Turns out, he was doing more than just schoolwork in Paris, however.
The picture was of him, wearing his favorite pressed button-up, Ray-Bans propped up on the top of his head, clothes slightly disheveled, as he apparently stumbled out of some club in Paris at 4 a.m. And he wasn’t alone. A hand was grasped in his own that connected to a slender, pale arm, which in turn belonged to someone I knew.
Selene.
Hugo’s sister was stumbling with him out of the club, her hand in his, and I felt bile rise up in my stomach as my heart dropped. It’s the strangest feeling, when you see something like that. It’s the closest I’d come so far to that feeling people talk about in movies where they say it’s like their heart has been pulled right out of their chests.
“Oh.”
I said it aloud and to myself in the empty living room and felt awful. Despite the afternoon sun and the chirping birds, everything felt dark and awful. I was a completely different world as I stared at the paparazzi picture.
Nik avoided paparazzi because he, in his own words, was never important enough to warrant being tailed by men with cameras shouting his name. And now there were several pictures of him all telling the same story: he was partying it up in Paris with the girl who had been flirting with him the entire night of the party a few weeks ago. And she looked so freaking smug about it too.
My phone dinged with a new message and I didn’t bother to pick it up. I just walked into the kitchen and started pacing. I’d sent him a heartfelt letter weeks ago. He hadn’t said a word back to me. But he went to Paris and got drunk in some club and did God-knows-what with that skanky, evil, intruding…
The doorbell rang.
That I could not ignore, so I walked myself to the front of the house and opened the door to Jess who had complete murder in her eyes.
“I texted you,” she said. “But I’m here now because all my rage could not be contained to a text conversation. What the hell?”
She was livid. Awful as this all was, it was nice to see someone else the object of her anger and frustration instead of me.
“Like, is he freaking kidding me?” she ranted. “He went out with that French floozy in the middle of—oh I don’t know—his dad’s funeral arrangements? This guy is going to be king of a whole country—“
“It’s a micro country—”
“Don’t defend him. You wrote him a well thought out and kind letter and not only does he not say a word, but he jets off to Paris to get wasted in the clubs with a girl on his arm?”
I let her go because she was saying everything I wished I could articulate. It was hard to be too incredibly angry at him because this was a crazy time and coping mechanisms were a thing. But she had several points I was thinking myself. And feeling, in the worst way.
It was all so awful, and all I could do was sit in front of my TV, half a world away, and watch while my best friend screamed and ranted everything I was feeling but was too involved to be able to say.
* * *
Things did not get better after that. If I had thought school was a reality show before, it was the Olympics of reality TV now. Everyone was looking at me. Even the people who had tried to hide their prying eyes before were now openly gawking at me. Some teachers were even getting in on it, with lingering, sympathetic looks and offhand questions about whether I was okay or overworked or some other B.S. that was not the real question.
I considered taking my parents up on their offer to let me stay home from school. Anything was better than all this. In fact, being homeschooled for the last year of high school seemed like a completely solid option.
“Hey,” Jennifer said carefully as I sat down in homeroom. It didn’t feel like the welcoming, soft “hey” that Jess had given me a week ago. But there was nothing unkind in Jennifer’s eyes. In fact, for the first time she looked like she might actually be truly sincere. “I’m sorry about…everything, basically. It sucks and I have no idea how you must be feeling.”
I was shocked. I had expected some kind of self-serving, impassioned rant about it all and promises to make it all better with hair braiding and sleepovers and all the other vapid things Jennifer liked to talk about to me, loudly, so people would think we were friends. But this was real. Jennifer was looking at me with genuine understanding, and I felt bad for my assumptions. Had I misjudged her?
“Yeah, it’s—not great,” I said, shrugging.
“I know it’s going to sound like, totally useless, but I’m here if you want to talk at all or drown your woes in pizza or something. My dad makes a crazy good homemade pie,” she said.
I looked at her and felt myself smiling, soft and real. I nodded. I might actually take her up on that. When the bell rang I felt a little bit warmer inside, and Jennifer gave me a smile and passed me her number on our way out of homeroom.
* * *
“Wait, you’re not doing anything for your birthday?”
I had taken Jennifer up on her pizza offer. I’d invited Jess too, who was not overly happy at the idea of being dragged to the house of a girl I’d been describing as a yuppy prep for weeks. She was even more averse to now having to share friendship space with another girl who had a name that started with J. She was possessive that way. But one whiff of Jennifer’s dad’s pizza had her salivating and forgetting anything at all in life that wasn’t the pizza in front of her.
“I’m not a huge party person,” I said. “I had like, a ‘sweet 16’ and stuff but I was never one for having everyone stare at me while I opened gifts or blew spit all over cake trying to blow out candles.”
“Gross,” Jess mumbled over a bite of pizza.
“Well you should do something. Like a mall spree or a pool day while it’s still kind of warm enough. What day of the week is your birthday?” Jennifer asked.
“Friday.”
“So let’s do dinner or something. If you don’t want to go out, my dad can make you another pizza. You can have your parents come over and we can do a whole thing,” she said. “Take your mind off the crazy of life and unfaithful, asshole boys.”
