The Reinvention of Moxie Roosevelt (11 page)

“I’m really glad I met you, Mox,” she said.“You’re exactly the kind of person I was hoping to find for my club. And to be friends with. I thought Eaton would be full of fakers, but you are the real deal.”

I couldn’t do anything but smile. And I kept smiling as Reagan followed Spinky and Kate out the door, rendered frozen by the feeling of guilt that overcame me, and the knot that arrived in my stomach.

I was not exactly the real deal. But I comforted myself by thinking that I was not exactly
not
the real deal either. The thing is, I
intended
to become the person Reagan thought I already was.

And I knew a perfect way to start.

Midway
through my second week at Eaton, I was finally starting to get into the flow. I had classes every day, two early-morning lessons a week with Mr. Tate, and then EE. This left most of my afternoons free to work in the practice rooms. I’d started using the same one each time, and there were little cubbies there where I could store my music and my metronome, so I didn’t have to schlep them around campus and out myself as an Über Piano Nerd.

I got up really early on Friday morning while Spinky was still fast asleep and headed over to the practice rooms to exercise my fingers and mull some things over in my brain before my 8:00 lesson with Mr. Tate. I warmed up with a series of Bach two-part Inventions, then took a deep breath and plunged into the first page of Goldberg Variation number 28. It was physically painful to listen to the sound of my own playing. When I made it to the measure where Mr. Tate had told me to stop, I went back to the beginning and blundered through it again, wincing at the racket. By the time I arrived at Mr. Tate’s office, I had gotten slightly used to sounding like I was playing with most of my fingers taped together.

“Ah, good mawnin’ Miss Kippah,” Mr.Tate said, standing up and giving me a little bow. “Ah, but—” He checked his watch, and beamed. “Good mawnin’,” he repeated. One of the many things I’d learned from Mr. Tate in the last two weeks was that he often didn’t sleep at night, but spent the hours listening to his old records, playing his piano, or working on compositions of his own. His perpetual confusion about the time was, I had decided, 60 percent real and 40 percent a put-on. He often professed the same confusion about the month, and occasionally the year. I loved 100 percent of it.

“How’s our iceberg?” he asked. He’d taken to referring to the piece as our iceberg, though I was never quite clear if I was supposed to be the
Titanic,
the captain, or Kate Winslet. I like to think it was option number three.

“Cold, slippery, unpredictable, and full of cracks,” I told him.

Mr. Tate clapped. “Perfect,” he said. “Let’s hear it.”

“Okay, but—”

He raised one hand palm out, traffic-cop style, and I smiled.We had agreed on a strict “no disclaimers” policy for my playing—I was not supposed to apologize in avance for mistakes, blunders, or even flat-out disasters. I closed my mouth, sat down at the piano, took a deep breath, and played what I had been practicing for two days. When I finished, I sighed and looked over at him.

“Miss Kippah,” Mr. Tate said, “I am extremely pleased that you have chosen to take my advice and leave the issue of finger precision for a later time.”

I laughed. Only Mr.Tate could turn “Well, you hit plenty of wrong notes” into a compliment.

“And your trills are coming along. You may not hear it yet, but you are beginning to understand this variation. The tempo is good for you, it will come up to speed on its own, and you will be surprised at how fast you will move without giving the air of being showy.”

“Liberace lived for showy,” I said with a grin. Mr. Tate had a deep-seated loathing for the now-departed Las Vegas pianist, with his massive ringed fingers and sequin-covered coats.

“Liberace was about as sharp as a sack of wet mice,” Mr. Tate declared. “All right, then, Miss Kippah. You’ve come a long way in just a few days, and I can tell without asking that you’ve been practicing up a storm. Now let’s get down to business. Break the notes down, starting with this measure here.”

I lost myself in the notes, seeing them through Mr. Tate’s eyes, and before I knew it, the lesson was over. The lessons were never long enough, but they charged me like solar panels absorbing the sun and kept me going for the whole day.

I retained my good mood, even through an algebra class that I was certain Mrs. Feeny was conducting in Norwegian. In fact, the only two things at Eaton I was really unhappy with were math and Kate Southington. The sting of her obvious dislike of me gnawed away at all of my personalities, since I didn’t believe I had done anything to deserve it. Part of me still wanted to try to win her over, because the whole situation made me uncomfortable.

And there was also the lingering specter of the New Student Talent Show, which I was beginning to think of as a horror movie called
The Thing That Was Not Funny
, starring me.

I could feel the pressure building, but I’d already spent all morning in the practice rooms. I needed something else. Oh,
Fabulous
! I made another stealth run to the school bookstore, which was full of students, most of whom were wearing soccer uniforms. One of them wasn’t, however. I recognized Kate’s strawberry blond ponytail and bony shoulders from the back. Should I pretend I didn’t see her, or once again dip my toe in the icy waters of diplomacy?

The question answered itself when she turned around with a stack of magazines in her hands.

The magazine on top was
Fabulous
.

Finally—something to bond over!

“Why, Kate Southington, I’m onto you,” I said cheerfully. “You can’t hide from me.”

Kate’s head snapped around, and when she caught sight of me she looked positively alarmed.

I walked right over to her.

“Don’t worry,” I said, nodding my head toward the magazines. “Your secret is safe with me. I won’t tell a soul how ‘Fabulous’ you really are!”

Kate’s face had gone red. My jokey dialogue was clearly tanking. But I didn’t understand. It had been funny with Ms. Hay and the
Star Trek
novels. What was the difference?

I gave it one more shot.

“I too share a shameful secret,” I whispered in an overly dramatic voice.

“Shut up,” Kate snapped.

“Oh come on, I’m only joking,” I said.

