There was among the little girls a desperate yearning to please her, which felt to Cooper as familiar and nurturing as her mother’s embrace. She lived as the object of anxious looks and careful appraisal of her moods and desires; her reaction to every comment or joke or suggestion or observation was carefully studied and analyzed by her peers, lest she should appear displeased by the offering. How she had arrived at this position would have been a subject of some conjecture if the other little girls were capable of such analyses. But as it was, they inhabited a fixed universe, a clock set in motion by a malevolent god who made Cooper in her own image, if god were a beautiful nine-year-old girl who wore Abercrombie every day, had white skin smoother and softer than the flesh on a kitten’s paws and hair that was three different browns and two reds, all shining.
Cooper’s dominance over the entire fourth grade was the subject of conjecture among teachers and administrators, but virtually impossible to confirm and awkward to bring up in discussion with her parents. It had been noted that girls often came to the office crying after encounters with her, but Cooper’s composure was such that these cases ended up as hard-to-parse “she said/she said”s, and Cooper had already deduced that adults much preferred to avoid entanglement in these spats. Cooper herself did not recall when she began to take pleasure in shows of dominance over her classmates; it came about as soon as she became aware that she was indeed dominant. She never wondered where this power came from. One day in second grade, it was simply there. A few of the girls she had played with in first grade, girls less cute than her, slower readers, less gifted on the monkey bars, kept trying to play with her during yard and she would shake her head and inform them without any malice in her voice, “I’m not playing with you.” And Cooper would turn to those she had chosen, and they would feel blessed, and those she had rejected would feel cursed. They would try to compel her with platitudes recalled from books and teachers who believed all children should be friends in a vast continuum around the earth—make new friends but keep the old—but Cooper dismissed that idea. She could never put words to it, but she had already formulated her dictum: no ugly friends, no fat friends, no dumb friends. How, exactly, did it benefit the species for prepubescent girls to be making each other cry? Nobody could answer that, but in the years since Cooper’s first assertions of dominance, her behavior had transformed the school so much that some children were terrified of attending, others were moved to private schools, and still others attended expensive and ultimately fruitless child psychiatry sessions, which invariably resulted in the prescription of antidepressants. If there had been a meeting of parents, therapists, administrators, and girls with tear-stained faces, then perhaps Cooper’s role as catalyzing agent in this cycle of fear and intimidation would have been revealed. But Cooper, observed in the school yard by the untrained eye, was just another very pretty little girl. There were small signs: the body language of defeat after a dismissive wave from Cooper; the glances freighted with hope and desire; the way every little clique in the school yard seemed to radiate in descending order of attractiveness and/or popularity from Cooper’s position just inside and to the right of the gate; her back to the school yard, her hoodie draped on her shoulder beneath that lustrous hair. Her disapproval was as imperious and cutting as a dauphin’s waving away of an insufficiently delicious pastry.
COOPER’S PARENTS BARELY registered their daughter’s status, only noting to each other with some satisfaction that she seemed popular and to have many friends. There had been the occasional phone call from another mother, reporting their daughter was upset with something Cooper had said or done, but most parents adhered strictly to the “let the kids work it out for themselves” rule, which made sense to Brooke and Mark, particularly since that meant they didn’t have to intervene. And when occasionally they mentioned such matters to Cooper, she easily persuaded them that the conflict was more the fault of her peer rather than herself, that the insult and the hurt had been at the very least mutual if not, in fact, directed at Cooper. She had merely retaliated, and was, indeed, a victim herself. No parent was equipped to objectively adjudicate such matters and so the conversations ended with imprecations to behave, be good, be nice, and how could any parent gazing at this adorable nine-year-old not believe her? Cooper had been among the top academic performers throughout her elementary school career, and even occasional absences because of modeling go-sees had not impeded her mastery of times tables, division, or her reading of the required Junie B. Jones books. Though her teachers had noted that Cooper’s modeling, her appearance in ads for Benetton, Gap, and even Apple, had caused among the girls a fervent wish to also be models, and some had taken to stating that as their career ambition.
