The Secret Runners of New York Read online

  I was not exempt from their evaluations, especially after my tumble at the assembly.

  ‘Morning, Memphis,’ Hattie said one day as I arrived during a free period. ‘Managing to keep it upright today?’

  ‘That was so embarrassing,’ Verity said in a low voice that I could hear clearly.

  Misty had been sitting with them, reading something on her laptop (she had stuck a Louis Vuitton sticker over the Apple logo). She looked up at the comment.

  ‘Come on, ladies, give the girl a break. It was her first day,’ she said, smiling at me. ‘Besides, she’s my neighbour. Lives on the other side of the Remo.’

  She nodded to me and I nodded back in thanks and kept walking. I wasn’t quite sure what to make of this act of social rescue. Sure, it was nice, but somehow it wasn’t. It felt like there was something behind it: having Hattie and Verity say something nasty allowed Misty to step in and look all sweet and friendly. Of course, maybe I was overthinking all this. Maybe she was just hedging her bets until she sized me up and figured me out.

  This is how it usually went: a girl would walk in with, say, a new Birkin bag.

  ‘That’s cool,’ Misty would comment.

  Or a giant zit.

  ‘Did you see her face? How embarrassing,’ Hattie would whisper.

  Or the time one girl came in with a huge swollen jaw after a trip to the dentist.

  ‘Oh, God, like, mortification,’ Verity said.

  Or if one dared to show enthusiasm for something, especially something geeky, quirky or retro. Like the day Jenny said to one of her friends that she’d bought tickets to an ABBA tribute band concert.

  ‘Lame,’ Verity said.

  After a time, I began to see the pattern. Any act or thing could be judged with one of three adjectives: cool, lame or embarrassing. (That said, I never saw Misty use the word lame. She was liberal with cool and selective with embarrassing. Again, this confused me. If she was the good cop, she was still allowing this to happen. Except on rare occasions—like mine—she didn’t stop the other two from saying the horrible things they said.)

  Having said that, as I watched these one-word judgements occur over and over during those first few months, I started to see it less as mean-girl cruelty and more as a sign of a lack of vocabulary. Misty was smart, but Hattie and Verity—who were not that attentive in class to begin with—literally didn’t have any other words to describe things.

  When they talked about their own lives, it ranged from the superficial to the downright nasty.

  One day, Verity turned sideways as she looked in her handheld mirror, assessing her nose. ‘Oh, I hate my nose. My mom has said I can get surgery on it next summer. Yay!’

  Hattie complained constantly about her household staff. ‘They are such lazy fucking Mexicans. Consuela never cleans my bathroom properly; the toilet is always filthy. My mom hates her, too—gives her hell, makes her start all over again. But then, last week, Consuela found my stash of weed in my dresser and told my dad. He grounded me for the whole weekend. Fucking cow.’

  Often they were joined in their booth by a male student named Griffin O’Dea.

  The son of a well-known theatre producer, Griff had the build of a linebacker: six feet tall, stocky but not fat, strong but not muscly. He had a mop of frizzy orange hair that tested the boundaries of Monmouth’s male grooming policy.

  He was gregarious and flamboyant, the life of the party, or maybe he just had ADHD. Whether he was in the gym bench-pressing with the jocks or in the common room with Misty and her entourage, he was always going a thousand miles an hour. He’d been friends with Misty since elementary school. Word was, he had been to rehab twice, but for what exactly I didn’t know.

  In the common room, Griff happily joined in the judging and name-calling with Misty and her gang.

  His pronouncements on the boys entering the common room included: ‘Hey Cameron, how’s life in the closet, dude?’ ‘Morning, Thatcher, love those new glasses. No, really, I do.’ Or one whispered recommendation: ‘Girls, make a mental note of Roland. I saw him in the locker room yesterday: he is hung. It’s always the quiet ones.’ Then he’d laugh uproariously.

  The cruellest thing I ever saw Misty’s friends do in the common room involved a shy chubby girl named Winnie Simms.

