Sex Kittens and Horn Dawgs Fall in Love (10 page)

10

A Subterranean Lunch Is Followed by
the Tale of Cheryl and Robert

T
he Pound is not nearly as cliquey and gossipy as most other schools I’ve heard about, but let’s face it: three best friends who show up on the same day with three black eyes (though only one apiece!) is such a mind-boggling display of synchronized swimming by the Great Beyond that it’s bound to start rumors. Here are some of the better ones:

We had a three-Kitten catfight over a Dawg (and MANY names are being proposed as possible candidates!).

We had a “rumble” with a “girl gang” from another school, and we lost. In version B of this rumor we won, the other girls were hospitalized, and we’re going to have to appear in court, drop out of the Pound, go to jail, or all of the above.

Our self-inflicted wounds are a protest against violence against women, and we will be appearing on
60
Minutes
to discuss our ten-point plan for legislative, social, and economic remedies to this ongoing problem. ( Jess seems to approve of this rumor, and I can’t help wondering if she started it.)

My favorite is that it’s performance art, the black eyes are stage makeup, and we’re secretly shooting a documentary film about the whole experience. The film will premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah, to which the entire school will be invited in lieu of the traditional winter ski trip.

In the end, though, none of the rumors matter, because we know the truth. We also know that unless we DO something, the following dire consequences will ensue:

Kat’s recital will be Indefinitely Postponed and her chance with Argosy Records, kaput.

Jess’s tutoring project will be history and she’ll lose the tiny bit of ground she’s gained with D. J. Amberson, for good.

And the Search for X, not to mention my LIFE, will be over! Just when things were starting to get interesting.

(It took exactly three days for a full-color Brearley brochure to arrive in the mail, with a little Post-it note shamelessly attached: “My alma mater! Smiley-face, L.” I guess they don’t teach you at Brearley that people who use Latin phrases and smiley faces together are “Non compos mentis, look it up! Duh-face, F.”)

For these reasons and more (for, let us not forget, sad-face F. is still pining away for my Stray Dawg Matthew, who was suitably wowed by my Observations and Descriptions of the Romeo/Juliet Thing but remains impervious to my poorly aimed X that can’t seem to hit the broad side of a barn), the Sex Kittens are all feeling a bit glum, too glum even to go to the Moonbeam for lunch.

Instead, Kat, Jess, and I don our coats and eye-concealing sunglasses (I borrowed a pair of supersized 1980s shades from my mom, who never throws anything away despite our lack of closet space), get take-out sandwiches and corn chips from the corner deli to bring back to the Pound, and march grimly downstairs to the practice rooms to eat. Technically you’re not supposed to have lunch down here, but we can’t bear the thought of sitting in the Pound’s big dining room with all the stares and whispers that would doubtless swirl around us.

Jacob happens to be downstairs practicing his sitar, and when he sees us wander by he asks, politely, if he can join us. Due to his offbeat good looks (the tan has faded but the dreads are still platinum) and the aura of showbiz charisma he inherits from his mom, Jacob is considered somewhat of a hottie at the Pound, and he’s prominently featured in the Kittens-have-a-catfight-over-Dawgs subset of rumors. But Jacob is not the sort who cares what other people say. And he’s packed his own lunch of gluten chunks and pickled veggies on brown rice, so a subterranean picnic it is.

Jacob is trying to cheer us up by letting us taste the gluten chunks and guess what they’re made of (the correct answer is gluten) when who but Trip should appear at the door of the practice room. He presses his face against the glass comically. “I’ve been looking for you crazy kids everywhere!” his muffled voice says through the closed door. “Open up! I wanna see these pretty pugilists for myself.”

We Kittens are in no mood, but ever-polite Jacob is already wiping the gluten juice from his hands and opening the door. Trip enters, talking fast and loud as a stand-up comic. “So, is it true what everyone’s saying? That you girls wandered into an S-and-M club in the Village by mistake?” He gets a good look at us and stops short. “Oh, man!” Trip howls. “If only I had my digital camera—check out the bruised babes! This teenage trio packs a knockout punch of sex appeal! I’m serious, girls, we could do an awesome Web site.”

Jacob turns to me. “Who’s the asshole?” he asks politely.

Trip finds this hysterical. “Right on, brother! Defend their honor. I’m totally out of line, as usual.”

“This is Trip,” I say, in a please-calm-down voice. We don’t need any more black eyes just now.

