Jesse and I came to a halt as Roux started digging around in her purse. Some lip gloss clattered to the floor, along with a MetroCard and what looked like a movie-ticket stub. I hoped Roux wasn’t going to the movies by herself. That would just be sad.
“Here!” she cried, finally producing a five-dollar bill. “For the swear jar!”
Jesse and I looked at each other, but Harold just produced an old glass jar that was filled with bills. “You have a swear jar with your doorman?” Jesse asked, incredulous.
Roux hung on a little tighter to my arm, wobbling on her heels. “Let’s just say that some neighbors and I had a little run-in three months ago.”
“And by run-in, you mean …?”
(Harold was now reading his newspaper like we weren’t even there.)
Roux grinned, the happiest drunk on the block. “I told this one tenant that he should—how can I put this?—have sexual relations with himself. And that did not go over well.”
“Wow,” Jesse said. “This might be a New York first.”
“So now I’m working on being a better person, which means I don’t get to drop f-bombs anymore. And I’m putting Harold’s grandkids through college!”
Harold just tucked the glass jar back under the desk, muttering something about rich kids. I’m not sure what he said, though. It was hard to hear over Roux yelling, “Bye, Harold!”
I dug through Roux’s purse and found her keys while Jesse propped her up against the elevator wall, using his arm and hip to keep her upright. “Ow,” she kept saying, but she didn’t move, so we ignored her. The front door lock looked pretty basic—just a normal deadbolt—but Jesse and Roux were right there and there was no way I could open the lock without them noticing. Or Jesse noticing, at least. I was pretty sure that Roux couldn’t focus her eyes.
I finally found the keys and opened the front door while Jesse moved Roux inside. Everything was dark and drawn. It was sort of creepy to enter this huge apartment and not see a single adult, but Roux didn’t seem too put off by it, so I guessed it was normal for her.
“Okay, kid,” Jesse said to her as he steered her toward the stairs. “Here’s the plan. You’re going to drink some water and sleep it off and start fresh tomorrow.”
“I love water.” She sighed. “I love Maggie, too. Jesse!”
“Yeah, Roux?” His voice was muffled as Roux flung her arm around his neck, whacking him with her oversized coat sleeve.
“You like Maggie, too, right? She’s hot. Don’t you think Maggie’s hot?”
“Roux, I will murder you,” I muttered. “Well, I won’t, but I know people. They can do it without making a mess.”
“Hot like burning,” Roux continued, ignoring my death threats as she put one foot on the stairs. Then she stopped. “Whoa, spinning stairs. Terrible idea.”
Jesse looked at me over Roux’s head. “She’s so trashed,” he whispered.
“So trashed,” I said.
“You’d think she’d build up a tolerance at some point.”
“Hey, I have tolerance,” Roux said before lurching violently and nearly knocking Jesse and I back down the stairs. “I don’t hate anyone.”
“Of course you don’t,” Jesse said as I caught Roux by the shoulders and pushed her forward.
“People hate me,” she replied as we kept nudging her up the stairs. “But I have only love in my heart for those assholes. Ugh, swear jar! I owe Harold five more dollars now. Remind me tomorrow! Where’s my room? I need to puke.”
I looked at Jesse. Jesse looked at me. Roux’s suite seemed to be a very long hallway away, and she looked six shades of queasy. “Can I puke here?” Roux asked as she neared a potted plant that sat at the top of the stairs. “How about this? It’s a plant. Hi, plant!”
“Oh, boy,” Jesse said under his breath.
“Okay, Operation: Save the Plant and Move Faster is now in effect,” I announced, and the two of us got Roux down the hall in record time.
“Hold it for about thirty seconds, okay, buddy?” Jesse said. “Or I’ll never forgive you.”
“Yeah, you’re my buddy, Jesse.” Roux grinned. “My good buddy. You were and then you weren’t but now you are.” She shifted her glazed eyes to me. “It’s because you’re hot, Maggie,” she whispered conspiratorially.
