Owen was breathing deeply now and had stopped rubbing her back. As soon as Porsha was sure he was asleep, she’d slip out the door and ask the concierge downstairs to call her a car home. After all, she had a reputation to maintain. And it wasn’t like she was ditching him.
The best way to keep a guy intrigued is to disappear.
28
“Snowball fight!” Chanel cried at the top of her lungs to no one in particular. She’d been dancing with a pack of tipsy, half-naked models and her silky mane was matted to the back of her neck, creating a sort of unidreadlock, beach hair effect. She’d been relieved of her I LOVE TAHJ t-shirt for a cool four thousand bucks by her old friend Guy Reed from the Les Best boutique and was now wearing only a hot pink bra that looked like a bikini top.
“Snow volleyball!” a guy shouted back even louder. He was dressed in a black ski suit from the Les Best ski line, black fur boots, and a pair of black fur earmuffs clung to his ears. He pointed out the huge bar windows to where a volleyball net had been set up outside on the snowy sidewalk.
In a matter of seconds the entire roomful of writhing, sweaty bodies attacked the coat closet, pulling on the nearest Fendi sheepskin or goose-down Gucci parka to protect their skinny bodies from the cold before they dashed outside to frolic in the snow.
Chanel giggled as she slipped into a parka with a beaver fur–trimmed hood that would have fit a giant Eskimo. In the last two hours she’d drunk more champagne than she had on New Year’s Eve and she felt giddy and warm all over. Before she could even zip up her coat, someone grabbed her hand and pulled her out the door with him.
Outside the snow had enveloped everything and the streetlights glowed gold on the downy white blanket. Without the constant honk and roar of traffic, there was a pleasant calm about the city, as if it had finally gone to sleep. Shrieking in merriment, the gang of models, stylists, and photographers plowed through the thigh-deep drifts and began spiking balls over the volleyball net with total disregard for the peaceful scene.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” Chanel breathed. She wished Tahj were there so she could kiss him and tell him how much she loved him while stuffing a great big snowball down the back of his shirt. But he wasn’t—the party pooper—so she would just have to make do. She turned to the guy holding her hand. It was the guy in the black ski suit, and he was tall and gorgeous. Everyone there was. She let go of his hand and scooped up a handful of snow. “Come here,” she beckoned him. “I want to tell you a secret.”
He took a step toward her, his breath filling the air with steamy clouds. “What?”
Chanel stood on tiptoe and wrapped her arms around his neck. Then she kissed his cold, smooth cheek. “I love Tahj!” she squealed, stuffing the snowball down the back of his black ski suit and tearing off through the snow to join the others.
The guy chased after her, grabbing her legs and knocking her down just as they reached the volleyball net. The game was halted as the crowd of gorgeous revelers began to hurl snowballs at the frolicking pair, stopping now and then to light cigarettes or reapply their lip gloss before joining in again. Chanel howled with laughter as snow went down the back of her jeans. That was the great thing about being so beautiful and so carefree. It didn’t matter who you were with or what silly thing you were doing—you always had a fabulous time. In fact, you didn’t even have to be in love with just one person when the world was already so in love with you.
29
Bree and Elise were still kissing when Rufus called.
Ring, ring!
“Shit!” Bree threw Elise off of her, leaped off the couch, and sprinted into the kitchen. It wasn’t like anyone could see them, but she still felt like she’d been caught doing something incredibly embarrassing.
“Everything okay?” Rufus growled cheerfully into the phone. “I’m stuck down here with Max and Lyle and the rest of these losers. The snow’s a bitch.” Rufus spent most Friday nights down in the East Village at an old bar with his Communist writer friends. He sounded jolly, the way he always sounded when he’d had two or three glasses of red wine. “You girls staying out of trouble?”
Bree blushed. “Uh-huh.”
“Well, tell that friend of yours to stay put. No one in their right mind should try to get anywhere tonight.”
Bree nodded. “Okay.” She’d been kind of hoping Elise would go home so she could take a hot bath and collect her thoughts, but she couldn’t very well ask her to leave when there were four feet of snow on the ground and it was still coming down. “I’ll see you later, Daddy,” she said, almost wishing she could tell him how confused she was about what had just happened. She might have been a budding artist but that didn’t mean she had to experiment all the time.
Bree hung up the phone. “So what should we do now?” Elise asked, wandering into the kitchen with her jeans still unbuttoned. She separated an Oreo and licked the cream out of the inside.
Elise seemed to be hinting that she was ready to move on to the next chapter in This Is My Body for Women, but no way was Bree going to find out what that entailed. She faked a yawn. “Dad says he’s coming home soon,” she lied. “I’m kind of tired anyway.” She glanced out the kitchen window. Everything was white and the snow was still falling. It looked like the end of the world.
“Come on.” She led the way to her bedroom. “Dad wants you to stay over.” All she had was a single bed that she was definitely not sharing with Elise. Not when Elise was so...horny and unpredictable. “You can sleep on my bed and I’ll sleep on the sofa.”
“Okay,” Elise replied dubiously. “I better call my mom. You’re not mad at me are you?”