“I’m that filthy rich drunkard you’ve heard so much about,” offers Trip helpfully.

Jacob eyes Trip with suspicion. “Easier for a camel to boogie through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven, dude,” he says.

“So true, man, that’s why I’m not even trying!” Trip laughs. This attitude seems to pass muster with Jacob, and he and Trip do a little peacemaking hip-hop handshake, banging fists and trading high fives.

Trip gags at the gluten, so we offer him corn chips and he joins us on the scratchy synthetic carpet. Now that our blood sugar is rising, we Kittens feel more hopeful and decide to do some serious problem-solving. First on the agenda is how to get Kat’s recital back on track.

“I need a room with a grand piano, and my dad not to know I’m rehearsing with Dmitri,” she says.

“Easy,” Jess says. “The big practice room here has a grand piano. You can rehearse at school during the day.”

“But that means Dmitri has to come to the Pound,” says Kat, with an ewwwwww sound in her voice.

“True,” Jess says. “But wouldn’t it be better to have him here? Where we can all keep an eye on him?”

“That’s the other thing,” moans Kat. “I have to tell Dmitri I’m not interested in him
romantically
”—at this she makes a face—“but not upset him so much that it makes him quit being my accompanist, but be firm enough so he doesn’t take it as a maybe when I ask him to come to my school and rehearse AND not tell my dad!” Ewwwwww indeed.

“We could hire a hit man,” suggests Trip.

“If he’s dead he can’t play, dude,” says Jacob. “I pity the Russian. It takes character to bear a broken heart with dignity.”

“I know what to do.” The wheels are turning ever faster in my Kittenbrain. “You need a
boyfriend
.”

“What?” says Kat, appalled. “I don’t WANT a boyfriend, that’s the whole point. Why can’t I just say that?”

“Because,” I say, remembering something I read once in the Unbound Page, in the Women Who Love the Exact Same Wrong Man Over and Over Again Till It’s Ridiculous section, “Dmitri already has a whole fantasy life about you. Saying no is not going to be enough. If you already have a boyfriend, then he has to accept that he can’t have you, plus he won’t take it so personally that you think he’s gross.”

“So I just tell him I have a boyfriend?” Kat asks hesitantly. “Are you sure that’ll work?”

“No!” I declare, realizing that it won’t. “That’s why someone has to pretend to BE your boyfriend!”

“I’ll do it!” volunteers Trip. “Except, does it have to be only pretend?”

Kat’s eyes are starting to flash sparks. “No thanks, Trip,” she says, with an edge. “One unwanted suitor is more than enough.”

“That’s cold, woman!” says Trip, still smiling but clearly wounded. “Okay, no more jokes, not that I was kidding. I’ll shut up now.” Poor guy, I think, though I’m proud of Kat for sticking up for herself. Being in a practice room is obviously helping her stay in Violin Kat mode, flashing eyes and all.

Wait—did someone say unwanted suitors? Brainstorm!

“Randall will do it,” I announce.

“RANDALL?” says Jess, eyebrows practically curving into question marks.

“Why not me?” says Jacob. “Or Matthew? I’m sure either one of us would behave like a perfect gentleman,” he adds, inclining his head respectfully toward Kat.

“Of course you would,” I say, refusing to contemplate Matthew being Kat’s fake boyfriend, even temporarily. “But Randall is the better choice.”

Now Jess gets it. “Because if Dmitri gives Kat any trouble,” she begins—

“Randall,” I finish, “will whup his lovesick Russian ass.”

No one can argue with this. But Kat is dubious that Randall will agree. I touch my cheek, which is starting to get a green tinge at the edges of the bruise. “He owes me a big favor,” I say. “I’m sure he’ll do it.”

Privately, what I’m thinking is this: if Randall feels about me even remotely the way I feel about Matthew, he’s bound to do anything I ask. Does that include pretending to be the boyfriend of one of my best friends? There’s one way to find out!

(This raises the question of whether I’m actually curious to know whether Randall DOES feel that way about me. A question we will skip for now. Because anyone who’s ever taken a test knows, if you don’t know the answer, skip it and come back to it latah!)

“But I don’t like to have people watch me practice,” protests Kat. “Except you, sometimes.”

“Then Randall’s your man,” I say. “You won’t even know he’s there. I mean that in a nice way,” I quickly add.

