“Iknow you.”
Lucy Mendelssohn’s lips were so full they were almost obscene. Lips like that didn’t belong on a sixteen-year-old girl. Especially a sixteen-year-old, Catholic school, girl. They belonged in a lip gloss ad, one that had been photoshopped and airbrushed into ridiculousness.
“You’re on my bus,” the lips said. Meg struggled to look away from them, to focus her attention on the eyes above them. Eyes that were staring her down.
“I am?” Meg tried to smile, but she was so out of practice, the frozen muscles in her cheeks wouldn’t cooperate. Instead, she gnawed on her thin lip and wondered if Lucy’s plump lips were natural, or stuffed with some miraculous bovine lard.
There were plenty of girls at Rose School who’d been under the knife. Plastic surgery was very commonplace among one particular group of students. Meg’s nickname for them was The Disgraced Debs. The Debs were at Rose because it was their last resort. They weren’t bright enough for the challenging prep schools. Some had even been expelled from prestigious boarding schools. Their daddies had bought their admissions to renowned party universities, so they were just biding their time at Rose until graduation. The Debs filed their fingernails in class with bored, blank, faces. Sometimes these bored, blank, faces had splints on perfectly pert noses. Wrinkled school blouses were often arranged to showcase new, spectacular, cleavage.
Lucy Mendelssohn was not a Deb. She wore severe black eyeliner. She had stubby fingernails, a perfect GPA, and a bitchy attitude. She didn’t belong to the other significant society at Rose, the Holy Scolders, so her lips weren’t the result of a lifetime of piety and prayer circles. Lucy must be genetically gifted. Thus, Meg felt required to loathe her.
Just a little bit.
“I knew it.” Lucy was smug. Meg expected her to turn away then, but she didn’t. “I’ve been trying to figure out where I knew you from, and it would have driven me crazy all afternoon. I can’t concentrate on my detention busy work with that hanging over my head.”
She smiled and was transformed. The quick flash of teeth was like a tiny burst of sunshine peeping through a cluster of storm clouds. A hint of something nice, hiding, back beyond the gloom.
Lucy Mendelssohn was interesting.
Lucy was the first to raise her hand in class, the first to argue a point, and she’d verbally disembowel anyone who hadn’t thought through their rebuttal or, worse, tried to backpedal. Everyone at Rose was afraid of her.
Especially the teachers.
“I’m also in your English class.” Meg was eager to continue the conversation. It had been so long since she’d had one. “And History. And Religious Studies. And Latin. I’m Meg. I’m new,” she added, in case Lucy hadn’t figured it out. Rose wasn’t a huge school, only three hundred or so girls, but it was difficult to single out anyone in the endless parade of identical woolen blazers, identical maroon skirts, and identical melancholy attitudes.
Meg, in the beginning, had enjoyed the anonymity of uniformity. She’s hoped to disappear altogether.
Lucy popped a pen into her mouth and nibbled it.
“You must sit in the back,” she said after a minute, frowning. “I don’t pay attention to what goes on in that wasteland.”
The back of the classroom was Deb territory. Back there, they could snooze unnoticed, or flip through magazines, or pop a few stolen Percocet.
“Yeah, it’s like a bad soap opera back there,” Meg giggled. “Lauren McGuire said…”
“Ugh. Gossip.”
Lucy slid the paperback book off her desk and shuffled through the pages as she stared at Meg.
Lucy’s gaze traveled from the part in Meg’s sleek, straightened, hair to the bottom of her polished penny loafers. Meg knew she was being sized up, and had a good guess of what her classification would be: preppy, private school girl, straight out of central casting. Lucy’s eyes lingered on the vintage handbag Meg had slung over the back of her chair.
“Is that a Bitten Bag?”
“Yes.”
“Those were mass produced in Central-American sweatshops, you know. Child labor. Little kids working twelve hours a day to make a stupid pocketbook? What an atrocity.”
Meg glanced back at the purse, wishing her eyes shot laser beams so she could engulf it in flames. She’d bought the bag her first week at Rose. Back then she hoped she might be able to infiltrate the Debs, but her nose was crooked, and her mother’s medicine cabinet held nothing but expired aspirin and corn removal pads. She didn’t have a trust fund and wasn’t dating anyone from St. Martin’s Academy, Rose’s brother school. As far as the Debs were concerned, this made her a non-entity. Meg was relieved. Keeping up with those girls would be work.
Worse, it would be expensive.
Lucy was staring at her, waiting for a response.
Is this a test? Meg glanced down at the floor, ready to force her features into the appropriate mix of shock and remorse, but something black and shiny caught her eye. Her head whipped back up.
“I prefer all of my clothing to be manufactured by children. Orphans preferably. Their tiny little fingers can get the stitches just so.” She pointed down at Lucy’s feet. “See the seam of your boot? Those are Doctor McAllister’s, right? Craftsmanship by Eastern European urchins. Fine work indeed.”
The corner of Lucy’s mouth twitched. It wasn’t another smile, not entirely, but it was close.
“Touché.”
Meg had been a Rose Student for five long, lonely weeks. On her first day at the all-girls, private Catholic school, she thought she’d be living out her favorite movie cliché- the New Kid.
The New Kid plot was always straightforward: the brave boy struggles with scoliosis and narcolepsy, becomes a conquering hero during the school toe wrestling tournament, and later goes on to succeed at Harvard.
The lovesick girl follows her crush to a Southern prep school, realizes that she is both gay and a Libertarian at prom, and later goes on to succeed at Harvard.
When Meg first pushed open Rose School’s heavy, oak, front doors, she fully expected her life to go in a similar, inspirational direction. She was the plucky underdog. She survived a terrible experience. She was overdue for her happy ending.
