Upper East Side #1

by Ashley Valentine

  "Mekhi? Hello? Are you alive?"

  “Yeah, I heard you,” he said, sucking in his breath sharply and feigning disinterest. “So what?”

  “So what?” Bree said incredulously. “Oh, right, like you didn’t just have a mini heart attack. You’re so full of it, Mekhi.”

  “No, I’m serious,” he said, pissily. “What are you calling me for? What do I care?”

  Bree sighed loudly. Her brother could be so irritating. Why couldn’t he just act happy for once? She was so tired of his miserable, fake-deep, introspective poet act. Half the reason she called him during the school day was to make sure he hadn’t thrown himself in front of a bus or locked himself in the furnace room at school. Mekhi courted death the way most teenage boys court pretty girls. Someone had to make sure he was still alive.

  “Nevermind,” she sighed again. “Forget it. Eat something. Drink something other than coffee. Get some exercise. I’ll talk to you later.”

  She clicked off and Mekhi shoved his cell phone back into the pocket of his faded black corduroys. He snatched a pack of cigarettes out of his back pocket and lit another one with the burning stub of the one he was already smoking. His thumbnail got singed, but he didn’t even feel it.

  Chanel Crenshaw.

  They had first met at a party. No, that wasn’t exactly true. Mekhi had seen her at a party, his party, the only one he’d ever had at his family’s apartment on 99th and West End Avenue.

  It was April of eighth grade, and Mekhi was thirteen. The party was ten-year-old Bree’s idea, and their father, Rufus Hargrove, the infamous retired editor of lesser-known Beat poets and a party animal himself, was happy to oblige. Their mother had already moved to Prague a few years before to “focus on her art.” Rufus had been watching Criminal Minds and had realized that Mekhi had all the makings of a serial killer: abandoned by his mother at a young age; still wet the bed sometimes; loved to set things on fire, including his sister’s hair and their large domestic cat, Marx. So far Mekhi hadn’t shown any interest in actually killing anyone but himself, but Rufus thought his son needed to get out more, engage with kids his own age.

  Rufus had sent out an e-mail from Mekhi’s account inviting Mekhi’s entire class to the party and asking them to invite as many people as they wanted. More than a hundred kids showed up, and Rufus kept the beer flowing out of a keg in the bathtub, getting many of the kids drunk for the first time. It was the best party Mekhi had ever been to, even if he did say so himself. Not because of the alcohol, but because Chanel Crenshaw was there. Never mind that she had gotten wasted and wound up playing a stupid Latin drinking game and kissing some guy’s stomach with pictures scrawled all over it in magic marker. Mekhi couldn’t keep his eyes off her. Finally, he'd found a reason to live.

  After the party, Bree told him that Chanel went to her school, Emma Willard, and from then on Bree was his little emissary, reporting everything she’d seen Chanel do, say, wear, etc., and informing Mekhi about any upcoming events where he might catch a glimpse of her again. Those events were rare. Not because there weren’t a lot of them―there were―but because there weren’t many Mekhi had even a chance of going to. Mekhi didn’t inhabit the same world as Chanel and Porsha and Kaliq and Jaylen. He wasn’t anybody. He was just a regular kid―a depressed and lonely stray from the Upper West Side.

  For two years Mekhi followed Chanel, yearningly, from a distance. He never spoke to her. When she went away to boarding school, he tried to forget about her, sure that he would never see her again, unless by some act of magic they wound up at the same college.

  And now she was back.

  Mekhi walked halfway down the block, then turned around and walked back again. His mind was racing. He could have another party. He could make invitations and get Bree to slip one into Chanel’s locker at school. When Chanel came to his apartment, Mekhi would walk right up to her and take her mink coat, and graciously welcome her back to New York.

  It rained every day you were gone, he’d say, poetically.

