Supergirl Mixtapes

by Meagan Brothers

  “Uh, over at … uh, Pratt Institute.”

  “Now that’s a good school. You really gonna drop out?”

  “I, uh—I sorta just did.”

  “Holy shit!” Gram guffawed, slapping his hand down on the counter. “You don’t waste no time!”

  “No, I guess I don’t.”

  “Hey, you didn’t forget about our party, did you? We’re having one Thursday after next. You think you can make it?”

  “I have to, um, I have to see if I can get off work.” Why was I lying to him so much? Once I’d started, it was hard to stop.

  “I hear that. You just tell the boss to give you the night off, because we are going to have a serious G. T.”

  “A G. T.?”

  “A good time.” He grinned. I thought about Travis and how he didn’t like Gram. I wondered how I’d sneak out. It wasn’t like at home, where I could just drop out of the window. And once I was out, how was I supposed to get back in?

  “I guess I oughta let you look around.” Gram sat back. “Anything I can help you find today?”

  “Nothing in particular.” I had a little money, but I hadn’t planned on shopping. “I just thought I’d come in and say hi.”

  “Really? I’m flattered. Hi, then.” Gram leaned forward on the counter again, smiling his bright smile.

  “Hi.”

  When I got back to the apartment, Travis was packing up his guitars for rehearsal.

  “How was your day, dear?” Our old routine.

  “Ehhh,” I growled. “Actually, it was pretty good.”

  “Oh yeah?” He looked up. “Square pizza in the cafeteria? Or is it all red wine and veal piccata over there?”

  “What’s veal piccata?” I dumped my backpack on the floor.

  Travis laughed. “Just a fancy way to eat a cow, that’s all.” He picked up his guitar cases. “Tell your mom I’ll be home late.”

  “Sure,” I said, helping him with the door. He always told me to tell her that. But he always came home before she did, anyway.

  I was surprised at how easy it was to be a dropout. I’d get on the subway in the morning, same as always, and ride into the city. But I’d get off downtown, usually at Astor Place or Bleecker Street, somewhere near Mom’s old neighborhood. I’d get breakfast and then, when it opened, I’d go into Barnes & Noble, up to the second floor, where I could sit with a cup of coffee and the Village Voice and watch the people on the street below. Reading the Voice made me think about money. About all the things I wanted to do and the money I didn’t have to do them with. But I wasn’t some schoolkid anymore, and I had plenty of time now to take care of the money problem. I felt older already, sitting in my perch, reading the Voice. I read the sex column and the horoscope and thought about what kinds of jobs I could get. I thought about being a waitress in a music club. Or a bartender. How old did you have to be to go to bartending school?

  After a while, I’d leave the bookstore and explore the city. I walked around NYU, thinking I’d run into Gram. Washington Square Park became my favorite place to hang out and read. There was a boy who came there every day with his acoustic guitar to play Bob Dylan songs. After each one, he’d thank the people who stood around listening. “Thank you. Thank you very much. That was ‘Positively Fourth Street’ by Bob Dylan.” I saved change to throw in his guitar case. I thought a lot about what Gram said. About free fall. But I didn’t feel scared anymore. I was still glad to be in New York. It felt like anything could happen here. It felt like something was happening. I mean, there I was, doing nothing, just sitting in a park, and I was being entertained. In New York, there was somebody willing to play you Bob Dylan’s entire back catalog if you cared to stop and listen, and that was just in one tiny part of the city. Back home, you could drive all over town, but pretty much the only thing to do if you skipped school was go home and watch The Price Is Right.

  I didn’t drift like that for too long. I’d been skipping school for about a week when I came downstairs to find a big black car parked in front of the strip club. The window whirred down as I went past.

  “Maria.” I turned. It was Nina. “Get in the car.”

  “I’m—I’m on my way to school,” I lied.

  “No you’re not. You haven’t been at school all week. Get in, please. I’m late.”

  I was too surprised to argue. I obeyed, stumbling a little as I slid in next to Nina on the warm leather back seat.

  “Did my mom find out?” I asked.

