by Nia Stephens
Think Bree should go out with Thomas, her fellow Manhattanite? Then read on!
Chapter 5
Thomas
“You chose Thomas, huh?” Kylian asked, reading over Bree’s shoulder as she typed a quick hello. “I wonder if Lucas knows him.”
“Probably,” Bree said. “Gardner isn’t a big school.”
“But it’s tutorial-style, like ours, so all his classes have about six people,” Sutton pointed out. “Lucas might not know much about him.”
“Only one way to find out,” Kylian said, fishing his cell phone out of his backpack.
“You can’t call him now!” Sutton gasped. “It’s the middle of the day! What if he’s in class?”
“Then it’ll be on vibrate. Relax.” They all waited in silence as Lucas’s phone rang, or vibrated, a few blocks away. Bree’s stomach flopped when Kylian chirped, “Hello there!” but it settled down when it became clear that he was leaving a message.
“Well, that’s that,” he said, putting his phone away. “Time for class!”
Actually, they were a little late for class, which always annoyed Dr. Brennan, Bree’s calculus teacher. But Bree figured the school was asking for it since they didn’t have bells. The headmaster thought that bells were undignified, even if they helped people like Bree get to class on time.
Dr. Brennan punished Bree by forcing her to do all of the sample problems on the board, writing things down as Dr. Brennan explained them. Bree had a hard enough time following him when he was doing derivatives on the board, but since she was late to class today and had skipped class entirely on Monday, she figured she deserved it.
Her next class was PE, which she took with the fencing coach, Master Bateman. Because she usually worked hard in his class—on the off chance that she got to do a remake of Zorro someday—and because she never made fun of his name, Master B. adored Bree. So when she asked to be excused a few minutes early, he let her.
As soon as she stripped out of her tight, sweaty fencing whites and threw on her uniform, she headed back to the computer lab to check her e-mail. Normal people knew how to access e-mail on their cell phones and could check it all day long but Bree was technologically challenged. She wasn’t surprised to see a new message from [email protected] in her inbox:
Hi Bree,
I’m glad you wrote. You’re right—we do seem to have a lot in common, though I’m more interested in making music than in acting. Want to hang out? I’ve got tickets for the Buck Buchanan Samba Ensemble this Friday night. Interested?
–Thomas
Bree had to suppress a squeal. So far, this online dating thing was easy. She typed out a quick response then dashed for her next class. She spent it in a happy fog, which is dangerous when you have only five classmates.
Bree was still grinning when she ran into Kylian after class. He wasn’t smiling. In fact, he had a strange look on his face, a mixture of worry and guilt.
“What’s up?” Bree asked.
“Um . . . nothing?” he said, his eyes darting around her, as if looking for an excuse to escape.
“Yeah right. What happened? Did Lucas call you? Is there something wrong with Thomas?”
“Ur . . . Not really. I mean, not wrong, no . . . but it might be a prob—no, it might be weird—oh, never mind! I’ve got to get to my locker!”
“Hold it, buddy,” Bree said, grabbing him by the arm and dragging him into the nearest empty classroom. “There is something wrong with this guy. What is it?”
“Wrong isn’t the right word,” Kylian said, twisting his watchband around and around his left wrist, the most obvious of several nervous gestures.
“Is he HIV positive?” Bree blurted, her mind instantly jumping to the most extreme conclusion. As the leading cause of death for young black women in America, HIV completely freaked her out.
“What?!” Kylian shrieked, then covered his mouth with both hands, glancing at the door. “Of course not! Well, I guess he could be—you never know, right, unless you’ve seen test results with your own eyes? But if he is, Lucas doesn’t know anything about it.”
“Does he have a rape conviction or something?” Bree demanded, trying hard not to shake Kylian by his narrow shoulders. “Is he a neo-Nazi? What’s wrong with him?”
“I can’t tell you exactly, Bree, but it’s not that bad. It’s just different.”
Bree gave him the look, but he didn’t fold.
