All Night Long (14 page)

“The Dodgers are out. The Mets are in,” Faith pronounced.

Lydia sighed. It had been a mistake to bring Jimmy on a shopping expedition. She craned her neck longingly and peered at the stands where hidden couture treasures awaited her. “How about if you let us three girls shop for clothes and stuff for just a half hour,” Lydia decreed, “and after that we'll do whatever you want.”

“I don't care.” He turned away from her.

“All the clothes they have here are crap,” Faith said.

“Right,” echoed Martina.

This untruth was nearly enough to make Lydia weep. And yet here was Martina buying right into it.

“Y'all, follow me,” Lydia said, and made a beeline for a booth where she'd found treasures in the past. She pawed through a row of skirts until she came to a darling yellow eyelet number going for the delightful sum of seven bucks; Lydia noted that it was a Chloé with the tag ripped out.

“This skirt at Saks would sell for hundreds,” Lydia explained, holding it up to Martina. “It's an amazing bargain!”

“No offense, but you only think that because you have bad taste,” Faith said. “If it was worth so much money, it wouldn't be here. I'm thirsty, can we get something to drink? Not Fiji water. Fiji water is out. Smart Water is in.”

“I'm thirsty, too,” Martina said.

Sigh. Lydia made a mental vow never to bring the children here again. She found the nearest refreshment stand and bought them all soft drinks and french fries, which she figured would keep them happy for the next fifteen minutes.

The girls chowed down, but Jimmy ignored what Lydia knew
to be his favorite food. He wandered over to a display of small toys and began twirling a Rubik's Cube. Lydia dimly remembered having one in Texas before she'd been dragged off to Ama country. It was a box with six different colors on it. The object was to keep turning the colors until one side was solid blue, one red, one yellow, one orange, one white, and one green.

Impulsively, Lydia called out to the shopkeeper, who was an elderly lady in a flowered dress. “How much for the Rubik's Cube?”

The woman held up five laconic fingers.

“Dollars?”

“No, euros. Of course dollars,” the woman said. She had a strong Russian accent that immediately reminded Lydia of Anya. “You want?”

Jimmy tossed the cube back onto the table. “No.” He walked away.

Yep. There was definitely something wrong. Lydia chalked it up to the disruption of Anya leaving home. She caught up with Jimmy. “You're feeling kinda punky, huh?”

“What do you care?” Jimmy sneered.

Wow. He really was taking the moms' breakup hard. Lydia decided she'd talk to Kat about it. She bought them all soft-serve ice cream—at least Jimmy ate that—and then called X to come pick them up.

On the way home, Jimmy didn't say one word at all.

Seven hours after leaving the flea market—midnight, to be exact—Lydia was winding her way through the dense, sweaty crowd at Surf's Up, a new club on the beach in Venice. X had dropped her on the way to some place he wanted to visit in
Marina del Rey, with the promise that he'd pick her up later if she needed a ride. She'd asked Billy if he wanted to join her, but he had begged off. He was doing set decoration for a music video that was being shot on a yacht, and he couldn't get out of the gig even if he'd wanted to.

That was fine. Lydia liked going out by herself. In fact, the night she'd met Billy, she had been out at a club alone. And this one, with its pounding surf-punk music, surfboard theme, and buff waiters in jam shorts and nothing else, was very appealing. It was apparently appealing to hundreds of others, as there'd been a line outside that stretched for fifty yards down the beach. That hadn't stopped Lydia, though. Wearing a sheer green slip dress over a lacy black bra had been a wise choice. The behemoth of a door guy had given her a quick once-over, then waved her inside. No cover charge, either.

Lydia stood in the center of the throng and exulted. The bass thumped, half-naked bodies grinded—the club encouraged people to shed their tops (there was the moral equivalent of a coat check just for shirts, and if you went barechested you got a coupon for two-for-one drinks)—and Smart Lights reacted synchronously with the music, changing color, focus, and diffusion. This was perfect. She didn't want to think. She didn't want to yack. All she wanted to do was dance.

She moved onto the dance floor and started to sway to the music.

