I was at least able to get a better look at him out on the street standing beneath a street light. His eyes were grayish blue, not so different from the color of my own. He was very clean shaven, and his hair was thick and straight, the kind of hair that girls always want. I had previously assumed that it had been dyed darker than its natural color because this guy’s skin was so pale, but up close it looked like it was his real hair shade. His eyebrows and eyelashes were the same dark, dark brown. He had a pierced lip – a tiny silver hoop through the lower left edge of his mouth – which kind of freaked me out.
“No one has ever thought my story was interesting before,” I informed him. “Where are you from?”
“New York,” he said.
“No, before,” I asked. “You have a little accent.”
“I was born in Russia,” he said. “We moved here from St. Petersburg when I was five.”
I shifted my weight around in a silly little dance that served as an attempt to keep warm. I hoped I hadn’t offended him by pointing out his accent, you know, in case he had worked hard to lose it or something. I was taking my exercise in not making assumptions about people very seriously and was analyzing everything I said to new people in my life with caution.
“Your accent is barely noticeable,” I assured him. “But intriguing.”
“Thank you,” he said. “I thought you had a very beautiful and memorable face when I first saw you. Honestly, I didn’t expect to ever see you again. And what about you? Where are you from?”
His funny, formal English was charming to me. It was always tough for me, moments such as this one, where I knew I was about to lie and was fully conscious of the sin I was about to commit. There was something about this guy in particular, his friendly face, the patience with which he spoke, the way he just kept looking into my eyes, that made me want to be completely honest with him. I am sure this sounds very corny, but out there on the street, with the snow starting to fall in heavier flakes around us, I would have wanted that conversation to last forever if I hadn’t been so darn cold.
“I’m from California,” I lied. “But I live here now. I work at an art supply store downtown. What about you? What do you do?”
He extended his hands to me, palms down, as if I was supposed to guess what that gesture meant.
“What do you…” the answer came to me like a doorbell ringing. “Oh, you’re a tattoo artist!”
“Yeah,” he said. “I didn’t ink these because you’d have to be crazy to do work on your own body, but I designed these.”
“Cool,” I said, kind of lying about thinking his tattoos were cool. The designs were impressive, but the only reaction I ever consistently had when someone asked me to check out their tattoos was ouch.
“What’s your name?” the guy asked.
He looked right at me with those big blue eyes – almost right through me – and I felt so exposed that I was just about to forget the entire past month of my life and say Grace when—
“Get back in here! It’s freezing!” Jacinda had thrown open the back door of the club and the vibrating bass from the club exploded out into the street. She was motioning for us to come back inside.
Upon seeing Jacinda, my bashfulness took over and I blushed furiously. Who did I think I was, flirting out on a dark street in Brooklyn with a mysterious stranger? A mysterious tattooed stranger? I remembered being mortified when Mama had told me that I wasn’t old enough yet to wear red nail polish and the feeling that I had, being interrupted by Jacinda, was the same.
“I’m freezing,” I giggled at the guy, and he smiled warmly.
“Eric’s going to have my hide if I bring you home sick,” Jacinda complained, pulling the door closed behind us as we re-entered the club.
As soon as we were back inside, being deafened by the music, I felt the guy put his hand gently on my shoulder.
“Tell me your name.”
“Gigi,” I turned and shouted into his ear in the hope that he would hear me.
Or not. It was a very scary prospect to me that this guy might actually find me again. As much as I was curious about finding a boyfriend and being the object of male attention, that whole world was entirely foreign to me. My parents were downright embarrassing when it came to talking about sex.
Don’t get me wrong. I definitely wanted to wait until marriage. But I wasn’t sure how waiting ¼til marriage factored in with all the other stuff like holding hands and kissing. There was a giant divide in the girls at Treadwell; girls who talked a lot about sex and girls who avoided the topic under all circumstances.
“Gigi,” he said, as if the name was precious to him. “I’m Felix.”
Felix. Somehow the name, although totally weird, was perfect for him.
“I’ll see you around,” he said.
