Rebecca looked at me, one of her pale eyebrows arched a little higher than the other one. At the time, I didn’t see her point. For all I knew, the guy had been harassing poor Emily. In retrospect, I should have known better.
Rebecca cleared her throat. Emily looked over at us. Neil kept looking at Emily. Poor guy—if you ask me, he had it bad.
Emily smiled at me. Then she looked at Neil and said, “Three …”
Neil straightened up, like he felt he had to prove to us that he wasn’t being pushed around. He said, “Sarah was never anything like you.” Then he turned and looked hard at me, but not so hard at Rebecca. He left the room. Emily didn’t even watch him go.
“Hi,” she said to me.
“Hi,” I said. “I would have called you, but you’re not in the phone book.”
Her eyes kind of sparkled when I said that, and she smiled again, very sweetly.
“We’re unlisted,” she said. “My dad doesn’t like to be bothered at home by people we don’t know. You know, like telemarketers.”
Beside me, Rebecca made a disapproving noise, the kind you associate with someone rolling her eyes. Rich people, she was probably thinking, they don’t like to be disturbed like the rest of us.
Emily looked directly at her, making it clear she knew what was going on. “You still playing aggressive basketball?” she said.
“No,” Rebecca said. I waited for her to say something like, You still crying every time someone blocks you? But she didn’t. Instead she said, “Mike wants to tell you something.”
“Oh?” Emily turned to me again, and again her face relaxed.
I guess I hadn’t expected that we would actually find her, because I hadn’t thought through what I was going to say. She looked at me, waiting.
“Mr. Henderson seems to be interested in you,” I said finally. “Really interested, if you know what I mean.”
“No,” she said, “I don’t know what you mean. Who is Mr. Henderson?”
“The janitor,” I said. “At the community center.”
“The community center? You mean, where I met you?” She gave Rebecca a little smile.
I nodded.
“What do you mean, he’s really interested in me?”
“I saw him watching you.”
“You mean, like you were watching me that time?”
I felt Rebecca’s eyes on me.
“Mr. Henderson is an old guy,” I said. “I saw him going through your wallet.”
Emily stood there, a hand on her hip, half-smiling, half-suspicious. “I caught you going through my wallet.”
“Because I wanted to see what he was doing,” I said. “And I saw him follow you to the subway.”
She was still smiling, but now she also seemed annoyed. I could see it in her eyes. “You’re kidding, right?” she said. “This is some kind of joke, right? Did Becky the Basher here put you up to this?”
Becky the Basher?
“It’s Rebecca,” Rebecca said. “And I’ve never been fouled for bashing.”
“It’s no joke,” I said. I couldn’t believe Emily’s reaction. “I’m telling you, Mr. Henderson was watching you. He followed you. He went through your stuff. I thought you should know.”
She studied me a moment. Then she said, “Well, thanks for telling me.” She didn’t sound even remotely grateful. “We’re not going to swim there again for a while. Our coach finally arranged practice time at a place closer to here. So I guess this Mr.—what did you say his name was?”
“Henderson.”
“Mr. Henderson is going to have to ogle someone else.” She picked up the instrument case. She looked at me and then at Rebecca. Then she set the case down again, fished a pen out of her pocket and looked around for some paper. Finally she grabbed a piece of sheet music from a rack and scribbled something on it. “My phone number,” she said. “My cell. You know, in case someone else takes an interest in me that you think I should know about.” She handed it to me, then she said, “What about you?”
“Me?”
“Your phone number,” she said. “Can I have it?”
I recited it, and she wrote it on another sheet of music. Mr. Korchak at my school would have flipped out if anyone scribbled on school music. I guess private schools were different. Or rich kids were.
“Well then,” she said, “I guess I’d better run.” She flashed a great big grin at Rebecca as she strolled out of the music room, her narrow hips swaying and making me remember how great she had looked in her navy blue Speedo.
“Ahem!” Rebecca said.
I turned to face her. “Becky the Basher?” I said.
