Kitty Kitty (2 page)

Despite all this Fun-n-Beauty, some part of me could not shake that conventional desire to graduate from high school and attend an institution of higher learning. Even Model
Daughters are allowed to dream, and it was this dream that had carried me to my father’s room that morning. Specifically, the dream of being allowed to join my pals in San Francisco for their tour of West Coast colleges, which was happening the next week, and which my father had said he’d “take under consideration.”

Here is how dedicated I was to my dream: Instead of screaming in agony and calling the emergency service to come perform an eye-ectomy on me when I saw my father in his bike shorts, I whispered, “Brave Purpose,” to myself and said, “Why hello, Lance Armstrong. Have you seen my father anywhere? I have a question for him.”

Yes, the high road was what I was taking.

BikeShort Dadzilla said, “What are you talking about? Who is Lance Armstrong?” Which is the kind of thing only a certified genius can get away with saying without being locked up as a certified lunatic. For good measure he added, “If that was a reference to my outfit, I am wearing this because I don’t want to go bald.”

“Ah,” I said, because one should not provoke the insane. “Of course.”

Sherri! joined us then, wearing, I am pained to say, a matching black-and-yellow bike outfit. (Although, unlike Somepeoplezilla, she looked fantastic in it.) I guess the whole bald thing left me looking a bit puzzled because she said, “Cedric and I ran into a colleague of his—”

“Norris is a chemist, not a colleague,” my father inter
rupted her to say, further showing off his genius grasp of conversational mores.

“A chemist,” Sherri! resumed, “who had a heart attack last year and lost all his hair, which for some reason launched your father on a health kick. Norris said he lost thirty pounds like that”—she snapped—“taking spin classes here in Venice, so we’re going to start too.”

I am sure I was about to say something extremely witty and clever, but Dadzilla chose that moment to turn around.

If her father in bike shorts is something a girl should never ever have to see, him in them from the back is that times a hundred million. Especially if they happen to have the words SIR LIGHTNING emblazoned across the rear in bright yellow. And double especially if he then does a deep knee bend and says, “I quite like these shorts, Sher. I may start wearing them all the time.”

Which is the answer to the question: Which one of the Four Sentences of the Apocalypse is guaranteed to bring on the End Times?

In case anyone ever asks you.

Unaware that he was leading the charge toward Armageddon, Dadzilla was full of sprightliness. From the middle of some kind of stretching exercise, he growled, “What is wrong with you, Jasmine? Are you sick? You’re making a face.”

By averting my gaze I was able to regain the use of language. “Why, Father, nothing is wrong,” I said. “I am not making a face. I am just pleasantly surprised to see you looking so—”

I broke off there, and not only because I had no idea what word could possibly come next. I did it because in the process of Gaze Averting, I’d spotted something reflected in the mirror on the top of Dadzilla’s dresser. Something incredible.

I’d only got a quick glance because I didn’t want to be obvious, but a glance was enough. Because what I’d seen was a printout with the logo of a travel agency on the top, the name CALLIHAN below it, and below that, a list of flights between Venice and London and somewhere in California. What else could that mean than that he was going to let me go and meet my pals in San Francisco? As a surprise! The best surprise in the entire world!

To say that my heart soared inside me like a super-bionic butterfly would be saying too little. I’d been reading Charles Dickens novels where the heroines are kind to their dear sweet papas, and I felt like one of those girls now, all clingy and brimming with wide-eyed tenderness. In my mind I pictured myself with bouncing curls and tiny bows in my hair and tattered but well-mended pantaloons.

“What did you come to ask me?” Dadzilla demanded then, and not exactly in a tone that a Dickens father would use.

But at that point nothing could dampen my mood.

I laughed sweetly, in the Dickens manner, and said, “Oh, it was nothing, Papa. I just wanted to ask you if there were any little favors I could do for you while I was out today.”

The “Papa” might have been a bit much because he narrowed his eyes and said, “What is wrong with you, Jasmine?”

“Can’t a daughter be kind to her precious parent?”

“Not if that daughter is you.”

