Surprise, surprise, the high schoolers say on the screen, a middle school dance this weekend! No uniforms necessary. It’s goin’ down in the gym!
I reach over to grab Clarissa by the shoulder, but she gives me a look like, Ugh, Stop. Clarissa is my only friend, but she is also trying to move up. Outside school, we sing every word of Rent, tell secrets, and look up pictures of Bonsai Kittens with the bedroom lights off; her mom makes us baked ziti and classic Italian desserts; I attend Clarissa’s soccer games. But in school, our friendship is cautionary. Clarissa grew up with members of the A-crowd, the most popular, and when they start on me she’s allowed to join in on the chanting, Your underwear is showing, Queera. Get bent! I know where I stand: I wear a soup thermos with a strap around my neck, a back brace; I have an imaginary boyfriend named Brahman; I roll a suitcase filled with books because my equestrian posture is still considered precious and can’t handle any excess weight. My nose bleeds onto my desk at least twice a day. I want Clarissa to move up, and I’m no good for that. It’s an arrangement I understand—a deal I would, and eventually will, gladly take for myself.
It’s 1999 and our prep school is one of the first in the country to issue mandatory laptops to every student. They’re called Study-Pros, and they’re wired to a group of men in the library called the Tech-Center who observe and control how we use them. If we get distracted in class, clicking around on Napster, a member of the Tech-Center will often move the arrow of our mouse directly to the “X” like some phantom conscience. Recently, a member of the Tech-Center called my father to tell him I had downloaded porn videos onto my Study-Pro after school hours, when I didn’t think it counted. My father told him to go fuck right off.
We call the Study-Pros Craptops. They look like baby tombstones, cold to the touch, a gritty silver with blue rubber bumpers and handles. Because the school says they are indestructible, each class has made it their mission to destroy them. There’s nothing more thrilling than watching the A-crowd hurl their computers into the school lake and then onto the asphalt of the pickup loop, where high schoolers run them over in BMWs. The only way they stop is if the president’s Maybach creeps up. The president of our school—a huge, booming man with pants too short—has a chauffeur drive him from building to building in order to keep us in line. He’ll be investigated for fraud and money laundering just after we graduate, claims he will deny, but right now, this is still his school, his ways.
Clarissa and I are waiting outside the drama building for our moms to pick us up. She’s just finished a Key Club meeting, and I’ve just exercised one of the school horses, an asshole gelding named Kale, who lives here on campus.
Do you think I could e-mail Quince? I ask her. About the school dance? I step on top of my Craptop in my riding boots and jump a little. This is about as much as I can do without feeling guilty.
You’re loco, she says. We’re not even supposed to go to this thing. Dances like this are not for people like us.
Maybe I should just tell him how I feel, I say.
What about Brahman? she laughs.
Get out with that.
Boys are supposed to ask girls. Don’t be desperate.
It could go good with Quince. I can write a good e-mail.
I can’t do this right now, says Clarissa. The girls are coming soon. Clarissa promised her psych homework to the A-crowd, typed papers on the groupthink in 12 Angry Men.
My parents say I should always express myself, I say.
Do not touch your Craptop, says Clarissa. That would be so fucking embarrassing.
The A-girls trickle out of the building across from us. They gather under a palm tree, unbutton their skirts and let them drop to the grass like dead birds. Beneath their uniform skirts, the girls all wear tight, cotton shorts with slits up the sides. The shorts are called Soffes, and my mother won’t buy them for me because everybody else wears them. She says they look cheap, and why would you want to wear the same shorts as these skank-ass white brats? Clarissa swings her pink JanSport backpack over one shoulder (two shoulders would be social suicide) and waves me off. Do not! she says, between her teeth, as she smiles and skips toward the girls.
Years later, my mother will tell me that she prayed to a higher power every day that maybe, just once, she might find me standing with the other girls at the school pickup loop, laughing. Don’t be alone, she would repeat in the car. For once, don’t be alone. Let those girls talk to her. Let her act like a skank-ass Boca bitch if that’s what it takes, just don’t be alone.
The next morning, before school, my Study-Pro lights up with an e-mail from QPearson88. B my date 2 the dance? it says. 2 shy 2 ask. Meet U there.
I have a date to the middle school dance, I tell my parents. My father is lying on the living room couch, propped on an elbow. He drops his roll of newspaper on the floor, his sports bets scrawled over it in blue and red smears. He says, Who? I mean, who’s the lucky guy? I mean, I’ll chop his balls off.
I love when this happens in the movies, on TV, in the books I read: a boy comes for a girl and then the father suddenly loves the girl more, steps up, becomes protective. No boys or men have ever desired a fatherless girl. I have always wanted this complication.
Don’t say that! I laugh, swatting him in the arm. He takes me down to the couch with him in one swift yank. On my father’s four TVs, four different announcers give us some stats. Dad says the Raiders will pay my college tuition one day if we play our cards right.
What’s this? What’re you saying? My mother’s sitting on the floor in the corner of our living room, next to the television pyramid, organizing stacks of CDs for her new catalog-ordered player.
Mom, you won’t believe it.
Believe this, she says. Watch! She punches in a number—57—and the player glows blue, spins all the glittering CDs around like a fan. Michael Bolton’s voice seeps out of the speakers. Like magic! she says. It’s like a goddamn computer, this thing!
Enough with the Michael Bolton! screams my father.
And Rich Gannon passes, it’s the Raiders! screams an announcer.
I have a date to the middle school dance! screams me.
Wait for another! screams my mother, punching in a new number.
Enough with the Wilson Phillips!
My mother stands up and grabs hold of my hands. We dance to our song—Some day somebody’s gonna make you wanna turn around and say good-bye!—in front of the televisions.
Where’d you two even come from? says my father. He can’t help but smile. Not from me.
My mother wants to dress me for the middle school dance. She drives me to the Boca Raton Town Center mall, pulls our car up to valet. Limited Too? or dELiA*s? she asks, giving me a nudge, because these are the stores of my dreams, the stores I haven’t been old enough to shop in yet. These stores sell Spice Girl lollipops and the lowest pants and the finest glitters that don’t rain off.
Inside Limited Too, my mother chooses a baby-blue tank top with clouds on it. She holds it up between her fingers—the V-neck cutout, a white sparkling shoelace that ties the V tight. She walks me to a dressing room and hands me a black miniskirt with two baby slits up the sides. It’s too tight on me, and too short, but my mother says, Celebrate those legs! as she pulls me out from behind the dressing room curtain. I can barely move my thighs in the skirt, so I shuffle my feet. You don’t ride horses for nothing!
It’s too much, I say. The Backstreet Boys sing through the store speakers, and I feel embarrassed, like a little girl, just listening to the way they want it while I’m wearing this outfit. My legs are scarred and pale from my half-chaps, from all the stiff boots and pinching stirrup leathers over the years. Even worse—they’re hairy, especially my knees.
You’re just used to that long, fugly uniform skort, she says. You look hot like this, trust me. Quince will DROP DEAD.
Will you let me Nair for this? I ask. Please?
I’ll think about it, she says. It is a special occasion.