Upper East Side #3

by Ashley Valentine

  Kaliq watched them go, admiring the way Porsha’s thick hair hung past the collar of her sky blue cashmere coat. He raised his left hand and breathed in that clean, fresh scent that reminded him of her bare skin. Then he turned back to Bree. Her dark puff of curls. Her bulky black parka. Her itsy bitsy hands. Her shy smile. It was a relief to have Porsha gone so he could stop comparing them. Because the honest truth was, there was no comparison.

  A perfume bottle in the shape of a ballet dancer stood on the glass counter beside them. “Hey,” Kaliq changed the subject. “Have you ever seen the Nutcracker?” Bree was into art, so she probably knew all about ballet.

  She shook her head, smiling tentatively. She’d been to Lincoln Center with her architecture and design class, but that was as close as she’d come to seeing a real ballet. “No, not yet.”

  That wouldn’t do. That definitely wouldn’t do. Kaliq had taken Porsha to the Nutcracker for the past three Christmases, and even though he knew it was seriously uncool, he always really enjoyed it. It was such a trip the way in the first scene, during the Christmas party, the tree on stage was just a normal, average size tree. Then, after the little girl went to sleep and started to dream, the tree grew out of the floor, turning into this humongous tree on steroids—way bigger, even, than the tree in Rockefeller Center. And then all the toys came to life and started fighting with one another. It was awesome.

  Kaliq pulled his cell phone out of his pocket. “We’re having dinner at your dad’s tomorrow night, right?”

  Bree nodded.

  “Then let’s see if they have any tickets left for the matinee.”

  Bree leaned back against the perfume counter, overcome by those flulike symptoms again. Kaliq was taking her to the ballet! How could she not love him?

  12

  As soon as his last midterm was over on Thursday, Mekhi walked to his favorite Chinese-Cuban coffee shop on Broadway and ordered a café con leche and an egg roll. Then he got out a brand new black notebook and a ballpoint pen. All week long he’d been trying to write something halfway decent to send with his college applications, but everything he wrote was complete garbage. He’d never had trouble writing before—usually the words just flowed out of him. Sure, he’d been distracted by midterms, but there was still no denying it. He had writer’s block.

  Mekhi sipped his coffee, dribbling milky brown drops all over the first clean white page in his notebook. In a way, having writer’s block put him in league with the big boys. Tolstoy had it, Hemingway had it. He wasn’t sure if any of his favorite French existentialist writers had it, but then he figured they probably all must have at one time or another. That didn’t make it any less painful, though. In fact, it was excruciating.

  Poor, tormented soul.

  Mekhi could tell from looking at his old black notebooks that the last time he’d written anything worth saving was before Thanksgiving, before he and Yasmine had kissed for the first time and realized they were in love.

  He rolled his egg roll around in sticky plum sauce and took a bite. Aside from death, love was his favorite topic, but now that he was in love, the words he used to write about it all seemed so superficial and clumsy. If he could only find some new angle from which to approach the topic.

  He dipped the egg roll in sauce and bit into it again. Hot egg roll grease ran down his wrist. A waitress bumped his elbow with her hip and he dropped what remained of the egg roll into his mug, spattering milky coffee everywhere. Most people would have been pissed, but for Mekhi it was a lightbulb moment.

  Sex! he thought. Sex was the ultimate physical expression of love, which was why, when he ever actually did it, he wanted it to be at the moment when the only way to say what he truly wanted to say was to make love.

  Mekhi uncapped his pen. He’d read enough critical theory to know that some of the most clichéd ways to write about sex were using images of blooming flowers, sunrises, and fireworks. He also knew it was possible to make just about anything sound sexual. But he wanted to write about sex in new and unexpected ways. He stared at the half-eaten egg roll marooned in his coffee, thinking.

  Any normal boy thinking about sex would have instantly thought about taking his girlfriend’s clothes off. However, Mekhi wasn’t a normal boy. Instead of thinking about taking Yasmine’s clothes off, he was thinking about words, and the fact is, there’s nothing sexy about plain old words unless they’re being used in a sexy way. And in order to do that, you have to stop thinking about words and start thinking about something, or, even better, somebody else. Preferably with their clothes off.