  “Victoria barely knows what day of the week it is.” Nina took off her gloves. The driver swerved into the empty street and accelerated onto the BQE. “The school called your grandmother, and she called me.” Nina pulled a cell phone out of her purse and flipped it open. She punched the numbers.

  “Here.” She handed the phone to me. “Tell her you haven’t been abducted by a street gang, please.”

  I pressed the phone to my ear. My stomach dropped. I was sure I was about to be the first casualty of a phone call. Death by Condescending Tone.

  “Hello?” Grandmother was wide awake, even at seven a.m.

  “Hi, Grandmother?” My voice nearly broke. “It’s Maria.”

  “Maria, thank God. Where have you been? What’s going on up there?”

  “Everything’s fine. I—”

  “It certainly isn’t fine,” she bellowed. “Do you have any idea the strings I had to pull to get you into that school? The money I’ve spent?”

  “I’ll get a job. I’ll pay you back—”

  “I don’t want you to pay me back. I want an end to this nonsense. First this melodrama with your father, now you disappear from school and your mother’s phone is disconnected.”

  “We moved. I told Dad—” I gripped the car door as we flew down the highway.

  “For heaven’s sake, Maria, you know you have to tell your father something at least fifty times before he remembers. Why wasn’t I privy to this information?”

  “I—I don’t know. I just didn’t think—”

  “No, you certainly didn’t think. And I wish for the life of me you’d explain why a smart girl like yourself continues to act without thinking.”

  I didn’t answer. Rhetorical question, anyway. I felt my cheeks burning hot. Out the window, I watched as Nina’s driver took the exit for the Brooklyn Bridge. As soon as we got off the BQE, we came to a quick stop at the back of a packed lane of traffic.

  “I’m sorry, Grandmother.”

  “You should be! You’ve got your father and me both worried sick. And, as far as that school goes, you’re done with it. I’ve been duped into this situation once, and I won’t be duped into it again.”

  “But I—” I suddenly realized what she was talking about. She figured that I was just like my mom, taking her money and running off to the city and then dropping out of Pratt.

  “I’ve spoken to Mrs. Dowd,” Grandmother said. It took me a second to remember that Mrs. Dowd was Nina. “She’s going to arrange for you to be picked up in the mornings and dropped off in the afternoons. You’ll attend the public school, and if you don’t like it, tough. Your other option is to come home, re-enroll at Langley, and I will pay the tuition. But I’m not funding any more shenanigans. You hear?”

  I looked over at Nina, touching up her lipstick in a compact mirror. She caught my eye and raised her eyebrows.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I hate to think about what goes on in those public schools up there, but this is what happens when we don’t do what’s expected of us, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And I do hope you’ll call your father. Maybe you can explain to him what’s going on, because I certainly don’t understand it.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You behave yourself, now. I love you, Maria.”

  “I love you, too, Grandmother.”

  She hung up the phone. I handed the cell back to Nina, trying not to cry in front of her. We were inching along the Brooklyn Bridge, stuck behind an acciden
t.

  “Your grandmother thinks she’s called your bluff.” Nina snapped her mirror closed. “She thinks that one day in a Brooklyn public school is going to send you running back to the familiar arms of your old prep school.”

  “So what” was all I could think to say.

  “So, I think she’s right. The school you would have to attend is, unfortunately, notorious for its violence. You won’t be happy—”

  “I wasn’t happy at Prince.”

  “Don’t interrupt me while I’m offering you an out.”

  I shut my mouth. Nina didn’t sound as angry as my grandmother, but she meant business.

  “Maria, what do you want to do?” She turned and looked at me, her mouth a curt line.

  “Do about what?”

  “I mean, what do you want to do with the rest of your life? What do you want to be when you grow up?”

  I laughed. I didn’t know why. At Langley and at Prince, in the short time I’d been there, they were always trying to get us to think about college, even as far back as eighth grade. In the last year, everyone became obsessed with their SAT scores. I didn’t care, though. The only reason I went to Langley was because my grandmother thought private school was the only way to get a proper education. But I didn’t care about proper. I was just trying to make it out in one piece.

