Sex Kittens and Horn Dawgs Fall in Love (13 page)

We’re all confused. “What was that?” asks Randall, concerned. “Is he sick?”

Deej looks like she’s about to say something, but busies herself with her food instead. Curried root vegetables with apricot chutney over basmati rice. It smells delicious. Kraft American singles on Wonder bread would also be good right about now.

When Trip returns, he sits down and resumes eating without comment.

“Everything okay?” asks Jess after a moment.

Trip smiles. “That was my friend calling. My P.O. He likes to check up on me.”

Deej pushes away her plate and fixes Trip with a look.

“You’re on parole?” she asks pointedly. “And what did you do? What did a rich boy like you need to steal?”

If I may speak for Randall and Jess as well as myself, I’d say we are as shocked by the blunt force of Deej’s question as we are at learning that Trip is on parole. But Trip doesn’t flinch.

“I’ll tell you what I did,” he says softly. “I fell in so deep with the wrongest crowd you can imagine, I almost screwed up my whole life trying to climb out.”

“I did that, too,” Deej says. Her voice is low and compassionate. “That’s my old crew. The ones that picked on Jess.”

“They weren’t so bad,” says Jess quickly.

“We were tighter than tight till this year,” says Deej, sounding sad. “Now they’re in high school, they think they’re all grown, too cool for school, going too far with everything, telling me to do the same.” She turns to Jess. “That’s why I didn’t want them seeing me hang out with you. Sorry I tripped you that time! I figured if I did they’d leave you alone. They get mad when I get tight with other girls.”

Jess taps her eye. “I noticed!” She laughs.

“You’re lucky that’s all you got!” says Deej. “They’re still my friends,” she adds after a moment. “But I don’t wanna do what they do.”

Trip’s been taking in her story like he’s having his fortune told. “Been there,” he says softly. “Believe me, I have.”

Are Trip and Deej opposites? Or the opposite of opposite? Before I can decide, Trip raises his glass of iced tea. “It’s not champagne, but even the sober are allowed to pretend. To new friends!” he says warmly. “I’m glad to have met you, Deej.”

“Yes!” says Jess. “We’re all so glad to have you here. Even if it’s just for today. But I hope it’s not!”

“I’m glad, too,” says Deej, sounding surprised. “Man, this place is sure not what I expected!”

Jess and Deej insist on going downstairs with Randall and me after lunch to check up on Kat and check out Dmitri, and Trip clearly would like to continue checking out Deej, so after lunch the five of us troop downstairs.

I’m feeling grateful for this Matthew-free midday adventure. It’s distracting me from the broken heart that’s lying in itty-bitty shards someplace inside me, near the liver, it feels like. There’s no palpable X zinging between me and Randall, but it was not unpleasant to watch him eat, which I’m taking as a good sign.

The big practice room has Plexiglas windows along the top half of one wall. We don’t want to be conspicuous, so the five of us crouch down on the carpet and sneak a peek above the bottom edge of the window.

“OhmiGOD!” chokes Jess. “LOOK at him!”

There’s Dmitri, all right. He’s at the piano. I blink hard, but it’s not a vision.

“Lord!” breathes Deej, awestruck. “Have. Mercy.”

It appears that gross-gross-gross, hotly-in-my-bosom Dmitri looks an awful lot like Johnny Depp. Dark hair, dark eyes, sculpted cheekbones, stern jaw but with soft, little-boy lips.

We can’t stop staring. Trip and Randall are looking at us like we’ve gone insane. Jess’s eyes are so dark you can’t really see into them, but if they weren’t I know they’d have little Xs floating in them right now.

It’s hard to hear through the Plexiglas, but it appears that Kat and Dmitri are having an argument. He’s gesturing wildly and talking fast, and she is standing with one hand on her hip, tapping her bow on the edge of the piano in a very impatient way.

Randall presses his ear to the glass. “Boeing, I think that’s what he’s saying,” he reports.