  But Mekhi was stuck on the words. The more he agonized over which words to use, the more convinced he became that he couldn’t write about sex because he hadn’t had it yet. And if he couldn’t write about sex, he couldn’t write about love, and if he couldn’t write about love, he couldn’t write about anything at all.

  Was sex the cure for writer’s block?

  13

  After school on Thursday, Yasmine was walking down Broadway in Soho filming a transvestite dressed in a black jumpsuit and six-inch platform boots. Suddenly, she was stopped in front of Victoria’s Secret by a woman handing out promotional flyers introducing the Very Sexy lingerie collection.

  Buy two Very Sexy bras and get a free matching v-string or tanga! the flyer said.

  Yasmine wasn’t sure what a v-string or a tanga was. She bought her Hanes Her Way cotton underwear and tank tops at Rite Aid and had never even been inside a Victoria’s Secret in her life. She looked up at the posters of Adriana Lima modeling the Angels collection that filled the windows.

  Seamless lingerie with a heavenly fit, the posters read. Of course anything would look seamless and heavenly on Adriana, but would it look good on her?

  Yasmine slung her camera strap over her shoulder and pulled open the store’s heavy glass door, thinking it might be kind of amusing to find out. She was accosted as soon as the door swung shut behind her.

  “Welcome to Victoria’s Secret,” said a petite Hispanic woman in a tight black pantsuit. “Can I help you find anything today?”

  Yasmine glared at her. She hated hovering salespeople. “No,” she said dismissively. “I’m just looking.”

  The woman smiled graciously. “That’s fine. Just so you know, my name is Yasmine.”

  Yasmine stared at her in surprise. “That’s my name, too,” she said, feeling sort of bad that she’d been so rude to the woman. “We have the same name.”

  Hispanic Yasmine beamed back at her. “Isn’t that a coincidence? Well, you won’t forget my name. Just give me a holler if you need anything.” Then she turned away to help another customer.

  Yasmine glanced around the store. Perfume and music filled the air, and the carpet on the floor was a deep, velvety red. Round tables draped with red satin were stacked with thongs and panties in solids, animal prints, and floral patterns. On every wall hung racks of bras in lace, satin, and cotton. There were teddies, tangas, v-strings, and boy shorts. Slips, bustiers, garters, and garter belts.

  Yasmine had never seen so much square footage devoted to the type of girly vanity she had always loathed. But maybe, just maybe, a Very Sexy lace plunge bra and matching lace tanga were just the type of thing she needed to make herself so irresistible to Mekhi, he’d have his organic poetic moment or whatever it was he was waiting for and decide he was ready to have sex.

  She walked over to a rack of red lace bras and flicked through them. 34B, 36C, 38D. She didn’t even know what size she was. Beneath the rack of bras was a rack of lacy underwear, more like shorts than panties—extremely short shorts. Yasmine examined the tags. So these were tangas. Well, they didn’t look so bad. She glanced around the room, searching for her Hispanic namesake.

  “Decided you’d like to try something on after all?” Hispanic Yasmine asked, stepping around a counter to Yasmine’s left, where she’d been busy folding a stack of white cotton thongs.

  Yasmine shrugged helplessly. “Um, does this come in black?” She
held up one of the red lace Very Sexy bras.

  “What size do you need?”

  Yasmine frowned. How could she have gotten through seventeen years of life without knowing her own bra size? “I’m not sure,” she mumbled almost inaudibly.

  Hispanic Yasmine smiled benevolently. “Let’s find a changing room, then, and I’ll measure you. Then we can talk about what you’re looking for. We’ll find something in a style you like that suits your figure and is comfortable to wear, too! How does that sound?”

  Yasmine nodded reluctantly. She didn’t exactly like the idea of someone measuring her chest, and she had no clue what she was looking for, but Hispanic Yasmine seemed like a pro, and she had already come this far so she might as well go for it.

  “As long as it comes in black,” she insisted.

  We know, we know

  14

  Porsha Sinclaire

  Yale University Application Essay

  December 23

  The thing I love most about Audrey Hepburn’s film persona is that she’s aloof and approachable at the same time. She’s poised, but down to earth. She’s mysterious, but open...

