“I don’t get it. Why are we doing this again?” Elise asked. She’d already finished all her homework and was staring out the window over Jenny’s shoulder, bored nearly to tears.
“I told you. I left my favorite hat on the bus this morning and if I ride enough buses, I’m sure I’ll see it,” Jenny lied.
“Someone probably took it,” Elise argued. “Your cute fuzzy red hat? I’m sure someone took it.”
A swollen-ankled middle-aged woman wearing a dowdy trench coat and reading the
Wall Street Journal
glared at them the way people are always glaring at teenagers when they’re talking in public. Like, could you please just press the mute button? Well,
excuse
me.
“Just this last bus and then we can go home,” Jenny promised, even though she’d promised that two buses ago.
Elise put her hand on Jenny’s black-stockinged knee and left it there. “I don’t really mind. It’s not like I have anything better to do.”
Jenny waited for Elise to remove her hand. “What are you doing?” she whispered loudly.
“With what?”
“With your
hand
.”
“The book says to express your affection with gentle caresses,” Elise declared.
“But I don’t want you to. Besides, we’re on a
bus
,” Jenny hissed, pushing Elise’s hand away. The last thing she wanted was for L to see her and Elise
caressing
each other.
God.
How embarrassing.
“What’s wrong with it?” Elise cried, shoving Jenny in the leg just as the bus lurched over a bump. Jenny slipped off the seat and onto the floor, her butt landing hard on her neighbor’s shoes.
Jenny closed her eyes, too mortified to open them. If her secret admirer were watching now, he wouldn’t be writing her any more love notes. The bus lurched over another bump as it roared across the park and Jenny’s boobs bounced mercilessly, as if she hadn’t been through enough.
“Here.” A hand gripped her arm.
“Fuck off,” Jenny mumbled in total humiliation. She batted the hand away and struggled to her feet. A blond head loomed above her. Tall. Nice nose. Hazel eyes with blond-tipped lashes. It was
him
—the Bendel’s boy!
“Are you all right?” he asked. “There’s an empty seat back here. Why don’t you sit down?” He took her hand and pushed backward through the crowd.
Jenny slid into the hard, narrow seat and looked up at the boy, her heart pounding. He looked to be about sixteen and he was perfect, just perfect. “Are you L?” she asked breathlessly.
He smiled shyly. One of his front teeth was chipped a little. It was extremely cute. “Yes. It’s Leo,” he answered.
Leo
. Of
course
.
“I’m Jennifer!” Jenny practically screamed, she was so excited.
“Jennifer,” Leo repeated, as if it were the most uniquely beautiful name he’d ever heard.
Elise poked her head through the rush-hour crowd and narrowed her blue eyes at Jenny. “Hey, I’m sorry I pushed you. Are you okay?”
Leo smiled his adorable chip-toothed smile at her as if to say that any friend of Jenny’s was a friend of his. Jenny’s first instinct was to snarl at Elise to buzz off so she and Leo could get acquainted in peace. But she didn’t want Leo to think she was a total bitch. The man seated next to her stood up and Jenny patted the seat. “Sit down.”
Elise let go of the handrail and plunked herself down in the seat. “Hey,” she said, looking up at Leo. She clacked her knee against Jenny’s leg when she recognized him. “
Hey
.”
“Elise, this is Leo. Leo, this is Elise,” Jenny introduced them sweetly. The bus halted abruptly and Leo reached for her shoulder to steady himself.
Oh, God. He touched me! He touched me!
Jenny could feel Elise studying them as she tried to figure out what was going on.
“Do you go to Constance Billard, too?” Leo asked Elise.
Elise nodded, looking totally confused. All of a sudden, Jenny felt bad for her. She put her arm around her friend and smiled up at Leo. “We’re best friends.”
Elise giggled and let her head fall on Jenny’s shoulder. “I guess you found your hat,” she whispered quietly.
“Yup,” Jenny giggled back, relieved that Elise was cool enough not to ask too many questions. When they were alone, she would explain everything, just like best friends were supposed to. She gazed up at Leo’s perfectly structured, perfectly paintable face, swooning as he flashed his shy, chipped-tooth smile again. “I knew your name couldn’t be Lance.”
v
turns down chance to film decomposing fish bodies!
