by Sheila Agnew
I poked again at the large, rubbery, yellowish beans in my salad.
‘Here,’ said Leela, pulling a little red notebook out of her bag and flicking it open and handing me a pen. ‘Just write Janet’s email address here, that will be enough.’
I hesitated.
‘Oh! I’m so sorry, Evie,’ she said gushingly.
‘What?’ I said.
‘Are you afraid Janet doesn’t want you anymore?’
‘No, of course not!’ I said hotly. ‘Janet is one of the most loyal, best, greatest people I know. She would have me in a second, any time, no matter what.’
‘So, there’s no problem then,’ said Leela crisply.
I pushed the pen and notebook back at her.
‘I want to go home,’ I said.
‘Of course you do, sweetie, and you will be back in Ireland very soon. It must be lovely there, so beautiful with all those green fields and sweet little horses. I really must visit on my next trip to London.’
I didn’t point out that I had meant Scott’s apartment because I was sure Leela had known exactly what I’d meant.
‘Whatever,’ I said, and she tut-tutted at my rudeness, but stopped pushing to get Janet’s email address.
I took the cross-town bus by myself back to Scott’s apartment and I put the lunch with Leela completely out of my mind as if it never happened. I can do that sometimes.
Chapter 12
On Wednesday morning, Kylie called as Scott and I were finishing our breakfast bagels. I was ignoring Ben as punishment for chewing the tip of my elephant Ellie’s trunk. As I chatted with Kylie, Ben gazed at me with sad, puppyish eyes, begging for cream cheese, and, I fondly imagined, forgiveness. Kylie was heading to Chelsea Piers with Greg Winters. It turns out that Kylie knows Greg. More than knows. They go to the same school and are good friends.
‘Greg plays for the River Rats. That’s a kids’ ice-hockey team. They have a game today so I’m going to go watch and then I have my figure skating lesson. You guys could watch my lesson and we can all eat lunch afterwards.’
I hesitated. I had planned to help out Scott in the clinic.
‘I’ll ask Scott if he’ll be okay this morning without me.’
Scott looked up from page six of the New York Post.
‘I will do my very best to manage adequately without you,’ he said solemnly. ‘Don’t stray from the Piers and I expect to see you back here no later than three. Have fun.’
‘Thanks a million!’ I replied.
The Rivers Rats’ game was more exciting than I expected. Greg was amazing. He swept up and down the ice so quickly and scored a goal against the New Jersey team.
‘Woo-hoo!’ yelled Kylie. ‘Go Rats!’
‘There were no fights,’ Kylie said, a bit sadly, when the game ended.
Greg, still glowing from victory and from a fresh batch of angry-looking mosquito bites, sat on the bench beside me to watch Kylie’s figure skating lesson. I was in awe. She was so graceful on the ice and she did some amazing spins.
‘That’s a double Axel,’ Greg told me.
I thought she was fantastic, but her coach, a tall skinny woman in a blue and white tracksuit, yelled harshly at her several times. At the end of the lesson, I could tell the coach was having a go at Kylie although I couldn’t hear what they were saying.
‘Why is the bully coach being so mean to Kylie?’ I asked Greg angrily.
Greg looked surprised.
‘The coach is just trying to motivate her to do better, to be better. Kylie has a competition coming up.’
‘It’s not the Olympics,’ I muttered.
‘Not yet,’ said Greg.
After Kylie had changed back into normal clothes, the three of us went for burgers and fries and shakes at the diner and had a great laugh. Kylie didn’t mention her coach and she didn’t seem upset at all.
‘Your coach seemed a bit mean,’ I ventured.
Kylie swung around so that her green-streaked ponytail nearly landed in my raspberry-chocolate milkshake.
‘Suzie is the best. She’s the greatest coach in the Tri-state area. I’m lucky she is teaching me. She’s tough on me because I haven’t practised enough, and she’s right.’
‘Does Rachel come down on you to do better?’ I wondered.
‘Nooooo! My mom is so not the competitive type. She just wants me to be happy. I think she would prefer if I did not compete at all, if I just skated for fun, but I like competing. Sometimes I wish she was one of those pushy moms so I would be forced to practise more.’