  Porsha stopped typing and pressed the backspace button on her MacBook until all the words had been erased. Film persona? What the hell was that? It made her sound like some poseur film freak like Yasmine Richards, that girl in her film class with the shaved head and fat knees.

  The thing was, Porsha had to write about Audrey Hepburn as she appeared in her films and not as a real person, because Porsha honestly didn’t know all that much about the real Audrey other than that she’d stopped dressing in custom-made Givenchy couture when she got older, cut all her hair off, and just wore khakis and black turtlenecks all the time. Porsha had taken out a bunch of books on her from the library but never got past the first chapter. She didn’t really want to hear about Audrey’s colitis problem or her work with UNICEF. It was so much more interesting to imagine what Audrey’s life had been like than to read the real facts.

  “What’re you writing?” Miles asked, refreshing her orange juice with a mini bottle of Smirnoff vodka.

  As it turned out, Tahj had invited Miles to St. Barts to spend Christmas with them and decided not to tell Porsha about it until they met up at the United Airlines check-in desk. It was pretty obvious that the only reason Miles had come was because he thought he’d spend the entire trip getting it on with Porsha. But she was determined to make him see before they even landed that he was sadly mistaken.

  “Nothing,” she said without looking up.

  They’d had to leave the apartment at the ungodly hour of 7:40 in the morning. Now it was 1:00 and the plane was still an hour away from St. Barts. Tahj was asleep—or maybe he was just pretending to be asleep so he wouldn’t have to watch Miles hitting on his stepsister. Chanel was listening to music on her headphones, relieved to be away from Flow’s constant flood of gifts, the latest being a three-foot-tall chocolate snowman. Brice was playing chess on his iPad and sulking because at the last minute his friend Tyler's mother had decided not to let him come to St. Barts because Tyler had an embarrassing bed-wetting problem.

  Porsha stirred the ice cubes around in her drink with a little brown plastic straw. Thank fucking God for small favors.

  “I tried to call you all week,” Miles told her as he reclined his seat in an attempt to stretch his long legs out in front of him. Much to Porsha’s dismay, they were all packed into economy class like sardines. “But I must have taken your number down wrong or something.”

  Porsha kept her eyes on her computer screen. No, she replied silently. I just gave you a fake number.

  Miles reached up and skimmed his fingers along the ends of Porsha’s thick hair. “I missed you,” he whispered.

  She glanced at him, unsmiling, and then looked away again, wondering what Audrey Hepburn or Dorothy Dandridge would do in such an unpleasant situation. You know those religious wackjobs who have bumper stickers on their cars that say, “What would Jesus do?” Well, Porsha had a similar saying: “What would Audrey/Dorothy do?”

  It wasn’t that she had anything against Miles. He wasn’t a slimeball, and he wore amazing Armani clothes. He was nice looking and he was friends with Tahj, who was also an okay guy, although if she had her preference, she wouldn’t have a stepbrother at all. Porsha should have felt flattered by Miles’s attention, and maybe she would have if she’d been in the mood to flirt with him. But the reality was that at 1:00 in the afternoon, crammed into economy class on a crummy little airplane with her computer in her lap and her dirty hair in a ponytail, she didn’t feel like flirting with anyone.

  “Excuse me, miss, would you be interested in a copy of Vogue?” the steward from first class asked. He looked like a younger taller Idris Elba, and if he hadn’t been wearing a United Airlines uniform, he might have even been cute.

  Porsha took the magazine. She noticed that the steward wasn’t passing out Vogues to everyone in economy, only to her.

  “Can I get you a drink? Champagne?” he offered with a wink.

  Porsha dropped the magazine on the floor. Couldn’t he tell she was busy? “No, thank you,” she replied.

  Miles handed the steward his empty rum-and-Coke glass. “I’ll take another one.”

  The steward took the glass, looking annoyed that he’d specifically asked Porsha if she wanted something and now he was stuck waiting on the teenage hotshot sitting next to her.

  Miles went back to stroking the ends of her hair. “Aren’t you going to read your magazine?”

  Porsha wanted to tell him to go shove the magazine up his Armani ass, but she knew that in such a situation Audrey and Dorothy would remain calm and continue to do what they were doing in hopes that the offending person would get the hint and leave them alone.

