Upper East Side #8

by Ashley Valentine

  “Uh-huh,” Kaliq grunted, as if checking Porsha out for the first time. Her hair had grown into a very French-looking, short and sexy bob that suited her finely featured face, milk chocolate complexion, and petite little body. Oh, she was cute all right.

  And she was no longer his.

  “Want me to stop her? Check her bags?” Darwin offered.

  Kaliq puffed on his joint, considering how Porsha would react if Darwin called her over. The thought made him smile wistfully and as he watched Porsha disappear down the crowded block, fresh tears began to spill down his cheeks. Bitchy and stubborn and selfish and neurotic, Porsha was the epitome of high maintenance, but no matter how many times he’d fucked up, she’d always taken him back. It usually started with a sidelong glance or an irate phone call, and then he’d show up at her door and they’d kiss and make up. But Porsha wasn’t sending him any if-you’re-really-nice-to-me-I’ll-consider-it vibes. It seemed he’d fucked up for the last time. Besides, he was with Chanel now, everybody’s dream girl.

  Everybody including him?

  The porter opened the door again, and Chanel glided out of the hotel sporting a Les Best tennis visor. With her silky hair cascading down from beneath the visor, her long and golden athletic-even-though-she-got-no-exercise-except-for-gym-class legs, and radiant smile, she looked like an advertisement for the type of haute couture tennis clothes that were way too gorgeous to actually sweat in.

  “Taxi back to school?” she asked Kaliq with a sly wink. She might have been too tired to walk, but she wasn’t too tired to fool around in the back of a taxi.

  Who could ever be too tired for that?

  Then she noticed the tears. “Poor baby,” she crooned, reaching out to dab at Kaliq’s cheeks with her thumb. The crying had started a few days ago, and at first it had been sort of alarming. What was a handsome stoner stud like Kaliq doing crying? But then she’d grown to think of it as sexy and extremely touching. Who knew Kaliq had such a sweet gooey center?

  Darwin took a step forward. He wasn’t about to let this exotic bombshell get away as quickly as the chocolate goddess had. “You got a receipt for that hat, miss?”

  Chanel reached up to touch the mint green visor like she’d forgotten she was wearing it. She bit her luxuriously full cherry-ChapSticked lips. “Oops.” Her eyes flashed, challenging Darwin to arrest her. “I’m friends with the designer,” she declared.

  Darwin grinned—yet another guy to fall under her spell. “Aw, that’s okay,” he replied bashfully. “I guess I just wanted an excuse to talk to you.”

  Kaliq realized suddenly that he ought to have been jealous. He took Chanel’s dry warm hand in his damp, tear-streaked one. “Come on,” he urged, trying to sound manly and firm despite the quaver in his voice.

  “God, I love it when you fight for me,” Chanel murmured. She leaned her head against his shoulder and kissed his right ear. He put his arm around her waist, encouraged by the strong curve of her hip. They tripped down the steps, barely resisting the urge to tear each other’s clothes off right there in front of the hundreds of fanny-pack-toting tourists mobbing the Brooks Brothers flagship store across the street. Their getting together might have been a total accident, but they were still two, beautiful, irresistibly kissable people—why not take every possible opportunity to fool around?

  Exactly.

  “Lucky guy.” Darwin whistled as he headed back inside to hit on Rain or Alexis or whichever cute Willard girl had the most stuff in her bag.

  Kaliq fought back another rush of tears. He was into Yale. The most beautiful girl in the universe, whom he’d known forever, was practically begging him to do it with her in a taxi on the way back to school. He was insanely lucky.

  So why couldn’t he stop the tears from falling?

  To: yrichards@emmawillard.edu

  From: tajh.campbell@bronxdale.edu

  Subject: idea of the day

  Okay I know I just kissed you goodbye like an hour ago, but I had an cool idea on the way up to school–man that’s a long ass subway ride! Anyway, what if we just get done with our finals and skip graduation because a) it’s going to be boring, b) our parents could care less, and c) you said yourself you’re not really a white dress kind of chick. We could take off in the Saab, drive to the Grand Canyon, watch the sun set, eat some one hundred percent organic wild mushrooms, and dance naked with the coyotes out under the stars. I want to spend the summer exploring the country and holding you in the moonlight. Damn, there’s the bell. Anyway, think about it. You’re my girl.

