Upper East Side #1 Read online

  “Whoa,” Alexis breathed. “There’s like, nobody here.”

  “I think that’s the idea. They’re all at Porsha’s party. She invited everyone we know. Except Chanel, of course.”

  It was true. Now that Chanel was having a little shindig, Porsha was throwing an even bigger and better one with a DJ, full bar, and catering.

  Imani stepped onto the gleaming parquet floor and glanced around. “I think I hear music.”

  Both girls paused to listen as the crooning heartbreak of Bryson Tiller's mixtape wafted down the long hall leading to Chanel’s bedroom.

  “Slow songs,” Alexis observed meaningfully. She pointed at a unknown boy's discarded jeans. “Look.”

  “I knew those rumors about her were true,” Imani scoffed. "First week back and she's already hooking up with some dude."

  Wordlessly the two girls crept down the torchlit hall, cell phones clutched in their hands.

  Chanel lazed on her bed with only a white sheet wrapped around her, wondering idly whether to put her shorts back on or if jeans would be better, in case she and Kaliq decided to venture out. Kaliq was in the shower. Steam rose from the crack under the door as he ran through fake lacrosse plays in a loud sportscaster’s voice.

  “And it’s Number 4 sprinting in from midfield. He makes an impossible catch! Look at him go! And it’s Number 4 again! Goal!!!”

  “Hi, Chanel,” Imani taunted from the doorway. “I know it’s a pajama party, but that doesn’t mean you have to spend it in bed.”

  Chanel bolted upright. Kaliq’s jubilant shouts from the shower were impossible to conceal. And everything—the clothes on the floor, the steamy air, the rumpled sheets—spelled one thing: S-E-X.

  “What are you guys doing here?” she demanded.

  Alexis crossed her arms over her chest. “You invited us, remember? You invited everyone. You’re supposed to be having a party. Although Porsha’s having one too now, and hers sounds way more fun.”

  Something about the way Alexis was looking her up and down, the way Imani was peering around the room, the way both of them had their arms crossed like they were judging her, made Chanel realize that they both had to get out. Now. And it wasn’t just Alexis's facial expressions or Imani's sarcasm. The real problem was them knowing about her and Kaliq. If she didn't get rid of them, they would tell Porsha and then Porsha would absolutely and finally never be friends with her again. She had to act fast.

  “Uh-oh. My new boo and I made such a mess.” Chanel rolled off the far side of the bed and pulled Kaliq’s big, white, button-down shirt on over her head, covering all the necessary naked parts.

  “Typical,” Imani whispered to Alexis.

  Chanel began to yank the sheets and comforter into a big pile on top of the mattress. “Could you guys help me get these sheets into the incinerator? There’s like, chocolate sauce and champagne all over them. I don’t want the maid telling my mom. Mom hates it when I stain the linens.”

  “Lord please save her for me…do this one favor for me,” Kaliq sang embarrassingly from the shower.

  Alexis and Imani nudged each other with their elbows.

  “The garbage chute is right outside the back door,” Chanel said, quickly gathering a handful of bedding in her arms. “You guys grab the comforter and I’ll get the sheets and pillows.”

  Excited by the prospect of having even more dirt to spill to Porsha, the two girls were happy to oblige.

  The big white comforter was heavy and awkward. Alexis and Imani followed behind the barefoot Chanel, dragging it between them as she padded through the enormous white kitchen.

  “The maid’s out shopping, thank God.” She unlocked the back door and held it open for them. “Go ahead. Chute’s on the left.” The girls dragged the comforter into the dusty back hallway of the building, where only the help were meant to go.

  “It smells weird back here,” Alexis observed.

  Imani glanced around nervously. “Quick, open the chute.”

  Alexis pulled open the heavy metal door and they began to stuff the comforter and sheets into the chute. Suddenly, Chanel slammed the back door and locked it, scampering off before Alexis and Imani even had time to oblige.

  The iPod was now in full dance party mode. Kaliq shimmied around her bedroom wearing only a towel. His chest muscles bulged and his normally wavy hair was curly and wet.

