Stalker Girl

by Rosemary Graham

  Carly was glad Val was in the shower when she got there. That way she didn’t have to look Val in the eye when she answered “Nothing” to Val’s “What’d you do all day?”

  Not exactly a lie, but it felt like one.

  There’d been a time when Val and Carly had no secrets or lies between them.

  Once, early in their friendship, Carly had tried lying to Val. It was a white lie. A totally harmless untruth told to spare Val’s feelings. This was back in eighth grade, Val’s first year at the Bellwin School when she and Carly were just getting to know each other, before Carly understood that Val wasn’t the kind of person whose feelings needed sparing.

  They were in algebra. Val was at the board demonstrating how she’d managed to solve the extra-credit problem no one else could figure out, and Celine Hardiman told Piper Peterson—loud enough for half the class to hear—that she’d seen Val’s shoes in a Wal-Mart commercial.

  “Or maybe it was Kmart. I don’t know, one of the Marts.” Piper had laughed as she always did when Celine tried to be funny, and they both sneered at Val when she walked back to her seat.

  When Val asked Carly what that was all about, Carly said something like they were making fun of how smart Val was. But Val took one look at Carly’s face and knew that wasn’t it. She pressed for the truth, and it only made her laugh.

  After class Val went up to Celine and said, “Actually, they’re from Payless. Buy two, get a third pair for half price. Bought them with my own money, too. And by ‘my own money,’ I mean money I earned doing this thing—you might have heard of it—it’s called working.”

  Someday Carly would tell Val everything. Like she used to. And they’d laugh about it. Like they used to.

  Hey, remember that time I went temporarily insane?

  And you turned into Scary Stalker Girl? Oh, yeah. You were some kind of crazy. I’m so glad you’re normal again! Ha! Ha!

  Yeah, me too. Ha! Ha! Ha!

  But Carly wasn’t ready to get all confessional. Not again. Not yet.

  As far as Val knew, Carly was avoiding all things having to do with Brian. Just one week before, she and Val had deleted all of his band’s songs from Carly’s iPod, every last one of his texts on her phone, and the pictures she had on her laptop. They’d made something of a ceremony of it after Carly finally admitted that he had broken up with her. For three weeks she’d managed to hide it from everyone—even her best friend (and in some ways even herself)—in the vain hope that it wasn’t really a breakup, just a temporary break. But there came a point when Carly couldn’t fool herself any longer. She told Val what had happened and asked for her help.

  It felt good. And right. Carly promised Val she wouldn’t contact Brian or go online looking for information about him or his band. “That boy is taking up too much rent-free space in your head,” Val said. “It is eviction time.”

  But then, almost immediately after making her promise, Carly broke it.

  Now she cleared a swath of the steamed-up mirror in Val’s bathroom and pulled the Paris Hilton sunglasses out of her bag.

  Val turned the water off, slid the shower curtain open, and laughed when she saw Carly in the sunglasses. “Where did you get those?”

  “Chinatown,” Carly said, putting her hand on her hip and thrusting a shoulder out. “I thought it was time for a new look. What do you think?”

  “No offense, but they look terrible on you. They take up your whole face. Can you get me those towels?”

  Carly grabbed two fluffy pink towels from the rack behind her and handed them to Val.

  “When were you in Chinatown?”

  “I . . . uh . . .” Carly turned her back and started undressing, trying to remember exactly what she’d already said about how she spent her day. “I just sort of wandered over there this afternoon.” She hung her clothes on the doorknob and stepped into the shower at the back end of the tub as Val stepped out at the front.

  Hidden safely behind the shower curtain, she said, “I had to take Jess down to Nick’s, and I just felt like walking.” She squeezed a glob of tropical-fruit-scented shampoo into her hair. If her voice betrayed anything, it was drowned out by the shower.

  “Well, I’m confiscating them.”

  Carly peeked out from behind the curtain to find Val wrapped and crowned in pink towels and wearing the sunglasses. They looked good on her. The brown tint went with her skin tone and hair much better than with Carly’s.

  “Go ahead. Keep them.”

