Dream Girl

by Lauren Mechling

  “What can I say?”

  “You’re a good kid.” She sounded sincere, and I felt better for hearing her say it. “We should probably go over some stuff before you leave.”

  “I’ll be there in a little over an hour.” And to throw Kiki and Clem, who were straining to listen in, I groaned, “I can’t believe you’re making me go to another Professors Who Paint show.”

  “Again?” Kiki asked after I’d hung up. “Those ninnies don’t even wait for the paint to dry, do they?”

  { 16 }

  The Worst Kind of Magic

  Mom and I both had Friday flights, and we both waited until early Friday morning to pack. Watching Mom get ready for Florida was a master class in economy. She filled her Day-Glo suitcase with four days’ worth of clothes and a travel-sized box of laundry detergent—even though she was raised by Kiki, she hates wasting money on hotel laundry services. My packing method for my two-night trip was a bit more festive: I brought enough to allow for three daily changes, plus an emergency clothing supply to last through the unlikely but possible event of a thirty-day hostage situation.

  That’s not to say I was completely on the ball when I got ready. I forgot to deal with my chipped toenails, and more importantly, I never got around to telling Becca that I don’t know how to ski. I kept meaning to, but after listening to her rhapsodize about the space-age gondolas or the thrill of careening down Aspen Mountain at a million miles an hour, it began to feel too late, and I tried to convince myself that it would be less jarring for everyone if I waited until we got there to tell Becca.

  Once we touched down late Friday night, I couldn’t get any alone time with my friend, and I didn’t want to announce my handicap to the entire Shuttleworth clan. There were seven of us—Becca, Andy, the Shuttleworth parents and grandparents, and yours truly. At the airport, we stuck together in a tight cluster, only to fan out when a fleet of town cars picked us up and ferried us to the hotel.

  We were staying at an enormous two-winged guesthouse at the base of Aspen Mountain, with stone walls and red shutters. I felt dizzy when we got there—and not just from altitude sickness. The lobby was extraordinary. A few guests crowded around a fireplace; others were taking catnaps on oversized leather couches. The windows overlooked a steaming hot outdoor pool, just beyond which stood the snowy mountain.

  “I’ll be right back.” Becca ran off.

  “Where are you—” I started, but something heavy landed on my shoulder.

  “I’m so tired.” Andy was resting his face on my collar. “If I fell asleep here, would you mind?”

  “Um…be my guest.” I stood stock-still, praying that he wouldn’t be able to detect my galloping heart.

  “Andy!” His mother scolded him for “bothering our nice guest” and pried him away from me before Becca returned from wherever she’d run off to.

  Everyone seemed delighted with the hotel except Becca’s dad. He’d been in a bad mood since we’d left New York, and he’d spent the entire plane ride tapping the side of his shoe, his mouth set in a frown.

  “How about dinner already?” he asked, his first words all day. “I’m tired of waiting around.”

  Becca’s grandmother Dixie looked slightly shocked, then decided to smooth over her son’s prickly mood with her Southern charm. “Well, you know I’m always up for a good prime rib,” she purred.

  The hotel’s welcome ritual was as beautifully choreographed as a Christmastime ballet. As soon as one dapper hotel employee had relieved us of our bags, another swooped in bearing a tray of espresso cups filled with hot chocolate. Normally I like a proper-sized cup, especially when it’s filled with anything chocolatey, but after I took a sip I understood why the portions were so small. With a consistency somewhere between liquid and solid, there was no way anybody could make their way through more than a few ounces of this stuff. It was one of the strangest and most delicious things I’d ever tasted, second only to the caramelized curried pecans at the Walforf’s Bull and Bear bar.

  “Nutritious stuff,” Andy said before drinking his allotment like a shot.

  “Yeah, it’s got plenty of chocolate and…sugar.”

  “You’re forgetting lard,” Andy reminded me.

  “Ew!” Becca cried, elbowing her brother in the ribs. “He’s just messing with you.”

  I didn’t care. I wanted to wipe up the remnants inside the cup with my finger, and could use the discouragement.

