Wait, hadn’t Dr. Clover said the reserve reading wouldn’t earn them extra credit? “How do you know about that?” asked Natalya, proud but a little confused.
“I have my ways,” Dr. Clover answered, not smiling.
“The librarian,” Natalya realized, thinking out loud. “The librarian told you.”
“An interesting hypothesis,” Dr. Clover responded. Was it Natalya’s imagination or was there just the hint of a smile at the edge of Dr. Clover’s mouth? “But you haven’t answered my question.”
Natalya had read the articles Dr. Clover had put on reserve each week. “I really liked the one about how trends are viral. But the one about the politics of funding for science research and the one on the biosphere weren’t as interesting to me.” As she rated the articles for Dr. Clover, Natalya suddenly wondered if she’d liked the article about trends best because it was while she was photocopying it that Morgan had asked her to have lunch in order to invite her to the party.
“Yes, that author’s work is influential.” Dr. Clover nodded briefly. “Have you considered doing an experiment of your own?”
“I thought we’re doing a research paper, not an experiment.” Natalya remembered Sloane and Katrina talking about writing their reports on outer space. It wasn’t as if they could decide to go live on the International Space Station.
Or could they?
Dr. Clover waved her comment away. “I want you to engage in a current scientific debate, that’s all. And given your work in class and your willingness to go the extra mile in your reading…” She shrugged. “You have an impressive mind. I wouldn’t want you to feel constrained by secondary sources if it is primary research that is really appealing to you.” Without waiting for Natalya to respond, Dr. Clover made an abrupt pivot and headed to the back of the room. “Think about it, Natalya,” she called. And then she disappeared into her office.
Natalya didn’t walk to the cafeteria, she floated there. Dr. Clover had said she had an impressive mind. An impressive mind.
The lunchroom was crowded, but Jordan waved her over. “You survived!”
Natalya laughed at Jordan’s relief. “Come on. Clover’s not that bad.”
Catherine shook her head in disbelief. “Please, that woman is S-C-A-R-Y.”
Perry nodded in agreement. “I don’t want to throw around the word soulless lightly, but, you know…”
Now was probably not an ideal time for Natalya to announce that Dr. Clover was her favorite teacher in the world. Instead, she dropped her bag on an empty chair. “I’m going to get some food.”
“Not the mac and cheese,” Jordan reminded her. She held up her own sandwich. “Ham. It’s the other white meat.”
“Thanks.” Natalya nodded and headed toward the food area. She couldn’t believe it. The scariest teacher at Gainsford had complimented her mind. The most popular girl in the grade had e-mailed her an invitation to the party of the century. A group of totally nice girls saved her a seat at lunch and warned her away from the dangerous food offerings.
There was a spring in her step and a smile on her face as she crossed the cafeteria.
High school totally rocked.
FRIDAY NIGHT, JANE and Natalya arrived at Victoria’s within seconds of each other. When Jane saw Natalya waiting for the elevator, her fingers clutching the handle of a suitcase on wheels, she laughed.
“How much did you bring?” Jane had a slim garment bag slung over one shoulder and a tiny tote over the other.
“Pretty much everything in my closet,” Natalya confessed. “But I still don’t think I have anything good.”
“What’s your new friend’s name again?” Jane asked as the elevator door opened. “The one who’s so much cooler than we are?”
“Ha-ha.” Natalya stepped in next to Jane and watched the numbers ascending. “Her name’s Morgan Prewitt.”
When they’d gone three floors without Natalya’s speaking, Jane bumped her friend’s shoulder lightly with her own. “Are you okay?” she asked. “You seem a little tense.”
“I’m not tense,” said Natalya, spinning her head in Jane’s direction. “Why would you say I’m tense?”
Jane held her hands up as if to show there was no weapon in either. “Sor-ry,” she said quickly.
Natalya sighed and returned to studying the numbers above the door. “No, I’m sorry. I’m just…Maybe I am a little nervous.”
“Don’t be,” said Jane. “I mean, they obviously want to be friends with you or they wouldn’t have invited you.”
