Bittersweet Sixteen

by Carrie Karasyov

  Bittersweet Sixteen

  Carrie Karasyov & Jill Kargman

  Contents

  Chapter One

  There’s one thing you have to know. In the world…

  Chapter Two

  Suddenly, from the threshold of the lounge door came a…

  Chapter Three

  Our dining room is not your average scene with a…

  Chapter Four

  “Hid,” sighed Whitney when Sophie popped out of the dressing…

  Chapter Five

  That Saturday, after I finished jamming on all my homework,…

  Chapter Six

  Unlike my house, where you just have to call up—and…

  Chapter Seven

  I was totally astonished on Sunday when Whitney and Sophie…

  Chapter Eight

  Sophie opened the door and four very cute but very…

  Chapter Nine

  On Monday, after a seemingly endless day of classes (including…

  Chapter Ten

  When Whitney and Sophie got wind that Cynthia Tedesky had…

  Chapter Eleven

  When I got to the San Gennaro festival, I drank…

  Chapter Twelve

  Maybe it was the giant green formaldehyde frog splayed across…

  Chapter Thirteen

  After a Sunday split between studying and worrying about Sophie…

  Chapter Fourteen

  I had residual hurt feelings about my whole Laura-in-the-dust paranoia,…

  Chapter Fifteen

  Until tonight, I had believed the Titanic was the most…

  Chapter Sixteen

  After a heart-pounding weekend of managing to avoid repeated phone…

  Chapter Seventeen

  There is always a quiet before a storm, and the…

  Chapter Eighteen

  I never knew a red bouncy dodgeball could be a…

  Chapter Nineteen

  I was right not to get my hopes up. Okay,…

  Chapter Twenty

  The little boat I had been diplomatically sailing between the…

  Chapter Twenty-One

  It all went down at the Temple of Dendur, that…

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  It had been a quiet weekend. I mean, mute. Crickets.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Should I have been so harsh to Jake? No. It…

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  It’s almost scary how easy it is to be invisible.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  After being calmed down by my parents, who were distraught…

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  There wasn’t really a silver lining in sight for the…

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  After buying fabric, gathering grosgrain samples, and spending time sketching…

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  It turns out Jake had called again over Christmas break…

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  With the lilting sound track of Jake’s post-dinner evening carrying…

  Chapter Thirty

  Little by little the darkness subsided, and the gap was…

  Chapter Thirty-One

  The gilded, carved double doors of the Pierre ballroom burst…

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter One

  There’s one thing you have to know. In the world of private schools, penthouses on Park Avenue, chauffeur-driven Bentleys, and $100-a-plate family dinners at Le Cirque, one thing reigns supreme as the pinnacle of a tenth-grade girl’s social calendar in New York: the almighty Sweet Sixteen birthday extravaganza.

  It was the first day of school, sophomore year. That September anticipatory stress was coursing through every capillary of every student, and not because of the backbreaking textbooks already tucked into our Marc Jacobs bags for the nightly grind. It was because the competition for the best Sweet Sixteen soiree was about to start, and it was steep. I mean, way more cutthroat than the honor society plaque.

  Let me back up. My name is Laura Finnegan and I live in New York City. My school is not your average football ’n’ cheerleader, pom-pom, pep-rally, flag-waving, all-American Rydell High kind of place. No varsity letters, no football games, no prom king…no prom. See, my school, Tate Academy, is—gasp—all girls. I know, nightmare, right? Oh, and did I mention the uniform? Gray pleated skirt and white button-down shirt. Not that we really care; I mean, who are we trying to flirt with by our lockers? No one! Oh, and btw, we don’t even have lockers; we have carpeted lounges with individual closets opening onto the couch-filled room.

  See, Tate is the top private all-girls academy in New York, a bastion of education and refinement that has been enlightening the city’s finest young ladies for over two hundred years. Jackie O. personally saw to its landmark preservation in the eighties, when the ivy was eating away at the historic limestone facade. Located on the überposh Upper East Side, it boasts a student directory where most of the last names are the same as Fortune 500 companies.

