“Yeah,” Bijoux said, suddenly sounding like she was gloating a little bit. “Wait until you see Dad. He is pissed. He said he’s going to beat the crap out of Danko.”
I hung up my phone and turned to face Kristijan to tell him I was ready to go back inside the club. “Ready?” I asked.
But he just stood there for a moment, studying me. My eyes searched his, trying to figure out what he was thinking, and for a second I thought he might be wondering if he should kiss me. Then he gently took my left hand and led the way back into the club, where we reunited with Taylor and danced until DJ JK’s set ended at five in the morning.
I was a little surprised when Taylor told me and Kristijan that she wanted to wait for Jake after we retrieved our coats from the coat check. He had expressed interest in joining us for a very late night (or early morning, depending on how you chose to look at it) snack. Kristijan suggested that we get crepes from a 24-hour place where he sometimes went with classmates. So we waited out in front of the nightclub, suffering the bitter cold just to give our eardrums a rest. Taylor was nervous and giggly. I had thought she really liked Todd, but the way she was acting about this guy, Jake, was baffling. Totally unlike her. When he finally stepped out of the nightclub, he put his arms around her waist and gave her a juicy kiss on the cheek. Their body language and bright smiles definitely suggested that they were a couple.
“Where are we headed?” he asked.
“A restaurant that makes French crepes in Chueca,” Kristijan told him.
“Cool,” Jake said. “Man, I am so glad you guys all speak English. I don’t even know what people are tryin’ to say to me most of the time here.”
Outside, beneath the street lights, I could see why Taylor was acting so girlish and weird around Jake. He was really cute. Cute enough to model t-shirts for Hunter Lodge, for sure. He had a long, straight nose, dark brown eyes, and cheekbones that looked like they had been chiseled out of marble. He was so good-looking that I had no idea how he had escaped Bijoux’s hawk-like predatory skills when it came to locating cute boys. I seriously prayed that Taylor had not informed him of everything I had told her earlier that night. As far as I could tell, she had no clue that her phone call to her dad had resulted in my own father hopping on the next available flight to Spain. Presumably my giant grizzly bear of a dad was on a plane at that very second, somewhere over the Atlantic, probably pouring superhuman quantities of trail mix down his throat and flipping through channels maniacally, never watching any show for more than three minutes. He had a very short attention span.
As we walked down the narrow, winding streets of Madrid, we passed colorful bursts of graffiti and crossed beneath the fancy balconies of high-rise apartment buildings where some residents were already enjoying sunrise breakfasts before their workdays began. We were careful to be quiet. It was very early on a Monday morning, and while most of the city had shut down business for the week of Christmas, Madrid seemed like a significantly more polite city than New York, so I assumed rabble-rousing would not be appreciated.
When we ran across a major traffic intersection, at the center of which was an enormous fountain, Kristijan and I lingered behind when Taylor and Jake ran all the way across the turn-about, narrowly avoiding being hit by oncoming traffic. The fountain where we were marooned was a majestic depiction of Neptune, god of the sea, riding atop what looked like a chariot made of seashells, drawn by two galloping horses. We stood near its edge, standing on gravel that surrounded the fountain in the middle of the traffic turn-about since there was no sidewalk. The sun was rising, and we had accomplished our mission of staying awake and outside until the first rays of dawn light reached out over the horizon. In our reflections in the pool of water, Kristijan was the golden image of endless summer, his skin still a slightly lighter hue of bronze than it had been at Okrug Beach back in August when we had huddled in the shade beneath the stacked rental boats. His hair still gleamed, the color of straw, curling at the nape of his neck, and his blond eyelashes, bleached by the sun, looked as if they’d been dusted with gold when light hit them in just the right way.
And just for a second, I saw myself as he saw me. I was taller than I’d been over the summer, and my face was more serious. My childish chubby cheeks had disappeared somehow during the fall and I hadn’t noticed until then. I looked more like Bijoux than ever before, but still had more of my dad’s features than she ever would. For once, I wasn’t repelled by my own image. I was comforted by my appearance; I looked like me, and despite everything that had happened to me in the last few months, I still was me. And even though six months before, I would have been willing to trade lives with just about anyone, in that moment, as the sun was just starting to illuminate the sky behind us, I didn’t want to be anyone other than myself.
