Privileged (27 page)
“I’m so, so sorry for any pain I caused you,” I told the twins. “Don’t let hating me screw up your test tomorrow.”
“Like you give a shit.” Rose snorted. “We’ll be reading about ourselves in fucking
Scoop
.”
For a second I wondered how much more they knew about me. Had they made the
Scoop
connection, too? “I know you don’t believe me, Rose, but I do care about you. So much. And Will—”
He shook his head. “Megan—if that really is your name—don’t. Whatever you were going to say, just . . . don’t.”
He turned and headed down the stairs. I didn’t even think about following him.
“We’re going to our rooms now,” Rose said. “When we get up in the morning, I strongly suggest that you be gone.”
That was it. I went into my suite and shut the door behind me. Numbly, I called a cab to the airport, rinsed myself off in the shower, changed into ugly Century 21 outfit number two, and packed my stuff. It didn’t take long, since I was taking back to New York only what I’d brought from New York. Everything else—the clothes from Marco and the girls, the makeup, the gear, the bling, even the flatiron—I piled neatly on the bed. On top of it all, I put the check from Laurel, the ATM card to the bank account Laurel had opened for me, and my flash drive.
I wrote a note to Marco, too. He’d befriended me when I’d needed a friend the most. What had I done? I had used him.
I’m sorry
felt grossly inadequate, but I said it anyway.
Then, dressed exactly as I’d arrived at Les Anges, with the same backpack over my shoulder, I headed for the front gate to meet my cab, stopping only to slip my note under the door of Marco’s cottage. I was leaving behind everything I’d gotten in Palm Beach—everything, including my heart.
Identify which part, if any, of the following sentence is incorrect:
(a)
Serendipity
is a concept that seems (b)
vague and theoretical
, but (c)
which
actually plays a role in most (d)
peoples
lives. (e) No error
I
jammed my hands in my pockets against the biting cold as I trudged up the steps at the Astor Place subway stop on the downtown number 6.
The night before had been the worst of my life. Beavering half of New York and getting burned out of my apartment paled in comparison. I’d huddled in the Palm Beach airport until 6:10 A.M., when I was finally able to get on a flight to La Guardia, and then I’d been shoved into coach purgatory between a crying baby and a hygienically challenged guy. It reminded me of one of my earlier vocab lessons with the girls—a thought that made me smile before I found my chin trembling.
There was DIRECTV on my seat back, but I couldn’t watch. All I could do was think of how I’d made a mess not just of my life but of a lot of other lives, too. I willed Rose and Sage to be at the SAT testing center in West Palm. I hoped with everything I had that they would put aside last night and do their best.
The weather in New York was gray and fifty degrees colder than in Palm Beach. I was surrounded by the pasty faces of an urban workforce who didn’t get much sun. When I reached the top step of the Astor Place station, the winter storm that had been in the offing since I landed smacked me like a slap of reproach. Icy wind bit my face; slanting snow gathered on my eyelashes. I had no gloves, boots, scarf, hat, or jacket. When I’d departed in such a hurry from New York two months ago, I hadn’t given a thought to the fact that I’d be returning in the middle of winter.
A middle-aged man in a long coat racing for the subway steps jostled me; I slipped on the icy sidewalk. Out went my feet. I fell heavily to the ground, my ass landing in one of those snow/slush/dog pee puddles that just scream
winter in New York.
Welcome home.
Thoroughly soaked, teeth chattering, I slogged east past the cheap-chic shops and restaurants of St. Mark’s Place. When I got to East Seventh Street, the bells of St. Stanislaus began to chime as I let myself into my old building. It no longer smelled of smoke, but of the ethnic dishes cooked by its residents: stuffed cabbage from the Polish lady on the ground level, kimchi from the Korean couple on two, homemade borscht from the Russian family on three, serious cheeba from the Rasta on four.
And then, finally, I was at my door. It was a good thing, too. My ass had frozen into an ice sculpture.
I’d called Charma from La Guardia to warn her that I’d be home a little bit early. There’d been no answer, which had led me to think that she was out doing one of her children’s theater tours. But when I unlocked the three locks and opened the door, I found Charma oh so naked and oh so
entwined
with the guy in the Wolfmother T-shirt from the park that Sunday from so long ago, when I’d first lost my backpack.