“Honestly, Bree, if I thought he would be bad for you, or you were in any danger, I’d just tell you,” Kylian assured her. “But Lucas says he’s a perfectly decent guy. He likes him, but they don’t have any classes together and he doesn’t know him well.”
“If he turns out to be a freakazoid and this turns out to be a disaster, you’re going to be so sorry, Kylian Mercer.”
“Since I’m the one who talked you into trying HelloHi, I expected nothing less.” Kylian sniffed, straightening his sweater as if Bree had been using it to drag him around.
“All right, then,” she said, slipping an arm into his. “Let’s go find Sutton.”
That Friday night, Bree was having second thoughts. There was a lot of room for speculation in “nothing wrong . . . just different.” An obsession with wearing women’s underwear was different. Crashing funerals was different. Being so afraid of germs you had to wear plastic gloves to go to public restrooms was different. Different could mean anything.
But just in case Thomas turned out to be wonderful, Bree was going all out: shimmery new red dress from Donna Karan, perfectly matched lipstick from Chanel, three different shades of eye shadow, all meticulously applied. She stole a pair of Manolo Blahniks from her mother, though not entirely sure that was such a good idea. Samba is some kind of dance music, right? Bree thought, looking at the gorgeous strappy heels on her feet. Well, I can always say no. I’d rather look good at the table than dumb on the dance floor any day.
Suddenly she heard the night doorman’s voice over the apartment’s intercom. “There’s a car downstairs for you, Bree,” said Calvin.
“Thanks, Calvin. I’ll be right down,” Bree answered, giving herself a final check in the big mirror over the fireplace in their living room.
“I’d hurry up if I was you,” Calvin said, completely breaking his Edwardian language training. “This is a nice car.”
When she got downstairs, Bree could see that it was some kind of Rolls-Royce limousine, because she recognized the fairy hood ornament. And she could tell it was old, but she couldn’t tell the difference between a car that cost one hundred thousand dollars and one that cost one hundred million, so she didn’t know just how nice this car was.
Calvin had a quick fight with Thomas’s driver over who got to open the door for Bree, and Calvin won, bowing with a flourish. She winked at him as she climbed in, mentally preparing herself for the worst. But the young man in neatly pressed black pants and a red oxford shirt looked even better than he did in his picture. He had on a pair of little wire-rimmed sunglasses and the lenses were so dark Bree had no idea what color his eyes were. This sunglasses-after-dark thing was different, but nothing Bree couldn’t live with.
“Hi,” she said, climbing inside. She was a bit surprised that he didn’t hold out a hand to help her into the car, but his smile was nice enough that she didn’t mind.
“Hi, Bree. I’m Thomas. Nice to meet you.” Now he held out his hand to shake.
Okay, thought Bree. He’s a feminist. I can live with that.
“Nice meeting you too,” she said, gripping his hand firmly. He had a nice handshake—he didn’t try to crush her fingers, but he didn’t squeeze her hand as if her bones were made of glass. “I understand that we were just two degrees of separation away before HelloHi.”
“Do we have a mutual friend?” Thomas’s voice was clear and deep. He could be a great voiceover for movies if he gets tired of music, Bree thought.
“No, a friend of mine knows a friend of yours,” she told him.
“If you go to Ritt
enhouse, I bet we’ve got at least one mutual friend. Do you know Evan Mitchell?”
“He’s two years behind me, so I don’t know him very well,” Bree said, settling into her seat. “How do you know Evan?”
“We have the same cello teacher,” he explained. “What about Sarah Ribera?”
“Definitely. We’ve only got one actual princess at Rittenhouse, and she’s it,” Bree said. There were a couple of girls who would be princesses if a lot of their relatives died, and plenty of girls as rich as queens, but only one whose summer home was an ancestral castle in Italy. “How do you know Sarah?”
“We share a godmother.”
Bree thought about that. “Are you secretly a prince, Thomas?”
He laughed. “I think I might technically be a prince—one of my grandmothers is a Medici, but I’ve never tried to sort all of that out. I mean, Florence hasn’t been a principality since the sixteen hundreds or something? So I’m not much of a prince, if at all.”
