Truthfully I had every freedom I could imagine at Treadwell. I could watch anything I wanted on cable television, subscribe to trashy fashion magazines, gossip with my friends, and I probably could have figured out a way to be with boys if I really wanted to, since certainly plenty of girls on campus managed that without too much difficulty. But for my entire freshman year at Treadwell, I didn’t try anything that wouldn’t have gotten my parents’ approval. I was living under their thumbs even though I was over a thousand miles away. My life was constricted entirely by the limits of their public stature. I would never find myself and live my own life if I was always going to be Chuck and Debbie Mathison’s daughter.
Until I was standing at North Station with a decision to make, I had never before felt the need to find myself. I was content being Chuck and Debbie Mathison’s daughter. I liked going home to my fancy house in Phoenix and riding my horse. It was only just then, at that moment, seeing with full clarity that my parents sat atop a business, and that business was based on criticizing the lifestyles of others for profit. And that business was more important to them than Aaron.
Maybe more important to them than me.
“OK,” I said. “The first thing we have to do is get rid of our cell phones. The SIM cards are traceable. You called me from the train, so if they start looking for us, they’ll know you were in Boston.”
I took out my cell phone, prepared to pop out the data chip and toss it in a nearby garbage can. And just then, it rang. It was Mama.
Aaron and I both froze, and I felt like the phone in my hands was a ticking time bomb. It rang four times and then went to voice-mail.
I had a choice to make: if I checked the voice-mail and heard Mama’s voice, I was probably going to chicken out and call her back.
So instead, I popped my SIM card out and tossed it. Aaron somberly did the same thing as me with his own phone.
“We should put some of the cash into pre-paid credit cards,” I instructed Aaron. “There are a lot of things that will seem suspicious if we’re paying in cash.”
He nodded, following my directions. We bought a pre-paid VISA gift card at the drug store with cash, and then used it to buy two one-way tickets to New York’s Penn Station from the automatic ticket machine. Why New York? Where else would anyone go to start over, to hide, to forget everything that had previously happened, and to create a new identity? I figured that there were probably fewer Spirit Channel viewers in New York City than any other major municipality in the U.S. I knew my father’s ratings trends inside out; our viewership was always down in the Northeast.
As unsteady and as nervous as I felt about boarding a train, all of our actions felt surreal. I knew I would be in New York City in three hours with no hotel room booked and no idea what the next day would bring, but part of me still thought that this was temporary. Our parents couldn’t stay angry at Aaron forever. They would realize we were gone, they would find us, they would admit they were wrong and the whole argument had been a misunderstanding, and life would return to normal. The country would find another scandal to exploit and the world would forget about Aaron and Heather.
How young and hopeful I was that night when we boarded our high-acceleration train to New York City. I was fifteen, just two months shy of my sweet sixteenth birthday, and I was still so green around the edges that I believed in miracles.
New York City was intoxicating.
We stepped out of Penn Station on 8 Avenue and I could see Times Square glittering ten blocks to the north. It was almost ten o’clock at night and the streets were still packed with pedestrians, which really shocked me, considering it was Sunday night. The sidewalks smelled sticky because of the candied nuts for sale in carts on every corner. There was a concert at Madison Square Garden that night, making the pedestrian congestion around Penn Station even more impermeable.
Aaron and I linked arms to avoid being separated; since we had chucked our SIM cards, we would have no hope of finding each other if we were ever to get separated.
I had been to New York before with my parents, but never like this, out on the street with strangers blowing smoke in my face and music blaring out of the open doors of every deli and retail store, all of which were still open at that hour. Cities look a lot different from behind the tinted windows of rented security detail vehicles. The activity of New York was intimidating and exciting. There were a million things I had never had a chance to do in New York, and we were actually there. On Seventh Avenue. Right in the heart of it.
