Upper East Side #8

by Ashley Valentine

  Also by Ashley Valentine

  Bridgeport Academy

  Bridgeport Academy #1

  Upper East Side

  Upper East Side 1

  Upper East Side 2

  Upper East Side 3

  Upper East Side 4

  Upper East Side 5

  Upper East Side 6

  Upper East Side 7

  Upper East Side 8

  Upper East Side 9

  Upper East Side 10

  Upper East Side 11

  UPPER EAST SIDE 8

  Copyright © 2016 by Ashley Valentine

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof

  may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever

  without the express written permission of the publisher

  except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Based on the Gossip Girl series by Cecily von Ziegesar.

  Table of Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  Author's Note

  Bridgeport Academy

  1

  “Are you going to try that on?” a weirdly underdeveloped senior named Alison Baker asked Porsha Sinclaire timidly. Porsha pushed the silver hanger down the rail toward Alison. A white, cardboard-stiff, linen tunic by some random Scandinavian designer? No, thanks.

  “Take it,” she responded generously.

  Alison had stringy hair, a gap between her front teeth, and was bone thin. She wore a white button-down shirt every day and the type of navy blue lace-up shoes that Emma Willard required in kindergarten but which were phased out of the uniform in first grade. Once, in fourth grade, Alison had peed in her pants in the library because she wouldn’t go to the bathroom before finishing Charlotte's Web, and she’d had to spend the rest of the day wearing a pair of too-small wool tights from the lost and found with no underwear.

  Scratch, scratch.

  In sixth grade, Alison had unsuccessfully invited Porsha to her country house in Osterville on Cape Cod two weekends in a row before finally giving up. She’d then proceeded to spread a nasty rumor that Porsha’s father wouldn’t let her go away on weekends because he and Porsha were having an incestuous relationship and that was the only time they had together.

  Porsha’s totally gay dad? Hello, stupidness?

  “That dress would look fantastic on you. My shoulders are way too narrow for it,” Porsha lied.

  Alison pulled the tunic dress on over her oxford shirt and let her Willard uniform fall to the floor. The dress hung from her stick-figure body like a soggy potato sack. With her mousy dark hair in a limp middle part, she looked like the girl who gets possessed by a demon in that sick horror movie The Exorcist. “Do you think it’s too big?” she asked Porsha.

  Even Porsha didn’t have the heart to pretend that Alison actually looked good. “Maybe,” she replied, too preoccupied with the pile of slinky, brightly colored Stella McCartney dresses to care anymore.

  “Hey, I was about to try that one on!” Imani Edwards whipped a frothy white dress out of Rain Hoffstetter’s hands and held it up to her ladder-tall, waistless frame. She was growing out her bangs and her hair was bobby-pinned down to her forehead in seven different places in a sort of intentional disarray that looked semi-cool and semi-retarded.

  “Hello? That’s a size two. No way are you a size two,” Rain countered, gripping the hem of the dress and threatening to rip it out of Imani’s hands. “I’m shorter than you,” she insisted determinedly, even though, like Imani, Rain was a lot closer to a size six than a size two.

  “I don’t know why you guys are being such bitches about that stupid dress,” Porsha yawned over at them as she moved on to a rack of sweaters. “It’s off-white, and look.” She pointed a pearly manicured finger at the satin padded hanger the dress hung from. “The belt that goes with it is pink. Our graduation dresses have to be completely white.”

  It was true. The girls had to wear long white dresses, white gloves, and white shoes. It was like a wedding, except they were being set free instead of tied down—yippee!

  Even though it was two sizes too small, Imani still clung to the dress as if her life depended on it. “Well, maybe I don’t want it for graduation. Maybe I have a party to go to or something.”

  As if she got invited to secret parties that Porsha didn’t know about.

