Ordinary Girls Read online

  Dedication

  To Alice

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Books by Blair Thornburgh

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  One

  Ah! But verses amount to so little when one writes them young. One ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness a whole life long, and a long life if possible, and then, quite at the end, one might perhaps be able to write ten lines that were good.

  —Rainer Maria Rilke

  I have never been good at beginnings, which is one of my many shortcomings. Starting with childhood seems very romantic, like a true bildungsroman, but I don’t really remember half my childhood due to being a baby, and I’m not about to rely on Ginny’s accounts of what I was like, because she did not care for having a baby sister and once covered me in Vaseline when Mom left us alone in the playroom. So I suppose I will start on that sunny Saturday in September when I first realized how acutely I wanted to murder my sister.

  For reliability’s sake, this is mostly hyperbole. Even now, I am not sure I actually possess the stomach to become a teenage murderess. I faint when I get blood drawn. I can’t even watch those extreme plastic surgery shows where people lie on a table like sliced deli meat wrapped in blue tarp and come out with a springy new set of whatevers, because they are disgusting. I cannot, for any reason, abide hospitals. But living with Virginia Eleanor Blatchley, highest of the high-strung, especially at the beginning of her senior year of high school—that would have driven even the most steely nerved and introverted of young women to madness.

  That Saturday, September 3, had dawned pastoral and bucolic: Iris Mortimer-Blatchley was dead asleep, probably splotched with oil paint. Almost-Doctor Andrews, our tenant (he lived in the carriage house) was composing music for his PhD course of study. The poodles were lounging on one of our beds, the fish were circling each other in little fish loops, and the chickens were fattening themselves on the crusts of my apple butter toast that I had obligingly dumped into their backyard pen. I was looking forward to an afternoon of watching Home and Garden Television, practicing my French-braiding, or reading Ginny’s hand-me-down copy of Jane Eyre, which was the summer reading, and which I had already finished but would gladly read again.

  Yet soon the morning demonstrated signs of high drama. By ten to noon, Virginia Eleanor Blatchley was clomping around between the tower room, the library, and the kitchen. Furthermore, I, Patience Mortimer Blatchley, found myself occupied with getting Kit Marlowe to come out from the compartment under the stairs—which is a very good place for hiding. I used to climb in there with my notebook when I was a little girl. Now, however, I was too big to fit, and Kit needed to take his heartworm medication or he would probably die.

  “Kit.” I crouched in front of the little white door, clicking my tongue cajolingly. “Here, Kit.”

  Kit meowed but did not move. I pulled my phone out of my pocket to use as a flashlight, which made Kit’s eyes gleam like marbles.

  “Plum?”

  From somewhere up on the second or third floor, Ginny’s voice rang out. I ignored it and tucked the end of my braid out of the way so it wouldn’t get coated in dust.

  “Plum?” she called again. Ginny does not like being ignored. “Plum? Plummy? Plum? Where are you?”

  Where I was was on the first floor, kneeling on the Oriental runner with the stain from where Gizmo threw up my Easter candy three years ago.

  “I’m trying to feed the cat a pill,” I yelled back.

  “Girls, this house is too big for yelling,” yelled my mother. “And I have a headache.”

  I leaned forward so that my head was now in the compartment with Kit, since there was no way I wasn’t going to get dust on it at this point. It was hot and dark in there, and smelled like old wood and warm cat.

  “Come on, Kit,” I said calmly. “I mixed it in some spreadable meat and everything.”

  Spreadable meat was what we had taken to calling liverwurst, our all-purpose pill concealer for Kit and the poodles. You can’t even get it at the regular grocery store, just the co-op market where they sell organic coffee in big bins and the natural kind of toothpaste that tastes like rotten strawberries and you’re likely to run into the parents of someone you strongly dislike, like Tate Kurokawa. But that was the length we—I—would go to for our pets.

  Kit hissed.

  “PLUM!”