  Then they would sneak into his father’s library and take each other’s clothes off and kiss on the leather couch in front of the fire. And when everyone left the party, they would share a bowl of coffee ice cream, Mekhi’s favorite. From then on they would spend every minute together. They would even transfer to a coed high school for the rest of senior year because they couldn’t stand to be apart. Then they would go to Columbia and live in a cramped, unheated studio apartment with nothing in it but a huge bed and a view of the same cold Hudson River that Mekhi had wanted to jump into on so many bleak nights. Chanel’s friends would try to lure her back to her old life, but no charity ball, no exclusive black-tie dinner, no expensive party favor could tempt her. She wouldn’t care if she had to give up her trust fund and her great-grandmother’s diamonds. Chanel would be willing to live in squalor if it meant she could be with Mekhi. And when they died, they would die together, holding hands, like Romeo and Juliet, only better.

  Brittle bones, hot lips―

  Spring, summer, autumn, winter.

  Only the worms know.

  “Shit, we only got five minutes until the bell rings,” Mekhi heard someone say in an obnoxious voice, breaking him from his poetic trance.

  Mekhi turned around, and sure enough, it was Jaylen Harrison, or “Scarf Boy,” as Mekhi liked to call him, since Jaylen was always wearing that ridiculous, monogrammed, cream-colored scarf.

  Jaylen was standing only twenty feet away with two of his senior Riverside Prep pals, Rashad Paine and Cameron Prescott. All three boys wore matching jackets and fingerless leather driving gloves, and Jaylen had on his new custom-made loafers without socks. The three boys—whose parted box fades were all cut in an array of designs—didn’t speak to Mekhi or even nod to acknowledge his presence. Why should they? These boys took the 79th Street crosstown bus through Central Park each morning to school from the swanky Upper East Side, only venturing to the West Side for school or to attend the odd party. They were in Mekhi’s class at Riverside Prep, but they were certainly not in his class. He was nothing to them. They didn’t even notice him.

  “Dude,” Jaylen said to his friends and lit a cigarette. Jaylen smoked his cigarettes like they were joints, holding them between his index finger and thumb and sucking hard to inhale. Too pathetic for words.

  “Guess who I saw last night?” he said, blowing out a stream of gray smoke.

  “Beyonce?” Cameron guessed, lighting up a Newport with his ridiculous, fingerless-gloved hands.

  “Yeah, and she was all over you, right?” Rashad laughed, brushing cigarette ash off his leather jacket.

  “No, not her. Chanel fucking Crenshaw,” Jaylen said.

  Mekhi’s ears perked up. He was about to head inside for class, but he lit another cigarette and stayed put so he could listen.

  “Porsha Sinclaire's mom had this little party, and Chanel was there with her parents,” Jaylen continued. “And she was all over me. She’s, like, the sluttiest girl I’ve ever met.” He took another toke on his smoke.

  “Really?” Cameron said. “I'd heard that, but you know, you can't believe everything you hear.”

  "Oh yes you can,” Jaylen countered. “First of all, I just found out that she’s been fucking Kaliq Braxton since tenth grade.” He took a poignant drag on his cigarette as the other two boys nodded eagerly. "And she’s definitely gotten an education at boarding school, if you know what I mean. They had to get rid of her, she’s so slutty.”

  “No way,” Rashad said. “Come on, dude, you don’t get kicked out for being a slut.”

  “You do if you keep a record of every guy you slept with and get them hooked on the same drugs you’re doing. Her parents had to go up there and get her. She was, like, taking over the school!” Jaylen was really getting worked up. He was spitting all over his pigskin loafers as he talked. “I heard she’s got diseases, too,” he added. “Like, STDs. Someone saw her going into a clinic in the East Village. She was wearing a wig.”

&n
bsp; Jaylen’s friends shook their heads, grunting in amazement.

  Mekhi had never heard such bullshit. Chanel was no slut; she was perfect, wasn’t she? Wasn’t she?

  “So, you guys hear about that bird party?” Rashad asked. “You going?”

  “What bird party?” Cameron questioned.

  “That thing for the Central Park falcons?” Jaylen said. “Yeah, Porsha was telling me about it. It’s in the old Barneys store.” He took another drag on his cigarette. “Bruh, everybody’s going.”

  Everybody didn’t include Mekhi, of course. But it very definitely included Chanel.

  “They’re sending out the invitations this week,” Rashad said. “It has a funny name, I can’t remember what it is. Some girly shit.”

