E. Lockhart - The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks

Frankie saw Matthew in the caf several times the next week at a table full of senior boys; but it was impossible for a sophomore to walk over to a senior table and just say hello in front of everyone. Once, he passed her outside, running in his soccer practice clothesa pair of cleats swinging in one hand. Late! hed grinned in explanation, looking over his shoulder and loping off in the direction of the playing fields.

Oh, he had great legs.

Had he not been interested, after all? Frankie wondered as she watched him go. Was she too young for him?

Had he stopped liking her when shed talked back to Dean about the Pirates of the Caribbean ride?

All week she tried not to think of him, and actually studied for her classes. On the weekend she went to town with Trish and Artie, and played an ultimate Frisbee game.

At the start of the second week of classes, however, Frankie switched out of Latin and into an elective called Cities, Art, and Protest that sounded like more fun. The class was taught by a teacher named Ms. Jensson. She was new to Alabaster and wore beaded cardigan sweaters and unusual skirts. She had a masters from Columbia in art history and told everyone shed come to Alabaster to escape New York Citybut then here she was, spending all her time discussing it in class. So ironic.

It was the first time Frankie had ever taken a course that couldnt be described in a single word: French. Biology. Latin. History. Ms. Jensson explained various ways of conceptualizing cities and how organically developing cities contrasted with smaller, more deliberately planned environments such as Alabasters own campus. The students read architecture criticism, a history of Paris, and studied the panopticona kind of prison designed by late eighteenth/early nineteenth-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham, which was never actually built.

The architecture of Benthams panopticon was created to allow a watchman to look at all his prisoners without the prisoners knowing whether or not they were being observedmaking them feel as if they were constantly being watched by an omniscient being.

In other words, everyone in the panopticon knew they could be watched at all times, so in the end, only minimal watching actually needed to happen. The panopticon would create a sense of paranoia so pervasive that its inhabitants became practically self-governing.

Ms. Jensson then had the students read an excerpt from a book called Discipline and Punish, in which Michel Foucault uses the idea of the panopticon as a metaphor for Western society and its emphasis on normalization and observation. Meaning, we live our lives in places that operate like the panopticon. Schools. Hospitals. Factories. Office buildings. Even the streets of the city.

Someone is watching you.

Or, someone is probably watching you.

Or, you feel like someones watching you.

So you follow the rules whether someones watching you or not.

You start to think that whomever is watching you is larger than life. That the watcher knows stuff about you that you never told anyone.

Even if the watcher is someone dumb like a boarding-school headmaster.

Or an eighteen-year-old schoolboy.

Or a fifteen-year-old girl pretending to be an eighteen-year-old schoolboy.

Its a systematic paranoia. Like, when you have that creepy sense that your dad knows you drank that beer, even though you drank it four days ago and theres no evidence whatsoever that he knows.

Or when you are alone in your house, and you go to use the toilet and lock the door behind you anyway.

Or when you have a new boyfriend and youre alone in your room and you pick your noseand then you think how grodie that was, and how somehow your boyfriend must have been able to see you and hes going to dump your slimy, nose-picking self as soon as you see him next. And you can also kind of hear your grandmothers voice in your head, reminding you to use a tissue. And that horrible queen-bee popular girlyou can hear her nasty voice back in the fifth grade when she caught you wiping a booger on the underside of your desk, calling you booger eater for half the school year, even though obviously if you were eating your boogers you wouldnt have been wiping them on the desk in the first place.

So its not that you either pick your nose because you want to pick it, or you dont pick your nose because its germy. Its that you are having a mental conversation with all the forces that could be watching you and condemning you for your nose-picking (potential or actual)even though rationally you know that no one can see you.

Thats the panopticon.

Cities, Art, and Protest was so much better than Latin. Frankie did all her reading early.

THE INVITATIONS

Frankie first noticed the pale blue envelopes in her morning history class a week and a half into the school year. Star Allan, a sophomore who lived on Frankies hall, sat with her friend Claudia, comparing notes.

Star was petite. A crew team coxswain. A brash, loud voice. A ponytail so long and swingy, Frankie wondered it didnt topple her backward. A brain the size of a corn kernel. Did you get one of these? Star called across the table, flashing her envelope and the matching card within.

Star was going out with Dean, Frankie knew.