  “Thanks, dahling,” Val said as she smacked air kisses on each side of Carly’s wet face. “Come on, we’d better move it. We’re going to get slammed tonight, thanks to J.Lo.”

  “J.Lo? Is she coming in tonight?”

  “No, but she gave us a shout-out on the radio, and people have been calling all day for reservations.”

  Val’s mother and uncle started SJNY—San Juan, New York—ten years earlier. For those ten years, it had been popular enough among the Spanish-speaking uptown population to make them a reasonable income and employ anyone in the family who needed a job. But a recent write-up in New York magazine had brought its popularity to a new level. Now the whole city knew about SJNY’s “generous portions of tasty Puerto Rican fare”—the “zingy ceviche” and “tantalizingly seasoned stews and soups.” People from all over the city lined up on Friday and Saturday nights to gorge on the cheap food and generous tropical drinks and to hear the live Latin jazz in the bar.

  Val and Carly helped Val’s mother, Angela, manage the door. They kept track of the waiting list and handed out menus. Sometimes, when things got really busy, they helped clear and set tables or deliver food.

  The combination of Saturday plus a Jennifer Lopez endorsement plus the unseasonably warm weather meant, according to Val’s cousin Luis, that they would be especially busy that night. He greeted the girls with an order for three hundred fruit garnishes—one slice each of pineapple and orange speared together with a paper umbrella—for all the fruity cocktails he’d be mixing later.

  “Three hundred?!” Val protested. “I think the power’s going to your head.”

  Luis had just turned twenty-one and been promoted from busboy to bartender, and he was taking his new position seriously. “Yeah, yeah. Trust me, we are going to get slammed tonight.”

  Val headed for the kitchen to get the fruit just as her mother walked over from the podium, holding a phone to her chest.

  “Luis,” Angela said, in a loud whisper.

  “Yeah?”

  “Es la loca, Katrine.”

  “Tell her I’m not here.”

  “She knows you’re here.”

  “Tell her I’m dead.”

  Angela held the phone out. “You’d better talk to her. I don’t want another scene.”

  Luis let out a big sigh and reached for the phone to talk to his ex, Katrine, aka the muchacha loca.

  Luis and Katrine had been together from the time they were fifteen. They were supposed to get married after they graduated from college—he from St. John’s with an engineering degree and she from Rutgers, premed. They hadn’t set a date, but he’d bought her a ring and she’d started reading bridal magazines.

  Then, out of the blue that past summer, Luis broke up with her. Everyone was shocked, especially Katrine.

  She’d been making scenes ever since. Showing up at his classes at St. John’s or his on-campus apartment in the middle of the night. The Saturday before this, she’d come to the restaurant at the height of the dinner rush and sat at the bar all night, holding her head in her hands, quietly crying, while all around her people drank and danced and laughed. She stayed all the way to closing, and then Pedro, Luis’s father, drove her home at two in the morning.

  Val backed out through the swinging kitchen door, carrying a cardboard box overflowing with tropical fruit. “Oh, don’t worry, I got it,” she said to Luis as she hoisted it up onto the bar. Luis didn’t notice Val’s sarcasm. He was holding the phone away from his ear and wincing. Katrine’s m
uffled lamentations echoed throughout the room.

  Val looked at Carly and shook her head. “Is that who I think it is?”

  Carly nodded and rolled her eyes. “Yup.”

  “I don’t get it. Why does she keep calling?”

  Carly shrugged. “I don’t know.” But she did know. She knew what it was like to be so obsessed you did things you knew you shouldn’t. She didn’t think she was as bad as Katrine. Not by a long shot. She was much more careful. She knew that you had to keep your obsession to yourself.

  “See? Aren’t you glad we did that intervention on you? ”

  Carly nodded again as she reached into the box for a pineapple.

  Carly was glad it was going to be a busy night. She needed something to get her mind off the things it wanted to think about, all the questions it wanted to ponder about Taylor and Brian together, all the wondering it wanted to do about how Brian thought of Carly now, if he ever did think of her.

