Upper East Side #5

by Ashley Valentine

  Uh-oh.

  Kaliq's hopeful smile cracked a little. “Why's that?”

  “Because you're not captain material, Braxton!” the coach barked. “Look at you, gabbing on the phone like a playboy while the rest of your teammates are out there dogging it. And don't think I don't know about your getting busted for dope.” He made a little growling sound. “You're no leader, Braxton.” He spat again and turned his back on Kaliq, jamming his hands in his parka pockets as he walked away. “You're just a rotten pile of disappointment.”

  “But I haven't been smok—” Kaliq called after him, his voice trailing off into the wind. The sky was steel gray, and the bare tree branches creaked and moaned. Kaliq stood alone on the brown March grass, holding his lacrosse stick and shivering a little in the cold. His father was a former navy captain, so he was used to shrugging off the power-tripping tirades of grumpy old authority figures. But it was still pretty outrageous that Coach Michaels thought the only non-stoned guy on the team wasn't fit to be captain. Coach hadn't even given him a chance to defend himself.

  He bent down and picked up his coat. If he were high right now, he would have smiled serenely at the coach's accusations and lit a joint. Instead, he slung his coat over his shoulders, gave the finger to the coach's retreating back, and trudged across the darkening meadow toward Fifth Avenue.

  Charlie, Jeremy, and Anthony were waiting for him on the pathway leading out of the park. Anthony was too much of a stoner even to play sports, except for the occasional game of soccer in the park, but he always met the guys after practice with ready-rolled joints and a big grin on his goateed face.

  Slowly the boys made their way out of the park and onto Fifth Avenue. “Bro, he made you captain, didn't he?” Charlie asked, his voice cracking the way it did when he was high, which was basically all the time.

  Kaliq grabbed the bottle of blue Gatorade out of Charlie's hands and took a swig. Even though these guys were his best friends, he wasn't about to tell them what had happened. “Coach offered it to me, but I turned him down. I mean, I'm pretty sure I'm already into Brown, anyway, so it's not like I need lax captain on my transcript. And I'll probably miss a few weekend games hanging out in Connecticut with Mercedes. I told Coach to give it to a junior.”

  The three boys raised their eyebrows in surprised admiration. “Jesus, dude,” breathed Jeremy. “That's like, huge of you.”

  All of a sudden, Kaliq felt the sort of rush he might have felt if he'd actually told the coach to make a junior captain instead of him. How huge he might have been, if only that was what had really happened.

  “Yeah, well.” He smiled uncomfortably and buttoned up his coat. Not only had he lied about the coach offering him the position of captain, he'd also lied about his chances of being accepted at Brown. Sure, his dad had gone there, and sure, he'd had a kick-ass interview, but he'd been baked as a loaf of bread for every exam and standardized test he'd taken since eighth grade, so his grades and scores were barely mediocre.

  “Here.” Anthony held out a burning spliff. He had a tendency to forget on an hourly basis that Kaliq had quit smoking the stuff. “It's Cuban. I bought it from my cousin who goes to Rollins down in Florida.”

  Kaliq waved the joint away. “I have a paper to write,” he said, turning away from the group toward home. It was hard to get used to, not being high. His head was so clear, it almost hurt. And all of a sudden there was so much to think about.

  Whoa.

  4

  When school let out for the day, the formerly scruffy but now fashionably groomed and polished Mekhi Hargrove didn't linger outside Riverside Prep with the other senior boys, bouncing basketballs and eating slices from the pizza place on 76th and Broadway. Instead, he zipped up his new jacket, retied his new shoes, and headed across town to the Plaza Hotel to meet his agent.

  The ornate gold-painted Plaza dining room was buzzing with the usual throng of gaudily dressed tourists, extravagant grandmothers, and a few loud families, all toting shopping bags from FAO Schwarz and Tiffany, and all drinking tea. Except for Rusty Klein.

  Mwa! Mwa!

  Rusty blew kisses into the air on either side of Mekhi's face as he sat down.

  “Is Mystery coming?” he asked hopefully.

  Dozens of gold bracelets clanked noisily as Rusty clapped herself on the forehead. “Fuck me! I guess I forgot to mention it. Mystery's on a six month world book tour. We've already sold five hundred thousand copies in Japan!”

