UPPER EAST SIDE

by Ashley Valentine

  As if the enormous new science wing his father’s development company built on campus last year had absolutely nothing to do with it.

  “Fuck you,” Porsha replied. “In case you forgot, I would be hearing from Yale right now if you hadn’t kept me up drinking shit beer and eating crappy junk food in that gross motel room the night before my interview.”

  Tahj rolled his eyes. “I never told you to kiss your interviewer.”

  Chanel let out a little snort and Porsha glared at her. “Sorry,” Chanel apologized quickly. “Come on, Porsh,” she coaxed. “You’re, like, the best student in our class. You’re definitely getting in. You just have to wait until April to find out.”

  Porsha kept on glaring at her. She didn’t want to wait until April. She wanted to know now.

  Tahj lit another herbal cigarette and tilted his chin toward the ceiling to blow a few smoke rings. Already there seemed to be a sort of lazy, superior air about him, as if he knew he could just drink champagne all day for the rest of second semester and still go to Harvard. The fucker.

  “Hey,” he yawned. “I have to head up to Scarsdale to practice with my music group, but let’s go out later to celebrate.”

  Chanel stood up on the bed and did a few jumping jacks, as if she really needed the exercise. “For sure.”

  Porsha watched Chanel’s gorgeous hair fly up into the air above her head and then cascade prettily down onto her shoulders as Tahj blew more smoke rings. All of a sudden, Porsha couldn’t stand to be in the same room with them. “I have homework to do,” she huffed, reaching up to feel her new hairdo as she turned to leave.

  “Oh my God!” Chanel cried, vaulting off of Tahj’s bed. “Wait, Porsha—your hair!”

  Nice of her to finally notice.

  Porsha stopped in the doorway and put a hand to where her thick hair fell in a clean line at the nape of her neck. “I like it,” she declared defensively.

  Chanel walked around her like she was one of those Greek marble statues on the main floor of the Met. “Oh my God!” she repeated and reached out to tuck a flyaway hair behind Porsha’s ear. “I love it!” she exclaimed, a little too enthusiastically.

  Porsha wrinkled her pert nose suspiciously. Did Chanel really love it, or was she just being fake? It was always so hard to tell.

  “You look exactly like a dark skinned Dorothy Dandrige,” Tahj remarked from the bed.

  Porsha knew he was only saying what she wanted to hear to make up for being such a smug asshole about getting into Harvard. She thought about mentioning her Yale alum interview with Owen Wells on Thursday night but decided to keep the interview to herself. “Excuse me,” she told them coldly. “I have stuff to do.”

  Chanel watched Porsha leave and then climbed back onto the bed beside Tahj. She picked up the letter from Harvard and folded it up, carefully tucking it inside the envelope again. “I’m so proud of you,” she murmured, falling into Tahj’s arms and kissing him.

  Eventually Tahj pulled away, but Chanel kept her eyes closed, licking the sweet herbal aftertaste of his kiss from her lips. “I love you,” she heard herself say. The words seemed to have just fallen out of her mouth. She opened her eyes dreamily.

  Tahj had never told a girl he loved her, and he hadn’t planned to say it to Chanel, at least not right away. But it had already been an amazing day, and she was so completely gorgeous with her cheeks all flushed and her perfect mouth all red from kissing. Why not? It was like the end of one of his secret cheesy rock-star fantasies, where he and some incredibly hot girl roared off into the sunset together on a Harley.

  “I love you, too,” he said back, and kissed her again.

  8

  On his way to Riverside Prep Tuesday morning, Mekhi stopped at the newsstand on 79th and Broadway to buy the Valentine’s Day issue of The New Yorker and a large black coffee that tasted like it had been made three years ago—just the way he liked it. The cover of The New Yorker was an illustration of Noah’s Ark docked at a pier in New York Harbor, with the Statue of Liberty looming in the background. The words The Love Boat were painted on the side of the ark, and all of the animals lined up to board were holding hands and kissing and groping each other. It was pretty funny.

