Before I could slip my hand away, he grasped it again. “Give me your new cell phone number.”
I laughed shortly at the irony: dreamy Hunter asking for my number, when I couldn’t give it to him anyway. “I don’t have a cell phone.”
He closed his eyes and kept them closed for several seconds, as if hoping that when he opened them again, my second head would have disappeared. In the light of two mismatched lamps on nearby tables, each of his blond lashes cast two long shadows down his tanned cheeks. He opened his eyes. “How can you not have a cell phone?”
“Too expensive.”
Shaking his head, he pulled my hand until it lay flat on the table in front of him. He drew a pen out of his pocket and clicked it open. “Here’s my number, then. If you ever need me, find a phone and call me.”
I was pulling hard all this time. Despite my best efforts, by the time he stopped talking he’d already written hunter across my palm, in case I forgot whose phone number was written there, and his area code.
“Hunter.” I looked around the coffee shop, afraid of making a scene at work, but truly not wanting Hunter’s number tattooed on my hand. “Hunter, this may be hard for you to understand when you are on the stealing end of the inheritance rather than the victim end. If I needed help, you are the last person on Earth I would call.” I gave my hand one last, hard jerk and reeled back a couple of steps. His pen had left his entire phone number on my palm, plus a line down my middle finger and off the tip.
“My break is over and I’m already in trouble for getting here late.” Scooting my mug from the table, I hurried away, weaving among the now crowded tables filled with a second wave of late-night coffee addicts. My boss glowered at me with his fists on his hips. I could only hope Hunter, the future president of a multimillion-dollar equine enterprise and the heir to a fortune, understood where I was coming from as a girl alone and struggling financially. I hoped he would cut me some slack about the stable boy.
As if.
NEW YORK IS THE CITY THAT never sleeps, but it does get tired. Its eyelids grow heavy and it wants to veg in front of the television. When my boss let me off work at eleven, all the other shops were closed. Traffic was sparse. Only a few pedestrians passed me on the street. The lights were no less bright, but the night had formed a dome over them, as if I were walking through a movie set made to look like the city rather than the real thing, and I would never see very far down the dark side streets even when dawn broke.
I felt like the only person in the world awake and walking by the time I reached the honors dorm. But every window on the front was still lit, even mine, dimly, with light filtering through the doorway from Summer and Jørdis’s outer room. I might even encounter Hunter in the stairwell. This should have been the last thing I wanted, but it wasn’t. I lingered over my mailbox in the lobby, sifting through endless pamphlets for campus events scheduled when I would be at work and tossing each one in the recycling bin.
Finally I shuffled up one flight of stairs and opened the door to my room. The first thing I saw was Summer and Jørdis sitting cross-legged on Jørdis’s bed, cutting out pictures. The second thing I saw was my green-sequined belly-dancing outfit hanging on the back of my door. When I’d first brought it home from the thrift store, I’d planned to keep it in the closet I shared with Summer, but Jørdis asked me to hang it in full view of the room because she liked the glitter. She was an art major.
Maybe this was how Hunter had known I was taking belly dancing. Growing warm, I wondered when in the past week he’d been in my room.
Summer looked up from her scissors and grinned at me. “Well? Did the stable boy make it to your assignation?”
I glared at her, then looked pointedly at Jørdis. Summer and I really, really needed to work on our silent language.
Summer dismissed Jørdis with a flourish of her scissors. “Jørdis knows all about it. Brian stopped by. He said he and Manohar and Hunter went out and got wasted, and Hunter told them he was the stable boy.”
Usually I was very careful with my belongings because they would need to last me a long time. My book bag was a large leather designer bag I’d seldom used back home. I needed it to take me through college and beyond, because I’d never be able to afford another one like it. And I dropped it to the floor with a thud, unable to hold up the weight of my books and “Almost a Lady” for another moment.
Jørdis produced a third pair of scissors—her supply of sharp instruments was limitless—and held it out to me. “While we are discussing this, come and cut for me. It will help you with your aggression.”
