Brooklyn Girls (7 page)

I take a deep breath. “I can’t go out tonight. I’m getting up at 5:30 tomorrow. I’ve got a job. Or a date. I can’t tell what it is. And I was fired. Again.”

There’s a shocked silence.

“Bartolo’s
fired
you? Oh, honey, are you okay?”

“You’re working at 5:30 tomorrow morning? Who the fuck works at 5:30 on a Saturday morning?”

“Who the fuck
dates
at 5:30 on a Saturday morning?”

“Tell us everything, now.”

CHAPTER 5

It’s dawn. Jonah and I are on a rooftop in Williamsburg, for our job-slash-date. He met me outside this building with two takeout coffees, beamed a big sleepy smile at me, and wouldn’t tell me what we were about to do.

The thought crossed my mind that he could have nefarious plans for me. Then I saw that he was wearing a Care Bears T-shirt and pale pink canvas shorts tied with a piece of rope, and realized that any man who dresses like a Huckleberry Finn hipster cannot possibly be evil.

And now, as I sip my coffee—God, I love coffee—I can’t stop looking over the river at Manhattan. It’s so beautiful in the early morning sunlight, it looks practically CGI.

I can’t leave Rookhaven, I can’t leave New York. I want my life here too much, and more than that, I’m … I’m
hungry
for whatever it is that’s waiting for me.

I just don’t know what that is.

“Beautiful, huh?” says Jonah, joining me as I gaze out over the city.

“It’s amazing,” I say.

“I read somewhere that the philosopher Descartes says that a great city should be ‘an inventory of the possible,’” says Jonah. “A place where anything can happen. Where you never know what’s coming next.”

“I love that,” I say.

“Turn around, and say hi to the girls.”

The girls?

Suddenly I see three hip-height blocks in the corner of the rooftop. I squint into the dawn sunlight and squeal. “Watch out! Bees!” I almost leap into Jonah’s arms.

“Relax, pussycat.” He pulls a mesh-covered safari hat out of his bag. “You’re not scared of bees, are you? If you’re going to be a wuss about it, wear the wuss hat.”

I ignore the wuss hat, though, actually, I
am
scared of bees. “No, no, I’m fine. So … what are we doing?”

“We’re beekeeping.”

I nod, trying to look cool. Of course we are. We’re in New York City. Why wouldn’t we be beekeeping?

“I look after the hives for my buddy Ray,” says Jonah, picking up a metal watering can contraption. “He runs a restaurant downtown. Nail it today, you can take over this job.”

Pia Keller, beekeeper? “So, we’re going to … milk the hive?”

Jonah lets out a loud laugh. “Are you serious?”

“No,” I add quickly. I hate it when I say stupid shit. “I mean … so what are we doing?”

“We’re going to check the supers,” he says, igniting the metal watering can. “This is a smoker. The smoke makes them sort of stoned, so they don’t mind when we check out their living quarters. Just be slow and quiet.”

Then a bee lands on my arm and I run to the other side of the rooftop, squealing.

“Dude! Seriously!” says Jonah. “You’ll scare them!”

“Sorry!”

“Just do what I tell you to do,” says Jonah. Our eyes meet for a second, and he arches an eyebrow. Flirty McFlirterson. This
is
a date. But do I like Jonah like that? I don’t think I do.

Suddenly I think of the guy I saw on Court Street, the Prince Charming wannabe with the ridiculously nice eyebrows and the loud British girlfriend.… Ugh! Why am I even thinking about him? After all, he’s taken, and I’ll never see him again. And I don’t do relationships.

Why?

Well, his name was Eddie. And he was my first love. (Cringe, I know. There’s no other way to say it.) I was sixteen, and had arrived at my third boarding school shell-shocked and miserable after being kicked out of my previous two schools, not to mention the ensuing parental hellstorm. Then I met Eddie. When we were together, I felt calm for the first time in my life. We just, I don’t know, clicked. And he helped me study, stopped me from partying, got my life back on track. More than that, he made me feel happy, safe, understood … I felt
rescued
. He told me I rescued him, too—from the cookie-cutter New England girls he’d grown up with, from never laughing till he cried, from the suffocation of being popular yet lonely as hell. It was all bullshit, of course. The only person who you can ever rescue is yourself.

Anyway.

Just as we were about to meet up for the first time all summer before heading off to college (him to Berkeley, me to Brown), he broke up with me. Over the phone! His exact words: “Pia, let’s face it. You’re a flight risk, it’s never gonna work. I’m just doing this before you do.”

