“Where are you?” Ruth demanded. “I’m walking down the boardwalk and I don’t see you anywhere.”
“I’m by the custard stand. What?”
“Paulie Junior stepped on a jellyfish. We’re packing up. What custard stand? There are at least five custard stands.”
“Hold on.” Frankie didn’t want her mother to see this boy. This smart, strange boy she probably shouldn’t be talking to. And she didn’t want the boy to meet Ruth, either. “She’s yanking my chain,” she told him, and held out her hand. “I gotta go.”
His hand felt warm and solid in hers. “Good luck at school,” he said. “Maybe I’ll see you around.”
“Frankie? Frankie! Who are you talking to?” Ruth’s voice barked from the phone.
“You’re not going to see me around,” laughed Frankie, beginning to walk away. “You live in New York City.”
“Maybe I do and maybe I don’t,” called the boy. “You did say Alabaster, right?”
“That’s right.”
“Okay, then.”
“I gotta go.” Frankie put the phone back to her ear. “Mom, I’m on my way back. I’ll be there in five. Will you please relax?”
“Good-bye!” called the boy.
Frankie shouted back: “I hope you liked the custard.”
“I like vanilla better!” he called.
And when she turned to look for him again, he was gone.
OLD BOY
Frankie’s dad, Franklin, had wanted a son to name after himself. However, he did realize that since Ruth was forty-two when Frankie was born, he probably wasn’t getting one. He decided that he would just name the baby girl something as close to Frank as he could get. So they named her Frances, and called her what they called her.
Senior became Senior, which suited him.
When Frankie was five, her parents had divorced. Ruth found Senior dismissive of her intellectual capacities and personal endeavors. Senior (a WASP atheist) found Ruth’s observant Judaism an irritant, and felt the pressures of maintaining relationships with two young girls and a sometimes cranky wife were infringing upon the perfection of his golf game and his advancement in the medical profession (which wasn’t as stellar as he wished). After separation, Ruth took the kids to live near her family in New Jersey, while Senior remained in Boston, paying monthly visits to the children—and all the boarding school bills.
Senior Banks was a doctor specializing in lung problems. Mentally, however, he was an Old Boy— more concerned with his network of Ivy League cronies than he was with the diseases of his patients. He had attended Alabaster (back when it was all male), followed by Harvard, just as his father had attended Alabaster followed by Harvard.
“Old Boy” means alum, but to Frankie’s mind— even before her intellectual explosion sophomore year—the oxymoron was apt. Senior’s boyhood days were still the largest looming factor in his conception of himself. His former schoolfellows were his closest friends. They were the people he golfed with, the people he invited for drinks, the people whose country homes he visited on vacation. They were people he recommended for jobs; people who sent him patients and asked him to sit on boards of arts organizations; people who connected him to other people. His medical practice had become considerably more profitable in the decade since his divorce from Ruth.
When Frankie was starting sophomore year, she and Ruth drove to Boston and collected Senior for the last leg of the trip. Despite his relative lack of involvement in her life, Frankie’s dad wasn’t going to miss a chance to stroll the old campus and remember his glory days. He and Ruth retained a tight and false goodwill as the car headed into northern Massachusetts.
As he drove, Senior was talking about skating on the pond; going to football games. “These are the best years of your life,” he boomed. “Right now is when you make the friendships that are gonna last you a lifetime. These people will get you jobs, you’ll get them jobs. It’s a network that’s going to give you opportunities, Bunny Rabbit. Opportunities.”
Ruth sighed. “Senior, really. The workplace is more democratic now.”
“If it’s changing,” Senior snorted, “why am I paying for Alabaster?”
“To get her an education?”
“I’m not paying for the education. She could get that for ten thousand less a year. I’m paying for the connections.”
Frankie’s mother shrugged. “I’m just saying, take a bit of the pressure off. Let Bunny find her own way.”
“Hello, Mom,” said Frankie from the backseat. “I can speak for myself.”
Senior took a swig of coffee from a thermos. “I’m being practical, Ruth. This is how the world operates.
You get in with the club, you’re in with the club, and it makes life easier. Then it’s a cinch to meet the right people to get done what you want to get done in the world.”
“Nepotism.”
“It’s not nepotism, it’s how the universe operates. People hire people they know, schools admit people they know—it’s natural. Frankie is forming loyalties— and people are forming loyalties to her.”
“Dad, I’ve already been there a year. You’re talking like I’ve never been to the place.”
“Sophomore year is when it really began to happen for me.”
Frankie thought: Poor Senior. He has no life. Just a memory of a life. It’s pitiful.
And then she thought: I have no friends at Alabaster that I like anywhere near so much as Senior still likes his friends from high school.
Maybe it’s me who’s pitiful.
And then she thought: His whole clubby thing is dumb.
And then she thought: I’d like to go to Harvard.
And then she thought—because this was the thing she’d been thinking about for most of the drive to Alabaster: I wonder if Matthew Livingston will notice me this year.
