There was among the other little girls a desperate yearning to please Cooper, which felt to her as familiar and nurturing as her mother’s embrace. Cooper lived as the object of anxious looks and careful appraisal of her moods and desires, her reaction to every comment or joke or suggestion or observation studied and analyzed lest she appear displeased by the offering. How Cooper had arrived at this position would have been a subject of some conjecture if the other little girls had been capable of such appraisal, but they inhabited a fixed universe, a clock set in motion by a malevolent God who made Cooper in her own image—if God were a beautiful nine-year-old girl who wore Abercrombie every day, had white skin smoother and softer than the flesh on kitten’s paws, and hair that was three different browns and two reds, all shining.
Cooper’s hegemony over the entire fourth grade was a fact just now beginning to be suspected by teachers and administrators, but virtually impossible to confirm and awkward to bring up in discussion with her parents. It had been noted that girls often came to the office crying after encounters with her, but Cooper’s composure was such that these cases ended up as hard-to-parse she said/she saids, and Cooper had already deduced that adults much preferred to avoid entanglement in these inter-child spats.
Cooper herself did not recall when she began to take pleasure in shows of dominance over her classmates, only that it came about as soon as she became aware that she was indeed dominant. She never wondered where her power emanated from. One day in second grade it was simply there. A few of the girls she had played with in first grade, girls less cute than she, slower readers, less gifted on the monkey bars, kept trying to play with her during yard and she would shake her head and inform them without any malice in her voice, “I’m not playing with you.”
And Cooper would turn to those she had chosen and they would feel blessed, and those she had rejected would feel cursed. They would try to compel her with platitudes recalled from books and urgings from teachers who believed all children should be friends in a vast continuum around the earth, should make new friends but keep the old. But Cooper dismissed that idea and could never put words to it but had already formulated the thought: no ugly friends, no fat friends, no dumb friends.
Why she was the first to arrive at this dictum, which other girls were slowly coming to on their own, was ineffable. Was it genetic? Environmental? How, exactly, did it benefit the species for prepubescent girls to be making each other cry? Nobody could answer that, but in the years since Cooper’s first assertions of dominance, her behavior had so transformed the school that some children had grown terrified of attending, others had been moved to private schools, and still others attended expensive and ultimately fruitless child-psychiatry sessions that invariably resulted in the prescription of anti-depressant medication.
If there had been a meeting of parents, therapists, rabbis, administrators, and girls with tear-stained faces, then perhaps Cooper’s role as catalyzing agent in this circle and cycle of fear and intimidation would have been discovered. But such a cabal was, of course, an impossibility. And Cooper, observed in the schoolyard by the untrained eye, was just another, very pretty, little girl. There were small signs, the body language of defeat after a dismissive wave from Cooper, the glances freighted with hope and desire, the way every little clique in the schoolyard seemed to radiate in descending order of attractiveness and/or popularity from Cooper’s position just inside and to the right of the gate, her back to the schoolyard, her hoodie draped on her shoulder beneath lustrous hair, her hand raised in dismissiveness of a displeasing classmate—this gesture, at least, as imperious and cutting as a dauphin’s waving away of an insufficiently delicious vintage.
_____________
Cooper’s parents barely registered their daughter’s status, only noting to each other with some satisfaction that she seemed popular, was invited to the bat mitzvahs of girls several years her senior, and had many friends. There had been the occasional phone call from another mother, reporting that their daughter was upset with something Cooper had said or done, but most parents adhered strictly to the “let the kids work it out for themselves” dictum, which made sense to Sara and Mark, since that meant they didn’t have to intervene. And when occasionally they mentioned such matters to Cooper, she was persuasive that the conflict was more the fault of her peer rather than herself, that the insult and the hurt had been at the very least mutual if not, in fact, directed at Cooper. She had merely retaliated and was, indeed, a victim herself.
No parent was equipped to adjudicate such matters objectively, and so the conversations ended with imprecations to behave, be good, be nice, and how can a parent gazing at her adorable nine-year-old not believe she is in the presence of a vessel of goodness and niceness? Cooper had been among the top performers throughout her elementary-school career, and her teachers had to duly report this salutary progress during parent-teacher meetings. Even occasional absences because of modeling go-sees had not affected her mastery of times tables, division, or her reading of the required Junie Jones books—though her teachers had noted that Cooper’s modeling, her appearance in Benetton, Gap, and even Apple ads, had caused among the girls a fervent wish to be models also, and some had taken to stating that as their career ambition.
