Klepto (14 page)

“I’m sorry. I just wanted to say, dinner’s in about twenty minutes. You want milk?”

“Okay. Thank you. Good-
bye!
” I said. How irritating.

“
Okay
. You don’t have to be so touchy.” She closed the door. Did she notice the jeans? That whole exchange was too quick for her to notice, right? I changed back into my painters pants.

We ate dinner watching reruns of
I Dream of Jeannie
and
The Partridge Family
—our love of reruns was one of the few things we had in common.

“What’ll you do if you don’t get into RISD?” I asked Ellie during a commercial.

“I don’t know, it’ll totally suck. I’ll have to go to one of my safety schools.”

“I heard Mom and Dad fighting about the cost of tuition the other day. I mean, I probably shouldn’t tell you, ’cause you shouldn’t feel guilty or anything. . . .” I said.

“No, I already know. But they fight about everything. Their marriage is, like, totally on the rocks,” Ellie said, eating a forkful of mashed potatoes.

“Yeah,” I said. Then we watched a Pine-Sol commercial without saying anything.

“What do you think would happen if they got a divorce?” I said.

“I don’t know,” Ellie said. “They’d stop fighting, I guess.”

 

 

Before bed, I was washing my face in the bathroom that Ellie and I shared. You had to walk through Ellie’s room to get to it, which was okay, ’cause Ellie was a pretty deep sleeper—she didn’t wake up if I came in to pee in the middle of the night.

“Jule?” she said from her bed, her lap covered with different-sized paintbrushes. She was doing a small water-color painting of her bedroom windows.

“Yeah?” I poked my head through the bathroom doorway, my mouth full of foamy toothpaste.

“Where were you after school today?”

“What?” I gargled.

“Did you have something after school today? How come you came home so late?”

I spit out and rinsed. This gave me a few seconds to think.

“I stayed after to rehearse with Max, my scene partner.”

“Oh,” she said. I waited a few seconds. She seemed to buy it.

“Jule?” she asked again, and I held my breath a little.

“Yeah,” I said, burying my face in a towel.

“I promise I’ll knock next time,” she said, looking at me.

“Okay, thanks,” I said.

“Sleep tight,” she said.

 

 

I got in bed and stared up at the ceiling for a while, thinking about what a liar I was. I lied to Ellie. I couldn’t tell her I went to Sak’s after school ’cause she’d want to know if I got anything and then I’d have to lie about that. I wondered if it was really bad of me to lie so much. My acting teacher, Mrs. Zeig, always said, “If you lie in life, you lie onstage.” I lay there thinking as long as I was a dishonest person I’d always be a dishonest actress. A bad actress.

Then I thought about my new Girbaud jeans and got excited.
What top should I wear with them tomorrow?
I wondered.
Or should I wait and save them for a special occasion?
I went through my wardrobe in my head. Maybe my white long-sleeved shirt with the tiny dancing cartoon guys and musical notes in purple and green and black would go good with the jeans. It was the shirt I was wearing one time when Julie pointed out I dress more cute than sexy. She didn’t mean it in a bad way, I could tell, but it kind of hurt my feelings. Julie could pull off dressing sexy ’cause she was pretty big-chested. I didn’t even start to have a chest until, like, a year ago. Anyway, I liked my musical notes shirt in spite of what Julie said, and it would look great with my new jeans. I’d tell Ellie that I borrowed the jeans from Julie. But I wouldn’t say anything unless she asked.

 

 

Ugh. Scene Day finally arrived, and I was so unbelievably nervous even though Max and I had rehearsed and rehearsed and we knew we were ready.

“The purpose of Scene Day,” Mrs. Zeig tried to convince us, “is to determine which part of the
craft
each of you needs to work on.”

Yeah, right. What it really felt like was the whole drama department watching and judging if you were a good actor or not, based on this one stupid scene.

