Authors: Elisa Ludwig
Tucked inside the envelope was a necklace, a delicate gold chain with a cloisonné bird pendant. I recognized it right away, because I’d been obsessed with it when I was little. She used to wear it all the time and I’d spent what seemed like hours studying its bright intricate patterns. To a kid, it had always seemed like a magic charm, the kind you’d wave to summon a fairy and make all your troubles go away. I no longer believed in magic, but I still thought it was pretty.
“I came across that today when I was unpacking. I don’t know if I ever told you, but my mother gave this to me, before—” She looked down quickly. “Well, before she kicked me out of the house…”
“… Because you were pregnant with me,” I finished. I knew it had been a painful time for her but I didn’t want her to be afraid to say it out loud or to keep any secrets from me. I didn’t blame her for anything. And it had all turned out just fine, hadn’t it?
“Yes. It reminds me of her. But I think it’s time you have it now. You never met her, but I’m sure she would have loved you.” Her eyes filled with tears, and I felt a lump sticking in my own throat.
“It’s so beautiful,” I said, holding it up to the light and letting it twirl on its chain. “Thanks, Mom. I’ll take good care of it.”
“I’ve also made a decision.” My mom grasped my shoulders and met my eyes. “Willa, this will be the last time we move. I promise you.”
“Yeah?” My voice caught between a laugh and a sob. She’d never promised me anything like this before, and I was almost afraid to believe it. Staying put for a while might actually mean we could live like normal people did—making friends, having more than a handful of possessions, really being part of a place instead of just adopting a background for a while.
But this place was beyond normal. We were surrounded by beauty, and I could already feel it seeping inside me, a bubbly, dizzying mixture that went straight to my head.
She smiled and the amazing Arizona light gleamed in her eyes. “That sound good to you?”
It sounded awesome. I was ready to give the luxe life a shot.
CHERISE WAS RIGHT, it turned out. I had a lot to learn. It was only my second day at Valley Prep, or VP, as the locals liked to say, and my head was already spinning. It was like learning another language. The principal was called the headmaster. Grades were called forms. My English and history teachers went by their first names—that would be Julia and Eugene, respectively.
“There are three types of first-name teachers,” Cherise explained as we walked together down the hallway after fourth period. “Either they’re just out of college or they’re into radical politics or they’re gonna end up in a hot tub with a student.”
“But is it ever all three?” I asked, testing her with a teasing smile.
She seemed to think about this for a moment, folding her arms across her emerald-green tank top. “Not that
I’ve seen. Doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen, though.”
“And what’s down there?” I asked my helpful tour guide—and, I hoped, PF (potential friend)—as I pointed down an adjoining corridor to a glassed-in diorama of a mummy.
“That’s the anthro wing. Ethnology, apes, diachronic studies—that sort of thing.” She returned my puzzled look with a waving hand. “You know, old cultures. Anyway, the mummy’s the real deal.”
I gasped. “It is?”
“I mean, I haven’t personally peeled back the gauze myself, but so I’m told. You going to the dining hall?”
That was another thing. The school called its cafeteria a “dining hall” and it was clean and white and actually smelled good. In fact, it looked like a place where Martha Stewart and the Barefoot Contessa might conduct secret-recipe swaps. A massive stone wall embedded with a pizza oven curved out from the hallway into the kitchen, so that students could watch their made-to-order creations sliding into the fire. Other kids were lined up by the espresso machine and the sushi bar.
After I’d filled my tray with organic salad greens and fig-balsamic-stuffed pork loin and quinoa—a lunch that would have surely impressed my mom, who was obsessed with goat milk and alternative grains—I got in line for freshly squeezed juice. There was a changing selection of exotic flavors like papaya, açai, and coconut water. Two days in, I could sense a dangerous habit
forming. Was there rehab for wheatgrass?
“Do they have orange?” a girl behind me asked. Her curly dark hair was pulled into a high ponytail and she was wearing a denim jacket over a tight black dress.
I stood on my tiptoes, trying to see ahead to the menu. “I think so. Well, I see blood orange.”
“Blood orange. It sounds disgusting,” she said.
