He pshawed. “She’s actually thirty-six, and our two-and-a-half-year age difference is enough, thank you very much.” He helped himself to a bite of pancake. “I didn’t want to go to Kiki’s party because—” He stopped abruptly, like he’d said too much already “Because Dean Rabinowitz was going to be there.”
“So?”
“He’s not my dean.”
“I’m totally lost.”
He squeezed his eyes tight. “Look … I’m not at Columbia this semester. I flunked three of my finals and they’re making me finish the year at City College.” He shifted in his seat and looked away. “That’s why I’ve been so obsessed with passing my midterms, so I can prove that I can ‘apply myself My advisor and I made a deal, that if I can do well this semester, I can come back to Columbia. Dean R. signed off on it.” He waited a beat. “Make sense?”
I was so stunned I could barely make a sound.
“And I didn’t want you to find out.” His voice was cracking.
Man, he was cute. And man, was I a paranoid freak. How had I managed to misinterpret everything?
“Why were you afraid?” I asked. “What were you afraid I was going to do?”
“It’s not about what you’d do. I just didn’t want you to know. You have no idea how embarrassing this whole thing is.”
“I don’t care,” I said. “I mean, of course I care that it bothers you. But I don’t care if your grades slipped.”
He waited a second before smiling softly. “I’m not quite sure ‘slipped’ covers flunking three classes out of four. I just thought you’d think I was a fool for messing up.”
“I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care.” I said it like a magic spell.
“What if I kissed you?” He paused. “Would you care about that?”
“No,” I blurted, my head buzzing. “I mean yes. I mean, please …”
I wanted a kiss so badly I could barely remember how to finish off the sentence, let alone what the question had been.
He leaned in as far as he could and I reached over to meet him halfway, over a pile of pancakes. Strangely, the skin by my collarbone warmed up, as if the necklace hadn’t gone anywhere.
Maybe things weren’t so hopeless after all.
{ 21 }
The End of Anonymous
When our waitress dropped off our check, I saw she’d written Thanx guys!! and added two smiley faces—one wearing a top hat, the other a mound of squiggles that resembled Whitney Houston’s “How Will I Know”–era hairdo.
“Am I the only person who feels uncomfortable when people draw things on the check?” I asked.
Andy folded his brow in befuddlement as he examined it. “They’re not bad drawings.”
“That’s not the point,” I said. “She shouldn’t have to try so hard. She’s working hard enough as it is and … it just makes me feel funny, that’s all.” I trailed off and waited while Andy slung his duffel bag over his shoulder. He looked even cuter than usual with his tan and a freckly nose.
“No, I think I get it,” he told me when we got outside. “I have random things that make me feel a little sad too.”
I eyed him suspiciously. “Like what?”
“Lots of stuff…”
Traffic was backed up all the way to the Brooklyn Bridge and the sky was glittering with stars.
He flagged down a cab and opened the door for me. “Disney World, for one.”
I laughed as he scooted in next to me.
“Your trip wasn’t good?”
“It was okay when I was hanging out with my grandparents on the golf links, but then I thought it would do me some good to check out the Magic Kingdom.”
“The magic was gone?” I asked.
“You could say that. So were the kids.” He took my hand and kept talking.
Stay cool, Claire.
“It was mostly fully grown people posing for their wedding pictures with Goofy and Minnie. It was creepy. Please tell me your parents didn’t go to Euro Disney for their honeymoon.”
I assured him he was safe. “Didn’t I tell you they eloped in some chapel in Niagara Falls and Kiki has never forgiven them?”
Andy laughed. “Of course.” Our car shot up to the top of the bridge, then stalled by a snarl of traffic. The driver was muttering about how he should have known better than to take a rush-hour fare to Manhattan and Andy was tossing him a steady supply of “Sorry, mans.”
We were on top of the Brooklyn Bridge, which, given what I knew about the weak cable, probably would have felt a little more frightening if I weren’t sitting next to Andy and letting him play with my fingers. The city spread out before us like a feast and I was wishing I could freeze the moment and make it last ten years.