  “I'm like, hey what's up, hello…seen your pretty ass soon as you walked in the door,” he sang goofily into Chanel's hairbrush along to the old Fetty Wap song. “Hey. What happened to the covers?” He looked up at Chanel. “You’re wearing my shirt.”

  His oblivious puppy dog adorableness never failed to turn her on. Eager for a distraction from the demise of her nosy classmates and energized by kicking them out, Chanel tackled Kaliq and pulled him down on the bare mattress. It occurred to her that maybe they should crash Porsha's party—together—just to shock everyone. But first she had to show Kaliq just how freaking special he was—for coming to her party, and for being the only boy she ever loved.

  That is special.

  10

  “Once, in the park, I saw her eating a whole bucket of fried chicken without even coming up for air. I wouldn’t put anything past her.”

  If Porsha had to listen to Jaylen Harrison tell another story about Chanel Crenshaw, she was going to personally strangle every single one of the eighty-seven partygoers in her living room. What was the point of having a party when you hated everyone there? The music on her iPod was old and played out, her mother and Cyrus had drunk all the good champagne and scotch, Alexis and Imani had completely disappeared, Kaliq still hadn’t shown up, the hired bartender had decided to feature Cosmo-flavored slushies and pickled onions, both of which made her gag, and she was bored, bored, bored.

  She watched the sexy gay man behind the bar stab at a frozen block of ice cubes with a metal ice pick before dropping the cubes into a blender full of pink Cosmo mix. He blended the icy gunk, poured it into a plastic glass, skewered a pickled onion with a blue plastic cocktail sword, and slung it into the slush.

  “I’m getting so drunk,” squealed a girl Porsha had never seen before. The girl seemed to be no older than twelve and she was flirting with the bartender, even though he was so obviously gay. She wore a hideously blue suede jacket and ugly leggings with zippers on the ankles, and her black, chin-length weave looked like a wig made out of dirty straw.

  Porsha had spent the last hour waiting for Kaliq to show up so she could kick everyone out of the party and finally have sex, but it occurred to her now that she could just kick everyone out anyway and have a nice mug of hot chocolate in bed with one of her box sets of Audrey Hepburn DVDs—Breakfast at Tiffany's, Funny Face, My Fair Lady. After all, it was a school night, and this twelve-year-old really ought to have been home in bed.

  “Did you hear about the falcons in Central Park?” Jaylen Harrison intoned from behind her. “Freaking falcons are breeding. They’re not endangered. They’re eating the goddamned squirrels and pigeons right out of the fucking trees.”

  The bartender worked at another lump of ice with his pick. Porsha regarded him enviously. Oh, what she could do to Jaylen’s face with that pick.

  “My friend better get here quick before I drink too much and embarrass myself,” the twelve-year-old told the bartender. Then she looked up and covered her mouth in surprise. “Whoa. Oh my God. Porsha Sinclaire is so not happy right now.”

  Porsha followed the annoying girl’s gaze to see what it was she was supposed to be so upset about. Kaliq and Chanel stood in the foyer, faces aglow beneath the Sinclaires’ ancient brass chandelier, smiling like assholes. Chanel unbuttoned her coat and Kaliq helped her out of it like the gentleman he was.

  Or used to be.

  Surely it was only an accident that they had arrived together. But what the fuck was Chanel doing here in the first place? She was supposed to be having her own lame party.

  Chanel grinned at Porsha and waved. A warning chill ran up P
orsha’s spine.

  “I whip my hair back and forth, I whip my hair back and forth, I whip my hair...!”

  All of a sudden that ridiculous Willow Smith song came on and Chanel and a bunch of other girls put their hands on their knees and began to whip their hair back and forth, over and over and over again, with embarrassing zeal.

  Porsha crossed her arms over her chest. Fucking idiots.

  Kaliq walked over to the bar and ordered a Cosmo slushie, presumably for Chanel. Hello? Was Porsha invisible? She lit a cigarette and blew smoke in his direction, knowing she would pay for it later when her mother grilled her on which of her so-called friends would dare smoke in the house.

  The twelve-year-old girl was whipping her hair back and forth right next to Kaliq’s elbow. She stopped and grinned shyly up at him. “So, are you and Chanel like, together now?” she asked loudly enough for Porsha to hear. Across the expansive living room, Chanel was still whipping her gorgeous silky hair all over the place, like a go-go dancer on crack.

