SECRET Revealed (18 page)

Danica popped in with our coffees.

“Thank you, my dear,” Matilda said, easing mine in front of me. “So you saw that we’re planning Solange’s Step Seven fantasy already. We decided we’d try Ewan, Dominic’s friend. The one you recruited last year?”

Ewan was the sexy redhead I’d seen playing pickup soccer with one of Matilda’s recruits. I couldn’t resist his bratty smile, so when I asked for Dominic’s number, I was thrilled when Ewan threw his in too. Okay, so she either wasn’t going to bring up Jesse’s Step with Solange, or she didn’t think I had seen it.

“But wasn’t Ewan rejected?”

“He was rejected by last year’s Committee. But his sole naysayer has retired, and with you on board this year we’d
have unanimity. Now, Step Seven, as you know, involves something a candidate’s curious about. Turns out Solange is curious about trying something that I think might also intrigue you.”

“Oh?”

When Matilda said the word, I nearly spat my coffee across her desk.

“A
threesome
?” I sputtered. “Why me?”

“You brought Ewan in.”

“But I’ve never done … 
that
before.”

“Precisely why you’re perfect for this. Neither has Solange. And Ewan has to learn not only how to participate in a threesome but how to make a sexual neophyte—in this case, you—comfortable with a new situation. Remember: all your fears will be Solange’s fears, your reluctance much like hers. You’d be Solange’s sexual stand-in for Ewan’s training. Now you and Pauline don’t necessarily have to do anything together, or to each other, unless you want to. The focus is on what the man does to and for both of you.”

“Pauline would be the third?” Okay, this was getting freakier!

“Yes. This is her specialty. Sorry. I probably should have told you that first.”

“Does Pauline know you’re asking me?”

“She suggested you. But you should sleep on this decision. It’s a few fantasies away still. So don’t feel any pressure, Cassie. It’s all in fun.”

“Right. Of course. Fun.”

I slept on it. Next to Jesse. At his place.

In the morning, after a quick tussle, my head in the crook of his arm, I began to prod. It could not be helped. It was like my brain and mouth had been hijacked by the old pre-S.E.C.R.E.T. Cassie.

“So you did it!” I said, acting all celebratory.

“Did what?” he asked groggily.

“Solange. Her fantasy. I saw your name scratched out on the board.”

He didn’t speak.

“I guess that was it, then, your last kick at the can,” I continued. “After all, Solange is the last S.E.C.R.E.T. candidate for a while, anyhow.”

“Huh. I suppose you’re right,” he said, stretching dramatically.

“Hope you went out with a bang, so to speak.”

I immediately regretted my stupid joke. Without responding, Jesse hoisted himself off his bed.

“Come on, Cass, I’ll drive you to work. I gotta be in early. We have a four-tiered wedding cake to build for tonight.”

I didn’t budge. Fists on hips, Jesse just looked at me tangled in his sheets.

“Don’t, Cassie. I don’t ask
you
for details.”

“If you did, I’d tell you.”

“I don’t want to know.”

“Why? Because you’d be jealous, or because you don’t really care?”

What is wrong with me
?

He waited a beat and then he said something that stung me to the core. “You’re regressing.”

While he shuffled off to shower, I got up and padded around for my phone. Still wincing from his comment, I texted Matilda.

Happy to take part with Pauline. Am curious too
.

After he’d showered, Jesse dropped me off at work with a tender kiss that I had a hard time returning. When he said he’d call me later, I muttered something about being busy and that I’d call him.

“Cool beans,” he said.

“What does that even mean?”

“I am not going to get into it with you. Go.”

Dell was already in the kitchen, her recipe folders out. This was our routine every Tuesday morning. We sat side by side on benches next to the pastry table to tweak and assess which plates from the week before were hits and which were met with tepid approval. Then we adjusted the special menu and coming inventory accordingly. Why bother buying thirty Cornish hens if no one ate them?

“People loved the Bordelaise shrimp spaghetti last night,” she said, as I pulled up a stool next to her. She didn’t even bother with “hello.”

Now this was a woman who was all about her work.

“Eggplant fritters were good too,” she added.

“Yeah, more of those,” I replied, making dramatic checkmarks. I had to shake this mood. “Let’s not press the frogs’ legs.”

“Let me try them with my gran’s jerk rub.”

“Okay, yeah. But not this week. And maybe bones out next time.”

We went through the salads carefully, since produce was expensive in February and Mardi Gras week demanded crowd-friendly fare.

We were concentrating so hard I barely noticed Claire crossing the kitchen to head out back for a cigarette, alarming for two reasons: I thought she had quit smoking, and she seemed to be in a zombie trance.

“She’s a moody little thing,” Dell said.

“She’s a teenager. They’re all moody little things. You still are,” I said.

Since the restaurant opened, I’d been spending less time with Claire, which might be why I hadn’t noticed her gradual drop in energy, or that dark cloud that now followed her everywhere. I grabbed a cardigan hanging on a hook and threw it around my shoulders to follow Claire out back. I found her blowing smoke through the fence.

“Brrr, it better warm up before the parades or I’m skipping them.”

“I know, I know. I’ll wash my hands after my cigarette,” she said, not looking at me.

“I know you will. What’s going on? You seem down.” I sounded like the guidance counselor in an after-school special.