ALABASTER
Information as to the locale and setting of Alabaster, its course requirements, and the sports activities required therein will be given in these pages solely on a need-to-know basis. It is of no relevance to the understanding of either the Loyal Order of the Basset Hounds, the Fish Liberation Society, or any of the other spurious organizations that committed the so-called crimes at Alabaster, that Frankie Landau-Banks took modern dance and played ultimate Frisbee, though she did. It does not matter that her elective was initially Latin because her father thought she should take it. And it is of no concern how she decorated her dorm room.
It is crucial, however, to understand this: Frankie Landau-Banks was and still is, in many ways, an ordinary girl. She liked clothes and was glad to have grown enough over the summer to necessitate a large school shopping trip. She bought copies of In Touch magazine at the drugstore and remembered silly facts about celebrities. She giggled in a goofy way when she was amused or embarrassed. She felt awkward around popular people, and couldn’t figure out whether she was good-looking or freakishly ugly, because she often felt both within the space of an hour. Starting her sophomore year, she missed her sister, worried about her geometry class, and avoided Porter (the sophomore Spy Club member and lacrosse player who had been her boyfriend October through May of the previous year) in favor of pining after boys who were older than she was and unaware of her existence.
Namely, Matthew Livingston.
Other facts about Alabaster that are of actual importance to this chronicle:
1. Frankie’s roommate, Trish, was a freckled, horsey blonde who’d spent the first half of her summer doing Outward Bound and the second half on Nantucket helping out in a stable. She was one of those people who is friendly to everyone, though not especially close to anyone besides her boyfriend, Artie. Trish was interested in psychology, debate, and baking; she played lacrosse and field hockey and seemed destined to have a house in Kennebunkport. Her teeth seemed like rather more teeth than belonged in her mouth, although all of them were straight and white.
Artie, Trish’s boyfriend, was a member of the Audio Visual Technology Club (AVT), which mean
t that he carried keys to quite a number of buildings on campus.
Alabaster was fully wired—and all the dorms had wireless networks. Every student had a laptop (included in the cost of tuition) and an Alabaster e-mail address.
The Alabaster campus, like that of any preparatory academy that funnels students into Ivy League schools, had many, many buildings, most of which are of no interest. However, take note of these few:
a. an old and largely neglected theater, eclipsed by
b. a newly built arts complex;
c. a founder’s house museum;
d. a chapel with large stained-glass windows featuring the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, several images of the Virgin Mary, and a number of saints, in which was held a mandatory morning assembly at the start of each week;
e. an old gymnasium (now empty and blocked off as it awaited renovation);
f. a new gymnasium with a state-of-the-art rock-climbing wall; and
g. the Hazelton library, the architectural jewel of the campus, which featured a large and shiny dome on top.
In the main building, as well as in several other prominent locations, pompous oil paintings of past headmasters, distinguished teachers, literary figures, and board presidents hung with imposing and slightly ridiculous grandeur. All of the subjects were men.
And last: many of the buildings, built in the late nineteenth century, were connected by steam tunnels—utility tunnels intended for the maintenance of heating pipes that run underneath the ground. These tunnels were locked, and student access to them was explicitly forbidden by the administration. But there wouldn’t be a story here if there weren’t a way of getting in.
THE GEEK CLUB CONGLOMERATE
A telling anecdote about Frankie Landau-Banks: In October of her freshman year, the Chess Club, the Spy Club, the Science Olympiad, the Horticulture Club, the Role-players, and the Geography Bowl, plus a few others, had banded together for the sake of their relatively limited memberships. They called themselves the Geek Club Conglomerate, pooled their money, and decided to have a party. The party was partly a membership drive—trying to build the sparse attendance in most of these extracurricular activities—but primarily it was a social event. There was to be a DJ, corn chips, onion dip, warm soda, and possibly a disco ball.
A slightly late invitation to participate in the Conglomerate was issued to the Debate Club, of which Frankie was already a member, and naturally, the Debate Club members debated whether or not they wanted to accept membership. They didn’t consider themselves geeky, and were not, in fact, universally considered geeky. Debaters had a status akin to that of people in student government—if you were really cool, you probably wouldn’t bother; but participating didn’t automatically connote social awkwardness.
Regarding the party, some had argued that debating was indeed geeky. They should embrace the geek factor of their chosen activity. If you called it “forensics” instead of “debate” it most certainly sounded geeky. Anyway, the only way to have any armature against the accusation of geekiness was to reinvent the term, so that geek and chic were one and the same, as they were in some sections of Silicon Valley, no doubt.
“We’ve got to replace geek bleak with geek chic,” one proponent actually argued, while another pointed out that fighting the accusation by loudly proclaiming oneself ungeeky was certainly the geekiest thing anyone could do. He then explained that he was using “geekiest” in its pejorative sense only in that last part of his final sentence, as he hoped (but dared not assume) his fellow club members understood.
The dissenters argued that to jeopardize the precarious coolness of the Debate Club would undermine the social standing of its various members. Allying them to members of the Geography Bowl, who were notorious nose-pickers and flatulents, would cause a downslide in the collective morale of the debate team members, possibly even leading the more socially glamorous of them to depart the team so as to avoid membership in the Conglomerate. With several of its leaders decamped, the dissenters claimed, the debate team would suffer. It would lose the competitions it had traditionally won, its ranking would slide, and its members would fail to get into top colleges. The whole thing would go to hades in an alligator purse.
