Upper East Side #6

by Ashley Valentine

  Kaliq followed the coach over to where the two university women were standing.

  "It'd be great to have our own pitch," Coach Michaels told the women. He gestured at the stretch of Central Park grass where Kaliq's teammates were dismantling the goals. "But when you play in the city, you use what you've got."

  As if they really had it rough.

  On a bench nearby, four tenth-grade girls in green plaid Seaton Arms uniforms giggled and whispered to one another, their eyes fixed longingly on Kaliq.

  "At least in the park you always have an audience," the Yale coach observed. She was tall and good looking, with a mane of blond hair and an angular face. A street vendor was selling drinks and ice cream from a cart parked near the benches. She unzipped the front pocket of her navy blue backpack with the gray Yale bulldog decal on it. "Can I buy you two a Gatorade or something?"

  "No thanks, ma'am. Gotta get home to the wife." Coach Michaels shook hands with the two women and then clapped Kaliq on the back. "He's a talented boy. Let me know if you have any questions."

  The coach took off, and Kaliq whacked at the new spring grass with his lacrosse stick. "I better get home and shower," he mumbled, unsure of what the two women had planned. Brittany, his interviewer from Brown, was watching him expectantly. She had left a message on his cell phone asking him to meet her in the lobby of the Warwick New York Hotel at five o'clock that afternoon to "discuss his options."

  Whatever that meant.

  The coach from Yale handed him a blue nylon sports bag with a big white leather Y embossed on it. "Compliments of the team," she said. "Your jersey and shorts and stuff are all in there. Jockstrap. Even socks."

  Brittany's face fell. Guess she hadn't thought of that. "Are we still on for later?" she asked quickly. "I could buy you dinner." Her hair was a burgundy color, which Kaliq hadn't remembered from when he met her in October, and he wondered if she'd dyed it. Actually, she was a lot cuter than he remembered and he kind of liked that she hadn't tried to seduce him with a whole bag full of Brown sweatshirts and shit. Even if he decided to go to Yale, did he really need a Yale-issue jockstrap?

  "I'll be there," he said. Then he held out his hand to the Yale coach. "Thanks for coming down."

  But the coach wasn't giving up that easily. "How 'bout I take you to brunch around eleven tomorrow? I'm in the Hotel Wales on Madison—Sarabeth's is right downstairs. Their pancakes are wicked good."

  Kaliq noticed the Yale coach had a seriously nice chest—big, but firm. She looked like one of those Olympic volleyball players. He slung the Yale bag over his shoulder. "Yeah," he agreed. "Brunch sounds good."

  It was kind of a head trip to be schmoozed this hard by two of the hardest-to-get-into colleges in the country, and it might be fun to see just how badly they wanted him.

  16

  "Tell me honestly, is this obscene?" Bree asked.

  Yasmine was perched on the edge of Bree's bed filming her while she selected an outfit for her upcoming photoshoot. Yasmine was supposed to be helping Mekhi pack, but he'd discovered a notebook full of poems he'd written back when he was thirteen and was busy hunting for some recyclable poetic gem.

  Good luck with that.

  Bree had psyched herself up to appear at the photo shoot without a bra, something she never did, at least not in public. Not only that, she'd decided to wear a light blue T-shirt that was kind of tight. "So, what do you think?"

  "Yes, it's obscene," Yasmine replied matter-of-factly, careful to keep the camera focused above Bree's shoulders so her ratings wouldn't go from PG-13 to NC-17.

  "Really?" Bree turned around to check out her butt in the mirror on the back of her closet door. Her new jeans made her legs look so much longer than her other jeans did. It was a remarkable feat of engineering.

  Yasmine panned around the room. It was a typical adolescent girl's room, decorated in pink and white, with a collage of pictures ripped out of fashion magazines tacked to the wall and a bookshelf strewn with teen fiction and half-dressed Barbies that never got thrown out. The art on the walls was definitely unique, though. A perfect replica of Klimt's The Kiss, an impressive copy of van Gogh's Windmills, and a stunning O'Keeffe-like picture painted by Bree herself. Yasmine panned back to her subject. "Why don't you try a black shirt?" she suggested. "And a bra."

  Bree's face fell. "It's that bad?"

