At Your Service (19 page)

Pay is looking at me funny as she says, “Tell her how many other acts there were in the singing category.”

I sigh. “Three.”

“And you got
fourth
place?” I can tell Sophie is trying not to giggle.

“Exactly,” says Pay.

“We weren't
that
bad,” I mumble. “And I can see you, Pay.” She's standing off to the side rotating her finger next to her ear in the universal “she's crazy” sign.

“We were worse,” Paisley says.

Sophie is full-out laughing now. I honestly think it might be the first time I've seen this. “Will you show me? Oh, please.”

“Of course we will. And you'll see it's not bad at all.” I make a big show of placing the hat top down on the ground in front of us, all ready to collect tips. Then I strip off my suit jacket and hand it to Sophie. Pay looks resigned as she assumes her starting position just behind me. Sophie scoots to a bench across from us, so we can face the sidewalk and, hopefully, our soon-to-be-paying audience.

“I won't be able to do all the dance moves with my ankle.” My poor ankle. Even wrapped up tight, it's starting to swell against the bandage.

Pay snorts again. “Oh, I think that's just fine. The singing alone will give her enough of an idea.”

I turn my neck to glare at her. “I didn't mean
you
shouldn't do them. I'll do all the hand ones; I'll just have to stand in place while I do.”

Paisley bites her lower lip and nods, careful not to make eye contact with me. Well, she can just be that way. I seem to remember her being quite the choreographer back when we were plotting our big stage debut. At least she's quiet as she assumes starting position: feet hip-width apart, hands crossed above her head. “And a five, six, seven, eight.”

I face Sophie and belt out,
“They say the neon lights are bright on Broadway . . .”

Pay pops out from behind me, jazz hands fluttering.
“On Broadway.”

A few people walking by poke each other and whisper. Whatever. Like they haven't seen stranger things today; this is New York City. I begin snapping my fingers as I change the tempo and launch into Daddy Warbucks's “N.Y.C.” song from
Annie
.

“The shadows at sundown,

The roofs that scrape the sky.”

We belt out the rest of the lyrics while a couple more people toss us curious looks. I hope Pay's game for the dance number that's coming up as we head into the next song, from the musical
42nd Street
. I don't want to crane my neck behind me to see, because I'm too afraid to lose my balance. Instead I give a giant smile to a lady walking by with her dog. She yanks on her puppy's leash.

“Come and meet those dancing feet

On the avenue I'm taking you to, Forty-Second Street.”

I might be singing about
dancing
on Forty-Second Street, but the minute I say the address, my mind goes right back to
kissing
on Forty-Second Street. I blush and wobble a little on my good leg.

One guy drops a single dollar bill in our hat as he walks by. I forget to sing for a note or two as I salute him. Okay, here comes the finale. Paisley steps up next to me, and I grab on to her shirt for balance. This is going to be tricky with a twisted ankle, but I slide my arm around her back just the same. When we performed this onstage, we had our arms clutched tightly around each other, but now I know it should actually be “fingertips to fabric,” thanks to our Rockettes rehearsal.

Pay begins the kickline and I halfheartedly join in, kicking my bandaged ankle a foot or two off the ground. And forget about fingertips to fabric; I have to cling to Paisley to keep from toppling over. We start singing “New York, New York,” and I make sure all my ba-ba-ba-da-bops are delivered with extra-snappy jazz hands. We are so owning this.

“It's up to you,

New York, NEEEEEEEEEEW YORRRRRRRRRRRRK!”

We belt it out as we come to a rousing finish. And then . . .

Crickets.

Seriously.

No one even acknowledges our existence. After I put my heart and soul into that and everything! I hop on one foot over to Sophie and give a halfhearted bow.

She sticks two fingers in her mouth and lets loose with a whistle Alex can probably hear in his ferry line.

“Brava, ladies! Brava!” At least she seems to have genuinely loved our performance. Too bad she's in no position to tip us.

Pay looks equally impressed with
her
. “Where'd you learn to whistle like that?”

Sophie blushes. “I don't know. It's just this weird thing I can do. I can whistle like any bird, too.”

