by Jenny Lee
By the time Lolly got to the phone in the office, she was hysterically crying, assuming someone had died. Kimmie told her older sister to stop blubbering and just listen. Lolly yelled at her younger sister for scaring her and then gave Kimmie her first lesson on how to recognize an Ambien stupor. Lolly’s theory was that sometimes when their mom couldn’t sleep even after taking an Ambien, she’d take another one in the morning, but then forget. She would then have her usual Nespresso to avoid a caffeine headache and go back to bed. This would produce a weird, chemically induced fugue state where their mother looked like she was awake, but was actually asleep.
“Let me guess,” Lolly said. “She’s watching TV?”
“Yes!” Kimmie answered.
“What’s she watching?”
“Some old movie called Sixteen Candles?” Kimmie said. “But she’s just watching the last five minutes, and when it ends she lifts her arm up like Frankenstein’s ex-wife and rewinds it to the part where the redhead walks out of the church in an ugly dress. She did it like seven times in a row. It’s freaking me out.”
“Been there, done that, own the T-shirt. Look, I wigged out the first time I saw Mom like that, too. It’s totally Stranger Things meets Paranormal Activity in a four-hundred-dollar bathrobe!” Lolly whispered, because she could tell the nosy office secretary was trying to eavesdrop. “Don’t sweat it, she’ll stop eventually. But once, years ago, I sat with her when she was watching the Hathaway transformation montage from The Devil Wears Prada and she finally agreed to get me a navy Prada mini backpack. So there’s bennies, too.”
“What’s a ‘bennies’?” Kimmie asked. Nothing made her feel more like a little sister than not understanding her older sister’s coolgirl slang.
“Benefits, dumb ass. Okay, gotta go. And next time, be a normal person and text me instead of calling the school and scaring the shit out of me.”
Kimmie, now understanding the deal and feeling sorry for her mom, sat and watched the end of Sixteen Candles with her at least ten more times, later taking the DVD and watching the whole thing on her laptop. Because of that day, those last five minutes of the movie were burned into Kimmie’s brain forever.
In Kimmie’s updated, Valentine’s Day version, she’d be wearing different clothes, of course, probably a pink dress, which sounded so basic, but Kimmie couldn’t help it if she looked best in a cliché color. Even though Kimmie found the flower crown tired, she had one on like the redhead, only not in such disgusting colors and for sure with zero baby’s breath. Once the street cleared, there he’d be. Count Vronsky was for sure her Jake Ryan, and instead of a red Porsche, he’d be leaning against a black Maserati. But Vronsky would do the exact same shy-smile-and-wave that Jake Ryan did. In Kimmie’s version she wouldn’t do whole “who, me?” thing and look behind her in shock, because Kimmie would know he was there for her. And he’d be holding a heart-shaped box of chocolate marshmallows, because it was Valentine’s Day, after all.
Kimmie had honestly believed this was going to be the first Valentine’s Day of her life to experience being in love and having a boyfriend. But that was before Sucky Saturday, which was what she was calling that agonizing night at the club.
“C’mon Kimmie, stop daydreaming. Let’s go! We’re running late.” Her mother ushered her into the backseat of their Uber, which was waiting at the curb. Kimmie was horrified to discover it was the same car with the giant red teddy bear in the front passenger seat that had passed by her earlier. If she survived this ridiculously stupid day, it’d be an honest-to-god miracle.
IV
Anna held the cardboard box in her lap for a few minutes before opening it. She first exchanged pleasantries with Thomas, one of her father’s regular drivers. She hadn’t seen him in a while, so he showed her a few pictures of his new twin grandbabies born on New Year’s Day in Virginia. In return Anna explained the inner workings of Westminster to him, which reminded her that she had forgotten to bring the plush, heart-shaped squeaky toys she had gotten for her two dogs.
Lee Ann and Ali, her dogs’ trainers and handlers, had picked up Gemma and Jon Snow on Sunday evening before Anna left for dinner with Alexander. She needed to get them used to being without her, and they would both be groomed first thing Monday morning in the city. Anna could have brought Gemma back to Greenwich last night, but she decided Jon Snow would be calmer with his sister around. This reminded Anna of her own brother, who got in less trouble when she was present, too.
