Beautiful Stranger (18 page)

“Ah, there’s Joyce Maynard,” Stevens MacCall noted as he glanced over his shoulder toward the back of the room. “She’s teaching a creative writing seminar first semester, by invitation only.” He patted Anna’s arm again. “Don’t feel badly. She only took twelve students. Gotta run. See you in New Haven.” He stood and hurried off to join Joyce.

“Ah,” Anna mumbled to no one in particular, then kicked herself for unwittingly parroting Stevens MacCall. The idea of spending another four years in his haughty, judgmental presence made Anna want to barf. Preferably on him. She would have liked to meet Joyce Maynard, though. She’d read Maynard’s stories of her relationship with J.D. Salinger back when Maynard had barely graduated from high school, and her memoir
At Home in the World
. Instead, Anna got to watch Stevens MacCall practically barrel into the slender, brunette novelist.

Well, maybe she’d get to talk to her up in New Haven—if she wasn’t surrounded there by huge groups of seniors and graduate students, as well as eight or ten Stevens MacCall Richardson clones.

But wait. She should find her roommate. They ought to talk about what they were each bringing up. No need to duplicate floor lamps and stuff like that. What was her name? Contessa? She started toward the back of the meeting room, edging around knots of people who all seemed to know one another, though Anna understood that most of them had never met before. It was like being in this room, being part of the next Yale freshman class, made them all part of a special society that conferred the blessing of instant rapport and camaraderie.

She’d swum in this water her entire life. So why did she have the unsettling feeling that she was sinking?

“Hi.” A pert-nosed girl approximately the limited height of Dee Young, with flaming, obviously dyed red hair, stood in front of Anna, pointing to her name badge. “Contessa Weiss. I think we’re roommates.”

Contessa wore fingerless fishnet gloves on her hands. Her stubby nails were painted black. She had multiple piercings in each ear and a tiny skull-shaped stud in her nose. She wore a short red plaid pleated skirt, like something from a Catholic girl’s school uniform, and a zebra-striped cardigan over a Hello Kitty T-shirt. Her huge eyes were lined in kohl black, and she was chewing some kind of green gum with her mouth open.

“Nice to meet you, Contessa,” Anna said politely.

“What makes you say that?” she asked, looking perplexed.

“Well, we’re going to be roommates. …” Anna’s voice petered out. She was trying to be civil.

“But in fact you don’t know if it’s nice to meet me because in fact you know nothing about me except that the visual signals you and I choose to give out to the universe are diametrically opposed and utterly dissonant, correct?”

“Being pleasant to someone you’ve just met seems like a gracious choice,” Anna commented. She heard her mother’s frosty tone in her own voice. But honestly, what was up with this girl?

“From your arcane sociological perspective. Point taken,” Contessa allowed. “Although if we were debating, you would lose. So I met a friend of yours over a cappuccino. Stevens MacCall?”

Anna blanched. “Stevens isn’t my friend,” she couldn’t help commenting.

Contessa cocked her head and regarded her. “Define ‘friendship.’ Give me specifics. Generalities are irritating.”

No
, you’re
irritating
, Anna thought, but carefully kept her face in neutral.

“I don’t want to define ‘friendship,’” she said pleasantly. “My point was simply that while Stevens and I went to Trinity together, we were not, in fact, friends.”

“He said your writing sucks,” Contessa commented.

Anna clenched her hands into fists. “Evidently that’s his opinion.”

Contessa blew a bubble and popped it, then rechewed her gum. “I have two poems in the new anthology of
Tomorrow’s Best Writers Today
. Stevens MacCall had a devastating short story about killing rats in the Bowery. He’s going to be immense.”

Anna resisted the biting remark that came into her head, which was, What the hell did Stevens MacCall know about the Bowery? Or about rats? He knew yachting. And his daddy’s Range Rover. And how to show his passport to the customs officials in Bermuda, where his family had their third home. But rats in the Bowery?

“And of course I’m in Joyce’s creative writing seminar,” Contessa continued. She stretched lazily and rolled her head back and forth, working out some real or imagined crick. “You?”

“I didn’t even know about it to apply,” Anna admitted.

