Brooklyn Girls (3 page)

“Hang on a moment.” Julia narrows her eyes at me. “Bed hair. Panda eyes. And stubble rash. Peepee, you got action last night!” she exclaims.

“I did not! And don’t call me Peepee!”

“Have we made up?” coos Angie, peering out from Coco’s room. She wraps her bare leg around the door, lifting one snow boot–clad foot up and down like a meteorology-loving stripper. “Are we all friends again?”

“Those are my boots,” says Julia. “Why are you wearing them?”

“Are you planning on skiing soon? I think not.” Angie sashays past us down the stairs. “It’s August. I’ll return them in pristine condition as soon as the house is clear of party debris, okay, Mommy?”

Julia rolls her eyes and heads downstairs. “Start cleaning.”

Angie flicks the finger at Julia’s retreating back.

“Real mature, Angie.”

“Suck my mature.”

“I’m hungry.”

“You’re always hungry. Let’s clean.”

Somehow, being hungover and giggling with Angie cheers me up and helps squash my what-the-sweet-hell-am-I-going-to-do-now thoughts. She keeps making little moans of dismay at each new inch of party filth, and pretty soon we’ve both got the giggles.

“When I have my own place, there will be no carpets,” I say. “Carpets are just asking for trouble.”

“Did anyone lose a shoe? And why did we invite someone to our party who wears moccasins?”

“Is this red wine or blood? No. Wait. It’s tomato sauce. Weird.”

“You wanna talk me through the hickey, ladybitch?”

I catch Angie’s eye and bite my index finger sheepishly.

“You had the sex? You little minx…”

“With her brother,” I whisper, pointing at Madeleine’s door. “Bit of an oopsh.”

Oopsh is our word for a drunken mistake.

“Oopsh I kissed the wrong dude, or oopsh I tripped and his dick landed in my mouth?”

I crack up. No one does crass like Angie. She looks like a tiny Christmas angel and acts like a sailor on a Viagra kick. “Or was it more like, oopsh, I’m riding his face and—”

“Too far! That’s too far.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t tell Jules, she’d just have to tell Maddy, and it’d be a whole thing.”

“Absolute-leh, dah-leng,” she says, in her best imitation of her mother’s British accent. “You were totally kamikaze last night.”

“It was August 26. That’s International Pia Goes Kamikaze Day, remember? Crash and burn.”

There’s a pause. “Oh, dude, I’m sorry. I totally forgot. Eddie.”

I can’t bring myself to look at her. Only Angie saw me that day, only Angie knows how bad it was. She always calls me a drama queen, but she knows that misery was real. You don’t fake that kind of breakdown.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I say.

Angie keeps cleaning. “Fuck him, Pia. Okay? Fuck him! It’s been four years!”

I nod, scrubbing as hard as I can. It has been four years since we broke up. And I really should be over it. Then, thank God, Angie changes the subject.

“So I’m gonna move out to L.A. after the holidays,” she says. “I don’t really belong here in Brooklyn, you know?”

This news just makes me feel even sadder. There’s no point arguing with Angie. She does whatever she wants. Instead I scrub harder and, stair by stair, stain by stain, we make it downstairs. Angie puts on some music, and we clean to the post-party-appropriate strains of the Ramones. I can hear Julia and Coco throwing out empty bottles in the kitchen and, every now and again, shrieking when they find something nasty. Oh please, God, no drugs or used condoms. Just spare me that.

“What time did the party finish?” I ask Angie.

“About five. Lord Hugh and I saw out the last of the party people just as the sun was coming up.”

“He seems … Lordesque.”

“He’s very Lordesque.” She nods. “He also knows his way around a washer-dryer.”

“Did you guys do a”—I pause and grin at her—“full load?”

“Just a half load. Then we rinsed. Very thoroughly. Oh, look. Half a spliff. How nice.”

We make it to the first floor, and help Julia and Coco finish up the kitchen, which primarily involves de-stickying every surface. Nothing does sticky like forty-year-old linoleum.

“That was intense,” says Julia, wiping her forehead with her arm. “The laundry room flooded. That’s what made Vic’s ceiling collapse.”

“I’ll fix it,” I say again.

“Oh, I know you will.”

“I cleaned the bathrooms,” says an icy voice. I look up, and see Madeleine, carrying a mop and bucket. “They were absolutely revolting.”

“Thanks, Moomoo,” says Julia. Madeleine rolls her eyes at Julia’s nickname for her—she professes to hate it—and pushes past us to the sink, giving Julia’s ponytail an affectionate tug. She’s so nice underneath that cold-and-controlled exterior, just not to me, not anymore.