  The last time Mekhi had seen Mystery had been at an open mike at the Rivington Rover Poetry Club downtown. They'd practically had sex on stage as they performed improv poetry together. Then the wan, horny, yellow-toothed poetess had retreated to write, and Mekhi hadn't seen her since.

  “But her book's not even out yet,” he protested.

  Rusty piled her fire engine red hair on top of her head and stuck a sharpened number two pencil through it. She picked up her martini and guzzled it, smearing hot pink lipstick all over the rim of the glass. “It doesn't matter if the book never comes out. Mystery's already a celebrity,” she declared.

  An avid chain-smoker, Mekhi was suddenly desperate for a cigarette. But smoking was prohibited, so instead he grabbed a fork from off the table and pressed the tines into the palm of his shaking hand. Mystery, who was only nineteen or twenty (Mekhi wasn't quite sure), had managed to write a memoir called Why I'm So Easy in less than a week. The day she'd finished it, Rusty had sold it to Random House for an astounding six-figure advance, with a film deal attached.

  Rusty scooted her chair forward and pushed her half-drunk glass of stale tap water toward Mekhi, as if she expected him to drink it. “I sent ‘Ashes, Ashes’ out to the North Dakota Review,” she told him offhandedly. “They hated it.”

  “Ashes, Ashes” was Mekhi's latest poem, written in the voice of a guy who misses his dead dog, only it was left up to the reader to figure out that the narrator was addressing a dog and not his old girlfriend or something.

  It's the first baseball game of the season

  I wait for your kiss

  Breath meaty like chocolate

  My shoes are still there

  One in your bed where you left it

  The other in the backseat of my car

  Mekhi slumped in his chair. The week his poem “Sluts” had come out in The New Yorker, he'd felt invincible and famous. Now he felt like a loser.

  “Sweetness, I can think of several reasons why your writing may not appeal to everyone the way Mystery's does,” Rusty crooned. “You're still young. All you need is some good training. Fuck me, I need another drink.” She belched into her fist and then stuck both hands above her head. Within seconds, a sploshingly full martini was set down before her.

  Mekhi picked up the half-empty glass of water and then set it down again. He wanted to ask her about those “several reasons” why his writing didn't appeal to everyone the way Mystery's did, but then again, he was pretty sure he knew. While Mystery mostly wrote about sex, Mekhi mostly wrote about death, or wanting to die, or wondering if being dead was better than being alive, which was kind of depressing if you thought about it. Also, he wasn't an orphan like Mystery was—according to legend, anyway. An orphan raised by prostitutes. Mekhi was just a seventeen-year-old kid who lived in a sprawling apartment on the Upper West Side with his outrageous but loving divorced dad, Rufus, and relatively loving, big-boobed little sister, Bree.

  “So was that all you wanted to tell me?” he asked, feeling very depressed indeed.

  “Are you kidding?” Fueled by the fourth gulp of martini number two, Rusty whipped a cell phone out of her limited edition Louis Vuitton purse. “Get ready, Mekhi boy. I'm calling Sig Castle at Red Letter. I'm going to get him to give you a job!”

  Red Letter was the most prestigious literary journal in the world. Started five years ago by the German poet Siegfried Castle in an abandoned warehouse in East Berlin, it had recently been bought by Condé Nast and moved to New York, where it was currently thriving i
n its role as the innovative avant-garde child of the publishers of Vogue and Lucky. Rusty started dialing before Mekhi even had a chance to respond. Sure, working at Red Letter would be an honor, but he wasn't really in the market for a job right now.

  “But I'm still in school,” he muttered. His agent tended to forget sometimes that he was only seventeen and therefore couldn't meet her for midmorning espressos on a Monday or fly to London on the spur of the moment to attend a poetry reading. Or hold a full time job.

  “Sig-Sig, it's Rusty,” she crooned. “Listen, babes, I'm sending you a poet. He's got potential, but he could use a little sharpening up. Got me?”

  Siegfried Castle—Mekhi still couldn't believe Rusty was actually talking to the Siegfried Castle—said something Mekhi couldn't hear. Rusty thrust the phone at him. “Sig wants a word.”

