The Diamonds Read online

  For my sister, Abby,

  who sparkles more than any Diamond I know

  Let us not be too particular; it is better to

  have secondhand diamonds than none at all.

  —Mark Twain

  Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

  —The First Amendment

  to the United States Constitution

  I was in English when it happened.

  AP Literature, to be specific. Next to me were Eric Rogerman, who listened to his iPod during class and was prematurely balding, and Mary Aberfeld, who smelled alternately like cheese and pickles and was prematurely balding, too. Behind me sat Dara and Dana Hoebermann, identical twins with lazy eyes and a penchant for gossip. The rest of the class, more or less, was filled with people I didn't particularly care about—not in a rude way, don't get me wrong, but in the sense that my life with or without them would be exactly the same.

  It was the third day of school. So far, we'd read scenes from Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare, 1597) out loud while Mrs. Bloom spoke the stage directions with an affected British accent.

  Fact: Bloom is a complete nutjob.

  It wouldn't surprise me to learn she was from another planet entirely, one where it was acceptable to leave your house in the morning with curlers nestled in your hair, wearing a necklace of baby spoons and forks strung on mint-flavored dental floss. (I won't even try to explain that one.)

  Still, there's nothing better than performing Shakespeare—even if it's not onstage. I'd been stuck with the role of the Nurse; at first, this offended me beyond belief. The Nurse was old and probably fat. Definitely fugly. One of the title roles was being played by Marisa T. Karava, the only person I knew who wrote her middle initial on papers and who, if asked her name, would reply, “Marisa T. Karava.” (I could therefore only assume that the “T” stood for “Tool.”)

  Marisa read Juliet's lines with about as much enthusiasm as I had for going to the dentist. I'd almost suggested to Mrs. Bloom that she'd made a terrible casting mistake, but then I realized I sort of liked reading the Nurse. To spice things up in class, I spoke every other word with a cockney accent. It threw people off, which was a good thing. Jed thought I was predictable, and I despised that label. I wanted to be spontaneous. Fun. Carefree.

  Here's the scoop on Jed, my boyfriend: two years before, as a sophomore, he'd become the first underclassman in Bennington's history to be elected student body president. He'd held on to the title ever since. Jed excelled at the game of (high school) politics—patting the right backs, shaking the right hands, kissing the right asses.

  I was the girl he could be himself around, loosen his tie around (literally; Jed wore a tie to school every day), even complain around. I'm not sure if it was love, but our relationship was definitely more than your typical high school fling. Jed understood me, which was what I liked most about him. Not that his father was nouveau riche or that Jed was a Dartmouth legacy or that his wardrobe consisted almost entirely of buttery pastels or even that he ran the morning announcements, which were pretty much his own television show that aired for ten minutes during homeroom.

  Fact: At the Bennington School, a disgustingly posh preparatory on the outskirts of Manhattan (and by that I mean Long Island), the morning announcements are presented on televisions throughout the school—one per classroom—in this ridiculous sort of variety show that Jed hosts. One of the privileges of being student body president.

  Typically, student groups wrote up their own messages and Jed performed them like monologues while the show filmed live in the video production room behind the auditorium. At Bennington, the morning announcements were a Pretty Big Deal, and Jed Brantley was a Pretty Big Deal for delivering them.

  But he was an Even Bigger Deal for dating me.

  Marisa had just butchered the balcony scene (Romeo. Pause. Oh Rom-e-o. Wherefore cough art thou yawn Rom-e-o?) when Mrs. Bloom glanced at the clock and flipped on the TV screen above the blackboard.

  “Do you like being the center of attention? Are you blind?” Jed asked. He was wearing a ribbed sweater, hair swooped over his right eye in a way that made me want to brush it back. “Auditions for The Miracle Worker are this week and the Drama Club wants you to be there on Friday!”

  I really shouldn't let him write his own jokes.

  “Now, there's something important I have to say,” he said.

  My ears perked.