Jørdis was Danish and no nonsense, softened only by the silk scarves she dyed herself and tied around her hair to keep it out of her paint. She seemed like a nice enough person and she hadn’t yet complained about me tromping back and forth across her room at strange hours to get to mine when I worked late. She only seemed distant because of her harsh Scandinavian accent, her flattened affect, and the fact that she was always either gone, with her bed made tightly, or sitting carefully on her bed so as not to muss it, holding scissors. When she and Summer and I first met, she had told us right away how her name was spelled, that the o in her name contained a slash. Summer and I had called her “Jørdis with a slash” behind her back for several days until we decided she wasn’t so bad.
One thing she was very good at, surprisingly, was making friends. She’d already decided her project for her college gallery show at the end of the semester would be a series of huge collages composed of tiny cut-out faces. This meant that whenever Summer or I had a spare moment, Jørdis shoved a pair of scissors in our hands and dumped a pile of old magazines or photographs in our laps. She also recruited people she met in the lobby or the hallway to come back to the room and cut out faces with her.
Tired as I was, I didn’t think handling a sharp instrument was a good idea. But I knew from experience that there was no arguing with Jørdis. I slunk to her bed and accepted a pair of scissors and a ten-year-old copy of Rolling Stone. “Hunter promised not to say anything to Gabe,” I murmured, “but since he got drunk with Manohar and Brian and told them, I’m screwed already. They’ll spread it everywhere because I’m the honors program joke.”
“Brian didn’t make it sound that way at all.” Summer placed a neatly clipped face on the pile in front of Jørdis and turned the page of her copy of Tiger Beat. “Hunter was shocked and flattered by your story, and he got drunk with Manohar and Brian because they were discussing whether you have a thing for him.”
For a long, delicious moment, I believed Summer. Then my memory of my conversation with Hunter kicked in. “Did Brian tell you that’s what went on,” I asked her, “or is this your interpretation of the events?”
“It’s my inter—”
“Right,” I butted in. “Do me a favor and stop interpreting. Hunter could not care less whether I have a thing for him, because he doesn’t have a thing for me.”
“I’m not so sure.” Jørdis bit her lip and carefully cut around someone’s ear for an achingly long moment before she continued, “I caught your Hunter outside in the hall several days ago, reading our names on the door. I made him come in and cut for me.”
Wow. I nodded toward the door to my private room. “Did he ask you whose belly-dancing costume that was?”
“He did,” she said. Mystery solved.
“Did he peek into my room?” It was tiny, only the width of the bay window that took up one whole wall, and exactly large enough for a single bed and a miniature dresser and desk. Every room on the front of the honors dorm housed two roommates in the outer chamber and one in this alcove. I’d heard around the dorm that students killed for these bay window rooms, and the older students called dibs. But Jørdis said the tiny room made her claustrophobic and reminded her of her summer in Japan, where she had been made to sleep in a tube. Then Summer didn’t jump at it, so I did. I loved the smallness, the closeness, and the door that I could close. It was all very Virginia Woolf—until you rememb
ered that she committed suicide, which took some of the fun out of it.
No, I loved my little room, but I had to store most of my stuff in Summer’s closet in this larger room. There wouldn’t have been much for Hunter to see inside my room. I still wanted to know whether he’d seen it.
“He did not peek,” Jørdis said, “but he pumped me for information about my roommates, especially you, until I asked him whether he knew you.”
Summer leaned forward expectantly and dropped magazine and scissors. “What did he say?”
“He said, ‘Not really.’”
Summer turned to me. “See? He’s confused by your swift exit from Kentucky. Jørdis asks him whether he knows you and he wistfully says, ‘Not really,’ like he wants to reconnect with you but doesn’t know how.”
I sliced through the center of the picture I was trimming. I was too tired to argue with Summer, but I wished she would quit picking up the broken pieces of my life and trying to build something romantic out of them. That’s what I’d tried to do in “Almost a Lady,” and that’s what had gotten me in this mess.