“Oh my God, shut up,” I hissed at her. “If you have even a molecule of sobriety in your body right now, you will stop talking.”
Roux just laughed and stumbled through her doorway. She would have fallen right into a pile of shoes if Jesse and I didn’t catch her. “You’re turning an interesting shade of green, Roux, you know that?” Jesse grimaced as he turned her around.
We steered Roux into her massive bathroom. Bottles and beauty products littered the granite countertop, and a hair dryer dangled precariously from an outlet. “Okay,” I told her. “Anchors away.”
And right on cue, Roux pitched toward the toilet and puked up Jesse’s parents’ very expensive French wine.
Chapter 12
I took care of things after that, since although guys like to gross each other out, when girls do gross things, guys apparently turn into delicate Puritans. Whatever.
Anyway, I cleaned Roux up, gave her water and an aspirin, and Jesse and I got her facedown on her bed before tiptoeing out of the room. “Do you think we should stay?” I whispered.
“No, she’s fine,” he replied. “She’s been way more trashed before. This was like middle-school drunk.”
“See,” I said, “that doesn’t make me feel any better.”
“Trust me,” he said. “It’s not dangerous until she starts speaking with a Russian accent.”
“A Russian accent?” I wondered if Roux could teach me how to do that.
“Yeah, it’s bizarre. No one gets it.”
We went through several more gilded rooms in Roux’s house, sneaking past floor-length windows as we crept toward the massive mahogany front door. “This apartment,” I murmured, “is ri-donk-ulous.”
“I didn’t know people actually said the word ‘ri-donk-ulous,’” Jesse replied.
“I didn’t know people actually thought about the word ‘ri-donk-ulous,’” I retorted.
Jesse grinned and gave me a shove. “You started it.”
“Seriously, though, this apartment is crazy, but yours? Is bonkers.”
“That’s one word for it.”
I decided to risk it and say something very nerdy. “Are Roux’s parents home? Like, is there a responsible adult on the premises?”
“Nah, they travel a lot,” Jesse said. “Her nanny used to show up at all the school events, but, you know, then we grew up. No one has nannies anymore. And besides, her parents are still married. Roux won the lottery.”
I thought about my family as we went down in the elevator and strolled past the doorman. I hadn’t spent a night away from my parents in my entire life. They were always home when I came home, and I was pretty sure that even if they weren’t spies, they’d be able to tell if I stumbled home wasted. And then I thought about Roux in her echoing, empty apartment and felt kind of sad for her. Growing up with spies, I always had someone to count on.
I wondered if maybe Roux was counting on me.
Jesse and I walked down Eighty-Second Street toward Central Park, me shivering in my turtleneck and jeans. “Spies don’t wear a coat?” he asked me.
“What?” I gasped. “What are you talking about?”
He raised an eyebrow. “Your costume.”
“Oh.” And that concludes this week’s heart attack. “I think I left mine at your place. If anyone took it, I’m going to be pissed.”
“Here,” he said, and started to shrug out of his tuxedo jacket. “My good deed of the day.”
“Thanks,” I said. It smelled a little musty, but it also smelled like Jesse. Focus, I thought to myself. Go in for the kill.
“So,” I said as we passed the banners outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “I couldn’t help but notice that you didn?
??t have a chance with the magical karaoke machine.”
Okay, not my strongest kill shot, but I was new to this sort of conversation. You know, alone. With a boy. Alone.
“Neither did you,” he said.
I laughed and tucked my hair behind my ears. It had come unpinned somewhere around hour four of the party, when Roux had been busy showing me her favorite wine. For the third time. “Well, I only karaoke to ‘Bootylicious’ but you didn’t have it.”
“Want to do it right here?”
I looked up at him. “Are you insane?”
“C’mon, it’s just this bodega.” Jesse waved his arm to indicate the small store on the corner. “Your audience is small.”
“I was kidding!” I cried. “I don’t even sing in the shower, much less in public!” I had spent my entire life trying to blend in with the people around me, and I was fairly certain that singing like Beyoncé on a Manhattan street corner would ruin that whole effect.
