Invisible Girl (17 page)

Noise slaps at my sleep. I dropped off while the whispering still darted around the sleeping bags. Now there’s a tiny knocking at the window and I know all the guys are here. All except for Andrew. Apparently, his dad’s getting some kind of award tonight and he’s out of the loop.

I’m relieved. Somehow it’s one less level of pressure that I have to deal with. I even think of staying in my sleeping bag if they’re all going to go outside, but then Annie whispers, “Let them in; my parents won’t be here for a while.”

Grudgingly, I get out of the bag and slide back up against the wall to at least get out of the middle of the room. The boys have all been drinking. I can smell it the second they walk in. Annie doesn’t seem to realize it yet as she welcomes them all in with whispered giggling, telling them to be quiet so they don’t wake Carmen and Megan.

The boys tumble in. JKIII is the first. While Annie goes to get the leftover Chinese food from the kitchen, he makes his way over to Amal. She’s breathtaking in her white pajamas with her hair a black waterfall and her face soft and drowsy in the pale moonlight splintering in through the French doors. While everyone is bustling over the food Annie starts bringing in, JKIII starts asking Amal questions about Georgia.

The questions all seem innocent enough, but I know better. They’re warm-up questions for what he really wants. I can tell by the way his eyes never leave her face except to steal down to her chest and how he seems oblivious to everything going on around them.

Amal answers his questions shyly, but seems eager to have someone to talk to who will just sit down, since a couple of the other boys are getting sort of rough at the other end of the family room.

I sit in the shadows, just watching. A little while later, after the Chinese food has been hauled out and sodas and chips are passed around, Annie comes back to the circle with the high flush she gets on her cheeks when she’s in social director mode. She stops dead in her tracks a few feet away from the sleeping bags. No one else notices what she is doing, but I do. I see her mouth fall from a full flirtatious smile into a tight line of fury. Her spine gets more erect. She’s staring hard at JKIII, but he’s so engrossed by Amal’s beauty and so involved in his drunken dissertation on the profound difference between southern women and all other women that he doesn’t even see her.

It doesn’t matter that Amal has, by now, discerned that JKIII is drunk and is actually leaning her head slightly away from him. It doesn’t matter that she hasn’t shown anything but polite interest in his attentions. Annie has seen
him
look at
her,
and none of it was with polite interest.

She gives Amal one last look of pure hatred and then walks over to the other guys in the room and tells them that they have to leave now because her parents will be home any minute. While they’re stumbling to their feet, she manufactures a pretty girl smile and walks over to JKIII to say, jauntily, “You too, babe. You gotta go. My parents will kill me if you’re here.”

JKIII gives one last drunken, longing look at Amal and then stumbles out the door with the rest of the guys.

Everyone puts their sleeping bags back where they were. Amal falls asleep first, her beautiful face young and innocent against her pillow. I start to drift when I hear the first stirrings of Annie’s new campaign, whispering through the other sleeping bags: Amal is a total slut and she can’t be-lieve how hard she was hitting on JKIII.

It’s open season now. The other girls, grateful that the status quo has returned, and now unburdened by the expectation to be nice to the beautiful southern outsider, relieve themselves. Eva says she saw Amal scoping JKIII out the first time she even met him. Leslie agrees, adding that it was obvious to her that Amal was just using all of them in order to hook up with him. Emily bets that if any of them went back to Amal’s old school, she’d have a bad reputation there, sure enough.

Annie pulls out her phone and pulls up her Facebook. “Girls, I think it’s time for a little honesty.” Cruel and excited smiles light the other girls’ faces. They grab their phones and I have the feeling they’ve done this before. I glance over Eva’s shoulder to see what she’s doing. She’s pulled up Amal’s Facebook page. Eva’s fingers fly over her phone. She’s leaving an anonymous message in Amal’s Honesty Box. I don’t have to see it to know what it says.

I mull over the indictment of Amal. A new piece of social knowledge settles itself in my brain. An exception to the rule of courting competing beauty is the emergency measure of destroying its holder with rumor. Since the girls set all the social agendas, Amal will be in exile without the group. Even Andrew won’t come sniffing around her anymore. Sluts, I know, even from Catholic school, live outside the tribe.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Amal wakes up, oblivious to the social annihilation that happened while she slept. Since we have school, we all zip out of our sleeping bags and into various showers and then into our clothes. Carmen has laid out a full spread of food, but Annie just runs past her, annoyed that she would even think we had time to eat, so all the girls run past her too. I’m kind of hungry since I didn’t eat much Chinese food last night, so I grab a bagel.

We pile into Aunt Sarah’s SUV. Annie rolls her eyes when she sees my bagel and I shove it into my backpack. Then, she quickly moves on; she has bigger fish than me to fry this morning. “So, Amal, how’d you sleep?” she asks innocently. Obviously, in the time pressure of getting ready in the morning, Amal has not yet had time to check her Facebook.

Annie’s in the front passenger seat. Eva, Leslie and Emily are in the middle and I am in the far back next to Amal. “Good,” Amal says happily. She’s settling in against her seat cushions, obviously excited about being a beautiful girl going to her expensive school with her new A-list girlfriends. She misses the sharp, mean looks that dart amongst the other girls, and if I didn’t hate her so much, I’d actually feel sorry for her.