Anna noticed her hands were shaking when she started to peel the tape off the box with her fingernails. She knew she was being silly, but there was nothing she could do to calm her nerves. She would never get a job with the bomb squad, that was certain.
Since they parted on the train platform eleven days ago, Anna hadn’t seen him at all. Well, that wasn’t exactly true. One day last week she decided to sit with Beatrice at lunch, where they talked about how much fun they’d had at Jaylen’s party. And like a game of cat and mouse, neither girl brought up Vronsky’s name. When Anna asked whether Beatrice had stayed in the city that weekend, she had told Anna she’d come back to Greenwich on Sunday to hang out with her fam. She showed Anna a picture of her mother’s new custom Range Rover she had received as an early Valentine’s Day gift from Beatrice’s father. In the picture, Anna noticed Vronsky in the driver’s seat, but he wasn’t facing the camera. When looking at it, it took all her strength to not grab Bea’s phone and enlarge the photo so she could study his profile. Instead, she commented on how she always loved the giant red bows that arrived on new cars and wondered where they were made.
“No doubt they were assembled by tiny hands in China,” Beatrice said. Anna didn’t react, though she noticed that Beatrice realized her error and didn’t apologize, probably thinking Anna wouldn’t be offended since she wasn’t Chinese. This was exactly the kind of snarky comment Steven would make, so Anna was used to it even though she didn’t approve.
“Was your mother happy with her new car?” Anna asked.
“Yes and no, she pulled me aside and asked me if I knew of any reason why my dad would feel guilty enough to buy her a new car. She just got a new car two years ago, and my mother barely drives herself as it is.” Beatrice laughed, but again, Anna stayed quiet. She couldn’t help but feel like Bea was testing her, so she wanted to be careful with what she revealed.
“Did your dad have a reason to be guilty?” Anna took the bait.
“Depends on how puritanical your values are,” replied Bea breezily. “In my book, no. But does he probably have some new yummy twentysomething bouncing on his dick? Absoposilutely! My dad’s no saint.”
“I wouldn’t expect so, with you as his acorn,” Anna tossed out.
“Hot damn, girl! I always knew you had a little Veronica in there,” Bea squealed.
Anna’s first instinct was to apologize immediately, but before she could Beatrice placed her perfectly manicured finger over Anna’s lips to stop her. “Don’t you dare apologize. Bettys are très boring, and I know you’re not that.” Anna, pleased by the praise, spent the rest of lunch with Bea and her friends, a gaggle of popular girls whose topics of conversation hopscotched from fashion to boys to gossip with rapid-fire banter and lots of laughter. It was quite a fun change of pace for Anna, who sat with them a few more times as well. This year she had been spending her lunches getting a head start on her homework now that Alexander was in college and she no longer ate lunch with him at the Wick cafeteria.
In the car, Anna took the top off the box and stared at its contents. Inside were an envelope and two small gifts wrapped in red paper and white ribbons. Inside the larger of the two boxes, she found two gorgeous red leather dog collars. Each one had an engraved heart-shaped charm hanging from the silver ring with her dog’s names on one side and her own phone number on the other. There was a small white card at the bottom of the box that read: “Best of luck for Best in Show!” Anna didn’t even realize she was smiling until Thomas commented from the driver’s seat. �
��Someone seems pleased. Gifts from Alexander W.?”
At the mention of her boyfriend’s name Anna felt an immediate flood of shame. “It’s from my brother. I did him a favor recently so he’s just showing his thanks, I guess.” Anna exhaled. There it is. The first lie. She dismissed her thoughts and opened the next box, which contained a small red velvet drawstring pouch. She pulled out what looked like a dog collar charm, but this one was heavier than the others. The charm was a thick shiny heart a little bigger than a quarter. She knew enough about jewelry to recognize this charm was more than likely white gold or platinum, as there was weight to it. Anna stared at it and saw that on one side of the heart the word YOU was engraved and on the other side, the word ME. Reading the words, she gasped.
“Everything okay, Miss K.?” Thomas asked.
