Rosebush (12 page)

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.”

“Yeah.”

She gave me a weird look. “Enjoy that.”

“Um, thanks?” She was turning to go when I stopped her. “Want to get a coffee or something later?”

“Why? So you and your friends can destroy my reputation some more? There are easier ways to steal someone’s boyfriend.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I know where those Licky Nicky rumors came from. I didn’t want to believe it at first, but how could I not? When the ‘details’ started filtering out. My dad just finished his miniature golf course and you’re one of the only people to go down there.”

“You think I started those rumors?”

She didn’t say anything, just stared at me blandly.

“Why would I?”

She gave me a hard look. “Don’t act naive.
‘He sounds like the perfect boyfriend,’
” she mimicked my voice. “And now you have him. Although I should thank you. I was looking for a way to break up with him and that made it easy.”

“Nicky, you have to believe me, I didn’t start any rumors.”

“I don’t
have
to do anything. And what I really don’t have to do is stand here and talk to you.”

She started walking away, then turned and looked back at me. “The sad part is, I really liked you. I thought you were cool. Now I just feel sorry for you. Don’t you ever get tired of being the pawn between those two? Their little doll, doing whatever they say?”

“That’s not how I am.”

She shook her head. “Right. One day you’ll wake up and realize how expensive this is.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’ll learn the true price you’ve paid for your boyfriend and your popularity.”

Someone else had said something similar to me once. But they were both wrong.

“Jealous much?” I shouted at her but also not at her, at a memory, at someone far beyond hearing. She was. She was jealous about David, about my friends.

She laughed, gave me the finger over her shoulder, and kept walking.

That was the last time Nicky and I talked.

And then at the party she’d hugged me and kissed me and said she wanted to be my friend. And she gave me a drink.

All of which was weird. But for some reason I still couldn’t imagine Nicky drugging me.

Unless she and David—

No.

But David hadn’t been on the DVD, I reminded myself. And neither had Nicky.

It didn’t make sense. Although after hallucinating the writing on the mirror, and my weird reaction to seeing Kate and Langley, I didn’t feel like I was exactly the best judge of what made sense and what didn’t.

The flowers, the bouquets and cards, those were real. Weren’t they?

I wanted to cry out in frustration. And then I wanted to do it even more when the phone started to ring.

I willed my arm to work, but I couldn’t lift it. “Help!” I shouted. “Someone—”

Loretta came in, lips pursed, shaking her head. “No one should be putting calls through to you.” She picked up the phone. “Room 403, who is speaking, please?” She started to frown, her eyes got wide with surprise, and finally she smiled. “Why, thank you, your voice isn’t too hard on the ears either. Let me see if Miss Freeman is available.”

Loretta held the phone to her chest. “A David Tisch would like to speak to you.”