Dream Girl

by Lauren Mechling

  “Save it. Besides, it’s cute.” Still gripping her magazine, she stretched her arms in the air. “It’s going to be at this whacked-out place called the Portrait Club. You’ll either love it or hate it.”

  I smiled, but I masked my excitement well, I think. Thanks to Kiki and her friends, I already knew about this centuries-old institution on East Forty-fourth Street, and I’d heard all about the annual pig roasts and the private room where former presidents used to entertain their movie-star girlfriends.

  “It will probably be boring, but I shouldn’t tell you that because I want you to come and keep me entertained,” Becca said. “As long as you go into the place with the right sense of humor, you’ll find it entertaining. It’s one of those private clubs where everyone looks like a dead white man waiting to happen.”

  I refrained from telling Becca I was already well aware of the club and kept a lid on the sparks of excitement that were going off in my chest. I had to admit, it was funny that my first club experience would be at the Portrait Club. After all, when most New York girls my age go to their first club, they end up on some third-rate dance floor filled with other underage kids moving around spastically to electronic bleeps and drumbeats. Then, at the end, somebody throws up.

  Tantalizing, right?

  “Earth to Claire.” Becca rolled up her magazine and came at my head with it. “You in?”

  “I think so.” I rocked forward and stood up. “Let me just check my calendar.”

  “Oh, will you quit it? I already told everyone you’re coming.”

  { 12 }

  Dr. Quack

  I was biking along a bland suburban stretch, pedaling as fast as I could. The houses were cardboard-cutout plain, with identical rosebushes in full bloom in front. I desperately wanted to get back into the city, but every time I reached a corner and moved onto a new street, it was no different, with the same single line of trees along the curb and silver flowers to the right of every doorstep.

  A low murmur turned into a loud rumbling. I looked over my shoulder to see a postal truck blow around the corner and come at me. I didn’t want to be run over by some slap-happy driver, so I shifted to the right, turning my handlebars toward the edge of the sidewalk. Instead, my bike levitated and started floating over the vehicle. I was too shocked to keep pedaling, but my bike kept going. This flying thing was pretty fabulous!

  The truck disappeared under a canopy of gray leaves, and when it reemerged there was a black and white plaid duffel bag poking through the passenger window. Somebody must have tossed it in the air, because it flew up, straight at me. The bag grazed my front tire before plummeting and landing at the foot of a tree. I turned around to get a last look, but the leaves showering down got in the way.

  Flying didn’t feel so fun anymore.

  “Come on, Tinker Bell,” Coach Blendack yelled at me. “You can do it!”

  He was cramming his top two favorite conversational tactics into the space of three words: (1) he screamed, and (2) in what must have been some sick attempt to highlight how interchangeable we Hudson students all seemed to him, he called every girl Tinker Bell and every guy buddy.

  We called Coach Blendack Bullwinkle—though not to his face. He looked like a moose, with a bulky physique and tufts of hair poking from behind each ear. A former biology teacher rumored to have been moved to the athletics department after a nervous breakdown, Coach Blendack gave us what he called weight-lifting tests every Monday morning. He’d walk around the gym and watch everybody do two sets of bicep curls. It was part of his plan to elevate physical education’s fallen reputation or something. During these weekly affairs he was fond of saying, “Anything you fail to do here can and will be used against your grade point average.”

  Predictably, it worked; a few kids even brought notebooks to PE. Sometimes I kept myself entertained thinking what a Hudson kid wouldn’t do for a higher grade point average. Hold your breath all day? No problem. Eat a brown paper bag? Pass the salt and pepper, please.

  “Let’s go, Tinker Bell!” Coach Blendack’s spit sprayed across my nose.

  I could feel the shine collecting on my forehead and the stench settling on my skin as I steadied my knees, crooked my right elbow, and raised my arm to my waist. It wouldn’t go any farther. How was it that I was so hopeless at this beefcake business?

  It certainly didn’t help matters that I’d had another black-and-white dream the night before. By this point I understood there was a direct link between my crazy dreams and my bouts of dire exhaustion, and this day was no exception. Just thinking about riding my bike and floating above suburbia brought on a new wave of fatigue. The weight dropped to my side.

