“I have a brother,” said Julia, as if that was all the explanation required.
Beatrice shrugged. “Well, as long as he doesn’t rape anyone, I won’t spray-paint anything on his door.”
“What if some girl just says that he did?” Julia asked. She turned to the other boys in appeal. “That’s all it takes, these days, right? Some girl makes an accusation, and then the boy’s guilty until proven innocent.”
Beatrice made herself take a breath before she spoke. She kept her voice mild. “I don’t think it’s something girls lie about.”
Cade clapped his hands. The color in his cheeks seemed, to Beatrice, even more pronounced than it had been at the start of the lunch period. She wondered what he was thinking, if he was flustered, or embarrassed. She wondered, again, what she was doing there, when he said, “Hey, how about we change the subject?” He turned toward Beatrice, and ran his hand through his dark hair. “A bunch of us are going to the movies Friday night. Want to come?”
* * *
“I don’t get it,” Beatrice told Doff after school as they sat on the steps in front of the school. Doff’s fine blonde hair was drawn up into a ponytail, and she was using her tongue to push her mouth guard in and out of her mouth.
“You’re the new girl,” Doff said, as if this was totally obvious. “Most of the kids here have known each other since kindergarten. When Lily got here freshman year, it was like a movie star showed up.”
Beatrice shook her head. “There’s no way he actually likes me.” Still, there was that prickle of excitement, a buzzing sensation at her knees and the small of her back. The smooth, handsome rich boy falling for the artsy girl from the wrong side of the tracks—or, in her case, the girl who just looked like she was from the wrong side of the tracks—that was the kind of thing that happened in old movies, the kind her mother watched. From her limited experience, it never happened in real life. Things that happened in real life were like what had been done to her friend Tricia, back at Emlen. She could still remember Colin Mackenzie sitting down next to them, at Chapel, putting his arm around Tricia and having the nerve to look confused when she shoved him away. She’d known then that nothing would happen to Colin. He’d just say he’d gotten mixed messages, or that he’d been confused, and he’d get to stay, and Tricia, who was on scholarship, would get sent home.
“Invite him to poetry club,” Doff said with a smirk. “See if he asks you to take a look at his Emily Dickinson.”
Beatrice snorted. “How long did it take you to think that up?”
“Most of lunch, and the rest of G block,” Doff said, shrugging modestly. “I started with ‘read his Charles Dickens,’ but Charles Dickens is a novelist.”
“What about his Philip K. Dick?”
“Who’s that?” asked Doff.
“He wrote the book that got turned into Blade Runner.”
“Ah.” Doff pulled on her shin guards. “Do you like him?”
“Who, Philip K. Dick?”
“No, dummy. Cade!”
Beatrice considered. Cade looked like the worst kind of boy who ended up at places like Emlen, or Melville: preppy and privileged, entitled and swaggering. Once, at one of her mom’s annual clam bakes on Cape Cod, she’d overheard her uncle Danny telling Uncle Jesse about someone he’d known at Emlen, someone he and his husband had run into at the Provincetown airport: He’s always been one of those born-on-third-base-and-thinks-he-hit-a-triple types. That saying fit most of the boys she’d met there to a T. They thought they’d gotten where they were: at Emlen, on their way to Williams or Princeton or Yale, with nice clothes and straight teeth, because of how hard they’d worked, and not primarily because, as Tricia used to say, they were lifetime members of the Lucky Sperm Club.
Cade was yet another member of that club. But still, there’d been a moment when Cade, with his flushed cheeks, had looked at her, and his cheesy smile had fallen away, and she’d thought that maybe there was something there, something that wasn’t detestable, a boy she could actually like. There was also the social capital an association with Cade like that could guarantee. If she had a popular jock boyfriend, it wouldn’t matter what she wore, or if she said weird, abrupt things, or had absolutely no desire to get into a top-tier college. She would belong at Melville, her position secure. Her mother would approve. Not that she cared, one way or the other, only it might be nice to see something besides the frown that seemed to have established permanent residence on her mother’s face since she’d come home.