  Mekhi's hands dripped with sweat as he held the phone to his nervous ear and croaked, “Hello?”

  “I hawen't gut a cwue vho you ahr, but Wuthsty cweated dat vantastic Mystewy Cwaze, so I thuppose I muthst take you athswell, yah?” lisped Siegfried Castle in a snooty German accent.

  Mekhi could barely understand a word, except for the Mystery Craze part. How come everyone had heard of Mystery and no one had heard of him? After all, he'd been published in The New Yorker. “Thank you so much for the opportunity,” he responded meekly. “I have next week off school for spring break, so I can work all day. Once break is over, I can only come after school.”

  Rusty grabbed the phone away from him. “He'll be there Monday morning,” she pronounced. “Bye-bye, Sig-Sig.” Clicking off, she tossed her phone into her purse and groped for her martini. “We used to be lovers, but it's better now that we're friends,” she confessed. She reached out and pinched one of Mekhi's dark, confused cheeks. “Aw. You're Sig-Sig's new intern, his cutie-patootie little intern!”

  Rusty made it sound so demeaning, as if Mekhi would be spending his workdays stirring Siegfried Castle's decaf mochas and sharpening his pencils. But an internship at Red Letter was such a prestigious, impossible-to-get job, he couldn't possibly complain.

  “So, is Red Letter named after the letter A for adulteress that Hester Prynne had to wear in The Scarlet Letter?” he asked, genuinely interested.

  Rusty stared at him quizzically. “Fuck if I know.”

  5

  After the Rancor editorial meeting, Yasmine Richards raced out the door of Emma Willard and down the steps. Her hair didn't fly out behind her, bouncing prettily against her shoulders, because she kept her head shaved and basically had no hair. And she didn't have to worry about twisting her ankle in her heels, because she never wore heels. In fact, she never wore shoes, only boots. Big ones, with steel toes.

  The reason Yasmine was in such a hurry was because Ruby had given her a list of crap to buy at the health food store on the way home from school, and she really needed to get it done and get home before her parents arrived, just in case she'd forgotten to put away some evidence of her filmmaking and they found it and found her out.

  At the bottom of the steps, she nearly mowed down the very last person she'd expected to see. Mekhi, her former best friend and boyfriend. His freshly-cut hair was neatly styled, with long sideburns framing his serious jaw, and he was wearing a gray suit that looked French and expensive. This from a guy who previously only cut his hair when he stopped being able to see, and who wore the same pair of brown corduroys until the bottoms were frayed and there were holes in the knees.

  Yasmine tugged on her black wool leg warmers and folded her arms across her chest. “Hello.” Why the fuck are you here, anyway?

  “Hey,” Mekhi responded. “I'm just waiting for Bree,” he explained. “I got a job today. I wanted to tell her about it.”

  “Good for you.” Yasmine waited for Mekhi to say something else. After all, he was the one who'd cheated on her with that Mystery bitch, and he was the one who'd completely sold out to become famous. He could at least apologize for that.

  Mekhi remained speechless, his eyes shifting from her face to the school doors and back to her face again. Yasmine could tell he was dying to tell her about his new job, but she wasn't going to give him the satisfaction of asking about it. She pulled a tube of Vaseline out of her jacket pocket and smeared some on her lips. It was the closest thing to lip gloss she owned. “I saw your sister inside, talking to her art teacher. She'll be out in a minute.”

  “So what's up?” Mekhi asked, just as she was about to take off.

  Yasmine suspected he was only asking so she would ask him what was up, and then he could tell her all about how he'd been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize or some shit.

  “My parents are coming to town tonight,” she responded, caving in a little. “You know how much fun that always is for me,” she added, and then wished she hadn't. It didn't do any good to remind them both that they knew everything about each other now that they no longer spoke. “Anyway. Bye.

  “Yeah.” Mekhi held up his hand and gave her a big smile, the kind of fake, shit-eating smile he'd never even known how to give until he started going to fashion shows with air-kissing agents and famous weirdo-slut poetesses. “Good to see you.”

  Good to see you too, asswipe, Yasmine responded silently as she strode toward Lexington Avenue to catch the subway to Williamsburg.

