Like a magnet drawn to metal, he felt himself being pulled back to Times Square. Having a destination cheered him up, and he began to walk with purpose. He would, he decided, get something to eat, then wander around a little bit to look for Matt Gower. After that, he’d try to drum up some money if he could. He wasn’t at rock bottom yet, but his resources were getting lower, and the idea of not having enough money to eat was a scary one. After hanging out in Times Square for the early part of the evening, he planned to leave while it was still light and head to the park to look for a better sleeping spot. That bench had been far from ideal, but it had taught him that he could have done a better job packing. A thin blanket would have provided coverage from bugs and a barrier from the night air. In a pinch, it could be draped over a bush and made into a tent. If it was waterproof on one side, all the better. He’d heard of a young designer who’d created a coat that unfolded for purposes such as these. Something like that would have been invaluable.
Times Square was just as crowded and loud as the day before. On one corner, a Peruvian trio played, two guys on pan flutes and one on drums. Dalton kept walking. On the other side of Times Square, a kid wearing a knit skullcap danced to the loud thumping of a boom box. Bystanders clapped in time as he spun and flipped to the music. Dalton continued on. Performers dressed up as Disney characters, action figures, and other random entertainers called out as he went by. “You take picture with me, yes?” asked Spider-Man.
“No, thanks.”
He went into the Times Square McDonald’s. It wasn’t his first choice, but he knew the menu. It was cheap, quick, and tasty. The line was long, and it was humid indoors, but twenty minutes later, he was fed for the night.
He returned to the brick wall he’d shared with Matt, slid down to sit, and got out his harmonica. With his baseball cap in front of his crossed legs, he was in business. This was, he decided, a good spot, after all. It was off the beaten path but still had enough people going by that someone was bound to throw some money his way. In exchange, he was prepared to entertain them with the musical musings of his Hohner harmonica. He knew only two songs: “When the Saints Go Marching In” and “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” He’d learned these two songs at summer camp by rote memorization when he was ten, and weirdly enough, the knowledge had stuck with him.
His limited repertoire didn’t matter to the people walking past because all they heard was what he was playing at the time. A few looked down and smiled as they went by, but it took a good twenty minutes before he saw any money, and that was change, a few quarters flung into his cap by an older woman in a hurry. He would have thanked her, but she was out of earshot by the time he could get the words out.
He kept going, totally getting into it, conducting with one hand while holding the harmonica to his mouth with the other. When he saw a pair of men’s hiking boots stop directly in front of him, he looked up to see a scowling guy with cropped hair staring down. The man had his arms folded disapprovingly in front of his sleeveless T-shirt. Dalton was at the “merrily, merrily, merrily” part of the song and stopped. “Can I help you?”
“Are you crippled?” he asked angrily.
“Me? No.”
“Do you have a debilitating physical condition, some disease that doesn’t allow you to function properly?”
“No.”
“Are you mentally ill?”
Dalton could see where this was going. He shifted uncomfortably on the pavement. “Not technically.”
“Then why don’t you get a damn job like the rest of us? A healthy young guy like you begging for money. You should be ashamed of yourself.” Having smugly made his point, he strode off and didn’t look back.
“Thank you, sir. You have a good evening too!” Dalton yelled at his back as he kept going. From the hunch of his shoulders, it was clear he’d heard him, but he didn’t bother to respond. Dalton felt rattled by the man’s anger. Rattled and ashamed. Even knowing he was participating in a social experiment of his own choosing didn’t help.
It’s not like he didn’t know that some people felt this way. This man was just a rougher version of his father. It was different, though, hearing someone talk about the homeless in general versus having that kind of contempt aimed right at him. Even though he’d done nothing wrong, he felt shame sweep over him. It didn’t get more personal than that.
