Brand X

by Laurie Gwen Shapiro

  “We were waiting for you, Adrienne.”

  Mrs. Kleinman gave me a smile of approval and said, jubilantly, “Jordan Popkin of Manhattan, your essay won the National Council of Teachers of English Achievement Award in Writing. First prize. In the country.”

  My eyes scanned the room in disbelief. I held back my shriek. “Really?” I said almost silently.

  “Now, what was the essay on, exactly?” Perry said. I think he was proudly impassive.

  “Punk rock,” I sputtered. “How it was invented in America by kids who weren't at all financially deprived—”

  “And how England was facing societal devastation that made their youth anger more real to record buyers,” my ex-English teacher finished for me.

  I smiled at her. “You say that better than I can!”

  “You did just fine!” She laughed.

  The coolest kid in our high school looked at me intently with a touch of fascination. “That essay”—he paused for a second—”sounds really cool.”

  “You know, dear,” said Dr. D, “I am grateful for such a positive spotlight on our school. And it's not even to do with math and science.”

  “As I'm always saying, kids have different skill sets,” Mrs. Kleinman said.

  Dr. D ignored her. “Because of your work with my brother and your knack for English, I'm reconsidering what I said to you and your friends. I think we should open up internships to match talents.”

  Mrs. Kleinman fanned the air in disbelief. “Sensational, Delores! I have quite a few other kids in my classes who have genuine writing talent. And they go here for their parents, but they flounder in math or science. I'd love to get some of the outstanding kids in my current essay workshop apprenticing at one of the great literary magazines in Manhattan. We have a unique opportunity to use this city's fabulous resources as a learning tool.”

  “Look what you started,” Dr. D said to me, almost adoringly.

  It was so, so, so flattering.

  I was still coming to terms with the news when I emerged from the room. I was so dazed that I left my house keys in my locker.

  When I got home I buzzed and buzzed. Where was my father? I sat outside on my doorstep, and about fifteen minutes later he walked out of the elevator with three stuffed plastic grocery bags.

  “Forgot your keys?”

  “I had good reason.”

  “Aliens?”

  “Hurry up and open the door. This is big.”

  “Okay—” he said inside.

  “Do you remember that essay I wrote after reading your books about punk rock bands?”

  “Very much so. I was glad I had such influence over you.”

  “Good, because that very essay just won the National Council of Teachers of English Achievement Award in Writing, and I was called into my principal's office and the editor in chief of our school—”

  Dad's face lit up. “Is there money involved?”

  “Dad! Does money matter here? I think there is money coming, but I forgot to ask.”

  “Let's call your mother.”

  And we did.

  When Mom came home, she had a huge bouquet of red roses for me.

  I don't think I ever saw my mother so proud of me. All night, she called everyone she knew. Grandma Pearl first, of course.

  And then my sister at Princeton.

  Dad had looked up the amount on the Internet by then. “And she even earned herself five hundred dollars,” he said on the other phone extension.

  “Not quite a Princeton scholarship,” I said.

  “I wasn't comparing!” Dad cried guiltily.

  Sari interrupted: “My little sister rocks!”

  At school, it was almost impossible, but I kept my mouth shut about winning the big prize. I decided not to tell Jeremy or even Clara about it. In two days there was going to be a big story on me in the school paper. I really wanted the dramatic surprise of being a success. Clara had her moment with the Times. Would she be as jealous of me as I was about her Times internship? More, probably. Why did that feel kind of good?

  When I got to school after my internship two days later, the first person to say anything to me was Vaughan.

  “Hey, Jordie, I saw that article. So wild.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I knew it was coming, though.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “From Perry.”

  I'd forgotten that Vaughan and Perry were friends.

  Everyone in class apparently had seen the article too.

  Even Etchingham took a few seconds to clap his hands. “Well done, Miss Popkin.”

  Forget about the award. That was probably the biggest surprise of the year. Well, almost.

