The Birthday Girl

by Melissa de la Cruz

  “Get a load of that one,” said Shari, on her right, as she puffed on her vape right in the middle of dinner. “Who’s that cute young thing?”

  Shari had been a friend since London, Tokyo, and New York. They had been models together, and now Shari ran one of the biggest swimsuit companies in North America. If you swam, if you were ever wet, you wore one of her suits. Shari had a plane and had just closed on her fifth house, located on an island off New Zealand’s Northland, where everyone who was anyone was buying these days, for the thinking was that it would be the only country safe from the coming apocalypse.

  Ellie looked to where she was pointing. Huh. It was a young, buxom girl that she didn’t recognize. There were a few guests she didn’t know by name or by face, spouses, plus-ones, but she was certain she’d never seen that girl before. The girl was laughing and biting her lip. And who was she talking to? Oh, wait, was that Todd?

  Todd was laughing and doing that thing, running his fingers through his dark hair. He was flirting.

  After all, the girl was pretty, and so young.

  Was her husband fucking that girl?

  Todd certainly wasn’t fucking her. They hadn’t had sex in what—who knew? Who could remember? If he wasn’t with his ex-wife, was he having an affair with that girl? What else could it be?

  * * *

  —

  Then there was him. She glanced at her phone, at his texts from earlier in the evening. Happy birthday, girl. See you tonight. He said he would be there, that he would show up later. Almost as a threat. But would he? It had been so long. So many years. Would he even recognize her? Would she recognize him?

  Why now? Why was he suddenly reappearing in her life? What did he want?

  She remembered that awful night. Did he want money? Was he going to blackmail her? Was that it? They had agreed it was all an accident. It was no one’s fault. It certainly wasn’t her fault. She was just an innocent bystander. Right?

  She couldn’t eat.

  The waiters took away her untouched plate—all those truffles; she should ask them to set it aside for the dog, she thought, even though that spoiled little Maltese had caused her so much trouble already—when out of the corner of her eye, she saw her husband get up from his seat, leaving the cute girl behind to approach the stranger they’d noticed earlier in the backyard. She’d been honest when he’d asked about the strange man earlier. She had absolutely no idea who he was.

  Who was he? He was lingering by the doorway, staring at the party. Every seat was taken and yet there he stood, alone and out of place. She began to have a terrible feeling about this.

  She pushed her chair back and ran to the front of the room, right behind her husband. Todd was standing at the doorway, in front of the strange man.

  “Can I help you?” he asked. “Are you sure you’re in the right place?”

  Ellie walked up, and Todd swiveled, his face was getting red. “Ellie, do you know this guy?” he asked in an accusatory tone.

  “No! I told you! I have no idea who he is!”

  “Mrs. Todd Stinson?” the man asked.

  “Yes, that’s me.”

  The man handed Ellie an envelope. “You’ve been served.”

  NINETEEN

  Dancing Queens (16)

  October 19

  Twenty-Four Years Ago

  10:00 P.M.

  Just as Mish had predicted, entrance to the club was easy. No one even checked for IDs. They paid the five-dollar cover and walked inside. The first thing Leo noticed was the stench. It smelled like beer and urine and grime, with a toxic layer of smoke. Leo decided the overpowering smell of smoke was preferable to the stink underneath. There was a crowd in front of the stage, dancing, as the first band played through their set. The music was loud, deafening, but there was a frenetic energy to the place, a sense of mass celebration, and Leo suddenly understood why people gathered at these places. It was a ritual, an offering, a way of marking the weekend, with music, drinks, and laughter.

  Brooks had thought to hide the beers in his backpack, so they huddled to a corner where the bartenders and security wouldn’t see, and they drank them. Leo’s was a little lukewarm, but it was okay. So this was what a nightclub was like. She felt grown up, so much older than when the night had begun. She’d been drunk, then sober, then high, and now she was here. Someone handed her a cigarette, so she smoked it.

  “Let’s go to the other rooms,” said Mish.

  “There are more rooms?”

  “Duh,” said Mish, who, to Leo’s surprise, seemed to have been here before, many times. She grabbed Brooks’s hand and led them out of the main floor.

  The club was made up of a warren of rooms; some were just rooms covered in garish paint, and people were sitting there, drinking and talking, and some were huge rooms with different kinds of music, and people dancing. Mish led them through each room, but she would shake her head and move on, dissatisfied, until they reached a back room that was almost completely dark, with a throbbing bass line and a packed crowd of people dancing in the middle of it. A few girls were dancing on little tables, letting everyone take a good look at them.

  “This one,” said Mish with a naughty smile, pulling them into the middle of the swaying crowd. Brooks shrugged and moved from side to side, his approximation of dancing.

  They danced for a bit, until Mish jumped up on one of the tables and pulled Leo up to dance with her. They danced in sync, and Mish began to gyrate her hips against hers, and Leo ground back, letting Mish’s hands move up and down over her body. She did the same.

