Upper East Side #3

by Ashley Valentine

  Kaliq gazed up at the paintings on the walls with his mouth hanging open. He didn’t know which one was the Pollock, nor did he recognize any of the other artists’ styles Bree had used, but he recognized himself times six, and that was enough to make him pause.

  “So this is where I spend most of my time,” Bree explained gleefully. Kaliq had been so charming talking to her father, it had made her fall even more in love with him. Bravely, she stood on tiptoe and put her hands on his shoulders. “I’ve kind of wanted to kiss you all night,” she whispered huskily.

  Kaliq stiffened, but not in the way you’d think. Yes, normally this sort of advance would have given him a major boner, but Kaliq had just gotten a very clear picture of Bree spending hours alone in her room painting these good but extremely weird portraits of him. The thing was, he had just told Bree he loved her. And he’d meant it at the time, sort of. But did she now expect him to, like, deflower her or something?

  He kissed her lightly on the mouth. “I’d better go soon,” he said gently. “I have to pack for tomorrow and stuff.”

  Bree frowned. “Oh, please don’t leave.” She grinned and looked down at the floor. “I’m still wearing my thong.”

  Kaliq had to get out of there before she started taking off her clothes right in front of her art collection. Luckily he didn’t have to think of a good reason why he needed to leave immediately, because just then his cell phone rang. He pulled it out of his pants pocket and looked at the number flashing on the screen. It was Jeremy. “Hey, man, where are you?”

  “We’re about to meet up at that bar on Rivington. You know, the one where Charlie got kicked out for doing bong hits on the fire escape?”

  “Okay, calm down,” Kaliq instructed, thinking that if he made the call sound urgent, Bree would let him go.

  “Huh?” Jeremy said.

  “I’ll be right there,” Kaliq responded. He hung up and grabbed Bree’s hand. “I’m sorry, Brianna, but I really do have to go. Jeremy said Charlie and Anthony took some bad Molly and they’re freaking out. I gotta go over there and help them before they do any serious damage.”

  Bree nodded, her lower lip trembling. Kaliq was going away to Maine tomorrow. She wasn’t going to see him for days and days. “Okay.”

  He pulled her into a hug. “I’ll be back for New Year’s Eve. You be good, okay?”

  She squeezed her eyes shut and hugged him tight. “I love you.” She couldn’t get enough of saying it.

  Kaliq let go and grabbed a stuffed panda from her bed. He tucked it under Bree’s arm. “Pretend he’s me,” he said, kissing her on the forehead. And then he shot out of the room and down the hall, showering Mr. Hargrove with polite thank-yous before jumping into a taxi headed straight for the bar on Rivington Street, where he was going to buy his friend Jeremy a very large drink to thank him for inadvertently saving his ass.

  20

  “We can’t just stay in here all day,” Chanel told Porsha. It was almost noon on Christmas Eve and she was standing at a window of their villa, looking longingly across the deck at the white sandy beach and the turquoise-colored sea beyond.

  “But what about Flow and Miles?” Porsha reasoned as she squeezed toothpaste onto her electric toothbrush. “I thought we were hiding.” She’d thought staking out in the villa with Chanel would give her time to work on her Yale essay, but so far all they’d done was drink tall glasses of rum punch garnished with orange slices, maraschino cherries, and paper umbrellas. It was time to break out the MacBook.

  Chanel had other ideas. A whole night and half a morning indoors doing nothing was absolutely her limit. “We’re going to the beach,” she announced, pulling on a pair of white short shorts over her white bikini bottoms. “And if anyone wants to talk to us, they’re going to have to talk to these.” She whipped around and pulled away the little white triangles of her bikini top, flashing Porsha.

  Porsha raised her eyebrows and then went back to brushing her teeth. She spat into the sink. “You mean, go topless?” she asked, liking the idea already.

  Chanel nodded, a devilish grin playing on her face. “That’s exactly what I mean.”

  * * *

  Tahj, Miles, and Brice were having a windsurfing lesson a few feet offshore when Chanel and Porsha unfurled their beach towels in the sand, removed their bikini tops, and lay down on their backs with their breasts bared to the heavens.

