7 Souls (8 page)

The wind was picking up, out in front of the school, an hour later. The sky had not cleared. Mary drew her trench coat more tightly around her and continued staring at the grooves in the dirty sidewalk, realizing she’d memorized them. She knew she should go home. She’d long since given up on getting a “Happy birthday”—that was the impossible dream—but she’d settle for a simple “Hey, Mary” from somebody she knew, or even somebody she didn’t.

Oh, who are you kidding? Go home. Nobody cares; not Patrick, not anyone else. How much clearer can they make it?
All she was doing was making it worse for herself. She could just go home and take a bath and go to bed and sleep late tomorrow morning and watch Saturday cartoons and then maybe throw herself off the Brooklyn Bridge. The only reason she was staying at Chadwick—the only reason she hadn’t left, after cutting all her classes—was because home meant her own dismal little room and Mom calling out for her cigarettes and blended orange juice. Maybe watching some MTV or even soaps on the damn Daewoo television, which sucked … and that was just too pathetic a way to spend her seventeenth birthday. She drew the line at sitting at home watching television—she would rather stand here leaning against this metal gate and be ignored and wait for—

“Hey.”

A male voice—one she didn’t know—coming from right in front of her. She could see a pair of scuffed Puma running shoes and the cuffs of some worn-out jeans without moving her eyes.
Somebody telling me to move
, Mary thought dully.
I’m in somebody’s way, again. Somebody has to unlock their bike or something
.

“Mary? Hey. You all right?”

I won’t look up
, Mary thought.
It’s not worth it. I don’t even know who’s talking to me, and I don’t care. I refuse to find out
.

The Pumas didn’t move. Whoever this person was, he wasn’t going anywhere.

“I’m fine,” she said.

“You sure?” Mary realized that she had been wrong: there
was
something familiar about the voice. “You don’t look fine.”

Slowly Mary raised her head.

It was Dylan. Ellen’s friend Dylan, from the roof.

“Are you looking for Ellen?”

Dylan shook his head, brushing his hair back from his forehead and giving her a clear look at his face—which wasn’t bad, surprisingly. She hadn’t seen what he looked like up close: it was the effect of his olive complexion, his thick stubble, and his messed-up hair. He looked like an Indie Rock version of one of those French poets on the covers of Ellen’s old books.

“No, I’m not looking for Ellen. I’m actually looking for you.”

What?

Mary pushed herself away from the gate and stood upright, bringing herself closer to Scruffy Dylan, who, apparently, was looking for her. At this point in the day, she figured she was ready for whatever dismal surprises were still to come.
After a birthday like this, what else could go wrong?
She didn’t know, but she had a hunch she was about to find out.

“Why are you—why are you looking for me?”

“Yeah … well …” Dylan rocked on his feet, staring down at the ground, his hands jammed in his jeans pockets. As she waited he took a deep breath, then slowly exhaled. “Okay, no more beating around the bush. It’s like this: how’d you like to have dinner with me tonight?”

Mary had thought she’d had some idea what to expect—but she had
not
been prepared for this. She was so startled, so surprised, that she couldn’t speak; she just stared at him, waiting while he slowly raised his eyes to meet hers.

“Okay, bad idea,” Dylan said quickly. “Bad—bad idea; I get it. Never mind; forget I asked. It was stupid of me to—”

“No, wait,” Mary said, shaking her head. “Wait, I’m just surprised, that’s all. You want … you’re asking me out to dinner?”

“Yeah.” Dylan nodded calmly. “I’m asking you out to dinner. I thought”—he paused, looking at her, tilting his head while he fumbled for words—“you’re obviously having a bad day and I’ve been wanting to ask you out, so here I am.” He smiled in a way that seemed to say,
My fate is in your hands
. “Don’t be too mean—before you cut me down to size, let me just, um, diffidently point out that it takes a little bit of courage to do this.”

“But—” Mary was at sea. “You mean tonight? This evening? You want to go to dinner tonight.”