She nodded quickly, unable to speak, her mouth suddenly dry. Anna quickly slipped the charm into her pocket, grabbed the envelope, and then closed the box, thinking that when she arrived at Madison Square Garden she’d store it in her overnight bag in the trunk. She had planned to sleep in the city that night. When she texted Steven of her plans, he’d told her about his V-Day, mentioning that since Lolly couldn’t sleep in the hotel overnight, he planned to come home after he dropped her off.
Even though Steven probably didn’t remember, he once drunkenly told her about their dad’s standing hotel room at the St. Regis. It was a room rented by his company for any C-level executive who was working late and couldn’t get home (her dad’s office was two blocks away), but from what she gathered, the only person who had the key to the room was her dad. Steven had to have gotten permission from their father to use it for Valentine’s Day, and she wondered whether Steven was going to share with Lolly that the suite may or may not be used by their father as a place to bring women.
When she had learned about the hotel room, Anna didn’t know what to think. In her eyes her father was perfect, and she didn’t like to think of him keeping secrets from her mother. She comforted herself with thoughts that her parents had been happily married for over twenty years, and perhaps her mom knew about the room. Anna wasn’t naïve and had read enough books to know that marriage was complicated and some couples had certain “arrangements.” But she had a hard time believing her mother would ever be the type of woman to turn a blind eye.
They were in Manhattan by the time Anna gathered the courage to open the last envelope. It was smaller than a regular greeting card and thinner, too. Inside the envelope, a postcard-sized ink drawing outlined four men wearing suits and sunglasses posing on a set of steps. The drawing was finely detailed, but there were no words on it, and Anna drew a total blank at who these men were or what they were supposed to represent.
Anna loved a good mystery, but she was irritated by the drawing. The fact that she didn’t understand it made her feel stupid, and she racked her brain, going over everything the two of them had said to each other, which was very little. The most time they’d spent together so far was on the dance floor, but they had barely spoken for hours; their main communication that night had been through dancing.
Then, like a lightning bolt, she knew. She opened her phone and typed the words “Now that we found love.” She hit search. Heavy D & The Boyz was the name of the group who sang the song from the club. Anna hit “images” and several pictures of the band came up. One of them was the exact pose on the postcard she was holding. She searched the lyrics and read them again, which brought her back to their last dance of the night.
Now that we found love, what are we gonna do … with it?
Anna smiled, her eyes sparkling with happiness at the secret message. She stared at the tiny work of art and thought about Vronsky hand drawing it for her while he listened to the song, thinking of her as he sketched. What a wonderful box of Valentines, each one more surprising and unique than the next. These gifts were très romantic! They couldn’t have been given to any other girl; they were for her and her alone.
It was then that Anna finally admitted she had been thinking of him for the last week and half as well. She’d wondered if Vronsky remembered her dogs were competing at Westminster, and now she had confirmation he did. Her heart fluttered at the thought that maybe he would be there. Would he dare? Could he be so bold?
Anna grabbed her makeup bag out of her purse and decided a touch-up might be in order. As her mother always advised her, you never know when you’ll get asked to go leaf-peeping in some cute guy’s Lambo.
V
Kimmie hadn’t seen Dr. Becker, her pediatrician, in a few years. Competitive athletes see sports-medicine doctors, and all last year she had only dealt with orthopedic surgeons because of her knee. But Dr. Becker had been her pediatrician since she was a baby. After a few minutes of catch-up with her mom in the exam room, Dr. Becker asked her mother to go wait outside while he examined Kimmie. As soon as her mother left, his demeanor changed. Dr. Becker was the doctor of choice for a lot of rich kids in Manhattan, so he was a guy who had seen and heard it all before. He was incredibly successful because he knew how to handle the parents of rich kids as well as the kids themselves.
Kimmie told her doctor how she’d started to feel mysteriously achy and tired a week and a half ago and then said nothing more. Dr. Becker gave her a look that said, “Cut the act and just tell me the real deal.” There was something about his look that made Kimmie realize she needed to do exactly that, which is when she started crying … and blabbering. He listened for a bit, and then typed something on his iPad. Seeing him record her tale of woe made her incredibly self-conscious, so she stopped talking.
