Luckiest Girl Alive: A Novel Page 3

  I didn’t dare push my luck and apply to any Ivy Leagues, but plenty of their hangers-on would have me, told me they wept as they read my essay, bursting with purple prose and histrionic declarations of all I had learned about this vicious life even though I had only just begun it. Oh, it was a tearjerker, I made sure of it. So in the end, my name and the school that taught me to hate it got me into Wesleyan, where I met my best friend, Nell, the most beautiful WASP whose stinger pierced everyone but me, and she was the one, not some sage professor, who suggested I drop the Tif and go by Ani, pronouncing it “Ahhh-nee,” because “Annie” was simply too pedestrian for someone as world-weary as I was. Changing my name had nothing to do with hiding my past, and everything to do with becoming the person no one ever thought I deserved to be: Ani Harrison.

  Spencer scooted her chair closer to the table, taking advantage of this intimate moment. “I hate when people ask me where I went to high school.”

  That wasn’t a sentiment I could agree with. There were times I loved saying where I went to high school, loved the opportunity to prove how far I’d come. So I shrugged, my face stone, letting her know we weren’t bound to be buddies just because we had an alma mater in common. “I don’t mind. I feel like it’s a part of what makes me me.”

  Spencer suddenly realized she was leaning in too close, that this was a point on which we couldn’t see eye to eye, and it had been presumptuous of her to think we could. She drew back in her chair, giving me my space. “Of course. I would probably feel the same way if I were you.”

  “I’m participating in the documentary,” I volunteered, to show her just how much I didn’t mind it.

  Spencer nodded slowly. “I wanted to ask you. But of course they would want you.”

  I checked the TAG Heuer on my wrist. Luke had been promising me the Cartier for the last year. “I will say that you should definitely try and get an internship, even if it doesn’t pay.”

  “How would I afford rent?” Spencer asked.

  I eyed the Chanel bag hooked over the back of her chair. On second glance, I saw that the seams were starting to unravel. Old money, this one, tied up in trusts. Good family name, decent-size house in Wayne, and not a penny to spare the panhandler on the subway.

  “Waitress or bartend at night. Or, commute in every day.”

  “From Philly?” Not so much a question as a reminder of where she would have to come from, as though I was crazy to suggest it. My chest sizzled with irritation.

  “We’ve had interns here who have commuted from DC,” I said. I took a slow sip of my coffee then cocked my head at her. “Isn’t it only two hours or so on the train?”

  “I guess,” Spencer said, looking unconvinced. Her dismissal disappointed me. Things had been going fairly well up until this point.

  Giving her the opportunity to redeem herself, I reached up to adjust the delicate gold chain around my neck. I couldn’t believe I’d left out the most important piece.

  “Are you engaged?” Spencer’s eyes went cartoon character wide on my pride and joy: a fat, brilliant emerald planet, flanked by two winking diamonds, the band simple platinum. It had been Luke’s grandmother’s—pardon me, his Mammy’s—and when he gave it to me he’d offered me the option to reset the stones on a diamond band. “Mom’s jewelry guy said that’s the look a lot of girls go for now. It’s more modern I guess.”

  And that’s exactly why I didn’t want to have it reset. No, I would wear it just the way dear sweet Mammy had worn it: at once restrained and ornate. A very clear message: This is an heirloom. We don’t just have money, we come from money.

  I stretched my fingers out, taking in the hardware as if I’d forgotten it was there. “Ugh, I know. I’m officially old.”

  “That is the most stunning ring I’ve ever seen,” Spencer declared. “When are you getting married?”

  “October sixteenth!” I beamed at her. Had Eleanor been there to witness this blushing bride nonsense, she would have tilted her head and smiled her “Aren’t you cute?” smile. Then gone on to remind me that even though October wasn’t necessarily a rainy month, weather could be unpredictable. Did I have a backup plan in case it did rain? She’d had a tent on standby and even though she didn’t have to use it, the reservation cost her ten thousand dollars. Eleanor is bursting with neat little factoids like that.

  I pushed my chair back. “I have to get back to work.”

  Spencer was out of her chair in half a second. She stuck her hand out. “Thank you so much, TifAni, I mean”—she covered her mouth and her whole body tittered with a geisha giggle—“Ani. Sorry.”

  Sometimes I feel like a windup doll, like I have to reach behind and turn my golden key to produce a greeting, a laugh, whatever the socially acceptable reaction should be. I managed a tight farewell smile for Spencer. She wouldn’t mistake my name again, not once the documentary aired, not once the camera narrowed in on my aching, honest face, gently dissolving any last confusion about who I am and what I did.

  CHAPTER 2

  * * *

  I spent the summer between eighth and ninth grades listening to Mom rave about the Main Line. She said it was “very hoity-toity” and that I was really going to experience how the other half lives by going to high school there. I had never heard the word “hoity-toity” before but inferred what it meant based on the saucy dip in Mom’s voice. It was that same throaty purr that the Bloomingdale’s saleswoman used to convince her to buy a cashmere scarf she couldn’t afford: “It looks rich on you.” “Rich.” The magic word. Dad did not agree when she came home later and rubbed it against his face.