  Love you,

  Tahj

  3

  “So, it looks like it’s unanimous. Mekhi Hargrove, you’re our graduation speaker this year,” announced Mekhi’s Riverside Prep senior homeroom teacher, Mr. Cohen, head of the history department, who insisted the boys call him Larry.

  “Huh?” Mekhi looked up from the poem he was scribbling in his ever-present black notebook. The poem was called “My Highway” and was all about the incredible journey Mekhi was about to embark on. Since there was nothing keeping him in the city, he’d decided to leave early for Evergreen College, where he was going in the fall. He’d already applied for a summer job there through the college’s employment office website. And right after graduation, he was going to drive all the way there to Olympia, Washington. If he ever got a car, or even learned how to drive.

  Oops.

  Mekhi had decided to model himself after Jack Kerouac when he was writing On the Road. On his journey west, he’d hook up with the most gorgeous local girls in every town, try exotic new food and drink, like peyote and two-hundred-proof tequila, and make detours to bizarre local attractions, like caves with hundred-foot-long stalactites and bleeding rocks, or a cow with quintuplets. He’d already been published in the New Yorker at the impressive age of seventeen and had a brief stint as the lead singer for the popular band the Raves, but when he arrived in Washington State, all the hell the way across the country, he’d have a new degree from the College of Life.

  Bucking girls and shucking corn,

  Rodeo bullhorns, Stetson longhorns, a Kansas cyclone.

  A Nebraskan girl leaves her lipstick on the dash—

  She salts my beef, stirs my gumbo, spits out my pit.

  Uh-oh. Sounds like he was a rock star for one day too many.

  “The class voted for you and you alone,” Larry explained. “You should feel extremely honored.”

  Mekhi was mystified. He pushed his chair back, crossed his grubby blue Pumas one over the other, and shoved his hands into the pockets of his worn-in corduroys. “But I didn’t even nominate myself,” he blurted out.

  Way to make it obvious that you have no friends.

  Snickers erupted throughout the room.

  “It’s like, you’re a celebrity, man, and we want you to represent us,” Jaylen Harrison explained in a mock stoner voice. Jaylen’s pet snow monkey, Sweetie, was curled up in a fuzzy white ball in Jaylen’s lap, asleep and wearing his favorite tight T-shirt with a bright pink S on the back of it. Everyone, even the teachers, had gotten so used to the monkey, they didn’t bat an eye, but Sweetie still gave Mekhi the creeps.

  “We figured it’d be easy for you, since you’re writing all the time anyway,” Jaylen continued sarcastically. More snickers.

  Mekhi tipped his chair back. “Wait. Let me get this straight. You nominated me?”

  Jaylen flipped up the collar on his bright purple shirt. “It’s like Larry said. It was unanimous.”

  Mekhi’s hands began to sweat. Senior speaker was an honor, but he felt like he’d gotten it by default. He certainly wasn’t the most popular guy in the class. He’d spent his entire senior year either trying to become famous or hanging out with his former best friend and girlfriend, Yasmine, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. He guessed all the other guys in his class were going to be too busy partying or trying not to fail their finals to bother writing a graduation speech.

  “Just keep it light. And remember, everyone just wants th
at diploma in his hands, so keep it short, too,” Larry advised, pulling on his lame goatee like the wannabe teenage boy he so totally wasn’t.

  “Okay,” Mekhi responded dubiously. It appeared he had no choice in the matter.

  Jaylen tapped him on the shoulder. “So guess what? That dykey girlfriend of yours? I heard she’s gonna be single again. Her ‘better half’ is moving out.”

  Meaning Porsha or Tahj? Mekhi wasn’t even sure anymore who Yasmine was living with. All he knew was it wasn’t him.

  Mekhi's perspiration-soaked hands began to shake with a mixture of confusion and happiness. Maybe Yasmine had broken up with Tahj. But they were so in love, they even had matching haircuts. He scribbled a series of check marks across the top of the page he’d been writing on. Yasmine broke up with Tahj!?

  “So I take it you’re accepting the nomination,” Larry persisted, tapping his pencil annoyingly against his wooden teacher desk. “All in favor say, ‘Yeah!’”

