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

by Caitlyn Duffy

  Seth looked me up and down approvingly. “I know you from somewhere.”

  “Yeah,” I said quietly. “Los Angeles.”

  Seth shot me with his fingers in a gun pose. “The Sigma party. You’ve got the crazy hot older sister.”

  “Younger sister,” I lied, trying to imply that Bijoux was younger than me.

  “Right,” Seth said, not at all believing me. He returned his attention to Christie.

  “Your work is the rage tonight, sister,” he told her.

  And he wasn’t exaggerating. Everyone was gaping at Christie’s prints, taped to the wall. I fell into a group and studied them. Christie had been kind of been stretching the truth that she was naked in the pictures; she clearly was, but they were shot using some kind of slow shutter speed effect that made it pretty impossible to see any gratuitous details. I didn’t have any areas of expertise except for maybe crème-filled sandwich cookies, so my opinion on photography hardly mattered. While Christie’s photographs were hardly ground-breaking, they weren’t bad. They were, honestly, good enough that it was hard for me to imagine how she’d taken them all on her own.

  Christie was the star of the show that night. Every guy in the gallery wanted to exchange words with her, and a lot of girls, too. The other two photographers whose work was being featured, both male, introduced themselves. One guy, who was completely bald and introduced himself as Tyler, had shot an entire series of photos based on burlap sacks stuffed to resemble the shape of women’s bodies, dressed and posed in haute couture gowns. I could kind of appreciate how his work addressed the topic of modesty and how he was poking fun at vanity. The other guy’s work was a series of black and white prints featuring what looked like young women dressed like Pioneers in a mud wrestling ring. That I completely did not understand, but anyone could see that the guest curator of the show had an appetite for photography having to do with the female form and fashion. Seth definitely lived up to my hazy memory of him back in Los Angeles, moving smoothly through the crowd, befriending every guy he saw with high-fives and back slaps, and schmoozing shamelessly with women.

  I busied myself by making repeated trips to the back of the gallery where a small folding table had been set up and drinks were being served. Fortunately, since I had been to this kind of event before, I knew that it was customary to leave a dollar in the tip jar for every glass of wine I asked for even though technically the drinks were free. If there was anything Mom couldn’t stand, it was cheap behavior, and I had been raised to tip whenever and wherever appropriate. The petite woman behind the folding table who was pouring fresh glasses of wine smiled at me with appreciation, probably surprised that one of the youngest guests in attendance would be the most consistent tipper. Her acknowledgement of my wrinkled dollar bills was probably the only thing keeping her from cutting me off the fourth time I sheepishly approached the table for a refill. Alone in front of the bathroom mirror for a few minutes, I could see in the harsh light that my lips and teeth had been stained purple by red wine.

  Around eleven when the crowd began to thin out, Seth emerged from the very back of the gallery with the girl I presumed to be his girlfriend, a very gaunt, pale model with long red hair. “Let’s go,” Seth told Christie and me. “A bunch of us are going downtown. You should join us.”

  Along with the two other photographers whose work was being featured and a handful of people who had introduced themselves to us as magazine editors, we piled into cabs and migrated further downtown. It had started getting unpleasantly humid outside and I wondered if rain was inevitable. Christie and I crammed into the back seat of a cab with Tyler and a woman who was an art critic for the Chelsea Quarterly. She appeared to be even older than my mom, with gray hair cut severely short and a handbag that I happened to know cost more than some kinds of cars. As the story of my life always seemed to unfold, I was the person in the cab who everyone else least wanted to engage in conversation.

  “So, Christie, are you a student?” the art critic asked as we idled at a stoplight.

  “Yes,” Christie said.

  “SVA?” Tyler asked next to me, leaning forward to get a better look at Christie on the other side of me.

  “No,” Christie said, and then laughed her practiced, flirtatious laugh. “We go to the Pershing School. Thankfully, this is our last year.” She winked at me conspiratorially.

  “A high school senior,” the art critic said, intrigued by the idea. “Now that’s a story. Are your parents anyone I would have heard of?”

