Reconstructing Amelia (12 page)

“And, Amelia,” he called after me. “I’m serious about being careful. Sometimes it’s hard to tell how fast the current’s moving until you’re headed over a waterfall.”

After school, I was sitting in a sticky booth in the mostly empty Roma Pizza, waiting for Sylvia to come back with our slices. I was still feeling a little amped from the thing with Zaritski, especially after sailing out of Woodhouse’s office, all mission accomplished and whatnot. All those years of keeping my nose jammed down into books really had given me some kind of Grace Hall–ified force field.

My phone vibrated with a text as Sylvia was on her way back to the booth with our two slices. I jerked it out of my bag, trying to read it before she got there. It was from a blocked number, which meant one of the Maggies.

Party, @ Maggie 2. Put pizza down, dump harlot. We’re about to pop your cherry.

It was from Zadie, I could tell even though the number was blocked. She’d called Sylvia a harlot before. Holy crap, how did Zadie know I was a virgin? But no, wait, she couldn’t. She didn’t. She probably meant my first coed party. I needed to calm down. She’d told us we’d get to go to a Magpie–Wolf’s Gate party after all of us newbies had pulled off our first deed. And Maggie 2 was Dylan. A party at Dylan’s house was not something I wanted to miss. I shoved my phone back in my bag.

“Why do they always have to make it so hot?” Sylvia said, tossing the two greasy paper plates onto the table and shaking out her hands. “It’s totally the best pizza in the hood, but you say ‘not-so-hot’ and they, like, make it
extra
hot.”

Luckily, Sylvia hadn’t seemed to notice I’d been looking at my phone. And now that she’d sat down, she was focused on using her electric blue nails to organize the little cheese-covered squares she still had them cutting her slices into like she was a three-year-old. I looked past Sylvia through the flowers painted on Roma’s front windows to the Yogo Monster and the liquor store on the other side of Seventh Avenue. I expected to see Zadie over there, watching me. But there was just a big pack of moms with strollers and little kids.

“So I know that Ian saying he wants to hang out isn’t the same as him saying he wants to be, like, my
boyfriend
or whatever,” Sylvia said, picking up on her Ian monologue pretty much exactly where she’d left off when she’d gotten up to get our slices. She popped another square of pizza into her mouth, then checked her own phone for texts. From the disappointed look on her face, she didn’t seem to have any. “But he did say once that he never hooks up more than once with girls who go to his school. So him hooking up with me a bunch of times has to mean
something
, right?”

I snapped my eyes down from the window when I felt her looking at me.

“Um, yeah,” I said. From the way Sylvia’s face balled up I knew it hadn’t been enthusiastic enough. And Ian Greene did seem totally into Sylvia. Of course, that wildness of hers that all the boys loved hadn’t yet taken its turn into full-on wacko. “I mean, yes, totally. Absolutely.”

Her face relaxed a little. “You
really
think so?”

“Definitely. Nobody hooks up more than once with somebody they go to school with unless they think it could be a real thing,” I said, as though all my information on this kind of thing didn’t actually come from
gRaCeFULLY
. “It’s too messy. Especially for somebody like Ian. Why would he bother? He could totally meet girls anywhere.”

Sylvia nodded, but she looked kind of worried. My phone vibrated then with another text. I tried to be subtle about checking, but Sylvia was looking right at me.

D
ON’T BE LATE
, it said.

“Who’s that? Your BFF Ben?” Sylvia asked, rolling her eyes. “I’m telling you, that kid has way too much free time to be texting you. Can you say
loser
?”

“I have time to text him back,” I said. “Am I a loser, too?”

Sylvia shrugged. “If the shoe fits,” she said. I scowled at her. “Listen, don’t blame me. You’re the one who’s settling for cybersex.”

I wanted so badly to shove my phone in her face. I wanted to tell her that it was
she
who was the loser, not me. Because
I
’d been tapped by the Maggies, and the Maggies didn’t tap losers. Except, of course, I couldn’t tell Sylvia anything about the Maggies. I felt bad about that. I even felt bad for bragging about the Maggies in my head. And Sylvia was Sylvia, too. When she felt bad about herself, she picked on me. It was just the way she was, which reminded me of those stupid texts about my dad that I was almost 100 percent sure she’d sent as some kind of joke.