Sara was aware that promoting her daughter’s modeling career could be seen as tacky and not in line with contemporary parenting dictates—the child should choose her own path—yet it was clear that Cooper not only enjoyed the photo sessions but also thrived on the competitive aspects of “go-sees” and casting, took pleasure in meeting with photographers and art directors and playing the cute little girl. So how could Sara deny her this? She limited her daughter to just one day of castings a week; for actual jobs, Cooper was allowed to take as many days as the shoot required. The money was being deposited in a 529 account, so both parents felt there was ultimately some virtue to all this commerce.
And didn’t all parents harbor the wish that their daughter would be pretty, popular, and smart? This was a neighborhood of winners, attractive, bright women, M.A.’s, J.D.’s, Ph.D.’s, or I.M.G.’s, who had married successful men and lived in expansive apartments in an exclusive part of town, and so wouldn’t matriarchs be adept at spotting their offsprings’ prospects, even as mere nine-year-olds? There was such emphasis placed on beauty, on fame, on being famously beautiful, that a little girl who seemed particularly gifted in these areas would be a source of some secret pride to the parent. And so it was for Sara, who could see in her daughter’s sometimes haughty mien—she could admit it, to herself but to no one else, Cooper, occasionally, could be sort of a bitch to other little girls—the makings of an alpha female. The type who could have a featured-in-Vogue run through New York society—the kind of run usually reserved for pretty, well-born English girls—that so many women who came to Tribeca from suburbs instead of from the Upper East Side still secretly believed was the truest form of making it. We live through our children and want only the best for them but have trouble recognizing that our notion of the best is too often the worst.
_____________
There was a pleasing rhythm to Cooper’s life, from the walk with her sister and father down Greenwich, past the security guard who always wished them a good day at school, alongside the restaurants still shuttered, to the market where her father would buy her an avocado sushi roll for lunch, and finally to drop-off, where she would take up her position by the gate and wait with a few select peers for Heather, their teacher, to gather them for class.
Cooper carefully curated her friends. There were the girls she found physically appealing; there were some whose families had elaborate summerhouses; there were others whose parents occupied glamorous perches and whose last names promised entrée. To what, Cooper couldn’t even say, but she was already imbued with a notion that connections mattered.
It had been a while since she had organized any ostracism. Such bullying no longer held out much fun for her, since it was too easily accomplished. But she did recall with some smug satisfaction when she had made Amber cry, when she had made Sophie cry, when she had made Juliette cry, and so on. It had all been so easily achieved, unthinking even, just a snub, a refusal at jump rope, a disinvitation to tag, and then the careful informing of her more elite friends that the girl in question was no longer welcome. Oh, there were always unreliable allies, Cooper had noticed, girls who would continue to play in secret with the rusticated former colleague, but she could usually forge a solid alliance among the girls who had more looks than brains. All this calculation, for Cooper, came as naturally, easily, and instinctively as choosing an outfit; she didn’t need to think about such ruthlessness before implementing it. It was who she was.
_____________
The arrival of boys and the accompanying crushes, and the online chat that accompanied this new dimension, was the first changing of the established school order to occur on Cooper’s watch, and before she had time to react to it she had noticed that her hold on some of her best friends was slipping. The other cute girls were paying more attention to their various crushes, to boy classmates who seemed stupid and indifferent but were nonetheless more the fervent object of their desires and were displacing Cooper’s latest modeling catalogue as an object of general conversation and admiration.
She understood, immediately, that this was an important change in the topography. Girls were beginning to care more about what boys thought of them than what Cooper thought. A girl who was liked by many boys could survive, even thrive, without Cooper’s blessing. This turn of events was surprising but, Cooper felt, manageable. She was the prettiest girl—professionally pretty, even—and so why shouldn’t the boys also determine that she was most prized?
A few years later, when Cooper would learn algebra, she would immediately grasp the concept of variables, of a number changing value depending on the equation around it. She possessed a mind that processed quickly and without self-awareness of why and how it was processing. Such a formidable mind behind a less-fetching face—behind, perhaps, the face of an Indian boy—would have simply enabled her to pass quickly through the educational portals, up through Lab and then Stuyvesant and on to the Ivy League. But matched up with Cooper’s physical appearance, the output was just as calculating yet put to more immediately evil purposes.
So Cooper recalibrated.