Jesse was starting to hum and shake his own booty, though, wiggling his eyebrows at me. “You know you want to,” he sang.
Time for a distraction.
“You know what I do want?” I replied. “Ice cream.”
“What?”
“Ice cream,” I told him. “To quote Kanye, ‘Me likey.’”
“Ice cream,” Jesse repeated.
“Cherry Garcia.”
Jesse glanced down at me. “That is a brilliant idea.”
A few minutes later, Jesse emerged from the store with a paper sack, two plastic spoons, and a small plastic package that he tossed at me. “Here,” he said. “Don’t get excited, it’s not a real ruby.”
I put the cherry-flavored Ring Pop on my left hand and hugged it close. “I’ll never take it off,” I promised.
“C’mon,” he said, nodding down the street. “Let’s find a stoop.”
Which was how we came to sit on the front stoop of some brownstone at one in the morning, passing the pint of ice cream back and forth. The autumn air was even chillier now, but Jesse’s jacket was surprisingly warm and the ice cream tasted so good that I didn’t even mind how cold it was.
“You know what would be cool?” I said as I passed the ice cream back to him.
“If that ring was real so we could auction it at Sotheby’s and split the profits? Sixty-forty, of course, since I did buy it for you.”
I giggled. The candy looked ridiculously huge on my hand, but I didn’t want to take it off. “Nope. Try again.”
“If Radiohead played at my next birthday party?”
“Haven’t they already done that?”
Jesse passed the pint back to me. “No. Selfish bastards.”
“Shame. But what I was going to say was that it’d be cool if we could keep hanging out like this.” I dug into the ice cream, then glanced at Jesse. “Are you eating all the cherries out of this?”
“No. And yeah, that’d be cool.” He was totally stealing all the cherries, that liar.
“Yeah?” My heart was sort of pounding, but I told myself that it was just the sugar and leftover adrenaline from the party earlier than night.
“Yeah.” He looked up at me and grinned. “Maybe we could skip the part where we carry Roux’s drunk ass upstairs, though.”
“Maybe we can do something easier next time,” I replied. “Like scale the Empire State Building one-handed.”
Jesse bumped me with his shoulder. “You first, Spy Girl.” He laughed. “You look geared up for it.”
“Ooh, don’t call me that,” I said before I could stop myself.
“What? Spy Girl?”
“Yeah.” I glanced around us, but the people walking by were all in a hurry to get home. No one cared about our conversation. “It’s just a costume. And I have a name, you know.”
“I know,” he said. “Maggie.”
No one had ever said my name like that before, like it was quiet and special and unique, the only real name that I had, the one hardly anyone knew.
“I just …” I tried to explain without actually explaining. “I like my name. I like when you say my name.” Then I passed him back the ice cream. “It’s melting. You should eat more of it.”
“I’m good,” he said, and he took the ice cream and set it on the step without breaking eye contact with me. “Maggie.”
My heart was turning into a hummingbird, crashing against my ribcage every time he said my name. I’ve been nervous and scared and even petrified before, but I had never felt like this. “Well, you don’t want to wear my name out,” I teased him, moving back ever so slightly and reaching for the ice cream. “You sure you don’t want more? Because I’m starving.”
I was so not hungry.
“Wait, you just told me to call you by your real name, then when I say it, you get all weird and uncomfortable.” His eyes were boring into me, like he could see every phony birth certificate, every illegal passport. “You don’t like your name?”
“No, I like my name a lot,” I lied. “Margaret’s a very … classic name. I just … I feel like we keep talking about me. And Roux. Let’s talk about you.”
He paused and ran a hand through his hair, which only served to make it curlier. “So what about me? What, did you google me or something?”
Jesse seemed annoyed now, looking everywhere except at me. I had thought that I couldn’t handle him looking at me anymore, but now that he wasn’t, I wanted his gaze back where it had been.
“I didn’t google you,” I lied. “I just—”
“So you googled my dad probably. Every other girl has.”