“By the way, what’s up with the texts about my dad?” I asked. I felt more pissed off once I’d brought it up. It was a seriously messed-up joke. “Why would you ever think that was funny?”

“What are you talking about?” She was trying to play all innocent, and she was doing a pretty good job.

“Sylvia, come on. I know it was you.”

“Let me see it.” She held out her hand for my phone. “Because I so did not send you any text about your dad.”

Right away, I dropped my phone back into my bag, then played like it was too much of a pain to dig for it. There was no possible way I could let her get her hands on my phone. What if another text from Zadie came through?

“I’m not making it up,” I said.

“I didn’t say you were.”

“The last one said, ‘Your dad isn’t who you think he is.’ ”

“And it was from
my
number?”

“No, it was blocked.”

“But you still thought
I
sent it to you?” Sylvia looked all offended. “Thanks.”

“I guess I was hoping it was you.” Which was more true than I’d realized.

But it definitely wasn’t Sylvia. That was for sure. Because she was a terrible liar. If she hadn’t been telling the truth, I’d have totally known it. It could have been from Zadie or someone else in the Maggies. It wasn’t a secret that I didn’t live with my dad, but the fact that I’d never even met him kind of was. Sylvia was pretty much the only person who knew that.

“What did your mom say?”

“About what?”

“Um, the
text
?” Sylvia asked, looking at me like I had to be playing dumb on purpose.

“I didn’t tell her,” I said, feeling a little guilty.

“Why not?”

I’d thought about it, obviously, but I wanted to figure out who they were from first. If the messages had come from Sylvia, my mom probably would have wanted to have some humiliating sit-down with her mom. And if they
hadn’t
come from Sylvia, my mom would have called the school to tell them someone was stalking me. It wouldn’t be long before she ended up talking to Woodhouse, and he would tell her all about the Maggies.

“I didn’t tell my mom because I thought it was from
you
.”

“Oh yeah, I forgot. Nice.”

“Anyway, that last text was from my coach,” I said. “I left my cleats back at the field. I have to go get them.”

Sylvia looked a little wounded. “You’re coming back, though, right?”

I looked down at the time on my phone. “I’ve got a bio test tomorrow. Probably not.”

“Oh, okay, I guess,” Sylvia said. “But before you go, can you at least—just bottom line, you don’t think I should call Ian again, do you? I mean, I should wait for him to text me back?”

Dylan lived up on Second Street near the park, in a brownstone that looked a lot like ours except it was white stone instead of red, and there was a kind-of-cool, kind-of-creepy sculpture out in front of a small tree with hands at the end of the branches instead of leaves. I was standing at the bottom of the steps staring at it when the door flew open. At the top was Dylan, barefoot in a loose dress and a bunch of necklaces. She had a cigarette in her hand, which she looked weird holding. Like it was a stage prop.

“Come on, come on,” she said, waving me up. “You’re one of the guests of honor.”

When I got to the top of the steps, she crushed the cigarette out on the stoop, linked her arm through mine, and guided me inside. Her living room was packed with furniture and tchotchkes and bodies—boys and girls piled on couches and stretched across the floor. It was filled with smoke, too. Pot, cigarettes; most people had a beer in their hand. I must have stopped walking because Dylan tugged me gently forward, toward the kitchen.

“You look like you’ve never seen a party before,” she laughed as she headed to the refrigerator and pulled out a Brooklyn Lager.

I had been to parties before—slumber parties, movie parties, birthday parties, even some boy-girl parties. Never a party like this.

Dylan snapped off the cap and handed me the beer like she was handing me a stick of gum. I took it. Or I must have, because there the bottle was, in my hand. It felt cold and slimy and heavier than I would have expected. I gripped it tight so I wouldn’t accidentally drop it. I’d had wine at Christmas, and Sylvia and I had once done a shot of her father’s disgusting whiskey. But I’d never had a beer before, definitely not one of my own at a party full of cool kids. I was staring down at the bottle when Zadie came pounding into the kitchen. She seemed drunk already, or maybe just more angry than usual.

“Ugh,” she said when she saw me, shielding her eyes like I was hard to look at. “If it isn’t Crazy Eyes. Delightful.”

“Be nice, Zadie,” Dylan said, without bothering to look at her. “You said that you would be.”