I wanted to urge him not to go so soon, but I didn’t really have anything else to say. Besides, Jacinda was dragging me out onto the dance floor.
Hours later, when we were on the M train headed back to lower Manhattan, her curiosity about Felix was endless. Around us, the snow-covered rooftops of Brooklyn drifted slowly past the windows of our train until we stopped above ground on the elevated track for a long while due to the heavy snowfall.
“Who was that guy sweatin’ you at the club?” she asked.
Every once in a while the conductor came on the loudspeaker system and told us that we should stay calm and not worry, that work men were clearing the track. But that was probably a huge lie; it was an insane hour. I was sleepy. Thankfully, I didn’t have to work the next day. Jacinda had magically produced a bag of Combos from her purse and we were snacking away like maniacs, starving after being on our feet for so many hours. Another great thing about Jacinda was that she always had snacks.
“Just a guy,” I said, but my silly smile gave me away.
“He looked like he wanted to hit you over the head with a club and drag you back to his cave,” Jacinda teased. “So what’s the deal? Do you like him?”
“I like him,” I admitted. I never, ever would have thought I’d be crushing on a guy with tattoos and a lip ring, but then again, I never would have thought a guy like that would be seeking me out for conversation in a nightclub packed with other girls. I was very curious about his life, but what was the point in wondering? The city was huge. The chances of us running into each other three times had to be highly unlikely.
“So are you gonna get with him, or what?”
“Jacinda!” I exclaimed.
She exploded into childish giggles.
“I don’t even have his phone number,” I said, hoping to rid of her of the idea that I was going to “get” with anyone.
“Girl, you need to work on your game,” she said, swatting me. “That boy woulda probably put a diamond ring on your hand tonight if you’d asked for one. He was starin’ at you like you were a Thanksgiving turkey and he hadn’t eaten in a week. All you white girls like them nerdy emo boys. Not me. I want a man who looks like he can fight a tiger with his bare hands.”
I highly doubted Orlando had ever fought any tigers with his bare hands.
Just then, her cell phone made its texting vibration sound. She immediately pulled it out of her jacket pocket and clucked her tongue. “Well, guess who’s still awake.”
“Oh, Jacinda, you can’t let him come over now. It’s four in the morning!”
“His goose is cooked, and he don’t even know it yet,” Jacinda said, tucking her phone back into her coat pocket. “I gotta find myself a man who picks me up from work in a nice heated car and takes me out to fancy restaurants. You, too. Let this be a lesson to you, Little G. Don’t ever make excuses for a man.”
I smiled at the sound of her calling me by the nickname that my brother had used on me since early childhood. I wondered how Jacinda had ever gotten to be so, so cool.
It was so late at night, and the trains were in such a state of disorder because of the strange snowfall, that Jacinda crashed at our apartment. By the time we got
back to Chinatown, the sky was pink with morning light and the neighborhood was already starting to deliciously smell like coffee. Aaron was already sound asleep, his snoring audible through the wall in my room.
“Sorry, I don’t have furniture,” I whispered to Jacinda as I spread out my blankets on the floor for us both.
“Whatever, Gi, you guys got your own place!” she exclaimed. “Do you know how mad cool this is? I would be out of my mind if I could move out of my mom’s apartment.”
We grew very sleepy immediately, the snowflakes falling from the sky visible through my bedroom window.
“Stop breathing on me, girl. You got some bad pepperoni pizza breath,” Jacinda complained hoarsely.
“Sorry,” I said, and rolled over. Brushing teeth at that hour hadn’t been a priority.
I stared out my window at the graffiti painting on the wall across the gangway. Losing myself in that mysterious wedding portrait was how I frequently drifted off to sleep, the distant smile of the groom imprinted on my memory. The couple’s expressions, the groom’s hand on his bride’s shoulder, had become so dear to me. I wondered about their story often, and wished they would tell it to me in my dreams at night.
A few minutes later, Jacinda stirred again.
“Dang, your brother can snore,” she muttered as we were both on the edge of sleep. “I’m gonna have to get real with him about nasal strips tomorrow.”
