Upper East Side #5

by Ashley Valentine

  Also by Ashley Valentine

  Bridgeport Academy

  Bridgeport Academy #1

  Upper East Side

  Upper East Side 1

  Upper East Side 2

  Upper East Side 3

  Upper East Side 4

  Upper East Side 5

  Upper East Side 6

  Upper East Side 7

  Upper East Side 8

  Upper East Side 9

  Upper East Side 10

  Upper East Side 11

  UPPER EAST SIDE 5

  Copyright © 2016 by Ashley Valentine

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof

  may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever

  without the express written permission of the publisher

  except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Based on the Gossip Girl series by Cecily von Ziegesar.

  Table of Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  Author's Note

  1

  “What island are we going to, anyway?” Porsha Sinclaire asked her mother. Eleanor Sinclaire Campbell was perched on the edge of Porsha's bed, watching her daughter get ready for school while they discussed spring break.

  “Oahu, dear. I thought I told you. We're going to that resort on the North Shore, so the boys can learn to surf.” Eleanor cupped her hands around her almost-seven-months-pregnant belly and frowned at the cream-colored walls as if trying to channel the baby's preference about wallpaper. She was due in June, and Porsha would be off to college soon afterward. Today Eleanor and her decorator would discuss her plan to turn Porsha's room into a baby girl's nursery.

  “But I've already been to Oahu,” Porsha wailed dramatically. She'd known for weeks that they were going to Hawaii for spring break, but until now she hadn't thought to ask where. She kicked her antique mahogany dresser drawer shut and stood in front of the full-length mirror on the back of her closet door, primping. Her close-cropped hair was neatly tousled; her white cashmere V-neck was just deep enough to suggest a hint of cleavage without her having to worry about being sent home by Mrs. M, the headmistress, for dressing like a slut; and her new turquoise flats looked so excellent with bare legs, she decided not to put on tights, even though it had been an unusually frigid March and she was going to freeze her ass off. “I want to go someplace new," she added, pouting into the mirror as she applied a second coat of lipstick.

  “I know, sweet pea.” Her mother slid off the bed and squatted down to eyeball a particularly dangerous-looking electrical outlet in the skirting board near the window. Once the decorating was finished she would have to hire someone to baby-proof the entire house. “But you've never been to the North Shore. Tahj says the surfing is the best in the world.”

  To Porsha's dismay, her mother was wearing beige velour track pants with the word Juicy on the butt. Hello, inappropriate?!

  “So do I, like, not exist anymore?” Porsha demanded. She dragged her bag out of the closet and dumped her school stuff into it. “First you're kicking me out of my room, and now I have no say about where we go for vacation?”

  “The boys are buying some surfing things for our trip right now. You might want to have a quick look on Tahj's computer. See if there's anything you want,” her mother answered distractedly. She was on her hands and knees now, circulating the room, checking for any danger that might be lurking from a baby's point of view. “You know, I was thinking apricot for the color scheme—so it's girly, but not too pink? But now I'm thinking maybe a greeny yellow might be even nicer. Endive.”

  Porsha had had enough. She didn't want to go to the North Shore of Oahu, she had no interest in buying surfing equipment, she didn't want to talk about color schemes for the stupid baby's nursery, and she certainly didn't need to look at the word Juicy on her mother's wide-load pregnant ass for a moment longer. With a final spritz of her favorite Marc Jacobs perfume, she left for school without even saying goodbye.

  “Yo, Porsha. Come here a minute!” her seventeen-year-old stepbrother yelled from his room as she stomped by.

  Porsha stopped and poked her head into the room. Tahj and her twelve-year-old brother, Brice, were sharing Tahj's natural-fiber desk chair—all brotherly—while they ordered surfing gear online with Cyrus Campbell's credit card. Brice had stopped cutting his hair in an attempt to grow dreadlocks just like Tahj's, and he looked as if he had some sort of foul hair fungus. Porsha could hardly believe this was the room she was going to have to live in until she went off to college. Tahj's hemp bedspread and natural sea-grass carpet were littered with old reggae album covers, beer bottles, and Tahj's dirty clothes, and the room stank of his herbal cigarettes and those revolting soy hot dogs he was always eating—raw.

