Luckiest Girl Alive

by Jessica Knoll

  Moni got up to go to the bathroom after we ordered.

  “What are you thinking for the dresses?” Nell shook her frosty hair out of a knot. The bartender stared.

  “You looked great in the rose water,” I said. “But your nipples are kind of a problem.”

  “What would Mr. and Mrs. Harrison say?” Nell placed her hand over her heart, a scandalized Victorian in a too-tight corset. My future in-laws amuse Nell to no end, what with their misleadingly modest home in Rye, New York, their summer estate on Nantucket, his bow ties and her chic white bob, held away from her face with a velvet headband. I wouldn’t have blamed them for turning up their classic Nordic noses at me. But Mrs. Harrison had always wanted a daughter and I still can’t believe that she’s satisfied with the likes of me.

  “I don’t think Mrs. Harrison has ever seen her own nipples,” I said. “It would probably be a good anatomy lesson for her.”

  Nell held up an invisible monocle to her left eye and squinted. “So these are what you call areolas, dear?” she said, her voice wobbly as elderly tourists standing on the subway. It was a stereotypical old lady impersonation, and she sounded nothing like Mrs. Harrison. I could picture the look on my future MIL’s face if she could hear us, roasting her over the cayenne pepper in our fourteen-dollar Bloody Marys. She wouldn’t get mad—Mrs. Harrison never gets mad. Instead her fine eyebrows would pinch, the skin there collapsing in a way Nell’s cannot, her lips parting in a soft “Oh.”

  She had been so patient the first time Mom visited the Harrison home, prowling the handsomely decorated rooms, turning over candlesticks and other totems to decipher their origins (“Scully & Scully? Is that a store in New York?” “Mom, stop.”). Most important, Mr. and Mrs. Harrison were contributing 60 percent to the wedding. Thirty percent was coming from Luke and me (okay, Luke), and the remaining 10 percent from my parents, despite my protestations that they didn’t have to, despite the fact the check would never clear even though they insisted. As the main investors, the Harrisons were fully within their rights to veto my fabulously hipster band and dominate the guest list: more sixty-year-old women in headbands, fewer twenty-eight-year-olds in skanky party dresses. But Mrs. Harrison had only held up her never-manicured hands and told me this is your wedding, Ani, and you should plan it as you see fit. When the documentary people first reached out to me, I’d gone to her, fear lodged in some secret pocket in my throat, like I’d swallowed a bulging time-release Adderall with no water. My voice so husky I was embarrassed by it, I’d told her how they were digging into the incident at Bradley, that they wanted to portray the untold story, the real story, the one the media had gotten wrong fourteen years ago. It would be worse if I didn’t agree to be a part of it, I reasoned, they could paint me any way they wanted and at least if I had the opportunity to speak for myself I could—“Ani,” she’d stopped me, her expression bewildered, “of course you need to do it. I think this is a very important thing for you to do.” God, I am a shit.

  Nell acknowledged the shine in my eyes by diverting the conversation. “So midnight? I liked the midnight.”

  “Me too.” I twisted my napkin into a villainous mustache, the ends pointy and hard, curled into a wicked smile.

  “Stop worrying about the new film date,” Nell said, her read on me as sharp and as worrisome as Luke’s is not.

  I came across Nell like you would a Robert Mapplethorpe at a street art fair, gobsmacked that something so valuable would be lumped in with a bunch of other crap like that. She’d been slumped against the bathroom wall in Butterfields, a dorm we later took to calling Butterfingers, for the lacrosse team residents who manhandled girls made Gumby-legged by Popov vodka. Even with her mouth hanging open, her tongue dry and pebbled white from all the medically sanctioned stimulants, there was no question that she had a movie star face.

  “Hey,” I said, my hand on her tanning-bed-tan shoulder—easy to crawl into those fluorescent coffins when you’re so young you think twenty-four sounds ancient—and I shook her until she opened her eyes and I saw that, of course, they were as brilliant blue as the sky on the cover of the Wesleyan brochure mailed to prospective students.

  “My bag,” Nell kept wailing, even as I pulled her to her feet, wrapped my arm around her dagger ribs, and dragged her back to my room. I had to throw her into the brush twice, leaping on top of her as Officer Stan from campus security ambled by in a golf cart, out for freshman blood with an alcohol content of .001 or more.