“Shut. Your. Mouth,” Kate hissed. Then she pushed roughly past me, actually shoving me to one side.

I stood there for a second, completely stupefied. Was there an instruction manual that came with this girl? Had I somehow missed it? Why did she get bent out of shape over the stupidest things?

I looked around to see if any of the soccer team had overheard the exchange. Impossible to tell. In any case, I must look like an idiot just standing there. I went over to the magazine section as I’d originally planned. I pretended to scan the titles, though I didn’t register anything. All I did was play the Kate dialogue over and over in my head.

A quick glance over my shoulder informed me that Kate had made her purchases and was gone. The soccer team was also filing out the door like a single organism composed of many tan legs in knee-socks.

At least I can get my stupid magazine now, I thought.

But once again, there was no
Fabulous
magazine to be had.

Was nothing going to go right?

I approached the checkout lady, too steamed at Kate Southington to be embarrassed about asking after my trashy magazine a second time.

“You’re the one that asked about the magazine,” she said.

I nodded. “You said—”

“They came in, and they went out. The girl ahead of you bought every copy I had. Sorry.”

Kate had bought every copy of
Fabulous
magazine? I was furious. What a petty thing to do. She didn’t want me to have my favorite magazine, so she wasted twenty bucks to make sure I couldn’t buy one?

But wait. Kate Southington had no way of knowing I loved that magazine. No one at Eaton knew that. She couldn’t have known what I was in the bookstore to buy.

So why had she taken the whole stack of copies?

There was definitely something off about the girl. She was acting bizarre. And I
still
felt like I knew her from somewhere. Something was definitely up, and I had to know what it was.

I went straight to the library and grabbed a spare desk in the computer bay. I Googled “Southington” and “Migawam,” then “Southington” and “music,” but came up empty. Then I Googled “Kate Southington.” No hits. I cleared the search field and just reentered “Southington.” There were thousands of hits for that. I noticed a link to
haveyouheard.com
, one of my favorite celebrity gossip sites. I pulled up an archived article flagged “Southington Family,” glanced at the photograph that came up along with it, and drew in a long, deep breath.

It was all right there for the world to see. The picture was of hotel billionaire Lockwood Southington and his two daughters. One of the girls was flaunting herself for the camera, hands on hips, chin slightly lowered, long blond hair hanging in a flawless curtain around her heavily made-up face. She was gorgeous, and she wanted to make sure we all knew she knew it.

The second girl had her face slightly turned away from the camera, head angled down, arms folded over her chest, eyes on the floor. The caption identified the two girls as “aspiring model Brooklyn Stiles Southington and notoriously camera-shy younger sister Phyllida Caytson Southington.”

Phyllida. Caytson. Southington.

Caytson Southington.

Kate Southington.

Holy mackerel. This family made celebrity headlines every month! And not in a good way. Brooklyn Southington was the poster girl for trust fund kids—famous for her partying ways, her skimpy outfits, and her rapidly expanding collection of miniature dogs. She drove a neon pink Hummer and had been arrested for various party crimes, like attempting to use a yacht as an impromptu rock arena. Her father was currently awaiting trial for some kind of money-related misbehavior. The mother had run off with a polo player, then returned unrepentant to the family, if memory served. The Southingtons were one of the richest and worst-behaved families in America. When I thought Kate looked familiar, I had no idea how familiar she really was.

And now I knew her secret.

No wonder she had bought every copy of
Fabulous
.

Kate was an Undercover Heiress.

I ran across the quad and into Sage, and jogged up the stairs to the third floor. I was bursting to tell Spinky the secret identity of Kate “All My Cops” Southington.

But by the time I reached my hall, I knew I wasn’t going to say anything to Spinky about Kate’s secret. As mean as she was, there were just some things a girl didn’t do to another girl.

There was only a half hour left of evening study period, and the hall was quiet when I pushed open the glass double doors. Maybe Kristen hadn’t done check-in tonight. I paused a moment to catch my breath, then opened the door to our room and hurried inside.

I caught a brief glimpse of something brass colored wrapped in gauze on the ground as my foot connected with it. I stumbled and pitched forward, landing flat on my face.

Two sets of feet quickly came into view. One wore combat boots.

The other wore suspiciously non-heiress-issue, plain white, brand-spanking-new sneakers.

“Moxie,
are you concussed?” Spinky said. “I’ve always wanted to ask someone that,” she added.

I looked up to see Kate standing slightly behind Spinky, her arms folded. When our eyes met, she narrowed hers into little slits. Yeah, she hated me. And I was beginning to understand why.

The conversations about how I hated rich people too. The paparazzi comment. The Hummer remark. And at the bookstore—I had told Kate I knew her secret. Did she think I’d been goading her all this time? That I knew her secret and this was my way of telling her? She was probably afraid I would blab. And why wouldn’t she be afraid? Her world was full of ex-friends and disgruntled family employees spilling Southington secrets to the
National Enquirer
. What was I supposed to do? Mouth “Your secret is safe with me”?

“Let me help you up, roomie,” Spinky said, extending her hand. I let her pull me up, avoiding eye contact with Kate. “I’m sorry I left the incense thing in the middle of the floor. I’ve been trying to figure out some kind of sling for it. Except that Kate has pointed out that using gauze will make it a fire hazard.”

Kate nodded at Spinky.

“Well, I’m sure you’re from a very safety-oriented family,” I said. “With all those police and stuff.”

I was trying to let her know I was going with her cover story. But my words had the opposite effect. Kate pressed her lips tightly together and her face went white with fury. If Spinky hadn’t been standing between us, I feel certain Kate would have ripped my heart right out of my chest.