  It was lunchtime on a rainy day and the common room was full when Winifred Simms entered, only to have Verity guffaw, ‘Winnie! Christ! I saw you naked in gym class yesterday. For the love of God, please wax your pussy. You need a Weed Whacker down there it’s so bushy! Damn, you traumatised me. I cannot unsee what I saw.’

  Winnie’s face went beetroot red and my heart went out to her. She was a quiet and studious girl. I also happened to know she was an only child who lived with her father. Older sisters and shallow moms help a girl in this department. Winnie had probably never even contemplated this kind of personal grooming. She scurried out of the room.

  Anger surged through me and for a fleeting moment, I thought of standing up and saying something, but then I had a flashing memory of my incident back in Memphis.

  And I bit my tongue.

  I can’t say I was proud of myself, but I’d been burned before. Badly.

  A few minutes later I saw Misty approach Winnie in the corridor and place a comforting arm around her shoulder—again, the others tee up the meanness and she follows through after with the niceness—and I convinced myself that it was all okay.

  In the end, I guess you’d say that my first couple of months at Monmouth were pretty standard for a new kid: stay under the radar, try not to anger the mean girls or stray too close to the orbits of the weirdos, and make a few tentative connections, like I did with Jenny Johnson.

  Jenny and I had several classes together: math, physics and English lit. If the world didn’t end, Jenny wanted to be a computer programmer and app designer, while I harboured desires of becoming an engineer, so we both worked hard on math and physics, often getting together to work on homework problems.

  I told her about the Winnie incident.

  ‘That’s Misty’s genius,’ Jenny said. ‘She never says a bad word about anyone. Her two bitches do it. Then she sidles in after and acts all nicey-nicey. It’s brilliant passive-aggressive shit. But don’t be fooled, she can drop the axe with the best of them. She was friends for a while with that sophomore who went missing a couple of years ago, the first one, the smart one, Trina Miller.

  ‘But then just after Christmas, around the time Trina started tutoring Bo Bradford, Misty barred her completely, just stopped talking to her, froze her out. Trina became persona non grata around here. A few months later, she was gone. Disappeared. I think she just couldn’t take it anymore.’

  ‘Is that right? Frozen out?’ I knew all about that.

  Jenny said, ‘I heard that the FBI investigator even questioned Misty about Trina’s disappearance but nothing came of it.’

  ‘Are Misty and Bo Bradford a thing?’ I asked.

  ‘She seems to think so, but I’m not sure he does.’

  I looked at Jenny. ‘You really don’t like them, do you?’

  ‘I don’t like their attitudes,’ she said. ‘This school is already white enough. But those girls, they’re white on the outside and the inside, their blank minds completely untouched by the real world. They think that just because they are rich they’re better than everybody else.

  ‘Yet their parents’ wealth has actually hurt them. It has deprived them of any kind of ambition or direction. Any hunger. They’re modern dilettantes, like those party-girl heiresses you see on Snapchat going out to nightclubs every weekend.

  ‘I don’t know what your stepdad’s like, but my dad’s old-school. He’s got more money than God, yet he doesn’t even give me an allowance. That’s why I got a job. “I have to let the world rough you up a little,” he told me.’

  For the record, my stepdad,
Todd, gave my mother a six-figure monthly allowance and out of that she gave Red and me a couple of hundred bucks in cash to cover standard teenage incidentals (back in Memphis, I’d topped it up with the odd babysitting gig). I seriously doubted Todd even knew how much she gave us. He was a strange guy, Todd, smart for sure, but quiet, detached. There was nothing mean about him, don’t get me wrong, but it was like he was surprised whenever he saw Red and me in his home. We were simply the baggage that came with our hot mom.

  Jenny went on. ‘But those girls, their dads give them black Amex cards and limo rides to school, so all they do is gossip and shop, gossip and shop. And if you asked them what they’re going to do with their lives, they’ll tell you: gossip and shop. Find out for yourself. Next time you’re chatting with them, ask them what they plan to do when they finish school. See what they say.’

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘I will.’

  BOYS AND BEEMERS

  As November came around and the days turned colder, I was feeling pretty good about myself and Monmouth. The place was starting to feel a little less alien.

