Mafia Girl (22 page)

“Do you ever just think, fuck it, I’m not going to wear a scarf anymore?”

His face turns dark and as serious as it was when he first told me what happened, and my stomach tightens.

“No,” he says. And a moment later, “If it were you, Gia, would you just let everyone see the scar?”

That’s the kind of question I never asked myself because why would I? I don’t know what to say at first and I think about it for a few seconds. “Yes, I would because I don’t think you have any reason to hide it and you shouldn’t have to because it’s part of who you are now.”

“Hmm, maybe. I don’t know, Gia. I don’t know if I can.”

I look at him some more and get totally emotional, which I hate. “You know something, Clive?”

“What?”

“I love that scar,” I whisper, my voice cracking.

He narrows his eyes and kind of slumps a little as he looks at me like he doesn’t understand.

“The scar means that it didn’t work. You healed. You’re here now, alive, with me, Clive, and that is so, I don’t know, life affirming? It’s such a symbol of then and now.”

Then Clive gets teary-eyed too. “You’re right, Gia,” he says, nodding. “I never thought about it that way.”

Then we curl up together, and I guess Clive is in the mood to open up because he starts talking about his parents, who he never talks about.

“Ten years after I was born, my mom became pregnant,” he says. “I guess it was unexpected and it made her happy…so happy.” He pauses and looks off in the distance and then turns back to me.

“But a few weeks after birth…my baby sister died of a heart ailment. They had all these doctors come in to the hospital…from all over the world. And still…nobody, nobody could do anything.” He stares out the window and shakes his head. “My mom was nearly destroyed by that because she always, always wanted a girl. She was so depressed she was almost institutionalized.” He scratches the back of his head.

“And after that she withdrew from me and changed so much. I just couldn’t reach her anymore. I felt…I felt like my parents were blaming me for living after the baby died…Then they sold that apartment and bought this one, but that didn’t help, and so they started traveling all the time after that…trying to run away, I guess…and leaving me here with a governess while they were starting more magazines everywhere…and I felt like I was being punished.”

“Oh my God, I can imagine,” I say. That makes me feel horrible and so sorry for Clive even more because you’d think they’d hold on to him even tighter, but people don’t always act the way they’re supposed to. Then I think about my dad and mom, and even though our lives are not like anyone else’s, I know they’d both kill for me, and that means everything and keeps me grounded. I look over at Clive and think back to being in Paris with him and remember that in passing he said something about starting therapy with his parents when they got home, so maybe people can change…

“You know what you said…in Paris…about room service and fancy hotels and everything not making you happy?”

He nods.

“You were right. That’s all bullshit. It’s all staging. None of that matters.”

“Hmm, staging…I would never have thought of it that way,” he says, the corners of his mouth turning up.

I go home
and pretend I don’t see the cartons. There are more of them each day as my mom and Anthony start to pack up the house. I’ve been putting off packing mine and they lie flat against the wall of my room.

While I can’t deal with packing up my life and giving up my room and especially my princess bed, I go to my closet and pull out six pairs of fabulous heels. I carry them into Anthony’s room and put them on his desk.

“Time to eBay these.”

“I thought you loved—”

“They’re shoes, Anthony. Just shoes.”

In the middle of finally going through all my stuff the phone rings.

If it isn’t enough that Dante has a 911, he is now the owner of a Harley, and I mean how cool is that?

“Wanna go for a test drive?” he asks.

And duh, do you think I’d say anything but yes? Even though my mom is shaking her head and going, “Gia, I don’t like motorcycles. You could fall off. You could kill yourself,” I’m like, “Ma, Dante loves me, he’s going to crawl. He’ll be careful. Do you think he wants to kill me?”

I put on jeans and a leather jacket to kind of look the part. And even though I hate helmets, I run over to Ro’s and borrow one and put it on even though it flattens my hair. In the meantime Dante is sitting in front of the house waiting impatiently and, like a complete asshole, he keeps revving up the engine over and over, which is totally stupid, but kind of funny. And then Mr. Giancana from across the street comes out and yells, “Keep the noise down, keep the noise down, you stupid kids!” And Dante mutters something under his breath, and then we take off and go up the FDR.

