Upper East Side #2

by Ashley Valentine

  At the Creed counter, Chanel admired the pretty glass perfume bottles with the same delight as a small child in a toy store. Moving on to the Kiehl’s counter, she was tempted by a jar of deep-cleansing natural clay face masque. Of course, she already had enough beauty products to last ten years, but she loved trying out new ones. It was kind of an addiction.

  Nothing wrong with that. There are definitely worse addictions.

  Chanel was about to ask the man behind the counter if the masque was okay to use on her skin, which tended to be dry, when she noticed a familiar figure striding purposefully through the store to the men’s department.

  It was Porsha. Chanel put down the jar of masque and followed her.

  Porsha wasn’t sure if Barneys was going to have what she was looking for, but that was because she didn’t even know what she was looking for. Kaliq wasn’t going to be impressed by a new sweater or a nice pair of leather gloves. She had to find something unique. Sexy but not corny. It had to be cool. And it had to remind Kaliq that he still loved and wanted her.

  Porsha headed straight for the underwear department. First she found a table covered with an assortment of colorful cotton boxers. Further on were racks of luxuriously soft bathrobes and flannel nightshirts, and shelves filled with boxes of plain old tighty-whiteys and skeevy bikini/thong-type underwear. None of these would serve. Then Porsha caught sight of a rack of gray cashmere drawstring pajama bottoms.

  She pulled a pair off the hanger and held them up. MADE IN ENGLAND, the tag said. PRICE: $360.00. They were casual yet sophisticated. Handsome, yet so soft and delicate that the idea of them brushing up against Kaliq’s bare skin made Porsha feel almost motherly. She crumpled the pajama bottoms in her hands and pressed them against her cheek. The scent of fine cashmere filled her nostrils and she closed her eyes, imagining Kaliq wearing the pajama bottoms without a shirt, his perfect caramel chest exposed as he poured them each a glass of champagne in their St. Clair Hotel suite.

  They were definitely sexy, and there was no question about it. She had to have them.

  Chanel pretended to be very interested in a red Ralph Lauren bathrobe, size extra large. It was big enough to shield her from Porsha, and the rack it was hanging on was set up so that her view of Porsha was completely unobstructed. She wondered if Porsha was buying something for Kaliq. Probably. Lucky guy—the pajamas she was looking at were gorgeous.

  Back in the good old days, Porsha would have asked Chanel to help her pick out a present for Kaliq. Not anymore.

  “Are you looking for a gift for someone?” a sales guy asked, approaching Chanel. He looked like a bodybuilder, bald and tan and practically busting out of his suit.

  “No, I—” Chanel faltered. She didn’t want the man to start dragging her around the store, showing her things, and risk being seen. “Yes. For my brother. He needs a new bathrobe.”

  “Is this his size?” the sales guy asked, pointing to the one she’d been looking at.

  “Yes, it’s perfect,” Chanel said. “I’ll take it.” Her eyes darted over to Porsha, who was walking to the counter carrying the pajama bottoms. “Can I just give you my credit card here?” Chanel asked the guy, turning to bat her long-lashed eyes at him. She pulled her credit card out of her wallet and handed it to him.

  “Yes, of course,” he said, whisking the bathrobe off the hanger and taking her card. “I’ll be right back.”

  “It’s a gift,” Porsha told the man behind the counter, handing him her credit card. The card had her name on it, but it wasn’t actually hers. It came out of her mother’s account. Porsha’s parents didn’t give her an allowance, they just let her buy whatever she needed, within reason. A pair of nearly four-hundred-dollar pajama bottoms for Kaliq when it wasn’t even Christmas didn’t exactly fall into the “within reason” category, but Porsha would find a way to convince her mother that the purchase had been absolutely necessary.

  “I’m sorry, miss,” the man behind the counter told her, “but your credit card has been denied.” He handed the card back. “Is there another card you’d like to use?”

  “Denied?” Porsha repeated. Her face felt hot. This had never happened to her before. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. Quite sure,” said the man. “Would you like to use our phone to call your bank?”

  “No, that’s okay. I’ll just come back some other time.”