“Wow,” Bree said. “That’s still pretty amazing.”
“Not really. Unless you’re actually going to inherit a throne, the royalty thing doesn’t mean much nowadays. I mean, you know Sarah—she’s cool and all, but nobody’s idea of a princess.”
Bree had to laugh. “She may not be the princess in ‘The Princess and the Pea,’ but she has a lot in common with Xena, Warrior Princess. Have you ever seen her play lacrosse?”
“No, but I hear she swings the stick like a two-handed broadsword.”
“Yeah, she’s pretty awesome. And have you seen her hair in the last couple of months?”
“No. What does it look like?”
“She’s been bleaching it bone white and teasing it all fuzzy. She looks like a dandelion that’s gone to seed.”
He smiled, but he didn’t answer her. He seemed to be staring into space, which creeped Bree out just a little. It bothered her that she couldn’t see what he was looking at.
“So, do you play samba on your cello?” Bree asked, just to keep the conversation moving.
“Sure. My training is more classical, but I’ve been playing around with other kinds of music lately. It’s one of the things I like about the cello—its range works for almost anything. I’ve listened to Metallica played by a cello quartet. There’s even a hip-hop quartet. You’ve never heard OutKast until you’ve heard ‘Hey-Ya’ played on a cello.”
“You sound like my friend Sutton, except she plays the accordion,” Bree said. Sutton did have a strange obsession with the accordion, but she didn’t talk about it much. Sutton thought people would think it was boring, and she was right.
An interest in odd instruments was the one thing Sutton shared only with Jordan, though he was into bagpipes, not accordions. Sometimes they went to tiny clubs in Alphabet City to hear strange indie bands that combined polkas and punk rock like Freddielicious and the Celtic funk band Teensie McPhoo. On those nights Bree watched old movies by herself or with Kylian.
But Bree didn’t want to get into all that with Thomas.
“If you think OutKast sounds different on a cello, you ought to hear it on a button accordion.”
They talked about music until they arrived at the bar in TriBeCa where the samba ensemble was playing. Bree was warming up to Thomas. She was impressed by the breadth of his musical knowledge—he knew music the way she knew movies, always eager to find that next gem, the brilliant recording that no one knew about, the short film by a young genius that perfectly encapsulated a human experience. And it didn’t hurt that he might be a prince.
On the other hand, Bree had gotten a little bored by their conversation. When she tried to steer it toward the subject of movies, he brought it back to movie scores, movie soundtracks, movie sound effects—he didn’t have anything to say about anything but music. This could be a problem, Bree thought. They couldn’t spend all their time playing the name game and talking about the soundtrack to Idlewild.
Thomas’s chauffeur helped Bree out of the car, then, to her surprise, offered Thomas a hand as well.
“Thanks, James. I’ll text you when we’re ready,” Thomas said to his driver.
“Certainly, sir. Your cane?” said James, offering him what looked like an antique ebony cane with carved ivory on the bottom and the top. It looked a bit like a magician’s wand, Bree thought.
But then she finally realized what should have been obvious from the beginning: Thomas was blind.
“Thanks, James. See you later,” Thomas said, taking the cane with one hand and holding out his other arm to Bree.
She slipped her arm in his like she did two or three times a day with Kylian, but she was all too aware that this meant something different. She had to watch out for his footing as well as her own, which was already treacherous because of her super-high stilettos.
I am going to make Kylian pay big-time, she decided, leading Thomas to the bar’s doors. She could feel her cheeks flushing a shade of pink much brighter than the blush she was wearing. She was almost glad that he couldn’t see how embarrassed she was.
I can’t do this, she thought miserably. I’m going to make myself look like—seem like an idiot. She wondered if he could feel the slight tension tightening every muscle. She thought he might. Walking with Thomas was more like ballroom dancing. She didn’t have to tug on Thomas’s arm to guide him—he noticed the slightest pressure, just like she did when a partner led her across the floor. She was often grateful for the ballroom lessons, though she had complained when Fee told her to take them. It was better than ballet for teaching graceful movement, how to be conscious of everything her body was doing, as well as be attuned to someone else’s movements. She thought Thomas might have taken lessons, too. He had the same sort of body consciousness—which meant he probably knew exactly how tense Bree was.