  Today was opening day for the Browns of London trunk show in the main ballroom at the St. Clair Hotel, and this particular group of Emma Willard senior girls had all cut homeroom to be there. What better way to find the dress that had been sampled in England but never sold in New York—the perfect, coveted, one-of-a-kind graduation dress. The only problem was that their graduation dresses had to be all white, and most designers shy away from all-white dresses so as not to invoke unsexy images of baby christenings and Little Bo Peep.

  Not to mention wedding gowns.

  “Too bad this one has a train,” Alexis Sullivan mused, holding up a puffy-sleeved satin number by Alexander McQueen that looked like the dress Sleeping Beauty had worn to bed when she slept for a hundred years.

  “Ew,” Imani sniffed. “The train is definitely not the only thing wrong with it.”

  The trunk show consisted of fifty-eight racks of dresses—including ball gowns, cocktail dresses, wedding and brides-maid dresses, skirts, blouses, and cardigans, two hat racks, and even a rack full of tiaras, veils, and scarves. The clothes were gorgeous and exquisitely made, but the girls were not being gentle with them. Clothes were strewn all over the carpet, and the usually glamorous, gilt-accented ballroom looked like the walk-in closet of a fashion-crazed Manhattan society hostess, getting dressed for a benefit in an alcoholic frenzy

  The throng of dress-hunting girls fell silent for a moment as a tall exotic girl with almond-shaped eyes pushed open the door to the ballroom and handed her leather Louis Vuitton purse over to security. Behind her stood a caramel-skinned boy with waves in his hair and glittering green eyes.

  “I bet they’re late because they had to get a room first,” Rain giggled, nudging Nicki Button in the ribs. Over the weekend, Rain and Nicki had gotten Japanese hair straightening treatments together, and their jet-black hair looked unnaturally straight and glossy, like it had been glued on by specialists from Madame Tussaud’s wax museum.

  “Look. Porsha is pretending she didn’t see them come in. Oh my God, and Chanel is, like, walking right up to her!” Lauren Salmon whispered shrilly.

  Their arms full of dresses, the other girls followed Chanel Crenshaw with their eyes as she floated toward a rack of elegant-but-still-a-little-dorky straw hats two feet away from Porsha and began to try them on.

  “Nice,” Kaliq Braxton commented unenthusiastically from where he slouched against the wall, looking more brooding and introspective than usual. This was the sort of trunk show where, instead of waiting in line forever for the two private changing rooms, most girls stripped down in between the racks to
try things on. But Kaliq was the most desirable boy on the Upper East Side. Girls got naked at the snap of his stoned fingers, and it was still he who got ogled, not them. It was no surprise that he seemed unimpressed. It was also obvious from the way he kept his eyes trained on his limited edition Jordans that he was doing his best to pretend he hadn’t noticed that Porsha—the girl he was supposed spend the rest of his life with but had fucked over only last week by fooling around with Chanel—was standing only twenty feet away, glaring at him.

  After walking in on Kaliq and Chanel, Porsha had sworn to herself that she would not freak out at the sight of them, grab the nearest sharp or heavy object, and hurl it at their heads, shouting, “Cheating, horny fuckheads!” But she couldn’t help feeling more than a little pissed off by how good they looked together. They both had the same healthy, sun-drenched glow, as if they’d spent hours together on a blanket in Sheep Meadow, kissing and getting tan. Chanel was wearing one of Kaliq’s weather-beaten polo shirts, its collar faded and the hem frayed, and Kaliq’s cheeks sparkled a little in the bright ballroom light from the glitter of Chanel’s pale pink lipstick. Which might have been cute in other circumstances but was definitely not cute right now.

  Still, there was something amiss in their togetherness. You’d think Kaliq would be on top of the world after scoring the city’s most desirable exotic bombshell—right in front of Porsha, in the pool house bathtub during the girls’ senior cut day party out in Southampton, no less. But no. Red-rimmed eyes, dirty tissues streaming from his pockets, lackluster disposition—the golden boy appeared to be in a terrible funk. Or maybe he'd caught a sexually transmitted disease from one of those French tramps he was always rumored to be hooking up with.

