by J. Minter
“Oh my God, it’s so good to see you!” she squealed.
“You too,” I said, and then I couldn’t help but say, “You look amazing!”
And she did, too. She had gotten really tall and chesty and her skin was all golden from being out west. Liv used to be this girl with frizzy hair and a mouth that was freakishly large, but now it was like she had grown into her face, and the size of her mouth and the cat eyes—the whole thing just worked. Evidently somebody in Montana really knew how to do awesome-looking highlights, too. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. I’ve grown in all those ways, too, except for the skin tone part, since no matter what I do I’m really pale, but still, it’s weird when you haven’t seen somebody in a while and note how they’ve changed and gotten all … sexy looking.
Especially if that person used to wear maroon turtlenecks.
“You think so? Wow, thanks. I mean horseback riding is so different in the west and you know … ” Liv kept talking while we hauled her huge bags up to my room. It didn’t even occur to me how much stuff this was, because we had so much catching up to do.
We talked the whole time we were getting ready to go, and even though Liv had brought three suitcases of clothes, she ended up wearing this powder blue scoop neck C&C California shirt of mine with a jeans miniskirt I’ve had forever. I ended up sticking with my yellow sundress, but I put on a double strand of my mom’s pearls and put my hair in a twist so it would be a little more beach-girl-goes-formal. I told her all about Remy, and what a dick he ended up being, and she told me all about her boyfriends at the Cattington School. Her many, many boyfriends.
Getting dressed really can be the best part of the night sometimes, and when it was time to go I was almost disappointed. But that’s maybe just me being a little shy.
Anyway, at some point Arno knocked on my door and then poked his face in and told us the ship was leaving. Liv gave me this OMG-he’s-cute look, and then we took big breaths and followed him outside.
We were in a cab, cruising uptown, when I said, “Hey Patch, where are the rest of your friends?”
Arno turned around in the front seat to look at Patch, and then Patch said, “We’re meeting all of them there.”
“Oh, okay,” I said, trying not to sound like I cared too much. Which I didn’t, although I did want to be … prepared, I guess, in case Jonathan ended up there, too. He can be annoyingly, like, knowing about stuff sometimes, but in some ways I suspect he’s my best friend, or maybe soul mate, which makes it all the more weird that I haven’t hung out with him in so long.
I stared out the window for a lot of blocks and had a lot of thoughts about Jonathan and how difficult he was and how we argued all the time but also kind of enjoyed watching TV together in my parents’ bed when they weren’t around. And that’s basically all the time, as I’ve mentioned.
At the corner of Fifth and Seventy-second there were a bunch of carriages in a row. This driver wearing a top hat over a kind of gross ponytail asked us if we were there for the Reid affair. I would so ride around Central Park in carriages all the time if the drivers weren’t so weird and kind of dirty.
“Yes, unfortunately,” Arno said to the ponytail guy.
“What?” Patch said. “I thought you were all psyched on this.”
“Well, we’ve all been hired to drive you to the Boat House. So get on in,” the ponytail guy said, ignoring Patch and Arno. Liv and I climbed up first, and then my brother and his friend followed.
“This is so much fun,” Liv said. I nodded in agreement, but I guess she wasn’t talking to me, because she added, “Patch, isn’t this fun?”
“I guess so,” Patch said. “Actually, I don’t know if I’ve ever been in one of these before.”
As we rode into the quiet leafiness of the park, we started to overtake another carriage with some other partygoers in it. I knew they were going to the same place, because their carriage was decorated with the same big pink bows as ours was.
“Hey,” Arno said, loud enough for them to hear, “don’t we know those kids?”
There were two boys and a girl in the carriage, and they all turned to look.
“Wait a minute,” Liv said, in a voice that was maybe supposed to be quiet but definitely was not. “Flan, isn’t that that guy Jonathan you used to be secretly in love with?”
Everyone was staring at me, and maybe I would have been embarrassed, except that I was really distracted by this strange thing Jonathan was doing. Which was that he totally had his arm around some girl with shiny brown hair and a lot of freckles who was smiling idiotically at us like we were all about to be her new best friends.