The door opened on Victoria’s floor. “Sure,” said Natalya, stepping out into the hallway. She took a deep breath. “I mean, yeah. Of course.” Pulling the suitcase behind her, she walked down to Victoria’s door just ahead of Jane and rang the bell.
A second later, as if she’d been standing with her hand on the knob, Victoria yanked open the door. “They’re gone!” she whispered excitedly. “My dad’s flight from Syracuse was delayed, and my mom said they weren’t going to go, but then Satan went totally crazy on her. They were on the phone, and he was screaming, We’ve got less than three weeks, Jennifer. We’ve got less than three weeks! So they went.”
“Oh my god.” Natalya’s eyes opened wide with fear. “I didn’t even consider that.”
Victoria nodded. “I know.” She reached out and pulled Jane and Natalya into the foyer. “Come on, guys! Let’s get gorgeous.”
• • •
Forty-five minutes later, the three stood in Victoria’s room, knee-deep in rejected outfits.
“It’s like an issue of Lucky threw up in here,” Jane observed, surveying the damage. She was wearing a strapless black dress and a pair of high heels, both of which her mom had lent her.
“Okay, what about this?” Natalya opened her arms for Jane and Victoria to see what she was wearing.
“That could work,” Victoria chirped. She was wearing what she’d worn to their One Room graduation: a pale green sundress with a wide, puffy skirt.
Jane looked Natalya up and down, then shook her head sadly. “Sorry.”
“No?” Natalya plucked at the shiny silver shirt she was wearing and spun around to show the slight flare of her short black skirt. “Doesn’t it say party of the century?”
Still shaking her head, Jane told her, “It says Old Navy.”
“That’s bad, right?” asked Natalya, dropping to the floor in defeat.
“Well, it’s better than Little Miss Muffet over here,” said Jane, gesturing with her shoulder to Victoria.
“Hey!” Victoria objected, “I like this dress.” But she was laughing.
“Guys,” Jane explained, throwing her arms wide, “we’re in high school. We’re going to a high school party. You can’t be all G-rated.” She pointed at the tight bodice of her dress. “You need to be PG-13. At a minimum.”
“This is a disaster,” Natalya moaned. She flipped open the top of her suitcase, but it was empty. Not that it mattered. The tight silvery top was the most PG-13 thing she owned.
“Totally,” agreed Victoria. She gnawed at her lower lip. “What are we going to do? I don’t have anything like that.” She indicated Jane’s dress.
“What about your mom?” asked Jane.
“I mean…” Victoria did a quick mental scan of her mother’s wardrobe. “She has some fancy stuff. But it’s not, you know, sexy.”
“This sucks!” Natalya wailed. She flopped onto Victoria’s bed. “This totally sucks!”
“Okay, okay.” Jane paced what little clear floor there was, her hands on her hips. “We need a plan. Option A, we don’t go.”
“No way!” Victoria said immediately.
Natalya rolled over and stared at her. So did Jane. “Listen to this one,” Jane said, raising her eyebrows at Natalya and pointing her thumb at Victoria. “First she’s all worried about getting caught; now suddenly she’s a party girl.”
“We’re going,” Victoria announced. “If I have to find a store that’s open at”—she checked
the time on her bedside clock—“nine thirty on a Friday night.” Seeing how late it was made her panic. “Oh my god, we don’t even have time to go shopping anywhere.”
Suddenly, Jane, who had stopped pacing, jerked her head up and snapped her fingers. “That’s it.”
Natalya sat up. “Shopping? First of all, probably nothing’s open. Plus, by the time we go shopping we’ll have to turn around and come home.”
“Not if we already are home,” Jane observed.
“Okay, you’re losing it,” said Victoria. She looked down at Natalya. “She’s lost it.”
“Au contraire,” Jane corrected. “I’ve found it.” She paused dramatically. “We’re going shopping in Emily’s closet.”
“Oh my god,” whispered Victoria. Her eyes doubled in size. “That could be very, very bad.”
“True,” acknowledged Jane. There was a pause as Victoria and Natalya considered Jane’s suggestion.