Even now, just thinking about it, I feel like I’ve been slapped. He dumped me because I was too fickle, too irresponsible, too untrustworthy. He dumped me because of who I am … or who he thought I was, anyway, and since he knew me better than anyone, it’s the same thing, right?

I’d never known I could feel pain like that. Even remembering it now makes my throat ache with a big, painful tear-lump. You know that feeling?

I was staying with Angie in Boston at the time and had the biggest anxiety attack of my life. I thought I was dying. I couldn’t breathe, my heart was racing, everything was spinning, and all I could think was
it’s over it’s over
.… Angie ran in minutes later, though it felt like hours. She told me later she’d heard a strange moaning sound I don’t even remember making.

The next few weeks were … indescribable. I think that when a relationship ends, it’s a little bit like a death, and I was beside myself with grief.

Angie doesn’t really do heart-to-hearts, but God, she was amazing during that time.… She listened while I boozed and ranted. She held my hair back when I puked and stockpiled Kleenex for my tears. She reprogrammed my iPod so I didn’t have to listen to songs that reminded me of Eddie. She picked me up at the end of each night, carried me home, and put me to bed. She was, quite simply, the perfect best friend.

Then I started college, and decided to never talk about it again. It was the only way to contain my misery and act like Little Miss Happy Party Girl.

So that’s the Eddie story. That’s why I’m always single and only have casual flings. Why would I ever want to go through heartbreak again?

Urgh. I hate it when I think about Eddie. My brain goes back to him, over and over again, like when you’re eight and you have a tooth that’s about to fall out and you just wiggle it constantly.

But unlike a tooth, Eddie never falls out of my head.

My reverie is interrupted by Jonah walking up to me and tweaking my nose. “You want to see the honeybees, princess?”

Wearing woolen gloves, Jonah takes the lid off a hive and pulls up a wooden tray. It’s thick with honeycomb and crawling with drowsy stoned bees.

“I guess you gave them a buzz,” I say, slapping my thigh with delight at my own joke.

“You are hil—wait for it—arious. Okay, check it out,” he says. “This one is full of honey. It kind of blows my mind. Give bees a home, and in return they create the sweetest thing in the world.”

“What kind of flowers do they eat?” I ask, trying not to flinch every time a bee buzzes near me. “Have sex with. Whatever. Pollinize. Pollinate. You know what I mean.”

“Any flower, really, or fruit trees, berry bushes,” he says. “They fly up to four miles for their pollen, so that could get them to Central Park. And there’s the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens for the lazy bee, of course.”

I watch a fat little bee do two perfect figures of eight around the crowd, rubbing its fuzzy, chubby little body against its neighbors in a kind of soft-shoe shuffle.

“They’re so beautiful up close,” I say softly. “So busy and happy. They’re sort of comforting, you know?”

I stop myself, realizing that I’ve probably said something stupid again. I catch Jonah’s eye, but he’s not laughing. Instead, he leans in to kiss me, then at the last moment, something inside me says
nope
and I pull away.

Thank God, Jonah takes it like a man. “I love the smell of rejection in the morning!”

I laugh. “Sorry, dude. I’m just not…”

“Nothing to apologize for,” he interrupts. “Easy come, easy go, sailor. Let’s get to work.”

A couple of hours of honey-milking later, I’ve decided beekeeping is definitely not for me. It’s too dangerous (or I’m too wussy, whatever). I spent most of the time running back and forth over the rooftop whenever bees landed on me. Now we’re in Jonah’s beat-up old car, the sun is shining, and I’ve got a basket of hand-labeled Kings County honey jars on my lap.

“Baby, you’re a
fiyaaawork
!” sings Jonah along to Katy Perry on the radio.

“I feel so awake! It’s so much fun to
do
something!” I say. “I love it!”

“What’s life usually like for you, princess?” asks Jonah, laughing. “You just sit back and let slaves feed you grapes, or what?”

“Ah, bite me. This car is disgusting, by the way.” It’s filled with empty food wrappers and smells like feet.

“This? This is nothing. You should see my apartment. I share it with five other dudes, it’s like a petri dish of disease. The other guys are always getting sick, but not me!” He grins proudly. “Constitution of a Texas buffalo.”

Ew. Guys our age are so happy to live like pigs. I don’t get it.

“So, how do you fit in all these jobs around your acting career?”

