I focused on Geisler. I couldn’t afford any more distractions.
Chapter 2
That evening, as I pushed through the main doors—carefully, this time—and plodded down the steps, I felt like my brain had been stretched out and twisted into a pretzel. Three hours of lectures and then a long afternoon of practice, working at the Brahms until I swore I could hear it playing in my head everywhere I went, had nearly broken me. My eyes were bloodshot and sore from staring at music and my spine was a knotted mass of pain.
I need a billionaire to give me a massage. Maybe Natasha will loan me Darrell.
Footsteps behind me. A clatter of heels and then, with a rush of perfume and a silken swish of long, auburn hair, Jasmine was snuggled up against me, an arm around my shoulders.
I stopped my trudging and looked back at the icy steps in disbelief. I’d had to be careful even in my sneakers; Jasmine had just bounded down them in three-inch heels. How did she do that? I could barely even walk in any heel over a couple of inches…which was a shame, because they would have helped my height.
“Can I get changed at your place?” Jasmine asked.
“Changed?” Then I remembered we were going out. I was exhausted. “Actually, I think I just want to go home and pull the covers over my head.”
“Nope. Not an option. We need to get you out, before you disappear into a practice room and we lose you forever.” She pulled me forward and I started walking.
I really didn’t want to go out, but I’m not good at saying “no” to people. Especially Jasmine. Out of all my friends, she’s the most like a sister—or how I imagine a sister should be, since I’m an only child. A junior year actress, she looks like she was born for the screen. I don’t just mean she’s beautiful—she is, but that isn’t it. It’s that she’s eye-catching. When she walks into a room, you can’t not look at her—men and women alike. For starters, she has thick red hair almost down to her waist that she either wears in big, pre-Raphaelite curls or in a super-sleek straight curtain down her back. Secondly, she has these huge green eyes that can be innocent and shocked or incredibly filthy, depending on what she’s saying. And finally she has the body. She’s curvy, and I don’t mean that as a euphemism. She has an honest-to-God hourglass figure and she makes the most of it. Guys in particular stop and stare.
I sometimes busked for charity as part of a string quartet in Central Park. One Saturday the previous summer, we were having an okay day with maybe fifty dollars in the hat. Jasmine showed up in a green summer dress that showed quite a bit of cleavage and did nothing more than sit on the grass listening to us. We made three hundred dollars in the next hour, the crowd swelling by the second.
She was the anti-me, beautiful and confident. Maybe that’s why we got on so well.
“Fine,” I told her. “One drink at Flicker.”
A particularly cruel gust of wind lashed at us and I pulled my coat around me. I realized that Jasmine was in a light autumn jacket that stopped at her waist. She wasn’t just snuggling up to me to be cute.
“What are you wearing?” I asked. “You’ll freeze!”
“Not if we hurry up and get to your place.” She towed me along.
I tried to hurry, but no one moves fast with a cello strapped to their back.
“Why can’t you just leave it at the academy?” she asked, for what must have been the hundredth time since I’d known her.
I looked at her blankly. “How would I practice at home?”
Jasmine shivered and gave me a very strange look. “Karen, in all seriousness, you need to get out more.”
***
When I asked to move to New York so I could attend Fenbrook, my dad argued and grumbled and moaned about how Boston was better and then, when he finally saw that it was the only option, he rented an apartment for me. He didn’t wire me the rent money or help me pick out a place, he just dropped off the keys and told me where I’d be living for four years.
I know, I know—poor little rich girl. Don’t get me wrong, I’m very grateful for it. But it did demonstrate how our relationship worked.
The place he’d picked was in a nice neighborhood, because he wanted me to be safe. But it was a one bedroom apartment, because he didn’t want me to be distracted by anyone, and it was several stops on the subway from any of the areas popular with students, because he wanted me well away from “the party scene” (as if I’d ever go to a party anyway).
