So Yesterday (11 page)

Chapter
15

THE
APARTMENT DOOR SWUNG OPEN, AND WE EXCHANGED
terrified stares.

I recovered first, given that it was in fact my mom.
Not held hostage with a knife to her neck, just Mom.

She, on the other hand, freaked out. She stared at me
for a moment, then down at her keys, at the number on the apartment door, and
then back at me.

"Hunter
...
?"

"Hi, Mom."

The bag of groceries hit the floor, slumping to one
side as its forgotten contents settled. She took a few steps forward, taking in
my two-thousand-dollar black-tie splendor with her mouth wide open.

"Good God, Hunter, is that you? What
happened?"

"I decided to go for a new look."

She blinked once in slow motion. "No shit!"

Having induced mom profanity, I had to chuckle.

She took a few more steps, shaking her head, and
reached out to touch my platinum hair.

"Don't worry, Mom, it won't break."

"It looks pretty good. Actually, you look
fabulous,
but
..."

My hand went to the bow tie. Had it already gone
squiggly? "But what?"

"You hardly look like
...
you."

Her voice cracked on the last word, and in one awful
moment my mother managed to go all the way from profanity to tears. Her eyes
glistened, her lips trembled, and she actually sniffed.

I was appalled.

"Mom."

"I'm sorry." She rested one hand on my
shoulder, the other covering her eyes. Her shoulders shook.

"What's wrong? What did
I...?"

She looked up at me, and I realized she was laughing
now, a deep sound that shook her whole body.

"I'm sorry, Hunter, you just look so damn
different."

I took a deep, relieved breath. We were back in
profanity territory.

"Yeah, I'm going to this party tonight," I
explained. "And it's kind of formal, so Jen and I were hanging out and we
figured it would be fun to
...
you
know, dress up."

"Jen did that to your hair?"

"Uh, yeah."

"Well. . . well." She cleared her throat,
just smiling now, though her eyes still glittered. "You look incredible.
When did you learn to tie a bow tie?"

"Recently." I looked at the clock.
"Sorry, Mom, but I've got to get to the party. It's way uptown."

"Of course." She nodded, the shock finally
releasing its hold on her. Then she giggled. "I'm not going to tell your
dad, though. Can't wait until tomorrow morning. Oh, hang on, I almost
forgot." She reached into her bag. "This really nice guy—"

"Yeah, I know all about the nice guy."

My phone emerged, and I reached for it. The familiar
shape slid into my hand, solid and gloriously real. "Thanks for getting it
back for me. The nice guy, he didn't ask any weird questions or anything, did
he?"

"Uh, no. He just said he found it in
Chinatown."

"Was he a bald guy?"

Her eyes narrowed. "No. Why would he be?"

"Or a silver-haired woman with a big alien face
right here?"

"Hunter, how exactly did you lose your
phone?"

I shrugged, promising myself to explain everything
later. "Just dropped it, I guess. Thanks. I'm glad you're okay."

"Of course I'm okay." She smiled, stepping
back to take me in again. "I've survived worse things than you dyeing your
hair blond."

I didn't tell her that wasn't what I'd meant, just
hugged her.

"Have a good time, Hunter," she said as we
pulled apart. "And tell Jen that I really,
really
want to meet her."

I smiled. "I will. I want you to meet her
too."

The weird thing was, I really did.

************************************

The launch party was at the Museum of Natural History.

The Natural is a sprawling Gothic castle settled
against Central Park. The immediate neighborhood, full of park views and
private grade schools that cost as much as Ivy League universities, is home
turf for the
hoi
aristoi,
which is Greek for
"aristocrats." Us regular folk, we're the hoi polloi.

I took a cab uptown, a relatively small investment to
lower the odds of damaging my two-thousand-dollar outfit. The long summer day
hadn't completely given up its steamy grip on New York's asphalt; it was way
too hot to be standing on a subway platform in black tie. And too weird. Mom
thought I looked good, I thought I looked good, but cool is all about context.
Among the rest of the hoi polloi, I would probably just look like a
penguin.

A hungry penguin. What with my brief, perplexing
encounter with Mom, I still hadn't managed to get anything to eat. Hopefully
the party would have a few platters of aristocratic food circulating.