“Glad you could make it,” Ken Mogul said on Wednesday afternoon when Vanessa joined him at a booth in Chippies, the new Williamsburg coffee shop down the street from where she lived. He pushed a steaming mug of cappuccino toward her. “I ordered for both of us. Hope that’s cool by you.”
Vanessa sat down with her black down parka on and clasped the mug with both hands, pursing her lips as she blew on the hot, milky froth. “Thanks for hooking me up with that whole fashion show gig,” she said. “It was such a gas.” She winced, hating the way she sounded when she talked to Ken Mogul. Like some brainless poser fool.
Ken pushed his tortoise-shell Persol sunglasses up on top of his jauntily cut red hair and leaned across the table, ready to get down to business. “I’d like you to join me at Cannes this spring. I’ll introduce you to some other brilliant independent filmmakers. We can trade energy, brainstorm together. Then I want you to hold off on college for a year or two to make some films with me. It’s going to be magical, I can feel it.”
Enya was playing over the sound system. Vanessa unzipped her coat and then zipped it up again. She hated Enya.
“I’ve started working on a new project down in South
America,” Ken Mogul continued. “It opens with sea gulls feeding their young the flesh from decomposing fish bodies and then moves to gorillas in the rainforest abandoning their young. Then I’m going to cut to the streets of Rio, where kids are prostituting themselves for drugs. I haven’t begun filming yet, but I was thinking you could get in there and meet some of the kids,
befriend
them, get their
stories
. You don’t happen to know Portuguese, do you?”
Vanessa shook her head. Who was he kidding?
“Spanish?”
She shook her head again.
“It doesn’t matter. We’ll get a translator, or find some kids who speak English. All your expenses will be paid for by Duke Productions. You remember Duke from the Better Than Naked party?”
Vanessa nodded with an amused smile. How could she forget Duke, the dumbest guy on the planet?
“You’d have your own car, your own apartment, free equipment, and whatever else you need,” Ken added. “Are you with me?”
Vanessa noticed for the first time that Ken Mogul had very little definition in the chin area. In fact, he was practically chinless. “I’ve always wanted to go to Cannes,” she replied, thoughtfully slurping her cappuccino. “And your new project sounds really . . . awesome. But I got accepted early to NYU. I’ve wanted to go there since I was eleven years old. There’s no way I’m deferring.”
“But what about my film? Child prostitution! Animals abandoning their young! This is groundbreaking stuff!” Ken Mogul spluttered, spitting all over the counter. Vanessa thought that if he’d had more of a chin, the spit might not have gone so far.
Over Ken’s shoulder Vanessa noticed a light blue flyer pinned to a bulletin board.
Rivington Rover Poetry Club Open Mike
featuring readings by
Daniel Humphrey and Mystery Craze
Thursday, 8
P.M.
No wonder Dan had been blowing her off all week. He was busy being famous.
“Vanessa? Are you still with me?” Ken demanded. “First lesson you learn in this business is the clock never stops ticking.”
Vanessa smiled her half-amused, half-pissed-off Mona Lisa smile. As flattered as she was that Ken had asked her to work with him, she had no intention of becoming a mini-Mogul. She wanted to develop her
own
voice and her
own
career, not put all her energy into someone else’s work, however brilliant. She shook her closely shaved dark head. “I’m sorry.”
Ken Mogul’s barely there chin disappeared altogether as he lost his cool completely. “I’ve never offered to partner with anyone,” he said grimly. “This is the opportunity of a lifetime. I’m giving you the chance to make a feature film before you turn twenty. It’s unheard of!”
That old guy at the Culture of Humanity show had advised her not to take her talent too seriously. Ken obviously took his way,
way
too seriously. She stood up and yanked the light blue flyer off the bulletin board behind Ken’s head. She and Dan were supposed to be working on a film
together
, but if she could slip into the club and film him reading without him even knowing she was there, that would be even better. Dan was always better when he didn’t know she was watching.
“Thank you,” she told Ken. “I’m honored, I really am.
But I’m working on something new, of my own. I think I’d like to finish it.”
Ken Mogul pushed his sunglasses down on his nose and glared out the window. “It’s your loss.”
“Thanks for the coffee,” Vanessa said, even though he was no longer looking at her. She folded up the blue flyer and tucked it into her pocket. “Good luck at Cannes.”
