Look Both Ways (7 page)

“Wonder how much all this set them back,” Campbell said, perusing the expanse of champagne brick and fieldstone.

Tim replied cheerfully, “More than we’ll ever see. What do you think they do?”

“Sell drugs,” said Campbell.

“Mom!” Mallory and Merry gasped together.

“I didn’t mean it,” Campbell told them. “It was a figure of speech.”

Meredith jumped out of the car and began running up the drive, which she quickly noticed had the pitch of a ski hill. She yelled back, “I’ll be polite! Call me if you need me! I have my phone. I’m not sick, so don’t worry. The meds they gave me are working now and I can hardly feel it.”

“You don’t have your pajamas, though,” Tim called after her. Merry stopped. “I brought your flannel pants and your Giants sweatshirt.”

“Did you bring my iPod, Dad?” Meredith asked.

“You go to somebody’s house for a sleepover and listen to music they can’t hear? Isn’t that rude?”

“Why?” Meredith asked.

Just then, Neely pulled up in a four-seater golf cart, with Alli and Caitlin in the back.

“I saw you down here struggling,” she said. “Hi, Merry’s parents! I’m Cornelia Chaplin.” Neely shook hands as though she were twenty-five. She turned to Merry. “We thought we’d come and get you. If I had to walk up that driveway every day, I’d expire.”

“You work harder in practice than you do walking up the drive,” Campbell said mildly.

“But that’s just what I mean! If Merry leads practice, I’m wrung out like a rag when I get home,” Neely said.

What a suck-up,
Mallory thought.

But Merry thought Neely was being really nice, in a phony way.

“Well, have a nice time!” Campbell said. “I should have spoken to your parents.”

“Oh, they’re here! And we will!” Neely called.

“Merry, you take it easy,” Campbell said. “You know you have a concussion at least. You should be at home. This is ridiculous.”

“My dad is setting up a movie, and we have cheese and shrimp puffs from Luda. It’s going to be a laid-back night,” answered Neely. “Don’t worry.”

“Well,” said Campbell, “I’m only ten minutes away. Call before you go to sleep or if you have any changes in vision or increased pain.”

“Does she always talk like that?” Neely asked, as they spun away.

Alli and Caitlin said together, “Yes.”

Luda must be some fancy restaurant in New York City,
Meredith thought.

As they sped up the drive, with Meredith clinging to her duffel with one hand, Caitlin chattered, “We already went swimming. You should see the pool. It’s as big as the one at school! There’s a twelve-foot end and a diving board.”

“We can go again later,” Neely said. “But I have to eat now. Swimming makes me starved. We thought you would be here sooner.”

“I was, uh, I was in the hospital. Witness my hair.”

“I thought Crystal was in the hospital,” Neely said.

“Well, we went to see Crystal and her leg was gross and I guess I just passed out,” Merry explained.

“It was that gross?” Alli asked. “Warn me, because I’m going to see her tomorrow after practice.”

“It wasn’t gross to see. It was the way she described the ligaments being torn.”

“I thought passing out was Mallory’s thing,” Caitlin said. To Neely, she said, “Remember? Mallory’s her twin. She faints all the time.”

“Does she have, like, a brain problem?” Neely asked.

“No,” Merry answered.

“Yes,” said Alli.

A guy in a coat and jeans had come to take the golf cart away. Neely said, “Thanks, Stuart.”

Campbell refused even to hire a house cleaner, pointing out that the girls had arms and could push a vacuum. Merry told Neely, “They just like to get down on Mallory because she plays soccer, and she thinks cheerleaders are ga-ga. And no, she doesn’t have epilepsy or anything, and neither do I. I just got woozy because of Crystal’s leg, and then I had to hang around for ages to get a brain test and junk. My mom’s so overprotective she’s paranoid.”

“They had to test your brain?” Neely asked.

“Well, it could have been a seizure. But it wasn’t.” Merry pointed to her head. “Hence the nice hair gel.”

“It’s a very fresh look,” Alli said and broke the tension. “I’m glad you’re okay, Mer. But you can see the lump on your head from here. It’s going to kill in the morning.”

“I have ice packs and they gave me some super strong acetaminophen and codeine.”

“What?” Neely asked.