  Mekhi stood on the corner and lit an unfiltered Newport with trembling fingers as he turned back the cover and searched the table of contents for his poem. There it was under Poems: Mekhi Hargrove, page forty-two, “Sluts.” He flipped to it, forgetting all about the burning cigarette propped between his lips. Page forty-two happened to be the ninth page of a fourteen-page story by Gabriel Garcia Rhodes called “Amor con los Gatos”—“Love with Cats”—and right there, in the middle of the story, was Mekhi’s poem.

  Wipe the sleep from my eyes and pour me another cup.

  I see what you’ve been trying to tell me all along,

  Shaving your head and handling me (so delicately)

  With satin and lace:

  You’re a whore.

  It was freezing outside, but nervous sweat beaded on Mekhi’s eyelids, and his tongue was as dry as firewood. Mekhi spat the burning cigarette out onto the sidewalk and closed the magazine, tucking it into his black messenger bag. If he’d turned to the Contributors page, he would have seen the entry: Mekhi Hargrove (Poem, p. 42) is a high-school senior in New York City. This is his first published work. But Mekhi couldn’t handle looking at the magazine for a moment longer, not when thousands of people were right now browsing through it and stopping to read his brutal, angry poem, which he honestly wasn’t sure was any good.

  Mekhi walked down Broadway toward school, his hands shaking crazily. If only he could have pulled off some heist like sabotaging the The New Yorker’s printing presses so they couldn’t print vowels anymore. Then all the Valentine’s Day issues would have been recalled from the newsstands late last night.

  As if he could ever have pulled that off.

  “Yo, dude,” Mekhi heard the familiar, conceited voice of his least-favorite Riverside Prep classmate behind him. Mekhi stopped walking and turned around to see Jaylen Harrison flipping his signature navy blue monogrammed scarf over one shoulder and running his manicured fingers through his newly-dyed, bleach blonde hair. He looked like a knockoff Chris Brown. “Nice poem in The New Yorker, man.” He gave Mekhi a congratulatory clap on the shoulder, his monogrammed pinky ring glittering in the winter sunlight. “Who knew you were such a stud?”

  Was there something distinctively gay about Jaylen Harrison these days? Or perhaps not. Just because he’d gotten a blond dye job and was wearing a slim, cream-colored wool coat by Ralph Lauren and orange leather Prada sneakers didn’t mean he’d given up molesting defenseless, drunken girls at parties. Perhaps he was simply expressing himself.

  There’s certainly nothing wrong with that.

  “Thanks,” Mekhi mumbled as he fiddled with the plastic top on his coffee cup. He wondered if Jaylen was planning on walking all the way to school with him so they could discuss his poem. But then Mekhi’s cell phone rang, saving him from having to answer Jaylen’s inane questions about how many chicks he’d bagged before writing the poem, or whatever Jaylen Harrison liked to talk about on his way to school in the mornings.

  Mekhi put the phone to his ear and Jaylen clapped him on the shoulder again and kept walking.

  “Hello?”

  “Congratulations, Mekhi!” Rufus shouted into the phone. His father never got out of bed before eight o’clock, so this was the first time Mekhi had spoken to him all morning. “You’re the real banana, the genuine article! The New Yorker, the goddamned New Yorker!”

  Mekhi chuckled, feeling slightly ashamed. Countless notebooks filled with his father’s odd, disjointed poems were stashed in a dusty box in the broom closet. Even though he was an editor of lesser-known Beat poets, the truth was, Rufus had never actually been published.

  “And you’ll never believe—” Rufus continued, but then his voice broke off. Mekhi heard the toilet flush in the background. Typical. His dad had been talk
ing to him while he was in the can.

  Mekhi gulped his coffee and picked up his pace, crossing Broadway and heading down 77th Street. He was going to be late for first-period chemistry if he didn’t hurry up. Not that that would be such a bad thing. “Dad? You still there?” he asked.

  “Hold on, kid,” Rufus replied distractedly. “I got my hands full here.”