Ken Mogul zipped up his fur-trimmed Prada parka and pulled the hood up over his head as if to block her out completely. “’Bye.”
Vanessa headed home to sort through her camera gear and figure out what she needed to bring to the reading at the Rivington Rover Poetry Club tomorrow night. When Dan was finished reading she’d pop up out of the crowd and surprise him with an enormous mug of Irish coffee, his favorite drink. Then they’d trade stories about all the feebleminded famous people they’d met in the past week. And then she’d bring him home and remind him of what he’d been missing. She’d show him how to lose his virginity again the way he’d written in that crazy poem.
As if he needed showing.
“Want to take Mook out for a walk with me?” Aaron asked Blair through her closed bedroom door. It was Wednesday afternoon and she’d been holed up in her room since Monday, only opening the door to receive the brie-and-tomato baguettes and mugs of hot chocolate Myrtle brought her at ten and five o’clock. She’d even conned the family doctor into writing her a note excusing her from school for the week. She wasn’t sick exactly, the doctor assured her mother. Schools like Constance just worked their girls too hard, especially the seniors, and then there was all that additional pressure to get into one of the best colleges. Blair simply needed a few days of rest and she’d be herself again.
Well, not exactly. Blair was using her few days of rest to reinvent herself all over again. Like Madonna.
Aaron pushed open the door and poked his head inside her room. The air was pungent with the chemical odor of cigarette smoke mixed with minty mouthwash. Blair’s head was wrapped in a black-and-pink Pucci scarf, and she was lounging on the bed with her bare ankles crossed, wearing a white terrycloth robe and smoking a Merit Ultra Light through a long black cigarette holder. The look was very Greta-Garbo-in-hiding, which was exactly the effect she was going for.
Across the room,
The Great Gatsby
starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow played silently on TV. Blair puffed on her cigarette, staring dramatically into the near distance. She couldn’t bear to look at Aaron because he was wearing his Harvard sweatshirt again, as if he’d specifically dressed to piss her off. She’d already ripped her Yale pendant off the canopy over her bed and thrown it out her bedroom window along with her father’s old Yale sweatshirt. “If you don’t mind, I’d like you to please get the fuck out of my room.”
“I was just leaving,” Aaron replied. “Hey, have you talked to Serena lately?”
Blair shook her head. “Why?”
“No reason,” Aaron shrugged uncomfortably. He’d been hanging out with his buddies in Scarsdale since Friday night and hadn’t seen or talked to Serena since the Les Best show. He pulled a tin of herbal cigarettes out of his back pocket and tossed them onto Blair’s bed. “Try those,” he advised. “They’re 100 percent natural and they smell way better than that mass-produced shit.”
Blair kicked the tin onto the floor. “Have a nice walk.”
Aaron pulled her bedroom door closed behind him and headed outside with Mookie. He entered the park at Seventy-second Street, taking the path that led to a little wooden footbridge over a stream that fed into the lake. Every now and then Mookie stopped to dig furiously in the snow with his brown-and-white paws, as if he were looking for a doggie toy he’d dropped there last summer. Then eventually he’d give up and trot on again.
A petite blond in dark sunglasses and a blue Yankees cap jogged by wearing an I L
OVE
A
ARON
T-shirt over her red
velour tracksuit; the same I L
OVE
A
ARON
T-shirt that Serena had worn at the Les Best show. Aaron was pretty sure the blond was the actress Renee Zwingdinger, or whatever her name was, but he couldn’t be sure. It was pretty funny to think that famous actresses and models might be wearing shirts with his name on them when he was just some dude who went out with a beautiful girl who he guessed he wasn’t really going out with anymore.
When the wooden footbridge came into view, Aaron noticed that it was filled with people and equipment, a crew of some sort. As he came closer he saw that in the icy water opposite the footbridge a cameraman was standing up in a small inflatable raft, adjusting his tripod.
Aaron let Mookie hunt for squirrels under a tree as he watched the proceedings. The huddle of people on the bridge parted to reveal a girl dressed in a skimpy sunflower yellow sundress and blue sandals, her golden hair blowing in the icy wind. It was Serena, of course. She was unmistakable.
All of a sudden Mookie hurtled across the snow in Serena’s direction, howling with delight and wagging his stubby little boxer tail.