Finally, Victoria broke the silence. “Did I ever tell you guys what she called me a few weeks ago?”
“No,” said Natalya.
“What?” asked Jane.
“Betty Crocker.”
“She did not!” Natalya screeched.
“That bitch!” Jane agreed.
Victoria reached down and pulled Natalya to her feet. “Let’s go raid that bitch’s closet.”
They crossed the hallway to Emily’s room, but paused at the threshold.
“If you don’t want to do this, we don’t have to,” Natalya whispered.
Without answering her, Victoria reached over and flipped the switch; immediately the room exploded with light.
Even though Emily was away at college, her room still felt as though someone lived in it. There was a jewelry box on the wooden dresser, and half a dozen throw pillows were strewn on the futon in the corner. The bulletin board next to the window was covered with certificates and honors Emily had won with the debate team and photos of her with friends from the soccer team, at her high school graduation, and shaking hands with President Obama. The bookshelves were piled with paperbacks and old textbooks, jumbled against one another in no particular order. There was a Princeton pennant tacked to the wall above the light switch, and on the opposite wall hung two posters. One was a photograph of a beach in Alaska where people in boots and raincoats were wiping oil off baby birds. Underneath, the caption said: Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has. —Margaret Mead. The other poster showed a girl on a motorcycle racing along a desert road. This one read: Good girls go to heaven. Bad girls go everywhere.
The posters were Emily in a nutshell.
Victoria crossed the room and pulled open the closet door. “God, I can’t believe this is what she left behind.” The closet was stuffed with clothes. They seemed to burst off the racks. Above the girls’ heads, boxes of shoes were stacked almost to the ceiling.
“Seriously,” Jane agreed. “It’s like, how did she find the time to buy all these clothes and make dean’s list?”
“Did she bring anything to Princeton?” asked Natalya.
Victoria turned from the treasures of the closet to look at her friends. “We rented a van to get all her crap up there.”
“Can I just tell you something, darling?” Jane asked.
Victoria nodded.
“She is so not going to notice that we borrowed something.”
“WHAT FLOOR DOES Morgan live on?” asked Victoria. They were standing in front of number 65, a small apartment building, and Victoria’s bare shoulders glowed in the soft light of the old-fashioned gas lamp beside the bright red door. She was wearing an ice blue strapless dress that Emily had worn to Morningside’s spring formal her junior year.
Natalya shook her head. Emily’s black dress, which was slightly too big on her, came up high in the front but plunged so low in the back that she’d made Jane and Victoria watch her walk all around the apartment to make sure her underwear wasn’t showing. “She didn’t give me an apartment number,” Natalya said. “The invitation just said Sixty-five East Seventy-fourth.”
Jane shrugged away the anxiety in Natalya’s voice. “Don’t worry. The doorman will know.” There was a buzzer to the right of the front door, and Jane pressed it as Victoria rubbed her hands up and down her arms. “I’m freezing.”
“You look amazing, though,” said Natalya. “If Jack could see you now, he would freak out.”
Victoria looked away. “I don’t really like him anymore.”
“What?” asked Natalya, surprised.
“But he’s so cute!” objected Jane. “What happened?”
Just then, the front door swung open.
Jane, Natalya, and Victoria stepped inside, toying with their necklaces without noticing they were doing it. They looked around the lobby for a doorman, then, simultaneously, they all realized the same thing.
This wasn’t a lobby.
This wasn’t an apartment building.
This was a house.
All thoughts of Jack were immediately forgotten.
“Oh. My. God.” Victoria squeezed Natalya’s fingers, and Natalya squeezed Jane’s. They were standing in a large foyer with a white marble floor and an enormous winding staircase that slid up seemingly forever—in the shimmering light of hundreds of candles it was impossible to tell where it ended. Small recessed chambers lining the staircase held marble sculptures, and on the walls were gigantic oil paintings. Starting a few steps up, boys and girls were lounging on the stairs as if they were on sofas.
