7 Souls (2 page)

“Hello? Anybody here?”

The flawless white comforter snaked behind her like a snail’s trail as Mary moved forward through the doorway. She nearly jumped when she saw a middle-aged woman in a coverall—a dowdy-looking polyester dress that you’d have to call beige (it didn’t really qualify as taupe)—slumped behind a plastic table, reading a Spanish-language newspaper and peering at her. The woman didn’t move; she and Mary had locked eyes. An acrid smell of bleach permeated the room.

“Hello?”

“¿Sí?”

Great
, Mary thought dismally.
A language barrier, just to make this more fun
.” Can you help me? I can’t—I lost my clothes. I don’t have my clothes.”

“
¿Que?”

“Look.” Mary stepped forward, stumbling on the edge of the comforter, reaching for the cleaning lady’s arm. “I need
clothes;
I need something to wear and I’ve got”—the woman flinched as Mary plucked at the rough fabric of her sleeve—“I’ve got no money; I need to get home.”

The woman squinted at Mary. Her eyes were like black flint. She didn’t move. Mary could feel rivulets of sweat sliding down her body beneath the comforter, down the curves of her back, across the raw edges of the fresh scratches along her spine.
Come on!
she wanted to shout.
Are you blind? I need help!
Mary was trembling with cold now, the dirty linoleum pressed against her bare feet like a sheet of ice.
Come on, lady—I’ll come back here later and pay you what I owe; I’ll make Patrick buy you a Prada outfit, I’ll do anything…
.

The woman rose to her feet, without any change in her expression. She leaned close, so that the veined cracks and wrinkles in her face were visible, around the ragged edge of her brown lipstick; Mary could barely smell some kind of geriatric floral scent.

“Wrong,” the woman said with a thick Spanish accent.

“What? What do you—”

“Something wrong,” the woman went on, nodding firmly. Mary’s forehead was coated in cold, clammy sweat as she stared into the cleaning lady’s black eyes. The woman was pointing at her with a bent arthritic finger. “Something wrong with you. You go to church.”

“Look.” Mary was in no mood for whatever Sunday-school lecture the cleaning woman wanted to give her. “You don’t understand. It’s not my fault I’m—”

Mary stopped talking because she’d noticed something incredible, the first recognizable thing she’d seen since waking up. Just past the woman’s shoulder, on a bare wooden shelf, was an electrifying, familiar sight.

“You go to church, you say prayers,” the woman repeated, turning away toward a green storage locker. “I help you—I give you money. I no have much, but I give you—”

“My
phone.”
Mary pointed at the small, gleaming black and maroon BlackBerry she’d spotted, nearly dropping the comforter again. “That’s my phone, ma’am. If I could just—”

The cleaning woman seemed to have some kind of special need to move as slowly as humanly possible. She was painstakingly pulling out a coverall identical to the one she was wearing. She slammed the locker shut—Mary winced at the loud bang—laboriously turned to follow Mary’s slim arm and saw the phone. The BlackBerry’s green light flashed right then—the phone was on.

“Is yours? I find it,” the cleaning woman explained, picking up the BlackBerry delicately, like it was a piece of Steuben glass. “On the floor, I find it when I—”

“Yes
, that’s mine,” Mary said, stumbling as she reached for it. “Thank you, thank you—”

I dropped it on the way in
, she thought.
Whenever that was—whatever I was doing here
.

Whomever I was with
.

But she still couldn’t remember a thing.

Once the phone was in her hand she felt better. Flipping it open, she saw no messages, no texts, no missed calls—and a nearly dead battery. One bar, flickering.

“Such a pretty young girl; you no need to be in such trouble. You go to confession,” the cleaning lady told her. She was handing over a beautiful new twenty-dollar bill that nearly made Mary salivate because she needed it so badly. The comforter was slipping to the floor as she took the money—and the cleaning woman took her hand and squeezed it. “You confess your sins, you feel better.”

“Right.”
Confess my sins?
She would have settled for
remembering
her sins.

T
HE AIR WAS DAMP
and cool. The sky was white, as featureless as untrampled snow—it was the kind of windless, overcast day that could make you squint from the glare of the city’s low, cold blanket of clouds. The echoes of SoHo traffic ricocheted harshly around her ears, around the cloud of dirty black hair she swept back from her sweaty forehead as she pressed forward, hurrying down the shaded edge of the sidewalk.

