Away for the Weekend (12 page)

Nicki says something that makes the others laugh, and although she actually has no idea what it is Nicki said, Beth laughs, too.

Or is it her breasts? Beth’s not used to having breasts. Not like these. And if she were, she’d cover them up more than is possible with any of the clothes Gabriela’s brought with her. There isn’t even a sweater or a jacket in case it gets cold. All Beth could find was a sparkly, tissuey scarf that she’s wrapped round her neck, but it doesn’t so much cover her breasts as hang off them like an epiphyte from a cliff. She turns slightly, trying to shift them from his field of vision.

She wishes the limo would come. Lucinda keeps giving her what’s-wrong-with-you? frowns and Paulette keeps looking over, scrutinizing her, as if there’s something different about Gabriela’s appearance but she can’t put her finger on what. Nicki, Hattie and Isla have all stopped talking long enough to comment on how quiet she is.
You weren’t like this last night
. Besides wanting to get away from Mr Peculiar, Beth really would like to sit down. Her muscles are beginning to ache. And her back. She can see the reflection of the man in the hat and the white suit, ghost-like in the window. But she doesn’t see the car.

“What I’m really looking forward to is Madagascar,” says Hattie. “I can’t wait to go there.”

The others agree.
Cool… Mega… Awesome… Fabulous…

Madagascar
. Unlike famous designers, models, celebrities and terms belonging exclusively to the industry of fashion, Madagascar is actually something with which Beth is familiar. “Wow, Madagascar,” she says, grateful to be distracted from the man in the suit. “I’d love to go there. Did you know that they have six different species of baobab? And there are ninety-nine species of lemur that are only found there. It’s like a lost world.”

If Beth were paying attention, which she isn’t, she might at this moment fully understand the expression “the silence is deafening”. Her five companions stare at her with varying degrees of incomprehension. Paulette, Hattie, Isla and Nicki’s mouths all form Os of surprise. Surprise and sudden understanding. Something has changed; they see weakness where they saw none before. Last night, Gabriela was the obvious leader; today she’s not. Today she’s barely part of the group. Lucinda’s incomprehension is tinged with fear. She doesn’t doubt Gabriela for a second – geniuses can be really weird, everybody knows that – but she sees the sharks circling in the water. If Gabriela goes down, Lucinda goes with her. Beth, however, notices none of this.

Nicki takes it upon herself to speak for the group. “You what?”

“Madagascar,” Beth repeats. “It’s—”

“A joke,” Lucinda cuts in. “Isn’t it, Gab?” She turns to the others. “You know… Madagascar, the country…? Madagascar, Taffeta’s fashion house…?”

“Another joke?” says Paulette. “Maybe you should be a stand-up comic and not a designer.”

“Look!” yells Lucinda. “There’s the car.”

Thanking God for the Industrial Revolution and Henry Ford, Beth follows the others outside, and so doesn’t see who comes out of the restaurant just then.

Gabriela tried to get away from Delila so she could talk to Beth – oh, how she tried – but Delila, it seems, combines the physique of a quarterback with the dogged determination of one.

As soon as they got to the elevator, Gabriela remembered something she needed that she’d left in the room.

“Silly old me,” she said to Delila. “You go ahead and I’ll catch up.”

Delila refused. “You’re not leaving me alone with the weird sisters, not even for five minutes,” said Delila. “I’m coming with you.”

When they were almost at the entrance to the restaurant, Gabriela decided that she had to use the ladies’ room.

“I’ll only be a minute. You go on in.”

Although Delila’s arms weren’t folded in front of her and she wasn’t making her there-are-no-stupid-children-in-my-family face, she sounded as if she were. “I thought you used the facilities before we left the room.”

“I did. But I have to use them again. You know, it’s nerves.”

“I’ll go with you,” said Delila. “I have nerves, too.”

When they finally made it into the restaurant, Gabriela just wanted to pop into the store in the lobby to get a bottle of water for what promised to be a gruelling morning ahead. “You order for me,” said Gabriela. “Fruit cup and the largest cappuccino they have. I’ll be right back.”

“What’s the big rush?” Delila thinks that Beth may be having a mini-breakdown. She’s definitely the type. When the woman next door (who is also definitely the type) had her breakdown, she was just going out for a loaf of bread one minute and naked in Rite Aid the next. Nothing like that’s happening on her watch. “You can get it on the way out.”