  Except for moi—I don’t recall seeing Finnegan, my family’s name, on any publicly traded stocks, or published in Forbes, or published ever, for that matter. Okay, maybe in a scholarly quarterly journal or something, but certainly not in the glossy party pictures of Vogue or Town & Country, where I regularly spied my classmates’ moms in their couture designer duds.

  Luckily, I don’t really have to deal with all the over-the-top craziness of my own Sweet Sixteen. See, when I talk about these parties, I’m not talking about pizza and Pepsi at the local bowling alley. I mean black tie. I mean hotel ballrooms and flowers and lighting schemes and bands; events that cost more than a down payment for a small house in Ronkonkoma. But because my parents are NYU professors and barely have enough dough to have a Chuck E. Cheese fete, freaking about having the best bash isn’t even an option. Don’t get me wrong; it’s not like I’m on welfare or anything, but my parents can’t even pay twenty grand a year for tuition at Tate on their teacher’s salaries, so they obviously are not going to cough up half a mill on a rager that lasts a few hours. And although I admit that sometimes I like to imagine what sort of multimillion-dollar soiree I would host if I had the chance, honestly, seeing how everyone was wigging over hatching their gilded plans made it a little easier to be poor.

  So this autumn, when we all returned to school, I was prepared to ignore all the party-planning brouhaha and just dive into my textbooks and chalk up some A’s so I had a decent chance of a scholarship to an Ivy. The morning crunch of girls packed our class lounge, snapping cell phones shut, hanging up Gucci overcoats, and unpacking their Prada book bags into their closets. I said hi and greeted some of my classmates, asking breezily about their summers and hearing their litany of whirlwind adventures and world travel—one skied in the Alps, one attended summer classes at Le Rosée in Switzerland, one worked with “youths” in inner-city Chicago by day (then checked in to sleep at the Drake Hotel by night), and one hot-air ballooned through Scandinavia. Me, I worked at a camp in Maine teaching sewing in the crafts department and had fun but was psyched to come home and see my friends. Most of all, my best friend, Whitney.

  Whitney Blake is pretty much perfect. But not annoyingly perfect, just effortlessly flawless. Buttery blond and blue-eyed with Waspy facial architecture that Michelangelo would have used as a blueprint for his next statue, she was christened in Baby Dior, summered in Southampton, and sampled her first potato galette with caviar at age seven. I know, it sounds nuts, but it’s all she’s ever known, and she’s actually really down to earth. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be friends with her. We bonded from day one when she complimented my
French braid in second grade, and since I am an only child and she has an older brother she never sees, we became almost like sisters. She never made a big deal about my non-glam background; in fact, she loves my fam—and the fact that my house is normal, happy, and chill. If her parents are jet set, mine are sofa set: mellow, book reading, and always relaxed. Whitney and I just get each other the way old friends do; we complete each other’s thoughts and sentences; it’s like we have a code.

  We do have our differences; I can get stressed out (school-work, parents, life) and she’s usually very calm and confident. That’s because when you’ve pretty much been the queen bee for as long as anyone can remember, no one tries to dethrone you. The whole Sweet Sixteen thing? Not a thorn in Whit’s side—she and everyone else knew her January party would blow everyone else’s out of the Evian. She’s not cocky about it; she just knows. Like with guys. They woooorship her. I mean, putty in her manicured hands. They circle around her like sharks on the prowl for her size-four chum.

  Whit and I see each other every day and talk every night. Still, we always come to school and gather with our posse (our two other best friends, Kaitlin and Ava) to catch up on any other gossip that has gone down in the hours since we last convened. So today, after staking out our tenth-grade quarters and locating our new digs, Whit and I rendezvoused at ten of eight in the lounge.

