Stalker Girl

by Rosemary Graham

  “Wow. That does sound sad,” Carly said. Maybe Jess knew more than everyone thought. “What happened to their mother?”

  “Oh, she had a heart attack because she ate too many french fries from McDonald’s.”

  Carly laughed, relieved that the sad queen bore no resemblance to their mother. “They have McDonald’s in this kingdom?”

  “Yeah. Well, we call it Ye Olde Royal McDonald’s, but it’s basically the same thing. Too much fat. And stress. She was very stressed.”

  “Really? I didn’t think queens had that much stress in their lives. ’Cause of all the servants and stuff.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s what the stress was all about. Her servants were a lot to manage. And she was just—stressed. See, we’re trying to put in some positive messages.”

  “Maybe she should have done yoga.”

  “They didn’t have yoga back then.”

  “But they had McDonald’s.”

  “Yes. They did. In our version of back then, they did. We’re using our poetic licenses, okay? Do you think maybe you could just listen and not keep interrupting?”

  As soon as Carly put Jess to bed, she went back to Nick’s studio. The music was blaring and the blowtorch burning again. He was welding a spiraled spool of metal, which looked something like a thick, rusty Slinky, along the edge of a large metal box. He held up a finger to tell Carly he’d stop in a minute.

  She sat down on his wheeled stool to wait. She used to spin herself dizzy on that thing, or lie on her stomach and push herself across the length of the room as fast as she could. Once she’d smashed into the wall headfirst and gotten a huge bump on the top of her skull. She and Nick decided they wouldn’t tell Isabelle because she’d make Carly stop riding the stool, or want her to wear a helmet or something. They agreed they’d just be a lot more careful from then on.

  That’s how they invented the DTM code for “Don’t tell Mom.” They never did it for really big stuff, but for the little things, where telling would serve no purpose except to get Isabelle all worked up. Like the time Carly skinned her knee when she and Nick were hunting at one of their favorite junkyards. At the time, Isabelle didn’t even know Nick sometimes took her along on his junkyard jaunts, so that was an obvious DTM. They attributed the bloody knee to a fall in the park.

  “Hey,” Nick said, as he walked across the room.

  Carly got right to it. “Mom told me.”

  Nick took off the goggles and gloves, wiped the sweat from his forehead, and sat down on the wooden bench across from the stool.

  “I gathered.”

  “I can’t believe I’m not going to live here anymore.”

  “Me neither.” He reached for a coffee mug on the table behind him. From the look of it—a skin of cream floated on top—it had been there for a while. “I wish your mother would reconsider my idea.”

  “What idea?”

  Five minutes later Carly burst into her mother’s room without knocking.

  “Carly, geez. You scared me.”

  Good, Carly thought. She wanted her mother’s attention. She plopped herself down on the edge of the bed. The book Isabelle had been reading fell to her side. Families Apart: Ten Keys to Successful Co-Parenting. Next to it was Mom’s House, Dad’s House: Making Two Homes for Your Child and next to that, The Good Divorce.

  “Why are we moving when Nick says we can stay?”

  Isabelle had left some key information out of her version of events. Like the part about how Nick said they could stay in the loft. Wanted them to stay in the loft. He’d drawn up a brilliant floor plan that involved knocking down walls and building new ones to split the space into two apartments. The girls’ rooms would be in the middle, with one door leading into Isabelle’s (hypothetical) apartment and another leading into Nick’s. There’d be no need for them to move, no need to schlep Jess back and forth for half of every week or every other week or whatever they were planning. Nick would charge Isabelle rent—because she was like that, and he knew she’d never agree otherwise—but no more than she could afford, and nothing close to what he could get for the place on the open market.

  And he and Carly wouldn’t have to figure out how to carry on an ex-almost-stepfather/ex-almost-stepdaughter relationship. They’d just see each other whenever. She wouldn’t have to worry about what to call him. They would still be connected.

  But Isabelle turned Nick down flat, and Carly wanted to know why.