Frankie, then only a fledgling member of the team, had spoken up and ended the argument. “We’re forgetting the two key points,” she said after motioning that she wanted to speak.
“And what are they?” asked Zada, who was, as club president, acting as moderator.
“First,” Frankie said, “if our stated goal here is to maintain or increase the social standing of the Debate Club, we need to think of ourselves as politicians.”
“And?”
“There’s a tremendous amount of damage a bunch of scorned geeks can do once they’ve formed a conglomerate. We would be well-advised not to irritate them if we have any pretensions to social dominance.”
There was a moment of silence.
“We shouldn’t piss them off,” explained Frankie, “because who knows what they’ll do now that they’ve united.”
More silence. Then Zada said, “Good point. What’s the second?”
“There’s a party. Lots of people we know are going to it. And we’re invited.”
“So?”
“So. Do we want to go? I, for one, would like to go to the party.”
There was a quick vote, and when it was over, the Alabaster debaters had formally joined the Geek Club Conglomerate.
Walking out of that room was the happiest moment of Frankie Landau-Banks’s freshman year.
At the party, Frankie met Porter Welsch from the Spy Club and danced with him. The members of the Spy Club had pretensions to technological wizardry such as surveillance equipment, fingerprinting, and metal detectors, but the reality was that among them they owned nothing more than a pair of binoculars and one really small camera, and most of their time was spent reading and discussing the work of John le Carré and Frederick Forsyth. There were only four of them anyway.
Porter was, at age fifteen, already six foot three.
He had floppy black hair and a heft to his frame that was uncommon in even radically tall boys of his age. He wasn’t much of a dancer, but he knew it, and the faces he pulled when he danced gave him a perpetually startled look—as if he were, at regular intervals, surprised to find himself dancing. And with a girl, too.
Frankie already knew who Porter was, of course. His father was head of a power company that was exceedingly profitable, yet frequently written up in The New York Times for questionable business practices. (People at Alabaster know this kind of thing about one another’s families.) There had been a trial several years back that ended in a hung jury, and other suits were pending—but Mr. Welsch had remained a prosperous, if notorious, CEO. Porter was the youngest of three children, all of whom attended Alabaster; his sister Jeannie was two years ahead of him.
Porter asked Frankie if she wanted to study algebra with him in the library the next evening, and she said yes.
They laughed over their homework (eighth-grade stuff). They both liked reading and strawberry Mentos. Before Frankie knew it, Porter was walking her back to her dorm and they had kissed beneath a streetlamp.
She liked him. He was big. He seemed like more of a man than the other boys his age. She liked his messy dorm room stacked with piles of paperbacks.
She also liked watching him on the lacrosse field, where he was a star. She couldn’t quite believe he liked her, since at that point she looked very much like an uncomfortable kid, all gawky elbows and too-long legs, startling jaw and frizzy curls; but Porter said he thought she was funny, and that she had beautiful eyes.
It was nice to have a boyfriend. And though they weren’t “in love” and no love was ever discussed, Frankie and Porter went out for many months. She went to his lacrosse games. He attended her debates. They sent each other adorable e-mails and spent every Saturday night together. She met his family when they came on Parents Day (and was, in fact, surprised to find his
dad balding and jovial, since Porter had talked about him with such revulsion). They held hands in the movies and sat together in the caf. They were the longest-standing couple in the freshman class.
Until mid-May.
On May 19th, Frankie walked in on Porter fooling around with Bess Montgomery, a junior girl with a heart-shaped face and a taste for tall boys.
Frankie wept.
Porter made excuses.
Frankie said she never wanted to speak to him again.
She thought he’d come knocking on her door with a mouth full of apologies, but he never did.
MATTHEW
On the second day of school sophomore year, before classes actually started, Frankie caught sight of Matthew across the quad.
He was a senior. A dimpled chin, a ready smile, unruly dark hair, black-rimmed glasses that contrasted with his wide, wide shoulders. Matthew was a Livingston, meaning his father owned newspapers in Boston, Philadelphia, and Burlington. His mother was a celebrated socialite and fund-raiser for the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation and other worthy liberal charities. His family went back to Jamestown—but you’d never know it from his clothes. Like the other students at Alabaster, Matthew wore none of his wealth on his back. Old chinos and a thin red T-shirt with a stain on the stomach, ancient sneakers, and the same backpack Frankie knew he’d carried last year. He was editor of the school paper and a member of the heavy eight on the crew team, pulling the key fifth seat. More important, he was known for organizing late-night parties and hijacking golf carts.
When Frankie saw Matthew sophomore year, she was biking over to the new gymnasium to meet her roommate, Trish, for a swim. She caught sight of him walking down the path and was so engrossed in watching the way his hips rolled underneath the waist of his ratty khakis that—dumb, girly—she lost control of the bicycle, spun onto the grass, and fell over.