I mean, what was that about? And when did Liv become so totally tactless?
everyone has to talk to the new girl, and tonight the new girl’s name is liv
“Hey, did I meet you at the Yale Early Action meeting last week?”
Liv Quayle tossed her long, wavy hair over her shoulder and took a look at the latest guy to approach her. He was tall, with slicked back hair, and he was wearing a blazer and smiling wolfishly. He looked pretty uptown. Most of the guys at the party were pretty uptown.
“I don’t think so,” Liv said, smiling conspiratorially at her crew of new friends, Jonathan, Ava, Arno, and David. Her best friend from elementary school, Flan, was standing with them, too. But Flan was a bit off to one side, looking just slightly piqued. “Especially since I haven’t even started high school,” Liv added, in order to bring home to this guy that he was absolutely no Patch Flood.
Because that was the guy she was holding out for tonight. And she could wait—she had spent two long years in Montana keeping her love for him, which dated to third grade, a secret. It wasn’t until her last e-mail from good ol’ Flan hinted at how big and popular he’d gotten recently that she realized it was time to come back to New York and make her love for him real. It was perfect timing, because she had finally gotten all hot and popular, too.
“Oh,” the uptown guy said, looking a little confused, like he wasn’t sure whether to keep hitting on her or scamper away. “Um, I guess it was nice to meet you then,” he said, and lifted his glass at her before turning around.
Liv wiggled her fingers in his direction, and mouthed Buh-bye at his back as he moved through the topiaries and white balloon sculptures set up throughout the Boat House restaurant. The beamed ceilings over their heads were decorated with strands of Christmas lights arranged in cursive L-shapes, and out the windows they could see a warm summer night descending on the park. Their little group had been enjoying rounds of pink champagne from the trays being circulated by waiters. And Liv was getting increasingly weak-kneed by the general madness infiltrating the usually staid restaurant.
“This really isn’t my regular scene,” Liv said with a giggle, to no one in particular. What she meant of course was that it was filled with guys who were cute but totally uninteresting compared with Patch, who was even more sparkly-eyed and delicious than when she got sent away to boarding school by her parents.
But she couldn’t think about them now. If she thought about her parents she would have to admit to herself that they were probably wondering where she was right now, and then she would have to deal with that. For Liv, ignorance-is-bliss had always been a friendly motto.
She took a sip of her champagne and surveyed the crowd. There were a number of older women with big dramatic hats, though the place was jam-packed with kids, too, most of whom looked pretty preppy but also looked like they knew how to party. Whoever this Liesel girl was, she had really gone all out. Downtown-famous DJ Tahoe was spinning, which had inspired a small but enthusiastic dance floor in the corner. He was playing a Kanye West song, and a bunch of kids were getting down quite a bit farther than Liv would’ve thought they could.
“It’s not my scene, either,” Jonathan said emphatically. He was wearing a light brown suede motorcycle jacket and his bangs were styled diagonally across his forehead as though he were an actor playing a private-school boy
on TV. “This place was built in what, 1910?”
“I like the Boat House,” the Ava girl with all the freckles said. She had a big smile on her face. “I think it’s really classic. And I think it’s much older than that.”
“Mmmhhmm,” Liv said, rolling her eyes. Liv had decided that Jonathan was totally cute, and Ava was totally not. She leaned over to Flan and whispered, “He is so darn cute. For you, I mean.” Flan evidently agreed, because she jabbed her elbow into Liv’s side in excitement/horror.
Two guys wearing blazers and gigantic chrome watches walked by and gave Liv the up and down.
“It must make you sort of uncomfortable that all these guys are hitting on you,” Patch’s friend David said. He was really tall. David was obviously not a guy who had ever been very smooth with girls and probably wouldn’t know fun if it came over and yanked down his baggy jeans.
“No, I’ve gotten used to it,” Liv said. Then she laughed (being careful not to shoot champagne through her nose, which was so something she would have done two years ago, except with milk) just to show that she didn’t take her new hotness too too seriously.