  “You can’t hide forever, Kit,” I told him, sternly but wisely, in the tone of voice a governess might use to instruct her young charge in the ways of the world. If it were not the twenty-first century, and I were not only fifteen, I would become a governess. Surely, in that line of work, tone of voice is key.

  Above my head, the boards of the stairs groaned and squealed, and someone’s feet came pounding down. Everything at 5142 Haven Lane groaned, or squealed, or rusted, or just didn’t work. It was extremely old and tired, for a house. But it had been around since 1863, and was therefore grand. Not enough things are grand anymore, if you ask me.

  “Plum? What are you doing?” came Mom’s voice from somewhere outside the compartment. “Why is there spreadable meat on the mail table?”

  “I told you,” I said, easing out from the compartment. My braid did, in fact, leave a trail in the dust. Cripes. I shook it off. “Kit’s afraid of his heartworm pill. Even when I hide it.”

  “Take care of it later.” Iris Mortimer-Blatchley, my mother, was looking stately and columnar, draped in her daytime blacks—not to be confused with her evening blacks—and a midnight-blue scarf. Black, Mom always said, is universally flattering, to which Ginny would always reply that Mom was being morbid and just because she was a widow didn’t mean she had to dress like one. I thought Mom looked nice, even if she did wear a lot of eyeliner for someone over the age of forty. One time, when I was eight, I called her “a handsome woman of middle age,” which was something I’d read in a book and I thought sounded complimentary. Mom did not think so.

  “But—”

  “He’s not going to catch heartworm in the next three hours,” Mom said, waving a hand. “Just give it to him when we get back.”

  “You don’t catch heartworm, Mother,” I said. “It’s not like a cold. Which cats can also get, I think.”

  “Thank you for the veterinary lesson. Will you please go help your sister find something white to wear? I forgot about that thing of hers, and she’s having a conniption about it.”

  Kit, recognizing he had won this round, purred from inside the compartment.

  “We?” I said. “Leave for what?”

  “The thing,” Mom said. “The school thing. With the white dresses.”

  “Oh no,” I said. I knew there was a reason I knew that today, specifically, was September 3. The cream-colored invitation from the Gregory School for the annual Senior Tea had been sitting on the kitchen counter for at least two weeks. “Do we have to?”

  Mom pressed a hand to her forehead. “Do you think I want to go?”

  It was a rhetorical question. Mom did not like socializing with the other Gregory School parents any more than I liked socializing with anyone. Especially any other Gregory School sophomores.

  “Plum!!!!” came the shriek.

  “She can’t find something to wear,” Mom translated. “I don’t know what to do with her. Can you just—I don’t know. Do something?”

  “Honestly, Mother, I could not care less if Ginny can’t find clothes,” I said primly.
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  Mom pressed her lips together. Although our mother did not believe in buying makeup, she did acquire a healthy number of samples every time she stopped in a Sephora, including, evidently, something bloodred.

  “Well, you should,” she said. “She took some of your clothes.”

  I leaped to my feet.

  To get to Ginny’s room in the tower, you can either take the front stairs, which are very creaky, or the back stairs, which are very steep, and you are likely to slide down and break your shin if you don’t walk slowly. Victorian houses are not constructed for the impatient. Which makes it a miracle Ginny loves living here so much, as she is patience deficient. Our father used to joke that it was good they named us in the order they did or Ginny would be a living oxymoron.

  I took the front stairs, which wound through the pink-red front-hall walls, and creaked into Ginny’s room, which was round and painted with a mural. When our mom was pregnant with my sister, she’d spent the last weeks of her confinement decorating the tower bedroom walls with a fairy-tale landscape of castles and bunnies eating ice-cream cones and airplanes trailing little banners like at the beach. It was, naturally, wonderful.

  “Don’t take my stuff!” I cried.

  “Is the cat okay? Is Mom acting weird? Do you have anything white that I can borrow?”

  My sister was sitting on her giant sleigh bed, cross-legged in a pile of clothes—none of them white, many of them mine. I flew forward and ripped a pair of corduroys out from under her knob-knee.

  “Ow!” she yelped melodramatically. “You gave me a brush burn.”

