Upper East Side #8

by Ashley Valentine

  Tahj held up the dress again and twirled it around on its hanger. “I also kind of think you don’t want to miss graduation. You love those girls,” he added gently, sounding only slightly gay.

  “Yeah, right,” Yasmine agreed sarcastically, but again she felt totally relieved. She could wear the dress even though she was supposed to hate white. She could sit next to Porsha and make fun of Mrs. M and finally graduate, and the whole class would get drunk together afterwards, even though they were all supposed to hate each other.

  Okay, maybe she did love those girls just a little bit.

  Tahj waggled the dress in front of her. “You know you want to.”

  Yasmine snorted and snatched it out of his hands, catching him in a hug as she did so. “Don’t think you’re getting away without kissing me goodbye. I don’t know when I’m ever going to see you again.” She kissed him quickly on the lips and then pressed her forehead into his warm, familiar shoulder, her body a bundle of nerves. She was breaking up with her boyfriend, she was about to graduate, there was a party to go to, and a whole four years at NYU awaited her, with no more stupid flicking uniforms!

  Yippee! Except, hasn’t she sort of forgotten about someone?

  Yasmine changed into her dress right in front of Tahj, feeling almost sisterly toward him now that they were broken up. She still loved him and probably always would. But the great thing about love was that it evolved.

  Let’s make sure she remembers that.

  “What do you think?” she asked, doing a Barbie-esque spin in Porsha’s wedge-heeled shoes.

  Tahj flinched, as if it hurt to see her looking so incredibly gorgeous. He held out his hand. “Come on. I heard on the radio the subways are a mess. I’ll drive you.”

  Aw. How come boys get so much cuter after we break up with them?

  29

  “And that is why I’m standing here today in a pair of limited-edition Manolo Blahnik shoes and an Oscar de la Renta suit that was tailored just for me,” Porsha told her audience with an indulgent smile as she wound up her speech. “Don’t ever let anyone tell you should be happy with what you have. There’s always more, and there’s no reason you shouldn’t have it all.”

  Everyone in the church remained politely silent, as if they weren’t quite sure whether she’d finished her speech or not. Not that anyone was actually paying attention.

  “Hey, is that who I think it is?” Alexis whispered to Imani. The two girls craned their necks to see over their classmates’ heads as Yasmine appeared in one of the church’s side entrances. Her face was happy and her dress was a stunning white. Her wedge-heeled shoes were awesome, and her little white fishnet gloves were outstanding. She looked so different from her normally black-clad frowning self, she was barely recognizable.

  “Yeah, and she actually looks kind of…good,” Imani remarked reluctantly. “Of course, Porsha picked out her dress. Otherwise she probably would’ve come wrapped in a white sheet or something.”

  Actually, Yasmine had flirted with the sheet idea, but the dress was so much more flattering.

  “Um, that’s all,” Porsha announced from her place at the podium. She looked around for Mrs. M, and that’s when she noticed Yasmine. First Porsha narrowed her eyes to show that she was pissed as hell at Yasmine for being so late. Then she gave her friend and former roommate a thumbs-up for looking so completely amazing. The audience broke out into weak applause as she made her way back to her seat.

  “Thank you, Porsha,” Mrs. M said, taking her place at the podium. “And now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for. It is my pleasure to hand out the diplomas to the graduating class. Yasmine Marigold Richards, don’t bother finding a seat. You’re first.” She flashed Yasmine one of her rare and famous warm smiles, forgiving her most alternative graduating senior for missing half the ceremony.

  Marigold?! That’s what you get when you have hippie artist parents.

  Yasmine strutted to the front of the room in her awesome shoes, ears burning at the sound of her ridiculous middle name and eyes shiny with tears, full of love for everyone there, including Mrs. M. She couldn’t believe she’d almost missed this. Clasping the burgundy leather diploma case in her hand, her big hazel eyes shiny with happy tears, she hugged the headmistress like she was her long-lost grandma.

  “I’m also extremely proud to bestow on you, Yasmine, the Georgia O’Keeffe Award for creative excellence,” Mrs. M announced. She placed a light blue satin ribbon around Yasmine’s neck. From it hung a gold-plated medal embossed with one of Georgia O’Keeffe’s vagina-like poppies. “Congratulations.”

