Where It Began(7)

Art?

Did somebody say art?

Hell no.

After Winston, I would be attending the totally impossible college of my parents’ dreams. Biz school from the sound of it, between Bloody Marys. Because: Do you know what twenty-three-year-olds who graduate from Wharton make even in this economy? Six figures!

Gabby Gardiner, shake hands with your totally impossible, not-going-to-happen future.





VII


IN ACTUAL FACT, THE HIGH POINT OF THAT YEAR AT Winston is when Miss Cornish, the art teacher who does the crafty part of art—ceramics and pottery and sculpture—puts my ceramic spoon holder on a pedestal outside the teachers’ lounge because it is an outstanding example of really good glaze.

At my old school, I had always been this sort of regular person. At Winston, I figure out quickly that I am sub-regular. Basically, everybody else is either gorgeous or super-smart or incredibly good at something important, born with the popular gene or richer than God. And I’m not. So, big surprise, I do not get a whole crowd of popular friends and a round of applause when I walk down the hall.

Look:

There I am, telling myself all these helpful affirmations such as, Oh Gabby, you really are smart. Oh Gabby, you’re totally normal and everything is fine. Oh Gabby, aren’t you just the most adorable thing that ever got out of bed in the morning?

Only if any of this were true, it is hard to explain why I’m standing around Winston School watching Billy Nash and the Slutmuffins lounging in the Class of 1920 Memorial Garden, owning benches and tables and patches of grass that are instantly cool just because they own them, watching the smart kids and the über- rich kids and the weird kids in the manga club all hanging out together in big happy clumps, while I am alone with my unimpressive grades and no one to talk to except for Lisa Armstrong and Anita Patel.

“Your little friends called again,” Vivian says from what sounds like far away across the vibrating green room.

Friends?

You would think that after all these enlightening sessions with Ponytail Doc trying to get me to tell her all about myself, it would be easier to connect the dots.

I open my eyes, but everything stays in a lot better focus when they’re closed. “Who?”

“That Lisa and Anita,” Vivian says. “Those friends.”

Making her little puke face as if having to be reminded that her daughter is once again reduced to counting these poor excuses for fashionable teens as her only friends makes her physically ill.

As if she can’t stand to remember.



What I remember is the smell of burnt, melted bittersweet chocolate and charred marshmallows. The backs of their heads—Lisa’s strawberry-blond fluff and Anita’s black braid—blurring in the smoke that billows from the wall oven in Lisa’s kitchen. Grabbing for the mitts and the fire extinguisher and waving magazines at the smoke detectors to try to get them to turn off.

How long ago was that?

There I am, thirteen years old and slouching around Winston School in the shortest blue uniform skirt in the history of man over tiny black bicycle shorts. The only cute thing about this skirt is the pocket on the butt. Anita is wearing a similarly truncated skirt over a pair of leggings, which is also, God help us, a Winston School style, except Anita is wearing them because her mother made her. Lisa is the one person still wearing the baggy khaki uniform pants that no other girl has ever worn to school after the first day of seventh grade. Lisa is also the one person at Winston School who admires me for something before I get Billy after four years of total obscurity.

It is October of seventh grade and I have just figured out that art is the only thing I don’t suck at, but it turns out to be the only thing Lisa does suck at (apart from her apparent inability to shop for clothes that don’t have some Disney character or strange-looking appliqués on them) and that she really really wants to be good at. This is because her parents are seriously religious cinematographers who value art just a notch below how much they value God Almighty.

It is November and Lisa has started following me to assembly and sitting next to me and Anita, who actually has the potential to be completely regular, except she has to take Hindi language class and Indian dance class and learn to play weird-looking musical instruments and entertain old ladies from her extended family who are visiting her from New Delhi for months at a time. She has to figure out how to modify her uniform in a way that keeps her mother happy but does not involve social suicide.

At least the stuff she has to do to keep her mom happy doesn’t involve getting people to think she’s hot.

There we are in December, about as hot as egg salad sandwiches or, in Anita’s case, completely vegan soy wraps. There we are, sitting three in a row, invisible enough to slouch there in the back of the auditorium eating contraband snack food, while Mr. Piersol, our idiot headmaster, slogs from one alarming story to the next in his mind-numbing weekly ascent up Cliché Mountain. Not to mention, Mr. Piersol would appear to be scrounging all his information on teen life off a shady website for urban legends.

News flash: Boston high school girls caught in pregnancy pact!

Oh no, boys and girls: Children having children! Look before you leap!

“Children having icy pops. Look before you lick,” Anita whispers, gazing up at Mr. Piersol, hunkering down in her auditorium seat to eat the lime icy pop that she smuggled in.