Upper East Side #1 Page 8

  “Don’t you even want to see her?” she asked.

  Mekhi remembered what he’d heard Jaylen Harrison say about Chanel. That she was the sluttiest, druggiest, most venereally diseased girl in New York. And Bree had just said she looked experienced. But Mekhi didn’t believe a word of it. It was all just a bunch of terrible lies and bullshit rumors. And the more he thought about it, the more he wanted to kill Jaylen for spreading them.

  Mekhi shrugged his shoulders and pointed at the pile of grapefruit carcasses on Bree’s plate. “That is so foul,” he said. “Can’t you just eat a Pop-Tart or something, like a normal person?”

  “What’s wrong with grapefruit?” Bree said. “It’s refreshing.”

  “Watching you eat it like that isn’t. It’s disgusting,” Mekhi said. He stuffed the rest of his donut in his mouth and licked the chocolate off his fingers, being careful not to smudge any on his script.

  “Don’t look, then,” said Bree. “Anyway, you didn’t answer my question.”

  Mekhi looked up and shrugged his scrawny shoulders. “What question?”

  Bree put her elbows on the table and leaned forward. “About Chanel,” she said. “I know you want to see her.”

  Mekhi scowled into his lap. “Whatever,” he mumbled.

  “Yeah, whatever,” said Bree, rolling her eyes. “Look, I know last night didn’t work out, but there’s this party Friday after next. It’s some big fancy benefit thing to save the peregrine falcons that live in Central Park. Did you know there were falcons in Central Park? I didn’t. Anyway, Porsha Sinclaire is organizing it, and you know she and Chanel are best friends, so of course Chanel will be there.”

  Mekhi kept reading his script, completely ignoring his sister. And Bree went on, ignoring the fact that Mekhi was ignoring her. She was used to it, since Mekhi rarely said anything anyway.

  “All we have to do is find a way to get into that party,” Bree said. She grabbed a paper napkin off the table, scrunched it into a ball, and threw it at her brother’s head. “Mekhi, please,” she said pleadingly. “We have to go!”

  He tossed the script aside and looked at his sister, his deep brown eyes serious and sad. “Bree,” he said. “Do you really want to get kicked out by another doorman? I don’t want to go to that party. Next Friday night I’m probably going over to Zeke’s house to use his PlayStation, and then I’ll probably head over to Brooklyn to hang out with Yas and her sister and their friends. Just like I do every Friday night.”

  Bree kicked at the legs of her chair like a little girl. “But why, Mekhi? Why won’t you go to the party?”

  Mekhi shook his head, smiling bitterly. “Because we weren’t invited? Because we’re not going to be invited? Give it up, Bree. I’m sorry, but that’s just the way it is. We’re different from them, you know that. We don’t live in the same world as Chanel Crenshaw or Porsha Sinclaire or any of those people.”

  “Oh, shut up. You’re such a wimp! You drive me crazy,” Bree said, rolling her eyes. She stood up and dumped her dishes in the sink, scrubbing at them furiously with a Brillo pad. Then she whirled around and put her hands on her hips. She was wearing a pink flannel nightshirt and her curly black hair was sticking out all over because she had gone to sleep with it wet. She looked like a mini disgruntled housewife with boobs that were ten times too big for her body.

  “I don’t care what you say. I’m going to that party!” she insisted.

  “What party?” their father asked, appearing in the doorway to the kitchen.

  If there were an award for the most embarrassing dad in the universe, Rufus Hargrove would have won it. He was wearing a sweat-stained wife beater and red checkered boxers, and was scratching at his hairy belly. He hadn’t shaved in a few days, and his gray beard seemed to be growing at different intervals. Some of it was thick and long, but in between were bald patches and blotches of five o’clock shadow. His curly gray hair was matted and his dark eyes bleary. There was a cigarette tucked behind each of his ears.

  Bree and Mekhi looked at their father for a moment in silence. Then Bree sighed and turned back to the dishes. “Never mind,” she said.

  Mekhi smirked and leaned back in his chair. Their father hated the Upper East Side and all its pretensions. He only sent Bree to Emma Willard because it was a very good school and because he used to date one of the English teachers there. But he hated the idea that Bree might be influenced by her classmates, or “those debutantes,” as he called them. Mekhi knew their dad was going to love this.