First, she took note of the boys who seemed to inspire the most erratic behavior among her peers. There were two, Jason and Jake, who seemed the most popular—though oddly, Jake was one of a set of identical twins, and his genetic match, Jeremy, was largely ignored. Both Jason and Jake were of average height and size, prone to the same boisterous shouting and frequent shoving as their fellows, yet by some quirk they had emerged as the most prized. They were both tasseled-haired, their locks descending in insouciant wisps over their blue eyes, slight freckles dotting pink cheeks, delightfully gapped teeth, pink lips. Both were athletic, both were successful participants in Downtown Little League, and both had been the fastest boy in the fourth grade, a title passed back and forth like a scepter between monarchs in a line afflicted by regicide.
It was easy enough for Cooper to persuade the 2Js, as they were called, that they should focus all their boisterous attention-seeking, their clamoring look-at-me antics of skirting up the wrought iron gate, sliding down the hallways on lunchroom trays, and walking on their hands up the stairs toward Cooper instead of any of the other young females. All it took was an indication, by giggling, by pausing to gape, by teasing, that she had noticed and was interested in their boyish display. That succeeded in winning over the 2Js, so they made their noisy show, as florid and vulgar as a male jungle fowl display, complete with similar preening and snorting sounds, in her general direction. When Cooper finally deigned to speak to them, to launch a discussion about pop songs that so perplexed the boys they could only answer with the default “Word” after everything she said, Cooper had re-established her position. And though Sara was perplexed at Cooper’s suggesting that she would like a play date with a boy, it seemed harmless enough and she arranged such, over many awkward laughs with Jason’s mother.
But Cooper found the appointment itself to be a disappointment. What were you supposed to do with a boy? She had no idea, and immediately upon the arrival of one of the Js, deposited in their loft by a Jamaican helper and received by Mabel, her babysitter, it was apparent that the squawking, clucking little rooster of the yard was here much diminished and shy. Boys were terrible bores, Cooper determined, as they didn’t express any interest in drawing or painting or dressing up or looking for music clips on YouTube or going through her book. He seemed interested only in playing tennis on the Wii, and so Cooper went along with that, a dull afternoon that she vowed she wouldn’t repeat any time soon.
The boy was sufficiently transfixed by Cooper, by her family’s loft, dazzled by the proximity to her, that he would continue to badger his mother for a repeat engagement, which Cooper indicated to her mother, with a quick, even shake of the head, no, she was not interested. Her status secured by her having had a play date with the most desirable of the boys, she now felt she could afford to take a break from these laborious and torpid creatures.
_____________
Most of her go-sees took her out of Tribeca, to lofts and studios in Chelsea or Dumbo, but there were still a few photographers in Tribeca, those successful enough to be able to afford it or who had bought in early enough that they could afford to stay. As Cooper’s career progressed, babysitter Mabel was increasingly delegated by a sometimes-stoned Sara the task of depositing Cooper at castings and go-sees. She was to hang around and make sure the little girl wasn’t fondled, abused, or made to feel ugly. The photographers who worked with children tended to be women and, if at first they were excessively sensitive about hurting a child’s feelings, over the years expediency necessitated less glad-handing and more curtness. It was impossible to look at a hundred kids in one day without making a few feel bad that they weren’t gorgeous or cute enough. And certainly the mothers who so often accompanied the kids would glower or glare back at the photographer and art director when they felt their child wasn’t receiving the love he or she deserved. But the parents were generally so supplicating at the possibility of the next job that they hesitated to too flagrantly voice their displeasure, or, more frequently, they would turn their anger not inward but toward their daughter, for not being beautiful enough or being diffident or being shy or being fat.
This photographer, in his Hudson Street loft, seldom worked with children. He wore the vintage tortoise-shell-framed glasses, artisanal T-shirt, and skinny jeans of a fashion photographer, and he was more accustomed to dealing with an entirely different type of child, the gamine pubescent girl, 16 to 18, who increasingly were the ones magazines wanted in their editorial. Advertisers, on the other hand, still wanted the grown-up girls in their campaigns, the models who became famous when there were still famous models.
And so now, working on a luxury campaign, this photographer found himself in need of glamorous child, an actual child, not a child-woman, for a shoot, the child here nothing more than a lovely prop for the statuesque model, a beautiful petite human to accompany beautiful alligator-skin luggage and beautiful back seat of a Maybach.
Yet while most fashion photographers would quickly flip through the comp, look at the girl, and then snap a few Polaroids, this bespectacled photographer, a weedy man with a pronounced and complicated limp that pistoned him up and down as he walked from camera to computer monitor to model, had a mellower, calmer, sweeter manner. He asked Cooper about herself, how she got into modeling, and whether or not she liked it—and the photographer seemed genuinely surprised that she lived just a few blocks from here and even more shocked when she told him her school.
