Lola shook her head in confusion.
Chip paused in his progress and stood by a large cactus, prodding it gently with one outstretched finger. Marlene had his other hand and was tugging him along, trying to force him onward.
“I told you,” Scarlett said, pointing. “I told you.” She was glad to have her worst suspicions vindicated—Marlene had been up to something. There was nothing quite like the sweet, sweet nectar of being right.
“You have to be kidding me,” Spencer said. “You told me you were taking us out.”
“I was covering for Marlene,” Lola said, flustered. “She wanted it to be a surprise.”
“How the hell would Marlene be able to afford this?”
“You know how she gets stuff through Powerkids. I figured she had a gift certificate or something and was sharing it. She gets all kinds of things. I didn’t know!”
“So what do we do now?” Scarlett asked. “Want to have family dinner night with your ex?”
“Well, we can’t leave,” Lola said.
“Why?” Spencer asked.
“We’re here for Marlene,” Lola said.
“If Marlene wants to have dinner with Chip, let her have dinner with Chip.”
Something very strange had come over Scarlett’s older sister. There was a totally foreign blush to her paper-white cheeks, and she was rocking a bit on her low heels.
“Don’t leave me,” she said, clutching them both by an arm. “Please. Don’t leave me. Tomorrow, he’s gone. He goes to Boston for school. You won’t have to deal with him anymore.”
“I thought the day you broke up with him was the day I didn’t have to deal with him anymore,” Spencer said, looking at the tiny, pale hand that gripped his wrist.
“You weren’t that picky on the day he saved your show. You owe him.”
This, sadly, was true. Chip had played a large part in making Hamlet happen by distracting their parents on a day-long cruise on the Sutcliffe family boat, giving Spencer and Scarlett enough time to load in an entire cast and stage a show. He did this after Lola had broken up with him, no less.
“Look,” Lola said, when neither Spencer nor Scarlett responded to that statement. “Maybe…I don’t know. I want to stay. But I can’t stay here alone. And Marlene must have gone to a lot of effort, so, let’s just stay, okay? It’s a free dinner at our favorite restaurant. It could be worse. I’m just going to go to the ladies’ room, and then we’ll stay, okay? Okay?”
She accepted their stunned silence as a yes, nodded tersely, and tiptoed off to the ladies’ room behind her.
“This is so bad,” Spencer said, leaning up against the decorative old-fashioned gas pump behind him. “This is so, so bad…”
He trailed off, and his face stiffened into a neutral mask as Marlene dislodged Chip from the cactus and brought him over.
“Stay here,” she commanded them all. “I’ll get us a table.”
Chip had really outdone himself tonight, outfitwise. The pants were stripy, the shirt was a different color and seemed deliberately too small, the tie a different stripy still. Ridiculous as it was, there was no doubt in Scarlett’s mind that what Chip was wearing cost a fortune—that perhaps, if you touched him, an alarm would go off somewhere. Not that Scarlett had any plans on touching him.
He took a careful step in Spencer’s direction and extended a hand of greeting.
“What’s up?” he asked.
Chip seemed understandably nervous to be facing the Martins once again, because even he knew that Scarlett and Spencer weren’t his biggest fans. Scarlett’s dislike was fairly tepid, but Spencer genuinely couldn’t stand him and had never hidden that fact. Chip had no real personality; at least, Scarlett had never seen it. It may have been one of those things that stayed hidden most of the time, like a groundhog.
But that wasn’t the problem. Chip’s crime was something he couldn’t really help. He was rich. Seriously rich. Bona fide, centuryold, New York society, private school rich. To be fair to him, Chip never bragged about his wealth, nor did he appear to care that Lola and her family came from a totally different financial league. He was not snobbish. If anything, he acted like he’d recently landed on the planet and was charmed and fascinated by the things he found there. The magical underground “subway” train that transported people all over the city. Credit card limits. Doing your own laundry. Having a job. Chip gazed in wonderment at it all.
