All Art Classes Will Now Be Independent Studies in Papier-Mâ6ché and Decoupage.
Bring your newspapers, magazines, and glue.
(And please stop whining about the lack of art supplies and art teachers.
It’s getting very annoying.)
On a Monday morning several weeks later I lie on the floor of my closet staring up at the racks of clothes that trace the path of my destruction.
A dress made out of my old Hello Kitty pillowcase for the Art Stars, who, it turns out, only wanted to make art about being abandoned by Daphne. Apparently, she and the rest of the Hot Spot wreaked havoc by dousing everyone’s papier-mâché projects with water, turning them into mush. “We’re not even supposed to work with papier-mâché this year, but our oil paint order hasn’t come in yet. It kills us to see her stomping around in her stupid indigo jeans.” Then they let me help make a collage about their pain.
Next to the pillowcase dress is the only thing I could think of wearing for my week with the Do-Goods—a fitted, but not too fitted, Life is good T-shirt. Apparently, the Do-Goods have been doing double do-good duty, comforting an endless parade of girls who burst into the bathroom crying after being verbally filleted by Aloha or Heidi or sometimes even Daphne.
Stuffed in a corner behind my whomper shield is a pair of hemp underwear, my fashion concession for the Greenies. There is also my getup from my thoroughly confusing week with the Vox Foxes—a 1920s newsboy cap, knickers, and long socks that proved to fit my frame more easily than the standard Vox Fox vamp attire. The entire week Beatrice kept giving me peculiar looks and saying things like, “You really don’t know where we get our headlines?”
She didn’t let me attend any private meetings, she just kept me stationed in the dining room so I could get people’s comments on the increasingly disgusting food served at lunch.
My rejection came in the form of a Trumpet of the Swan special edition delivered, mercifully, only to me. There were no articles, just one headline that read:
GIGI LANE:
THE CLEARING OF THE CLIQUES CONTINUES
(Good luck, Gigi!)
A beret and black scarf from my week with the Bookish Girls. I sigh, thinking of the sad look Rebecca gave me when she grejected me. “We really did appreciate you referencing the beat poets of the 1960s with your wardrobe. But I’m sorry, you just don’t fit in with us.”
I stare at the ceiling. I have no idea even what to wear today. What in God’s name does one wear for the single most humiliating day of your life? Severance, I tell myself. Just get through this week, and severance will be yours.
I sit up and yawn. I’m Gigi Lane, I think. I yawn again. “Ugh, why even bother.”
Why even bother is right, I think later that morning, my carefully washed, toned, and made-up face completely ignored by every single person I pass by on my way up the front steps and into school. I haven’t worn makeup in weeks, and to think I trotted out my brush skills for this? I should have just worn a bag over my head and been done with it.
“Gigi!” I jump at the sound of my name and see Deanna rushing toward me. I’m so relieved to see her, to see that she sees me, that I almost cry out. She pulls me into a hug. “I’ve been trying to call you! Are you okay?”
I shrug. “I’ve been better. Just trying to get through the week, you know?”
She nods. “I know. It’ll be over soon, and then you’ll get that sweet severance, right?” She pinches me lightly on the side and then tries to cover her shock at just how much chub she actually grabs.
“Right!” I chirp, trying to sound happy.
“Well”—she looks over her shoulder to where the Cheerleaders are gathering—“I’ve got to go.”
I nod. “I’ll talk to you later.”
“Okay, call me tonight and tell me how it goes!”
My week with the Cursed Unaffiliated has me in tears the first day. Seriously, these are the saddest little social orphans you will ever meet. That is, if you actually meet one. They are those girls that you don’t notice unless you trip over one of them while walking backward and calling sassy insults to your girlfriends. And once you fall over them, it’s like they disappear in a poof of unpopularity.
And they don’t even hang out together—that’s what kills me! They have no leader, they’re just this totally flat, listless organization. I find one of them, Brynn, in our allotted meeting place before school. She’s right where she said she would be, in the never-used bathroom on the third floor, last stall.
“Hey, Gigi.” Brynn glances up at me. She’s sitting on the toilet, lid down and pants up (thank God), doing her homework. The clipboard is propped up on the toilet paper roll holder.
“Hi, Brynn.” I lean against the stall door. “Why don’t you do your homework in the library?”
“They’re not open yet.”
“Oh.”
“And I can’t do my homework at my house because my mom is off her meds and I have to keep an eye on her while my dad goes to work the night shift.”
“Oh,” is all I can say.
“So …” She motions to the bathroom stall. “This is basically it. The Cursed Unaffiliateds don’t really hang out together. I honestly don’t even know how many of us there are. It could be just me. That’s how it feels sometimes.” She looks at me, focusing on my eyes. “Sometimes I think that I want to scream, just to have people hear me. And then I wonder if I’m screaming already.” She shudders and then shrugs. “Anyway, I have detention at lunch—I was wrongfully accused—not that we’d sit together anyway. You can probably find space in the library or maybe the upstairs bathroom.”