  “Bree wants to go to some fancy benefit next week,” he told him.

  Mr. Hargrove pulled one of the cigarettes from behind his ear and stuck it in his mouth, playing with it between his lips. “A benefit for what?” he demanded.

  Mekhi rocked his chair back and forth, a smug look on his face. Bree turned off the faucet and glared at him, daring him to go on.

  “Get this,” Mekhi said. “It’s a party to raise money for those peregrine falcons that live in Central Park. They’re probably going to build like, birdhouse mansions for them or something. Like there aren’t thousands of homeless people that could use the money.”

  “Oh, shut up,” Bree said, furious. “You think you know everything. It’s just a stupid party. I never said it was a great cause.”

  “You call that a cause?” her father bellowed. “Shame on you. Those people only want those birds around because they’re pretty. Because it makes them feel like they’re in the pretty countryside, like they’re at their houses in Connecticut or Maine. They’re decorative. Leave it to the leisure class to come up with some charity that does absolutely no one any good at all!”

  Bree leaned back against the kitchen counter, stared up at the ceiling, and tuned her father out. She’d heard this same tirade before. It didn’t change anything. She still wanted to go to that party. She was tired of always hearing about all the cool things the cool girls did the next day. She wanted to be part of the coolness.

  “I just want to have some fun,” she said stubbornly. “Why does it have to be such a big deal?”

  “It’s a big deal because you’re going to get used to this silly debutante nonsense, and you’re going to wind up a big fake like your mother, who hangs around rich people all the time because she’s too scared to think for herself,” her father shouted, his dark, unshaven face turning angry. “Dammit, Bree. You remind me more and more of your mother every day.”

  Mekhi suddenly felt bad. Their mother had run off to Prague with some count or prince or something, and she was basically a kept woman, letting the count or prince or whatever he was dress her and put her up in hotels all over Europe. All she did all day was shop, eat, drink, and paint pictures of flowers. She wrote them letters a few times a year, and sent them the odd present. Last Christmas she’d sent Bree a dress from Germany. It was about ten sizes too small.

  It wasn’t a nice thing for their father to say that Bree reminded him of their mother. It wasn’t nice at all.

  Bree looked like she was about to cry.

  “Lay off, Pops,” Mekhi said. “We weren’t invited to the party anyway. So neither of us could go even if we wanted to.”

  “See what I mean!” Mr. Hargrove said triumphantly. “Why would you want to hang out with those snobs anyway?”

  Bree stared glassy-eyed at the dirty kitchen floor.

  Mekhi stood up. “Hurry up and get dressed, Bree,” he said gently. “I’ll walk you to your bus stop.”

  12

  TO: kaliqbraxton@stjudes.edu

  FROM: porshasinclaire@willard.edu

  I'm at my mom's hair place. Lunch is over in 38 minutes & they're making me wait. Missed you when you left last night. Mom & Cyrus was going away Friday. You can sleep over. This time it's really going to happen.

  I love you. Call me. xo

  PS: I'm not cutting my hair short, just waxing my bikini ;)

  Every Wednesday, Kaliq and Porsha had grown accustomed to e-mailing each other a quick love note (okay, it was Porsha�
�s idea), to help them get over the hump of the boring school week. Only two more days until the weekend, when they could spend as much time together as they wanted. Kaliq scanned the note without really reading it. Which hairs Porsha chose to cut or wax didn’t concern him. In fact, he’d really rather not know. He liked to think she looked pretty without really trying. But that would be a different girl.

  He scrolled through the other junk in his inbox and was thrilled to discover an e-mail from that particular girl.

  TO: kaliqbraxton@stjudes.edu

  FROM: chanelcrenshaw@willard.edu

  Hey. I didn’t even see you leave last night. Sorry. Let’s all get together Friday night. OK? Love, Chanel.

  “Hey, Braxton! Quit fucking with your phone!”

  It was a sunny October day in Central Park. Out in Sheep Meadow lots of kids were cutting class, just lying in the grass, smoking, or playing Frisbee. The trees surrounding the meadow were a blaze of yellows, oranges, and reds, and beyond the trees loomed the beautiful old apartment buildings on Central Park West. A guy was selling weed, and Anthony Avuldsen had bought some to add to what Kaliq had picked up at the pizza parlor the day before at lunch.