I pointed at Summer with my scissors. “Hunter said he would ask Manohar and Brian not to tell Gabe or anyone else about the stable boy, but he couldn’t promise anything. That’s where you come in. You’re friends with Brian. Ask him to keep quiet about this as a favor to you. Make friends with Manohar and do the same thing.”
“Whoa!” She held up Tiger Beat as a shield. “I already defended your story. Haven’t I done enough?”
“Five words.” I counted them on my fingers for her, the scissors hanging from my thumb. “Can. I. Have. Erin’s. Vote?”
Summer cackled. “I can’t imagine asking a favor from Manohar. You heard him in class. He hates me.”
“Then you’re going to have to do a one-eighty and stop antagonizing him in class,” I said. “If he wants to tell me that romance novels aren’t fit to wipe his ass, you just go ahead and let him say that. My internship is more important than my pride.” I wasn’t sure this was true. My pride was pretty damned important. But I was tired, cutting with only one eye open now. If I had that internship, I wouldn’t need to work for six hours on top of attending class and studying for twelve.
Summer winced. “My father specifically warned me not to get all citified at college and bring home a white boy.”
I exchanged a brief glance with Jørdis. I was more fluent in my silent language with her than with Summer. Jørdis and I were wondering how Summer had made the leap from not antagonizing Manohar to taking Manohar home to Mississippi.
I went with it. “Manohar isn’t white.”
“He’s worse,” Summer said without looking up from her magazine page. “To my father.”
“I’m not asking you to enter into a serious relationship with Manohar and take him home to meet your racist daddy.”
Summer’s lips pressed into a hard line. She looked forward to showing her daddy who was in charge of her life. I had her already.
I continued, “I’m asking you to flirt with Manohar and get some info out of him. And if you break his heart—well, that’s romance novel fodder, and only what he deserves, right?”
“Right,” she said with fake reluctance. Suddenly she seemed absorbed in carefully clipping a new face. She was determined not to look up and let us read in her expression what we’d already guessed: that she was crushing hard on Manohar and was thrilled to have this excuse to go after him.
Jørdis sat back against the wall and smiled at me in admiration. The silent message was so obvious I would have been concerned that Summer would read it, too, except that Summer was clueless. Yes, I was good at reading people. I studied them so I could put them in my novels.
If only I could read stable boys.
5
After a few more minutes of cutting out faces and silently laughing with Jørdis about Summer’s utter lack of subtlety, I said good night, closed myself in my own room, and studied. I sat there for three days. At least, that’s what it felt like.
I did leave during these three days. I went to class, and I spent long hours at the coffee shop. But the New York experience I’d longed for was slipping away from me, not because of my lack of cash, but because I was so overwhelmed with the homework I couldn’t get done while I was busy making coffee.
And I did love my tiny room. True, there was hardly any space for storage, but I hadn’t brought a lot of stuff with me from Kentucky anyway, and I didn’t have the money to buy the cute wall organizers I’d seen in other girls’ rooms on other floors. My walls were tacked with colorful abstract oils I’d borrowed from Jørdis. And of course most of the space was filled with the bay window: a wide wall of glass on the front of the building, and a narrow one diagonally on either side. I could open the shades and watch people approach on the sidewalk, pass the building, and continue down the sidewalk until they disappeared into the endless rows of nineteenth-century town houses. I could imagine the many students before me who had drifted off from their calculus homework watching the foot traffic. I could picture the young men and women in their finery who had stood at this very window when it was part of their family’s parlor. They had looked out into the dusty street, their bellies fluttering with butterflies, waiting for the carriage drawn by spirited matched bays that would take them to the ball.
My one small shelf over the desk was piled with my textbooks. I didn’t junk up my shelf with New York trinkets like Summer did. I needed to focus not on being here but on staying here, studying hard, writing well, getting that internship. The one folly I allowed myself was the New York City magnet I’d brought with me from Kentucky—the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the Statue of Liberty stacked together and reproduced in the finest painted plastic. I’d had it for years. I’d stared at it as a kid, longing to come here someday. And now it stuck to the metal filing cabinet that doubled as my bedside table, reminding me I’d better not throw it all away.
