The Luckiest Girls

by Nathalie van Walsum Fuson

  21

  Jane

  “Did you hear about Campbell?” Ling asks when I come home from school. She and Sophia are in the kitchen, looking very serious.

  “No, what about her?”

  “Something happened to her face,” Ling says.

  “What do you mean, ‘happened to her face?’” I ask.

  “She broke out in a weird rash or something. She had to go to the ER.”

  “The ER? Because of a rash?” That doesn’t make sense. These fools don’t know what they’re talking about.

  “It was an allergic reaction,” Sophia explains. “A really bad one.”

  “Jesus. I mean, her face! How does she look?”

  “I don’t know. Margo went to fetch her so we’ll know soon.”

  When Margo and Campbell arrive, Gigi is already home, and so are Maya and Brigitte. Gigi meets them in the hall and I see Gigi’s face before I see Campbell’s. Gigi’s eyes go wide and she looks like she’s trying to stay composed but doesn’t know what to say. Margo looks very sad. When I see Campbell my heart aches for her. Because she looks awful, just awful.

  “Oh, Campbell,” Sophia gasps, and reaches out to put an arm over Campbell’s shoulder, but Campbell recoils as though Sophia was a cobra, she jerks her hand up to stop her and gives her a look of such cold fierceness that none of the rest of us dare to approach her.

  “I want to go to my room,” she whispers. “Everyone leave me alone.”

  Campbell trudges up the stairs and after a brief pause Gigi follows her. It’s not just Campbell’s face that I don’t recognize, it’s everything about her. Campbell has always been the upbeat one, even when she’s going through a rough time with work or Gigi or one of the other girls, but now she sounds like she’s broken inside. We’re all stunned.

  When Gigi returns downstairs and addresses us she is back in control.

  “I have warned you girls before not to experiment with beauty products and treatments. Many of those so-called natural products are full of allergens.”

  “What product was it?” Brigitte asks.

  “She doesn’t know. Probably some naturopathic garbage. Now she may have ruined her face for good.” Gigi shakes her head in anger and disappointment.

  Gigi has never been a font of compassion, but I think it’s a bit rough of her to blame Campbell for her condition when she doesn’t really know what caused it. For all she knows Campbell could have leprosy, but Gigi would still find a way to be angry at her about it. Maya and I decide to go check on Campbell.

  Maya knocks on the door, even though it’s her room too.

  “Hey,” she say in a kind voice. “How are you? Can we get you anything?”

  Campbell ignores us. “Listen, Campbell, it’s going to be okay. It’ll get better in a few days,” I say as I sit on the bed beside her.

  “What if it doesn’t? My face might be scarred permanently.”

  “Naah. My dad’s a doctor, remember?” Maya says. “He knows some of the most famous plastic surgeons in the world. I bet he can find you a doctor who can make you look perfect again.”

  “It’s not just about my face,” Campbell sobs. “Somebody did this to me on purpose.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. I think someone put something in my moisturizer, but I don’t know what, or how, or even why. Who would hate me this much?”

  “Campbell, are you sure? It seems a little extreme,” Maya says.

  “Forget it then. Forget I said anything.”

  “No, I mean…I just can’t believe anyone would do that.”

  “I don’t believe anything anymore. I don’t even believe you right now,” Campbell replies.

  “Well, that’s nice to hear,” Maya says.

  “I just want to be alone.” Campbell turns away from us. Maya and I leave her and shut the door behind us.

  I find Gigi in her bedroom. “Campbell thinks somebody did this to her on purpose, and I think she may be right,” I say.

  “That is the silliest, most melodramatic thing I’ve ever heard,” Gigi snaps. “I hope she doesn’t get it in her head to say the same thing to me. As if one of my girls could do such a thing.”

  “Why do you think they couldn’t? Seriously, Gigi, what do you know?”

  “I know that my girls don’t behave like thugs. I don’t take just anybody into my home. I know these girls. I know them better than I know you.”