  She put her credit card back in her wallet, grabbed the pajama bottoms, and turned away, heading back to the rack where she’d found them. The cashmere felt so buttery soft in her hands it made her sick to think of leaving the store without them. What was the deal, anyway? It wasn’t like the money in her mother’s account had just, like, run out. But she couldn’t exactly call her mom and ask her about it, since she’d lied to get out of the house, saying she was going to a movie with Kaliq.

  The man had removed the heavy plastic security tag, Porsha noticed before she put the pajama bottoms back on the rack. She also noticed that there were lots more pairs of gray cashmere pajama bottoms left. Would they really mind if she just…took them? It wasn’t like she hadn’t tried to pay for them. Besides, she spent enough money in Barneys. She deserved a free gift.

  Chanel waited for the burly sales guy to come back with the bathrobe she hadn’t meant to buy and her credit card receipt. She watched Porsha start to put the pajama bottoms back and then stop.

  “I’ll just need your signature at the X,” the sales guy told Chanel. She turned around, and he handed her a big black Barneys shopping bag with the robe tucked neatly into a black box inside.

  “Thanks,” Chanel said. She took the credit card slip and knelt down on the floor to sign it, using the box as a surface. Across the carpeted floor, she saw Porsha crouch down between two racks of flannel nightshirts and stuff the pair of pajama bottoms hastily into her Louis Vuitton purse.

  Chanel couldn’t believe it. Porsha was stealing!

  “Thanks so much,” Chanel said, standing up. She pressed the receipt into the sales guy’s hand, grabbed her shopping bag, and headed for the exit. Even though she had done nothing wrong, seeing Porsha steal made her feel like she had. She couldn’t wait to get out of there.

  After pushing her way out onto the street, Chanel turned up Madison, walking quickly. The shopping bag banged against her leg as she took in big gulps of crisp, autumn air. She’d gone into Barneys to look for something cool and fun for herself and had come out with a men’s size extra large bathrobe. What was she doing spying on Porsha, anyway? And what the hell was Porsha doing shoplifting? It wasn’t like she was broke or something.

  Still, Porsha’s secret was safe with Chanel. She had no one to tell.

  Porsha left Barneys and turned up Madison, her pulse racing. No alarm had gone off, and no one seemed to be following her. She’d gotten away with it! Of course, she knew it was wrong to steal, especially when you had plenty of money to pay for things, but it still felt kind of exhilarating to do something so completely illegal. It was like playing the villainous femme fatale in the movie instead of the pure and steadfast girl-next-door. Besides, this was just a one time thing. It wasn’t like she was going to turn into a major shoplifter or anything.

  Then she saw something that made her stop in her tracks. At the end of the block, Chanel Crenshaw’s long silky hair gleamed in the sunlight as she waited for the light to change. A large black Barneys bag was slung over her arm. And just before she began to cross the street, she turned around and looked straight at Porsha.

  Porsha ducked her head down, pretending to be looking at her Rolex. Shit, she thought. Did she see me? Did she see me taking the pajama bottoms?

  Keeping her eyes down, she opened her purse and dug around for a cigarette. When she looked up again, Chanel had crossed the street and was fading into the distance.

  So what if she did see me? Porsha told herself. She lit a cigarette with nervous fingers. Chanel could go ahead and blab to everyone in the world that she’d seen Porsha Sinclaire stealing from Barneys,
but no one would believe her.

  Right?

  As she walked, Porsha dipped her hand into her purse and fingered the soft cashmere pajama bottoms. She couldn’t wait for Kaliq to put them on. The minute he did, he’d know exactly how she felt about everything, and he’d love her more than ever. Nothing Chanel could say or do would get in the way of that.

  8

  “Why are you here?” Yasmine Richards asked Mekhi when him and Bree arrived at The Five and Dime.

  Mekhi shrugged. “I wanted to see how Chanel’s film turned out,” he said, as if it was no big deal.

  Yeah, right, Yasmine thought. More like you had to come worship Chanel’s bony ass.

  “Chanel’s not here yet,” she told Bree and Mekhi as they looked around. The dimly lit bar was nearly empty, with only two twenty-something guys sitting at a table in the back reading the Sunday Times and smoking cigarettes.