  “Shall we?” Andy asked.

  I looked up and realized the rest of his family had started walking to the restaurant.

  “I guess we don’t have much choice.” I smiled.

  “Booty warming,” he said as we trailed the others.

  “I think my hot chocolate got stuck somewhere around my lungs,” I said, blushing. My booty was something I liked to cover up, not discuss.

  He laughed at me. “I wasn’t talking about your digestive tract.” He pointed to the sign at the concierge desk. It offered hot stone massages, gourmet dog meals, and, last but not least, boot warming services.

  Whoops.

  The restaurant was an oasis of beige and gray tones undoubtedly designed to please older patrons. If I ever had a restaurant of my own, I’d hire Clem to deck it out with hot pink walls and disco blobs.

  The only empty seat was next to Andy, which meant that I barely registered the beautiful scenery and five-star dishes. Still, in my befogged state, I couldn’t help detecting something awkward in the air. Or maybe Becca’s dad was just profoundly grumpy. He seemed to bounce into a better mood when the waiters brought out his rib-eye steak, even if he only ate a little bit.

  At the end of dinner, after all the grown-ups had their dessert wine and a waiter in a knee-grazing jacket brought out a box of handmade truffles, Becca’s parents decided to call it a night. “It’s been a very long day, and we’re not as hip and happening as you,” Becca’s dad said to us. “I’m going to go upstairs and check in with my old friend Larry. He comes on in ten minutes.”

  “Would that be Mr. King?” I asked.

  “None other.” He winked.

  I pictured Kiki sipping tea in bed as she waited for her suspender-wearing boyfriend to come on TV already.

  “Now I’ll tell you what we ‘hip and happening’ kids are doing,” Becca announced once her parents had disappeared. She pointed at the lobby’s glass wall. Beneath the darkening sky, the swimming pool stretched out under a cloud of steam.

  “Isn’t it freezing?” I asked. If I could have made a list of all the things I’d rather not do in front of Andy, wearing a bathing suit would have been right up there, along with freaking out to “Peanut Duck” with Henry and helping my dad trim his mustache.

  “Don’t worry,” Andy said. “We did it last time. The heat’s turned up a million degrees, so you don’t even notice how cold it is.”

  Before I could tell them I didn’t have a bathing suit, Becca was distributing towels and disposable bathing suits in vacuum-packed cases. “Gotta love the concierge desk,” she said.

  We all got changed in the lobby bathrooms, and before I knew it, I was the only one still indoors, with a towel wrapped around me. The other two had left their clothes in a heap by the door and jumped into the pool. I couldn’t see anyone’s faces—just shapes moving around the steam.

  I dropped my towel on top of the pile and ran shivering toward the pool, the ground frosty against my bare feet. The water was warm, and I darted about like a happy little tadpole. The steam by the water’s edge was too thick to see through, and the only way to tell whether somebody was nearby was when the water surged or rippled.

  Something grazed against my shin, and I didn’t think much of it. I just kept going. Or I tried—I didn’t get very far. In fact, I didn’t go anywhere. I was floating on my stomach when I realized somebody was holding my ankles from behind. I looked over my shoulder and saw Andy’s silhouette, his prickly head atop his lean body. I looked around for Becca but couldn’t see anything.

  “I t
hink your hands got tangled up in my legs.” I was trying to sound matter-of-fact, as if it were perfectly normal that he was holding me like a wheelbarrow, my huge butt about three inches from his face.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, and pushed my feet toward the pool floor. Then he took hold of my shoulders and turned me around so we were facing each other. I stepped closer and reached out to take his hand. Every cell in my body felt hot, even warmer than the water, and I looked up at the moon and wondered how it could be as cold as I’d heard it was if it was burning that brightly.

  I heard some splashing, then pitter-pattering that grew quieter.

  “Becca went back inside,” he whispered, pulling my fingers, one by one.

  “How can you tell?” I looked toward the hotel. “I can’t see anything.”