“Really?” Pay looks intrigued. I grab on to the bench for balance as I lean over to retrieve the single dollar bill out of the hat, and then I sit down on my butt next to Sophie.

“Certainly,” Sophie says.

“Okay. Do a blue jay,” Paisley requests.

Sophie blows a tra-la-la whistle that makes her cheeks hollow out. Pay claps her hands together. “That was great. What else can you do?”

A guy walking by is being totally obvious about eavesdropping.

“Try a dove,” he says. Sure, buddy. Where were you a minute ago when we were performing our hearts out?

Sophie just smiles and rearranges her face. This time her cheeks puff way out as she emits a cooing noise that does sound a lot like a dove. She probably has lots of them in her castle courtyard. They seem like princessy kinds of birds.

“Sparrow,” calls Lady Liberty from her platform. Or at least I think it was her. When I glance over, her face is frozen again.

By now a few people have started to gather near us, watching. Hmmm. Zing. A lightbulb flicks on over my head, and I hop back up. Literally. It's all I can do on one functioning leg.
“Ladies and gentlemen, step right up. The Amazing Sophie will dazzle you with her birdcalls. She'll tweet; she'll coo; she'll amaze you!” Okay, so somehow I'm channeling a big-top circus announcer, but whatever, because it's totally working. A few people stop to watch us.

Sophie looks dazed, but she grabs hold of Paisley's hand for courage and jumps up to a standing position on top of the bench. I catch her eye and she grins at me. Grins. At
me
.

I move the FDNY hat in front of our bench and call out, “She's taking requests. What would you like to hear first?”

A little girl in a yellow dress steps forward with a dollar clutched in her fist. She hovers over the hat, looking back at her mom before dropping it in.

I lean down. “What kind of bird would you like to hear?”

She speaks so quietly I can barely hear her. “A parrot?”

“A parrot,” I call up to Sophie.

The little girl blushes and rushes back to hide behind her mother's leg. Sophie smiles and nods once, then closes her eyes and lets loose with a string of whistles that sounds exactly like a parrot. I think. I don't really know what a parrot sounds like since I'm pretty sure we don't have those on the Upper West Side, but people are clapping, so it must sound right.

Holy wow.

I really thought Walt Disney made all that stuff up when he drew Snow White bustling around the dwarves' kitchen whistling to the forest animals. But no. Apparently this is some secret princess superpower. What else is true, then? Can she whip up a ball gown from a few scraps of ribbon? Spin straw into gold? Although if that were the case, I guess we wouldn't need to rely on birdcalls to earn our ferry tickets. We could just set her up with a spinning wheel and stage a raid on the stalls of the horses the policemen ride around Central Park.

I get a little lost in my fairy-tale fantasies and don't notice that our hat is filling up with crisp ones. There's even a five-dollar bill in there! Sophie rocks. Meanwhile, she's all lit up like the crystal ball that drops in Times Square on New Year's Eve. She's actually having fun. Little Miss Perfect has dropped her stiff posture and all her decorum, and she's having a blast puffing her cheeks in and out and pointing to audience members with requests.

How weird. But cool. I like this version of Sophie. She catches my eye and winks.

Winks!

In about ten minutes our hat is full, and the three of us
are giggling like we just met the mayor. Even Lady Liberty steps down off her box and transfers three dollars from her hat to ours. “Well done, ladies.” Before we can answer her, she's back up and still as a lamppost. For some reason, this makes us giggle even harder.

I count up the bills. “Twenty-three dollars!”

Sophie smiles. “Girls, I think we have a ferry to catch.”

I
force Pay and Sophie to run ahead and grab a spot in the ticket line. It's already 4:20, and I know what the lines to get on the ferry can be like this time of year. It's going to take crazy luck to get on the five o'clock boat and, quite frankly, we haven't had a whole lot of that on our side today. When I catch up to the girls, there are only three groups ahead of us. Sophie looks upset, though.

“What's up? Did they close?” I ask, hobbling in next to them.

“No. But Paisley isn't coming.”