“How
molto
amusing you are! I would love to stay and expose myself to more of your wit, wisdom, and sporty style, but I must go be enriched by the Italian language in the classes you kindly arranged for me. You have a nice spin class, and be careful. I wouldn’t want anything to happen to you.”

He peered at me with his Everywhere Eye for a moment, but my conscience was as clear as 7UP and he found nothing. Finally he said, “Stay out of trouble and we’ll see you tonight for dinner. And don’t think you’ll get out of it by having room service in your room, because you won’t. I want to talk to you.”

If I’d needed confirmation, I’d just gotten it. Dinner + talk = SURPRISE. More math! “Of course,” I cooed, shaking my curls. “It will be a delight to share a simple meal with you.”

I hightailed it back to my room, and, once the door was closed, did a very special dance for joy. Not only would I get to go to San Francisco with my pals, but Jack had said that if I made it back for the college trip he’d fly in from Los Angeles for a day or two to see me. San Francisco was like around the corner from him! He could come just for lunch! Where lunch means kissing! And dessert! Where dessert means ice cream! And also kissing!

It was like a bonbon–and–Tater Tot dream, and all I had to do to make it come true was stay out of trouble until
dinnertime. Which was nothing compared to all the staying out of trouble I’d done for the past six weeks. Just to be on the safe side I put my lucky Cookie Monster Underoos on over my Wonderbra, and quickly scrolled through the outfits Polly had organized and cataloged on my computer for me to find the one that looked the most suitable for Mayor of Mind-My-Own-Business Island.

As I reached the door to leave, I saw my horoscope sitting on the desk. The Gobi Desert! Grave consequences! Ha ha! How could I have believed for a second something sandwiched between an article about two robbers who dressed as nuns, an open letter from chief of police C. Manzoni about the rubbish problem, and an advertisement for a wig store? What a silly girl I was. With a carefree flourish, I crumpled it up and tossed it in the trash.

Which was unfortunate because as I did that, I threw away the crucial clue I’d need to save at least three lives. One of them my own.

Of course, I didn’t know that. Instead I went prancing off to Italian class, basically to my doom, like a six-foot-tall prancing thing.

It was, as the natives would say, a
bellissimo
morning with the sun sparkling on the water of the canals, and the gondoliers shouting cheerily to one another, and the birds doing little bird dances in the sky, and there was a general feeling of
la dolce vita
. In fact, I was in such a carefree letting-my-hair-down mood I was inspired to compose casual poetry.

I am glad Trouble

is not ice cream because then

I could not have any
.

Everyone I passed on my way to the Francesco Petrarca Instituto per le Lingue (or, as I liked to call it, Frank’s L’il
Language School) seemed like they were in a
dolce vita
frame of mind too. As I went over the first bridge, I exchanged
ciao ciao
s with the woman from the gelateria I stopped at on Wednesdays, and the tall man with the Great Dane from the pizza restaurant.

When we first got to Venice I thought people just recognized me and said hello out of pity, given that it was pretty clear I was not Venetian. For example, the average Venetian girl is short, cream-colored, and boobed, with hair whose T-shirt slogan would be something like “Ask Me About Being Cute!” (if hair wore T-shirts), while the average Jas is tall, cappuccino-colored, and non-boobed, with hair that would be more appropriately dressed in an “Ask Me About Your Missing Puppy” tee.

But I realized the inhabitants of Venice were just very civilized. Los Angeles people never say hello on the street unless they are planning to make you the star of a crime scene photo. In Venice, even if you only know someone a little, like if you sat next to them once at the gym when Sherri! made you go to “Lo Rubber Fun Workout Relax,” and your rubber band suddenly got a mind of its own and flew out of your hand and hit them in the eye and they had to wear an eye patch for two weeks, they say hello to you. Just to make up a random example.