  “I don’t want to live like that.”

  “Live like what?”

  “Apart but together. Together but apart. You’re old enough to imagine, aren’t you, how hard that would be for me? I don’t want to come home and smell his dinner cooking, or hear his music through the walls. Or that wo—another woman’s voice.”

  “Is that why you guys are breaking up?”

  Isabelle looked down at the bed and fingered the frayed edge of the comforter cover.

  “Oh my God. Is that it? Is Nick having—” Was it still an “affair” if you weren’t married to begin with?

  Isabelle reached across the bed and took Carly’s hand. “It’s not what you think. Yes. He’s seeing someone. But that’s not the reason we’re breaking up. I’ve known about it. We both—”

  “Oh my God, Mom. Stop.” Carly yanked her hand away and put both hands up to her ears. This was worse than listening to her father explain the mechanics of getting Ann pregnant. “I don’t want to hear it. Whatever it is.”

  Actually, Carly’s mind was racing with questions. But they were questions she didn’t want the answers to. Were they both “seeing” other people? Of all the stupid euphemisms, that had to be one of the stupidest. Is that why they never actually married? Was that part of the deal all along? Who would Isabelle be “seeing”? And when? Those Sundays in her office? In her office? On the couch under the portrait of virginal (so everyone assumed) Julia Bellwin herself?

  If it weren’t her life—if it weren’t her mother and her about-to-be-ex-almost-stepfather and there weren’t a seven-year-old involved then, Carly thought, it might be funny.

  “I’m sorry. You’re right. I shouldn’t burden you with our stuff. Listen, I wish I were the kind of person who could do what Nick’s proposing. It sounds very—European and sophisticated. Everyone thinks I’m nuts for turning him down.” Isabelle shrugged and shook her head. “Sometimes I think I’m nuts for turning him down. But I think it would be confusing for Jess. And . . . I know myself. I won’t be able to build a new life with Nick on the other side of the wall.”

  “But you said yourself it’s a crazy market. Where are we going to go?”

  “I’ll find something. I know I will. But I—”

  Carly cut her off. “You aren’t the only one affected here. What about Jess? What about me? Nick wants us to stay. I want to stay. Jess would want to stay if she had any idea of what was going on. You’re going to ruin everyone’s life because you changed your mind and decided that your open marriage wasn’t so cool anymore?”

  Carly was glad to see Isabelle flinch. She wanted to inflict pain. She wanted a fight.

  But Isabelle wouldn’t bite. “I’m going to ignore that. I’m not going to try to explain my choices to you. But you’ve just heard some very upsetting news, and I don’t blame you for lashing out.”

  Carly wished Isabelle would blame her. She wanted her mother to yell so that she could yell back. She wanted to scream, to throw something, to see mother flinch again.

  Carly called Val to discuss.

  “I vote for the camp,” said Val.

  “Really? I thought you’d say Ohio.”

  “Nah. Camp.”

  “Why?”

  “For one, it’s only a two-hour train ride away, and you can come down to the city on your days off.”

  “And you can come up.”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. I don’t like woods.”

  “Okay. What else?”

  “Counselors. Have you seen this camp’s Web site?”

  “No.�
��

  “I’m looking at it right now. The tennis guy is hot. He goes to Georgetown. And there’s a swimming instructor. Ray Booker. Amherst. And wow. I mean wow!”

  “But we hate guys like that.”

  “Correction. You hate guys like that. I’m reevaluating my position.”

  “Jake?” Jake Alden, a senior at Edward G. Champion, was Val’s lab partner in AP physics. (EGC and Bellwin offered some specialized classes jointly.) For a year, Carly had been hearing the ongoing narrative of this contentious pair. They were both supersmart, both bent on med school, and neither quite trusted the other to do things right. But over the course of the school year, aversion had morphed into attraction, just like in the movies.

