“Okay, good.” Mom was typing it all down. “You want some quiche? There’s leftovers.”
“I’m okay,” I told her. “I’m too tired.”
“As long as you’re not on a diet. You need your energy.”
“Don’t I know it,” I murmured.
When I slid into my room, I put on “Needle in a Haystack” by the Velvelettes and lay on top of my covers, feeling slightly woozy and munching on some dark chocolate. I was going over the events of the night and wondering whether I’d blown my chance at ever getting into Helle House again. Next, I moved over to my computer to check up on Moonwatcher.net.
Somewhat surprisingly, they still didn’t have any photos of Hallie and me, just a shot of some gorgeous Asian girl they must have mistaken for a Moon and a shot of Becca wearing Andy’s herringbone coat and stocking up on tennis magazines from a newspaper stand in Midtown. It made me happy to see how serious her interest in Louis was. Normally, Becca and sports don’t see eye to eye.
Next up was the Elle House Web site, its blog already updated. “Elle House hosted the Chelsea premiere of Daddy’s Little Girl by award-winning filmmaker Orly Matthews!!! Over cocktails, members shmoozed with the babe who made the film, Daddy’s little girl herself. Hundreds of cinema enthusiasts came, and we all agreed with the Village Voice critic who called the movie ‘sumptuous.’”
Without really thinking about it, I ran a Google search on “Orly Matthews” and “Village Voice.” What the review actually said was “Matthews includes sumptuous footage of her parents’ villas in her otherwise brainless film.” Looked like the Village Voice had been rewritten by the village idiots.
But the glimmer of amusement I felt faded away when I remembered I still had to figure out a way to get the iPod back.
I clicked on my e-mail account, and when I was logged in, I could barely believe my eyes.
You know what they say about a watched pot never boiling? Ditto for a watched in-box. In the wake of the early-morning girl outside the window incident, I must have checked my account fifty times, never to find any word from Andy And now, the second I’d stopped thinking about seeing him with the stupid girl with the swizzle stick legs, an e-mail from him was waiting.
I took a deep breath and tugged on my cameo necklace, as if that was going to change the nature of what he’d written. Then I clicked OPEN.
hey, hope the cult hasn’t sucked you in too deep. ive been going all kinds of nuts with midterms. But I have a zillion questions for you, like have you ever got stuck on an elevator with a pharmaceutical representative and do you like ginger ice cream and did you know you look exactly like this australian chick on that reality show cruise or lose? anyway, hope to see you around. your old friend misses his shorty—a
The nerve! It was like he couldn’t figure out how to go about letting me know it was over—compare me to a cheesy reality television contestant or use the F-word that ends in “end”—so he’d decided to go with them both.
Bastard.
I lay back and racked my brain for a revenge plan. These things usually take a while, but it hit me over the head like a frying pan.
I couldn’t wait for tomorrow’s lunch period to get to work.
At the end of English class the next day, I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. In the bathroom, I freshened my eyeliner, glossed my lips, and pinned my hair into a high crest for a vaguely rockabilly effect. Mr. Cowboy Shirts, eat your heart out.
Alex was easy to spot in the back of the cafeteria. I sat down across from him and he glanced up from his New Yorker long enough to throw me a friendly nod. I felt a nervous flutter and I wasn’t sure if it was because of what I was about to do or because I’d forgotten how cute he was. Maybe it was a little of both.
“You know David Lynch, the Twin Peaks director?” he asked. “He practices transcendental meditation. Twice a day for twenty minutes, swears by it.”
He gobbled the remains of his cereal, then took off his watch and passed it to me. “Tell me when the time’s up, okay? I’m going to try it.”
“You’re going to meditate right now?”
This was throwing a wrench in my plan.
“Why not?” Even with his eyes closed, his face was too expressive to convey serenity His fleshy, slightly uneven lips were twitching and when he wiped his nose with the back of his hand, I knew there was no way he was getting any meditating done. I kicked him under the table. “Alex, I need to ask you something.”