“Boeing?” whispers Jess, alarmed. “A Boeing? That’s a PLANE! Maybe he wants her to fly away with him! Maybe she’s saying no and he won’t listen! Maybe we should do something!”

“Bowing,” I say. “It’s a violin thing.”

That’s when Kat sees our 5 × 2 = 10 eyes peering through the window. Poor Kat! She hates to be watched, but she did ask us to check up on her. Randall stands up straight as an arrow and marches to the practice-room door. “How’s it going, baby doll?” he booms.

“Fine,” says Kat, who clearly has the situation well in hand. “Thanks, we’re fine. I’ll see you later, okay? End of day is fine.”

That’s when I notice Dmitri again, through the window—he’s kind of hard NOT to notice, but I especially notice him right now because of the look on his face. He’s watching Kat and Randall, and something changes. His Johnny Depp lips form the shape of an O. His cheeks start to flush, red as borscht.

“We have a lot of work to do,” says Kat, shooing Randall out and closing the door. “Thanks! Bye!”

“She’s fine,” pronounces Randall. “Our work here is done!”

Poor Dmitri, I can’t help thinking. Externally speaking, he is the Walking Embodiment of X, but even this is not enough to carry the day with Violin Kat, who simply has other things on her mind. No one’s X is foolproof, apparently.

And, okay. I will admit this. Seeing Randall act all boyfriend-like to Kat is making him seem, I don’t know . . . boyfriend-like?

“What are all these rooms for?” asks Deej, looking down the long hallway. There is a subtle hum in the air, the overheard strains of all the different kinds of music being played at once, muffled and mixed together.

“These are the practice rooms,” says Trip with a grand gesture, like this is his house.

“All these rooms!” exclaims Deej, tiptoeing down the hall in wonder. “For practicing music? Really?”

She turns and looks at Jess, her face radiant. “Can I?”

Jess grins at Deej and opens the door of the nearest empty room.

“Do you play?” asks Randall, impressed.

“She SINGS,” Jess declares. “Deej sings like an angel.”

Trip stops short and leans against the wall as if he’s about to melt. “Deej, honey, you are getting more dangerous by the minute,” he says. “That’s like, magic to me. I can’t even carry a tune.”

Deej skips into the practice room and closes the door. “Can you hear me from outside?” she shouts.

“No, not too much, tiny bit!” we call back, fibbing a little.

“Gimme a holler later, then! I’m gonna be a while!” Deej yells through the door.

And then Deej starts to sing.

Trip plops down on the floor, right where we’re standing. “You all go about your day,” he says to me and Jess and Randall. “I’m gonna stay here and listen to the music.”

And he crosses his legs in the shape of an X, and leans back against the wall, and closes his eyes.

I could be wrong, but it looks he plans to stay for way more than five minutes.

Lucky
13

The Third Experiment Results in
an X-Cellent Mutual Rescue!

“A
re you mad at me?”

I can’t believe Matthew is asking me this. It’s been like, a week since the don’t-you-care-about-Frosty incident. And I haven’t been avoiding him, exactly. It’s just that I don’t want to search for X anymore, and I don’t want to hear Matthew nattering about how great Jess is anymore, and so I’ve been keeping busy doing, you know, stuff. Lots of stuff to do. But I finally ran out of stuff, and it’s the first time since the Frosty incident that I’ve agreed to go to the Moonbeam in the afternoon with Matthew, like we used to do almost every day.

I don’t want to be here, but what choice do I have? There are only two more weeks till the science fair, and kiboshing the Search for X has proven impossible. Not only is Matthew not taking my bitter-quitter attitude seriously—Matthew Dwyer, miss the science fair? Unthinkable!—but there’s the small matter of Fatherdear.

Dad and I spent my most recent excruciating weekend in Lauraville performing superhuman feats of not talking about my eye, or Brearley, or the out-of-control nature of my wastrel life. Instead, we passed the time being very very tense, watching TV, and wandering the mall (and for once I was grateful for Laura’s endless spewing of chitchat, which significantly reduced the danger of actual communication).

