Upper East Side #3

by Ashley Valentine

  The DJ started to play 45's hit song, “Korrupt Me,” and then Flow swaggered on to the dance floor out of nowhere, wearing a tuxedo jacket over a red T-shirt that said BE KIND in white capital letters, and grinning like someone who knows he's one of the sexiest guys in the entire world. Flow was the only biracial son of a Danish lingerie model and a Jamaican coffee mogul. He stepped behind a glass podium, the music stopped, and everyone watched.

  “I just want to give a shout out to all of you for dressing up and coming out tonight to raise money for...” Flow opened his tuxedo jacket and pointed to his T-shirt, and some of the perky, enthusiastic guests at the ball who weren’t ashamed to sound like assholes shouted, “Be Kind!”

  At that same moment, Porsha pushed open the ladies’ room door to find Kaliq and Bree standing directly in her path, holding hands. Bree was wearing a loud grandma style dress of dubious design that was way too big on the bottom and way too small on top. She and Kaliq looked like tacky kids from the suburbs out on their prom night.

  Porsha adjusted the straps of her dress and smacked her ruby red lips together. The sooner she got out of there, the better. But she couldn’t just slink away like some poor ditched ex-girlfriend. She had way more fucking pride than that.

  Way, way more.

  “I’d also like to thank the organizing committee for the ball, chaired by Porsha Sinclaire and Chanel Crenshaw,” Flow continued, reading from the little cue card in his hand. “Hey, why don’t you two girls come up here and help me announce how much money you raised?”

  Everyone craned their heads to look for Chanel and Porsha. In her typical exuberant fashion, Chanel let out a loud whooping sound and glided effortlessly across the dance floor and up to the podium with her silky hair flying. Flow took a step back, struck dumb by her gorgeousness, and Chanel leaned into the microphone.

  “Come on, Porsh,” she cried, looking around the crowded room. “Get up here!”

  Porsha could feel people staring at her. She attempted to smile and left her post by the bathroom door, walking directly in front of Kaliq's and Bree's noses as she made her way to the front of the room.

  Kaliq's mouth opened as Porsha swished by. She looked better than he remembered, and her ass was more defined. Her thick hair gleamed, and her milky chocolate skin had a pearly sheen that made him want to touch it. She looked sexy. No, she looked better than sexy. Suddenly he felt confused. He wanted to grab Porsha's arm and say, “Come back here. I made a mistake.” But then Bree squeezed his hand, and he looked down into her big brown eyes and deeply plunging cleavage and instantly forgot about Porsha again.

  Kaliq was like a dumb Labrador retriever. If you dangled a stick in front of him, he just had to have it, but if you threw a tennis ball, he forgot all about the stick and went after the ball.

  Porsha joined them at the podium and Flow handed Chanel a piece of paper, grinning from ear to ear because the two chairs of the ball had turned out to be so gorgeous.

  “Okay,” Chanel said, reading from the piece of paper. “So we raised $800,400. All proceeds will go to Be Kind, the new international animal rescue fund.” She showed off the famous smile that had been captured in so many photographs for the society and gossip pages and nudged Porsha in the arm.

  Porsha had chaired hundreds of these things. She knew the drill. She leaned into the microphone. “Thank you for coming!” she shouted, smiling her best do-gooder smile. “And don't forget your gift bag—that's the best part!”

  The music started up again, louder than before and everyone went back to drinking and dancing. Flow bent his head toward Chanel and whispered something in her ear. His breath was warm and tickled her ear and he smelled like new leather.

  Chanel giggled. “Wait one sec, okay?”

  Flow nodded as Chanel grabbed Porsha's arm and stepped away from the podium, dragging Porsha with her back to their tables.

  “He wants me to meet him outside so we can go for a ride in his limo. Quick, get your coat. You're coming, too.”

  Porsha frowned. She really wasn't the third wheel type, thank you very much. “I don't think so.”

  Chanel pretended she didn't hear her. She wasn't going to let Porsha poop all over her party.

  Alexis, Imani, Jaylen, Tahj, and Miles were all still sitting at the table, drinking shots of Vodka that Jaylen had snuck in with him in a silver flask.

