by K. A. Tucker
She may as well have smeared “I hate Maggie” in blood, as cutting as that particular entry was. In later journal entries, Celine rarely ever refers to anyone by name. They are simply “he” or “she.” Once in a while she references someone with an initial, but that’s as far as she ever goes. It’s like she was protecting herself in case anyone ever read these. I’m not surprised. Celine was never the type to talk badly about anyone, so it would make sense that she felt guilty about doing it even in the privacy of her journals.
I had to take a break not long after reading that entry, chug a glass of vodka, and calm my scorned heart before I moved on. Thankfully, it seemed that my decision to keep the money and start Villages United appeased Celine somewhat. I was finally getting a grip on reality, according to her. Doing something real instead of being that “holier-than-thou person who bites the hand that feeds her.”
I wonder, had my family’s money come from organized crime, would she have said the same? Does no one see the criminality of what Sparkes Energy and other companies like ours do to the world, even if it’s not deemed “illegal” by government standards? Sure . . . there are tax incentives and propaganda and “investments” being made in renewable resources, but not nearly enough for a six-trillion-dollar global industry. There isn’t a day that goes by without seeing what some people more ideological than me consider environmental murder: entire forests being cut down, glaciers melting away, poisoned water from coal ash and radioactive leaks. Everyone knows what’s happening and yet we continue to gobble up the world’s resources like hungry little puppies. And I sit on a pile of wealth borne from it.
Over the next several diaries—I broke an antique screwdriver while trying to pop the lock on one of them (I’m hoping the screwdriver isn’t valuable, or Hans will have my head)—Celine seems more focused on school, her fledgling eBay business, her new antiquing blog, and dating than on me and my life choices. She’s still struggling, eating ramen noodles and canned tuna, but she’s doing what she wants and she sounds happier.
More hopeful.
I skim through the pages about her ex-boyfriend Bruce because I already know how that story ends and seeing how infatuated she was with him makes me want to throw the diary at the wall.
She talks about graduating and moving from NYU’s residence to share a one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn with a friend from school, paying for her share with a waitressing job until, nine months later, she finally lands an admin job at Vanderpoel. An insurance company and nothing glamorous, but she knows that with a bachelor’s in art history, she’s lucky they looked twice at her application. Plus, she figures working at an insurance company is good on her résumé, down the road. Of course she would have rather gone straight to her MA, but New York is expensive and she just can’t afford tuition. She has her future mapped out, though. She knows she wants to apply to Hollingsworth and that, based on what her brilliant friend, Hans, told her, they look more closely at graduates of Hollingsworth Institute of Art in their hiring process. I guess it doesn’t take a genius to figure that out.
So, she just needs to save sixty-eight thousand dollars for tuition fees. Or borrow it.
From a bank.
Not from her wealthy friend.
Up until this point, I’ve read her diary entries with an eager heart, though heavy at times.
But this diary, with its black, soft suede engraved letter C . . .
I need to stop now. To catch a breath, calm my shaking hands.
CHAPTER 10
Celine
July 12, 2012
I awake to a banshee’s screech.
“Not again,” I groan, stumbling as my legs get caught up in my sheet. I grab my winter boot on my way out to the living room. “Which way did it go?”
Patty points to the far corner of our kitchen, but makes no move to climb down from the piano stool wobbling beneath her weight.
I toss the shoe to the doormat, knowing it’ll be useless. The cockroach has sought refuge within the crack in the wall.
“That’s the third time this week. I’ve had it!” Patty cries out.
Last year we battled a mouse infestation. Now roaches. Between the two of us, I’ve somehow become the assigned vermin killer. I still haven’t figured out how that happened; I’m no less skittish. “You should get down off that stool before you break your neck.” I salvaged the claw-footed antique from someone’s trash a few weeks ago and replaced the missing screws, but it’s far from “good as new.”
