even cowgirls from vermont get the blues

“Whose idea was it to send me to Constance anyway?” fifteen-year-old Vanessa Abrams demanded of her nineteen-year-old sister, Ruby.

“Fuck if I know.” Ruby was in the bathtub, soaking off the sweat and stench from her gig at Pete’s Candy Store the night before. She was the bassist for the band SugarDaddy, the latest sensation on the Williamsburg, Brooklyn, bar scene, and she’d been up all night, rocking out. “Do you mind?”

Vanessa stood in the doorway of the bathroom while her sister floated naked in the sparsely bubbled lukewarm water, her thick black Williamsburg hipster bangs plastered to her clammy white forehead. “Is there some reason why I couldn’t go to a more convenient, less materialistic, less-full-of-bitches school in, say, Brooklyn, which happens to be where I live?” Vanessa railed on.

“You know the story.” Ruby hugged her pale wet knees. “Dad read an article about that woman recycling personal objects to make art in Atlantic Monthly and the artist’s bio said she went to Constance Billard. He was so impressed that when you told him you wanted to come live here with me, he just signed you up. He doesn’t care what a hassle it is to get there. And it makes him feel good that you’re at this ritzy school all day. It’s like he thinks the school can be your substitute parent because it’s used to dealing with families where the parents are always in Gstaad or Cannes or wherever.” Ruby lay on her stomach so that her flat, pink ass was in plain view. Outside the tiny, city-grime-smeared bathroom window a cargo truck rumbled by on its way to the sugar factory three blocks away. That was one of the things Vanessa loved about living in gritty Williamsburg: the air always smelled like cotton candy.

“Nice,” she muttered grimly. Vanessa turned to the mirror over the sink, grabbed Ruby’s green rubber hairbrush, and started to brush out her waist-length, naturally jet-black mane. Six months ago, on her first day of school at Constance Billard, the tenth-grade girls had all gone crazy over her hair, stroking it and braiding it, like Vanessa was one of those Barbie hairdressing heads or a new pony or something. It was clearly the only thing they liked about her. “Okay, so he read that article like twenty years ago. The girls in my class don’t give two shits about recycling or art. All they do is get their highlights done and trade lip glosses they get in gift bags at all those fancy parties they go to. Plus, you graduated from White River High and you’re making decent money without even going to college.”

“I’m exceptional,” Ruby replied dryly, sitting up to squirt Johnson’s baby shampoo into her palm. “If I’d gone to Constance instead of some shitty high school in Vermont, I’d probably be the first woman president by now.”

Vanessa examined her pores in the bathroom mirror. The bathtub was beige and the sink was scrambled-egg yellow—-typical Williamsburg—but she adored the wonky plainness of the shabby one-bedroom apartment. If only the school she attended five days a week, all day long, were equally wonky. She’d spent lunchtime alone yesterday, drinking black tea and eating saltines while at the other end of the table Kati Farkas, one of her shiny-haired, glossy-lipped classmates, complained about having to go sailing again in the Greek Isles for spring break with her parents. “But I’ve already been to Corfu. It’s like, can’t they take us sailing somewhere in Greece with better shopping, like Milan?” Kati had whined, blissfully ignorant of the world’s geography, topography, and just about everything else, despite Constance Billard’s efforts to educate her.

It wasn’t as if Vanessa had tons of friends back in Vermont either. She’d spent so many years dreaming about moving to New York City and becoming an avant-garde filmmaker in the style of Ingmar Bergman, she didn’t have time to socialize. Now that her parents had finally given in and let her move in with Ruby she was sort of . . . bored. Or maybe the word empty was more like it. It wasn’t a new feeling, but she’d thought the sensation would go away when she got to New York, and it hadn’t, not really. Not even when she pigged out on falafel.

“You need a project,” Ruby observed from the scratched beige porcelain tub. Her parakeet, Tofu, flew into the bathroom and alighted on the soap dish, where he pooped and then started to dip his green beak into the murky bathwater.

Vanessa picked up her digital camcorder again and zoomed in on Tofu. “It’s so cute how he does that,” she giggled.

Ruby rolled her eyes and sank down lower in the water. “You’re still relatively new in town. You need to establish yourself and make a few friends so you have something else to do besides film me naked in the bathtub, which is actually totally perverted and annoying, especially when I’ve been up half the night playing my tits off,” she yawned. “Why don’t you start a blog or something? Like, fill the homepage up with stills of parakeet shit or some such. There are a lot of people who’d be into that. Think of all the friends you’d make. You might even meet your first boyfriend that way.”

Vanessa reached out with her foot and kicked the soap dish into the tub. Tofu flapped up to the shower curtain rail with a squawk. His poop floated on the surface of the bathwater like a piece of chewed Juicy Fruit gum. “Wench,” Vanessa muttered before stomping out of the bathroom in the black vintage Doc Marten steel-toed combat boots she wore as a big “fuck you” to Constance Billard’s “simple dark shoe” rule. There was nothing complicated about combat boots, but she was pretty sure the school was thinking of something more along the lines of a penny loafer or ballet flat. Right. Fuck that.

She flopped facedown on the plain white sheets of the unmade futon in her boxy, plain white bedroom, intending to wallow in irritation and resentment until Ruby dragged her wet ass out of the bath and turned on a movie or something. But Ruby’s comment had given her an idea. Vanessa spent most of her free time at home, flipping through back issues of alternative photography and art journals and absentmindedly splitting the split ends in her long black hair. Constance Billard’s photography studio was ridiculously well stocked and totally underused, and the school probably had millions of dollars in endowment money. Why not take advantage of the school’s resources and start an arts magazine of her own? She could ask for submissions from her fellow Constance students and feature one of her own darkly brilliant photographs on the cover of every ingenious issue. She wouldn’t get a boyfriend out of it, not that she cared, but it would keep her busy, and it might even help her get into NYU.

Of course she’d probably have to publish a lot of dumb photographs of girls’ pedicured feet and poems about dead bichons frises, but she could always deface them with a fat black Sharpie in the privacy of her own home. Maybe some girl’s big-deal gallery owner mom would discover her raw, intuitive, behind-the-camera eye and she’d begin her filmmaking career before she even made it to NYU film school. Maybe Ruby was right—she did need a project. Starting her own arts magazine would be the ideal way to establish herself uptown and show everyone there was more to the pale, slightly chubby, dark-tressed, Doc Martens–wearing newcomer from Vermont than they’d first thought. And while she was at it, maybe she’d do something different with her hair, something unexpected.

Here’s hoping whatever she does doesn’t involve parakeet poop.