Twice a week, I walk to school with Bianca. We are two girls in a three-girl clique. The third girl is Sarah, who is tall and elegant, and who fits into her mother’s silk jumpsuits. We are all fourteen. We know every lyric to the Pharcyde’s “Passin’ Me By.” We smoke. We sit on stoops drinking Zimas purchased from a bodega with my sister’s old ID, and wait for Bianca’s pager to vibrate.
We ride taxis late at night, funneling through the Helmsley Building on Park between Forty-Fifth and Forty-Sixth into downtown territory until we reach a run-down Irish pub on Twenty-Ninth Street that doesn’t card. Sometimes we try to slip past the door guy at Continental on St. Marks Place or Nightingale’s between Twelfth and Thirteenth or Flamingo East on Second. Once we went to the SoHo loft of a boarding school boy who paged Bianca “58008.” That spells boobs upside down.
More often, though, we walk up and down Park Avenue from Ninety-First to Seventy-Second Street searching for boys from other prep schools. When Bianca’s pager lights up, we find a pay phone on Lexington and she figures out where everyone has gone—usually somewhere in the Seventies between Park and Lex or on the steps of the Met Museum.
Recently, a crowd of prep school kids gathered on Seventy-Second Street, hugging one another and bumming cigarettes. We met a boy who lived across the street from our school. His hair was short and blond, and he had a pinched face like Pee-wee Herman’s, only more serious. He spoke quietly from behind his hand when we asked where he went to school and who he knew that we knew, too. Then everyone ran into the street to hail cabs, because we heard that someone just got mugged. In the cab Bianca said, “I think he liked you.”
So now we leave for school a half hour early and wait in a nearby diner in case he walks by on the way to his bus stop.
When Bianca picks me up outside my building, she is wearing a peacoat and standing on her tippy-toes with one arm out in first position. Ever since last month, when she signed up for the dance elective, she’s developed this new affectation of practicing ballet, so that her long, lean limbs swing in front of my eyes when I’m trying not to think about them. Another distracting thing about Bianca is her hair, which is textured with golden streaks, cut to her breast, and smooth as the silk camisoles in my mother’s closet. If I had her hair, I’d be closer to beautiful. And her eyelashes, too. They are exceptionally long, but when anyone points this out, she sighs and says, “I know, it sucks.”
She never brags, even when something good happens. Everything is a “disaster”; she is always “the most” embarrassed, “the biggest” fuckup, or the “ugliest person alive.” The opposite is true, but sometimes I’m fooled into thinking we’re the same. I try to remember that when she says she failed the history test, she means she got a B. When she says a boy doesn’t like her, she means he hasn’t called yet, but he will. When she says a boy likes me, she means she’s not interested in him.
“We’re wearing the same thing,” she says when she sees me in my peacoat, which is big and bulky and purchased from an army-navy store. Hers is from the women’s coat section of Bloomingdale’s.
Last year I didn’t notice these slight differences, but now I’m aware of every small thing that makes her better than me. “She just has that sparkle,” my mom said when I told her that Bianca was elected to student government. A sparkle is a thing you can’t get; either you have it or you don’t. It’s like fairy dust, which is what my mom says my sister has with boys. “She just sprinkles it on them, and they fall in love.”
It’s a twenty-five-minute walk from Park Avenue to East End Avenue. We used to stop for cream-filled doughnuts on Lexington and chocolate cat tongues on Second Avenue, making up celebrity fantasies grounded in logistical facts along the way. Meeting Leonardo DiCaprio at his regular spot, Club USA; meeting Robert Sean Leonard outside his show at Lincoln Center; meeting the guy from The Heights, because someone we know had met him before. New York City girls meet celebrities all the time. There was the girl in my sister’s class who was friends with the Spin Doctors, another who claimed she met Matt Dillon in a bar. In our version, the encounter usually begins with a description of our outfits, and ends with a chosen celebrity picking one of us up at school so everyone can see.
Lately, though, our walks have changed. Now we get iced coffees and talk about real boys who call Bianca on the phone at night. Then we talk about our mothers.
Today Bianca is in a fight with hers. Something about a late-night phone call and her mother getting on the line to say something embarrassing to a boy.
“Seriously, my mother is crazy,” one of us always says.
Crazy is what we call our mothers, and we know what we mean. We mean we can’t always predict their responses. We mean that sometimes their voices get low and their teeth clench, so that when we look in their eyes we can see that they hate us.
Our mothers are friends, part of an inner circle of moms from our school who on occasion take over our living room, clank glasses, speak in hushed voices, and after their glasses are refilled, erupt in laughter. Down the hallway, in my bedroom, I’ll listen for the whispered sound of my name.
Bianca and I are halfway to school and our rolled-up skirts are riding up our waists. We wear sheer black tights on our legs. Foundation on our skin. Sunflowers perfume our necks.