Gabriela sips her coffee with a sigh. She has only been Beth Beeby for an hour or so, but she’s already really tired of it. It’s like being a frog or a spider. Or dust. Something no one notices unless it gets in their way or lands on their lunch. Gabriela isn’t used to being ignored. She’s used to being noticed and admired. If she drops something, someone else picks it up. If she’s lugging a lot of stuff down the street, someone will offer to carry it for her. Today she could stagger through the lobby carrying three small children and a German shepherd and no one would so much as step out of her way.

And not only is she stuck behind the invisible shield that is Beth Beeby’s body, she is stuck with the geeks. On what should be the most exciting weekend of her life, she’s stuck with girls who eat like wolverines and talk like teachers. She takes another sip and lets loose another sigh. If this is the way the rest of her life is going to be, Gabriela will never see eighteen. It isn’t worth it.

Delila calls Jayne, Esmeralda and Aricely “the weird sisters”, but Gabriela has already started to think of them as the Bad, the Boring and the Major Pain in the Neck. Which makes Delila the Good.

Jayne is controlling.
I sit there… Put that in the middle… Wouldn’t it make more sense to order a pot of tea for all of us…?
Aricely assumes that everyone enjoys the sound of her voice as much as she does.
Did you know that Mozart…? I read this article about Wordsworth… When we went to Paris…
Esmeralda is always right.
No, that was Martha Gellhorn… No, it wasn’t in Philadelphia… That’s not blue, it’s aquamarine…
All three of them have more opinions than the Supreme Court. If they weren’t so irritating, they could put a hyperactive insomniac to sleep.

And that’s the other thing. They don’t talk about normal, real-life things like clothes and boys; they talk about school things like books and plays. They don’t see movies; they watch films. They don’t listen to bands; they listen to orchestras. They go to plays, not pop concerts or basketball games.

Gabriela has nothing to say. She thought she did, but she was wrong.

“When you say
musical
,” Jayne said to Gabriela when she tried to get into their conversation on Broadway theatre, “can I assume that you don’t mean opera?”

“I’m talking about the classic existential novel of self-delusion and subjectivity,” Esmeralda informed her with a smile as thin as tulle when she mistakenly thought they were discussing something she knew. “Not a TV ad for underwear.”

And now, her eyes on Gabriela’s fruit salad, Aricely says, “I can’t help it, but that reminds me of the time we went to Costa Rica. Costa Rica is just so amazing. You should see the flora and fauna – I wrote six poems just about the birds. But what I was saying was that while we were there, we visited this pineapple plantation. And ohmygod… You haven’t tasted pineapple till you’ve tasted that. And fresh? We had it straight from the field. It was like eating dew.”

Gabriela picks up her fork and stabs at a chunk of pineapple in her bowl.
Of course you did. It was probably reciting a poem while you ate it.

Jayne’s voice, always pitched for command, saves Gabriela from having to reply. “Are you serious?” she demands. Mercifully, this question is to Delila. “You’ve never seen
Jules et Jim
?

“I don’t really watch movies with subtitles.” Delila says this loudly. “And it’s not because I can’t read fast enough to catch what they say,” she adds. Also loudly.

“But it’s a classic,” says Esmeralda.

Delila breaks a piece of toast in half. “Coke’s a classic, too, but I don’t drink that either.”

Aricely, distracted from fresh pineapple, joins in. “I would’ve thought that as a poet…”

“As a poet,” says Delila, “I like language. The words are important to me. I don’t want to be the prisoner of some bad translation.”

Gabriela allows herself a small smile as she stabs a chunk of banana.
You should think twice before you take on the warrior princess.
Say what you will about Delila – her size, her shape, her hair, her stubbornness, her obvious fondness for bold prints and primary colours – she doesn’t let anybody push her around. No matter how hard they may try.

Gabriela carefully balances a cherry on top of the stack of pineapple, while Esmeralda, Aricely and Jayne begin a discussion of world literature. Their voices buzz in the background. She’s never been so bored in her life. Not ever. Not even the time she broke her ankle in two places and sat in emergency for four hours with absolutely nothing to do because she’d also totalled her phone when she fell. But at least then the anguish was physical and not mental.

And that’s when – unplanned and certainly unprovoked – Gabriela picks up the cherry from on top of the pineapple, and throws it across the table at Jayne.

