“God, you are so lucky,” Riddhi murmured. Riddhi’s parents were really strict and would never have allowed her to go to Europe with people from school. Not even if Dean Fontana was going to be along on the trip to supervise. Not even if Dean Fontana was going to share a room with her.
“Not that lucky,” Taylor insisted. “On our whole agenda, we’ll only get two days out of eight to ourselves to go shopping and hang out. The rest of the trip has been planned down to the minute already, and between having to practice for our performance every afternoon and all of the museum stuff that Señorita Rosenkrantz wants us to do, it’s not like we’re going to be partying, or anything.”
Convincing Taylor’s stepmother to let her go to Spain hadn’t even been all that difficult. With Taylor’s dad still in rehab, her stepmother Jill had thought it might actually be good for Taylor to get a change of scenery and a break from family drama. I wished in vain for the millionth time that I was Taylor’s sister instead of Bijoux’s. Or, at least I wished that my dad had remarried someone like Jill instead of a weirdo like Phoebe who carried a spray bottle of anti-bacterial cleaner around the house with her all the time in Malibu. I had thought over the summer that Taylor’s stepmom was kind of frumpy and boring, but every time Taylor went home to New Jersey for a weekend, she came back with stories about doing cool stuff with her stepmother and half-sister that my own mom would never do with me, like planting a garden of tulips and daffodils in the back yard and waking up super early to watch the sunrise over the beach. I had been silently praying for an invitation to join them for a weekend.
“I already forwarded the itinerary to you,” Taylor informed me, waving her print out around before folding it and tucking it back into her Coach bag. “You should try to book the seat next to mine.”
After study hall, my mind was racing throughout Algebra 3. Flights had been booked. Boarding passes were available for download. People were going to be getting on a plane, and I didn’t have a ticket yet, nor did I have a final game plan assembled for how I was going to propose this entire trip to my mom. The following night after Aikido practice and my appointment with my algebra tutor, I dared to browse an online travel website for flights to Madrid that departed Boston’s Logan airport on the morning of December nineteenth. Taylor’s flight was at the top of the list, and I cringed when the website indicated in bright orange messaging that there were only two seats left! Ignoring Kate, I dug my wallet out of my leather handbag and pulled out my emergency American Express card, which really was only supposed to be used for emergencies. Already in my life I had experienced a lot of shopping-related shoe emergencies and denim emergencies that the card had solved without my mother ever commenting when she paid the bill. It was possible, but not likely, that a travel-related emergency would similarly go unnoticed.
The flight was more than fourteen hundred dollars but I had absolutely no idea if that was cheap or expensive for coach airfare to Spain. I began the booking process on the website and got all the way to the screen where I had to enter my passport information and credit card number. My passport! I wasn’t entirely sure that I had brought it with me from New York, and trying to board an international flight without proper identification would obviously be a huge hindrance to my big plan to sneak away from the United States. Abandoning my ticket-booking process, I flipped through papers I had shoved into the top drawer of my desk when I had moved into the room I shared with Kate, and found my blue leather passport book in an envelope with a copy of my birth certificate and my old ID card from Pershing. Out of habit, I turned pages of the little book to look at the stamps from all of the countries I’d been to since I’d been issued that passport when I was nine. I counted eight trips to Croatia.
My finger idled over my keyboard with the mouse icon on my laptop screen directly over the CONFIRM button on the website. Did I dare to book an international flight without telling my mom? Would the credit card company immediately call her to bring to her attention that I was making plans to flee the country? Would she then call me to demand to know what was going on? Could I just pretend to be completely stupid if she were to ask me what the heck I was thinking, and claim I didn’t realize that the trip would keep me away from home over Christmas? Would she take my credit cards away forever?
It was too much of a risk. I couldn’t complete the booking. Impulsively I closed the browser window to prevent myself from changing my mind again. I went to sleep that night with a sour feeling in my stomach, expecting that by morning, the flight on which the junior symphony from Treadwell would be flying to Madrid would be completely sold out, and I’d have no choice but to tell Taylor that I couldn’t go.