In the cab I pulled the two phones from my pocket,
mine and Mandy's, comparing them to confirm that my own had actually come back
to me. But what did that mean? Maybe the really nice guy who'd returned it was
exactly that, and no one was after me. Could Detective Johnson have been right
about Mandy? Had she simply been called away to care for a sick relative and
lost her phone somehow? Of course, for that to be true, the whole chase through
the abandoned building would have to have been a misunderstanding. Or a random
crazy guy? A hallucination?

Didn't seem likely.

And even these radical theories didn't explain the
Hoi Aristoi
launch party invitations. The
anti-client was real and wanted to talk to me. Probably they had ditched my
phone for some random passerby to find. They didn't need it anymore because
they knew that I couldn't abandon Mandy to her fate (or resist the lure of the
shoes) and that I would be at the party tonight.

Fiddling with the phone's buttons, I decided to call
Jen.

"You
got
Jen's
phone.
Leave
a
message."

"It's Hunter. I got my old phone back. Some guy,
not a bald one, brought it to my mom at work. I don't know what that means. So,
uh, see you later, I guess. That's the plan, right? Um, bye."

I settled back into the taxi seat, wishing she'd
answered or at least that I'd managed not to leave such a dorky message. I've
never been a fan of voice mail, which is basically a big magnifying glass for
anything or anyone that makes you nervous. But surely I had no reason to be
nervous around Jen. I thought about all the times she had caught my eye that
day, had found reasons to touch me, to keep hanging out with me. Not to mention
give me a complete makeover. Jen liked me.

But did she
like
me? I rubbed my temples—the
big problem with being dazzled by someone (yes, I was dazzled) is that you wind
up too dazzled to see if they're dazzled by you in return. Or something like that.
Maybe Jen was just fascinated by the hunt for the missing Mandy.
 
Or maybe she thought I had adventures like
this every day and was going to be disappointed when it turned out I didn't.
And do girls usually bleach the hair of guys they want to hook up with?
Probably not, but maybe Jen did
__________

Added to this mental remix was a certain awareness
that my anxiety was probably focused in the wrong direction. If my disguise
didn't work tonight, my crush on Jen was going to be the least of my worries:
the anti-client might squash more than my ego.

I thought about all those movies where the doubtful
guy says, "But we'll be walking straight into a trap!" And the brave
guy says, "Yeah, but that's why they won't be expecting us." Which
is, of course, complete crap. The whole point of setting a trap is that you
expect someone to walk into it, right?

But they were expecting dark-haired Hunter of the
Skater Shorts, not blond non-Hunter the Mighty Penguin.

I took a deep breath. I really needed some food.

************************************

By this hour the museum was closed to the public, but
its hillside of marble stairs was still dotted with tourists. I joined the
other party-bound filtering up through the tired and sunburned clots of camera
pointers. We swept gratefully into the museum's air-conditioned cool, women in
evening gowns and men in black tie. In the lobby a barosaurus skeleton reared
up over our heads, eighty feet high, defending its skeletal young from a
skeletal T. rex. I remembered coming here as a kid, wondering why all these
dinosaur skeletons were bothering to eat each other when there clearly wasn't
much meat on any of them.

The
crowd was big enough to disappear into, the horde of voices smoothed to a
rumble by marble echoes. Among my fellow penguins I felt very much in disguise,
blending into the throng as velvet ropes channeled us from the lobby to the
Hall of African Mammals.

This
was the old part of the museum, dating to the days when conservationists went
to other places, shot animals, brought their corpses back, and stuffed them.
Which is a
kind
of conservation, I suppose. In the center of the huge
hall a family of stuffed elephants tramped along together, massive and
clueless. Set into the walls around us were dioramas—zebras, gorillas, and
impalas against painted African landscapes, staring out at us with wide glass
eyes, looking paralyzed with surprise, as if no one had told them that tuxedos
were required.
  
j

The
crowd was drifting in slow circles, moving clockwise around the elephants. True
to Manhattan form, the party was just now kicking into gear two hours late,
everyone grabbing their first drinks. The slow circling gave me the chance to
scope things out, searching for a disguised Jen and any sign of the
anti-client.