The music cranked up several floors above me, signaling a party. I’d overheard Manohar and Brian talking about it in creative-writing class a few days earlier. I’d felt the obligatory blush flood my face, and the obligatory drive to glance at Hunter at the end of the table, where he chuckled with Isabelle. If our dorm was throwing a party, surely he would be there.
But the farther I stayed away from Hunter, the better for both of us. I even smiled at Manohar during class when he shot a few barbs at me about the romantic elements of Isabelle’s awful story. After class, as I was walking out with Summer, I thought I heard Manohar whinny at me. I ignored him.
Now that the bass line of the rock song shook my bay windows, I turned the page in my history textbook. And wished for my music player after all.
I’d almost regained my concentration, focusing on the words rather than the beat, when the door burst open and banged against my desk. “We’re going to a beach party!” Summer announced, already bouncing away. “Put on your bathing suit!”
I peeked around the door frame into the larger room, where she was pulling a bright yellow bikini out of her dresser. “The coffee shop takes up so much of my time,” I said. “I need to study while I ca—”
She whirled to face me and shook her fists, a piece of bikini swinging in each. “You wanted me to flirt with Manohar and bring him over to your side. This is the perfect opportunity, and I am not going to a party in the men’s bathroom in a bikini by myself!”
Reluctantly I pulled my own bikini from my dresser. It was designer, from last year. Luckily it was solid steel blue, not a bold pattern that would date it to a particular collection. And it wasn’t too worn. I’d gotten no use out of it at all during my long, hot summer working in New York.
One of the differences between expensive clothing and cheap clothing, I’d discovered now that I’d actually tried on something in a New York department store’s bargain basement, was that expensive clothing could make the wearer look better. My bikini was no exception, draping in graceful folds
reminiscent of a 1950s starlet.
But a glance in Jørdis’s full-length mirror reminded me that there was nothing the loveliest designer bikini could do about my freckles. This summer I’d had zero opportunity to acquire a light tan, so my freckles stood out like a pox on my white skin. In Pride and Prejudice, Lydia calls a neighborhood girl a “nasty little freckled thing.” Silently Elizabeth agrees. The reader is not to sympathize with Lydia, but she is to sympathize with Elizabeth. I loved Jane Austen with all my heart, but I could not forgive her for this.
Summer called, “I guess, if I am going through with this bizarre notion of flirting with Manohar, I need to touch up my makeup and look like I mean it.”
This was Summer’s hint, I thought, that I’d taken off my makeup for the night, and she did not approve of my look for a party. Reluctantly I pulled my face cream out of my makeup bag. I was almost out. And I would never be buying this particular miracle cream again. It was ridiculously expensive, I realized now that I compared its price with dorm rent. I resented having to waste a dollop on this party, just to silence Manohar on the stable-boy issue.
Summer watched me struggle with the tube. “Fold it like toothpaste.”
“I’m past that point. I think I can get another month out of it if I cut it open, but I’ve tried all Jørdis’s scissors. They’re not sharp enough.” I sighed with relief as I came away with a smear and moisturized my face. Then I reached for my powder.
“Are you trying to cover up your freckles?” Summer watched me in the mirror above her dresser. “I’m not saying you should. But I use a brand of foundation that’s a lot thicker than yours.”
“No, I’m not trying to cover them up. It’s fruitless. I’ve tried everything and I have made peace with them.” Lie. “The most I can hope for is to tone them down with a look of dewy freshness.” I passed the powder brush over my nose one more time. I’d lived a hard life and lost my looks already. Or maybe that was the dark circles under my eyes from studying late. Anyway, I wasn’t gussying up to catch a man. Summer was saving my internship and I was going with her, in a bathing suit so I would feel even more naked and exposed than I had during that first critique session in the writing class—almost as if Hunter had planned the party this way.