“Hey, Lydia! You found us!” Staci waved her arms. “Look, you guys. It's Lydia!”

A moment later, the trio besieged her and was pulling her toward the bar, offering to buy her a drink—any drink.

Lydia was conflicted. Yes, Staci had called her earlier to
suggest she come to this club. And yes, she'd wanted to see it. But she felt guilty as hell being here without Kiley and Esme. She told herself that if she ran into the girls, she'd do her best to convince them how wrong they were about her friends. And if the girls continued to be assholes about it, she'd ditch them. Forever.

The bar area was packed. “I'd love a drink,” Lydia said. “But I don't feel like waiting that long.”

“We never wait,” Amber said, tossing her head so that her dangling cherry-shaped rhinestone (or were they diamonds, Lydia wondered) earrings sparkled. She wore low-slung brown and aqua plaid Imitation of Christ trousers and a sheer aqua tank top, looking, Lydia thought, about as perfect as a girl could look.

If you liked that kind of thing.

Staci—dressed in a canary yellow Zac Posen babydoll with skinny jeans that Lydia had coveted at Fred Segal, merely raised her right hand toward the bar, waving two fingers with a come-hither look, and a bare-chested and goateed bartender appeared, smiling as if he had all the time in the world.

“Does everybody know what they want?” Staci asked.

“Flirtinis,” Zona declared. “All around.”

Staci nodded, and the bartender disappeared. “It's good publicity for their club when I show up,” she explained to Lydia. “They think maybe my father will use this for a location in a movie. Guess who's here tonight?”

Lydia was usually pretty good at this game. When she'd lived in Amazonia, she devoured the magazines that were air-dropped in, or brought in by doctor and nurse volunteers. The interior of her mud hut had been decorated with celebrity photographs
torn from these magazines. They didn't last long, of course. The humidity and the insects got to them quickly.

The bartender pushed four drinks across the metal bar, and Staci took hers. “Justin. See the guy with the big glasses, coat, and Italian hat?”

Lydia squinted. “You mean that guy?”

“That guy,” Staci acknowledged. “Want to meet him?”

Lydia couldn't help herself. “I'd love to!”

This was fantastic. This was why she had come to L.A. It was as if she was being repaid with interest for all those months in the rain forest with an indigenous people whose idea of fun was to pierce their cheeks with sticks. Lydia had mixed feelings about her life in Amazonia. She'd learned a lot, and she'd lived in a way that few Americans ever could. But there were no clubs like Surf's Up on the Rio Negro.

“So, Lydia. Are you having a good time?” Staci's question was direct.

“Fab!” Lydia replied. She was not one to mute her enthusiasm.

“Good, because we've been talking.” Staci traded a significant look with Amber and Zona, then turned back to Lydia. “We've decided we like you.”

Only at this point did Amber and Zona smile. Phew.

Lydia smiled. “Great.”

“But,” Staci went on, “there is a little problem.”

“It's about your friends,” Amber added.

Big shocker. Well, Lydia was ready. But first, she wanted to hear all the ugly and despicable things these girls had to say. In all their glory.

“My friends?” Lydia echoed. She did everything but bat her
sooty lashes to emphasize her “innocence” at the query. “What about them?”

“We have a split decision on that girl Kiley,” Staci explained. “Platinum's nanny. She might have possibilities, but she's got a lot of work to do.”

Zona nodded emphatically. “Her clothes? Ohmigod, who dresses like that?”

“Plus she's a little fat,” Amber went on. “Not, like, superhuge or anything. But really she could take off, like, ten pounds.”

“Interesting,” Lydia said. She knew exactly how to keep her face neutral so that these snotty girls had no clue what was really going on in her head.

“Okay, so anyway, Kiley is a maybe,” Staci summed up. “But that chick Esme?” She rolled her eyes.

“I wore an outfit just like hers when we did
West Side Story
last year,” Amber added maliciously. “She looks so cheap.”

“By ‘cheap’ did you mean …
Latina
?” Lydia asked, smiling so that they'd think this was a friendly question.

