UPPER EAST SIDE

by Ashley Valentine

  Elise let go of the handrail and plunked herself down in the seat. “Hey,” she said, looking up at Damien. She clacked her knee against Bree’s leg when she recognized him. “Hey.”

  “Elise, this is Damien. Damien, this is Elise,” Bree introduced them sweetly. The bus halted abruptly and Damien reached for her shoulder to steady himself. Oh, God. He touched me! He touched me!

  Bree could feel Elise studying them as she tried to figure out what was going on.

  “Do you go to Emma Willard, too?” Damien asked Elise.

  Elise nodded, looking totally confused. All of a sudden, Bree felt bad for her. She put her arm around her friend and smiled up at Damien. “We’re best friends.”

  Elise giggled and let her head fall on Bree’s shoulder. “I guess you found your hat,” she whispered quietly.

  “Yup,” Bree giggled back, relieved that Elise was cool enough not to ask too many questions. When they were alone, she would explain everything, just like best friends were supposed to. She gazed up at Damien's perfectly structured, perfectly paintable face, swooning as he flashed his shy, chipped-tooth smile again. “I knew your name couldn’t be David.”

  38

  “Glad you could make it,” Ken Mogul said on Wednesday afternoon when Yasmine joined him at a booth in Chippies, the new Williamsburg coffee shop down the street from where she lived. He pushed a steaming mug of cappuccino toward her. “I ordered for both of us. Hope that’s cool by you.”

  Yasmine sat down with her black parka on and clasped the mug with both hands, pursing her lips as she blew on the hot, milky froth. “Thanks for hooking me up with that whole fashion show gig,” she said. “It was such a blast.” She winced, hating the way she sounded when she talked to Ken Mogul. Like some brainless poser fool.

  Ken pushed his tortoise-shell sunglasses up on top of his jauntily cut red hair and leaned across the table, ready to get down to business. “I’d like you to join me at Cannes this spring. I’ll introduce you to some other brilliant independent filmmakers. We can trade energy, brainstorm together. Then I want you to hold off on college for a year or two to make some films with me. It’s going to be magical, I can feel it.”

  Yasmine unzipped her coat and then zipped it up again.

  “I’ve started working on a new project down in South America,” Ken Mogul continued. “It opens with seagulls feeding their young the flesh from decomposing fish bodies and then moves to gorillas in the rainforest abandoning their young. Then I’m going to cut to the streets of Rio, where kids are prostituting themselves for drugs. I haven’t begun filming yet, but I was thinking you could get in there and meet some of the kids, befriend them, get their stories. You don’t happen to know Portuguese, do you?”

  Yasmine shook her head. Who was he kidding?

  “Spanish?”

  She shook her head again.

  “It doesn’t matter. We’ll get a translator, or find some kids who speak English. All your expenses will be paid for by Duke Productions. You remember Duke from the Better Than Naked party?”

  Yasmine nodded with an amused smile. How could she forget Duke, the dumbest guy on the planet?

  “You’d have your own car, your own apartment, free equipment, and whatever else you need,” Ken added. “Are you with me?”

  Yasmine noticed for the first time that Ken Mogul had very little definition in the chin area. In fact, he was practically chinless. “I’ve always wanted to go to Cannes,” she replied, thoughtfully slurping her cappuccino. “And your new project sounds really...awesome. But I got accepted early to NYU. I’ve wanted to go there since I was eleven years old. There’s no way I’m deferring.”

  “But what about my film? Child prostitution! Animals abandoning their young! This is groundbreaking stuff!” Ken Mogul spluttered, spitting all over the counter. Yasmine thought that if he’d had more of a chin, the spit might not have gone so far.

  Over Ken’s shoulder Yasmine noticed a light blue flyer pinned to a bulletin board.

  Rivington Rover Poetry Club Open Mike

  featuring readings by

  Mekhi Hargroveand Mystery Craze

  Thursday, 8 P.M.

  No wonder Mekhi had been blowing her off all week. He was busy being famous.

  “Yasmine? Are you still with me?” Ken demanded. “First lesson you learn in this business is the clock never stops ticking.”