“Oh, okay,” David said. Liv gave him a pitying smile, because she could tell he wanted her a little bit, and then she craned her neck for Patch. He’d been kind of oblivious to the fact that they were about to begin the most important romance of their young lives, which of course made him totally all the more irresistible.
A new song came on, and Flan grabbed Liv by the arm, in this weird awkward way that made Liv wonder if maybe Flan wasn’t a little jealous of the new, hot Liv. “Let’s dance!” she said really loudly, and started pulling her away from the other kids.
“No, wait,” Liv said. “Where’s your brother? Let’s get him first. He loves to dance, right?” She looked around, and realized that Patch, who had been standing so quietly and patiently, had finally snuck off to some secret place, probably hoping that she would watch him go and then follow a few minutes later. But she had totally missed it, and now she had no idea where he was or even which direction he might have gone in. Damn!
“Um, not really,” Flan was saying. She widened her big blue eyes at Liv in a way that made Liv wonder if something was wrong. Like, maybe Flan was trying to tell her that she had lipstick on her teeth?
“Patch definitely doesn’t like to dance,” Arno said, kind of sarcastically. Liv made a mental note: Her dream man did not like to dance. “Hey, where’d he go anyway?”
Jonathan and David shrugged. “We should be used to Patch disappearing by now,” Jonathan said.
“I’ll dance with you, Liv,” Arno said, stepping forward.
“Oh my God!” Liv shrieked, pretending not to hear Arno’s offer. He was cute, too, of course, but she had to keep her eyes on the prize. “Look, you guys, you see that girl in the big movie star glasses over there? I think that’s Sara-Beth Benny.” She looked at the group, waiting for them to recognize the starlet and be as excited as she was. “You know, from that old TV show Mike’s Princesses—do you recognize her?”
“That’s not her,” Arno said, arching an eyebrow dubiously in the direction of the girl hiding behind the sunglasses. She had a dramatic black bob, and she looked very tiny making her way through the crowd. “I know SBB. And so does David. And that’s totally not… David?”
They all turned toward David, but David had scurried away in the other direction.
“That’s weird,” Jonathan said. “I think that maybe is SBB. No one else could have made David bolt like that.”
“You know her?” Liv gushed. “She is like my style icon. Can we meet her?”
Jonathan shrugged. “I guess, if you really want, but don’t tell David. He’s still pretty messed up about how she moved into his parents’ house and morphed from his girlfriend into his sister.”
“Gross,” Liv said, wrinkling her nose. “I still want to meet her, though. Flan, don’t you totally want to meet her?”
Flan looked like she wasn’t sure for a minute, and then a smile broke through on her face. “Okay,” she said, “I totally want to meet her, too.”
Jonathan smiled, and Liv was pretty sure there was some kind of connection between him and Flan. Liv resolved to give Flan whatever help she needed. That way, once it came out that Liv and Patch were like this hot super couple, Flan and Jonathan could be like their slightly-less-golden-couple friends. “All right, ladies,” Jonathan said, bringing Liv back down from her Patch fantasy. “But prepare yourselves. That one has got some real emotional problems.”
“Yeah,” Arno said. “She’s like the most needy person ever, and she apparently will recite whole episodes of that old TV show she was on for anybody who asks. All that stuff about her passing out at weird bars and going to, like, Thailand at the drop of a hat … it’s all true.”
“Really?” Liv said, wishing she knew what Thailand looked like. “That’s so cool.”
Ava made a face. “This feels kind of exploitative. I’m just going to stay here, okay?” she said, like she thought they were all being celebrity whores.
Jonathan looked sort of exasperated or confused or something and then he said, “Okay,” and turned back toward Flan and Liv. They all looked to where Sara-Beth Benny had been, but by then the whole room had shifted. The crowd had parted at the middle, and people were pushing at them to move back from the center. The music had changed, too; DJ Tahoe had been replaced by a quartet of classical musicians playing some very dramatic piece.