  See? It doesn’t pay to be too greedy.

  He looked thin and depressed, and Chanel looked distracted and spacier than usual. Porsha satisfied herself with the notion that they were definitely not happy. Kaliq was probably always too high to pay attention to Chanel in the way that she passive-aggressively demanded. And Chanel probably forgot to call Kaliq all the time. He pretended not to like constant calling, but he secretly needed it the way only children always need to be reminded that they are the center of the universe.

  With a private smug smile, Porsha went back to the rack of dresses she’d been sorting through in a halfhearted attempt to find something original and irresistible to wear for Emma Willard’s graduation ceremony, which was only two weeks away. Why waste energy on hating them when there were more important matters to attend to, like buying a dress?

  Chanel pulled off the hat she was wearing and tried on a black silk one with tiny faux pearls stitched all over it, and a cropped, black mesh just-over-the-eyes veil. She pursed her lips at the mirror and decided she looked like some mobster’s trophy wife. That was one of the things she loved about acting so much. She could bat her thick-lashed eyes at the audience from behind a veil and suddenly she was a tragic figure badly in need of a little TLC or, at the very least, a stiff cocktail.

  This particular hat was very dramatic, which was exactly the way she’d been feeling lately. Not depressed dramatic, or ecstatic dramatic, but behaving-in-a-way-that-wasn’t-exactly herself dramatic. She stole a sidelong glance at Porsha, who was fervently flicking through a rack of dresses, refusing to even acknowledge her presence.

  Chanel exchanged the black hat for a hideous thick purple headband with fake fruit and leaves sewn all over it. If only Porsha would look her way, Chanel knew she’d pee her pants with amusement. But Porsha kept her back turned. Chanel sighed. Only a week ago they’d been best friends again. Now this. She and Kaliq were together, and Porsha wasn’t speaking to them.

  Hooking up in the bathroom at Imani’s party had been a total accident, and if Porsha hadn’t caught them, they probably would have left it at that. But it would have been just plain cruel to hook up in front of her and then not try to make it mean something. Though she and Kaliq had never actually discussed it, they both cared about Porsha too much not to stay together so she wouldn’t think it was just some random horny hookup between two beautiful, self-centered people who couldn’t control themselves.

  Which, of course, it was.

  Besides, it wasn’t like being together was hard. They were both gorgeous, they loved each other—always had—and Chanel’s Fifth Avenue penthouse was only four blocks away from Kaliq’s townhouse between Park and Lexington. Plus, all they really ever did was fool around because a) they’d known each other since they were toddlers, so there wasn’t anything new to know, and b) even though Chanel would have been happy to, they couldn’t go all the way because Kaliq seemed to be having a problem lately...

  Oh? And what sort of “problem” might that be?

  “Hey, Chanel,” Imani called over from the Stella McCartney rack. “I heard you got nominated for senior speaker by Mr. Beckham.”

  Chanel propped the purple-fruited headband back on its hook. “Really?” she responded with genuine amazement. Mr. Beckham was Emma Willard’s film teacher. She had stopped taking film in ninth grade and hadn’t even been at Willard the next two years. She’d been up at Hanover Academy, in New Hampshire—until she kind of missed the first few weeks of senior year and they wouldn’t take her back. Why would Mr. Beckham, of all people, nominate her for senior speaker?

  Good question.

  “So, are you going to do it?” Imani persisted.

  Chanel tried to imagine herself standing at the podium in Brick Church on Park Avenue, addressing her class, dressed in their pristine white dresses and white gloves. Oh, the places you’ll go. Our future’s so bright, we’re going to have to wear shades, etc. She might have liked acting and modeling, but inspirational speaking wasn’t exactly her thing. Surely one of her other classmates would be way more into it.

  “Maybe,” she replied, noncommittally.