Life would go on even if I didn’t go to Madrid, I knew. I would simply go to New York for Christmas, keep my door locked, avoid making eye contact with Danko, and count down the minutes until I could return to school. The second semester of school could only get better for me, I knew. There was a very strong possibility that Christie was going to be enrolled; her dad had narrowed down the possibilities for her boarding school education to Treadwell and one other option in Connecticut. That was a good reason to smile every morning, because there was a possibility that we could lobby for our own room as roommates. My days with Kate’s omnipresent sniffling and soft breathing were potentially numbered, and my future at Treadwell was bright if I could just control myself.
“What day are you arriving?” Kristijan asked me that Friday night on video chat. I had made the mistake of bragging to him that I was coming to visit as soon as Taylor had introduced the idea of Madrid, and he had latched onto it, grilling me every time we chatted online. I had started to fear that Kristijan was going to mention all of the plans he was making to show me around his new home to his parents, who were then going to ask Danko and my mom about my trip to Spain, about which naturally they had not been informed.
I should have told him right then that I wasn’t coming, that I’d spend Christmas in New York as I always did: unwrapping presents in the living room in the morning, procrastinating in my room and trying on all my new clothes to avoid putting on a floral dress, usually one with puffy sleeves or some kind of ruffle, for the drive to Grandmother Von Weurth’s. At night, once we’d returned to the apartment after dinner at Grandmother’s, Mom liked to make us bundle up and walk to the Wollman ice skating rink in Central Park for a spin if it wasn’t too cold outside. She and Bijoux were good skaters and liked to flaunt their skills as they’d race around to the pop music that would play over the loud speakers. I, of course, had been too impatient for lessons and was a crappy skater as a result. Dad hadn’t made any mention recently of his own plans to return to the house in New Jersey over the holidays, which probably meant that Phoebe’s work would be keeping them on the West Coast.
But of course, instead, I told Kristijan, “The nineteenth. I won’t arrive until night.”
A total lie.
“Great,” Kristijan said. “The airport is only an hour away from downtown Madrid. You can be here for dinner, because everyone eats late. I want to take you to this market called San Miguel and show you about tapas.”
He told me all about how Madrileños peeled shrimp with their fingers, and how one of his classmates with a very bad shellfish allergy had sat down at a café and touched a table where the previous patron had been peeling shrimp and had gone into allergic shock. He told me that the royal palace of Madrid was just a short walk from the market where he walked to take me, the very same palace where Christopher Columbus presented his exotic findings to Queen Isabella after his first trip to the “New World.” I wanted him to stop talking, stop filling my head with so many details about a place I wasn’t really going to be visiting in a matter of weeks.
That weekend, Tobin and Bijoux broke up for good.
I didn’t even hear about it first from Bijoux. When I went down to the dining hall for breakfast on Saturday morning, Riko and Chihiro were whispering with their heads bent over Chihiro’s mobile tablet as I picked up m
y tray and entered the kitchen area. After I emerged with my bowl of cereal and a banana, and sat down across from them, Chihiro practically threw her body over her tablet to prevent me from seeing what she had been looking at.
“What’s going on?” I asked innocently.
Riko and Chihiro shrugged at each other and Riko said something to Chihiro in Japanese that I didn’t understand. “We’re sorry about your sister,” she told me.
“What are you talking about?” I asked. I had gotten a ton of text messages overnight, but I had fallen into a habit of just ignoring my cell phone when it buzzed because the buzzing simply never ceased.
Chihiro slowly slid her tablet across the table so that I could review what was on its screen. The relationship storm brewing between my sister and Tobin had erupted into a huge fight outside a nightclub in Los Angeles the previous night. If all of the gossip blogs were to be believed, it was Tobin who was dumping her this time around. Columnists were saying he was tired of her spoiled antics and greed, and wanted to end things before Christmas because he suspected she was going to demand an obscenely expensive Christmas gift.
Well, she was Bijoux Norfleet! Of course she was going to demand a ridiculously expensive Christmas gift. She demanded that from everyone! But the way that the bloggers were positioning everything, they seemed to be taking Tobin’s side. They were making it seem like Bijoux was a paranoid, evil shrew, constantly accusing him of cheating on her and punishing him with ridiculous demands.