  I woke up the next morning to find Nell scrambling about on my floor, digging under my futon, her frustration sounding in quiet grunts.

  “I tried to find your bag!” I said, defensively.

  She looked up at me, panic freezing her on all fours. “Who are you?”

  We never found her bag, but eventually I figured out why it was so goddamn important to her. The bottle of pills—to help her sleep, to help her not eat, to help her stay up all night studying in the library—clanking together like a baby’s rattle as she walked. It’s the only thing we don’t really talk about.

  Nell reached across the table and her ugly fingers pushed into the crevices of mine. She squeezed, and I felt the tiny bug between our hands; hers stained blue when she drew it back. I put the discipline on my tongue. Took a gulp of my bloody, swallowed, and waited. Even if this documentary did nothing to clear my old name, even if no one believed me, the least I could do was take away their ammo: She’s disgusting, nothing but a fat, bitter slam pig. The pill left a residue on my tongue that tasted the way money smells—musky, powdery—and I willed myself to believe that redemption was the only possibility.

  CHAPTER 4

  * * *

  It was only my second week at Bradley and already I had to replace my entire wardrobe, with the exception of the orange cargo pants from Abercrombie & Fitch. Ostentatious as they were, Hilary had graced them with her seal of approval. I had a vision of her in my room, complimenting the mid-level-mall collection in my walk-in closet. Nestled between a stack of khakis, she’d spy a flap of orange, sticking out at her like a candy-coated tongue. “Do you want them?” I’d say. “They’re yours. No, seriously. They’re yours!”

  Mom took me to the King of Prussia Mall and we spent two hundred dollars at J. Crew on piles of tweedy, cable-knit things. Next we went to Victoria’s Secret, where I picked out a rainbow selection of tank tops with built-in shelf bras. Mom suggested I wear them under everything to smooth out my “baby fat,” which puckered stubbornly around my belly button. The last stop was Nordstrom, for a pair of Steve Madden clogs, the same ones all the wrap and salad girls wore. You heard them thwacking down the hall before you saw them, the soles of the shoes sticking and unsticking from their heels. “I just want to glue them to their feet,” I overheard a teacher say.

  I begged Mom to round out our purchases with a Tiffany Infinity necklace, but she said Dad would have her head.

  “Maybe for Christmas,” she teased. “Get good grades.”

  The other major change involved my hair. Dad’s side of the family is 100 percent Italian, but Mom is sliced with Irish, and with my coloring Hilary determined I could handle even blonder highlights. She told me the name of the salon she went to and Mom booked the first available appointment with the cheapest stylist on staff. The place was all the way out in Bala Cynwyd, which was even closer to Philadelphia and, therefore, farther from us. Mom and I got atrociously lost on the way to the appointment and we arrived twenty minutes late, which Mom said the snotty receptionist didn’t have to remind us of three fucking times. I was worried the salon would turn me away and tried to reassure myself that we’d been seen climbing out of a BMW—that had to count for something, right?

  Thankfully, the cheapest stylist on staff found it in her heart to pardon our tardiness and painted my head in thick stripes of yellow, orange, and white, each one at least an inch from my scalp so that I already needed a touch-up before I even walked out the doors. Mom did not care for the final product and threw an embarrassi
ng fit, which at least managed to get us 20 percent off the salon’s crappy services. Then we drove straight to the drugstore and purchased a light brown hair dye for $12.49, which, when blended with the expensively bad bleach job, resulted in a gorgeous golden hue that faded into the same color as Mom’s exhausted brass candlesticks as quickly as my star rose and fell at school. I found it fitting that my perfect shade of blond lasted as long as my popularity, really.

  Even though Hilary and Olivia were warming to me, they were still cautious. So I kept my head down and spoke only when spoken to, usually in passing in the hallways or on the way out of the classroom. I was a while off from being invited to eat lunch with them, further still from being invited to one of their houses on the weekend, and I didn’t push my luck. I understood this was the assessment period. I could be patient.