Brooke was aware that promoting her daughter’s modeling career could be seen as tacky and not in line with contemporary parenting ideals—the child should choose her own path—yet it was clear that Cooper not only enjoyed the photo sessions but also thrived on the competitive aspects of go-sees and casting. She took pleasure in meeting with photographers and art directors and playing the cute little girl. So how could Brooke deny her this? Though she limited her daughter to just one day of castings a week—for actual jobs, Cooper was, of course, allowed to take as many days as the shoot required—Cooper had been late to school eleven times this semester because of morning castings. A note had been sent home warning the parents that any more tardies and they would have to attend a special program for the parents of chronically late children. But Cooper wouldn’t consider skipping work for school and the money was being deposited in a 529 account, so both parents felt there was ultimately some virtue to all this commerce.
And didn’t all parents harbor the wish that their daughter would be pretty, popular, and smart? This was a neighborhood of winners—attractive, bright women, MAs, JDs, PhDs, or IMGs, WMGs, Fords—who had married successful men so that they could live in expansive apartments in an exclusive part of town. So wouldn’t the matriarchs be adept at spotting their offspring’s prospects, even as mere nine-year-olds? There was such emphasis placed on beauty, on fame, on being famously beautiful, that a little girl who seemed particularly gifted in these areas was a source of some secret pride to her parents. And so it was for Brooke, who could see in her daughter’s sometimes haughty mien (she had to admit, Cooper occasionally could be sort of a bitch to other little girls), the makings of an alpha female, the type who could have a featured-in-Vogue run through New York society—the kind of run usually reserved for pretty, well-born English girls, the kind of run that Marni Saltzwell had had—that so many women who came to Tribeca from the suburbs instead of from the Upper East Side still secretly believed was the truest form of making it.
THERE WAS A pleasing rhythm to Cooper’s life. From the walk with her sister and father down Greenwich, past the security guard who always wished them a good day, alongside the restaurants still shuttered, to the market where her father would buy her an avocado sushi roll for lunch, and finally to drop-off, where she would take up her position by the gate and wait with a few select peers for Heather, their teacher, to gather them for class.
Cooper carefully curated her friends. There were the girls she found physically appealing, there were those whose families had elaborate summer houses, and others whose parents occupied glamorous perches. On what, Cooper couldn’t even say, but she already knew that connections mattered.
It had been a while since she had organized an ostracism; such bullying no longer held out much fun for her since it was too easily accomplished. But she did recall with some smug satisfaction when she had made Amber cry, when she had made Sophie cry, when she had made Juliette cry, and so on. It had all been so easily achieved, unthinking even, just a snub, a refusal at jump rope, a disinvitation to play tag, and then the careful informing of her more elite friends that the girl in question was no longer welcome. There were always unreliable allies, Cooper had noticed, girls who would continue to play in secret with the ostracized one, but she could usually forge a solid alliance among these girls. Particularly the ones who had more looks than brains. All this calculation, for Cooper, came as naturally, easily, and instinctively as choosing an outfit. It was who she was.
THE ARRIVAL OF boys as an object of interest, and the endless online chat that accompanied this new dimension, was the first change of the established school order that had occurred on Cooper’s watch, and before she had time to react, she noticed that her hold on some of her best friends was slipping. The other cute girls were paying more attention to their various crushes, boys who seemed stupid and diffident but were nonetheless the fervent object of their desires, than they were to Cooper’s latest drama. She understood, immediately, that this important change in the power dynamic meant that she had been displaced. A girl who was liked by many boys could survive—even thrive—without Cooper’s blessing. This turn of events was surprising but Cooper felt it was manageable. She was the prettiest girl—professionally pretty, even—and so why wouldn’t the boys see her as the most prized? So, she adjusted. (Years later, when Cooper would learn algebra, she would quickly grasp the concept of variables, of a number changing value depending on the equation around it.)