He’s getting off on weaving all around the traffic instead of being stuck in it, which is always what happens, even with the 911, which can go from zero to sixty in four-and-a-half seconds, which Dante always reminds us, like it matters in Manhattan, and then he turns around to me and keeps saying, “How cool is this, huh, Gia?” And I’m like, “Yeah, unreal,” and hanging on to him and telling him to go faster. Then a cop car goes by so Dante slows down and when it passes he goes faster. A car nearly cuts us off, and Dante curses him out and then cuts him off and gives him the finger, and after about an hour of intense speeding, I say, “I have to go back and do homework.”

“C’mon, Gia,” he says, “don’t be such a killjoy.”

He’s talking about going upstate, which would take four hours, and asking why we have to get back so soon, and we’re having this stupid conversation while he’s going like seventy-five. I’m starting to get cold and cranky and I hear a siren and think, oh shit, we’re going to get pulled over. And crap, this is not what I need. But no, the cop isn’t chasing us, because, thank God, there’s someone who’s going even faster than we are. And I look at the police car and start to think, could it be Michael? Omigod, what if it is Michael, would he bust us? And how intensely weird would that be?

Only no, it’s not Michael, because the cop is some fat, beefy guy with reddish skin, and I am starting to think that I’ve lost it because New York City has, what, about thirty-five thousand cops, so why is that thought even entering my mind now?

For a fleeting second I think about what Clive found out about Michael. I’m tempted to ask him just to know once and for all what the mystery is all about then decide no, that’s stupid and just forget it.

I close my eyes and concentrate on the wind blowing my hair and I pretend I’m sitting on the wing of an airplane as it flies through the open sky carrying me to a different life.

Dante heads downtown.
We stop at a red light and in the next lane there’s a bus and I look up and see a huge ad for
Vogue
and I realize that this is the new issue, and no, I’m not on the cover and was never supposed to be, but I am inside, at least I think I am.

“Pull over, pull over,” I yell. I make him stop at a newsstand and I buy five copies.

I look and look and then there they are, my pictures. For a few seconds I just stare because at first I don’t recognize my own face and I need to examine what’s on the page in front of me. It feels like one of those tests at the eye doctor’s office where they click, click, click, and things either get fuzzier or sharper and you raise your finger when everything is finally 20/20.

First is a full-page picture, the first of a series of portraits of us in a kind of portfolio with the headline:
Underage and Over the Top
. That had to be John Plesaurus’s idea, I realize, because he’s such a deviant. But whatever, the pictures are killers, and I show them to Dante, who looks and looks and says, “Holy crap, Gia, you look gorgeous.”

“We have to go home,” I say, so he takes me back, and I call Ro and Clive and Candy and show my mom, and everyone is like, “Gia, I’m running out right now to buy it.” And then I look online, and there it is too. At that moment there are only two people in the world I want to call up and tell.

Only I can’t. Which just sucks.

On the way to school the next day, all I keep thinking about is
Vogue
and the pictures and what people are going to say, but when I get inside there is this strange mood in the air and I can’t decide if it’s me or if something is going on. I wave to Clive and he comes over and whispers in my ear and I realize that no, it’s not me, there really is a creepy vibe.

No one is supposed to know but at Morgan nothing stays secret for long, and someone heard someone who overheard someone, and the next thing we find out is that the school paper has a story about it even though the administration didn’t want that. But since this is the USA and we do have free speech, they decided they couldn’t “curtail the school paper’s freedom to tell the truth.” So it says that Christy, Georgina, and Brandy have been “asked to leave”—otherwise known as being suspended—for an indefinite amount of time for “misconduct.”

Bottom line: They stole the ballots. And removed enough votes.

To make. Me. Lose.

Only why did they confess? I talk to Clive and Ro and Candy who spoke to other people who spoke to other people who saw stuff on Facebook, and the story is that Mr. Wright interviewed each of them separately and must have turned the heat up and brought in their parents and—bingo—Christy started crying and admitted everything.