“There’s a hotel I found up on 105 and Amsterdam near Columbia University,” Aaron said. I was impressed. He had done his research. “It’s affordable. We can manage it there for a few days while we make a plan. But… we’re probably going to have to show ID in order to get rooms there.”
ID was a problem. We were officially no longer Aaron Matthew and Grace Anne Mathison. We had quietly and indecisively reinvented ourselves during the first half of our train ride before slumping into a heavy silence for the second half. Aaron had gone through Jason and Kevin before deciding on Eric, which I approved of since it was close enough to Aaron that it wouldn’t be the end of the world if I ever used his old name mistakenly. I chose Theresa and then changed my mind and insisted on Monica, and then Aaron put his foot down and told me absolutely under no terms could I choose a name of a saint. That was way too obvious.
Grumpy, ten minutes later I settled on Gigi, since Aaron’s nickname for me since we were kids was Little G.
So, we were unofficially Eric and Gigi Martin. A brother and sister from Southern California on a mission to make it in the big city. And I was no longer fifteen, I’d aged three years in the last two hours and was eighteen. As difficult as this was going to be to convincingly pull off, it was even more important than the fake name. School was out of the question; we couldn’t have truant officers sniffing around. I did my best to only think about Aaron as Eric.
Aaron thought he knew of a storefront near Times Square in Hell’s Kitchen where it was possible to get fake ID’s. But when we arrived at the place that he was sure had been his friend’s recommendation, it was a greasy pizza shop. Trying to make the most of our situation, we stopped for twenty minutes and each ate a slice of pizza.
“If you were a fake ID shop, where would you be, Gigi?” Aaron asked me. His use of my new fake name sounded foreign and forced.
“Mmm…” I grunted, a long string of hot cheese dangling from my mouth. I blotted it away with a napkin. “Where kids who want ID’s live.”
“You’re a genius!” Aaron exclaimed.
After studying the subway map for at least five minutes, we boarded the A train bound for Washington Square, downtown, in the neighborhood of New York University. I was relieved when we exited the subway tunnels into a neighborhood that was far quieter and prettier than Times Square. We walked past Washington Square Park and up and down the streets of fabled Greenwich Village, past t-shirt shops and gelato stores that were all still, amazingly, open at nearly midnight. The t-shirts that hung in the windows of stores all had shockingly crude sayings silkscreened on them and I cringed. I felt like I wasn’t supposed to be reading things like that, although my days of feeling ashamed about rough language were effectively over.
If I had wanted to hear polite language, we had made a very poor choice in destinations.
Aaron stepped inside a burger joint where a couple of kids our age were unwrapping sandwiches in the window and asked them where a guy could get a fake ID around there. He seemed confident when he rejoined me on the sidewalk that he knew where he was going.
I followed my brother to a small storefront on Sullivan St. where all kinds of pipes and trinkets made out of glass painted all colors of the rainbow were on display in the front window.
“You make ID’s in here?” Aaron asked the middle-aged man behind the counter.
“Sure do,” he replied. “How can I help you?”
Aaron and I were both asked to take turns standing in front of
a blue backdrop that the man pulled down behind the counter, not unlike a window shade. He took our photographs with a Polaroid and wrote down all of our information.
“She’s supposed to be eighteen?” he asked dubiously, looking at me.
“Yes sir, she is eighteen,” Aaron insisted.
Even when standing in a late-night store making a fake ID, Aaron used impeccable manners
“You kids in some kind of trouble?” the store owner asked, looking us both up and down.
I began sweating instantaneously. I was definitely lacking in practice and nerve when it came to lying, and when I opened my mouth to speak, nothing came out.
“No, sir,” Aaron responded quickly. “No trouble, sir. My sister and I just want to be able to buy cigarettes without a hassle, ya know?”
“It’s just most people want ID’s that say they’re twenty-one, that’s all,” the store owner said, scratching his bald head pensively. “I gotta dig up a special template for an under-twenty-one California license.”
