The school bell in the hallway rings and, like a Pavlovian trigger, sends everyone scrambling for the door. Mr. Lawrence holds his book up in the air in a sad little attempt to keep order, shouting, “We begin again tomorrow, same place.” Then he turns to me. “And you’ll be up first, Bloom. You have all night to meditate on the benign indifference of the world, so come up with something good. And in English, por favor.”
I nod that I will and gather up my stuff. Outside the classroom, Astrid Foogle is at her locker, surrounded, as always, by her disciples. She’s doing an imitation of me, a monologue in fake French, her shoulders hunched, nose squashed with her index finger.
My eyes down with the proper beta deference, I slide by her and her friends on my way to my own locker. But Astrid spots me; I can tell because she and her friends go silent and I hear the heels of their shoes—they’re Prada pumps, you little sow—accelerate toward me, her friends just a pace behind.
“Hey, Gwenny,” she starts up. “Translation question for you. How do you say ‘suicide is never the answer’ in French?”
I ignore her and keep walking, hoping for a sudden fatal stroke—hers or mine, doesn’t matter. The heat radiates off my face, anger becoming rage becoming whatever’s stronger than rage. I can only imagine what it looks like. I fold my shaking arms over my chest.
“Seriously,” Astrid continues. “Because someone like you has to have thought of suicide from time to time. I mean, why wouldn’t you, right? So, s’il vous pla?t, how do you say it, Gwenny? En fran?ais?”
I spin around, and the words come bursting from my mouth. “Va te faire foutre.”
Astrid stops, and for a half second—no, less than that—fear snaps across her face. But then she realizes where she is, in her kingdom surrounded by acolytes, and the real Astrid returns. She arches her beautifully pruned eyebrows.
One of her friends, Chelsea Bunchman, smiles. “Astrid, she just told you to go fuck yourself.”
Astrid’s mouth opens into an O and I hear a little gasp sneak out. “You little piece of trash,” she says, and takes a step closer.
I see the slap while it’s still in midair. I see it, but even so, I don’t do anything to stop it. Instead, I cringe, shrinking my head down into my neck and my neck down into my shoulders. It’s a hard slap—Astrid really means it—and my head twists to the side under its force. The nail of one of her fingers catches my skin and stings my cheek.
A crowd is forming. I see the grinning faces of Luke Bontemp and Connor Monroe and maybe a dozen other students staring wide-eyed, less in shock at what they’ve seen than in glee. They’re standing around Astrid and me in a semicircle, as if in an arena. This is entertainment, I realize, a time-honored kind. I take note that Astrid didn’t punch me, didn’t kick me, didn’t pull my hair. She very calmly, very deliberately, slapped my face. It was the uppercase-L Lady slapping the lowercase-m maid.
Instead of slapping her back—and, who am I kidding, Gwendolyn Bloom would never slap back—I close my eyes, the humiliation like the winds I remember from the Sahara, hot and hard and lasting for days. An adult voice orders everyone to move along, and when I open my eyes, there’s a middle-aged teacher whose name I don’t know standing there with his hands in the pockets of his khakis. His eyes travel from Astrid to me and back again.
“What happened?” he asks Astrid.
“She told me to—I can’t say the word. It was a curse word, f myself.” Her voice is demure and wounded.
“Is this true?” he says, looking to me.
I open my mouth, about to rat her out for slapping me. “It is,” I say instead.
*
L’étranger, the title of the book we’re studying in World Lit, is usually translated into English as The Stranger. But it could also mean The Outsider or The Foreigner. That’s me, all of it—stranger, outsider, foreigner. I’m technically an American. That’s what my passport says. But I wasn’t born here and, until the start of junior year this past September, I had lived in the United States for only eighteen months, right after my mother was killed. We—my dad and I—came to New York so he could take up a post at the United Nations, which isn’t too far from my school, Danton Academy.
There’s no way in hell my dad could have afforded a place like Danton on his own. But my father is a diplomat with the Department of State, and private school for us diplobrats is sometimes one of the benefits. Depending on which country you’re in, that private school might be the only good school for a thousand miles and you’re sitting in class with the son or daughter of the country’s president or king or awful dictator. That happened to me once. The asshole son of an asshole president sat next to me in my math class. He wore shoes that were made specially for him in Vienna and cost five thousand dollars a pair, while kids were starving in the streets just beyond the school’s stucco walls.
Not that it’s so different at Danton. The kids here are the children of presidents and kings and dictators, too—just of companies instead of countries. Most of my classmates have always been rich. Usually, the only poor person they ever meet is the foreign kid who delivers their groceries for them or brings over the dry cleaning. My dad makes what would be a decent living anywhere else in the world, but to the kids at Danton we’re poor as dirt.
Sitting on the bench outside the assistant director’s office, I fuss with my uniform skirt—God, I hate skirts—pulling at the hem so that it falls lower on my black tights, flattening out the little pleats. The uniforms are an attempt to equalize us, I suppose, but there are no restrictions about shoes. Thus, wealth and tribal loyalties are displayed with the feet: Prada pumps and Gucci loafers for old money versus Louboutin flats and Miu Miu sneakers for new money. I’m one of the irrelevant two-member Doc Martens tribe. Mine are red and beat-up, but the other member, a quiet artist’s kid from downtown who’s tolerated by the others insofar as he’s a reliable source of Adderall, goes with polished black.
Not that if I suddenly showed up in Prada it would make a difference. I don’t look like Astrid Foogle, or any of them, really. I’m too tall, too thick-waisted. Nose too rectangular, mouth too wide. Everything some kind of too. My dad and my doctor say I’m just fine the way I am—say it’s hormones, or muscle from all my years of gymnastics. Everyone’s built differently, don’t accept anyone else’s definition of beauty, et cetera, ad nauseam. But it’s their job to say things like that. So I color my hair at home with the very finest CVS store-brand dye, lace up my Doc Martens, and pretend not to care.
When the assistant director finally steps out of her office, she’s all patronizing smiles and fake concern. Mrs. Wasserman is her name, and she’s forever wearing a cloud of perfume and sugary joy, as if any second she expects a cartoon bluebird to fly out of the sky and land on her finger.
“How are we today?” she asks as we go into her office.
“Amazing,” I say, sinking down into a chair upholstered in blood-colored leather. “Just perfect.”