Tempestuous (10 page)

“Oh. My. God.” I instantly realized. “Brian was here.”

“How do you know?” Caleb wondered.

“Myrtle. I’ll explain later.” I inched up to the bird cage. Hopefully my powers of persuasion were as effective on birds as they were on humans.

“Hi, pretty bird!”

“Was
sup
! ” Uggh. I’d heard my fill of that phrase over the last two years.

“Yes, was
sup
! They were in here tonight, weren’t they, you winged goddess?”

“Was
sup
! ”

“Where did the mean boy and his bitchy girlfriend go? Did they say? Can you tell me where, smart birdy?”

Caleb tapped me on the shoulder with his free hand. “Um, excuse me? I wanna go on record here as saying this is getting a little worrisome.”

“Not now,” I hissed. “I’m busy.”

“As you were, then. Carry on.”

“Heyyyy Myrtle, Was
sup
… was
sup
….” I said, trying to speak her language. “Did they say where they were going next?”

Like the avian world’s very own Bird Whisperer, I stupidly spent the next several minutes trying to psychically connect with Myrtle, cajoling and pleading with her to enlighten me as to Rachel and Brian’s whereabouts. Just when I was about to acknowledge the inanity of my efforts and concede Caleb’s point, Ariel walked back from the front of the store, stroking Sebastian’s soft ears.

“Sorry, Miranda. I know you’re busy with Myrtle, so I hate to interrupt, but just thought you’d want to know I spotted Rachel walking into Veronica’s Boudoir just now.”

Caleb doubled over in laughter, forcing my left shoulder to dip involuntarily.

“Okay, Ariel, thanks,” I said with a sigh, tempering my frustration at both my cohorts. “Tell Sebastian to get ready. It’s on.”

• • •

Veronica’s Boudoir was on the mall’s upper floor within close proximity to where the Eastern Preppies were bivouacked at this end of the building. That meant the payoff could be huge if my plan unfolded without a hitch. As we darted, unseen, from the pet shop toward the lingerie store, I quickly filled Ariel in on Rachel’s history.

“She’s from Poughkeepsie, not Manhattan like she claims. Her mom married the black sheep brother of the heir to a cough drop fortune when Rachel was in middle school and that’s when they moved here. Her true roots are a bit more, well, rural.”

“I don’t get it,” said Ariel confused. “How does that help us take her down a notch? And why do we need Sebastian?”

“Just wait,” I said. “You’ll see.”

I thought back to the weekend I’d accidentally happened upon Rachel’s inner demon, so to speak. She and the Itneys had conked out in front of the TV watching
SNL
. I couldn’t sleep, and since I typically read in lieu of counting sheep, I went up to Rachel’s room to grab
Jane Eyre
from my overnight bag. It wasn’t where I left it, so I checked the closet to see if her housekeeper, Rosie, had hung it up in there. I’d been in her bank-vault-sized walk-in closet plenty of times before when we tried on outfits for double dates or the first day of school. I ventured back to where Rachel kept all her designer purses, stored with the same loving care as the Met’s Egyptian collection. I couldn’t find my bag, but on a shelf in the corner underneath a stack of
Vogues
I noticed a fabric-covered binder. It was about four inches thick, trimmed in a surfeit of white eyelet and pink ribbon. Curious, I picked it up, expecting to see cute pictures of Rachel as a baby. Turned out it wasn’t a photo album but more of a scrapbook-journal hybrid put together by someone who couldn’t have been much older than twelve or thirteen. Common decency would have dictated that I put the book back where I’d found it, but since most of this “young Rachel’s” inner musings were surprisingly banal (names for her future children, celebrity crushes) I didn’t feel too guilty about reading on. Nevertheless, by the time I’d emerged from Rachel’s bedroom and snuggled back into my sleeping bag in the family room, I felt privy to a dark recess of her mind that I was certain she’d never meant to share with anyone.

Peering around the entrance to the boutique like a three-headed monster, Caleb, Ariel, and I saw Rachel in back browsing the bras and lace teddies. Having ascertained that our target was still there, we retreated out of her direct line of sight for a quick powwow.