“Oh, no,” I murmured to myself. I immediately reached for my purse and pulled my mobile phone out. Sure enough, there were four text messages from Bijoux sent at insane hours of the night, which probably couldn’t have been considered quite so insane if she was really on the West Coast. Before I could even lift my phone to my ear to call my sister, Nicola had materialized in front of me, freshly showered with her wet hair pulled back.
“My brother called me first thing this morning,” she told me in her posh accent. “He insists that you permit him to call your sister immediately.”
I started flipping through my sister’s texts worriedly, trying to get a sense of her frame of mind. All of them implied that she wanted me to call her. I highly doubted she was going to be in any kind of emotional state to talk to Nicola’s brother on the other side of the planet. “Eh… I need to talk to her first and find out if that’s cool.”
“Why wouldn’t it be cool? My brother is a nice guy. Very emotionally mature,” Nicola insisted. “He’d make an excellent rebound.”
I rose from the table, forgetting all about my breakfast, and hurried out of the dining hall, leaving Nicola, Chihiro and Riko to complain about my rudeness after my departure.
“Bijoux, where are you?” I demanded in the voicemail I left for her, pacing around outside the front of the dorm without wearing a winter coat. “You’d better call me the second you get this message.”
I went back up to my room to fetch my laptop and coat, more than just a little annoyed that Kate never went home on weekends anymore now that the election had passed and her father had won another term. After nestling into a private corner of the library, surrounded on the fourth floor by scientific reference books that I would never read, I continued reading all of the blog gossip about my sister’s break-up. The spin was awful. There were endless quotes from Tobin’s cast mates and friends about what a terrible influence Bijoux had been on him, encouraging him to stay out late and party so hard that he would miss his call times on set the next day. I didn’t know how much of this was really true; I knew Bijoux really liked to party hard, but I also knew that since she and Tobin had moved in together in the East Village, she had preferred staying home at night with him. If his behavior in Croatia had been any indication of his lifestyle, he was just as much of a party animal as my sister.
An hour passed without her calling me back. Getting really worried, I broke library rules and called my mom on her cell phone, hoping she’d answer. I was pretty sure she was back in New York, but I hadn’t spoken to her on the phone since she’d returned from her trip to Paris.
“Hello, dear,” she said, sounding surprised to hear me when she answered.
“Mom, have you heard from Bijoux?” I asked. “Everyone’s saying she broke up with Tobin and I haven’t heard from her all day.”
“She’s on her way home,” my mom assured me. “Her flight left Los Angeles two hours ago. Thank goodness. This puppy of hers is driving Danko mad.”
“The magazines and blogs are saying terrible things about her, Mom. How can they just make up lies like that?”
My mother sighed. I could tell from the background noise I could hear on the phone that she was at her office in midtown and not in our sound-proof apartment, which was sad, given that it was the holiday season and a Saturday, too. “I’ve done my best to try to shelter you girls from the press. This kid obviously has a powerful publicist and I just don’t think it’s in your sister’s best interest to fight back. The more material she gives them to work with, the worse this is going to be. That’s why I’ve insisted that she fly home immediately. She needs to lay low for a while and stay out of the public eye.”
It was December 14th. Even though I had chickened out of booking the ticket to Spain, I still felt eager about the upcoming date of Friday the nineteenth, as if a seat on that plane was waiting for me. Taylor’s flight would be taxiing down the runway in just five short days, and in my heart I hadn’t given up yet on sitting next to her all the way to Madrid. It was the perfect opportunity for me to suggest the idea while I had my mother on the phone. The question of whether or not she would let me accompany Taylor was on the tip of my tongue, but I just couldn’t bring myself to ask it.
Mom beat me to the issue of Christmas by switching topics and asking, “I was going to book you on a flight home on Friday morning. Will you have time to pack by then after your finals?”
I was almost out of time to gain her approval for the trip, I knew. I felt like an archaeologist action hero in a movie, throwing my body at the ground and rolling beneath a stone wall in an ancient pyramid, rapidly lowering itself from the ceiling because some kind of booby trap had been triggered by a villain, just in the nick of time before the wall slammed down and created a giant dust cloud. In my mind’s eye, I saw the sliver of light that was my escape plan shrinking and shrinking. I was rolling and rolling, but I wasn’t going to make it beneath that wall before it slammed down.
