The Viscount's Daughter - [A Treadwell Academy - 03]

by Caitlyn Duffy

  So my heart swelled with hope for a possible solution to my problem of living at home when Christie announced with pride at lunch time on a Thursday afternoon that her photographs were going to be exhibited at a tiny gallery downtown on Orchard Street.

  “It’s a group show,” Christie bragged quietly to me and this other girl, Amanda, who often sat with us at lunch time. I had gotten the distinct sense the year before that Amanda didn’t like me much, but tolerated me as an unfortunate requirement of friendship with Christie. She thought I was too loud, too bossy, too crass. I probably was all of those things, so I didn’t care too much about her opinion of me. “It’s my work, and two other people, hand-selected from over a thousand submissions. And the guest curator of the show is Seth Zable!”

  “Who the heck is Seth Zable?” I asked.

  Amanda grimaced at me. “Only like, the hottest fashion photographer in the world. He shot all those ads for Tanzo jeans.”

  “Yeah, the ones with Candy Llewellyn,” Christie added.

  I knew which ads they were talking about. They had run the year before in every major magazine, and parents had freaked out about them because the model in them was anorexically thin and the ad was shot in such a way that it kind of looked like she was holding a joint and exhaling smoke. With that association having been made, I was able to visualize a guy I had seen at parties downtown with my sister… kind of sinister-looking with a lot of tattoos and a thin mustache. I was pretty sure I had met him before, but at the time probably hadn’t known he was anyone of importance.

  I ate my French fries in quiet admiration of Christie. I knew she really wanted to be a photographer but hadn’t known she was actively sending her work out for consideration in group shows. Her achievement made me yearn for some kind of goals of my own, but I honestly didn’t have any hobbies.

  “So, there’s an opening party tomorrow,” Christie announced in a tone that suggested there was more to be said. “You guys are welcome to attend if you want.”

  Amanda picked the crust off her sandwich. “What time? I have to be home on Fridays by ten.”

  Unlike me and Christie, both of us living on the Upper East Side in Manhattan, Amanda lived in Brooklyn Heights. Brooklyn was like, another universe.

  “It doesn’t even start until nine,” Christie said, sounding disappointed. “What if you just sleep over at my house?”

  “No can do,” Amanda said firmly. “Tomorrow is my dad’s birthday. I have to be home.”

  I smelled a lie, but I let it go. Amanda probably had her reasons for not wanting to accompany Christie downtown, and I had firsthand experience with how persuasive Christie could be when we were out partying and she had bigger plans.

  “So are you in, Bets?” Christie asked me. “There will be wine and snacks, I’m sure.”

  “I’m in,” I nodded. I didn’t care about wine and snacks. Christie’s proclivity toward blowing curfews and attracting the attention of police was of greater interest to me than getting a buzz off cheap wine served in a plastic cups. I’d been to gallery openings before and was willing to bet that an hour spent in the company of Christie’s fellow photographers and their friends would result in a long night of debauchery.

  The next morning before school, my belly was tying itself in knots with anxiety about the goals I had set for the day. Impatiently, I tugged on my Pershing uniform of a starched white button-down shirt with a rounded Peter Pan collar, and Fitzgerald tartan pleated skirt. After tugging on my white knee socks (an itchy, annoying requirement of the uniform especially in September when the temperature was still reaching ninety degrees every afternoon), I balled up a pair of lacy black tights and stuffed them into my backpack. From my closet I removed a stretchy black sleeveless dress with weird metal studs all over it, formerly Bijoux’s, that I thought was dead sexy even though it was incredibly uncomfortable to sit down while wearing it. The dress would come with me, and Christie and I would be changing at her place after school. I prepared for the day ahead under the promise to myself that it would be my last day at Pershing.

  Today would be the day I would hatch my plan.

  When I left the apartment to walk the ten blocks to Pershing, I waved goodbye to two maids in our living room whose names I didn’t know. Of course by the time I left for school in the morning, Mom had already been at work for an hour and Danko always left early because technically his business began when the stock market in Europe opened. In the lobby of our building, the morning doorman, Deshaun, tipped his hat at me.