  She turned her attention back to her essay. What she wanted to say was that Audrey Hepburn had all the qualities she thought a woman ought to have. Style, beauty, grace, intelligence, wit, courage, and a certain mystery that made men fall for her instantly. But Porsha wasn’t an idiot. She couldn’t very well say in her Yale application essay that the reason she admired Audrey Hepburn was that she was irresistible to men—especially not after Porsha had kissed her interviewer.

  Ms. Glos had told her not to be so literal. Porsha arranged her fingers on the keyboard again and started to type, letting the words flow without really planning what she was going to say.

  Sometimes I dream that I am the black Audrey Hepburn. I feel lighter and clearer and I speak with the same cool accent she had. Audrey made everything look easy. She never had to take AP exams or rewrite a stupid college application essay. She never had to go on vacation with her mom or her fat, annoying stepfather or her stepbrother’s annoying, horny friend. Her boyfriend never ditched her for a ten-year-old. And even if she did have problems, she kept quiet about them and dealt with them on her own instead of telling everyone in the world, including her interviewer at Yale. When I am Audrey, I feel like I can take on the world.

  Porsha reread what she had written and then blacked out the whole paragraph and deleted it. When I am Audrey, I am psycho was more like it.

  “And it looks like a beautiful day in the area as we begin our descent into St. Barts,” the captain’s deep voice came on over the plane’s sound system. “I’d just like to take this time to thank you for flying with us today. I’d especially like to thank the pretty girl in 24 B. Have a great vacation, and I hope you’ll choose United again whenever you fly.”

  24 B. Porsha looked up at the little tag on the ceiling. That was her seat. Had she only imagined the pilot had just hit on her, or had he actually done it?

  Miles was still stroking her hair and the steward came back with his drink and a glass of champagne for Porsha, even though she’d said she didn’t want one.

  “Compliments of the pilot,” the steward said with a knowing smile.

  Porsha felt like Mia Farrow in Alice, the Woody Allen movie that Mr. Beckham had made her film class wat
ch not once but twice. In the movie, Alice—this dull Park Avenue mom—had gone to some weird place in Chinatown where she ate these funky Chinese herbs that attracted guys to her like flies.

  Not one to refuse a drink when it was handed to her, Porsha downed the glass of champagne and snapped her laptop closed, dumping it into her Louis Vuitton carry-on bag and kicking it under the seat in front of her. The plane was beginning to descend, and outside the window the warm Caribbean Sea glittered promisingly. Porsha twisted her ruby ring around and around on her finger, eager to get into her new Gucci bikini and out onto the beach, away from everyone and everything.

  Tahj opened his eyes and sat up, blocking her view. He smiled at her. “Finish your essay?”

  “Fuck off,” Porsha answered.

  15

  “More curry powder!” Rufus Hargrove growled at the tomato sauce after he tasted it. “More rum!” It was Friday afternoon and his annual holiday bash was due to kick off in an hour.

  “But Dad, isn’t lasagna supposed to taste Italian?” argued Mekhi.

  His father furrowed his bushy gray eyebrows and wiped his sauce-smeared hands on his dirty white SAVE THE WHALES! T-shirt. “When did you become such a tight ass?” He waved a wooden spoon above his head. “There are no rules here, only possibilities!”

  Mekhi shrugged and poured a few cups of dark rum into the sauce. No wonder everyone always raved about his dad’s lasagna. After a few bites they were completely wasted.

  “So who’s this dude your sister has invited?” Rufus asked. He used words like dude to mock the way Mekhi and Bree talked. It was completely annoying.

  “His name is Kaliq,” Mekhi said distractedly. “He’s pretty cool,” he added, although he was pretty sure his dad would actually despise him. Kaliq wore polo shirts and had an expensive haircut. He wore leather shoes and a leather belt, and he was usually so high, he couldn’t have a conversation without breaking into an asinine giggle in the middle of it. But Mekhi didn’t bother explaining this to his dad. He was too distracted by the fact that Yasmine was going to arrive any minute and he’d almost made up his mind that he was going to tell her he wanted to have sex.