Catwalk (48 page)

The hallway quiets down. Even Shalimar stops yapping as Aphro storms off.

I run after her, my cheeks burning. “You can’t deny that you’ve been acting shady. What do you expect me to think?”

Aphro keeps marching, ignoring my glare. Leave it
to Ice Très to go for the spotlight—literally. “Hold up, Boo-Kitty, let me holla at you for a minute.”

Ignoring him, I continue to sashay steadily toward Aphro, because I know that Caterina and her crew are still filming us.

Over my shoulder, I hear Shalimar whispering harshly at her thug: “What are you
doing
?”

Ice Très breaks free from her octopussy tentacles and gains on me. “Come on, Your Catness, I know you’re pissed, but I can explain. Just give me five minutes,” he begs me, touching my shoulder.

Instantly, my chest constricts, but the chatter in my head shouts,
I want the truth!

“Pashmina, don’t listen to him,” Elgamela advises me in her eerie clairvoyant tone.

“It must be you spying on us,” challenges Aphro. She points the index finger on her bangle-jangling arm in Ice Très’s face and snarls, “Cuz she may be feeling you, but you don’t fool me—you son of a biscuit-eating, graffiti-slinging dirty dog!”

I twirl around to face Ice Très. “Have you been spying on us?”

“Y’all are tripping,” he says, smirking.

“What about that computer virus?” I say, accusingly.

“Oh, you in another galaxy now,” he says, still smirking, shrugging. “I got caught up on Friday night, that’s what I’m trying to tell you.”

“Save it for the delovelies who read your blog!” I hiss, bringing up the radickio nickname he used for girls he likes in his blog entry. “There’s no excuse for standing someone up in this age of technology—send a text message, or an SOS. Ya dig?”

Suddenly, I feel a breath of fresh air in my chest, like someone opened a window. Ice Très just stares at me, speechless, like a jackal who realizes he’s arrived at the scene of the carnage too late to snag anything more than a pile of picked-over bones. As he walks away with his tail between his legs, Aphro stands there with her arms folded across her chest. “You wanna know what’s going on?” she asks, defiantly.

“We sure do,” smirks Nole.

“They took Lennix and put him in another foster home,” she reveals, referring to her beloved little foster brother.

“Why?” Felinez asks, surprised.

“He told our caseworker he didn’t want to stay with us anymore because of Mr. Maydell,” she says, getting riled up. “That’s why I’ve been acting janky lately and why I couldn’t come to the fitting. He left that day.”

“But why?” Felinez asks again.

“Mr. Maydell was beating him,” I say, realizing that I knew all along.

Aphro doesn’t deny it. “Now they won’t let me see
him. They said it’s better if he doesn’t have any contact with us anymore.”

“That’s not right,” Nole says, shaking his head.

Aphro’s eyes water but she remains stone-faced.

“Why didn’t you tell us what was going on?” I ask, hurt that my best friend couldn’t even come to me and tell me the truth.

“I
hate
this drama—and nobody wants to hear about it, so I keep it to myself,” Aphro spurts, seething with rage.

“That’s not true. We do wanna hear about it,” insists Felinez.

“What you really mean is, you don’t want to talk about it with us,” I correct Aphro. I know she hates being a foster child, but she never says it.

“Why would I want to talk about my business? It’s not like you would understand,” Aphro sputters.

Felinez wraps her arms around Aphro and I join in, because there is nothing left to say. Aphro is right. We don’t understand what it’s like to be a foster child.

Tears well up in Angora’s eyes. “I can’t imagine what you’re going through, either,” I whisper in her ear.

Now Nole starts tearing up, even though he still has his signature smirk on his face. “You’re wrong, Miss Aphro—that’s all I’m going to say. I
do
understand. Trust me. I wish I was a foster child.”

“Don’t say that,” whispers Felinez.

Luckily, Aphro doesn’t react to Nole’s insensitivity. “I’m so mad with Mr. Maydell, I can’t even look at him anymore,” she says, fighting back her tears.

“Are you going to stay there?” squeaks Felinez.

“Yeah—where am I going? I’m not trying to be up in another foster home. And he ain’t doing nothing to me, so I can deal with him,” she reveals, poking out her mouth. She’s starting to get defensive again. I can tell because she pulls away from us and folds her arms across her chest.

Nole senses it’s time to move on. He grabs my arm and snaps, “Why you still here? Isn’t Panda waiting for you outside?”

“Yup,” I confess. “I’m going—thanks to all of you.”

“There’s a reason for everything,” Elgamela reminds me, stroking my shoulder.