I
was jumpy. The little plastic twigs of the clothing's tags were starting to
poke, and I was still surprised by glimpses of a certain peroxide stranger in
the glass that separated me from the Africa veldt. Every girl of Jen's height
dragged my eyes after her, but unless she'd opted for plastic surgery, she
wasn't any of them. Of course I flinched whenever a bald head popped up in the
edges of my vision, half expecting a powerful hand to land on my shoulder and
lead me away to some dark corner of the ^
museum. I moved through the party, nervous and hyper-alert, as if the pair of
sleeping lions in the corner diorama were still alive.

To calm myself, I did what comes naturally to any cool
hunter: I read the crowd.

The demographic of
Hoi
Aristoi
was young and wealthy, the sort of people whose job it
is to go to this sort of party. You know who they are. Their names are in bold
type in gossip pages, presumably to remind them what they did last week. They
were here to refine their social skills, readying themselves for the day when
their trust funds would blossom into real inheritances, and they would join the
boards of museums and orchestras and opera companies and go to more parties.
The odd camera flash snapped, gathering fodder for the Sunday Styles section
and celeb magazines' back pages. Apparently
Hoi
Aristoi
really had aristocratic roots. Any magazine that could
occupy the entire Museum of Natural History for a party was backed by people
with serious social connections.

I wondered if any of the people here would ever
actually read
Hoi Aristoi.
Would it run advice columns
for the single scion? Essays on mink coat maintenance? Bargain buys for the
bulimic's bathroom?

Not that the articles really mattered. Magazines are
just wrapping for ads, and advertisers must have been lining up to fill the
pages of
Hoi Aristoi,
ready to flog Hamptons real estate, deals on drug
treatment centers and liposuction, a dozen labels I shall not name. And for
every true aristocratic reader would come a hundred wannabes, pitiful creatures
willing to buy a handbag or wristwatch advertised, hoping the rest of the
lifestyle would somehow follow.

Why did this tribe annoy me so much? It's not like I'm
against social hierarchies—my job depends on them. Every cool constituency from
hardtop basketballers to Detroit DJs organizes itself into aristocrats and hoi
polloi, insiders and nonentities. But this crowd was different. Becoming an
aristoi
wasn't a matter of taste,
innovation, or style, but of being born into one of a select hundred or so
Manhattan families. Which
is why aristocrats don't really have Innovators. For
their new looks they rely on designers from Paris and Rome, hired help selected
by Trendsetters like Hillary Hyphen. The top of the
Hoi
Aristoi
cool pyramid—where the Innovators should be—is
chopped off, sort of like the one on the back of the one-dollar bill.
(Coincidence? Discuss.)

Suddenly my step faltered, my sour mood lifting. A few
yards away two rent-a-models were stationed in front of a trio of bedazzled
bison. And they were giving out gift bags.

Filthy rich or bomb-throwing anarchist,
everyone
loves gift bags.

I grabbed one, assuring myself that it was just to
look for clues about the party's sponsors. Parties in New York are always
multi-corporate orgies, a mix of advertising, guest lists, and giveaways. Gift
bags are the final repository of all this cross-marketing, with everyone
involved throwing in an abundance of free toiletries, magazines, movie
tickets, CD singles, chocolates, and minuscule bottles of liquor. The main
sponsors (I don't mind naming brands, because you can't buy them in stores, for
reasons that will soon become clear) were
Hoi
Aristoi
magazine itself, a spiced rum called Noble Savage, and
a new shampoo that went by the peculiar name of Poo-Sham. The big prize in the
bag was a free digital camera, no bigger than an old-fashioned cigarette
lighter, with the Poo-Sham logo plastered all over it.

A free digital camera as a carrier for advertising. I
gave this the Nod.

Man cannot live on gift bags alone, though. I consumed
the chocolate and looked around for real food.

A tray went past carrying champagne and orange juice.
I grabbed a glass of the juice and gulped, only to discover it was spiked with
Noble Savage
...
a
lot
of Noble Savage. I managed not to sputter, drank it down for the sugar, and
immediately regretted it. An empty-stomach buzz began to take hold of my brain.