“Okay, Ariel,” I whispered, grabbing the thankfully placid rabbit from her and securing it in the crook of my free elbow. “We’ll make sure Sebastian’s in the right place at the right time. All you need to do is go in the store and tell Rachel that Brian is freaking out downstairs at Teasers wondering where she is. Escort her to the elevator, and keep her distracted. Press the button for the ground floor, then once the doors start to close, hit the alarm button. You’ve got to jump back out as fast as you can.”

Having handed Ariel her marching orders, I headed to the nearby glass elevator with Caleb in tow.

“Sorry, genius, but pressing the alarm button isn’t going to trap her in the elevator,” he said.

“Duh! What do you take me for, a sociopath? I’m not going to trap her anywhere.”

“Okay then, would you care to spell it out? Because you lost me.”

“Don’t I wish. Look, I’ll explain it all later. Let’s just get Little Bunny Foo-Foo in there. They should be heading this way any second.”

I gently placed Sebastian on the corner of the elevator floor with a pile of Muesli-looking rabbit food to keep him from scampering out. Caleb and I hid out of view as the elevator closed in on him. My heart took five more pounding beats before Ariel and Rachel came walking at a fast shuffle around the corner.

“But like, what was he saying?” Rachel said. “Did he seem pissed? I mean, I
told
him where I’d be! And, no offense, but seriously? I don’t need a nonentity like
you
getting involved.”

“I just think you’d better go talk to him, ASAP,” said Ariel, ignoring the blatant insult. When the elevator door opened, both girls stepped in, but not a half second later, my diminutive pal flitted back through the closing doors as the elevator’s screeching alarm bell began to sound. Rachel’s bloodcurdling scream soon chimed in. A masterstroke, if I do say so myself.

I’d discovered the unusual chink in Rachel’s armor about halfway through my perusal of the doily-covered chronicle she’d stashed in her closet. She’d written passionate entries about her involvement with the 4-H club breeding and raising rabbits. (Embarrassing, right? But I digress.) One section of the binder served as a shrine-like documentation of her zealous commitment to her “beauties.” I scanned through pictures of a chubby-cheeked, knobby-kneed Rachel posing proudly in front of her outdoor rabbit hutch, cradling baby rabbits as if she herself had carried them in her womb for nine months. Blue ribbons from county fairs were Scotch-taped alongside crude line graphs of the creatures’ ages and weights written in Crayola markers. I could tell from the photos and her overuse of smiley faces and exclamation points, that her favorite rabbit was a pure white roly-poly guy she called Fritz. Clearly this had been no mere passing fancy but a hardcore obsession for Rachel. All of it was certainly understandable behavior from a prepubescent girl; quite sweet, really. But like
Charlotte’s Web
minus the feel-good heroics of a literate arachnid, Rachel had to face the morbidly pragmatic reality: Most rabbits bred in captivity are not intended to live happily ever after. I didn’t have to picture Rachel bawling her eyes out saying goodbye to a caged Fritz and friends the day they were sent off to, well, I shudder to think where. Her journal had elaborated on the heartrending scene in great detail.

And here’s where things got weird. As the journal continued, Rachel began making fairly frequent references to nightmares involving Fritz. In the dreams, he started off looking docile and sweet as she’d known him, but he’d eventually manifest ferocious, razor-sharp teeth and an insatiable bloodlust. She’d wake in a cold sweat, and confided in her diary that she’d felt certain Fritz was haunting her as punishment for sending him to his dismal fate.

From an appreciable distance, Ariel, Caleb, and I watched Rachel make her screaming descent in the glass elevator. Midway between the upper and lower floors, the transparent box came to a sudden halt. Rachel was hysterically pushing buttons on the elevator panel, banging frantically on the buttons, doors, and glass window panes.

“Well, what do you know. She
is
stuck!” Caleb said.

“That wasn’t my doing,” I said. “She must have accidentally hit the emergency stop button in her desperation to get out.”