“Personally,” Rebecca said, “if it was me, I’d tell creepy Mr. Henderson where to find her. I’d even draw him a map.”
“It was your idea to tell her.”
“I guess I was hoping she’d changed. She hasn’t.” She thought for a moment. “No, wait a minute, she has. She’s gotten worse.”
“She’s turned into one of those stuck-up rich kids you don’t like, right?”
“The way she acts, she could be the original blueprint. You know what I think? I think she uses that thing about her mother. I think she plays on the sympathy. You keeping that?”
“Huh?”
She was looking at the piece of sheet music in my hand, the one that Emily had scrawled her phone number on.
“Uh, no,” I said. I tossed it into the wastepaper basket near the door.
“So,” Rebecca said, smiling now, “you want to meet my mom?”
“Sure.”
“Follow me.” She led the way out of the room. As I passed the wastepaper basket, I scooped out the crumpled sheet of paper and jammed it into my pocket. I don’t think Rebecca noticed. I wasn’t so sure about Neil, though. He was in the hall just outside the door. I saw him when I straightened up. He didn’t say anything. He just looked at me. I ran to catch up with Rebecca.
Riel was sitting at the dining room table, marking test papers, when I got home from the community center that night. He glanced up.
“Did you talk to Teresa?”
“Yeah.” I really had talked to her. I had done it because I knew Riel would ask me. He’d probably check too. I had told her that I wasn’t sure I should say anything, I wasn’t even sure if I had seen it right, but I had noticed Mr. Henderson holding a girl’s backpack and it was open and I just thought I should say something, you know, in case anything had fallen out or gone missing. She had frowned and asked if I thought he had taken anything. I said no, I was pretty sure he hadn’t, but that I had been there and I didn’t want anyone to think that I had taken anything, you know, in case anyone reported anything missing. She gave me another look, like she was trying to figure out what was going on, but she said, no, nothing had been reported missing. She thanked me for telling her, but I could see she wasn’t exactly sure what to do with the information.
“And?” Riel said.
“And she said it was good I mentioned it.”
Riel’s smile was 100 percent I-told-you-so. “There’s a message for you,” he said. “A girl called.”
“Rebecca?”
“Emily. She said you had her number. She wants you to call her back.” He looked at me. “I don’t remember you mentioning an Emily before. Is she from school?”
“She’s from the community center,” I said. I was thinking, Emily called? Why? What did she want? “Is it okay if I take the phone upstairs?” The phone in the kitchen was a cordless.
He nodded. “Just put it back when you’re finished.”
I got the phone and took it up to my room. I closed the door, fished out the crumpled piece of paper I had shoved into my jeans pocket, and smoothed it out with the back of my hand. She answered on the second ring.
“It’s me,” I said. “Mike?” Like it was a question, like I wasn’t sure who I was. I don’t know why she made me so nervous, but she did. Way more nervous than I’d ever been around Rebecca or even Jen.
“Hi, McGill,�
�� she said, sounding cool, calling me by my last name. “I was wondering—do you think you could come over to my place tomorrow after school? I need to talk to you about something.”
The correct answer was no. No way. Rebecca would never speak to me again if I said yes to Emily Corwin. And I cared about Rebecca—a lot.
“Yes or no, McGill?” she said.
I can’t explain why, but instead of giving the correct answer, I heard myself say, “Yeah, I guess.”
“It’s a request,” she said, “not an order.” She sounded amused. I imagined her smiling. “You don’t have to if you don’t want to.”
“No, I do,” I said. Maybe I said it a little too fast. I heard her laugh. “It’s just—I don’t know where you live.”
“You have a pencil?”
“Yeah,” I said while I scrabbled for one in my desk drawer. I wrote down the street and the number of her house and jotted down her instructions.
“Great,” she said. “And McGill? Just you, okay? Leave Becky at home. Okay?”