This was one of the most beautiful lofts Cooper had ever seen, and she had seen many, many beautiful lofts. Though she didn’t know how to express size in terms of square feet, she did know enough to guess that this loft was three times the size of her family’s loft and twice the size of her richest friend Cameron’s, so that meant this photographer was moneybags. There were floor-to-ceiling casement windows facing east and south, Corinthian columns in a row down the middle with acanthus leaves carved in at the top and even a DJ station in the corner with twin turntables. There was a pod that looked like a giant mushroom cap in one corner that was the exterior to the coolest kid’s room she had ever seen, and when she asked who lived there, she was told, “Miro, he goes to your school.”
Miro? She didn’t remember him.
“Is he in fourth grade?”
“Fifth,” she was told.
Ah, an older boy. His appearance in the loft, blond-haired, sleepy-eyed, in buttoned-up blue shirt, slim-cut selvage denim, and Converse, seemed to Cooper a manifestation of some sort. Had he been hiding out in his mushroom cap of a room? Or had he been here all along in some corner of this vast main room, buried between the cushions of a giant sofa?
“Cooper goes to school with you,” Miro was told by the photographer.
Cooper looked at the photographer, with his crazy gyrating limp, his somewhat effeminate manner—he didn’t seem to her like other dads, like her dad, but she guessed he was Miro’s dad.
Miro nodded, uninterested.
Cooper gazed at him, hoping he would recognize her: surely even the fifth-grade boys must have noticed Cooper. But Miro merely flopped on another of the many sofas that formed various conversational rectangles around the room and did something on his phone. But when they were finished with her Polaroids, Miro asked her if she wanted to draw, and Cooper loved drawing. She looked at Mabel, who looked at the photographer, who was studying the Polaroids, and shrugged and said sure, but it might be weird if Cooper saw the other girls coming in for their go-sees, and Mabel assured him that Cooper wasn’t the type to be bothered by that.
Cooper and Miro went to draw inside the mushroom cap. He had the awesomest stuff: a huge round bed, a flat-panel TV, a new iMac, so many iPods they were tossed around casually, and for painting and drawing he had easels and tons of colors, pastels, paints, and clean brushes in every thickness. He pulled over an orange stool and told Cooper to sit down at one of the easels, and then he sat before the other one and asked, what do you want to paint, and she suggested, how about Kid Robots, and Miro shrugged, and said whatever, and so they drew and painted their own designs for Kid Robots.
There were barefoot Burmese men who brought them cookies and soy milk while they were working in the warm afternoon sun, and Cooper snuck glances at Miro while he was working and thought he was the perfect-looking boy, not all trying to be cool or tough, but just the way he sat there concentrating on his drawing gave her a pleasant but unfamiliar feeling. And when they showed each other their designs, Cooper saw that Miro was definitely the best drawer in the whole school and she thought that was so awesome. He even let her keep some of his designs, which she folded up and put in her leather valise. She found herself hoping even more than she usually hoped that she would get this job and so return to this apartment and she even thought to herself that the reason for this was to be around Miro.
_____________
She saw Miro at school the next day, and he barely acknowledged her. He was in double-file line with his class, waiting at the library entrance, and he just bobbed his head slightly when he saw her, nothing more, and she was sad and confused and couldn’t figure out why he didn’t start fighting with his neighbor or walking on his hands the way the 2Js, or other fourth-grade boys, did when they saw her. She didn’t know the word snubbed, but she felt it, and the unfamiliar ache ruined even her usual enjoyment of snubbing others, so that day at lunch she even let other girls, ugly girls, play with her if they had asked, because she was so preoccupied trying to figure out why Miro didn’t seem as excited about her as she was about him.
She actually broke the rules twice that day and used her cell phone at school to call and text her mother to ask if she had gotten that job. Both calls went to voicemail and neither text was returned. They heard nothing that evening, and when Mabel took Cooper and her sister to get dinner at Bubby’s, Cooper was so distracted she didn’t even think to tell Mabel there was no way she wanted to sit with another girl from her class who happened to be there with her helper. So she ended up having her mac and cheese with Evie, the kind of girl she never, ever, would sit with under normal circumstances.
_____________
Did she get it? Did she? Did she? Sara was tired of fielding this question from Cooper, who was jumping up and down and pulling at Sara’s wrist.
Though finally she could say, yes, okay, yes, you got it. Next Tuesday, she would skip school to arrive at the shoot at 8:30.
“At the loft? At the same place where the go-see was?”