By this point, the elevator alarm bell and Rachel’s screams had drawn a growing number of bemused looky-loos from the cool-kids’ ground floor camp. A chorus of “holy shit”s and “what’s she doing?”s echoed staccato-like up to the second floor from where we stealthily watched the proceedings.

Still stuck between floors, Rachel flattened her back up against the side of the elevator opposite Sebastian, whom I could just barely see nibbling nonchalantly on bunny kibble. She kept craning her head to look away from the bunny, writhing and squinting her eyes as if she was facing a nuclear blast.

“Nooooooo!” she screamed. Her hyperventilating chest heaved up and down, like some sort of beleaguered heroine in a high-octane action flick. “Let me outuuuut! He’s going to steal my soul! He’s going to steal my SOUL!!! Somebody, please! Save me!”

I stared wide-eyed—the histrionics were way better than even I had predicted—while Ariel watched amazed, her hand cupped over her glimmering orthodontia.

Finally, Brian emerged from the crowd that was gathered ten feet or so below the elevator car. “Rachel!” he said, half shouting, half chuckling. “Was
sup
, babe!?”

His flunkies all laughed hysterically while Rachel just stared down and wailed, big fat tears cascading over her cheeks. By the time they’d all stopped teasing her and instructed her to simply push the ground floor button so the elevator would resume operation, she looked stark raving mad. She raced out when she reached the ground floor, and the doors shut behind her. Ariel crept unseen to call the elevator back up so we could retrieve Sebastian and return him safe and sound to the pet shop.

• • •

As we walked back in that direction, I filled Ariel and Caleb in on Rachel’s history with Fritz.

“Wow, straight out of
Donnie Darko
,” Caleb remarked. “I have to admit—not that I’m condoning it or anything, but—that was truly something to behold.”

I blushed with pride. Normally, I would have spent the next hour (well, make that the next week) reveling in my
coup de grace
, but my work here wasn’t finished. Not by a long shot.

“Hey, did either of you see Britney or Whitney down there among all the gawkers?” Ariel and Caleb both shook their heads no.

“Okay then, let’s drop off Sebastian and motor,” I said. “I think I know where we might find them.”

“Work it, girl,” Britney said as Whitney half-tripped over her own feet, clad in six-inch leopard-print heels. She collapsed into a cushy armchair and made a cavalier show of kicking the prized pumps off her feet. One landed with a rustle in the tissue-papered box on the floor but the other missed its mark, alighting next to one of several crumpled piles of clothing. Removing a pair of ginormous Jackie O. sunglasses—the $320 price tag still dangling from the frame—Whitney looked at them with passing interest before tossing them over her shoulder.

“This is about as boring as, like, a medically induced coma,” she said, sighing. “I can’t believe I’m actually saying this, but I’m sick of trying on clothes.”

“That’s a first,” said Britney, grabbing a pink cocktail dress off a nearby rack and holding the hanger up to her chest. “Would you say this color is ‘bubble gum’ or ‘baboon butt?’” When Whitney ignored her, she rolled her eyes, dropped the dress and its hanger to the floor, and stepped lithely over it. “Okay, then. What do
you
want to do?”

“Let’s go meet back up with
Brian.
” Whitney’s voice was a grating squawk, and paired with her overdone eye makeup and “Sweet Sixteen” nose job, she reminded me of a colorful macaw parrot.

“I got the impression Rachel wanted us to bail for a while. You know—for some, like, alone time.”

“Yeah, whatever,” Whitney said. She and her rhyming counterpart had boyfriends who, like Rachel’s ex, Max, had left for college in the fall.

Caleb, Ariel, and I watched the two of them from the mezzanine above the dress salon at Blumenfelds. The place looked like it’d been ransacked, strewn with frocks hung over the backs of chairs and in piles in front of the three-way mirror. Rachel, the Itneys, and I had tried on gowns here for homecoming last year. It was hard to reconcile that not-too-distant memory with the present moment, but I’ll admit I had fun at the time. And why not? We were four fetching girls with expensive tastes, hot boyfriends, and enough money to buy pretty much whatever we wanted. Not a care in the world, and, I could finally see in hindsight, not a clue.