“You sound like a fortune cookie,” I say, swiping Willi Ninja, Jr.’s riff.

“Make sure you give him my phone number and tell him to call me before my mother breaks our computer,” shrieks Nole.

“I will,” I tease him. I turn to Aphro. “And I’ll call you later. And thank you for hooking me up with the shoot.”

“Yes, that is great news,” Angora says, sounding pleased.

I’m glad no one wants to escort me downstairs, because I don’t want Panda meeting my friends—yet. Good thing, too, because my heart sinks the second I spot Chris outside standing by himself, his hands shoved in his pockets. He seems even shorter than I remembered, possibly because he’s dressed like a Milk Dud—brown corduroy pants, bomber jacket, and rugged clodhoppers all sort of blend together on his pudgy physique into a round chocolate mass. I try to hide my disappointment, even though it’s hard for me to fake the funk.

“You okay?” Chris finally asks, when we’re seated in the brightly lit diner of his choice, which is packed with tourists.

“Just fashion drama,” I confess. “I’m tethered to this espionage business by a reinforced nylon thread.”

Chris nods but I can tell he’s confused.

“The computer virus?” I remind him.

“Oh, that espionage,” he says, smirking.

I wonder if he’s making fun of me. “You don’t think it’s some unrelated incident, do you?” I grill him. “It’s all connected to the Catwalk competition. If I find the weak link, the whole piece will unravel like Gianni Versace gunmetal fabric from the seventies. Sorry, you wouldn’t know about that.”

“I understand. There’s always interface to a program,” pipes up Chris, changing his tune.

I don’t understand Chris’s cyberspeak, so I bury my face inside Googies’ gigantic laminated menu. The endless choices seem a big blur to me, but I’m gathering that the food here is probably as corny as Chris is. “What are you getting?” I ask absentmindedly.

“The hot dog,” he says, sounding unsure of himself.

“Me too, with lots of raw onions,” I decide, giggling at my repellant nature. Now let him try to kiss me with those crustacean lips!

“Wait till you see this hot dog,” announces Chris.

“I can’t wait.” I grin like a five-year-old excited about a supa-dupa surprise. Then I pull out my pot of Glam Bomb and slick some more on my lips.

“So, did you finish the Design Challenge?” he asks me, curiously.

“Yup—thanks to you fixing my computer,” I say, buttering him up. “I feel good about what we turned in—even though things are kinda crazy.”

The ponytailed waiter brings our plates of food and plops them onto the table. “Wow—that’s the biggest hot dog I’ve ever seen!” I exclaim. This time I’m not faking the funk. I stare at the
foot-long
hot dog topped with sauerkraut and onions and relish and wonder how I’m even going to fit it in my mouth. “It’s huge!”

Chris starts cutting his with his knife and fork.

“Duh,”
I giggle, following his cue. Then I squirt lots of ketchup on my french fries, and eat one with my
fingers, thank you. “Omigod, this is the best french fry I’ve ever eaten in my entire life.”

Chris grins, looking pleased, pushing his glasses onto the bridge of his pudgy nose. “I’d like to see the stuff you did.”

“You mean the designs? Oh, those are top secret—still,” I quickly add so I don’t hurt his feelings, “you know, just in case
you’re
the spy.”

“Right.” Chris nods, knowingly. “I have an idea for designing something, too.”

It figures. Now I realize I was delusional for thinking Panda wanted to pounce on me. He probably just wants connects.
Oy
. Everybody wants to be a designer—even Dalmation tekkies.

“Lemme guess—Mohawk pants with multiple utility pockets and adjustable cuff tabs to store computer-encrypted information?” I snicker.

Chris blushes, then stutters, “S-something like that. Except it was a shirt with insulated Velcro patch pockets for carrying your flash drives, and the pants have a cyber chip sewn into the back pocket. I guess everybody has ideas, huh?”

“They sure do,” I say, stuffing my face. “What do you wanna call it?”

“Cyber Chic,” Chris says like he’s embarrassed for sharing his designing drive. “Well, I won’t have time anyway.”

“Why not?” I ask, unembarrassed as I lick the ketchup from my hands, one finger at a time, because now I feel like the teacher and not the student.

“I told you I have a part-time project at this PR firm. I’m helping revamp their computer programming. And it’s down on Varick Street, so then by the time I get home … And I gotta go to school, and and then there’s homework …,” he rattles on.

“Did you say this place is on Varick Street?” I ask, my ears perked. “What’s the name of it?”