  “I’m sorry,” I said to Coach Blendack.

  “Don’t be sorry!” he roared. “Be strong!”

  “I’m just—I’m just too tired.”

  “Like the last time,” he huffed. “Let me remind you, Twinkie, tired is a state of mind. It should not be your defining characteristic!”

  And idiocy shouldn’t be yours, I thought.

  Beth Blanks, a bookworm who was in my homeroom, snuck over to me once Coach Blendack had moved on to the next victim.

  “It happens to the best of us,” she said knowingly.

  “What does? Him?” I pointed at our teacher’s ample bottom.

  “Too much studying. Did you see Lucinda Dobbs?”

  Lucinda was one of the few Hudson students who didn’t need to be identified by last name. She belonged to the group of seniors who stood in the same spot outside school every day. They were called the Queen Bees, after their attitudes or average bra size, depending on whom you asked. Lucinda was the one with red hair. Everyone knew that—even me.

  “What about her?” I asked.

  “She pulled an all-nighter for civics and then she walked into a lamppost on her way to school,” Beth said. “There’s a green bruise on her forehead. It won’t be long before everybody has one.”

  It wasn’t until I walked into homeroom, still sweaty from the previous period, that I understood the implications of what she was saying. My old friend Sheila was sitting by a Bunsen burner, brushing her bangs off her forehead to display her new injury.

  Talk about being a fashion victim.

  That night Henry was visiting his friend Dov, so it was just the three of us at dinner. Mom made ratatouille and chicken with forty garlic cloves, a French specialty. She must have wanted information out of me—she started out by asking me a million questions about how I was feeling. When she finally realized I had nothing of interest to share with her, she and Dad got to talking about Dad’s latest paper submission, and I doused my potatoes in Soul Sauce and let my mind wander back to what Kiki and her Waldorf family had told me about Becca. Now that I knew Becca’s billion-dollar secret, I felt protective of her. There were plenty of worse things to be than a ketchup princess, but still, it must have been pretty weird to be bonkers-rich.

  “Hello, Claire.” Dad was waving his napkin in my face like a bullfighter. “Are you listening?”

  I snapped back to attention. “Now I am.”

  Mom clasped her hands and leaned over my way, at an angle that suggested we were about to have what she and Dad called a Serious Conversation. The funny thing—if you can call it funny—about our Serious Conversations was that they are anything but conversations. Mom and Dad would prepare little spiels that they would take turns delivering, one overlapping the other, a tactic they’d devised to prevent any interruptions from yours truly. The last time we’d had one of these was in the aftermath of my Henry Hudson acceptance.

  My parents cleared their throats and exchanged awkward glances before Mom got started. “Your gym teacher called today. He said you’ve been exhausted and he wanted to know if you’ve been sleeping enough,” Mom reached out and rubbed Dad’s thigh. I looked away.

  Dad cut in, “We think it must be hormonal.”

  Hearing my dad say the word hormonal was more disgusting than…well, I’d rather not think about
more disgusting alternatives.

  “We’re sure this can be solved,” Mom said, “what with all the medical advances of today.”

  “I don’t understand,” I whimpered, still not looking at them. “Since when does being fifteen years old and showing up for school feeling a little tired constitute a full-blown medical crisis?”

  “Nobody said anything about a crisis,” Mom said. “We’re just concerned.”

  Oh no. Concerned. My least favorite word in the English language. Why didn’t she just come out with it and say “major trouble”?

  “We called an expert,” Mom said.

  “An expert.” I leaned back and looked up at the ceiling. “You mean you called a decrepit old neighbor who can’t remember his own name half the time?”

  “That only happened once,” Mom said. “Where’s your compassion?”

  “We’ve all noticed it,” Dad said. “You haven’t been yourself. Something’s changed.”

  “Maybe it has to do with the fact that I spend most of my waking hours at the lamest school in America?” I ventured. My necklace started to make my skin itch and I moved the clasp to the back of my neck.

