Debating darcy, p.1
Debating Darcy, page 1
For all the brown girls who dreamt of gossamer gowns
Only to realize we were already wearing crowns
(And for Colin Firth. For reasons that I hope are obvious.)
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Sayantani Dasgupta
Copyright
THE FIRST TIME I saw Firoze Darcy, I was standing on the top of a cafeteria table in a high school I didn’t even go to, a borrowed tie around my head like a bandanna, belting out show tunes into a wedge platform heel I was using as a microphone.
In other words, I was not at my dignified best.
To be fair, what normal sixteen-year-old girl wouldn’t have been a little punchy in the same situation? I’d woken up far too early on a Saturday morning to ride in a freezing bus to a school that should have taken fifteen minutes to get to but took forty-five due to a very confused (and possibly very myopic—sorry, parked Toyota with new yellow racing stripe) bus driver. Then I’d used up all my nervous energy in three back-to-back rounds of what was basically competitive acting against a bunch of fellow teens of variable thespian skill. Lunchtime was my chance to rest my jangled nerves, unwind with my friends as we waited to see which of us speech competitors had broken into our final rounds, and basically let my inner theater nerd have her way with me.
I was on the aforementioned cafeteria table, in the middle of performing my favorite song from Hamilton with my friends Tomi and Jay, when I saw him. A boy I’d never seen before. He was suited and booted, as my cousins in India would say. He was tall, dark, and handsome, like the cliché hero from an eighteenth-century British romance novel. Also, I realized with a weird skip of my heartbeat, he was Desi. Like me.
And maaan, could the guy wear a suit.
Of course, pretty much every other teenager in the Hartford High School cafeteria on that September afternoon was wearing a suit. Because that was the generally accepted uniform at speech and debate competitions. (Except Tomi, who actually made her own clothes, but that was a whole other crafty situation.)
But while most of us looked like awkward adolescents wearing cheap, off-the-rack imitations of adulthood, this guy looked like somebody had cut and molded his dark blue blazer to his not-inconsiderable shoulders. And don’t even get me started about the fit of his slacks. That description would be quite shockingly NSFW.
What I mean to say is this: He was, at least by appearance, just what a young man ought to be.
So, logically, I entirely blame him for what I did next. Which was to look straight down into the boy’s dark eyes from my perch on the wobbly cafeteria table, crook my non-manicured finger at him, and start singing at him like he was a beautiful woman and I the future murderous vice president of the United States: “Excuse me, miss, I know it’s not funny, but your perfume smells like your daddy’s got money!”
The entire cafeteria, already hopped up on nervous competition energy and vending machine snacks, exploded in laughter. The boy made an incoherent noise, half clearing his throat and half protesting.
“I’m … sorry?” he managed to say, blinking at me. His voice was deep and chocolate-molten-cake yummy.
His delightful voice, combined with the uptightness of his expression, somehow egged me on. I winked, hamming it up. “Why you slummin’ in the city in your fancy heels? You searchin’ for an urchin who can give you ideals?”
Next to me, Jay laid a hand to his forehead and sang in a dramatic falsetto, “Leela, you disgust me!”
“So you discussed me!” I stared at the handsome boy, my body humming with mischief. “I’m a trust fund, baby, you can trust me!”
Everyone in the cafeteria went bonkers at that, howling and pointing. When the boy realized the entire high school cafeteria was staring at him, his body grew tense, his expression changing rapidly from surprised to shocked to glowering.
“She’s got you there, man,” said a blond dude I hadn’t noticed before next to the Desi hottie. “You do have that fat trust fund, don’t you, Darcy?”
Blond boy was smiling and nodding at us, or rather, should I say, smiling and nodding at Jay, a flirtatious smile playing at his lips. But as much as he seemed to be enjoying our performance, his friend clearly wasn’t.
“I hope you’re happy, Bingley.” The Desi boy named Darcy knocked his friend’s arm off his shoulder. “This kind of … immature behavior is exactly why I didn’t want Netherfield Academy joining the public school forensics league in the first place.”
Everyone in earshot—who, as it happens, almost all attended public schools—shouted in outrage. Someone threw a wadded-up page of homework in his direction. Giving the crowd an imperious look, Darcy turned on his heel and stalked away.
“What in the actual Marie Antoinette?!” Jay asked, and the team at the next table cheered.
Jay was always able to come up with a good line, even at a tense moment. One of the many reasons I loved him. That, and the fact that we’d been neighbors and best friends since my dad had lost his old job and I’d moved to our town in the sixth grade.
Even Tomi, who normally did not stoop to insults, snapped her finger in the air like she was one of the Schuyler sisters. “Seriously. Off with his head!”
“ ‘This kind of immature behavior!’ ” I mocked in a voice loud enough to carry. “What an elitist jerk!” Then, a beat or two too late, I added, “I mean, let them eat cake!”
“The moment’s passed, Sofia Coppola.” Jay patted my arm in mock sympathy as he jumped off the table.
“I’m still working on my timing vis-à-vis spontaneous quippery,” I admitted.
“That Marie Antoinette comment was so good, though,” said Tomi.
