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Authors: Nia Stephens

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Think Bree should tell Antonio to get lost before Graciella finds her? Then read on!
Chapter 6
Model Behavior
W
hen Bree woke up screaming the next day after a blonde with a butcher knife had chased Bree through her dreams, she knew she should just tell Antonio not to call her anymore. Sure it was cowardly, but it was also the smart thing to do. Antonio was hot and he seemed sweet enough, but Graciella had tried to stab her after Bree had spent all of five minutes alone with him. That was just a little too crazy for Bree.
Still, he seemed like a nice guy, and Bree wasn't in a hurry to give him the brush-off. So instead of calling him right away, she called Kylian and offered to take him to breakfast. It was a small way to thank him for saving her from Graciella, but something he always appreciated. Kylian ate more than Bree and Sutton combined, but managed to stay thin without jogging a single step.
“Sounds good,” he said. “Meet you at Pete's in thirty.”
Pete's Pancakes and Waffles was one of SoHo's secrets. It wasn't something Bree did often, but once in a while a girl needed to eat a stack of pancakes with real maple syrup, two eggs fried in butter, and hash browns smothered in cheese. The day after a girl tries to stab you is a good time for a big breakfast.
“I have the weirdest feeling about that girl from the party,” Kylian said as soon as he sat down across from Bree, throwing his copy of the
Times
next to hers.
“Well, Kylian, as a boy grows up, sometimes he has feelings for a special girl,” Bree said in a
Father Knows Best
voice. “Let me tell you about the birds and the bees.”
He laughed and signaled the waitress for a cup of coffee. “If I had special feelings for a girl, she wouldn't be the one. Although I guess Graciella is the only one I've ever rolled around on the floor with.”
“Then what kind of special feelings are we talking about?”
“Like I know her. We don't, do we?”
“I think she's a model. You've probably seen her face around somewhere.”
“Not her face. It wasn't her face that seemed familiar.”
“Um, Kylian, I don't know that I want to talk to anybody about memorable female body parts, especially not you.”
“Have it your way,” he said. “I assume you won't be hanging out with your pal in Jersey any more?”
“Not a chance.”
“Consider it case closed. What are you having for breakfast?”
After breakfast they decided to walk off some calories by hiking all the way to Central Park West, then maybe have a second breakfast at Sutton's. As they approached the Edwardian, a tall, dark-haired beauty turned away from Bill, the day doorman, who had apparently been flirting with her for quite some time.
“Graciella!” Bree squeaked.
“Briona,” she snarled, snatching the enormous golf umbrella that the doormen used on rainy days and raising it over her shoulder like a baseball bat.
“Wait!” Kylian said. “I get it now! Where I recognize you from!”
Amazingly enough, Graciella did wait, tapping her foot expectantly, while Kylian tore through his issue of the
Times
. She was obviously flattered that Kylian had recognized her. Meanwhile, a growing crowd of curious passers-by were gathering to watch the drama.
“There!” he said triumphantly, waving a full-page ad for one of the high-end jewelry stores. “That's you, isn't it?”
“Why yes,” Graciella said, blushing delicately. It was a great picture: Graciella's smiling face was just slightly out of focus, while the enormous diamond on her ring finger was perfectly clear.
“I thought so. I knew I had seen you before you tried to stab me last night.”
“Ooooh,” said the crowd as Graciella showed off her beautiful, long-fingered hands, one of which still clutched the umbrella.
“I am primarily a foot model,” she explained in her thick accent. “My feet have appeared in every major fashion magazine in New York and abroad.”
“Ahhhhh,” said the crowd, impressed. Flashbulbs were going off.
“And that is why Antonio will never stay with you,” Graciella told Bree, brandishing the umbrella again. “Your feet cannot compare to my own!”
“Um, no,” Bree agreed. “Probably not. My feet are not my best feature.”
“Then he will not perform with you!”
“Antonio's got a foot fetish?” Kylian said, sounding shocked. “He really should have said so on his profile.”
