Stalker Girl (23 page)

Carly knew that conversations like that took place all the time. And not just between guys, either. She’d heard girls at school say worse. Still, it was creepy to be standing practically in the middle of this one, unable to move without losing her view of the stage.

Brian never talked about girls that way. And if Liam or Avery or some guy started that kind of talk he’d find a way to change the subject or suddenly remember something he’d left in the van or a call he had to make. He never got all self-righteous about it; he just didn’t go along with that bragging tell-all stuff.

“Now, that’s sick,” the storyteller said to the listener.

“No. It’s just practical. A man has to take these opportunities when they come along.”

There was no response to this pronouncement because right then, the house lights went down and the stage lights went up. Conversations dropped off and people started cheering as Liam and Avery strode onstage, looking out into the crowd., Brian walked out last, keeping his head down.

To someone who didn’t know him, he might appear shy. But Carly knew the lowered head meant he was focusing, gathering his energy.

As soon as Liam sat, and Brian and Avery strapped on their guitars, they launched into “Mailman,” and the audience was on its feet. Some sang along. Brian’s eyes were closed, his head moving slightly to the beat.

She wondered if the sound guy had them mixed right, because it seemed like
all
she could hear was Brian’s bass. She could feel it, too, traveling through her body. She watched his fingers move along the frets and curve around the strings and remembered how those fingers used to stroke her neck and slide down her spine before coming to rest in the small of her back.

For a second, she indulged the memory. She closed her eyes and imagined Brian standing behind her. All she’d have to do was lean back and his arms would circle her waist, his lips would find that place on her neck.

She snapped out of the reverie when she almost fell off the stool.

She tried to focus on her reason for being there. She was saying good-bye. She was putting the past behind her and moving forward with her life.

She tried to focus on being happy for Brian. He’d worked so hard, and now he was finally getting recognition. She looked around the club. It was twice as big as Train, and it was packed. She’d never seen them in front of a crowd that big. People were still coming in, too. Finn and Mike were still at the door, checking a steady flow of IDs.

“Mailman” ended to long, loud applause. Avery took off the Strat, put it on a stand behind him, and picked up his beloved Gibson acoustic while the clapping died down. Brian stayed in his corner, smiling at no one in particular.

When Avery got back to the mic, there was more applause.

“Thank you. Thank you very much.” He waited for the second wave of applause to die out and said, “So this next one is our newest. My brother here—” He held his arm out toward Brian, who nodded shyly while people applauded and hooted and whistled. “My brother Brian here writes all our songs. Don’t ask me where he gets his ideas. Although with this one I think maybe I know. See, there’s this girl—”

Carly’s stomach tightened. Her throat contracted.

Everyone else laughed.

“Oh, wow. This is so bizarre. There she is—” Avery held an arm out toward the door and every head in the house turned to see Taylor laughing as she talked to Finn and Mike, whose stony faces seemed to light up in her presence. She shook her head, pulled an ID out of the back pocket of her jeans, and handed it to Finn, who handed it to Mike, who shined his flashlight on it. She kept talking, seemingly oblivious to the fact that everyone in the entire club was looking at her.

Carly had to get out of there. Fast.

She’d seen an EXIT sign on her way upstairs. It was over the door to the hall where the bathrooms were. She could be down the stairs and out back before they even started looking for her. But she couldn’t pull herself away. She needed to see what happened next.

“Hey, Taylor.” Avery had one hand over his eyes to block out the glare of the lights. He gave a little wave with the other and Taylor finally turned around and looked up on the stage, surprised. “Oh, hey, Ma.” Everyone laughed again and looked back at the door. Sure enough, there was Sheryl, standing right behind Taylor, talking excitedly to Finn while digging through her purse. When she pulled out a wallet, she held it up in the air like a trophy.

“Hey, Mr. Doorman, that’s my moms. You gots to let her in.”

More laughter. Sheryl was laughing, too, gesturing toward the stage and nodding. Even Finn was laughing.