  Outside class Vaughan pulled me to the side. “So, are you going to the Halloween dance with anyone ?”

  “No….”

  One of our classmates was yapping on her purple cell phone and immediately stopped to listen. So Vaughan motioned for me to follow him a few feet closer to another classroom door.

  “Would you like to go with me?”

  The sensation of screaming for joy in my head was new. “With you?” I said almost inaudibly.

  “I know it's such a bourgeois thing, but, well, yeah, I thought it might be fun.”

  “I'd love to go with you,” I said, my voice back.

  He gave me one of his devastating grins. “I better get your phone number then, huh?”

  Jeremy jerked around from the stairwell when he saw me writing something on a paper for Vaughan. I don't think he could have heard us.

  He waited for me. “What was that about?” he asked.

  I stopped the hole with a little lie. I could see why Clara liked the Big Surprise. In another questionable flash decision, I decided I would surprise my friends again with more wild news, but this time at the Halloween dance. I'd experienced being the center of attention, and it felt good.

  “He wanted my e-mail. He's doing a walkathon.”

  “Oh.” It was a pretty pathetic thing for me to say, but despite what my mother thought in those days, I didn't usually fib, and Jeremy had no reason to think I was snowing him.

  Later on that day, I sat in my bed for hours thinking about reaching my goal. I think it was being taken seriously that won Vaughan over. Although I'm sure a peek at my elevated breasts didn't hurt the cause.

  Around seven o'clock, I heard the phone ring. Before I could pick it up, my mother did.

  “Can I tell her who is calling?” she said.

  Who would be calling me on my parents' line?

  “It's a gentleman named Vaughan,” she said, and I sprang up so fast that I could feel her curiosity. I could have sworn I gave Vaughan my cell number. I guess I had panicked so much when he asked me to the dance that I defaulted to the number I've known longest.

  Since Mom had handed me the cordless phone, I was able to move myself to my room.

  “So, you're home on a Friday night too,” Vaughan said.

  “My mother needed me tonight,” I replied.

  “Yeah, well, I just didn't make any arrangements.”

  He was so much more confident than me for admitting the truth. In actuality I just hadn't heard of any Friday parties going.

  “Do you want to catch a movie tonight? I mean, if you can get out of your obligations—”

  “Did you have one in mind?”

  “Do you like horror? Drama?”

  “I love movies in general.”

  “Me too.”

  What I really liked was romantic comedies, but as every girl knows, that is a dumb thing to say to a guy.

  “Why don't you meet me by the multiplex on Third Avenue and Eleventh Street and we'll see what we like.”

  “I'll give you a call back,” I said. And then I gave him my cell number too.

  After I called him to confirm that I could come, we agreed to meet in a Japanese teahouse called St. Alps, where he said “Japanese hipsters” hung out. He went on to say that there was a huge Japanese hip
ster scene in the area, and was most surprised that I had never heard of Angel's Share, a sake bar hidden above one of the stores on East Ninth Street. “You see everyone there. Sean Lennon. The Beasties.”

  “I don't think I can get in. I don't have a fake ID.”

  “How can you be a teen living in the city without a fake ID? Don't you go to nightclubs, rock concerts?”

  I felt mighty inadequate as I said, “I've been to a few all-ages shows at Irving Plaza.”

  “We have got to get you a fake ID. My friend Ben King makes amazing fake IDs. Every time I've been carded I've gotten in.”

  I was really surprised by this news, because even though I knew Ben was edgy, I didn't think he would risk jail time. “But the drinking age is twenty-one and you're sixteen. How can they not tell?”

  “King is a genius.”

  Vaughan and I never made it to the movie theater. We ordered two bubble teas with little pearls of tapioca floating in them. I ordered the almond blend and he got a mango one. It was a strange but nice-tasting beverage. I let a few tapioca balls roll on my tongue as I listened to the story of how he'd lost his official internship notebook and finally found it in his kid sister's toy box ripped to pieces—apparently Vaughan had a sister who was twelve years younger than him because his mother had remarried. “She's four and still gets off on putting things into holes and slats, but she already has a modeling contract.”

