Stalker Girl (19 page)

Now Bernie Williams was coming to SJNY.

Sheryl needed to know this. She and Carly were friends, right? And a friend would let a friend know if there was a possibility of meeting her idol, right? Carly could reserve a table for Sheryl, and she could drive down from New Paltz in a couple hours.

“Really? Wow. What time?” Carly stood up and turned toward the ladies’ room, her phone in hand.

“Not till late. Ten o’clock,” Val said.

Good,
Carly thought,
she’ll have time to get here.

From a stall in the ladies’ room, she called Ernestine’s. That number had escaped Val’s notice. As she counted the unanswered rings, she imagined Ernestine’s cluttered kitchen. Empty. With the old-style yellow wall phone sending its ring through the big empty house.

There was no answer, and so she left a breathless message for Sheryl and told her to call back if she wanted Carly to try to hold a table for her.

Angela was strict about phones at SJNY. A sign by the podium and a note on the menu asked customers to silence theirs and take any conversations outside. She said it would be totally tacky for her staff to be checking messages or texting or whatever while they were supposed to be taking care of customers. Employees weren’t even supposed to carry their phones at work. That way they wouldn’t be tempted.

Most nights Carly and Val left theirs in a cabinet in the coatroom.

But that night, when it came time to put their phones away and Val offered to take Carly’s, she said she’d do it herself, making an excuse about needing to check with her mother about picking up Jess the next day.

 

All night long, while people around her were enjoying themselves and each other and the music, all she could think about was whether Sheryl would call back.

Every chance she got, Carly called Ernestine’s again. From the linen closet, the walk-in fridge, the coatroom.

Sheryl never picked up the phone.

It was closer to eleven when Bernie and his entourage arrived, and by then SJNY was completely packed. The dining room was full, the bar was five deep, and there was a line out the door. The band, Los Postizos, already had a huge following both in New York and in San Juan. Somehow word that Bernie Williams was going to play with them spread through uptown Manhattan and over to the Bronx, and it seemed like all of Spanish-speaking New York had come out for the party.

As Angela led Bernie through the dining room to his table, the place went nuts. People stood up. The band broke into a fast and funky, Latin-jazz version of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” complete with congas, bass, guitar, and a full horn section.

A lot of New Yorkers go out of their way to be unimpressed by celebrity—or to appear unimpressed because they like to think of themselves as celebrities waiting to happen. They think living in the city places them above the ordinary citizens of the world. If one of those New Yorkers passes, say, Scarlett Johansson on Fifth Avenue, he’ll check her out, for sure. And he’ll probably tell his friends about it later, but he won’t let his excitement show out there on the street. And he’d never ask for an autograph.

At SJNY nobody was pretending to be unimpressed. People kept a respectful distance—after all, the man hadn’t even sat down yet. But no one was playing it cool. Bernie Williams was in the house, and the house was very, very happy.

Except Carly. Carly was miserable.

All around her, people were clapping, dancing, waving, throwing kisses, snapping cell-phone pictures. She was standing against a wall with her hand resting on her phone, her eyes locked on the door, hoping. If you’d asked her then, she would have told you that all she was hoping for was that Sheryl would get a chance to meet her idol. She believed it herself. But of course what she was hoping for was that not just Sheryl but the whole lot of them would show up and it would be like it was before.

Before she ruined everything.

There was one brief moment when she felt like she was actually at the party and not watching it on TV. It was close to midnight. Bernie was up onstage with the band, and the whole restaurant had turned into one giant dance floor.

Val came over, smiling and holding her hands out, insisting Carly dance with her. Reluctantly, Carly put her hands in Val’s and let herself be pulled away from the wall. As she followed Val’s lead—shook her hips and shimmied her shoulders—she experienced a few blissful moments of freedom. She felt the music traveling through her body and stopped looking at the whole thing as something Brian was missing, something that would be a hundred times better if Brian were by her side. When Val lifted her arm and twirled Carly once, twice, three times around, Carly’s phone came flying off the waistband of her skirt. It clattered across the floor, landing at Angela’s feet.

“Oh. Wow. I totally forgot I had that,” she mumbled as she rushed to pick it up.

She would soon lose track of her lies, but that one, to Angela, felt creepy. Angela had always been so nice to Carly. She gave her the job, and let her work as much or as little as she wanted. Angela didn’t even notice the phone or hear Carly’s lie. The music was too loud, and she was too distracted.

 

Later that night, Carly’s phone vibrated as she lay half sleeping on the pullout in Val’s room. She’d turned off the ringer so if Sheryl called back she wouldn’t wake Val.

Her heart sank when she saw BRIAN on the caller ID. This couldn’t be good.

He didn’t even say hello. “You called my mom?”

“Um. Yeah,” she whispered, hoping not to wake Val, hoping he’d take the hint and lower his voice, too. “Did she tell you why?”

“I know why you said you called her.” He didn’t lower his voice. If anything, it got louder. “I know you called her eight times.”

Carly rolled off the bed, holding the phone to her chest to muffle the sound as she stumbled across Val’s room and down the hall to the bathroom. Eight? Could she really have called eight times?

She turned on the light, closed the bathroom door, and sat on the cold tile floor with her back against the door.

“She wasn’t home. I just kept trying because—”

“She was home, Carly. We were all home. We all heard.”