“Are you all right?” the postman asks as I sign the receipt for the Cursed Unaffiliated’s rejection letter.
“Fine,” I answer.
“Are you going farming later?” he asks, his voice cheery.
I look at him questioningly.
“Your overalls … never mind. Have a good day.”
“Thanks,” I mumble. “You too.”
I don’t bother brushing off the dead leaves on the wicker chair before I sit down. In the cold the cushion has hardened, and it chafes my ankles as I pull my feet under me. A hard wind blows, scraping more leaves up the porch, where they swirl against the open front door, some of them fluttering inside. I tuck my hands inside my overalls, just two fingers out to rip open the letter.
The last line of the Cursed Unaffiliated’s rejection letter is like a stiletto to the heart. “You get used to it,” the letter says, and I realize the Cursed Unaffiliateds are right. Over the past weeks my heart has hardened, a shell of bone leaving just enough room for my heart to barely beat. I lay my head against the back of the wicker chair and listen to the wind and the leaves and the jailed beat of my heart.
“You don’t have the necessary melancholy to be a Cursed Unaffiliated.” Please! I should write them back the “jailed beat of my heart” thing. That’s the sort of bunk they live for. Oh, woe is me, my heart’s in jail, I’m slowly turning to stone, nobody likes me, everybody hates me, might as well eat some worms.
From inside I hear my cell phone ring. I kick most of the leaves out of the front hall and shut the door behind me. I switch on the lights, impressed that I sat on the chair long enough for it to grow dark around me and for my fingers to turn a splotchy red. If that’s not true melancholy, I don’t know what is.
I should have just let the phone go to voice mail.
“Gigi? It’s Beatrice Linney.”
“Oh. Hey, Beatrice,” I say. I flop forward over the back of the couch, my butt in the air, my face buried in the cushions. “I thought you might be calling.”
“I just heard. I know I’m supposed to stay objective, but I have to say I’m really sorry about the way things have ended up for you. Swan’s Lake isn’t the school it used to be. It’s like we’re falling apart, the building and the students.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“Gigi, I hate to bother you in your hour of need, but I’m going to have to ask for a statement.”
“A quote. Your side of the story. About … about being rejected by all the cliques.”
I groan.
“What was that? Can you repeat that, please? How does it feel to be rejected by the Cursed Unaffiliated? What does that even make you?”
I stand up, my head swimming from being upside down. “A free agent.” I sigh into the phone. “And yes, you can quote me on that.” I hang up before she can ask another question. My phone rings again before I can put it down. I look at the number and sigh. I debate just letting it go to voice mail, but I know I have to get this over with.
“Hello?”
“Gigi, this is Fiona Shay. I am calling to inform you that you have failed your severance task and will therefore not receive your severance. Once again, please remember that—”
“I hope you’re happy,” I say.
“Once again, please remember—”
“They’re destroying the school, you know.”
Fiona sighs impatiently. “I have no time for your high school drama, Lane. Just let me get through this. Please remember that—”
“And it’s all your fault. You could have stopped it—”
“Gigi, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Please-remember-that-you-are-permanently-exiled-from-theHotSpotandyoucan’ttalkaboutuseverGood-bye!”
I wish you could listen to the dial tone on a cell phone after someone hangs up, instead of that digital click sound. That’d be much more dramatic than lying here with a silent phone pressed against my ear, my legs dangling over the back of the couch, my head hanging almost to the floor. I know that I should call Deanna, though she can probably guess what happened already.
You know that saying “Misery loves company”? It’s total bullshit. I’m miserable and I don’t want company, especially not Deanna. How could I even face her? She’s a Cheerleader and I’m a … a nothing. I’m starting to think maybe it really is better that I stop talking to her, especially at school. I can’t take her down with me. Even if she is top tier, it’s not guaranteed that the Hot Spot’s rampage will spare her. It’s for her own good.
All the blood rushing to my head is making me loopy. I listen to the silence of my house and then yell, “It’s Friday night! Woo-hoo! Par-tay!” My voice sounds nasally. “Gigi Lane is in the house!”
I realize what I’m about to do before I do it. Gooseflesh ripples up and down my arms as I take a deep breath and then scream as loud as I can, “I’m Gigi Lane and you wish you were me!”
There. It’s done. The words ring in my ears, their power gone by the simple act of screaming them out loud. I don’t need that affirmation anymore. It didn’t work.
A familiar, media-ready voice floats in from the front hall. “Well, that’s not exactly grammatically correct, but it’s a good start!”
“Where’s my little Girlie Bird?”
My mother’s home.
My mom spends her first day home from her tour in her pajamas. It reminds me of those documentaries or behind-the-scenes videos of movie stars, where even when they are out of their makeup and costumes and contact lenses, even when they are wearing eyeglasses and a messy ponytail, there is something undeniably glamorous about them. You can tell they’re special even if they’re wearing sweatpants and eating Wheaties. That’s how my mom is, and that’s how I used to think I was.