  “Have a good day at school, Betsey,” he told me. “Where did that sister of yours run off to?”

  I smiled. “Don’t know, don’t care.”

  That was a lie, I did know and I did care. Bijoux was extending her visit to Los Angeles to spend more time with Tobin. The two of them had been in all of the major gossip magazines the week that school had started because of the airing of the first episode of Striking Out. Bijoux had also done exactly what I had told her not to do, which was flirt shamelessly with the members of All or Nothing back stage at the Jam Music Television Awards. Expose Magazine had featured a picture of her smirking in a slinky hot pink strapless dress with her arm around Nigel O’Hallihan on the page opposite the picture of her and Tobin jogging in Runyon Canyon. Of course, of all five members of the band, Bijoux had to be photographed snuggling with him, my favorite.

  But at least her frolicking detour in Los Angeles had indefinitely delayed her moving out of our apartment. She texted me several times a day, of course, as she probably texted over twelve thousand words a day to her various friends and ex-boyfriends all over the globe. During the two weeks we’d been back in New York, she hadn’t mentioned finding an apartment in the East Village even once. So, that was a relief. Even though she was barely there, our apartment was still technically her home, and she was expected back at some point even if only to pack up her things.

  The Pershing School was located on East 79th Street between Lexington and Third Avenue, a distinguished block with ivy lining the façades of the brick brownstone homes on both sides of the street. The school building itself was a double-wide brownstone, five stories high. It hinted at old world glamour, from its snazzy front lobby with black and white Italian marble flooring, to the Victorian plaster moldings around every door and window frame. It was, however, teetering dangerously on the edge of total ruin from decades of disrepair. Sitting in class, I often felt like at any given moment a heavy chandelier might just fall from the crumbling ceiling overhead and crush whoever happened to be sitting beneath it. I’m not a bloodthirsty jerk or anything, but sometimes I kind of wished that would happen, just to shake up the day. Particularly if a chandelier happened to fall on Jessica Johanessen, who had once asked me during freshman year if a thyroid problem was at the root of my bulky figure.

  The building’s state of imminent collapse did not prevent me from having frequent fantasies about being the lady of the house when the building was back in its glory days. I very much enjoyed imagining what it must have been like to cruise through those lofty rooms in a hoop skirt, bellowing out orders to servants. On a particularly boring day in Geometry, I had mentally redecorated the classroom as my master bedroom, even surfing furniture stores on my mobile phone beneath my desktop for cool window treatments. Leaving Pershing would make me a little sad. But I had already thoroughly explored the Treadwell campus on the school’s website and its many buildings and dormitories would surely suffice as locations for future fantasy sequences.

  The school day dragged.

  In English, Ms. Kumar was trying to engage us in a debate about The Scarlet Letter. I seethed annoyance with her from behind my desk, still angry about the book report situation she had created for me over the summer. Under different circumstances, I was loath to admit, I probably would have liked Ms. Kumar a lot. She was probably twenty years younger than my other teachers, had dip-dye hair that I am sure the principal of our school did not appreciate, and once I’d seen her scratch the bac
k of her neck to reveal a tattoo of the Chinese symbol for double happiness.

  But unfortunately for her, I did hate her, and she seemed oblivious.

  “Betsey,” she called on me even though I was not one of the brown-nosers raising my hand in response to her question about my opinion of Reverend Dimmesdale.

  “What?” I said, not really feeling like contributing to the discussion as part of my overall intent to be thrown out of Pershing. I was very distracted by my plans to break enough rules later that night to give Mom no choice but to send me away.

  “What do you think motivated Arthur Dimmesdale? A genuine desire to protect Hester and Pearl, or a selfish urge to keep his own indiscretions a secret from the rest of the town?”

  I shrank in my seat and tried to evaporate inside of my maroon blazer. My initial inclination was to denounce Dimmesdale for being a coward to shy away from the truth about the role he’d played in Hester’s dilemma, fathering her illegitimate child. But before the words left my mouth, my brain had a change of plans. “He couldn’t help it that he was afraid to tell the truth. Everyone has secrets. No one in their village would have understood.”

