Theresa Rebeck - Three Girls and their Brother

By the time we got back through the glass doors and into the security lobby, a whole bunch of teachers and students was gathering. Meanwhile, all those journalists were like in a feeding frenzy or something; it was like once they got started on the craziness they didn’t know how to turn it off, so they actually tried to come in after us. Which finally turned into a kind of a showdown. Señor Martine, Dean Morton and Luke, the black guy who sits at the front desk and makes you sign in if you’re tardy, charged the mob and started yelling at them.

“This is private property! I am asking you to leave! You are not allowed entrance to this building! This is a private high school!” yelled Morton. He was actually holding his arms out, sort of like he was being crucified, but more like he thought those photographers were actually chickens or pigeons or something he could just shoo away. “If you do not leave this property immediately, we are calling the police!”

This was not good enough for Luke. “Motherfuckers! Get out of here, you fuckheads! The police are coming to kick your ass—get out—GET OUT.” He grabbed one guy, a kind of short, fat guy with a big beard and a huge lens, who was shooting wildly at anything and everything.

“Don’t you fucking touch me, man!” the short photographer yelled. “I can sue you! That’s assault!”

“You take another picture of these kids, I’ll show you what assault looks like,” Luke told him, sticking his finger in the guy’s face. Meanwhile, two other photographers were deep in it with Morton.

“The police are coming. You are not permitted in this building,” Morton droned. These idiots started to argue about freedom of the press.

“You want to do that? Show these kids that the press can be silenced? What’s that teaching them? This is a free society. This isn’t fucking China, we’re covering a legitimate story.” Meanwhile the rest of the gang behind them kept clicking away.

It really was enough to make you sick. Luckily Luke is rather large, and when he gets mad enough to yell it’s rather undeniable. “GET OUT OF HERE,” he yelled. “I DON ‘T GIVE A SHIT ABOUT FREEDOM OF THE PRESS, YOU SHITHEAD, YOU THINK I WON ‘T HIT YOU, YOU TRY IT, MAN, JUST TRY ONE MORE STEP IN THIS BUILDING, THESE ARE MY KIDS. MY KIDS, MOTHERFUCKER.”

Dean Morton cringed a little at that; obviously he was not thrilled that Luke was cursing so freely in front of all us fragile teenagers, but there was no denying that it was an impressive performance. And all of us fragile teenagers were definitely stoked that our security guard was willing to slug it out with all of the representatives of the free press that New York could spare that morning. Truth be told I think Morton was impressed too. In any event, he didn’t say anything, and after they managed to get off another few hundred shots, the so-called protectors of all American freedoms finally took off.

Everybody got sent back to class and I got sent to the nurse’s office, because I had a scraped-up face and a split lip. By the time they patched me up, Amelia had already been sent home, which really pissed me off. I mean, they couldn’t wait and let us go together? But people don’t think of these things. Anyway, the next day we all got the beginnings of a clue as to how serious the shit was that Amelia had stepped in. The many pictures taken by all those protectors of a free press were really quite impressive. And they printed all of them. Pictures of Amelia screaming, Amelia hitting photographers, Amelia kicking photographers, Amelia kicking me. Amelia curled up in a little ball on the sidewalk; they printed that one, too. A couple of those geniuses actually had video of the whole thing, which they showed on three local news shows, Entertainment Tonight and CNN, which, due respect to CNN, but there was in fact a war going on in Iraq at the time; you had to wonder why they actually cared about some kid who hit a couple of photographers in Brooklyn.

In any event, they showed the footage on television quite a bit, and the story that went along with the visuals went something like this: “Pint-sized It Girl Amelia Heller is burning through her fifteen minutes as fast as she can. Recently showcased in the New Yorker magazine, the fourteen-year-old heiress to a major American lit legacy has been spending her nights partying with the likes of film actor Rex Wentworth, who she allegedly bit in a scuffle at a Manhattan hot spot last week. Here she lets the paparazzi get a taste of her teen angst. An unidentified fellow student comes to her aid …”

The unidentified fellow student, that’s me.

Polly and Daria were livid. Their moment in the sun had been completely obliterated by Amelia’s shenanigans. Our home life now veered between long stretches of sullen silence and endless hours of screeching female rage.

“This is not about you, Amelia. None of this was ever supposed to be about you ,” Daria would hiss.

“I said, I didn’t want to do it in the first place!”

“Do you know, do you have any idea of how long it’s taken me to get my career to this point? Do you even have half a clue—”

“Oh, what career?”

“Look, people say that no publicity is bad publicity.” This halfway optimistic opinion, or something like it, coming from Polly.

“People who have never had this kind of spectacularly shitty publicity say that! And it’s not my fault! None of this is my fault! All of it is her fault, and she doesn’t even care!”

“I care! I want to go to school! I can’t even go to school, everybody hates me, and I hate everybody!”

This was occasionally punctuated by a series of slamming doors.

And in fact, she couldn’t go to school—Collette called, the first morning, and put everyone in lockdown. Nobody was allowed to leave the apartment, and nobody was allowed to talk to anybody, either. Which put everyone in an even worse mood. The phone would ring off the hook until Mom finally answered it, and then she would hold the receiver tightly to her ear, cover her face with one hand and melodramatically whisper, “No comment.” Then, infinitely bereaved, she would set down the receiver. It was quite an act and, as far as I could tell, gained us not one shred of legitimacy from the reporters on the evening news, who just kept reporting, snidely, “No comment from the girl’s family. Looks like they’re trying to keep this under wraps.”

And then the anchor-idiot would say, “Little too late for that!” And they’d all chuckle. I mean, you really wanted to blow your brains out.

After three days of this I came home from school—the lockdown only counted for girl members of the family; nobody out there really seemed to give a shit, frankly, about the unidentified fellow student—to find Collette holding a major powwow around our kitchen table. In spite of how crucial she had become to everyone’s lives over the past six weeks, this was in fact the first time I had ever laid eyes on Collette, and she was, frankly, pretty impressive. She wore one of those perfect suits—tight, curvy, both sexy and severe—and she was drinking ice water, and crossing her legs to one side, so that anyone who entered the room could see right off what great legs she had.

“All right, the fact is, Maureen Piven got out in front of us in every media outlet,” she announced. “She had them all in her pocket within twenty-four hours, caught us absolutely flat-footed. She’s brilliant at this, absolutely flawless. I would have warned you ahead of time not to take her on, but I had no idea Amelia would do anything as stupid as biting Rex Wentworth.”

“He was—”

“Save it, Amelia. The damage is done.” Collette clearly was not interested in discussion at this point, but the level of anxiety was pretty high. Mom leaned forward, wringing her hands.