She complies, wiping the light sheen off her brow with her forearm. We’ve been living in a constant state of sweat for the past three weeks, thanks to a scorching summer and a broken air-conditioning unit in our sixth-floor bedroom window. Our landlord said he’d take a look at it.
He also told us he’d get exterminators in, back in May.
“Hey Celine . . .” Patty bats her full lashes at me from her new spot, curled up on our couch—a corduroy hand-me-down from her older brother Gus that’s splitting along the seams and has no doubt seen college guy things we don’t ever want to know about.
Heaving a mock sigh, I drag my feet toward the kitchen.
“You’re the best!”
“I know.” Patty and I have been roommates for almost four years. Long enough to know that she gets up once a night between the hours of one and three for an ice-cold glass of milk, without fail.
“How am I going to survive in London without you?” she wails, accepting her drink.
“You won’t.” I flop down next to her. “So don’t go. Please.” I give her my best sad face.
“I have to. I can’t turn down an opportunity like this. It’s what I’ve been working toward.”
I pick at a loose thread in one of the cushions. We first met in college. She had a job lined up before she even graduated, at one of those up-and-coming advertising agencies. The kind that bounces your meager paycheck every once in a while and works you to the bone. But in just a few short years, and with Patty’s help, that ad agency landed enough key clients to make a real name for themselves. She’s been promoted to a director’s role and asked to relocate to London to help the fledgling office over there get their bearings.
While I’m ecstatic for her, I’m going to miss her terribly. The likelihood that we will drift apart when she’s gone is high. Patty lives for the moment and strives for the future; she’s never been good with keeping connections to her past.
“So come with me!”
My head flops back. We’ve had this conversation at least half a dozen times. “I’ve got a job at Vanderpoel.”
“As a gopher.”
“And plans for my master’s.”
“You can rack up seventy grand in debt getting a piece of paper over in England. They have schools there, too.”
Just hearing her say that number makes me cringe. I’ve been setting aside money every paycheck for over a year now and I barely have enough to buy textbooks. If I manage to squirrel away even half of that by the time I’m thirty, I’ll be surprised. “But Hollingsworth wants Hollingsworth Institute graduates.”
“That’s what Hans told you. You hope he’s right. Just like you hope he can actually get you a job.” I feel her knowing glare boring into the side of my face. Sometimes Hans likes to paint himself in a very fair light, to the point that you’d think people bow in his very presence. In this case, I hope he’s not stringing me along and that he can actually get me a job at one of the world’s top auction houses. They gave him one because he graduated at the top of his class, with impossibly high grades. He’s an actual genius on paper. It probably doesn’t hurt that his uncle is a renowned curator who currently works for the Guggenheim, and he comes from a long line of archaeologists and historians.
“I belong here. In New York City. In the same country as my mother.” Rosa Gonzalez would lose her mind if her twenty-five-year-old daughter moved across the ocean. It’s bad enough that I’m on the opposite side of the country, but she knows how much I love it here, so
she doesn’t guilt me about it. Too much.
Patty doesn’t have any rebuttal for that, as I expected. “Yeah . . . I guess.” She pauses. “Have you decided what you’re going to do about this place? We have to give notice next week if you’re not staying.”
“I’m not sure yet.” I can’t afford the rent on my own. It’s almost my entire month’s take-home salary. And I’m not going to find a cheaper one-bedroom, or even a studio, unless I leave the city completely. It already takes fifty-five minutes each way from this shitty apartment in Brooklyn to my office in Manhattan as it is.
“I can ask around. See who might be looking for a roommate,” Patty offers.
“Thanks.” I eye the one bedroom. I hope I don’t have to resort to sharing it with a complete stranger.
“Or . . .”
I turn to find her watching me with that look. “I can’t.”
“How many times do I have to tell you that it’s not that bad. Honestly!”
“I can’t.” The conviction I had in my voice the first time she suggested it eight months ago has faded. I’m afraid that desperation may finally be winning over.