  And then came the day when Ms Vandermeer, the school counsellor, politely interrupted my physics class and asked to see me in her office.

  Feeling every eye in the class zero in on me, I rose from my desk and hurried out after her.

  ‘So, Skye,’ she said when we had both sat down in her office. ‘How are you settling in?’

  Ms Vandermeer was an older woman with a soothing voice and no discernible interest in fashion whatsoever except for the pair of bright red reading glasses that she wore perched on the end of her nose and which she peered over to look at you.

  I gazed around her office. There was a poster on the wall behind her desk: COOL KIDS DON’T SMOKE. It looked like it came from 1992; the kids in it looked about forty and they did not look in any way cool.

  ‘Okay, I guess.’ I shrugged.

  Ms Vandermeer assessed me over her red reading glasses, as if searching for signs of discomfort or distress.

  She held up a manila file with my name on it. ‘Skye, as school counsellor, I’ve been privy to your medical history, so I know about the . . . incident . . . when you tried to harm yourself.’

  So that was it.

  I rolled my eyes. ‘Ms Vandermeer, I swear, I’m fine now. School is fine. Life is fine. I do not feel like hurting myself. I haven’t since that day.’

  I could hear the testiness in my voice and I took a breath, trying to calm down.

  Fuck. A suicide attempt was like a scarlet letter on your record and it followed you everywhere.

  Ms Vandermeer flicked through the file. ‘These notes from your old school in Memphis mention that the . . . self-harm . . . stemmed from a falling-out you had with the class president there. How are you getting on socially here?’

  ‘Good,’ I said tightly. ‘I mean, so far so good.’

  ‘Well.’ She smiled kindly. ‘I’m glad things are going okay. If you ever feel down or just need someone to talk to, my door is always open.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said through gritted teeth, and I got out of there at rocket speed.

  Truth be told, I was doing well in my classes: in math and physics, of course, but also, to my surprise, in English.

  I liked our English teacher, Mrs Hoynes. She was young, bespectacled and newly married to a cute male teacher at a nearby school. Fresh out of Columbia, she was energetic, enthusiastic and idealistic. She spoke a lot about ‘taking on the world’ and ‘being our best selves’.

  One day, as she was handing back some creative-writing stories we had done, she asked me and Dane Summerhays to stay behind.

  So when the class ended, as the other students dispersed, I waited with Dane. Handsome and carefree, with the wavy blond hair of a California surfer, Dane Summerhays looked like he’d stepped out of an Abercrombie & Fitch ad. I imagined that, outside of school, he probably wore boat shoes a lot.

  Even in the short time I’d known him—which included his snide remark about Ms Blackman at the opening assembly—I’d noticed that Dane had a habit of checking himself out in mirrors or windows; always a quick admiring glance. He was on the lacrosse team with Red and Bo. Girls swooned over him. High school was heaven for guys like Dane Summerhays.

  When all the other students had gone, Mrs Hoynes said, ‘Skye, Dane. I thought your stories were simply marvellous work. Dane, I felt your piece about a day at the polo showed real insight.’

  ‘Thank you, ma’am,’ Dane said, grinning.

  ‘And Skye,’ she said, ‘a ghost story. I thought it was fabulous; genuinely frightening. Where did you learn to write like that? Did you do a course at your school back in Tennessee?’

  I shrugged. I’d never done any kind of writing course. ‘I just enjoy reading novels, I guess.’

  She smiled knowingly. ‘I see. Edgar Allan Poe? Or did I detect some Mary Shelley in there?’

  ‘Er, Stephen King, ma’am. I’ve kinda read all his books. He’s my favourite author.’

  I didn’t say that he was my absolute favourite author. I had all his books on my shelf, arranged in order of publication.

  ‘Oh,’ Mrs Hoynes said. ‘Well, with your permission, I’d like to post both of your stories on the school’s internal website and include them in the yearbook. What do you say?’

  Dane nodded casually. ‘Sure. Why not? Cool.’

  Mrs Hoynes turned to me. ‘How about you, Skye?’

  I stood there frozen, unable to speak.