No, of course it wasn’t at the loft, it was at a studio in Chelsea.
Her next question didn’t even make sense to Sara. “Will Miro be there?”
“Who is Miro?”
“This BOY she likes,” said Penny, her little sister.
“Shut up, Penny!” Cooper went off to her room and sat down, looking at Miro’s designs.
The day of, as Cooper sat in an aluminum-framed chair while a make-up artist went over her and then stylist fitted her so she looked almost as cruel as she did in real life, she found herself impatiently waiting for the photographer to limp over and say hello and when he did she blurted out, “Is Miro coming?”
The photographer seemed surprised by the question. “Maybe, maybe later. He’s at school right now.”
Usually, Cooper thrived at being the center of attention, and she loved having all the eyes in the silent room focused on her, just the clicking of camera motor and quiet comments by the photographer asking his assistant for levels, strobe, and new backs, and pealing away Polaroid covers to show the takes to an art director or editor. She loved that manufactured tension as all these grown-ups were working so hard while she just stood there or sat there, following simple directions—pout, more smile, less smile, turn, okay, try that, now really happy, now super-duper happy, more like that but with bigger eyes, really big eyes, biggest happiest eyes in the world, okay, now with mouth open, can we get a reflector in there, I’m getting some glare on the teeth—okay, now that big smile, with super big eyes, and—
But this shoot wasn’t as fun. She wasn’t the center of attention. The grown-up model was the actual star and clearly the focal point of the shoot. Cooper was a prop to be brought into the frame on certain shots and then pulled back out. She had to change three times, from play clothes to dressy and then, finally, into a formal frock. But it wasn’t fun, mainly because she had been hoping to see Miro, to have Miro watch her be the center of attention and now, even if Miro did show up, she wouldn’t be the center of attention and he would never see how amazing and beautiful she was and anyway, this wasn’t any fun because this Sophie model was like the superstar and Cooper was just this kid.
_____________
That evening, when Penny was looking through her book and found Miro’s designs and removed them to trace because she, too, admired them, Cooper, panicked at losing Miro’s drawings, stomped through the loft until she found them on Penny’s desk and began shouting at her: These are mine, she insisted, these are mine, mine, mine.
Penny began crying: You don’t have to scream at me, they’re just some stupid designs.
Cooper grabbed them back. They aren’t just some stupid designs, she said, but she couldn’t explain why.
_____________
And finally came the kind of humiliation that anyone who had watched and observed Cooper—and that would mean the entire fourth grade—found so unlikely, most weren’t sure what they were watching when it happened.
For those who saw it, it was one of those moments that would be relived and discussed with the kind of fervor adults might use when discussing a particular celebrity’s or politician’s scandal—for, in some sense, in this schoolyard, Cooper was a celebrity. With the entire fourth and fifth grades both recreating during a sunny spring afternoon, Cooper broke away without a word from her clique of girls, walked all the way across the yard, past the boys playing tag and basketball, the girls in line for jump rope, and others hunched over drawing with chalk, between the islands of backpacks and lunchboxes and jackets discarded in piles around the concrete playground, archipelagoes of bright colors against the chalk-marked concrete. She weaved between and through all this to where she saw, backlit by the sun, his silhouette thin and slouching and so boyish, to Miro, wearing headphones in flagrant contravention of school rules, leaning against the wrought-iron gate.
And she said, “Hey.”
What happened next would become exaggerated through each telling until, finally, it would be described as the childhood equivalent of a removed glove slap upon an offending knave’s face. He had, it was said, turned his back, stuck out his tongue, wagged his hand with thumb on nose, spit, flicked a booger, made moose ears. Actually, Miro simply nodded without removing his headphones but didn’t engage any more than that. It wasn’t a snubbing so much as simple inaction. Even an angry response would have been better than this non-response. It left Cooper backing up and winding all the way through the yard to where her friends had stood, only now, already, upon her return, her status was infinitesimally decreased.
For the fourth-grade girls, this was the moment the fever broke, when the pain became bearable, when the soul was on the mend. Her grip had been loosened, her powers dwindled, all of it in an instant and inexpressible and perhaps even unconscious to those who were there. Her bravery at being bold enough to take that public risk was unremarked and unnoticed. Cooper herself hadn’t felt brave, she hadn’t felt anything at all as she made that walk; it had been a compulsion, one that she had never felt before yet would act upon again.
The children didn’t do a dance or sing a song at the end of tyranny. They continued their hopscotch and jump rope until the bell rang and they filed inside, aware that something was different, but unable to figure out exactly what.
