Confessions of the Sullivan Sisters (10 page)

I had no coat, hadn’t thought of getting it, didn’t have time. It didn’t matter. I turned onto Charles Street and ran north to Penn Station.

While I ran, I thought,
What if Robbie isn’t there? What if he’s given up on me, not having heard a word from me for weeks? What if he is the jerk Sully said he’d be, a liar, and never planned to wait for me at all? What if he’s hiding, waiting to see if I’ll come, only to sneak away laughing at my hopeless gullibility?

It was too late to worry about that now. I had ruined my debut. I had humiliated my family and friends. I left nothing but scorched earth behind me. If Robbie wasn’t there, I had nothing to go back to.

Or maybe I did, but I didn’t want to.

I paused at the threshold of the station to catch my breath. The cold air burned my throat.

Robbie stood by the Christmas tree, just as I’d imagined. His face lit up when he saw me. He held out his arms. I ran to him.

All explanations would come later. The train arrived, we boarded it, and rode out of town through the night.

That’s the whole story.

I’m sorry I embarrassed you and Daddy-o and everyone. But I must confess: Those three days in New York were so wonderful, I can’t bear to think I might have missed them. Don’t punish everyone else for my crimes. Please, please forgive me. And please don’t cut us out of the will. I don’t care about the money so much for myself, but Ginger and Daddy-o won’t know how to get by. And what kind of life will poor Takey have?

I’m asking your understanding…and once you understand, I know you’ll forgive me.

Sincerely and dutifully,

your granddaughter,

Louisa Norris Sullivan

My Evil Family

As you may or may not know, Almighty, I’m not the most popular girl at St. Maggie’s these days. Something in my personality rubs people the wrong way. And that’s okay with me.

Little tricks like the one I played at Matt Bowie’s swim party in September don’t help. But who can resist? Bibi D’Alessandro is such a tempting target.
You
may think Brooks Overbeck should be elected Mullah of Roland Park, but
I
can’t stand the way everybody fawns over him—especially girls.

So I borrowed Brooks’s phone and sent Bibi D’Alessandro a text from Brooks. Except Brooks didn’t know anything about it. He was swimming at the time. I wrote UR SO HOT BB. COME
HERE & KISS ME RT NOW and pressed
SEND
. Then I tossed his phone back on his towel and closed my eyes and tried to look innocent.

My friend Bridget giggled and said, “You are so evil.” (You remember Bridget, right? She came to my birthday party last summer. Choppy brown hair, freckles? You called her “Pig-nose”? Not to her piggy little face, of course.)

“I am not evil,” I said without opening my eyes. “Bibi is.”

Bridget and Sassy and I had tagged along with Norrie to Matt Bowie’s party. Not because I wanted to see these people but it was hot and I felt like a swim. I love swimming next to a cemetery—it helps remind me not to drown.

Bibi was stretched out on Eliza Caton Bowie’s tomb when she got the text. The tomb is the best spot for sunning because it’s long and flat and the stone warms up in the sun. Most Hated Tasha Wallace lounged on the ground next to her like a good toady. I saw Bibi lift her phone and shade her eyes to read the screen. She passed the phone to Tasha. While Tasha deciphered the message, Bibi sat up and looked over toward the group of us on the pebbly shore of the reservoir.

Brooks had just walked out of the water, dripping. He shook his hair and toweled off and sat down with his friends, laughing about how Ryan Gornick can spit water between his front teeth with pinpoint accuracy. Bibi stood up, adjusted her bikini, and swaggered toward us through the crumbling headstones. Tasha climbed onto Eliza Bowie’s tomb to watch.

Brooks lay back on his towel and closed his eyes. It was too perfect, almost as if he were Snow White waiting for someone to
come wake him with a kiss. And Bibi would be his Princess Charming, whether he liked it or not.

“This is awesome,” Bridget whispered.

Bibi stood over Brooks’s prone body, casting a shadow across his face, but he didn’t open his eyes. She straddled him, knelt, and planted her hands on either side of his shoulders. His eyes popped open. She bent down and kissed him very much
à la française
.

Brooks jerked up, startled, and yelped, “Hey! What—?” It was an involuntary reaction. His forehead bumped Bibi’s nose, hard. Her nose started bleeding.

Bibi jumped up, shaken, wiping her nose and staring at her bloody fingers in confusion. Ryan and the other guys whooped and laughed. Brooks rubbed his thin wet hair, a good-puppy look on his face. I don’t know what everybody sees in him, but Bibi’s nuts about him, and so is Norrie’s friend Claire and a million other girls. I sometimes wondered (
used
to wonder; we have our answer now) if Norrie liked him too, though she wouldn’t come out and say so. Even Bridget gets this goofy look on her face when he’s around. She tries to hide it from me but I SEE ALL.

“Hey, Bibi, I’m sorry,” Brooks said. He offered her a corner of his towel to wipe off her nose and lip, but that just smeared the blood all over her face. “I didn’t know you were there. Uh, what were you doing on top of me like that anyway?”

“When are you going to figure it out, Overbeck?” Ryan said. “Chicks dig you.”

“She was seized by an irresistible urge to have your babies,” Davis said. “It’s simple biology.”

“She walked over here in an Overbeck trance,” Ryan said. “Must have Overbeck babies…Must have Overbeck…”

Bibi glared at them. “You texted me. You told me—” She saw the blank look on Brooks’s face and stopped. “What’s going on here? Is someone playing a trick on me?” Everybody laughed as she glanced from face to face, paranoid. Well, not paranoid, I guess, since she wasn’t imagining things. Someone
was
out to get her.

“Bibi, don’t get upset,” Brooks said. “You can kiss me any old time.”