  Yasmine hopped offstage and walked down the center aisle of the church to Porsha’s third row pew. “Can I sit here?”

  “Move over,” Porsha told Rain. Rain was wearing a white dress that looked like an oversized tutu from Swan Lake. “Your dress doesn’t need that much room.”

  “Imani Regina Edwards,” Mrs. M called, holding up Imani’s diploma.

  Yasmine wedged herself in beside Porsha and grabbed the graduation program out of her hands. “Shit. Sorry I missed your speech.”

  No she’s not.

  “That’s okay.” Porsha tugged on Yasmine’s dress. “Tell me you don’t love this and I’ll totally kill you. You should wear white, like, every day.”

  Yasmine blotted her tears with her thumbs and flipped open the burgundy leather case holding her diploma. “Check it out,” she breathed. Both girls studied the gold-embossed piece of parchment paper upon which was printed Yasmine’s name, followed by the date and the name of their school, and then a whole bunch of stuff in Latin. It was totally official looking and totally worthless looking at the same time. All those years of uniforms and too much homework for this?

  Yasmine flipped the case closed and held it tight to her chest. She didn’t care—she’d made it! And her whole future lay ahead of her. After taking every film course NYU offered, she’d become a famous indie filmmaker, except she’d stick to true indies—unlike her former mentor, Ken Mogul, who was totally selling out with that teen movie he was making at Barneys. It was a good thing Tahj had broken up with her today, because now she was free to meet all sorts of interesting people from around the globe, and she could experiment with different relationships. After all, wasn’t that what college was all about?

  Yeah, maybe. But again, isn’t she kind of forgetting about someone??

  30

  “Chanel Caroline Crenshaw,” Mrs. M called out.

  “Shit,” Porsha muttered under her breath. Where the fuck was Chanel, anyway? She glanced back at the other Crenshaws. They looked perky and excited. Unbelievably, they still hadn’t quite grasped the fact that Chanel was missing.

  “Chanel? Are you present?” asked the headmistress, scanning the church with her glassy brown eyes. “Has anyone seen Chanel?” The pretty, never-quite-reaching-her-potential Chanel Crenshaw was forever late for morning assemblies, but one would have thought she could pull it together to be on time for this particular event.

  The other girls twittered. No one offered the headmistress an answer. Porsha glanced back at Chanel’s family once more. Now they looked confused, although the Crenshaws never lost their cool. Cairo jutted his chin at Porsha, silently suggesting that she go up to accept Chanel’s diploma for her.

  “Porsha Cornelia Sinclaire,” Mrs. M announced sternly. No Willard girl had ever missed graduation before, and she was cross now, very cross. She’d allowed Chanel to come back to Emma Willard after she’d been thrown out of boarding school, and now Chanel couldn’t even be bothered to turn up for commencement?

  Porsha went up to the podium to receive her diploma. “I’ll take Chanel’s for her,” she whispered, hoping her voice wouldn’t carry over the microphone.

  Mrs. M smiled tersely and shook her hand. “That won’t be necessary,” she replied, nodding at something over Porsha’s shoulder.

  Porsha spun around to find Chanel sprinting up the aisle in her suit—exactly the same white satin Oscar de la Re
nta suit with the swishy knee-length skirt that she herself was wearing. And because Chanel was practically a foot taller than Porsha and they both weighed the same, it looked even better on Chanel, despite the fact that she was barefoot, her hair was all over the place, and she’d forgotten her gloves.

  “Sorry, Mrs. M!” Chanel panted, flashing their headmistress the famously charming smile that had won over everyone from avant-garde artists to the admissions offices at Yale, Brown, Harvard, and everywhere else she’d applied. “Just think—this is the last time I’ll ever be late!”

  Porsha wanted to slap her for being so charming when she should have been in serious trouble. In fact, Chanel probably would’ve failed chemistry and not graduated if it hadn’t been for her. She hated they way they must look standing side by side in their matching suits. People probably thought they’d bought them together or something. One thing was for sure—Porsha was definitely making Chanel change her outfit before her big party at the Yale Club tonight. No fucking way was she allowing Marcus to see how much better Chanel looked in that damned suit.

