Rosebush
“What do you mean? Why was she yelling at him?” I asked.
“Not just yelling,” Langley said, her eyes wide for emphasis. “She kept saying, ‘How do you like Kicky Nicky?’ and giving it to him in the shins.”
Kate leaned in confidingly to say with a wicked smile, “Which was admittedly kinda fun to watch?”
“For a preacher’s daughter you’re a bit on the evil side. You know that, right?” Langley asked.
“Part of my charm.” Kate batted her eyelashes.
“Why do you think Nicky was freaking out?” I asked.
“It’s Nicky.” Langley shrugged like that was answer enough. “We tried to find her today, but there were a few people who didn’t get back to us to be on the first part of the video.”
“Probably still sleeping the party off,” Kate said. “I bet a lot of people are?”
Did she and Langley exchange a look?
Langley said, a little too eagerly, “The doctor said we should talk to you to help you remember what happened Thursday night.”
“Although frankly, if I were you, I might not,” Kate said.
“What do you mean?” I asked them.
“Well, since the night included Crippen break dancing—”
“Literally,” Kate put in, “as in ‘break the coffee table and an urn.’”
“—and a lot of sophomores in unfortunate knockoff dresses, you’re better off not remembering. The whole thing was more faux than fun.”
“My memories are so sketchy. I remember walking in and then looking for the boys.”
“We found them in that media room watching some special about the mating practices of bonobos and getting high,” Langley reminded me. “You crawled into David’s lap, but since Kate and I aren’t huge Chimps Gone Wild fans, we went in search of drinks and Dom came with us.”
“I remember that. And I remember sitting and talking to David and Ollie.” I riffled through my mind. Something about spiders? “Wait. I remember being in some nutty bathroom with you guys because—” I recalled Alex’s bad behavior then. “Oh, sweetie, I’m sorry. Alex is a jerk,” I said to Langley.
“It’s okay. It turns out that his father is being honored by the Austrian government that weekend and that’s why he can’t come, so it’s not that he didn’t want to see me.”
“So are you back together?” It was a bit hard to keep up with things between Langley and Alex, especially since none of us had ever met him and their entire relationship existed over phone and IM. But Langley had said that he might be The One, meaning The One she liked enough to get over her dismay about anything messy and actually have sex with, which meant she genuinely adored him.
“I don’t know. He’s on probation for making me wonder.” I laughed, which made the cuts on my face sting, but I didn’t mind. It was good to feel something, even pain. Langley went on. “That’s not what’s important. What else do you remember?”
“After the bathroom it’s just a big blank space.”
“You don’t remember anything?” Kate asked. “Like where you went?” She was leaning forward, a crease between her eyebrows. Her gaze, her tone seemed more intense than necessary.
“No. The doctor says that could be from trauma or from the hit I took to the head.” I didn’t mention what Officer Rowley said about being drugged. “Did either of you see me at all after I left the bathroom?”
“No.” Langley shook her head. “Kate and I were together all the time, but you disappeared.”
Kate nodded. “We assumed you were with David, but then we saw him and he was—”
“—looking for you too,” Langley finished. “That’s when we got worried and went driving around, but you’d just vanished.”
Why did I feel like they were talking too fast? Covering something up? Langley was smiling too much and Kate’s eyes kept wandering from me to Langley to the door. Was there some drama behind the scenes that everyone was covering up, had something—
“Excuse me.” Langley’s voice interrupted my thoughts. “But what is she doing here?”
Chapter 10
At first I thought Langley meant my mother, but then I realized she was looking at the dark-haired girl standing slightly behind my mom in the doorway. She had one of the blue-satin padded hangers my mother favored with a suit jacket on it dangling from her index finger while she feverishly typed notes into a BlackBerry with her other hand.
“She’s Jane’s mother’s intern,” Kate whispered.
My mother had an intern? I had no idea. “Who is she?” I asked.