“Mad?” Bree repeated casually. “Why would I be mad?” She pulled open her dresser drawer and handed Elise an oversized T-shirt and a pair of sweatpants. “Sleep in these,” she directed. Otherwise Elise might decide to sleep in the nude, which would be very uncool, especially if Rufus came home later that night and barged into Bree’s room to give a senseless sermon on the meaning of life, as he was sometimes known to do when he’d drunk too much wine. She pulled out some pajamas for herself and closed the drawer. “I’m going to take a shower. You can use my cell phone if you want to call your mom.”
Elise took the clothes and gazed up at the paintings on Bree’s wall. Over the bed was one of the Humphreys’ cat, Marx, dozing on the stove, painted in thick oils. Marx was a deep turquoise color, and the stove was red. Near the window was a self-portrait of Bree’s feet, with her toenails painted orange and the bones in her feet painted blue.
“You’re really good.” Elise slipped her jeans down over her knees. “Don’t you want to finish my portrait?”
Bree grabbed her pink terrycloth bathrobe from the hook on the back of her door. “Not tonight,” she responded, quickly heading down the hall to the bathroom. She’d take a long, hot shower, and hopefully by the time she came out Elise would be asleep. Tomorrow they would eat their Eggos and go sledding in the park and goof around like normal girls. No more experimentation. As far as Bree was concerned, experimentation was completely overrated.
30
“Hold the reins in one hand and the whip in the other,” Gia instructed Kaliq. They were up in Gia’s attic, but instead of hanging out inside the gorgeous antique carriage and smoking dope and kissing and being mellow, Gia was acting all hyperactive and making Kaliq drive the carriage.
The attic itself was incredible. It was full of beautiful old things from days gone by, but kept in perfect order as if at any time someone was going to carry them downstairs and put them to use again. The carriage was painted gold and lined with purple velvet, and under the seat inside, in a little leather chest, were fur rugs and muffs to keep your hands warm while you went out for a ride. Best of all, eight white carousel horses with white feather plumes affixed to real leather harnesses were pulling the carriage.
“Come on, faster, faster, giddyap, giddyap!” Gia shouted at the carousel horses, cracking her long leather whip and bouncing up and down in th
e red leather coachman’s seat.
Whoa.
Kaliq sat back on the seat beside her and tried to light another joint, but Gia was bouncing around so much, it fell right out of his hand. “Fuck!” he cried, exasperated. He leaned over the side of the carriage to see where the joint had fallen on the white-painted wood floor, but the attic was lit only by a single dim bulb and he couldn’t see the joint anywhere.
“That’s okay.” Gia jumped down from the carriage. “Come on, there’s something I want to show you.”
Reluctantly Kaliq left the joint where it had fallen and followed her to the other side of the attic, where a bunch of antique wooden trunks were stacked. “This is where all my old horse stuff is kept,” Gia explained. She opened the top trunk and pulled out a handful of ribbons she’d won at horse shows. “I was a really good rider.” She offered the ribbons to Kaliq.
All of them were blue, with the name of the competition stamped on them in gold. HAMPTON CLASSIC JUNIOR HUNTER GRAND CHAMPION, Kaliq read. “Cool,” he said handing back the ribbons. He wished he’d found that joint.
“Check this out.” Gia pulled a large white plastic canister out of the trunk and placed it in Kaliq’s hands.
The canister rattled as Kaliq turned it over. The name of an equine veterinary practice was printed on one side. Connecticut Equine Health. He looked up at Gia questioningly.
“They’re horse tranquilizers. I’ve taken them before. Half a pill is enough to send you to another planet, I swear.”
Kaliq noticed that there were tiny beads of sweat on her upper lip, which was strange, because the attic was unheated and he was freezing his ass off. He shrugged and handed the canister back, uninterested.
Gia unscrewed the top and shook the giant white pills into her sweaty palm. “Come on. This time I’m taking a whole one. Or maybe we should each take two and see what happens.” Her dark hair fell into her eyes and she shook it away impatiently as she counted out the pills.
Kaliq stared at her, feeling frightened all of a sudden. He was pretty sure Gia had taken some kind of pill when she’d disappeared into her bathroom before, and she had already been high before that, so adding a horse tranquilizer to the mix sounded like the worst idea he’d ever heard. What was he going to do with a totally fucked-up ODed girl in the attic of a huge mansion in Greenwich, Connecticut, in the middle of the worst snowstorm in history?
“I think I’ll pass.” He pointed to a little metal device in the trunk, thinking that maybe if he diverted her attention, Gia would forget all about the pills. “What’s that?”
“A hoof pick,” she answered quickly, holding out the pills. “The groom uses it to clean out the horses’ hooves. Come on, take one.”
Kaliq shook his head, his mind fumbling for a way to get both of them out of the realm of horse pills and into safer territory.
“Gia,” he said looking into her light brown eyes with his sparkling emerald green ones and grabbing her wrist hard so that the horse pills scattered on the floor. He swept her up in his arms and kissed her dark red lips. “Let’s go back downstairs, okay?”
