Dyan Sheldon: Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen

Like how difficult it was to be a beacon in the subterranean, wind-swept and coal-black abyss that is Dellwood, New Jersey.

I had no trouble getting everybody at school to call me Lola. I told my teachers that even though the register said my name was Mary, Lola was what I’d been called at home since I was a squalling infant in my mother’s arms.

Only Mrs Baggoli, my English teacher, put up a struggle.

“Lola?” Mrs Baggoli stared at me with her gimlet eyes. “You want to be called Lola?”

Ignoring the soft snickers around me, I nodded. “My parents fell in love watching Damn Yankees together,” I explained, inspired. “That’s why they call me Lola.” As far as I know, neither of my parents has ever seen Damn Yankees . I saw it by chance when I was home with the flu one winter. I would have turned it off if one of the characters wasn’t named Lola. One of the few signs that my parents are actually intelligent enough to be related to me is the fact that they both detest musicals. But Mrs Baggoli believed me.

“‘Whatever Lola wants, Lola gets’?” queried Mrs Baggoli.

I’d known she’d catch the reference. She was the drama coach as well.

I smiled. It was a good-natured, self-mocking smile. Teachers hate any sign of arrogance.

“I was two when they started using it,” I said. “You know what two-year-olds are like.”

“Don’t I just,” said Mrs Baggoli, with what I took as a significant look at the rest of the class. “All right, Lola,” she went on, pencilling my real name in her register. “I’ll try to remember.”

As I’ve already said, however, I was less successful in other areas. I’d pretty much thought that all I had to do was appear on campus like an incredible sunset after a grey, dreary day, and the starving young souls of Dellwood would immediately abandon their videos and glossy magazines, and flock to me, begging for shelter from the storm of meaningless trivia that made up their lives.

But I was wrong. The youth of Dellwood probably wouldn’t have noticed a nuclear explosion, never mind a messenger of hope from the greater world. In my first year in the clean air and safe streets of Dellwood (two more of my mother’s reasons for moving), I’ve met only one truly kindred spirit. That’s my best friend, Ella Gerard.

There was nothing about Ella to suggest that here was my spiritual kin the first time I saw her. She looked like most of the other girls in my homeroom – expensively if dully clothed, well fed, perfectly groomed, their teeth gleaming and their hair bouncing because they use the right toothpaste and shampoo. If New York is a kettle of soup, where tons of different spices and vegetables swim around together, all part of the whole but all different at the same time, then Deadwood is more like a glass of homogenized milk. Ella was wearing a nondescript pink A-line dress and white-and-pink sneakers. The kindest thing you could say about her hair – which was twisted into a tight ball at the back of her head – was that it existed. Although Ella shops in the same stores as most of her classmates she always goes for what Mrs Gerard calls “the classic look”, which means that everyone else dresses like the dedicated followers of fashion that they are, and Ella dresses like her mother.

That first morning I sat at the front of the room in my genuine US Army combat trousers, dyed purple by my own fair hands, and the Ché Guevara T-shirt my dad brought me back from Mexico, listening to the other girls catch up on the summer gossip and sort out who was seeing whom and who was wearing what and when the first big party of the autumn was going to be, feeling like a visitor from Alpha Centauri. A visitor from Alpha Centauri who was wishing she’d stayed at home. I could tell that every morning I would sit there, ignored by the other girls, hearing practically the same conversations over and over again. And I could also tell that every morning I would sit there, and they would make a show of checking me out and then looking at each other, smirking at the way I was dressed because they themselves were walking billboards advertising whatever was in fashion that week, ignorant of true style and flair. The girls in Deadwood get their fashion ideas from Seventeen and television. They don’t wear clothes as a statement of their inner selves, as I do; they wear labels.

Anyway, Ella sat near me in homeroom. The kids in Dellwood not only dress the same and talk the same; when they think, they pretty much think the same, too. But I sensed almost immediately that Ella was different in that last, crucial respect.

Carla Santini (of whom more later…) was the centre of all meaningful homeroom conversation among the girls. Sophisticated, beautiful and radiating confidence the way a towering inferno radiates heat, she swept into the room in black trousers and a short black sweater as though she’d just stepped from the pages of Vogue . Although she’d checked me out the second her foot was through the door, it was a good five minutes before she finally deigned to talk to me.

“Aren’t you the girl who just moved into the old Swenska house?” she asked. She was using the sickeningly charming voice I’ve come to know so well, but she still managed to emphasize the word “old” and make it sound as though it meant more than “no longer young”.

Taking their cue from Carla Santini, her entourage all looked at me too. They were barely breathing.

“Maybe,” I said, returning her sugar-overdose smile with one of my own. I’d checked her out, too, without even seeming to look her way. I’d known girls like Carla Santini before – there are lots of girls in New York who think the world wasn’t complete until they were born – and I’d never liked one of them. “I didn’t realize our house had a name.”

The boy behind me, Sam Creek (more on him later, as well…), snorted. I saw Ella’s mouth tremble.

Carla Santini’s laughter rang through the classroom like an alarm.

“Is that supposed to be the famous New York sense of humour?” she asked. Loudly.

That caught the attention of the few people who weren’t already riveted by the spectacle of Carla Santini putting me through my paces.

“Are you from the city?” asked Carla Santini’s sidekick, Alma Vitters (more of her later, too…). She made it sound like she was saying, “You mean, you’re from Alpha Centauri?”

Before I could say, proudly, that I certainly was from the City, Carla answered for me.

“That’s right,” she said. “A real city slicker.” She gave me a phoney look of sympathy. “You must find it pretty dull in Dellwood, after New York,” purred Carla.

“You won’t for long with her around,” whispered a voice in my ear. I glanced right. Sam Creek was leaning forward on his arms as though falling asleep.

By then I’d figured out who Carla Santini was. Her mother was the real estate agent who sold my mother the old Swenska house. It was obvious that, despite Carla’s show of innocent curiosity, she already knew a lot about me and my family. Everything her mother knew: our income, our lack of a male parent, probably even the fact that I hadn’t wanted to move.

“I don’t know yet.” I smiled that famous New York “choke-yourself” smile. “I only just got here.”

Carla rang a few more alarms.

“Seriously,” she said when she was finished being incredibly amused, “Dellwood must be a big change. I mean, New York…”

It was at this point that other people began to join the conversation. Someone told a story about her aunt being mugged not five minutes after she got off the train at Penn Station. One of the boys claimed to know the statistics of violent deaths in the City for the last five years. One of the girls told a story about her friend’s friend who was abducted off the street in New York in broad daylight, in front of dozens of people, and no one tried to help her. Someone else said he’d seen a documentary about gangs that made him turn down free tickets to Madison Square Garden.