Everyone was looking at her, the eyes of passersby widening before they turned quickly away. Mary understood: she saw her fast-moving reflection flow past in the windows of the storefronts along Houston and knew that she looked like a homeless waif, a drug casualty, a hospital escapee or a runaway, her makeup smeared, her hair askew, her body clad in a ridiculous beige coverall that fit her all wrong, with a waistline high up on her rib cage, and a zipper she couldn’t reach tugging painfully on a tangle in her hair, making her eyes water with every step. Her feet were clad in oversize white tennis shoes that had seen better days; a blackened wad of gum was smeared over one of the soles.

She hunched her shoulders against the cold March air as she darted around a pair of skateboarders who grinned wildly, obviously reacting to her crazy Amy Winehouse appearance. Her ankles were aching from the speed at which she’d been moving. The polyester coverall was rubbing against the cuts on her back, rhythmically scratching them like sandpaper.

Mary had to swallow to hold off a sudden need to vomit—and the faint, nauseatingly stale taste of tomato sauce filled her dry throat.

Why am I tasting tomato sauce?

A fleeting image of a dark red tablecloth flickered into her mind. Faint opera music in the background … the clatter of silverware and the babble of dozens of voices …

Nothing else. She couldn’t remember.

I’ve got to get home
, Mary thought. It was a few minutes past seven, according to a big, old-fashioned clock on a bank she was passing.
I’ve got to get home and get dressed for school—and get ready for my birthday
.

Mary wasn’t quite ready to think about that part yet. Here it finally was—the morning of her seventeenth birthday, a day she’d looked forward to for
years
—and it wasn’t exactly starting the way she’d imagined. Nobody was bringing her breakfast in bed and handing over brightly wrapped presents. None of her friends had texted her with a morning birthday greeting.

Come on—it’s early yet
, she told herself.
Everybody’s just waking up
.

But were her friends waking up with hangovers too?

Whom was I with? What happened?

Walking into the shadow of a fire escape, Mary realized that the air was thickening with heavy humidity; already the flat white sky was darkening, showing watery gray traces of lower, heavier clouds. Five cabs had cruised past, each with its sign maddeningly unlit. Like all Manhattan residents, Mary knew that the chances of finding an empty taxicab downtown in the morning were about the same as the chances of finding a hundred-dollar bill on the sidewalk.

Eduardo’s!

That was it. She suddenly remembered going to Eduardo’s—the, well, the “budget” Italian restaurant in her neighborhood—with her sister and her mother, who didn’t think of the local one-star spot as a budget restaurant at all, since she almost never ate out (or even left the apartment).
Mom took us to dinner—a pre-birthday dinner
, Mary remembered. The stale, ghostly tomato taste in her mouth made sense now: she could dimly remember the tiny, cramped restaurant and the red tablecloths and the piped-in opera and the plate of fettuccine marinara that Patrick or her friends Amy and Joon would have taken one look at and refused to touch, sending it scornfully back to the kitchen—and then bodily dragged her down to Balthazar or a place more her speed.

Because that was the point of Mary Shayne’s birthday; it had been the point since forever. It was always something big, something crazy. In middle school it had been tame stuff: pizza parties at Two Boots, ice-skating parties at Chelsea Piers, frozen hot chocolate at Serendipity. Then it had changed; it had exploded into an underground legend for the private school set—New York’s self-described “playas under eighteen.” Mary never even
planned
the parties; they just formed out of the ether like darkening storm clouds: last year’s ridiculous scene at Nana’s, an underage speakeasy by the West Side Highway; two years ago, when they commandeered Inganno on Gansevoort Street and distributed free pancakes to everyone in the restaurant on Mary’s friends’ dime; a succession of bottle service bills and backstage passes and ragers in parent-free apartments, escalating—everyone knew—to the big One Seven, Mary’s last Chadwick blowout, and to whatever was coming tonight.