  “I don’t really want to go to college.” It was the first time I’d said it out loud. I expected Nina to get upset and try to convince me otherwise, but she didn’t.

  “What are your interests? Are you an artist, like your mother?”

  “No. I like art, but I’m really bad at it.” I hadn’t inherited my mother’s talent. My art class forays were all lame still-life sketches and crookedly thrown pots that ended up holding my dad’s pencil stubs and tire pressure gauges out in the garage.

  “So, what else? What do you like? What are you good at?”

  “I dunno. In school, I’m good in French and English. History. But I like … I like music.”

  “Do you play an instrument?”

  “No.” I thought about Travis showing me the chords on his guitar when I first got to New York. I hadn’t touched a musical instrument since then. “Not really. I just like listening to music. I like reading about the bands and, I was thinking, if there was some job where I could just—” I stopped, realizing how silly it sounded.

  “Where you could just what?”

  “Where I could just listen to music all day long. Like, maybe work in a record store or something. I dunno.”

  “That makes sense, considering your parents. I never did understand why your father would come to New York City to be a country singer. You’d think Nashville would’ve been more appropriate.”

  “He came to—My father? To be a country singer?”

  “I thought you knew this.” Nina rolled her eyes. “He wanted to be the next Kris Kristofferson, or somebody.”

  “I thought he—He told me he came to New York to work for his uncle Vin’s trucking company.” When my grandfather first emigrated from Italy, he came to New York. He ended up in Atlanta because of the company he worked for, and he met my grandmother and stayed. Supposedly we still had family all over New York and New Jersey, but my grandmother lost touch with them when my grandfather died.

  “He may well have. But as far as I know, he was a bouncer in a dance club. Which is, I believe, where your mother met him. He was trying to be a folksinger or something on the side. I thought this was a well-known story.”

  “Not to me.” The car lurched ahead. We’d finally passed the accident, and now we were driving at top speed over the bridge, rushing toward Manhattan.

  “Back to the topic at hand. What I’m offering you is this: education. It’s ridiculous to think that, here you are, in a city full of the finest art, music, and architecture in the world, and instead of experiencing it, you’ll be sitting in some stuffy, overcrowded classroom somewhere in the bowels of Brooklyn, waiting for your turn at the chalkboard to solve for x.” Nina raised an eyebrow at me. “I didn’t care much for school myself.”

  “So, what do you want me to do? Go to some other school?”

  “No. You’ll come to my apartment. Every morning, nine o’clock sharp. I’ll teach you everything you really need to know.”

  “Will it—will it count?”

  “We’ll make it count.”

  “What about Grandmother?”

  “I’ll handle her.” Nina smiled. “I think she’d rather I kept my eye on you, anyway.”

  I looked out the window, watching City Hall blur past. Public school, or hanging out with Nina and talking about architecture all day. Did I really need to think about it?

  “So when do we start?”

  Nina got out of the car at a huge bank in Midtown, then had her driver take me back home. When I got there, Mom was awake, drinking coffee at the kitchen table.

  “You’re home early,” she said.

  “Teacher in-service. You’re up early.”

  “Your grandmother called.” Mom drained her cup. “You really thought Lady Hawkeye wouldn’t catch you cutting classes from eight hundred miles away? She sees all, kiddo.”

  “I guess I was pretty dumb.” I sat down at the kitchen table.

  “Ah, she’ll get over it.” She got up for a refill. “You want some coffee?”

  “Sure.”

  “So you’re stuck in public school now. How do you take it?”

  “It’s no big deal. It’s my own fault, anyway.”

  “No, how do you take your coffee?”

  “Oh. A little milk and a lot of sugar.” Mom went to the fridge. “Actually, um … Nina offered to homeschool me.”

  My mother laughed, a deep snort that sounded like tearing paper.

  “Nina? Nina Dowd? Wants to homeschool you?” She closed the fridge door. “I know I haven’t been up very long, but that’s the craziest thing I’ve heard all day.”