“Your dad will be here later today,” Kristijan said quietly.
“Yeah,” I agreed. All of the homesickness that I hadn’t felt since leaving our apartment in New York in September hit me at once. I painfully missed my room and all my stuff. It would be nice to go home if Danko wasn’t going to be there, lurking around every corner. I missed running wild in Manhattan with Christie, and staying up late watching movies with her.
“So, we won’t spend Christmas together,” he said wistfully.
This time I took both of his hands in my own and looked directly at him. “I’m sorry, Kristijan. You have no idea how hard it was for me to even get here yesterday, but I came because really wanted to see you. More than anything. No matter what happens with my mom and Danko, will you please stay friends with me? Like, can we still talk on video chat when school starts again?”
He looked confused for a moment and then said, “I wasn’t joking about being your boyfriend. But I can understand if you don’t want me.”
I blushed furiously. How had I ever doubted his intentions? Danko had made me feel so worthless, and Alex had hurt my feelings so badly, that I’d not even been able to believe that a perfectly cute and normal boy—one who I actually already genuinely loved—wanted me. I had convinced myself that he had been joking, never once considering that his offer had been earnest.
“I didn’t believe you,” I confessed. “Why would you even like me?”
He shrugged, as if he couldn’t find the words in English. “You’re the only one,” he finally said.
He took a step forward and kissed me, and he tasted every bit like the salty sea in Croatia. I felt like the sun was shining inside me as he kissed me, and even though I’d kissed lots of boys before, I decided that I would consider that kiss to be my official first kiss because Kristijan was probably the first boy to ever kiss me who really, truly knew me. I could simply not believe that after so many months of feeling so alone and hiding from everyone, that he was right there with me, his lips against mine, his hands cupping my cheeks. He’d been there all along, knowing there was something wrong, and I had been so busy hiding, I hadn’t noticed.
Our romantic moment was interrupted by a bunch of idiotic teenagers driving by in a Mini Cooper, honking their horn at us. I wished I had taken Spanish instead of French, so that I could have told them all to go to hell.
CHAPTER 17
My dad appeared in the lobby of Taylor’s hotel as he said he would, bursting through the gold scalloped doors like the giant Kool-Aid pitcher from the television commercial, and smashed me in a smothering hug.
We checked into a hotel room of our own, and after I went to sleep, Dad introduced himself to Mr. Ferris and Señorita Rosenkrantz and told them why he was there. Naturally neither of them had any idea that I had shadowed the symphony to Madrid, but by the time I woke up around lunchtime, my dad had a ton of news for me. First, I was staying at Treadwell if that was what I wanted. He promised me that he’d even take my mom to court and sue her for custody if she threatened to yank me from the school where I had turned my life around. He confessed that he was thinking about doing that anyway, because he was completely distraught about Bijoux’s suicide attempt the m
orning I’d flown to Spain. He was furious with my mom for doing what he considered to be a downright crappy job of parenting us.
I was pretty shocked to hear him say that Bijoux had tried to kill herself. I had figured that she had overdosed on something, but I never would have suspected that Bijoux had been so upset about breaking up with Tobin that she wanted to die. I silently mused to myself as my dad continued talking that maybe that was the fundamental difference between me and my sister. She was prettier, skinnier, and friendlier, but I was tough.
Dad confirmed that Mom knew what I’d told Taylor. After Chase had called him, Dad had immediately called Mom to find out just what the hell was going on over on East 73rd Street. Mom had acted shocked, horrified, and basically seemed to be in denial. Dad hadn’t waited around in New Jersey to hear the results of Mom’s confrontation with Danko over the phone. As far as he was concerned, we’d be boarding a flight back to Newark the next morning, and I’d be staying with him and Phoebe in Middletown for Christmas. Dad wasn’t letting me anywhere near Mom’s apartment until Danko was gone.