  “Kiss on the Lips,” Jaylen said, stubbing out his cigarette with his obnoxious, custom-made shoes. “It’s the Kiss on the Lips party.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Cameron said. “And I bet there’s going to be a lot more than kissing going on.” He sniggered. “Especially if Chanel’s there.”

  The boys laughed, congratulating each other on their incredible wit.

  Mekhi had had enough. He tossed his cigarette on the sidewalk only inches from Jaylen’s fancy shoes and headed for the school doors. As he passed the three boys he turned his head and puckered his lips, making a smooching sound three times as if he were giving each boy a big fat kiss on the lips. Then he turned and went inside, banging the door shut behind him.

  Kiss that, assholes.

  7

  “What I’m going for is tension,” Yasmine Richards explained to Emma Willard's small Advanced Film Studies class. She was standing at the front of the room, presenting her idea for the film she was making, a loose adaptation of Natural Born Killers, the gleefully violent and weirdly beautiful Oliver Stone film about a pair of murderous, lovestruck psychopaths.

  Yasmine reveled in the idea of an audience of her peers, munching popcorn while they watched the most vile and graphic images of violence she was capable of producing onscreen. They all acted like such goody-goodies. She wanted to show them the gritty underside of the very world in which they lived. Shove their faces in it and force it down their diamond-studded throats. She wanted to lure them in with a love story, and then make them gag.

  “First I’m going to shoot the wedding scene, when Mallory and Mickey become Mallory and Mickey Knox, but only she talks. Actually, her voice is my voice, not the actress’s voice, in voice-over. And he never has any lines.” Yasmine paused dramatically, waiting for one of her classmates to say something. Mr. Beckham, their teacher, was always telling them to keep their scenes alive with dialogue and action, and Yasmine was deliberately doing just the opposite.

  “So just a voice-over for the whole film?” Mr. Beckham asked from where he was standing in the back of the classroom. He was painfully aware that no one else in the class was listening to a word Yasmine was saying.

  “You’re going to hear the silence of the buildings and the bridge and the sidewalk, and see the streetlights on their bodies. Then you’ll see their hands move and their eyes talking. Then you’ll hear them speak, but not much. It’s a mood piece,” Yasmine insisted. “I want the images to scream. I don't need much talk.”

  She reached for the slide projector’s remote control and began clicking through slides of the black-and-white pictures she’d taken to demonstrate the look she was going for in her short film. A headless black wig draped on a park bench. A slab of pavement. A manhole cover. A pigeon pecking at a used condom. A wad of gum perched on the edge of a garbage can.

  “Ha!” someone exclaimed from the back of the room. It was Porsha, laughing out loud as she read the note Rain had just passed her.

  For a good time,

  call Chanel v.d. Crenshaw

  Get it―VD??

  Yasmine glared at Porsha. Film was Yasmine’s favorite class, the only reason she came to school at all. She took it very seriously, while most of the other girls, like Porsha, were only taking Film as a break from Advanced Placement hell―AP Calculus, AP Bio, AP History, AP English Literature, AP French. They were on the straight and narrow path to Yale or Harvard or Brown, where their families had all gone for generations. Yasmine wasn’t like them. Her parents hadn’t even gone to college. They were artists, and Yasmine wanted only one thing in life: to go to NYU and major in film and make the darkest, artiest films ever made.

  Actually, she wanted something else. Or someone else, to be precise, but we’ll get to that in a minute.

  Yasmine was an abnormality at Emma Willard, the only girl in the school who had a nearly shaved head, wore black turtlenecks every day, read Silence of the Lambs over and over like it was the Bible, and drank unsweetened black tea. She had no friends at all, and lived in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, with her twenty-two-year-old sister, Ruby. So what was she doing at a tiny, exclusive, private girls’ school on the Upper East Side with Gucci-Pucci-tutu-wearing princesses like Porsha Sinclaire? It was a question Yasmine asked herself every day.

  Yasmine’s parents were older, revolutionary artists who lived in a house made out of recycled car tires in Vermont. She threatened to transform the wood stove into a live bomb and melt the house unless her parents let her move in with her bass-guitarist older sister in Brooklyn. Her parents finally gave in, but they wanted to be sure the perpetually unhappy Yasmine got a good, safe high school education. So they made her go to Emma Willard, which she soon found out was the worst form of torture imaginable.