But in the Mysterious Grown-up Realm, somewhat outside my Kittenradar, Cheryl-versus-Robert negotiations have been ongoing, with Discipline, Structure, and Academic Rigor Mortis the recurring buzzwords. I knew I was doomed the night Mom got off the phone with him and sounded all cheerful.

“I just talked to your dad,” she announced, like I couldn’t tell who it was, with all her Robert-pleases and Robert-listen-to-mes. “He says he’s reserving judgment for now, but only because he is VERY impressed that you’re doing a project for the science fair.” She sounded quite pleased with herself. “So you better come up with something GREAT!”

Great. So now I have two weeks to discover the Secret of Love, which I already know doesn’t apply to me anyway, and during which time I get to watch the Dawg I love be in love with someone else. Sounds fun,
n’est-ce pas?

At least the Opposites Attract data is finally pouring in. In fact, this X-periment is being played out in IMAX proportions in front of our very eyes, as Trip and Deej continue to toss the X back and forth like a Frisbee.

And Deej is now officially a visiting student! After she discovered the practice rooms and had some very fruitful conversations with the Pound’s Master Music Mentors, she decided to give the Manhattan Free Children’s School a chance, at least till the end of freshman year. Whether meeting Trip had anything to do with her decision I don’t know, but Matthew and I are Observing their budding romance carefully and taking copious notes.

We still don’t know what to do about a Mutual Rescue experiment, since everything we think of sounds life-threatening and I don’t need a repeat of the black eye situation. Nor do I know what I want to eat, because this gargantuan menu at the Moonbeam offers way too many choices. But I do know how to answer Matthew’s question.

“No!” I lie, brazen as Charles when he’s elbow-deep in the cookie jar. “Of course I’m not mad at you. Why would I be mad at you?”

“I don’t know.” He shrugs. “About Frosty, maybe? Or about, you know. You and me. The X thing.”

Oh, THAT old thing! “Listen, Matthew,” I say, strictly business. “I know how you feel. You know how I feel. We’re friends, right? We’re partners in science.”

He looks a little pained. “That’s what I thought, too. But lately I’ve been thinking—no, I’ve been feeling—the thing is, Felicia—”

OhmiGOD! He’s going to tell me about his CRUSH on JESS! I pray for a waitress to interrupt, but all the Moonies in their gibbous moon T-shirts are waxing and waning elsewhere.

“The thing is, I really like, uh, Jess,” Matthew says, staring deeply into the holes of a saltshaker. “I think I have for a while, but I didn’t realize it, I guess. And then I had to write that essay, remember, when we traded homework assignments?”

—To tell the truth—

“And then I had this weird vision at Dervish’s house, and Jess was in it—”

—although I understand these sensations intellectually I
don’t really have direct experience—

“—and, anyway,” Matthew says, more softly, “until you and I started talking so much about X, and love, and everything, I didn’t really understand what I was feeling.”

Oh.

Now I get it. Matthew’s X has finally been activated, as a direct result of OUR science project. But not even the Oracular Forces of All-Knowingness could have predicted that Matthew’s X, once awakened, would end up pointing straight at JESS!

Bitter, bitter hindsight! Better to have let sleeping Dawg X lie. Too late now, though.

“I know she’s your friend, so I don’t have to tell you how great she is,” Matthew goes on. “And I don’t think she’s interested in me, anyway. At least, it doesn’t seem like she is. But until now I didn’t know how . . . you know . . .” He trails off, the agony written all over his face.

“How wonderful and horrible it would feel?” I offer. “How endlessly you would think about it? How completely it would ruin your life?”

“Uh, yeah,” he mumbles. “So I was thinking, now that I understand this crush thing a little better, that maybe you might be mad at me.”

“I’m not,” I lie, again. I feel a tiny flash of pity for his suffering, which I squelch immediately. Squelch!

“That’s good,” he says. “Because I wanted to ask you something. About Jess.”