“Yes, you can! Celine! Wouldn’t it be nice to not worry about how you’re going to pay bills? Wouldn’t it be nice to not go into major debt, just for school?”
“Yes, but . . .”
“Okay, look.” She shifts until she’s facing me head-on, her hair a mess of tendrils from the top knot she didn’t bother to take out earlier. “All I’ve ever had to do is wear a beautiful dress, eat delicious food, and drink martinis. You don’t even have to talk, really. You’re just arm candy, and then they drop you off in a town car at your door with a pile of cash. Nothing more. Nothing that you don’t want to do. I promise!”
How I ended up with a roommate and friend with such loose morals, I’ll never be able to explain. She started going on these “dates” almost two years ago now, an opportunity that arose after she ran into an old college friend who was putting herself through law school with these same “dates.” Patty wasn’t doing it to pay tuition, though. She just wanted to cover her bills and shop for clothes way above her pay grade, until her career in advertising took off. I told her she was crazy, but who am I to argue whether she needs a five-hundred-dollar purse when I spent my week’s grocery money on an antique china doll.
“You remember Carrie Seltzer from Human Psych?”
I frown. “She had ginger hair?”
Patty nods. “Doin’ it to pay for medical school.”
“Really?”
“Remember Sorcha Jackson?”
“The newspaper’s editor?”
“Columbia Journalism graduate now.”
I sigh. Patty knows how to work away at my defenses. “I just . . . can’t.”
She pouts. “I hate that I’m leaving you in the lurch like this.”
“Honestly, it’s okay. And you’re not.” I reach out and settle a hand on my friend’s knee. “You could have afforded to move to a much better apartment years ago and you stayed, because of me.”
She hasn’t given up on persuading me just yet. “At least try it once, this Saturday night, and see if you can handle it.”
“This Saturday?” As in two days from now?
“Yeah. Why? What big plans do you have? I mean, I know that Antiques Roadshow is on . . .”
I grin sheepishly. She knows me too well.
“Seriously. I have something lined up with a really nice guy. I’ll tell him I’m sick and you can go in my place. He won’t care.”
“I don’t know.”
“One date a week and you could have this palace all to yourself when I leave.”
We each scan the dumpy, five-hundred-square-foot roach-infested apartment before our eyes meet again.
We double over in laughter.
————
“I can’t believe you talked me into this.” I smooth the black silk over my abdomen. It’s one of Patty’s more subdued cocktail dresses, which she reserves for one of the many agency entertainment functions she has to attend throughout the year. We’re the same size, only my curves are much more pronounced, making this dress hover on the brink of scandalous.
“You look great,” she murmurs, catching a loose strand of hair with a shot of hairspray. “Just don’t eat too much or you might pop out of it.”
My laugh sounds wobbly, thanks to my nerves. “I’ll be lucky to keep anything down.”
“Well, try not to puke either. These guys pay a lot of money. They expect a certain pedigree. One that doesn’t puke all over them.”
The buzzer sounds, and I’m hit with the overwhelming urge to pee.
“You’ll be fine. Come on.” Answering the buzzer with “We’ll be right down!” she grabs her keys and leads me out the door in her signature flip-flops, tank top, and baggy shorts. “I went out with Raymond when he was in New York last time. He’s really nice. And filthy rich. Big-time into the oil business.”
Oil business. I wonder if the Sparkes would know him.
God, Maggie would literally fly all the way over from Africa and murder me if she knew I was doing this. Definitely one of those secrets I’ll take to my grave.
The archaic, musty-smelling elevator creaks and groans down six stories while Patty fills me in on sixty-nine-year-old oil tycoon Raymond Easton from Dallas, Texas, who lost his wife ten years ago to cancer and hasn’t remarried. “Don’t bring her up unless he does, but if he does . . .” Her face turns sad-puppy. “It’s so sweet, Celine. Oh my God! You can tell how much he loved her and misses her.” Her slender arms tense with the strength needed to open the old lobby doors. “Just be yourself and he’ll adore you. And, for God’s sake,” she gives me a little push toward the town car waiting to drive me to Manhattan, “make sure you smile!”