When she’d called, she’d imagined the old phone’s retro ring echoing through dark, empty rooms. Across the room, on the desk where Sheryl kept her computer, they had a more contemporary phone, complete with caller ID and an answering machine. But Sheryl always kept that phone’s ringer off, because she liked the sound of the old one. She said it reminded her of Ernestine.

“You were there?”

“Yup. Drove up after work. It’s her birthday, and we were having a little family party before our gig at Pi-Ep, and we had to turn all the phones off because you wouldn’t stop calling and what I want to know is—”

Carly pictured that scene. All three of the boys, plus Liam’s parents, sitting around Ernestine’s table, listening to her squealing message. She cringed as she imagined the looks exchanged, the eyes rolled, the elbows dug into Brian’s side.

“—am I going to have to change my number? And my mom’s, too?”

“No. Of course not.”

“First you come by my work.”

“Brian, I—”

“Then you call my mom? Come on, Carly. You don’t want to be that girl, do you? That’s not you.”

“No. I don’t—I’m not—I wasn’t—I just wanted to tell Sheryl about Bernie Williams, that’s all.”

“Okay. So why not just leave a message? Why’d you keep calling?”

“’Cause you know how sometimes you come home and you forget to check your messages, and I just—I know how much she loves him and I honestly thought she’d want to know. . . . But I guess I lost count. I’m sorry.”

As it turned out, it was a good thing Sheryl didn’t make the trip. Carly wouldn’t have been able to get her any nearer to Bernie Williams than across the room. Angela and Pedro did some serious crowd control.

“Carly—”

“Yeah?” She braced herself for more harsh words. She didn’t blame him for being pissed. She’d called eight times. During Sheryl’s birthday party. After doing that stupid stop-by that afternoon.

“It’s nice that you thought of my mom. You know her well.” He laughed. He laughed! “The woman loves her some Bernie Williams.”

Carly laughed, too, relieved that he didn’t seem so mad anymore. “Yes, she does.”

“You know, if it wasn’t a two-hour drive, I think she would have bolted the minute she heard.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. But it wasn’t exactly practical, you know?”

“Yeah. I guess. I wasn’t thinking it through.”

It was nice. Talking calmly like that. She had to concentrate, though, to keep her mind from going past
This is nice
to
Maybe . . .
It was hard, but she did it. She sat there, quietly, just breathing. Trying to accept how things were.

“You still there?”

“Yup,” she said, smiling. He was being so nice. It felt so much like before.

“So, Carl?”

And he was calling her “Carl,” like he did that summer.

“Yeah?”
Don’t hope,
she told herself. He’s just being nice.

“I wasn’t planning to tell you this yet, but—it seems like the right thing to do.”

Uh-oh.
The blood in her ears started pounding, so she couldn’t really hear what he said next. The first two words were muffled, but she heard the third and fourth loud and clear. They were
someone
and
else
.

“What? ”

“I’m only telling you because I have this idea like you think maybe we’re going to get back together, and you need to know—”

No, she didn’t. She really didn’t need to know, and she wished he would stop, but he didn’t.

“I’m seeing someone else.”

CARLY WENT
back to bed, but there’d be no more sleep for her that night. It never occurred to her that he would get involved with someone else so soon. It had been only three weeks since they broke up! Who could it be? What about needing time for the music? Was it that record-company girl? Maybe he was just with her to get the record deal.

Somehow, as skanky as it would have been of him to hook up with someone for the sake of getting signed, this idea comforted her. If that was the case, at least then she’d know it wasn’t real. Not in the sense of being truly together and connected like she and he were. He wouldn’t be taking this new girl to the secret room.

He couldn’t exactly bring someone like that home to Sheryl, could he? Had he? Had he brought whoever she was home? Had the new girl been sitting there, celebrating Sheryl’s birthday with them? Had she heard Carly’s messages and rolled her eyes, too?

She looked over at Val, who was sound asleep with a little smile on her face. Probably dreaming about Jake. She couldn’t tell Val what Brian had just told her. That would mean admitting that she’d called Sheryl just minutes after promising she’d avoid all things Brian. It would be humiliating.

As she lay there wide awake, Carly’s fingers itched for Val’s laptop. Now that she knew, she needed to know more. She needed to know who this “someone” was who had replaced her so quickly.

Maybe that was the real reason she didn’t want to tell Val. Val would be keeping an eye on Carly now. Now that she’d heard all the gory details of Carly’s obsessing over Brian, she’d be on the alert, watching for signs of relapse.

 

When the sky finally lightened at about six, Carly rolled off the pullout and crept out of the apartment.

She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been up this early on a Sunday morning. The streets of New York are never so quiet as they are at that hour. Almost every store she passed was closed, with its security gate down and locked. She saw the early shift of green-aproned baristas getting the Starbucks between Val’s place and hers ready to open. She saw dressed-up old ladies climbing the steps in front of St. Cecilia’s, and a disheveled guy in a tux emerging from that new luxury high-rise on Lexington.

 

Carly knew exactly what she had to do to get the information she needed. When she got home, she opened her computer, went straight to Shira’s blog, and left this anonymous comment:

She had no idea if the new girl had been at last week’s show, but it was worth a try.

There was an e-mail from her father, “gently reminding” her yet again to get her Denman application done. And one from Sheryl, written the night before.

It was a nice idea, putting her mind elsewhere. At the time, though, it was impossible.

There was nowhere else for her mind to go.