She turned to face me. It’s funny how you can look at someone without really seeing them. This time I saw her face pulled gaunt and made shadowy from bad sleep. She looked older, haunted. She could have passed for a preoccupied thirty-year-old mom. Maybe she was pregnant!

“Can I leave a little early today, Cass? Maureen can close the Café on her own,” she said, her voice quavering.

I noticed orange and yellow stains on her fingers, the chain-smoker’s affliction. It wasn’t just sadness in her eyes; there was something else too. Something like terror.

“What is going on, Claire? Spit it out.”

“Forget it,” she said, tossing the cigarette and storming past me.

I grabbed her upper arm, which was thin and startlingly cold to the touch. I wouldn’t let go.

“Stop. Okay? I need you to tell me what’s going on. Is it school? Olivia? What?”

“Just some kids at school. It’s nothing.”

“What are they doing now?”

She looked around the vacant back alley as if half expecting her tormentors to be hiding here.

“They’re making my life a living
hell
,” she said, bursting into tears.

She was a toughie, a dreadlocked, tattooed teen swaggerer who beneath it all was just a deeply sad little girl. I threw an
arm around her and let her cry. I knew what it was to be bullied and to feel small. When I was her age, if my sister Lila wasn’t picking on me at home, there were a pack of mean girls whose sole job on the planet seemed to be to find my most tender spot and push against it until it bruised.

“Hey, hey, hey,” I said as her sobs subsided. “Is this about that whole Ben thing?”

“Yeah,” she said, looking astonished that I remembered the name of a guy she’d been spending time with. “I thought it was over. But they’re fucking harassing me.”

“Who is?”

“All of them. The girls. Olivia … the others. Her friends, who used to be my friends. Ben showed them a picture. It was meant … just for him. God! I was the nothing girl, then I was the new girl. Now I’m the dirty fucking whore.”

I winced as she recounted how the girls had posted this picture online. It involved, I assumed, some nudity. That was followed by taunting posts labeling Claire a filthy slut and whore, asking her to move back to Slidell where she belonged. I would have thought a creative arts school would be populated by more progressive, open-minded kids, but it seemed the cruelty of youth knew no bounds.

“Have you told your uncle?”

“Right, so he can go talk to their parents and embarrass the shit out of me and make things even worse? If he knew how bad it was, he’d tell my dad and my dad would make me move back to Slidell, and I don’t want to. I love it here. I love living with Uncle Will and working here with you
guys. I don’t want to go back to the boonies. I wanna stay here. Dell’s teaching me stuff.” Her body vibrated like a little bird’s.

“What can I do? How can I help you?”

She started sobbing anew, her head bowed forward, the weight of her dreads pulling it low. Dell poked her head out back, ignoring the sadness coming off our little scene.

“Meat delivery’s here. They want a check,” Dell said, eyeing Claire with concern.

“Okay. Be right there.”

I turned back to Claire and placed both my hands on her arms, centering her in front of me so she would listen clearly.

“Go home, Claire. We’ll figure this out. But you have to tell your uncle Will.”

“I can’t.”

“Then let me talk to him tomorrow when he comes in. What’s being done and said about you, we have to find a way to let these girls know they can’t do that. It’s the only way.”

She nodded, her mouth and nose now covered by her apron. I wanted to fold her up and put her in my pocket forever. I wanted to protect her from the world’s cruelty. Instead, I kissed her on the temple and went back inside, leaving her alone to smoke another cigarette and pull herself together. I had never wanted kids of my own, yet mothering this one seemed to come to me so easily and felt so good.

Later that night, mid-shift, after carting up plates for busy waiters who were in the weeds and stirring sauces while Dell plated some beautiful langoustines, I had a moment of
clarity. I used to let people bully me, too, for years. I never believed that I had a say or a voice. I thought bullying was something to be tolerated, first from my sad, repressed family, then from my drunk of a husband. But I got over that kind of thinking and Claire would too. I had found a purpose and a meaning in my life, and I could help her find that too. She would come to see that life was bigger and brighter than the shit she was going through in high school. If I couldn’t stop the bullying she was being subjected to, at least I would help her see that things could get better later. She had to believe a better world was waiting for her.

At the end of our busiest, craziest shift yet, Dell and I perched on bar stools, brandy snifters in hand, panting a little at what we’d accomplished.

“I think that was the best night we’ve had,” I said, clinking her glass. “And it’s not even Mardi Gras.”

“When you dropped that beautiful langoustine—I know you were thinking about wiping it on your apron and putting it back on that plate.”

“I was not! I would
never
do that, Dell!”

She gave me a sidelong look and we both burst out laughing.

“I did almost do that. I panicked!”

“You did great tonight, Cassie. A real
restaurateur
,” she said, exaggerating the Frenchness of the word.

I almost cried.

My phone vibrated in my pocket. When I saw it was a text from Will, my heart leapt from my rib cage. I wished
he had been there that night, had seen me handling everything so calmly and competently.

He wrote:
You still at work?

Oh dear. What was this? A booty call?

I am. We had a great night tonight! Best yet. What’s up?

I stared at the screen, heart racing, waiting for a reply. The phone rang instead. It was him.

“Cassie,” Will said, not sounding like Will. “I’m at the hospital. Can you come? It’s Claire. Something happened.”