Gia let her head fall heavily against his chest. “Okay,” she demurred. Her luxurious, wavy hair trailed almost to the floor as Kaliq carried her down the long hall from the attic stairs to her bedroom. He pulled back the plush white covers and set her down on the bed, but she clung to him. “Don’t leave me alone.”
Kaliq wasn’t planning to. Who knew what she’d do if he did.
“I’ll be back in a sec,” he said, extracting himself. He walked across the room and into the bathroom, leaving the door ajar so he could catch Gia before she did anything dumb. Lined up on the counter next to the bathroom sink were three little bottles of prescription pills. Kaliq recognized the name Percoset because he’d taken the painkiller when he’d had his wisdom teeth removed, but he didn’t recognize the names of the other two. None of the three prescriptions were made out to Gianna Spark.
He washed his hands and then went back into the bedroom. Gia lay flat on her stomach in her white cotton underwear, snoring softly and looking much more innocent than she deserved to. Kaliq sat down beside her and watched her for a while. The bones in her vertebrae stuck out from her back, moving up and down as she breathed. He wondered if he should call someone, or if it was normal for Gia to just take a bunch of pills and then go to sleep.
In the Breakaway meeting that day Jackie had said that if they were ever struggling and needed a hand to reach out to, they could call her. Kaliq pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and searched for Jackie’s number, which she’d insisted everyone program in during the meeting. Kaliq had thought there was no way he’d ever need it. He stood up and went back into the bathroom as the phone began to ring.
It rang for a long time before Jackie finally answered groggily. “Yes?”
Kaliq looked at his watch, realizing too late that it was two o’clock in the morning. “Hey,” he said slowly. “This is Kaliq Braxton from your group that met today?” he explained, wishing he sounded less stoned. “I’m, um, at that girl Gia’s house? I just found out she took a whole bunch of pills and I think she’s fine—she’s sleeping—but I just wanted to ask you, you know, should I do something?”
“Kaliq,” Jackie said urgently, suddenly sounding like she’d just drunk ten cups of coffee, “I want you to read me the labels on the pills, and, if you can, tell me how many she took.”
Kaliq picked up the bottles and read out the names. He didn’t mention the horse pills, but he was pretty sure Gia hadn’t ingested any of those. “I don’t know how many,” he said helplessly. “I wasn’t watching when she took them.”
“And you’re sure she’s asleep? Her breathing is regular? She’s not vomiting or choking?”
Kaliq rushed into the bedroom feeling more alarmed than ever, but Gia was still sleeping peacefully, her ribs expanding and contracting gently with each breath, her long hair fanned out on the pillow around her head. “Yeah,” he said, relieved. “She’s sleeping.”
“Okay. I want you to stay there and watch her. Just make sure she doesn’t start to vomit, and if she does, sit her up, lean her over your shoulder and pat her on the back so she doesn’t choke on it. I know it sounds unpleasant, but you want her to be well. You want to facilitate her recovery.”
“Okay,” Kaliq answered shakily. He glanced at Gia again, praying she wouldn’t do anything weird.
“I’m going to send a van over from the clinic. It’s going to be a while because the roads are basically closed, but I don’t think you’re too far away—they’ll make it there eventually. Are you prepared to stay strong, Kaliq? Remember, you’re our hero tonight, our Prince Charming, our knight in shining armor.”
Kaliq walked over to the bedroom window and peered out. There was so much snow, the circular gravel driveway in front of the mansion was indistinguishable from the vast lawns beyond. He didn’t feel like Prince Charming—he felt helpless and trapped, like Rapunzel. Hadn’t he been in enough trouble already?
“Okay,” he told Jackie, trying to sound more confident than he felt. “I’ll see you soon.” He hung up his phone and stuffed it into his back pocket.
Of course our Prince Charming was completely unaware that he might have just saved the princess's life. But it’s the reluctant heroes of fairy tales that we fall in love with over and over, despite their flaws.
31
All Monday morning Porsha had been dreading peer group. Not that she minded talking about hooking up with boys, or peer pressure, or whatever else the freshmen wanted to talk about. After all, today was Valentine’s Day, so everyone at Willard was talking about hooking up with boys. What she dreaded were all the questions the ninth graders in the group were going to ask Chanel about walking the runway in the Les Best show, what it had been like to hang out with all those famous models, and blah, blah, blah. They’d probably ask about her stupid I LOVE TAHJ T-shirt and what was going on with her and Tahj, because they’d heard blah, blah, blah. As if it w
as all so very interesting.
Not.
Why was it that the world was so full of followers when there were so many choices in life? Porsha slipped an extra slice of chocolate cake onto her tray just to make sure she’d have something to do while the girls in peer group were boring her to death.
“Hello,” she practically yawned when she sat down at the crowded table a few minutes after the group had begun. “Sorry I’m late.”
“That’s okay,” Chanel replied gaily. She’d gotten a complimentary trim and highlight job before the fashion show, and her long silky hair was even shinier and more perfect than it had been before. “We were just talking about Elise’s parental problems. She thinks her dad might be having an affair.”
Elise’s thick bangs were pulled back and clipped to the sides of her head with tiny pink heart barrettes. There were dark circles under her bright brown eyes, like she’d been up all night worrying.
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