  Mish turned so that she faced Leo. They were almost the same height; it was strange to realize that, when Leo always felt so much bigger than Mish but she actually wasn’t. They were the same. People were always saying how much they looked alike. She was looking right into Mish’s eyes. Mish pulled her closer and closer, her eyes were glazed, and up close, Leo could see the sparkles in Mish’s eye shadow; they glinted in the light. Below them, Brooks took a pull from his beer and watched.

  Mish put her hands on either side of Leo’s face. She did that sometimes, right before yelling at her to Stop Being So Uptight or Have Some Fun Already. But this time she didn’t yell. She just brushed Leo’s cheeks softly with her fingertips in a gentle caress.

  Then she turned away, and continued to dance. Brooks removed a few more beers from his backpack.

  They danced for a few more songs, but Leo got tired of that. Her feet hurt. “I’m going to look for Arnold!” she yelled into Mish’s ear so that her friend could hear her over the music.

  Mish made a face. Why was she so annoyed with Arnold? Wasn’t Arnold an old friend of Mish’s? Was she just annoyed Arnold was paying attention to her and not Mish for a change?

  “Fine, go, look for him, what do I care? I’m only your best friend, but if you want to hang out with him on your birthday, fine,” said Mish, pushing her off the table.

  “Don’t leave without me,” Leo warned.

  Mish rolled her eyes. As if.

  Leo left her with Brooks, and went to see if she could find her friend.

  * * *

  —

  The club was a maze, staircases going to dark caverns guarded by beefy bodyguards checking for the right wristbands that allowed access to the right VIP rooms, none of which she had. It was hard to see through the smoke and the crowd, but she tried. For a while she worried she’d lost track of time and her friends, and wondered how she would get home—she didn’t have enough money for a cab, but she thought she could walk maybe, or call her mom at the restaurant, although that wouldn’t be any fun. Which room was the one Mish and Brooks were in? They all looked the same to her, and for a minute, Leo panicked. She was all alone in a crowd of strangers, and she felt very young all of a sudden.

  “THERE YOU ARE!”

  A hand reached out of the crowd, on the dance floor,
and grabbed her head, the fingers clasping around her skull.

  She shrank from it at first, but when she looked up, the hand was attached to an arm and the arm was Arnold’s. He was grinning.

  “Hey!”

  “Hey,” he said. “Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you.”

  “You didn’t,” she assured him.

  “Where’s your posse?”

  She shrugged. “Somewhere.”

  “Mish doesn’t like me much,” he said.

  “Who cares about Mish.”

  “Come on,” he said, and pulled her from the dance floor. He took her to a ledge away from the speakers, where it was quieter. “This is where I work. Want some more?” he asked, handing her a vial. Arnold was the house dealer. Every nightclub had one, or several, to service the patrons who came to party.

  She took it and snorted it.

  “Cover it with your hands. I mean, girl, come on now.”

  “Oh, sorry,” she said, laughing.

  “You’re all right.”

  “Do you work here every night?”

  “Some weekends, kind of dead the rest of the week, and I gotta take turns with the other dealers,” he explained. He kept his backpack nearby. Leo understood that’s where he kept the drugs.

  They talked a little, and once in a while someone would come up to them.

  “What you got?” they’d ask.

  Arnold would tell them.

  Then Arnold would tell them to meet him by the water fountain, and he would slip them whatever they asked for and stuff the cash in his back pocket.

  Leo leaned back on the wall, affected a bored pose. Sometimes people asked her too. “You got smokes? Uppers? Blues?”

  She’d nod over to Arnold.

  She felt useful, like she belonged. No one looked at her twice. No one questioned her.

  Arnold came back. “I like this song,” he said, when the music changed.

  “Want to dance?” she asked him.

  “Nah, I suck at dancing.” He looked a little sad. “Sorry.”

  “It’s all right,” she said. And it was.

  TWENTY

  Pianos and Sopranos

  October 19

  The Present

  10:00 P.M.

  Thankfully, Todd didn’t make a scene in front of the guests. Instead, he’d looked almost relieved, like it wasn’t the worst news in the world, that she was being slapped with a lawsuit. She confessed, told him everything, how their neighbor was suing, of all things, for dog doo-doo. “It was just a misunderstanding,” she said. “Well, it began that way, and then they caught it on their camera.”

  “What happened?”

  What happened was that a few months ago, Miranda, their nanny, had called in sick, and Miranda, in addition to shepherding Eli and Otis to their various after-school activities (karate, art, flag football, fencing, and therapy), also took care of the family dog. She was responsible for walking and feeding their rather petulant and overweight Maltese, Cece. Since it was Lynn the LA housekeeper’s day off, there was no one else to walk Cece, so Ellie had hired one of those dog-walking services to take Cece around the block.

  “You know, since I always have to do everything around here,” she said.

  Todd frowned and Ellie quickly reversed course. “Sorry, I meant, the burden of day-to-day household management often falls to me, even though you are the one at home.” She was supposed to stop using the word always in their marriage; they had paid an expensive shrink thousands of dollars to tell them this.

  Todd shrugged and didn’t seem up to the task of defending his right to play video games on his phone all day, so she went on.