  “But it’s one-thirty.” Bree looked at her watch. “We were supposed to meet at one.”

  Yasmine shrugged. “You know how she is.”

  It was true, they did know. Chanel was always late. Neither Mekhi nor Bree minded, though. It was an honor to be graced with her presence. But it drove Yasmine up the wall.

  CJ came over and ran his fingers through her short-cropped black hair. “You guys want something to drink?” he offered.

  Yasmine grinned at him. She loved it when CJ touched her in front of Mekhi. He was the bartender at The Five and Dime, the bar down the street from the apartment Yasmine shared with her older sister, Ruby. He was twenty-two, with Hershey chocolate skin and beautiful eyes, and he was the only guy she’d ever met who didn’t make her feel ugly, pudgy, and odd. All this time Yasmine had thought CJ had a crush on Ruby, her cool, bass-playing older sister whose band played at the bar. But all along it had been Yasmine CJ was after. “You’re different,” he told her. “I love that.”

  And Yasmine was different. She was definitely way, way different from her classmates at the Emma Willard School for Girls. They lived with their well-to-do parents in penthouses off Fifth Avenue. She lived in a small apartment over a Spanish bodega in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. She had grown up in Vermont, but when she turned fifteen she’d begged and brooded until her artist parents had relented and let her come to New York to live with Ruby. The only condition was that she get a good, solid education at uptight Emma Willard. Yasmine’s classmates didn’t quite know what to make of her. While they were getting their hair done and shopping at Barneys or Bendel’s, Yasmine was shaving her own head with electric clippers and bargain hunting for logo-free jeans and T-shirts, which were always entirely black and entirely unfeminine.

  Yasmine had met Mekhi when they’d both gotten trapped in a stairwell, locked outside of a dumb party in tenth grade, and they’d been good friends ever since. Over the past year, Yasmine and Mekhi had spent a lot of time together, and Yasmine had developed a terrible crush on him. But Mekhi had had eyes for only one girl: Chanel fucking Crenshaw.

  Yasmine was lucky CJ had found her, and she was trying to get over Mekhi, but it was hard. Every time she saw his scruffy dark face and his trembling, almost birdlike hands, she felt giddy. Mekhi, of course, was completely oblivious. He just went on being nice to Yasmine or completely ignoring her when Chanel was around, which didn’t make it any easier.

  Mekhi’s sister, Bree, worked with Yasmine on Rancor, Emma Willard’s student-run arts magazine, for which Yasmine was editor in chief. Bree was a talented calligrapher and photographer, with a great eye. Bree and Yasmine had also helped Chanel with her film—because she had asked, and because no one could ever say no to Chanel. But Bree had no interest in being Yasmine’s friend. She was an oddball and a major fashion disaster, and not the type of girl Bree aspired to be.

  “Can you make Irish coffee?” Mekhi asked. It was his favorite drink because it was mostly made of coffee.

  “Yeah,” CJ said.

  “I’ll just have a Coke,” Bree told him. She didn’t really like the taste of alcohol, except for champagne.

  “So are we going to watch Chanel’s movie, or what?” Mekhi asked, swiveling back and forth on his bar stool.

  “We have to wait until Chanel gets here, stupid,” Bree said.

  Yasmine shrugged. “I’m pretty filmed out anyway,” she responded. “That’s all I’ve been doing for the past three weeks.” It was true—she’d been staying up late every night to work on her movie for the Emma Willard senior film festival. It was also the movie she’d planned on sending to NYU along with her application. Yasmine’s dream was to go to NYU next year and major in film. She wanted to be a famous director of cult masterpieces, but her latest effort had turned out to be kind of a disaster.

  The story of her film was borrowed from a scene in Natural Born Killers, the the gleefully violent and weirdly beautiful Oliver Stone movie about a pair of murderous, lovestruck psychopaths. Mekhi played the lead alongside a gum-chewing Willard sophomore named Marjorie, who had no acting talent whatsoever. Yasmine had decided to use Marjorie instead of Chanel, even though Chanel was perfect for the part, because she couldn’t stand to watch Mekhi moon over her rehearsal after rehearsal. What a mistake. It was a love scene, and Mekhi and Marjorie had no chemistry at all. It almost made Yasmine want to laugh when she watched it, except that she was usually already crying. That’s how bad it was. She hoped the film festival judges would concentrate on the quality of the cinematography, which was her strong point, and not on the dialogue or the acting, which sucked.

