Mafia Girl (2 page)

“What did my dad say?” I whisper.

Mario raises his eyebrows and turns his upright fist in a circle.

Translation: I. Am. Screwed.

I set the table for dinner the way I always set the table, using the perfectly polished silver forks and knives and the lacy place mats that are really plastic lacy place mats so that you can wipe away the stains and pretend they never happened.

We all sit down and eat the way we always do without drama, at least for the time it takes to eat the stuffed artichokes and drink the first glasses of Chianti. Anthony wolfs down his dinner and my mom always says, “Slow down and enjoy your food,” and my dad never says anything. His mouth just tightens.

Then I jump up to carry the plates with the mounds of artichoke leaves into the kitchen while my mom puts on her elbow-length oven mitts and brings the manicotti to the table. I serve my mom first and then my dad. He holds up his hand because I’m about to give him a portion for three.

“Basta, basta,” he says, looking at me pointedly, which—knowing my dad—means not only enough manicotti, but also enough of everything I’ve put the family through. I put some of it back and he continues to x-ray me with his eyes because my dad gets most of the information he needs by reading people’s faces, leaving them no space to hide.

I look back at him and mouth, “I’m sorry.”

“Sorry,” he says mockingly, lifting his chin. His mouth hardens and he looks through me until I look away. He’s not going to ruin dinner by punishing me now. He’ll think about it. Then after I go to my room and try to concentrate on homework, which I won’t be able to do because I’ll be waiting for him to come up, he’ll open my door without knocking.

“Starting tomorrow, no more…” he’ll say and let me know my sentence. I’ll listen and take it because when my father makes up his mind, if you want to live, you don’t try to negotiate.

“Gia?”

The next morning I’m sitting in my usual seat in English, but Mrs. Carter can’t see me because she’s nearsighted. I wave from the back and then come up to her desk and she hands me back my paper on
Julius Caesar
.

“Excellent,” she says. “It breathes.”

“It breathes” is Mrs. Carter’s way of saying that you didn’t just rip your ideas off Wikipedia or SparkNotes like a mindless asshole who’ll end up in trade school or buy a paper off the website that Dante and others I know regularly frequent.

All of us at Morgan School are way above that. About the only things not required to get into Morgan are a DNA swab and an E.P.T. test. To seal the deal, they ask for a tuition deposit stiffer than a payoff to a Colombian drug cartel.

But bottom line, the green light depends on who your parents are or how much they make. In my case, it’s a bit of both. When my acceptance letter came, inscribed in magenta with one of those calligraphy pens, we all knew that an affirmative meant that my life would change for better or worse.

So I work hard. And when Mrs. Carter says my paper “breathes,” she means I put my soul into it and that it has depth, which might sound stupid except I know what she means, and anyway I like her and the transported look in her eyes when she reads Shakespeare. And it’s fun to psyche out all the flawed personalities because IMO Shakespeare’s characters are cool, especially Hamlet who’s troubled and all, but brilliant and hot. And their motivations are no different from ours, because who doesn’t feel strung out like a desperate loser?

I walk back to my seat making sure to hold my paper so Christy Collins sees it and dies because she’s convinced the only reason I usually get As is that the teachers are afraid they’ll get whacked if I don’t, which is ridiculous. Christy has never gotten an A, probably not a B either, but if money could buy grades, she’d be in Mensa. But never mind that, she’s stone-cold jealous of me.

“Typical,” she spits out as I pass her and her eyes glom on to the A.

I glance over my shoulder feeling a rush of pleasure at her snarky face.

“Can I read it?” Clive asks.

Clive Laurent is this totally unique, asexual, standout person who looks, acts, dresses, and thinks differently from everyone else on the planet. I’m convinced he was born a thousand years ago and somehow time-traveled and ended up at Morgan because he took a wrong turn on his way home to Camelot.

Clive has long, wispy blond hair and pale skin. No one has ever seen him without the navy cashmere scarf he wears knotted around his neck no matter how cold or hot it is. I think he’s hypothermic if that’s a word or a medical condition or state of being or something when you walk around perpetually chilled.