“Amen,” Jess said, raising her pizza slice in salute.
I hated to call Nik names or insult him but my patience was wearing thin, and I was done making excuses for him. I still hadn’t heard from him, and there had been a few more pictures of him out with groups of people at bars. Hugo and Selene were not far away from him in any of them, and this only worked to stir up my anger. So I smiled a thank you at Jennifer, and nodded.
“I think I could get on board with that,” I said.
Jennifer let out a little squeal. She was still the cheerleader type at heart.
“Great, so what’s your favorite pizza? My dad can make anything,” she said.
“Seriously. If he opens up his own shop, I’m first in line,” Jess said.
I shrugged and told her to surprise me. We talked more over pizza while ignoring the trending topics and hashtags and Google news stories that were no doubt blowing up our phones on the dresser across the room. It was nice to have an escape. And it was nice to feel real, solid friendship after essentially becoming a stranger to Nik.
Jennifer did have a point. Boys could be so dumb and clueless sometimes and all I wanted was to eat pizza and watch bad TV with these two for the next three days. Girls were lucky to have other girls to unload all their woes on when boys were being dumb or mean. In my mind I let all my anger at Nik stew.
I’d written him another letter that morning. I made no mention of the paparazzi pictures of him, only saying that he seemed to be doing better. I tried to be as polite (passive aggressive) as possible, hoping he felt some of the sting I was trying to inflict. There was little chance though, Jess said, that a boy would pick up on all the subtle things girls were able to put into letters or texts or phone calls.
So all the things I didn’t say in the letter, and all the names I didn’t call him, rattled around my head and occasionally came out. Jess and Jennifer were not nearly as kind as they trashed him
left and right over pizza. It was a strange show of loyalty and I was grateful for it. I couldn’t exactly complain to my parents and it was nice to have someone to commiserate with me.
“Nikolas doesn’t get any pizza though,” Jennifer said. “Even if he does get over his asshole boy stage, he’s in pizza prison for a long time.”
“He lives like an hour’s flight from Italy; I’m sure he can get his own,” Jess said.
“It’s the principle of the thing.”
Jess rolled her eyes and dug in to the last slice she had silently claimed. I ate my own pizza and felt better for the first time in days. Friends were a pretty awesome thing to have, and I didn’t have to wait weeks for the return of a letters, for once.
* * *
Somehow Jess and Jennifer had managed to finagle my parents in on their birthday plan, because my mother informed us over dinner two days before my birthday that we’d be going to Jennifer’s for my birthday dinner/the world’s saddest birthday party ever (that last part was my take on it, not hers).
“It’s better than insisting on the Cheesecake Factory for the fifth year in a row,” my father laughed.
“Okay but an eighteen page menu is no joke,” I said. “Even with four years of birthday dinners there I still never got the same thing twice.”
“Touché.”
“Who is Jennifer? Jess said you go to school together,” my mom said. She looked pleased that I was expanding my social circle.
“She sits next to me in homeroom.”
I didn’t need to tell them how she originally talked to me only because she found out I was besties with, in her words, “a royal hottie.” She’d flipped all that around when there was evidence that I was possibly getting my heart broken by a stupid boy. Girls were often good that way, sensing romantic trouble in other girls. And it turned out Jennifer was solid.
But I stuck with the homeroom story because I didn’t feel like spilling all that at the dinner table.
We continued eating somewhat quietly for a while before I heard the familiar buzz of my phone ready to vibrate itself right off the kitchen counter. I looked up at my mom who nodded to dismiss me from the family dinner early, and I grabbed the phone. It was a number I didn’t recognize.
“Hello?” I said into the receiver.
I was immediately met with the sounds of static, blaring music, and loud voices. I pulled the phone away from my ear slightly in reflex as I walked into the hallway.
“Isabel! Hey! Long time no talk!”
I felt my blood curdle under my skin. That was Nik’s unmistakable accent, punctuated by a ridiculous slurring of words and the sounds of one of the clubs he’d been pictured stumbling out of.
“Nik?”
“Sorry. Didn’t catch that. How are you?”
“What the hell are you doing?”
I had no idea what country or time zone he was in but I knew, wherever he was, it could not be a reasonable, business hour.
“Talking to my friend. I missed you.”
I had two options. I could hang up this call, which was going to be ridiculously expensive depending on where he was calling from (and if I didn’t, my dad was for sure going to kill me). That would be the smart thing to do. The less intelligent thing would be to try and have a rational conversation with a young man who was clearly too drunk to remember by morning that he had called me. A guy who also had been implementing the worst coping mechanism for dealing with the death of his father. The guy who had ignored me for weeks.
“Nik, call me back when you’re not at a 4 a.m. rager,” I said.
“I miss you so much.”
That one was quiet. I was surprised I could hear him at all, over the sounds of a thumping bass and yelling people. That one he meant, and it was not something I wanted to deal with. I had heard about drunk dialing before and movies always made it seem funny and sweet when people said things they couldn’t bear to say in sober, daylight hours. But here it just made me ache as I remembered the pictures of him and Selene. Was she with him?