“Okay,” I said. That’s when I heard it in my voice—eagerness. I wanted to see her again. I shouldn’t have, but I did. I wanted to talk to her, maybe get to know her a little better. I wanted to go to her house and see what that looked like too. Maybe Rebecca didn’t like her—maybe she didn’t like any rich people—but I didn’t feel the same way. I was curious—about her, about where she lived, about what kind of life she lived. That didn’t mean I wanted to go out with her. I was happy with Rebecca. But a guy can want to expand his horizons, right? A guy can talk to one girl, even drop by her house, while he’s seeing another girl, right? It’s not a crime, is it? It’s just one visit, to a big house, a rich girl’s house. And, no problem, I wouldn’t bring Rebecca. Heck, I wouldn’t even tell Rebecca. As I hung up the phone, I wondered why Emily wanted to see me. I wondered if she felt the same way I did. I wondered if she wanted to get to know me too.
CHAPTER SIX
The woman who opened the door for me at Emily’s house looked about sixty. She told me to wait while she let Emily know I was there.
“Is that your grandmother?” I said when Emily finally appeared.
For a moment Emily looked confused. Then she said, “Oh. You mean Estelle. She’s our housekeeper. Why?”
“Just wondering,” I said. I had never met anyone who had a housekeeper. Jen’s parents were pretty well off. They lived in a big house in a really nice neighborhood and drove his-and-hers Beemers. They had a cleaning lady who came in three times a week. Whenever they had a party, they hired a bartender and a couple of people to pass out the hors d’oeuvres and to clean up afterwards. But they didn’t have a housekeeper. And, it turns out, at least in comparison to Emily, they weren’t rich.
Emily lived on a tree-lined street not far from her school. To get from the street to her house, you had to press a button at a big black iron gate set into the high stone wall that enclosed the property. Then you had to wait for someone—in this case, Estelle the housekeeper—to ask you over the intercom who you were and what you wanted. Then you had to wait for her to check with someone inside the house—Emily, I guess—before she pressed the button inside the house that unlocked the gate.
The house itself was set way back from the street. I followed a stone path to the front door and was about to press the bell when the door flew open. Emily grinned out at me.
“You surprised me, McGill,” she said. She seemed to like calling me by my last name. “You’re right on time.”
I didn’t know why she was so surprised by that.
“Come on in,” she said.
I stepped into the kind of front hall that I had only ever seen before on TV or in the movies. It was big, with a round table in the middle of it and a vase of fresh flowers in the middle of the table. The floor, which was made of some kind of tile, was so clean it sparkled. A curving staircase led to the second floor. Through a door to one side of the stairs was the living room—I found out later that it was the formal living room and that there was another, less formal one at the back of the house that overlooked what Emily called the gardens. To the other side of the stairs was the dining room. I must have been gaping at all the art on the walls, not to mention the furniture that had definitely not come from IKEA or Sears, because Emily said, “Yeah, I know. It’s like living in a museum. Touch anything and my dad goes nuts. He’s got every item in the house cataloged, photographed, and identified. And I am not kidding. He’s very big on his stuff, my dad is.” It sounded to me like she didn’t share his enthusiasm. She called to Estelle that we were going upstairs. Then she said, “Come on, McGill.”
“Where are we going?”
“My room,” she said. “Where else?”
Her room? Jen’s parents never let me go into Jen’s room. Of course, after the first couple of times I’d gone over there, Jen’s parents wouldn’t even let me in the house. I felt more welcome at Rebecca’s house, but we always hung out in the sunroom or in the family room, never in Rebecca’s room.
“Are you coming or what?” Emily said.
I glanced around. It didn’t look like anyone was going to stop me, so I followed her up the stairs.
The upstairs hall had more furniture in it than Riel had in his whole house. There was a sofa, two armchairs, and a table in front of a huge round window at the front of the house. Halfway down the hall was another table with more fresh flowers on it and a chair beside it, so if you got tired walking around in all that space you could sit down and have a rest. A bookshelf at the far end of the hall ran all the way up to the ceiling. It had a ladder attached to it so that you could climb up and reach the books at the top.
