Little White Lies (3 page)

Whenever Mike walked around with that group, I couldn’t help but wonder if any of them were aware of how ridiculous the whole “we play sports, and
we
cheer for them; thusly we walk together” routine was. I wanted to believe that he knew. Like me, Mike comes from a family that prizes academics over athletics. But Mike’s family could also probably afford to buy the Brooklyn Nets. And while I’m not into jocks per se, I do like the look of a letterman’s jacket.

What I really love about Mike is that he’s a not-so-secret nerd.

I’d always known who Mike Cornelius was, but we met at a SKOOLS 4 ALL fundraiser over the summer. Mike was running all of the techy-related things, coordinating the donations on several laptops at once. SKOOLS 4 ALL was a
brand-new nonprofit aimed at providing education for children in impoverished African countries, launched with a lot of hype, so Mike had a pretty important job for a seventeen-year-old. He got it because 1) he has the skills and 2) his parents are on the board of Pulse TV, the TV network owned and operated by Karin and Anders Skool—or as they are universally known on Page Six, the Skool Twins.

Pulse TV is kind of a CNN meets MTV (minus the music) for young people. News and pop culture and social issues. When they started, they were cool because they didn’t try very hard to brand themselves. Sort of like what
VICE
could be if they were less annoying and had a conscience. Pulse broadcast a lot about the Skool twins themselves, how they were helping with some inner city cause or raising money for some sort of positive global initiative. Hence, SKOOLS 4 ALL. From Pulse TV I learned that ninety-nine percent of all schools in Ethiopia don’t even have books. Seriously. A school with no books. WTF?

And the Skools are a pretty interesting pair, to say the least. The Internet says they’re twenty-eight, but they could be anywhere from twenty to thirty-five. (I’m not good at ages.) Both are tall and thin, with alabaster hair and skin. High-fashion good looks—you know, from one angle you aren’t sure which one is the boy or the girl.

“Babe, this post you wrote about de Blasio is incredible,” Mike said to me. “You’re so right. I don’t even remember how I found it.” He had an unfortunate tendency to forget all interactions with Rachel. He also seemed to have forgotten she was standing right in front of him. “You never told me you were a writer!”

Before I could respond, he planted a kiss on me. A public
display of affection, or PDA as the kids were calling it, was really out of the ol’ box for Mike Cornelius.
Little White Lies
had really affected him that much? I almost felt like I should plant a kiss on Rachel. For once her oversharing had paid off.

“Maybe now you won’t need to call Dante de Blasio in five years,” he added with a crooked smirk.

“Are you jealous of Dante, Mike? I just put that in there because you know what they say, sex sells.”

He planted one more kiss on me and peeled out like it was choreographed.

Rachel rolled her eyes.

I stood there, blushing, flattered, unable to do anything but giggle like an idiot.

The rest of the day became a blur of compliments and updates from kids around school. By the final bell,
Little White Lies
had over a thousand followers. Don’t get me wrong; I knew I had a lot to say, and that I could be entertaining when forced … but entertaining to a thousand people, almost all of whom were total strangers?

When I went to sleep, the number was up to 1,342.

I woke up the next morning in a bit of a haze. The day before felt like a dream. I decided not to think about the Tumblr—until, of course, my mother opened her mouth at breakfast.

“Kanye West doesn’t know the first thing about fashion.” She was on the iPad, scrolling through the latest article featuring one of Kanye’s rants.

My mother’s morning reading routine ostensibly revolved around reputable sites like CNN or
The New York Times
, but that was just to cover her gossipy tracks. She always made her way to the entertainment section within three minutes.
My dad inevitably glanced away from his physical copy of the
Times
, just to “take a peek” at what the celebrities and youth of America were up to.

“Kanye is such a smart young man, but he is getting involved in things that really don’t concern him,” he said.

My first inclination was to get into a debate about Kanye. But why bother? Over the course of my seventeen years on Earth, I’ve found that getting into arguments with a mother who’s a professor and a father who’s a litigator is a complete waste of time. At least, arguing face-to-face … but writing about it? If I’d learned anything from yesterday’s surreal experience, blogging was worth my while.

Three minutes after I uploaded the second post, I got a text from Mike.

Hey- can i see u before school? I need to talk to u. Meet by your locker? See u soon.

Anytime someone—not just my boyfriend,
anyone
—asks if they can talk to me, my mind goes to terrible places. What could he want to talk to me about? Is he afraid I’m going to shave my head and grow that Afro? Does he want to break up? No. There was no reason for us to break up. I was being crazy, right?

I texted him back.

Talk? Sure. I’ll be at my locker!

During my mini freak-out, I ignored a barrage of texts from Rachel. As someone who overshares, she is a person who likes to send texts in fives. I skipped to the last one.

LOL! This one was even better!
I sent it to my parents!

Why?
Why did Rachel send this to her parents? If the Bernsteins knew, my parents would now know, too. And while they have some sense of humor, they might not be as amused if they found themselves the catalyst, inspiration, and punching bag for my blog.

Another text from Rachel came in.

My parents loved it!

Hmm. If they loved it, maybe my parents might? Wishful thinking.

