The Carlyles (8 page)

The Poor Little Rich Girl Blues

Jack leaned back against the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art as she sucked down the Splenda-sweetened dregs of her iced coffee. Jiffy Bennett, Genevieve Coursy, and Sarah Jane Jenson were perched around her, smoking Merits and occasionally glancing down at the shirtless skater boys performing tricks on the steps below. This was where they always ended up hanging out when there was nowhere else to go, and even though it was kind of boring, Jack felt totally at home. This was her junior year, when she would get the lead in
The Nutcracker,
be the toast of New York City, maintain an A-plus average, and
finally
have sex with J.P. It was all too perfect, and it was all about to come true.

“So what was up with that girl in French?” Jiffy asked as she turned her freckled face to the sun and exhaled a cloud of smoke in the direction of the skaters.

“Baby Carlyle?” Sarah Jane looked over and readjusted her glasses. “I don’t know. My mom knew the Carlyles’ mom in school, though, and apparently she’s a total freak, too.” Sarah Jane had practically white eyelashes and eyebrows, giving her a permanently startled expression. “But their grandmother was
the
Avery Carlyle, so, you know, they can’t, like, ban Avery and Baby from Constance. . . .” She trailed off, sighing.

“
The
Avery Carlyle? What does that mean?” Jack asked. Talking about the Carlyles was so boring. She’d rather talk about something interesting.

Like herself, for instance?

“You don’t know who Avery Carlyle is?” Sarah Jane looked even more surprised than usual. “She was, like, one of those old lady philanthropists. She hung out with Brooke Astor, Annette de la Renta . . . all them. One of my aunts was friends with her. Apparently, she had affairs with at least one royal in every European country. My aunt said it was her goal or something.” Sarah Jane nodded summarily.

Thank you, Miss
Town & Country
.

“Whatever,” Genevieve said loyally. She leaned back on her elbows so that her boobs stuck out for the viewing pleasure of the gaggle of Frisbee-toting St. Jude’s guys walking past.

“It’s not like she can win that election thing anyway, right? You’re going to do it.” Genevieve shaded her eyes from the sun and squinted over at Jack. Last year, Genevieve had been Jack’s best friend. But Genevieve had spent the summer with her producer dad in L.A., where she’d had a less-than-five-minute fling with Breck O’Dell, the star of some stupid summer movie. Now she was completely full of herself. Not like Jack was jealous or anything. Having a fling with a B-list movie star was bordering on tacky.

“You totally should do it. You’d get to do something about the auditorium and the mirrors and the uniforms, and you’d be responsible for social events—we could totally have a huge, school-funded party with the Riverside Prep boys. Or maybe St. Jude’s. What do you think?” Jiffy asked eagerly as she pawed through the purple information packet detailing the position’s duties. She wore two ponytails on either side of her head in some sort of farm girl look that was an attempt to be Anna Sui edgy but actually made her look like a poodle. “You’d probably want to do a party with Riverside Prep because of J.P., right?”

“Probably.” Jack smiled. For the first time, the position didn’t sound like some sort of lame, résumé-padding activity. Getting the school new uniforms and planning parties could actually be pretty cool. And since she was competing with Elisabeth Cort, that weak-bladdered, unfortunately truck-shaped girl whose breath always smelled like tuna fish, and the klepto Avery Carlyle, she doubted there’d be much campaigning necessary. Bagging the SLBO position would ensure an absolutely sparkling high school transcript, as well as allow her to be even more socially active than she already was, without lifting a finger.

“Oh my God, Breck just messaged me! He said he’s going to be in the city this weekend!” Genevieve squealed, pulling out her Treo and blushing as Sarah Jane and Jiffy crowded around the screen’s tiny display.

Jack rolled her eyes. “Okay, I’m out.” She stood up, brushing the back of her seersucker skirt. She would go home and change, and spend the afternoon with J.P. Unlike Genevieve, she had a
real
boyfriend.

Jack walked home to Sixty-third between Fifth and Madison, smiling as she caught sight of the stately ivy-covered town house with window flower boxes and an artfully curving front entrance. But as she approached, she paused. Two moving trucks stood outside. Her mother gripped the wrought-iron railing that bordered the front steps, chain-smoking Gitanes as if her life depended on it.