And of course, Dad was going to insist that I go for counseling, which Treadwell would provide. He sat down on the edge of the bed in the suite where I had been sleeping and he started crying. My dad is 6’4 and weighs two hundred and eighty pounds. He also has five tattoos, at least five that I know of, and boxes every single day with a trainer, so it was totally freaky to see him break down in tears. And of course seeing him cry made me cry. When I told him that everything had been going on since I was twelve, he wanted to know why I hadn’t felt like I could tell him. I said I didn’t know; it felt too cruel to tell him that I honestly didn’t think he’d care when we were sitting in a hotel room in Madrid and he obviously cared way more than I ever could have imagined.
“When your mom and I split up, I was a mess. I can understand why a judge would have awarded her sole custody,” he told me, shaking his head, “But I have always wondered if that was the best thing for you girls. And now I think it’s pretty evident that it wasn’t. Did your mom have any idea that this was going on?”
I shook my head. “I didn’t want her to be sad.”
“It’s over now,” Dad told me, hugging me again. “Now we’re in Madrid for one night only, and we’re going to go to the oldest restaurant on the face of the planet and eat like kings.”
Bijoux had collected her belongings and left Mom’s apartment on East 73rd Street with Foxy, angrily. She had told Mom that if she didn’t divorce Danko, she would never speak to her again. I spent my first three nights back on American soil in New Jersey with Dad and Phoebe, who was uncharacteristically nice to me. The morning after Dad and I got back, without saying a word to me, Dad drove into the city, stormed up to Mom and Danko’s apartment, and punched Danko, who was back from Paris, right in the face when he answered the door. Mom called the police on Dad, he had to sit in a jail cell downtown until Phoebe drove into the city in her Jaguar to pay his bail, and Danko was going to need reconstructive surgery on his nose. The story he was sticking with was that I was a brat and a liar, and that I had also convinced Magda to go along with my deceitful charade.
Late that night, I could hear Dad and Phoebe talking in their living room from where I was resting in the bedroom that was mine when I visited them. Dad was saying that Mom had tried to convince him that I was addicted to attention and was lying about everything. My jaw clenched, even in the pitch blackness of the guest bedroom, upon hearing that. Kristijan had told me on video chat earlier that day that his dad, Viktor, had gone to the police in Croatia to file a report against Danko so that if he ever flew home again, he would be arrested at the airport for assaulting Magda. I couldn’t comprehend why my mother wouldn’t accept that Danko was guilty when even his own brother wanted to see him punished. But love makes people do crazy things, I knew.
The magazines and blogs had a field day. The press assumed that Dad’s violent outburst was a result of him drinking again. Why would a man punch his ex-wife’s husband in the face two days before Christmas, unless it had been in a drunken rage?
“I do not condone your father’s actions,” Phoebe told me in their huge kitchen the following night, Christmas Eve, as Drew and I picked at a pizza she and Dad had delivered to the house. “But that idiot stepfather of yours deserved it.”
On Christmas Day, Dad drove me into the city to Bijoux’s apartment after opening presents and going to church with Phoebe and Dad’s sisters, and we had dinner together. We were a fraction of a family at a cool modern restaurant around the corner from Bijoux’s, all three of us trying hard to be polite and to refrain from saying insensitive things. Thankfully there were no paparazzi out because it was a holiday, and even when our handsome waiter recognized us and brought us a bottle of very nice red wine on the house, Dad graciously thanked him but waved it away, telling him that he was sober and that Bijoux and I weren’t old enough to drink. I couldn’t stop staring at Bijoux throughout dinner; it had been so long since I’d seen her without her purple contacts in.
After dinner, Bijoux did me the hugest favor ever by agreeing to talk to Nicola’s brother Tommy on the phone for a few minutes. Amazingly, he made her laugh several times. Nicola texted me repeatedly for hours after the call, thanking me profusely.
“Hmm. He’s cute,” Bijoux commented when I showed her Tommy’s picture.
Dad allowed me to stay in the city with Bijoux but only on the condition that I call him every two hours, and primarily because he was worried about Bijoux staying in the apartment alone. I was under strict orders to call the police immediately if Danko were to appear at the apartment, and the day after Christmas, Dad had a locksmith come by to change all of the locks and replace the security system. Very strangely, Bijoux had absolutely no desire to go out at all, not even to the grocery store, so we were complete homebodies, sleeping until almost noon every morning and making odd meals of popcorn and buttered noodles.