  “Come on,” Chanel told them gleefully. “Everybody outside! We're moving the party to Flow's limo!”

  Porsha fished her coat-check ticket out of her not exactly cruelty-free leather purse. Sometimes Chanel's enthusiasm verged on annoying. But it wasn't like she'd been having the time of her life at the ball. And plus, she liked the idea of being all dressed up and riding around town watching the world go by through smoky limousine windows. It was so Audrey in Breakfast at Tiffany's. And maybe a ride in Flow's limo would be just the thing to magically transform her life from a series of disasters to a series of dreams come true.

  Or maybe not.

  * * *

  Kaliq was getting kind of bored just kissing Bree. He hadn't had much to drink, and he really needed another joint. “Want to go for a walk or something?” he asked.

  Bree smiled up at him. His eyelashes were so long and thick they looked fake. The only thing that would make tonight even more perfect than it already was would be if Kaliq told her, “I love you.” And hopefully that was exactly what he was about to do.

  “Sure,” she replied eagerly.

  They retrieved their coats, and Kaliq held the door open for her as they left the bustling hotel. A massive limo with smoky black windows was parked outside.

  They walked down the marble steps to the sidewalk, and Kaliq let go of her hand to discreetly light a joint. Bree fiddled with her black suede gloves, disappointed. If Kaliq was going to say, “I love you,” she didn't want him to be all high when he did it.

  All of a sudden, the back window of the limo rolled down and Chanel's beautiful head appeared. “Hey, you guys! Come on! We're having a party! Get in! Get in!”

  As usual, Chanel was acting on impulse. It didn't even occur to her that they were the last fucking people on earth Porsha wanted to see.

  Bree had always pretty much worshipped Chanel, and riding around with her and whoever else was in the car sounded exciting and glamorous. More exciting than walking around in the freezing cold while Kaliq got buzzed. She touched his arm. “Can we?”

  Kaliq shrugged. He was up for anything, as long as he could bring his joint with him. “Yeah,” he said. “Why not?”

  The door swung open, and Bree giggled excitedly as she clambered over the mass of fishnet-clad legs and tuxedoed knees and wriggled into a tiny spot near the window next to a girl wearing the most amazing and expensive looking shoes she had ever seen. A girl who also happened to be Kaliq’s ex-girlfriend, Porsha Sinclaire.

  Bree’s face turned hot and she immediately turned her head the other way, only to make direct eye contact with a leering Jaylen Harrison, the asshole who had tried to smother her in a bathroom stall at the Kiss on the Lips party in October.

  See what happens when you dive into a limo without checking to see who’s in it first?

  3

  Mekhi Hargrove bit Yasmine Richards’ pinky nail off and spat it onto the brown shag rug on his bedroom floor. The nail was much longer than the others, and he was tired of the way she was always accidentally scratching him with it.

  “Hey, that was my guitar nail,” Yasmine protested, wrestling her hand away from him and examining the damage.

  Mekhi laughed, his dark face scrunching up beneath his shaggy twists. He rarely got a haircut, but the overgrown look suited his disheveled, overcaffenaited poet image. “Like you play guitar.”

  Yasmine shrugged and rubbed the top of her dark, close-shaven head with a knuckle. She had enormous hazel eyes and skin the color of cinnamon rolls and might even have been pretty if she stopped shaving her head. But Yasmine wasn’t into prettiness; she preferred the darke
r sides of things, their ugly underbellies.

  “How do you know?” she said. “During the day I hang out with you, but at night I rock out.”

  “You don't even like loud music,” Mekhi scoffed. He pushed her down on the bed and started to tickle her under the arms. “Your favorite CD is a recording of a thunderstorm.”

  “Stop!” Yasmine screeched, thrashing her arms and legs and snorting hysterically. “Mekhi Randolph Hargrove, you stop it right now!”

  Aw, aren’t they cute?

  Mekhi stopped tickling her and sat up. “You said the R word.”

  Yasmine pulled her black turtleneck down where it had ridden up over her slightly chubby stomach. “Randolph, Randolph, Randolph. Who gives their kid a middle name like Randolph, anyway? It sounds like the name of a condom or a porn star or something. Randolph the Lubricator!” she howled.