  You bitch, Porsha thought, her ears aching from eavesdropping. Ever since the infamous bathtub incident at Imani’s party, Porsha had been obsessively determined to surprise everyone by rising above Chanel and Kaliq’s stupid, hurtful behavior, making it look like she really couldn’t give a damn, and end the school year as the girl everyone most admired.

  Not that she wasn’t already the girl everyone most admired. She’d always had the best clothes, best bags, best fingernails, coolest hair, and by far the best shoes. But this time she wanted to be admired for her courage, independence, and intelligence. And being senior speaker at graduation was definitely part of that package. Right now Yasmine Richards, Porsha’s unlikely shaven-headed black-wearing roommate, was back at Willard nominating Porsha for senior speaker. But as usual, that sneaky bitch Chanel had to go and fucking copy her.

  The tricky part of it was, no one actually campaigned to be senior speaker. And usually there wasn’t even a vote, because usually only one person got nominated. Becoming senior speaker was one of those things that just happened—another mysterious Emma Willard tradition that no one ever quite understood. Things were bound to get a little interesting now that two girls were about to be nominated.

  Especially these two.

  Chanel understood instantly that Porsha would think that she actually wanted to be senior speaker, which was definitely not the case. But how could she defend herself when Porsha wouldn’t even look at her? Unable to resist, she pointed at the gothic white dress in Porsha’s hands. “Oh my God, that would look so amazing on Yasmine. That’s who it’s for, right?” she asked with a bright smile.

  Oh, so you think it’s okay to talk to me? Porsha thought. Wrong. Unable to muster a succinct spoken reply, Porsha shrugged and carried the dress over to the makeshift register set up on a banquet table near the door, paying for it with one of her three platinum credit cards, which were paid off by her mother’s accountant, Ralph.

  This isn’t going to be easy, Chanel thought with a theatrical sigh. “I’m not in the mood to buy anything anyway,” she added out loud and glanced around for Kaliq. Fighting with Porsha was always so exhausting. Espe
cially when it involved being madly in love with Kaliq Braxton.

  2

  Kaliq was outside the hotel with the trunk show security guard, smoking a hand rolled, weed-mixed-with-tobacco cigarette. The sun beat down on Fifth Avenue and 61stStreet, and with the masses of European tourists and clouds of bus exhaust, it felt more like late August than the last week in May.

  “Beautiful day,” the security guard, whose gold plastic name tag read DARWIN, remarked. He was huge and bald and probably moonlighted as a nightclub bouncer. He squeezed his eyes shut to ward off the bright late-morning sun. “Summer is right around the corner.”

  Kaliq pressed his knuckles into his closed eyelids to keep the tears from streaming down his cheeks. He could blame it on the sun, or he could blame it on being dragged along to a trunk show with a girl, but the truth was that lately he’d been crying a lot. It was the end of their senior year, and he was with Chanel, the girl he’d loved forever—kind of. It was like he was finally tasting the meal he’d been looking at under glass all those years. He wanted to savor it, but everyone else was eating so quickly, there wasn’t time. And there was also this nagging feeling that he’d ordered the wrong thing.

  Wait, doesn’t he mean the wrong girl?

  “Should I be worried about one of your girlfriends in there stealing something?” Darwin asked. He pulled a silvery blue cell phone out of his pants pocket, scrolled through a few text messages on the screen, then stuffed the phone back in his pocket. He didn’t seem too worried. Then again, why would someone with biceps that large get nervous about a few devious teenage girls?

  Porsha had been known to shoplift, but not in front of her friends. Kaliq had never heard about Chanel shoplifting, but she had a naughty streak. She would do it out of sheer boredom. He shrugged. “Probably.”

  Just then the hotel porter opened the door and Porsha skipped down the red-carpeted stairs, brushing past Kaliq with her chin in the air and a white shopping bag swinging back and forth from her hand.

  “She’s cute,” Darwin whistled.