All down Second and Third Avenues, we are followed by hissing sounds. Tongues against teeth. Psst, psst. A stout man with bullet eyes watches as we pass him. “Sexy,” I think he says, but I can’t be sure.
“Eyes, eyes!” I shout, making hooks with my fingers and gouging out the eyes of a person who doesn’t exist. This is a joke reference to something we learned in our self-defense class.
This semester a special trainer comes in once a week during PE to teach us to respond to threats of violence, which are everywhere, we’re told. We see the headlines in newspaper kiosks on the street. “Nightmare in Central Park.” “Ripped Apart a Child with His Hands.” “East Side Teen Arrested in Park Rape-Slaying.” We hear the local news stories: the Central Park Jogger, the Preppy Killer, Etan Patz, Joel Steinberg, muggings, shootings, stabbings, child abuse, kidnapping, rape, date rape. People on the subways with syringes filled with AIDS. Watch out, we’re warned. They watch you walking in your uniforms; they know where you come from.
Some girls have drivers pick them up from school because their parents are afraid they’ll be snatched away. I’m not one of those girls, but still, my mother warns me, There are people out there who want what you have. She is a link on a chain of calls between mothers about the latest prep school kid mugged or attacked on the Upper East Side. They all blur into her stern warning, her index finger shaken in the air. “You travel in groups,” she says. “You don’t walk through Central Park at night. You take taxis when it gets dark.” She has the doormen put me in cabs and write down the taxi number. “You can never be too careful,” she says and I wonder what kind of violence she imagines in her mind.
When you learn about stranger danger as a child, you learn that other people want you, but nobody ever explains why. Now, when you are a teenager, it becomes clearer. The teacher’s ruler to our kilt hems, the assessments of our clothing as “too short” and “too tight.” I recognize this paranoia and what it’s about. The fear of showing off what you have, the certainty that others will steal from you if they see it—that’s wealth, but ours is a different kind.
Our currency is our bodies. We have what others want, what they feel they deserve. At school, we trade stories of being groped by strangers, and boast of what we’ll do the next time it happens: kick him in the balls—that is always our revenge plan.
But when a Rollerblader glided downstream along Lexington Avenue, stopping short to cup my chest, all I did was laugh. Not a real laugh, but a noise Band-Aid reserved for moments of shock—to normalize a situation, to shake off any bubbling emotions, to show I’m not afraid, but not mad either. In fact I was both, but fear outweighed the anger and paralyzed any confrontational impulse I might have. When the fear subsided and the Rollerblader was long gone, I was mad again, this time at myself for being such a coward.
There are two kinds of perpetrators: those strangers on the street and those you already know. All of them are men. Strangers lurk in public spaces or follow you down side streets, while those you know could be anywhere.
A girl in my school dated Robert Chambers, the teenager who strangled another girl he knew in the park. My mother set up my cousin on a blind date with our neighbor, a man who murdered a woman a few years later. A doorman was supposedly running a cocaine operation in the basement of our old building.
“You never know who anyone is,” my mother said when she told me about the doorman. I remembered the gold flash of his eagle-shaped belt buckle underneath his uniform, as if it were a clue.
The first thing we learn in self-defense is to use our house keys as a weapon to poke out the eyes of an attacker. “And if you don’t have your keys handy, you can use your two index fingers,” our instructor says, curling her fingers into talons. Then we line up one by one, run to the red line, and scream, “Eyes, eyes!” or “Nose, nose!” bumping an imaginary nose bone straight into imaginary brain matter with our two palms.
We learn to squirm out of someone’s hold when he is dragging us by our hair, flipping our bodies like fish, then finishing him off with a knee between the legs. We partner up and practice on each other, miming each movement without actually making contact, all the time screaming the names of body parts, as if the words alone could set us free.
But I have a secret: The steak knife I stole from the kitchen butcher block is buried in the zipper pocket of my book bag. When I’m alone on the street, I slide my hand into the pocket and grip the plastic handle. Downright dangerous, I think to myself.
At the diner across the street from school, Bianca and I slide into a window booth. Two coffees. Plain English muffin for Bianca. Toasted corn muffin for me. We each light a cigarette. She smokes Marlboro Lights. I’m experimenting with Capris, the super-thin kind that are only the circumference of a cocktail straw.
Bianca takes a drag and I fixate on her tongue—a strawberry budding in her mouth—where it has been, what it has known. I’m bothered by the way it brags in her mouth, all red and glistening.
Another one of our differences: I don’t know what it feels like to be kissed, and Bianca does. I was there for one of her first times with the popular boy on his rooftop.
There were three boys, all from the same co-ed private school in Riverdale. Two of them went to our Hebrew school, which is how Bianca landed us the invitation to sit on the roof of a building and sip wine coolers we brought, while the boys swigged on forty-ounces and bummed our cigarettes.