“Looks great, doesn’t it?” Emily said. “I don’t think my father has even read half of them. In fact, I’d be surprised if he’s read any of them.”
She led me through a door to the left of the bookcase.
I blinked when I stepped inside.
“This is your bedroom?” I said. It was huge—you could fit four, maybe six of my room in there.
She looked at me as if I had just emerged from a spaceship.
“Bed,” she said, pointing to a four-poster bed that had light blue curtains hanging around it. “Room,” she said, twirling like a dancer and pointing at the four walls. “Bedroom.”
Besides the bed that looked like it belonged to a princess who maybe lived in a palace, she also had a sofa, a table in front of the sofa, two big armchairs, an entertainment center that included a stereo, CD player, a pair of those really small but really powerful and high-quality speakers, TV, VCR, and DVD player, a desk, a computer, a couple of floor-to-ceiling bookcases of her own—and the ceilings were high—and her own bathroom, which, I could see through the open door, had a whirlpool bath in it.
“Nice,” I said.
“Be it ever so humble.”
Right. I looked around some more. There were a couple of pictures sitting on a table that was covered with makeup stuff. One was a nice-looking middle-aged guy, heavily tanned, great haircut, sharp suit, hands crossed in front of him.
“Your dad?” I said.
“Yeah. Mister Glitz.”
“Huh?”
“See that ring?” she said. I looked closer at the picture. “Diamond.” A huge diamond. It sparkled on the third finger of his left—no, his right—hand.
“You wouldn’t believe how many carats,” she said. “The cufflinks too.”
Cufflinks? Who wore cufflinks? I looked again.
“Diamonds,” she said. “And check his right ear.” I looked a third time. “Diamond stud.” Yup, there it was. Pretty big for a stud, if you ask me. “He thinks it’s cool,” Emily said. “I tell him, a guy his age, that’s not cool, that’s pathetic. But he loves diamonds. Loves the sparkle. So I call him Mister Glitz, you know, to get under his skin.”
“They must be worth a lot,” I said.
“You bet. And he’s got them all cataloged, marked—in this case, printed—and insured to the max. Like I
said, everything in this house is identified, cataloged, and insured.”
“Printed?”
“You know, like fingerprinted.”
I looked at the rock on his finger again. “How do you take a fingerprint of a diamond?” I said. “Aren’t they all pretty much alike?”
“No, McGill, they are not,” she said. “If I’ve learned anything living with my dad, it’s that diamonds are not all alike.” What did she mean, living with her dad? She made it sound like she hadn’t always lived with him. “And because they’re not all alike, you can take fingerprints of them. Well, sort of. You can take what they call a gemprint. The idea is the same as a fingerprint. It’s a laser scan of the diamond. Jewelers—good jewelers—call it the DNA of diamonds.”
The things I didn’t know. I looked at the second photo. Emily’s dad again—except he wasn’t wearing the huge rock on his finger in this one—a woman, and two little girls. One looked like Emily when she was maybe four or five. The other girl looked older.
“Your mom?” I said, pointing at the woman.
She nodded.
“And, what, your sister?” She nodded again, and I looked back at the picture. “She looks like your dad. You look more like your mom. Is she at university now?”
“Who?”
“Your sister.” Jeez, who did she think I meant? “She’s older than you, so I thought maybe she was away at university.”
“No,” Emily said, “she isn’t.”
I waited for her to say more, but she didn’t. Maybe she and her sister didn’t get along. Maybe they even hated each other.
Emily perched on the edge of her bed. “Have a seat, McGill.”
I sank down onto one of the armchairs.
“So,” she said, “what’d you have to do to end up at the community center?”
“Huh?”
“You’re there on a community service order, right? What’d you do?”
“How do you know that?” I said. Teresa Rego knew why I was there because she was the director of the community center. Maybe Mr. Henderson knew too, maybe they had told him. But it wasn’t supposed to be common knowledge.
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