  Mekhi could picture his dad drying his hands on the frayed red towel hanging on the back of the bathroom door and then pulling his rolled-up copy of The New Yorker out from under his hairy arm so he could read Mekhi’s poem again.

  “The deans of admissions from Brown and Columbia just called to tell me what a prodigy you are,” Rufus explained. It sounded like his mouth was full of something, and Mekhi could hear water running. Was he brushing his teeth? “They were slobbering all over themselves, the greedy bastards.”

  “Brown and Columbia? Really?” Mekhi repeated in disbelief. Ahead of him the sidewalk, shopfronts, and pedestrians suddenly all blurred together into a slow-moving, oceanic mass. “Are you sure it was them? Columbia and Brown?”

  “As sure as my piss is still yellow,” Rufus answered blithely.

  Usually Mekhi blanched at his father’s crudeness, but right now he was too preoccupied with his own success. Maybe being a published poet wouldn’t be such a bad thing after all. Ahead of him the black metal doors of Riverside Prep’s upper-school entrance loomed before him. “Hey Dad, I have to get to class, but thanks for calling. Thank you for everything,” he gushed with a rush of affection for his belligerent old dad.

  “That’s all right, kid. Don’t let this go to your head, though,” Rufus joked, unable to hide the pride in his gruff voice. “Remember, poets are a humble bunch.”

  “I’ll remember,” Mekhi promised earnestly. “Thanks again, Dad.”

  He clicked off and pushed open the school doors, waving to Aggie, the ancient front-desk receptionist who wore a different wig every day of the week, as he signed in. His cell phone beeped and he realized he’d missed a call while he’d been talking to his father. Cell phones were forbidden during school hours, but first period had already begun and the halls were empty. Trudging up the concrete stairs on the way to the chemistry lab, he called his voicemail.

  “Mekhi Hargrove, this is Rusty Klein from Klein, Lowenstein & Schutt. I read your poem in The New Yorker and, assuming you don’t have an agent yet, I’m going to represent you. I’ve got you on the guest list for the Better Than Naked show Friday night. Let’s talk then. You may not know it yet, but you’re hot shit, Mekhi. The public needs a serious young poet to make them feel worthless and superficial. And now that we’ve got their attention, we’d sure as hell better keep the momentum going. You’re the next Keats, and we’re going to make you so famous so fast, you’ll think you were born that way. Looking forward to it. Ciao!”

  Mekhi wobbled outside the door of the chemistry lab as he listened to Rusty Klein’s loud, breathless message for a second time. He’d heard of Rusty Klein. She was the agent who’d negotiated the million-dollar book deal for that Scottish guy who’d claimed to be Prince Charles’ illegitimate son. Mekhi had read about it in the New York Post. He had no idea what the Better Than Naked show was, but it was pretty cool of Rusty to put him on the guest list for it when they’d never even met. He also loved being called the next Keats. Keats was one of his major influences, and if Rusty Klein could recognize that after reading only one of his poems, he definitely wanted her to represent him.

  Tucking his phone back into his bag, he pulled out his copy of The New Yorker again. This time he turned to the Contributors page, reading his short bio before he turned to his poem on page forty-two. He read the poem from start to finish, no longer ashamed to see his own work in print. Rusty Klein thought he was good—Rusty Klein! So maybe it was true. Maybe he was good. He looked up and peeked through the little window in the chemistry lab door at the row of boys’ heads, all lined up like chess pieces facing the blackboard. School suddenly seemed so trivial. He was on to phenomenally bigger and infinitely better things!

  Suddenly the lab door swung open and the bizarrely short Mr. Schindle stood gazing up at Mekhi, wearing an ugly double-breasted suit and pulling on his wiry brown mustache. “Are you planning to join us, Mr. Hargrove, or would you rather stay out here and watch through the window?”

  Mekhi rolled up his copy of The New Yorker and tucked it under his arm. “I think I’ll join you,” he replied, stepping inside the lab and walking calmly to a seat at the back of the room. How strange. Mekhi never did anything calmly, and he’d barely recognized his voice when he’d spoken just now, for in it was a brazen note of cockiness, as if something new inside of him had blossomed and was ready to be let loose.

