“Are you new here?” I asked.
He nodded in response. “You know,” he said, watching me from under raised brows, “we’ve seen each other like, a thousand times before.”
I couldn’t believe it. He’d actually noticed me?
“You sure about that?” I faked disbelief. He was free to spill as much as he wanted, but that didn’t mean full disclosure had to be my game.
“You live in Washington Square Village, right?” I did a double take, and he answered my question before I could ask it. “I don’t, but my friend does,” he said. “Bash Ferris.” He raised an eyebrow questioningly.
I chewed the name over for a minute. “I know most of the kids in my complex, but I don’t think—”
“No, no, he’s an older friend. A professor. Sebastian Ferris.”
My stomach churned.
“Oh, him.” I downed the rest of my Orangina in one gulp. Professor Ferris was a misanthropic film scholar who got his kicks out of approaching professors’ kids to ask our opinions on obscure old movies there was no chance we’d ever heard of, much less seen. “I think he lives in building three.” I didn’t know what else to say.
A dimple formed in his cheek. “I can tell you think it’s weird. I was raised to hang out with people of all ages.”
“Not that weird,” I said, thinking of my Waldorf posse. “I actually have a group of friends in their seventies. They’re cool. A lot less wound up than most people our age.” I looked around the room to confirm my claim. One table over, the Game Theory Club was having its weekly lunch-hour debate, and a kid at our table was using the cafeteria’s scratchy napkins to make chemistry flashcards.
Almost as good as scientific proof.
“Exactly.” He slurped from his spoon. “Anyway, Bash is amazing. He and my mom used to go out, like, fifty years ago, so I’m sort of like the son he never had. Also I’m planning on becoming a filmmaker. That helps.”
I held back my smile. Aspiring filmmakers—or artists of any kind—were few and far between at Hudson. The school tended toward facts, not creativity.
“So that’s what it takes to get on his good side!” I exclaimed. He gave me a questioning look and I admitted that I wasn’t Professor Farris’s favorite kid. “We got off to a rocky start,” I began. “When I was little, he’d ask me what I thought of Disney movies and snort at my answers. There’s not much crossover in our tastes.”
“How so?” He leaned closer.
“I’m more into cheesy murder mysteries than Croatian new wave or whatever.”
“You have Bash all wrong. He just got me hooked on Hitchcock.”
I smiled. I love Hitchcock.
“No way. I just watched Frenzy last week,” I added quickly, over the ringing bell.
“Suspense. Nice.” He balled up his napkin, stuffed it in his empty milk container, and stood up. “Until next time?”
Strangely, I realized that I could only hope so.
I gazed at the table, studying the milk puddles he’d left in his wake. So the kid was a mess, but there was no denying it. He was pretty cool, and not just by Hudson standards.
There’s one downside to having unnervingly trustworthy best friends: when they start hanging out with each other, you can be sure neither of them is going to fill you in on the juicy details.
Or even the boring ones.
Becca’s and my schedules this semester couldn’t have been worse for running into each other at school, and most days her afternoons were more tightly packed than the first lady’s. Thanks to her and Louis’s shared tight-lipped style, all I knew about their Sunday bike ride was that it was “fine” (his word) and “good” (hers).
Louis waited until Thursday morning when I was getting ready to leave for school to call and bring it up. “Hey, did Becca say anything about our ride?”
“Well …” I was tapping Didier and Margaux’s breakfast flakes into their tank. “Just a minute-by-minute play-by-play. Is it all true?” Cruel, but how else was I going to get any dirt?
“You are such a bad actress. And nothing happened.” He sounded slightly disappointed. “Look, I kind of told her you and I were going riding today, and I think she’s joining us. Can you just, you know, play along?”
“You mean pretend we had plans for today?” I couldn’t conceal my annoyance.
“Exactly.”
“Lou, aren’t you forgetting something?” I paused to relish the absurdity of it all. “We already do. We’re supposed to go to Stuyvesant Town and play bocce.” My friend let out a pained “d’oh” noise and I reminded him he should be pleased. “At least it’ll be easy for me to get into character.”
When Becca and I came out of school at the end of the day, Louis was already across the street, diligently waiting for us on his bike. He had on a camel-hair coat and a green cashmere scarf. I felt a tug of jealousy—Louis was submitting to a wholesale makeover for Becca, whereas all I’d heard from Andy was a lame e-mail where he griped about his heavy homework load and asked me if I preferred Manhattan or New England clam chowder. If there was one thing Andy was still good for, it was random questions.
“Hey, Becca,” Louis said, as if I didn’t exist.
If I weren’t so fascinated by their lopsided dynamic, I would have killed him.
“Hi.” She leaned in to kiss him on the cheek, an act, I noticed, she executed with the nonchalance of somebody who couldn’t possibly reciprocate his feelings. Even though she was wearing a cashmere coat and ballet slippers made of fragile silver leather and ribbons that came up to her knees, she radiated an impossibly casual energy. “Have you been waiting long? I was at the nurse’s office.”
I perked up, remembering the nurses from my dream.
“What’s the matter?” I asked, sounding a little too worried.