  Actually, it was kind of good to see Mekhi, and she'd wanted to tell him more. She'd wanted to tell him how her parents' incessant “We are artists, hear us roar” personas stifled every ounce of creativity in her. How her parents didn't even know she made films, even though it was basically the only thing she enjoyed doing. How they didn't even know she'd gotten in early to NYU, purely on the strength of her art. And how they wouldn't know, for the duration of their nearly two-week stay, that her bedroom closet was stuffed with film equipment and her favorite old videos. Ironic though it might seem, Ruby—the kid who never went to college, wore leather pants all the time even though she was a vegetarian, and played bass in a weird, loud, almost all-male garage band—was the creative child, the favorite.

  Yup. Mekhi would've gotten a kick out of that. That is, if they were still talking.

  Arriving in Williamsburg, she hurried out of the subway and into the natural food store only a few blocks away. Soy mozzarella, wheat-free lasagna noodles...she read from the list Ruby had given her. Tonight Ruby was making her famous soy-tempeh lasagna in honor of their parents' arrival. There was another thing that set Yasmine apart. She was a carnivore, while Ruby and her parents were all vegetarians.

  She pulled a brick of tempeh out of the store's fridge. “You don't even look like food,” she told it, tossing it into her shopping basket. She shook her head and smiled bitterly as she walked down the aisle in search of the wheat-free section. Her father was always talking to inanimate objects. It was part of his whole “kooky artist” mystique. But Yasmine wasn't really an artist—yet—and if she didn't find someone to talk to besides a brick of vegetarian meat replacement she didn't even like the taste of, she'd be worse than kooky: She'd just go plain insane.

  “Why don't you go out and do something with your friends?” Ruby always asked whenever Yasmine looked particularly sad, bitter, and lonely. Yasmine always treated this question the same way she treated the question, Why don't you wear colors instead of only black? Because to her, black was a color—the only color. Just like Mekhi was her only friend. It was going to be weird when her parents asked about him, and even weirder not having anyone to hang out with over break.

  Unless…unless she found someone else to hang out with.

  6

  There he was! Bree flew down the school steps. Damien—which was clearly representative of Damien Hirst, who was a great, if not one of the greatest, artist in her opinion—Damien, her Damien, was waiting for her after school like a good boyfriend, the best boyfriend. Super tall and super cute, with happy brown eyes, an adorable chipped front tooth, and a loping gait. And he was hers, all hers!

  “Look, it's your brother,
” she heard her new best friend, Elise Wells, say behind her as she raced toward Damien. Only a few feet away, Mekhi stood hunched with his hands in his pockets, as if she were ten years old again and he was waiting to pick her up.

  Bree stood on tiptoe and kissed Damien's cheek as Mekhi stood watching. “Hi,” she murmured into Damien's ear, feeling extremely mature. With luck her entire class—no, the entire school—was watching enviously right now.

  “You're all warm,” Damien mumbled, taking her small hand in his awkward gangly one. His wrist accidentally brushed her boob and he blushed.

  Bree Hargrove was tiny, the shortest girl in her ninth-grade class, but she had the biggest boobs in the entire school, or maybe the entire world. They were so big, she'd considered getting them surgically reduced, but after some consideration, she'd decided they were part of what made her her, and so she'd decided to keep them. And after living with them for fourteen years, she'd grown accustomed to people accidentally bumping into them because they stuck out so far, but Damien was clearly still figuring out how to deal with them.

  Sure he was.

  “So, what should we do?” he asked, his voice barely audible. At first, Bree had trouble understanding him when he talked, since he spoke in near whispers and preferred texting to talking on the phone. But when she thought about it, she kind of liked that no one else could possibly overhear what Damien said to her. It was like they had their own private language. And it made Damien seem more troubled and mysterious, like someone with a dark past.

  Mekhi had heard all about Damien Berensen, the boy Bree had met online, but he'd never met him. He walked over and introduced himself. “So you're a sophomore? At Smale? I hear graphic art is pretty big there.”

  “Yeah,” Damien replied inaudibly, his eyes barely skimming over Mekhi's face. Bree hung on his arm and beamed up at him as if he'd just saved the world with his words. “Pretty much.”