“As long as there’s no pulp. Pulp is nasty,” the girl next to her said. She also had dark coloring, though she was more curvaceous than the first girl and she wore her hair loose and straight. Then she said something in Spanish. I’d always studied French so I couldn’t translate it. Whatever it was, it must have been funny because they were both laughing. I felt paranoid suddenly. Were they making fun of me?
I turned back and gave them a preemptive smile. If I smiled first, they would have to be nice.
That tactic seemed to work. The first girl smiled back at me. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to be rude. We’re just new here. Everything’s a little strange.”
“Me too,” I said, eager to meet other new people. So far I’d felt like the only one. “And I know what you mean.”
The curly-haired girl introduced herself as Mary and she said her friend’s name was Sierra.
Mary gestured to her tray. “They call this a Japanese cutlet. I call it a major upgrade from the meat loaf at our old school.”
“Don’t even remind me,” Sierra said with a shudder.
“The food at my old school was gross, too.” I was ready to wager they came from a public school, just like I did. “Where’d you guys go before?”
“You wouldn’t have heard of it,” Sierra said, dismissive. “It’s in the city.”
“Don’t be like that,” Mary tsked.
“What?” Sierra said, brow furrowing. “She wouldn’t.”
“Actually, you’re right. I probably wouldn’t have because I just moved to town,” I explained, wanting to put them at ease. “And if it’s any consolation, I’m sort of the professional new girl. I’ve started a new school every fall, more or less.”
“Wow. I guess we can’t really complain then.” Mary smiled at me—I couldn’t tell if it was just politeness, but it seemed genuine. “Well, nice to meet you.”
I got my juice and stepped back into the throng. By the time I’d paid for my lunch with the school-issued credit card, I’d lost track of Cherise and Mary and Sierra or anyone else I recognized. I stood pivoting my tray and looking for my next move.
Another thing that was weird about Valley Prep—and more obvious when everyone was in one room—was that there were no scruffy gutter punks, no Goth kids, no superpretty boys, no metalheads, no art nerds. Just about everyone blended together in a smooth, bland swirl of expensive fabrics, which only made people like me and Mary and Sierra stand out more.
That meant they were easy to spot—they were already sitting at their own table at the very back of the room. Another Mexican girl was with them and they were huddled over their food. I felt somehow intrinsically connected to them—it had to be the public-school thing and the new thing. I had an urge to go over and tell them that it wasn’t so bad being new—it was going to get easier. But who was
I
to tell
them
? They clearly already had a clique going, whereas I was the one standing there with my tray, trying to figure out where to sit.
Cherise grabbed my sleeve. “And our tour continues … please lower your lap bar and keep your arms and legs inside the car. To our left, the condiment bar, an example of twenty-first-century innovation in food service.”
Relief washed over me as she led me toward a booth along the back wall. There were larger tables in the center of the room, but the booths sat four people, and most of them were filled up already with various combinations of serious-looking girls and baby-faced guys.
“This is our usual table,” Cherise explained. “We always get a booth.”
I didn’t have time to wonder who “we” was, because as we were setting down our trays, Aidan Murphy passed by. He was wearing a pale blue button-down and his hair was as messy as the first day I’d seen him. I’d like to say I hadn’t thought about him since then but it just wasn’t the case.
“Hey, Cherise,” he said. And to me, “Hey, you.”
“Hello,” I replied. As I met his eyes, I felt a tingling flash, like my whole body had gone to sleep at once. Or maybe it was just coming awake.
Yep, as good-looking as I remembered.
Cherise glanced at me and raised an eyebrow, as if to say,
There’s your boy
. Then she looked back to him. “What’s up, Murph?”
“Sitting with the Glitterati, I see. The new girl moves fast.”
He hovered for a moment and I wondered if he was going to sit with us, but then he sauntered off, waving a hand behind his head and carrying his lunch straight out of the dining hall. He must have had something better to do, another girl to torment, or another criminal plan to act out. I watched him go, feeling a tiny bit disappointed and wanting to kick myself for it.
“What’s this Glitterati business?” I asked Cherise when he was out of hearing range.
“That’s what they call our crew. Me and Kellie and Nikki. I don’t know who came up with it. It’s stupid, I know, but somehow the name has just stuck. There they are now.”