Kat looks wary. “Okay,” she says. “But there’s one more problem. Good accompanists are expensive, and I have to pay Dmitri. Now that my dad is out of the picture, I’ll have to come up with the money myself.” She doesn’t need to elaborate. We all know Kat doesn’t have cash to spare. Her violin lessons alone eat up half her dad’s modest pay.

“If this Dmitri dude loves you, he’d do it for free, wouldn’t he?” asks Jacob. “I mean, I would, for an excellent lady like yourself, were I the gentleman in question.”

“But we can’t EXPLOIT his feelings for Kat, that will only ENCOURAGE him!” argues Jess. “It’s absolutely necessary that Dmitri be paid. Kat has to keep this STRICTLY business.”

True to his word, Trip has stayed silent during this whole exchange. Now he speaks.

“Hey, peeps,” he says quietly. “I know I’m the inter-loping asshole who crashed your party. But I’d like to help.” He’s careful not to look directly at Kat. “Paying the lovesick Russian is something I can do. Problem solved. Okay?”

We all stare at Trip.

“Don’t you want to know how much?” asks Kat in a shaky voice.

“Nope,” he laughs. “Sorry to sound like such a spoiled trust-fundaholic and all, but the fact is, it really, truly doesn’t matter.”

“That was so cool, what Trip did, don’t you think?”

“Yup.”

“He’s sort of surprising when you get to know him, isn’t he?”

“Yup.”

I’m desperately trying to start a conversation with Matthew, who’s grown even more inscrutable than usual in recent days. As we walk together, not even the Barnum and Bailey streets of the East Village seem able to draw him out of whatever inner world is absorbing his attention at present.

It’s not that we haven’t talked. In fact, after my action-packed lunch in the practice room with the Kittens and Jacob and Trip, I hung out with Matthew in the lab for the rest of the afternoon, yakking about the Romeo/Juliet Thing (with mostly me doing the yakking) and playing with the bunnies. We created two complicated and completely scientific grids enabling us to track the Kat/Dmitri and Jess/Deej situations (Jess and Deej being a Kitten-Kitten friendship and not a Kitten-Dawg romance, but Matthew was quick to agree with me that there seems to be a friendship version of X as well).

Matthew concurs that we should watch these X-periments carefully, without interfering, sharpened pencils and graph paper at the ready so as not to miss any data points.

On a more cunning and selfish note, I also told Matthew about my freaked-out dad and the Brearley threat. The boring classes, the hourly bells, the dorky school uniforms, and the absence of Dawgs! The looming danger (which I made sound more imminent than it in fact seems to be, my mom having expressed a deafeningly Open response to the Brearley letter bomb from “L.,” which sent Dad back to his corner, for now) that I could be snatched away from the Pound forever!

I didn’t say this last part to him, exactly, but I did keep the phenomenal X-generating power of the Romeo/Juliet Thing in mind as I waited for his reaction. Would the threat of my disappearance cause any surge whatsoever in the flow of X between Matthew and me?

“Wow,” he’d replied sympathetically as he clicked his stopwatch on George the bunny’s latest run through the bunny maze. “That would suck.”

Huh. Clearly, the Romeo/Juliet Thing, though effective in many cases, is not whipping up any X in this particular Dawg-to-Kitten, Matthew-to-Felicia configuration.

And so, with renewed purpose (on my part, anyway), we continue our research. Lunch with my dad is obviously nixed until further notice, but Matthew and I still haven’t officially interviewed my mom. And that’s why we’re ding-donging and wind-chiming our way through the door of the Unbound Page.

Unlike my dad, Mom retains an encyclopedic knowledge of every trivial detail I have ever let slip about my life beyond her eagle eye. Sometimes this can be trying.

“Matthew!” she says, giving him a hug. “We’ve met once before, it was at that bake sale at school when they were raising money for the roof repairs. How are the rabbits? Any progress in the long-term memory protocol?”

“Some,” he says, bewildered. Can she see his underwear through his clothes? It’s possible.

“I made some twig tea. It tastes bad but you have to drink it, it’s incredibly cleansing.”

Mom has these smushy beanbag chairs in the back of the store so people can hang out. I’ve often suggested to her that if she didn’t make it so comfortable to read in the store, people might actually buy the books, but she pooh-poohs this. “I’m creating community” is her answer. Whatevah. As we sink into the squishy chairs with our foul-smelling drinks, Mom starts to laugh.

“Oh! Robert called again.” She laughs some more, which could either be a good or a bad sign.