The man said he’d need an hour, so we roamed up and down the street aimlessly. I was growing really, really tired. Even at one in the morning, the streets of the Village were bustling with college kids drifting out of bars and jazz clubs, lingering on the street puffing on cigarettes, chasing each other in and out of pizza joints. I thought of what I was missing back at Treadwell. Surely the entire Colgate dorm was quiet for the night and probably only a handful of desk lamps remained illuminated at that hour.
The subway smelled like urine and at the late hour, the only other passengers on our car were angry-looking, hard-faced people and a handful of rowdy teenagers who got off at Times Square. A man with a half-way decent voice and filthy pants was singing for spare change, and midway through Hello, by Lionel Richie, he forgot the words and switched to Ain’t No Sunshine When She’s Gone, by Bill Withers. Aaron and I ignored him when he passed us with a paper cup asking for contributions. In all of my travels to other countries in working with the poor, no one had ever stuck a cup under my nose before and asked me for my money. It was unnerving.
I stared at my new ID on our train ride uptown to keep myself from falling asleep. It looked pretty impressive; I mean, not that I’d ever closely inspected a California Driver’s License before, or anything. It was entertaining to me that this little piece of plasticized cardboard suggested I was licensed to operate a vehicle. I didn’t know how to drive and hadn’t even had a shot at learning until the following summer when I would have been home in Phoenix. But no matter what the name was on the card, the picture was unmistakably me.
Dull red hair, not fire-engine red hair or auburn… just blah orange hair. A light smattering of freckles on my nose. Pale blue eyes, almost gray, that made me look passive and tired most of the time, especially set against my ghostly pallor when I wasn’t tan, which was always. I had a tiny chicken pox scar beneath the corner of my left eye that I’d had since I was six. Mama always assured me that I was pretty, but she had to say that. I knew in a line-up next to the other girls at Treadwell, I was nothing much to look at. I found my own appearance to be cringe-worthy. I was so uncomfortable with my plainness that the idea of dying my hair a different color or even wearing make-up made me embarrassed. Trying either would be a complete admission of defeat, in my mind. Like waving a white flag in the air and saying, OK, world, I get it and I’m plain as can be; I’ll try a little harder!
I felt like I was nodding off to sleep on the train; my head jerking up from my chest a few times. In a flash, I imagined my parents going to the media to find me once they discovered I had left Treadwell, and my sophomore school ID picture running in all of the global news media. That boring, plain Jane picture.
Suddenly I was fully alert and sensed the weight of someone else’s stare on me. Sitting directly across from me was a young man, probably around my age, looking right at me. Studying me. He was watching me so intently that I thought for a second that perhaps he recognized me, before I admitted to myself he definitely did not look like a regular viewer of The Spirit Channel. His head had been shaved but it looked like his dark hair had been growing back in for a few weeks, stick-straight and at odd angles. Thick black-framed glasses were sliding down his nose and he pushed them back up where they belonged with one finger. He had round black spacers in his earlobes, and I noticed with surprise that he had spider webs tattooed on the tops of his hands. He wore a battered green army jacket over a black hooded sweatshirt, and a patch-covered backpack was at his feet with Sharpie doodles all over it.
He was totally not the kind of guy I would ever encounter near Treadwell’s campus.
And totally not the kind of guy I ever would have thought was cute.
And yet, he totally was, and I caught myself blushing.
When the train neared 72 St., I pretended not to notice as he stood up and swung his backpack over his shoulder. But I couldn’t have been mistaken when he smiled at me just enough to make his dimples show and gave me a tiny wave as he exited the train.
What?
Boys never looked at me. They certainly never waved at me.
I would have pretty much been willing to sell my soul to the devil if Colby McKay had ever waved at me like that.
Of course, I couldn’t have known then on that crazy, disorganized night that I had just received the first of a handful of life-changing miracles that would come into my life over the course of the next six months. I could never have known, based on that brief encounter, that the boy I would nearly forget about in the seconds that followed would remember me for the next few weeks.