  In the meantime, Arthur and crew kept me company, and it wasn’t bad company by any means. Arthur cherished his gossip, and I don’t know how he did it, but he was always the first to report on a mortifying incident he had no business knowing about. He was the one to break the story that Chauncey Gordon, an icy junior with a sneer perpetually tattooed on her face, had been so drunk at a party that when the student president tried to finger her she peed all over his hand. Teddy had actually been at that party, and even Teddy didn’t know that. Teddy had the kind of pebbled red cheeks that all blond, sporty boys seem to have, and his summer tan came all the way from Madrid, where he’d attended a prestigious tennis camp for promising and rich young athletes. Without a football team, Bradley students chose soccer as the sport to revere, and they didn’t care about tennis. Still, I always felt Teddy could have leveraged himself better, made a play to sit at the table with the Hairy Legs, but he seemed content where he was. Arthur, Teddy, Sarah, and the Shark had known each other for years, and not even Arthur’s sudden, worrisome weight gain (“He wasn’t always this big,” the Shark whispered once when he went back for a second sandwich) or the halo of acne around his face could endanger his seat at their lunch table. I guess it was sort of sweet.

  Then the Shark made my year when she clued me in to the fact that we could get out of PE if we played a sport. None of the wrap and salad girls took PE, and those were the thirty-nine minutes of my week I loathed the most.

  “But then the downside is . . . you have to play a sport,” the Shark said, assuming we were in agreement when it came to a sport being worse than PE, which we were not.

  I had played field hockey at Mt. St. Theresa’s, but I wouldn’t say I was athletically inclined. However, I was the only one who didn’t mind mile-time day in gym. I never finished first, but it seemed like I could just go and go and go without ever getting tired (Mom said I’d gotten my good wind from her), so I opted to join the cross-country team. The fact that it was coached by Mr. Larson had nothing to do with my decision. Nothing at all.

  I couldn’t wait for all the running to carve all that baby fat off my frame. My flirtation with Liam was burgeoning, and trimming down could only help whatever it was we were building to. Liam played lacrosse, which was a spring sport, so at the moment he didn’t have a team to join, and without all that sweaty boy bonding he was also residing in popular kid limbo right along with me. You could tell he had been cool at his old school, and it was obvious he belonged with that table of Hairy Legs. It seemed he would get there eventually, the sharks already circling him, smelling him, trying to decide if he was prey or playmate.

  Even though Liam and I were in the same chem class, he was a sophomore. He’d moved to the area from Pittsburgh over the summer, his father a sought-after plastic surgeon with cheek implants that made him look a little like a Star Trek gul (source: Arthur). Liam had gone to public school in Pittsburgh, which was appalling even to me, and from what I’d gathered, the administration refused to transfer a lot of his credits because they weren’t “applicable,” which is administrationspeak for, “gross, public school.” He’d already slept with two seniors at his former alma mater, which made him seem dangerous to girls like the HOs. And dangerous was good. We’d all seen Leonardo DiCaprio lose his shit for Claire Danes in Romeo + Juliet just a few years ago, and we were waiting for our own tortured heartthrob who would risk life and limb to climb between our legs.

  You may think that because I went to Catholic school, I would have reservations about premarital sex, and I did, but none of them included the fear that fornication would send me to the fiery depths of hell. I had the opportunity to see firsthand what raging hypocrites nuns and priests could be. Preaching about kindness and acceptance and showing none of it. I’ll never forget how my second-grade teacher, Sister Kelly, warned the class not to speak to Megan McNally for the rest of the day because she’d wet her pants. Megan just sat at her desk, in a pool of her own rotten-tooth-yellow urine, hot tears of humiliation curling down her droopy red cheeks.

  I came to the conclusion that if a woman of the cloth could be so sure she was going to heaven despite being such a massive asshole, God must be more lenient than I’d been led to believe. What was a little impurity of the mind and body?