  And just like in the movies, there were obstacles. Jake’s long-term girlfriend, Juliet Kinkade, for one, and his rich, Social-Registered family for another. The last Carly had heard, Juliet was out of the picture and Jake was calling, but Val was still insisting that she didn’t want to have anything to do with “a guy like that,” meaning a guy whose ancestors came over on the Mayflower and whose family name was on multiple buildings on multiple college campuses. Not that Jake had done or said anything to indicate that he looked down on Val or that his family would object to her. He’d even come in to SJNY for dinner with his mother, and she was totally nice to Val. Carly had been urging Val to give him a chance, to at least let herself have some fun. But Val was stubborn and laser-focused when it came to her future. She’d kept all boys—not just Jake—at a distance. She said she was saving herself. Not for marriage but until she was safely enrolled in college.

  “Yeah. He called again tonight and pretty much begged me to go to the formal.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope.”

  “Wow.” The EGC senior formal was another one of those things—like summers in Paris—that belonged to the world of Piper Petersons and Celine Hardimans. Carly and Val had always tuned out when talk of the designer dresses and before-and-after parties started in April.

  “And you said . . . ?”

  “Yes. Believe it or not, I said yes. He was so sweet about it. I couldn’t say anything else.”

  “Wow. That’s great.” Carly really did think it was great. From what Val had told her, Jake sounded like a nice guy. So what if he was rich? “It took you two long enough.”

  “I know.”

  At the time, it didn’t occur to Carly to think of Val’s announcement as anything but good news.

  Carly must have slept some, but it felt like she was awake the whole night trying to decide between two awful options. She heard the party girls’ heels click their way down the street when the bars closed at three and the rumbling of trucks outside the one meat plant still in operation at about five.

  When she got up at six, she’d made up her mind.

  Val made some good points. Under different circumstances, she probably would have chosen the camp over Ohio, but she was too mad at her mother for ruining her life and couldn’t imagine going anywhere with her. And so that afternoon, she called her father.

  “That’s great. You could really be a help around here, too, now that Ann’s on bedrest.”

  “Bedrest?”

  Just that morning, Ann had experienced some bleeding and cramping. Because of the two prior miscarriages, she’d been advised to get into bed until further notice.

  Carly pictured herself carrying trays of food into Ann’s room, watching Oprah in the afternoons. Suddenly she understood Jolie Albright. Who wouldn’t start holding up 7-Elevens under those circumstances?

  And so Stony Hollow it was. The only job left by then was kitchen assistant, but that was fine with Carly. She wasn’t the counselor type. As much as she loved Jess, she didn’t see herself spending twenty-four hours a day in the company of ten girls Jess’s age.

  8

  GETTING OUT of New York was a depressing, exhausting experience, starting with the scene in front of what was about to become her former home.

  Nick and Isabelle were being all fake-polite to each other as they loaded the cab.

  “Let me get that.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You sure you don’t want me to come to the station with you? Help with your luggage?”

  Isabelle was nothing if not organized. She had sent most of their stuff ahead. All they had to carry was a small rolling carry-on each.

  “Positive. Really. We’ll be fine, won’t we, girls?”

  They were saying all the right, let’s-be-civil-about-this things but avoiding eye contact as they said them. As soon as the bags were in the trunk, Isabelle climbed into the backseat without another word to Nick, who was focused on Jess, who was finally reacting to the news that her parents were splitting up. She was crying and clinging to her father, saying, “I don’t want to go, I don’t want to go. I want to stay here, with you.”

  Isabelle and Nick had waited until a week before to tell her, and when they had, they’d shown her the full-color brochure from Stony Hollow, open to the page with the picture of a girl her age, smiling from the saddle of a pretty white horse, wearing a nifty velvet riding helmet.

  Hey, yeah. So your parents are calling it quits, but don’t worry, kid, ’cause you get to spend the summer on top of Snowflake here!