“Hold on. I think I’m getting somewhere good.”
“You’re still in the Hudson cafeteria,” I informed him. “But I’m about to invite you somewhere good.”
His dark eyes opened, gleaming curiously for more.
“You’re such a faker.” Steeling myself for my big Move Over, Andy plan, I outlined the setup for Kiki’s party.
“Murder mystery, sounds interesting.” He tipped his head forward, like he was hard of hearing. “But I’m confused. Are you asking me because you know how well I get along with adults or because you want me to be your date?”
I felt my cheeks crimson and searched his face for the right answer, but all I got was an open-ended stare. “I don’t know,” I wavered, mustering whatever courage I had to spare. “A little of both?”
Silence followed.
“So, you want in?” I asked.
“Yeah, let’s do it.” He lowered his lids again and his look turned a little dreamy. I thought I could detect a faint “om” sail out of his wet lips.
I, on the other hand, had no need for meditation techniques. My plan had worked. Nothing on earth could have made me feel any calmer.
Ian found me by my locker at the end of the day, emptying my bag of all the textbooks I wasn’t going to need that night.
“You’re wearing a skirt,” he informed me.
“It’s actually a dress.” I looked down to make double sure. Yup, the black studded Yves Saint Laurent number I’d put on that morning hadn’t dissolved.
“Whatever,” he said. “It’s perfect.”
Ian is aware of many things, but fashion isn’t one of them. “You feeling okay?” I asked.
“I should be asking you the same thing,” he said. “You didn’t forget the protest’s today, did you?”
Today?
Suddenly peeved, I bit down on my lip. “How could I forget something that you never told me in the first place?”
“Oh, it’s today.” He waited a beat. “You’re coming, right?”
“Ian—” I started.
He cocked his head gently. “Oh, c’mon. When’s the last time I asked you to do me a favor?” I turned it over in my head: no. The other Moons would kill me if I ended up in a newspaper, even if it was for a good cause—but I knew New York had more important things for reporters to be covering than a bunch of kids disputing the plotline of their favorite superhero. And I doubted the photographers for Moonwatcher.net would have any reason to be there. “Fine,” I said. “But you owe me.”
Ian grinned and took my bag. “You have no idea how hard this is going to rock. You’re going to be the girliest poster child ever.”
Me, the girliest anything? But when we arrived at Global Media’s Park Avenue headquarters, I noted I was more feminine in this crowd than a pink cream puff. The guys in the picket line were marching in a skinny oval outside the building’s revolving doors chanting, “Hey hey, ho ho! Your diamond-studded Toros got to go!”
My ears went sweaty at the realization of how noticeable I’d be in this setting, and when they saw me, the twenty-or-so Propeller regulars burst into applause. “Front of the pack, lady!” one of them screamed, and soon they were all at it, shouting “Front of the pack! No turning back!”
A couple of businessmen walking out of the building stopped to gawk. I looked at Ian and felt my palms go clammy. I knew the chances were slim, but what if someone did come by to take a photograph and I ended up in a newspaper? I couldn’t afford to get kicked out of the Moons, and especially not now.
>
“Ian, do I have to?” My voice was warbling. “I don’t like being front and center. It makes me self-conscious.”
“Oh, come on, you look fabulous, dahlink,” he said in a silly Russian accent. “Besides, it’s just a couple more minutes. Look.” He pointed out the fleet of black town cars that were warming their engines by the building entrance. “They’re just personal drivers waiting for all the bigwigs, and it’s already after five. When they go home, so do we.”
“And what happens when the bigwigs come out?”
“We just hand them our plea letter. It’s a comic I helped make. It’ll be over before you know it, I promise.”
I glanced around to make sure there was no press on the premises, then begrudgingly accepted a beautifully drawn global media, what did toro boy ever do to you? sign from a kid I recognized from Ian’s New Year’s Eve video game bash. From my spot at the front of the herd, I could see the Waldorf-Astoria’s Art Deco roof in the not-too-far-off distance. Thank God Kiki didn’t believe in going anywhere by foot.
