to throw parties—club kids, they call us—but I wouldn’t consider any of them real friends. We’re more like a bunch of loosely associated lunatics who throw parties with themes like Dante’s Disco Inferno! or Iron Curtain Chic! The club-kid scene isn’t about forming everlasting friendships or getting real; it’s not about having money, though I do make decent cash as a promoter, which comes in handy when I squander away my father’s money on magazines, dark chocolate, and records. It’s about being on top, where I rarely belong.
“You’ll move downtown and I’ll never see you again,” Sara whined, hurling herself abruptly to the floor, where she collapsed in a fit of fake sobbing. “Good-bye, cruel world!”
Sara goes to Nightingale-Bamford, the school I also attended until last year, when I was “asked to leave” by the headmistress. This may have been because I was basically showing up one day out of five. It also might have been because I was found in the girls’ bathroom at the start of the school year, chopping a line on the smooth, granite countertop, a rolled-up dollar bill in one hand. When the door swung open, I looked up at the girl framed in the doorway, her auburn hair the color of burnished strawberries, her legs wrapped in pale pink tights that made me think of pirouettes, a haze of tutus, feathers drifting slowly across a darkened stage. Her rose-colored mouth opened in a wide O, and as she stared at me, her eyes blinking slowly, I froze, gripping the bill tightly in my hand, her face blank and unreadable as the door slowly swung shut. When I was summoned to the headmistress’s office the next period during French, I placed my pens and pencils and textbooks carefully into my backpack, my movements slow and deliberate, masking the sinking sense of failure that crept over me like a bad dream.
Even though Nightingale is only fifteen blocks from Manhattan Prep, it might as well be at the other end of the universe, as Sara is in all honors classes and basically lives in the publications lab as coeditor of the yearbook. That’s the weird thing about Sara: even though she looks like the bastard offspring of Madonna and the Cure’s Robert Smith—all black rubber bracelets, dark eye makeup that she basically sleeps in until it smears artfully and her mane of wild blond hair—people like her, seek her out and want to be her friend. She manages to exist in a space where she cannot be clearly labeled or defined, moving seamlessly from clique to clique, belonging to none of them. If I had even one ounce of Sara’s self-confidence and charisma, her solidified sense of self, I could probably rule the world. Instead, I’m the weird girl who goes to a school for “special” kids, that even the other special kids avoid.
“Oh please,” I said, smiling at her antics. “Like I won’t see you all the time anyway.”
“True.” She sat up, her eyes sparkling with mischief before her face grew pensive. When Sara shifts gears, it’s like watching a wall come down—or go up, depending on what she’s feeling at the moment. “Is it because of . . . you know . . . parental stuff?”
The smile faded from my face, and I stared out the window at a garbage truck clanging down the street, not wanting to look her in the eye. “You could say that,” I mumble, my voice tight in my throat as if I’m being strangled by my own words.
“I thought things had gotten worse when you showed up with that black eye,” Sara said quietly, her eyes on the rug, “but I didn’t know what to say. I
never
know what to say.”
“No one really does.” My voice broke on the last word to leave my lips.
When I think about my mother, I have to stop what I’m doing and just breathe, my brain flooded with images: shades pulled down like eyes slowly closing, the windows shut tight. Wiping the blood and snot from my nose and cleaning the cut that splits my upper lip with hands that won’t stop shaking. That