Liv turned toward the entryway, and that was when she saw a white horse cantering into the restaurant. The horse had a big pink bow around its neck and on its back was a tall, slender girl with thoroughbred cheekbones and a mane of ash-blond hair rising from her forehead. She was wearing a white eyelet Michael Kors dress that buttoned all the way from the ankle to the bust and had a prairie shirt collar, and she was smiling and waving like a princess.
“Oh my God,” Flan said, clapping her hands, “isn’t that horse beautiful?”
Liv clapped, too, because she was witnessing the sort of wattage you just don’t get out west. She felt like every moment she spent in New York, she was learning a little bit more about how to win Patch and then keep him in her clutches forever.
don’t look now … but is that lara-jess jennings?
When the big white horse came riding through the Boat House, Sara-Beth Benny breathed a sigh of relief. Now, finally, people would stop staring at her and wondering if she was who they thought she was. Or whether or not she’d had lunch. Or dinner.
She wouldn’t even have gone out, except that she had to find David Grobart. And some sixth sense had told her that David Grobart would be at the Boat House tonight. Which was a nice coincidence, because the Boat House was where her mother had always taken her for lunch as a little girl when they were in New York. Sara-Beth’s mother was a famous stage actress who retired at thirty-three to marry the CEO of a telecommunications company, and always regretted it, and when she took her only daughter to the Boat House they would bond by ordering their hamburgers well-done and then sending them back to the kitchen for being burned. Mom loved the Boat House almost as much as Sara-Beth did, but she wouldn’t come to New York anymore because she insisted that everyone just looked at her and whispered failure under their breath. That was why SBB lived in a New York apartment by herself, and only went back to her parents’ Los Angeles home for holidays. But she didn’t really like being in her cold, lonely apartment, which was one of the reasons why she had to find David Grobart. His parents, who were therapists, had taken her in and let her live with them before her last business trip to Los Angeles.
So she had put on a shapeless dress made out of burlap that she’d bought in this little boutique on Mott Street, and a black wig that she had worn in one of the last episodes of Mike’s Princesses, the TV show that had made her famous. She’d worn the wig in the episode where she and her sisters suspected that their single dad might be dating their school principal, and trailed him in disguise.
>
She was pretty sure that people were still staring at her. A-holes!
SBB pushed against several of them as she moved out into the crowd, and hoped that the burlap would scratch them.
There was some to-do in the middle of the room—a guy in a bow tie who evidently worked at the Boat House was sweating and pleading with Liesel Reid, resplendent on top of a white horse, to get down.
“Miss Reid,” he was saying, “animals of a certain size are simply not allowed in our establishment. Now, you are a very special guest, but I’m still going to have to … ”
Liesel Reid shook her mane of ash-blond hair and continued to blow kisses at her friends, who were all jumping up and down and calling out her name. SBB was glad to see Liesel even if she was surrounded by adoring fools. The girls had known each other since kindergarten, when they had gone to the same school, and they understood each other. SBB pushed past the bow-tie man, consciously trying to scratch him with her dress, and grabbed on to the horse’s saddle. The horse snorted and shifted nervously in the crowd.
“Liesel,” she hissed.
Liesel took a look at the pint-sized girl standing below her, and then gave her a bland smile and a cupped-hand wave. A beat later, she realized who was hiding under those big glasses.
“Oh my God, SBB!” she shrieked.
Sara-Beth gave a fierce little shake of her head and put a finger over her lips, which she had used an almost white shade of lipstick on.
Liesel shifted her tan, well-defined jaw, and realized her mistake. She rotated and waved at the crowd. After the moment had passed, she leaned over slickly and blew kisses on either side of Sara-Beth’s face. “I’m so glad you could make it,” she said. “I haven’t seen you since the Mawc Jacobs show.”
“That catastrophe,” Sara-Beth said from behind her Marc shades. “They put us in the second row.”
“Idiots,” Liesel said happily. “Anyway, why the wig? New look for you. Very Uma circa Pulp Fiction.”