First, she took note of the boys who seemed to inspire the most erratic behavior among her peers. There were two, Jason and Jake. (Jake was one of a pair of identical twins, yet strangely his brother, Jagger, was largely ignored.) Both Jason and Jake were of average height and size, prone to the same boisterous shouting and frequent shoving as their peers. Yet, by some quirk, they had emerged as the most prized. They were both tasseled-haired, their locks descending in wisps over their blue eyes, slight freckles dotting pink cheeks, gapped teeth, pink lips; both were athletic, both were successful participants in Downtown Little League, both had, at one point or another, been the fastest boy in the fourth grade, that title passed back and forth like a scepter among monarchs in a line afflicted by regicide.
It was easy enough for Cooper to persuade the 2Js, as they were called, that they should focus all their boisterous attention-seeking, their clamoring look-at-me antics of skirting up the wrought-iron gate, sliding down the hallways on lunchroom trays, and walking on their hands up the stairs, toward Cooper. All it took was an indication, by giggling, by pausing to gape, by teasing, that she had noticed and was interested in their antics. It succeeded so completely that when Cooper deigned to speak to them, about pop songs or movies, they could only answer with default “totally” in response to everything Cooper said. She had reestablished her position. And though Brooke was perplexed when Cooper suggested she would like a playdate with Jason, it seemed harmless enough and she arranged one over many awkward laughs with his mother, Ava, a publicist she had dealt with a few times during her magazine career.
But Cooper found the playdate disappointing. What were you supposed to do with a boy? She had no idea. Immediately upon his arrival, deposited in their loft by a Jamaican helper and received by Sadie, her babysitter, it was apparent that the squawking, clucking little rooster of the yard was here much diminished and maddeningly shy. Boys were terrible bores, Cooper realized. They didn’t express any interest in drawing or painting or dressing up or looking for music clips on YouTube or going through her modeling book. Jason seemed interested only in playing tennis and baseball on the Wii, and so Cooper went along with that. It was a dull afternoon that she vowed she wouldn’t repeat. The boy was sufficiently transfixed by Cooper that he would continue to badger his mother for another playdate but Cooper indicated to her mother, with a quick, even shake of the head, that she was not interested. Her status secured by her having a playdate with the more desirable of the Js, she felt she could afford to now take a break from laborious and torpid boys.
MOST OF HER go-sees took her out of Tribeca, to lofts and studios in Chelsea or Dumbo, but there were still a few photographers in Tribeca, those who were successful enough or who had bought in early enough. As Cooper’s career progressed, babysitter Sadie was increasingly delegated by a sometimes-stoned Brooke with the task of depositing Cooper at castings and go-sees and hanging around and making sure the little girl wasn’t fondled, ignored, or made to feel ugly. The photographers who worked with children tended to be women and, if at first they were excessively sensitive about hurting a child’s feelings, over the years expediency necessitated less hand-holding and more curtness. It was impossible to look at a hundred kids in one day without making a few feel bad that they weren’t cute enough, and certainly the mothers who so often accompanied these kids would glower at the photographer and art director when they felt their child wasn’t receiving the love he or she deserved, but the parents were generally so supplicating at the possibility of the next job they hesitated to voice their displeasure, or, more frequently, they would turn their anger not inward but toward their son or daughter, for not being beautiful enough or being diffident or shy or fat.
This photographer, Barnaby, in his Hudson Street loft, wore the vintage tortoiseshell-rimmed glasses, artisanal T-shirt, and skinny jeans of a fashion photographer. He was more accustomed to dealing with an entirely different type of child, the gamine pubescent girl, fifteen to eighteen, who increasingly was the type the magazines wanted for their editorial. Advertisers, on the other hand, still wanted grown-up girls in their campaigns, and in this particular luxury campaign he needed a glamorous child who could serve as a lovely prop for a statuesque model in an ad for some beautiful alligator-skin luggage laid out on the backseat of a Maybach sedan. Yet while most fashion photographers would quickly flip through the comp, look at the girl, and then snap a few test shots, this photographer had a mellower, calmer, sweeter manner. He asked Cooper about herself, how she got into modeling and whether or not she liked it, and he seemed genuinely surprised that she lived just a few blocks away and even more shocked when she told him where she went to school.