In addition to the scarf, Clive lives in a vintage Burberry raincoat, which weirded me out the first time I saw him in school. But then I heard him answer a question in class and I realized that he’s completely brilliant and doesn’t have a mean bone in his emaciated body. He was so deserving of extreme niceness by someone who isn’t put off by his strangeness that he became my closest friend, not counting Ro.

It’s not like Clive is some poor soul who sleeps on a park bench and dump dives for food. His family is beyond rich and he lives in a ginormous ninety-million dollar duplex high up in the Time Warner Center, and when you’re looking out the window it feels like you’re in a plane hovering over a twinkling skyscraper fairyland.

Clive’s parents are media moguls so they’re always flying around in their own private Gulfstream. So Clive is mostly alone with maids, a butler, and a driver with only an aunt and uncle on speed dial. His only other company is the delivery guys from the Whole Foods downstairs because he’s always calling up and ordering crap. And all he does is read, read, read all day from his Kindle.

So every day Ro and I pack manicotti or lasagna for him so he’ll have a hot, homemade dinner because that’s the least I can do for a friend—because I don’t have too many of those.

Clive takes my paper and tucks it into his backpack. When he gets home he’ll scrawl little notes to me proving that he’s even smarter than Mrs. Carter. Then he’ll invite me to hang out with him and I’ll say yes because he’s sweet and kind and fun and has a wall of vinyls, never mind the pictures of the city that I love to take from his floor to ceiling windows to see New York in changing lights.

Especially from the bathroom.

Clive is the only person in the universe who has a white marble Jacuzzi in front of an enormous wall of glass with no curtains, so it’s fun to take bubble baths there and drink Dom and then stand up naked in front of the window and hope that someone in some other part of Manhattan in a crappy little apartment will see me through a telescope so I can give them a cheap thrill.

Anyway, the A on the paper is deserved. I worked for it because inside my head, my conscience is always telling me
prove yourself, prove yourself
so that one day I will have an actual life and become more than the self-sucking don’s daughter—the nickname I’ve been branded with since birth.

There’s a second voice too. That one keeps reminding me that if I don’t get As I won’t get into the right college and be able to follow my secret plan for the future.

Almost no one knows about my plan. Not Ro, my separated-at-birth best friend and next-door neighbor. Not Clive—at least not yet. Not my mom. And especially not Anthony. He wouldn’t believe me anyway because in his head the only career for a woman is domestic servant.

The only one who knows about my secret plan for the future is the person who keeps secrets better than anyone in the world: my dad.

When I told him, his eyes got all misty, something that doesn’t happen much, except when he watches sad movies where good people or animals die. Then he doesn’t just cry, he sobs.

Shut up. I know what you’re thinking.

I didn’t plan to tell him. But after my grandma’s funeral last year, he was sitting all alone in the living room in his favorite gold velvet armchair. My dad is almighty powerful all the time, only right then he wasn’t. He looked defeated, like he had shrunk inside himself. He was staring out the window as the rain poured down because on a day like that it made sense that the sun wouldn’t have the nerve to shine. The TV was off and he just sat there like the most alone person on earth, because I guess when you lose your mom you feel orphaned, even if you have a family of your own.

Grandma Giulia was his conscience. She was the only one who could smack his head and tell him what to do and he would never contradict her.

“Mama,” he might say, holding out a hand. But he’d never go further than that, which is something because my dad has a temper and, believe me, if he gets pushed, you do not want to be there.

So when I sat next to him and told him my secret plan he looked up and smiled, then kissed the palm of my hand like a blessing. I held hands with him for I don’t know how long, hoping that from then on he’d think more about the future than the past and not look so small and sad anymore. When his cell rang, I got up, sure he’d want to take the call, but he didn’t even look to see who it was.

Now that I’ve told him, I try to ace every paper and exam because no matter what anyone says about us and how stupid our lives can be, I’ll tell you something you should never forget: our family has brains.

“Keep Saturday night open,” Ro says when we talk on the phone after school. “We’re having a birthday party for Dante.”

