Bad Kitty

by Michele Jaffe

  Weirdly, after all my unsuccessful looking, she was now the first person I saw. She was standing there with none other than the Fabinator, who had changed his swim trunks for a pair of jeans and a jacket that no doubt concealed his gun. But more astonishing—more astonishing even than the fact that the Fabinator had tied his hair back with a black bow. A BOW! Way to show fashion who’s the boss of it, Fabinator! You go!—was that Fiona Bristol was leaning against a stool next to him, laughing and smiling. Looking happy. As if there were nothing wrong.

  As if she had not been sobbing and saying she was terrorized and sounding suicidal just a few minutes before. Hadn’t she?

  It didn’t matter, I realized, since she looked fine now. I should have felt relieved but I was more confused. Something must have shown up on my face because Jack said, “Are you okay?”

  My eyes went back to him and I almost said, “no,” because the way he was gazing at me, DOWN at me, made me feel woobly and tingly and like I wanted to bare my soul to him. But I didn’t want to move too fast—probably a bare foot was a better place to start—so instead, I tried for a smile that I prayed didn’t make me look stupid or young (dimples do that) and said, “Yes, I’m fine. I, um, thought I saw one of my friends. But I was wrong.”

  He said, “Good. I’d be sorry to lose your company.”

  “You would?” I asked.

  “Of course. It’s not often one meets a genuine good Samaritan.”

  That was not exactly what I’d hoped he’d say. “I’m more like a disaster attractor-beam. Ask my father. I’m no good Samaritan.”

  “I beg your pardon. As I understand it, you ran off with the cat simply to be nice. Because the little boy shouted at you.”

  I shrugged and then I heard my mouth reply, “I guess I’m just a sucker for boys.” Which was 100 percent not what I meant it to say. Uh, monkeys? You’re so dead.

  But I decided it was okay when he laughed. This really, really nice laugh that made me think of maple syrup melting on hot waffles. He said, “Thank you, Jasmine. It’s been a long time since someone has made me laugh that way.” Like he really meant it and was harboring some deep inner trouble, which only I could help him out of.

  Preferably while helping him out of his shirt.

  His face got serious, and he cocked his chiseled, cheekboned head to one side. “But I thought you were the keeper of the cold shoulder. You seem very warm to me for an ice maiden.”

  “I am. I mean, I’m not. I—” I’d looked away from him again, hoping that might allow me to speak like a human being, but instead I caught sight of Alyson on the other side of the dance floor, furiously pushing her hair behind her ear with her left hand.

  Was left good or bad? I couldn’t remember. From the way she was leaning away from the guy, I guessed it was bad. Which figured. I meet the man of my dreams, act like an utter moron, and then have to leave him without having a chance to redeem myself. I said, “I’m sorry, but I’ve got to go.”

  “Of course. It looks like you spotted your friend. It was a pleasure to meet you.”

  “Ditto,” I said, and headed for Alyson.

  Ditto? What was I, seventy? And why was I helping Alyson, anyway? She would never have helped me. Especially if she were talking to a guy.

  And what a guy. I looked back over my shoulder. Jack was still standing at the edge of the dance floor where I’d left him, but he was staring intently off to one side and kind of frowning. He was even gorgeous as he frowned. Be still my heart.

  Then I noticed these two really pretty girls in the corner staring and pointing at him (did I mention he was hot? Like “Get the ice pack, I’ve got a first-degree burn” hot?), and I realized he was out of my league.

  Plus, Alyson needed help. And she did look pretty grateful when I tapped her on the shoulder and said, “Hi, Allie,” even though I know she hates to be called Allie.

  “Jas. Nice of you to drop by.”

  “Yeah, well—” How did one butt in? “I’m having a crisis.”

  The guy with Alyson, wearing wire-rimmed glasses and a button-down shirt said, “Can’t you see we two players want to be alone?” He looked like a wannabe Bill Gates, but talked like a wannabe hip-hop star. Which is not exactly a combination I’d recommend if you were placing an order at 1-800-Dream Date. He added, “’Less you’re interested in making it a threesome, sweet thang?”