This was one of the most beautiful lofts Cooper had ever seen, and she had seen plenty. Though she didn’t know how to express size in terms of square footage, she guessed that this loft was three times the size of her family’s loft, and twice the size of her richest friend Cameron’s, so that meant this photographer was moneybags. There were floor-to-ceiling windows facing east and south, columns in a row down the middle with leaves carved in at the top, and even a DJ station in the corner with twin turntables. There was a pod that looked like a giant mushroom cap, the exterior to the coolest kid’s room she had ever seen. When she asked who lived there, she was told, “Miro. He goes to your school.”
Miro? She didn’t know him.
“Is he in fourth grade?”
“Fifth.”
Ah, an older boy. His appearance in the loft, blond-haired, sleepy-eyed, in button-up blue shirt, slim-cut selvage denim, and Converse sneakers, seemed to Cooper a manifestation. Had he been here all along?
“Miro—Cooper goes to school with you,” Miro was told by the photographer.
Cooper looked at the photographer, with his crazy gyrating limp, his somewhat effeminate manner; he didn’t seem to her like other dads, but she guessed he was Miro’s dad.
Miro nodded, uninterested.
Cooper gazed at him hoping he would recognize her: surely even the fifth-grade boys must have noticed her. Miro, though, merely flopped on another of the many sofas in the room and started doing something on his phone. But when they were finished with her test shots, Miro asked her if she wanted to draw, and Cooper loved drawing. She looked at Sadie, who looked at the photographer, who shrugged and said sure, though he wondered if it might be weird for Cooper to see the other girls coming in for their go-sees. Sadie assured him that Cooper wasn’t the type to be bothered by that.
Cooper and Miro went to draw inside the mushroom cap. He had the coolest stuff: a huge round bed, a flat-panel TV, a new Apple computer, and iPods and iPads casually tossed around like throw pillows. And for painting and drawing he had easels and tons of colors, craypons, crayons, paints, and clean brushes in every thickness. He pulled over an orange stool and told Cooper to sit down at one of the easels and asked her what she wanted to draw. She suggested, how about Kidrobots, and Miro shrugged, said “Whatever,” and so they drew and painted their own designs for Kidrobots. A barefoot Burmese man brought them cookies and soy milk and while they were working in the warm afternoon sun, Cooper snuck glances at Miro and thought he was the perfect-looking boy, not all trying to be cool or tough but just the way he sat there concentrating on his drawing gave her a pleasant but unfamiliar feeling. And then, when they showed each other their designs, Cooper saw that Miro was definitely the best drawer in the whole school and she thought that was so awesome. He even let her keep some of his designs, which she folded up and put in her leather valise where she kept her modeling book.
She found herself hoping more than usual that she would get this job, and that she would be allowed to return to this apartment. She admitted to herself that it had something to do with Miro.
SHE SAW MIRO at school the next day, and he barely acknowledged her. He was in double-file line with his class, waiting at the library entrance, and he just bobbed his head slightly when he saw her and she couldn’t figure out why he didn’t start fighting with his neighbor or walking on his hands the way fourth-grade boys did when they saw her. For the first time, Cooper felt snubbed, and the unfamiliar ache of it ruined even her usual mean-girl enjoyment. So that day at lunch she would even have let ugly girls play with her if they had asked, because she was so preoccupied trying to figure out why Miro didn’t seem as excited about her as she was about him.
She broke school rules four times that day—she used her cell phone at school to call and text her mother to ask if she had gotten that job. Both calls went to voice mail and neither text was returned. They heard nothing that evening, and when Sadie took Cooper and her sister to get dinner at Bubby’s, Cooper was so distracted she didn’t even think to tell Sadie there was no way she wanted to sit with another girl from her class who happened to be there with her helper, so she ended up having her mac and cheese with Evie, the kind of girl who she would never, ever sit down with under normal circumstances.
DID SHE GET it? Did she? Did she? Brooke was tired of fielding this question from Cooper, who was jumping up and down and pulling at her wrist.
Finally, two days later, she said, Yes, okay, yes, you got it. Next Tuesday, she would skip school to go to the shoot at eight thirty.
“At the loft? At the same place where the go-see was?”