  Kaliq shot Chanel back a quick “OK” and joined his friends. He, Jeremy, Anthony, and Charlie Dern passed an enormous joint between them as they kicked a soccer ball around on the grass.

  Charlie puffed on the joint and passed it to Jeremy. Kaliq shot Charlie the ball and he tripped over it. Charlie was six feet tall, and his head was too big for his body. People called him Frankenstein. Ever the athletic one, even when he was stoned, Anthony dove for the ball, kicked it up in the air and headed it at Jeremy. It hit Jeremy in his puny chest and he let it roll to the ground, dribbling it between his feet.

  “Shit, this stuff is strong,” Jeremy said, hitching up his pants. They were always sliding down below his skinny hips, no matter how tightly he buckled his Hermes belt.

  “Yeah, it is,” Kaliq agreed. “I’m all fucked up.” His feet were itchy. It felt like the grass was growing through the rubber soles of his sneakers.

  Jeremy stopped dribbling the ball. “Hey, Kaliq. Have you seen Chanel yet?” he asked. “I heard she’s back.”

  Kaliq looked at the ball longingly, wishing he had it so he could kick it away across the field and pretend he hadn’t heard Jeremy’s question. He could feel the other three boys staring at him. He bent down and pulled his left shoe off so he could scratch the bottom of his foot. Damn, it itched.

  “Yeah, I saw her last night,” he finally said, trying to keep his voice casual, hopping up and down on one foot.

  Charlie cleared his throat and spit in the grass. “Well? What’d she look like?” he asked. “I heard she got into all sorts of trouble up at Hanover.”

  “Me too,” Anthony said, sucking on the roach. “I heard she got kicked out for having sex with this whole group of guys in her room. Her roommate ratted her out.” He laughed. “Like, couldn’t she afford a hotel room?”

  Charlie laughed. “I heard she has a kid. I’m serious. She had it in France and left it there. Her parents are paying to have it raised in some fancy French convent. It’s like a fucking movie, man.”

  Kaliq couldn’t believe what he was hearing. When his friends were high they got so outrageous. He dropped down in the grass and began to remove his shoes and socks. He didn’t speak out in Chanel’s defense. He just sat there, scratching his bare foot.

  Meanwhile Porsha was getting impatient. On her back in a treatment room, naked from the waist down save for a paper “waxing skirt,” she’d been waiting for her aesthetician for nearly a quarter of an hour. She’d wanted to get a Brazilian bikini wax before Friday night, leaving enough time for the little rash she sometimes got afterwards to go away, and had chosen her mother’s salon to do the job because it was close to school and there was an open lunchtime appointment.

  The meatpacking district salon where she usually went for haircuts and waxing was huge and busy and modern, with cool music, fresh cappuccinos, and a separate floor for spa treatments. This salon was intimate—meaning cramped—with powder blue carpeting, gilt mirrors, and classical music, and was full of Park Avenue matrons with their dogs in their laps having their roots done by obnoxiously talkative stylists. The door to her treatment room was open just an inch, and she could hear one of the stylists talking to his client.

  “Hair is like a muscle,” he was saying. “It has like, a memory. And it has to be worked out, otherwise it just falls all blah, you know? It’s like a child. It needs exercise. It needs to be fed. And it needs to go to school. Or else it won’t get into a good college.” The stylist chuckled. “Not your children, babe. Yours are all geniuses, clearly.”

  Porsha had never heard anything more asinine in her life. Hair was nothing like a muscle. Hair was dead. Dead, dead, dead. Just like that idiot hairdresser should have been for saying something so stupid.

  She checked her e-mail on her phone for the twelfth time. Kaliq still hadn’t replied to her message. Where was he? Flirting with those slutty L’Ecole girls outside that pizzeria he always went to? Cutting class with his boys? Or worse, sharing a bottle of chardonnay in the park with Chanel?

  Stop it, she told herself. You’re acting crazy. But she was tired of lying there, partially exposed, with the door practically wide open and no one paying her any attention.