Zadie grabbed two beers from the refrigerator and slammed it shut with her hip. Dylan tensed at the noise but didn’t turn around.

“Nice?” Zadie growled, still glaring at me.

I took a long swallow of beer and tried not to gag.

“Yes, nice,” Dylan said. “You promised.”

“We never said ‘nice,’ we said ‘not mean.’ ” Zadie came around to stand next to Dylan. She leaned over to whisper in her ear, but Dylan kept pulling her head away. “And considering what I
really
think about Crazy Eyes here, I think I’m being charming as all fuck.”

Crazy Eyes? Zadie seriously hated me, but why? We didn’t even know each other. But with each meeting of the Magpies, how much she despised me became way more obvious. It was only when Dylan started being extra nice to make up for it that I had decided to stay. She even said I reminded her of herself when she was a sophomore. It might have just been a thing to say, but it still felt good thinking Dylan saw what we had in common.

I took another gulp of beer, holding my breath so I wouldn’t have to taste it.

“I don’t exactly love your badass ballerina, you know,” Dylan mumbled, crossing her arms. She looked upset now. “But I’m not taking it out on her.”

Your
badass ballerina. Did that mean I was
her
Crazy Eyes? Because I had been wondering who could have possibly picked me to be in the Maggies in the first place.

Zadie was still hanging near Dylan. She reached out slowly, pushing a few strands of Dylan’s hair gently behind her ear.

“Don’t touch me,” Dylan snapped, knocking Zadie’s hand away.

“Temper, temper,” Zadie said, with a mean smile. Then she held up her hands—a beer in each one—before sashaying toward the door. “Be careful, Crazy Eyes, that one bites.”

Carter appeared in the doorway to the kitchen then, looking disoriented and nervous. It was a relief to see a friendly face, but he didn’t even look in my direction before Zadie charged at him.

“There you are!” she said, pressing her hips against him, then her mouth hard over his. Carter looked woozy when Zadie came up for air. She grabbed his hand and jerked him toward the living room, smiling back at us over her shoulder. “Catch you later, ladies.”

“She’s not as bad as she seems,” Dylan said when she was gone. But she didn’t sound convinced. “You have to really know her. She’s my best friend. A lot of the time, it’s felt like she was my only friend.”

“What do you mean?” I laughed a little, even though it definitely didn’t seem like she was making a joke. “You have a million friends.”

“Not ones who know the real me,” Dylan said, her eyes turning glassy. “Not like Zadie knows me.”

“I’d like to know the real you,” I said, feeling my cheeks flush, but I was glad I’d said it all the same.

“Come on,” Dylan said, smiling as she linked her arm through mine. “I want to show you something upstairs.”

I followed her back through the smoky, antique-filled living room toward the creaky, dark staircase. Her house, laid out so much like mine, couldn’t have looked more different. Stuffy and overstuffed, but not in a totally bad way. Like a set for a Jane Austen movie. I looked over my shoulder as I started up the stairs. That’s when I caught a glimpse of Ian Greene sitting on the couch. But who was that sitting with him? It had been a girl, definitely. And I could have sworn it was Zadie. I thought I recognized her pointy boots and her little plaid skirt. Was that Ian’s hand on Zadie’s leg? But she’d just been with Carter in the kitchen. She couldn’t have traded up that quickly. It was too late, though, to go back and check as Dylan pulled me up the steps and out of sight.

“Come on,” Dylan said, half playfully, half losing patience. “Hurry up.”

When I looked back, Ian was gone, disappeared along with the rest of the living room.

“Are all the guys here in Wolf’s Gate?” I asked when we were at the top of the steps. I tried to sound nonchalant.

“Yeah. Most of them are okay. Some of them are assholes.” She sounded bored as she pointed to a doorway halfway down the hall. “We’re going in there.”

We turned inside a small office, with a big mahogany desk and a formal leather chair. The walls were lined with books, the old, leather kind with fancy gold trim and thin crinkly pages. And not just new books made to look old either. These were old, old books.

“Wow,” I said, stepping closer. The classics were all there—
Odyssey
,
Moby-Dick
, Dante’s
Inferno
. “This is amazing.”

“Nobody reads them,” Dylan said, like she didn’t want me getting the wrong idea. “My dad just collects them. Original ones, too.” She pulled one book down, which was displayed alone on a little shelf. “Like this one.”