Where It Began

As if he actually believes that if only I’d be that girl and if he drove that big car over to Winston School, we would all be magically transformed. As if parents who pay the humongous tuition out of leftover pocket change would leap out of their even bigger cars, bang on the Mercedes’ slightly darkened side window, and beg him to sell them a strip mall in the Philippines.

Because a guy with such a perfect kid must be hot shit.

It is as if he’s never actually met me, an ordinary student with the normal amount of friends, who doesn’t like sports, and is somewhat good at art.

Art?

Did somebody say art?

Hell no.

After Winston, I would be attending the totally impossible college of my parents’ dreams. Biz school from the sound of it, between Bloody Marys. Because: Do you know what twenty-three-year-olds who graduate from Wharton make even in this economy? Six figures!

Gabby Gardiner, shake hands with your totally impossible, not-going-to-happen future.

VII

IN ACTUAL FACT, THE HIGH POINT OF THAT YEAR AT Winston is when Miss Cornish, the art teacher who does the crafty part of art—ceramics and pottery and sculpture—puts my ceramic spoon holder on a pedestal outside the teachers’ lounge because it is an outstanding example of really good glaze.

At my old school, I had always been this sort of regular person. At Winston, I figure out quickly that I am sub-regular. Basically, everybody else is either gorgeous or super-smart or incredibly good at something important, born with the popular gene or richer than God. And I’m not. So, big surprise, I do not get a whole crowd of popular friends and a round of applause when I walk down the hall.

Look:

There I am, telling myself all these helpful affirmations such as, Oh Gabby, you really are smart. Oh Gabby, you’re totally normal and everything is fine. Oh Gabby, aren’t you just the most adorable thing that ever got out of bed in the morning?

Only if any of this were true, it is hard to explain why I’m standing around Winston School watching Billy Nash and the Slutmuffins lounging in the Class of 1920 Memorial Garden, owning benches and tables and patches of grass that are instantly cool just because they own them, watching the smart kids and the über- rich kids and the weird kids in the manga club all hanging out together in big happy clumps, while I am alone with my unimpressive grades and no one to talk to except for Lisa Armstrong and Anita Patel.

“Your little friends called again,” Vivian says from what sounds like far away across the vibrating green room.

Friends?

You would think that after all these enlightening sessions with Ponytail Doc trying to get me to tell her all about myself, it would be easier to co

I open my eyes, but everything stays in a lot better focus when they’re closed. “Who?”

“That Lisa and Anita,” Vivian says. “Those friends.”

Making her little puke face as if having to be reminded that her daughter is once again reduced to counting these poor excuses for fashionable teens as her only friends makes her physically ill.

As if she can’t stand to remember.

What I remember is the smell of burnt, melted bittersweet chocolate and charred marshmallows. The backs of their heads—Lisa’s strawberry-blond fluff and Anita’s black braid—blurring in the smoke that billows from the wall oven in Lisa’s kitchen. Grabbing for the mitts and the fire extinguisher and waving magazines at the smoke detectors to try to get them to turn off.

How long ago was that?

There I am, thirteen years old and slouching around Winston School in the shortest blue uniform skirt in the history of man over tiny black bicycle shorts. The only cute thing about this skirt is the pocket on the butt. Anita is wearing a similarly truncated skirt over a pair of leggings, which is also, God help us, a Winston School style, except Anita is wearing them because her mother made her. Lisa is the one person still wearing the baggy khaki uniform pants that no other girl has ever worn to school after the first day of seventh grade. Lisa is also the one person at Winston School who admires me for something before I get Billy after four years of total obscurity.

It is October of seventh grade and I have just figured out that art is the only thing I don’t suck at, but it turns out to be the only thing Lisa does suck at (apart from her apparent inability to shop for clothes that don’t have some Disney character or strange-looking appliqués on them) and that she really really wants to be good at. This is because her parents are seriously religious cinematographers who value art just a notch below how much they value God Almighty.

It is November and Lisa has started following me to assembly and sitting next to me and Anita, who actually has the potential to be completely regular, except she has to take Hindi language class and Indian dance class and learn to play weird-looking musical instruments and entertain old ladies from her extended family who are visiting her from New Delhi for months at a time. She has to figure out how to modify her uniform in a way that keeps her mother happy but does not involve social suicide.

At least the stuff she has to do to keep her mom happy doesn’t involve getting people to think she’s hot.

There we are in December, about as hot as egg salad sandwiches or, in Anita’s case, completely vegan soy wraps. There we are, sitting three in a row, invisible enough to slouch there in the back of the auditorium eating contraband snack food, while Mr. Piersol, our idiot headmaster, slogs from one alarming story to the next in his mind-numbing weekly ascent up Cliché Mountain. Not to mention, Mr. Piersol would appear to be scrounging all his information on teen life off a shady website for urban legends.

News flash: Boston high school girls caught in pregnancy pact!

Oh no, boys and girls: Children having children! Look before you leap!

“Children having icy pops. Look before you lick,” Anita whispers, gazing up at Mr. Piersol, hunkering down in her auditorium seat to eat the lime icy pop that she smuggled in.

“Anita!” says Lisa. “That could have such double meaning.”

News flash: Catty clique of mean cheerleaders in Texas cause sad, chunky cheerleader to leap from bridge!

Oh no, boys and girls: If you can’t say something nice, don’t say it!

“If you can’t say something nice, welcome to Winston School,” Anita says.

“That is so mean.” Lisa says. And then she snickers. “Are you by any chance a member of a catty clique?”

“I want to be in the catty clique!” I say. I am not completely joking.

“Sorry,” says Anita. “I think you might have to be pregnant first. And you have to look like a Slutmuffin.”

We don’t look as if we’re members of the same species as the Slutmuffins, as if we are fit to inhabit the same planet, as if our skin is made of the same dewy membrane, or that our hairs were ever genetically programmed to spring out of our scalps and line up in perfect order like theirs.

Cut to a montage of sleepovers at Lisa’s house with everybody sitting in their sleeping bags watching old Technicolor movies with Doris Day and Debbie Reynolds and making large sheets of semi-inedible marshmallow fudge, shooting at each other with Silly String.

I don’t know. Maybe all over the country, this is what deliriously happy teenage girls are doing Friday nights, but it seems as if all of the people worth being at Winston are engaging in somewhat less boring activities involving sex and drugs and rock and roll.

What I want is to be one of those people.