  Yasmine smiled her half-amused, half-pissed-off Mona Lisa smile. As flattered as she was that Ken had asked her to work with him, she had no intention of becoming a mini-Mogul. She wanted to develop her own voice and her own career, not put all her energy into someone else’s work, however brilliant. She shook her closely shaved dark head. “I’m sorry.”

  Ken Mogul’s barely there chin disappeared altogether as he lost his cool completely. “I’ve never offered to partner with anyone,” he said grimly. “This is the opportunity of a lifetime. I’m giving you the chance to make a feature film before you turn twenty. It’s unheard of!”

  That old guy at the Culture of Humanity show had advised her not to take her talent too seriously. Ken obviously took his way, way too seriously. She stood up and yanked the light blue flyer off the bulletin board behind Ken’s head. She and Mekhi were supposed to be working on a film together, but if she could slip into the club and film him reading without him even knowing she was there, that would be even better. Mekhi was always better when he didn’t know she was watching.

  “Thank you,” she told Ken. “I’m honored, I really am. But I’m working on something new, of my own. I think I’d like to finish it.”

  Ken Mogul pushed his sunglasses down on his nose and glared out the window. “It’s your loss.”

  “Thanks for the coffee,” Yasmine said, even though he was no longer looking at her. She folded up the blue flyer and tucked it into her pocket. “Good luck at Cannes.”

  Ken Mogul zipped up his fur-trimmed Prada parka and pulled the hood up over his head as if to block her out completely. “Bye.”

  Yasmine headed home to sort through her camera gear and figure out what she needed to bring to the reading at the Rivington Rover Poetry Club tomorrow night. When Mekhi was finished reading she’d pop up out of the crowd and surprise him with an enormous mug of Irish coffee, his favorite drink. Then they’d trade stories about all the feebleminded famous people they’d met in the past week. And then she’d bring him home and remind him of what he’d been missing. She’d show him how to lose his virginity again the way he’d written in that crazy poem.

  As if he needed showing.

  39

  “Want to take Mook out for a walk with me?” Tahj asked Porsha through her closed bedroom door. It was Wednesday afternoon and she’d been holed up in her room since Monday, only opening the door to receive the brie-and-tomato baguettes and mugs of hot chocolate Myrtle brought her at ten and five o’clock. She’d even conned the family doctor into writing her a note excusing her from school for the week. She wasn’t sick exactly, the doctor assured her mother. Schools like Willard just worked their girls too hard, especially the seniors, and then there was all that additional pressure to get into one of the best colleges. Porsha simply needed a few days of rest and she’d be herself again.

  Well, not exactly. Porsha was using her few days of rest to reinvent herself all over again.

  Tahj pushed open the door and poked his head inside her room. The air was pungent with the chemical odor of cigarette smoke mixed with minty mouthwash. Porsha’s head was wrapped in a black-and-pink scarf, and she was lounging on the bed with her bare ankles crossed, wearing a white terrycloth robe and smoking a Merit Ultra Light through a long black cigarette holder. The look was very old-Hollywood-star-in-hiding, which was exactly the effect she was going for.

  Across the room, The Great Gatsby played silently on TV. Porsha puffed on her cigarette, staring dramatically into the near distance. She couldn’t bear to look at Tahj because he was wearing his Harvard sweatshirt again, as if he’d specifically dressed
to piss her off. She’d already ripped her Yale pendant off the canopy over her bed and thrown it out her bedroom window along with her father’s old Yale sweatshirt. “If you don’t mind, I’d like you to please get the fuck out of my room.”

  “I was just leaving,” Tahj replied. “Hey, have you talked to Chanel lately?”

  Porsha shook her head. “Why?”

  “No reason,” Tahj shrugged uncomfortably. He’d been hanging out with his buddies in Scarsdale since Friday night and hadn’t seen or talked to Chanel since the Les Best show. He pulled a tin of herbal cigarettes out of his back pocket and tossed them onto Porsha’s bed. “Try those,” he advised. “They’re 100 percent natural and they smell way better than that mass-produced shit.”

  Porsha kicked the tin onto the floor. “Have a nice walk.”