  Gizmo and Doug, who were curled up by the pillows like two black standard poodle doughnuts, lifted their heads an inch.

  “Ginny,” I said. “You can’t just take my stuff.” Two hours ago, those corduroys had been neatly folded and sitting in a laundry basket with their neatly folded fellows. Now they were a rumpled mess.

  “We’re sisters,” Ginny said simply, as if that excused everything. She rubbed her palm over her knee. “And I need you to lend me something. If it’s white.”

  Lending implied I was the one to instigate the action of sharing. But I never was. This was one of thousands of tiny irritating Ginny things pushing me to the brink. “Well, even if I wanted to, I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  I gave her a look that hopefully said, You are shaped like a forest nymph crossed with a praying mantis while I am shaped like a lima bean.

  “Because the only white thing I have is a sheep costume from the youth group Christmas pageant,” I said instead. Gizmo, smelling the spreadable meat, was now licking my fingers.

  “Ugh!” Ginny wheeled back her arm and flung a shoe—black, low heel—at the wall. It bounced, leaving a crumbling crater behind.

  “God, Ginny, what is wrong with you?” I rushed over to the wall to inspect the damage. The shoe had landed square in the middle of Imperative Park, which Mom had painted full of signs that read KEEP OFF GRASS and ENJOY THE VIEW. The sign that read SNIFF next to a bunch of flowers had been obliterated. “You’re ruining everything.”

  Ginny sulked. “Mom says you should check the closets. In the Hiltiddly Room, I guess.”

  The Hiltiddly Room is actually the utility room, meaning a random room on the third floor with built-in closets and a sink and all the exercise equipment no one uses, but when we moved in I mispronounced it in my baby-Plum way and the name stuck. This tendency to misunderstand words is also how I ended up with a nickname that sounds very little like my actual name.

  Ginny bounded ahead across the landing, I followed much more sedately, and Gizmo brought up the rear.

  “Has Mom been acting weird to you?” Ginny flung open a closet and pushed aside some of Great-Grandmother Eleanor Blatchley’s old fur coats.

  “What?”

  “Has Mom”—she sneezed—“been acting weird?” She stopped and rubbed her nose. “I think she might be smoking again. I saw butts in the urns. Haven’t you noticed?”

  “If you mean have I caught her in the act, then no,” I said. “It was probably just Almost-Doctor Andrews.”

  “Almost-Doctor Andrews can’t smoke,” Ginny said. “His undergrad minor was in vocal performance. He knows better than to abuse his voice.”

  “As if I am supposed to know what doctoral candidates in music do or don’t do in college,” I muttered. It being her senior year, college was Ginny’s new obsession. This was part of what was fueling my sororicidal (of or relating to murdering one’s sister) fantasies.

  “And no,” Ginny went on, not waiting for me, as usual. “I mean, haven’t you noticed that she’s acting weird?”

  “You mean more than usual?” Iris Mortimer-Blatchley was never not weird. For one thing, she did wear all black all year all the time, and not just because she was a widow. Also, her hair was pure silver, instead of highlighted to hide the gray, and fell all the way to her waist, instead of ending in a neat bob. She was not going to blend in well at the Senior Tea. “You have met our mother, right?”

  Unable to provoke sufficient drama with this interrogation, Ginny was back to the closet. “What am I supposed to find in— Ooh.” She thrust a bony hand into the closet and pulled out a crepe, knee-length dress with a pleated skirt and a giant, triangular collar.

  Her face contorted in disgust.

  “It’s white,” I said helpfully.

  “It’s old aye-eff,” Ginny said.

  “It’s . . . vintage?” I tried.

  “You don’t even know what that means.”

  “Do, too. It’s French for old.”

  Ginny cracked up. “It’s French for ceci n’est pas une robe blanche.”

  “If you say so.” French was my worst subject, probably because Mme. Fournier despaired of me for not being as intelligente as ma soeur, and also because I did not like speaking up, much less in a language that was not my native tongue. This, in a nutshell, was what it was like to be Patience Mortimer Blatchley.