  Her dad appeared in her open doorway, the long pieces of his wiry gray hair pulled up on top of his head in one of Bree's scrunchies. "Jesus, girl, put a sweater on or something," Rufus gasped. "What will the neighbors think?"

  Bree knew her dad was playing around, but it was pretty clear what the general agreement was. She pulled a sweatshirt out of her closet and pulled it on over her head. "Thanks, people. It's so nice to know you care," she said, glaring at her dad. "Any chance I could move into your place, too?" she asked Yasmine.

  "Absolutely not," Rufus retorted. "Who will drink all the orange juice before I even get up in the morning? Who will fill up the butter compartment of the fridge with nail polish? Who will bleach my black socks pink?"

  Bree rolled her eyes. Her dad would be really lonely all by himself. And she didn't really want to live with Mekhi and Yasmine anyway. Not when they were practically married and everything. It would be way too weird.

  All of a sudden Yasmine felt horribly guilty for taking Mekhi away from Rufus when Mekhi's mother had already left years ago to live in Prague with some aristocrat or something. "We'll come over for dinner on weekends," she offered lamely. "Or you guys could come over and cook. Ruby has lots of great cooking stuff. Someone better teach me how to use it."

  Rufus brightened. "We can have cooking tutorials!"

  Yasmine fiddled with her camera lens, trying to get Rufus into the picture. "Mr. Hargrove, do you mind if I ask you some questions?"

  Rufus sat down on the floor and pulled Bree down next to him. "We love the attention!" he said and pinched his daughter in the side.

  "Dad," Bree whined, crossing her arms over her chest even though she was wearing the sweatshirt.

  "So, how does it feel to have a son old enough to be going to college and moving out?" Yasmine asked.

  Rufus tugged on his wiry, untamed, salt-and-pepper beard. He was smiling, but his brown eyes were liquid and sad looking. "If you ask me, he should have moved out a long time ago. American families spoil their kids. They should start school as soon as they can hold their heads up, and they should be out of the house by fourteen." He pinched Bree's side again. "Right about when they start acting resentful toward their fathers."

  "Dad," Bree whined again. Then she brightened. "Hey, does this mean I can have Mekhi's room? It's like twice the size of mine."

  Rufus frowned. "Let's not get ahead of ourselves," he grumbled. "He still needs a room." He cocked a wild eyebrow at Yasmine. "You might kick him out. He might even get kicked out of college!"

  "But you just said—" Bree started, and then stopped. Her father was always contradicting himself. She should have been used to it by now. "Anyway, once I get some modeling money, I can redecorate this room," she added.

  Rufus rolled his eyes dramatically for the sake of the camera and Bree punched him in the arm. Then Mekhi appeared in the doorway. He was wearing a green polo shirt that his mother had sent him a few years ago. It was about three sizes too small and made him look like a golf-playing dweeb on crack.

  "That shirt stays here," Yasmine ordered.

  Mekhi chuckled, pulled the shirt off over his head, and tossed it into Bree's trash basket.

  "Hey," Bree whined. "Use your own trash can."

  "It's just a shirt. You can handle it," Mekhi growled back.

  Then Bree burst into a fit of giggles. Mekhi thought he was such a stud because he'd had a poem published in The New Yorker and had gotten into all those colleges, but without a shirt on he looked really puny, and wasn't it sort of lame that he did absolutely everything Yasmine told him to without question?

  "I'll really miss you, Mekhi," Bree
sighed with pretend dolefulness.

  Rufus pulled a packet of mini cigars out of his back pocket and passed them out to everyone without any explanation. Then he lit his and began to puff away. "Maybe it's for the best," he sighed.

  Yasmine turned off her camera and rolled her unlit cigar around between her lips. It was hard not to feel guilty when Rufus looked so sad, but then again, she couldn't wait to have Mekhi all to herself, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Her eyes were riveted on his dark, bony chest. It was the chest of a tortured artist. Her man.

  "Ready to go?" she asked, grinning at him excitedly.

  Mekhi grinned back. He still hadn't come down from his happy high, and he wasn't planning to anytime soon. "Ready," he responded gamely.

  Let's just hope he packed some other shirts.

  17

  Chanel held Drew's cheeks in her hands and blew steam into the lenses of his glasses. Then she rubbed it off with the tip of her perfectly shaped nose. "Promise me you'll come to New York?"