“Her name is Sloan Whitley,” was all Langley said, but her tone suggested that Sloan Whitley might be synonymous with Satan’s Girlfriend. It caught me off guard, especially because Sloan looked slightly familiar to me, like I’d seen her somewhere recently, and the impression in my mind was that she was nice.
“Was she at the party?” I asked.
Kate answered. “Yeah, I think I saw her there. Right, Langley?”
Langley shrugged. There was definitely something odd going on.
Sloan trailed my mother and Joe into the room, still typing. “…and Hetty Blanstrop at the Post,” my mother finished her sentence. “Ask to speak to Hetty directly. Do you have all that?”
“Yes, Mrs. Freeman,” Sloan said.
“Sloan, do you know all the girls? My daughter Jane in the bed, obviously, and her best friends, Kate and Langley. Sloan is a sophomore at your school. She wants to work in politics one day.” Bright smile.
Everyone murmured hello. Sloan blushed. She glanced at me fast, nodded quickly at Kate and gave Langley an unsure smile, then set the hanger on a chair and stepped outside to make her phone calls.
My mother hugged Kate and Langley and gave them each an air kiss on the cheek. “Girls, I’m so glad you’re here. We’re about to have a press conference announcing a reward for information about what happened to Jane.” She lobed a telegenically perfect sympathetic glance in my direction.
“A reward?”
“The police said it would help, so Joe has agreed to give a ten-thousand-dollar reward for information leading to the apprehension of whoever did this to you,” my mother said, smiling at him.
“Thank you, Joe,” I said, meaning it but hating having to. “That is very generous.”
“Anything I can do to help,” he explained, suddenly bashful. “Wanted to do more, but that Officer Rowley said it wasn’t necessary.”
My mother patted his face and beamed on him the way I remember her smiling at my father at the breakfast table on the nights after they’d had me babysit so they could go out to dinner together. Their fingers would brush as she poured him more coffee and they would both jump back a little in this shy way and even though I felt a little left out, I knew this was love, and I wanted it for them forever.
Now she was doing it to someone else. “You are a wonderful man,” she told Joe. My stomach tightened.
She turned back to my friends. “Would you two be willing to answer phones for an hour later?”
“Of course,” Kate said. The tension in her had become even more intense once my mother arrived and I had the sense that she couldn’t wait to leave.
“I’m sure we could round up a lot of volunteers,” Langley confirmed, pulling out her BlackBerry. “How many people do you need?”
“Um—” For a split second, my mom looked lost. Then she snapped back into focus. “Coordinate with Sloan, if you don’t mind. Sloan? Sloan?” My mother went over to the door, muttering, “Where is that girl?”
“I think she stepped outside to make—” Kate started, but my mother had her head out of the doorway.
“Sloan,” she called. “Sloan? I need—oh there you are.” Sloan seemed to take my mother’s demands with complete calm. It was only my friends and I who upset her. “Sloan, I want to go over the script. Joe, please take Annie and wait for us on the front steps of the hospital. Kate and Langley, thank you for all your help. True friends. Jane is lucky to have you.”
La
ngley winked and as she bent to give me a kiss on the forehead, I caught a whiff of her Jo Malone grapefruit cologne. It was so familiar, so soothing, like the promise of normalcy. Kate gave me an air kiss on the cheek and whispered, “Get better, sailor girl.”
That gave me a lump in my throat. “Thanks,” I said to both of them, meaning it in big ways and small.
“Don’t be absurd,” Langley said. “What else were we going to do? Sit around at home and wish you were with us?”
The lump in my throat got bigger.
They gave me a pinkie salute, even though I couldn’t feel it, and moved to the door. Langley turned to wave one last time, but Kate crossed the threshold fast, like suddenly she couldn’t leave quickly enough.
And then I was alone. Well, with Judge Zonin, “The last word in justice,” on the television who filled the slot right before the five o’clock news. With his thick wavy hair precisely graying at the temples, a spray-on tan, and very white teeth Judge Zonin looked to me more like he should be selling toothpaste or the good life than dispensing justice.
