Saturday afternoon in a mall food court, Angela, a girl of 17, picks anxiously at a basket of steadily curdling cheese fries, awaiting important news to be delivered by Kelly, another girl of 17, who arrives anon, folder in-hand.
“You’ve got my texts,” Angela says, eyes still fixed on her fries.
“Yeah, all 8,000 of them,” Kelly says in stifled exasperation.
“Oh please, Kelly,” she says finally looking up, “it wasn’t that many. Maybe four or five.”
“In quick succession in one night. I was doing homework.”
“I thought we’ve talked about not using that as an excuse to skirt your commitments. Barbarians do homework. People desperate to be loved do homework. But that folder you’re clutching like a dead hamster suggests that your bad habits didn’t distract from your more important task.”
“They … didn’t.”
“What’s the damage?”
Kelly takes the chair across from Angela and opens the folder. “The damage is, I guess, encouraging?”
“I don’t know about that,” Angela says skeptically. “‘Encouraging’ is not an encouraging word. You forget that my mom is a consultant for loads of corporations, and she tells me that the most important thing to know in life is that words aren’t words, and some words are less like words than other words. ‘Encouraging’ and other positive reinforcements are the worst offenders in being non-words. That’s what Mom says.”
“I don’t know what you want me to say.”
“I want you to tell me you had fun conducting the focus groups.”
“I had fun! I did what you said. A girls-only group and a boys-only group. Five each, with the same statement about Patty Mansfield having a sixth toe in the middle of her right foot.”
“How was the girls’ group? I’m keen to know. Did you try the alternate wordings? Did they respond differently to ‘People are saying that …’ or ‘I heard that …’ or ‘Patty Mansfield allegedly …’ and whatever?”
“So about that group … Things got sort of sidetracked. After I made the statement the girls got the idea that she actually had a wort.”
“A wort?”
“Yes, this diverted to a separate discussion of comparing worts and various skin tags and unique sores that they’d each experienced in the past, directly or indirectly.”
“Did you mention the weird flip-flops?”
“I did and it didn’t matter. To them the flip-flops may have been prescribed, like from a doctor, and even said that if they were in Patty’s situation, they’d do the same.”
“They felt empathy? For Patty?”
“I tried to get them back on topic but Danielle Chamberlain kept recommending her dermatologist like she was sponsored by him.”
“Hold on,” Angela’s spine goes rigid. The fries in all their gooey decrepitude now seem a very remote concern. “How did Danielle get on the group?”
Kelly tenses up having prepared for the worst but realizing she hadn’t prepared nearly enough.
“Okay … so … I was telling Amber McQuaid about it when we were at Wendy’s after lacrosse practice. I was trying to get her to do it but she had tutoring in chem or rock climbing class or both—anyway she couldn’t do it. Danielle must have been within earshot because she came up to my table and kept asking questions and she got kind of pushy about it and kind of positioned herself like she had to be there for it to be serious and I know you said five girls and she was the fifth girl even though you and Danielle have a bad sort of history and I thought it would be fine and not a big deal please don’t be mad.”
“Fine … I get it. Danielle put you in a corner as she likes to do. But it’s more than a ‘bad sort of history.’ We were destined to loathe each other. Her mom is a consultant too. So I can see her picking our idea apart and spinning it to her advantage and at my expense.”
“I guess children of consultants have it pretty hard, I guess?”
“Well, in fairness to Danielle, she’d be a horrible human being even if her mom was a garbage man.” She pauses, briefly regaining her appreciation of the all but unstoppable decline of her fries. “What do your parents do again?”
“My dad is a relationship manager at a boutique law firm. My mom is in a hospital, where I don’t think she does anything. Before that she was a home decorator.”
Angela regards once more the molten, starchy horror of her fries in a brief meditative trance, then comes down to earth realizing no improvement is possible. “It looks like our findings may have been compromised. Word-of-mouth sharing is out; but there’s a way we can salvage this.”
“The third floor bathroom?”
“I mean, we could scorch it onto the football field. But logistics are mid.”
“But there are already way worse things written about Patty in three different stalls.”
“I’m aware of my own handiwork, Kelly.”
“Were you the one who wrote that Patty was murdered and replaced by a male impostor?”
“Yeah and it was great. Patty was this close to believing it herself. I swear she spent a week walking dreamily through the halls like she was already in a Netflix documentary reenactment. But then Danielle went and spoiled it by saying she was doing ketamine between classes. Like, she literally crossed out what I wrote and put ‘Patty ❤️ Special K’ over it. Who fucking does that?”
“Can I …” Kelly reaches to take a piece out of the mass grave of soggy carbs between them. Angela bats her hand away with feline territoriality.
“But we’re seniors now, Kelly. Senior year is no time for simple cruelty. We need to be more dynamic. More subtle.”
“More sub— … Subtler?”
“We need to put this into action before Danielle scoops us. Monday morning, zero period, take any color Sharpie of your choosing and write it somewhere between the window and the paper towel dispenser. Maybe even right on the paper towel dispenser if you’re feeling bold.”
“That blatant?”
“Exactly. We don’t need people to ruminate on this while they’re on the toilet. This is for impact. A quick strike.”
“The same wording?”
“Make it as simple as you can. But more like a commandment or something, not a billboard ad.”
“Let me write that down.” She scribbles hastily, perhaps illegibly.
“Smile, Kelly. I’m giving you actual homework.”
“Got it. And … the boys’ group …”
“What? Oh, what about them?”
“I gave them the same thing and they had more specific questions.”
“I bet they did.”
“Well, not specific, really. Vivid, I guess?” Kelly flips through the contents of her folder and holds up a piece of unevenly torn and partially crumpled legal ruled paper. “Actually they wrote them down he—”
“I’d put a lighter under that.” Angela grabs her purse and prepares to leave. “Text me a pic of the bathroom once it’s complete. Maybe do some practice runs at home so it’s perfect. Remember: we’re seniors and we need to be perfect.” She leaves the fries on the table.
“Will do,” Kelly says smiling, nodding her head like a malfunctioning doll. Alone, she reaches over to the fries. Cold synthetic cheese oozes out from beneath the hardened top layer as she picks apart the mound. She grimaces in disgust and, in an act of dutiful friendship, tosses it in the garbage with the appropriate minimum of sentiment.