“Antonio loves the feet,” Graciella said. “He sees they are the pedestal of a woman, the basis of her perfection!”
“Graciella, I promise to stay far, far away from Antonio,” Bree said. “I don't think I'm really his type.”
“How could you give up such a man? He knows the woman's feet like the map of his own country, like—”
“Okay, break it up,” said a cop wandering over from the park. “Show's over, nothing to see. What are you doing with that umbrella, lady? Hand it here.”
Without a crowd, Graciella meekly submitted to the cop, accepting a warning with downcast eyes.
“What a city,” Bree said as Bill held open the door for her and Kylian. “A woman threatens me in front of my building and nobody does anything.”
“Well, think of it this way,” Kylian suggested. “It may be a crazy city, but it isn't New Jersey.”
 
DO YOU THINK BREE MADE THE RIGHT CHOICE?
turn to page 148
to see what would have happened if she gave Antonio another chance, or
turn to page 70
to choose another boy.
Think Bree should go out with Thomas, her fellow Manhattanite? Then read on!
Chapter 5
Thomas
“Y
ou chose Thomas, huh?” Kylian asked, reading over Bree's shoulder as she typed a quick hello. “I wonder if Lucas knows him.”
“Probably,” Bree said. “Gardner isn't a big school.”
“But it's tutorial-style, like ours, so all his classes have about six people,” Sutton pointed out. “Lucas might not know much about him.”
“Only one way to find out,” Kylian said, fishing his cell phone out of his backpack.
“You can't call him now!” Sutton gasped. “It's the middle of the day! What if he's in class?”
“Then it'll be on vibrate. Relax.” They all waited in silence as Lucas's phone rang, or vibrated, a few blocks away. Bree's stomach flopped when Kylian chirped, “Hello there!” but it settled down when it became clear that he was leaving a message.
“Well, that's that,” he said, putting his phone away. “Time for class!”
Actually, they were a little late for class, which always annoyed Dr. Brennan, Bree's calculus teacher. But Bree figured the school was asking for it since they didn't have bells. The headmaster thought that bells were undignified, even if they helped people like Bree get to class on time.
Dr. Brennan punished Bree by forcing her to do all of the sample problems on the board, writing things down as Dr. Brennan explained them. Bree had a hard enough time following him when he was doing derivatives on the board, but since she was late to class today and had skipped class entirely on Monday, she figured she deserved it.
Her next class was PE, which she took with the fencing coach, Master Bateman. Because she usually worked hard in his class—on the off chance that she got to do a remake of
Zorro
someday—and because she never made fun of his name, Master B. adored Bree. So when she asked to be excused a few minutes early, he let her.
As soon as she stripped out of her tight, sweaty fencing whites and threw on her uniform, she headed back to the computer lab to check her e-mail. Normal people knew how to access e-mail on their cell phones and could check it all day long but Bree was technologically challenged. She wasn't surprised to see a new message from [email protected] in her inbox:
Hi Bree,
I'm glad you wrote. You're right—we do seem to have a lot in common, though I'm more interested in making music than in acting. Want to hang out? I've got tickets for the Buck Buchanan Samba Ensemble this Friday night. Interested?
–Thomas
Bree had to suppress a squeal. So far, this online dating thing was easy. She typed out a quick response then dashed for her next class. She spent it in a happy fog, which is dangerous when you have only five classmates.
Bree was still grinning when she ran into Kylian after class. He wasn't smiling. In fact, he had a strange look on his face, a mixture of worry and guilt.
“What's up?” Bree asked.
“Um . . . nothing?” he said, his eyes darting around her, as if looking for an excuse to escape.
“Yeah right. What happened? Did Lucas call you? Is there something wrong with Thomas?”
“Ur . . . Not really. I mean, not wrong, no . . . but it might be a prob—no, it might be weird—oh, never mind! I've got to get to my locker!”
“Hold it, buddy,” Bree said, grabbing him by the arm and dragging him into the nearest empty classroom. “There
is
something wrong with this guy. What is it?”