  “What did you think that sound was? A duck walking around the side of the pool? Here,” he said gently, and before I knew it his face was so close to mine I could feel his breath on me. Apart from the fact that I was wearing a hideous disposable bathing suit, this was everything a kiss was supposed to be—slightly scary, and more than a little fluttery. And we hadn’t even started kissing yet. Drifting closer, I wondered if it was humanly possible for things to get more exciting.

  As it turned out, things did get more exciting, but not in the way I’d hoped. Suddenly Becca was poolside, yelling at us from a patch of fog. “That celebrity magician guy, Daniel What’s-his-face, he’s doing a show in the lobby! Hurry up!”

  Andy’s shoulders tensed, and the space between us suddenly felt emptied of the turbocharged energy that had been there just seconds ago. “We should probably go in before we get into any more trouble,” Andy murmured, and before I knew what was happening, he had sunk underneath the surface and was shooting over to his sister.

  That night the magician performed a whole slew of tricks, but none as astonishing as the first: he’d made Andy disappear.

  { 17 }

  Snowcaps and Setbacks

  Still in our bathing suits, Becca and I hung around to watch the magician stick a needle through his arm and make his socks change color before heading up to our room.

  The room was infinitely better than the magic show. It was absurdly luxurious, with a theater-sized television set and two hot tubs—one in the bathroom and one in the ballroom-sized bedroom, abutting the window. Of course I’d seen fancy hotel rooms before, but never had I had one of my own. If a war was going to break out in the West anytime soon, I wished it would happen this weekend. Camping out would be a dream come true.

  We let our towels drop to the floor and put the hotel robes on over our wet suits. Becca went to get washed up and I lay on top of the duvet, replaying my nonkiss over and over.

  I felt like squealing—and at some point I must have.

  “What’s that?” Becca called from the bathroom.

  “The TV!” I quickly grabbed the remote control and flipped through the channels. A police drama. An ad for a psychic with a 900 number. A Hallmark special on “Dads We Love.” Which got me thinking.

  “Hey,” I called out, turning the TV off. “Is everything okay with your dad?”

  I heard Becca spit out her toothpaste. “Long story.”

  She came back into the bedroom wearing a pair of tortoiseshell glasses that I’d never seen before. Sometimes I forgot how short a while we’d actually been friends.

  She flung herself on the bed. “If I tell it to you, you have to promise not to share it with anybody. Can I trust you?”

  Um, can you trust somebody who almost kissed your brother in the pool ten minutes ago and isn’t telling you about it?

  “Of course.” I could feel the guilt sloshing in my stomach.

  “I’m serious.”

  “So am I.”

  Becca stuck her fingers under her glasses and rubbed her eyes. “Earlier today somebody tried to steal the key.” She looked at me, waiting for something to register. “Wait, you have no idea what that means, do you?” She kicked off her fuzzy boots and shook her head. “Oh God. This is gonna be a long night.”

  We stayed up talking until two in the morning. Well, we stayed up and she talked. There was a lot of ground to cover—four centuries’ worth. Back in the 1640s, the Shuttleworth family left England and settled in Virginia, where they set up a tomato farm. And that was only the beginning of things.

  Becca explained that her ancestors did quite nicely for themselves every year. But in 1739 they had a bumper crop, earning far more than they ever expected. Rather than sit on the extra money or blow it on a bunch of petticoats or whatever it was people wasted their money on in the eighteenth century, Becca’s savvy ancestor Arthur purchased an extra acre of land, four horses, and something that would prove to be the biggest payoff: a recipe from the neighboring Soyle family, who sold their delicious Soyle Sauce ketchup, which they called “Saul Sauce,” at a few general stores.

  “It must have seemed logical to go into the ketchup business,” Becca said, “being a tomato farmer and all.” She went on with the history lesson, telling me how Arthur Shuttleworth and Edward Soyle settled on the sum of four hundred pounds for the recipe.

  “Nothing to sneeze at back then,” Becca told me.

  “I’m sure,” I said, remembering how the kids in the Little House on the Prairie books would buy a pair of overalls for a dime.

  “It was a good deal for the Soyles,” Becca said, “but they started to get the idea that they’d been screwed. And while my family grew the business, the Soyles hit a streak of bad luck.”