  It started drizzling, and then the rain bucketed down. It was easiest to sit and talk some more. I haven't had too many first dates—two to be exact—so I wasn't sure what to talk about.

  He told me about a camping trip he took with the Ultimate Frisbee team, which included Perry and another senior who I had never heard of.

  “You don't know Teddy? He's captain of the Ultimate Frisbee team? His father holds the ambassadorship to some European country—Belgium, I think.”

  Not only did I not know Teddy, but I was also sure none of my B-list friends knew about this camping trip. In some schools, the football gods reign. But at Manhattan Science, it was the academically excelling Ultimate Frisbee team members who were the exalted.

  That ultrapopular clique was so mysterious to me (and the majority of the student body) that I had no idea that Vaughan was even on the team. Didn't you have to be a cool senior to be asked? Vaughan quickly figured out that I had never been at a game, and proudly explained some of the rules to me. “Ultimate is a noncontact sport played by two seven-player teams. Come to the next match. We're playing Brooklyn Tech in Central Park next weekend.”

  That offer, counting today and the upcoming dance, was three dates.

  Eventually the Halloween dance came up.

  “Do you want to coordinate a costume?” he said.

  “Did you have something in mind?” Did he mean to make it obvious to the school that we were together? Was this nirvana or what?

  “No, you pick an idea. I really can't care less about the dance. I just wanted to hang out with you.”

  What followed was one of the lamest ideas I've ever had.

  “I could go as Charlotte from Charlotte's Web,” I said to Vaughan. “You could be Charlotte's spiderweb.”

  He stretched out the neck of his black-ribbed turtle-neck. “You want me to be a spiderweb?”

  The dumbness of my suggestion hit me when he repeated it back to me. “I guess since you're a boy you never read that story—”

  “Don't be so sexist. Of course I did. Everybody's read Charlotte's Web.”

  Vaughan, surprisingly, was suddenly fine with the suggestion. “I guess coming as a spiderweb is better than what my girlfriend at camp made us dress up as.”

  “What was that?”

  “Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy.”

  I smiled.

  “Katie,” he confided in hushed tones, “was so not happening. But we were only fourteen at the time.”

  Then he moved his chair around next to mine and said, “Hey, you, come here, give me a kiss.”

  At just the right moment, his tongue found mine, just like in the few R-rated movies Clara and I have snuck into. I was floating on cloud nine.

  “Let's get out of here,” he said, and we walked out into the rain.

  The night had turned gusty as well as rainy, and we gave up on forward motion. He stuck his hand out for a cab, and once we were inside asked me in front of the driver for the address of my building.

  My date not only kissed me in the cab, he kissed me in the lobby for a long time.

  This is the one time I was grateful that my parents could not afford a doorman building.

  After a long Monday morning in which Marcus kept going in and out of our room to make private calls, he twisted his fingers around his pencil as he addressed me. “Have you eaten, my friends? How about an indoor clambake?”

  “First you need a pail of clams,” I said jokingly.

  “Ah, come this way, my lady.”

  Lunch was, and I kid you not, a pail of clams. Marcus was talking all strange around me, very fast, something about how he had bought three dozen near him at the best fish store in the city. He'd set up a Bunsen burner in the conference room. He made our team wear straw hats like we were at a beach party as he cooked the clams in a pan coated with melted butter.

  I could tell from Paulette's face that she was suspicious as well. “Get your bad news out as quickly as possible,” Paulette said suddenly to Marcus.

  What bad news was this? Involving whom?

  Marcus coughed once, pulled the hat down over his eyes, and said softly, “Your Olympic mascot idea didn't get the go.”

  “What? You lost the account?” Was this my fault? I didn't mean to cause ruin for them.