  “No,” I said. “Thank you anyway.” I spotted Veronique nearby and I flagged her over. “There’s our other friend. We’ve got to go. Come on, Alyson.”

  The guy reached out to stop me, holding my dark arm next to Alyson’s paler one, and said, “You sure? A little chocolate on vanilla action. I could get into that.”

  “I beg your pardon?” I asked. Model Daughter, I told myself. Be a Model Daughter.

  “Oh, yeah. Have me some hot chocolate with whipped cream on top.” Veronique had wandered over by then, and he licked his lips, said, “Make that a double portion,” and pulled us closer to him.

  Alyson said, “Eeeeeew. Let go of us!”

  And for once I completely agreed with her.

  Even when she balled up the fist of her free arm, reached up, and punched him in the nose.

  Little Life Lesson 10: Violence is not the answer.

  Little Life Lesson 11: However, in books where it says punching an assailant in the nose will debilitate him, it’s true.

  Seven

  People are always surprising you. Take Alyson. She hadn’t seemed to like the guy that much when I walked up to them, and when we got in the down elevator she said, “I’ve never been so grossed out-slash-insulted in my life.”

  I nodded. “I know what you mean.”

  That’s when she looked at me like I’d grown extra heads. “Um, excuse me, what do YOU have to be grossed out about? I mean, he went from hitting on me to hitting on you. That is MORTIFYING.”

  Veronique nodded vigorously. “I was just telling Jas how surprised I am that guys—”

  “Uh, Veronique?” Alyson interrupted. “Were my lips moving? They were? Right. When my lips move, yours don’t.” She looked down at her hand. “Great. My knuckle is bleeding and I broke another nail. This is all your fault, Jas.”

  Now that was MasterCard.

  And then there was her nerd boyfriend, DJ Jazzy Bill Gates. He didn’t really look that likable to me. But it turned out, moments later in the lobby, that he knew a lot of people. People with muscles and thick necks. Including Bachelor Number Two from the bar. Who was now with a pack of like-minded individuals, following us through the lobby shouting, “You made a mistake, tall girl.”

  The three of us stayed slightly ahead of them to the front of the hotel. Where, mercifully, we found our limo waiting.

  Limo, yes. Driver, no.

  Screaming hordes? Right behind us.

  Alyson and Veronique took refuge in the back of the limo and hit the LOCK button, rolling down the window to say, “Go find the driver, Jas.”

  I should have left them there right then. Headed for the hills, made a life for myself as a mountain woman, living off the land, yodeling for tourists, and milking yaks. Or at least hopped in a cab and gone back to the hotel.

  But for some dumb reason, I felt like it would be wrong to leave them there. Plus, if I did, Alyson would tell her father who would tell my father and the Model Daughter scheme would be dead and gone. Deader and goner than it already was. So I turned around, praying that when I did, by some miracle, I’d see the driver. What I saw instead was one of the Screaming Horde Of Guys (SHOG) shoving a burly valet parker out of the way like he was a popsicle stick. Deciding this was the G-rated preview of the NC-17 treatment he had in store for me, I ran to the driver’s side of the limo and tried the door.

  It was unlocked. And the keys were in the ignition.

  I decided it was a sign.

  My plan, as I peeled out of the Rio driveway leaving the SHOG in my wake, was to go straight back to the Venetian.

  Only limos? While completely s
tocked to answer all your crystal decanter needs, are a bit light in the map department. Sure they have one of those electronic GPS direction locator units. But those are kind of finicky, it turns out. Like, one wrong button push and whammo!, they only speak Chinese.

  Oops.

  Little Life Lesson 12: If you have your cousin and her friend stand out the sunroof of your limo to give you navigational instructions, be sure that they aren’t facing backward to wave at the cute guys in the Porsche behind you when they tell you to go left or right.

  Little Life Lesson 13: Making U-turns in a limo requires some form of advanced super-driver training they don’t give you in regular driver’s ed. At least not at my school.