In an attempt to shake it off, he turned back to the harmonica. For some inexplicable reason, business picked up after that. It might have been that the people who came by were more generous, or maybe he just looked a whole lot sadder, but the money flowed in for the last three songs. One group of Asian tourists was exceedingly generous. They wanted him to stand up and pose for pictures with them, which he did. By the excited way they went on and on, he speculated that they thought he was someone else. Someone important. A celebrity maybe? He wasn’t sure, but whatever. In all, he made seventeen dollars and thirty-six cents. And got heckled only once. Pretty good for his first time panhandling.
Later in the park, he filled his plastic water bottle with water from one of the restrooms, then used the facilities and washed up. This was his life now: trying to stay hydrated and fed, avoiding bugs and predators, keeping his possessions safe, and searching for a fairly comfortable place to sleep. Tomorrow he’d seek out other homeless people and try to get a read on their situations.
CHAPTER NINE
Cece looked small and plain. Standing there with wet hair and no makeup, she looked more like a teenager than an adult woman. The troubled look on her face was not an expression Greta recognized from the videos. Cece asked again, “If I found out what?”
Katrina stood up and threw her arms out wide, one of them pointing straight at Greta. “If you found out that Greta’s here!”
Vance joined in. “We were going to make it a surprise and have Greta show up at the door, but you got here too quickly.”
“Greta’s here?” She turned her head and did a double take, then smiled.
Greta got up from the table, ready to thank her for the internship, but before she could say a word, Cece had thrown her arms around her, giving her a tight hug. The two were nearly the same height, their heads so closely aligned that their ears nearly touched. “Oh, Greta, I’m so glad you’re finally here,” she whispered.
Finally here? Greta found this puzzling since she’d arrived as quickly as she could on a flight Deborah’s assistant had booked. It’s not like she could have come any earlier. Maybe it was just an expression. “Thank you. I’m glad to be here.” Greta started to say what an honor it was to be allowed to intern for Firstborn Daughter, Inc. and how it would make her résumé stand out in a big way when Katrina broke in.
“I hate to interrupt,” she said, “but we have a full schedule, and we’re already behind.”
Cece’s face fell. “Can’t we just forget about the schedule? I’d love to have the day to spend with Greta.” Her words tamped down the energy in the room.
“I think we’d all love a day off,” Vance said with a laugh. “If we could forget the schedule, we would, Cece. But hair and makeup will be here in an hour, and you still have to eat. We have to go over the setup and learn our lines, because the film crew comes at twelve thirty. A lot of other people are involved besides us. We can’t let them down.”
A film crew? Hair and makeup? Greta had no idea what was going on, but her first day on the job was sounding way more involved than she’d anticipated.
Cece sighed dramatically. “I hate this. I just hate this. Why don’t I ever get to decide?”
“Cece, if you’d just—” Katrina tried to speak.
“It’s exhausting!”
Vance rushed in to put an arm around Cece’s shoulders and began to speak soothingly. “Now, Cece, mornings are always tough, but we’ll get through it together, right?”
“I know, but . . . ”
“Come on, Cece,” he said playfully. “I know it’s hard to get started, but after we get warmed up, we have a lot of fun, don’t we? Don’t
we?”
She nodded. He walked her to the other side of the room and kept talking, his face next to hers, voice low. Cece’s shoulders dropped, relaxing as he spoke. She didn’t have the personality Greta had expected from seeing her videos. Was she overtired? Hungover? Impossible to know. One good thing, Greta reflected: Cece seemed genuinely happy to see her. Maybe with time they’d become friends. Actual friends, not like the kind her parents hired.
Katrina whispered to Greta, “It’s amazing the way he can always get her to calm down. I call him the Cece Whisperer.”
“Because Vance is Cece’s gay boyfriend,” Greta said.
“What?”
“Hashtag gay boyfriend,” Greta clarified, referencing what she’d seen on social media.
“Oh, yeah.”
Within a minute or two, Cece came back smiling and joined everyone else at the kitchen table. Once Cece began eating, Katrina laid out what they’d be doing that morning. “Vance and I stayed up almost all night coming up with your backstory, Greta, and I think you’ll love what we came up with.” She had an over-the-top smile that made Greta think loving it was her only option. “We’re playing up the cousin aspect of the relationship between you and Cece and doing a kind of compare-and-contrast thing.”