  “What size are you?” Tahj asked. “We can order you a wet shirt. It keeps the board from chafing.”

  “They come in cool colors,” Brice added enthusiastically. “Neon green and stuff.”

  Like Porsha would ever be caught dead in neon green, let alone a neon green wet shirt. She could feel her lower lip trembling with a mixture of horror and overwhelming sorrow. Here it was, only seven forty-five in the morning, and she was already on the verge of tears.

  “Found 'em!” Cyrus Campbell, her eyesore of a stepfather, boomed from behind her. He waddled down the hallway from the master bedroom, wearing only a red silk bathrobe tied with a dangerously loose knot. His bristly mustache needed a trim, and his fat face was red and oily. He waved a pair of enormous orange swim trunks at Porsha. They had little blue fish printed all over them and would have been kind of cute on anyone but him. “Love these. Boys are going to order me a wet shirt to match!” he announced happily.

  The idea of spending Spring break watching Cyrus make a fool of himself on a surfboard wearing his orange swim trunks and a matching orange wet shirt was enough to drive Porsha to real tears. She slunk away down the hall to the foyer, yanked her coat out of the coat closet, and hurried off to meet her best friend. Hopefully Chanel would think of something—anything—to cheer her up.

  As if that were even possible.

  2

  Chanel Crenshaw sipped her latte and squinted gloomily down at Fifth Avenue from her perch on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her abundant silky hair overflowed the hood of her white cashmere sweater and spilled onto her shoulders. There it was again on the side of the M102 bus—the ad for Chanel's Tears. She had no problem with the way she looked in the picture. She liked how the cold wind had whipped her yellow sundress up between her tanned knees, and how even though she'd been wearing only sandals and a sundress in the middle of Central Park in February, the goosebumps that had studded her arms and legs had been carefully airbrushed out. She even liked how she wasn't wearing lipstick, so her perfectly full lips looked sort of chapped and bruised.

  It was the tears in her enormous almond-shaped eyes that bothered her. Of course that was what had caused Les Best to name his new scent Chanel's Tears in
the first place, but the real reason Chanel had been crying in the photo was because that was the day—no, the very minute—Tahj Campbell (whom she was pretty sure she'd been in love with, at least for a week) had broken up with her. And what bothered her, what made her feel like crying all over again, was that now that they were broken up, she had no one to love, and no one to love her.

  Not that she didn't love almost every boy she'd ever met, and not that every boy in the world didn't totally love her. It was impossible not to. But she wanted someone to love her and shower her with attention the way only a boy who was completely in love with her could. That rare sort of love. True love. The kind of love she'd never had.

  Feeling uncharacteristically dark and melancholy, she pulled a cigarette from out of her rumpled black bag and lit it just to watch it burn.

  “I feel as ugly as the weather,” she murmured, but then broke into a smile when she saw her best friend, Porsha, walking up the steps toward her. She picked up the extra latte she'd bought, stood up, and held it out. “Cute shoes,” she remarked, admiring Porsha's latest purchase.

  “You can borrow them,” Porsha offered generously. “But I'll kill you if you spill anything on them.” She tugged on Chanel's sleeve. “Come on, we're gonna be late.”

  The two girls ambled slowly down the steps and up Fifth Avenue toward school, sipping their coffee as they went. Cold wind blasted through the bare-limbed branches of the trees in Central Park, making them shiver.

  “Jesus, it's cold,” Porsha hissed. She tucked her free hand into Chanel's coat pocket the way only a best friend can. “So,” she began to vent. She'd gotten control of her tears, but her voice was a little unsteady. “Not only does my mother walk around, like, stroking her ovaries, but today the decorator is coming to turn my room into Baby Central, in shades of radicchio and ass!”