  My reservations had more to do with the technical—will it hurt, will I bleed everywhere and embarrass myself, how long until it stops hurting and starts feeling good, and the biggie, what if I get pregnant? Secondary to those concerns were STDs and the threat of acquiring a bad reputation. I was learning from Arthur that lots of girls slept around at Bradley, but only a handful of them were shamed for it. Chauncey was a prime example. Even though she pissed on the student president’s hand, she generally had a boyfriend, and therefore didn’t seem to be judged harshly. It seemed to me that as long as I was having sex with a boyfriend, I could escape any social ire too. And that was preferable to me anyway. I didn’t want sex to get off (I’d figured out how to do that on my own long ago anyway). No, I wanted the cool sheets against my back, to cradle his body with my knees as he whispers, “Are you sure?” A nod, the expression on my face frightened but wanting, the push that would change it to pain, signaling to him how much I was giving to him, him wanting me even more for my sacrifice. I could have an orgasm any day of the week—underneath my covers, in less than a minute—but there was something about this, about a guy wanting my pain, that strummed me deep inside.

  Bradley required that all students take a two-hour annual computer seminar, and when Liam walked into the tiny lab he chose to sit next to me, even though there was a seat wide open next to Dean Barton and Peyton Powell, both juniors, both flashing idols on the soccer field.

  The computer science teacher led us through a series of complicated instructions in order to set up our school e-mail address. I was deciding between the name of my suicidal cat and “lithium” as my password when Liam nudged me and motioned to his screen. I squinted at the page. “The Purity Test: 100 Questions to Determine if You’re a Prude Who Needs to Get Laid or if You’re a Dirty Whore Who Needs to Close Her Legs.”

  Liam aimed his mouse at the first question, “Have you ever French-kissed someone before?” and looked at me, like, “Well?”

  I rolled my eyes. “I’m not in the fourth grade.”

  Liam laughed quietly and I thought, Good one, Tif.

  And so this went on, ninety-nine more times—Liam pointing to a question, looking to me for my answer. When we got to the part that asked how many people you’ve slept with, Liam hovered his arrow over the answer “1–2.” I shook my head, and he inched to the right, “3–4.” I shook my head again, and, grinning, he moved it again, “5+.” I punched his arm lightly. Dean’s head swiveled.

  “We’re going to have to change that,” Liam said softly as he swept the arrow all the way to the left and clicked on a button, the word “Virgin!” blinking in bubblegum pink.

  The lab ended and Liam quickly exited out of the page, but not before Dean and Peyton paused at our table and Dean asked, “What’s her score?” A big grin stretched his homely face wide. I got Peyton’s appeal—with his fluffy blond hair and cerulean eyes, he was pret
tier than any Bradley girl. But Dean. Sure, he was tall and had a good body, but with his large ears and flat face, his coarse muddy hair, he looked like the middle monkey from the March of Progress illustrated in our biology books.

  “Low, man.” Liam laughed. “Low.”

  No one bothered to consult me, even though I was sitting right there and it was my test and my score, but even so, an inexplicable thrill shimmied through my body. My purity score mattered, for whatever reason, and that meant I mattered too.

  After that, Liam started sitting with the Hairy Legs and the HOs at lunch.

  My invitation came a couple weeks later, nearly October by then, after thunder and lightning drove all sports teams to the gym. Mr. Larson claimed the stairs, the ones that ran from the locker rooms in the basement to the basketball court, which the soccer team had immediately monopolized.

  “Two steps,” Mr. Larson said. His thick thighs split wide as he demonstrated the drill. He jogged back down and blew his whistle, and we hiked the stairs in sets of two, again and again, sweat coiling the hairs at the napes of our necks.

  “Two-foot hops.” Mr. Larson glued his legs together and bounced up the stairs like a pogo stick. He turned around at the top and looked down at us as if to ask if we had any questions. When no one spoke, he blew the whistle looped around his neck and shouted. “Go!”

  I still had another flight of stairs before me when I looked up and saw Dean and Peyton and a few other members of the soccer team, their backs against the wall, their gazes menacing. With each step I cleared, my huge breasts slammed against my rib cage, forcing my breath out in a fat-kid grunt. This was not an activity I wanted anyone to witness, let alone an assemblage of prep school Adonises.

  It seemed like an eternal agony, but then I heard “All right, guys,” and watched as Mr. Larson jogged up the rest of the stairs, all the way to the landing until his wide back blocked Dean and Peyton from my view. He was saying something to them, impossible to hear over the noisy protest of my lungs, but I caught Dean’s “Awww, come on, Mr. Larson.”