“Mother?” she asked, a terrible suspicion gnawing at her. Vivienne’s eyes were as red as her hair, and mascara streaks had dried into awkward rivers down her pale face. Jack walked closer and stood below her mother on the stoop. “Mom?” she said again, and looked around. Had they decided to redecorate? Three overweight men without shirts were sweating onto the polished surface of their George Nakashima turned-leg dining room table as they heaved it out the entranceway.

“Your father . . .” Vivienne sobbed noisy, racking, French-accented sobs as if she were auditioning for
Phèdre
, the French tragedy they had read last year in Madame Rogers’s class. In it, a Greek queen plots revenge on her ex-lover before completely going off the deep end. “He has sold the house and the furniture. All of it. All is gone.” She blew into her red silk handkerchief and sniffled.
“Bâtard!”
Her face clouded ominously.

Two more movers were smoking Marlboros dangerously close to Jack’s walnut four-poster canopy bed. Her bed always made her feel like royalty. Its pristine white eyelet bedspread had slipped off and was now lying in a heap on the cracked pavement.

“We’re . . .
homeless
?” Jack exclaimed in disbelief. Maybe her mother was overreacting. It wouldn’t be unusual. Whenever she spoke to Jack’s father she threw the phone against the wall. She’d been through six silver Bang & Olufsens this year.

“We will live in the upstairs garret,” Vivienne said. “It will be like when I was a girl, living in the cinquième arrondissement and going down the hall for water. It is what we must do. An artist must always suffer,” her mother finished dramatically as she gestured with her still-burning cigarette.

Jack narrowed her eyes. The garret was a collection of rooms on the top floor of their town house. In the past, her father, who now worked as an investment advisor at Citigroup, had threatened Vivienne with living up there if she didn’t stop spending money. It had become a sort of joke between Jack and her mother: they used it as storage space for some of the more extravagant and rarely used items they purchased on shopping binges with Charles’s credit cards.

Hey, sheepskin-lined lizard-skin Gucci boots need to go
somewhere
in the summer.

“Your father said he tried to warn you, but you never returned his calls. He said I had my chance. He never saw that I was an artist! An artist cannot just
work
. What, he wanted me to go to an office, answer phones?” Vivienne wailed, wringing her small hands. Her tiny dancer’s body had once been limber and elegant but now looked positively frail. One of the moving men raised his eyebrows at the other, who was pulling up his butt crack–revealing pants.

“You knew he was going to do this?” Jack cried. She thought of her ancient father, his much younger wife, and the stepbrats living in the Perry Street town house. Assholes.

“Well . . . yes,” Vivienne admitted. The smoker’s lines on her forehead creased.

“And what am I supposed to do?” Jack screeched, gripping the iron railing for support. She felt like she was going to throw up.

“Ah, cherie.” Vivienne stood and enveloped her in a hug. Jack could feel every one of her vertebrae and the cloying smell of far too much Chanel No. 5. “It will be good for you to learn how to suffer.” Vivienne pulled away and disappeared up the ivy-covered service entrance with a grand flourish.

Jack watched her mother’s unnaturally delicate frame retreat in disbelief.

One of the movers huffed as he carried a ruched bergère chair from the living room out of the doorway. How could they be so nonchalant? Didn’t they realize they were moving away her
life
?

Jack tried to compose herself. In dance class they’d once had a meditation session where they learned to calm audition nerves by choosing one word and repeating it in their heads. She tried to do that now by imagining her spine in alignment, and her one word:
perfect
. The instructor had wanted her to choose another word—like
fight
or
focus
—warning her that perfection was impossible to achieve. She’d chosen it, anyway.

“Hello!”

Jack turned to see a tiny blond girl bound down the steps. She looked about five years old and wore a pink tutu and matching wings from FAO Schwarz. Jack narrowed her eyes at the innocent little girl. A new family was already living in her house? Her parents could have as many dramatic fights as they wanted, but how could he just put Jack up in the attic, like some antique castoff?

Or some lizard-skin boots?

Jack closed her eyes and massaged her temples, hoping that when she opened them the little girl would be gone and her life would be back to normal.

“My name’s Satchel! I live here now!” Jack’s eyes flew open. The little girl danced above her on the steps.
Her
steps.

“Satchel?” Jack croaked in disbelief. She glanced down at her Givenchy purse. The sight of the buttery leather comforted her, and she was thankful she had some dignity left. She straightened her shoulders and elongated her neck.
Perfect.

She would just book a room at the St. Claire. Unless . . . unless . . . unless her father had also canceled the credit cards?

