Confessions of a Not It Girl (10 page)

CHAPTER TEN

"You didn't!"

"I did."

"Oh my God!"

"I know." It was Wednesday evening (or, as I preferred to think of it, T minus two days), and I was sprawled out on my parents' enormous king-size bed throwing Q-tips at Pieter, our cat, who likes to bat them under the rug. We'd already gone through most of the box.

"But what if he finds out?"

"How would he find out? He's not exactly about to call the dean of students and say, 'Hi, I'm a second-year law student, and I'm just trying to confirm that a young woman I met at a party and am romantically interested in is, in fact, a senior at New York University.'"

"Didn't he ask why you live at home?"

"I told him I couldn't deal with dorm living and my parents won't buy me my own apartment."

"So now instead of thinking you're in high school, he thinks you're a spoiled little rich girl."

"An
of-age
spoiled little rich girl. It's not my fault. I had every intention of telling the truth. I
told
him I was a senior, but then he said, 'In
high school?'
and he sounded so horrified I had to say college."

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It's not like I'm morally opposed to lying about how old you are. I mean, Rebecca's not the only one with a fake ID burning a hole in her Kate Spade bag (well, I guess technically my fake ID is burning a hole in my
fake
Kate Spade bag). But it does seem to me there's a difference between flashing an Arizona driver's license at a bouncer and constructing a false identity in order to seduce one of your father's employees.

"So are you going to make up classes and a major and stuff?"

"I doubt it'll get that far. He kept saying he wasn't even going to show up."

"But you're going?"

"He'll be there."

"How do you know? He
said
he couldn't make it."

"He called, didn't he?"

"Maybe he's just a nice guy," I said. "He didn't want you waiting around for him, so he called to say he wasn't coming." Pieter was backing away from and then attacking the Q-tip lumps under the carpet. He takes the game very seriously.

"He left his
number.
He could have just said, 'Rebecca, it's Brian. I'm sorry, but I'm not going to meet you at The Madison on Friday.' Click. End of story. He didn't need to be all"--she made her voice deep and sexy-- '"Hey, it's Brian. Why don't you give me a call on my cell?'"

Pieter looked up at me, and I threw him another Q-tip. He pounced on it. "How'd he get your number?"

"Information." She took a drag. "Plus, why the long

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conversation? It takes ten seconds to tell someone you're not going to meet her somewhere. We were on the phone for half an hour. He'll be there."

Drinks at The Madison. Were there any circumstances that could possibly result in Josh and me being thrown together at The Madison's hip, sexy bar?

Setting:
A Midtown street during a sudden rainstorm. Jan is huddled under the awning of The Madison Hotel. Josh walks by her and then turns around.

JOSH:
(Not sure if it's her.)
Jan?

JAN:
(Equally unsure.)
Josh?

JOSH:
(Smiling.)
It is you. What brings you here?

JAN:
(Tosses mane of thick, nonfrizzy hair over bare shoulder.)
I was just shopping for this backless evening gown I'm wearing. What about you? JOSH:
(Reaching out to wipe an errant raindrop off Jan's cheek.)
I just finished soccer practice nearby.
(Waves vaguely.)

JAN: What a coincidence.

JOSH:
(Looks up at the rain.)
You wouldn't by any chance be free for a drink, would you?

JAN: Actually, I would. But I don't think you can go into The Madison in your soccer uniform.

JOSH: Oh, I always bring a tuxedo with me wherever I go-

JAN:
(Noticing his garment bag.)
Well, then, let's have that drink.

JOSH:
(Smiling knowingly.)
I was hoping you'd say

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that.
(He opens the door, revealing The Madison's dimly lit, sleekly modern bar, and holds it for her.)
You know, I've been thinking about you a lot lately....

CURTAIN

"Hello? Hello! Earth to Jan. Come in, Jan."

"Sorry. I just can't believe that two nights from now while you're sipping cosmopolitans in Midtown, my father will be humiliating me in my own home."

"I thought you said Sarah invited you
there
for dinner."

"News flash. My father's obsessed with making some Italian soup he's discovered. He won't rest until everyone in the tri-state area has tasted some."

"You're having soup for dinner?"

I rolled over onto my back. Pieter meowed for me to throw him another Q-tip, but thinking about Friday's dinner made me far too depressed to engage in strenuous physical activity.

"It's
special
soup," I said sarcastically.

Downstairs I could hear the opening bars of yet another opera. Suddenly my father's voice boomed.
"Let all the cats out, or we'll have some mice to deal with."

"Believe me," I said, "at this moment soup is the least of my problems."