Vance said, “Sort of like that kids’ story The Country Mouse and the City Mouse.”
“I don’t think I know that one,” Greta said.
“Don’t worry about it. It’s not critical for you to know it.”
“Why do I need a backstory?”
Katrina looked a little exasperated, but Vance jumped in to explain. “All of Cece’s social media accounts are carefully orchestrated. What her followers are seeing are not just random bits of her life but videos and stills designed to enhance the brand. For instance, when Cece’s clothing line won that ‘Made in America’ award, we could have just announced it and shown a picture of the plaque, but that would have been boring, so instead we had her tour one of the manufacturing facilities—”
“I remember that!” Greta said, recalling the time the three had visited the factory that manufactured Cece’s clothing line. They’d handed out thank-you cards with $500 tucked inside to each of the employees. “The people working at the machines couldn’t believe you guys were there. They had to shut down the line, and then they all gave Cece a standing ovation and clapped for like five minutes. The one guy said because he had that job, he finally had health insurance that would pay for his daughter’s surgery. Oh, man, that one made me cry.”
“That’s what I’m talking about,” Vance said approvingly. “We want to create an emotional response. Making a connection is always our goal.”
“Wait a minute. So none of it is real?” Greta asked, stunned. First, she’d found out that Vance and Katrina had auditioned to be Cece’s friends. Now she was coming to the realization that everything she knew about Cece’s life was a sham, a fabrication made to sell perfume and clothing.
“We try to tie it in to Cece’s life as much as possible. Every now and then, we include her parents and Brenna to drive home that she’s a part of the Vanderhaven family empire, but for the most part, we emphasize the single-girl-in-the-city aspect. A majority of the clips and photos are filmed here, so that part is real. We’re really in Cece’s kitchen or bedroom or whatever. When we’re at an event or a club, we have to set it up ahead of time so we can get permission to film there and get photo releases from whoever winds up being in the shot. It gets more involved, especially if we’re in a club and there are a lot of people in the background.”
“What about when you guys had a bet to see which one of you could bake the best Christmas cookies?” That one had been Greta’s personal favorite. Vance and Katrina had a cookie Bake-Off while Cece served as the judge. As it turned out, it hadn’t been much of a contest. Vance had done an absolutely awesome job. His cookies had looked fantastic while Katrina’s gingerbread men had been a disaster—undercooked, misshapen, and droopy. The expression on Katrina’s face when she pulled her cookies out of the oven became a meme Greta had seen hundreds of times, captioned with “When even your cookies hate you.” She’d watched that particular clip whenever she felt a little down, and it made her laugh every single time.
Vance laughed. “Our favorite bakery whipped up my cookies. I told them not to make them too perfect, and they did an incredible job. In exchange for their silence, we featured their business on Valentine’s Day.”
Greta kept glancing Cece’s way to see her take on all of this, but she just nibbled on some fruit, not participating in the conversation at all.
Katrina added, “After the Valentine Day’s episode, their sales went up something like four hundred percent. A total win for everyone.”
Greta felt a catch in her chest. Finding out none of it was real felt like a betrayal. “But you said you were an expert baker because you used to help your mom make Christmas cookies.”
“That part’s true,” he said with a nod. “Family tradition. My sisters and I always gathered around the kitchen table making cutout cookies and decorating them. We did our share of eating them too.”
Katrina riffled through her folders and passed out paperwork to each of them. Glancing over it, Greta saw what looked like a script, complete with stage directions and dialogue for each of them. The scene began with a knock on the door. When Cece opened it, Greta would be on the other side, crying. And it went from there with five pages of dialogue.
Greta looked at Katrina. “I don’t get it. What is this?”