Well, except for the Harvard part. She’d never been that delusional.
The days went on, and her classmates filed past her, snug in groups of two and three. Scolders. Debs. All ignored her. Her longest conversation had been with a particularly pious Scolder who, after learning that Meg wasn’t a baptized Catholic, had offered to pray for her hell-bound soul.
That was nice, Meg supposed, but it would have been nicer to have someone to sit with at lunch.
“Is the teacher coming back?”
Meg was disappointed in this, her very first detention. She hadn’t been forced to write an essay about shattering high school stereotypes, or copy lines on the chalkboard like that consummate juvenile delinquent, Bart Simpson. Instead, she’d been told just to sit and be quiet for an hour. It was against Meg’s nature to sit still, especially when cobwebs were cluttering one corner of the classroom. She itched to grab a broom and sweep them away.
“Someone will come back eventually.” Lucy circled a passage of text with her pen. “It takes them a few minutes before they remember someone’s supposed to be here, babysitting me.” She looked over at Meg and raised an eyebrow. “I mean, babysitting us. So, what are you in for?”
Meg turned away from the cobwebs, and the millions of dust mites that were inevitably congregating there. She knew she should tell the truth. After Boston Jefferson High, and the lie that nearly got her killed, she’d sworn off lying for good. She’d promised herself that she’d tell nothing but the truth, the whole truth, no matter what the consequences. It was a promise she’d made before. It was a promise she’d broken before.
But sometimes the truth was just so…lame.
Sister Immaculata, a stickler for tidiness, compliance, and all things neat and orderly, had given Meg detention for forgetting to tuck her shirt into the waistband of her navy uniform skirt. Meg hated to tuck in her shirt. The way it billowed up made her look like a thick-waisted sow.
Lucy was in detention for reading a rousing passage from the Vagina Monologues in English class. She managed to shout out four good lines before Sister Katrina realized what she was reading and packed her off to the principal’s office.
“Sorry,” Lucy had told the nun before she left. “I know you don’t like to be reminded of your vagina.”
It was the most fantastic thing that Meg had ever seen.
Meg’s passive-aggressive shirt-tail disobedience just couldn’t compare.
“I had a disagreement with Immaculata, about the dress code,” Meg said. It gave her a rush to lie again, even if it was more like an exaggeration, just a little color to spice things up. “I demanded to have the option of wearing pants. Isn’t it so incredibly sexist that we have to wear a skirt?”
Lucy shrugged, and shifted the pen to the other side of her mouth, apparently unimpressed. Meg wished she’d come up with a better story, something outrageous like setting fire to the vice-principal’s office. Or an affair with the janitor.
He was sort of cute.
If you liked short, balding, retirees.
“So, Immaculata thinks you’ve got an attitude problem,” Lucy said, and Meg felt relief flooding through her. She hadn’t blown it. Yet. “Welcome to the club. I, also, have an attitude problem. The nuns hate me.”
The nuns had loved Meg, at first. She’d shown so much promise in her admission essay.
“Meg wrote an exemplary piece about our namesake, St. Rose of Lima,” Sister Agnes had gushed during her first Religious Studies class.
Meg had shrugged away the praise. Of course, the essay was exemplary. She’d paid Jonathan Wong, the freshman with the highest GPA at Boston Jefferson, two hundred dollars to write it. She had teared up a bit, just reading the first paragraph. Jonathan was a talented wordsmith, destined for great things. She wished she could have tucked him into her backpack, and brought him with her to Rose, but Jonathan was six two and, therefore, somewhat conspicuous.
Jonathan’s essay was forgotten the minute Immaculata saw Meg hurrying down the hall with her shirt-tail flapping in the breeze. Rose girls weren’t allowed to be sloppy. It was an offense right up there with blaspheming or eating a burger on Fridays.
“Aren’t all nuns supposed to love everyone?” Meg wanted to keep Lucy talking. “Isn’t that, like, a requirement?”
“Nuns don’t like anyone,” Lucy answered with a dry laugh. “They’re bitter old women who had no marriage prospects. They hate the world, young girls the most.” She brushed her dark hair off her face and looked at Meg. “Is this your first time in a Catholic school?”
“Yes, but I was in a religious school, once before.” The lie slipped out of her. It had potential. She pieced together a story. “When I was little, my mom was in this sort of cult,” she whispered, though the two of them were the only ones in the empty Biology lab.
“What kind of cult?” Lucy’s eyes widened.
“I’m not sure.” The best lies were short. Too many details were the trademark of an amateur. “I was tiny. My mom left when they wanted her to marry some old guy who had, like, four other wives.”
“Icky.”
“I know, right?” Meg said. “My name for a while was like, Rainbow Moonbeam or something. I don’t remember much about it.” Inviting more questions would just allow more room to mess up. “We’re obviously not Catholic, so nuns are a complete mystery to me.”
Lucy closed her paperback.
“At this school? It’s not just the students who are superficial assholes. The teachers are too.”
Meg’s purse was looming by her shoulder, with the tag still on so everyone could see the name of the designer. She quickly slipped it off the chair and kicked it under her desk.
“Ah. Leading by example.”
Lucy chuckled. It was an infectious sound.
It would be so nice to have a friend again.
Meg was wondering what else she could say that would make Lucy laugh when Sister Katrina burst into the room, her glasses swinging from a chain around her neck. She looked from Meg to Lucy, surprised to find them talking.
“I’m sure you two have some homework you could be doing,” she said, settling down in the teacher’s desk. “Books out, please, Ms. Ford.”
Lucy slumped further in her seat and opened her book again, sighing deeply. Reluctantly, Meg pulled out the textbook she was meant to be studying, but she couldn’t concentrate on quadrangles. She studied Lucy instead.