  Tahj pulled her bedroom door closed behind him and headed outside with Mookie. He entered the park at 72nd Street, taking the path that led to a little wooden footbridge over a stream that fed into the lake. Every now and then Mookie stopped to dig furiously in the snow with his brown-and-white paws, as if he were looking for a doggie toy he’d dropped there last summer. Then eventually he’d give up and trot on again.

  A petite girl in dark sunglasses and a blue Yankees cap jogged by wearing an I LOVE TAHJ T-shirt over her red velour tracksuit; the same I LOVE TAHJ T-shirt that Chanel had worn at the Les Best show. Tahj was pretty sure the girl was the actress Keke Palmer, or whatever her name was, but he couldn’t be sure. It was pretty funny to think that famous actresses and models might be wearing shirts with his name on them when he was just some dude who went out with a beautiful girl who he guessed he wasn’t really going out with anymore.

  When the wooden footbridge came into view, Tahj noticed that it was filled with people and equipment, a crew of some sort. As he came closer he saw that in the icy water opposite the footbridge a cameraman was standing up in a small inflatable raft, adjusting his tripod.

  Tahj let Mookie hunt for squirrels under a tree as he watched the proceedings. The huddle of people on the bridge parted to reveal a girl dressed in a skimpy sunflower yellow sundress and blue sandals, her silky hair blowing in the icy wind. It was Chanel, of course. She was unmistakable.

  All of a sudden Mookie hurtled across the snow in Chanel’s direction, howling with delight and wagging his stubby little boxer tail.

  “Mookie, no!” Tahj shouted. Everyone on the bridge, including Chanel, turned to look.

  “Mookie!” Chanel squealed, crouching down to kiss the dog on his wet nose as he wriggled excitedly between her legs. “How’s it going, handsome?”

  Tahj ambled over to the footbridge, his hands shoved deep into his green army pants pockets. “Sorry,” he mumbled to the crew of makeup artists and stylists.

  “That’s okay,” Chanel said, standing up. She broke away from her entourage and kissed Tahj lightly on the cheek. Her yellow dress was stenciled with iridescent blue birds and her lip gloss smelled like watermelon. “We’re just shooting a perfume ad. You can watch if you want to.”

  Tahj kept his hands in his pockets. There were a million things she could have said to make him feel guilty for hiding out in Scarsdale and never calling her, but Chanel was too cool for that. She was truly magnificent, which was part of the reason he had to let her go. It was too much effort to match someone who shone as brightly as she did.

  “Don’t let me keep you,” Tahj said. He opened his tin of herbal cigarettes and offered her one. She took it and held it between her coral-glossed lips as he lit it for her. “Oh, and thanks for the roses.”

  Chanel exhaled, blowing sweet smoke into the chilly air. “We never got our tattoos.”

  Tahj smiled tenderly. “That’s probably a good thing.”

  A perfect tear began to form in the corner of Chanel’s right eye and trembled on the edge of her lower lid.

  “Let’s get this done!” the photographer shouted from his inflatable boat.

  Chanel turned to wave at him, her yellow dress fanning out around her knees and her silky hair flying. In that instant, the tear dropped onto her lovely cheek, a perfect illustration of every human emotion Les Best wanted to encapsulate in his new perfume ad. They’d have to airbrush out the cigarette in Chanel’s hand and the goosebumps dotting her arms and legs, but you’d be surprised how easy that is to do.

  40

  After watching The Great Gatsby twice in a row, Porsha clicked off the TV and picked up her phone. She was eager to talk to someone; to let the world know she was still alive despite everything. The thing was, she absolutely dreaded speaking to every single person she knew, including her gay, France-living dad, whom she had always counted on to cheer her up. If only there were someone else, someone new and different who—

  Actually, there was one person she could bear to speak to. And why the fuck shouldn’t she call him when he had called her completely out of the blue last week while she was getting her hair cut?

  She speed-dialed Kaliq’s cell phone number, and, to her surprise, he answered it.

  “Kaliq?” Porsha crooned into the phone. “I heard all about what happened. How are you? Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, actually I’m really good,” Kaliq responded, sounding suspiciously unstoned. “My dad’s still pretty pissed off about what happened, and I don’t know how it’s going to affect my chances at Brown, but I’m still good.”