“That’s right. Do you have other plans?”

He’s got to be kidding
, Mary thought.
Right? This is a joke
.

But she could see that he wasn’t kidding. It was obvious, looking at his face.

“No,” she said finally. “I guess I don’t. Have any other plans, I mean.”

“Okay.” Dylan nodded. His eyes were uncommonly green, she noticed. “Look, please—go ahead and shoot me down quickly, because the longer that takes, the less pleasant it will be.”

“But you don’t even know me.”

“Not entirely accurate,” Dylan said. “Ellen never shuts up about you, and she’s, like, my sister.”

“Which makes us related,” Mary told him, smiling. Behind her, the school doors had begun banging open more often as the school day came to a close. “I’m not sure that’s—”

“Right, right; forget I said that.” Dylan shook his head and his hair flipped back and forth across his deep-set eyes. “She’s not my sister and neither are you; we’re not related and I don’t know you. So will you go out with me?”

She knew how to deal with these situations, of course. She
had
to. Mary Shayne was a brilliant rejectrix—a master of the graceful exit strategy. She had a whole arsenal of prepared rejections for everyone: budding filmmakers, men over thirty, stunt-jumping skater teens, drunken hipsters who smelled like Belgian beer. She even had one for the rich freaks on the Upper East Side in their blue blazers and white turtlenecks and professionally shortened jeans.

“Look, Dylan, I—”

He got the message that fast. “Okay,” he interrupted, sighing heavily. “Okay, that’s—At least I tried.”

Dylan turned to begin walking away, and when he did, Mary had an unobstructed view across Eighty-second Street.

She had no idea how long Patrick had been sitting on the brownstone’s steps. She’d been staring at the ground so long, feeling sorry for herself and posing like a pity magnet, that she must have missed him. But there he was, forearms on knees, smoking a Dunhill and watching her.

Watching
them
.

As fast as she could, Mary flicked her gaze away, desperately hoping that Trick hadn’t seen her looking at him. It was impossible to tell—he was too far away. She fixed her eyes on Dylan’s face and forced herself not to sneak any more glances at Patrick.

Six hours, Trick. It only took me six hours to move on
.

“Yes.”

It took Dylan a moment to react; it was like she’d said something so incomprehensible that he was struggling to interpret it. “Wait—really?” he blurted out, and his grin was so natural, so unmannered, that it lit up his face like a little boy’s. “‘Yes’ like ‘yes’? Like you really want to do it?”

Why not? After a day like this, damn it, why not?

Mary smiled. “Yes,” she said.

“Wow.” Dylan was visibly flustered; he tried to disentangle his jacket from his messenger bag and nearly dropped them both. “Wow. That’s—that’s just great.”

Mary smiled—a full-power, hundred-watt Mary Shayne smile. It had the predictable effect. Dylan was clearly forgetting to breathe.

“What time?” She had to ask it twice. “Dylan? What time?”

“What? Oh—any time. How about eight, at, um, Aquagrill? You know where I mean? On Spring Street, next to—”

“I know where you mean,” Mary said warmly. “That’s perfect. Aquagrill at eight; I’ll meet you there.”

“All right,” Dylan said, looking dazed. “All right.”

Watch this, Patrick
, she thought, leaning forward to give Dylan a quick kiss on the cheek, letting her hand linger on his shoulder.
Did you like that? There’s more to come
.

3
6:52
P.M.

“N
OW, SEE,
” A
MY SAID
, pointing at Mary with the well-manicured pinky finger of her wineglass-holding hand,
“that’s
what it’s supposed to look like!” Her voice was a little too loud and her pale, freckled face had become flushed—it was her second glass of wine, or maybe her third. “What do you think, Joonie?”

“Yeah,” Joon said flatly. She was on Mary’s other side, straddling a turned-around designer chair, her chin on her smooth forearms, absently twirling her own balloon-like wineglass. She was dressed in a white tank top and designer running pants. “Cool.”