  Yasmine loathed Willard and every other girl who went there, but she never said anything to her parents. At least she was in New York, and there were only eight months left until graduation. Eight more months and she could blow this fuckhole sky-high and escape downtown to NYU.

  Eight more months of bitchy Porsha Sinclaire, and even worse, Chanel Crenshaw, who was back in all her splendor. Porsha looked like she was absolutely orgasmic over the return of her best friend. In fact, the whole back row of Film Studies was atwitter, whispering and passing notes.

  Fuck them. Yasmine wanted to stuff their notes down their throats and strangle each one of them with the arms of their annoying cashmere sweaters. But she had a film to make. She lifted her chin and went on with her presentation. She was above their petty bullshit anyway. Only eight more months.

  Perhaps if Yasmine had seen the note Alexis had just passed to Porsha, she might have had a tad more sympathy for Chanel.

  Dear Porsha,

  Can I borrow fifty thousand dollars?

  Sniff, sniff, sniff.

  If I don’t pay my coke dealer the money I owe him, I’m in big trouble.

  Shit, my pussy itches.

  Let me know about the money.

  Love,

  Chanel v.d. Crenshaw

  Porsha, Rain, and Alexis giggled noisily.

  “Shhssh,” Mr. Beckham whispered, glancing at Yasmine sympathetically.

  Porsha turned the note over and scrawled a reply.

  Sure, Chanel. Whatever you want. Call me from jail. I hear the food is really good there. Kaliq and I will visit you whenever we’re free, which might be...I don’t know...NEVER?! I hope the VD gets better soon.

  Love,

  Porsha

  Porsha handed the note back to Alexis, feeling only the tiniest speck of remorse for being so mean. There were so many stories about Chanel flying around, she honestly didn’t know what to believe anymore. Plus, Chanel still hadn’t actually told anyone what she was doing back, so why should Porsha say anything in her defense? Maybe some of it was true. Maybe some of this stuff had really happened.

  Besides, passing notes was so much more fun than taking them.

  Yasmine cleared her throat. “I’m going to be writing, directing, and filming. I’ve already cast my friend Mekhi Hargrove from Riverside Prep as Mickey Knox.”

  Her face heated up when she uttered Mekhi’s name. He didn’t talk much and was very morbid, but he’d let her in out of the cold when she was locked out at a party two ye
ars ago and she’d been bossing him around ever since. Mekhi was her only friend in the entire city, although she would kill for them to be more than just friends.

  “I still need a Mallory. I’m casting her tomorrow on the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge at dusk.” Secretly she wanted to don a wig and play Mallory herself, but then there’d be no one to hold the camera. The original Mickey and Mallory Knox had been played by the hugely muscular bald cowboy Woody Harrelson and the gangly doe-eyed Southern teen bride Juliette Lewis. Mekhi and Yasmine couldn’t have looked more different. But that was the fun of an adaptation—she could use the story and fuck with it.

  “Anyone interested?” she asked. The question was a private little joke with herself. Yasmine knew no one in the room was even listening to her; they were too busy passing notes.

  Porsha’s arm shot up. “I’ll be the director!” she announced. Obviously she hadn’t heard the question, but Porsha was so desperate to impress the admissions office at Yale, she was always the first to volunteer for anything.

  Yasmine opened her mouth to speak. Direct this, she wanted to say, giving Porsha the finger.

  “Put your hand down, Porsha, ” Mr. Beckham sighed tiredly. “Yasmine just got through telling us she is directing and writing and filming. Unless you’d like to try out for the part of Mallory, I suggest you focus on your own project.”

  Porsha glared sourly at him. She hated teachers like Mr. Beckham. He had such a chip on his shoulder because he was from Nebraska and had finally attained his sad dream of living in New York City only to find himself teaching a useless class instead of directing cutting edge films and becoming famous.

  “Whatever,” Porsha said, tucking her thick, shoulder-length hair behind her ears. “I guess I really don’t have time.” And she didn’t.