“Grubster PR—I didn’t tell you I had a job?” he says, proudly. “You’re the only person that I’ve seen from the posting, and I forgot that I even had the notice up on the school bulletin board—so when you called, I liked the way your voice sounded, and that’s why I called you back,” he says, blushing from his true confession.

“Oh, admit it—as soon as you heard I went to F.I., you pounced on it,
pronto
!” I squeal. Then I start thinking about the name of the firm he told me. “I’ve heard of that firm before.” I stop to think about why Grubster PR sounds so familiar; then I remember that it’s the PR firm that handles Calvin Klein and Betsey Johnson, to name a few famous fashionistas—and it’s a client of Jackson Holdings, Shalimar’s father’s company. “Yeah, Grubster PR—that’s a Big Willie firm.”

“There is an intern there who goes to your school, not that she ever talks to me or anything. But you know how snobby the girls are at F.I.,” Chris snickers, and now he is blushing big-time.

“So how do you know she goes to my school?” I say, becoming increasingly curious.

“Oh, um …” Chris stalls before he admits, “Well, I guess you never noticed, but we hang out outside your school sometimes.”

“Oh, trust, I noticed
they
hang outside our school. Dalmation students are hard to miss—but I never, um, saw you in the—” I stop myself before I blurt out, “pack.” Instead, I say, “crowd.”

“One of my friends in school, Roger, used to drag me along. Maybe you didn’t see me because I was hiding behind him,” he admits sheepishly.

“You’re funny,” I say, returning the compliment he paid me when he fixed my computer. “So, what girl are you talking about?”

“I don’t know her name, but I’ve seen her before—going inside the school—and I remember because she had on the same sort of tall leather lace-up boots. You know, kinda yellowy, but not really?” he says, trying to explain.

“You mean like butterscotch?” I ask in disbelief, because I think I know who he’s talking about.

“Okay, butterscotch,” agrees Chris. “And she’s kinda short, Spanish, and her hair is really dark. She wears it slicked back into a long, thick ponytail?”

“Chintzy,” I utter out loud, even though I’m still hanging on to the sliver of a shred of possibility that it could be someone else. Chintzy certainly would have told me if she’d gotten a job—at Grubster PR!

Chris picks up on what must be a blank expression on my face.

“You all right?”

“I’m sorry but I gotta go,” I squeak, my hands frozen. Suddenly, I have the image of Chintzy on that Friday we went fabric shopping—when she mistakenly headed to the downtown entrance instead of the uptown one, since she was going home to take care of her sick father. It wasn’t a mistake at all!

“Okay,” he says, visibly saddened.

Now I feel bad, but I have to call Felinez pronto to help me with this emergency. I run outside to call, and thank gooseness she stops fighting with Michelette long enough to answer the phone. After I break it down, Felinez has an idea to set off another Operation: Kitty Litter.

“Trust me,” Felinez says reassuringly. “Now go back inside and try to be nice and we’ll do it tomorrow. I’m bringing that special bag—to dangle right in her face. She’ll talk. You’ll see.”

“Oh, speaking of bag—you just reminded me—I forgot the doggie bag,” I giggle.

“Like I said, go back inside!” orders Felinez.

When I walk back inside, Chris is so happy to see me that I feel like a puppy brought home as a gift on Christmas Day.

“I thought I said something to upset you,” he spills.

“No, you didn’t, but you did,” I say, then clarify it.

Chris nods knowingly.

“I’m glad you brought me here,” I say, sitting back down.

“I’m glad they didn’t take your food away yet.” He smiles.

“Me too.” I smile back. And this time, I really mean it.

Right after first period, Felinez and I walk through the passageway in Building C to get to Building D, which houses the hair and makeup annex. “Yoo-hoo!” shouts Bobby Beat, who is running off in another direction.

“Holla at you soon,” I assure him as we make our way to the wig arena. We look through the opened door of each of the wigs and extensions classrooms in the Hair Annex until we spot Chenille in her black overalls, propped on a stool, carefully applying rollers to a long, frosted wig perched on a Styrofoam head. She looks at me glumly, like the Grim Reaper has come earlier than she expected.

I motion for Chenille to come outside. She shakes her head, but we don’t budge. At this point, a few of her fellow weavers are peering curiously at Felinez and me. A few even beam in recognition. They know that I’m the leader of the House of Pashmina—and some of them even voted for me in the Catwalk elections. A surly look of defeat washes over Chenille’s face as she realizes that we’re not leaving. Taking a deep breath, Chenille stands up to come outside and deal with
whatever drama is coming her way via her annoying older sister.