  Mrs. M had had enough. Half an hour of shaking parents’ hands and offering a few lame stories about their sweet intelligent daughters, and she was off to Woodstock for the summer to watch Vonda weed their heirloom tomato collection.

  “Take your seats, girls,” she ordered, dismissing Porsha and Chanel.

  They walked back to the pews. There was no room for Chanel, so she perched on Yasmine’s knee.

  “You have my blessings.” Mrs. M blew the seniors a kiss. “And now, class is dismissed!”

  Whooopppeeee!

  31

  After the ceremony, Kaliq did a few bong hits with the other boys in the billiard room over at Jeremy’s, but his heart wasn’t in it. They were all high school graduates, while he was still “diploma pending.” Whatever the fuck that meant.

  Leaving them to celebrate without him, he meandered slowly west on 86th Street toward home, thankful that his parents had been so pissed off at him for that goddamned asterisk that they’d gone straight up to Mt. Desert Island for the week, leaving him in peace. Up in his room, he began to sort through his walk-in closet. On the shelf above the clothes rail, behind that ridiculous Michael Myers mask he’d worn for Halloween two years in a row back in fourth and fifth grade, was the little mahogany treasure chest that his uncle Gerard had given him when he was eight, where Kaliq stowed all his old photographs. He grabbed the clothes rail with one hand and used it to steady himself as he scaled the closet wall with his bare feet, trying to get the fucker down.

  The chest spilled open on the floor. There he was on a fishing boat up in Alaska two Augusts ago with his arm around his dad, both smiling like losers and wearing foul-weather gear. That was the best time he and his dad had ever had together. Fishing in the weird eleven o’clock twilight, surrounded by ghostly glaciers, and sharing a flask of Scotch on their way back into port. Then there were the pictures of him and Porsha. He looking bored and sleepy and embarrassed, with his head on her rose-colored pillows, and she looking crazily ecstatic, with her cheek pressed violently into his ear as she held her camera in front of their faces and snapped the pictures herself.

  Then there was the picture of Chanel’s elegant tanned foot with the words Miss you written on it in purple marker that she’d sent him last year while she was still up at boarding school. Kaliq had kept it, loving her sexy silver toe ring, and loving how he knew it was from her, even though she hadn’t sent it with a note or used a return address or anything. He held the photograph in his hands, trying to invoke that tingly turned-on feeling he’d felt when he’d gotten it in the mail, but now it was just a silly old photograph that didn’t really invoke anything.

  He glanced at the photo of him and Porsha again, missing the way they used to kick around together doing stupid things, like drinking way too many vodka tonics before a movie and then running out during the previews because they couldn’t stop laughing. Her new-shoe-and-cucumber-skin-cream smell. The way she was so sexy when she was throwing a fit. He wanted her to sit on his lap. He wanted her hands in his pockets. He wanted her to call him at seven o’clock in the morning on a Sunday because she was hyper and couldn’t wait for him to wake up.

  He tossed the photos back in the chest and closed the lid. Hanging on the clothes rail inside a clear plastic bag was the moss green cashmere sweater Porsha had given him last spring. The maid had sent it to the dry cleaners so it would be ready for Kaliq to wear at Yale in the fall. Kaliq ripped open the bag and felt inside the sweater’s right sleeve. No, maybe it was the left. Yes, there it was. The tiny gold heart pendant Porsha had sewn inside it so that he would always be wearing her heart on his sleeve. Porsha probably thought he hadn’t noticed the heart, but he wore the sweater so much, how could he not have? He loved that sweater.

  Sounds like the love went beyond knitwear.

  Tears began to seep out of the corners of Kaliq’s green eyes as he grasped the gold heart pendant between his thumb and forefinger and ripped it out of the sweater’s sleeve. His phone rang before he could decide what to do next.

  Hopefully nothing too rash.

  “Hello?”

  “It’s been a rocky year for you, son,” Coach Michaels barked on the other end of the line. “I thought you were over all that drug nonsense. Then you have to go and steal my damned Viagra? What’s wrong with you, boy?”

  “I’m sorry,” Kaliq mumbled almost inaudibly. He was already crying. Coach couldn’t make him feel much worse.

  “I had a long talk with Dr. Nesbitt and your dad after the ceremony,” Coach continued, “and you’re one lucky kid.”