This trait, however innocent, had never been very endearing to Spencer or Scarlett. Scarlett thought Chip was dull and a little dim. Spencer exhibited something that ranged from profound irritation to seething hatred. Scarlett always assumed that this had something to do with seeing a guy a year younger than himself, who had an endless spending limit, no known vocation, and no pressure to accomplish anything right away. Chip would get four years of college to continue his lacrosse-playing and shirt-buying, and maybe a year or two after that, before anyone asked him what he planned on doing with the rest of his life.
He loved Lola. Of that, no one had any doubt. He loved Lola with a kind of palpable, squeamish love. His eyes followed her when they were in a room together, and when she left, his brain seemed to go into a sleep mode, waiting for her reappearance. He cared enough about Lola to extend his hand to Lola’s tall, unpredictable older brother who had fixed him with a gaze of stone. Scarlett had no idea what Spencer was going to do with the extended hand—so many things were possible in his world—but he merely shook it. Even Chip seemed surprised by this.
“I like your tie,” Spencer said.
Chip grabbed the tie reflexively with his free hand.
“Oh…thanks. I just got it. I’ve been looking for one in this color for a while. They don’t make this shade that often, so…anyway, I found it at Hugo Boss and…”
Spencer’s face had frozen in a tableau of slightly exaggerated interest, inviting Chip to keep digging his hole, keep talking about his tie until the universe finally went poof, rolled itself back into a ball, and took itself home.
Lola quietly emerged from the restroom. Chip opened his mouth to say some kind of greeting, but failed. Lola smiled shyly and put her head down.
“Chip got a new tie,” Spencer said. “I did something with a tie this morning, Chip. Want to see?”
Before Spencer could demonstrate his strangulation method, Marlene reappeared.
“Table’s ready!” she said.
“Guess we should sit,” Lola said, knocking Spencer gently out of the way as he reached for Chip’s tie. “Lead the way, Marlene.”
As she walked off, Lola mouthed the words “stop it” over her shoulder, and Spencer pointed to his heart, as if he had no idea what she could possibly mean.
“Remind me to kill Marlene later,” he said quietly to Scarlett. “Just in case I forget. Let’s eat and get this over with. And eat a lot. Order everything.”
At the table, Lola and Marlene were positioning themselves on a bench seat against the wall. Chip was milling around, trying to do the mental math about where he should sit. He backed up on Scarlett and Spencer’s approach, letting them take whatever seats they wanted. Spencer delayed sitting down, hesitating between two chairs for over a minute. Chip eventually got so nervous from this that he excused himself.
“Sit!” Lola exclaimed when Chip was out of earshot.
Spencer gleefully took a seat next to Scarlett. A trayful of organic guava smoothies arrived, unbidden. These were the best drinks in the place, but were also shockingly expensive.
“Chip is trying to win us over with fancy fruit drinks, huh?” Spencer asked, accepting one.
“I ordered them,” Marlene said. “I also got guacamole.”
“Spencer,” Lola said, “be nice!”
“I was,” he said, straightening the napkin on his lap. “I was being very nice. I was asking him about his nice tie.”
“I know what you were doing.”
“Yes, but could you prove it in court?”
“Spencer, please…”
>
“What? I’m telling you, nice is my middle name. Right, Scarlett?”
“Your middle name is Reynolds,” Scarlett said, sipping from her smoothie.
“Just one night,” Lola said. “Please, Spence. Don’t bait him. He’s trying to be friends.”
“Kind of a pointless activity, don’t you think? Considering that he’s your ex, and he’s leaving the city tomorrow?”
“Stop it, Spencer!” Marlene said, a note of absolute authority in her voice. “Don’t ruin everything!”
Spencer shrugged and sat back, folding his arms over his chest in temporary surrender.
Chip returned just as the guacamole cart came rattling up to the table. They all watched a man with an alarmingly wide smile whack avocados in half and smash them to bits in a huge stone mortar. It looked like a carefree job, one that helped you get out all your aggressions and frustrations. Scarlett watched him enviously as he smacked down the pestle, grinding in the garlic and onions and cilantro. He would never need therapy. Anytime he had a problem, an avocado would meet a terrible death.