Which was why Mom had taken them out last night—rather than try to compete with all that—actually leaving their apartment and bringing Mary and Ellen to that red-draped table at Eduardo’s. Mary remembered it all now: chewing and swallowing the mediocre fettuccine and drinking the red wine they’d brought, sitting through the awkwardness while Mom watched her proudly across the yellow candlelight and beamed, her little girl already seventeen (or nearly), my God, how time flies. Which was the
last
thing Mary wanted to hear, because she just
knew
what came next:
It’s too bad your father’s not here to see this …
, Mom’s cue to get misty about her husband, which Ellen always encouraged. Wanting to be anywhere else; refusing dessert (even while looking around for a waiter with a cupcake and a candle in it, ready to smile and cover her face as the restaurant patrons sang “Happy Birthday,” but that never happened); finishing the wine … as Mom (her feelings hurt, as usual) made a big self-pitying show of dropping money on the table and leaving early; and after that, Mary and Ellen getting the check and their coats and then …

And then
what?

She had no idea what had happened next.

“Taxi!” Mary yelled, vaulting forward into the street. A lone cab was approaching, its rooftop lights shining. Mary was still so queasy that she was afraid she’d stumble and faint with the effort of running, but she was already in a footrace with a pinstriped Wall Street type who obviously had to get to the trading floor by the first bell and wasn’t going to let a crazy-looking teenage cleaning lady take his cab away no matter how high her cheekbones or how luminous her pale blue eyes, glittering through slits of smeared mascara.

“Taxi, taxi!” she called out again, burping up more marinara-flavored stomach gas and sprinting toward the cab.

She won the race—barely—grabbing the cab’s chrome door handle and giving Wall Street Man a pleading look (with a slight pout), which seemed to do the trick: he smiled tightly as she heaved the door open and tumbled inside the cab.

“Ninety-fourth and Amsterdam,” she told the driver, who obediently hit the gas. Behind them, she caught a dwindling view of Wall Street Man scanning the empty street.

Have I got enough money?
she wondered suddenly. SoHo to the Upper West Side—five miles of Manhattan traffic—was going to cost more than twenty dollars. Yet another thing to worry about.

Deal with it later
, she told herself.
One problem at a time
.

The back of the taxi was freezing. Mary had her arms wrapped around herself as she huddled against the backrest, still shivering (nonstop since she’d awakened), her dried-sweat-covered skin scratching against the cheap weave of the borrowed coverall (which she was so tired of being grateful for, because she
hated it)
, the cuts on her back itching.

Mary’s BlackBerry was giving its familiar, hateful LO BATT chime. She peered at the screen again—still no calls, no texts, no e-mails.
It’s my birthday and nobody cares
, she thought dismally, before reminding herself that it was only 7:08
A.M.
(according to the BlackBerry’s display). Scrolling back a day, she saw the indicator for a “To Do” item and thumbed it—and stared at it, suddenly remembering.

THURS EVE TEST PREP SCOTT

That’s right
, Mary realized, leaning forward as the taxicab banged over steel plates in the street, heading west.
Of course, of course—that’s what happened next
.

Or what was
supposed
to have happened next.

The one blight on her day, today, the one flaw in the perfect diamond of her seventeenth birthday, was Mr. Shama and his hateful physics test—something about Bernoulli’s Principle, which she had never come close to understanding. Shama’s frantic blackboard scribbling—all those symbols and numbers scrawled across the board while the diminutive teacher waved his arms, fluorescent lights gleaming on his bald head—was nonsense to her, pure hieroglyphics. Which was where Scott Sanders came in.

Scott was in the class with her. He was quiet and shy and round-faced, with gold-rimmed eyeglasses like those worn by Mr. Shama, whose every utterance Scott seemed to instantly comprehend in his preternaturally calm way. Scott had gotten early acceptance at Princeton or Stanford—Mary couldn’t remember which—and would soon be joining the ranks of pasty-skinned, virginal
Star Trek
and
Battlestar Galactica
fans who handled all the engineering and ran all the computers in the world.

But, more important than any of that, Scott was Mary’s “nerd lifeline” (although she’d never say it that way to him). Out of the goodness of his heart and his Borg Collective brain, Scott had agreed to help her with physics (just like he’d helped her with chemistry and geometry last year, and, come to think of it, every hard class they’d shared since he’d arrived at Chadwick in eighth grade). In a school full of snarky pseudo-debutantes and trust-fund jocks, Scott was that wonder of wonders: a legitimately nice person who was willing to help those less endowed with genius than himself. How many times had Scott’s homemade flash cards and drill sheets and “private tutorials”—evening hours spent together at Chadwick or at the Midtown branch library—completely saved her? Mary wasn’t sure, but the thing that amazed her the most was that Scott never seemed to want anything in return. He was “happy to help”—he was always happy to help, and left it at that.