  Limos are kind of fun to drive, though. They have a smooth ride and much better pickup than you would think. Their brakes are also quite good.

  Which comes in handy if you find yourself surrounded on all sides by police cars and are forced to pull over onto the gravel shoulder of the highway.

  It turned out our limo driver had just gone to the bathroom, and boy was he surprised when he came out and found his ride gone. Surprised enough to call in a favor with a friend on the police force who issued an all-points bulletin on us.

  (For the record, at no point while extending the use of a hotel limo did Mr. Curtis specify that it was only for riding in. So there would really be no technical basis for a grand theft auto charge.)

  (And I seriously don’t see why I was threatened with a resisting arrest charge when I was not the one who, as the police report states, “promised to ‘give you cops a makeover you’ll never forget’ while menacing the officers with a pack of Bubble Yum and a cuticle scissor.”)

  (Nor was I the one who “attempted to inflict grievous bodily harm against Officers Knightly and O’Bannon with a pointed high heel, size seven, and a cell phone.” Since, among other things, I am the only potty-trained person in North America not to have a cell phone.)

  (And I wear a size ten.)

  Yes, Fates, I know. Ha ha. Get your laughs now.

  I would have said, once Officers Knightly and O’Bannon let us go merely with a warning to “never make yourselves visible to us again,” after a long cell phone chat with Veronique’s father—whose superpower, apparently, was to get his daughter both into clubs and out of legal jams—that this was one of the worst days of my life. I could not think of a way it could have been worse. I mean, I’d been mauled by a cat, a security guard, and some strangers at a bar. I’d almost died in my most embarrassing underwear. I’d been arrested two times. My attempt to be a Hallmark Card Model Daughter had been pretty much of a failure. And I had humiliated myself in front of the man of my dreams. Twice.

  But as I put on my Hello Kitty pajamas and got into bed, I couldn’t stop smiling.

  I’d met the One.

  And he was tall.

  I was so tired-slash-euphoric that I could barely string the sentences together in the email I wrote to Polly telling her about what had happened,2 but I knew she’d never forgive me if I didn’t send one. As it was, I fell asleep almost as soon as my head hit the pillow.

  Still, there is nothing like the sound of someone trying to break into your hotel room to jolt you out of even the deepest sleep.

  Eight

  At first I thought the scraping was a sound in my dream, but since my dream was about Jack and me on a deserted Caribbean beach eating ice cream sundaes, it didn’t quite fit.

  Neither did the distinctive sound of the door handle turning on the outside door of my room.

  I needed something to use as a weapon to protect myself. Polly always keeps a pair of stiletto heels by the bed for emergencies, but I can’t wear them because they make me too tall, and anyway, I’d probably hurt myself in the middle of the night. I knew there was a Bible in the night table and that seemed like the kind of weapon a penitent Model Daughter would use to protect her virtue.

  I took it and I crept out of bed. The way the room was laid out, there was a little entryway between the sleeping area and the front door. Off of that was the bathroom. I couldn’t hear anything over the sound of my breathing, so I held my breath as I pressed my back to the wall and peered around the corner toward the door.

  Nothing.

  With the Bible in one hand, I slid toward the bathroom, kicked the door open, hit the switch, and yelled, “Ha!”

  No one.

  I looked in the little separate room with the toilet in it. I looked in the closet. I even bent down and looked under the sink, even though I could see standing up that no one was there.

  I was alone in my room. The bolt on the door was locked. The security chain was still in place.

  I must have dreamed the noises.

  Then I looked at the floor. There, lying on the carpet, was a piece of paper. It was an envelope with the hotel name on it, the kind that came in the stationery set in the desk.

  JASMINE CALLIHAN

  ROOM 35017

  was written on the outside, so there was no question it was for me.

  I admit it, as I carried it and my trusty Bible to the desk near the windows, my hands were shaking, partially from being scared and partially because I kept thinking: What if it was a note from Jack?