  Lucky? It wasn’t exactly the first word that came to Kaliq’s mind.

  “Withholding your diploma was just a little slap on the wrist to let you know you can’t get away with stealing my stuff, especially my medication. Your real punishment comes this summer. I’ve got a place out in the Hamptons that could use some fixing up. So if you want to play lacrosse for Yale next year, you gotta be my boy this summer. Live over the garage, work for me, and in your spare time, you’ll be going to the local church for AA meetings.”

  Kaliq swallowed hard. He’d imagined a lazy summer up in Maine getting high and helping his dad with the boats, but he had no choice. He had to be the coach’s Hamptons bitch for the summer. “Sorry for being such a dick, Coach,” he said earnestly. “I promise to make it up to you.”

  Coach Michaels chuckled. “Then at least you’ll be a dick with a diploma!”

  Kaliq forced himself to chuckle along with the old man. Things were going to be okay, he told himself. He’d have his diploma by the end of the summer.

  “Thanks, Coach.” He hung up and opened his damp hand to look at the gold heart pendant.

  Well, some things were going to be okay.

  He sighed the sort of shuddering, exhausted sigh that comes after a long cry and tossed the heart onto his neatly made bed. Then he went back to rummaging through his closet. He was supposed to meet Chanel at Porsha’s Yale Club party at seven o’clock. Maybe she’d come up with a way to make everything okay.

  Without any Viagra.

  32

  “I guess I failed to raise you properly.” Rufus sighed heavily as he stared into a glass of red wine. The way he saw it, you had two choices in this city. Either you spent an arm and a leg to send your kids to private school, where they learned to shop for insanely expensive clothes and to be snobbish to their father, but also to converse in Latin, memorize Keats, and do algorithms in their heads; or, you sent them to public school, where they might not learn to read, might not graduate, and risked getting shot. He’d thought he’d done the right thing. But now it looked like neither of his kids was going to any school of any kind next year.

  “You didn’t fail, Dad,” Mekhi corrected as he scarfed down a forkful of sesame noodles. Rufus and Bree had waited outside Hunan 92 on 92nd and Amsterdam while he went in to buy some celebratory takeout. He’d stayed up all night w
orking on his speech, drinking instant coffee after instant coffee and smoking Newport after Newport. If he didn’t eat something, he wasn’t going to make it to any party later. Now they were home, sitting at the dining room table, staring at one another, with an unopened bottle of champagne on the table. It was a Monday and barely four o’clock—an odd time to all be home together.

  “At least he got into college,” Bree put in glumly. She’d worn a new stretchy lavender dress to Mekhi’s graduation, and there were two huge damp spots under each floppy boob from where she’d sweated in the heat. She felt disgusting and was particularly resentful of her brother and father for being in such equally bad moods that they weren’t even going to try to cheer her up. She thought about calling Elise, but she was at her country house in Cape Cod, and she’d only make Bree feel worse by moping about the fact that they were going to be apart next year. That is, if Bree was actually going anywhere next year. As things stood, she might have to be homeschooled.

  She glanced at her father. In an effort to fit in with the other fathers, he’d worn a suit to Mekhi’s graduation, but it was black wool—too warm for June, and all wrong with the tight-fitting orange shirt he’d borrowed from Mekhi to wear underneath it. He’d yanked out the orange shirt in his fury, and his curly salt-and-pepper hair was now fashioned into a sort of messy chignon, held together with the electric blue magnetic clip they used to keep their takeout menus on the door of the refrigerator. To make things worse, there were stray pieces of pink towel lint in his beard.

  Maybe homeschooling wasn’t such a great idea.

  “Isn’t there someplace you kids need to be?” Rufus asked, downing the remains of his wine. Obviously, one glass wouldn’t be nearly enough.

  “Come on, Pops,” Mekhi complained. “It’s not like I’m never going to college. I just deferred for a year, that’s all.”

  Rufus reached for the uncorked bottle of Sangiovese in the middle of the table and poured himself some more. “I just spent eighty thousand dollars on your high school education, all borrowed, so it’ll probably be double with interest. Excuse me for not being ecstatic.” His gray eyebrows knitted together in a furry single line. “Does Yasmine even know about this?” he demanded suspiciously.