“I don’t care. No strings attached.” He spread his hands, palms up, as if to demonstrate the lack of strings.
“And you don’t even want to know what it’s for?” I asked.
“It’s none of my business, is it?”
I looked at him and he looked at me. It was like jumping off a cliff, but without knowing what waited below or even how far it was to the bottom.
“Okay,” I said, though I couldn’t believe I was saying it. “If you insist.”
Twenty-three
I ended up telling him anyway, and he even came with me to drop off the check. This time Rafe was wearing a tie with little giraffes on it, and I was tempted to take a picture to send to Natalie. I mean, first ponies and then giraffes? There was no way she could still be suspicious after that.
Rafe treated Quinn in the same kind, formal way he’d treated me and said he’d call when he had more news, though he warned it might not be until after the weekend. That felt sort of anticlimactic, but there was plenty to keep me busy in the meantime.
Thursday night I had go to Patience’s for dinner. Charley was supposed to come, too, but she ended up being conveniently busy in the editing room and had to cancel at the last minute. I had a feeling she was actually curled up in her favorite chair back at the loft, eating ice cream and watching TV, but she’d already had to put in so much family time on my behalf that I couldn’t blame her. Mostly I was just jealous.
Thanks to Carolina, I was now hyperconscious of the number eight, and I had to wonder what she would have made of Patience’s apartment. Not only was the address 888 Park Avenue, the apartment was on the eighth floor, and her foyer was painted a deep dark red.
But nothing inside felt dangerous. Everything looked like it had been decorated by Ralph Lauren, and a uniformed maid served us at a long table set with gold-rimmed china. This time I was careful to stay away from Gwyneth’s water glass.
The conversation was about as stimulating as it had been in Southampton until Mr. Dudley came up. “He’s such a talented young man,” said Patience. “And so handsome. I was part of the search committee that hired him after the last drama instructor left. I’m so glad to hear he’s working out.”
A very slight tinge of color washed across Gwyneth’s face, turning her complexion from white to off-white. In class, she’d been assigned a scene from Our Town. Apparently she’d be playing a dead person, but I seemed to be the only one at the table who found any humor in that. And Patience was thrilled to hear about Quinn and me doing Romeo and Juliet.
“So are you and Quinn an item, Delia?” she asked me.
“Excuse me?”
“You know, an item. Are you dating or hanging out or whatever it is that kids say these days?”
“Oh, uh, no,” I said. “We’re just friends.” There was no way I was ever going to tell Patience how I really felt, and especially not at the dinner table with Jeremy and the Monkeys. And right then Gwyneth managed to knock over her father’s wineglass, which created a welcome distraction. I was beginning to wonder if I’d been underestimating her.
It was raining on Friday, so Quinn and I couldn’t go outside to rehearse and neither could anyone else. Which meant that the entire class was trying to rehearse in the auditorium. We ended up squeezed in a corner of the stage between a group doing a scene from Death of a Salesman and another group doing a scene from Waiting for Godot. It was a pretty hopeless situation. We couldn’t even get all the way through our scene once without interruption, which meant we couldn’t get to the kissing, either.
“What are you doing tomorrow?” Quinn asked, raising his voice to be heard over the din. “Do you want to come to my house and rehearse?”
Inside, I was dancing a happy mental jig, but I just said yes, of course, so that meant that Friday night Charley and I had to do outfit planning. It wasn’t like I was going to wear my uniform to Quinn’s apartment.
“Where does he live?” asked Charley.
I checked the address. “East Seventy-second Street?”
“I don’t know why I asked. You do realize that you’re probably the only person at Prescott who doesn’t live on the Upper East Side? So we want put-together but a little funky.” According to Charley, that meant a full-skirted dress from Anthropologie under a cropped cardigan with tights and Mary Janes, but she only decided on that after another prolonged session of trying on everything in my closet.
I took the subway uptown. I’d thought I’d finally gotten over feeling jittery about seeing Quinn, but the idea of doing our entire scene together, kiss and all, was enough to make the jitters come back with a vengeance.
The address belonged to a big stone building just off Fifth Avenue. One attendant held the door for me while another called to announce my arrival. Then a third took me up in an elevator that opened directly into the Rileys’ apartment on the top floor.
Nobody was in the foyer, but I heard the sound of wheels on parquet and assorted thumps and yelps in the distance, so I headed in that direction. And a few wrong turns later, I found myself in what could really only be described as a ballroom.
It was the size of a regulation soccer field, with a wall of windows looking south over the city and an enormous crystal chandelier hanging from the ceiling, which had to be at least two stories high. And except for a grand piano in a corner, the entire space was practically empty.
Which made it perfect for Bea and Oliver’s purposes. They were both wearing roller skates, and they’d set up an obstacle course using folded card tables and coatracks and even a miniature trampoline. They were gleefully bashing into walls and tables and each other like everything was made of rubber, including themselves.
“They’re cute but not all that bright,” Quinn said, coming up beside me as I watched.
“Delia!” Bea spotted me and zoomed over, with Oliver behind her. “Guess what we’re doing.”