“Sure,” I said meekly. I couldn’t even believe the sound of my own voice. I was disgusted with myself for being so timid. Such a pushover. Even as I was agreeing to the trip home, I was internally steeling myself against it. No part of me honestly intended to get into a car bound for Logan Airport to board a flight to New York City on Friday morning.
However, by the time I hung up the phone with my mom, I had told her to go ahead and book my ticket home. I placed my phone down on the table at which I sat in the quiet, empty library and silently started crying. Harsh, bleak winter light filled the area where I sat, flooding the library through its glass ceiling. After over two months of being at Treadwell and not even having to look at Danko or hear his voice, the thought of walking through the double doors of our lobby in the building at East 73rd Street and having to put on an act that I was happy to be there was just too much. I knew I couldn’t run forever. Eventually I was just going to have to go home and resume my regular life. I just wasn’t ready… yet.
My sister called me back hours later when I was back in my dorm room, fetching my biology textbook so that I could return to the library after dinner. My life in the dining hall had become significantly more bearable after Thanksgiving. I had secured a permanent spot at Riko and Chihiro’s table, and more often than not, Nicola sat with us, too. Sometimes I could sense Chloe’s eyes on me, and I knew she was saying vicious things about me, but I had too many other things to worry about to give her nasty comments to Ramona and Danielle any serious consideration. Selecting perfect Christmas gifts for my ne
w friends on campus had been a very serious affair for me, and I’d spent considerable time shopping online and emailing back and forth with my mom about ideas. Naturally, picking out good presents was one of her favorite things.
When Bijoux called, her speech was slow and slurred. “I’m fine,” she insisted. “Better off without him, that’s what everyone keeps saying, anyway.”
“You sound weird,” I told her.
“I’m just tired. Mom gave me some anti-anxiety pills.”
Wonderful. How just like our mother to prescribe medication as a means of coping with an unpleasant situation. It was always baffling to me that Mom spoke so self-righteously about going to rehab and cleaning up her act when I was a toddler, and considered her struggle with alcoholism to be such ancient history that she would drink casually with Danko as if it wasn’t a big deal… but she had absolutely no problem with ingesting pills for any reason under the sun. When she had difficulty falling asleep, she took a pill. When she woke up feeling fat, she took a pill. Bad mood? Pill. Too happy, for too long? Pill.
“You shouldn’t take any pills right now,” I cautioned Bijoux, knowing how much she liked to drink when she was upset. “Mixing pills and alcohol is a really bad idea.”
“What alcohol?” she complained. “I’m at home on the Upper East Side. They won’t let me go to my own place downtown until one of Mom’s assistants gets down there and throws away all of Tobin’s junk. It’s not exactly happy hour around here.”
One perk of being rich was being able to rely on hired help to spare you the sadness of having to remove all traces of an ex-boyfriend from your life. I really couldn’t imagine Bijoux taking care of that task all on her own.
The following week felt like it whizzed past in fast-forward. Strangely enough, final exams were considerably easier than mid-terms, but of course I realized that my observation may have been skewed by my preparedness. The teachers were in good spirits and seemed to be as eager to get rid of us for the holiday break as we were to be through with classes for three weeks. Ms. Ziegler gave all of the girls in French 1 little red satin stockings with fake white fur trim stuffed with papilottes, colorful foil-wrapped chocolates that contained tiny firecrackers that were released when the candies were opened. All of us daintily tried one in class and marveled at the little pop! I loved the candy so much that I commanded myself to save the rest for Christmas morning so that I’d have something to look forward to, but then ended up eating all of them in my dorm room to Kate’s great annoyance on Monday night. On Wednesday night, I had dinner at Hartford Hall with Taylor, Ruth and Riddhi, and barely said a word as Taylor excitedly told us about how Todd had promised to take her to a very fancy restaurant for dinner in Madrid. She was going to have to find a way to sneak out of the hotel where all of the Treadwell students would be staying.
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