“I know, right?” Jay said in such a self-satisfied way that I laughed. Our Longbourn High teammates, along with the next-table-over Meryton team, clapped, and Jay took a wavy-handed, Shakespearean-style bow.
“Why are the good-looking ones always such turds?” I asked with a dramatic sigh.
“Beyond the obvious explanation that the cis heteronormative patriarchy tells them the world should revolve around them?” replied Tomi. “Oh, no reason at all!”
Tomi gave me a hand as I clambered awkwardly down from the table, my bandanna once again becoming a borrowed tie and my microphone transforming back into a slipper. Cinderella turning back into a pumpkin after the ball, as it were.
“Only the good-looking straight ones are turds, my darlings.” Jay waved across the cafeteria at the blond boy Bingley, who actually waved back. Not that I should have been surprised. With light brown skin, dark eyes, and a jawline that could double as a rapier, Jay was way too handsome for his own good.
“He is cute,” Tomi offered with a twinkle in her long-lashed eyes. “I give you leave to like him. You’ve liked many a stupider fellow.”
“But his cuteness manifests in a very Chip and Muffy/Martha’s Vineyard/Hamptons beach house sort of way, wouldn’t you agree?” I clenched my jaw for extra elitist emphasis.
“Oh, I’ll shake up his little country club life, don’t you worry!” Jay assured me airily.
I would have gone on, scouring my brain for more witty ways to tease Jay about Bingley, if the acoustics of the cafeteria had been different. If the acoustics in that cafeteria had been worse, in fact, a lot of things would have gone down differently. But, as it was, Hartford High’s cafeteria doubled as its theater, and the two boys from the Netherfield team were standing right next to the stage at one end of the room. Whoever had constructed the space clearly knew what they were doing, architecture-wise. Because just then, in one of those natural lulls in the volume of the conversation nearby, Darcy’s and Bingley’s voices bounced back to us from across the cavernous room.
“Oh, come on, man, don’t be like that!” Bingley was cajoling his friend. “It was a joke!”
“Mentioning a trust fund here, with these kids? Not funny!” Darcy responded.
“Loosen up, dude,” Bingley went on. “It’s not like it’s every day you get serenaded by a beautiful girl on a table!”
“Beautiful? If you say so.” Darcy’s scornful voice rang out across the cafeteria, clear as a bell. “Certainly not beautiful enough to tempt me!”
My entire team, and the teams around us, got even quieter then, and I could feel their eyes on my back. Somebody went “ooooh” and somebody else snickered but was quickly shushed. Even as the volume of conversation rose again around us, people repeating what we’d all overheard, Darcy’s words and their implication hit me like a crashing wave, washing me in a painfully familiar sense of humiliation.
“What the actual fork?” hissed Tomi, her worried eyes searching my face, her hand reaching for mine. “You okay, Leela?”
“Sure, no, what do I care what that jerk thinks?” I managed a wobbly smile.
I let her twist her fingers through mine but only felt worse for it. I wished I could melt into the sticky tiled floor, or maybe pull on a magic ring of power and make myself invisible. The crummiest part was I hadn’t felt this way in years, not since I’d moved out of the almost-all-white town in which I’d grown up. There, among the Bingley-like blonds with their matching polos and polo ponies, I’d been convinced that my brown skin made me intolerably, horribly, disgustingly ugly. It had taken me years to unlearn those cruel lessons, but to be perfectly honest, I wasn’t 100 percent there yet.
It was Jay, predictably, who saved the day, not by giving me sympathy but by making clear he didn’t think I needed any.
“I don’t care what you haters say.” He ran his hand over his spiky black hair, smoothly continuing our conversation from before. “I’m planning on giving that Bingley my number. That is, as soon as I can get him away from his evil idiot buddy—the one with the shockingly terrible eyesight. Guy’s clearly overdue at the optometrist.”
I turned back to my friends, trying to maintain control over the muscles of my face, trying to stop the boy Darcy’s comments from echoing again and again through my brain. But my heart was beating uncomfortably fast and my mouth felt full of ashes, like all the silly joy of being young, carefree, and theatrical had been burned to dust by his scorn.
With his brief, hard words, Darcy had stuck me in a time machine, sending me back to the schoolyard bullies who had mocked elementary school me with pseudo Native American “woo-woo-woos,” who had rubbed my dark brown skin to see if my “tan” would come off, who had taken ostentatious sniffs in my direction and complained that I smelled like curry. Back then, I had been sure someone like me could never be considered pretty, heroic, or worthy of being a protagonist, even of my own story. I had been convinced I should try and erase myself from every social situation, from every public space, from the very narrative that is America.
My forensics teammates kept chattering around me, but I couldn’t get Darcy’s mockery out of my head. Because what made it worse, of course, was that he was Desi. Unobtrusively, I tried to straighten my out-of-control shag of a hairdo, noticing for the first time how rumpled my skirt suit was. And, egads, what was that stain near the waist? Ketchup? My mind drifted to my aunts in India, who made such a fuss about me staying out of the sun, whispering to my mother that it was too bad I’d inherited my father’s complexion and not hers. I thought of how in my American Bengali community, people always said I had a “pretty face,” adding, in a lower voice, “for a dark girl.”