“Anyway,” Avery continued his introduction, “the name of this song is, ‘Same Goes for Me.’” He turned toward Brian, who counted off.

Carly looked back at the door. Sheryl and Taylor were gone, and Finn wasn’t smiling anymore.

He was scanning the crowd, looking for the fake girlfriend.

The imposter.

The wannabe.

The usta-be.

She started moving. The place was a lot more crowded now, and she had to squeeze her way through a lot of bodies.

“Excuse me. Sorry. Excuse me.”

She’d seen Shira Zeidman in the crowd and steered clear of her. Not that she thought Shira even knew who she was, but just in case.

Some people stepped aside or leaned back to give her space. Others gave her dirty looks and refused to budge. Eventually she made it to the bottom of the stairs. She peeked around the corner to the door. Taylor was nowhere in sight. Finn and Mike were huddled with another grim-faced, official-looking guy. Finn handed that guy the clipboard and took off toward the front of the club, walkie-talkie in hand, scanning the crowd. Mike went the other way, also holding a walkie-talkie.

She followed the EXIT sign down to the end of the hall where the bathrooms were. The exit was a big, heavy door with a red handle that read:

Carly ran through her options in her head: She could open the door, trigger the alarm, and run for it. How far would she get before Finn and Mike picked up the trail? What did she even know about what was behind the door? What if she couldn’t find her way out of the alley?

Catty-corner to the exit was one more door, marked EMPLOYEES ONLY. It was open slightly. She peeked in to see a long, dimly lit staircase and cases of beer stacked along the wall at the bottom. She considered heading down, hiding in the basement until closing, and then mixing into the crowd when everyone left. She could ditch the hoodie, let her hair down.

Before she could think this plan through, she heard the blip and fuzz of a walkie-talkie and saw someone heading up the stairs from the basement.

The voice on the walkie-talkie asked, “You check the basement?”

As the footsteps got closer, she heard her friend Finn say, “Yup.”

She held her breath, pushed the emergency handle, and braced herself for the alarm. The door gave without a sound, opening onto an alley that smelled of cigarette smoke mixed with garbage mixed with something buttery and sweet.

A guy in a stained white jacket and checked pants stood outside the kitchen of the restaurant next door, smoking a cigarette and speaking Spanish into a cell phone. Behind him she heard the clatter and bang of pots and pans and happy, accordion-heavy music.

He kept talking on his phone as he looked Carly up and down.

“Hi,” she said, smiling, trying not to look scared or guilty despite feeling very much of both. “Um,
hola
. Excuse me.
Por favor
. Can you tell me which way is out?”

Bittersweet was about a third of the way down a long block. From where she stood, the shorter way to the end of the block looked dark, like maybe it was a dead end, like maybe she didn’t want to walk down it alone. It would take longer to get to the other, well-lit end, but it was a much less scary prospect.

He shrugged, took another drag off his cigarette and said
“Nada”
into the phone.

For a girl with a Puerto Rican best friend and a job in that best friend’s family’s restaurant, Carly had a pathetic command of Spanish. But she tried.
“Dónde es la—la
—
”
She had no idea how to say
out
or
exit
, so she said
“puerta
,
”
door.

He stared at her and pointed to the door she just came out of, then turned his back, like he didn’t want anything to do with the crazy
chica
yelling at him in the alley.

“No. No. Out of
here
.” He turned back around. She pointed down with both hands. And then up, to indicate over the building, toward the street. “How do I get out?!” She was practically shouting, in that obnoxious way people do when trying to communicate with someone who doesn’t speak their language. But she didn’t care how she looked, or sounded. She was desperate. Finn and Mike could burst through that exit any second.

Her desperation must have come through, because the guy ended his conversation with a quick “
Adiós,
” closed his phone, and pointed down the alley toward the dark, short end.

“Or you can go through here,” he said, nodding toward the kitchen.