“Her mom’s a nurse,” Caitlin said. “She can’t say ‘aspirin’ like a regular person.”

The girls ran up a staircase that looked like it was out of one of the old movies Campbell forced them to see, like
Gone with the Wind.
Neely’s room was like an apartment, with her own projection TV and two computers, one just for mixing music. The viewing system was elaborate, with speakers in alcoves all over the room. This was what Neely meant by her dad “setting up” a movie. There was an actual little projector-type thing, not a DVD player. The whole other side was the fabled closet with buttons Neely could push to make the racks move so that she could choose clothes by color.

Then came Neely’s actual bedroom. It wasn’t really a “room,” the way the other girls understood it. It was a “suite” of small rooms —almost like her own little apartment in the gigantic house.

Everything that draped or floated around the king-sized bed was peach and black. Peach sheets with a black velvet comforter. Peach curtains encircling the bed that swept down from a star-shaped light on the ceiling. Black velvet pillows and bolsters. In one corner, Meredith glimpsed an open door that led to a bathtub so big it needed steps to get into it.

“This is a lot like our room,” Merry said. She thought of their corner of the attic with one dresser in one closet and the private bathroom they were so proud of in the other closet and wanted to fall on the floor laughing.

“It is?”

“Oh, please. My room is in the attic. It’s not a hole in the wall. It’s a hole in the roof!”

“You live in a big house,” Alli said loyally.

“It’s big, but it’s old-big. . . .There are a bunch of goofy little rooms they used to keep canned berries and bags of potatoes in and stuff a hundred years ago. Literally a hundred years ago. And something is always breaking. This house . . . this is like the mall,” Merry said. “I share a room with my sister.”

“I couldn’t stand sharing a room,” Neely said. “I have to have absolute darkness and quiet when I sleep because I’m so wound up. I have to wear a sleep mask.”

Merry said, “But it’s so quiet here at night. It’s hard to believe, living here, that people take the train to New York every day.”

Neely said, “They wanted me to have country air. I loved city air.”

“We like being close to New York but not in it,” Caitlin said.

“Well, you see, Chicago, in a lot of ways, was more cutting-edge than New York. Like fashion, for example.”

“Like that’s nuts, for example,” said Alli, defending her city. “If Chicago is so about clothes, why does, like, Ralph Lauren live in New York? Is he still alive?”

Nobody was sure, but they knew he had lived in New York, or at least New Jersey.

“You’ve never been to Chicago,” Neely said softly. She didn’t elaborate. Was it really just an explanation or a whole new form of snottiness? If it was, Merry wanted to learn it: All three of the girls from Ridgeline had just got spanked somehow, and they didn’t even feel it.

Mrs. Chaplin (“Call me CeeCee . . . . ”), who had her own online hat and jewelry boutique, and whose black velvet leggings with a green velvet riding jacket and a huge suede hat were the talk of the town, stopped in. She was as thin as one of the girls. “I’m going to do my yoga practice, Neely, love. Do you girls want some pizza puffs to go with the shrimp?” she asked.

“We’re fine, Mama. We’re going to watch the movie.” Mrs. Chaplin wiggled her fingers in farewell. Neely dimmed the lights. “This is such a cool little indie. It’s not in theaters yet. It’s about this girl who runs away from a religious commune with her boyfriend.”

“How did you get it?” Alli asked.

“My dad’s one of the producers,” Neely said. “He does a lot of little things besides entertainment law. He produces movies. He’s working on a book about renewable energy. He’s the lawyer for mostly directors and stuff but some movie stars too. Like, I used to think Demi Moore was my aunt or something.”

Merry said, “Oh.”

“Where did you get these?” Alli asked of the shrimp puffs. “These are so great I could, like, live on them. Is Luda a caterer?”

“No! Luda’s a person. Ludamila. She’s from Georgia, not the state—the country by Russia. Luda’s lived with us since I was born.”

“And Stuart?”

“He’s her husband. Sergei. He changed it when they became citizens. He works here too. And then I have tutors and my gym coach. She comes once a week from the city. And the cleaners and my mom’s assistant, Natalie.”

“You have your own coach? Like . . . no class?” Caitlin asked.

Neely smiled. “My mother was an Embraceable You when she was young. Before she met my father.”