  “Well, that’s easy to believe. But do you really know them? Gigi, look, Maya is starving herself, Campbell is being harassed half to death, and Sophia and the others works so hard they take stimulants just to keep up. If you care so much about them, then put a stop to it.”

  “Enough, Jane, I mean it. I know what happens in this business, I’ve been in the business longer than you have been alive. But you are way, way out of line right now. I don’t want to talk about this. Not now, not ever.”

  “Right. Because if you admitted it, you’d have to actually do something about it.” I stand up to leave the room.

  “Did you get a chance to look at the Overbrook Academy catalog yet?” Gigi calls after me. “I left it on your bed.”

  She might as well have told me straight out that my days in this house are numbered.

  In the middle of the night my phone buzzes me out of a deep sleep. I pick it up just after it stops, and, squinting through bleary eyes, I see Niko’s name on the screen. That idiot. I’m sure he’s lying awake worrying about something stupid, like which physics section we’re supposed to read. As soon as I start to drift back to sleep he calls again.

  “What?” I answer, not disguising my irritation.

  “Can you let me in?” he says. His voice sounds weird and nasal. “I’m right outside your house.”

  “Right now? Are you crazy?”

  “It’s an emergency. Please, Jane.” He hangs up.

  I tiptoe down the stairs in the dark. When I open the front door Niko, wearing only a T-shirt, sweatpants and sneakers despite the cold, steps into the light of the portico, his face downcast. The moment he looks at me I gasp in shock.

  One side of his face is bruised and swollen. His upper lip is split, oozing blood. He hugs his chest, shivering, as he limps inside.

  “Holy shit, Niko, what happened? Were you mugged?”

  Niko just shakes his head. We stumble to the kitchen where I help him into a chair, and then I dampen a kitchen towel and wrap it around a handful of crushed ice.

  “Here, hold this on your lip.”

  Niko flinches, and takes the towel from me.

  “What happened?” I ask again. He won’t even look at me. Finally he answers so softly I lean in close to hear him.

  “My father,” he whispers.

  “Your father?” At first I don’t understand, but with growing horror, the unimaginable truth dawns. “You mean your father DID this to you?”

  Niko nods mutely. It’s not possible, I think. No one could do something like this to their own child. I knew his parents were crazy, but this is criminal. I put my arm around his shoulder to hug him, and Niko gives a soft yelp. When I look at his back I see why. Pink stripes seep through his shirt. That bastard wasn’t content just to beat up Niko’s face; he beat him with a belt too. I feel sick.

  “He went through the browser history on my computer,” Niko says softly. “He saw that I’d been on a support website for kids who are g…like me. It’s my fault. I wasn’t careful enough.” Niko starts crying. “He came in my room and pulled all the drawers out of my desk, threw everything on the floor, and then he found my notebook and tore it apart and threw it in my face, and then he started hitting me and hitting me…” by now Niko is crying.

  “Niko, we should call the police.”

  “You don’t understand,” Niko sobs. “My father’s a diplomat. He can’t be prosecuted the way other people can. If he commits a crime, he may be deported. But see, I’m here under his visa. I can’t stay here on my own.”

  I don’t have an answer fo
r that. All I know is that, right now, Niko needs to be somewhere safe where he can rest. I help him up the stairs to my room. Wincing, Niko lies on my bed, drawing his knees to his chest like a small child. I draw the comforter over him and pull the trundle bed out from under my bed and lie on it. Soon Niko’s breathing becomes deep and rhythmic, but it takes a long time before I fall asleep myself.

  In the morning I’m startled awake by Gigi’s shrill yell from the stairwell.

  “JANE! Get up and come here this instant!”

  The door to my room is open, and Ling and Brigitte, still in pajamas, peek in anxiously from the hall.

  “Shit. Stay here,” I say to Niko who opens his eyes groggily. I meet Gigi at the top of the stairs.

  “Is what Margo tells me true?” Gigi bellows. “Do you have a BOY in your room? This is unacceptable, Jane! It’s the last straw! You know the rules, how DARE you…” She’s sputtering with fury.

  “It’s not like that,” I interrupt. “It’s Niko, my friend. You’ve met him. He’s hurt, Gigi, he needs help.”