It was great, and very generous of him, and not having to pay rent meant that I was one of the few students at Fenbrook who didn’t have to work a part-time job (another thing he’d never allow). But the place never felt like mine. He’d even furnished it himself, which meant that—just like at home—there was no television (I’d been the only kid at school with a music score on their lunch box instead of Elmo or Batman). In a tiny show of defiance, I was saving up to buy a TV, though I knew I’d have to find somewhere to hide it when he visited.
We trudged in out of the cold and Jasmine gasped as the warm air hit her. “You have your heating come on before you’re even home?” she asked in disbelief.
“Isn’t that the idea of a timer?”
She sank into the leather couch with a groan of pleasure, long auburn hair trailing languidly over the edge. You could have pointed a camera at the scene and you’d have had a furniture store commercial right there. “Sure. But no one actually does it. What if you’re late home or you go straight out? You’d have wasted all that money.”
“Good point.” I didn’t like to mention that all the bills went straight to my dad. I had no idea how much the power cost. I had no idea how much the apartment cost, for that matter. He’d given me everything I needed.
And he could take it away just as easily.
Something occurred to me, looking at Jasmine luxuriating on the sofa. “What are you going to change into?” I asked. She was in jeans and a sweater—not her usual going-out attire.
“Oh, it’s in here.” From her purse, she pulled out a wad of black fabric no bigger than my hand, then let it unroll. “Ta da! What do you think?”
“Where’s the rest of it?”
“It’s stretchy,” she told me defensively. “It looks bigger on.”
“Uh-huh. Well, I’m going to take a quick shower. Make yourself at home.”
In the shower, I turned the temperature up to almost scalding and the force up to the “Massage” setting, hoping that it would help unkink my back. I did that a lot, after a hard day playing. I liked to imagine that it was a big, blond guy with huge biceps massaging me. In my mind, his name was Sven and we sat in his cabin in Sweden looking out at the pine trees while he worked oil into my back.
It occurred to me that that was a lot of detail to get from a shower setting. Maybe I did need a boyfriend.
Connor swam up into my mind and I yelped in shock, turning and catching the spray right in my face. When I’d stopped spluttering and the jet was safely hammering away at my stomach, I carefully allowed myself to go back to the thought.
What was he doing in my brain? I wasn’t interested in Connor—in fact, he was the exact opposite of everything I was interested in. If I was going to date, they’d need to be reliable, and serious, and…safe.
Why did my list of requirements for a guy sound like a Volvo commercial?
Connor didn’t have any of that going for him. He didn’t have anything going for him, except for his looks.
If you’re into that sort of look, I told myself quickly. Which I’m not.
I realized the shower was turning into an epic, so I cranked off the water, toweled off and padded through to the bedroom to find something to wear. I knew Jasmine wasn’t going to let me out of the apartment in my jeans and sweatshirt, but my wardrobe was…limited. I finally found a dark red blouse and a black skirt, and pulled out the one pair of heels I dared to wear. They were only a couple of inches high, so I could walk in them. Just.
I found Jasmine in the kitchen, wearing the dress and making a sandwich.
Only that doesn’t really describe the scene.
The dress…it looked as if someone had drawn a line across her breasts a millimeter north of her areolae, drawn another line across her thighs a hairs-breadth below the bottom of her ass cheeks, then colored the space in between with a black Sharpie.
The dress, though, paled in comparison to the sandwich. It started off normally, with bread and then ham, and then cheese, and then another slice of bread. But then it seemed to forget to stop, and there was a layer of lettuce and some bacon strips and tomato and then more bread and some cold chicken and pickle and…I watched as Jasmine emptied a bag of chips to form the top layer and crunched a final slice of bread on top. The thing was a foot high.
She turned around as she heard me and beamed, then looked guiltily down at the sandwich. “Um…this is okay, right?”
“Of course!” I sat down at the table and watched as she worked her way through the thing. She ate breathlessly, as if she hadn’t had food in a month.
“Jasmine….” I asked slowly, when she was done. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing!” She licked mayo off a finger. “I was just hungry.”
