Upper East Side #7

by Ashley Valentine

  Well, so what? Kaliq didn't deserve sex. Besides, eating a hot fudge sundae in a Plaza Hotel bed while plotting her revenge on her asshole-of-a-loser-soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend was even better than sex.

  Way better.

  * * *

  Dear Seniors,

  We are so excited for next Friday, which as you know is Senior Cut Day, now known as the first day of SENIOR SPA WEEKEND!!!!! Yes, it's a school day. Unfortunately we'll be too busy getting ready for our hot-stone facials and seaweed body wraps to remember to show up! Please don't be worried about getting into trouble—not that you really are. Senior Cut Day is an ancient Emma Willard tradition, and no one's ever been expelled or even punished for it.

  So here's what's happening: Thursday night at 6:30 P.M. we'll board the Braxton family's big sailboat, which is docked at Battery Park City. The Braxtons are having their annual benefit cruise to the Hamptons, and they've generously offered us a ride. As soon as we dock in Sag Harbor, we'll be picked up by a fleet of limos, which will whisk us off to Imani Edwards' amazing beach house, where the biggest, bestest girls-only slumber party will take place. NO BOYS ALLOWED. In the morning we'll have breakfast by the pool, catered. After that, a day of treatments brought to us by Origins. And everyone will get an Origins gift bag valued at three hundred dollars to take home with her totally refreshed and revitalized new self!

  Dress: Resort casual. Towels, hairdryers, bath, and beauty products galore will all be supplied. No dogs, please, even if they're really small. And NO BOYS! Let's hear it for an amazing weekend of bonding with the girls!

  Big Smoochies!!

  Love,

  Your classmates Alexis Sullivan and Imani Edwards

  P.S. We put a suggestion box in the senior lounge, so your ideas are welcome, not that we haven't already planned the most perfect day!

  P.P.S. Two, four, six, eight, only one month till we graduate!

  8

  “How come no matter what I wear I always look like a cartoon character?” Bree complained to her friend and school classmate, Elise Wells. It was Saturday night and they were getting ready for Mekhi's gig with the Raves at Funktion, a new music venue in a revamped fire station on Orchard Street. Bree glanced at Elise. “And you always look so normal.”

  The two girls regarded their reflections in the full-length mirror on the back of Bree's closet door. Bree was wearing a stretchy red top with a plunging U-shaped neckline that made her breasts look enormous. She was barely five feet tall, and her very first pair of True Religion jeans had been way too long for her when she bought them at Bloomingdale's, so she'd had the lady at the dry cleaner's on Broadway and 98th shorten them about ten inches. Now she noticed that the purposely “antiqued” spot on each leg where her knees were supposed to be fell at mid-shin. The only acceptable part of Bree's body was her head. She liked her big, far-apart eyes, her clear hazelnut skin, and her natural curly black hair with its straight, severe bangs across the forehead. As Chanel once told her, she looked like a Prada model—with oversized breast implants and stumps for legs, although Chanel would never have said that part.

  Elise's body was totally the opposite. She was seven inches taller than Bree, with long skinny legs, long skinny arms, and a flat chest. Nothing was ever too tight on her, except maybe in the belly region, which had a sort of doughnut roll around it. But that was easily hidden beneath a shirt. There was really nothing Bree could do to hide her chest. Then again, Elise was covered with freckles—there were even freckles on her eyelids—and she had chin-length hair that was so thick and so coarse, she could barely fit it into a rubber band.

  Well, nobody's perfect. Except for maybe a very select few of us.

  “Let's trade tops,” Elise suggested. She pulled off her black V-neck and handed it to Bree.

  “Okay,” Bree responded dubiously, and pulled off her red one. Elise's shirt was from H&M, and hers was from Saks, which was slightly nicer, but Bree didn't want to hurt Elise's feelings by saying anything. Besides, the results were astronomical. Bree's chest looked almost modest in the black top, and the red top made Elise's hair gleam with highlights neither of them had even known she had.