No, of course it wasn’t at the loft, it was at a studio in Chelsea.
Her next question didn’t even make sense to Brooke. “Will Miro be there?”
“Who is Miro?”
“This BOY she likes,” said Penny, her little sister.
“Shut up, Penny!” Cooper went off to her room and sat down, looking at Miro’s designs.
The day of the shoot, Cooper sat in an aluminum-framed chair while a makeup artist went over her and then a stylist fitted her so she looked almost as cruel as she did in real life. She found herself impatiently waiting for the photographer and when he limped over to say hello, she blurted out, “Is Miro coming?”
The photographer seemed surprised. “Maybe later. He’s at school right now.”
Usually, Cooper thrived on being the center of attention. She loved having all eyes focused on her, the only sounds the clicking of the camera motor and quiet comments by the photographer asking his assistant for levels, strobe, and new backs. She loved the way the grown-ups worked so hard while she just stood there following simple directions: pout, more smile, less smile, turn, okay, try that, now really happy, now super-duper happy, more like that but with bigger eyes, really big eyes, biggest happiest eyes in the world, okay, now with mouth open—can we get a reflector in there, I’m getting some glare on the teeth—okay, now that big smile, with super big eyes, and—
But this shoot wasn’t as much fun. Even if Miro did show up, she wouldn’t be the center of attention, and he would never see how amazing and beautiful she was and anyway this supermodel Sophie was the superstar and Cooper was just this prop.
By the time Brooke showed up to pick up Sadie and Cooper, Cooper was already so disappointed she didn’t even answer when Brooke asked how it had gone, and had to have Sadie tell her that the photographer seemed very happy with what he had gotten, and then the photographer limped over and kissed Brooke on both cheeks and said that they had met before and that he occasionally had coffee with her husband in the morning, after drop-off.
THAT EVENING, PENNY found Miro’s designs when she was looking through Cooper’s book. She removed them to trace because she, too, admired them. Cooper, panicked at losing Miro’s drawings, stomped through the loft until she found them on Penny’s desk and began shouting at her, “These are mine, mine, mine.”
Penny began crying. “You don’t have to scream at me. They’re just some stupid designs.”
Cooper grabbed them back. “They aren’t just some stupid designs,” she said, but she couldn’t explain why.
AND FINALLY CAME the kind of humiliation that anyone who had observed Cooper—and that would mean every kid in the fourth grade and the entire faculty—found so unlikely that most weren’t sure what they were witnessing when it happened. It was one of those moments that would be discussed with the kind of fervor that adults use when they talk about a particularly salacious celebrity scandal. In the middle of yard, with the entire fourth and fifth grades playing during a sunny spring afternoon, Cooper broke away, without a word, from her clique of girls. She walked all the way across the yard, past the boys playing tag and the girls in line for jump rope, past the yard monitor Lamont with a whistle on a cord around his neck, between the islands of backpacks and lunchboxes and jackets discarded in piles around the concrete playground. She weaved through all this to where she saw, backlit by the sun, the thin and slouching and so boyish silhouette of Miro, wearing headphones in flagrant contravention of school rules, leaning against the wrought-iron gate.
And she said, “Hey.”
What happened next would become exaggerated through each telling. Miro had turned his back, stuck out his tongue, wagged his hand with thumb on nose, spit, flicked a booger, made moose ears. Actually, Miro had simply nodded without removing his headphones. It wasn’t a snubbing so much as simple, pure indifference. Cooper backed away and walked through the yard to where her friends had stood. Already, her status was infinitesimally diminished. For the fourth-grade girls, this was the moment the fever broke, when the pain became bearable, when the soul was on the mend. Once Cooper had been exposed as having an unrequited crush, her powers dwindled. Her bravery at being bold enough to take a public risk was unremarked and unnoticed. Cooper herself hadn’t felt brave. She hadn’t felt anything at all as she walked toward Miro; it had been a compulsion, one that she had never felt before yet would act upon again.
The children didn’t do a dance or sing a song to celebrate the end of tyranny. They continued their hopscotch and jump rope until the bell rang and they filed inside, aware dimly that something was different.