“Why don’t you go back to the bar and your girlfriend and then sleep this all off,” I said bitterly.
“No, I’m talking to you. I got your letter and I—I didn’t know—I still have it. I tried writing back but…”
“But it’s just easier to get hammered every night at a different club?”
I knew I should have just hung up when I realized who was calling and why. But everything I’d been bottling up, only occasionally letting it out in tiny bursts to Jess or even Jennifer, was coming out now at the sound of his slurred voice and the images of him doing some obscene grinding dance with Selene that would be sure to get him kicked out of a high school prom.
“I didn’t mean to.”
That was it. I couldn’t reason with an irrational person. And the sadness and quiet in his voice were making me feel sorry for him.
“I don’t know how you managed to get my number, Nik, but if you want to call me back, do it when you’ve got a clear head.”
And then I hung up before he could say anything back. If I let him talk, he would convince me to listen to him, and if I listened to him I might forgive him. So that was that, and I walked back into the kitchen.
“Who was that?” my mother asked.
“Wrong number.”
Chapter 5
Waking up and being eighteen was a lot less exciting than it had sounded. You still couldn’t really do much when you turned eighteen. There were another three years before they let you buy alcohol or go into a casino. You could buy lottery tickets and win maybe $3 at a time. You could buy a gun, and you could be drafted and told you have to go defend your country. So some new things became possible at eighteen, but mostly I was just tired and glaring at my alarm.
There was a light knock on my door and my mother stepped in.
“Happy birthday,” she said.
“Hey. Thanks.”
I yawned and rubbed my eyes and forced myself up and out of bed. There is a terrible inevitability to waking up in the morning. You can hit snooze and put it all off as long as you want, but eventually you have to get out of bed.
It had been several days since Nik’s drunken phone call and I hadn’t heard anything since then. The pictures of him stumbling out of clubs had subsided and I wondered if his mother had finally knocked some sense into him.
What I did receive, however, was an email I did not expect. From his sister.
Hi Isabel,
Happy birthday! I tried to time this so it got to you right at midnight your time even though it’s already your birthday here. And yes, I remembered ;) I just wanted to say hi and I hope you’re doing well. We’re soldiering on as we can. Everything is kind of quiet and somber here and as much as I miss my father it would be nice if someone were willing to smile once in a while. It wouldn’t be a crime.
The other reason I wanted to send this to you was to apologize. Niky told me what he did (by which I mean he called me, and was going on about how he called you and you hated him and went rambling on about how bad he felt. I’m pretty sure he was drunk.) I haven’t spoken to him since then so who knows what his normal, sober mind has to say about it all. But I wanted to issue an apology on his behalf. I know it’s nowhere near the same as him actually apologizing but I wanted you to know that I still care a lot about you and want you to have a good birthday, regardless of my brother’s irresponsibility.
Please keep in touch!
--Sonia
I couldn’t help but smile a little bit. The content of the email brought back unfortunate feelings and memories but I’d always liked Nik’s little sister and it was clear she was growing into a much better adult than any of us. Three years younger and she was already better at basic human communication than her brother.
I drafted an email response back to her but waited to send it for a time when I hadn’t just woken up. I wanted, partially, to talk about what Nik was doing, but at the same time, I didn’t want to predicate my entire friendship
with her on prying into her brother’s life. So I waited to send it until after school.
Jennifer, of course, made a huge deal out of it being my birthday. She made sure Ms. Riddlemoser knew in homeroom and she talked loudly about our birthday plans and just generally smiled at me the entire day. She was loud and attention-seeking but even this seemed sincere. It was very…Jennifer.
I hadn’t told her about Nik’s phone call, but even so, she seemed to know I needed a distraction.
After school, Jess was waiting on the path home to walk with me to my house. She shoved a small, poorly wrapped box in my arms.
“Shouldn’t I do presents all at once?” I asked.
“You’re turning eighteen, not twelve. We don’t all have to watch you and say “ooh” and “aah” as you open your gifts.”
I shrugged and unwrapped it. It was a book I’d been staring at in the used bookstore window for a few weeks now. I smiled and hugged her as well as I could while we were still walking down the street.
“I know you’re secretly a lit nerd,” she said. “You can’t hide it from me.”
That had been something Nik and I had once bonded over as well.
When Jess and I arrived back at my house there was a pile of birthday cards that had come in the mail sitting on the kitchen table. I took their presence out in the open as permission to begin opening them and Jess didn’t object.
“Dad’s side grandmother,” I announced as I tore open the salmon-colored envelope and pulled out a card covered in glitter and sprawling cursive words. “$20 gift card from Starbuck’s. She knows me well!”
I grabbed the next one and announced it was from my other grandmother. This card was more of a joke card and also revealed a $20 bill. Jess made a “cha-ching” sound as I handed off the envelopes to her. I went through another envelope from my cousins out in California which held a gift card to Ikea for college dorm goodies. The final envelope came in a shiny gold envelope and had a fancy sticker holding down the flap in the back. When I turned it around I felt a little sick.
Letters from a Prince: The Royals of Heledia (Book 1) Page 7