  The distraction tactic seemed to work. But then all that week Jess had watched as Carly and her mother packed up the entire contents of their rooms into boxes. They still didn’t have a place. The plan was for Isabelle to keep looking by Web and phone, and when she got something, Nick would move them in. Jess didn’t have to do any packing. Her room at Nick’s would stay unchanged, and they’d get new stuff for her mother’s place. This, along with the pretty horses, was somehow supposed to soften the blow.

  But it was clear to Carly as she stood on the sidewalk watching all this that rainy morning, with the cab meter running and the cabbie repeatedly checking his watch, that Nick and Isabelle had only delayed the blow, possibly even made it worse.

  Nick squatted down to Jess’s level and took her hands in his. He promised to talk to her every day, to come and visit as soon as possible.

  But she was having none of it. She pulled her hands out of his grip and threw herself on him—wrapped her arms and legs around him with such force that he almost fell over. If there hadn’t been a parking meter for Nick to grab on to, they would have both wound up on the sidewalk.

  Her mother asked Carly to get Jess off Nick, but Carly refused, and in the end her mom had to get back out of the cab and peel Jess off Nick herself. Jess still wouldn’t give up. It took the two of them to get her into the cab and strap her into her seat belt.

  Once Jess was strapped in, Nick tried to engage Carly in a meaningful good-bye. But that would have required that she look him in the eye, and this wasn’t something she was ready to do. She didn’t know what she was supposed to say to him. She didn’t know how she felt about him anymore, either. She believed her mother when she said that he wasn’t to blame, that it was more complicated. She had no idea if “seeing someone” meant a big love thing or something more casual. And she didn’t want to know. But it creeped her out to think that he had a secret life, even if it was a secret he shared with Isabelle, and even if Isabelle had one, too. When she’d first heard her mother’s plan, she’d worried about him, imagining him rattling around the empty loft with no one to talk to. Apparently Nick would be just fine.

  “So you’ll call me?” he asked.

  She shrugged and kept her eyes on the sidewalk.

  “Is it okay if I call you?”

  “I guess,” she said, still not looking up.

  “You’ll keep an eye on Jess?”

  “Yes,” she said, and escaped into the cab.

  When they finally got to Penn Station, Isabelle blew up at the ticket guy when he told her that their reservations were for the next day. It wasn’t a big deal—there was still plenty of room on that day’s train—but that didn’t stop her from berating him, the unidentified pers
on who had messed up her reservation, the entire Amtrak organization, and the United States of America, for selling its soul to the airline and automobile industries and settling for the “train system of a third-world country.”

  Jess fell into a deep, posttantrum sleep as soon as they pulled out of the station. Isabelle mostly stared out the window, every now and then reading a page or two in the book on her lap, Basic Camp Management. Then she’d give up with a groan-sigh and stare out the window again.

  9

  CARLY SHOULD have known better.

  She should have taken one look at Cameron Foster with his wispy blond hair and his puka beads and Top-Siders and run the other way. But the scene outside the place she would no longer be able to call home had made her vulnerable. Add to that all of Val’s talk about how she shouldn’t be so judgmental, how she should try to see the preppy hot male counselors with an unprejudiced eye, and you can understand how Carly might have briefly fallen into a mildly delusional state of infatuation with Stony Hollow’s head sailing instructor.

  When Cameron greeted them on the platform at the train station and started working his charm—taking their bags, teasing Jess out of her funk, asking Isabelle about her work as a college-placement counselor (and working in the fact that he went to Columbia)—she let herself be charmed.

  Carly had her first five days at Stony Hollow free. They didn’t need her in the kitchen yet since only the counselors were there for orientation. During those five days, Cameron seemed to pop up a lot. He gave her and Jess a tour of the camp, took them out on the lake a couple times, regaling them with stories about crewing boats in exotic places, and his own days as a Stony Hollow camper. He listened intently—or appeared to listen intently—to Jess’s detailed summary of “Return to the Castle.” Jess basked in Cameron’s attentions. Sincere or not, cheering up Jess earned him bonus points in Carly’s eyes.