“Nothing,” Becca said. “I just needed a Band-Aid. I got an ugly paper cut.” She wiggled her bandaged index finger and smiled impishly. “I know, I’m a baby.”
I decided to dismiss the coincidence.
“And what are those, baby shoes?” Louis asked, looking down at Becca’s feet. “She can’t wear those, can she?” His first words to me.
“My mom called me ‘tinfoil toes’ this morning.” Becca pouted. “You don’t like them either?”
“That’s not the point,” I responded. “Those ribbons have ‘accident’ written all over them. They’re going to get caught in the spokes and—”
“Things could get very Isadora Duncan.” Louis was trying to sound cool but there was nothing mellow about the way his eyes were sweeping Becca from behind his tortoiseshell frames. She raised her chin and gave him a challenging look.
Oh, would they just kiss already!
“You know,” now Louis was mumbling, “the dancer who wore the long scarf in the convertible and—”
“I think every girl who has ever worn a long scarf knows what happened to Isadora Duncan,” she told him. Her cell phone chimed from inside her bag, but she ignored it. “I actually always thought it was a beautiful story.”
“Yeah,” I said, “nothing says beautiful like having your head snap off.”
“Or your foot,” Louis added, giving Becca’s left slipper a playful tap. I could feel the electricity from where I was standing.
We finally persuaded Becca to go back inside and get her gym shoes.
As Becca scampered back up the steps to school, I turned to Louis with an impressed grin. “Wow, she must really like you. Nothing comes between that girl and her fancy footwear.”
“Nah, I think she just really likes bik—” His face dropped like a stone and I turned around to see Becca sailing back down the steps. She was still wearing her dancing shoes and her face was lined with a distraught expression.
She rushed over our way. “I can’t,” she said, slightly out of breath.
“There’s no shame in wearing sneakers in public,” I told her. “Millions of people do it every day.” I gestured down at Louis’s red Converse high-tops.
When had he filled her in on the details of our itinerary? Was he calling her during the middle of the day from school?
“That was the plan,” I told her. “But if you want us to ride uptown with—”
“No. I’m so late I’m just going to get a cab.” A frown was worrying her pretty features. “I’ll come next time. And I’ll remember to dress appropriately. Promise.”
Without Becca, the tone of our afternoon dampened. Louis was obviously preoccupied with her flakiness, which he was taking as personally as possible. He was zoning out, and every conversation I tried to start with him felt like a long distance telephone call.
And there was another bummer to deal with. Stuyvesant Town’s once-cozy warren of brick apartment buildings and community playgrounds was now slicker than a wet iguana. I vaguely remembered how a realtor had paid a princely sum for the land a few years ago, and suddenly the middle-class apartment complex had been converted into a whole new world. See-through pink terraces wrapped around the buildings at strange angles and the homey old park benches had been replaced with latex pods, also in pink.
The main attraction, the city’s last public bocce courts, had been replaced by a chartreuse mini-golf course. So instead of playing bocce, a superfun game where you roll balls around in the dirt, all there was to do was watch a yuppie gab on his cell phone while he practiced his putting skills.
Not surprisingly, Zeta Equities flags were planted everywhere. Sink Landon must have been having a field day. First the Apollo—now this. Andy would have a heart attack.
“This isn’t as much fun as I’d hoped,” I told Louis after we’d been sitting on adjoining pods for an uncomfortably long stretch.
“You’re telling me.” He popped a peanut in his mouth and tossed the shell at a trash can. It missed. “Hey, Lemon, do you think if I took, like, an opera appreciation class I’d have a better chance with your pal?”
I felt a surge of warmth.
“Maybe.” I kicked the ground. “Though, Becca’s not being here is not what I was talking about.”
“I was trying to ignore the obvious.” Louis cracked open another peanut. “Ever hear of a coping mechanism?”
I bit back a smile. Louis has been going to a shrink since before he could talk, and has a habit of lacing his conversations with psychobabble.
“What’s shrink-talk for ‘Let’s get out of here’?” I asked.
Louis smiled. “Why do you ask that?”
“Are you kidding? Because what they did to this place is totally depr—”
“No, no, it was a joke. ‘Why do you ask that?’ is my shrink’s catchphrase.” Louis got up and took a final glance at the pink putting “green.” He shook his head and hopped back on his bike. “Man, oh man.”
We rode out the First Avenue exit and tootled around Alphabet City, a once-punk neighborhood now known for its designer tea lounges and overpriced consignment shops. The sky was a dusky blue and the streets felt less crowded than usual, but just as we were passing Tompkins Square Park, a black SUV with a NY 11111 license plate blasted up from behind, shattering any semblance of tranquillity. It started up a siren and ran a red light, and people were sticking their heads out of nearby shops to see what the noise was all about.
My palms broke into a sweat. The vehicle had my number all over it. Or, to be more specific, all over its license plate. Okay, so the number ones weren’t dancing on a stage, but it was still too close to the Rockettes dream I’d had that weekend at the Moonery to ignore.
“Let’s follow it!” I shrieked over the earsplitting noise.