Brooks was trying to help her joke her way out of it, but Bibi is humor impaired—which makes her more fun to tease—and didn’t see the exit he was pointing out to her. She ran back to Eliza Caton Bowie’s tomb to clean up her face.

Brooks jumped to his feet and started over to help her. “Hey, look, I’m really sorry about your nose. Let me help you….”

Norrie and Claire came out of the water in time to see Bibi running away and Brooks chasing after her, apologizing like crazy. “What was that all about?” Norrie asked.

I shrugged, all innocent. “You know Bibi.” I twirled a finger next to my ear to indicate insanity.

“Not really,” Norrie said. “She’s your friend.”

“She
was
my friend,” I said.

“Whatever.” Norrie settled down on her towel and closed her eyes. She was too busy with her very important senior year debutante stuff to care about the petty problems of little sisters like me.

“No one’s going to read our blogs,” Bridget said. “How will anyone even find them?”

Bridget and I were hanging in the second-floor bathroom, smoking clove cigarettes out the window. We were trying to turn
it into a bad girls’ bathroom that nice girls would be afraid to use, but so far we kept getting interrupted by ninth graders whose idea of bad was chewing gum.

“The truth always finds a way,” I said as three Trident chompers finally finished reapplying their baby-blue eye shadow and flounced out of the bathroom. “Eventually, word will spread, and we’ll be famous.”

“Okay, but how long is that going to take?” Bridget can really be annoying. Whiny. And that turned-up nose of hers
can
look a little like a pig snout. I never said you were wrong about that, Almighty. “Maybe we should post on the school blog. That way everybody will see it.”

I shook my head. Bridget never thinks things through. “That’s no good because then the nuns can shut us down. This way we have our own independent blogs and no one can stop us from saying anything we want. This is supposed to be a free country, once you get out of the nuns’ jurisdiction.”

“You have so much more stuff to write about,” Bridget whined again. She’s my best friend kind of by default. Since the whole Bibi episode last year nobody else really wants to be friends with me. “Bootlegging and murders and feuds…My family’s big secret is that my mother had our cat put to sleep. She claimed Pawl had gum cancer but it was really just because he wouldn’t stop peeing on the living room rug.”

“Tell it, sister!” I tried to encourage her.

“It’s so lame.”

“You’re not digging deep enough,” I said. “Your family has got to have better secrets than that. What about your dad’s business
trips? Who knows, maybe he’s really visiting his secret other family.”

She looked doubtful. “You think so?”

“Anything’s possible.”

Bridget’s blog is called bridget2nowhere.com, which was starting to look like truth in advertising. I was determined that
my
blog would make a difference in the world. A big difference. Stamp out hypocrisy wherever you find it! That was my new motto. And guess what? I found out the biggest hypocrites live in big houses uptown. Which just happens to be where you live.

“We need to band together,” I said. “To form an Anti-Popular Front. We will destroy everything.”

“To the Anti-Popular Front!” Bridget shouted. We clashed our silver rings together. Mine has a skull and crossbones, and hers has a peace sign. We had already talked about things we could do to destroy everything—typical bullshit things like shaving our heads, getting nasty tattoos, piercing every pierce-able place on our bodies, running away to New York or Portland, Oregon, and living on the streets, or squatting in an abandoned warehouse downtown. But kids have been doing those things for years, and what does it accomplish? Nothing. We decided that the most destructive thing we could do—what would upset the adults in our world the most—would be to tell secrets. All the family secrets we knew. And show everyone that the upstanding citizens they admire so much are, at best, lazy sybarites and, at worst, criminals. Criminals who never get caught, and if they do, never go to jail. We would take down society through our blogs.

So you see, it was nothing personal.

Bibi and Tasha came in then. Tasha pinched her nose and Bibi tried to wave away the clove smoke. “Ugh, really, Jane,” Bibi said. “You can smell that all the way down the hall. Are you trying to get kicked out of school?”

“She’ll never get kicked out,” Tasha said, rubbing her thumb and forefingers together in a way that suggested money.

I knew what they were hinting: that I’m coddled at St. Maggie’s because you are one of the school’s most distinguished alumnae and largest donors. But if that’s true, why is Sister Mary Joseph clearly out to get me? Why was I given three weeks detention last year for protesting the school musical? Was jumping onstage and doing a striptease in the middle of
Guys and Dolls
really so terrible? True, I wasn’t technically in the play, but the girls who
were
in the play were stripping too. (They were chorus girls singing that “Take Back Your Mink” song.) Just because I actually made it all the way down to my underwear before being hauled offstage, I got punished. Which only underscores my point: The play is sexist and exploits women, and a girls’ school, of all places, shouldn’t condone it.

But nobody got my message about sexism. All they cared about was that I took off my clothes.

Bibi and Tasha each shut herself in a stall and started talking over the metal dividers as if that gave them some kind of Cone of Silence. “Anyway, tell everybody to come to my house at eight,” Bibi said. “And if they want anything to drink, they have to bring it, because my parents don’t have anything. And make sure they know I invited tons of boys.”

They flushed simultaneously and emerged to wash their hands. “Having a party, Beebs?” I asked.

“What—did you hear that?” she said.

I tossed my ciggie in the sink. “Just dry your hands and get out.” I tried to sound tough. “This is the bad girl bathroom.”

Bibi and Tasha laughed as they left. No one was taking my bad girl bathroom idea seriously.

“When’s her party?” I asked Bridget. “Have you heard anything?”

“Saturday.”

“Screw them. We’ll have our own bash at my house. Just the two of us. And it will be way cooler than some lame high school party.”

“Yeah,” Bridget said. She always says that. She’s my yes-girl.

A yes-girl comes in handy once in a while.