“We are not racist,” Zona insisted. “Jennifer Lopez's niece happens to go to our school. Her dad is a music producer. She lives in that redbrick mansion on Crest Hill.”

“Esme comes from the Echo,” Staci explained. “I mean, she was sitting with those gangbangers.”

Lydia lifted one eyebrow. “She was sitting with her old friends. How do you know they're gangbangers?”

“Echo Park High is full of 'em,” Staci said. “Everyone knows that. That is, for the kids that actually go to high school.”

“Uh-huh,” Lydia agreed. “But, see, I don't think that means that
everyone
in Echo Park is a banger. Any more than
everyone
in Bel Air is a snob.”

Staci gave Lydia a cool look. “If it talks like a duck and walks like a duck …”

Her friends giggled.

“I know a gangbanger when I see one,” Staci went on, flicking an imaginary speck of something off her shoulder. “Plus, I heard she does gang tattoos.”

“Oh, y'all have that totally wrong,” Lydia said. “She's a tattoo
artist
. She does freehand designs and charges a mint. She inks the biggest stars in Hollywood. I mean, she's booked up for like a year in advance.”

This, Lydia knew, was perhaps a slight exaggeration. But it was worth it for a good cause—to get these girls to see the error of their preconceptions.

Amber narrowed her eyes. “Did you make that up or is it true?”

“Of course it's true,” Lydia replied.

Staci shrugged. “All I know is what I heard. If I wanted to be friends with a girl and she had hideous accessories, I would be kind enough to tell her to lose the accessories. If I want to be friends with a girl and her hideous accessories are her other
friends
… then I tell her to lose the friends,” she concluded.

Lydia nodded thoughtfully. “I sure do appreciate how you put that. Now I'm lookin' at it in a whole new light.”

“We thought you would,” Zona sniffed.

“You'll see,” Amber added. “Being friends with us means your senior year will rock.”

“I'm going to the ladies' room,” Lydia said. “And while I'm gone, I'm going to give all this some serious thought. Y'all make some very good points.”

Staci beamed and turned to her friends. “See? I told you she'd see it our way.”

“Excuse me, y'all.”

Lydia left the girls at the bar. She hoped they were still waiting a half hour later, when she was in the Audi with X and he was driving her home.

She might be from a place where women put plates in their ears and called it fashion, but she had her standards.

“You floated a mile high in the sky in a balloon with me. You can put your head underwater.”

Tom's words made Kiley break out in a cold sweat, even though it was eighty-five degrees at ten o'clock on this sunny Sunday morning. They were at the adult pool at the country club, the colonel and his wife having taken Serenity and Sid to the PX at Edwards Air Force Base to buy them back-to-school clothes. The only reason that Kiley wasn't a part of the shopping excursion was that Serenity hadn't wanted Kiley to witness what she referred to as her “humiliation.”

They were supposed to return to the Crossroads School in Santa Monica, one of the more liberal private schools in the city, but the colonel was making noises about sending Serenity and Sid to Father Ryan Elementary and Bruce to Father Ryan High School. Both these Catholic schools were renowned for their discipline. All three kids had already threatened to run away if this happened.

When Tom heard that Kiley had the morning free, he proposed this outing to the club so that they could take a whack— together—at Kiley's so-called anxiety attacks underwater. Tom hoped that if he was with Kiley, she'd be able to put her head underwater wearing scuba gear. And since he was a certified scuba diver himself—he'd learned on a modeling shoot at the Egyptian resort of Sharm El Sheikh—he was able to check out some gear from the recreation manager at the club.

It was a magnificent August day. Warm temperatures, blue skies, a gentle breeze, and a club that was mercifully empty of members this early in the day. But Kiley had so many things on her mind that it was tough for her to focus. Tomorrow, she'd be testifying at Platinum's trial. She hoped that the lawyers wouldn't grill her to death. Meanwhile, she'd been putting off calling her mother and father in Wisconsin to tell them about the upcoming article in the
Universe
. Mostly, she was starting to think that the editor she'd met outside the courthouse had been bluffing.