Quelle horreur!

At St. Jude’s, It’s All For One and One For All . . .

“Okay, guys! I know it’s the first day back but you’re looking slow,” Coach Siegel yelled from atop the rickety metal lifeguard stand at the Ninety-second Street Y, where the St. Jude’s team practiced every day at 3 p.m. He blew his shrill-sounding whistle while he discreetly checked out his abs in the stand’s reflective surface. He was twenty-five, had graduated from Stanford only a few years before, and still had oats to sow, as he mentioned to his swimmers at every opportunity.

In lane three, Rhys was listlessly swimming the crawl. He felt Owen pass him, leaving him in his wake as he charged toward the pool wall. Even though he was used to being the fastest, Rhys couldn’t get himself to care. Instead, he glided leisurely toward the end of the lane.

“Sterling, stay behind a second.” Coach hopped off the stand and walked over to Rhys, his Adidas slides making a squishing sound against the wet deck. He had a square jaw, skinny legs, and a buff chest that he claimed the ladies loved.

Rhys dragged himself up on the damp pool deck with a sinking feeling in his stomach.

“Sterling.” Coach Siegel ran his hands through his shaggy reddish-brown hair. “You were late,” he stated.

Rhys nodded and glanced down at the water pooling on the tiles. One puddle looked sort of like a heart. Rhys put his foot in it, and the water scattered across the blue tile in runny droplets.

“Sorry, I just had some things to take care of,” he said, not looking Coach in the eye. In fact, he had spent the first fifteen minutes of practice crying in the rarely used bathroom near the upstairs science labs while he looked through all the camera-phone pictures he’d taken with Kelsey last spring. She’d looked so thrilled to have his arm around her shoulders. What had gone wrong?

“Oh-kaaaaay,”
Coach Siegel said slowly, drawing the word out to several syllables. Rhys winced. It wasn’t enough that his girlfriend had stomped all over him, but now he was getting heat for it at practice? “I know it’s the first day of school and stuff comes up, but it’s not just you missing the first few minutes. You were off the whole practice. The new kid, Carlyle, clocked you!” Coach Siegel narrowed his mouthwash-blue eyes at him, waiting for more of an explanation.

“Sorry, I’m dealing with some personal stuff,” Rhys mumbled. The phrase
there’s another guy
kept banging around his head. Was that true? Who could it possibly be? Some Cape Cod kid? A Riverside Prep guy Kat had met at a party?

“Lady trouble?” Coach perked up.

“No, just . . . school stuff,” Rhys said quickly.

“Okay, well, hopefully this was just a rough start, because I can’t have my captain perform like you did today.” Rhys nodded and Coach clapped him on the back. “And let me know if it’s lady trouble. Girls can kill you,” he said knowingly.

Yeah, but we’re so worth it.

Rhys trudged to the locker room, where Jeff Kohl and Ian McDaniel were passing around a silver flask of Maker’s Mark. The room was super-humid and smelled like chlorine, BO, and feet.

“Is
niiiiiiiice
.” Ian did a ridiculously bad Borat impression as he offered the flask to Owen. Owen shook his head. Just then, Rhys stormed through the door and tore open his locker.

“So, dude, I sucked.” Rhys pulled a Vitamin Water from the side pocket of his overstuffed Speedo swim bag and took a long swig.

“You seemed fine.” Owen wrung out his towel distractedly. Now that he was out of the pool, he found it impossible to stop thinking about Kat or Kelsey or whatever the hell her name really was. How long had she and Rhys been dating? Were they in love? Was that why she hadn’t even told him her name? Did Rhys have any clue she’d been unfaithful to him this summer?

“No, I really sucked,” Rhys repeated.

“Hey, dude, you need a beer,” Hugh Moore, a muscley junior, yelled. He threw a Budweiser over from the next row of lockers. The can hit the floor, sputtering as it released a hiss of carbonation and foam.

“Not now, man,” Rhys said, knowing that, as captain, he should give some half-assed speech about how they weren’t supposed to drink in season, let alone in the locker room. Except he really couldn’t get himself to care. Instead, he wanted to cry.

Again.

“So, you know the girl I introduced you to at lunch? Kelsey?” Rhys asked, his face contorting as he sat down heavily on a worn wooden bench.