I wasn’t great at social stuff, but I wasn’t stupid either. I gave her a look.
“Okay, I skipped lunch,” she told me.
I kept looking at her.
“And breakfast.”
I sighed. “I know you’re busy with auditions, but you have to make time to eat. I know you think I’m boring, but—” I saw something in her expression. “What?”
She stared at the table.
“Jasmine, do you not have money for food?!” I asked, horrified.
She raised big, guilty eyes to me. “It’s not like I spent it on booze and weed,” she told me. “I just—I don’t make much, and I had three auditions this month, and all of them were way across town and I had to get a cab for one of them because it was nowhere near the subway and none of them panned out so they just soaked up money and my landlord’s an asshole and—” She stopped and took a deep breath, and I could see the beginning of tears creeping into her eyes.
“Stop,” I told her. I shook my head in dismay. “Idiot.”
She sniffed. “For running out of cash?”
“For not telling me.” I went to my bedroom and dug for the little tin box in the bottom of my underwear drawer. I didn’t actually have that much money—yes, my father paid my rent and bills, but I didn’t see any of that money and he didn’t let me have a part-time job, so cash was tight. He gave me an allowance to live on—enough for groceries and the occasional item of clothing, if I was careful. I’d been eking out the money each month and squirreling away what I could, and had saved three hundred dollars towards a TV.
I marched back into the kitchen and gave her the wad of notes. “Here.” She opened her mouth to argue. “No. You’re taking it. And it’s a gift, not a loan. I don’t want it back.” When do I have time to watch TV, anyway?
Jasmine looked at the money and then at me. “Thank you,” she said at last.
“Thanks for being friends with a weirdo like me.” And then we were hugging and I very nearly started crying myself, so I squeezed her quickly and changed the subject. “That dress doesn’t look bigger on.”
Jasmine blinked back her own tears and looked down at herself, then at me. “Well, at least I don’t look like I came straight from the office.”
I examined my blouse and skirt. “It’s smart,” I told her.
“You look like a secretary. At least undo a button.”
I gave her a mock glare, but undid the top button of my blouse. It wasn’t like it made much of a difference anyway, with my chest. Maybe Jasmine had been in line ahead of me, and the boob gods had given her both our shares.
“Great. Let’s go.” Jasmine started to pull on the same light jacket she’d worn before.
“Wait, seriously? You’re planning to go out like that?” The dress left her bare up to her thighs. “You’ll freeze!”
She shrugged and indicated my sensible winter coat. “Trendy as your polar explorer special is, I can’t afford one.”
I had an idea. “Wait here.”
I went to my bedroom and rummaged in my wardrobe. Minutes later, I was back with a full-length snow white fur coat.
“What the fuck?!” Jasmine asked. “How much money do you have, and how many baby seals did you have to club to death to make that?”
“It’s not real fur—it’s from a thrift store. And it’s not mine! Don’t you remember it? It’s the one you wore in freshman year for the play about the Russian oligarch. You were the mistress.”
Her brow furrowed as she turned the coat over in her hands. “Yeah…Svetlana. I vant to go to America! But what’s it doing in your closet?”
I shrugged. “Afterwards, the girl doing costumes said they might need it if they ever staged the play again, but she didn’t have any room to store it, so….”
“You’ve been keeping it in your closet for three years just in case?! Karen, you’re too…nice.”
“I own about three outfits. It’s not like I need the space.”
She pulled on the coat, which reached down to her ankles. On anyone else it would have looked ridiculous but, with her long red hair and the tiny black dress, she just about pulled it off. She hugged me, which was like being cuddled by the Abominable Snowman.
“I don’t deserve a friend like you,” she told me. “I need to do something nice for you.”
“Let me stay in?” I suggested hopefully, my voice muffled by the fur. “I could do some practice….”
She released me and marched me out the door. “Not that.”
***
We met Natasha and Clarissa at Flicker. Dan had come along, too, on the proviso that he obey our no-boyfriends rule.