Two guys standing behind podiums faced Judge Zonin, both with their heads shaved. One of them wore a suit and tie; the other was more casual in a long-sleeved sweater that clung to his pecs.
“And then he calls my girl,” Pecs was saying, pointing to the guy in the suit. “Using my cell phone he calls my girl and starts stepping out with her.”
That was when it hit me: David hadn’t been on the video. It was weird that I hadn’t even realized he’d been absent. Now that I did, though, it bothered me.
“Is this true?” Judge Zonin asked, his eyebrows rising so high they were almost lost in his fancy hair.
“Is simple math, man.” The guy in the suit turned over a palm. “He got her on Friends and Family, right? I use his phone to talk to her; it’s free for everyone.”
Was that why Langley and Kate were so strange? They didn’t want me to notice that David wasn’t in it?
“You were supposed to be my friend, yo,” Pecs said, gripping the podium like he wanted to punch someone. “Friends don’t play that way. Steal my steady, steal my phone. But both? No.”
Probably sleeping it off. That’s what Kate and Langley had said about Nicky, and it was probably true of David also. He was just sleeping it off. Or practicing. A lot of times he got so absorbed in practicing he didn’t answer his phone. Or the door. Like that time two weeks earlier. And when he had finally come to the door, he’d been annoyed that I had interrupted him.
The guy in the suit spread his hands. “Just sound business, man, and the free market at work.”
Pecs hit the podium now. “Free market this—one day you’re gonna to pay for what you’ve done. One day soon. And I ain’t talking about reimbursement for the phone.”
“You’re scaring me there, sir,” Judge Zonin said.
He was scaring me too. And then I realized, it wasn’t him. His words were an almost perfect echo of what Nicky had said to me during our last real conversation.
Chapter 11
Nicky and I had been assigned as biology lab partners at the beginning of the year, and the second week of classes she’d invited me to her house to work on an extra-credit project. I was surprised because I was enough of a geek to do that, but I didn’t think she was. Nicky di Savoia was cool in a way that went beyond popularity. Her dad was a famous music producer and her mother was a former supermodel and the whole di Savoia family was always showing up in the copies of Gotham and Vanity Fair my mother had lying around the kitchen.
The di Savoia house was invisible from the street, hidden behind thick hedges and a tall wall. Inside was a stone castle—complete with a moat.
“You have your own drawbridge?” I asked incredulously.
“Yeah. We need it, there’s an alligator in the water.”
“No way.”
“It’s a miniature one. Okay, it’s an invisible one. But just pretending it’s there has had a great effect on the twins’ obedience.”
The twins were Nicky’s five-year-old brothers, Marc Antonio and Gian Luca. Like Nicky, they’d been adopted from an orphanage for refugee children, only Nicky came from Brazil and her brothers were from Vietnam. They ran up to greet her as soon as we stepped from the garage into the massive Tudor-style kitchen, and if I’d been surprised by Nicky wanting to do extra credit, I was even more surprised seeing her with her brothers.
“What was your favorite thing at school today?” she asked Marc Antonio first.
“I caught a ladybug.”
“Tell what you did with it,” Gian Luca said, smug.
“I ate it. Tastes just like chicken.”
“Marc Antonio is the chef in the family,” Nicky explained. “He’ll eat anything once.”
She was amazing with them, asking them questions about their friends and teachers and getting them a snack and cleaning off their faces and examining with great solemnity a scraped knee and an invisible splinter. Watching them together made me make a resolution to pay more attention to Annie. Or really any attention.
Mr. and Mrs. di Savoia came into the kitchen “to see what all the laughing is about,” and I couldn’t help it, I stared at them. Not because they were both exotically gorgeous—he was Native American and Italian and she was Somali American—or because her dad had tattoos over every visible inch of skin.
I stared at them because they were barefoot and holding hands.
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen my mother barefoot except getting out of the shower, and even then she usually stepped right into slippers. And parents holding hands? Never.
