Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,9

one of the curved triangular shards. “She is a witch.”

As Kate was about to break away to Coco, the bell rang. Bwoop! I made a hard right down the English hall and was drawn instantly into the belly of the crowd. I could hear Kate’s voice trailing me—“Evie! Eveline!” I didn’t turn, even though the way she called me was better than the way Coco had called her. My name from Kate’s lips sounded shy, pining and bare. I felt sad about that, but also I felt a mixture of relief and release just to be alone. My body lightened, and when people said hello to me, I answered, “Hello.”

Kate and Coco had gone into the music room probably; probably they were cleaning their flutes, sitting with mingling meringue hair, and all four hands polishing buttons and spitty levers. Perhaps they were discussing me, with Coco saying through rows of tiny teeth how I seemed envious, her eyes shaking.

It was not hard to envy Coco. Her family lived on David’s Lane, one of the nicest streets in the village, in a house with a corrugated roof like in picture books of Spain. She wore Lacoste shirts and cloth-covered headbands from Mark, Fore & Strike, the golf-lady clothing store on Main Street, and she rode a kiwi-colored Motobecane bicycle to the beach after private tennis lessons. She had a collection of those Pappagallo purses with the wood handles and the button-on fabric covers. According to Kate, Coco paid forty-five dollars for a style and a blow-dry at that special salon in town next to O’Malley’s pub. Mrs. Hale drove a new Mercedes with basketballs and bags of groceries in back, and unlike my mother, she never had beer breath or wore hip-huggers with peace sign patches or hung around with merchant marines and lab technicians. Mrs. Hale did not belong to Mensa.

Once, when my mom and I saw Mrs. Hale collecting tickets at the Ladies Village Improvement Society Fair, she was wearing a straw bonnet with big paper peonies; she’d made it herself.

“Who has time for such nonsense?” my mother asked. “Does that woman ever read?”

Despite the energy crisis, Mr. Hale would take his family on long summer trips on My Romeo II, their ultra-sleek cabin cruiser, to Block Island or Nantucket or Martha’s Vineyard, where Coco and her boating friends would meet prep school boys. Every September, the photos would make the rounds—Coco and Breanne Engel or Pip Harriman, honey-brown and curly blond—hugging boys in Duke University sweatshirts, beige docksiders, and puka shell necklaces. Coco never had to go on trips to Gettysburg, West Point, Old Sturbridge Village, or those World War I air shows up in Rhinebeck like I always had to with Dad and Marilyn. All the family photographs are of me in blinding sunlight, dressed in plaid shorts and ribbed white knee socks and lace-up Earth shoes leaning on some cannon or posing before acres of headstones in Civil War cemeteries. And my mother had never once taken a vacation; she did not even own a camera.

Sometimes I couldn’t help but feel meager compared to Coco, and then to confuse meagerness with envy and envy with hate. Everyone always says you shouldn’t feel hate or even say the word.

“Bullshit!” Jack once barked. “Who told you that?”

“People.” I couldn’t think of anyone at the time.

“Words are constructs, like houses. Say whatever the fuck you want. Besides,” he added lovingly, “you are incapable of true hatred.”

Jack was right. Some feelings just occur, and giving them nicer names does not make them go away. If what I termed hate could be more accurately described as an aversion to the witchy way that Coco acted, it would have changed nothing inside of me.

Envy is awful. Unlike jealousy, which comes from the threat of losing what you cherish, envy is a dark desire for things over which you have no right or claim. Once I realized that she couldn’t possibly take what I loved, and I didn’t really want a life of privilege, especially when having such a life seemed to require flaunting it to those who had nothing, I was overtaken by an enormous boredom with Coco. A soaking rain type of boredom, liberating and complete, touching down everywhere in equal amounts. From that moment I was done. I realized it was a lot like doing math. She was quantifiable. I was not.

I entered the first class of my senior year early, which meant I was one step closer to getting