  All of a sudden, Chanel's longing for true love seemed kind of trivial. Her parents hadn't gotten divorced because her dad was gay, her middle-aged mom wasn't pregnant, her stepbrother hadn't come on to her and then her best friend and then ditched them both, and she wasn't being forced to move out of her room. Not only that, she wasn't still a virgin at the grand old age of seventeen, and she hadn't kissed her Yale interviewer and then almost lost her virginity to her Yale alumni interviewer, completely messing up her chances of getting in. As a matter of fact, when she really thought about it, her life was just peachy compared to Porsha's.

  “But you get Tahj's room, right? And it's just been redecorated for him—it's nice.”

  “If you like hemp curtains and ecofriendly furniture,” Porsha scoffed. “Besides,” she added, “Tahj is an idiot. Going to Oahu for spring break was his idea.”

  Chanel didn't think Oahu sounded so bad, but she wasn't about to contradict Porsha when she was in a bad mood and risk getting her eyes poked out. The two girls crossed 86th Street against the light, banging against each other as they ran to keep from getting mowed down by a taxi. When they reached the sidewalk, Chanel suddenly stopped in her tracks, her huge eyes gleaming excitedly.

  “Hey! Why don't you move in with me?!”

  Porsha crouched down to hug her frozen bare calves. “Can we keep moving?” she asked grumpily.

  “You can live in Cairo's room,” Chanel continued excitedly. “And you can totally screw Oahu and come skiing in Sun Valley with us!!”

  Porsha stood up and blew into her coffee, squinting at her friend through the steam. Ever since Chanel had come back from boarding school Porsha had completely hated her, but sometimes she really loved her. She took one last sip and tossed her half-empty cup into a trash can. “Help me move in after school?”

  Chanel slipped her arm through Porsha's and whispered in her ear, “You know you love me.”

  Porsha smiled and rested her trouble-weary head against Chanel's shoulder as the two girls turned right on 93rd Street. Only a few hundred yards beyond stood the great royal blue doors of the Emma Willard School for Girls. Ponytailed girls in gray pleated uniform skirts milled around outside, chattering away as the notorious pair of seniors approached.

  “I heard Chanel got a huge modeling contract after she did that perfume ad. She's going to bring her baby back from France. You know, the one she had last year before she came back to the city? All the supermodels have babies,” chirped Rain Hoffstetter.

  “I heard she and Porsha are going to get an apartment downtown and raise the baby themselves instead of going to college. Porsha decided not to ever have sex with guys, and obviously, Chanel has had enough sex to last her whole lifetime. Just look at them,” intoned Lauren Salmon. “Total lesbos.”

  “I bet they think they're making some big feminist statement or something,” Imani Edwards observed.

  “Yeah, but they won't feel so good about it when their parents are, like, forced to disown them,” Alexis Sullivan put in.

  The first bell rang, summoning the girls into school.

  “Hey,” Chanel and Porsha called over as they passed the group of girls on their way inside.

  “Cute shoes!” Rain, Lauren, Imani, and Alexis sang back in reply, even though only Porsha was wearing new shoes. Chanel was wearing the same old scuffed brown suede boots she'd been wearing since October. Porsha always had the best shoes and the best clothes, and Chanel always looked gorgeous, anyway, even in her frayed, cigarette-burned boarding school clothes. Which was yet another reason to hate the pair, or to love them, depending on who you were and what mood you were in.

  3

  “Got it!” Kaliq Braxton twirled his lacrosse stick over his head, scooped up the ball, and tossed it expertly to Charlie Dern. His caramel cheeks were smudged with dirt, and his wavy hair matted with sweat and bits of dried Central Park grass, causing him to look even finer than the finest model in an entire magazine. He lifted his shirt to wipe the sweat from his glittering green eyes, and even the pigeons roosting in the trees nearby cooed with pleasure at the sight. The group of junior girls from Seaton Arms watching on the sidelines tittered with excitement.