“What should I do?” I asked Ian.
“Just hold up the sign and look like you’re really unhappy,” some guy directed me.
“That won’t be so hard,” I grumbled.
But as the sunlight faded, so did my self-consciousness. For the most part, nobody was stopping to pay attention to us, and some of the chants the kids had come up with were so goofy I had to have fun with them, like “Diamonds are a Toro Boy’s worst friend!” and “Stop the global war on Toro.”
Before long I had joined in. When we got to “No bull! All Toro!” I was giving it my all, like the fourth member of the Ronettes I’ve always wanted to be.
I was actually getting a little too into it—so into it I didn’t notice the way the other guys had died down just as a trio of businessmen came out of the building. “Now’s our chance!” Ian was jumping up and down. “Stevie!”
Stevie Marconi, a Propeller regular who’s so tall his pants barely come past his knees, ran up to the businessmen who were exiting the building. “Free of charge,” he said, trying to pass out the Save Toro Boy comic brochures. The businessmen tried to ignore him, though it was evident from their tensed jaws that he was getting on their nerves.
The rest of us had stopped to stare, though probably not at the same thing. All the guys were rooting for Stevie, feverishly emitting whoo-hoos and tossing out lines like “Diamonds are for never!” and “May the force be with you!” Meanwhile, I had discovered something far more interesting: the HRH monogram on the briefcase of one of the businessmen.
No way.
I’d been so busy worrying about press, this beyond- obvious tidbit had failed to occur to me: the CEO of Global Media, Mr. H.R.H., was Harold Reagan Hendricks, Reagan’s dad.
I held my breath steady.
“Watch it!” said a kid who was winding his arm up like a pitcher.
“What the hell are you doing?” Ian screamed at him, but the egg was already spinning through the air, heading toward Stevie and the suits. My heart lurched and I just stood there, watching it all unfold, knowing things were going to turn out badly but not sure what I could do before—
Splat!
Mr. Hendricks’s shoulder was covered in yellow gunk. And his face was red with rage. A team of hulking men jumped out of the town cars and charged our way.
“Everybody run!” somebody behind me screamed.
My thoughts scrambling, I started to sprint. The sound of scuffling feet behind me was growing louder by the second.
Compared to the others, I was as good as a cripple. Who was I kidding? I didn’t have a fighting chance.
Just as Ian and the rest of the kids ripped around the corner, a hand went for my shoulder with a viselike grip. “Hold up, Missy,” I looked up to see a security guard bearing down on me. His face reminded me of raw meat and he had the breath to match. “You’re not going anywhere.”
{ 18 }
Manhattan Murder Mystery
I was shivering in my gray one-piece bathing suit. I hustled to the edge of the diving board and took the plunge. The pool felt deliciously warm. When I looked down I saw that my legs had morphed into a mermaid tail, and there were long sections of silver hair streaming out of my bathing cap.
As my weird dreams go, it was a good one—even oddly relaxing. Then again, a hostage situation would have been soothing the night after my misadventures at Global Media. Most of the protestors were too fast for the thugs of the Global security detail, but Rick Pinkwhaler, Frank Xu, and I hadn’t been so lucky. The only good thing to come from our experience with being nabbed by security was that I now knew how to torture people to the breaking point: stick them in a windowless room with a thirty-second clip from the cartoon “Dingo Berries” on constant loop, pull them out to repeatedly ask the same question about who threw the egg even if they couldn’t answer on previous attempts, and make them wait three hours before delivering the verdict.
In the end, they let me go, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t left with a serious case of post-traumatic stress disorder. I was going to kill Ian.
A day later, I still felt worn out. I made my way into the Moonery late in the afternoon. I pinched my cheeks before opening the door to the office. I hadn’t talked to anyone in twenty-four hours and was feeling out of it.
As though I wasn’t nervous enough about running into H.R.H.’s daughter, Reagan greeted me with, “If it isn’t the star of the antiglobalization movement.”