  The curtains had been closed the night before by the hotel staff, and when I opened them, I was surprised to see it was already daytime. The clock on the desk read 7:19 as I took the piece of notepaper out of the envelope. It was mostly blank, except across the center where someone had written:

  STAY OUT OF IT,

  FOR YOUR OWN GOOD.

  A FRIEND

  How nice, I thought. I have a friend interested in my well-being.

  Not.

  What I thought was, “Stay out of what?” and then, “Someone is threatening me.” So when I heard footsteps behind me, I picked up the Bible and hurled it at the intruder.

  Who happened, unfortunately, to be my dad. Coming in through the door that connected our two rooms.

  “Bloody hell, Jasmine, what are you doing?” he said, catching the Bible. Before I could commend him on his outstanding reflexes (and I wasn’t even going to add “for an older gentleman”), he said, “Never mind. I don’t care what you are doing now. I only care what you did last night. Blast all, can’t you stay out of trouble for two hours together?”

  Which did not seem to mark this as the right time to tell him that I had a mystery correspondent concerned about my longevity. Or lack thereof.

  Pretending to stretch, I shoved the note in the elastic waistband of my pajamas. “Sorry, Dad, you scared me.”

  He was flipping the Bible over in his hands. “Were you reading this?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I was. To repent. For last night. Sometimes I like to do that.”

  “I’ve never seen you reading the Bible before.”

  “Well, you know, I like to think my literary tastes are a bit eclectic.”

  “I thought your literary tastes were limited to books like Introduction to Crime Scene Investigation and The Detective’s Handbook.”

  If my dad had ever wanted to try knocking me over with a feather, that would have been a good time to choose. I had no idea he even knew about those books. They were strictly on the No Read list, which the Thwarter uses to crush my dreams. I’d had to save my allowance for three months for each of them. And pull up a corner of the carpet to make a hiding place. This meant serious trouble.

  But then I remembered what Roxy and Tom’s older brother said when their parents caught him with pot in his sock drawer right out of rehab, and I saw a ray of hope. I looked my dad in the eye and said, “I’m just holding them for a friend.”

  Only after I said it did I recall that Mr. and Mrs. Hernandez hadn’t bought it.

  “Humpf,” my father said, or snorted. “We’ll talk about that later. Now, about the limo—”

  “I was bringing it back. I just got a little lost. I had to take it because these guys were chasing us after Al—”

  “Jasmine?”

>   “Yes?”

  “Stop talking. I do not want to hear another excuse about how something else ‘happened’ to you. About how you accidentally punched a man in the nose. I—”

  “What? I didn’t—”

  “I know all about it. Alyson told her parents. And we will deal with that at a future time. For now, your uncle thinks the entire situation is hilarious. He says he’s thrilled Alyson got out and had some fun.”

  My poor, poor misguided uncle. But what was bad news for the world—Alyson out sharpening her claws on the world’s collective couch leg—was good news for me. Because my father adored his younger brother. And if his younger brother wasn’t mad and wasn’t punishing Alyson, then I was in the clear. Although the fact that Alyson fobbed that right hook off on me smarted.

  “Not that I am happy about it, mind you,” my father felt forced to conclude. In case I suddenly thought that he had grown a new limb and filled it with Pop Rocks and kindness.

  “Don’t worry, I’m sure you’ll have a chance to ground me again soon,” I said.

  (But I was joking. Do you hear that, Fates? JUST JOKING.)

  (Little Life Lesson 14: The Fates have no sense of humor.)

  My dad looked at me for a loooooong time, one of those searching looks that make you want to start hopping around on one leg and flapping like a bird to make them stop. He said, “I sincerely hope not, Jas. And to see to it that there is at least a moment of peace around here, I would like you to stay close to Sherri! and me for the rest of the day.”

  “Sure, okay,” I said, and even my dad was surprised by how enthusiastic I sounded. He didn’t realize that I was figuring whoever had threatened me would keep their distance so long as I was near my parents.

  Or that I needed to get him out of the room for what I had in mind.