  She'd spent the entire afternoon sitting right next to Drew in the pit during orchestra practice. The conductor had even let her play the timpani and the bells! Of course, she could hardly keep time watching Drew play xylophone. The way he closed his eyes and pursed his lips and tapped his feet as he played was beyond adorable. After practice he'd bought her a cappuccino in the coffee house, and they'd started to share a brownie. But by then Chanel was so smitten she'd had to drag Drew back to his dorm room for a private xylophone lesson.

  Uh-huh.

  Not that she'd gotten him out of his neatly pressed J. Crew khakis—he wasn't that kind of boy—but he definitely knew how to kiss. Now they lay entwined on his narrow bed, their clothes all rumpled and their hair matted to their heads. Chanel wanted to stay that way for the rest of the weekend. Unfortunately, she had to go.

  Drew took off his glasses and cleaned them on his pillowcase. He put them back on and cleared his throat. "So, do you think you'll decide to go here in the fall?"

  "Definitely," Chanel breathed. She nuzzled her head into his chest. "I don't know how I'm going to make it until then without you."

  There were only two weeks left of Drew's sophomore year. Then he was off to Africa for the summer to study percussion. He kissed her hair. "I'll come down and visit before I go, and I'll write every day while I'm gone."

  Aw.

  Chanel closed her eyes and kissed him for a long, long lime. It was dinnertime and the dorm was quiet. Then, all of a sudden, voices resounded in the hall outside as people returned to their rooms to do whatever it was people did after dinner at college—study, flirt with the cutie down the hall, study, hook up with the cutie down the hall, pretend to study, make cosmos, play strip poker, order pizza.

  The door opened and Drew pulled away from her. A light skinned boy wearing a red baseball hat and black basketball shorts stood in the doorway. "Hey. What's happening?" he said in a strong southern accent.

  "Wade, Chanel. Chanel, my roommate Wade. Chanel is from New York. She's on her way down to Brown," Drew explained, looking flustered.

  Chanel sat up and wiped her mouth.

  "Just stopped by to check out Harvard?" Wade observed in a mocking tone. "Guess you liked it okay."

  Chanel blushed even harder. She swung her feet to the floor and slipped them into her brown suede Calvin Klein flats. "I better go. My driver's been waiting for over an hour."

  "I'll walk you," Drew offered. As soon as they were out of the room and walking down the hall to the exit doors, Drew gave Chanel's hand a little squeeze. "For the past two years Wade has given me shit about not having a girlfriend. I don't think he expected to see me with someone so..." He faltered and bit his lip, as if embarrassed by the stream of adjectives that was about to pour out of his mouth.

  Mouthwateringly beautiful? Supremely bodacious? Superbly succulent? Female?

  Chanel grinned up at him as he held the door open for her, her cheeks flushed with the rush of love. Drew didn't have to finish his sentence. She knew how he felt, because she felt exactly the same way about him.

  A gray Lincoln town car was waiting at the bottom of the steps, ready to whisk her off to Providence. She wrapped her arms around Drew's neck, pressed her cheek against his, and inhaled in an attempt to absorb as much of him as possible. "I love you," she whispered in his ear before pulling away and running down the steps and into the car.

  Drew raised his hand to wave goodbye and the car pulled away, leaving Chanel smiling and crying and happier than she had felt in a long, long time. At long last she'd found true love.

  A love that would last for at least thirty seconds.

  18

  "Okay, so you want to hear something totally gross?" Forest, one of Rebecca's Georgetown roommates, asked the group.

  Porsha was seated around a table with Rebecca and her three roommates in the back of Moni Moni, a cheesy Georgetown karaoke bar. A tour bus full of nerdy-looking Hispanic men in tracksuits monopolized the karaoke machine, putting everything they had into their songs. Porsha and the other girls were drinking kiwi-flavored frozen cocktails called Kiwi the Snowman while they pretended not to notice how obnoxious the so-called music was. The drinks were ridiculously strong and they were having trouble stringing sentences together.

  "I'm sure you're going to tell us, even if we don't want to know," Jessica replied. Jessica had black hair streaked with blond and a nose that was so severely pugged, Porsha could see straight up it.

  Not that she was really looking.

