I felt strangely drained as I tried to eat my popover and eggs. Well, I guess it’s not so strange—my mother is kind of an emotional vampire at times. I decided to revive myself with a phone call to Skags. Her real name is Tiffani Skagsgaard, but if you call her Tiffani, she will hunt you down and destroy you. It’s always hard for her the first day of school, when the teacher calls out “Tiffani Skagsgaard?” and is confronted with this very boyish-looking young lesbian furiously shouting, “It’s SKAGS!”
She picked up the phone on the second ring. “S’up?” she grunted.
“My mother is the most superficial person on the planet,” I said.
“And water freezes at zero degrees Celsius. Tell me something everyone in the world doesn’t already know.”
“That’s the thing, Skags—not everybody in the world knows it. In fact, I’d say most people in the world don’t know it. They think she’s this warm, loving culinary goddess who nurtures people with love and food.”
“Hold up—I don’t think anyone would ever mistake your mother for warm. She’s not Paula Deen. She’s an ice-queen-prom-princess type. And I assume she’s already ruining your summer.”
“Yeah, and get this—she made me take a helicopter from Manhattan to East Hampton just because she wanted to kiss up to Senator Fairweather’s wife. It was the Fairweathers’ helicopter, and I had to ride with Delilah and Teddy Barrington and this kid Jeff.”
“The Teddy Barrington?” Skags shrieked in a high-pitched, girlish tone. “Dreams do come true!”
I laughed a little. “He’s totally bizarre,” I said. I told Skags about the shoving incident I’d witnessed at Baxley’s.
“Dude, that is seriously messed up,” she said. “Jesus. That poor waitress. She’s, like, the abused mistress. How’s Montauk Barbie this year? You think he hits her, too?”
“No, I don’t think he does,” I said. “Delilah’s actually pretty good, I think. You know she’s always nice to me. I think she’s trying to hook me up with this Jeff kid.”
“Is he hot?”
“He’s not your type.”
“Well, obviously not. Why do you think she wants you to mate with one of the jet set?”
“I don’t think it’s like this big plan, I just think she thinks we’d go well together. He’s cute enough”—I was downplaying the situation, obviously—“and he doesn’t seem like he’s a complete idiot. Kind of has an attitude, but whatever. Delilah called me this morning and asked me to go play tennis with her and Teddy and him today, but I said no because I’m doing my SAT book.”
Skags groaned. “You and that freaking SAT book are like the lamest pair in history, you know that? You’ve been glued to it for months. Why don’t you just go out and play some tennis?”
“You sound like my mother.”
“Gross! No, I don’t.”
“Well, she was all pissed that I’m not going.”
“That’s just because she’s obsessed with Montauk Barbie’s Republican robot mom. I’m the one with your best interests at heart here: some good old-fashioned physical activity, bonding with the local teen population, getting out of that stupid fancy house for a reason that doesn’t involve your mom dragging you to some dumb party. I don’t care if it means you have to hang out with some WASPY teen-dream hooker.”
“She’s not a hooker. She’s just—she’s a nice girl who happens to come from a very stupid world. And I feel kind of bad for her about the cheating thing—Jeff said everybody in town knows.”
“You’ve always been a Delilah Fairweather apologist. Every summer you call me up and tell me the dumb stuff she does and says, and every summer I’m like, ‘This girl sounds like an empty shell of a human being,’ and you’re like, ‘No, she’s nice, it’s the other kids who suck.’ Someone has a girl crush.”
“I’m not gay, Skags.”
“A girl crush is different from being gay, dude. A girl crush is like when one girl is so into another girl that it’s almost sexual, but not quite. A girl crush is way creepier than being gay, which is not at all creepy and in fact is completely awesome, in case you were wondering.”
“I wasn’t.”
“Have you ever seen The Roommate?”
“No.”
“Dude, it’s got Leighton Meester from Gossip Girl. Blair freaking Waldorf! It’s so much fun.” One thing you should know about Skags—despite the fact that she considers herself cooler than everyone else, including me, she is in love with Netflixing old episodes of Gossip Girl. She pretends it’s because she thinks Blake Lively and Leighton Meester are hot, but actually she gets really into the soapy storylines and has passionate opinions about whether Dan should be with this girl or that girl. She’s seen every single episode at least once.
“I don’t have a girl crush on Delilah. I just appreciate the fact that she treats me like an actual person. None of the other kids around here have ever given me the time of day.”
“Except for Jeffrey, the new love of your life.” Skags went into her impression of my mother. “And what do his parents do, Naomi, dear? Are they in plastics? Coal? Mass-produced sex toys?”
“Yes,” I said. “They’re vibrator moguls.”
“Oh, Naomi, darling, that is just delicious!” Skags cracked herself up and broke character. “Oh, dude! Change of topic, but such a good one. Guess who came into the DEBJ yesterday?” Skags works at a little café called That’s a Wrap, which we refer to as the De-Ethnicized Burrito Joint.
“Who?”
“La reina de las bestias. The queen of the Beasts!”
“Jenny Carpenter?”
“JCarpz herself. She rolled in alone, ordered a chicken wrap with extra guacamole, and then told me she’s been eating nonstop since she broke up with Taylor Cryan.”
“Did she look fat?” I asked evilly.
“Dude! No. I mean, her boobs looked big, but they always look big.”
“Gross.”
“Deal with it. Anyway, it was pretty obvious she wanted me to know she was single, because she’s completely into me.”
“Double gross.”
“Is this 1992, Naomi? Who says ‘double gross’? More like double hot. I’m gonna hit it by the end of the summer, I swear.”
“You’re such a guy.”
“No, Naomi, I’m a young woman who subverts the conventionally accepted gender paradigm because I refuse to conform.”
“Oh, right. I forgot.”
Skags switched gears abruptly. “Listen, for real, you sound exhausted. I know your mom is sucking the life out of you. Why don’t you skip the SAT book and take a nap? You know you get sick when you don’t get enough rest.” There was a sudden note of concern in her voice that was kind of sweet. Sometimes I think Skags is more like a mom to me than my own mom is. Which is weird, because Skags is actually really similar to my dad, which maybe means I have two dads? I don’t know.
Anyway, a nap sounded good to me, so I bid Skags farewell and brought the plates inside. I knew Mom’s weekly housekeeper was coming that day, but I still scraped and rinsed the plates and put them in the dishwasher myself. I’m aware this doesn’t make me some kind of heroine, but it’s behavior that my mother actively discourages, especially if other people are around.
“Darling,” she once said at one of her beloved afternoon iced tea parties, emitting a peal of shrill laughter, “you don’t need to do that. Give the help something to do!” Then her assembled “friends,” all of them social climbers in their own right, laughed as well. It made me kind of hate her in that moment.
I went upstairs to my bedroom, which Mom had done in this obnoxious boat theme: blue and white stripes everywhere, with antique ships in bottles and old framed maps. She dubbed it New Nautical Chic, and when Town and Country came to photograph the house, she made me wear the most heinous sailor dress and pose by the bed. I was twelve and sported those blond highlights her stylist, Jonathan, had put in, plus a bunch of makeup he piled on me. I looked like an overgrown version of one of those beauty pageant toddlers. Skags, who still went by Tiffani back then, taped a copy of the article to the front of my locker the first day of seventh grade. I didn’t talk to her for a week.