  “I bet Chanel Crenshaw doesn't even look at herself before she goes out,” Bree declared. She dropped down on her knees and started crawling around the room. “She probably doesn't even have to try stuff on, except for maybe shoes.”

  Elise put her hand on her hips. “What are you doing?”

  “Wearing in the knees on my jeans,” Bree replied, still crawling. “Did you hear about Chanel and Kash from the Raves?”

  Elise nodded. Everyone had heard.

  Bree crawled across the matted pink carpet to her closet to select a pair of shoes. Of course, Chanel never had to crawl around like a dog in an attempt to make her jeans look normal. “I don't know how she does it.” She pulled out her new Michael Kors gold sandals and slid them on. Her dad said the sandals looked like something a belly dancer would wear, but she'd gotten them for free at the W photo shoot, and they were the nicest shoes she owned.

  How strange that she'd had that little moment of superstardom—that photoshoot with Chanel—and now she was back to being plain old her, a fourteen-going-on-fifteen-year-old girl with big ambitions and an even bigger chest. It wasn't like her life's ambition was to quit school at the age of fourteen and become a supermodel, but it would have been kind of nice if someone had asked her to.

  Bree stood up and brushed off the knees of her jeans. They were completely, disappointingly unfaded and, except for the wonky placement of the distressed part of the denim, completely uninteresting—just like everything else in her closet. Chanel's clothes were always so perfectly frayed, faded, and worn, belying the colorful and mysterious history of their wearer. Bree couldn't help but wonder whether her own clothes would fade and develop character too if she got kicked out of Willard and sent to boarding school.

  “Ever thought about going to boarding school?” Bree wondered out loud.

  Elise made a face. “Eat school food three times a day and live with your teachers? No thanks.”

  Bree frowned. That wasn't how she pictured boarding school at all. In her mind boarding school meant freedom: from her manic-depressive Mr. Poet/Rock God brother, from her overprotective and embarrassingly unkempt dad, from Emma Willard's horrendous school uniforms, from her dusty old bedroom, and from the everyday boringness of doing the same-old same-old, now and for the next three years. It also meant opportunity: to live and go to school with boys, boys, boys, and to be the girl she'd always aspired to be—the girl no one could stop talking about.

  Rufus poked his head in the door, not even thinking about the fact that Bree was no longer five years old and might be completely naked or something. His unruly curly hair was tied in a ponytail with a piece of the bright blue plastic bag the New York Times was delivered in every morning. “You girls want me to help you get a cab?” he asked with cheerful concern.

  Bree could tell her dad was dying to go to Mekhi's gig with them, but tonight was his monthly anarchist writers' workshop—the only thing he took as seriously as raising his children, even though none of his writing had ever been published.

  “That's okay, Dad.” Bree smiled sweetly, daring him to say something rude about her sexy gold sandals. “Ready?” she asked Elise.

  Elise smeared an extra layer of Bree's favorite MAC lipstick on her already shiny lips. “Ready,” she responded.

  “You two look so…” Rufus tugged on his straggly beard, struggling for the right adjective. “Grown-up,” he said at last.

  Yeah, but we're not exactly models-who-date-rockstars material, Bree thought as the two girls contemplated their reflections in the mirror. Elise had on way too much lipstick, and Bree kind of wished her Kors sandals weren't so totally flat, so she'd at least appear taller. After all, she wasn't going to the gig to see Mekhi. She wanted to meet Kash Polk and the rest of the band, and she wanted to make an impression.

  Bree stood on tiptoe and t
hen eased her heels back into her shoes again. “Lucky we're on the guest list,” she sighed, “or they'd never let us in.”

  Actually, with a chest like that she could probably get in anywhere. But let her find that out for herself.

  9

  “What the fuck?” Yasmine demanded. How she had missed them after all these years she had no idea. She twisted her head around and checked her reflection in the bathroom mirror once again. There they were—four big brown moles, all lined up on her neck behind her ear like some kind of fucked up constellation. She felt like a girl in a Clearasil commercial, panicking because she'd gotten a pimple right before going out on a date. Pimples were temporary, though. The moles were there to stay. Who in her right mind would keep her head shaved with moles like that on her neck?