  “He called me last night.”

  I turned around from my closet at Whitney’s elated morning report and got an excited jolt as if it were a hot guy calling me. I mean, I’ve had minor hookups and stuff, but with my un-Barbie looks (brown hair, brown eyes, kinda pale, and, oh yeah, small boobs) I am hardly schoolboy drool material. But I do love hearing Whit’s romantic stories. We always get psyched for each other about everything—guys, grades (guys for her, grades for me, alas, study-dork that I am), and we always mutually support. I’d been waiting to hear if she aced her latest game of flirt-o-rama. He had called.

  “He is so effing hot, Laura! I mean, like, en fuego. He’s thinking of becoming a male model. He’s been approached by, like, Abercrombie’s scouts.”

  After a summer of beachside clambakes, tennis lessons, and heavy petting with the Greystone Country Club lifeguard, Whit was on a high. But before she could launch into full recap, Kaitlin approached with Ava and they kissed each of us on both cheeks, the usual Euro-style greeting all the girls at Tate gave one another in the mornings.

  “Hey, girleens,” said Ava, running off. “I’ve gotta bolt and go get a new chick downstairs to tour her around. See you later.” Ava was the girl who was extracurricularing herself into college. She was a tour guide, worked in the admissions office, was on student council, had a column called “Cappuccinos and Conversation” in the Tate Gazette, and had just become secretary of the French Club (she was partial to Louis Vuitton). With her giant apple-green eyes and her chic little Frédéric Fekkai–snipped bob, she was the epitome of a Tate student, which is probably why she was on the cover of the Tate bulletin every quarter.

  “So, what’s this I overheard about your beach boy becoming a male model?” Kaitlin asked, rolling her eyes.

  “What’s wrong with that?” asked Whitney. “I mean, helloo! He’s stunning.”

  “Whatever.” Kaitlin shrugged, flipped her strawberry blond hair, and walked off to plop her Chanel quilted tote and cashmere sweater-coat in her closet. Whitney looked at me with a perfectly plucked raised brow.

  “Laura, what do you think? You always tell me the truth.” Whitney leaned in closer. “I mean, I love Kaitlin, but she always says these little barbed things and then walks off and won’t tell me what she’s really thinking.”

  “Whit, you are smart,” I started. “And I tend to think of male models as vapid himbo types who are really vain. I know he’s older and ripped and stuff, but come on, do you really want a guy who counts calories more than you? Lame-issimo.”

  “Oh my God, you are so right,” she said, fidgeting with her signet ring. “That would fully freak me out.” She twisted a lock of her hair. “Plus I still love our gang of guys at Bradley. Jake Watkins totally has a thing for me, I can sense it. Maybe I should go for him this year,” she said, pondering.

  “Jake Watkins?” I asked, surprised. I didn’t know Whitney was into Jake. I didn’t know she had really even noticed him. I mean, he was the hottest of the Bradley gang, but last year we had been hanging more with the St. Peter’s guys and had only recently decided to clean house and bring the Bradley boys into the forefront of our lives. I had known Jake from ballroom dancing school and always casually chatted with him at Youth Against Cancer dances. Although I knew he went to Southampton during the summer, I had no idea that he was on Whitney’s radar. “I just…I didn’t know you liked him.”

  “Oh yeah, we hung out in Southampton. He’s had a total growth spurt over the summer, and he literally makes Orlando Bloom look like a barfburger. I am totally going to lock him in this year. I mean, right? Don’t you think he’s better than the male model?” she asked, looking at me earnestly.

  “Totally. Smart is better. You have to remember,” I instructed, “male models are like Cadbury Cream Eggs: The outside shell is really sweet, but inside there’s nothing but goo.” Ah well. Another hottie had been claimed by Whit. Usually I didn’t even know the guys Whit liked, but Jake…

  Whitney burst out laughing. “I missed your special Laura lingo this summer,” she said, putting her arm around me. There is no one like you, suga.”