I look at Pay and make question marks out of my eyebrows. She just shrugs.

“I was thinking. I know you have your gut feeling and all, but we need to be practical. Ingrid could be headed back here
by now. Your boats could all pass right by each other and then we'd be totally out of leads.”

She's completely right. It should have been me insisting on this. Yet another concierge fail on my part.

The line moves forward by one.

“I'll stay,” I offer. Partly because I think I should be the responsible one since it's kind of my fault we're in this mess and partly because, even though Sophie and I have been acting fine toward each other the last half hour, we haven't actually acknowledged any of the words we exchanged on the subway, and I'm afraid if we're all alone, she'll go back to being the Ice Princess. Or worse. She might yell at me some more.

But Pay is shaking her head. “No, it should be me. Sophie, Ingrid's your sister and chances are good she'll still be on the island. You should be there for that. And Chloe, you're in charge of these guys, so you should probably have at least one of them with you at all times.”

The family in front of us steps up to the ticket window.

Hmm. She's right again. As much as I don't want it to just be me and Sophie without Pay as a buffer, I have to admit, her plan makes the most sense. For the thousandth time today, I wish we had our cell phones on us so we could coordinate these things. Right now I could just call up Alex and ask him
if he has Ingrid and, presto bingo, problem solved. Seriously, how did people exist before the digital age?

The family moves away, and I make a quick decision on behalf of all of us. “Pay's right. She should stay. We'll go. C'mon.”

Sophie gives a miserable shrug, and the three of us step forward to the window. We don't see anyone inside, but then I realize the person has just bent over. He straightens and catches my eye.

“Two kids' tickets, please,” I say.

“Sorry, girls,” he says into a small microphone clipped to the cash register, as his right hand tucks a small
CLOSED
sign into the bottom half of the window. Now I can only see him from the nose up. But he can still see my mouth clearly and it is saying:

A. No.

B. No, no, no, no, no.

C. If I was any less polite, there would be a C, and it would be: Are. You. KIDDING. Me?

This is like walking to school in February and having to go down a half block from the crosswalk to avoid the puddles
of slushy, sooty, melting ice puddles and then stepping off the curb only to land in the dog poop someone didn't scoop
and
getting sprayed by a taxi driving too close to the side of the road. It's too much at once. I'm done.

Tears well in my eyes even as I let loose with a hysterical-sounding giggle.

I hope this ticket seller is a New Yorker and therefore prepared for anything, because something is going down. Possibly me. I falter on my ankle and grab on to the ledge of the ticket window for balance. This puts me eye to eye with the surprised ticket seller.

“Please, mister. You have no idea,
no
idea, what kind of a day we're having. We have to get on that ferry.”

He looks so sympathetic that for a second I think he's going to open his register back up and print us off some tickets. But then he just says, “Look, kid, I'm sorry. We're sold out.”

“You're telling me you can't find space on one of those ferries for two girls? We're small. We'll squeeze. She can sit on my lap.”

“It's not that. We're closed.”

I sneak a look back at Sophie and Pay, who are watching with defeated looks on their faces. I must look the same, but it hits me how wrong that is. If I really want to make it as a
concierge, I need to be better than this. I need to hear no and bounce right back up, already looking for a new angle. Those two might be resigned, but I am Chloe Turner, Junior Concierge, and it's time to start acting like it.

I may not have been able to beg money off passersby, I may not have been able to keep my guests in my possession at all times, I may not have even been able to step foot off a subway car with any degree of grace and coordination, but I'll move to New Jersey before I let a person at a ticket counter keep my guest from doing something she wants to do.

I swipe the tears from my cheeks before turning back to the window. I square my shoulders and stand as tall as I can on my one good leg. Then I take a deep, calming breath like those people doing tai chi in the park before work, and I look the man directly in the eye.

“Sir, I recognize you have orders to follow, and I can appreciate that, but I would like a moment of your time. If I had my wallet on me, I would be able to show you my business card and prove to you that I am the junior concierge at the Hotel St. Michèle. Are you familiar with our hotel, sir?”