reason, I couldn’t feel my feet.
On the other side of the door would be my date, Hunter Carmichael. We had spoken a couple of times in the past week, but I had not met him in person. He was an attorney, apparently, in a downtown firm. I approached the door with a whiff of anticipation—after all, I wasn’t against the idea of meeting someone, and on the phone he sounded gracious, if a bit nervous. Who wouldn’t be?
I turned the doorknob and got my first look at Hunter Carmichael, dressed in a vintage black tuxedo, his hair slicked down with motor oil, boxed corsage in hand and smiling like a beaver. I instantly concluded that, while well-scrubbed and earnest, he wasn’t my type—not by a country mile.
“Megan?” he asked, and of course he also had his first look at me. I had turned my face to the good side, just a bit, to delay the shock.
“You must be Hunter.”
“So nice to . . . finally meet you.”
“Thanks.”
“You look . . .”
“I know,” I said, content to leave it at that.
He tried not to stare, but that proved impossible. Sad too,
because from the one side I looked good. Margot had achieved more than I thought possible, and in my lavender dress, with my hair back in an elegant chignon, I was tolerably pretty—except for the train-wreck part.
Mom and Dad stood to greet Hunter, who glanced back at me one last time. I smiled sweetly.
“This is my mother, Lucy, my dad, Angus, and my sister, Julia. Mom, Dad, Julia—Hunter Carmichael.”
“Hunter,” Dad said.
“Sir.” They shook hands.
“So pleased to meet you,” Mom said, offering her hand.
“It’s an honor to meet you, Mrs. McKnight,” Hunter purred. “And what a lovely dress.” He was laying it on thick as peat moss. Julia and I exchanged looks behind his back, as if to say, “Oh well.”
“Why thank you, Hunter,” Mom said, blushing slightly.
“Very nice to meet you too, Julia,” he said, turning.
He offered me the box he still held.
“I brought this for you.”
“How thoughtful,” I said.
“May I?” he asked.
“Of course.” He opened the box and his fingers shook slightly as he tied a gorgeous violet orchid on my wrist.
“It’s lovely, Hunter. And the color goes perfectly with my face,” I said, without a trace of irony. Hunter tried to laugh, but it came out more like a late-stage tubercular cough.
“Hunter, would you care for a glass of wine, or . . . a drink?” Mom asked.
“No thank you.” He looked at me. “We should probably be going.”
“We should.”
Julia’s date, Simon Lucas, arrived as we were leaving. Simon was Abby’s older brother, and we had spent family vacations with him and Abby since we were all kids. Simon was the perfect escort—he was fun and funny, and as they were cousins, there was exactly zero romantic pressure.
The Season Page 6
