“I was fine with our life before.”
“Callie—”
“So—you want me to loan Anna a dress?”
“Yes, Callie. And we need to impress them—it’s important for Dad’s business, and for mine. They’re from The Fund.”
Somehow, whenever my mom mentions the hedge fund my dad works for, I hear the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in my mind: fund-fund-fund-fund.
“Some of these people might want to invest in Scent With a Kiss,” Mom went on. “We don’t want Anna to be embarrassed. Everyone else will be dressed up.”
So what could I say? I said okay.
But then I had to explain the whole situation to Anna, and I could tell that her feelings were hurt. And I have no idea if she would have been embarrassed to wear her jeans at the Pie Soiree, but I can tell you that she was embarrassed in my green dress that was two sizes too big for her, since Anna is a twig and I am more like a log.
Still, though, she tried to be friendly and chatted with this one fiftyish woman wearing black leather pants and a black sweater. Anna went on and on about her favorite holiday movie, the underrated classic Jingle All the Way, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the woman said that she would have to stream it for her grandchildren. So I thought that was very good, but later, my mom pulled me aside and told me that the woman was on the board of Dad’s hedge fund and that Anna should not have been talking to her about Jingle All the Way. And I am not sure, but I think Anna overheard my mom. All I know is that she was supposed to stay the whole weekend, but instead she went home that night, after the Pie Soiree. She said she wasn’t feeling well.
She left my dress carefully folded on the end of my bed. Anna hugged me good-bye before she left, but we were both awkward, like we had forgotten how to use our arms.
The good news was that my mom thought the Pie Soiree was a huge success. Two people said they might be able to help her soap company.
Anyway, so I am thinking about this as Cassius sits there, eating cookies and chatting about antiques with my grandmother. He is clearly from here—from the Upper East Side. My mother would probably love him. He clearly has “the life we are trying to manifest.”
Whatever that means.
CHAPTER NINE
In which the heroine’s friends come to her aid (sort of)
WHEN I REACH MY apartment building, I nearly stop in my tracks because sitting right there on the black leather couch in the lobby are Zelda and Min. Uggh. Why is everything going wrong all at once? Hasn’t anyone ever told Murphy that his law totally sucks? I try to turn around, but it is too late, they have seen me, and Min holds up a small brown shopping bag and calls, “Callie!”
“Hey, you guys,” I say as they leap up to hug me. I am hugging them back and trying to peek out of the sides of my eyes to see if my parents are around. I am very lucky, because the doorman on duty is Ivan. His English isn’t so great, so I am hoping he will not bother trying to listen in on whatever incriminating thing my friends are about to say regarding school and whatnot. “What, uh, what are you doing here?”
“I made you soup!” Min says. “I used that recipe that Taylor Swift gave you!”
“Oh. Great. Yeah, Taylor, uh . . . she makes the best soup.” I sniff the package. Actually, the soup doesn’t smell horrible. I got the recipe from Tastealicious.com, which my mom uses a lot for recipes. She started calling the site “her friend,” and then I started calling it “Tay-Tay,” as in, “Did you get this recipe from Tay-Tay?” So when Min asked about my lunch last week, I told her the recipe was from “Tay-Tay,” and Zelda was standing right there, and she said, “‘Tay-Tay?’ Like, Taylor Swift?” and she sounded like she was joking. So then I thought that maybe she was making fun of me, so I was all like, “Uh, yeah! Taylor Swift gave it to me.” And Zelda looked impressed and said, “Cool, my dad has met her,” and she definitely sounded like she wasn’t teasing me anymore at all, and she was, like, jealous that I was soup-buddies with Taylor Swift.
So now I get more of “Taylor’s” soup. “This was really sweet of you, Min, thanks.”
“We missed you today!” Min is so cute and cheerful and excited about the soup that she honestly reminds me of that pug puppy I saw yesterday with Desmond. It’s always funny to see her with Zelda, who is more . . . house-cat-ish.