I looked out the window as I drained the dregs of my milkshake. I spotted Finn, dressed in hockey gear, walking past the diner with a slim blonde girl. He saw us and waved with his hockey stick.
‘Finn’s too old and too good to play for the River Rats anymore. Now, he plays in a different league. He’s their big star,’ announced Greg proudly.
‘Who’s his girlfriend?’ asked Kylie.
‘Tamara something. She’s a freshman at Nightingale-Bamford,’ Greg said.
‘That’s one of the best private girls’ schools in the city,’ Kylie explained to me. ‘A freshman is someone in their first year of high school.’
‘She’s very pretty,’ I noticed.
‘If you like blondes,’ said Greg.
‘She’s too All-American, Gossip Girl slash cheerleader slash prom queen type. YAWN,’ said Kylie.
The more I get to know Kylie, the more I like her.
There was a note waiting for me when I got home, written in green ink.
‘Evie, the very old vacuum your uncle owns sucked up the trunk on your elephant yesterday. Sorry, Eurdes xx.’
I was horrified. I had punished Ben for nothing. I scrambled off to search for him straight away, but he was not in any of his normal places. Eventually, I found him lying under the receptionist’s table in the waiting room of the clinic, gnawing on what looked suspiciously like a tube of Leela’s lip-gloss. Good boy. I knelt down beside him. I knew he wouldn’t understand the word ‘sorry’ but I wanted to say it anyway.
‘I’m sorry, Ben.’
He licked my hand and he wagged his tail.
‘Longest walk ever, coming up right now,’ I told him and he happily stretched out his front paws so far that his belly hit the ground as I went off to search for his leash.
Later that evening, Ben and I hung around the clinic, keeping Snickers company. Snickers is a little, cotton-wool white bundle of tight curly fur, a Bichon Frise, which is a very popular breed of dog in Manhattan. He was staying overnight in the crate in the backroom of the clinic because Scott had to perform dental surgery on him the following morning. I was sitting cross-legged beside his crate, desperately yanking my almost bristleless hairbrush through an enormous knot when Scott walked in.
‘What is it?’ he asked, looking at my face screwed up in pain.
‘The mother of all knots,’ I answered.
Scott bent over to have a look, disappeared for a couple of minutes and returned with a scissors we use for trimming cat hair before operations and, with a decisive single snap, chopped off the large knot and handed it to me.
I stared at it, appalled.
‘Scott, I can’t believe you just did that.’
‘What?’ he said innocently. ‘You have lots of hair. I have never seen a kid with so much hair; you won’t even notice it’s gone.’
I resolved to keep my hair issues away from Scott’s trigger scissors hands in the future. Joanna would have been able to empathise but she was on a date with Stefan.
Joanna seems to like Stefan a lot because she is being pretty hush-hush about him and acting all girly. Although he’s from Frankfurt he speaks English perfectly if a little stiffly, with a London accent. His hair is white-blonde and his eyelashes are so fair I thought he didn’t have any when I first met him. He is huge, even taller than Scott, and has the largest feet I have ever seen. Stefan works for a hedge fund, which is some complicated finance job that has nothing to do with gard
ening. He doesn’t seem like a bad guy. He’s very polite. Last Tuesday, he took Mrs Rubenstein by the arm and helped her out of the waiting room, carrying Lulu in her cage, and hailed a taxi for them. Scott said he was just trying to impress Joanna. I’m not so sure. Stefan has nice manners. He’s just boring. I don’t think he can help it. He was probably born that way.
Scott and I have spied on him a couple of times, getting out of his Porsche to pick up Joanna from work.
Scott said, ‘It’s a crime against humanity to have a highlighter-yellow Porsche.’
He had a point. The car was so not cool, but I think he might, totally understandably, feel a bit jealous of Stefan because Scott’s Jeep is ancient and breaks down a lot, always at the worst possible times.