  Porsha pointed her bare toes into the air and frowned at the day-old cotton-candy-pink polish that she’d painted on herself out of complete boredom. “You poor baby,” she sighed sympathetically. “Rehab must really suck.”

  “Um, actually—and I know this sounds weird—I’m starting to kind of like it,” Kaliq admitted. “I wish it wasn’t such a haul to get up there, but it’s a really cool, modern place, and it’s kind of, I don’t know...relaxing to do something totally unrelated to school.”

  “Really?” Porsha fluffed up the pillows behind her and sat up in bed. Rehab was relaxing? Maybe it was exactly what she needed—a respite from the travails of her everyday existence. She could picture herself wrapped in a downy white spa robe, her face lathered in green clay masque, her feet and hands stuck with acupuncture needles, sipping detoxifying herbal tea as she lounged on a daybed chatting to an attentive counselor in a white linen tunic.

  “If you could be any sort of animal, what would you be?” the counselor would ask her. Nothing too challenging.

  Rehab. Why hadn’t she thought of it before? Sure, there might be a little therapy involved, but she’d never had a problem talking about herself. And best of all, Kaliq would be there—the two of them alone together, away from the city and all its messy baggage. She’d always dreamed of spending a weekend with Kaliq at a romantic bed-and-breakfast on the Cape or in the Hamptons. A rehab clinic in Greenwich, Connecticut, would be almost as good. Sure, she’d thought she’d wanted to erase Kaliq’s arrogant, cheating presence from her life entirely, but Kaliq sounded like he was turning over a new leaf, which was exactly what she was trying to do!

  “So how do you get into rehab anyway? Can you just sign up, or do you have to be sent there by somebody?” Porsha asked. She glanced at herself in the mirror on the back of her closet door. With her hacked-off hair, she looked enough like a heroin addict that they were sure to admit her.

  “I think you can sign yourself in, but who’d be crazy enough to do that?” Kaliq asked.

  Porsha smiled. She would. “So do you want to get together tomorrow night or something?” she asked. “I know I act like a bitch sometimes, Kaliq, but I always wind up missing you.”

  “Sorry. I have to be at Breakaway for group,” Kaliq responded. He hadn’t seen Gia since the night of the snowstorm and Jackie had promised Gia would be returning to group tomorrow. “I take the train, so I don’t get home until pretty late.”

  “All right. But let’s get together sometime soon, okay?” Porsha said. “You know you love me,” she added in a seductive whisper and hung up.

  H
opping off her bed with newfound energy, she removed the scarf from her head and messed up what little hair she had left with a dime-sized squirt of texturizing hair gel. Then she opened her bedroom door for the first time all week. “Mom!” she shouted down the hall. “Come quick. I need your help with something!”

  What better way for the leading lady to make a comeback than to emerge from rehab, refreshed and rejuvenated, with her handsome leading man at her side?

  41

  “I’m glad you’re here,” Mekhi told Mystery as she ran her chewed-on, yellow-nailed fingers through his fashionably cut hair. By total coincidence he and Mystery had arrived at the Rivington Rover Poetry club at the same time, and for the last fifteen minutes they’d been smoking unfiltered Newports and groping each other in a stall in the ladies’ room, trying to get psyched up for their reading. “I’m kind of nervous.”

  “Don’t be,” Mystery loosened his narrow black tie and clasped his hand. “Come on. Let’s see what we’ve got.”

  They emerged from the ladies’ room hand in hand, Mystery in a transparent silk sheath through which her black cotton underwear was completely visible, and Mekhi in his new black suit: the Bonnie and Clyde of poetry.

  The small, dark basement club was already crowded with people sipping coffee and lounging on the tattered old sofas haphazardly dotting the room. A random disco ball spun from the black ceiling and over the sound system Prince whined a depressing song from his last album.

  The lights blinked on and off twice and a tiny Japanese girl wearing a black leotard and pink ballet tights took the stage. “Welcome all to open mike at Rivington Rover. It is so special to have you here,” she whispered into the microphone. “Tonight two of New York’s most special poets will recite for us simultaneously. I’m honored to give the stage to Mystery Craze and Mekhi Hargrove!”