  “What do you mean by bad luck?” I asked.

  “Everything, really.” She tented her hands together. “Scrapes with the law, bankruptcies, failed business plans. They’ve been trying for hundreds of years. They started a candlestick company, a hotel, a chain of restaurants, a department store. All failed. No one remembered the original recipe, and they tried to start a gourmet ketchup company, but nobody wanted to buy a fifteen-dollar roasted organic tomato compote for their hot dogs, so that went belly-up. Then they tried to package generic ketchup in single-serving foil packets, but it turned out people like to squeeze the bottles themselves. Their lost luggage Web site flopped, and now they just had another big disaster, a company that designed video games for dogs.”

  “I’m actually surprised that didn’t work. People can be so weird with their pets…So now what? The Soyles are off in Siberia, licking their wounds?”

  “If only.” She flipped onto her back and stared up at the ceiling. “They’re right across the Hudson River, in Bayonne, New Jersey. They have a new project, a chain of retro steakhouses, with topless waitresses. It’s called Rumps and Humps.”

  “Classy.”

  “The classiest. They also manufacture tube socks. I’m sure you’ve seen the factory. The one with the huge smog cloud over it.”

  “Um, aren’t there a few that fit that description?”

  “Yeah, but last year Soyle Socks was handed more labor violations than any other company in New Jersey.”

  “Sucks to be them.” The clock said it was nearly one o’clock. I got up to close the curtains.

  “It’s crazy, but I really think they’re cursed,” Becca said quietly. “One of their sons is in jail for armed robbery, and last year a grandchild got in a nasty car accident. He can’t walk.”

  A chill shot up my spine. I spent a moment looking out at the dark mountain before pulling the curtain shut.

  “I wouldn’t feel too sorry for them,” she said when I’d made my way back to the bed. “They think we’re thieves, and Lazarus—he’s the president of Soyle Socks—is constantly scheming to get the recipe back. And then there’s Otto—that’s Lazarus’s son. He’s the devil in white-rapper clothing. He and his thug friends used to wait for Andy outside school and mug him.”

  “Mug him?” I repeated, wagging my head in disbelief. “I can’t believe this is all about ketchup.”

  Becca looked as if she was getting impatient. With what, I had no idea. “You�
��ve probably never stopped to think about this, but ketchup is a big deal. You should hear my dad get started on the subject. He calls it the great universal food. At least, now it is. When ketchup was first invented, in the 1600s, it was made of mushroom and anchovies.”

  “I think you mentioned that before,” I told her. “Sounds delicious.”

  “I know. But then they figured out how to use ripe tomatoes and everything changed for the more delicious. They came up with a sauce that’s not too sweet, and not too spicy. Everyone likes it. In America we eat it with our potatoes, Japanese people eat it with rice, and in Poland they eat it with pizza.” There was a broken-record element to her speech, and I suspected she’d heard her dad’s spiel more than a few times. “The Soyles have been trying to come up with their own versions, with different spices and flavors, but here’s the thing: people just like their ketchup…ketchuppy.”

  “Makes sense,” I said, readjusting the pillow under my neck. “That’s how I like mine.”

  “Well, Soul Sauce has been around so long, that’s what people think ketchuppy tastes like. And of course my family is obsessed with keeping the magic formula private. They act like it’s the nectar of the gods.”

  “Well, based on what you’re saying, it sort of is.”

  She shrugged. “At this point, it’s hard to keep perspective. My parents especially. They used to lock the recipe away in the company headquarters in New York, but people kept breaking into the building, so we had to move it to a bank safe. The key to the safe was just moved to a secret location that’s not even in the country. Anything to keep Lazarus away.”

  “Do you actually think they’d ever get the recipe?”

  “That’s the least of anybody’s worries.” Her eyes clouded over. “They’ve done other stuff. My uncle William was kidnapped for a week when he was seven. Nobody officially knows who was behind it, but still…And my dad’s totally paranoid that we’re not safe in the family planes.” She looked over at me to make sure I was following.