  “Gross,” said Brice, turning his back so he didn’t have to look.

  Miles dropped his sail and fell into the water. He surfaced and shook his head at Tahj, who was still standing on his board. “I can’t believe you get to live with that,” he said enviously.

  Tahj’s sail was waterlogged. He yanked hard on the rope, trying to raise it and block his view of the beach, but no matter how hard he pulled, the sail stayed underwater. Porsha probably thought she was being European and sophisticated going topless like that, but in his opinion, it was slutty. Anyone who walked by could take a look, and then later on at dinner they’d see her all dressed and be able to imagine exactly what she looked like naked. Thinking about it made him feel dizzy.

  Their Speedo-wearing Rastafarian windsurfing instructor, Prinz, waded into the water with his back to the beach. “Let me give you a hand,” he said and dove in, dolphin-like, coming up underneath Tahj’s sail and pushing it up out of the water with his head.

  Nice trick.

  Tahj gathered up the slack until the sail was right where it was supposed to be, perpendicular to the board. He gripped the rubber handhold attached to the sail and leaned back as it caught the wind. The board skimmed along the surface of the water, making little slapping sounds as it hit the waves and leaving a nice wake in its path. Tahj felt extremely cool. He was doing it!

  People began shouting behind him, and he glanced over his shoulder to look. Chanel and Porsha were standing on their towels, tops still off, clapping and cheering him on.

  “Go, Tahj! Go, Tahj!”

  Tahj stared at them—he couldn’t help it—for a second too long. When he turned around again, his board had run aground on a sandy point sticking out into the cove, and he went flying over backward, landing like an overturned crab on his back in the shallow water.

  Ouch.

  * * *

  Miles wanted to talk to Porsha, but he wasn’t sure if there was some unwritten code about how close you could stand next to a girl sunbathing topless without appearing to be leering at her. He also wasn’t sure if Porsha cared.

  Prinz had swum off to rescue Tahj from the sandbar, so Miles pulled his Windsurfer up on shore and walked across the sand until he was standing about eight feet from Porsha’s towel. Both she and Chanel were still lying on their backs. Oh, man, it was a sight to behold.

  “Hey,” Miles said nonchalantly.

  Porsha turned her head and squinted at him. This was going to be fun. She sat up, giving him some full frontal nudity. From the waist up, anyway. “Hi.”

  Miles looked down at the sand, blushing despite himself. He looked cute in his red surf shorts and shell necklace. “Um, I was just wondering if you’re planning to come to the Christmas Eve party tonight.”

  Porsha glanced down at Chanel. “Are we planning to go to the Christmas Eve party tonight?” she whispered.

  Chanel grinned, holding her hand over her eyes like a visor. “Definitely.”

  Porsha turned back to Miles. “Sure we are.”

  Miles nodded, trying to keep his eyes on her face. “Cool. See you later.”

  Porsha smiled and shielded her eyes, watching him trudge back to his Windsurfer and show off his muscles as he pushed it back into the water. This was fun. How often did guys give you eight feet of breathing room? She lay back on her towel and rolled over onto her stomach.

  It may have been fun, but even using SPF 45, there’s only so much sun a girl’s bare breasts can take!

  * * *

  After an hour and a half of sunbathing, Chanel had browned herself thoroughly on both sides. She was about t
o tell Porsha she’d had enough sun when...

  “Chanel?”

  She rolled over and sat up. Yes, it was Flow. And yes, her top was still off.

  He didn’t seem to mind. He came right up to the edge of Chanel’s towel and stood over her. Beside her, Porsha lay on her stomach, her head covered with a white T-shirt, pretending to be asleep.

  “Finally,” Flow breathed, shaking his dark curls away from his long-lashed eyes. He was wearing electric orange surf shorts and nothing else, and his lean, muscular body was tanned to buttery cinnamon toast perfection. Around his neck a shark tooth hung from a leather string. “Did you miss me?”

  Chanel shrugged her shoulders and rubbed her arms, half concealing her bare boobs to keep Flow from getting too good a look. “Well...you sent me so many presents...”

  He frowned. “Not that many.”