  “Interesting,” Ms. Kumar said, mulling over my response, narrowing her eyes at me. She addressed the rest of the class. “How many of you believe you’d have the courage to tell the truth if you kept a secret that would change the perception that everyone you knew had of you?”

  I let my curly hair fall forward, obscuring my face as I hunched over my desk to pretend to take notes. I, for one, knew I’d be willing to keep that kind of secret for my whole life.

  Leaving school after classes let out was a little nostalgic for me. Naturally, no one knew but me that I didn’t plan to come back ever again. I thought about cleaning out my locker as Christie rambled about the outfit she had planned for the night, but decided against it, considering it might be perhaps too obvious if I brought home all of my belongs that I had planned my own exit. So I left my picture of All or Nothing, but took my makeup case. There was no sense in potentially leaving good purple eyeliner behind.

  Christie and I picked up lattes and she talked nonstop about her photography on the walk back to her apartment building, which was in the opposite direction of my own. The only photographs of hers that I’d seen before were ones she’d posted online. They were mostly spotty, retro-looking lomography snapshots of her Persian cat, Princess Diana, and random landscapes of Central Park. I knew that Christie really wanted to be an avant garde photographer but I thought her ambitions were similar to Bijoux’s intentions of being the world’s next greatest handbag designer. All talk, no action.

  “The theme of the group show is modesty,” she told me in her lobby as we strode past her doorman toward the elevators. “I may or may not be naked in some of the pictures they’re showing.”

  “Christie!” I exclaimed. “Why would you submit naked pictures of yourself to a photo exhibition, you freak?”

  “Well, I was accepted, wasn’t I?” she said. We boarded the elevator and Christie tapped the P button for “penthouse.”

  “Yeah, but isn’t that like, child pornography?” I asked.

  “Does it count if I’m the pornographer?” Christie teased. “Anyway, they don’t know that I’m only fourteen. The submissions were limited to people over eighteen, so for the record, we’re seniors in high school tonight.”

  I sighed. Partaking in something as sneaky as Christie’s showing off weird exhibitionist photos of her naked self in public would not really have been my cup of tea, usually. But the entire event smacked of potential trouble, which only aided my purpose more. This whole thing could blow up into a regrettable incident in any number of ways: the curator discovering Christie’s real age later that night and being charged with a crime for showing her nudie photos, Christie’s parents walking into the gallery and having coronaries, both of us getting arrested for drinking cheap free gallery wine out of a box, underage. My nerves were jittery with anticipation and I was so stressed out that I constantly had to go to the bathroom.

  “Do you have a urinary tract infection or something?” Christie called from where she was laying on her bed with her cat, the third time I had to use the bathroom adjoined to her bedroom.

  “No,” I said before I flushed.

  “Oh my god, you do,” Christie teased. “You totally fooled around with that weird cousin of yours in Croatia and you got a UTI! I knew it!”

  “I DID NOT,” I thundered, completely annoyed with myself for ever mentioning Kristijan to her. “It’s not like that. He’s like my brother, or something.”

  “Whatever, Betsey,” Christie said, flipping through a copy of a fashion magazine, swinging her legs back and forth. “I saw pictures of you and Bijoux in Expose over the summer. I know how you roll.”

  “Not even,” I said, not wanting to explain how the stupid the stuff I did with my sister in Virginia Beach had absolutely nothing to do with my friendship with Kristijan. I hadn’t seen any pictures in Expose Magazine but I could think of a handful of inopportune events that had occurred over the summer when someone might have snapped a picture. I couldn’t control the flush that crept into my cheeks. This was the problem with partying with Bijoux; it was impossible to imagine in the moments when the fun was unfolding how easily everything could be spoiled by some idiot with a picture to sell to a tabloid. Our mom had cautioned us time and again that we couldn’t trust strangers. Bijoux just didn’t care what the world thought of her, but I did.