  Chanel’s film, on the other hand, had turned out to be the most austere and cerebral piece of art Yasmine had ever encountered. She could barely stand to watch it. And the most maddening thing about it was that it was completely unintentional. Chanel had no clue what she was doing, but somehow the film had turned out to be completely riveting. It was pure genius. Of course part of the reason it was so good was that Yasmine had done most of the filming. She couldn’t believe she’d actually helped Chanel make the frigging thing without taking any credit for it at all.

  Mekhi looked at his watch for the fiftieth time that minute. He was practically peeing in his pants he was so anxious.

  “Jesus. Why don’t you just call her?” Yasmine snapped impatiently. Jealousy brought out the worst in her.

  Mekhi had programmed Chanel’s number into his cell phone weeks ago. He pulled the phone out of his coat pocket and stepped off his stool, pacing back and forth as he waited for her to pick up. Finally the answering machine came on. “Hey, it’s Mekhi. We’re in Brooklyn. Where are you? Give me a call when you get a chance. Okay. Bye.” He tried to make his voice sound nonchalant, but it was nearly impossible. Where was she, anyway?

  He went back to his bar stool and climbed on. A steaming glass of Irish coffee sat on the bar in front of him. It was topped with a tower of whipped cream, and it smelled awesome. “She wasn’t home,” he said, then blew into his drink before taking a gigantic gulp.

  Chanel was riding up in the elevator on her way home when she realized her mistake. With her in the elevator was an elderly woman in a mink coat, clutching the Styles section of the Sunday Times. It was Sunday. Chanel was supposed to be in Brooklyn, going over the final cut of her film with Yasmine and Bree. And she was supposed to be there an hour ago.

  “Shit,” Chanel muttered to herself.

  The woman in the mink glared at her before stepping off the elevator. In her day, young girls living on Fifth Avenue didn’t wear blue jeans or swear in public. They attended cotillions and wore gloves and pearls.

  Chanel could do the gloves and pearls thing, too. She just preferred jeans.

  “Shit,” Chanel said again, tossing her keys on the table in the foyer. She hurried down the hall to her room. The answering machine light was flashing and she pressed the button and listened to Mekhi’s message.

  “Shit,” she said for a third time. She hadn’t been expecting Mekhi to be there, too. And she didn’t have Mekhi’s or Bree’s cell numbers, just their number at
home, so she couldn’t call back. She'd lost her iPhone back at boarding school and hadn't bothered buying a new one, so she was stuck with her parents' ancient house phone and answering machine, which recorded messages but not phone numbers.

  How inconvenient.

  Deep down, Chanel knew why she’d probably forgotten to go to Brooklyn. She hadn’t wanted to watch her film again, especially not in front of other people. It was the first one she’d ever made, and she was a little insecure about it, although Yasmine seemed to think it was truly amazing.

  It wasn’t a typical sort of film. It was kind of like a film about making a film when you don’t have any actors and don’t know how to use the equipment. Like a documentary within a documentary. Chanel had loved making it; she just wasn’t sure it would make any sense to anyone who didn’t know her. But Yasmine had been so enthusiastic Chanel had gone ahead and entered it in Emma Willard’s senior film festival. First place was a trip to the Cannes Film Festival in May, a prize donated by Imani Edwards’ famous actor father.

  Chanel had already been to Cannes many times, so she didn’t really care about the prize. But it would be cool to win, especially since both Porsha and Yasmine had entered and they were both in the advanced senior film-studies class, while she had no experience in film at all.

  Chanel found her Emma Willard class list on her desk and dialed Yasmine’s home number. “Hey, it’s Chanel,” she said, when the answering machine picked up. “I completely forgot that we were meeting today. Sorry. I’m such a loser. Anyway, see you in school tomorrow, okay? Bye.”