“How are you feeling?” Zelda asks.
“Better, thanks.” I cough a little into my hand. “I was just . . . uh . . . picking up some medicine.” Hack, hack.
“Where is it?” Min asks.
“It wasn’t ready yet,” I say. “They have to . . . mix it.”
“I didn’t know they still did that,” Zelda says, so naturally, I’m all like, “It’s artisanal.”
Zelda lifts her eyebrows, but Min has already moved onto something else. She pulls out her phone. “I texted you the assignments.” Min is, in fact, texting at that very moment, her thumbs working madly on her smartphone. “And now I’m sending you this hilarious—”
“Omigod, the video?” Zelda peers over at the screen. “You have to—”
“Juliette nearly lost it during lunch when I showed it to her,” Min agrees. Min is always posting things on PicBomb and has usually seen every cool photo or video a week before it starts trending.
“And then she laughed . . .” Zelda shudders. She hates Juliette’s laugh; it’s so loud that people always stare when she starts hooting. Zelda hates it when she feels like people are staring at her, which is kind of sad because she is so pretty that people stare at her a lot. Zelda has a difficult life.
My phone chimes, so I know I’ve received the assignments and the video.
“Watch it now!” Zelda urges, so I fake-cough into my hand again. I’ve got to get them out of here as quickly as possible, but the truth is that I’m really touched that they came over with soup, and everything. It makes me feel like we’re better friends than I thought.
“I think I’d really better wait and maybe . . . uh . . . watch it in bed . . .”
“Oh, Callie, you poor thing!” Min wails, and when I cough into my hand again, Zelda adds, “Keep your germs away from me.”
Min punches her on the arm, but Zelda says, “I’m serious! Placement testing is on Friday, and my mom will flip if I get sick and miss it.”
I forgot about placement testing. That’s an all-Haverton test in language, math, and science, in order to see who is going into advanced classes for the following fall.
“You’ll be well by Friday, won’t you, Callie?” Min asks. “Because the concert . . .”
“I’m sure I’ll be well by then,” I say quickly. I’ll have to be, really. Because if I miss the placement test, Haverton will definitely call my parents in for a consultation, and that would be the absolute worst. “Listen, you guys, I should probably get upstairs. Everyone in my family is sick, too.”
“Yeah, we saw your dad come in,” Zelda says, nodding at the elevator.
“He looked awful.” Min’s eyes are wide, and very serious.
“He got hit the worst,” I say, which is actually a true fact. Just not about germs.
“Listen, Callie, would you bring the—”
“I’ll bring the money tomorrow, Zelda. I swear.”
“Okay.”
Min gives me another hug, but Zelda just blows me a germ-free kiss.
I wave at them through the glass as they hustle outside. They wave back at me, and Min mimes eating the soup and rubs her belly. I nod at her, then notice Ivan staring at me.
“Soup,” I say, holding up the paper bag.
“You are sick, Ms. Callie?” he asks in his accent that is from someplace in Europe where people sound a little like Count Chocula.
I fake-cough into my hand, and then say, “No,” which, hopefully, could mean anything. Ivan cocks his head. I sort of have the impression that he thinks everyone who lives in this building is crazy, but he might just have Resting You’re-Crazy Face.
“Well, I’ll see you later, Ivan,” I say
, backing toward the elevator, which takes about five hours to finally land in the lobby and open up.
But it finally does, and then I am headed toward our apartment, with soup and a video, and for a moment, I believe that I really am sick and that I deserve all of this attention and special treatment. It’s nice to get all of the good parts of being sick without actual vomiting.
Maybe I should try it more often.
Maybe I will.
CHAPTER TEN
In which the heroine eats some soup, which only leads to questions
“THIS IS GOOD,” DAD says as he takes another spoonful of Min’s soup, and I think about how the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. And then take a left at the esophagus, of course.