How short the road from love to hurt! From rejection to revenge! One bleeds into the other as smoothly as a Creamsicle morphs from orange to vanilla.

Matthew Dwyer, the Dawg I Once Loved, has rolled in the poison ivy of unrequited X. I feel his pain, and I want him to suffer even more.

“Do you think,” he says, turning his attention to the pepper mill. “Do you think I should—tell her?”

Knowing, as I do, the full extent of Jess’s lack of interest in Matthew, I do not hesitate even for a sliver of a split second. “Absolutely,” I say.

If I were a cartoon I’d be sprouting little devil horns right now. How badly I want him to know what it’s like to have your tender, heartfelt confession of love fall on indifferent ears! That’s data he doesn’t have yet.

“Really?” he says, his foolish heart quivering with hope. “What would she—I mean, YOU know her really well. What do you think she’ll say?”

I lean very close to Matthew, not caring about my breath, because I am wrapped in a cloud of sulfur and brimstone. “Just tell her how you feel,” I advise. “It’s best to be open about these things.”

The next day at the Pound, Ms. Blank hands me a fax from Berlin.

Dear Felicia,

I will be staying in Berlin until further notice. The
reason, I am happy to tell you, is love.

But first, Berlin! A glorious place. The quality of the
light, the music and the food! The setting is so very conducive
to romance—all that was required was a suitable Fräulein.

Enter Miss Elke Wolfgram, whom I met at the award
ceremony for my poems at the Deutsche Oper. There, with
the cool night air lit by crystal chandeliers, filled with music
by the Berlin Philharmonic, and attractively perfumed by
Miss Wolfgram herself, a spark ignited that continues to
burn, even as we get to know each other, haltingly, through
her passable English and my impossible German.

At my age, when love comes, we must not ask foolish
questions but seize the day and be glad.

I ask your forgiveness for my long absence, but perhaps
something in this turn of events contains a lesson of relevance:
about the universal language of love, the spell cast by a great
city, or a di ferent subject altogether. I leave the unpuzzling
of all that to you, my dear Felicia.

For now, I will enjoy my Fräulein and look forward to
your correspondence. Till next we meet,
Ich bin ein Berliner!

Yours,

Frasconi

“
‘Ich bin ein Berliner.’
President Kennedy said that,” says Trip, turning to Deej. “Know what it means? ‘I am a jelly donut.’ ”

Deej looks at him, supremely dubious. Trip, Deej, Jess, and I are in the math room, a box of Krispy Kremes on the table in front of us, our math books pushed to one side. Kat and Dmitri are rehearsing in the basement. I don’t know where Randall is, but Matthew and Jacob are upstairs in the lab, trying to teach the rabbits to distinguish between a dozen or so of the more popular ragas in Indian classical music.

Little twangs from Jacob’s sitar are audible through the ventilation system as Trip picks up a jelly-filled donut to illustrate his point.
“Ich bin ein Berliner!”
he says, and bites down. The jelly squirts everywhere and Trip guffaws at his own mess.

“Actually, that’s a myth,” I say, in the interests of accuracy, and also to conceal my disappointment over Mr. Frasconi’s letter. “Though it’s true that a Berliner is a jelly donut, in Germany.” There’s a whole section about conspiracy theories in my mom’s bookstore, so I’m pretty well informed about JFK trivia. “In context,
‘Ich
bin ein Berliner’
means ‘I’m one of you, I feel your pain,’ that kind of thing.” How could Mr. Frasconi abandon me like this. Falling in love? At his age? More ridiculous than a thousand foolish valentines.

“I get it. Like, I’m down with the peeps of Berlin,” says Trip.

Deej looks at him, her eyes the color of the chocolate filling inside a chocolate-cream-filled Krispy. “You sound wack talking like a homey, Trip,” she says, a glint of fun in her voice. “Because you are the whitest whiteboy I have ever seen!”

Trip laughs so hard he almost falls off his chair. “I’m just trying to fulfill my second-language requirement for college,” he says. “But whiteboy and homey won’t do it, huh?”