  The school website. And the yearbook. It terrified me beyond words to even contemplate having my story published openly. What if people hated it? What if they thought it was just the silly, juvenile work of a teenage girl?

  I looked at Dane. I envied his calm acceptance of Mrs Hoynes’s invitation. How did boys do this? And so easily? Write something, accept praise for it and just happily put it out there for all the world to see? Was it a boy/girl thing? Boys didn’t seem to fear failure or any kind of humiliation or embarrassment.

  Yet that was all I could think of.

  ‘Skye?’ Mrs Hoynes said. ‘Earth to Skye. What do you say?’

  I shook my head quickly. ‘No, no, I don’t think so. I don’t think I could do that.’

  I could hear myself as I said it and I died a little on the inside. I sounded like my father.

  ‘Okay,’ Mrs Hoynes said, disappointed. ‘I guess I thought—well, no problem.’

  I left the classroom, hating myself.

  There was one other incident with Mrs Hoynes that warrants mentioning, if only because it saved me from following up on Jenny’s challenge.

  It was the final period of the day on a Friday in mid-November and nobody wanted to be there.

  Mrs Hoynes was discussing Pride and Prejudice (which I liked) but Hattie, Verity and Misty, huddled at the back of the classroom, were talking. Sitting a few desks in front of them, I could hear what they were talking about: fashion and boys.

  It was clearly getting on Mrs Hoynes’s nerves. Her eyes kept darting toward them until finally she snapped and said, ‘Miss Brewster, Miss Keeley, Miss Collins. Have you no interest at all in what we are studying today?’

  ‘Not really,’ Verity retorted tartly. ‘It’s just a stupid book.’

  Mrs Hoynes froze.

  The rest of the class fell silent. A line had been crossed.

  Mrs Hoynes said, ‘You don’t think you might learn anything that will help you in later life?’

  Verity snorted. ‘I’m absolutely certain of that, ma’am.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Ma’am, I plan to marry a young man with name-value and a whopping great trust fund, punch out a couple of munchkins for him, hire a fulltime nanny, drive a big BMW SUV and lunch in the city every day. Reading books doesn’t feature in that plan at all.’

  Hattie high-fived Verity. ‘And
there you go.’

  Mrs Hoynes—young, energetic and hopeful—just stood at the head of the class and her mouth fell open.

  As the days got colder, Central Park became greyer.

  The trees became more skeletal, the paths more muddy, and our morning walk across it became more of a stoic trudge.

  Every day, Misty would be met by her chauffeur-driven Escalade. If we emerged from the lobby around the same time, I would subtly wave or nod to her.

  I also saw her brother.

  His name was Oscar but everybody called him Oz. He was fifteen, a sophomore at Monmouth and even though he was a year younger than Misty, he stood a head taller.

  He was also kinda weird.

  Oz had ruddy red cheeks and a buzz cut, and if he was outdoors, whatever the weather, he always wore a grey beanie. A little overweight, he stood with a hunched-over stance, as if trying to minimise his height. Whenever I saw him, he was perpetually bent over his cell phone. I thought he was guaranteed to have neck problems later in life.

  On the rare occasions when he looked up from his precious phone, I noted that he had the same droopy eyes as Misty. One morning, as we passed on the sidewalk, he glanced up and I smiled at him and said, ‘Hey, Oz,’ but he just ducked his head and didn’t utter a word.

  I mentioned it to Jenny.

  ‘Misty’s a bitch, but Oz is just plain odd,’ she said. ‘I heard he’s got ADHD so bad that he’s on the highest possible dose of Ritalin. Word is, when he was thirteen, his mom found a bunch of dirty searches on his smartphone, so she sent him off to military camp for the summer. Misty told everyone about it. Ah, the three Collins kids, Chastity, Misty and Oz: loose, bad and mad.’

  I had one other interesting encounter with Oz Collins.

  It was just after the school’s annual talent show. You know the kind of event, every school has one: students volunteer to perform in front of the entire student body and their parents. It’s either a moment of wonder when you discover that one of your classmates has an up-till-then unknown God-given talent . . . or some poor soul gets humiliated when they discover they’re not as talented as they thought they were.