“Obviously, um, tonight’s on me,” Chip said as the waiter approached. “I just thought, you know, dinner…”
“Thank you,” Lola said politely. She was doing some kind of napkin origami in her lap.
Once they had ordered half the menu (Spencer wasn’t kidding), a fog of silence fell on the table. Lola and Chip kept slipping looks at each other, being tediously, horribly coy. Unlike the silences between Scarlett and Eric, these were full of meaning and potential, and Scarlett wanted no part of them.
“What are you majoring in?” she asked, breaking the silence. She didn’t care, it was just the only question that sprang to mind.
“Oh…yeah.” Chip shuffled his utensils. “We, um, we don’t have to pick our majors for a year or two. So I’m just taking a bunch of classes. And probably row. I guess. They row a lot. In Boston. They have a…big river. I forget what it’s called.”
“The Charles,” Marlene said. “I looked up your school online, and some stuff about Boston.”
Sometimes, Marlene could be really creepy. She could get away with it while she was eleven, but it was going to be a problem really soon.
“Oh right,” Chip said, smiling. “Yeah, I knew it was a name.”
“You knew the name was a name?” Spencer asked politely.
Scarlett thought she felt a kick brush by under the table.
“I won the canoeing trophy,” Marlene said. And this time, she provided an explanation. An extremely long one. The trophy had apparently been the result of some all-day adventure course where Marlene had to navigate around the lake. They were treated to descriptions of every single girl in Marlene’s bunk (she didn’t like them, except for one named Zoe, who sounded like she was now Marlene’s little lieutenant). Chip listened intently. A conversation about eleven-year-olds rowing around a lake was one he could keep up with. And he was a rower. Paddling techniques were exchanged. This had a softening effect on Lola, who liked it when anyone paid attention to Marlene.
After a while, Chip must have felt like he had to share his attentions with another Martin, and so he finally turned to Scarlett.
“Hey, Scarlett,” he said. “Good summer?”
“I…guess?”
“Are you still seeing that guy?” he asked. “Ed…no…”
“Eric,” Scarlett corrected him, far too hastily.
“Right,” Chip said. “Eric. Nice guy. From the show, right?”
“Right…”
Spencer fell back in his chair and looked up at the red-tiled ceiling, probably wishing that it would choose this moment to collapse.
“That guy was an idiot,” Marlene continued. “He was just messing with Scarlett. And he was really—”
“Marlene!” Lola said brightly. “Tell Chip about the Powerkid of the Year competition. Marlene is being considered for…”
The interruption only confirmed Marlene’s suspicion that she was onto something worth talking about.
“Eric was gross,” Marlene went on, leaning toward Chip. “I hated him, and…”
“Hey, is this one spicy?” Spencer said, making a wide reach across the table for the Scotch bonnet salsa, the one that glowed an alarming yellowish-green. Before anyone could answer, he filled a chip with a massive scoop and ate it.
The reaction that followed, while certainly exaggerated, was not entirely fake. The gasping and grabbing all the glasses of water—the banging on the table that drew the attention of all the nearby diners and the waiter—all of it was designed to kill this avenue of conversation. Marlene took the hint this time.
Dinner passed by slowly. Now that he had convened the Martins, Chip had nothing to say to them. It was a puzzling exercise of silences punctuated by the sizzle of fajitas and the endless consumption of pricey smoothies. Marlene tried to keep filling the air, but after a while no one was even pretending to listen to the canoe stories.
Just as they finished up, Spencer’s phone rang.
“I have to take this,” he said, springing out of his chair. He returned a minute later. Scarlett could tell from the tightness of his jaw and the way he fixed his eyes on the table and didn’t play around anymore—the call had been about the audition, and the news had not been good.
“Anyone want dessert?” Chip asked cheerfully.
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ACT II
A SPIES OF NEW YORK EXCLUSIVE!