  Ginny held the dress at arm’s length like it was poisoned.

  “I told Mom like three weeks ago that I needed to buy something to wear to this and she totally ignored me,” she said. “Then I tried to buy something online, but I think her card must have expired because it wouldn’t go through.”

  “You stole her credit card?”

  Ginny waved her hand. “I’m her dependent. It’s allowed.”

  “Well, does it have to be white?”

  “Yes, Plum.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” Ginny said crossly. “For the ritual sacrifice. Cripes, I can’t wear this.”

  We had both started saying cripes after a summer spent watching all of the episodes of Jeeves and Wooster we could find on YouTube. Ginny had decided I was definitely Jeeves the valet, because I was practical and spoke in a normal tone of voice, and I had pointed out it was only too obvious that she was Bertie Wooster, because she got herself into lots of scrapes and could never remember the words to poems.

  “Ginny, you look good in everything,” I said. It was the annoying truth. “Just wear it, okay? Who cares?”

  “Yeah.” Ginny held the dress against her body and swayed a little. I caught Gizmo’s collar before he nipped at the hem.

  “Is there going to be dancing at this tea?” I asked.

  “Shut up,” Ginny answered, and stopped swaying. “Can you do one of those braids for me?”

  I sighed. “Yes, but like, now.”

  Ginny threw the dress on the NordicTrack and started pulling her clothes off right in the middle of the Hiltiddly Room.

  “Were you going to pick that up?” I asked, when she flung her sweatshirt to the ground. She ignored me and yanked the dress over her head.

  “How do I look?”

  The dress hung off her in a gauzy, not-particularly-well-fitted way. “Well . . .”

  She stomped off to her room before I could finish, and, after deciding to leave her jeans where she’d thrown them, I did, too.

 
“Merde,” Ginny said into the mirror. We were night and day: Ginny, six feet tall with thin, wispy blond hair and bronze-colored eyes; me, relatively tall, with obstinately thick brown hair and muddy eyes to match. The only thing we had in common was our sheet-white skin. “I look like one of those fairy paintings Mom likes.”

  “You mean the Pre-Raphaelites?”

  “Yeah. Like the Lady of Shalott. Is she one of the ones who drowns?”

  “Probably,” I said. “They all drown in the end.”

  Ginny cackled, then closed her eyes, crossed her arms over her chest, and fell backward onto her bed, which alarmed the still-sleeping Doug. “I shall die, Plummy. The stress is too much. Please put my body in a flower-wreathèd barge and push me gently downstream, preferably in the direction of the University of Pennsylvania.”

  This was too fanciful to merit a response. Ginny only slipped into her sonnet-like pronunciation of past participles when she was irretrievably far gone into a flight of fancy. I sat on the edge of the bed and scratched Doug’s butt.

  “Plum!” Ginny opened one eye. “Don’t you care about my incipient trauma?”

  I shrugged. “Why would you still go to college if you’re dead?”

  “It may be the only way I can get there,” Ginny said gravely.

  “Well, if you’re dead or in college, can I have your room?”

  “Do you want me to be dead, Plummy?”

  I pretended to think about it, partially as a joke, partially not. Ginny, now not dead at all, leaped out of the bed.

  “Plum!”

  “Okay, okay,” I said. “I don’t want you dead.”

  I didn’t want her dead. But at that point, I would not have minded if she were simply gone. As cruel as it sounds, I knew my life would be infinitely easier and more pleasant when my life did not revolve around Ginny’s quotidian hissy fits.

  “Girls?” Mom’s voice called up the stairs. “Ten minutes was over almost ten minutes ago.”

  “Coming!” we yelled at the same time.

  “Here,” I said in my governess voice. “Let me do your hair.”

  Ginny is terrible at doing hair because she is impatient and doesn’t have time to spend hours watching tutorials on YouTube because she is studying or spending time with her best friend, Charlotte. I, having neither a particular reason to study nor a best friend, have nothing but free time, and extremely fast fingers besides.