  She yanked open a drawer beneath the bathroom sink, looking for some of that skin-colored cover-up crap her sister Ruby put under her eyes when she'd been up all night. She found a stick of something called Peekaboo that was a little lighter than her natural cinnamon skin tone but good enough. She dabbed some over the moles, rubbed it in, and examined the results. Now she looked like she had poison ivy, or poison neck. She considered pasting a Band-Aid across the whole area, but she didn't have one big enough to cover all four of the moles, and a Band-Aid would only draw attention to the problem. She washed off the cover-up and then dug around in the drawer, looking for something that might distract Angel from the hideous deformities on her neck.

  As if the still-healing lip piercing on her lower lip wasn't distracting enough. Angel had been polite enough not to mention it before, but now that they were getting to know each other, he might ask if the crusty sore beneath that silver ring actually hurt.

  And why would Angel even want to check out her neck? They were only going to the Raves gig together—just hanging out to see if they'd mind cohabitating, as in roommates, not lovers who looked at each other's necks. Besides, Angel was an artist. He might think her moles were cool.

  A sample vial of perfume called Certainty was rolling around in the bottom of the messy vanity drawer. It sounded like the name of a tampon or a pregnancy test, but Yasmine eased the little black cap off the vial and dabbed some perfume on her wrists and temples anyway. Certainty smelled musky and powerful and might be so distracting to Angel that he wouldn't even notice her disgusting configuration of neck moles. Maybe it would even work some sort of magic. She would walk into the club where Mekhi and the Raves were playing; Mekhi would turn green with a mixture of desire, regret, and mad jealousy; and Angel would feel immediately certain about wanting to live with her. As a friend, of course.

  Of course.

  10

  “Sure you're all right, man?” Kash asked for the second time through the locked bathroom stall door.

  “Yep,” Mekhi called back from the other side of the door, praying that Kash and the rest of the band would think this was just his usual pre-gig behavior and go back to playing poker and knocking back shots or whatever they were doing backstage.

  “All right, then. See you in a few,” Kash replied. “Nice shoelaces,” he added before leaving the bathroom.

  Perched on top of the toilet seat lid, Mekhi stared woefully down at his new sneakers and the absurdly wide pant legs that nearly covered them. Yesterday he'd wandered into 555 Soul on Broadway in SoHo and let a sales guy talk him into a completely new performance wardrobe. Big yellow-and-black shirt, insanely huge baggy pants with drawstrings and toggles and pockets all over them, black Converse sneakers with yellow laces, and a trucker hat with a picture of a yellow YIELD sign on it. The hat kept his wild, shaggy twists under control and revealed his shaved neck, making him look more menacing than he'd ever thought possible. In fact, with his new outfit, he kind of looked like one of those cheesy rappers from 2005, which was really not the look he wanted at all.

  None of the guys in the band had commented on his outfit when he showed up, but then again he hadn't really given them time. One look at the huge line forming outside the club and the instruments and microphones set up on the stage inside had sent him rushing to the bathroom to puke his guts out. He'd been locked in a stall ever since.

  If only he had a lucky charm like a handmade silver belt buckle or a shark tooth necklace the way most legendary rock singers probably did. He could don his lucky whatever-it-was, his nervousness would disappear, and he'd perform with complete abandon, driving the crowd insane. Instead, he just sat on the toilet in the club's men's room and smoked his lucky Newports—about forty of them—feeling progressively sicker and sicker.

  All of a sudden the men's room door creaked open and the scuffed toes of Kash's black boots appeared under the stall door once more. “Have a taste and you'll be all right,” he advised, shoving an unopened bottle of Stoli under the door.

  Mekhi took the bottle. If he was going to perform tonight he'd need to feel as fly as his outfit. He opened it and took a swig. His stomach felt so bottomless and endless, it was like pouring a teaspoon of vodka into an empty well. He took another swig and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand.

  “See you in a few then, yeah?” Kash said again. “You might want to lose the hat, though,” he added gently before leaving the men's room.