We played the name game.
“Do you know Eddie Falcone?”
“Yup, he’s in my class. Do you know Alix Cunningham?”
“She’s in the grade above us, so we know her, but we don't hang out.”
“She’s really cool.”
One boy hit the other boy’s side and they both collapsed in laughter at a private joke about Alix Cunningham and something beautiful she must have done.
Alix’s name appears on some of the flyers for prep school nightclub parties, which means she’s popular not just in her school, but throughout the network of prep schools. The flyers are for parties at rented-out nightclub venues, and they usually feature a rotating roster of about twenty-five names—similar to the charity gala invitations our parents receive, only these invitations have neon writing and black backgrounds. The names of the hosts are written in a larger font. The hosts corral the committee of VIP names that fill up the rest of the card in smaller writing. There is a ten- or twenty-dollar entry fee for most of these parties, but if you’re on the flyer, of course, it’s free. You are part of the attraction, like a celebrity guest.
“Wanna see the other side of this roof?” the popular boy asked Bianca. He reminded me of Montgomery Clift, an old Hollywood actor whose biography my mother keeps by her bed. Both of their noses had the slightest hook at the tip. Only, Clift had dark, slicked-back hair and wore a blazer and tie. This boy wore baggy jeans with a hooded pullover and had blond hair that parted in the middle. When he ran his hand through it, which he did often, two golden streaks formed curtains around his green eyes.
He put his arm around Bianca’s shoulders and walked her around a corner behind a vent so they were out of view. The two other boys laughed at more private jokes while Sarah and I pretended to look at the skyline.
“Is that the Chrysler Building?” I asked, not looking directly at either of the boys, but hoping they would answer.
“What? I don’t fucking know.”
Sarah rolled her eyes to let me know they were stupid, not me. Still, I wished I could have taken back the noises I made. I hate calling attention to myself when I have the shakes. I get them in the presence of boys. I have to ball my fists to keep my hands still, but the wire that runs through my body still vibrates as if it has been plucked.
When Bianca emerged from behind a vent, the boy was holding her by the wrist and she was chewing on the side of her mouth to keep from smiling. That night I noticed, even in the darkness, how red her tongue was. The color of a lipstick-kiss stain, the mark of a woman, lolling about inside her.
“I think I see him,” says Bianca, looking through the diner window for the boy who might like me. “Oh, wait, forget it.”
Outside, a tree shakes itself off. An old woman with a walker inches across the street.
“We need a plan if we see him,” she says, arranging Sweet’N Low packets into a pyramid on the table. “I don’t know—should we wave at him? Maybe we should wave at him to come inside?”
“Let’s pretend we’re busy talking and see if he notices us,” I say, because I’m good at impersonating someone having a conversation. There’s a lot of wrist flicking and shrugging involved, but the words don’t matter.
“So I’m talking and you’re talking, and yes, that’s amazing, but no, I’m shaking my head no.”
We crack up. We hope the boy walks by right now and sees us cracking up, engaged in our own lives instead of his.
“Anything else for you two girls?” the waiter, Anthony, asks, but he knows the answer.
“Anthony hates us,” Bianca says when he walks away.
Our half-smoked cigarettes burn in the ashtray. A kitchen bell dings twice. The cash register opens. There are muffin crumbs all over my kilt.
“He isn’t coming,” I say, calling it. It’s almost eight; he would have left by now. He took another route to the bus stop or he left early. We need to get here earlier. And now another day is about to start without any boys. There is nothing to think about during class. No change. Nothing different.
After school, I walk the dog all the way back to East End Avenue and cross the street on the block where the boy lives. I have done this before, standing outside his apartment in the evening willing him to come outside, but Bianca doesn’t know that.
Back and forth, back and forth, along a block paved with hexagons. The dog sniffs each please curb your dog sign staked in tree soil. Behind us, all the lights are out in the mayor’s mansion. I watch for shapes behind the wrought-iron leaves of the boy’s door. Come out, come out, come out.
I don’t even know if I’d say anything to him. I probably wouldn’t. But if I could see him, then maybe he’d see me and want to talk, and ask for my number so we could talk more, and I could go home and tell Bianca and tell my mother, and then maybe she would think I had fairy dust, too.
When the sun sags low, the dog and I give up and walk west, past York, First, then Second Avenues. Psst, psst. I keep my head down and wind the leash around my fist.
Now it’s Third Avenue, then Lexington, with more buildings with wrought-iron doors, and behind them, men with white gloves gripping their handles from the inside. On Park, the sky is almost navy and light pools under every awning. I look up when I hear someone tapping glass and squint to see through the building’s door. There, behind the glass, is a man’s white-gloved hand, folded in the shape of a gun, pointing at me.