  “No, no, calm down,” Marcus said. “They are going with our third idea.”

  “For The EggcupsV

  “Yes, indeed. The head of Burger Man wants a safer bet. Safer means a Disney movie. No one in the industry has vision anymore.”

  “Wow” was all I could say.

  “Except us,” he added nervously. “And that means you too.”

  Then they all looked at me like they would desperately need to coax happiness back into my life.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yes, of course. It was amazing they even considered it….”

  Paulette clucked her tongue. “You're such a mature young lady. Such composure.”

  “Well, I've had other good news since I've seen you last.”

  “Which is?” Paulette asked.

  “I actually won a national high school essay contest.”

  “Oh, sensational!” Paulette exclaimed.

  “Which one?” Marcus asked.

  “You know specific high school essay contests?” Joel asked drily.

  “A few,” he said.

  “The National Council of Teachers of English Achievement Award in Writing.”

  “I was hoping you wouldn't say that,” Marcus said, even as he slapped me on the shoulder to congratulate me. “I submitted an essay for that. There were a hundred finalists, and I didn't even get on that list.” He looked at me. “You did say you were a finalist, didn't you? My teacher said the chances of winning were infinitesimal.”

  “You're not a good listener, are you?” Paulette said to Marcus.

  “Um, I won,” I confirmed sheepishly.

  Marcus had a funny expression on his face for a second, and then he dropped to the ground. “Oh, Your Highness! I'm not worthy!”

  I grinned and then said in an affected royal voice, “I'm sorry you didn't win. What was your essay about?”

  “Barbecues,” Marcus said with a straight face.

  “Barbecues?” Paulette, Joel, and I asked in unison.

  “I still remember my opening line: 'An expert barbecuer knows how to tenderize anything.' “

  Everyone chuckled, but there was another faint sound of laughter coming from behind us.

  Brad was listening in again.

  “Help yourself to some clams,” Marcus said.


  “I will,” Brad said.

  “Go ahead and laugh, my friends,” Marcus said, “but my English teacher liked it. I'll tell you what won my year, some stupid shallow essay about the fall of the shah of Iran.”

  “Barbecuing being a much better essay topic,” Paulette said.

  “I know. I was hurt. I'm sure that's why my sister didn't tell me that my intern took the gold. She was shielding my fragile soul.”

  Paulette patted him on his bare knee. (It was forty degrees outside, but he was wearing beach shorts.)

  Joel rolled his eyes at Brad and then turned back to me. “Is there money involved?”

  I looked at him. “That's what my dad asked me. I asked him, and I'll ask you—is that what counts?”

  “College costs money.”

  “A token amount. A few hundred dollars.”

  “Stop picking on the wunderkind,” Marcus said.

  I smiled big and removed my straw hat. “But there's more,” I said dramatically as I laid it down on the table.

  “Where do you go from there?”

  “He asked me to the Halloween dance.”

  “Who?” Marcus said.

  “Who do you think?” I said with a theatrical toss of my head.

  “No!” Paulette yelled.

  “Am I missing something?” Marcus asked.

  “And you're our creative chief?” Joel laughed.

  “Operation Vaughan was a success.”

  Marcus let out a doglike yelp. “That too!”

  Paulette kissed me on my head. “Sweetie, I am so happy for you. Tell us everything. Eggcups bore us, as you know.”

  And I did, about the article in the paper, the dance, the surprise extra date. They were oohing and aahing at every detail.

  “Did you kiss?” Joel said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “What was it like?”

  “That I'm not telling.”

  Joel looked knowingly at Brad again, whose small face was much too orangey from the tanning salon he frequented across the street. “I so want to be back in high school,” Brad pined.

  Spending sixth period in precalculus as “ Vaughan's girl” was truly a weird, wonderful experience.

  Vaughan winked at me once. That's all. I took his cue to be chill about things and didn't gaze over at him.

  “We'll speak tonight,” he whispered softly at the end of class.