Flicker’s known for three things. The first is that, like Harper’s, the bar staff is almost entirely made up of Fenbrook students. The second is that the walls have screens showing random movie clips, without the sound. The third is that all the cocktails are named after movies, and they range from the fairly safe to the I-no-longer-remember-my-own-name.
“I’m going to have a Panic Room,” Clarissa announced. As usual, she was wearing something incredibly expensive and stunningly tasteful: a deep green top and a diagonally cut skirt. With her blonde hair and perfect make-up, you could have dropped her straight into a Vogue cover shoot.
“Don’t,” said Natasha, who worked at Flicker a few nights a week and so was an expert. “It’s just a Morello cherry floating in gray sludge. Barely a shot. Have a Moulin Rouge or something.”
“I’m not having a Moulin Rouge. It comes with pineapple and sparklers and a goddamn plastic elephant. It’s…”—Clarissa looked at Jasmine’s dress—“tacky.”
Jasmine stuck her tongue out at her.
I studied the menu. “I think I’ll have a Mamma Mia.”
Everyone groaned. “That barely has any alcohol in it!” said Dan. “It’s mostly marshmallow fluff. At least have a Pretty Woman!”
I sighed. “Okay, okay—a Pretty Woman. Nat?”
Natasha pursed her lips. “I don’t know. Something like The Godfather.”
A wave of dead silence expanded out from her. People at the table next to us stopped talking. No one had The Godfather.
Nat looked around her, spooked. “Something like The Godfather,” she repeated. “Not the actual Godfather. Obviously.”
We all relaxed.
***
A half hour later, I was sitting with my back to the room when I heard the door to the street crash open. A blast of cold outdoor air froze my ankles. Three male voices started singing—an old love song from the nineties, with the notes flattened out by alcohol. In their heads, I’m sure they sounded great.
“Shut the door!” yelled someone.
The voices came closer, moving towards the bar. Actually, if you ignored the slurring, one of the voices didn’t sound too bad, its Irish lilt making it stand out from the rest. I g
roaned inwardly as I realized who it was.
Conversation at our table had died when the singing started. It sounded like the same had happened across most of the bar—it was impossible to ignore, since you’d have to yell to talk over it. I could feel the irritation building inside me. We’d come for a quiet drink, and he had to burst in and spoil things, not just for us but for everyone in the bar. I hated drunk people.
They finished their song, and there was applause. I rolled my eyes. Why were people encouraging them?
I realized that Jasmine was one of the ones clapping. She caught my look. “What? They’re not bad.”
I kept my voice low. “They’re drunk.”
“So?” Jasmine leaned across to Natasha. “Would,” she murmured, looking at someone behind me.
I couldn’t resist turning around, even though I knew who it was. Connor Locke was standing at the bar, talking to a busty, blonde-haired girl who was serving. Probably asking for her phone number. Connor had two other guys with him, guys I didn’t recognize from Fenbrook.
I turned back to the table. “Why?” I asked Jasmine.
“Are you kidding? Look at him!”
I sighed and took another look. He was turned half away from me, his leather jacket pulled tight around his waist as he twisted, showing off his wide, muscled back. I hadn’t really noticed that before. Or—what Jasmine had probably been focusing on—the fact that his jeans were snug over his firm, athletic ass.
There was a mirror on the other side of the bar, and I glanced at it, wondering if I could get a glimpse of his face. Only to find him staring straight back at my reflection.
I whipped back around to the table, hoping he hadn’t noticed.
“He’s at Fenbrook, right?” Clarissa asked. “Music.”
“I barely know him,” I said quickly.
“Karen!” Connor’s voice behind me. He was suddenly looming over our table. I mentally willed the others to circle the wagons and block him out, but of course they slid their chairs back and turned and smiled. Dan, who’d been sitting next to me, had slipped away—probably chatting to some cute actor—and that had opened up a convenient gap for Connor to slide into.
In Harmony Page 3