Maybe Scott secretly fancies Joanna without even realising it himself, but I could be totally wrong. When David and Mum first became friendly, I spent ages working on getting them together as a couple because I thought David fancied Mum like mad and I thought she fancied him too. When they eventually realised what I was up to, they sat me down for a talk.
David asked me, ‘Evie, you know I’m gay, right, and you know what that means?’
‘Yeeees,’ I said, ‘but I thought that might change, you know, on account of you falling in love with Mum.’
‘I do love your mum very much as a friend but the being gay thing, that’s not going to change.’
I felt very stupid because I was sure his being gay was just a detail, a little obstacle that could be overcome. I thought Mum was a bit lonely and could do with a nice, fun boyfriend like David and they both loved theatre so they had a lot in common.
As a result of the David – Mum romance fiasco, I completely lost confidence in my matchmaking instincts. I promised Mum I would cease all matchmaking activities. She said I was talented in other areas.
Chapter 13
After lunch yesterday, I skyped with Deirdre and Cate, my best friends in Dublin.
‘It’s been raining all day every day per usual,’ claimed Cate gloomily.
Deirdre chipped in, bursting to give me all the news.
‘Aoife McNally had a birthday party with a bouncy castle in her back garden. It was sad. She was mortified that her parents rented a bouncy castle as if she had turned nine instead of twelve. Fiona O’Hegarty’s mum was wearing these super high black heels, the ones with the red soles – Christian Bootins.’
‘You mean Christian Louboutins,’ said Cate.
‘Whatever! Stop interrupting me! I’m trying to tell Evie the story. Anyway, Mrs Hegarty must have had too much vino or something because she decided to have a go on the castle and one of her Lo … one of her shoes punctured it and the whole castle started to collapse. There were loads of little kids on it. They started screaming like mad and there was total chaos as all the parents tried to get to them. Poor Aoife was doubly mortified.’
‘But she got some fantastic birthday pressies,’ said Cate, ‘like a turquoise mountain bike.’
‘I hadn’t finished,’ said Deirdre. ‘John Donaghy broke it off with Sarah and now he’s going with Fauve Brennan. She’s Mark O’Toole’s cousin from Sandymount. She has a tattoo in Celtic script on her shoulder that says Daughter of Ireland or something like that, and she has peroxide streaks in her hair and her nose is pierced and she goes snowboarding in France every Christmas. She’s supposed to be brilliant at it. Almost everyone from the class got invited to the church part of Miss Butler’s wedding. Her dress was so gorgeous.’
‘Sounds cool,’ I said cheerfully.
‘Will you listen to her? In America only what … seven weeks and already has an American accent,’ said Deirdre.
‘That’s daft,’ I said. ‘No, I don’t. No way, and I only managed to get two words in. How could you think I sounded American from that?’
‘You have a bit of a twang,’ said Cate.
‘You’ll probably lose it when you are back here a day,’ she added reassuringly.
I didn’t feel reassured.
‘Tell us all about what’s going on with you in New York,’ said Deirdre. ‘I’d kill to be there for a week.’
The phone call with the girls bugged me for the rest of the day. I asked Joanna about it later as I helped her disinfect the examining table.
‘Do you think I sound American?’ I wondered.
She laughed.
‘No, definitely not.’
‘Not even a tiny bit?’ I persisted.
‘No, you sound about as American as Kate Winslet.’
‘Who?’ I asked.
‘The Titanic chick, the British one.’
‘Oh.’
It was hard to feel reassured by someone who couldn’t tell the difference between a British accent and an Irish one. I tried Scott next as we ate our take-out chicken burritos with extra guacamole.
‘Do you think I’ve started to sound American?’ I asked nonchalantly.
‘Nah,’ he said with his mouth full, ‘you’ve picked up some American words and expressions but not the accent. Why?’
‘It’s just that some of the gang from Ireland were slagging me. They said I sound American. I don’t want to go home with a new American accent.’
Scott wiped some of the guacamole carefully from his chin.
‘Why do you care, Evie?’ he asked briskly.
‘I don’t know. I guess I don’t want to lose being me. I don’t want to be the American Evie. That would just be weird. Where would Irish Evie go? I mean, where would I go?’