“No way,” snorts Deej. “My grandma, Miss Doris, she’s all proper, right? She’s always on me and my cousins about the way we talk with each other. ‘Doris Jean, you are an AFRICAN girl!” That’s what Miss Doris says. ‘You show your best manners where-EVAH you go.’ ” Deej makes a face. “But if I talk like Princess White Bread at my school—”

“They think you’s buggin’?” says Trip, grinning.

“You got THAT right!” laughs Deej.

“Hey, Deej,” Jess says, her bright-idea lightbulb twinkling on. “You’re giving me a great idea! Standard English is a REALLY useful skill, I mean in terms of taking the SAT, future employability, and so on. Do you think we should incorporate some speech training into the peer tutoring program at your school next year?”

“Standard ENGLISH? Sku me, shorty!” Deej sounds rather miffed. “Do you think we don’t get the network news on 145th Street?”

And then, in pitch-perfect, rapid-fire newscaster speech, every vowel and consonant plucked straight from the middle of mainland, strip-malled, and cineplexed America, Deej recites:

“In tonight’s State of the Union address, the President will explain the state of the union, since we’re too stupid to figure it out for ourselves! Full coverage of the white man’s speech at eight, with more white men providing commentary at eleven! All this, plus sports, weather, and a special investigative report on Who-Put-This-Stick-up-My-Butt! Thank you for watching Caucasian News Network!”

That does it. Trip is now on the floor, with actual tears of laughter rolling down his cheeks.

And Jess, for once, is speechless, in every language.

Deej fixes Jess with her chocolate-cream stare. “At my school, we talk like we do because that’s OUR slang. Like you and your friends got YOUR slang, like your Kitten-and-Dawg ‘thang.’ ”

Jess’s cheeks are so red right now I’m afraid she might cry. “You are totally right,” she says. “That was utterly stupid of me, Deej. I apologize.”

“It’s okay, Jessie,” Deej says, her tone softening. “Miss Doris says the same thing as you, about college and all. At Miss Doris’s house we talk whiter than Trip!” Deej kicks Trip under the table, cracking him up all over again.

“I would LOVE to meet Miss Doris sometime,” says Jess, starting to sound like herself again. “May I?”

“Me too,” says Trip, weak from laughter, as he climbs back into his chair. “I bet she’s a cool lady.”

“Then I’m coming, too!” I say. “If we’re invited, of course!”

“Y’all wanna meet my grandma?” asks Deej, looking at us in a you-people-are-crazy kind of way. “Oh, she is gonna love that!” Deej winks at Jess and smiles. “Miss Doris would LOVE to get a look at you, Jessica Kornbluth!”

Miss Doris is not the only person who would enjoy getting a look at Deej’s new friends. That becomes clear the next afternoon, when Deej’s former crew shows up at the Pound.

“Oh man, this is not good,” mutters Deej when we walk out of school and see a small but raucous crowd of girls hanging out on Gramercy Park South.

It’s one of those early April jacket-season days that fashion-conscious New Yorkers live for. Resplendent in our attractively layered outfits, Jess, Randall, Trip, Deej, and I are on our way to meet Matthew and Jacob and even hardworking Kat for a picnic in Madison Square Park. I’m looking forward to it—the chance to lie on the grass and stare at the clouds while dispensing coy, data-gathering tidbits of flirtiness to Randall and Observing his reactions. Not to mention the fun of watching Matthew squirm and suffer around Jess. He hasn’t confessed his loooooove to her yet, despite my nefarious encouragement, but he’s been looking pale and thin lately, with dark circles under his eyes.

“Can’t we just wave and keep walking?” says Jess warily. Of the three black-eyed Kittens, Jess’s eye has taken the longest time to heal.

“Relax,” says Trip, puffing up his chest. “I think I can take a bunch of cute girls.”

“Don’t play around, Trip,” warns Deej. “These girls are no fools and they have mean boyfriends. Let me go see what’s up.”