  “Don’t look so worried.” Mom twirled a wisp of hair around her finger. “You’re not in trouble. Dr. Rothbart called in a prescription for some very light sleeping pills for you. They’ll be ready at Duane Reade on Sixth Avenue.”

  “Noctolux,” Dad said. “The Web site says it enables you to have REM sleep and leaves you feeling energized.” He widened his eyes to illustrate his point in case I didn’t get it with actual words.

  I couldn’t take any more of their hassling me, so I got up to clear the table.

  The phone rang when I was rinsing the plates. By the time I came back into the dining area, Dad was frowning like a catfish.

  “Dov’s mother,” he told Mom after he hung up. “She said somebody was supposed to pick up Henry at five.”

  “Damn it!” Mom said into her hands. “With my deadline and this whole medical condition, it completely slipped my mind.”

  The word condition sent me into a tailspin, and it took all my determination not to throw a hissy fit. As I knew from experience, that would only make matters worse.

  With nothing left on the table to clear, I picked up a copy of Paris Match and pretended to find a photo spread of the Prince of Monaco’s latest romantic getaway totally riveting. Anything to keep from making eye contact with my parents and being told I had to go out and pick up my little brother.

  “Oh, poupée?” Dad said in his best syrupy voice. “Your mother and I have so much work to do.”

  And before I could come up with a good excuse, Mom was accepting Dad’s implied question for me.

  “What a great idea. While you’re out, you can pick up the prescription.” She flashed me her hazy smile.

  A smile so mesmerizing that, as far as I knew, nobody had ever been able to say no to it.

  Who was I to break tradition?

  It was a fine, warm night, and the air smelled of fallen leaves and hot dog steam rising from vending carts.

  When I got to Dov’s place, a town house not far from us, I saw Henry waiting by the window. He had his raincoat on, with the hood tied tightly around his face.

  “He must be happy to see you,” Dov’s mom told me when she opened the door. “I didn’t know we’d have him for so long.” She sounded a little uncomfortable. “Dov’s already gone up to his father’s for the night. I told Henry he could play on my computer, but he just wanted to wait for you.”

  “What took you so long?” he called out as he stomped down the hallway toward me.

  “Don’t ask me,” I said, happy to see the only seminormal member of our family. “You can take it up with our parents. And by the way, it’s not raining.”

  Dov’s mom laughed. “He’s been wearing that since Dov left. I told him I think it looks cute.”

  Henry didn’t much feel like talking. He pouted as we walked down Carmine Street, kicking a bottle cap along the way.

  “It’s not my fault Mom and Dad forgot,” I said. “Don’t take it out on me.”

  Henry made a puffing sound and kicked again.

  “If you want to sulk, that’s fine, but then we’ll go straight home. Or…you can buck up and we can take a long walk.”

  It works every time. While most eight-year-old boys dreamed of growing wings or playing professional football, Henry clings to another fantasy: to walk and walk and walk. He shed his morose self on the corner of Carmine and Bedford streets and perked up as we snaked our way through the West Village. With his hood now hanging down his back, Henry told me about the idea he and Dov had come up with to build a mass transit system for time travel.

  I was starting to have fun with my weird little brother, and I almost walked right by the drugstore without remembering I had to stop in.

  I wasn’t dying to pick up the prescription, but I knew it would get my parents off my case. “Just stay here,” I said as I parked Henry up front by the Halloween costumes. He lunged for a hairy ape head and pulled it over his face.

  “Claire!” His voice sounded muffled through the mouth slit. “Have I told you the gorilla ice cream joke yet?”

  “No, and I can’t wait,” I told him. “Why don’t you practice it in your head? I’ll be back in three seconds.”

  Ten minutes later, the line hadn’t moved and I leaned back to look down the aisle and make sure Henry hadn’t been kidnapped yet. My little sixty-five-pound gorilla brother was still there.