  I’d attended an all-girls Catholic school since kindergarten, in a town that was devoid of any Main Line aristocracy on account of the fact that it was shy of the border by about fifteen miles. I didn’t grow up in the slums or anything, my surroundings were just morbidly middle class, with plenty of gaudy neighbors who mistakenly considered themselves upper. I had no idea that was the case at the time, had no idea money could show its age, and that old and worn was always superior. I thought wealth was shiny red BMWs (leased) and five-bedroom McMansions (mortgaged three times). Not that we were even fake rich enough to live in the five-bedroom travesties.

  My real education started on the morning of September 2, 2001, my first day of freshman year at The Bradley School in Bryn Mawr, PA. I have marijuana (or “grass,” if you want to embarrass me like my father) to thank for landing me at the mouth of the old mansion that served as the English and Humanities wing of Bradley, swiping my sweaty palms on my orange Abercrombie & Fitch cargo pants. If I’d just said no to drugs, I’d have been storming the quad of Mt. St. Theresa’s upper school, my scratchy blue kilt catching between my thighs, tawny from a summer spent marinating in Hawaiian Tropic oil, day one of my mediocre young adult life that would never pan out to be anything more than a Facebook cliché. My existence defined in successive photo albums documenting my engagement weekend in Atlantic City, vanilla church wedding, and artfully arranged naked newborn.

  What happened was this: My friends and I decided it was time to try pot at the beginning of eighth grade, the four of us climbing onto my best friend Leah’s roof from her bedroom window, passing a soggy joint between our Bonne Bell–slicked lips. The terrifying awareness it brought to every limb—even my toenails!—was so acute I started to hyperventilate and cry.

  “Something isn’t right,” I half-gasped, half-laughed to Leah, who tried to calm me down but ultimately succumbed to a maniacal fit of laughter.

  Leah’s mother came to investigate the commotion. She called Mom at midnight and said in a dramatic whisper, “The girls got into something.”

  I’d had a Marilyn Monroe body since the fifth grade, and the parents had no problem believing I was the mastermind of our Catholic schoolgirl drug ring. I just looked like trouble. In one week, I went from being the queen bee of our small, forty-girl class to an annoying little fly trying to avoid being squashed. Even the girl who stuck French fries up her nose
before eating them wouldn’t stoop so low as to sit with me at lunch.

  Word traveled to the administration. Mom and Dad were called in for a meeting with the principal, an ogre of a woman named Sister John, who suggested I seek an alternative school to continue my education. Mom harrumphed the whole car ride home, finally arriving at the conclusion that she would send me to one of these exclusive private schools on the Main Line, which would give me a better shot of getting into an Ivy League, which would give me a better shot of marrying into some real money. “That’ll show them,” she announced triumphantly, her hands choking the steering wheel like it was Sister John’s wrestler’s neck. I’d waited a beat before daring to ask, “Are there boys on the Main Line?”

  Later that week, Mom came and picked me up early from Mt. St. Theresa’s, driving us forty-five minutes to The Bradley School, a coed, private, nondenominational institution located in the bowels of the lush, ivied Main Line. The admissions director made sure to mention, twice, that J. D. Salinger’s first wife had attended The Bradley School in the early 1900s, back when it was an all-girls boarding school. I stored that fun fact away, trotted it out for interviews with prospective employers and parents-in-law. “Oh yes, I attended The Bradley School—did you know J. D. Salinger’s first wife went there?” It’s okay to be insufferable as long as you’re aware that you’re being insufferable. At least that’s how I justified it to myself.

  After the tour, I had to take the entrance exam. I was seated at the head of a regal table in a formal, cavernous dining room located in a wing off the cafeteria. The bronze plate above the doorframe declared it THE BRENNER BAULKIN ROOM. I couldn’t understand how anyone in the English-speaking world could be named Brenner.

  I don’t remember much of the exam, except the part where I had to write a description of an object without ever explicitly identifying the object. I went with my cat, and ended the passage with her diving off our back porch to her bloodied, mangled death. Bradley’s boner for J. D. Salinger made me think they had a thing for tortured writers, and I was right. A few weeks later, we got word that my financial aid was approved and that I would be matriculating with The Bradley Class of 2005.

  “Are you nervous, sweetheart?” Mom asked.

  “No,” I lied out the window. I didn’t understand why she had made such a fuss about the Main Line. To my fourteen-year-old eyes, the houses didn’t look nearly as impressive as the pink stucco monstrosity Leah lived in. Taste, I had yet to learn, was the delicate balance between expensive and unassuming.

  “You’re going to do great.” Mom squeezed my knee, the goop on her lips catching white sunlight when she smiled.

  A row of girls, four deep, marched by our BMW, their backpacks firmly secured to their slight shoulders with both straps, thick ponytails bobbing like blond plumes on Spartan helmets.

  “Mom, I know.” I rolled my eyes, more for myself than at her. I was dangerously close to crying, to curling up in her arms while she ran her long pointy nails up and down my forearm until I had goose bumps. “Tickle my arm!” I used to beg when I was little, snuggling up to her on the couch.