Andy and I started talking about some old detective book he’d read in Florida that he thought I’d like and I was reminded of how easy talking to him could be. He made me feel heard and he made me laugh. Next thing I knew the car was pulling up outside the Waldorf. Andy leaned in to kiss me, and I heard cars honking.
“Let’s go!” the driver said. “This isn’t a motel on wheels.”
“Tell Kiki I said hi,” Andy called as I hopped out.
“She’ll be happy to hear it,” I told him.
As for how happy, you have no idea.
I rushed toward the hotel door and was feeling so floaty I almost forgot to respond to the bellhop’s “Evening, Claire.” In the elevator, I tried to pull myself together, fixing my hair and taking in a deep, bracing breath.
“Well, there you are,” Kiki said when I appeared at the door. She sounded vaguely peeved, as if I was showing up late for something.
“Did we have a date?” I asked, and walked over to the couch. I straightened my back and neatly folded my hands in my lap. I needed her help getting my necklace back, and I didn’t want to waste any time being lectured about how nobody wants to spend time around a “Slumpy Susie.”
“No, I just had a feeling you’d be passing by.” Kiki poured herself a refill from her silver martini shaker and tottered over to her favorite spot on the couch, by the i don’t repeat gossip so sit close needlepoint pillow. “You must be tired, dear.”
“What makes you say that?” I sat up straight as a lamppost.
“Oh, all that groveling and making your case with the young Mr. Shuttleworth.”
I felt my face go cranberry. “Do you have a spy following me around or something?”
“Nothing so glamorous! Just a custodian.” She paused to savor my confusion. “He called to say this little trinket turned up during the post-party cleanup.” She pulled my cameo necklace out of her pocket and dangled it under the lamp’s glow. The onyx background appeared unscratched and the ivory profile was white as fresh snow.
“Can I see it?” I was practically foaming at the mouth.
“Of course you may. Now I hope you’ll keep a better eye on it.” A heavy pause. “And on your beau.”
“You bet I will.”
“That’s my girl.” She fastened the necklace back in its rightful place and I felt as if I’d had a two-hour-long massage.
When I got home that night, I went straight to bed—blue jeans and eyeliner and everything. I was so psyched to get back to my dream life I didn’t even remember to turn out the lights until I was already under the covers.
“Henry!” I yelled out, and he came pattering into my room in no time, wearing his asterix et les vikings T-shirt over a pair of canary yellow Farmhouse School sweatpants I’d long since outgrown.
We worked out a trade: a flick of the light switch in exchange for a slightly deformed Lindt truffle I’d bought half-off at Bleecker Gourmet. “If you give Didier and Margaux a pinch of fish food, I’ll toss in the remainder of an obscenely sized Mickey Mouse sugar cookie,” I said, remembering the oh-so-romantic plastic-wrapped dessert Andy had unloaded on me in the cab.
“Deal.”
A bunch of old-school gangsters were seated around a bright white table, smoking cigars and laughin
g heartily. I was wearing a slinky black turtleneck dress and coming around with a tray of gray cocktails. When I got to the man at the head of the table I saw that he was hiding something in his lap: an art magazine with his own portrait on the cover. And then, as if that wasn’t weird enough, he winked at me—from the page.
Okay, I got it: he was a gangster, just like Al Capone, the dead gangster who was supposedly watching over the iPod. He was trying to tell me something about where it was hidden.
But why couldn’t he just tell me, then? And I’m sorry, but the fact that he wasn’t a real person was no excuse.
Feeling exhausted—blissfully exhausted, that is—I secretly chugged from Mom’s J’ PARIS coffee cup before leaving for school, and turned the dream over and over in my head all day long. What was most frustrating was the fact that there were parts of it I understood—the snow-white table was obviously straight out of Helle House Decor 101, and the gangsters had to be stand-ins for the lovely ladies who ran the show there. But for the love of dark chocolate, why was the guy in the portrait winking at me? Was it a taunt? A come-on? Was I supposed to be on the lookout for people with blinking problems?