  “Is Ryan going to be there tonight?” I asked Christie, changing the topic and kind of hoping he would be. We were in her parents’ kitchen, surveying the edible options in the fridge. I hadn’t seen Ryan at all since the beginning of summer. Although, it did strike me as kind of odd that Ryan would potentially join us in a very small gallery where everyone in attendance would be finding out what his girlfriend looked like naked, most likely before he’d had a chance to see Christie naked with his own eyes.

  “Oh, hell, no,” Christie said, shaking her head emphatically. “He doesn’t know anything about this. I told you what he did to me, right? He knew I was really into photography, so for his birthday in July, he asked his parents for a fancy Canon camera. And of course they bought it for him, because he gets everything he wants. So all summer long, all he wanted to do was take pictures, like we were in some kind of competition or something. Lame.”

  I kept my thoughts to myself. If I had a boyfriend like Ryan, I wouldn’t care if he wanted to copycat my hobbies. But boyfriends were really the last thing on my mind. Especially since what had happened in Croatia. At the end of our freshman year, Christie had been freaking out about how far she should go with Ryan. She liked him, and this may sound really hopeless, but she wanted to save her virginity for Thom DaSilva, one of the other boys in All or Nothing with Nigel O’Hallihan. Not that Christie had ever met anyone in All or Nothing, of course, but stranger things had happened. Thinking about that kind of stuff gave me a headache, though. Losing virginity and wanting everything to be perfect that first time all seemed so childish and pointless that autumn in light of everything else.

  Around seven, Christie’s mom arrived home and stuck her head into Christie’s bedroom, where we were playing music and putting on makeup. “Who’s in the mood for sushi?”

  “We’re going out, Mom,” Christie said sharply to put an end to any of Mrs. King’s intentions of having a fun girls’ night at home. “It’s Amber’s birthday and we’re going downtown for pizza, and then her dad is taking us bowling in the Village.”

  We didn’t know anyone named Amber.

  Christie’s mom regarded our little black dresses with suspicion. “You both look awfully dressed up for bowling.”

  “It’s Friday,” Christie stated for her mother, as if that explained perfectly why we would be going bowling in dresses so tight we could barely breathe in them.

  “Well, be sure to take cabs. I don’t want you two on the subway dressed like trollops,” Mrs. King sa
id, and left us alone to continue getting ready.

  We did take a cab, of course, because we could barely walk in our high heels. Enjoying the commotion of the Lower East Side on a Friday night, we stopped for slices of pizza around the corner from the gallery. We sat atop swiveling stools and ate, trying our hardest not to mess up our lip gloss. Older girls who were already drunk for the night glared at us, disapproving of our presence on their turf on their Friday night out.

  “Oh my god, I’m so nervous,” Christie whispered when we stepped out of the pizza shop, just a few feet away from the gallery.

  “It’s going to be fine,” I assured her, stroking her arm. “They chose you. You don’t have anything to prove. It’s your night.”

  Christie took a deep breath and smiled. I was proud to be her friend as we walked down Orchard Street. The gallery was already packed, and a DJ was positioned in the very back by the restroom, spinning alternative rock. Without irony, everyone in attendance wore black. Christie’s photos were along the right side of the gallery on one exposed brick wall, and when we entered the gallery, a tall, skinny guy in a vintage baseball league t-shirt with a thin mustache made a beeline for Christie.

  “Christie!” the guy said, grabbing her by both elbows and kissing her on both cheeks, as if he was European. I could tell instantly that he was not European, both by his Brooklyn accent and my reassurance to myself that I had, in fact, met him before and knew otherwise.

  “Seth!” Christie exclaimed, as if they were old friends, and she, too, was accustomed to foreign exchanges of affection. It was a little boggling that somehow over the summer while I had been away, Christie had already met all these weird art people in preparation for this show. I hadn’t been in touch with many of my friends over the summer, and now it was evident just how much our lives had changed since June. Christie’s life was taking twists and turns for the better. Mine was spiraling off into a dark, inescapable abyss.