  “She says she’ll take me to museums and the opera and stuff. She says she’ll teach me her business.”

  “You don’t need to know her business.” Mom put the coffee cup in front of me. “I know she may seem smart and like she’s got her shit together and all, but trust me—she’ll turn on you.”

  “Yeah, well.” I guess she was thinking about losing the apartment on Rivington. “I don’t see what it could hurt. She just wants me to experience the city.”

  “It could hurt you, kiddo. Nina looks out for Nina. And her business—her husband was a creep. All the people she deals with are creeps.” She sat down, rubbing her eyes. “Just don’t get involved with her, okay? Just go to the regular school like a regular person. Will you trust me on this, please?”

  “I trust you,” I told her. But I didn’t see what was so bad about Nina. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I figured, just because my mom was upset about the apartment, why should I have to suffer? After all, Nina didn’t totally kick her out. She offered us this new place in Brooklyn, and it was fine.

  “At least you don’t have to wear a uniform in public school,” she said. Then she sat up suddenly, as if the caffeine had kicked in all at once. “Oh my gosh! You totally need new clothes! For a new start!” She grabbed my hand. “Shopping spree!”

  Mom forgot all about Nina and started plotting our shopping trip. I smiled and sipped my coffee.

  7

  Trash and Vaudeville was crammed full of clothes that were way too cool for me. Like thigh-high patent-leather boots and metal-studded belts and torn-up T-shirts with pictures of Sid Vicious. Mom and Travis had talked me into trying on a pair of slinky black pants that were so tight, I had trouble breathing. With my skinny legs, I looked like a pair of scissors.

  “Those are killer,” Mom decided.

  “Yeah, they’re killing me.” I unbuttoned the top and exhaled. Then I caught a glimpse of the price tag, and I almost couldn’t breathe again. “Why don’t we shop at Nina’s boutique? Doesn’t she give you an employee discount?”

&nb
sp; “We’re not shopping at Nina’s.” Mom sighed, irritated. “Rich old lady clothes. Anyway, quit looking at the price tags. It’s on me.”

  We’d been all over downtown already. Mom had bought me a bunch of vintage blouses and pre-ripped punk rock T-shirts and a pair of saddle shoes, charging it all to her credit card. It was fun at first, but now I was tired and ready to get back into my comfortable old baggy jeans and sweatshirt. And I knew it had to be costing my mom a small fortune.

  “Try this on with those pants.” Mom thrust a silk button-down shirt at me. It was bloodred, with silver buttons and silver thread. “This shirt is so hot. It’s totally Mick Jagger.”

  I went into the dressing room. The shirt was as tight as the pants, and the buttons only went about halfway up my chest. When I came out to look at myself in the full-length mirror, Travis was trying on a leather jacket.

  “Where’s Mom?”

  “She went out to smoke.” He looked at me. “Wow.”

  “I know.” I tugged at the red silk, trying to cover my chest. “It’s way too tight, isn’t it?”

  “No, it’s, uh—it looks really good.” But he was blushing and looking down at the jacket he had on, suddenly very interested in the zippers on the sleeves. Before I knew it, I was blushing, too. I felt like I might as well have come out of the dressing room in my underwear.

  “Okay, I was totally right about that outfit.” Mom came back in, swishing down the tight aisle. “You are so hot in that!”

  “I can’t wear this to school,” I muttered.

  “So … what if you get asked out on a date?” She gave me a mischievous look. “You can’t wear a black sweatshirt every day of your life. Right, Travis?” She turned to him. He was taking off the leather jacket. “We’ve got the male perspective right here. What do you think, honey?” Mom threw her arm around my shoulder. “She’s totally hot, right? Total boy magnet?”

  “Yeah.” Travis hung up the jacket, barely looking. “Very magnetic.”

  “See? There you go.” Mom pulled at the shirt, adjusting the collar. “Amazing. You have such a perfect body, it’s sick. You have to model. When Lee gets back from Milan, we’re totally setting up headshots for you. He works with models all the time—he is so going to freak out when he sees you.”