I hung back in the doorway, speechless. The guards had taken our names, but how did she know? I thought one of her issues with her dad was that he never told her anything.
“It’s on YouTube,” Becca provided. She wiggled an eyebrow and got up to turn around the monitor, which was set to a video called “Verrueckter Kampf vor Globalmedia!”
“It means ‘Trouble Outside Global Media,’” Sills translated. “Some German tourist is keeping a blog of his New York adventures.”
My mind was spinning—how on earth had they uncovered the most random thing on the Internet, and so fast? And did it count as the kind of press that was going to get me kicked out of the Moons? My stomach started to churn as I prepared myself for the worst.
I looked out the window.
It was growing darker and the leaves in the courtyard appeared two-dimensional. “Nice work,” Reagan said. Her voice was sweet and she was giving me her megawatt smile. “I Google him all the time, but never have I come across anything this interesting. Thanks for the entertainment. Egg-cellent stuff.” She pulled a new tube of lipstick out of her bag and proceeded to remove the plastic seal.
“N-no problem.” I dug my hands in my pockets, stunned by her reaction. How could she be so detached? “To be honest, it wasn’t my idea. I can’t really take any of the credit.”
“Oh, I think you can.” Her voice was frayed and the volume was increasing with each word. The other girls were looking around the room in supreme discomfort, and Hallie started to thumb through the magazine she’d been balancing on her lap.
I couldn’t make a sound, let alone think of anything to say, as Reagan threw on her coat and scarf and stomped toward the door. When she was inches away from me, I noticed that her nose was red and puffy.
How could I be so dense? She was completely furious with me.
My gaze fell to the floor, as if a magic salve would be there on the rug.
“Ray, I swear … I had no idea it was your dad.”
She glared at me. “Then how’d you know it was him, just now?”
Self-consciously, I drew back my shoulders. “I’m not following.”
“Has anybody said anything about my dad since you got here?” she challenged.
“I—I—” I stammered. “I mean, I figured it out eventually. I knew he worked there, but I didn’t put it all together until—”
“Too late,” she finished off my sentence, and turned to address the rest of the room. “Have a fantastic meeting,” she said with a sneer. “I’m
going to go home to say good-bye to my parents.” She fixed her steely gaze on me. “You’ve inspired Dad to spend the next few weeks working out of the L.A. office, and Mom’s tagging along so she can protect him from egg-pelting insaniacs when she’s not blowing off steam on Rodeo Drive or wherever.” With that, she bolted.
I felt my cheeks burn and scanned the others’ faces. “I really didn’t know …,” I started to say.
“Don’t get too worked up about it,” Becca said in a soothing tone. “Reagan’s parents bring out the worst in her. They pay more attention to their orchid collection.”
“That’s not true,” said Diana. “They care about her inability to get into college too.”
“Ouch,” muttered Sills.
“She’ll come around.” Becca came over to rub my back comfortingly. “And you’re putting your riot girl days behind you, understand?”
“Yeah,” I promised. I felt so grateful for Becca’s protection. I slumped against the wall and listened to the sound of Reagan’s footsteps fade to nothing.
“Good.” Poppy smiled brightly and made a spot for me by the window seat. “Now what’s this about your findings at Helle House? You say they’re our culprit?”
“I’m pretty sure.”
Nobody said anything, but Sills gave me a look that said we could do better than pretty sure.
In the meantime Kiki was planning her “Murder on the Showgirl Express” birthday blowout, for which she was assigning guests costumes. She was playing the grand dame of the musical revue, and my invitation had come with a role for my date: “dapper oilman.”
The following night, when I walked into the Has Bean, the coffee shop where Alex had suggested we meet, I saw that my date’s interpretation of 1950s tycoon wasn’t what I’d been picturing—he was wearing a tight purple zoot suit, his hair slicked back with what must have been an entire tub of Vaseline.
Alex downed the remains of his coffee and rose to his feet. “That’s quite a getup,” he said.
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