  “Most of you know my girlfriend, Marni.” A few kids turned around to stare at me. “Short blond hair, sort of pretty, nice gams.”

  Sort of pretty? Gams? I attempted to hide my eyes behind my fingers.

  “I just want to say how much I've enjoyed dating you this past year,” Jed continued. “You've been a great girlfriend.”

  A few girls “awwed,” even though his little speech was definitely not aww-worthy. Some of the guys on the opposite side of the room rolled their eyes and I silently applauded them. I had no idea what Jed was doing.

  “That being said, it's time to let you know that we're through. I've met someone else who's really great and, uh, doesn't like her friends more than me. Sorry. I'm sure you understand.” Jed straightened a few papers on his desk and then said, “Hey, Darcy!” before the announcements were over and the screen turned blue.

  Oh.

  Shit.

  No one looked at me, and no one made any noise. At all. The room was so silent I could hear myself breathe. I could hear the soft hum of Eric's iPod and the sound Mrs. Bloom's shoes made against the floor. My arms began to tingle and my stomach swirled like water in a toilet bowl.

  “Can you believe that?” I heard Dara Hoebermann say.

  “That effing sucked,” Dana replied. “Even more than the time I ate a Popsicle for breakfast and my tongue was stained orange.”

  “That was this morning,” said Dara.

  I attempted to smile. Maybe I could play this off like it was all a big joke, like I'd known that Jed was going to do this. But I hadn't known. As the whispers started filling up the classroom, I could hear my own voice echoing, Stupid, stupid, stupid, in my head. And I tried hard—the hardest I'd ever tried—not to break down and cry.

  After a few minutes, or what felt like minutes and were probably only seconds, the heads started to turn. I dug into my purse for my cell phone and quickly texted 911! to Clarissa, Priya, and Lili. Supposedly, if we ever received a text like that during school, we would all leave class and meet up in the faculty bathroom—which no one ever used—by the student parking lot. I say “supposedly” because it had never happened before. An emergency, I mean. And this was definitely an emergency.

  I clicked Send and raised my hand. “Can I use the bathroom?” I asked, trying to sound as desperate as possible, which wasn't very difficult. “It's important.”

  “He's a pig,” Priya said, wiping her eyes with a Kleenex. “He disgusts me. If I wasn't on a diet that forbids eating bacon, I would totally fry him up and put him on a BLT. Like that.”

  By the time I arrived at the bathroom, Priya, Lili, and Clarissa were waiting for me with open arms. That's what friends are for, I guess. Being there to pick you up when you're down. Way down.

  “Thanks, Priya,” I said, trying to avoid acknowledging that Jed had made a mockery of me in front of the entire student body and that Priya was on a diet, which meant I would have to start one in a few days. (You can't let one of your best friends diet alone. It's inhuman.)

  And the whole broken heart thing, too.

  I felt completely out of control. Tears poured down my cheeks; my nose was raw and leaky; my throat burned and my chest throbbed with pain. Every muscle in my body was sore and weak and numb. I barely had the strength to hold a tissue.

  “I'm sorry,” I said, sniffling. “I just feel so awful.”

  Priya gave me a smile, or at least what I thought was a smile. Her eyes were hidden by a ginormous pair of black sunglasses that matched her hair, which was piled on top of her head like a plate of spaghetti.

  “He doesn't deserve you,” said Lili, rubbing small circles on my back. “You're much better off without him.”

  Lili was nothing at all like Priya, who was loud—life of the party—and the tiniest bit, well, dumb. Not that everyone has to be smart or anything, but while Priya had been blessed with the ability to fill out a halter top, Lili had been blessed with brains. Her mother had been born in Korea and her dad was Mexican, leaving her petite and slightly olive; there was a natural glow about her, and the result was stunning. Lili didn't seem to notice how pretty she was, though, which made her the easiest of all my friends to get along with.