I looked up, and it seemed that everyone else did, too. The clanking of trays and din of cross-table chatter seemed to hush. A breeze stirred the room, fluttering the edges of the Valley Prep banner with its lion-flanked motto: “Honor. Respect. Fidelity.” From the entrance,
two girls approached, walking with long strides, their matching stiletto boot heels hitting the floor in unison like their own personal theme song. They were the girls I’d seen in the parking lot the other day. The glowy pretty girls. Both had long dark hair. Both were slender and effortless in their movement. Both seemed to know that all eyes were on them, and they were wallowing in the moment, working it. It wasn’t so much coming into the room as arriving.
The Glitterati. Of course.
I drew in a breath, gathering courage and making some quick calculations. So what if I’d avoided these types of girls in the past? This was a new school, and a new start. There was no reason I couldn’t fit in here. I just had to bring my A game.
“Fashionably late, as always,” Cherise said, as they found their seats at the table.
“We had a little cream-blush moment in the bathroom,” said the girl next to me.
“See?” the other girl said, smiling and touching the apples of her cheeks.
“Lovely,” Cherise said. “Guys, this is Willa Fox. She just moved here from Colorado. I met her in homeroom. Well, I guess technically we met in the parking lot.”
The girl next to me tossed her thick brown hair and revealed diamond studs the size of dimes. “The girl with the bike, right? I’m Kellie Richardson,” she said. The confidence of her voice matched her whitened teeth and
flawless skin. Could they be natural? Some people were just lucky like that.
“That’s me,” I said. “The girl with the bike.”
The other girl introduced herself as Nikki Porter. Up close I could see that she was less conventionally pretty than Kellie—her lips and nose were more pronounced, her eyes more hooded, but she had long, slim fingers that were wrapped in multiple platinum rings that I totally coveted.
“Well, now that we made it I guess we may as well get started,” Kellie said, reaching into her bag. She produced a few photocopied sheets and handed them around. I saw that the sheets were some kind of checklist. She turned to me. “Sorry, I would’ve made one for you, but I didn’t know you’d be here. Wanna share?”
“Great, thanks,” I said, smiling. The fact that Kellie was willing to share anything with the newbie was a pretty good sign. I’d thought there were just certain irrefutable social rules that went across all high schools, and that one of them was that popular girls were always catty, but that didn’t seem to be the case at Valley Prep. Maybe in a place with house heads and prefects and independent studies and an honor code everything was bound to be a little nicer.
“First item is VPLs,” Nikki said, giggling.
“Anyone get it?” Kellie asked.
“I was so counting on Madame Bruning,” Cherise said. “She’s usually got serious VPLs going on. But she let
me down. She has, like, Spanx on or something today.”
“Ew,” Nikki said, waving her hand over her eyes. “I’m having a bad visual right now.”
“What’s VPLs?” I ventured.
“Visible panty lines,” Cherise explained. “Sorry. This is just a game we play on the first week of school. Kellie made it up in fifth grade. It’s kind of like a scavenger hunt, but it’s all about the teachers.”
Then again, maybe they were just as catty.
“I got this one,” Kellie said.
“Who?” Nikki demanded.
“Ms. McDevitt.”
“The Middle School English teacher?” Cherise said. “That doesn’t count.”
“It counts.” Kellie waved her fork carelessly around the room. “We’re not limited to Upper School. I made up the rules and nowhere does it say we have to stay with Upper School.”
Cherise looked skeptical as she plunged her teeth into her panini.
“Not only that,” Kellie continued, “but she was wearing white pants. Hello, Labor Day is over, lady. Major fashion fail.”
“I so got the next one,” Nikki said. “Check this: Mr. Page saying ‘um’ fifteen consecutive times.” She picked up her phone and played back the recording.
“That’s classic,” Cherise said. “Anyone catch a bow tie?”
“Over there,” I said, jumping in excitedly, pointing to a white-haired teacher by the condiments bar.
“Oh my God, Mr. Sinclair. Good eye! I can’t believe you got that right out of the gate,” Kellie exclaimed.
I saw, when she fixed her eyes on me, that she had a magnetic draw about her. It wasn’t just her prettiness—it was an aura of calm and control. The girl had never had an embarrassing moment in her life, I was sure of it. She’d probably never been new anywhere, either. She was pure legacy.