They got into an intense discussion with the twins about what to cook for dinner that night while Nicky and I went up to her room. That was a surprise too because it was filled not with music posters like I would have expected but with American Girl dolls. “I can’t help it, I love them,” she said.
I went to touch one and saw her flinch a little.
“Sorry. It’s just I don’t usually, you know, handle them without gloves.” She looked sheepish. “Oh my God, I’m acting like such a geek I’m embarrassed for myself.”
“Not at all,” I said. “My mother still has the clothes her Barbies wore in special dress bags she made for them.”
“Wow. I’m going to remember that next time David makes fun of me for being so anal. He makes me close the dolls’ eyes if we’re making out up here.”
David was her boyfriend then and they were the coolest couple at Livingston High, so the thought of them making out surrounded by dolls—even dolls with their eyes closed—was really funny. “How long have you been going out?”
“David and I? Seven months, five days and”—she checked her clock—“sixteen hours. We met in line for a midnight showing of Casablanca.”
“That’s so cute,” I said. “He must be the best boyfriend ever.”
She rubbed her wrist. “He is. For sure.”
I had dinner with the di Savoia family and afterward we played a game of miniature golf on the indoor course they’d just installed in the basement, complete with a steam-spitting volcano. “I’d rather have my boys hitting each other with sticks here than attacking other people’s kids in public” was how Mr. di Savoia explained it, but based on the way Mrs. di Savoia snickered when he said that, it was clear it was as much for him as for them. Each hole had a dance you had to do before you could shoot, and some of them had secret handshakes, and I could hardly remember a time I’d had more fun. As I left, Mrs. di Savoia took my hand and gave me a kiss on each cheek and said in her slightly accented English, “I hope you will visit again. It is rare for Nicola to bring a girlfriend over. Come back soon.”
Nicky blushed. “Mom.”
“I’d love that,” I said, and totally meant it.
Langley and Kate found me at my locker the next morning at school.
“Where were you yesterday, jelly bean?” Langley asked, peeling the silver foil from an ice-cream sandwich. One of Langley’s many enviable
qualities was that no matter what she ate, she never put on any weight. “We kept calling and calling you.”
“I was at Nicky di Savoia’s working on bio. Did you know there’s a mini-golf course in the basement of their house? With a volcano?”
“Seriously?” Kate asked, sipping her latte. “Don’t let my father hear that, he’ll put one in except instead of a volcano, it will be a statue of him.” She got pensive for a moment. “Of course, that could be fun to shoot balls at.”
“And you could dress it up.” I shouldered my bag and the three of us started to walk toward AP European History.
Langley nibbled the edge of her ice-cream sandwich. She always ate it the same way, nibble, lick, nibble, lick, from the outside in. “It sounds like you had fun.”
“I did.”
“I wouldn’t hang out with her too much, though.”
I stopped walking. “Why not?”
Langley stopped too. “Haven’t you heard the rumors? Licky Nicky? Likes to suck dicky?”
“I’ve never heard anything like that,” Kate said.
“Me either,” I agreed. “What are you talking about? She dates David Tisch.”
Langley shrugged and started walking again. “I guess he hasn’t heard them either.”
Maybe because I was listening for them, I started hearing the Licky Nicky rumors after that. At first it was just a trickle, but soon everyone was talking about it. One guy said she’d blown him in front of one of her dad’s gold records, another told about a hot night on top of the miniature-golf-course volcano, the kind of details that gave the rumors authenticity. I was in the hallway once when a senior boy came by and said to her, “Hey, Nicky, hungry? How many licks would it take you to get to the center of this?” and grabbed his crotch. She started getting more withdrawn, so I didn’t see her as much, and when our bio rotation ended, I didn’t see her at all. I heard she and David broke up, but I didn’t know the details.
The last time we talked was in early December. There was a weekend of Indian summer, so I took Annie to the park and Nicky was there with the twins. It was a little more than a month after I’d started dating David and I thought it might be awkward, but she came over in response to my nervous wave and said, “So, I hear, you and David.”