I made a point of smiling cheerfully as I closed my laptop and turned off my phone. I filled in my mom and dad about every single thing I’d do after school and the exact time I’d be home, and then I bolted out the door. I tried not to think about what they would do to me once they read the blog.

Mike was standing at my locker, without the harem or the jocks. All six-foot-four of him, smiling with his Colgate-commercial charm. And damn if he wasn’t in his football jersey. Oh, God. Be. Cool.

“Hey, I saw your new post this morning. Pretty great stuff, Coretta.”

“Oh, yeah, thanks.” I couldn’t really understand why he was bringing this up, at a time when it seemed like he might break up with me. Trying to soften the blow?

“Now listen, I sent it to my parents, and they were really impressed.”

I had no idea how to respond, so I just smiled. What is it with people and sending things to their parents? Besides, Mike’s parents were something altogether different, even from the Bernsteins. Long story short: Douglas and Esther Cornelius are very prominent African-American venture capitalists. (The few, the proud.) When I go to their house, I feel like I shouldn’t stare at anything too long, because it’s all so expensive and fragile. My eyes aren’t rich enough for it.

“Mike, I didn’t write that thinking your parents would see it, and I don’t think that—”

He put his finger on my mouth.

I believe the term is “shushing.” Yes, he shushed me. It was the first time he’d ever done that.

“Coretta, before you start, they sent it to all of their business and media contacts. You, my dear, are becoming quite the sensation.”

Buzz. A text from Rachel.

Ummm. You have 7,000 followers! WHAT!?

I’m not sure exactly what my face looked like, but it felt like my eyes were bulging out of my head and might fall out onto the floor.

Seven thousand followers? How is this possible?

Coretta White had far more than seven thousand followers by the time she crossed my radar, of course. When Alex’s call came, she had over 700,000.

She was also realer than anyone I’d ghosted for in a long time.

After accepting the job and placing R$$P back on my communications table, I leaned back on the Big Silver Ball into a gentle back-bend, then closed my eyes and lingered on thoughts of my ex-girlfriend-turned-employer. I was careful not to fall on my head. In the six months I’d been sitting on the BSB, I had fallen on my head exactly twice. Still, I could really feel the difference in my core strength.

Unfortunately my six-pack was still obscured by the countless other six-packs that had passed through over the decades. Ice Cream and Beer: the Two Pillars of My Visible Prosperity, the foundation of my formidable paunch.

Reflecting on my twenty-year relationship with Alex was akin to visiting an absurd carnival fun house populated with the rich and powerful. Strobe-lit pockets revealed glimpses of autistic Nobel Prize winners, plastic-smile politicians, menopausal titans of industry. From unseen passageways sprang gum-popping teenybopper stars, lascivious celebrity chefs,
and rappers who ranged from the monosyllabic coma-toast to wide-eyed megalomaniacs.

I shared the price of admission with a secret cadre of misfit friends and occasional subcontractors when the workload got too heavy.

Alex was aware of all of them and was always there along with us—but somehow removed, above it all,
herself
.

Now the prospect of fostering a single identity—the truly amazing Coretta White—had an unsettling result. It made me question my own identity. I tried to rewind, so I could make some sense of the endless stream of someone elses I had inhabited. Half of my life, it occurred to me, had been devoted to pretend time, to imagining myself as someone other than Karl Ristoff.

For the first time ever, for the first time since Alex had brought me into this ghost-racket, I actually found myself wondering about my “true self.”

Who
was I?
What
was I?

I saw no point in apprising Alex of my plunge into uncertainty.

Back in college I’d based my identity around being in a band, the Peter O’Toole Society*. We were a campus sensation, drawing crowds in small Cambridge clubs, getting paid to play parties and school-sanctioned trip-fests at colleges throughout the Northeast.

Possessing no discernable musical ability but plenty of unrestrained personality, I was the front man. An early ’90s white rapper convinced that I was the heir apparent to the Beastie Boys*. The rest of the group was essentially a prototypical four-piece Ivy League jam band—drums, guitar, bass, and keys—and they were frighteningly good. Too good for
me, it turned out, although I’m not sure why it took them three years to realize it.

Exactly one week after we landed ourselves in
Rolling Stone
magazine as one of the “Best College Bands in the USA,” I was fired. Our guitarist broke the news. He and the other three members of the Peter O’Toole Society wanted to break up so they could embark on “a new project.” This new project would consist of the original band minus me. Apparently they were being held back creatively by having to play “behind a white rapper.”

I didn’t see the point of arguing my case. If they wanted to swap showmanship and charisma for the creative freedom to take mushrooms and play extended interpolations of The Meters’* greatest hits, well, that was their pickle, and they could suck it.

On the other hand, Alex first met me at a POTS show. She made it abundantly clear that she was interested in me
in spite of
my stage persona, M.C. Expensive Meal aka Dick Johnson.

“Please stop rapping,” she pleaded, about two months into our relationship. “Just … don’t rap. Okay?”

“But rap is in my blood, baby.”

In retrospect I find it hard to believe that I made such a pronouncement without irony. “Rap is in my blood, baby”? I must have been saying that as a joke, right? But my memory is of a perfectly straight-faced (and much thinner) younger self articulating those exact words, and Alex staring back with a look of abject pity. There was enough pity for both of us.