  Mekhi got very quiet all of a sudden, frowning as he poked his finger into a cigarette burn in the ancient wool blanket on his bed.

  Yasmine sat up. “I’m sorry. I promised I wouldn’t make fun of your middle name and now here I am, laughing at it like an asshole.”

  But that wasn’t what was bothering Mekhi. “CJ is what, like, twenty-two?”

  Yasmine’s eyes got even bigger. CJ was the older bartender she’d been seeing before Mekhi had finally gotten with the program and realized that they should be more than friends. “Yeah, so?”

  “And he’s a bartender. Kind of a bad boy?”

  “I guess.” She still couldn’t see what he was getting at.

  Mekhi scooted back on his bed and lit his millionth Newport of the day. He inhaled deeply and blew a gray stream of smoke into the air above Yasmine’s head. She could tell he was trying to look composed, but his eyes were nervous.

  “So were you guys...um...having sex, or what?”

  Yasmine tried to suppress her smile. So that was what this was about. She considered her answer. “Kind of.”

  “Like, you kind of were, or you kind of weren’t?”

  “Like, we did it, but not that much,” Yasmine replied vaguely. She and CJ had had sex twice. The first time had been in broad daylight, and she’d felt so self-conscious about her body that she hadn’t really paid that much attention to anything. The second time she'd felt more relaxed, but still couldn't see why it was such a big deal. To her it seemed amusingly prehistoric. Like, it really was exactly the same thing all those zebras and hyenas did during mating season on those nature shows. Still, it was kind of cool to have done it already. It made her feel like she had more substance, a been-there-done-that sort of history.

  “I see.” Mekhi took another drag on his cigarette. And then another. He traced the stitching on the hem of his white, coffee stained pillowcase. He was a virgin and Yasmine wasn’t. He didn’t know how he felt about that.

  Actually, he did. He felt nervous, stupid, short, skinny, weird, and completely inadequate. What did she have to go and have sex with some other guy for?

  “Look, I know you’re a virgin,” Yasmine said bluntly. “But that doesn’t mean you have to stay one.” She raised her thick eyebrows suggestively and grinned.

  Mekhi looked up and grinned back, his face turning warm. “Really?”

  Yasmine nodded and inched toward him. “Really.” She put her hands on his skinny chest and pushed him down on the bed. Then she pulled the cigarette out of his hand and dunked it in the half-empty mug of stale coffee on his bedside table. “Don’t worry,” she said in her best husky, experienced-woman voice. “I know what I’m doing.”

  She kissed him softly on the mouth and then began to undress them both. First she pulled off his gray T-shirt, and then she pulled off her black one. She was wearing a black tank top underneath it. Everything Yasmine wore was black.

  Mekhi took a deep breath and closed his eyes. This wasn’t how he’d imagined it would happen. For him, sex was right up there with birth and death as one of the most intense, poetic experiences a person could have. It wasn’t something you did with your girlfriend when you were bored one Saturday night before midterms. It was something you did when you had already explored each other in every other way—intellectually, spiritually, philosophically. Mekhi had even toyed with idea of waiting to have sex until he was married and ready to have children. He wanted to have kids and name them after his favorite writers: Kafka, Goethe, Sartre, Camus, and Keats. Even if he didn’t wait until he was married, the first time was supposed to be a process of discovery, like you were learning to talk to each other in a new language. But Yasmine had already learned the language from some other guy.

  “You have really narrow feet,” she observed, kneeling on the floor as she pulled Mekhi’s socks off.

  He sat up and pulled his feet away from her. “Wait.”

  Yasmine crawled up the mattress and sat down next to him, cross-legged, in just her black tights and her tank top. “What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t want to do this,” Mekhi said. He folded his skinny arms over his bare chest. His corduroys were still on, but he felt very naked. “I mean, not right now.”

  Yasmine reached out and poked him playfully in the arm. “I was nervous the first time, too. It’s really no big deal,” she said reassuringly. “Promise.”

  Mekhi swallowed and looked up at the ceiling. He kept his eyes fixed on a crack in the molding above his head. “I’d just rather wait until it’s more...organic.”

  “O-kay,” Yasmine said slowly. “But this is just sex, you know. It’s not a poem.”