Mary was standing in Amy’s dressing room—not her bedroom, but her dressing room, a completely separate room, as Mary always marveled—wearing a gorgeous green bustier dress, her feet bare. Her wineglass was on the smoothly polished floorboards next to the mattress-size mirror she was facing. Jason Mraz was blasting from about sixteen speakers downstairs—they’d left the system running when they’d finally stopped wasting time and come up here to get to the business of the hour: preparing Mary for her date.

What a day
, Mary marveled, bewildered.
It started in a furniture store—and it went downhill from there
. It was definitely not like any birthday she’d ever had—it was like the
opposite
of a birthday. Now she wanted to put the whole thing out of her head—just drink some wine and dress up and go on a date and forget about Chadwick and Patrick and Mr. Shama’s physics test and the nurse’s tongue depressor and the awful, disoriented feeling she’d had since she woke up.

Incredibly, her two best friends—flanking her right now—had not said
a word
about her birthday. She had decided not to say anything either, preferring to wait for one of them to remember. It had started out as a test, a game—a way to deal with her hurt feelings—and had progressed through stages of incredulity and astonishment until finally she’d just given up.
They forgot, that’s all
, she thought, still not quite believing it.
They forgot, and you can’t draw attention to it without sounding like a pouty bitch, so just let it go
.

“‘Yeah’? ‘Cool’? That’s all you’ve got to say?” Amy was incredulous. “It’s
awesome. Look
at her!”

Staring at herself in the mirror, feeling the warm effects of the red wine, Mary had to agree. She remembered the first time Amy had shown her the Nina Ricci bustier dress. She’d been afraid to even touch it. She never told Amy, but she had actually checked online to see what it cost, and when she saw the $2,300 price tag, she literally ran away from her laptop.

“That’s what it looked like in the store,” Amy continued, unperturbed. “That is so
not
what it looked like on me. Thank God I gave it to you. Come on, Joonie, you’ve
got
to agree with me.”

The dress was so simple, and so elegant—nothing but gorgeous dark green silk with ruched paneling and an impeccably tailored bustier top. It fit every contour of her body just the way she liked; it also showed plenty of leg, highlighted her clavicles and smooth shoulders and revealed just the right amount of back.

“I agree, I agree,” Joon said wearily. “This is all taking so long. Let’s get to the makeup, shall we?”

Amy Tovah Twersky was known to many as the Sturgeon Princess of Fifth Avenue. Of course, she loathed her title (bestowed upon her by a bitchy Chadwick girl on Facebook), but she did have to admit that her family had been providing high-quality sturgeon to the greater New York area for nearly a hundred years. They had grown into a gourmet food dynasty, second only to Zabar’s in the city’s heated Smoked Salmon Wars. As Amy often explained to Mary, the Twerskys had been feeding people for a century, and that was where she’d gotten her insane generosity.

But Amy’s compulsive giving extended way past the mere provision of foodstuffs. Mary couldn’t even count the number of times she had crashed at Amy’s Seventy-first Street town house, where they would disappear to the third-floor library and indulge in their guilty pleasure: late-night Wii golf on the sixty-five-inch plasma. Amy would bring up Bellinis, beluga, and toast points from the industrial-size kitchen for a two
A.M.
snack. She was simply generous to a fault. Nearly two-thirds of Mary’s designer outfits were gifts from Amy—handpicked from her shopping surplus and expertly tailored by her crack team of seamstresses to fit Mary’s petite frame.

“I love it,” Mary said conclusively. She turned left and right, admiring the view. She was feeling a nice buzz from the wine she’d already drunk, and the more she drank, the less she had to think about her Day from Hell and the lack of birthday wishes (or birthday presents, or birthday
anything)
. “I love it, Amy—totally. I think we have a winner.”

“About time.” Joon yawned. “Seriously, Mary, it’s divine. Now can we advance to the next level, already?”

“Meaning more wine, of course,” Amy said, glaring comically at Joon. “Here—open this.” Amy picked up the second bottle she’d brought upstairs from the wine cellar and tossed it to Joon, who caught it easily, diving toward the floor to snag the corkscrew with her other hand.