  As Luis predicted, it was a crazy-busy night at SJNY. The line for tables in the dining room was out the door by seven. The bar was packed four deep an hour before Los Postizos started their first set, and Luis and the other bartenders had gone through half of the three hundred fruit-laden paper umbrellas.

  But the busyness of SJNY did nothing to protect Carly from her renegade brain, a brain that was a lot better at multitasking than she’d ever imagined. Now that she’d gotten her glimpse of Taylor—the face and the long, elegant neck; the smooth, shiny hair; the yogafied body and fabulous, magnanimous personality—Carly couldn’t stop thinking about her. She would be taking down someone’s name, the number in their party, noting their time of arrival, telling them how long they could expect to wait, and at the same time she’d see Taylor laughing it up with the Dominican girls or the firemen in Washington Square Park. When she ran back to the kitchen for two orders of flan for table ten, she’d see Taylor and her mother with the New York Times crossword puzzle between them. When Angela sent her to the linen closet for a pile of napkins, she wondered about the dinner at the Deen brownstone that night. Was Brian there? What were they eating? Even as she faked her way through “Happy Birthday” in Spanish, a big smile on her face, she was trying to fight off the part of her brain that wanted to know if Brian kissed Taylor the same way he had kissed her, if he touched Taylor in the same places he had touched her.

  But the worst thing was what happened to her own memories now that she knew what Taylor looked like. She tried conjuring up her favorite memory from her summer with Brian—the first night in room nine at Ernestine’s when no one said, “We better stop.” Now when she thought about that night—how afterward they lay side by side on Brian’s futon, watching the sky change from pink and orange to deep, dark blue—she saw Taylor in her place.

  It was like she’d been deleted from her own memory.

  PART two

  5

  SHE WASN’T always like this.

  If you’d met Carly, say, just six months before, you wouldn’t have pegged her as a stalker in the making. You would have found a well-behaved, reasonably confident, responsible, and by all appearances normal teenage girl living a pretty comfortable life.

  Yes, her parents were divorced, but that was hardly unusual in her world. Only slightly more than half the girls at her school lived with both biological parents under one roof. (Or one of several roofs, this being the Julia Bellwin School for Girls on East 92nd Street, just off Fifth Avenue.) Slightly fewer than half shuttled back and forth across town or state or country—and in some cases, ocean.

  In Carly’s case, her parents’ split probably improved her prospects for happiness. Anyone who knew both of them well enough—and Carly was the one person in the world who did—could see that they never would have lasted. Carly’s father, Tim Finnegan, was a dedicated professor of archaeology, a man who was at his happiest sweating under the brutal sun of southwestern Turkey, where he spent six weeks every summer supervising the excavation of Aphrodisias, a once-bustling ancient Greek city named for the goddess of love. When he wasn’t in the field, Tim Finnegan was quite happy to be riding his bicycle across the bucolic campus of Denman College in Greenville, Ohio, on his way to give lectures on the ancient Greek water systems and safety pins. Her mother, Isabelle Greene, was a dedicated New Yorker, a refugee from the deepest New Jersey suburbs, which she fled as an eighteen-year-old, vowing never to return. Tim and Isabelle met as graduate students at Columbia. Tim was finishing up his PhD, and Isabelle was working on a graduate degree in creative writing, hoping for a career as a novelist.

  Carly’s parents weren’t married or even formally engaged when Isabelle became (unexpectedly but not unhappily) pregnant with Carly. But they were living together with the shared assumption that they would someday get married. The archaeology department at Columbia had an opening coming up, and Tim was considered a shoo-in when he finished his degree. So when that pink line showed up on the EPT, they went down to City Hall and exchanged vows with the happy—if vague—idea that “everything would work itself out.” But then that job at Columbia went to someone else. After a three-year search, Tim was finally offered what he considered a great job: a full-time, tenure-track position at Denman. By then Isabelle was even more certain that she didn’t want to live anywhere else but Manhattan—and Tim, who had put ten years of postgraduate work into preparing for his career, couldn’t imagine doing anything else but archaeology. So they split.