  That was true, at least in Whitney’s life. I think what bonded us together so well was that I am very matter-of-fact; I tell it like it is, no bull malarkey. And although Whitney did love the sycophants who were all too happy to kiss her Prada butt, I think she realized that she needed me, the one person who knew her inside and out and wouldn’t let her get away with anything. We made a good team. And now I guess she and Jake would make a good team also.

  Whitney looked around confidently and did a signature Whit Blake hair flip. “I feel it in my bones,” she said, beaming as she visually drank in her domain. “This year is gonna rock.”

  Chapter Two

  Suddenly, from the threshold of the lounge door came a very loud burst of unfamiliar laughter. It wasn’t accidental, spontaneous laughter but attention-getting laughter. Every perfectly groomed head in the room whipped around.

  “You’re so funny, Ava!” the offender boomed before realizing the lounge was pin-drop silent and her voice sounded like someone had put a microphone implant in her throat. She turned to Ava, stage-whispering audibly, “Geez, it’s like a mortuary in here. Doesn’t anyone talk?”

  Ava laughed. “It’s still early, sweetie. We haven’t had our lattes yet.”

  “Well, I hope that’s all it is, because this place is seeming pretty deadsville,” she sniffed.

  “Come on, let me show you your closet,” said Ava, leading the girl to the corner.

  I turned to Whitney and noticed her eyes digesting every detail about this girl with utter contempt. I looked back and a little five-alarm fire bell went off in my head: We were going to have a problem. She was the antithesis of Whitney. Her hair, although blond, was kind of messy and more of a brassy color, with exposed roots that seemed contrived rather than careless. She had very white teeth and very plump lips and flashed a million-dollar smile when she laughed—which was every five seconds. Although clad in the requisite Tate uniform, she had already boldly made it her own, tailoring her skirt way above the knees, pulling her white oxford ever so tight around her suspiciously ample boobs, and draping tons of Lance Armstrong cancer bracelets on her wrist. (Hey! Make a fashion statement and fight cancer!) Her shoes were the latest Louis Vuittons that had been photographed everywhere, and she wore giant diamond-and-gold studs that looked suspiciously like the ones J. Lo had worn to the Golden Globes. It was funny, because even though her eyes were slightly small for her face, and she wasn’t the thinnest person I had ever seen, she had something else: She was sexy. Yes, she definitely had that di
rty-girl thing going for her, which guys were going to lap up with a spoon. And you could tell in one swoop by the way she made her audacious entrance into our school that she was someone who loved to be the center of attention. Bring on the red flags right now.

  “Who the hell is that?” Whitney sneered, her voice oozing with disgust.

  “You haven’t met the new girl yet?” asked Kaitlin, hastily making her way over from her closet. She always liked to be in on everything. “I rode up with her in the ’vator. Cute, right?”

  “I haven’t met her,” said Whitney.

  “Me neither,” I muttered.

  “Oh my God, she’s, like, really cool. She’s from L.A. It’s so awesome, because we haven’t had a cool new girl in years,” said Kaitlin, smiling appraisingly in the girl’s direction.

  “What’s her name?” I asked.

  “Sophie Mitchum. Her dad is Marty Mitchum,” said Kaitlin knowingly.

  “Who the eff is that?” asked Whitney.

  “Duh!” said Kaitlin, exasperated. “He produced, like, every major movie you’ve seen for the past ten years. And Sophie knows soooo many celebs.” Kaitlin leaned in conspiratorially, her gold Elsa Peretti heart necklace dangling like a pendulum in my face. “She literally has Kirsten Dunst’s cell number and Chad Michael Murray’s pager.”

  Whitney rolled her eyes. “She already told you that? Talk about trying too hard.”

  “Oh, Whit! Be nice. I mean, if I get to meet Chad it will be beyond. Anyhoo, I promised her I’d show her where the science lab is, so later.”