After school Clive and Ro and I talk about celebrating but then think how lowbrow is that, so we hang out without exactly drinking Dom and reflect on the depths of their depravity or what have you while in our own quiet way we rejoice that they’ll be gone, at least until the beginning of the new school year. And from this day forward, Morgan will be a better place—or as Clive says, “a more noble institution.”

Ha ha ha.

I make the mistake
of telling Dante that I want to get into boxing, so the next thing I know he’s calling me up to come over because he found me gloves and a punching bag, which is already hanging from his basement ceiling like a side of beef in a meat locker.

I immediately start hitting that sucker again and again and it feels so good that I keep on going.

“If you want to kill your hands, Gia, keep going.”

He makes me take off the gloves and he wraps my hands with tape like the pros do, which is probably ridiculous at this point, and then he shows me the moves. “Face the bag with one foot in front and one behind,” he says, “and jab with the first two knuckles.” He jabs, jabs, jabs, punching straight out, and then so do I and then cross hook with my left hand, and it’s like, jab, stun ’em, and cross, hurt ’em, and I get a rhythm going and I’m starting to sweat.

“Okay, Gia, let’s take a break and I’ll show you the uppercuts,” Dante says.

But I’m jabbing, jabbing, jabbing hard and thinking of Wentworth and Christy and Brandy and jabbing, jabbing, jabbing, and cross hooking, and—whoa—this boxing stuff is very, very good for totally getting rid of the stress, and I keep going and going and going and…

“GIA, ARE YOU DEAF? STOP!” Dante yells.

I look at him. And stop. And if that bag was a person, we’d need a priest.

The next day we train again and I’m dancing around the bag keeping my elbows in close to protect myself and learning to uppercut to the rib cage and then do the head-on kicks to the stomach and the side kicks and the roundhouse kicks and finally the kicks from the back of the body that you save for when you want to seriously do damage like break ribs, and then two hours or so have gone by.

“You wanna go out for dinner?” Dante asks.

I catch my breath and realize I’m more exhausted than I’ve ever been and never mind food, the only thing I need is sleep because tomorrow I have to be up at the crack of dawn.

To visit my dad.

In prison.

It’s three a.m.
and I’m so wired I can’t sleep. Before breakfast we’re flying to Denver and then driving over a hundred miles south to Florence, Colorado, a place no one has heard of unless they’re in law enforcement or the family of someone who’s locked away in the supermax prison there and I’m twisting and shifting in bed and I’m cold and hot and in between and I get up and pee and get back into bed and try to sleep all over again.

But then my phone rings and my heart gets crazed. I glance at the caller ID, which I don’t have to because I know who it is, and think about how he just picked the wrong time to do this because—screw you, Michael, I’m just in the worst possible frame of mind and I don’t know what to say or not to say to you anymore and I can’t even go there now because I’m shaking like I’m living on a fault line and the earth is opening beneath my feet.

Are you glad they put my dad away? Are you breathing easier now? Or are you calling to say you’re sorry for me? I don’t need your pity so go away and just leave me alone.

It rings and rings and then he must hear my voice in his head because it stops.

Anthony and my mom are both dressed in blue. Anthony is in his best suit, a navy silk Brioni and a starched white shirt with a blue-striped Armani tie. My mom is wearing a royal blue woolen Valentino dress with a single gold cross around her neck. The rest of her crosses and all of her jewelry, including her diamond engagement ring, are gone now, part of the payback to the government.

I’m in a funereal black pantsuit with dark heels and sunglasses and a small gold cross on my neck. I’m searching in my drawer for a tie to hold my hair back when my hand lands on a red painted stone with a black and white spotted design, my Aboriginal gratitude rock.

It fits securely in the palm of my hand. I hold onto it and then drop it into my bag, which is already stuffed with tissues and Xanax because visiting your dad in the country’s most secure prison is not a walk in the park.

I think back to after school when I said good-bye to Clive and Ro and Candy. They all looked like they were about to burst into tears. I pretended not to notice.