That night when we sat down to eat, I tried to bring up the subject of Friday night's dinner as gently as possible.

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"So, you're cooking dinner for Josh and his cousin on Friday," I said.

My dad had taken off his apron and the chef's hat. I looked at him critically. He couldn't help being mostly bald, but there was no excuse for the love handles he was developing. Could he possibly work them off in forty-eight hours? I wondered.

"Daniel, I'm happy to cook if you'd rather not," offered my mom.

"NO!" I shouted. She looked hurt.

"I'm not such a terrible cook," she said. It was a complete lie. My mother is the worst cook in the world.

"You know, Stalin probably didn't think he was such a terrible person," I pointed out.

"Jan, that is an
awful
thing to say," said my mother.

"Apologize to your mother," said my father.

Clearly this conversation had gotten off on the wrong foot. I decided it was time to take the high road.

"I'm sorry, Mom," I said. "I should not have compared your cooking to Stalin's extermination of the kulaks." I was glad to see the research I'd done for my essay on Stalin's purges was paying off. My mother didn't say she accepted my apology, which I thought was fairly rude, but I continued. "I just meant, maybe Dad should cook."

"Of course I'll cook," said my dad. He held up a wooden spoon and started conducting along with the CD.
"I
will cook the meal for all the people. It will be so good that they will weeple"
he sang.

Was it really that impossible for my family to be normal for five minutes?

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"The thing is ..." I started. I needed to proceed delicately. "Maybe you could not sing along and, you know, not wear your chef's hat and the plastic apron." My dad looked at me. He still had his wooden spoon up in the air. "I mean, they're coming to meet you because you're a professor at an Ivy League school, so maybe you could try to look a little more...Ivy League."

My dad lowered the spoon and looked at me with a hurt expression. "You no like-a de apron?" he asked in a fake Italian accent.

"Not so much," I said.

"You no like-a de hat?"

"I believe my position on the hat has been firmly established."

"You no like-a de lyrics?"

"Maybe just not for Friday night. Then you could, you know, go back to your usual...thing."

My dad shrugged. "You no like, I no do," he said.

He and my mom looked at each other in their she'll-grow-out-of-it-someday way. Normally I might have taken this as an opportunity to point out that I was not the one whose idea of mature behavior involved leaping around the kitchen like a tone-deaf Pavarotti, but after the Stalin comment I decided not to press my luck.

"So, how are you doing with the applications?" my dad asked after we'd been sitting in silence for a few minutes.

"Fine," I said, spearing a pea with one tine of my fork.

They waited for me to elaborate. When I didn't, my mom asked, "Fine I don't want to talk about it, or fine they're getting done?"

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"Just fine." I stabbed another pea and then a third. Lined up like that they looked pretty, like beads on a necklace.

Nobody said anything. I could practically hear my parents looking at each other.

"Jan, we don't want to meddle," my dad started.

"I think we meddle a lot less than other parents," my mom added.

"Parents always think they're less meddlesome and more permissive than other parents," I said.

"Be that as it may," my mom said, "we've been pretty good about letting you handle this whole application process on your own."

"You mean except for the part where you made me visit every single small liberal arts college in the Northeast, forbade my applying anyplace west of the Mississippi, and spent ten thousand hours
casually
mentioning how much you think I'd enjoy Amherst?" I picked up a strand of spaghetti with my fingers and dropped it into my mouth. Normally this is the kind of behavior that annoys my parents, but tonight they were too focused on getting information out of me to be distracted by the old bad-table-manners trick.

"Jan, you make it sound like we're tyrants," my dad said.

"Notice that
I
merely say what you've done and
you
conclude you're being tyrannical," I pointed out. In debate we learned the best way to win an argument is to let the other side get tied up by its own logic; in the case of my parents, it was almost too easy.

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"The point your mother and I are trying to make..." my dad started to say.

I picked up my plate. It was time to bring out the heavy artillery.

"You know, I wish I could talk about this more," I said. "But I have a really big test tomorrow, and I'd better get cracking."

The day parents stop falling for the whole gotta-study-for-my-big-test-tomorrow routine is going to be an ugly one for teenagers everywhere.

When I got upstairs and saw the pile of college applications that lay on my green rug, I was forced to admit to myself the process was going "fine" only in the sense that nothing had actually happened and, therefore, nothing had yet gone wrong. Sitting at my tiny metal desk, I vowed to use my new incentive
(the registration line, the shy smile, I had no idea you were a student here...
) to finish my Wesleyan application
tout de suite.

"What unique qualities could you contribute to the Wesleyan community?"