  It was like that line in the Keats poem, “Why Did I Laugh Tonight?” Verse, Fame, and Beauty are intense indeed...

  And Mekhi was definitely feeling it.

  9

  “Let’s go outside and smoke cigarettes,” Elise whispered in Bree’s ear as they headed down to the cafeteria for recess, Emma Willard's 11 A.M. juice-and-cookies break. Only second-semester seniors were allowed to leave school during recess, so she was very clearly proposing something completely illegal.

  Bree stopped on the stairs. “I didn’t know you smoked.”

  Elise unzipped the small outside pocket of her beige backpack and pulled a pack of Marlboro Lights halfway out. “Only every once and a while,” she replied, pushing the pack back inside in case a teacher came down the stairs. “Are you coming?”

  Bree hesitated. If the receptionist noticed them leaving, she might yell at them and then call their homeroom teacher or even their parents. “How—?”

  “Let’s just go,” Elise urged, tugging on Bree’s hand. She started to run down the stairs, pulling Bree after her. “Go, go, go!”

  Bree held her breath as she followed Elise downstairs and sprinted across the red-carpeted reception hall toward the front doors. Trina, the school receptionist, was barking into her headset and sorting the mail at the same time. She didn’t even notice the two freshman girls streak past without stopping to sign out.

  * * *

  Porsha sat alone on the East 94th Street stoop favored by the Emma Willard senior girls, furiously smoking a cigarette and running through the college interview questions she’d been prepared to answer since October. There were only two days left until her interview with Owen Wells, and she absolutely refused to fuck this one up.

  Tell me about your interests. What kinds of things are you involved in after school?

  I’m president of the French club and the social services board at school. I’m also a peer group leader, counseling freshmen on social issues. I’m nationally ranked in tennis—I play all summer, but only twice a week during the winter. I volunteer in soup kitchens whenever I can. I also chair the organizing committees for about eight charity functions a year. We were going to do a Valentine’s Day ball this Sunday to benefit Little Hearts, a charity for children with heart problems, but the ball got canceled because of Fashion Week. We were worried no one would come. I sent a letter to everyone on the guest list and still raised almost $300,000. Fundraising has always been one of my particular strengths, and I definitely plan to volunteer my services at Yale.

  Porsha could just imagine Owen’s eyes widening in impressed surprise. How could Yale not accept her? She was first class.

  A first-class liar is more like it. The whole soup kitchen thing is completely bogus, and she’d sort of skipped the part about the seven other chairpeople who’d helped raise the money for Little Hearts.

  “Hey Porsha!”

  Chanel was ambling down the sidewalk toward her, wearing black fishnets with a hole in one knee, her luminous black hair pulled up in a messy bun. For some girls this would have been a very trashy moment, but for Chanel it was an I-can-get-away-with-this-because-I-look-good-in-anything moment. A cab rushed down the street and the driver whistled out the window and honked as he drove by. Cha
nel was so used to the sound of men whistling and cars honking, she never even bothered to turn around.

  She sat down next to Porsha and pulled a crumpled turquoise-colored pack of American Spirits out of her pocket. She’d started smoking them when she and Tahj had gotten together, because they were supposed to be all natural and additive-free.

  As if there’s such a big difference between all-natural carbon monoxide and fake carbon monoxide. Get real.

  “I still can’t believe how cool you look,” Chanel breathed, admiring Porsha’s hairdo as she lit her cigarette. “Who knew you’d look so sexy with short hair.”

  Porsha touched her head self-consciously. She’d thought she was supposed to be mad at Chanel but now she couldn’t even remember why. Her haircut was sexy, if she did say so herself.

  Flattery can work wonders.

  “So, I’ve been trying to think of a good present to get for Tahj, you know, to congratulate him on getting into Harvard? Can you think of anything he really wants, or maybe something he needs?”