  “Dude!” the class of boys responded in unison, perpetuating the not-so-funny tradition that had started on the first day of senior year. Mekhi blanched as they began to whoop and shriek in a completely unnecessary display of fake enthusiasm. “Go, Mekhi!”

  The minute the bell rang, Mekhi called Yasmine to tell her how sorry he was.

  Yeah, right.

  “Talk about misinformation!” Yasmine ranted. “Where do people get this shit? So, how are you anyway?” she asked, sounding kind of glad to hear from him.

  “I was just voted senior speaker,” Mekhi admitted, like he’d been campaigning for it for weeks. Secretly, he was dying inside that Yasmine and Tahj were still together, but he wasn’t about to let her know that.

  “Senior speaker? What the fuck!” Yasmine responded. “Wait, is that a good thing?”

  “I guess.”

  “Look, I have photo lab now, but do you want to come over later or something?”

  Mekhi pressed his cell phone against his ear until it began to hurt. A group of freshmen boys almost sent him toppling down the stairs in their rush to lunch. All of a sudden he realized just how lonely he’d been. Was it really possible that he and Yasmine could be friends again, just like that, with one phone call? And if they could be friends again, there was always the chance they could be more...

  “Will Tahj be there?” he asked cautiously as he wandered down the fourth-floor hallway toward English class. A random, lint-covered rubber band was in his pocket. He pulled his scraggly twists into a stubby ponytail and then pulled it out again, dropping the rubber band on the floor. His dad, Rufus, was Mr. Ponytail Freak, not him.

  “Tahj has music practice,” Yasmine told him casually. “Not that you couldn’t come over even if he were here.”

  Hello, threesome?!

  Mekhi felt like a window was swinging open and a cool breeze was sweeping his face. “I’m supposed to go to this stupid AP history cram session for our final next week, but I could skip it.”

  Jaylen's monkey scampered past him down the hall with a half-eaten bag of Doritos in his mouth. Jaylen was too busy dabbing pomade into his freshly-bleached hair in front of the full-length mirror he’d installed inside his locker to even notice.

  “Okay, I’m in photo lab now. As usual, everyone else cut except me. They’re all probably at some stupid sample sale or something. Shopping for their stupid white wedding—I mean, graduation gowns or whatever. Fuck!” Yasmine exclaimed, sounding like she’d stumbled into something. “It’s dark in here.”

  Mekhi’s ear was sweating now. “I wish I were there,” he blurted out, unable to stop himself.

  “Me too,” Yasmine responded eagerly. “Seriously.”

  Wait, was she flirting with him?

  “So maybe I will come over later,” he ventured. “Dad and Bree are away anyway, so I don’t have to be home at any particular time.”

  Is that so?

  “Cool.” Yasmine sounded distracted now. “Look, I’m gonna do something dumb like drink fixer instead of my tea if I don’t hang up now. I’ll see you later, okay?”

  Mekhi could hardly wait. “Yeah, okay.” He hung up. Down the hall Sweetie was peeing on the marble floor in front of the door to the history department offices. Mekhi grinned at him.

  Good boy.

  4

  “So just drink some coffee and read poetry quietly to yourself, okay, Dad?” Bree Hargrove pleaded with her uncooperative father, Rufus, as they stood in front of the dapper, wrought-iron gates of Hanover Academy, just outside the quaint and lovely town of Hanover, New Hampshire. After appearing semi-clothed on the Internet and in the pages of various fashion magazines, and colluding with rock stars in their suite at the Plaza Hotel, Bree had been given an ultimatum by Mrs. McLean, headmistress of Emma Willard. She had to stop making headlines and finish up her freshman year at Willard behaving like the demure school girl she was supposed to be, or she’d have to find some other school to attend in the fall. Bree had taken this as a challenge and wound up spending an entire weekend with the Raves in the lead guitarist’s Bedford Street townhouse. She’d even recorded a song with them! The following Monday, Mrs. McLean and everyone else in the city had read all about it in the gossip columns.

  Say goodbye to Emma Willard and hello to…boarding school!