“Practicing for your Mensa entrance exams?” suggested Quinn.
“Funny,” said Oliver sarcastically. And then, “What’s Mensa?”
“Delia, did you bring skates?” asked Bea, skating backwards in a circle around me. “You want to try our new Power Extreme Super Roller Challenge?”
“She’d love to some other time,” said Quinn. “But we have homework to do. And don’t you guys have to be somewhere?”
As if on cue, Fiona appeared in another of the ballroom’s multiple doorways. “Beatrice! Oliver! How many times have I told you no skating in the house? I just had these floors refinished.”
“So that’s why it’s extra slippery today,” mused Oliver. “Cool.”
Fiona herded them off to go change for somebody’s birthday party, and Quinn led me through a few more rooms and into a small library.
We’d agreed the previous day that we would both have our lines memorized for today so that we could concentrate on how we actually wanted to say them. It wasn’t like there was that much to learn—just the short dialogue between Romeo and Juliet. And thanks to Ash, I’d read the whole thing several times and seen it performed more than once. I already knew the scene pretty well.
But as much of the meaning was in what the characters did while they spoke—the blocking—as in the lines themselves, which played on the language of religious pilgrimage to justify first touching hands and then kissing. This was the hand-touching part that led to the kissing part:
ROMEO
If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine, the gentle fine is this:
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.
JULIET
Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
Which mannerly devotion shows in this;
For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss.
So, while we were saying all this, we were touching our hands together, palm to palm. And this was obviously not the least nerve
-wracking thing I’d ever done. Quinn seemed totally focused on the scene, and I was trying to focus, too, but the closer we got to the kissing part, the less easy that was. Either way, I was beginning to think that I liked drama. A lot.
Anyhow, we were almost up to the kissing part when somebody behind us cleared his throat and said, “Ahem.”
I practically jumped out of my skin. A man was standing at the door watching us. And if I hadn’t been blushing before, I was definitely blushing now.
But Quinn was completely calm. “Hey, Dad,” he said. “This is Delia. Delia, this is my father.”
“Hi, Mr. Riley,” I said. After everything Charley had said and some of what Quinn had said, too, I was expecting a total ogre. But if Hunter Riley was an ogre, it didn’t show on the outside. He looked like an older version of Quinn, though Quinn’s hair was light brown where his father’s was a much darker brown with some gray at the edges.
“Call me Hunter,” he said. “What are you two up to?”
“Rehearsing,” said Quinn. “We’ve got that drama class thing on Monday.”
“That’s right,” said Hunter. “I’d forgotten about that. Is Marcus coming later?”
“Uh-huh,” said Quinn.
“He said you should be able to bring your math score up to match your verbal score if you just work at it.”
“Uh-huh,” said Quinn again.
“I have some time before we go out this evening if you want to do a practice test with me,” Hunter said.
“Okay,” said Quinn.
“Good. Then I’ll see you later. Nice to meet you, Delia.”
“Nice to meet you, too,” I said.
“That was Hunter,” said Quinn as his father’s footsteps faded away.
“I figured. Since he said to call him Hunter and everything.”
“Marcus is tutoring me for the SATs. That’s why Hunter was asking about him. He’s very interested in improving my SAT scores.”
“It shows,” I said.
We went back to rehearsing, but the interruption had put a damper on things. Romeo and Juliet never had to worry about standardized tests. We started working everything over from the beginning, and it felt like it took forever to get back to the kissing part.
And then, just as we’d almost reached the moment, Fiona announced over an intercom that Quinn’s tutor had arrived, and I decided I should probably go.
Saturday night I spent with Charley, who said it was too dangerous to leave the loft, not because of crime or anything but because it was “amateur night” in Manhattan. “The entire city’s filled with—and forgive me for saying this, because it’s the sort of thing Patty says—tourists and suburbanites. We’re much better off staying here, where it’s safe. Now, I’m thinking either Reckless and tapas or Fire with Fire and Korean barbecue.”
But even Charley understood that a person can spend just so much time watching teen movie classics, so after we’d finished dinner, I let her think I was doing homework and went to spend some time online.
It was nice to know that Rafe was on the case, but it made me feel restless to just leave everything up to him. And in spite of all the people who’d been warning me about danger, I still didn’t see how looking things up online from the loft was going to put me in harm’s way. So I started Googling EAROFO’s board of directors.
As major corporate executives, they were all public figures, so there was a ton of information available about each of them on their company Web sites and on Wikipedia. But I didn’t find anything that conveniently mentioned how any of the executives was secretly trying to drill for oil in off-limits areas in Antarctica. I guessed that wasn’t the sort of thing people tended to announce publicly.
What I really needed to do was talk to one of these executives myself, but with the exception of a company called Navitaco, none of their headquarters was in New York. But the Navitaco Web site did provide an e-mail address for contacting company management. So even though I knew it was a long shot, I composed an e-mail describing myself as a student working on an economics project and asked if I could schedule an interview with Leslie “Trip” Young, Navitaco’s CEO. And just to be on the safe side, I sent it from my Delia Navare screen name.