I was thankful that Jacinda was spending the night. Her friendship made my life in New York all the more real, to employ her favorite expression. Our apartment felt safer when she was there. Nothing bad ever happened when Jacinda was around.
The last thoughts on my mind before I drifted off completely to sleep were of Felix. I still couldn’t figure out how or why he had remembered our first encounter on the train. I knew I was probably going to never see him again… but I was surprised at how sad that notion made me feel.
My job at Prekin and the routine of getting up every day and going there to work the cash register quickly banished high school from my mind. The work was somewhat mindless, but not hateful. By my fourth week of working there, high school seemed like a distant dream that may or may not have ever been real. Balancing out my drawer each morning and night when my shift began and ended was such a universe away from reading the Classics and falling asleep in Spanish II that I could really not imagine ever going back to school. After living on my own in New York for a month, squirreling away whatever money I didn’t absolutely need for food and subway fare in the kitchen drawer where Aaron and I were putting funds aside for December rent, the luxury and ease of boarding school seemed pitiable. My former classmates seemed very ignorant and naïve to me with my month of experience as an adult.
There was nothing at Treadwell that had been preparing me for real life. Within four weeks of real adult life, everything about my world at Treadwell was like a joke. Uncomfortable gym suits and volleyball matches in the gymnasium every single day during cold weather? Ha! Struggling through Spanish homework, racking my brains to do complicated trigonometry… it all seemed useless when it came right down to scanning canvas and paintbrushes all day.
Surely, I didn’t want to work at an art store for the rest of my life. But it was definitely easy to see how people could get stuck in a lifetime of entry-level work. The idea of trying to balance my forty hours of work each week with classes somewhere was insane. Of course I had grown up totally expecting to go to a four-year college and study art, but watching my colleagues at the store struggle with tuition and trying to cram in their required reading during shift hours did not seem appealing.
Plus, working at an art store had its perks. I got a ten percent discount on our merchandise and from my first paycheck I bought a moleskin notebook, on sale, and two fine-point black pens so that I could sketch. My laptop may have been in a dumpster somewhere in Chinatown, but nothing could prevent me from doodling my heart out the old-fashioned way. I began carrying my sketchpad with me everywhere, drawing portraits on the subway, around Chinatown, and one afternoon, I even walked all the way to Battery Park to draw the Statue of Liberty from over the cold waves of the river.
Life had been going so smoothly for so many weeks that I should have known God was going to step in and mess things up for me.
I had worked an early shift and headed to the break room in the back at four in the afternoon to clock out. My pink denim jacket, which I was pathetically still layering with sweaters despite the frigid temperatures, was hung in a locker along with my canvas bag. When I walked in, I noticed Mark fidgeting in his own locker. I was ridiculously nervous around Mark. I knew he was technically my boss and he shouldn’t be flirting with me, but he was teasing me and poking me all the time.
Which, of course, I kind of loved.
But I knew I wasn’t supposed to love it, and my paycheck was more important to me than getting attention from Mark. I already knew that he had a girlfriend at Pratt where he was studying painting. She was impossibly beautiful and stopped by the store to visit Mark often. She had a million body piercings and light brown hair twisted into dreadlocks that hung to her waist. They lived together way out in Brooklyn somewhere. So I had been doing my best to avoid one-on-one time with him in tight spaces during my shifts at work. There were plenty of other people at my job with whom I could hang out so that I didn’t seem like a total anti-social freak for avoiding him. I usually ate my lunch in the break room with Eliot and Dianne on days when they worked; they were both hilarious theater students at NYU.
“Oh, uh, hey, Gigi,” Mark said, jumping strangely when he heard me opening my locker behind him.
If he hadn’t acted so surprised to see me, or immediately angled his body so that I couldn’t see what he was trying to shove into his backpack, I probably would never have even suspected anything strange was going on. But unfortunately for us both, he started talking, and implicated me in sneaky activity.
“Look,” he said, “you know I go to Pratt and I can barely afford my tuition. I really need this stuff to finish my thesis, OK? Please don’t say anything to Jim about it.”