Joon Park, Patrick’s ex—
Patrick’s
other
ex
, Mary thought, still getting used to it—had inherited those perfect reflexes from her golf-obsessed father, along with glowing skin and a Mercedes Roadster convertible and a $2.3 million, tax-exempt trust fund (her dad was some kind of partner or something at the Bank of Korea). From her mother (also a Korean banker) she’d inherited perfectly straight hair, cute little puckered lips, a tiny nose and a lust for couture—not to mention the perfect body to wear it.

“Be careful,” Amy yelled, laughing. “That’s, like, a ten-year-old bottle of Romanée-Conti. Special occasions only. I think it cost like a thousand dollars or something.”

“Ain’t gonna drop it,” Joon muttered, getting busy with the corkscrew, her white-socked feet tapping to the music. “Shayne! It’s refill time—looks like you’re ready.”

“Cleanse your palette first,” Amy warned.

“Fuck that,” Joon said, reaching with her long, sinewy arms to pour the most expensive glass of wine Mary had ever held in her life. She poured in the proper Korean fashion, as usual, stiffly holding her left hand beneath her right elbow. “Here, Mary—
l’chaim.”

“I’m
supposed to say that,” Amy complained.

I could spill all the wine on the dress
, Mary thought dazedly.
How much money would I be wasting if I did that?

But the wine was exactly what she needed. When Amy had found her at the Chadwick gate an hour before, as the sky was darkening and the last of the students were scattering, and Mary had reported that Dylan had asked her out,
tonight
, Amy was astonished. She quickly added that it was the best thing ever—a fantastic way to get back at Trick—and had insisted that Mary come over to get ready for the date. Mary agreed immediately, not just because Amy had included Joon but because she really, really wanted to have a glass of wine beforehand.

I’m having the worst birthday ever
, she thought,
and I cut all my classes and my boyfriend dumped me and I just don’t care anymore
.

Mary could never decide what she envied most about the Twerskys’ town house. Some days it was the stately limestone facade, with its early twentieth-century balconies and polished brass trim. Some days it was the expansive foyer, with its white and gray marble floor. She loved the way the setting sun poured in through the domed copper skylight, casting its webbed, ethereal glow down all five flights of the spiral staircase.

Some days it was those rare moments of Manhattan serenity in the courtyard’s bamboo garden, or the feeling of pure love emanating from the professional kitchen in the basement stacked to the gills with aromatic Italian coffees, teas from East Asia, and every conceivable kind of cookie, from Oreos to the finest hazelnut biscotti. Obviously, she loved the plasma TV in the library—the Hall of Wii Golf Champions—and she salivated over Amy’s four-poster bed and wood-burning fireplace on the fourth floor, not to mention Mrs. Twersky’s Roy Lichtenstein prints, which surrounded the cylindrical second-floor hall.

But once the sun set, without question the most enviable feature of the 1903 town house was its well-stocked wine cellar. Isaac Twersky had excavated the basement in 1968 to reclaim the original wine grotto and make room for his vast collection—and when it came to wine, his legendary generosity didn’t waver.

“Does it taste expensive?” Joon asked, smiling nastily. “But then, you wouldn’t know, would you, Mary?”

“Hey! Leave my best friend alone, Joonie,” Amy scolded, taking Mary by the wrists and leading her toward the makeup table. “Sit down, Mary—let’s get to work.”

“Yeah, it’s getting late,” Mary noticed. “Can we get things
moving?”

“She doesn’t want to keep the Mystery Man waiting,” Joon said, refilling Amy’s glass. “Who
is
this guy, anyway? I’ve never heard of him.”

“Ellen’s friend,” Amy told her, pulling open drawers and scattering mascara tubes and compacts across the surface of the makeup table. “You never listen to what she tells you.”