  “You’re going to be late!” She planted a kiss on my cheek that left a sticky coating of lip gloss. In return, she got a sullen, new teenager “Good-bye.” That morning, thirty-five steps from the front door of school, I was still only in rehearsals for the role.

  First period was homeroom, and like a huge dork I was excited by this. My middle school didn’t have bells or different teachers for different classes. There were forty girls per grade, divided into two classrooms, and in that classroom you were taught math, social studies, science, religion, and English by the same teacher all year long, and if you were lucky, you got the one who wasn’t the nun (I was never lucky). The idea of a school where a bell rang every forty-one minutes, prompting you on to the next classroom, with a new teacher, and a new concentration of students, made me feel like I was a guest star on Saved by the Bell or something.

  But the most exciting part of that first morning was English. Honors English, another distinction my old school never made, in which I had secured a spot thanks to that brilliant 150-word description of my cat’s tragic demise. I couldn’t wait to take notes in the bright green pen I’d bought at the school store. Mt. St. Theresa’s made us write in pencil like babies, but Bradley didn’t care what you wrote in. Didn’t care if you took notes at all as long as you kept your grades up. Bradley’s school colors were green and white, and I bought a pen the same shade as the basketball jerseys to display my new allegiance.

  Honors English was a small class, only twelve students, and instead of desks, we got to sit at three long tables, pushed together to form the shape of a bracket. The teacher, Mr. Larson, was someone Mom would dismiss as “hefty,” but those twenty extra pounds had resulted in a kind, full face: squinty eyes, a slight arch to his upper lip that made him look like he was remembering some hilarious crack one of his buddies had made to him the night before over lukewarm Bud Lights. He wore faded pastel button-downs and had the kind of floppy, light brown hair that assured us it wasn’t too long ago that he was a prep school kid just like us and he, like, totally got it. My fourteen-year-old loins approved. All the fourteen-year-old loins approved.

  Mr. Larson sat a lot, usually with his legs stretched out in front of him, frequently reaching one hand behind his head and resting his skull against it, while asking, “And why do you think Holden identifies with the catcher in the rye?”

  That first day Mr. Larson made us all go around the room and say one cool thing that we’d done that summer. I felt confident Mr. Larson had designed this exercise for my benefit—most of the other kids, “Lifers,” had been funneled from the Bradley middle school, and had probably spent the summer hanging out together. But no one knew what the new kid had been up to, and even though it just tanning on my back porch, watching soap operas through the window like a sweaty, friendless loser, they didn’t need to know that. When it was my turn, I told everyone I’d gone to the Pearl Jam concert on August 23, which hadn’t happened but also wasn’t a fabrication I’d created out of thin air. Leah’s mom had reserved tickets for us back before the whole pot fiasco, before she finally had definitive proof that I was the bad influence she’d long suspected I was. But there was an ocean between Leah and these new people, and I had some new friends to impress, so I lied and I’m glad I did. My one cool thing I did that summer invited several approving nods and even an actual “Cool” from some guy named Tanner, which I was surprised to learn was not just a goal I set for my skin that summer but also a name.

  After that game was over, Mr. Larson wanted to talk about The Catcher in the Rye, which had been assigned summer reading. I sat up straighter in my seat. I’d torn through the book in two days on my back porch, my thumbs leaving humid half-moon imprints on every page. Mom asked me what I thought about it, and when I told her I thought it was hilarious, she cocked her head at me and said, “Tif, he has a serious mental breakdown.” This revelation shocked me so much that I reread the book, deeply concerned that this crucial element of the story had escaped me. For a moment I worried that I wasn’t the literary whiz I fancied myself, but then I reminded myself how Mt. St. Theresa’s eschewed literature in favor of grammar (less sex and sin in grammar), and so it wasn’t really my fault that my observations weren’t as sharp as they could be. I’d get there.

  The boy closest to the marker board groaned. His name was Arthur, and that summer the coolest thing he did was take a tour of the New York Times office, which, based on the reactions of the classroom, wasn’t as cool as seeing Pearl Jam in concert but also not as bad as seeing The Phantom of the Opera at the Kimmel Center. Even I understood it’s not impressive unless it’s on Broadway.

  “You enjoyed it that much, did you?” Mr. Larson quipped, and the classroom tittered.

  Arthur was close to three hundred pounds, and acne framed his face like parentheses. His hair was so greasy that when he pushed his hands through it, it stayed
, an oily arc from his hairline to the crown of his head. “Could Holden be any less self-aware? Here he is, calling everyone a phony, when he’s the biggest phony of them all.”

  “You bring up an interesting point,” Mr. Larson said encouragingly. “Is Holden a reliable narrator?”

  The bell rang before anyone could answer, and over Mr. Larson’s instructions to read the first two chapters of Into Thin Air, which we would discuss later in the week, everyone swept notebooks and pencils into their book bags before storming out in a rush of Steve Madden clogs and peach-fuzz-covered legs. I didn’t understand how everyone got out the door so quickly. It was the first time I noticed it, but once I did, I noticed it for the rest of my life: I was slow. What comes effortlessly to others doesn’t for me.