Aaron was falling asleep on the subway bench next to me. The bench was strangely hot, and I realized that the heater for our train’s car was directly underneath the seat.
“We’re going to have to wear disguises,” I told my brother. His head kept bumping my shoulder as he struggled to retain consciousness.
“Huh?” he stirred away.
“Disguises,” I repeated. “We’re too recognizable.”
The hotel uptown wasn’t far from Columbia University, but it was in a neighborhood that seemed very dangerous on our walk from the subway stop. A car siren was wailing relentlessly a block away. It was colder now, and unlike the prim and adorable townhouses we passed in Greenwich Village, the streets in Morningside Heights were lined with monster-sized brick apartment buildings. Also, unlike the bustling Village, this neighborhood was mostly desolate except for an old man standing outside on the stoop of his building, smoking a cigarette and looking at us with curiosity, and a woman urging the dog she was walking to hurry up and go already.
I shuddered and fastened the buttons on the front of my baby pink denim jacket. I wished I didn’t look so prissy and suburban. A million, billion different dangerous things could happen to two kids like me and Aaron on the streets of New York City at that hour. Anyone taking a glance at us could have figured out pretty quickly that we were from out of town, with our wide-eyed wonderment and enormous rolling suitcases.
I stopped short and screamed!
“What?” Aaron asked, grabbing my arm.
A huge rat, its fur slick with oil, had just run right in front of me from out of a pile of black garbage bags at the curb. It had come within an inch of my suede boot.
When we arrived at the large orange brick building, I observed that this wasn’t a hotel at all; it was a hostel. I shuddered. Had my mother been with us, she would have called the hostel très déclassé.
And unfortunately for us, there was no vacancy that night.
“Excuse me,” Aaron said to catch the attention of the man behind the front desk. “I’d like a room for the night.”
The man was balding and watching an HBO sitcom on a small television behind the desk. His back was turned to us, and either he had not heard us enter or he had chosen to ignore us, but now he turned to face us.
“We’re full tonight, guys,” the man barked at us without budging from his chair. “This time of year we book up early, usually be
fore four p.m. I might have somethin’ for ya tomorrow but I don’t know. It depends on everyone checking out in the morning.”
Aaron sighed, visibly frustrated and tired. It was almost three in the morning at that point. Where else were we ever going to find a place to sleep for a few hours?
“Is there any other place around here where we could go at this hour?” Aaron asked, sounding hopeless. “Our flight got in late from California and we’re really tired.”
I marveled at my brother’s yarn-spinning abilities. He was a convincing actor.
“You could try Rhythm & Blues up on one-ten,” the guy said, not seeming the least bit concerned about where we would sleep that night.
Back out on the street, we trudged uptown another five blocks.
“Sorry,” Aaron mumbled. “I guess I was in such a hurry to get on the road I didn’t think I’d have to call and make a reservation.”
“It’s OK,” I assured him. I was exhausted and my feet were aching from so much walking in one day. I was thinking how nice it would be if perhaps we’d wake up the next morning and decide to call this adventure a wrap. But then I’d be back at Treadwell, target of the rumor mill. It was safer to not even consider turning back.
The hostel on 110 St. was larger than the first. They had rooms available, but none of the family-style rooms in which Aaron and I could have bunked together.
We were going to have to split up.
“A key for the gentleman,” the woman behind the counter said, handing him a small metal key. “And a key for the lady.”
The woman, who appeared to be in her late thirties, who was one of several staff members behind the front desk, pressed a small silver key into my palm.
“Now that’s the key for your locker, not your room. The dorm-style rooms don’t have locks, only bunk beds. So please be sure to lock up any valuables in your locker. We aren’t responsible for lost or stolen items,” the woman warned us.
The Believer's Daugher - [A Treadwell Academy - 02] Page 7
