Colors Insulting to Nature. Cintra Wilson

Ned said glumly.

      “Every man for himself,” said Liza.

      Cloaked in these perilous doubts and presullied reputations, Ned and Liza stepped out of the filthy Honda and stood before the flagpole of Miwok Butte for the first time, amid the squall of voices and faces that would be their peers. Cliques had already been established among those who had endured local grade schools together; drifts of teen girls jounced by in matching tightnesses of pants, their hair identically tormented. Elite jock-boys flaunted the latest incarnation of pricey running shoes. Rich kids of the nonathletic variety wore the signifiers of the Ivy League: khaki pants, penny loafers, plaid scarves, French ski-sunglasses. Heavy-metal burnouts displayed long-handled plastic combs in corduroy back pockets. There were stray teens, belonging to no group, and no fashion—concave girls who looked as if they’d suffered low birth weights or family shame, and boys angry at being adopted or dyslexic, feeling the first tugs of crime’s undertow. They haunted the undersides of stairwells and various campus no-man’s-lands, sometimes binding together in subgroups of two or three. Ned was dismayed to see no malformed potential allies—even the rejects in this teen society looked too cool for him.

      The Miwok Butte High School campus was a grim bunch of concrete cubes, a 1960s architectural vision of fascist-modern offering no beauty and inspiring no hope.

      For Liza, the only thing to recommend Miwok was that the Baumgartens weren’t going there; they had been accepted at the Eiderdijken Preparatory Academy for the Arts, in the posh Pacific Heights neighborhood of San Francisco—an elite private school with connections to the nearby ballet, symphony, and opera houses. Chantal and Desiree were to receive a rarefied education from the finest instructors of dance, theatre, music, and film: culture heroes taking time out from their brilliant careers to raise the next generation of supertalent in a Romanesque Revival showplace with stone archways, polished wood floors, and leaded-glass windows framing views of the bay. In the local interest section of the Gazette, Liza read an article headlined “Sisters in Success,” featuring a flattering picture of Chantal and Desiree arabesqueing in front of the Academy.

      Liza gathered from the article that Eiderdijken was essentially the Royal High School of Performing Arts. Liza thought she would vomit.

      Miwok Butte posed one particular problem for the average teen. The kids who went there were generally one of three types: either the children of very rich Marin County parents who were too selfish and/or degenerate to try to get them a better education; rich kids who had been kicked out of better schools; or lower-middle-class kids that lived with single parents in boxlike apartments near the freeway. There was an unbridgeable gulf between the rich and not-rich, creating a distinct aristocracy among the kids who drove to school in BMWs with artificial tans and limitless supplies of the latest fashions, and a leper caste of bus-taking average kids for whom designer anything was beyond reach. The kids that weren’t insulated by cash fell through the cracks socially and often (perhaps due to the disenfranchisement they felt) academically as well.

      The first day of school was an extended sort of pep rally and orientation, wherein robust sophomores and juniors and wholly adult seniors sashayed around the campus greeting friends forgotten during the summer with joyous shrieks and teasing; the freshman class, knobby, brace-mouthed, frightened, hypersensitive, and in many cases as personally unformed as larvae, crept around, clinging to the walls for comfort.

      Liza was still heartbroken over Roland Spring, who had vanished from the earth. (She had tried calling his home number a month after the theatre disaster; it was disconnected—she called the Miwok Butte administration office, but they could find no Roland Spring listed among the incoming freshmen), but until some miracle drew him back into her landscape, she felt wholly entitled to appraising all Cute Boys, as her small consolation prize. As much as Liza hated Peppy for failing to deliver her to New York and Fame, she was still privately excited about going to any high school; high school held promise and mystery. According to the films she’d seen, it was where a girl found deep friendships and countless flirtations—perhaps even Actual Love. (The messy affair of “womanhood” held zero fascination for Liza—the signifying, Judy Blume-worthy event had already happened, in eighth grade. Peppy tried to congratulate her and offered to take her out for a “woman to woman” dinner at The Sizzler, but the idea of celebrating puberty with her mother over a sirloin was, for Liza, revolting on innumerable levels.)

      Liza’s first-day-of-school outfit, one she thought was fetching, instantly branded her as socially undesirable. She wore a diagonally striped minidress, high, white ankle-boots, and a braided metallic headband, having assembled the components at a strip-mall store named “WOW! EVERYTHING UNDER $10!” that Peppy had taken her to for back-to-school clothes.

      Noreen shuddered when she saw Liza at breakfast.

      “Oh, you don’t wanna wear that,” Noreen said, passing Ned a bowl of oatmeal.

      “Why don’t I want to wear that?” Liza sassed.

      “The kids’ll think you’re something you’re not.”

      “What am I not?” Liza asked, pushing it.

      “You know what I’m talking about.”

      “Oh, I forgot you know everything about the latest teen styles from reading Reader’s Digest.”

      “Be nice to Gramma,” said Ned.

      Liza liked the outfit because it made her look like a Solid Gold Dancer (Solid Gold being the #1 rated, Top 40 music TV show, hosted by Andy Gibb—the dancers were false-breasted amazons in lamé G-strings who would writhe spread-eagled on the stage, as if they’d been driven into sexual fits by the unrelenting fever of Lionel Ritchie numbers. “When I was a girl, shows like that were for bachelor parties,” Noreen lamented.)

      In the main building, Liza could hear girls giggle as she passed by. A pack of preppy boys stared at her with their mouths open in cruel mock-shock.

      “Catching flies?” Liza snapped.

      They laughed heartily.

      “Want to bob on my knob?” one of the boys yelled as she clicked away on her heels. Liza had no idea what he was talking about but flipped him the finger anyway.

      Liza’s homeroom was her English class, which was taught by a species of woman indigenous to Marin County: a fading beauty-cum-richex-hippie clotheshorse, partial to flowing “art to wear” garments of hand-painted silk with bleeding color patterns that resembled magnified bacteria. Mrs. Gubbins—“You can call me Kay!”—had married well, divorced well, and married so well again that she was at leave to pursue her altruistic mission of teaching high school English as an aside to her real “life goals,” which were apparently proselytizing for a certain faddish, Marin “self-actualization” cult known as everBest™. Her mediocre, uninspired English teaching was peppered with shrilly enthusiastic ever Bestial axioms and smug truisms.

      “Let’s situate the desks into a circle so we can all monitor each other’s eyes, shall we?” Kay trumpeted to her class of miserable, pocky fourteen-year-olds, all craving invisibility. Kay had all of the students go around the circle and say their names, their nicknames, and what they’d “rather be doing other than being responsibly here, now, in the present.”