  Christie hesitated, knowing that as soon as she dropped her dad’s name and the art critic got home later that night to begin researching, the cat would be out of the bag about Christie’s age. At that point, though, Christie didn’t care. She had already established her talent that night. “My dad is Adam King,” she said. “He’s not an artist or anything. He’s an investment banker.”

  “You’re in high school…” Tyler murmured, completely ignoring me. “I feel dirty having looked at those pictures.”

  “You loved it,” Christie fired back flirtatiously.

  An alien tractor beam could have extracted me from the back seat of that cab and up into a flying saucer hovering over downtown Manhattan, and probably no one would have noticed. I guess it was a good thing that I was so preoccupied with wanting to get myself punished when I got home later that night, or I might have been very jealous of the attention Christie was receiving. It was just like being out on the town with Bijoux and having really attractive guys ask me if I could pass along messages to my sister. I stared straight ahead, wishing I wasn’t so keenly aware that Tyler resented my sitting in between him and Christie. There was nothing about him that I found attractive, and he looked to be around thirty years old, but I was still jealous that he was clearly far more interested in Christie than he was in me. And I strongly suspected that her photography had far less to do with his level of interest than her long, shiny dark hair and tiny waist.

  I wondered what it would be like, just once, to be the real focus of attention for anything other than being a troublemaker.

  By the time we arrived at the bar, which was some kind of hipster spin-off of a pharmacy where $20 cocktails were served instead of prescriptions (it was called Rx), my mood had already soured and I was eager for the night to just progress so that I could get home and endure my mother’s tirade. I heard Tyler ask Christie quietly as the art critic paid for our cab if the bouncer out in front of Rx was going to be a hindrance to our entry now that he was in on the secret (or so he thought) about our age.

  I rolled my eyes, of course with my back to them as I approached the bar’s entrance, and wrapped my arms around the bouncer, a big guy named James who already knew me from my nonstop presence in the downtown scene the spring before, with my sister.

  “There’s my girl,” James said, giving me a bear hug. “I missed you this summer. How was Europe?”

  My ego temporarily rebounded, since at least I had been recognized and welcomed by a bouncer at a definitively cool bar. Christie raised an eyebrow. Maybe she was a rising art star that night, but my dad was a rock star and my sister was a pretty well-known celebrity, and that trumped art star in most bars downtown. Not that I rubbed any of my friends’ noses in it often or anything, but there were entire blogs about me and my sister and our clothes.

  I mean, I was royalty. Technically.

  “Hi, James,” I said. “These are my friends.”

  He nodded everyone inside and raised one finger to me in warning. “Keep it real, tonight, Betsey.”

  “OK, OK,” I agreed. James probably had no idea how old I really was but surely he knew that I wasn’t twenty-one, since even Bijoux was underage but had hung out at one time or another in every single bar in New York City.

  Absolutely nothing of interest happened during the hours we passed at Rx. Not to sound jaded or anything, but I already knew that ninety-five percent of the plans made in bars to follow up on friendships never actually materialized. Christie was ha
rdly a naïve young girl, but I knew all too well that all of the fabulous hipster people vying for her attention that night would vanish when the sun came up. Around midnight, Bijoux texted me a picture of herself and Tobin posing in bathing suits poolside at some hotel bar in Hollywood. I replied with a picture of the bar scene at Rx, capturing Christie’s goofy surprise with the flash on my cell phone.

  WHERE R U? Bijoux texted back.

  OUT was my reply.

  By 1 A.M., I was really wishing that at least Mom or Danko had called my cell phone trying to track me down. I wondered if they had even noticed I wasn’t home, and if suffering through sitting on a bar stool with the brass studs on my dress digging into the backs of my thighs all night was even accomplishing anything. Everyone who approached me to chat began by asking how I knew Christie.

  By the time Christie was finally so drunk and tired that she was ready to leave, I had to help her walk out of the bar and carry her bag.