His English was perfect, like he was born and raised in New York. Not even a trace of an accent. Carly should have felt like an idiot, but she was too busy feeling like a criminal. A criminal about to get caught.

“Some guy bothering you or something?”

“Something like that,” she said as she stepped through the
puerta
.

 

Carly looked around the shiny wood table at her parents, her ex-almost stepfather, and her lawyer. “Really. It didn’t have anything to do with wanting to be her. I just didn’t want to wait on line.”

Susan took a deep, skeptical breath and said, “Okay. Let’s say we tell them that bit about you just wanting to get into the club to say a silent good-bye. How in the world do we explain what you did Friday night?”

Carly wished she knew.

AFTER THE
Bittersweet incident, Carly thought for sure she was done with what she could see perfectly clearly was crazy behavior. Getting chased into a dark alley by two large men for having gained entry to a club under false pretenses will do that.

So she vowed to herself that it was the end.

Four days. She had four days of normalcy. She finished her paper on the Triangle Fire. Wrote her essay for Denman. It was pretty good, too. She wrote about that first trip to Turkey and how it hooked her on archaeology.

She was beginning to feel like she might be able to put it all behind her.

And then Friday rolled around.

 

Isabelle and her sister Nancy decided to go on a spa weekend, and Isabelle didn’t want Carly staying alone in the apartment. Normally she would have stayed at Val’s, but Val was visiting Cornell that weekend. Carly didn’t want to spend the weekend at Nick’s.

She hadn’t recrossed the threshold between Nick’s studio and the rest of the loft since leaving in June. She knew that even a glimpse of the river or the sight of sun pouring through the floor-to-ceiling windows onto the hardwood floors would make going back to the hovel even more torturous. The loft was home. But it was no longer hers.

And from what Jess had told her, it sounded like it was soon going to be Chantal’s.

Nick had been urging Carly to come down and hang out ever since she got back from Stony Hollow. She still had a key. He told her she could come anytime, whether he was home or not. She could hang out, maybe do her homework. Whatever she wanted. When Isabelle made her plans for the spa weekend, he amped up his case. It would just be the three of them: Carly and Jess and him.

“We’ll get a veggie special from Salvatore’s. Rent a movie.”

When Carly didn’t jump at the invitation, Nick brought out the guilt.

“You know, Carly, I think this would be good for Jess. She told me she’s worried about you. And with your mother’s depression, I’m worried about her. She needs her big sister.”

How could she refuse?

 

Carly was used to the strange feeling she’d get whenever she stepped off the train at Fourteenth Street now that it was no longer her station. But that Friday afternoon, with the prospect of a whole weekend at the loft ahead of her, it was worse. Her body felt like it was heading home, but her mind knew otherwise, and the confusion made her slightly dizzy.

They passed the newsstand where her mother used to buy the
Times
from Saleem in the morning and the
Post
from Raj in the afternoon, but the face looking out now was a stranger’s. She’d never seen the man playing saxophone or the two transit cops who stood by the stairs, eyeing the crowd and talking about some Johnny Depp movie they both saw. Carly used to know all the buskers and cops, if not by name, then at least by sight. These people were strangers.

Even with Jess’s hand in hers, she felt isolated and alone and cranky. As they headed from the subway stop to the loft, Carly found herself hating everyone she saw. Skinny women with blown-out hair clomping along on their skinny high heels. Overly groomed men in their casual designer clothes. Blinged-out gangsta wannabes.

And their little dogs, too. Everyone seemed to have a little dog in a little designer dog bag.

Black SUVs with tinted windows were double- and triple-parked along the street, their suited drivers out on the sidewalk, talking into cell phones or smoking cigarettes or checking out the women. Like the two tall, blonde ones bent over a map on the sidewalk ahead. They were arguing in a language Carly thought might be Swedish or maybe Norwegian, one of them jabbing the book with one finger, and pointing down the street with the other, saying, “
Ja! Ja!
Stella McCartney.”