My brain felt as fuzzy as unbrushed teeth, and Hudson’s never-ending background noise of chalk marks and atonal teachers wasn’t helping matters. I needed silence. I needed space.
In other words, I needed some quality time with my Schwinn bicycle.
If only it were so easy.
When school let out, Becca cornered me by the bike stand to tell me there was a listening party for Wiley Martins’s new album. “It’s called My Secret Girlfriend and the cover art apparently has a girl who’s the spitting image of Sills,” she told me with a lively look of the eye. “It’s at Global Media and Reagan said she can get us all in. You down?”
I’d had enough of Global Media, hadn’t I? “I wish I could,” I told her, “but I have this thing I have to do … for Kiki.”
She pursed her lips and blew her bangs out of her eyes. “What if I said Andy might come by?”
I looked down. “I’d say you were exploiting your family connections.”
“Isn’t that what they’re there for?” She smiled barefacedly.
And at that moment it occurred to me that family connections could blur your vision to the point of blindness. Even though the girls were upset about losing the opportunity to carry off their big plan, it was painfully clear their hearts were no longer in it. Their parents’ reputations were at stake, and that overrode the issue at hand, as if opportunities to keep the city’s crown jewels intact came around every other Tuesday. The task of making everything better fell to me.
“Well, say you’ll come to the after party. It’s at this converted pickle store in the Lower East Side.”
I hopped on my bike and kicked off. “Sounds weird, but possible. I’ll call you later.” And then I gave her that ridiculous telephone hand signal she’d made the first day back to school.
My plan was to go up to the Seventy-ninth Street Boat Basin, which Louis had been telling me about for months on end. When I need to think things through, there’s nothing like a bath or a quiet moment by the river.
I turned down Delancey Street and waited at a red light by the Bowery when a bus growled up from behind, engulfing me in the most obnoxious cloud of exhaust.
And then there it was. An ad for Christie’s auction house was on the side of the bus. And what was shown on the ad but a picture of a pair of eyes—one open and one shut. I was being winked at.
Bells went off in my head louder than at the end of a boxing round.
Christie’s. The auction house that had the Al “Scarface” Capone estate auction that Kiki and her friends all went to a couple of years ago. My dream about the winking gangster. What if this was a clue about where the girls were hiding the iPod? Could it have to do with something from the Al Capone estate?
Wouldn’t hurt to check. And thanks to the miracle of public records, I could probably find out.
I raced home and barely said hi to my parents as I ran into my room and booted up my computer. When my Internet browser came up, I typed in: “Christie’s Capone auction.”
Lo and behold: the centerpiece of the auction had indeed been the original Scarface’s cigar box.
A cigar—just like the one the gangster in my dream had been smoking!
I read a press report confirming an anonymous bidder’s purchase of the original Scarface’s silver cigar box, “one of the most important historical relics of our time.”
There was no way things were neatly falling into place for absolutely no reason. Unless my hunches were totally wrong, the iPod was hiding out in Al Capone’s cigar box. Weirdest of all, the price it fetched was one hundred thousand dollars. An inconceivable sum for a bunch of girls who couldn’t even pay their pizza bills.
And that was when it dawned on me. What if the Helle Housers weren’t clued in to the Moons’ relationship with Mayor Irving? There’d been so many people at Helle House’s film night event, who was to say they were all actual members? What if the girl we’d seen on the phone at Helle House was a lowly visitor, or a member who happened to be in cahoots with the real culprit?
Had to be.
But I was getting ahead of myself. That real culprit took anonymity pretty seriously. He or she was truly impossible to pin down—there were hundreds of articles about the auction, but nary a trace on who’d bought the box.
Talk about close but no cigar.
I’d gotten as far as I could on my own. I needed help—and fast.
Next thing I knew, I was locking my bike outside Global Media’s headquarters. I made my way to the reception booth and tried to bop my head in a shaggy way that a music journalist might, and mumbled something about the “listening party.”