  “I guess,” I said between sobs. Had Jed really dumped me like that in front of the entire school? Had our relationship meant so little to him? “It sure doesn't feel that way.”

  I blew my nose and averted my eyes from the mirror. I had never looked worse in my entire life. I felt like a wet, unwanted blimp. I glanced over at Clarissa, who had perched herself on the sink, the toes of her turquoise pumps dangling in midair. Once a week, Clarissa wore an outfit that was various shades of a specific color. That day she had followed in Picasso's footsteps and declared her “blue” day, choosing a navy blouse with eyelet lace and a sleek pair of low-rise jeans; a thick iridescent ribbon framed her forehead.

  There are a lot of things I could tell you about Cla
rissa von Dyke: she spent five hundred dollars every month to get her hair highlighted; she used to drive a Lexus but then got an Audi; and when she was bored, she poked freshmen with safety pins in the hallway. But that's not the important stuff.

  Clarissa was the kind of girl legends were made of. That sounds ridiculous, but it's true. She was a modernday Helen of Troy, outrageously, insanely gorgeous—the kind of beautiful that propelled boys to carry her books and girls to pack celery and baby carrots for lunch.

  It wasn't just that she was beautiful, though. Even I liked to think I wasn't a complete mountain troll, but I was still no Clarissa. No one was. Because no matter how hard anybody tried, that indeterminable X factor set her apart from all the other students at Bennington.

  The four of us had been best friends since freshman year. Some random girls started calling us the Diamonds when we bought matching diamond pendants at the mall and wore them to school. At first we adopted the nickname as a joke, but then it stuck, and before we knew it, that was exactly who we were—at Bennington, anyway. Diamonds. Girls wanted to be us, guys wanted to date us (not Jed, apparently, but whatever), and Clarissa was our fearless leader. While I adored Priya and Lili, Clarissa was the one person I couldn't live without, the first one I'd ask to the movies if I had two tickets, the first one I'd go to with a problem. With her, I didn't care that I was the supporting role and not the lead; I was happy to be a part of the show.

  Lili cleared her throat. “Clarissa,” she murmured as if I were invisible, “say something.”

  “Are you okay, Marni?”

  I shook my head. Jed had been my first real boyfriend, my first real kiss. Wasn't I worth an inperson breakup or, at the very least, a phone call? How long had he been seeing Darcy behind my back?

  I started crying again. All I could muster was “No.”

  For Clarissa, that was enough. “You're gonna be fine,” she said, slipping off the sink and holding out her hand. “I promise.”

  “I just want to go home,” I slurred.

  “You can't,” Clarissa said. “You have to go to gov.”

  AP Government was our final class of the day. It was a smorgasbord of United States history with a focus on the Constitution and its amendments, the judicial system—mainly the Supreme Court—and debate. It was the most riveting class I'd ever taken, and not just because my father was a law professor and I'd been groomed to find that sort of stuff interesting.

  Here was the problem, though: not only were the Diamonds in AP Gov, but so was Jed. And Darcy McKibbon, who wasn't full-on Goth but wore enough black eyeliner, bloodred lipstick, and witchy apparel to make people uneasy.

  “No way,” I said, folding my arms. “I won't go. I can't.”

  “You have to,” Clarissa said firmly. “I'm going to fix this, and we all need to be there for it.”

  Clarissa had a knack for making problems disappear. Caught without a hall pass? No problem. Forgot your homework? Hand it in the next day. She was the golden child of the Bennington School—a million students rolled into a single perfect person. One smile and people bent over backward to help her. And, to a much lesser degree, help me. It wasn't hard being a Diamond, truth be told. It was very, very easy.

  There's always a catch, though, and for me it was this: if our friendship had been a poker game, my cards would've been facing up on the table, while Clarissa's would still have been concealed, waiting for anyone—including me—to call her bluff.

  Clarissa looked at me with a mixture of sympathy and expertly applied mascara. “Okay?”

  “What are you going to do?” Priya asked, excitement spreading across her face.