————
I climb the cracked concrete steps to the front door. Our building looks even shabbier now, in comparison to the travertine-and-glass venue I just spent the last four hours at, eating delectable food I couldn’t refuse despite my nerves and my binding dress, pacing my martinis to avoid getting drunk, and listening to industry chatter that made no sense to me.
Luckily, it didn’t matter that it made no sense because, as Patty promised, I wasn’t there for more than polite chitchat and arm decoration. I did exactly what she told me to do: follow his lead, answer his questions, and above all else, smile wide. The first hour, those things proved difficult, but I managed, and Raymond didn’t seem to mind. I admitted later that this was my first “companion outing” as he calls it.
I waited for him in the hotel lobby, at a private table under his name. And when a weathered man with white hair, a rotund belly, and a bulbous red nose approached, I was sure I’d made a terrible mistake. I was sure I couldn’t go through with it.
But he shook my hand and sat down, and just started rambling. He talked about his children—two sons—and his four grandchildren, and their latest report cards. He talked about his five-hundred-acre ranch and his seventeen horses and his three dogs. He talked about his business and about how he’s thinking of retiring.
He talked to me like he hadn’t had anyone to talk to in a long time.
Once we left for the event—an industry meet and greet of sorts—he gave me his arm and led me around. I watched and listened quietly as all kinds of guys in suits introduced themselves to him, lavishing him with compliments. In between, he’d lean in and tell me what they wanted from him. Invariably, it was always money. The question was only how much.
And when he walked me to the town car and bid me good night, he kissed my hand, told me my payment was waiting for me in the car, and asked if I’d consider another “companion outing” in a month’s time.
I smiled. And agreed.
Now I rush to my apartment, a war of relief, guilt, and curiosity swirling within me. Relieved that the night is over, guilty that this would kill my mother if she ever found out, and curious about the contents of the Tiffany-blue gift bag that was wait
ing for me in the car. I didn’t dare open it under the driver’s watchful eye.
I hope Raymond didn’t rip me off.
“How was it?” Patty exclaims as I push through the door and kick off those painful stilettos. She’s sitting on the floor, a series of storyboards sprawled around her, and what I know to be a homemade extra dirty martini at her lips.
“Okay. I guess.” I head straight for the bedroom to peel off the dress and replace it with a tank top and boxers, tossing the bag on my bed. When I’ve washed my face and brushed my teeth and delayed the inevitable for as long as possible, I finally hazard a look into the bag. Inside, I find the cash that was promised—five hundred bucks—plus an extra three hundred, plus a diamond necklace that’s got to be worth . . . I have no idea.
“Did he give you a little extra?” Patty hollers. “He usually does.”
“Uh . . .” I stare at the sparkles wordlessly. Is this okay? Is this appropriate? I mean, I guess some could argue that none of tonight was appropriate but . . .
“Let’s see!” Patty appears at my side. “Wow! Nice!” The smile on her face tells me she’s not entirely surprised. “He likes to buy jewelry. You know that rose-gold bracelet I wear out sometimes? Raymond gave me that.”
“This is just . . .” Four hours of hanging off his arm, eating, drinking, and looking like a queen, earns me eight hundred dollars and diamond jewelry?
She shrugs. “These guys have a lot of money and they like to spend it. This is nothing to Raymond, but he knows that it’s life-changing to you.”
I look at the pile of cash with a twisted sense of hope. Three nights like that a month and I could easily afford to stay here by myself. “So now what?”
“Now you pay twenty percent to the house. Of the original fee, of course. The rest is yours to keep. Just don’t say anything about it.” She winks. “I’ll give you the address to her place. You can drop it off tomorrow and see about getting added to the regular call list.” She wanders back to her work.
Leaving me to stare at a dozen sparkling diamonds.
And consider new possibilities.