Of course, it was Saturday night, so nobody got back to me. And I was still online, trying to figure out my next move, when an IM popped up. I was expecting Erin or Justin, reporting on their second date. They’d had plans to go to a solar observatory that afternoon, because to them the only thing more romantic than plate tectonics was looking at sunspots through a telescope.
But it was Quinn instead.
QUINNER: meet me tmrw? 1:45 pm, 365 W 49 St
That was cryptic. We’d discussed rehearsing more on Sunday, though we hadn’t made a firm plan. But just seeing his IM up on the screen put an enormous, completely uncontrollable smile on my face.
DELIATRUE: ?
QUINNER: surprise. u in?
DELIATRUE: k
QUINNER: cool. c u there.
I stared at the screen for a long time after he’d logged out, still smiling uncontrollably, until Charley knocked to tell me she needed ice cream.
Twenty-four
Charley wasn’t exactly a morning person, and she was proud of her ability to sleep through just about anything. She’d even slept through an elephant stampede back when she was in the Peace Corps. So when her home phone rang before seven A.M. on Sunday, she definitely wasn’t going to answer it. Meanwhile, I didn’t see why anyone would be calling for me on that line or that early in the day, so I wasn’t rushing to grab it, either.
Out in the living room, the machine picked up the call and a female voice began leaving a message. The walls of my bedroom muffled the words, but I could hear well enough to tell from the woman’s lilting tone that it wasn’t my mother, which was the only thing that would’ve gotten me out of bed. So I rolled over and tried to go back to sleep.
But even Patience’s tendency to fill up all of the space on the machine hadn’t taught Charley to use the setting that limits the length of a message, so this message went on and on. And on and on and on. And then on some more.
I could hear the voice even with my pillow over my head, and unlike Charley, I couldn’t sleep through anything. So then I started counting, telling myself it would be over in thirty seconds. But after I’d counted to one hundred and the woman was still leaving her message, I crawled out of bed and went to answer the phone.
As soon as I opened the door of my room I recognized the voice. “—this dream, I am not sure what it will be meaning, but it is, how you say, a foretelling when I am having the dreams like this—”
I finally located the receiver under a pile of magazines and hit TALK. “Hello? Carolina?”
“This is Delia, sí? I cannot understand why you are not answering when I know you are in the house. Why are you being the ostrich with the pillow?” She sounded cranky, like I’d been deliberately ignoring her.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I just woke up. What was it you were saying about your dream?”
“In my country, the people have been up two, three hours already. You know, they are on the banana plantations, so they are working very hard to finish before it is too hot—”
I wasn’t as bad as Charley, but that didn’t mean I wanted to get up at the crack of dawn on a weekend to hear about agricultural practices in Ecuador. “That must be very demanding,” I said politely. “Now, what was it you wanted to tell me about your dream?”
“I have the dream about the Sagittarius. Have you been not heeding my warning?”
“I’m a Pisces,” I said.
“That is not what I said. The Sagittarius. He is dangerous for you.”
“So I should stay away from anyone who’s a Sagittarius?” I asked. That made more sense. Sort of.
“No, it is just the one Sagittarius. But I don’t know who he is.” I could hear the frustration in her voice. When you were used to knowing everything, it must be extra annoying when there wa
s anything you didn’t know. “It is bothering me a great deal—I cannot see it. But I am very sure that you have to be taking care with the Sagittarius. You understand?”
I promised her that I’d be careful, and she said she’d keep trying to figure out who, exactly, I needed to be careful of.
And while I knew enough by now to take any warning from Carolina seriously, it was hard to get too worked up that early in the morning or when the danger she’d described was so vague. I mean, one-twelfth of the people in the world had to be Sagittariuses, including Charley. Either way, I decided that the safest place for me just then was bed, so I went back to my room and slept until ten.
Charley and I had an extra-hard time figuring out what I should wear that afternoon, since we had no idea what Quinn had in mind. I ultimately headed out in an Anna Sui dress and boots and a bunch of Charley’s gold bangles. “We need to do something about your lack of accessories,” she said. “I’ve been sadly remiss. Maybe we can squeeze in some shopping one day this week.”
Thanks to Carolina, I was on high alert for anything or anyone that seemed threatening, but it wasn’t like you could tell when a person’s birthday was just by looking at him. Out on the street it was a regular September day, and none of the people I saw seemed to be up to no good.
The subway took less time than I’d expected, and while the address Quinn had given me was in a part of the city I’d never been to before, I found it without any trouble. I even ended up getting there early, but I didn’t think being early ruined the surprise. Though I couldn’t be sure, because I couldn’t figure out what was supposed to be surprising about the nondescript brownstone that matched the address.
I double-checked what I’d written down, and I definitely had the right number on the right street. The brownstone had been converted into several apartments, at least going by the number of buttons on the intercom panel, but Quinn hadn’t given me an apartment number to ring. I’d have to wait until he got there.
And Then Everything Unraveled Page 13