The security guy scrunched his face at me and I prayed he didn’t recognize me from my egg-pelting episode. “Who you with?”
“Um … Orbspot.” I bopped my head some more. “It’s a blog.”
“What isn’t?” He rolled his eyes and shooed me through to the elevator bank.
I made my way to a conference room on the forty-fifth floor. Sig was listening to a pair of headphones and didn’t seem to notice I was there.
I pulled back her headphone and she looked startled to see me. “You got a second?” I asked.
She cast me an expression that told me she knew something major was up. “Sure.”
We slipped out and walked to the women’s room at the end of the hall. It was brightly lit and empty, but for the muffled sounds of sobbing coming from one of the stalls. We exchanged awkward looks as I passed her the printout from the Christie’s Web site. She looked at me, dumbfounded. “Al Capone’s cigar box …?”
“You know how that girl at Helle House said that Al Capone was looking after it? I think that’s where the iPod is stashed away,” I said. Realizing I would sound crazy if I said I’d had a dream about a gangster cigar party, I added, “Everything else of Capone’s that was sold at the auction was destroyed in a fire.”
She looked at me skeptically, and I embellished the lie, “I read an article about it on the New York Times Web site.” I went on, “Though I’m not sure it belongs to the Helle Housers. If you’ll look at the cigar box’s price tag you’ll—”
“See there’s real money behind it,” she said, finishing my thought. She narrowed her eyes like a cowboy in an old Western.
“The auction house has records in an online database, but it’s user restricted.” I pointed to the URL on the top of the page. “You think you can hack in there and see who bought the cigar box?”
She folded the paper in quarters and stuck it in her back pocket. “Must you make this so easy?”
{ 22 }
To Catch a Sugar Fiend
As I walked through the lobby of Global Media’s headquarters, thunder boomed. But when I looked outside, I saw that the sky was still blue and there wasn’t a drop of rain. It took me a second to realize that the sound was comi
ng from a video monitor over my head. The actor in the Toro Boy promo was prettier than Miss Venezuela, with bone-white teeth and a swath of dark, shiny hair. Ian was going to need a familiar shoulder to cry on when he found out about this. It was time to make my amends.
I was downtown twenty minutes later. Lucky for me, Ian is a creature of habit. I found him in his usual spot in the back of Propeller Comics—only this time, he wasn’t curled up on the ratty tan couch and reading yet another comic book he wasn’t going to pay for.
The space was now doubling as an art school of sorts. Ian’s couch had been usurped by four little kids who had notebooks in their laps, their legs dangling nowhere close to the carpet. Ian was standing next to a huge drawing pad on an easel, his enormous army coat accentuating his tiny physique.
“Angry is the easiest!” he was saying as he drew a stick figure. “All you have to do is make their arms go up the air. Like this.” He used his marker to add two dashes to the figure and grinned. “Does this guy look like he’s fixing for a fight or what?”
The kids laughed, which only fired Ian up more. “There’s hundreds where that came from—goofy and naughty and sleep—” And then he looked up and saw me. I got one of the best smiles I’ve ever seen.
He turned back to the kids. “And sometimes when you’re in the middle of drawing, you might change your mind,” he said. “Like maybe you’re drawing Mr. Angry Guy and then you decide you want him to be happy. What do you do?”
“Give him Prozac!” yelled out one of the students.
Ian seemed taken aback. “Okay … any other ideas?”
“Tell him something to cheer him up!” I creaked from my spot by the Calvin and Hobbes display. “Like … his friend is sorry she temporarily erased herself. She’s ready to commit to ink.”
Ian grinned, then turned around and started scribbling furiously over the stick figure’s hands. “You can also build on the picture to add feelings.” And when he stepped away, I saw what he’d done: he’d added two bouquets of daisies. “You see?” He was focusing on the kids, but he wasn’t fooling anyone—the flowers were all mine.
Dream Life Page 23