Well, that should be easy enough. What unique qualities could I contribute to the Wesleyan community? I started typing.

I
have many unique qualities that I could contribute to the Wesleyan community. For example, I...

Sadly, nothing was coming immediately to mind. Perhaps I needed to be a bit more savvy, approach the essay from an entirely different angle. A little self-deprecation would help the admissions committee see I

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was not one of those slightly-above-average applicants with an ego ten times the size of her GPA.

There are many unique qualities I could
not
contribute to the Wesleyan community.

Ha! That was certainly a
unique
opening.

For example, I do not speak a foreign language, and I have no athletic ability. I have never had the lead in a school play. I am incapable of mastering a musical instrument and can't dance....

This was a little too easy. How profoundly depressing is it to realize at the advanced age of seventeen you actually have no unique qualities to contribute to anything?

I started again.

I am certainly a unique applicant who would contribute a great deal to the Wesleyan community. For example, I regularly spend hours in a special fantasy world that bears no relationship whatsoever to reality....

"Jan, phone's for you." No doubt it was Rebecca, eager to share more details of her upcoming romantic evening with Brian. I could see it already: Rebecca accepted at Brown, jetting off to Paris for a weekend with her older lover. Me, rejected everywhere, sitting at home with my parents night after night listening as my father invented opera lyrics.

"Hello?"

"Jan?" An unfamiliar male voice.

"Yes?"

"It's Tom."

"Hi."
Why was this happening to me?
I dug my nails into my arm like I do at the dentist, hoping the pain

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would erase the memory of Tom trying to suck on my neck.

"You haven't been in history the last couple of days."

"Yeah, I know. I went to some college information sessions." Actually, I'd
meant
to go to the sessions, but then Rebecca and I just went to Starbucks instead. It was probably good that I was getting so familiar with the Starbucks menu since I'd need to get a job there after being rejected from every college I applied to.

"Oh. How were they?"

"Informational."

"Well, that's good." The nail-digging trick wasn't working as well as it does at Dr. Monroe's. When I let go of my arm there was a line of purple half-moons on the inside of my wrist, but the memory of Tom's saliva was still as powerful as ever.

Tom cleared his throat. "The thing is, I was wondering if, ah..."

I had a very bad feeling about where his sentence was heading. "Um, Tom, I have to go."

"What?"

"I have to go." I racked my brain for any legitimate-sounding reason I might have to suddenly get off the phone. "My, ah, parents don't like me talking on the phone on school nights."

He sounded as surprised to hear what I'd said as I was to have said it. "Wow. They're, like, really strict, aren't they?"

"You don't know the half of it." I shook my head to show how crazy they were, but then I remembered

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he couldn't see me. I tried a long-suffering sigh instead.

Tom was clearly unmoved by my Academy Award-winning depiction of a misunderstood teen.

"So, is it, like, a religious thing?"

"Um, not exactly." I don't know too much about Judaism, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't have a rule that forbids talking on the phone on school nights.

"Okay, I'd better talk fast, then. I was thinking that, you know, maybe you'd, like, want to go out sometime."

There was silence.

I knew Tom was waiting for me to respond, but all I could think to say was,
This is what you get for not saying no, this is what you get for not saying no, this is what you get for not saying no.
After the first couple of repetitions, the sentence began to have an almost hypnotic quality. I could feel myself being lulled into a trance.

Meanwhile, the silence grew. "Jan?" Tom said finally. "You still there?"

"The thing is, Tom, I wish I could, but I can't."

"You can't?" He sounded annoyed and embarrassed, like someone had just told him his fly was undone.

"I just can't."

More silence.

Finally I couldn't take it anymore.

"It's not that I don't want to," I lied.

"Oh?" he said in his regular voice.

"It's just...my parents
....
"

"Your...oh, right. Oh. Sure. Wow." He laughed.

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"Yeah, I mean, if they won't let you talk on the phone, they're not gonna let you ..."

"Right." We were both laughing now. I was so relieved that my laugh wasn't even fake.

"That's a bummer," Tom said. "You're so cool about it. Don't you get pissed off?"

"Yeah, well...what can I do? They're my parents." I sounded saintly as a March sister.

"Sure," said Tom, sounding bored. "Well, I guess you'd better get going, then."

"Yeah," I said.

"Well, bye." He hung up.

"Bye," I cooed.

I hung up the phone feeling the kind of happiness you only experience after dodging a bullet. I was so relieved I even made up a little dance and named it the "Tom Richmond Will Never Bother Me Again Jig."

Whoever said honesty is the best policy obviously didn't have much experience with dating.

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