  “Is someone going to come in here and do my wax?” she called, hating that she sounded like a fifty-year-old high-maintenance housewife from New Jersey. “I have to get back to class.”

  The chatty hairstylist stuck his head in the door. He wore a short goatee and a slicked back ponytail. On every finger of both hands were sparkling gold rings. His skinny black jeans were complemented by a pair of red suspenders and a black shirt unbuttoned to reveal a tanned, muscular chest. Rounding off the look was a pair of black Prada biker boots. His over-fifty clients probably thought he was sexy. Porsha could barely stand to look at him.

  She crossed her legs one over the other beneath the paper skirt. “I’m waiting for Mina,” she snapped.

  The stylist tried to wrinkle his Botox-injected forehead into a frown. “Sorry, babe. Mina had to go pick up her son. Strep throat. Just give me a sec to finish this blowout. I’ll do your wax.”

  He closed the door, leaving Porsha feeling more exposed than ever. She was about to put her clothes back on when the guy returned.

  “So. How do you want it?” he asked, donning a pair of latex gloves and pulling them carefully over his tacky rings. He cocked his index fingers at Porsha like two latex-covered pistols. “Project Runway, the Bermuda Triangle, or Completely Spank-Me Bare?”

  He’d chosen the wrong girl to fire at. Porsha sat up. No way was she letting this jerk anywhere near her bikini line. “No, thank you. I’ll reschedule,” she told him briskly.

  The hairstylist glanced at the pot of boiling hot melted wax on the countertop and then eyeballed her bare knees. He grinned, his black goatee punctuating a set of hideously crooked yellow teeth. “Babe, trust me. I’ve seen it all.”

  Ew. Porsha had had enough of this hairdryer-wielding idiot. Never again would she return to this salon. She jumped to her feet, buttoned on her Willard uniform, stamped back into her Fendi flats, snatched her gray cashmere blazer off the hook, and slung her school bag over her arm.

  “Try waxing off your ugly face,” she spat, stomping off.

  The atmosphere in the Emma Willard cafeteria was substantially subdued. Porsha had run off somewhere, and Alexis and Imani sat by themselves at the senior girls’ regular table, sharing a pumpernickel bagel. Chanel started toward them, hushed stares stabbing at her back. When they spied her, Alexis and Imani dropped their bagel halves and glared at her so menacingly that Chanel altered her course and pretended to examine the salad bar.

  Even the olives and cherry tomatoes stared back at her, appalled and accusing. Chanel abandoned her tray, backing out of the cafeteria and fleeing to one of her old school haunts, the privat
e bathroom next to the nurse’s office.

  The bathroom seemed to have escaped the renovations the school had undergone in 1973, 1992, and 2002. The floor was old-fashioned black and white mosaic tile. The walls were white subway tile, graying and marked with girlish graffiti in some places. There was an old claw-foot bathtub, used by no one. The girls used to whisper that after hours Mrs. McLean invited her girlfriend Vonda over to the school for a bubble bath, but even that hadn’t happened in a while, since the tub was lined with a powdery film of white dust.

  Chanel checked the wall to the left of the paper towel dispenser and there it was. C + P FOREVER, scrawled inside a skinny heart. Porsha had written it with a turquoise-colored Sharpie in fifth grade while she and Chanel took turns shaving their legs for the first time with Porsha’s dad’s razor. How many times had Chanel and Porsha escaped to this bathroom together to discuss their hair, share their period woes, and apply lip gloss? How many times had Chanel stood outside that very bathroom door while Porsha pretended to have a stomach virus, quickly flushing down the remains of her lunch?

  Porsha was barely speaking to her now.

  Chanel washed her hands, even though they were already clean. Her reflection in the mirror was tense and her golden beige skin looked dull. She kept the cold tap running and began to splash icy water on her face, over and over, willing all the badness and loneliness and meanness to go away.

  Behind her the bathroom door swung open.

  “Oh my gosh!” exclaimed a short, brown skinned girl with curly black hair and a chest that was way too big for her tiny frame.

  “I should’ve locked it,” Chanel said, reaching for a wad of paper towels. She patted them against her dripping face as the girl stared at her with enormous eyes. “What’re you staring at?” Chanel demanded more harshly than she’d intended.