Okay, the Madeleine story, in brief: we were friends once. Really good friends. In fact, she and Julia and I were pretty much inseparable for freshman year. We’re all very different, but somehow we just … clicked, in an opposites-attract kind of way.

Then, suddenly, at the end of freshman year, Madeleine got crazy drunk for the first time ever and, out of nowhere, told me she hated me. I was holding her hair back so she could throw up, and she just said over and over again, “I hate you. I hate you, Pia, I hate you.” Then she passed out. The next day, I tried to talk to her, she shut down, and we’ve been in a cold war ever since. And now her brother is naked in my bed.

Hmm.

Between you and me, I wouldn’t have moved in if I’d known Madeleine was going to be here, too. Jules was probably hoping we’d make up, that the five of us will become best friends and start swapping traveling ya-ya pants, or whatever. I can’t see that happening. Particularly given that Julia’s now busy making her own little cold war with Angie.

An hour later, the whole of Rookhaven is clear of party fallout, not including hangovers.

“Perfect,” says Julia, smiling as she looks around the living room.

“C’mon, Ol’ Rusty hasn’t been perfect since the Eisenhower administration,” says Angie.

“Don’t call this house Ol’ Rusty,” snaps Julia. “If you hate it so much, you can always leave.”

“Who said anything about hating it?” says Angie.

“I like it just how it is,” I say.

“I
love
it. And I love Brooklyn. I’m a lil’ Brooklynista.” Angie smiles sweetly at us all.

“Can we get some food, please?” I say to distract them from their almost-argument. “I’m starving.”

“I’m making French toast!” That’d be Coco. She’s been trying to force-feed us comfort food since we moved in. “Everyone in the kitchen!”

“I’ll just be a minute,” I say.

Time to deal with you-know-who.

“Hey.” Mike is groggily stretching in my bed. He looks a lot better clean-shaven and in a pressed shirt. “Where’ve you been? You wanna snuggle?”

I laugh. “Snuggle?”

“All the cool kids are doing it. C’mon…”

I put on my aviators and take a deep breath. “Mike, your sister will kill me if she finds out about last night. Let’s just pretend it didn’t happen, okay?”

“Okay. Fine.” Wow, he’s bratty when things don’t go his way.

“I’m serious. She doesn’t like me as it is.”

“She doesn’t?”

“No…” Suddenly I realize that talking to Mike about his sister being a bitch isn’t the smartest move. “Um, you know. I’m probably misinterpreting it.”

“Maddy’s pretty hard to read,” he says. “She never lets her guard down. Even with me, and I’m family. I think it’s insecurity.”

I fight the urge to roll my eyes. I am so sick of people blaming everything on being insecure. It’s not a get-out-of-jail-free card, you know?

“Whatever. We’re all in the kitchen. Wait ten minutes and you can leave without being seen.”

“Why don’t I just climb out the window and shimmy down the drainpipe?”

“That would be perfect! Do you think you could?” I say, just to see his reaction. “Kidding. See ya.”

Thank hell that’s over with. I have more important things to worry about. Like being unemployed, broke, and cut off from the so-called Bank of Mom and Dad (pay interest in guilt!) with the threat of being forced to leave New York in exactly eight weeks.

*   *   *

If a kitchen
could be grandmotherly, then this one is. It’s huge, yet also 1960s-sitcom-rerun cozy. The kind of kitchen in which cakes and cookies and pies are always baking, you know? My mother
never
baked.

As we’re sitting around the kitchen table, listening to Lionel Richie and eating Coco’s amazing French toast with bacon on the side, I finally tell the girls everything. About the Facebook photo, work, and even my parents.

“In a nutshell, I destroyed Rookhaven, and I’m unemployed, unemployable, and broke,” I say, pushing my food around my plate miserably. “I don’t know what to do. Who gets fired after one week? I’m such a fuck-up.… If I don’t get a job, my parents will make me go live with them.”

“You can’t do that!” Somehow, Angie manages to look cool even talking through a mouthful of bacon. “You’d never survive! Your parents can’t make you do anything.”

“Yes, they can!” I say. “I’ve never stood up to them. I just do what they say, and then avoid them.”

“Sounds healthy,” Julia says.

I shrug. Is anyone’s relationship with their parents healthy?

“I can’t believe you were fired!” says Coco. “That must have been awful.” She reaches over to give me a hug. For the second time today, I have to blink away tears. I swear I want to cry more when people are nice to me than when they’re mean.

“Yuh,” says Madeleine. “Who would have thought dancing topless at a party would backfire like that?”