  “Does she need help getting home?” Tyler asked me, appearing suddenly out of the crowd as if a magician had waved a wand to produce him. He was probably wondering if there was a way he could be the lucky gentleman to escort Christie home in her vulnerable state.

  “She lives with her parents, creep,” I told him sharply, no longer feeling the need to play nice for the benefit of Christie’s career since she was too incoherent to make sense of what I was telling him.

  “Yeah, but I live just around the corner,” Tyler continued. “You guys could sober up at my studio if you wanted.”

  I ignored him and pushed Christie outside. I wasn’t an art star. I didn’t have to appease anyone. Besides, I could hardly let Christie go home with some wannabe artist guy. What about Thom DaSilva? It was my shared responsibility as her best friend to help her save herself for him, if that was what she really wanted.

  It was pouring rain, and of course neither of us had brought an umbrella. We lingered outside the bar for at least fifteen minutes, watching raindrops as big as baseballs hit the pavement of the street and splash into puddles that had already formed. Hailing a cab was impossible whenever it rained in New York. We were shivering, so eventually I called a car service. The driver sped us up to the Upper East Side by way of Madison Avenue, past all of the fancy overpriced shops, closed for the night with iron grates over their picture windows. My stomach cramped as we passed 73rd Street, my own street, and continued uptown.

  “That was so great,” Christie murmured. “The whole night, just great, right? One for the record books.”

  I had seen far heavier nights of wild partying in my short lifetime, parties where pianos had been hurled off hotel rooftops and police wearing riot gear had shown up. But I let Christie think she had just had an off-the-charts wild night. She didn’t have a sister like Bijoux. Her standards could be lower than mine.

  When the cab pulled up in front of her building and her doorman rushed outside wearing his rain parka, I fought the urge just to go upstairs to the Kings’ penthouse and spend the night there. My backpack was up in Christie’s room anyway, and my head was pounding from so much loud music and cigarette smoke. But it wasn’t 4 A.M. yet, and neither Mom nor Danko had texted me to let me know I was in majorly deep crap. As far as I could tell, staying out all night had been an exercise in futility.

  My heart was sinking. I really, really could not stay in that apartment on Park Avenue.

  “One hundred and tenth and Broadway,” I told the driver, deciding to stay out by myself a bit longer.

  Once uptown near Columbia University where I knew a few things would still be open at the odd hour, I poked around the 24-hour grocery store, bought a bottle of kombucha, and lingered outside to drink it beneath the store’s bright lights while it continued to rain softly. College kids wearing pajamas wandered in and out of the store, buying six-packs of beer and pints of ice cream to carry back to their dorm rooms. On the same block as the grocery store, I got another slice of pizza. I sat in the front window of the pizza shop, ignoring the drunken college boys at the table behind me. It was all I could do to hope that Mom and Danko were so angry that they were simply waiting up for me to deliver their wrath in person rather than over the phone. When the sky began to lighten with the onset of dawn, I finally hailed a cab home, barely able to keep my eyes open on the ride back downtown.

  Outside our building, that high school boy I loved was walking his Cocker Spaniel on the corner in his pajamas. It was almost 6 A.M., a perfectly normal hour to be walking a young dog.

  “Goodmorning, Miss Norfleet,” the weekend doorman greeted me as I dragged myself across our lobby. Surely I was a sight to behold, with my eye makeup smeared, wet hair, and bags beneath my eyes. I was sure I looked quite out of place in our ritzy lobby, with its quatrefoil mirrors, Hawaiian flower arrangements and pastel Persian rugs.

  “Goodmorning,” I mumbled.

  In the elevator up to the apartment, I braced myself. Even though I wanted to get in trouble, I wasn’t going to enjoy it. The elevator doors opened on the twenty-fourth floor and I dug through my handbag for keys. At the end of the carpeted hallway, I took a deep breath, and stuck my key in the door. I braced myself for disappointed expressions and yelling.

  And then… there was nothing.