“Dude, I wouldn’t call it an ‘acting career.’ I’ve been here six years and nothing’s really happening. Still, I’m having fun. Sometimes I help out my friend’s band, Little Ted. I take acting classes sometimes, the rest of the time I just mess around.”

“Cool,” I say, though actually, six years of just messing around sounds kind of depressing. “What was your last acting job?”

“Diesel ad campaign.” He’s trying to sound cool and failing.

“A TV commercial?”

“Uh, no. Web.”

“A Web site campaign? Isn’t that modeling?”

“No, it was moving image. It was acting.”

I’m doubtful about this (my motivation in this scene is
denim
!), but never mind.

At that moment, my phone rings.

I stare at the screen for a second, then press silent. It’s my parents. I haven’t spoken to them since the post-party phone-call disaster, and I don’t want to start now.

A minute later, my phone beeps. A message. May as well get it over and done with.

My dad starts speaking first. “Ah, Pia, it’s … 2:45
P.M.
in Zurich, which makes it 8:45
A.M.
in New York, you’re probably still in bed”—No, I’m not, I’m
working,
I think defiantly—“We’re calling to tell you that we’ll be in New York in October.”

My mother interrupts him from the extension. “And unless you have a job, a real job, you are coming back to Zurich with us where we can look after you!”

Then my father interrupts her again. “We will call you tomorrow. Try to be awake and sober.”

Click.

I press “delete,” hang up, and sigh.

Now, I know thousands of girls my age are totally independent from their parents, they’d just tell them to back off and cut all ties.… I don’t want to do that. Part of me still hopes that maybe, one day, the weird estrangement of the past few years will end. After all, they’re the only parents I’ve got. I really want them to be proud of me. Most of the time, I don’t even think they like me.

I look out the window, lost in thought. Suddenly the sunshine looks kind of bleak. Who am I kidding? I can’t make a career out of goddamn bee-milking. I need a job, a real job … and fast.

“Today is a special day for lucky guys and gals,” says Jonah in a radio announcer voice. “It’s Food Truck Festival at the Brooklyn Flea! And that’s where you, Pia Keller, will be working! Do you know the Brooklyn Flea?”

“Of course!”

Actually, I only went to the Brooklyn Flea for the first time a couple of weeks ago, with Angie and Coco in tow. It’s a gigantic collection of tented stalls selling everything from vintage stuff to design stuff to art stuff to, well, there’s just a lot of stuff.

Then I pause. “Wait, what’s a Food Truck Festival?”

“Jeez, you really are new here, aren’t you?” he says. “Food trucks are trucks that drive around the city selling—wait for it—food.”

“Well, duh,” I say, blushing. “Like ice-cream trucks.”

“Think bigger,” says Jonah, pulling into a parking space.

“Kebab trucks,” I say as we get out of the car. “Oh, I think I saw a cupcake truck once in SoHo.”

“Bigger.”

We walk down the street, toward a sign saying
BROOKLYN FLEA FOOD TRUCK FESTIVAL
, and now I know what he means by bigger. Lined up, one after the other, like gigantic colorful shiny toys: food trucks of every possible description.

Gobble Cobblers, Mac’N’Cheese, Schnitzeldog, Lang Kwai Fried Dumplings, The Spelthouse, Mexineasy, The Artisan Cheesemakers, Everyone Hates Offal (with the strapline “Fry Me a Liver!”), The Queen’s English Trifle Guild, Screamfer Ice Cream, Mash and Stew in It, Simple Simon the Pieman, Macaroonatics.…

“Punny,” I comment. “How do they make all that food in the back of the truck?”

“They have elves,” says Jonah.

“I’m getting hungry,” I add, looking up at him.

“Just you wait, sugar.”

People are already waiting patiently in line to get their food before a long day at the market. Wow, people will do anything for a good meal in this city. These trucks must be raking in the cash.

Jonah stops outside a dark green food truck with
A MEAL GROWS IN BROOKLYN
painted on the side in white block letters. The side awning is up, revealing a short, handwritten chalkboard menu.

BREAKFAST

French Toast with Raisin Bread (DUMBO)

Bacon (Mill Basin) with Fried Eggs (Brooklyn Heights) on Buttered Sourdough (DUMBO)

Buttermilk Cake Donuts (DUMBO)

And it’s ALL local, sustainable, seasonal, grass-fed, hand-reared, and organic whenever possible!