  Porsha took a deep breath and approached the bar. “Hello, Kaliq,” she hissed. She turned to the twelve-year-old. “Hello, little girl I’ve never seen before. Can you like, get lost?” Porsha angrily grabbed the girl by her ugly straw weave and dragged her out the door.

  Downstairs in the lobby Mekhi and Bree Hargrove were still alive and well, but a little down on their luck.

  What else is new?

  “Asia promised me she’d get us in,” Bree insisted as she dialed her Emma Willard classmate once more.

  Earlier that day she and Asia had hatched a plan to get into Porsha’s party, where everyone who was anyone was going to be. Asia would wear her mom’s blue suede jacket and pretend to be an actress. Bree would wear a V-neck and pretend to be Mekhi’s date, or, better yet, she’d bump into some cute St. Jude’s boy in the elevator who would refuse to go to the party without her enormous cleavage by his side. Both girls had sworn that whoever got into the party first would help the other girl get in.

  Mekhi was only going because his father would probably send him out later to pick up Bree anyway. Plus he had nowhere else to be. Plus Chanel might be there, even though Bree had mentioned something about Chanel maybe having her own party, although she had a feeling no one was going because oddly the senior girls at Willard were all being sort of mean about Chanel coming back—

  And that was when Mekhi had tuned Bree out.

  He had never been inside the lobby of such a fancy apartment building. The ceiling was twenty feet high, with elaborate gold moldings and a glittering crystal chandelier. On a marble-topped table in front of an enormous mirror stood a giant gold and cream china vase filled with at least one hundred fresh white roses. The floors were a creamy marble that sounded beneath Bree’s H&M boots and squeaked under Mekhi’s Converse sneakers. A doorman wearing white gloves and a gold waistcoat with his doorman uniform stood by the building’s glass door, while another white-gloved doorman manned the intercom system behind an imposing dark wood station.

  “I think my friend is up there,” Bree squeaked timidly at this second doorman. He was seven feet tall, buck-toothed and shriveled, and totally terrifying. “She just called me. She’s like, waiting for me.”

  “As I said before, you’re too late,” the doorman insisted. “I just received instructions from Miss Sinclaire herself. No more guests. The mother will be home soon and Miss Sinclaire is going to bed.”

  “But it’s only ten o’clock!” Bree protested. It had taken all her courage to come to the party and she wasn’t giving up easily.

  “It is a school night,” Mekhi mumbled at the floor. He’d been working on a new haiku about his murderous feelings toward Jaylen Harrison, compounded with his murderous feelings toward himself, compounded with his sister’s weird taste for hamburger meat, and illuminated by his love of cigarettes.

  Meat is murder.

  I love smoking—

  which one of us is better off dead?

  Mekhi still wasn’t sure about the first line. He’d be happy to go home and ponder it some more.

  “Oh, be quiet,” Bree snapped, as if reading his mind. She stabbed at the buttons on her cell phone. Stupid Asia. Bree should have guessed she was lying. Asia was probably already tucked in bed with her teddy bears, like the immature baby that she was, dead to the world.

  The doorman glanced at his watch, which was gold and looked like it had been keeping perfect time for all of the four thousand years he’d been a doorman. “It would probably be best for you to take it outside,” he told Mekhi politely but firmly.

  “It?” Mekhi wanted to protest for Bree’s sake, but feared the insults would only get worse. “Let’s just go,” he whispered, leading his sister toward the door. Chances were Chanel wasn’t even at the party anyway, and she was the only reason he’d come.

  If only they’d lingered in the lobby a moment longer.

  After throwing that little girl out, whose name was Asia or China or something equally stupid, Porsha asked Myrtle to remove the food and tell the bartender to stop serving. Then she called down to the doorman requesting that no additional guests be allowed up.

  Chanel was still dancing, the center of a hub of gyrating boys and girls, while Kaliq watched from the bar. She was acutely aware that if she stopped dancing every boy in the room might stop looking at her. In addition, she might have to talk to Porsha, who might be sort of mad at her about the whole Alexis and Imani thing.