Tuesday nights are a kind of sad affair at our apartment, because Tuesday nights are when Mom takes Desmond to violin practice. So it’s usually just me and Dad picking through the fridge until we both give up and Dad makes us cheese omelets. But tonight, we have soup and Mom made more bread in the bread machine, so we are living it up!
“Why did your friend make you soup, again?” Dad asks.
“She heard it was Taylor Swift’s recipe,” I say as if a) I’m not the one who told her that and b) that makes any sense.
“Well, it’s good that she’s learning to cook. I wish I’d learned how to cook.”
“Why didn’t Grandma Hildy teach you?”
Dad shrugs. “I was never interested. That was more Larry’s department.”
“Uncle Lawrence? I thought he was a painter.”
“He was good at everything,” Dad says. He scrapes his knife along the top of the butter, which totally drives my mother nuts when she’s around. Like I said, we are living it up.
Cassius’s question pops into my mind. “Did . . . did your dad approve of his being an artist?”
Dad’s dark eyes lock on mine. “My dad?”
“Grandpa Constantine.”
Dad spreads the butter over his slice of bread. Spreads it thin, scrape scrape scrape. “No.” He pauses a moment and then adds, “He wanted us both to work for the family business.”
“Why didn’t you?”
My dad takes another spoonful of soup. He swallows, and then says, “I did.”
“You did? But what—you quit?”
“Your grandfather sold the company shortly before he died. You were only three; you wouldn’t remember.”
“But—wait, why did he sell it? I thought you said he wanted you to work there.”
My dad is chewing his bread until finally he swallows and I think he will answer me, except that instead he takes a spoonful of soup.
“Didn’t he want you to take over?” I don’t know why I can’t let this go, but it just seems so completely unreasonable that it is bothering me.
“Things got . . . complicated.” My dad puts down his spoon. “Look, you never really knew my father, so I don’t expect you to understand. But he was a hard man. He wasn’t even speaking to Larry when he died.”
My mouth drops open in complete agapement. “Why?”
“He didn’t approve of Larry’s lifestyle.”
“What does that mean?”
“Larry was gay, Callie.”
I’m waiting for him to say more, like . . . and Larry was also a murderer. But he doesn’t add anything else. “And?”
“And my father thought that being gay was a sin.”
“But . . . I thought people were born gay.”
“That’s what Larry thought, too.”
“Did—did Grandma Hildy think that?”
My father toys with his napkin. “I don’t know.”
“But she loves Uncle Larry! She has that painting up in her apartment—”
My dad turns to me and looks me straight in the eye. “I just want you to know that I will support you no matter what, Callie.” He’s looking at me really intensely, and I feel a little intimidated, but a little comforted, too.
“Uh, okay.” There’s just something I don’t get. “But—Grandpa . . . How could Grandma Hildy have married somebody like that? Someone who would stop talking to his own son?”
“Callie.” My dad looks so pained that I regret bringing it up. “Your grandmother never stood up to my father, at least not that I remember. I think she was a little afraid of him.”
That’s how dad always refers to Grandma Hildy: “your grandmother.” I think it’s maybe weird that they are not very close.
I never really understood why, but now I am starting to get a little clue and there is a tiny little part of me that feels flattered that my dad told me all of this, but there is another, bigger part of me that is a little mad at my grandmother for marrying such a jerk and a little sad for everyone involved, especially my uncle.
I look down at my buttered bread. I’ve eaten most of it, and suddenly it feels kind of heavy and oozy in my stomach. “Do you want to go for a walk, or something?”
“I have to call the lawyer,” my dad says.
“What lawyer?” I ask.
“My lawyer.”
“What about?”
“Stuff about the fund. Severance stuff.” Severance is when you’re not working for a company anymore. My mom explained that “severing” means cutting something off, like someone’s head from their neck.
I used to think that being a grown-up is all about being able to watch as much TV as you want and eat ice cream for dinner, but the closer I get to actually growing up, the more I’ve noticed that it’s also about a lot of depressing stuff, like cancer and lawyers and severing.