WHAT IS THIS WE ARE HEARING…from the set of Crime and Punishment, the police procedural/courtroom drama that has been an integral part of our lives since we were just tiny spies? Is there trouble in our favorite fictional police precinct?
RUMOR IS…Donald Purchase, who plays our beloved Detective Sonny Lavinski, is unhappy with the current story line and is restless for a change. A well-placed source tells us that Donald wants out.
“Donald is a great actor,” our source told us in confidence. “But he’s been playing Sonny Lavinski for fifteen seasons now. He’s had offers from Hollywood for years. This time, he’s ready to take them.”
The idea of Sonny Lavinski leaving Crime and Punishment is enough to make us drop our morning brandy. We have grown up with his dry witticisms and his sense of justice. His gravelly voice has nursed us through many a hangover. We have seen him fight terrorists, save children (and a seal) from an explosion at the Bronx Zoo, and singlehandedly prevent the poisoning of the Central Park reservoir. We were there when his wife died, and when he found new love in the form of Denise “Wow, she’s way too young and way too hot for him but because he’s Sonny Lavinski we will accept it” Shapiro. And though we have never seen his daughter, Daisy, born in the first episode, her mysterious school projects and much-discussed talents have never failed to amuse us.
Is Sonny really leaving us? Because we will have to book extra sessions with our therapists now.
“Completely untrue,” Donald’s rep told us. “I don’t know where you’re getting this information, but Donald isn’t going anywhere. He just signed on for three more seasons. Donald loves New York, and he loves Crime and Punishment.”
We are reassured, somewhat. But we will never truly be content until we are sure Sonny is staying. We suggest locking him in a cage located on some prominent city landmark where we can go and visit him every day.
Sonny, you belong to New York. Our love is strong. And more than a little obsessive.
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THE FEVER
Eric Hall was a nice Southern boy, from Winston-Salem, North Carolina—once the strapping, blond star of his high school theater department. He seemed to drag along puffy white clouds and blue skies from some other corner of the earth. He was the kind of guy who smiled easily, who you imagined smelled of fresh-cut grass and his grandma’s peach cobbler, who tanned on the first day of summer, who was liked by all who met him. You could easily picture him on a horse, some
thing Scarlett did a little too frequently, and not always appropriately dressed in equestrian gear.
He’d gotten a haircut in the last few days. She liked it a little longer, but this was good. Cleaner. Crisper. With the sunned-out blondish end bits clipped off. Being a blonde herself, Scarlett was kind of bored of the color. The darkness was nice, and unfamiliar. She heard herself speaking, but there was a mumbled roar covering up the words in her mind. It must have been something about coming inside.
“She sent around business cards to the cast,” he said. “I thought I’d stop by. Just finished class. And when I saw you walking down the street with…”
“Murray,” Scarlett said, the name strangled in her throat.
“What?”
That was from Murray the doorman, who was watching them with ill-concealed disgust.
“Not, no…”
Scarlett was stuttering a little. She took a second to control her voice.
“Not you. The dog. The dog is Murray.”
“That dog’s name is Murray?” Murray asked.
Eric picked up on Scarlett’s signal that they should move quickly, quickly to the elevator. She tucked Murray the dog under her arm like a football. The elevator doors closed silently as velvet curtains, not like the great, end-of-the-world squawk that the gates of the Hopewell elevator made.
“He didn’t like that answer,” Eric said.
“He’s not a Murray fan,” Scarlett explained. “Also, his name is Murray.”
“Is that a coincidence?”
“No,” Scarlett said. “It’s just my boss making a statement.”
“Amy’s a piece of work.”
On that note of truth, the doors opened again, and the nineteenth floor hallway awaited them. Mrs. Amberson probably wasn’t even here. Scarlett knew she should mention this. Except that she had now lost the ability to speak, and all she could do was embark on the death march down the thick blue carpet to 19D, Eric sauntering just behind her, Murray stepping on her feet in his haste to get to shelter. She opened the door with her key, which Eric noted with a little tuck-up of the chin.
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