“Wrong isn't the right word,” Kylian said, twisting his watchband around and around his left wrist, the most obvious of several nervous gestures.
“Is he HIV positive?” Bree blurted, her mind instantly jumping to the most extreme conclusion. As the leading cause of death for young black women in America, HIV completely freaked her out.
“What?!” Kylian shrieked, then covered his mouth with both hands, glancing at the door. “Of course not! Well, I guess he could be—you never know, right, unless you've seen test results with your own eyes? But if he is, Lucas doesn't know anything about it.”
“Does he have a rape conviction or something?” Bree demanded, trying hard not to shake Kylian by his narrow shoulders. “Is he a neo-Nazi? What's wrong with him?”
“I can't tell you exactly, Bree, but it's not that bad. It's just different.”
Bree gave him the look, but he didn't fold.
“Honestly, Bree, if I thought he would be bad for you, or you were in any danger, I'd just tell you,” Kylian assured her. “But Lucas says he's a perfectly decent guy. He likes him, but they don't have any classes together and he doesn't know him well.”
“If he turns out to be a freakazoid and this turns out to be a disaster, you're going to be
so
sorry, Kylian Mercer.”
“Since I'm the one who talked you into trying HelloHi, I expected nothing less.” Kylian sniffed, straightening his sweater as if Bree had been using it to drag him around.
“All right, then,” she said, slipping an arm into his. “Let's go find Sutton.”
 
That Friday night, Bree was having second thoughts. There was a lot of room for speculation in “nothing wrong . . . just different.” An obsession with wearing women's underwear was different. Crashing funerals was different. Being so afraid of germs you had to wear plastic gloves to go to public restrooms was different. Different could mean anything.
But just in case Thomas turned out to be wonderful, Bree was going all out: shimmery new red dress from Donna Karan, perfectly matched lipstick from Chanel, three different shades of eye shadow, all meticulously applied. She stole a pair of Manolo Blahniks from her mother, though not entirely sure that was such a good idea.
Samba is some kind of dance music, right?
Bree thought, looking at the gorgeous strappy heels on her feet.
Well, I can always say no. I'd rather look good at the table than dumb on the dance floor any day.
Suddenly she heard the night doorman's voice over the apartment's intercom. “There's a car downstairs for you, Bree,” said Calvin.
“Thanks, Calvin. I'll be right down,” Bree answered, giving herself a final check in the big mirror over the fireplace in their living room.
“I'd hurry up if I was you,” Calvin said, completely breaking his Edwardian language training. “This is a
nice
car.”
When she got downstairs, Bree could see that it was some kind of Rolls-Royce limousine, because she recognized the fairy hood ornament. And she could tell it was old, but she couldn't tell the difference between a car that cost one hundred thousand dollars and one that cost one hundred million, so she didn't know just how
nice
this car was.
Calvin had a quick fight with Thomas's driver over who got to open the door for Bree, and Calvin won, bowing with a flourish. She winked at him as she climbed in, mentally preparing herself for the worst. But the young man in neatly pressed black pants and a red oxford shirt looked even better than he did in his picture. He had on a pair of little wire-rimmed sunglasses and the lenses were so dark Bree had no idea what color his eyes were. This sunglasses-after-dark thing was different, but nothing Bree couldn't live with.
“Hi,” she said, climbing inside. She was a bit surprised that he didn't hold out a hand to help her into the car, but his smile was nice enough that she didn't mind.
“Hi, Bree. I'm Thomas. Nice to meet you.” Now he held out his hand to shake.
Okay,
thought Bree.
He's a feminist. I can live with that.
“Nice meeting you too,” she said, gripping his hand firmly. He had a nice handshake—he didn't try to crush her fingers, but he didn't squeeze her hand as if her bones were made of glass. “I understand that we were just two degrees of separation away before HelloHi.”
“Do we have a mutual friend?” Thomas's voice was clear and deep.
He could be a great voiceover for movies if he gets tired of music,
Bree thought.
“No, a friend of mine knows a friend of yours,” she told him.