Ever since Ro’s older brother Dante and I made out in the upstairs bathroom when I was ten, he’s had a major crush on me. It happened at one of their family’s annual July Fourth barbecues where my dad and Ro’s dad—who owns the best pastry shop in Little Italy—wear stupid aprons with sayings like “I’m the Grillfather” and take turns cooking. My parents love Dante, which doesn’t help. He worships my dad and is a masterful suck-up who leaves gifts for me and for them for every occasion, from birthdays to Groundhog Day. Designer scarves, Tiffany rings, Vuitton bags, Prada wallets, cashmere hoodies, sports tickets, and anything else major-league expensive that “fell off a truck,” but whatever. It’s the thought that counts, right?

So when Saturday night rolls around after about eighteen courses of manicotti, lasagna, grilled salmon, filet mignon, roast chicken, calamari, clams oreganata, sautéed spinach, escarole, zabaglione, fifty kinds of cookies, and Ro’s mom saying for the twentieth time, “why don’t you kids ever eat anything?”—Ro and I and Dante and his friend Marco and some guy I never met before who they call Little Paulie, who’s about six-five, and some skanky girl named Viv with pink hair who is getting on my nerves because of her gluten-free diet thing, go down to Ro’s basement. After fighting for about an hour over which movie to watch and Dante finally grabbing his baseball bat and holding it over his head and threatening to smash the fifty-five-inch Sony TV he just got if “you all don’t just
shut up
and
stop arguing
,” we do finally and watch
The Fighter
, which is amazing. Dante sits close to me and I can tell he’s wasted because he’s whispering to me over and over again, “you’re so beautiful, Gia,” and “it gives me a hard-on just to look at you in that sweater.”

“Please shut up,” I tell him so I can watch the movie. But instead he starts to massage my neck, which is all it takes for me to fall into a sex trance, fantasizing that it’s Officer Hottie instead of Dante. Then again, Officer Hottie isn’t here and Dante is and what the hell because he does have good hands. And then like a slut I turn to him and we start making out even though I know that’s the last thing I should be doing because tomorrow he’ll probably steal a diamond ring and ask my dad if he can marry me.

But I can’t worry about that right now so I don’t. I pretend I’m into him and living for the moment, which is one way to justify being a slut. But it is his birthday and maybe he does deserve more than just a Loro Piana cashmere turtleneck because of all the crap he gives me. So when he grabs my hand, I follow him into the laundry room.

Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five. Four. Three. Two. One.

The door to my room flings open and my dad x-rays me so hard I can practically feel the burn. I stare back. And crumble.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper again in broken record mode.

He doesn’t dignify that with an answer. “You don’t go out for a month,” he says. “No movies, no out for coffee, no nothing.”

I wait. There’s more.

“And you babysit every Friday and Saturday for the Andreottis. And every cent, it comes to me to pay for the bill from Mario. You understand?”

I nod.

“No more cutting school,” he says. “No more drinking. No more trouble.”

“Okay, okay,” I whisper.

“Not okay,” he says. “You get serious.
Serious
.”

Serious.

My dad has guilt-tripped me like no one else can with his honor code and expectations. So after barely sleeping, I walk down the corridor at school and see the signs about the upcoming student council election and a light bulb goes off in my foggy brain. Even though the idea of running for president of this place is definitely something I should run from, I’m immediately jazzed by the thought of jumping in where I don’t belong and stirring things up.

At the very least, I could have fun buying art supplies and making posters and calling it schoolwork. But more importantly, I could get over on skanky people at Morgan who hate me, because most of them are. Spoiled. Stuck-up. Bitches.

Who dress in paisley or what have you and wear things like Belgian Shoes and have moms with names like Muffy who carry those stupid Nantucket straw baskets with scrimshaw medallions and talk interminably about going riding in Connecticut on the weekends or watching horse jumping or entering their purebreds at Westminster or playing golf, while the non-Wasp world, not in Litchfield or Greenwich, Connecticut, who are stuck in places like the fucking Bronx and Queens and lower Manhattan, except for Soho, are mostly out of work and panhandling, fencing crap on eBay, lining up for chump change from unemployment, and jumping turnstiles because they can’t even afford stupid MetroCards. I would love to drop-kick most of them so that they would open their recessive-gene eyes and get over that rarefied bullshit way of existing.