  Or what about the whole sleeping with her boyfriend thing?

  Porsha stepped in front of Kaliq, blocking his view. “Remember the last time you were over? When we were on my bed?” she asked. She stole a sip of Kaliq’s beer even though beer tasted like moldy socks.

  Kaliq nodded. He remembered.

  “Didn’t we start something and sort of not finish it?” Porsha elaborated.

  Kaliq frowned and then shrugged his shoulders. He was so used to Porsha almost having sex with him but never actually having it that he didn’t believe she ever intended to do it. “Maybe,” he said.

  Porsha stepped forward and put her hands on his chest. “Well, I want to do it now.” She frowned. “Actually, not now—my mom will be home in a minute and I really need to clean up and take a bath. This Friday. I want to do it on Friday.” She lifted her chin and gazed up into Kaliq’s pretty green eyes. Every time she got this close to him she could not stop smiling. “It’s going to be Friday the thirteenth,” she added kinkily.

  Kaliq smiled back and kissed her smiling red mouth. He could never resist when Porsha was being all coy and sweet and suggestive and smiley. It made him want to be all coy and sweet and suggestive and smiley right back. “Okay,” he agreed. “Sounds like fun.”

  Across the living room Chanel saw them kissing and stopped dancing. She stepped into the hall to retrieve her coat. Guests milled around, wondering whether to stay or go now that the bar had run dry. Chanel buttoned her coat. The elevator was crowded. The lobby was bright. Sadness stabbed at her broken heart as she walked up the quiet, leaf-strewn sidewalks of Fifth Avenue toward home, alone.

  11

  “You’re so full of shit, Mekhi,” Bree Hargrove told her brother. They were sitting at the kitchen table in their large and crumbling tenth-floor, four-bedroom West End Avenue apartment. It was a beautiful old place with twelve-foot ceilings, lots of sunny windows, big walk-in closets, and huge bathtubs with feet, but it hadn’t been renovated since the 1940s. The walls were water stained and cracked, and the wood floors were scratched and dull. Ancient, mammoth dust bunnies had gathered in the corners and along the baseboards like moss. Once in a while Bree and Mekhi’s father, Rufus Hargrove, hired a cleaning service to scrub the place down, and their enormous cat, Marx, kept the cockroaches in order, but most of the time their home felt like a cozy, neglected attic. It was the kind of place where you’d expect to find lost treasures like ancient photographs, vintage shoes, or a bone from last year’s Christmas dinner.

  Bree was eating half a grapefr
uit and drinking a cup of peppermint tea. Ever since she’d gotten her period last spring, she’d been eating less and less. Everything she ate went straight to her boobs, anyway. Mekhi worried about his little sister’s eating habits, but Bree was as spunky and energetic as ever, so what did he know? For instance, he didn’t know that Bree bought a toasted, buttered, chocolate-chip scone almost every day on her way to school at a little gourmet deli on Broadway.

  Not exactly a great strategy for breast reduction.

  Mekhi was eating a chocolate donut―his second―and sipping instant coffee with four teaspoons of sugar. He liked sugar and caffeine, which was probably part of the reason why his hands shook. Mekhi wasn’t into being healthy. He liked to live on the edge.

  While he ate, Mekhi was studying Yasmine Richards’ script for her short film, the film he was supposed to star in. He wouldn’t actually have to speak in the movie—thank goodness—because Yasmine was narrating the whole thing herself, but she’d asked him to read it anyway. Over and over the same lines popped out at him: Life is fragile and absurd.

  “Tell me you don’t care about Chanel Crenshaw being back,” Bree challenged Mekhi. She put a piece of grapefruit in her mouth and sucked on it. Then she stuck her fingers in her mouth, pulled out the white pulpy skin stuff, and put it on her plate. “You should see her,” she went on. “She looks so completely cool. It’s like she has this whole new look. I don’t mean her clothes; it’s her face. She looks older, but it’s not like wrinkles or anything. It’s like she’s Chanel Iman or some model who’s like, been everywhere and seen everything and come out on the other side. She looks like she’s totally, like, experienced.”

  Bree waited for her brother to respond, but he was just staring into his coffee cup. Life is fragile and absurd.