Charming as Verb: Chapters 11–17

“Look, a lot of people have very vapid interests that I can’t
 remember off the top of my head. Like, the girl from my locker 
just now, Eloise? She’s perfectly nice, but Eloise likes drawings
 of penguins. Nothing else, just penguins. How am I supposed 
to remember that?”

“Henri 
Haltiwanger: Senior. Dogs, con-man tendencies, sneakers.”
“I mean, that’s the gist of it,” I concede.

“Fine, fine. Let’s keep the quid pro quo blackmail going, I
 guess.”

Marvyn lives right in the middle of Union Square downtown. It’s far from a residential area, always buzzing 
and crowded with tourists, but he and his parents 
spend most weekends in Westchester. No one under the age of
 forty should use the term “pied-à-terre,” but true to form, Marvyn does so liberally.

“I don’t like the two of you becoming friends,” I stipulate.

Corinne suddenly raises her sunglasses over her head, framing her wall of curls as she narrows her eyes at me, making 
no effort to hide the fact that she is brazenly eyeballing my 
torso.

“Boy behavior is fascinating,” Corinne says, shaking her
 head but reluctantly looking away while Derek slinks out of the 
pool as discreetly as he can.

A universe where Corinne Troy matriculates
 at Princeton sounds very fair.

“If you’re expecting Roxane Gay discourse from Callan 
you’re in for a very long courting."

Evie is too sharp to insult 
with “I have no idea who you’re talking about” coyness.

She doesn’t sound angry, per se, but there’s a sharpness to the
 comment.

It’s selfish, but I want to take her up on it, and actually 
selfishness goes hand-in-hand with the callous sociopath I
 apparently am.

We walk all
 the way to the Wyatt in tandem, shoulders occasionally bumping, both implicitly knowing the path.

“Right! Well, Yadira makes a very fine point, but what we 
have to do here, when considering this, uh...matter, is look at 
the social ramifications of such a policy....”

Or, at least, to lend an ear to the myriad ways in
 which I would personally go about killing Greg Polan.

“Well, the maiming is essential, obviously. Oh, and all 
that stuff? The maiming and the eviscerating? It’s all happen
ing to Greg’s flayed body.”

When I say nothing again for a beat too long, Vu’s innate 
push to fill awkward silences kicks in again, this time surpass
ing his professionalism.

“Marvyn’s grades are excellent, as are his extracurriculars.
 You may not like his disposition, but his interview column in
 the paper was picked up by The New Yorker last year. From a 
purely academic standpoint, he’s a great student.”

Meanwhile, I was up at five forty-five 
this morning to pick up dog poop, and it categorically wasn’t to write an essay about it.

If two teams are competing against each other, one of the 
two will host the other in a display of decorum and sportsman
ship that looks great in school pamphlets and websites.

It’s a
 weird bit of logistics, but I imagine that Slytherin and Gryff
indor kids still often have to pose together and smile extra 
bright in Hogwarts brochures to show that the pesky Potter-era 
animosity is indeed ancient history.

Their school was founded in the 1900s, and
 they, in turn, find us FATE kids to be upstarts without the pedigree of the true elite, no matter what our endowment might
 be.

Their school was founded in the 1900s, and
 they, in turn, find us FATE kids to be upstarts without the pedigree of the true elite, no matter what our endowment might
 be.

The glare I receive tells me it’s best not to broach the topic.

There is no adult 
to intervene with us when Yadira, Greg, or I step out of line or
 eschew our commitment.

Having the home-field advantage for the St. Celeste team 
mostly translates to an audience that’s completely on their side: parents and debate enthusiasts that will politely clap when the
 visiting team makes a decent point but erupt in pointed and 
rapturous cheers when one of their own wins a rebuttal.

I wasn’t kidding when I said that public speaking wasn’t his forte. The day of every debate plays out exactly like this: like
 someone about to confront their fear of snakes by spending 
ninety minutes in a pit of anacondas.

This year, they have the bombastic confidence
 of handsome young white men of good families, which is to say 
infinite.

How quickly can debaters think?
 How cogently can they make their argument?

I go all personality on this one,
 starting with a comment about how our competition didn’t 
have to make that choice in designing their uniform. It’s the 
sort of cheeky self-awareness that works well in jolting the 
audience.

Yadira is all poised and stern on this one, which makes
 up for her slip in decorum.

It is just a chef’s kiss 
of derision that causes the ears of one of them to go bright red.

None of them appears hun
gry or destitute on their social media pages.

Instead, I give a hapless shrug.

My logic is stupid on the face of it,
 but somehow I feel no judgment emanating from Corinne.

She smiles, clearly reveling 
in keeping her cards close to the vest.

She thinks you’re an ‘upstanding young man’ and the 
only person that has made the whole dog situation, as she puts 
it, ‘bearable.’

Corinne smiles and acquiesces. “Well, that’s true.”

She sighs, sounding 
bored by the minutiae of even discussing this.

It’s impulsive, but I put up a quick Dear Uptown Updogs 
Customers message on the website, edit a truncated version for
 my seven clients scheduled for the next two days, and loop in
 Gigi from the dog run, who is more than thrilled for the opportunity to poach some of my clients by filling in for me.