When I finally confronted her a few days after Christmas about her stupid stunt, she confessed that the cocktail of toxins she had consumed to bring about her death was a mix of Advil, half a can of Guinness, some cold medicine, all of her birth control pills (I have no idea why she thought that might kill her), and the majority of a bottle of Pinot Grigio. I have said it before and I’ll say it again: my sister is oftentimes not very bright.
“God, Bijoux,” I teased her, hoping to make her laugh. “That’s the most pathetic attempt at suicide I’ve ever heard.”
“I know,” my sister sighed, sounding tired. She was stretched out on her couch with a cashmere blanket over her legs, and Foxy the puppy had made a little nest in her lap. “I’m not even very good at killing myself.”
“Well, if it’s any consolation, I’m relieved that you suck at killing yourself,” I assured her. “What would I do without you?”
Once I had said those words, their profundity really hit me. I hadn’t seen much of Bijoux since the beginning of the summer, but what would I do without her? Self-absorbed, air-headed and flighty… she certainly was all of those things, but she was my only sister. And at times she could also be protective, generous, and funny. If she were really to have died, it would have been just me, an only child, for the rest of my own life. It was fair to say that I loved her more than anyone else in the world, and I was pretty sure I was her favorite person, too.
“I know, I’m sorry,” she said, sounding genuine. “It just felt like the end of everything. Like, how am I ever going to have any kind of a life now that he’s gone? Nothing is ever going to be OK again. Someday I’m going to hear about him getting married, and becoming a father, and it’s just going to hurt all over again. I will just never understand why I wasn’t good enough.”
I didn’t know what to tell her, because six months earlier, I had been stuck in that same sentiment of believing that nothing was ever going to be OK again. But things were OK, or at least they were on their way to being OK.
It was a Wednesday morning, the first w
eek of January, a week before I was due to fly back to Treadwell for my second semester of sophomore year. There had been an ice storm the night before, and storms that severe were a bit of a rarity in Manhattan. Bijoux and I had stayed up most of the night, watching ice blanket the street lights, the sidewalks, and eventually the dark pavement of the street below her window in the East Village. Given the treacherous conditions outside, we had spent the entire night holed up in her apartment without venturing outdoors once, not even after an hour-long discussion about the gourmet macaroni and cheese restaurant two blocks away. Not even after she had tried to bribe me with a crisp fifty-dollar bill to put on my boots and brave the weather to pick up two large orders of the Pasta Norma variety, baked into a brick with eggplant, ricotta and black pepper. Foxy sat near the window with us, whimpering at the precipitation falling from the sky.
Around two in the morning, Bijoux had started reminiscing about when we were little girls, recalling trips to Disneyland that I had been far too young at the time to be expected to remember. She remembered the day I was born, claiming that she had stood in the front doorway of our house in Malibu watching as Dad had stuffed Mom into their Rolls Royce on the way to the hospital. Bijoux had instructed them to “send it back” if the baby (me) had been born with red hair.
“I wanted to name you,” she told me, getting a little teary-eyed. “I had a good name picked out, too. I wanted your name to be Princess Aurora, just like Sleeping Beauty.”
I was a little relieved that my parents had not entrusted baby-naming duties to my sister at the time of my birth.
Although I still hadn’t told her all of the details of what had happened in Croatia that summer, or the summers before, she kept returning to the topic. Dad had told me that I could press charges if I wanted to, and he would support me. I had endured a very long phone call with my mom, during which she said that “we” should not make the decision about pressing charges hastily. Primarily because the press would eat me alive, and I would bring a lot of unwanted attention not only to Darlene Cosmetics, but also to Bijoux’s career and my own public image. I was very conflicted about my feelings toward my mom that week. I didn’t like hearing Dad refer to her as a bad parent, because she wasn’t necessarily, and in fairness, I hadn’t told her what had happened. But she had noticed my behavior getting increasingly worse over the last few years and had never simply asked me what was going on.
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