  “What are you taking about? What do you mean, hurt?”

  “His dad beat him up. He has nowhere else to go.”

  Gigi pushes me out of the way and marches down the hall. When Niko emerges from my room, his eyes large and frightened, Gigi stops in her tracks.

  Niko’s bruises have deepened to dark blue and purple, with tinges of yellow. Gigi, her mouth open with shock, approaches him and gingerly touches his cheek.

  “My God,” she says.

  Taking Niko gently by the arm, Gigi leads him downstairs to her bedroom. Niko sits on the edge of her bed. I watch from the doorway as Gigi, with a tenderness and patience I didn’t know she was capable of, wipes the blood and tear stains off Niko’s face with a wet washcloth. Very, very carefully she removes Niko’s shirt. She opens a tube of ointment and squeezes out a dollop, then applies the ointment to the welts on Niko’s back, her fingers as light and gentle as a butterfly’s wings. Without a word I come inside, and I take the tube and together, silently, we work on Niko’s back. None of us say anything.

  Only when Niko’s injuries are treated, when we’re in the kitchen and he’s finished the scrambled eggs I made (which is all his torn mouth can handle) does Gigi coax his story out of him. Niko tells her everything he told me. When he’s done, Gigi’s eyes have that fierce, steely look. She is seething with anger, but not at us.

  “I promise you this,” she says. “You are not going back to that house. Not while your father is there. I don’t care whether he has diplomatic immunity or whatever he has.”

  Niko doesn’t look convinced. But Gigi stands ups with a wry smile.

  “You realize who I am, don’t you? I have a team of lawyers who specialize in juvenile law. Your parents are going to do whatever we tell them to, or I’ll turn this into an international public relations nightmare for the entire Argentinian Consulate.”

  She’ll do it, too. Niko’s monstrous parents have no idea of the shitstorm that’s about to hit them. Gigi picks up her phone and as she leaves us she’s already giving Carol instructions. For the first time, I’m glowing with admiration for Gigi. Real admiration. Not just appreciation for the fact that other people admire her, but genuine pride that she’s my grandmother.

  I don’t know the details, but I know that between Child Protective Services and Gigi’s lawyers, Niko is in no immediate danger of being reclaimed by his parents. The Aguilars are the type of detestable posers who don’t mind being cruel, they just mind other people knowing that they’re cruel, so they don’t care what happens as long as it happens with a minimal amount of noise. Meanwhile Mr. Singh, the Headmaster of Egleston, is working on finding Niko a host family for the rest of the school year.

  I don’t think I’ve ever hated anyone as much as I hate Niko’s parents, but something surprising happens the next day. I leave the house to run a quick errand to the drugstore, and a woman steps out of a navy blue Mercedes parked in front of the house. With a start I see it’s Mrs. Aguilar, and I realize she’s been parked there for a while, waiting for me. Her face is cold and expressionless. I almost turn around and run back inside, when she thrusts a duffel bag into my hands.

  “Thank you for being kind to my son,” is all she says. Then she gets back into the car and drives off without another glance my way. I look inside the bag, which is filled with some of Niko’s clothes and his school books. I don’t know what to think. I mean, I still think she’s a witch and a coward and a horrible person, but somewhere inside there may be a tiny glimmer of maternal concern.

  Regardless of Niko’s sexual proclivities, however, the idea of him and me sharing my room is too much for Gigi’s sense of propriety, so with Ling’s help I drag the mattress from the trundle bed into Ling’s and Brigitte’s room, where I will bunk until a more permanent arrangement is found for Niko. For now, however, he is Gigi’s guest. The other girls are all really kind to him and seem to enjoy the novelty of male company. Niko gets along particularly well with Campbell. It’s like the two of them have a special sympathy for each other. I’m not sure why, but I think it has something to do with the fact that Campbell doesn’t have a great relationship with her parents either.

  Niko, Jazz and I are still working on our documentary. We spend a lot of our time after school in the media center, editing our film. Some of the most interesting material is the stuff I filmed when no one was watching, although we have creative differences about how much of it we’re going to include.