“What we’re shooting today. Generally, we film ten or fifteen minutes and then edit it into smaller bits. The shorter clips are released on social media sites as teasers for the longer version. We wait to release that one to the YouTube channel. By the time it comes out, her followers are dying to see the whole thing.”
“I understand that it’s a script,” Greta said, slightly exasperated. “But why is the script saying that I just showed up without any notice? I would never do that. And this thing about me crying that my boyfriend, Nate, dumped me? That’s not true. Why can’t I just be coming to visit and to do an internship?”
“That’s your backstory,” Vance said. “If we said you were coming to do an internship, that would be way too boring, so we dreamed up this awesome entrance for you.”
“It will be a great opportunity for you to spread your wings, dramatically speaking,” Katrina said. “And when you start off in such a low place, that gives us room to have a great character arc.”
“A character arc?” Greta understood what a character arc was; she just didn’t know how it applied to her.
“You know,” Katrina said, “a character arc. You show up devastated from the breakup with your boyfriend. You’re also down on your luck, down to your last dollar. Then Cece takes you in, gives you a makeover and some great advice, and totally turns your life around.”
Cece suddenly glanced up, interested. “I love doing makeovers. And Greta is so pretty already, it wouldn’t take much.”
“Now we’re talking,” Vance said with a grin. “When Cece’s on board, it always turns out great. You’re gonna love this, Greta, and so will Cece’s followers. They’ll be so excited watching as you’re transformed from Greta’s Midwestern cousin from dairy farm country to a glamorous New Yorker seeing all the sights. It’s a great angle.”
Greta said, “But I don’t live on a dairy farm. My family lives in a house in the suburbs right off the interstate. We can drive to Milwaukee in, like, thirty minutes.”
“We’re taking some liberties, it’s true, but if it makes you feel better, we won’t show a farm and say you live there. We’ll imply that you’re used to a more rural life. Vance and I saw that Highway 83 runs from your subdivision past farm fields on the way to the shopping complex and movie theater, and we figured we’d work in some of that footage to show how different your life is from Cece’s here in Manhattan,” Katrina said. “Not a lie, just an inference.”
Greta mulled
it over for a few seconds. “I guess I’m okay with that, but me getting dumped by my boyfriend? There’s no way I want to play it that way.” For that matter, how did they even know about Nate? She’d never posted anything about the breakup, although she had changed her relationship status to single and stopped mentioning him. They’d gone out for only a few months. At first, he’d seemed like a great guy. Lots of fun, not too needy, said all the right things. After a while, she’d started to notice times when he seemed bossy and full of himself. When he commented on his female cousin’s fifty-pound weight gain after two years of marriage and said, in complete seriousness, that he thought it was grounds for divorce, Greta had gained total clarity. Gaining weight was grounds for divorce? What a superficial jerk. He was, she decided, not even someone she’d want as a friend, much less as a boyfriend.
When she told him the relationship was over and why, he laughed. “If speaking my mind is a reason to dump me, you’re going to be alone your whole life.” It had bruised her feelings at the time and made her wonder too—was he right? She hadn’t really had any successful long-term relationships with men. Why was that? Too picky, some said. She was being unrealistic. No one is perfect, they reminded her.
As she watched friends become happy couples, she sometimes wondered if she would be alone her whole life. She imagined decades going by, living alone, traveling by herself, no one to talk to at the end of the workday. The thought made her sad.
But what was wrong with holding out for the perfect match? It seemed to her that making a commitment to a man she wasn’t ideally suited for would be even worse. Maybe she was being overly romantic, but if she couldn’t have perfect, what was the point?
She’d been insulted when Nate told her she was going to be single her whole life, and hurt too, but beyond that, there wasn’t much in the way of breakup drama. Soon both of them had moved on. She saw him out at a bar a few months later and said hi as she walked past. He smiled and returned the greeting. Not a big deal.
Greta felt compelled to share her side of things. “Just for the record, I broke up with Nate. And there was no drama. At all. I don’t think he even cared that much.”
Good Man, Dalton Page 7