  “You'll see,” Clarissa said, soaking up her chance to be secretive. “Rest assured: Jed Brantley is going to regret the day he ever messed with one of the Diamonds.”

  She walked over to the door and pulled on the metal handle.

  “Don't do anything crazy,” I warned, even though it was no use. Clarissa would do exactly what she wanted. She always did.

  Clarissa tossed her hair like she was in a shampoo commercial. “No worries,” she replied with a smirk. “I've got your back.”

  “Me too,” added Lili, placing a hand on my shoulder.

  “Yeah,” Priya said. “Ditto.”

  • EXHIBIT A •

  I studied my three best friends as they stood with me in the faculty bathroom during the middle of first period, and smiled my first postbreakup smile. It didn't matter that I wasn't as smart as Lili or as funny as Priya or as beautiful as Clarissa (although truly, even now, that word doesn't do her justice). It didn't even matter that my boyfriend had cheated on me. We were a team. And unless something changed soon, this was who I would always be.

  A Diamond.

  Beautiful. Elegant. Unbreakable.

  A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

  —The Second Amendment

  to the United States Constitution

  People look at you funny after you've been dumped on the morning announcements. It's a special kind of look—typically reserved for those who suffer catastrophic misfortunes or travel to foreign countries for inexpensive plastic surgery—that I never anticipated being on the receiving end of.

  I was a Diamond. Things like this weren't supposed to happen to me.

  And yet they were. Every step I took, someone was gossiping about how Jed Brantley had dumped me for Darcy McKibbon. It was the biggest scandal Bennington had seen since Mr. Unger, a former economics teacher, had been accused of embezzling money from the school to pay for a mail-order bride from Hong Kong.

  By the time ninth period rolled around, I was a complete mess. The only place I wanted to be was in my bed, wearing a comfy sweatshirt, shoveling Ben & Jerry's Half Baked ice cream down my throat and watching Days of Our Lives. I had promised Clarissa I'd show up, though, and a promise was a promise.

  To say that AP Government was run like any other class would be lying. First of all, since Mr. Townsen was hot, he garnered instant and unwavering attention from all his female students, and secondly, he was incredibly cool, which meant all the guys listened to him as well. A winning combination, really.

  That week, we were in the middle of an in-class trial. A mock trial, if you will, as a large part of the curriculum was dedicated to dissecting legal procedure and its use in effecting United States law. It focused on the Salem witch trials of 1692. Not typical fodder for an AP Gov class, seeing as how the United States hadn't even been established yet, but Mr. Townsen believed it was one of the most primitive trials on North American soil—a warning to us all of what life might have been like sans our current government. (The Salem witch trials, as I'm sure you know, were totally bogus. They centered on these bratty little Puritan girls who pointed fingers at people for practicing witchcraft. Once folks were accused, their lives were pretty much ruined. It didn't matter that there was no proof. I won't get into a more detailed explanation, because (A) that's boring and (B) just Google it.)

  We'd been given a packet of information to study over the summer and were expected to know it by the start of school.

  “It's a dangerous thing to have a legal system without checks and balances,” Mr. Townsen had told us on the first day of class, after the bell had rung and we'd settled into our new seats. “To hold trials without proper evidence and condemn people to jail—or worse, death—without proof. Don't you think, Ms. von Dyke?”

  I'm pretty sure he called on Clarissa because the four of us were whispering together in the corner.

  “Sure, Mr. Townsen” was her response. “Whatever you say.”

  Instead of recreating the trials, kids in class were portraying the prominent figures of the time, throwing them into our current legal system to be judged for their actions. The point was to see whether in today's world the Salem witch trials would be able to occur.

  I was on the prosecution team, which consisted of the Diamonds; a girl named Sareep, who had a mustache and never talked; and Tommy Payne, this obnoxious kid who thought he was a reporter for the New York Times but was actually just a lame editor for the Bennington Press.