“Aren’t we a little old for cops and robbers?” Louis replied.
“It’ll be fun!”
Louis waved his arms in protest and screamed something about my needing a life, but the sirens drowned most of it out. Next thing I knew, we were hot on the car’s trail.
Adrenaline pumping, I followed it up First Avenue, and down a street in the East Twenties that was closed off to traffic.
“No bike traffic either!” A policeman made a circling gesture with his finger. “Turn around!”
I hopped off my bike and motioned for Louis to do the same. “We’re pedestrians, Officer,” I said, walking my bike forward.
The police officer looked profoundly peeved, but just then an old lady came at him with a thousand questions about the commotion.
“Hurry!” I cried, and led Louis through the barricades. He shot me an unwilling look.
Up ahead, the car had pulled over and I realized where we were. The people getting out were approaching the same alleyway I was used to accessing by the back door of the Moonery My heart palpitated. Something told me this delegation wasn’t going to visit Mr. Dimitrius, the self-cleaning-toaster-oven guru.
Louis was slowing down. “You saw who’s up there in that delegation, right? They’re going to suspect we’re trying to assassinate him or something if we keep following him around.”
“What are you taking about?” I kept going toward the phalanx of suits, trying to cover up my anxiety. “After what I told that cop, if we don’t keep walking it’ll look weird. Besides, don’t you want to see what the deal is?”
“This isn’t the same thing as playing Spy versus Spy in Washington View Towers.” Louis looked at me like I’d lost half my brain, and I wished I could either tell him the truth or come up with a good lie. “You go, I’m staying put.” I could tell he meant it.
“Whatever you want.” My nervousness came out as bitchiness, but I didn’t stop to apologize. I kept gripping my handlebars and walking ahead until I’d rammed my front tire into a stately-looking man’s leg. That was when I noticed who got to ride around in such a rudely behaved car. The tall, broad-shouldered man who’d climbed out of the vehicle was our mayor.
I was struck by how unreal he looked. He was like a wax statue of himself. “Just give me a second while I catch up with the girls,” Mayor Irving said to an aide.
The girls? I couldn’t help gaping. What girls?
“Young lady!” a security man boomed at me. “No autographs today. Move along!”
The mayor turned to look at me, and a flicker of recognition crossed his face. I couldn’t believe it. Did Mayor Irving know who I was? And did this mean he knew I was a Blue Moon?
Holy Honolulu. “Don’t worry about her.” The mayor pushed off the security man who was about to pin me to the sidewalk. “Least we can do for somebody who’s doing her part to keep the city green. If only more New Yorkers would get into biking.” He was speaking loud enough for everyone in the neighborhood to hear and he chuckled in the nervous, sleazy manner unique to politicians and game show hosts.
“Every little bit helps,” I managed to say, patting my bike. And in that stolen moment I looked up through the trees and down the row of houses. At the end of the alley, next to the Moonery’s white star marking, I could see Becca standing in the window, staring straight at me. A look of horror registered on her face and she pulled the curtain shut.
Must’ve been a very private voice lesson she had going on.
{ 12 }
Sight for an Eyesore
“Now what?” Louis asked when I caught up with him at the end of the street. “You wanna try to run over the president?”
“That’ll have to wait for another day. I’m actually supposed to be home for dinner,” I said. Remembering the one food Louis hated, I added, “Mom made her special cassoulet.”
“That’s the nasty bean thing?”
“Sure is,” I said, my thoughts drifting to the Moonery Something major was going on in there, and my heart sank. I couldn’t have been more uninvited. I had to shake free of Louis and see what was going on. “You down?”
“Nah.” Louis wrinkled his nose. “Bon appétit.”
Stinko was in his usual spot behind the counter while The Simpsons played on a snowy television behind him. When he saw me he started frantically waving his arms around. “Not tonight! It’s closed!”
“What are you talking about? I just saw Becca in—”
“I’m under strict orders.”
Way to add insult to injury
“Fine, then I’ll wait outside.” I was feeling more determined by the second, but generally speaking, I didn’t think it was a great idea to get on the bad side of anybody with half as much neck tattoo art as Stinko.
“In the cold?” Stinko looked at me, then let off a sigh and got up to drag a spare stool behind the counter. “You don’t have to do that.”
He made me a tomato and cheese sandwich and we watched the rest of The Simpsons, then Access Hollywood.
At the end of the show, during a segment on a supposedly famous travel writer who’d developed a sudden fear of flying, Stinko was too transfixed to notice the curtain in the back move and three girls trickle out into the shop.
Diana was the first to emerge, her red curls flashing by as she flew out the door. “Bye, Stinko!” An instant later Reagan made a beeline for the candy section. She ripped open a pack of Sour Patch Kids and stuffed half its contents in her mouth. “I was so dizzy I could barely think,” she said by way of greeting. Neither of them noticed I was there.
Becca, who was hanging back by a shelf of ramen noodles, must’ve had some sixth sense. “Hi, Claire,” she said coolly.
“Do we have to wait till the closing credits or can I come up now?” I asked her.
Dream Life Page 13