  Maybe more of the gifts had been from Alexis and Imani than she’d first thought. It was hard to know with those two.

  “Well, whatever,” Chanel said. “Anyway, have you heard the news? Apparently we’re engaged.”

  Flow grinned. “Yeah, I heard that, too. Don’t worry about stuff like that. You’ll get used to it.”

  The thing was, Chanel was pretty sure she didn’t want to get used to it. She’d never been out with a R&B singer before, and she’d had a good time with Flow that one night, but there were so many other guys out there. Rock climbers, photographers, race car drivers, actors, DJs. In a way, Chanel was just like that hummingbird she’d been watching last night as he buzzed ceaselessly from flower to flower. She didn’t want to hang out on only one flower, draining it for all it was worth. She wanted to taste as many flowers as possible.

  She dragged her ponytail over her shoulder and examined her split ends, not saying anything. Flow wasn’t used to girls acting so blasé in his presence. When was she going to throw her arms around him and tell him how much she’d missed him and how she never wanted to be without him?

  “So, my group is performing at the Christmas Eve party tonight,” he said finally. “I was hoping maybe we could hang out after so I could give you your Christmas present.”

  Chanel smiled. Oh God, not another present. “I’ll be there.”

  “Cool.” He paused, waiting for her to say something else. But she didn’t. “All right. See you tonight.”

  “See you.” Chanel lay back down again and poked Porsha repeatedly in her bare ribs.

  “You’re such a hypocrite,” Porsha murmured, rolling over and pulling the T-shirt away from her face.

  Chanel cocked her head. “How come?”

  “You act like you hate all the stuff he gives you, but I bet you can’t wait to see what he’s giving you for Christmas.”

  Chanel grinned. Porsha was right. She could moan all she wanted to about Flow’s steady stream of gifts, but girls do like presents, especially ones from famous, good looking R&B singers.

  21

  “What camera?” Yasmine’s twenty-two-year-old sister, Ruby, mumbled. It was 3:00 on Sunday afternoon, but it looked like Ruby had only gone to bed a couple of hours ago. Her eyes were smudged with last night’s black eyeliner and she was still wearing her skintight leather pants.

  Ruby slept on a futon in what was supposed to be the living room of their one bedroom second-floor apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The apartment was filled with equipment—amps and speakers and guitars and microphones for Ruby’s band, SugarDaddy, and cameras and lighting equipment for Yasmine’s filmmaking. On the floor was a rug their hippy-dippy artist parents had woven themselves. The rug had a Noah’s Ark theme, with animals standing in pairs on a green raft floating on a red sea, but it was so littered with Ruby’s clothes and sound equipment, the animals were completely hidden.

  “My Sony digital video camera,” Yasmine persisted furiously. “I left it on top of the kitchen counter.” She’d been planning to review the footage of what she’d shot in the park on Friday to see if any of the icicle stuff was worth saving and deleting the footage of Kaliq and Bree, but now she couldn’t find the camera anywhere.

  Ruby rolled over and put a pillow over her face. “I borrowed it.”

  Yasmine stared at her. Annoyingly, Ruby still had the pillow over her face. “What do you mean, you borrowed it? Where the fuck is it?”

  “I loaned it to some friends over at the Five and Dime. They’re using it to make a PSA about skateboarding.”

  “There was stuff on that!” Yasmine shouted in horror. “Stuff for my new film!”

  Ruby pulled the pillow off her face and sat up. “As if you don’t have about ten other cameras. I’m sorry,” she said sarcastically. “I’m sorry I entered your space without permission. Can I have a hug?”

  Yasmine glared at her sister with her hands clenched so tightly, her nails were making welts in her palms. Now she knew why she’d received fifteen e-mails this morning accusing her of being a lesbian pornographer Peeping Tom slut. Ruby’s friends had obviously done a hell of a lot more than just borrow the camera. They’d taken what was on it and posted it on the fucking Internet. Mekhi already thought she was perverted. What would he think of her now?

