Confessions of a Not It Girl (13 page)

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

June 15

Dear Diary,

I can't believe today is the last day of eighth grade!!!! I'm soooo psyched for high school!!!! Rebecca and I went by Banana Republic at lunch, and they had this awesome sweater on sale. I bought it for the first day of ninth grade, and Rebecca said it's definitely a sign of how high school is going to be lucky for me (and for her, too, natch).

Rebecca says we're going to totally ignore the freshman boys right off and see if there are cute sophomores. High-school parties are going to be awesome, b/c high-school guys are extremely cool. Rebecca and I agreed that we should have sophomore boyfriends when we're freshmen, junior boyfriends when we're sophomores, and senior boyfriends when we're juniors. Then when we're seniors, we'll either have boyfriends who are in college or take a year just to be single and hang out together before we graduate. Also, we're going to go to Europe for the summer between high

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school and college, and we don't want to be tied down since we'll probably have European boyfriends while we're over there. The world is our oyster! TTFN!

The last thing I had planned on doing when I got home was making myself feel even worse than I already did by taking a trip down memory lane. But the Williams essay asked applicants to "Contrast the
you
graduating from high school with the
you
entering high school," and I couldn't think of a single thing about me that had changed since junior high except I'd finally stopped trying to blow-dry my hair straight.

I ended up in the basement, where there are tons of boxes with all our old papers and clothes and stuff. I found the box with my eighth-grade work, and it was kind of embarrassing. I did a big paper that year titled "Anorexia: The Silent Killer," and reading it made me wonder if my career goals had once included a desire to be a staff writer for
The National Enquirer.
The introduction ends, "These girls are dying of hunger but refuse to eat. They are screaming for help, but no one can hear them. An epidemic. A tragedy. Anorexia: The Silent Killer."

I made a mental note not to leave for college without first burning everything I'd written during the twentieth century.

For some reason the diary was at the bottom of the box marked JAN'S SCHOOLWORK: 7TH AND 8TH GRADE.As soon as I saw it, I remembered all the other diaries

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just like it I'd had back when I was a kid. I was always buying these pretty clothbound books at stores that sell things like scented candles and tiny pillows embroidered with corny sayings and then forgetting about them. On the first page of a new book I'd write this diary belongs to jan miller!!! do not touch!!! if lost please return to jan miller. Then I'd write down my phone number and address, including
USA
(like I ever left the continental United States). But I rarely actually
wrote
in the diary. There'd be a long entry from the day I bought it, then another one the next day, and within a week I'd stop writing altogether. I don't remember what inspired the entry from the last day of eighth grade, but I do remember the sweater. It was a soft, gray cardigan I brought up to Cape Cod and immediately lost.

The Fantasy of High School: Parties with sophisticated older guys. Traveling through Europe with Rebecca.

The Reality of High School: Me. Alone. Rummaging around in the basement.

"Mom, are you downstairs?" It was Rogier.

His feet and shins appeared at the top of the stairs. "Mom?"

"Nope, it's Jan. When did you get home?"

"Oh, hey." He came down and sat on the bottom step, waving a CD in my direction. "I just got back a few hours ago. I went out to get this."

Every time Rogier comes home from Yale he has a new haircut. Over the summer it was kind of shaggy, but now it was short and preppy looking. Rebecca thinks it's

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because each of his girlfriends encourages him to cut it how she likes it. According to her theory, this new look meant Larissa was out of the picture.

"Do you know where Mom and Dad are?"

I shook my head.

" 'Cause I think they want us all to go out for dinner or something, but I was going to meet Larissa later, and I need to know the plan."

Apparently Rebecca's haircut theory was incorrect. "Mom and Dad will freak if you go out tonight."

Rogier shrugged, but he looked a little nervous. "So," he said, leaning against the wall. "How's it going?"

"Okay, I guess," I said. When I was younger I wanted that older brother who is incredibly wise and gives his younger sister tons of advice and has all these really hot friends who tease her in this brotherly way except for the one who falls madly in love with her. Then he and the girl's brother have this big fight one night out in the rain because the brother's all, like, "You're not going out with my sister!" and the friend's, like, "I love her, man."

Then they make up and everyone goes to the prom.

Unfortunately, Rogier never really had that many friends, and the few he did have were such incredible dorks that if one of them had asked me out, I would have had to kill myself immediately. Also, I can't exactly imagine Rogier getting all worked up about my honor like the brothers in movies and on TV. If I told him about that guy Alex, at the party, he'd probably just say, "Weird," or something like that. He definitely wouldn't go off and challenge him to a duel or anything.

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"Rogier?" He was staring off into space.

"Yeah?"

"Is college different from high school?"

"Sure," he said, pushing off the wall. He started to go upstairs.

"No, I mean
really
different. Like, completely different."

"What do you mean?" He turned to me.

"Well, I mean, is it like the difference between junior high and high school or is it the difference between Earth and Mars?"

"I've never been to Mars," he said.

"Ha ha." Sometimes Rogier can be as annoying as my parents.

"I don't know, Jan. Yeah, it's different. I mean, you don't have Mom and Dad breathing down your neck all the time."

Considering my parents were the least of my worries at the moment, that wasn't too comforting.

"What about socially? Like, guy-girl stuff."

Rogier shrugged. "I didn't really have much 'guy-girl' stuff at Lawrence."

"Could you use your imagination for, like, a
second?"

"Jan, I don't know. Yes, it's different." He started walking upstairs.

"Fine," I said.

"I mean, I think it is," he added, turning around. He stopped and thought about it. "I don't know," he said finally. "Maybe it's not that different."

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"Great," I said.

It was not what I had wanted to hear.