“Oh, whatever with the ‘protect delicate little Mary’ routine,” Joon complained, finally sipping the thousand-dollar wine herself. “Anyway, she may be
your
best friend, but
I’m
Mary’s best friend. This is good.”

“You are not!” Amy was appalled. “Mary, I’m your best friend, like, since forever, aren’t I? It’s in writing!”

“That’s true,” Mary allowed. She was riffling through the lipsticks, trying to find something she liked. “But Joon’s my
other
best friend. You’re
both
my best friend.”

Even though neither of you remembered my birthday
.

“That’s ridiculous,” Joon scoffed. She had put down the glass and come over to help pick through the lipsticks. “We can’t
both
be your best friend; it doesn’t make any sense.”

“Too bad,” Mary said, sipping some more of the wine. She tried to appreciate the thousand dollars’ worth of taste, and for a moment, as the rich, dry aroma filled her nostrils and the smooth wine slid down her throat like velvet, she imagined that she actually could. “Because that’s the truth.”

“Suppose you
had
to choose?” Joon wanted to know. “If you could only save one of us from, like, a burning building, which one would it be?”

The Mraz had ended downstairs and something else had come on—whatever Amy’s genius playlist had selected for them. Mary thought she recognized the Decemberists. “I’m not going to go near that one,” she said, beginning to brush her hair away from her face in preparation for making herself up. “What kind of question is that?”

That’s really what I want to think about right now—burning buildings
.

What’s come over them? Why is everything so damn
weird
today?

“It’s a
good
question! Here, let me,” Amy said, leaning in to push Mary’s hands away and start applying mascara herself. “Which one would you save? Bearing in mind, of course, that I’m
actually
your best friend.”

How am I supposed to answer?

Mary had no idea. Up close, she could smell the wine on Amy’s breath, and realized that her own breath probably smelled the same. She made a mental note to brush her teeth before she left to meet Dylan.

“She’d save me,” Joon said, “because she’d be standing there overwhelmed with indecision and then I’d be all, ‘Save
me
, bitch,’ and she’d do it.”

“What
ever
,” Amy countered scornfully. “You know as well as I do she’d make straight for me.”

“Can we
not?”
Mary said. Her speech was hampered by the fact that Amy was using a powder on her face. “It’s a stupid question! You’re
both
my best friend, okay?”

Joon was pouring herself another glass. The wine’s price tag obviously didn’t faze her. “One of us,” she said, “is
actually
your best friend. It’s just not always the same person. It depends.”

Depends on what?
Mary was getting irritated.
What kind of conversation is this, anyway? Can’t I just get drunk and have a rebound date and then go home and cry myself to sleep like a normal birthday girl?

“Look at
that
,” Amy said, delicately grasping Mary’s chin and turning her face so that she could see herself in the magnifying mirror. “What do you think, Mary-fairy?”

“Good,” Mary said. The moment she’d spoken, she knew it wasn’t enough—Amy’s need for compliments was insatiable. “I mean,
really
good, Amy—great job.”

“I don’t know what it would be like to be that pretty,” Amy remarked.

“Oh, get
over
it,” Joon said disgustedly, rising from her chair and reaching for the bottle yet again. “Here, Mary—let’s finish this, and then you’d better get going.”

“Here’s to best friends,” Mary said, raising her glass. “And to
not
dating Patrick Dawes.”

“Amen, amen, amen,” Joon said, laughing. “Oh,
hells
yes—I’ll drink to that.”

*   *   *

T
HE RESTAURANT STARTED FILLING
up just after they were seated. Dylan faced her across a small table with an avocado-colored cloth and a candle in a glass globe with a fishnet around it. Dylan had ordered a Dewar’s, neat, which, she had to admit, impressed her a little bit just because it was so simple—an adult drink, really. Her vodka martini looked enormous by contrast, like a top-heavy glass monument. She was tipsy enough that she was afraid to touch it the first time, afraid she’d spill it. The dining room was elegant, and loud.

“You look very pretty,” Dylan told her. “But then, you don’t need me to tell you that.”