We finish the rest of the soup without talking because it’s hard to change the subject when you’ve been talking about something really sad without seeming like a jerk. And it is also hard to keep talking about the sad thing, and maybe a little pointless. So what is left? Just soup and bread and silent walls. I think of a curly, twisty cloud, and try to hold on to it. Keep it positive, keep it positive . . .
The strange thing about other people is how impossible it is to know them. All of their thoughts are just this big, mysterious universe behind a locked door. My dad is sitting across from me, but I feel like maybe I don’t really know him, or Grandma Hildy, or even Desmond or my mom. Not at all. All I see are doors.
I wonder if my grandfather ever had those same thoughts about his own son.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
In which I realize my evil geniusness
I HAVE HATCHED A plan!
Last night, I watched Min’s video, which involved a guy on a Segway and a box kite and was very funny. Then I watched the video for “Money Changes Everything.” And then I watched several Althea Orris videos, and I remembered about how I was supposed to think positively and convert my mental energy into two hundred and fifty dollars. And that’s when I had an idea!
It involves breaking a rule, but desperate times call for desperate measurements and I need two hundred and fifty dollars and I really cannot show my face at school until I have it, so I am simply going to ask someone for the money. And that someone is my grandmother!
My father made this rule up years ago that Grandma Hildy is allowed to give me and Desmond presents, but that the presents are not allowed to be money or gift cards. We are not supposed to take money in any form from our grandmother, not even a quarter for a gumball. When I was little I thought that this was because my grandmother was secretly poor and didn’t want us to know, so of course I never took any money from her and once, when I was six, I even tried to give her five dollars. But now I realize that this is just a rule of my father’s and does not make any sense much like many of his other rules, for example the one about how I should go to bed at 8:30 p.m., which never happens, by the way.
So I find a brown paper bag for Desmond to put his lunch in and give him a little pep talk about fitting in so Simon Yee will ignore him. I do a very smart thing and explain it in terms of science. It’s called camouflage, and butterflies do it all the time, I tell him. Desmond likes butterflies, so I am hopeful that
he finds this inspiring. It’s like I always say, school is like makeup—it’s all about blending.
And now I am on my way to Grandma Hildy’s apartment so that I can get the money before I see Zelda, and if my grandmother does not have the cash, then maybe she can just write out a check or send the money to Zelda via PayPal.
Robert is misting the orchids in the lobby when I go in, and he scowls at me as usual but I just ignore him and head upstairs. Althea says grouchiness is contagious, and I don’t want to catch it.
When I step out onto my grandmother’s floor, I see Ms. Shaw stepping out of her apartment with a tiny little bag of garbage that must have about two tissues in it and nothing else. I am a little afraid of Ms. Shaw because she is always wearing a bathrobe. She claims to be a writer, but my dad once told me that this is just something people say when they are unemployed. Usually, I pretend that she doesn’t exist, which works well, because she is pretty spaced out and may not even realize I am a real person and not a ligament of her imagination. But today, she seems to see me, because she says, “I heard her go out.”
“My grandmother? You don’t have any idea where she went, do you?”
Ms. Shaw shrugs. “1986?” she says, as if this is some kind of answer. Then she shuffles down the hallway, toward the door where the trash chute is.
1986? What kind of answer is that?
Shoot. This is no good. I consider asking Ms. Shaw if she noticed whether my grandmother had her purse with her but decide that this would sound suspicious.
Ms. Shaw returns from the garbage area, shuffling slowly in her bunny slippers. She’s a little old—maybe forty or so—but she moves like she’s older than Yoda. She should do some yoga, I think. Yoga for Yoda. “Do you have any idea where she might have gone?” I ask as she pushes open her door.
Ms. Shaw turns back toward me and cocks her head, like she had forgotten I was here. Then she says, “She’s probably in her friend’s time machine. 1986!” Then she slips inside her apartment and shuts the door.
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