  The Raves were all about not having a look and not trying too hard. Most of them still wore the clothes their moms had bought them in prep school—Polo shirts, khakis—paired with something cool and absurdly expensive, like a custom-made trench coat from Dolce & Gabbana. But Mekhi's mom had fled to the Czech Republic with some balding, horny count before he'd even started high school, so he didn't even own any polo shirts or khakis, only the clothes he picked out for himself and paid for with the barely adequate clothing allowance Rufus gave him. He could feel his panic mounting. Who was going to want to listen to a sick, skinny high school kid with a shaved neck wearing fashion-disaster yellow-and-black shoes?

  You'd be surprised.

  11

  Skirt, shirt, bra, underwear, shoes, watch, pearl choker, pearl earrings. Chanel stared at the clothes her mom had laid out neatly on the end of her canopy bed. Everything her mom had chosen was gray or navy blue, which just happened to be Yale University's colors.

  Hello, dorkdom! Did she really need her mom to pick out her clothes? How old was she, anyway—five?

  Her parents were in their suite of rooms, getting ready for the Yale Loves New York party for incoming freshmen from New York City at Stanford Parris III's apartment on Park Avenue and 84th Street. For them it was just another cocktail party—a chance to mingle with the parents of the children their own children had gone to school and tennis lessons and SAT prep with for most of their lives. No one would know each other intimately, but everyone would know everyone. People like the Crenshaws thought of everyone in their circle as their dearest friends, but how intimate did you really want to be with someone like Stanford Parris III?

  “Are you almost ready, dear?” Chanel heard her mother call out to her.

  “Yeah,” she called back, feeling stubborn and grumpy and annoyed. After all, she could have been on her way to the Raves gig right now instead of to another totally boring and useless party with her parents. Ignoring the outfit her mother had selected for her, she sat down in front of her iMac and logged on. Most of the e-mails were from fashion houses like Burberry and Maison Margiela, announcing sample sales or parties to launch a signature fragrance or shoe, but a new message from someone at Brown topped the list, followed by a message from Harvard, and one from Princeton.

  To: Chanel87@yahoo.com

  From: apainter@brown.edu

  Carina Chanel,

  I used to paint faceless angels and hands without bodies. I used to be dead. Now my art has a face, and to have you here at Brown next year—oh living, breathing muse!—would be my resurrection. I kneel at your feet.

  Christian

  P.S. There is a rumor you are engaged to that madman lead guitarist in the Raves. My love, I pray this is only a rumor.

  To: Ch
anel87@yahoo.com

  From:bboy@harvarduniversity.edu

  Dear Chanel,

  I know you and I are cut from a different cloth, so to speak—I'm a jock from the boondocks and you're a goddess from New York City—but to quote a line from an old song, I just can't get you out of my head. When I think about you, the windows in my Jeep steam up and I can't breathe. I'm going to fail my finals because of you. I don't think they make you repeat grades if you fail a term in college the way they do in high school, but I wouldn't mind if they did, because then we'd be together for even longer. I know this is kind of crazy to say, but you're my girl, so you better come to Harvard next year. Here's to us for the next four years and forever.

  Love,

  Wade (your Harvard tour guide's roommate—remember me?)

  To: Chanel87@yahoo.com

  From:Sheri@PrincetonTriDs.org

  Dear Chanel,

  Just wanted you to know that we can NOT stop talking about how you and Kash from the Raves are like THE perfect couple!! We are TOO excited to meet him, but first we have to take down all the pictures of him plastered all over our house—SO embarrassing! Give Kash a kiss for us, and tell him we love him too (even though we'd NEVER try to steal away your guy).

  Love,

  Your sisters, the Princeton Tri Delts

  Chanel winced and deleted all three stalkerish messages from her computer, hoping to delete the last one from her brain. There was nothing worse than a bunch of girls pretending to be your best friends when you didn't even know them, all gossiping about you and your new boyfriend whom you'd never even met. Way to make her not want to go to college at all!