“If you go to Rittenhouse, I bet we've got at least one mutual friend. Do you know Evan Mitchell?”
“He's two years behind me, so I don't know him very well,” Bree said, settling into her seat. “How do you know Evan?”
“We have the same cello teacher,” he explained. “What about Sarah Ribera?”
“Definitely. We've only got one actual princess at Rittenhouse, and she's it,” Bree said. There were a couple of girls who would be princesses if a lot of their relatives died, and plenty of girls as rich as queens, but only one whose summer home was an ancestral castle in Italy. “How do you know Sarah?”
“We share a godmother.”
Bree thought about that. “Are you secretly a prince, Thomas?”
He laughed. “I think I might technically be a prince—one of my grandmothers is a Medici, but I've never tried to sort all of that out. I mean, Florence hasn't been a principality since the sixteen hundreds or something? So I'm not much of a prince, if at all.”
“Wow,” Bree said. “That's still pretty amazing.”
“Not really. Unless you're actually going to inherit a throne, the royalty thing doesn't mean much nowadays. I mean, you know Sarah—she's cool and all, but nobody's idea of a princess.”
Bree had to laugh. “She may not be the princess in ‘The Princess and the Pea,' but she has a lot in common with Xena, Warrior Princess. Have you ever seen her play lacrosse?”
“No, but I hear she swings the stick like a two-handed broadsword.”
“Yeah, she's pretty awesome. And have you seen her hair in the last couple of months?”
“No. What does it look like?”
“She's been bleaching it bone white and teasing it all fuzzy. She looks like a dandelion that's gone to seed.”
He smiled, but he didn't answer her. He seemed to be staring into space, which creeped Bree out just a little. It bothered her that she couldn't see what he was looking at.
“So, do you play samba on your cello?” Bree asked, just to keep the conversation moving.
“Sure. My training is more classical, but I've been playing around with other kinds of music lately. It's one of the things I like about the cello—its range works for almost anything. I've listened to Metallica played by a cello quartet. There's even a hip-hop quartet. You've never heard OutKast until you've heard ‘Hey-Ya' played on a cello.”
“You sound like my friend Sutton, except she plays the accordion,” Bree said. Sutton did have a strange obsession with the accordion, but she didn't talk about it much. Sutton thought people would think it was boring, and she was right.
An interest in odd instruments was the one thing Sutton shared only with Jordan, though he was into bagpipes, not accordions. Sometimes they went to tiny clubs in Alphabet City to hear strange indie bands that combined polkas and punk rock like Freddielicious and the Celtic funk band Teensie McPhoo. On those nights Bree watched old movies by herself or with Kylian.
But Bree didn't want to get into all that with Thomas.
“If you think OutKast sounds different on a cello, you ought to hear it on a button accordion.”
They talked about music until they arrived at the bar in TriBeCa where the samba ensemble was playing. Bree was warming up to Thomas. She was impressed by the breadth of his musical knowledge—he knew music the way she knew movies, always eager to find that next gem, the brilliant recording that no one knew about, the short film by a young genius that perfectly encapsulated a human experience. And it didn't hurt that he might be a prince.
On the other hand, Bree had gotten a little bored by their conversation. When she tried to steer it toward the subject of movies, he brought it back to movie scores, movie soundtracks, movie sound effects—he didn't have anything to say about anything but music.
This could be a problem,
Bree thought. They couldn't spend all their time playing the name game and talking about the soundtrack to
Idlewild.
Thomas's chauffeur helped Bree out of the car, then, to her surprise, offered Thomas a hand as well.
“Thanks, James. I'll text you when we're ready,” Thomas said to his driver.
“Certainly, sir. Your cane?” said James, offering him what looked like an antique ebony cane with carved ivory on the bottom and the top. It looked a bit like a magician's wand, Bree thought.
But then she finally realized what should have been obvious from the beginning: Thomas was blind.
“Thanks, James. See you later,” Thomas said, taking the cane with one hand and holding out his other arm to Bree.

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