  "Will you just tell us already?" Rebecca whined.

  "Okay," Forest said slowly. She lit a cigarette and paused dramatically. Forest was Korean-American and had bleached-blond hair that would have looked so much better if she just let it be black. Not that Porsha cared enough to say anything.

  "So you know how Georgetown is supposed to be all about brotherly love and there are no fraternities and everything is supposed to be all uncompetitive and all? Well, I just found out that there's this underground lacrosse fraternity, and for orientation the older boys make the younger boys eat a cracker with their pee on it. It's like this whole ritual thing. And if you, like, don't eat the cracker, you don't get on the team."

  Everyone made a face, including Porsha. Sometimes boys were just...gross. Except for Kaliq, who would never ever do anything remotely that disgusting.

  "You're from New York City?" Fran piped up. Fran was only four-foot-eleven, weighed about eighty pounds, and spoke in a breathy whisper. Her skin was so transparent, Porsha thought she could actually see Kiwi the Snowman pumping through her veins. "I've only been there once. I got food poisoning at a sushi restaurant and spent the whole week puking."

  "As if you don't puke enough already," Forest quipped, suggesting that Fran's diminutive size was self-imposed.

  "Do you know that guy Jaylen Harrison?" Jessica asked Porsha. “I follow him on Instagram.”

  Porsha nodded. Everyone knew Jaylen, whether they liked it or not

  "Is it true he didn't get in anywhere?" Rebecca asked, crunching ice between her slightly bucked teeth.

  "That seriously sucks," Forest said, without a hint of sympathy.

  Silently, Porsha gulped of her drink. Since Georgetown was looking less and less appealing and she basically had no other options, she could almost sympathize with Jaylen. He had always been so cocky about everything, no one had the slightest doubt he'd get in wherever he wanted to go. It never occurred to anybody that his cockiness might have offended his teachers so much that they refused to give him recommendations; that his over-the-top I'm-a-male-runway-model style of dressing and suggestions that his family buy the school he decided to attend outright might turn interviewers off; that he was too cocky or too lazy or both to take the SAT more than once; or that he'd send with his applications a video of himself overacting in an interschool musical that he didn't even star in, instead of an application essay.

  And so he was rejected. Not four or five times, but nine. Nine rejections.
Ouch! Even the worst scumbag deserved some sympathy for that. But Porsha was sure he'd find a way to wheedle his way in somewhere. He always did.

  "Do you know Leslie Ward?" Rebecca asked. "She came here for a term and then transferred to BU?"

  Porsha shook her head. She didn't know Leslie, but she could see why she'd transferred.

  "Do you know Alexis Sullivan?" Fran asked. "We went to camp together."

  Porsha nodded tiredly. The game was wearing thin. "She's in my class at Willard."

  "What about Kaliq Braxton?" Jessica asked. She nudged Forest's arm with her elbow and wiggled her eyebrows suggestively. "Remember him?"

  Forest nudged her back. "Shut up," she snapped, looking pissed off and sad at the same time.

  Porsha's hackles rose. "What about him?"

  "He visited here once. And seriously, he was the biggest stoner ever. But I heard he got recruited for lacrosse at all the best schools, even Yale. I don't think he bothered to apply here. He didn't need to."

  "Kaliq Braxton," Fran repeated. "We were all so in love with him," she giggled hoarsely. "Especially Forest."

  "Shut up!" Forest snapped again.

  Porsha's stomach churned. The Hispanic guys were taking a stab at Eminem now and they rapped obnoxiously. She pushed away her drink. "Kaliq got into Yale? That's such a lie," she said, almost to herself. Then again, when it came to Kaliq, she never knew what to believe.

  "Why would we lie to you? We don't even know you," Jessica retorted bitchily.

  Porsha stared at her for a moment and then bent down to retrieve her purse from underneath the table. "I'll be right back," she announced, and then stumbled towards the bathroom.

  19

  Brittany had interviewed Kaliq back in the fall, so she already knew he'd spent every summer since he was born sailing up in Maine. Because of this she assumed he liked lobster. And because she was supposed to lavish him with the best of everything in order to entice him up to Brown, she took him to the restaurant Citarella, where she'd pre-ordered a giant broiled lobster for the two of them to share, along with a bottle of Dom Perignon and a basket of frites.