When I come downstairs Saturday morning, she is sitting in the windowed breakfast nook in the kitchen, sipping coffee out of a big mug and reading the paper, her feet up on a chair and her reading glasses perched almost on the tip of her nose. There’s something polished about her, even first thing in the morning, and it feels like I’m looking at a candid black-and-white photo of a talk show host, or maybe a senator, instead of a real, live person, instead of my mother.
“Good morning, sunshine,” she says, looking at me and smiling. “Aren’t you a beautiful sight for sore eyes. Is your stomach feeling any better?”
I begged off the welcome-home dinner with my mom and dad last night, complaining of cramps and sneaking a can of Coke and a bag of Funyuns up to my room to hide out for the night.
I give a nervous laugh in response and bury my head in the refrigerator, pretending to look for the milk.
I have always felt like my popularity was a good balance to my mom’s fame, like they set each other off really well. I loved the reaction I got when I was introduced to people at my mom’s book parties and things like that. When I was younger, I’d go for a precociously polite effect, but once you pass a certain age, precociousness just looks like arrogance, so later I opted for youthful yet polished enthusiasm balanced with a beyond-my-years maturity. “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” I’d say, shaking someone’s hand, “my mom’s told me so much about you.” And whoever it was that I’d just been introduced to would raise his or her eyebrows at my mom and say, “You’ve got a lovely daughter.” And my mom has to have a lovely daughter, you know?
But now that the bottom has dropped out of my social stronghold, it feels like I have no weight to balance against my mom’s sort of staggering fame. I pour myself a bowl of cereal and sit down at the table with my mom. She smiles at me again, pulls out the Fashion section, and slides it toward me.
“Thanks.” I smile, glad she knows it’s my favorite section, and then notice that she’s on the front page.
“I was so tired when they took that picture.” She laughs. “The makeup artist had to shellac the concealer on.”
The article is called “Fly Away Home: A Girlie Bird Gets Ready to Land.”
“Wait, what?” I wrinkle my brow, reading the headline again. “‘Ready to land’? What’s that mean?”
“I know, it’s a good line. I wish I’d thought of it myself, actually.”
“But what does it mean?”
“Oh, it’s just about this being my last tour.”
I look back to the article, surprised at the tears stinging my eyes: “After ten years on the road the acclaimed author of the Girlie Bird self-help books is ready to call it quits.”
“You’re quitting? I didn’t know that.”
“No, I’m not quitting. I’m just not going to travel as much. It’s gotten to be too much. The whole quitting thing was Barry’s idea.” Barry is my mom’s PR guy, the one who gets my mom on talk shows and profiled in Sunday magazines. “He thinks it will up the interest.”
“So, you’re not quitting.”
“No, not technically.”
I look at her, and she holds my gaze for a moment before sighing.
“It’s a publicity stunt, Gigi. I’m not proud of it, but that’s the business I’m in. I have no plans to retire, but Barry thinks I may have reached media saturation too soon. He’s afraid the public will turn on me, so the plan is to pretend to quit while I’m ahead, and then come back due to popular demand.”
“But you didn’t even tell me you were going to fake-retire.”
“I’m sorry, honey, it’s just something we’ve been working on, nothing was really settled yet.”
I hold up the paper. “This looks pretty settled.”
“Well, we let them break the story. Aren’t you glad I’ll be home more?”
“Of course I’m glad you’ll be home!” I lie, not wanting her here to witness my total social annihilation. “I just wish you had told me. What, did you think I’d leak the top secret story of your fake retirement?”
“No,” she says calmly, “I did not think you would leak the top secret story of my fake retirement.” In my mom’s book Hold Firm to That Worm: The Girlie Bird’s Guide to Social Combat, she recommends that if someone is sarcastic to you, you should just repeat back to them what they’ve said in a totally neutral tone of voice.
I hate it when she uses the Bird on me.
She looks at me for a long moment before continuing. “You have just been very hard to get a hold of for the past few months.”
“I’ve been busy,” I snap ruefully.
“With what?” she asks.
“Life?” I sigh.
She studies me. “You’re an adolescent,” she finally says, nodding to herself.
“Excuse me?”
“Oh, sweetie, I didn’t mean to sound so clinical. It’s just that it’s basic child development. You seem to be going through some sort of adolescent phase.”
“Child development?”
It’s like she doesn’t even hear me, even though she’s staring right at me. “Have you been meeting your tweet?”
I consider. Since she has actually heard my tweet affirmation and didn’t seem that impressed, I guess that answer is, “No.”
She nods. “And have you been holding firm to that worm?”
Most definitely not. “No.”
“Of course not.” I can’t tell if she’s mad or excited. “And you and your dad, you’ve been loading up on all of the unhealthy foods on the ‘Rotten Worm’ list from Feeding Your Flock, am I right?”
I don’t know how to answer that, since I don’t want to get my dad in trouble. “Umm …”
My mom taps her fingers on the table, still nodding. “Interesting. Very interesting. Now,” she says, “tell me about school.”
I lie through my teeth.