  Obviously, she didn’t get it. To Mekhi it was a poem. Probably the most important poem he would ever write. He reached for his T-shirt and pulled it on over his head. “I’d just really rather wait, that’s all.”

  “Fine,” Yasmine said, on the verge of losing her patience. Mekhi was always overanalyzing things, writing about them in his little black notebooks until there was nothing left to write. She loved how sensitive and romantic he was, but for once it might be nice if he forgot to think about things so much and just went with the damn flow. Still, she’d had a crush on him ever since the day they’d met and become best friends three years ago. She wasn’t about to ruin things now that they were finally together.

  Mekhi lit another cigarette. His hands were shaking like crazy. Yasmine poked him again. “Hey, don’t worry so much. I’m fine with not doing it. Okay?”

  He nodded, and Yasmine grabbed his hand and pulled his arm around her shoulders. They settled back on the bed, and Mekhi blew smoke up into the red Chinese paper lantern overhead as he gently stroked the side of Yasmine’s stubbly head with his thumb. He was glad he didn’t have to explain himself too much. That was the nice thing about going out with his best friend. She knew him almost better than he knew himself.

  They lay like that for a while, watching the smoke from his cigarette float up into the air. That was the other nice thing about going out with your best friend. You didn’t always have to talk.

  “As soon as break starts, I want to shoot some more film,” Yasmine said, breaking the silence. “I’m worried my Natural Born Killers film was way too dark to send to NYU.”

  The last film Yasmine made was adapted from a scene in the movie Natural Born Killers and featured Mekhi as a murderous psychopath. Yasmine had applied early to NYU and wanted to send them one of her films instead of a written essay, since filmmaking was what she planned to major in. She couldn’t wait. Only one more term at the Emma Willard School for Uptight Girls, where (thank God) she didn’t fit in at all, and she’d be free, free, free!

  Mekhi blew out a long puff of smoke. He didn’t know what Yasmine was worried about. Her films were dark, but that was what made them brilliant. There was no way NYU wouldn’t take her. “If anyone has to worry, it’s me,” he said, his hands shaking nervously again.

  “What do you mean?” Yasmine demanded. “Any school with a halfway decent writing program would kill to have you.”

  “Yeah, but talk about dark. My poems are really—” Mekhi stopped. His
poems were personal, that was what they were. And it seemed sort of strange to send a whole slew of them off to some random admissions person at Columbia or Brown or Vassar, like he was baring his soul to a complete stranger who might not have even read the works of Goethe, Sartre, or Camus and wouldn’t understand his subtle references to their work.

  “You know, you might even think about trying to get some of your stuff published,” Yasmine suggested. “That would really get the college admissions people all worked up about you.”

  Mekhi stubbed out his cigarette butt in an empty Coke can. “Yeah, right,” he said. He liked to write, but no way was he ready to send stuff out to be published. He hadn’t even found his voice yet. He knew that. Every new poem he wrote sounded different from the old ones.

  Yasmine sat up again. “What? I’m serious. You should do it.”

  Mekhi slumped down further under the covers. “Whatever,” he mumbled halfheartedly. He wasn’t ready for sex, and he wasn’t ready to be published. Now he felt even more inadequate.

  Yasmine knew when it was time to back off. She took a deep breath and channeled her inner pussycat, the one who only got up from her warm spot on the radiator when Mekhi needed a rough kiss on his cute little face. She slid under the covers and kissed his chin. “One more week and we can spend all of break like this,” she murmured.

  Unlike most of their classmates at Emma Willard and Riverside Prep, neither Yasmine nor Mekhi would be going anywhere glamorous for break. Yasmine lived with her older sister, Ruby, in an apartment in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. Their parents were artists who lived in Vermont and always spent Christmas on tour with their performance-art troupe. Mekhi and his sister, Bree, lived with their father, Rufus, a Communist writer who didn’t believe in Christmas or Hanukkah, or any other holiday, for that matter.

  “Dad’s cooking his once-a-year lasagna dinner on Friday,” Mekhi said and ran his hands along Yasmine’s back, allowing himself to relax again. He loved how smooth and solid her back felt, not all ribby, like his own. “You’re coming, right?”