  “Anyway, I called the service to walk Cece, and this kid took her around the block, picked up the poop, and deposited it in the Andersons’ garbage cans because it was trash day and their cans were out and no one had taken ours out yet.”

  “So?”

  “So the Andersons caught it on their security cameras, and they’ve been harassing us ever since, about how we’d used their garbage cans for Cece’s poop, and I guess that’s a crime or something? They left notes under the door and voice mails on my phone, but I was so busy I forgot about it and now they’re suing us.”

  Todd barked a laugh. “They’re suing us?”

  “Well, one night late at work, I kind of called and told them their cameras were trained on our driveway and it was invasion of our privacy and I would sue them.”

  “And?”

  Ellie sighed. “I also told Miranda when she came back to work that when she takes Cece out for a walk to make sure Cece pees on their hedges. They caught that on camera too.”

  Honestly, she explained to him, it wasn’t even the worst bad-neighbor lawsuit in the world; according to their lawyer, there was much, much worse. There was a case of two homeowners fighting over beachfront property in Cape Cod, and the bad blood was so bad that one of them never got to build their beach house on their land for twenty-five years. The poor schmuck bought the land to build a dream home for his family, but he and his neighbor sued each other for so many years that he was already divorced and his kids grown and still he didn’t have a beach house. Then there was the Saudi prince who’s trying to build his five-building mega compound in Benedict Canyon but has been hit with lawsuits from his appalled neighbors, who’ve been winning their case, forcing the prince to downsize from ninety thousand square feet to a mere sixty thousand.

  But yes, this lawsuit was extremely petty, and it was a headache, and on top of everything else going wrong in her life, she was also feuding with their neighbors. She braced herself because now her husband was going to lose his temper because he always—no, often! Often!—blew his top, because that’s what Todd was like now that he was bitter and unemployed.

  Instead, Todd just shrugged. “Oh,” he said. “That’s it?”

  “Oh? That’s all you can say?”

  He patted her shoulder. “David will take care of it. That’s why we have that umbrella policy.” David was their lawyer and business manager.

  She couldn’t quite believe her ears. “Really?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Todd, they’re suing us for seven hundred thousand dollars! For dog poop!”

  “We have insurance.” He shrugged. “They’ll probably settle.”

  “You’re not mad?”

  “Well, it’s too late now, isn’t it? To walk the dog ourselves? I mean, come on, we never do that. When was the last time either of us walked Cece?” He looked amused, which was uncharacteristic of him. Todd was usually the one who went ballistic over this sort of thing.

  Ellie scratched her cheek. “I guess.”

  “It’ll be fine. We’ll get through it. Let the lawyers sort it out. In the meantime, stop calling them and leaving threatening voice mails, and tell Miranda to stop letting Cece pee on their yard.”

  “Okay,” she said, relieved, even if she couldn’t bring herself to tell him that she hadn’t paid the insurance premium last month, so most likely they didn’t have insurance to cover it. But that was a conversation for later. For now, she was just glad he wasn’t in the mood to quarrel.

  “We’ll get through it.”

  “We will?” Her mind was whirling with doubt.

  “Yeah, we always do,” he said, looking a bit hurt. “But come on, the show’s about to start.”

  * * *

  —

  Ellie had decided that, between courses, they would have entertainment. Maybe she’d gotten the idea for the pianist from her teenage memories of Nordstrom? She’d also hired an opera singer, maybe because she watched too many Woody Allen movies. Not that she could exactly name one where an opera singer performed, and to be honest, she was just trying to impress the New Yorkers. And also because Mean Celine’s childhood friend was a fancy soprano who sang at Mean Celine’s hu
sband’s white-tie fortieth, and Ellie had been jealous of that moment, which felt so special. Thankfully, Ellie had given enough money to the LA Opera over the years, and the head of the board had persuaded the reigning diva of the company to perform at the party.

  They’d installed a piano just for this moment. (No one in the family played; they’d spent thousands of dollars on piano lessons for the kids, and none of them could play a note.)

  She tried to catch Todd’s eye, but he was seated too far away and talking to Mean Celine’s husband, who was probably giving him pointers on how to have an affair. It was old news within their circle that Simon had a fling with one of the flight attendants who worked on their jet. He’d even installed the skank in her own apartment he paid for, and when Mean Celine found out, she’d gone ballistic. Simon threatened to cut them off—her and the kids both—if she told anyone. Mean Celine, whose father’s money was the basis of her husband’s success, laughed in his face and told everyone. She would not be humiliated in this manner. Still, she didn’t divorce him and they reconciled.

  Why had Todd looked so relieved when the process server handed her the papers for the lawsuit? What did he know? And who was that girl he was talking to earlier?

  She had to stop worrying about it, and tried to focus on Sterling, who was tapping a knife against his wineglass and trying to get everyone’s attention.

  “Ellie and Todd asked me to introduce the lovely singer we’re about to hear. I’ve been a fan of Madame since I heard her sing in Montreal. I think Ellie should turn forty more often! It’s not every day we get a diva in the desert. (Wink.) Although if you stay for bingo at the Ace later, we’ll definitely meet some fabulous queens, not that there aren’t many here already, present company definitely included.”