An older man in a tuxedo was waiting by the door—not a bouncer, because this wasn’t that kind of club, but a ticket-taker. Probably the owner. He greeted Thomas by name and winked at Bree, promising them the best seats in the house.
He delivered, too, leading them through the crowded club to a table ten feet from the stage. It was obvious which one was the man in charge: Buck Buchanan was tall, broad, and wild-haired. He looked more like an English poet from the eighteen hundreds than a Latino musician. But if Bree had any doubts about him, they disappeared once he began to play. With a name like Buchanan, he probably wasn’t born in Brazil, but he played samba as if it had rocked his cradle in São Paulo. Bree couldn’t help tapping her feet, and even thought about asking Thomas to dance. She was pretty sure he could dance—and dance well—from the way they walked in together, but what if she was wrong? If he couldn’t dance, it might hurt his feelings, and she didn’t want to do that. But maybe he would be more hurt if she didn’t ask him just because he was blind? Bree didn’t know what to do. She had never felt so awkward on a date before, not even at her first formal when her date got trashed on spiked punch and threw up all over the dance floor.
The loud samba music made talking impossible for a while, which gave Bree a chance to get her reactions under control. Maybe blindness wasn’t such a big deal. It might be if Thomas were poor, but Mr. and Mrs. Fira clearly had more than enough money to make Thomas’s life pretty close to normal.
“Do you know how to samba?” Thomas asked suddenly when Buck Buchanan announced that they were going to take a quick break.
“No, but I think I could pick it up,” Bree said cautiously. She had been watching the two couples that had braved the tiny dance floor, and it didn’t look all that different from other Latin dances.
“When they come back on, let’s try it,” he said with a grin.
“Well . . . all right.” Bree smiled bravely, then remembered that he couldn’t actually see her smiling and frowned in despair.
There was yet another awkward silence, which Thomas ended by asking, “Want another drink?”
“Sure.” Bree signaled “two” to the bartender, who brought another Coke and Diet Coke. Thoma
s had apologized as soon as they were seated for the fact that he was well known at the club, which meant that they knew he was underage. Bree told him she didn’t care. She liked the swimmy feeling she got after a couple of drinks, but didn’t need it to have fun.
“Okay, we’re back,” said the bandleader, springing back to the stage. “And I want to see some dancing this time!”
Thomas smoothly got to his feet and held out a hand for Bree. She took it, feeling as if every eye in the room was on her and Thomas. He seemed entirely at ease, leading her to the floor. She was worried about the other couples crowding them—the dance floor wasn’t much more than fifteen by fifteen feet—but they were given plenty of room. Too much room? Had everyone noticed that Thomas was blind? Maybe not—he moved with such assurance.
He slipped one arm around Bree’s waist and held her left hand with his right, just like ballroom dancing. But their bodies were pressed close, and the rhythms were faster, more exotic. Bree closed her eyes and relaxed into the dance, trying to imagine what he was experiencing. Bree could smell his cologne, something subtle and spicy, and feel his pulse in his wrist. He danced better than any of her partners at school. She thought maybe it was because his eyes didn’t distract him, but she couldn’t bring herself to ask. She just enjoyed herself as they moved across the floor in perfect rhythm with the music and each other.
“This’ll be our final song,” Buck Buchanan announced. To Bree it seemed that time had passed very quickly.
“Do you need to call your driver?” she asked Thomas.
“In a minute,” he said. “Right now, I just want to dance with you.”
The last song was a slow one, at least compared to the other songs the band had played. As they drifted across the floor, Thomas kissed Bree on the throat. It was brief but exhilarating, and it hinted at things to come. Whatever limitations blindness might have brought to Thomas’s life, it hadn’t kept him from dating. He was amazingly slick—almost too slick. But Bree didn’t want to judge him on just one kiss. That seemed more than unfair.