“A what?” Meredith asked.

“A St. Louis Rams cheerleader. A professional cheerleader,” Neely answered. “She was teaching me style things when I was in preschool.”

“They’re called the You’s, like the You’s and Me’s?” Caitlin asked.

“No. E-W-E. It’s a female ram.”

Imagine living this way,
Merry thought. It was like Neely was princess of something. She imagined even being an only child, without the constant emotional noise of Mallory’s moods and Adam’s pranks. What she felt stunned her: For a moment that fluttered past like the flap of a wing, she missed Mallory.

“Forget the movie! Let’s do something!” Neely said. “I require action.”

Neely opened her makeup cabinet, where Merry could see boxed sets in gold or turquoise packages, unopened. Neely took out a length of silver tasseled braid, which she attached to a roofing nail under the windowsill. She filled a backpack with rolls of toilet paper and helped the others, one by one, slide down to the ground, showing them how to leap the beams of the motion detectors so no lights went on when they slid the golf cart out onto Woods Meadow Road.

“Andy Wegner is that cute junior, right?” Neely asked. “His father is the club pro? They live right behind us.”

For the next fifteen minutes, Neely and the others festooned the Wegners’ house and trees with roll after roll of toilet paper that waved in the mild night breeze like the sails of tiny ships.

“He’d kill you if he knew it was you!” Caitlin said.

“Oh no! He’d be flattered,” Neely said. “Who else can we do?”

Forty minutes and three more cute guys’ houses later, the girls rope-climbed back into Neely’s room, where cups of hot chocolate were magically waiting. Neely replaced the silver braid and took out a small bottle of Bailey’s Irish Cream. Of all of them, Alli usually pretended to be the most sophisticated, but even her eyes popped. She asked, “Don’t they see that stuff? I mean Luda cleans in here, right?”

“My parents can handle it,” Neely said. “We’re totally honest with each other. They know a person has to cut loose once in a while. If you get to do a little now, you won’t be tempted to do a lot later. I stay in limits.”

“My life would be limited,” said Merry. “To about five minutes.”

“So tell me stuff,” said Neely as they sipped. “Tell me all the bad things that happened before I came. I know Kim’s older brother died. Was it in the Middle East?”

Her eyes seemed to glitter. Was gossip like this what she thought of as fun? About somebody’s dead brother? Merry wondered what Neely would think of as a really bad thing to do. . . . Merry thought of the little fingers, with their rings.

“He fell off a cliff, up above the river,” Caitlin began slowly, before Merry could shush her. “Meredith was there. Tell her, Mer.”

“There’s not that much to tell. I heard him scream. It wasn’t suicide. No one thinks that. It was a total accident. I just called the police.”

“And now Kim’s doing weird stuff,” Caitlin said suddenly. “She’s hanging with boys from Deptford and going to the quarry.”

Going to the quarry was code. It was code for using drugs. None of them knew what kind of drugs they were, but everyone knew they were the dangerous kind, and the girls who went there would be pregnant by sophomore year.

“Kim wouldn’t do that,” Merry objected. The shrimp and cheese were too rich for her stomach, and the house suddenly seemed too hot.

“You don’t know her anymore,” Caitlin said.

Merry thought,
Do I?

She didn’t feel as though she knew very much about anything.

For one thing, she’d never had more than a sip of champagne. Downing at least three little cups of Bailey’s in her mug tasted great with the hot choc, but she was woozy. She got up and splashed her face.

It did no good.

“I’m so exhausted,” she told the others, who were now preparing facial goop in a marble basin. “It must be from the hospital. I have to rest for a little while.”

Nearly stumbling, Merry fell into her own queen-sized pouf of a bed, which had been prepared for her while they were out TPING.

She heard the others laughing and trying to decide between mint-jasmine and honey-butter-cream scrub.

Merry was asleep when she walked over to the window and looked down—although she didn’t know it. She thought she was sleepwalking, although she later found out that her feet had never touched the floor. Merry looked down and saw that she wore a white gown with blue satin behind the eyelet lace—the kind of gown that probably cost fifty dollars. Out across the expanse of dark lawn were the ranks of the Chaplins’ trees, the moon between them like a ball tossed nervously hand to hand. But beyond the trees, it was morning.