Anyway, “without a care in the world” is likely how any of the people I strolled by (except the woman with the eye patch
because she sort of veered away from me quickly and probably didn’t get a complete look) would have described my general air of joy-to-all-creatures-great-and-small-ness, and they would have been right. Although my father had brutally ripped me from the bosom of my bosom pals and the lips of my liptastic boyfriend; and brought me to live in a taco-free country where most of the medication was administered using the Up-the-Butt method; and where there was a prime-time program called
Naked News
where the news anchors were indeed naked, which is not something to show to an impressionable teen girl whose boyfriend is both incredibly hot and incredibly far away; despite all of these travails, I was not bitter. If I had been any more full of the milk of human kindness, I would have been a cow.

That feeling kept up as I arrived at Frank’s, and even increased when I saw the name card ARABELLA RANDOLPH in front of the seat next to mine. Arabella was my Italian-Class Friend, one of those people you chat with casually in a certain setting but never see otherwise. She was also my only friend in Venice, and she’d been absent all week and I’d totally missed her. We’d initially bonded over our fascination with our teacher, Professore Rossi. Not a crushlike fascination, although Professore Rossi was in his early twenties and not bad-looking. It was more of an “Um, did he really say what I think he said?” kind of thing that was half the result of him speaking in Italian and half the result of him
saying things that were slightly unexpected.

Like, Professore Rossi objected to the fact that if you just went by our textbook, you’d think that everyone in Italy was either a butcher, a train conductor, or an aunt. This, he felt, was not representative of the
diversità e ricchezza
(diversity and richness) of the Italian people. He wanted to show us a more accurate picture, so he generously spent his OWN personal free time (emphasis
his
) making up dialogues for us to practice on, such as this one:

Yes! Because the only thing that might both exemplify diversity and richness AND come in more handy during a trip to Italy than being able to discourse about when Paolo and Francesca did/will/might arrive on the train from Bologna, is being able to direct experiments on lab animals.

You can see why I had to supplement my Italian course work by dedicatedly watching
Il Commissario Rex
, a television show about a German shepherd who works as a police detective, and episodes of
CHiPs
translated into Italian.

(Neither of which, apparently, should be recorded as an
Independent Study Project on my college applications, despite the fact that they clearly reveal the “healthy go-getter attitude” that Dr. Lansdowne says should be represented in that space.)

(Little Life Lesson 1: Life is filled with Deep Mysteries.)

Obviously even the most up-to-date model of Model Daughters would be intrigued by the personal life of someone who thought that monkey sedation was an exemplary discussion topic, so Arabella and I spent most of class passing notes that speculated about how Professore Rossi spent his free time.

As soon as I put out my name card, Arabella slid a note over to me.

One of the reasons I liked Arabella so much was because she believed that if she took any English word and either added “le” before it or an “o” on the end it became Italian. This made her amusingo with a side salad of Le bOnKeRs. I still couldn’t decide whether Arabella’s warning label should be CAUTION: UNSTABLE or SPECIAL HANDLING REQUIRED.

Like her outfits. She always wore black motorcycle boots with shiny silver buckles, and today she’d paired them with a green cashmere sweater five sizes too big for her, a leopard-patterned turban, and extra-long false eyelashes. The other regular fixture of her wardrobe was a huge fake (I assumed)
diamond brooch that she’d attach somewhere on her person; today she was using it to pin a feather to the turban at a jaunty angle, making her look kind of like the love child of Robin Hood and a maharaja. Which was actually a fairly conservative look for her.

I opened my notebook and wrote back:

Before I could finish, a shadow fell across my notebook.

“Do Signorina Callihan and Signorina Randolph have
something to share with the class?” Professore Rossi said, towering over us.

“I was just asking Jasmine how to say ‘birth certificate’ in Italian,” Arabella said, hitting him with Wide Eyes of Innocence.

“
Certificato di nascita
,” he told her. “Will there be anything else?”

“Le not,” Arabella said pleasantly.

“
Bene
. Then we may continue without bothering you?”

Ho ho ho! Teachers are so LE FUNNY.

The rest of the lesson zipped by because we were supposed to discuss our life goals, and I earned praise from Professore Rossi by saying I wished to sniff out crime. (Thank you,
Il Commissario Rex
!) I was already thinking of what flavors of gelato I would reward myself with for lunch, when Arabella passed me a final note that said,

As we filed out I asked, “What’s going on? Are you okay?”