I was stupefied. I hadn’t even observed what he was up to, but he stepped aside to show me that he had crammed several bottles of liquid gold leaf into his backpack. I was immediately panicky. Why had he shown me? I didn’t want to know that Mark was stealing from the store. Stealing inventory was just as bad as stealing cash from the register. Each of those bottles cost almost seven bucks and there were at least six or seven bottles in Mark’s bag. It wasn’t like forty bucks in stolen gold paint was such a huge amount of money that the store was going to go bankrupt, but Jim would definitely notice this amount of inventory missing because we didn’t sell much liquid gold leaf.
I must have stayed frozen in that position, with one hand in my locker reaching for my coat, and my jaw hanging open, for a solid minute while I tried to figure out what to do. I didn’t want to tell Mark I wouldn’t rat him out. I mean, I obviously wasn’t going to go straight to Jim’s office to tattle, but safeguarding lies made me really uncomfortable. If anyone ever asked me directly if I knew anything about missing gold leaf, I would totally not be able to convincingly lie about it. Promising Mark that I would lie for him would in itself be a lie, because I wasn’t sure that if I had to make good on the promise that I could.
I hated myself in that moment for being such a weirdo. Anyone else would have said, no biggie, dude, and would have forgotten about it. But I couldn’t just look the other way. I had been raised to believe that intentionally doing dishonest things was unacceptable, and no amount of living away from my parents was going to undo my belief system.
He zipped up his backpack and set it back in his locker. My hesitation must have made him nervous.
“Come on, Gigi,” Mark said, taking a step closer to me. He took my face in his hands and pinched my chin a little bit with his thumb. It was such a downright affectionate and sexy gesture that I got a little weak in the knees.
I mean, I
’m not an idiot. I knew he was going into flirt overdrive so that I would agree to cover for him. But I was impervious to his motivation. Close bodily proximity to any guy as handsome as Mark was enough to make me feel feverish, whatever his reasoning happened to be.
“My girlfriend’s cat was diagnosed with a tumor and I had to come up with two grand last month for emergency surgery,” he said meekly, looking deeply into my eyes. “I could barely pay rent this month and my thesis project is due on December 15. I mean, Ines and I have been eating pancakes made of Bisquick for the last week. I know it’s lame, but I really can’t spend the forty bucks to buy the paint I need. Please don’t say anything. I’ll run the purchases through checkout on Friday when we get paid. Jim never has to know.”
In the weeks that followed, I would seriously regret not going immediately to Jim that afternoon and tattling my heart out. But I couldn’t have known that afternoon what kind of jam my silence was going to put me and my brother in, in the not-too-distant future.
I walked home slowly and wove around SoHo taking an indirect route back to Chinatown. I stopped at an insanely fancy chocolate shop and wasted five bucks on a cup of hot chocolate, so rich that I could barely force it down my throat. It was freezing outside, just twenty-four degrees, too cold to snow. Aaron and I had to pay rent the following week, which meant it was going to be pretty tight for us financially and we probably wouldn’t be able to do anything for Thanksgiving more indulgent than maybe buying a pie at the grocery store. A big glistening turkey with sweet potatoes and marshmallows, stuffing with sausage and dried cherries, and acorn squash baked with nutmeg like Anna would have made for us at home was so far from the reality of what our Thanksgiving dinner was going to be that year, it made me want to cry. In addition to rent being due, neither of us had a winter coat, and that was definitely becoming urgent.
Yet as dire as our own finances were, I had never considered stealing anything from anyone.
Even in the days before I got my first check from Prekin, when I had walked to work with nothing in my stomach and ate a dry bagel for lunch (sixty cents from the deli on the corner), I still hadn’t even allowed myself the option of taking something that didn’t belong to me. Not even pocketing an apple or a granola bar from Whole Foods that would probably never, ever be noticed by anyone. There were days when I hunched over my cash register waiting for customers to check out when I could hear my stomach rumbling angrily and even still, I didn’t allow myself to think about going to the break room to scarf down someone else’s yogurt or ham sandwich out of the fridge on the sly.
The Believer's Daugher - [A Treadwell Academy - 02] Page 15