I stumbled back into the hallway and slammed the door shut. “Ohmigod. I am so sorry!” I yelled through the door. “I’ll be back!”
“No, wait, don’t go! We’ll get dressed!” Charma yelled back.
I was frozen and miserable enough to wait. A few moments later, Charma opened the door, wearing a green bathrobe. I saw Wolfmother behind her, zipping up his jeans with difficulty. Apparently, my surprise entrance hadn’t yet deflated his enthusiasm.
“I am so sorry!” I repeated as I stepped back into the apartment.
Charma laughed. “Why don’t you have a coat? Change clothes, and I’ll make tea.” I went into the bathroom and dug out my other Century 21 outfit from my backpack, thankful it was dry, but depressed as hell to be putting it on. I laid my clothes over the shower-curtain pole.
“Much better,” Charma approved when I came back out. She gave me a big hug. “Welcome home! Megan, this is Gary Carner. Gary, this is my roommate, Megan.”
He grinned and pointed at me. “You’re the one who calls me Wolfmother, right? Because of the T-shirt I was wearing the day I met Charma.”
“Guilty,” I admitted. “I called and said I’d be early,” I told Charma. “I guess I should have—”
“No big deal,” Wolfmother cut in. “Just doin’ what comes naturally.”
Charma smiled lovingly at Wolfmother and put on a teakettle in the kitchen. I wandered through an apartment whose four walls were familiar but whose contents were entirely new to me. Gone was the ruined found-on-the-street gear, replaced by the sixties Levittown-chic furniture that had once belonged to Charma’s grandmother. There was one other surprise—what had been Charma’s bedroom before the fire was now subdivided into two smaller spaces by a removable dividing wall. There was a single platform bed in each little room. It was clear which of these was mine—the one that wasn’t strewn with clothing and massage oil.
“You like?” Charma asked, handing me a mug.
After my suite at the twins’ manse, these looked like jail cells. No, wait. Coffins.
“It’s great,” I replied, trying to hide my dismay.
“Charma’s really loud when we fuck,” Wolfmother told me. “I don’t think those dividers will do much. So maybe you can just crank your iPod.”
“Don’t you guys ever go to your place?” I asked him, sipping my tea and trying to sound casual.
“I used to be in a thing with my roommate,” Wolfmother explained. “So we mostly chill here.”
We went back to the kitchen and sat at the new—to me, anyway—pea-green Formica table.
“How come you’re home early?” Charma wondered. “I thought you weren’t coming until tomorrow.”
“I thought I wasn’t coming until tomorrow, either,” I confessed.
“So?”
Maybe I would have filled Charma in if Wolfmother aka Gary aka Oversharing Guy hadn’t been scratching his crotch that I was already much too familiar with.
“There was a problem. I came home. That’s it.”
Charma looked closely at me. “What do you mean, ‘a problem’? Do you still get the money if the twins get in to Duke?”
“Like that’s gonna happen!” Wolfmother interjected, chuckling. “Charma told me all about your gig, and I saw their thing in
Vanity Fair
. Laughed my ass off.”
“Actually,” I said, warming my hands on the mug, “they might just get in.”
“I’m pretty sure an IQ is mandatory,” Wolfmother opined.
“Megs, you didn’t answer my question,” Charma said. “Will you still get the money or not?”
I shook my head.
“Wait,
what
?” Charma exclaimed. “They got all that work out of you, and then they fucked you?”
“No, babe, I fucked
you
.” Wolfmother leaned over to kiss Charma, then smiled at me. “Charma found her G-spot yesterday. Isn’t that a killer?”
Killer? I was going to have to kill him.
“Wow,” I ventured.
“Did you have any idea it was coming?” Charma asked. She pointed at Wolfmother. “And don’t say
I’m
coming!” She giggled.
“Not a clue. I mean . . .” I sipped my tea. “It was terrible at first. All they did was insult me. I did this whole makeover thing just so I’d fit in. In Palm Beach, you’re either a hair-makeup-designer-clothes diva, or you’re the hired help. It’s a whole subculture I’d never seen before.”
“Gotta love that elitist shit!” Wolfmother crowed. “Tell us more.”
“You name a vice, Palm Beach kids have it,” I offered.
“You partied with those guys?” Wolfmother queried.