The condensation from the ice cream was starting to run off the carton and onto my fingers. “Who’s your dad?” I asked, hating the way the lie felt in my mouth, dirty, like ash. “Why would I google him?”
Jesse took a deep sigh and his shoulders sagged forward. His hair fell back over his forehead, and I found myself wanting to brush it away, to touch his skin with my fingertips. “Sorry,” he said. “I get a lot of girls trying to use me to get to my dad. For internships, college letters of recommendation, party invites, all that. And it’s been a really shitty year. Especially this summer.”
“What happened this summer?”
He laughed a little, only it wasn’t a funny laugh, more like an exhalation of breath. “I haven’t told anyone yet. You can’t tell anyone, either, ‘cause it could really screw things up for my dad.”
My heart was starting to race again. Was it because Jesse was about to say something about the magazine article? Or was it because he was sitting so close to me that our hipbones touched? “Okay,” I said. “I know how to keep a secret.”
“My mom left in June.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
“Yeah. She and my dad never really got along. They were either fighting or not talking. But then I guess everything came to a head and she left right before school ended in June.”
“Do you know where she went?” I asked. The street was quiet now, a temporary lull caused by red lights and the late night, and I lowered my voice to match the hum of the distant traffic.
“I think Connecticut. We have a house out in Westport. Or maybe she’s in Europe. I’m not sure. She said she’d call”—he shrugged—“ but she doesn’t. When she left, she said she just needed time alone for a while. And my dad doesn’t want anyone finding out because he’s already under a lot of pressure with work and, you know, if a blogger finds out or someone at the New York Post …” Jesse’s voice trailed off and his eyes looked glassy, like a doll’s. “He thinks rumors could spread and hurt business.”
I sat next to him and thought of my summer days spent watching Icelandic TV and endlessly spinning locks on the safes’ dials, watching the neighbor boy and wishing I knew what to say to him. I wondered if Jesse had felt the same way, lonely for someone to talk to, penned in by things beyond his control. “Do you miss her?” I asked.
Jesse was quiet for a long time. “I miss the idea of her,” he said at last. “It’s like when people leave,
you can’t change anything or make it better. Maybe you can’t do that when they’re still there, either, but at least you think that you can maybe try one day.
“You know what I did?” he said, then continued before I could even answer. “I’m an idiot. I stole this book from the bookstore and then got caught.”
I froze. I couldn’t help it. “Really?”
“Yeah. I practically waved it in the security guards’ faces as we left, so it wasn’t really hard to catch me. I just thought …” He trailed off for a minute and then let out a deep sigh. “I thought that maybe if I got caught, it’d get in the papers and blogs, and my mom would read my name and think of me.”
My heart was somewhere in my throat, pressing down so hard that it made me hurt. “That’s kind of the saddest thing I’ve ever heard,” I murmured.
“If by ‘sad,’ you mean ‘pathetic,’ then yeah, it is.” He smiled, only it wasn’t much of a smile. “Anyway. That was my lame attempt at teenage rebellion. Woo. All I got was grounded and a paragraph on Page Six.”
“That’s very Gossip Girl,” I told him, trying to make him smile again. It sort of worked. He had a crooked smile that was starting to look less crooked by the minute. “And I’m sorry about your mom. And the bookstore.”
“Yeah, well.” He shrugged. “What are you going to do?”
“I know what you mean, though,” I told him. “About people leaving.”
Jesse looked up. “Did your mom bail, too?”
“No, no, not at all.” The idea of my mom suddenly waking up and leaving one day was impossible to comprehend. “I just meant that I know what it’s like to leave. Or to be left.”
“Yeah?”
I nodded and stirred the melted ice cream. “We move a lot for my dad’s job.”
“What does he do?”
“He works for universities. He speaks a lot of languages, but jobs are sometimes sort of tricky to get, so we move a lot.” I had told this lie so many times that once in a while I even found myself believing it. “But, you know, that means leaving friends, family, homes, and it’s never the same again.”
Jesse nodded as he took the ice cream back from me. “This is really gross now,” he said, smiling a little. “It’s sugar soup.”