“So you started feeling bad after this sweet sixteen party on the second, but you really started to feel bad in the last five days? Is that correct?” Dr. Becker questioned.
Kimmie nodded.
“During this party, were you drinking or doing drugs?” Dr. Becker asked, prompting her to continue.
Kimmie, still crying, shook her head. Like she would ever dare admit such a thing to the man who used to give her lollipops after every visit.
“Kimmie, what we talk about in here is privileged, so I’m not going to tell your mom. The only time I have an obligation to tell her anything is if I think you’re a danger to yourself or others. So tell me, did you drink or do drugs at the party?”
Kimmie decided she didn’t care anymore what he thought about her and started talking, realizing that once she did, she couldn’t stop. It felt good to finally have someone to confess to. Kimmie told him how she had been having a tough time now that she was a “civilian” again, no longer an Olympic hopeful but instead just a regular teenage girl. Who knew going to school at Spence would be way more challenging than waking up at 4:30 A.M. and getting to the ice rink for practice? She had never minded her early morning routine, mainly because when she was alone on the ice, she had a lot of time to think.
Kimmie admitted to suffering from insomnia for the first month of school because she hated how the other girls were whispering about her. And she felt too old to make new friends. Sure, she had it a little easier than most new students because of Lolly, but it was still hard. Lolly was often too busy with her upperclassmen friends. Kimmie liked her older sister, but their early tween years had been so different, with Kimmie always traveling for competitions and rarely spending time at home, that they weren’t as close as they could be. Kimmie felt like she was woefully behind when it came to her social development and was struggling to catch up.
“I’m not used to being not good at stuff,” Kimmie wailed pitifully. “Teenage girls are even judgier than ice dancing judges!”
“Never has a truer statement been made,” Dr. Becker replied sympathetically.
Kimmie eventually told him that she tried Molly on New Year’s Eve and she’d tried cocaine for the first time at the club, throwing her sister’s boyfriend under the bus in the process as the one who gave her the drugs. She then listened as Dr. Becker explained what a coke hangover was like and how, by doing it, Kimmie had blown a
ll the dopamine storage units in her brain. Which was absolutely the reason why she was so tired and needed a few days to recover.
“But if that really was only your first experience with cocaine, it doesn’t explain why you’re still feeling this terrible and crying eleven days later. I’m wondering if there’s more to the story? I promise you I’ve heard it all before. Not to say your unhappiness isn’t special, because it is. I’m just saying you need to trust me and tell me if there’s more than you’re letting on. Because if I had to make an educated guess, I’d say there may be a boy involved.”
Kimmie nodded glumly and finally spilled the tea about her shameful abasement at the hands of Vronsky. “I thought he was into me!” she blubbered, looking at the floor. “And I … I loved him. Or at least I thought I did. He used me, and I feel so stupid!”
When Dr. Becker asked Kimmie if she’d had sex with Vronsky, or with any boy for that matter, she blushed crimson and emphatically stated she had not. “No way, I would never. We just did … other stuff,” and watched as her pediatrician typed a sentence into his iPad. Hours later in the cab going home, Kimmie wondered what he had written, and if it was along the lines of “Thou doth protest too much.”
After her physical exam was over and his nurse had drawn four tubes of blood from her arm for the slate of tests he had ordered, Dr. Becker handed her a red heart-shaped lollipop with the word LOVE printed on it in white. “Sorry, kiddo, these are the only ones I have today,” he apologized. “I know you feel like crap about this Vronsky fellow, but I’m sure you’ll have no problem finding someone more deserving of your affection.”
Waiting for the elevator with her mom, Kimmie thought about her doctor’s last words to her, which she knew he’d said to make her feel better, but instead made her feel worse. Because it wasn’t true. Even though she hated Vronsky’s guts right now, she honestly felt there was no one more deserving than him in the entire city. She stared at the word LOVE printed on the heart-shaped candy in her hand and her bottom lip started quivering. She threw it in the trash can next to the elevator, but it was too late, a storm of fat tears had already begun to fall.