Maybe Rebecca and I would have made up if it was a regular week, but because of Thanksgiving, Rebecca left for Puerto Rico with her family Monday night. I kind of hoped she might call me from there (Rebecca's parents, unlike mine, do not see long-distance phone calls as a costly invention the telecommunications industry recently thought up to hoodwink us), but she didn't.

I ended up spending almost the whole vacation crossing things off my long-term to-do list; by Saturday night I'd cleaned out my closet, given myself a manicure and pedicure, put all my old letters into chronological order, and started the research for a history term paper due in January. Any minute now, I'd be ready to start on those college essays.

Maybe I was bored, lonely, and pathetic, but at least I wasn't disorganized.

There was a knock at my door.

"Yeah?"

Rogier poked his head in. "Do you want to go shoot some pool?"

"Okay," I said. I was surprised Rogier wanted to play pool with me since he's really great at pool and I really just suck. It's tragic because I'm desperate to be a good pool player. Having worked my way backward through the Julia Roberts canon, I've determined that my personal pool-playing goal is embodied by a scene in
Mystic

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Pizza
--one of her earliest movies--where the rich college kids are feeling superior to the poor townies, and then Julia, who's a townie, embarrasses them by kicking their asses at pool. Her triumph is compounded, obviously, by the fact that she has on a tiny little black skirt, and all of them want to have sex with her.

I guess you could say the major difference between me and Julia, aside from how bad I am at pool, is that if I were a townie in a tiny black skirt, the rich college kids would be too busy making fun of how tight my skirt was to notice how badly I was playing.

"How come you're home on a Saturday night?" Rogier asked as we were walking down Seventh Avenue.

"How come
you're
home on a Saturday night?" I countered.

"Well, I don't really live here anymore, so I'm not technically home," he pointed out.

"Oh," I said. "I guess that makes me the official loser in the family."

"If you say so," he said.

"Rebecca and I had a fight," I said after we'd gone another block. "Plus, she goes to Puerto Rico with her family for Thanksgiving every year."

"So you'd be home even if you hadn't had a fight with Rebecca?"

"I guess so." While we walked, Rogier was flipping a quarter up in the air and then catching it, demonstrating the difference between his hand-eye coordination and mine. I can barely catch something if you hand it to me.

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"Don't you have any friends besides Rebecca? Didn't you used to hang out with that girl...what was her name? Gabby? The one who was really cute?"

"You thought Gabby was cute?" I was so surprised I stopped walking. Rogier caught his quarter and turned to face me.

"I mean, I wasn't in love with her or anything, but yeah, I thought she was cute."

"I thought you didn't notice girls in high school."

Now it was Rogier's turn to be shocked. "Are you serious?"

"Well, why didn't you ask her out?"

We started walking again. "Um, in case you didn't notice, back then I wasn't exactly the most confident guy when it came to girls."

"Did you get...you know, are you more confident now?"

"Yeah, I'm more confident now," he said. Then he laughed. "When you start at zero, it's hard not to go up."

I didn't know what to make of that. I mean, clearly I wasn't exactly at zero since I wouldn't go out with a guy like Henry or someone who was a terrible kisser, like Tom. Did this mean my confidence could go
down
in college? That would certainly be a horrifying turn of events.

"So what happened to Gabby?" Rogier asked again.

"Why, do you want to ask her out?"

"Oh, yeah. I was hoping I could be one of the few guests at the Lawrence Academy prom who's older than the chaperones."

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"You think older guys don't go out with high-school girls?" I thought about telling him how old Brian was, but I couldn't be one hundred percent sure he wouldn't tell my parents. And my parents telling her parents that she had a twenty-two-year-old boyfriend who thought she was in college probably wasn't going to do anything to improve things between Rebecca and me.

"I am fully aware that older guys go out with high-school girls," Rogier said. "I just don't happen to be a scumbag, okay? What is
with
you? All I asked is what happened to your friend Gabby."

I shrugged. "I don't know. She got kind of irritating."

"Fine," said Rogier. We kept walking in silence.

The thing is, by last spring Rebecca and I had decided
everyone
was kind of irritating except the two of us. Only that meant now that Rebecca and I were irritated with each other, there was no one left to hang out with.

After we'd played a couple of games, it occurred to me that I should take advantage of this golden opportunity to get a guy's perspective on the Josh situation. Unfortunately for me, it turned out Rogier had even less insight into the workings of the male mind than I.

"Why don't you just tell him you like him?" Rogier was racking up for yet another game in which he would mercilessly defeat me.

"You're not serious."

He placed the cue ball to the left of center and broke. Three balls went into various pockets. Needless to say, when I break, no balls go in.

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"Stripes," he said. He looked at the table, deciding which shot to make next.

I tried a different approach. "I mean, what subtle stuff would you notice? Like, how guys don't like when girls don't eat, that kind of thing."

"What are you talking about?" Rogier, shockingly, missed his shot and stepped back from the table. "You're up."

I put some chalk on the tip of my pool cue. I always use a
lot
of chalk, even though it hasn't helped my game that much so far.

"You
know.
Guys don't like girls who don't eat." I looked for a shot I might possibly make, but even though the table was littered with options, I knew I'd manage not to sink anything. "It's a turnoff. That's why I ate the ice cream even though it had nuts in it."

I leaned over and missed the shot.

"Wait, you're telling me you ate something you don't like because you thought it would make him find you attractive?"

I nodded, even though I was feeling a little embarrassed. It's one thing to read an article called "Be Irresistible to Him." It's another to quote it.

"Why didn't you just tell him you don't like nuts?" Rogier surveyed the table while I went back to my stool and sat down.

"Guys don't like girls who are picky eaters," I explained.

"Where do you
get
this crap?" Rogier was leaning far over the table, one eye closed.