Jayne hasn’t thrown a piece of food since she ate in a highchair, but nature does sometimes override nurture. She automatically hurls her last piece of bagel across the table, hitting Delila. With one hand, Delila wipes cream cheese from the shoulder of her kaftan; with the other she lobs a teabag and gets Aricely right between the eyes.

Professor Gryck can move remarkably quickly for a woman built like a silo, and descends on them like the Day of Judgement. She is horrified and shocked. In all her years of teaching, she has never had anything like this happen. Not ever. Not even close.

“She started it!” Esmeralda points at Gabriela.

“Well?” Professor Gryck glares down at Gabriela. Last night, when they bonded over tension headaches and Beth apologized for everything from knocking her fork to the floor to choking on air, Professor Gryck had assumed that she was going to be the easiest of the group to handle. Shy. Nervous. Afraid not just of her own shadow but everybody else’s as well. But now she isn’t so sure. This certainly isn’t behaviour she expected. “What do you have to say for yourself?”

“I guess it just kind of slipped,” says Gabriela. “Or maybe it’s all the excitement.”

Professor Gryck’s sigh could rock an ocean liner. “Beth Beeby.” She holds a napkin to her heart as if staunching the flow of disappointment. “I swear, if I hadn’t seen you with my own eyes, I wouldn’t believe it. What happened to the lovely, polite, courteous, well-mannered girl I had supper with last night?”

Damned if I know
, thinks Gabriela.

As they leave the restaurant, Gabriela suddenly sees Lucinda, looking as if she’s just stepped out of an ad for body spray, sashaying out of the doors to where a gleaming black limousine is parked. It’s true that one Cadillac Escalade looks pretty much like another, but though Beth’s eyesight isn’t any better than her taste in clothes, Gabriela recognizes the driver who picked them up from the airport yesterday – 6′1″, 17″ neck, at least a 45″ chest, 36–37″ sleeve. And then she sees the others – Hattie, Nicki, Isla, Paulette. Her heart stumbles like someone whose stiletto gets caught in a grate. And there – wearing pyjamas and walking with all the grace of a horse in mud – is what looks to be her parents’ only child.

“Wait!” she calls, knowing no one will hear her. It’s all she can do not to weep.

As he leaves the restaurant, Otto’s attention is caught by the flock of fashionistas by the windows. He slows to a stop, unable to take his eyes off them. Off Gabriela. The feeling that something isn’t quite right that he had as he watched Beth mauling her food returns. The longer he watches, the stronger the feeling. Eventually, Remedios comes up behind him, but he ignores her. Suddenly, the girls start to move towards the door, all of them flowing as effortlessly as a river – except, of course, for the one who wobbles as if her ankles are made of rubber, holding on to every wall, door and post she passes like a bewitched mermaid trying to accustom herself to having legs.

“Otto! Let’s go!”

But Otto is still watching Gabriela as her fall is broken by a man walking in the opposite direction who opens his arms to catch her even before she topples towards him.

“Otto!” Remedios finally grabs his shoulder to yank him around. “Let’s—”

“Wait!”

It is, of course, not Remedios who cries, “Wait!” It is Beth Beeby, looking as if the last rescue ship just pulled out without her.

And that is when Otto realizes what Remedios has done. What she’d undoubtedly been planning all along. How could he have believed for even one minute that she intended to fix the contests? Fix the contests? Remedios Cienfuegos y Mendoza? The angel whose specialty is chaos? It would be like the most famous tenor in the world giving up opera to sing at birthday parties.

“Remedios, I believe you have some explaining to do,” says Otto, as he shoves her hand away and turns back to the finalists in the design competition. “But not now.” The driver of the limo helps the girl Otto now knows to be Beth inside and Otto starts across the room, moving like air. “Now what I want is the car.”

Although he wasn’t actually speaking to her, Remedios answers as she rushes after him. “The car? But we haven’t checked out yet. We—”

“We’re not going anywhere.” As he reaches the doors, the red sports car appears at the start of the driveway. “We’re staying here until you put everything back the way it was.” He gazes over his shoulder at her, giving her a look that would send the Devil back to bed. “Or should I say
everyone
?”

Remedios grimaces with exasperation. This is exactly why she wanted to leave first thing in the morning. She knew he’d be unreasonable if he found out what she’d done. If they’d left when she wanted, they’d be well on their way to the redwood forest by now – and well away from Gabriela and Beth, and Otto standing on his principles like a goat on a mountain ledge, ruining everything. “You’re overreacting.”