  * * *

  Christmas Eve afternoon, Mekhi was surfing the Internet, looking for articles on writer’s block and how to cure it. Everything he found was so fruity and stupid. Go for a walk. As if he didn’t already walk the length of Manhattan on a daily basis, contemplating over his inability to write anything coherent. Take a hot bath. He hated baths. All they did was put him to sleep. Exercise. No, thank you. His diet of cigarettes and coffee was hardly conducive to exercise.

  One site even discussed the merits of dropping acid. Apparently a prizewinning writer had written his entire novel on an acid trip one night and didn’t even remember writing it in the morning. But except for drinking at parties, Mekhi had kept pretty clean throughout high school, and he wasn’t about to start dropping acid now.

  Another site advised trying an exercise where you write the first word that comes to mind and then extrapolate from there. You might wind up with just a grocery list of words, the site said, but even that was better than nothing. Mekhi decided to try it. He turned to a fresh page in his notebook and held his pen ready.

  He wrote down the word telephone, but then his computer bleeped, indicating that he had a new e-mail. He grabbed his mouse and clicked open his inbox. The message was from Zeke, his only good friend at Riverside.

  Check out link below, man. —Z

  Mekhi clicked on the link, thinking it was probably just another stupid basketball trivia link Zeke had found. He turned back to his notebook without waiting to see what came up on screen.

  Telephone. Now what? He needed another word.

  His father knocked on his open door and poked his head into the room. “Hey, Mekhi, I’m going out for bagels. Any special requests?”

  Mekhi swiveled around in his chair, about to tell his father to bring him back a very large black coffee, but suddenly his father’s face turned gruesome as he stared at Mekhi’s computer screen.

  “Brianna Tallulah Hargrove—is that you!?” Rufus roared, storming into the room like a rabid bear. He was wearing a torn white T-shirt and his bushy gray hair stuck out wildly from all sides of his head.

  Mekhi swiveled his chair back around to look at his computer screen. The first thing he recognized was Bree’s red hat. Then he saw what looked like her exposed butt cheeks in a white thong. Suddenly a guy with waves in his hair, presumably Kaliq, pressed his mouth against her ass. The camera quickly cut to the guy pulling his pants down, and then the image cut to the two of them, wrapped tightly into his coat, doing what looked like the nasty. Father and son watched in horrified disbelief as the footage repeated itself over and over.

  “Brianna!” Rufus bellowed again, spraying the computer screen with angry spittle.

  Bree appeared in the doorway looking like the picture of innocence in a light blue sweatsuit with her hair pulled back into a curly puff of a ponytail. “Wha
t?” she demanded.

  Mekhi pushed back his chair so she could see the screen from where she was standing.

  “What?” Bree repeated impatiently. She took a step forward, and then her hand flew to her mouth at the sight of her bare butt on screen. It was like watching a horror movie in which she was the star. How could this have happened? she wondered in complete mortification.

  “It’s you and that Kaliq fellow,” Rufus pointed out unnecessarily, his face contorted with rage. He was a liberal parent. He let Mekhi smoke in his room and drink whenever he wanted. He’d let Bree buy her first pair of platform shoes when she was nine. But Bree was still his baby, and to see her writhing around half naked with a boy on the Internet was more than enough to give him a reality check.

  Mute with horror, Bree stared at the screen as the footage repeated itself. There was her hat, her thong, her butt with Kaliq’s head pressed against it, then the two of them rolling around in the snow inside his coat. It had been such a private, special moment, but now it was out there for the whole world—including her father and brother—to see. She let out a squeaky little gasp and bolted from the room.

  Rufus looked at the screen for a moment longer and then glowered at Mekhi. “Do you know anything about this?”

  Mekhi shook his head no, although he felt somehow responsible. He’d been so distracted by his writer’s block and waffling back and forth about having sex with Yasmine that he hadn’t protected Bree from that rich, cradle-robbing bastard, Kaliq.

  “Well, from now on I want you to keep an eye on her,” Rufus growled. “I may be lenient, but I can’t have her running around like some sort of floozy.”

  Mekhi nodded solemnly, and Rufus patted him on the shoulder and headed into Bree’s room, where she was lying facedown on her bed with her head buried in a soft pillow, surrounded by portraits of her beloved Kaliq.