It was a good thing they had raided Emily’s closet. One of the girls sitting on the stairs was in a black dress, longer and tighter than the one Jane was wearing. Another had on what looked like pajamas, but they were pale bronze silk, nothing like the matching Old Navy pajamas Victoria and Jane had bought in June.
Still holding hands, Jane, Natalya, and Victoria began to climb the steps.
“Hey,” Jane greeted a group of three people—two guys talking to a thin girl in a tight white dress.
“Hey,” said one of the boys. He was wearing a pair of soft-looking beige pants, and he had a square, handsome jaw. As the girls passed the threesome, the guy said something about a regatta.
“What’s a regatta?” Victoria whispered in Jane’s ear.
“Maybe it’s a dessert,” Jane whispered back. They giggled as behind them someone said, “Cheese!” and there was a burst of light. A second later, a girl’s voice squealed. “Oh my god, I look like crap. Delete that!”
Natalya stopped at the top of the flight of stairs they had just climbed, an enormous landing with archways opening up onto three of the biggest rooms any of the girls had ever seen outside of a school or a museum. They could see the corner of a grand piano. One of the rooms had a fireplace in which a fire was roaring. There were dozens of kids around, but no one was yelling or even talking loudly. If they’d been told everyone else in the house was ten years older than they were, Natalya, Jane, and Victoria would have believed it.
“We are so not in Kansas anymore, darling,” Jane whispered into Natalya’s ear.
Before Natalya could answer, someone called, “Hey, Natalya.”
They all looked to the room straight ahead of them. From a white sofa as big as a king-size bed, Morgan and Katrina waved, and the girls made their way into what would have been a living room except that once they were in it, they could see it opened onto another enormous room that also looked like a living room. There was a gigantic chandelier dripping glass teardrops that reflected the blaze of the fire like diamonds. The ceiling seemed to hover dozens of feet above their heads.
“Hi!” Natalya called back to Morgan. Taking Jane and Victoria by the hand, she pulled them to the sofa where Morgan and Katrina were sitting.
“I’m Morgan.” Morgan stood up and embraced first Natalya, then Victoria, and then Jane. She was wearing a silver dress of a shimmery material that made Natalya think of the invisibility cloak in H
arry Potter. It was tight through the hips and then fell gently into a skirt. Her hair was up in a sloppy bun. “And this is Katrina.” Katrina, in a short, bright red dress, gave a little wave.
“It’s so nice to meet you,” said Morgan, linking her arm through Victoria’s. “I’m really glad you could come.”
Victoria smiled a slightly confused little smile.
Morgan opened her mouth to say something else, but Natalya interrupted her. “Where’s the bathroom?” she asked abruptly.
Morgan pointed toward the landing, and Natalya skittered in the direction of Morgan’s finger, not waiting to see if Jane or Victoria wanted to come.
NATALYA COULDN’T FIND the bathroom. There was a door under the stairs, but when she opened it she found herself looking at a wall of sporting equipment. Shutting the door, she turned around. She didn’t have to pee that badly. She should just go back to her friends. But then she turned around and saw Morgan, arm through Victoria’s, speaking seriously to her.
Was Morgan telling Victoria how her mother was obsessed with Andrew Harrison? Saying the only reason she’d wanted to be friends with Natalya was because of who Victoria’s dad was? The thought made Natalya’s hands grow damp. She was standing at the bottom of a second flight of stairs, and she climbed them, making her way over strangers’ outstretched legs and past people pushing their faces together and saying “Cheese!” into the bright flash of the camera. She recognized a couple of girls from school, but they were busy talking, and she didn’t stop to say hello.
Through an open door at the top of the stairs she saw a bathroom, and she shut and locked the door. It was enormous, as big as Natalya’s kitchen, and tiled from floor to ceiling in tiny, pale blue tiles, like a swimming pool. She leaned back against the cool wall, closed her eyes, and breathed deeply. This party had been a major mistake. She should never have lied to Victoria. Friends didn’t lie to friends. What she had to do was go downstairs, tell Victoria and Jane why Morgan had really invited her, and then they’d all go home.
The Darlings Are Forever Page 12