In the auditorium there was a big stage with movable audience seats. So for Scene Day we created a “theater in the round”—a space on the floor in the middle of the room where we performed, surrounded by chairs on all four sides. Mrs. Zeig sat in a chair a little bit off the stage announcing our names and each scene before we went on. Max and I were third, thank God. I don’t think I could have stood it if we went last or near the end.

So we did our scene. Somehow that first line—“Wasn’t she cross with you on account of your fighting?”—came out of my mouth and it didn’t sound weird. I just said it like of course I say stuff like that all the time. Max responded, and I thought we were playing off each other well. And then, before I knew it, we had done the whole scene. Once it was over, I didn’t really remember it. Julie said that was a good sign, that that meant I was really in it, that I wasn’t self-conscious or watching myself. Julie said I was really good but she was biased, of course. All I knew was that I was so nervous that my hands were freezing, but once I was out there onstage, all my nervousness went away. It was the best feeling of relief when we were done and everyone applauded. Mrs. Zeig gave me a warm smile and squeezed my shoulder as I passed her on my way to the bathroom to change out of my costume.

On my way back to the auditorium, I ran into Josh.

“Wow,” he said, just looking at me. “You were, like, so
real
.”

“Thanks,” I said, like it was no biggie, but I could not stop smiling the hugest smile.

12

Maybe Something Was Wrong with Me

February was freezing, but that didn’t stop Julie and me from going to the outdoor flea market on Greene Street where I saw this gorgeous vintage cigarette holder. It was a long black plastic tube with a white stripe around the middle and rhinestones, like from the 1920s. I imagined a flapper girl in a red fringe dress and red satin gloves smoking with it. I suddenly felt like I just had to have it—not that I was really gonna use it, it was just so pretty.

This lady was selling all kinds of tchotchkes like cigarette holders and cases, old-fashioned tins, hair stuff, and old hats that were, like, part veil. She had long, silvery-white hair in a ponytail, but her face was young-looking. She wore a big man’s checked wool shirt.

Julie was opening and closing this silver cigarette case, and I was eyeing the holder with rhinestones, and the ponytail lady said to Julie, “That’s sterling silver.” She had a Southern accent, and you could see little puffs of her breath in the cold. “And an antique.”

“Uh-huh,” Julie said.

“Could use some shining up; just needs a little silver polish.” Her eyes were an intense dark blue and crinkly when she smiled.

“Yeah,” Julie said, flipping it over to see the price: thirty-five dollars.

“That’s an excellent price for an antique,” said the ponytail lady, lightly hopping from one foot to the other and hugging her gloved hands under her armpits.

“Uh-huh,” Julie said again. She kept opening and closing it; I couldn’t figure out what she was doing. Inside the case was a little piece of purple felt. Then the lady answered some other customer’s questions about a set of wineglasses or something and when she came back to us, Julie said, “Would you sell it for twenty-five dollars?” The ponytail lady frowned and thought a minute.

“I’d go to thirty, but I can’t go lower than that. It was my great-grandmother’s. See those initials there in the corner? SSB? That was my great-grandmother, Stella Schuman Brandt.”

“Wow,” Julie said. “Cool.”

“You girls aren’t smokers are you?” the ponytail lady said. “Don’t smoke, it’s bad for you. What are you, sixteen?”

“Yes,” I said. Sometimes I couldn’t help lying. I had just turned fifteen the weekend before, and Julie and I celebrated at Serendipity, this amazing ice-cream and dessert place. Julie would turn fifteen in October, so we actually wouldn’t be sixteen till next year.

“It’s a present for my older brother,” Julie explained. “He smokes—he’s twenty-four.”

“Ah,” the ponytail lady said. “Just a moment.” And she went down to the other end of her long rectangular table to open some matching canisters for a guy. I was still eyeing the black cigarette holder with the rhinestones.

