The unidentified fellow student, that’s me.
Polly and Daria were livid. Their moment in the sun had been completely obliterated by Amelia’s shenanigans. Our home life now veered between long stretches of sullen silence and endless hours of screeching female rage.
“This is not about you, Amelia. None of this was ever supposed to be about you,” Daria would hiss.
“I said, I didn’t want to do it in the first place!”
“Do you know, do you have any idea of how long it’s taken me to get my career to this point? Do you even have half a clue—”
“Oh, what career?”
“Look, people say that no publicity is bad publicity.” This halfway optimistic opinion, or something like it, coming from Polly.
“People who have never had this kind of spectacularly shitty publicity say that! And it’s not my fault! None of this is my fault! All of it is her fault, and she doesn’t even care!”
“I care! I want to go to school! I can’t even go to school, everybody hates me, and I hate everybody!”
This was occasionally punctuated by a series of slamming doors.
And in fact, she couldn’t go to school—Collette called, the first morning, and put everyone in lockdown. Nobody was allowed to leave the apartment, and nobody was allowed to talk to anybody, either. Which put everyone in an even worse mood. The phone would ring off the hook until Mom finally answered it, and then she would hold the receiver tightly to her ear, cover her face with one hand and melodramatically whisper, “No comment.” Then, infinitely bereaved, she would set down the receiver. It was quite an act and, as far as I could tell, gained us not one shred of legitimacy from the reporters on the evening news, who just kept reporting, snidely, “No comment from the girl’s family. Looks like they’re trying to keep this under wraps.”
And then the anchor-idiot would say, “Little too late for that!” And they’d all chuckle. I mean, you really wanted to blow your brains out.
After three days of this I came home from school—the lockdown only counted for girl members of the family; nobody out there really seemed to give a shit, frankly, about the unidentified fellow student—to find Collette holding a major powwow around our kitchen table. In spite of how crucial she had become to everyone’s lives over the past six weeks, this was in fact the first time I had ever laid eyes on Collette, and she was, frankly, pretty impressive. She wore one of those perfect suits—tight, curvy, both sexy and severe—and she was drinking ice water, and crossing her legs to one side, so that anyone who entered the room could see right off what great legs she had.
“All right, the fact is, Maureen Piven got out in front of us in every media outlet,” she announced. “She had them all in her pocket within twenty-four hours, caught us absolutely flat-footed. She’s brilliant at this, absolutely flawless. I would have warned you ahead of time not to take her on, but I had no idea Amelia would do anything as stupid as biting Rex Wentworth.”
“He was—”
“Save it, Amelia. The damage is done.” Collette clearly was not interested in discussion at this point, but the level of anxiety was pretty high. Mom leaned forward, wringing her hands.
“But why can’t we even defend ourselves? It’s not doing any good. We don’t say anything and it just keeps getting worse and worse and worse, what they’re saying about us, in the news papers, on the television—”
“I know it feels that way,” Collette nodded, not terribly sympathetic. “But you don’t want to provoke Maureen any further. This is completely personal to her. Karl Rove could take lessons from Maureen, when she’s in a mood like this. Did you guys do anything to piss her off? Besides biting Rex, did you say anything or do anything that I need to know about? Because we have maybe one shot to save this situation. I need to know everything.”
Amelia glanced at me, worried, then looked away. I looked down. We were fast, but not fast enough. Mom caught the look, thought for a moment, then another moment. She can be stupid about some stuff, but on other stuff she’s crackerjack. “Philip was rude to her,” she said. Daria and Polly turned and stared at me. Amelia kept looking at the floor.
“I wasn’t,” I said. “I barely said two words.”
“You were rude. She was telling us about her family, a story about her family, and Philip—”
“She said her great-grandfather was Franz Kafka!” I said.
Amelia’s face twitched. She was trying not to laugh. Daria caught it.
“You’re a moron, Philip,” said Polly. “What were you even doing there, anyway? No one invited you.”
“I was fucking polite! I was pretty fucking polite, if you ask me, about such a spectacular piece of bullshit!”
“He was polite about it, he really was, considering,” Amelia chimed in.
“No one was fooled, by either of you,” Mom snorted.
Really, the whole thing was ludicrous. It was suddenly my fault there were thirty crazed reporters in front of our building waiting to tear us all to pieces, because I didn’t say, “Oh really?” with enough conviction when a giantess in a green dress told me she was the direct descendant of a hooker who had once slept with Franz Kafka.
“Oh my god,” said Daria. “That’s what happened? That’s why they went after us? Because Philip was—”
“I wasn’t anything!” I yelled. “I hardly exist around here, you can’t dump this on me!”
“It doesn’t matter,” sighed Collette. “If that’s what’s behind it, the damage is done. She’s notoriously sensitive, so if she thought Philip was playing her she was going to punish everybody sooner or later. It’s just as well that we got it over with.”
“Is it over with?” Polly asked, raising an eyebrow. “’Cause it sure doesn’t look like that from where I sit. We’re all under house arrest.”
“You let the story have its natural life,” Collette explained, standing and pacing now, like a drill sergeant. “I couldn’t have you talking to the press because they want nothing more than to keep it all going—statements from you, statements from Rex, statements from Maureen—and she’s just too good at this. You go to war with Maureen Piven, you’re all dead before you’ve even started.”
“You mean we’re not? Dead?” said Daria. This was the news she was waiting for. And Collette sighed, apparently at our collective stupidity.
“No,” she said. “Not quite yet.”
Collette’s opening gambit, as it turned out, was to drag the two offending dimwits into the belly of the beast, whereupon both dimwits were expected to throw themselves on the beast’s mercy. I’m not kidding, that was the entire plan. We didn’t even call ahead; she just tossed us into the back of her town car and the next thing I knew we were standing around in the waiting room of the swankest offices I had ever seen. I mean, this place was spectacular: Leather chairs, walnut paneling, a little Jackson Pollock action on one wall and a full southern exposure of Central Park on the other. And that was the waiting room. A skinny guy in a white shirt and tie sat in a tiny cubicle around the corner; he had no expression on his face and kept telling people on his headset to hold, while he simultaneously listened to Collette explain that Maureen would see us.
“But