  Morning sun streamed in through our living room windows along with a cool morning breeze coming in off the East River. A fresh flower arrangement, presumably delivered the previous afternoon, rested atop our coffee table. The apartment was perfectly quiet, and I stood there, just inside the front door for a few moments after I heard the door click and auto-lock behind me in silence, just listening.

  It didn’t sound like anyone was home.

  I walked through the kitchen on my way to my bedroom, passing the closed door to Mom and Danko’s room. I lingered there for a moment, trying to determine if there were any sounds coming from behind the door that might give some indication that they were in there, sleeping. But I couldn’t hear anything. Besides which, it was totally odd that neither of them would be awake at 6 A.M. on a Saturday. Mom was kind of psycho about getting to Spin class on weekend mornings.

  Maybe, I thought, entering my bedroom and locking the door behind me, they had gone to bed angry at me and my punishment would follow later in the day. Maybe they were so upset with me, they’d gotten up this morning and started going about their day, knowing they’d have ample time to scream at me later when it was convenient for them.

  But everything seemed wrong. Screaming later was not Mom’s style. I washed off my makeup and changed into pajamas, wondering what was going on. It occurred to me that maybe my mobile phone was broken, so I checked before drifting off to sleep… I had two texts from Bijoux, so everything was in working order. I briefly considered texting Mom to ask if I was in some kind of trouble, but realized that if by some cruel twist of fate I wasn’t in trouble, it would seem very odd to her that I was drawing her attention to my night of misbehavior. Unfortunately for me, I was usually a lot slicker than that.

  There was the possibility that Christie’s parents would call Mom to complain to her about their daughter being left curbside, drunk off her face, the night before. But I wanted immediate punishment. I wanted instant relief. I wanted the registration paperwork for boarding school to be submitted that day. And Christie wasn’t interested in getting in trouble, so if she had to explain anything when she’d gotten up to her penthouse, there was a strong likelihood she had talked herself out of trouble.

  I squeezed my eyes shut and pulled my stuffed dog, Rufus, close to my chest. Rufus had been a gift from my dad on my fifth birthday and he smelled like Downy fabric softener from being washed no fewer than ten billion times. His acrylic fur was so ratty that it was clumped together, and one of his eyes dangled from a lasso of string, making him the least attractive plush toy in the world. But I loved him. He never traveled with my anywhere because I was paranoid about losing him.

  Around noon, a strange beeping noise woke me up. My bedroom was warm from the midday s
un pouring in through my open curtains. I sat up confusedly, not sure why I was still in bed at the odd hour until the events of the night before came back to me.

  My eyes identified the source of the beeping: my laptop, open on my desk. It had been summoned out of Powersave mode by my video chat program. I clumsily climbed out of bed to see who in the world would be trying to reach me on a Saturday afternoon, suspecting it was Christie to give me the lowdown on her parents’ reaction to our late night. But it wasn’t. It was Kristijan.

  “You look like you just woke up,” he said, laughing at my rat’s nest of curls.

  “It’s early here,” I said in a crusty voice, rubbing my eyes.

  “It is not!” he exclaimed. “It’s noon at least, lazy.”

  “Did you wake me up just to insult me?” I asked.

  It was evening in Zagreb and I could see the breeze rustling the curtains on Kristijan’s bedroom windows, behind him. Omar, the big brown dog, was stretched out across Kristijan’s bed in the background, gnawing away at a toy. Talking on video chat was an everyday activity for me, but it always fascinated me that I could essentially be observing what was happening on the other side of the planet as if I was right there.

  “No,” he said. As I became more awake and alert, I realized how happy it made me just to see his face and hear his voice. “I have a big surprise. I’m moving.”

  I grimaced. “Moving? Where are you moving to? Is your whole family moving?”

  “Just me,” he said. Kristijan rarely smiled widely, his happiness was always more subdued. But I could tell that whatever was going on over there, he seemed very pleased about it. “I had a long talk with my father about school, and about how I don’t want to study finance.”

  I blinked in surprise. “You never told me you didn’t want to study finance.”