“Do you want that?” Julie asked me under her breath. I nodded. Very slowly she turned around, so her back was to the table. Then she said in a very low voice, “Stick it up your sleeve . . . ready?” She looked around some more. “Now.” And I did. I put my glove back on so the cigarette holder wouldn’t fall out. I had pulled the holder from a coffee can full of plastic cigarette holders in different colors. You couldn’t really tell one was missing. Just then the lady came back to us.

“Decided?” she said to Julie. I put my hands in my coat pockets.

“I don’t know, thirty dollars is kind of a lot. . . .”

“I’m sorry, darlin’, I can’t go lower than that. Like I said, it was in my family. I’m just broken up to have to sell it.”

“Okay,” Julie said, taking out her wallet. “I’ll take it. It really is beautiful.”

“I’m sure your brother will love it,” said the lady, putting it in a plastic bag. “You have silver polish at home?”

“I think so,” Julie said, handing her cash.

“Just a little bit’ll shine it right up.” She handed the case in a little baggie to Julie. “Thank you, darlin’. Stay warm!”

“Thank you,” Julie said, and we were out of there.

Walking to the subway on Canal Street, I had so many thoughts buzzing around my head. Mostly just,
Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,
over and over like that.
I never stole at the flea market before
. It always seemed so out-in-the-open and more risky than a store. When we got a few blocks away, I pulled the black cigarette holder out of my sleeve and slipped it into my Chocolate Soup bag. I felt kind of out of breath, but I couldn’t tell if it was the excitement or the cold or because we were walking fast. Then I remembered I had a new vintage scarf to wear in my hair that I had stolen from Unique Antique Boutique after school last week. It matched the cigarette holder exactly, ’cause it was black with white dots. Usually knowing I had new stuff to wear to school the next day made me feel happy. But this time, I had a sick feeling. I started to wonder if that cigarette holder I stole also belonged to the ponytail lady’s family. Maybe Stella Schuman Brandt was a flapper back in the 1920s, and when she was twenty-five (that was the coolest age—I couldn’t wait to be twenty-five) she flipped her cigarettes out of her monogrammed silver case and popped them into her rhinestone holder, and her handsome boyfriend with slicked-back hair dressed in a tuxedo lit them for her.

I suddenly had this urge to turn around and go back. I wanted to inconspicuously stick the cigarette holder back in the coffee can. I could do it without the ponytail lady seeing me. I’d wait for just the right moment. But we kept walking to the subway. Just before we got to Canal Street, it actually occurred to me that we could go to Canal Jeans and look through the bowling shirts. How could I think about returning my cigarette holder one second and stealing something else the next?

When I got home from the flea market that day, I closed my bedroom door and sat on my bed holding the cigarette holder in my lap for a little while. Then I hid it in my underwear and sock drawer. I’d probably never use it. Why did I even want it in the first place? Maybe something was wrong with me. Was this really bad, what we were doing? Was something bad gonna happen to us? How long could we get away with it?

 

 

The next day I went over to Olivia Howe’s house on Central Park West. She just called me up out of nowhere and invited me over for lunch, which I thought was pretty cool. We made tuna-fish salad on whole-wheat bread like we used to all the years we were growing up together.

“So how do you like P.A.?” Olivia asked me.

“It’s pretty good. But it’s hard. There’s a ton of work,” I said, taking a bite of my sandwich. Whole-wheat bread sandwiches tasted so different from what I was used to. My mom always bought Pepperidge Farm white.

“Us, too,” Olivia said. “Dalton is
known
for its demanding homework. Like, it’s almost like
college-level
. I think it was even written up in some magazine, my dad said, as, like, one of the hardest schools in the city.” Suddenly our conversation felt tense.

“Yeah. Studying acting is really hard. We’re, like, always in rehearsal and stuff, I’m always memorizing lines—”

“Oh,” Olivia said, looking kind of put off. Was I being competitive? I didn’t mean to be; I was just trying to tell her about school. And anyway, all I heard about Dalton was that it was a school for celebrity rich kids.