  Both of Carly’s parents found new partners, and those two couples seemed, from her vantage point, better suited than the one that had produced her. Tim’s second wife, Ann, was a microbiologist and epidemiologist who happily spent her husband’s long absences in her lab with her microbes and pathogens.

  Soon after divorcing Carly’s father, her mother met and moved in with Nick, a Queens-born, self-taught sculptor specializing in large-scale installations constructed entirely out of materials found in junkyards and landfills. Nick, with his artistic aspirations and his unfinished loft in the Meatpacking District (which hadn’t yet become the prime neighborhood it now was), seemed like exactly the right companion for the artsy-bohemian life Isabelle had in mind. Carly was never sure if it was because her parents’ marriage failed, or because it fit her mother’s idea of how an artsy-bohemian life should be lived, but Isabelle never married Nick, even after they decided to have a child together. It didn’t seem to make a difference. To Carly and everyone who knew them, they seemed quite married.

  Carly liked Nick. Over the years they’d developed a close relationship. Nick never tried to be too parental with Carly. He was more like a close adult friend.

  Despite the distance, Carly had a good relationship with her father and got along well with his wife, Ann. She took the short plane ride to Ohio one weekend a month to visit them. She’d spend a week or two there every summer as well as some school breaks.

  Well then what about that school and those mean girls who were making fun of Val’s shoes? There’s a lot of pressure in those New York private schools, isn’t there?

  Yes, a lot of pressure. But Carly wasn’t particularly susceptible to it. She went to Bellwin for free because her mother was the head of college placement. With a long record of getting Bellwin girls into top schools, Isabelle and her team of able assistants were a big part of the reason people begged, bribed, and clawed their daughters’ way into the school in the first place. Though there was little in the world that her rich classmates couldn’t afford, they couldn’t afford to diss Isabelle Greene’s daughter.

  Carly wasn’t one to go around wishing she could trade homes or parents or wardrobes with the rich girls at her school. She’d never minded living on the fringe of Bellwin social life. Fringe was fine with her. She had her fringe friends, Val Rivera and Paula Castleman. Though since Paula’s mother married an Italian shoe magnate the year before, Paula appeared to be drifting away from the fringe to the white-hot center of Bellwin life.

  Paula and Carly bonded on the first day of kindergarten, af
ter circle-time sharing revealed them to be the only two girls in the class who had spent their entire summers in the city. No camp, no Europe, no house in “the country,” wherever that was. This was back when Paula’s mother managed a Madison Avenue shoe boutique and Isabelle was an assistant to the then-head of college placement. It wasn’t that the five-year-olds who had summer homes and servants rejected the ones who didn’t. Or that the ones who didn’t—Carly and Paula—felt inferior to the ones who did. At five, Carly was more impressed by Paula’s weekly trips to Coney Island than she was by Piper Peterson’s week on a yacht docked in Monaco. They simply felt more comfortable with each other.

  Val came to Bellwin in seventh grade, when the school was undergoing a big diversity push. Val would have gotten into Bellwin anyway. She was that smart and that disciplined. But she’d have been perfectly happy to stay at St. Cecilia’s, her neighborhood Catholic school, if Bellwin hadn’t found her and offered her a full scholarship.

  Despite the common wisdom about three being a crowd, the three of them had managed to stay a three-some of best friends up through the end of sophomore year. She and Val were still friendly with Paula, but now they were mostly a twosome.

  So how does a well-behaved, reasonably confident, responsible, and otherwise normal teenage girl become the kind of person who spends an entire day following her ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend around the streets of Manhattan—ducking into doorways, knocking into people, and almost getting run over by taxis along the way?

  It started with a string of bad luck at the end of Carly’s junior year. Or what seemed like bad luck at the time. Later, at the starry-eyed height of her relationship with Brian, Carly would see the series of events that had disrupted her life as the handiwork of a celestial being, someone whose job was to bring together lovers who were destined to meet. Maybe even Aphrodite herself, the patron goddess of the ancient city Carly was supposed to spend her summer helping to unearth.