Scott offered me some of his tortilla chips as he thought about what I’d said.
I spoke up again.
‘I’m not tough like Mum. She went through hundreds, maybe thousands, of auditions and dealt with so many rejections. One time, she got rejected five times in a single day. I don’t want to be rejected for having an American accent, for being different.’
I felt a little panicky.
‘It was hard enough fitting in when we settled back permanently in Dublin a couple of years ago.’
‘Evie,’ said Scott. ‘What kind of accent you have is not important. It doesn’t define you. You can be you no matter what your accent is like. Just be who you are. If that is different from others, so be it. When the Dublin kids realise that their teasing doesn’t bother you, they’ll get bored and move on to something else, like your blue hair.’
‘My hair hasn’t been blue in ages,’ I said, ‘but ok, I get your point.’
I mustn’t have sounded completely convinced.
Scott sighed.
‘Evie, you don’t need a stamp saying 100% Irish on your forehead, like a packet of Irish sausages. You are half-American and that’s not so bad. We’ve got Thomas Jefferson and Bart Simpson and Marilyn Monroe and ice hockey and Harley-Davidson bikes and Quentin Tarantino and … and … and … Brangelina and raspberry-chocolate milkshakes and JFK.’
‘And RFK,’ I said proudly, showing off a little.
‘And Bobby,’ he smiled.
‘Who is Quentin Tarantino?’ I asked.
‘He’s a movie director.’
‘Can I watch one of his films?’
‘No, you have to wait until you are older. Now, get out of here and take your multiple identities down to the clinic and see if Joanna needs any help.’
Chapter 14
I saw my first Broadway show last night. It was opening night for Mrs Winters’ new musical, Starchitect. Greg invited Kylie and me. We had fantastic tickets, in the middle of the main section, three rows from the stage. Finn was also there with Tamara. She was wearing a shimmery, light gold, chiffon summer dress with flat, gold, gladiator sandals. With her golden hair swinging down her back, she looked like a gilded statue, surrounded by a halo of gold. She smiled at us and said my ‘brogue’ was ‘cute’. I guess I didn’t sound American to her.
‘She’s hurting my eyes,’ said Kylie, putting on her pink cat eye sunglasses, not caring that sunglasses are not usually worn in theatres. I never saw Finn without his Rangers cap
before. Kylie nudged me; the curtains were rising and she looked as excited with anticipation as I felt.
The musical was about three architects, two men and one woman, who enter a competition to build the new, highest building in the world in Shanghai, in China. They were not just work rivals; all three of them were in love with the same woman, a professional photographer named Lillian who had short, spiky, cranberry-red hair.
‘Nobody would fall in love with that hair,’ whispered Kylie.
During the play, the architects all cheat and do nasty things to each other to try to win the competition and to win Lillian. In the end, Lillian didn’t choose any of them. However, none of them was really cut up about it because through the course of the show, each of them realised that what they actually loved most was the joy of designing a building. Nobody won the competition because the ruthless Chinese billionaire who had commissioned the building had a change of heart and decided to build good quality housing for the zillions of desperately poor Chinese factory workers instead of one big fancy office building. He and Lillian fall in love and walk off together into the smog at the end of the show, singing a duet.
We all squeezed through the crowds to reach backstage afterwards, Kylie coughing a little because the smog special effects were a little overpowering. It felt strange to be back in the theatre world again, strange and familiar at the same time. I kept expecting Mum to pop up and give me a sip of champagne out of her glass as she always did on opening night. But of course she did not.
Hordes of people crowded around Angela’s chair. Angela is Finn’s and Greg’s mom. Although her hair is short and purple-ash grey, she looked beautiful. She wore a dark green, mid-length cape over a sherry coloured strapless dress. She didn’t look anything like either Finn or Greg. When she saw us kids, she immediately sprang up from her chair, pushed her fawning admirers aside and came over and hugged Greg. She tried to hug Finn too, but he held back a little so she had to make do with rubbing his arm. She kissed Tamara and Kylie and me, twice each, which is very common in the theatre world and in Paris.