  Ahead of me, some angry woman in a red shift dress and a skinny white scarf was monopolizing the pharmacist, yelling about an allergic reaction she’d had to a pill. I had to wonder if she’d been such a crazy person before she took the pill or if this was the reaction. My eyes crawled over her and I found myself transfixed by her watch, which was huge and had the sun, the moon, and some stars on the ends of the hands.

  The woman waiting in front of me, who’d been heaving in irritation the whole time, could no longer contain herself. “Excuse me!” she yelled up to the counter. “I have a dinner date next month, and I’d like to make it.”

  At last, the culprit stuck her iPod buds into her ears and turned around to leave. As she stalked past, our eyes met, and I realized it was somebody I knew—Rye from the changing room at Bendel’s.

  I waved hello and she looked at me as if trying to figure out who I was. I saw a flash of recognition register, but she marched past me without a word anyway.

  I’m not going to say it didn’t sting, but drugstores can do that to people. I wasn’t dying to tell her about my sleeping pills from Dr. Quack, and maybe she was buying treatment for some embarrassing intestinal condition brought on by her starvation program. Or, even more likely, for the personality disorder I’d have bet good money she was born with.

  I didn’t give Rye any more thought until a little after ten, after everybody else had gone to sleep. All the lights were out, and the only noise was coming from the dishwasher. I’d just nearly gagged on my first dose of Noctolux, and was trying to erase the memory. I’d put on a reality show Becca and Douglas had both told me they were fans of, but it was boring with nobody to joke around with. And so I ended up under the covers, thinking the day over. Images of Dov’s mom and the gorilla mask and my new bottle of blue pills danced in my head. And then a picture of Rye arguing with the pharmacist came to the front of my mind.

  Suddenly, I felt much more awake. I realized that the glowing sun, moon, and stars on the hands of her watch were almost the same as the ones I’d seen in my dream the other night—the weird black-and-white one with that funny-looking grim reaper guy.

  Freaky.

  { 13 }

  Digging Up Act Two

  The Portrait Club was impossible to miss. It occupied a grand building right off Fifth Avenue. The club’s flag, which featured the profile of a man with a George Washington hairdo, was visible from a block away.

  Inside, portraits of every conceivable size
and style covered the first floor’s burgundy walls. It was a bit eerie, I thought, the way the members were mounted on the walls like trophy fish.

  I made my way into the sitting room, which was dark and cozy, with businessmen sitting in armchairs and puffing on cigars. Anywhere else they would have been called fat, but here the word was surely prosperous. Not wanting to distract their smoky reverie, I walked across the floor, heading toward the DINING ROOM sign as quietly as I could.

  When I was nearly there, a man in a red suit with brass buttons stopped me in my tracks.

  “Can I help you, miss?”

  “I’m fine,” I told him. But he repeated his question, and I realized he wasn’t interested in helping me as much as he was in making sure some stray hadn’t blown in off the street.

  “I’m here to meet some friends,” I said. “The Shuttleworths.”

  His eyes grew wide and he gulped. “Oh, right this way.”

  He guided me up a short flight of stairs into the restaurant. Waiters were tiptoeing around, pushing cheese trolleys and removing domed lids from plates. It was noisier than below, though the acoustics of the room were such that I couldn’t make out what any of the diners was actually saying. Talk of golfing with Congressmen and skirting environmental protection laws, surely.

  All the way in the back were Becca and what I assumed was the Shuttleworth clan. Everyone was dressed to the teeth, and I was relieved that I hadn’t worn anything too funky. I handed the man my coat and smoothed my cocktail dress—a violet organza Christian Dior number Kiki had recently donated to my cause.

  “Come here,” Becca shouted, pushing out the empty seat next to her. “Did that man insist on walking you over here?”

  If I’d been the club staffer, I would have been offended, but he merely smiled as he helped me into my seat and sidestepped away.

  “He was just trying to be helpful,” I said, glancing over at a guy who must have been her older brother. He looked about our age, and if he wasn’t Hollywood gorgeous, he was definitely appealing, with his light brown crew cut and rosebud mouth. Lest anyone think he was too perfect, there was a little V-shaped scar by the corner of his eye. My eyes darted away guiltily.