As if my subconscious manifested her, right then, I looked up to see a blonde girl standing in front of our table, her smooth straight hair hanging like a model’s around her impossibly perfect features. She was wearing a blazer the same style and color as the two other boys had been wearing. On the breast pocket of her blazer was a golden N—undoubtedly for Netherfield Academy. She reminded me of every girl I’d gone to ballet class with when I was little, the ones whose “nude” tights and shoes actually matched their skin, the ones who always got picked to be the ballerina princess over me because they looked the part, whereas I never would.
“Honestly, Firoze Darcy’s right. I mean, I don’t see the lie.” The girl gave a sour-lemon twist to her perfectly lipsticked lips, and I couldn’t tell which of Darcy’s comments she was talking about—the one about Netherfield joining the public school league, or the other, more terrible one?
Tomi seemed to be thinking along the same lines, because she stood up from her seat and confronted the girl, blocking me from sight with her body. My friend crossed her arms. “How exactly do you mean?”
“You public school teams … !” the blonde girl said, without fully finishing her thought. “I mean, are you people even here to be serious about forensics, or just be clowns?”
“Oh, the clown thing, obviously,” deadpanned Jay, standing up now, next to Tomi.
“Funny.” The girl narrowed her eyes at my bestie. “And by the way, just some friendly advice, kindly meant? Don’t even bother giving my brother your number, my dude. You’re so not his type.”
Jay opened his mouth, then shut it again, at an uncharacteristic loss for words. Tomi made some incoherent sounds of protest, but I just sat there, my brain empty of an appropriate comeback.
The girl rolled her eyes and clip-clopped away on her perfect heels.
“I take it back,” Jay said in a weirdly strangled voice, straightening the tie I’d just returned to him. “I’m going to give that Bingley guy my number, make him fall hopelessly in love with me, and then marry him and live happily ever after, just to get back at that evil shrew of a sister.”
“Revenge is an excellent reason to choose a life partner,” Tomi agreed, even as she lightly touched my shoulder, like she was making sure I was okay.
I cleared my throat, trying to get ahold of myself. “Also, the ‘my dude’? I mean, what was that?” I said as lightheartedly as I could.
“I have absolutely no idea.” Jay shook his head. “Clearly, our education is too limited at our sad public school to make use of such sophisticated vocabulariage.”
The shame I’d been feeling before as a result of Darcy’s words was fast hardening into anger. I wasn’t that little bullied elementary schooler anymore. Finding my voice through speech competitions, and finding community in my forensics team, had changed all that. I mean, who were these snotty Netherfield Academy types to put us public high school kids down, suggest we weren’t good enough to compete with them, laugh with them, date them? They were obviously so privileged, they couldn’t even see beyond their own hateful patrician noses, their own exclusive, gated-community lives.
It was settled. Firoze Darcy was, without a doubt, the most disagreeable, horrible, nasty, evil, conceited person I had ever met. I quite detested him.
IT IS A truth universally acknowledged that there are two kinds of people in high school forensics: speakers and debaters.
We speech-type forensicators (yes, it’s a real word, and no, it has nothing to do with criminal science) value interpersonal connection, the written word, and emotion. Whether we’re performing a ten-minute piece of prose or poetry, or a humorous or dramatic interpretation of a play excerpt, we are all about the art. High school sports teams may get all the public glory, but there’s nowhere to find such pure, unadulterated teenage passion as weekend tournaments of competitive acting.
Debaters of all genders, on the other hand, are the mansplainers of the forensics world. What speech competitors are to nuance and emotion, debaters are to speed-talking, ham-fisted point grabbing. They are, on the whole, pen-twirling jerks. If we speakers are the equivalent of football, soccer, basketball, and fencing teams all rolled up in one, debaters are the equivalent of verbal wrestlers—minus the tight onesies and weird helmets. They are all arguing, no artistry. (Also, don’t be offended or anything if you’re a wrestler—it’s just a metaphor, okay?)
Which is why I wasn’t surprised at all by the news passed on by one of our team coaches, Mrs. Bennet, who bustled up to us in the cafeteria just as Bingley’s sister was walking away. A frustrated community theater actress, Mrs. Bennet now threw all her passion for acting into coaching our team.
“Forensicators, gather round!” she chirped, wedging her flower-dressed form into the cafeteria bench.
We all obediently did so. Our forensics team consisted of seniors Oluwatomisin Lucas—or Tomi—who was an original oratory speaker, and Colin Kang, who did extemporaneous speaking. Even though brainiac Colin had the entire National Forensics Association rule book practically memorized, or maybe because of that, we’d elected Tomi president of the club, and Colin vice president. Then there were Jay Galvez and me, Leela Bose, juniors who did dramatic and humorous interpretation respectively. Our other team members included one sophomore, an emo/goth reincarnation of Wednesday Addams named Mary Stewart (I jest you not). And then there were two new, kind of silly ninth graders named Lidia Rivera and Kitty Cho, who were doing prose and poetry interpretation, although what they really seemed to be interested in was flirting with boys from other teams.