She hesitated for a moment, like she was trying to make up her mind about something. Finally she said, “I have to talk to someone at Prada. Come with me.”

Polly would never have forgiven me if I’d gone to Prada—aka LogoLand—so I convinced Arabella to stop for gelato
instead. I was kind of distracted while we were ordering because the radio was playing a song where the singer was describing all these guys his girlfriend could be hanging out with, guys with titles and fancy yachts, and how he wished he could just reach out and take her hand and tell her that he might not have a Lamborghini but that those other guys were weenies. I was thinking that not only did I know just how he felt but I could give him a few tips on heartache, when I realized Arabella was talking to me.

She was saying, “You know how today in class you said your goal in life was to fight crime? Is that true?”

“
Sì, signorina
. Why?”

“I lied about my goal. I don’t really want to be a lawyer, I just wanted to learn the word. Have you ever seen those kiosks at the mall where they write your name on a grain of rice?”

“Sure.”

She looked up at me and her eyes were shining with excitement. “I want to own one. To help people make special memories.”

Definitely SPECIAL HANDLING REQUIRED. I wasn’t quite sure what to say, but fortunately she wasn’t waiting for a response because she plowed ahead, almost desperately. In fact, as she went on about having already started researching it and her search for a feng shui person who could properly orient her kiosk, I had the impression that while she was
passionate about rice art, it wasn’t what she really wanted to talk about. So when she broke off in the middle of a sentence about micro-pens, I wasn’t completely surprised.

But I was surprised by what she said next, which was: “Jas, I think someone is trying to kill me.”

Since that’s the kind of statement that sets you speeding down the road past the NOW LEAVING MIND-YOUR-OWN-BUSINESS ISLAND! COME AGAIN SOON! sign, it was clear that in my role as a Model Daughter I should pretend to have developed rapid-onset deafness and scurry away. Which is, of course, exactly what I did.

In an alternate universe.

What I did in this universe was say, “What makes you think that?”

“I think there’s been someone following me all week. That’s why I skipped class. I didn’t want to leave my house.”

Be a Model Daughter
, I commanded myself.
Ask no questions. Batten down your hatches. Where hatches mean Eyes
. And also Ears. “Can you describe the person?” my mouth said. Traitor mouth!

“No, I’ve never seen anyone.”

“Then how do you know you’re being followed?” Shut up, traitor mouth!

“A fortune-teller told me I’m in grave danger.”

“I think fortune-tellers tell everyone that to get them to
pay them money. Has anything else happened to make you think that?”

“No, but I can feel it. A lurking menace. In the shadows.”

Oh, good. Not only was her stalker invisible, he qualified as a member of the Lurking Menace Club. It is so nice to have sane friends. I imagine.

But it was a relief and helped to put an end to the tug-of-war going on between Model Me and Traitor Mouth of a Thousand Unnecessary Questions. Because while having friends who were being targeted by killers was contraindicated by Model Daughters, having friends who were just delusional and possibly paranoid wasn’t entirely disallowed. In fact, you could make a case that Model Daughters had a responsibility to the community to be kind to the insane.

“You don’t believe me,” Arabella said with a wounded puppy expression. “No one believes me. I tried to tell—”

She’d been looking up at me but now she glanced over my shoulder and suddenly her face turned deadly white. Like she’d just seen an ax-wielding murderer. Or a ghost. Or a ghost with an ax.

“What is it? What’s wrong?” I asked as I turned to follow her gaze. I was increasingly convinced that whatever was going on with Arabella was in her head, and what I saw—or rather didn’t see—just proved it. Behind us were some gondoliers, a guy wearing a dress and wig passing out flyers to a Mozart concert, a nun, a man in a tweed cap, and a woman with massive blond hair talking on a cell phone. No one who
would make the Ghouls-n-Villains annual calendar, even in the honorable mention category.

Apparently, she was seeing something different than I was, because as I turned back she said, “It—it’s not possible.” And then her eyes got huge and she grabbed my arm and shouted, “
RUN!
”