  “Whoa. He must have worked out a lot in prison,” breathed one girl.

  “I heard his parents are sending him out to Alaska after graduation to work in a tuna fish cannery,” said her friend. “They're worried he'll go back to dealing drugs if he goes to college.”

  “I heard he's got this heart condition that's really rare. He has to smoke weed so he won't have attacks,” said another. “It's actually kind of cool.”

  Kaliq flashed them an oblivious grin, and the girls simultaneously closed their eyes to keep from falling over backward. God, he was perfect.

  It was the beginning of the season and no team captain had yet been appointed, so each boy was on his best behavior. After their usual scrimmage, Coach Michaels had asked them to free throw for a while. Kaliq was throwing with his friend Jeremy Scott when he heard his cell phone ring in the pile of coats. He signaled to Jeremy and then sprinted over to answer it.

  Mercedes Santiago, Kaliq's girlfriend of several weeks, was currently residing in an exclusive drug and alcohol rehabilitation facility in her hometown of Greenwich, Connecticut, and was only allowed to make supervised phone calls at certain times of the day. The last time Kaliq had missed her call, she'd been so bummed out, she'd gone on a bender and had later been found on the roof of the clinic, chewing gum and sniffing a bottle of nail polish remover, both of which she'd stolen from a nurse's purse.

  “You're panting,” Mercedes observed coyly when Kaliq answered. “Were you thinking about me?”

  “I'm at lacrosse practice,” he explained. Coach Michaels spat noisily into the grass only a few feet away. “I think it's just about over, though. Are you okay?”

  As usual, Mercedes ignored the question. “I love how you're all athletic and healthy and chem-free, and I'm sitting in this jail, pining for you. Just like a princess in a fairy tale.”

  Or not.

  A few weeks earlier, Kaliq had been busted by the cops while buying a bag of weed in Central Park and sent to
outpatient rehab at Breakaway, in Greenwich. Kaliq had first met Mercedes in teen group therapy. One night, during a tremendous snowstorm, Mercedes invited Kaliq back to her mansion to hang out. They got high together, and then Mercedes disappeared into the bathroom to pop prescription pills. Soon enough, she passed out in her underwear on the bed, and Kaliq had had absolutely no choice but to call the people at Breakaway to come get her. And ever since then, they'd been boyfriend and girlfriend.

  That would be some messed up fairy tale.

  “So the reason I'm calling is…” Mercedes crooned into the phone.

  Kaliq's teammates milled around him, pulling on their coats and chugging from the bottles of Gatorade they'd brought with them. Practice was over. Coach Michaels spat a wad of phlegm near the toe of Kaliq's sneaker and pointed a gnarly forefinger at him.

  “I'd better go,” Kaliq interrupted Mercedes. “I think Coach wants to talk about appointing me captain.”

  “Captain Kaliq!” She squealed into the phone. “My cute little captain!”

  “So I'll call you later, okay?”

  “Wait, wait, wait! I just wanted you to know I got my mom to convince these monkeys to let me out starting Saturday, as long as I'm with an adult or responsible mentor, so we're definitely going to my mom's ski condo in Sun Valley for your spring break, okay? Will you come?”

  Coach Michaels growled something at Kaliq and put his hands on his old-man hips. Kaliq didn't have to think about Mercedes's question for very long, anyway. Sun Valley sounded a hell of a lot better than regrouting his dad's old boat up at their summer house in Mt. Desert, Maine.

  “Of course I'll come. Definitely. Look, I have to go.”

  “Yippee!” Mercedes squealed. “I love you,” she added hoarsely, and then hung up.

  Kaliq tossed the phone on top of his navy blue coat and rubbed his hands together energetically. His teammates had all gone home. “What's up, Coach?”

  Coach Michaels took a step toward him, shaking his head as he sucked in snot from his nasal passages. “Last year I almost made you captain when Doherty crapped up his knee,” the coach said. He spat and shook his head again. “Good thing I didn't.”