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Private School
by Merran Jones This is how you do it: Have perfect hair—side parting with a sweep across the front. Use enough makeup to look cultured but not so much the teachers—horsey, unplucked women with marbled voices—complain. Never have pimples or enlarged pores. Wear your ties loose and your self-doubt looser. Grow a nice pair beneath a bulky uniform. And if you can’t succeed, use padding. No one knows the difference. Eat sushi or yogurt or tabouli for lunch. Walk along the river with the other girls. Your conversations about Butler & Wilson earrings, the holiday house in Nice, Daddy’s latest thoroughbred, should tumble from your mouths like leaping salmon, fighting for precedence. When a girl called Sara or Hermione or Isabella says she’s summering in San Francisco, say: “We’re going to French Polynesia.” (Five star accommodation, naturally.) Scratch the initials of a boy named Harry Smith or Thomas Wood into the desk. When the girls in the dorm ask who he is, shake your head, giggle, hug your pillow to your chest. Intrigue is better, since no school boy is really fit to be with. Ah, the boys … with their improbable stubble, nervous adam’s apples, and chilly legs. A girl called Sandra falls pregnant. Hug and sigh and make sympathetic sounds as you wait with her outside the nurse’s office. Once she’s inside, tut and roll eyes and say it was Dylan Powell—you know, the one with the overbite and lardy midriff. High-school is a bitch. At the end of year party, throw your arms around each other with Shakespearean melodrama, vowing eternal friendship. Move to Oxford for university and never stay in touch. Ten years later, the social gymnastics continue. This time in an office with a moderate salary and a pair of statement heels. |
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