“Re-ally?” Annie says, and all the other girls start laughing under their breath.

Amal must feel like she’s missing something. She looks up to hear more and to figure out what they’re laughing about. No one says anything. She sort of shrugs and then just relaxes in her seat as if figuring that she’s just too far back in the car to have gotten some joke.

She turns to me with interest. “So, Stephanie, how long have you been out here from Boston?”

My head jerks. Did she do that on purpose? Try to remind me of my expulsion from my own family? “A while,” I say rudely. I turn my back to her and stare out the window, feeling the familiar grind in my stomach. I try to push the rage against my parents back down and focus on trying to survive the day ahead.

I suffer through math class not having the energy to follow all the formulas the teacher, Mr. Specter, is writing on the board. The only thing that keeps me from sheer madness is that Mr. Specter looks like a wizard. He has a severe comb-over of thin, dyed red hair and long yellow teeth. I’d love to leap up, stick my pencil out like a wand and yell something Harry Potterish, like, “Expelliderus!”

That would certainly give Annie, who I can see is texting madly in the back of the class, a heart attack. And it would serve her right. As soon as Aunt Sarah pulled over to the curb in the drop-off lane, she and her three fellow vipers leapt out of the car, leaving Amal and me to struggle out of the far back.

I hustled out before Amal. I didn’t want to walk into school with her so I just ran off to my locker without even saying good-bye.

I saw a slice of her face as I turned to leave, and it looked hurt. I feel a splinter of guilt for leaving her like that since, if I’m honest about it, I’d have to admit that she probably never knew I liked Andrew in the first place. I shove the splinter down since I don’t have time to waste on feeling guilty about a girl who is movie star beautiful and can have anything she wants in the world.

Math is getting boring again since it’s not that fun to have a teacher who looks like a wizard if there’s no one to tell that to and try not to laugh with. I look around the classroom and see that Annie’s campaign to destroy Amal is running strong. Mean looks at Amal generate not just from Queen Anne and her subjects but from other girls residing on the outlying rings of their clique. News travels fast with instant messaging and texting. Even though it’s explicitly forbidden in the school rules to use cell phones at school, it’s clear none of the kids or faculty take it seriously. Girls have been receiving Annie’s news flashes about Amal being a slut all morning. A subtle buzz surrounds her, a dark current of dislike. She looks confused and nervous when she watches Annie rush out of math class, just like she did in social studies, without even looking at her.

I’m already seated when Amal enters study hall. Her face flashes with hope when she sees Annie and the group.

Annie’s group occupies the center table where everyone in the room has a view of them. I’m sitting at the end of their table with some filler girls between Annie, Leslie, and me. Eva and Emily sit across the table from them. I’m pretending to study my math book, trying not to care that the four of them are hunched into each other, chatting nonstop.

Amal hurries over, every quick step confirming her hope that the morning slights were because of some huge misunderstanding. There are no spots close to Annie, or the group. No effort is made by them to squeeze together to make room for one more friend. Amal stands behind Annie, waiting for her to take notice and motion her in, but Annie doesn’t turn around.

Amal looks nervous again, but makes the bold move of tapping Annie on the shoulder. Annie turns away from her huddled conversation, clearly irritated, with raised eyebrows that say, EXCUSE YOU without her having to speak one word.

“Hey,” Amal says hesitantly, yet with a hungry eagerness.

Annie wears the patronizing expression of a queen interrupted by a peasant. “Obviously,” she releases a short little annoyed puff of air through her nose, “not any room here.”

Amal reels like she’s been slapped. Her whole face cracks and her eyes blink away tears. I remember how young she really looks without her woman’s body. I feel sick watching it.

She mutters, “Oh, um, um, sorry.” But Annie has already turned back toward Eva, Leslie and Emily, who also wear perturbed looks in imitation of their queen.

Amal walks to an empty table in the back of study hall and opens up one of her books. She bows her head low over the book with her back to the whole world, and it’s not hard to see that she’s crying.

My heart tightens in my chest. It isn’t fair that I feel sorry for her. I have so many things raging through me that I could use all of my time just feeling bad for myself. But I don’t. Even as I try to push her out of my head and just stare at my math book, I feel her worm her way back into my thoughts. She is me sitting over there at that table all alone. Another girl sitting in another bubble of despair, just waiting for someone to pop it and find something, anything, to talk to her about.

In English class the air is even thicker around Amal as she sits in her chair looking around the room, stricken. No doubt she finally had time to sneak into her Facebook during study hall, probably to find solace from her friends at her old school, and found her Honesty Box filled with anonymous messages calling her a slut.

When Andrew walks into class he glides by her without even speaking. No big surprise. Obviously by now he’s heard, like the rest of the school, that she was hitting on an older and cuter guy. Not so great for his ninth-grade ego.

When Annie walks by, Amal presses her back harder into her chair, like she’s afraid to get hit by mean words, but her eyes look up, just a little, just in case study hall was just the last crazy piece of the whole morning mix-up and Annie will go back to being as friendly as she was at the pool and maybe even help her figure out who the cruel anonymous “honest” friends are. Annie doesn’t even blink her way as she flicks her hair right over her head and says a loud, “Hey, dude” to Andrew, then punches him in the arm.