  “Wow, these girls are a lot less well behaved when they’re out from under your grandmother’s watch,” Jazz says. “Holy shit…Is Sophia doing blow?”

  “Yup. Hey, you’re sure you can blur out their faces, right?” I ask.

  “Yeah, no problem. No one will recognize them. Whoa…is that the photographer’s hand on Maya’s breast? Nice catch, Jane.”

  “Check this out,” I say, forwarding the video to Theo and Campbell making out in the kitchen.

  “Eww. How old is that guy?” asks Jazz.

  “Ancient. Forty or something. Campbell, by the way, is eighteen.”

  “Well, at least he’s not a felon.”

  “No, just a creep, and all these stupid girls are falling over themselves to impress him. Listen,” I add, “I’m not really comfortable including all of this. I’m worried about how it will make the Towers Agency look, especially alongside Gigi’s speech about being so protective of her girls.”

  “That’s what makes it such an interesting story,” says Jazz. “We want it to be interesting, don’t we?”

  “I don’t want to include anything that will make Gigi look bad,” says Niko, who has gone from merely admiring Gigi to full-scale hero worship ever since she rescued him from his parents.

  “We’re not saying she’s aware of these things,” says Jazz. “She’s not in any of those scenes, so it’s not like we’re compromising her integrity. We don’t even have to identify the girls in the film as Towers girls.”

  “With my name on the film I don’t think it’s going to be a huge leap for anyone to make the connection that they’re Towers girls,” I say.

  “So what? It’s not like the whole world is going to see it.”

  “If we enter it in the New York Film School competition then we don’t know who will see it,” Niko says. “It could end up all over the internet.”

  “Look, I don’t know about you two, but I intend to get an A in this class,” says Jazz. “This is some good stuff. Mr. Vogels said that documentary filmmakers have a responsibility to document the truth. Well, this is the truth.”

  “It’s still going to piss Gigi off,” I say.

  “I thought she was already pissed off at you. I thought she was sending you to boarding school because she’s so pissed off at you.”

  “Look, I’ll think about it, okay? We don’t have to decide everything right this second.” We glare at each other until Niko suggests we table the subject, and we browse some of our extra footage. />
  “I like this scene,” Niko says, looking at a segment of the girls playing charades in the kitchen.

  “It’s one of the few times the girls were all having fun together,” I say. We rewind it a few times, focusing on the girls’ gestures and laughter as Margo unpacks her groceries around them. Suddenly I see something and my eyes go wide.

  “Holy shit,” I say. “Go back. Let me see that again.”

  “What?” Niko says.

  “Right there. Zoom in on that,” I say, pointing.

  “What? I don’t see anything,” says Jazz.

  “I get it. I totally get it now.” I jump up from my chair, my hand to my forehead.

  “Where are you going, psycho?” Niko calls after me.

  “I’ll see you at home,” I yell over my my shoulder as I grab my backpack and rush out of the room.

  I know who’s been messing with Campbell.

  As I run home, my mind races with everything that happened in the past couple of weeks and it all makes sense. Campbell was right. Someone has been deliberately tormenting her.

  The crazy thing is, Gigi was right too.

  I let myself in the house and run upstairs. Breathless, I knock on the bedroom door next to the attic.

  Margo opens the door to her room.

  “Jane,” she says. “Is everything all right?”

  “No,” I say. “It’s not.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I want to know why you did it. Why you tried to ruin Campbell.”

  Margo looks stunned, then angry.

  “How dare you say such a rude, hateful thing to me! Get out of my room. How dare you! I’ll tell your Grandmother,” she stamps with outrage.

  “Tell her. I think you’d better. I’m going to tell her anyway.”

  Margo looks at me with hurt disbelief. “Jane, how can you say such a horrible thing? I’ve been taking such good care of poor Campbell, the poor child, nobody has been kinder to her than I have.”

  “Yes, I noticed. Is it because you feel guilty?”

  Again Margo’s expression changes, and now she just looks mean. I swear, she should be the actor in the house.