  Now it was the following Monday and Bree had taken the day off from school to look at Hanover, the famously wild and crazy boarding school of her dreams. Hanover was where party girl extraordinaire Chanel Crenshaw had gone for two years before getting kicked out last October, and Bree imagined that Chanel had never been replaced. Well, here she was to replace her. She was going to bring Hanover to new heights of notoriety, and if, for some reason—which was hard to imagine—Hanover didn’t appeal to her, or worse, didn’t accept her, she would also visit the Croton School. Croton was only an hour and a half away from the city, in Croton Falls, New York, and according to all the prep school guidebooks Bree had been reading, it was almost as wild as Hanover.

  “I might get a haircut, too,” Rufus replied, sounding chipper. His curly hair was pulled back into a straggly ponytail held by a rainbow colored twist-tie that had come on a bag of bagels from the Whole Foods near their apartment building. To go with his fancy hairstyle, Rufus was wearing a red-and-white Western-style shirt, heavy brown canvas shorts, and scuffed beige sandals with white wool socks.

  Nothing like the country to bring out one’s sense of fashion.

  “Oh. Good.” Bree tried not to get too excited. The last time Rufus had gotten his hair cut—sometime around her thirteenth birthday—he had gone to a Lower East Side salon popular with drag queens and gotten a new hairstyle complete with purple streaks. “So, I’ll just go on my tour and meet you at that place in town,” she added, referring to the bookstore café they’d passed on the way through the town of Hanover. The campus was a mile-and-a-half walk from town along a nice tree-lined path. It would be reassuring to have that distance between herself and Rufus, in case he decided to start a political movement or something equally insane out of sheer anxiety at having to leave the city.

  “You got it!” Rufus pecked her on the cheek with his grizzly mouth before striding down the path with exaggerated jauntiness. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do!” he called out behind him.

  As if there were anything he wouldn’t do.

  Bree tugged on the pretty green blouse she’d bought at Scoop in Soho on Saturday. It was Japanese and had little dragonflies stenciled all over it. She’d buttoned it up all the way to the collar, but now that her dad was on his way, she unbuttoned the top two buttons, revealing her most surprising assets—her 34 double Ds.

  No reason the boys at Hanover shouldn’t know what they were in for.

  She extracted her laminated campus map from her bought-on-the-street-outside-of-Bloomingdales-but-looked-just-like-Chanel’s Louis Vuitton bag. The school’s ivy-covered old brick buildings were right out of an Abercrombie & Fitch catalog, but Bree was disappointed not to see any gorgeous, half-nake
d, sun-dappled boys playing Frisbee out on the lawns. Riley, the girls’ dormitory where she’d arranged to meet her host, was on the other side of the parking lot, perched on top of a grassy hillock. It was a gorgeous summer day, and the air smelled like fresh cut grass.

  “I already love it here,” Bree whispered, her hazelnut skin tingling with excitement. Her whole life was about to change. No more uniforms. No more bitchy, cliquey girls who would spend hours dissecting a girl’s choice of red lipstick over pink. No more being known only for her excellent calligraphy, her overhyped Internet disgrace, or her supposedly pornographic photoshoots. No more rumors, no more scandal.

  Well, maybe that was taking it a little too far. There was nothing wrong with a little scandal. It was just that at a boarding school like Hanover, the bar for scandal would be considerably higher.

  Bree’s host, Fiona Castagnoli, was waiting for her outside the door to Riley. Fiona looked like a forty-five-year-old soccer mom—short and pudgy, in a striped shirt tucked into Bermuda shorts. Her white socks were folded neatly at the ankle, and her white-on-white Reebok sneakers were brand spanking new. “Brianna?” she asked eagerly, her supercurly, tight auburn ponytail bouncing between her shoulder blades. “We have to hurry. I’m taking you to study hall and we’re already five minutes late!”

  Fiona was lugging a nerdy backpack with every book she owned in it. Bree blinked at her. When she’d thought about coming to visit Hanover, she’d imagined hanging out in a dorm room with chic cool girls, drinking vodka gimlets and flirting with boys smoking pipes, their school neckties flopping loosely against their bare chests.

  “If you have lots of work to do I could, like, hang out here and wait for you,” Bree offered.

  “Oh, could you?” Fiona cried. She seemed immensely relieved. “You see, it’s finals week next week, and I have forty-seven Spanish irregulars to study and thirteen proofs to do for geometry.”