“I was wearing a bra!”

“Pia, it was a sheer bra.”

“Stop it, Maddy.” Julia forks another piece of French toast onto her plate. I notice she hasn’t said anything about not wanting me to move out.

“Listen, I have loads of cash, you won’t go hungry … or thirsty.” Angie picks up a piece of crispy bacon with her fingers and dips it in a pool of maple syrup, and then lowers her voice. “And I think the laundry room flooding might have been our, uh, my fault. I’ll help pay for it.”

“I can loan you money, too,” says Julia quickly, her competitive nature kicking in.

“Don’t be crazy.” I can’t accept charity. I won’t. “If I need money that badly, I’ll go to a bank. Get a loan.”

“Are you crazy? Take a loan? You’d have some bananas interest rate, and the loan would just get bigger and bigger and you’d never be able to pay it back! So you’d have no credit rating! It would destroy your life!” Wow, Julia is really upset about the idea of a loan.

“Okay, jeez, I won’t go to a bank,” I say. “Anyway, that’s really not the point. The point is, I need a job. And I just have no idea what I could do.”

“What was your major?” asks Coco.

“Art history.”

“Art … historian?”

Everyone at the table giggles.

“Yes, I chose a very impractical major. No, I don’t know why.”

“Probably because it sounded cool,” says Angie, flashing me her best I’m-so-helpful smile.

I raise an eyebrow at her. “Not helping.”

“I could see you working at a fashion magazine,” says Coco, hopping off her chair. “Who wants more coffee?”

“Me please!” say Julia and Angie in unison, and frown at each other.

“I’m not a writer,” I say. “Anyway, it would be all
Devil Wears Prada
–y. And the models would make me feel shitty.”

“Besides, it’s really hard to get a job in anything related to fashion,” says Angie. For a second, I wonder if she knows that from personal experience. Before I can ask, she picks up her phone to read a text.

“And I need to earn money,
now,
” I say. And, I add silently, it’s a fact: the cooler the job, the worse the money. My salary at the PR agency—not even that cool compared to working in, like, fashion or TV or whatever—was thirty-five thousand a year, which, if you break it down and take out money for rent and bills, works out to about twenty-five dollars a day. I mean, a decent facial in New York is at least a hundred and fifty. How could anyone ever survive on that salary and still eat, let alone have a life?

Julia is in fix-it mode now. “Let’s make a list of your skills and experience. What did you do at the PR agency last week?”

I think back. “I pretended not to spend all my time e-mailing my friends, sat in on meetings about things I didn’t know anything about, and watched the clock obsessively. I swear I almost fell asleep, like, twenty times, right at my desk.”

Everyone (except Madeleine) laughs at this, though, honestly, it was kind of depressing. Am I really meant to do that for the rest of my life?

“If you need fast cash, get a fast-cash job, girl,” says Julia. “Waitressing. Bartending.”

I blink at her. “Manual labor?”

Madeleine makes a snorting sound of suppressed laughter. I ignore her. I said it to be funny. Kind of.

“With that kind of princess attitude, you’re screwed,” says Julia.

“I want a real job. Something that will impress my parents, which means something in an office. Something with an official business e-mail address.”

“So e-mail your résumé to PR recruitment agencies in Manhattan,” says Julia. “Then wow them with how bright and smart and awesome you are. Any PR agency in Manhattan would be lucky to have you!”

“Okay.” I love having a bossy best friend sometimes. It makes decision-making much easier.

CHAPTER 3

“Pia Keller?”

I stand up, smiling the hi-I’m-totally-employable smile that I’ve perfected during my previous fourteen recruitment agency interviews.

Bridget, the consultant who reluctantly agreed to “discuss options” with me, smiles thinly and offers a boneless handshake. My mother judges women on their shoes, but in the past week, I’ve learned to judge women on their handshakes. Limp is not a good sign.

I follow Bridget out of the reception area down a narrow hallway to a tiny meeting room. For a second, I consider turning around and walking out. I know exactly what’s about to happen, and I almost can’t bear to go through it again.

But I need a job. Fixing Vic’s kitchen ceiling cost just over twenty-two hundred, which I split with Angie (she insisted, though I’m not sure the flooding was caused by her and Lord Hugh; the plumber said a drain was blocked with cigarette butts), and the last ten days has sucked up the five hundred dollars that were left, just on food and the subway and tampons and shampoo—you know,
stuff
. It is as painfully obvious as it is painful: New York is an expensive city. I have, as of this very second, exactly eight dollars to my name. And nothing left in my checking account. At all.