Owen nodded and pushed his wet blond hair out of his eyes. How could he forget? He pretended to root around in his Speedo bag, not looking at Rhys. On the other side of the locker room Hugh, Ian, and a few other guys grabbed Chadwick Jenkins, one of the freshmen. “We’re going to shave off your eyebrows, man!” they shouted gleefully, pulling the terrified ninth grader over to a row of sinks.

“So, she broke up with me right after you left,” Rhys said woodenly, not even caring who heard. “She said there was another guy.”

Owen dropped his Speedo bag on the floor and sat down next to Rhys. Kat—
Kelsey—
had broken up with Rhys? She was single again?
There was someone else?
Did that mean . . . ?

“Wait, your girlfriend broke up with you?” Hugh repeated in disbelief, releasing Chadwick. Hugh sat down next to Rhys on the locker room bench. “Lay it on me.” He draped a companionable arm around Rhys’s shoulders and opened another can of Bud, unleashing a stream of spray that landed at Owen’s feet.

“I don’t know what to say. It was out of nowhere. She said there was someone else . . . and I don’t know who it could be, unless it was some asshole she met on the Cape. Whoever it is, I’ll break his fucking face,” Rhys muttered.

Owen had to stop a smile from spreading, feeling elated and guilty at the same time. Had Kat had broken up with Rhys because she wanted to be with
him
?

And guys are supposed to be so clueless.

Hugh nodded supportively. “This is serious.” Droplets of water from his arm cascaded down Rhys’s chest. “Hey guys? Come over here.” Owen glanced around at the collection of guys, most still in their Speedos, some with newly shorn eyebrows.

“Okay,” Hugh said, standing up on the bench and waving the open beer can around in the air. His ribs stuck way out, giving his chest an almost concave appearance. “I just learned that Rhys Sterling, our captain and all-around good guy, has gotten his heart stomped on by a Seaton Arms girl.” A collective groan echoed across the locker room. “Now, I know as well as you that it happens to the best of us. And we know that Rhys will find another girl. But until he gets one, I propose a challenge in the name of solidarity.” He looked around grandly and cleared his throat. “Until Rhys gets action, we won’t get action. And we will prove it by the beard.” He stroked his chiseled chin with his free hand and looked around.

“What the fuck?” Ken Williams yelled. He weighed more than two hundred pounds and looked more like a linebacker than a distance swimmer.

“We’ll all grow facial hair until Rhys gets lucky with a lady. Until then, none of us are going to hook up, either. And Jenkins, that means no playing with yourself,” Hugh yelled. “Who’s in?”

One by one the swim team guys hooted and high-fived Rhys, who sat on the bench, staring forlornly at the damp floor.

“You don’t have to do that,” he mumbled. The guys’ support was sweet and all, but shouldn’t he be galvanizing them to do well at Conferences, not showing what a pussy he was about a girl?

“If Rhys doesn’t get any, neither do we!” Hugh yelled. Owen scrutinized the guys, taking in Chadwick’s scrawny arms and Ken’s thicket of chest hair. He wondered if any of them actually
could
get any. Either way, he hoped this was more a hypothetical gesture of devotion and not an actual pact. Owen had never gone more than a week without kissing a girl.

And we love him for it.

“Thanks,” Rhys muttered to Hugh.

“No problem.” Hugh smiled. “Besides, my girlfriend is in France this year, so I’m in blue ball city with you, my friend.” One by one, the guys walked off, rubbing their prepubescent chins, as if they could massage stubble into being.

Rhys mustered a weak laugh and then turned to Owen. “I’d just feel so much better if I knew who the guy was,” he confided as the locker room emptied out. It was so quiet Rhys could hear the hollow hum of the flickering fluorescent lights overhead. They made his arms look weirdly blue. “If you find the dude, can you just pull off his nuts for me?” He tried to laugh, but it came out as a horrible choking sound.

“Sure,” Owen said, guiltily. “I don’t really know anyone. . . .”

“Yeah, I know, just if you hear anything. Or if you see her, maybe she’d talk. Just let me know if you find out anything. It’s all this guy’s fucking fault.” Rhys stood and kicked his locker. It made a sharp clanging sound that echoed through the empty locker room.

“Sterling, don’t break a bone over a lady,” Coach yelled from the tiny side office adjacent to the locker room. “And especially not one bone in particular!” he added with a cackle.

Rhys turned red. Fuck. Even Coach knew he’d been dumped. Was there any way to keep the news from spreading?

Get a team of cute boys to take a vow of abstinence. Who
won’t
be talking?