“I’ve been to three charity balls in the last six weeks, and I missed twice that many.” I shook my head at the insanity of it all.
“And you got to know a lot of those kids personally?” he asked.
“Better than I ever thought I would.”
Wolfmother scratched the stubble on his chin and looked at me intently. “Charma told me you worked for
Scoop
before you went to Florida.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You’ve done more serious writing than that?”
“When I was at Yale.” I yawned and realized how tired I was.
“Did Charma tell you what I do for a living?”
I drained my tea and rose to set the cup in the sink. “Nope.”
“I’m a magazine editor. At
Rockit
. Funny, I never saw you in the building.”
My exhaustion evaporated in an instant. Wolfmother was an editor at
the
magazine where I wanted to write? He and Charma could do it all night, every night, and I’d be their one-woman cheering section if he’d give me a chance to show him my clips.
I tried to remain cool. On the surface, at least. “That’s a great magazine.”
“I’d love to see what you have to say about your experience down there,” he suggested. “If you’re interested.”
Oh my God.
Was I interested
? I had enough material for five articles. “Definitely.”
“You know our editorial stance, right? Don’t hold back. Tell it all. The juicier the better—sex, drugs, rock and roll. If it’s good, I can make it a feature. Say, ten to twelve thousand words?”
Ten to twelve thousand words? That was major. Career-making major.
“Sounds interesting,” I mused, as if it were no big thing and I got offered to do a major feature for
Rockit
every day.
“Go for it, Megan,” Charma urged. “That’s exactly the kind of story you always said you wanted to write.”
Wolfmother and Charma decided to have breakfast at San Loco on Tenth and A, but I declined the offer to join them. All I wanted was a hot bath. Natch, there was no hot water. So I tried to go to sleep, but even as exhausted as I was, it was a lost cause. I had grown used to the sound of the ocean and the birds in the palm trees, not the roar and rumble of the Department of Sanitation trucks and ambulances screaming north on First Avenue every few minutes.
But mostly, it was the roar in my head that kept me awake. I had no job and no money. Wolfmother had offered me a lifeline. What kind of a fool wouldn’t grab hold?
I got out my iBook, propped myself up on two pillows, and booted it up. I didn’t have my flash drive anymore, but I knew I wouldn’t need it. Everything I needed to remember was inside my head. I opened a new document and started to type:
HOW TO TEACH FILTHY RICH GIRLS
by Megan Smith
If a waitress works a 6-hour shift, at a pay rate of $2.10 per hour plus tips, and if her tips average out to $11.00 per hour, how much will she earn on an average night?
(a) $78.60
(b) $67.80
(c) $76.80
(d) $68.70
(e) What difference does it make? She’ll never afford her rent, anyway.
W
ould you like gravy on your kasha varnishkes?” I asked the guy with the blue Mohawk. He wore a woolly black sweater with holes in it over a fishnet shirt. I noticed a small skull tattooed on his Adam’s apple. With him was a girl with a shaved head and large discs inserted into her earlobes that stretched them to the size of dessert plates.
“Yeah, sure,” Mohawk replied, sipping the black coffee I’d already brought him and Earlobe Girl.
“And two shots of vodka,” Earlobe Girl added. “For both of us.”
They were seated at one of the eight two-seat booths that had been my section ever since I’d started waitressing at Tver, the low-budget Russian restaurant and bar on East Tenth Street near Avenue B, two days after I got back from Florida. This was my third day on the job, and I was hoping that Vadim, the owner, would push me up to the bigger tables soon. Waitresses live on their tips. More bodies equaled more money, which I—sans Laurel’s ATM card—needed badly.
Broke
didn’t begin to cover my present state of affairs. I had arrived with a couple of hundred dollars in cash from my expense money. I’d used some to buy cheap makeup at Duane Reade and almost as cheap clothes at the Sacred Threads consignment shop down the block from my apartment. You’d be surprised at the gems some people will throw away.
I was able to convince Vadim that I wasn’t your typical East Village twentysomething hipster who would flake out and not show up to work, so he offered me a job the same day I applied. Sadly, the sartorial standards of his establishment were stuck in the Soviet era—we were forced to wear the world’s ugliest black-with-white-apron waitress uniforms. If you had anything approaching womanly hips, which, thanks to Marco’s everything, I certainly did, the shiny material only magnified them.