“Oh, it was by invitation only,” Contessa explained. “Evidently you didn’t even make the first cut.”

“Oh,” Anna said, and gulped hard.

“So, let’s talk music. What we’ll be listening to when we study,” Contessa went on. “I’m a retro hair-metal girl. Give me Van Halen or give me death.”

“I like silence,” Anna answered directly. “Maybe you could use earbuds.”

“Hate ’em. Never use ’em. I’ll get you some noise-reduction headphones. They’re not that uncomfortable. Okay, moving on.” Contessa popped her gum. “I study. Seriously. I had the highest GPA at Horace Mann. I’ve never gotten less than an A plus, except once in elementary school, and the teacher made a mistake. He had to rescind it and write me a letter of apology, which is in my permanent file to this day.”

“I study a lot, too,” Anna added, latching on to the one thing they seemed to have in common besides, say, female genitalia.

A girl with a waterfall of white-blond hair laughing with a boy who looked a lot like Ben jostled Anna as she passed by.

“So, have you got a boyfriend?” Contessa asked bluntly.

That was definitely territory that Anna didn’t want to explore with her future roommate. She certainly was not about to go into the details of either how much Ben had hurt her or her very new flirtation with her very old friend Logan. “No, I don’t.”

“I don’t do boyfriends,” Contessa declared.

“Oh, so you’re gay,” Anna clarified. Stevens MacCall was going to be terribly disappointed. She couldn’t help thinking that if she were Cammie, she’d be doing everything she could to encourage their relationship. The notion made her smile for the first time since she and Contessa had started to talk. “That’s fine.”

“Please,” Contessa scoffed. “I am totally a breeder. I love sex. I just don’t do the guy. I expect the guy to do me, if you know what I mean. It takes the edge off all that tension you get from studying. Relationships are so twentieth century.”

This girl is a horror
.

Contessa pointed a stubby, fishnet-encased finger at Anna. “You’re repressed. No loud animal noises, am I right?”

Anna’s jaw fell open. Was this girl really asking her about whether or not she made noise when she … ? Who
asked
someone a question like that?

“I just think that to discuss such personal things with someone I just met is a bit …” Anna searched for a word to substitute for
insane
. “Odd,” she finally concluded.

“‘Odd,’” Contessa echoed. “You are too funny. Check out my new video on YouTube. It’s the real me.” Contessa looked past her. “Hey, I see a friend from Fieldston. E-mail me. I’ll make you some metal DVDs and send ’em to you. I predict that by finals, you’ll be in love with Sammy Hagar too. Ta!”

Contessa took off, which Anna was very glad about. Unfortunately, she left the headache she’d given Anna behind. Why, why, why had they saddled her with this girl as her first college roommate? She knew that part of the freshman experience was that you could not put in for a roommate change for six months. The idea was that you would learn to get to know someone quite different from yourself. She had expected to be matched with someone who was not from the East Coast, for example. Maybe someone who grew up in the suburbs, or who played sports. She had not expected to be matched with a confrontational, heavy-metal-loving sex addict.

Anna stood there with crowds of happy, excited, and undoubtedly brilliant people swirling around her. She was sure some of them were lovely, interesting—fascinating, even. She was sure she could make friends. But she’d be stuck living in a tiny dorm room with Contessa for at least six months, with the noxious Stevens MacCall dropping by for unexpected visits.

At the moment, all the energy swirling around her like a tornado made her feel as if she were in its eye: silent, separate, and very much alone.

Vintage Red “Like a Virgin” Madonna T-shirt

“T
his place is a madhouse!” Ben shouted over the pounding, distorted beat.

“Woo-hoo!” Cammie screamed, enjoying the rush of the party atmosphere. They sat on the tall risers that formed the north end of the Vermont Theater nightclub and disco, watching two thousand or more revelers rocking on what used to be the floor area of the theater. Overhead, suspended from the ceiling, an actual NASA space capsule emanated multicolor rays of light that danced over the partiers. Smoke machines poured out cold white fog. Every few minutes, vibrant balloons dropped from the ceiling, either to be popped by the dancers or batted overhead like beach balls at a concert.

The Vermont Theater, located on the east end of Hollywood near the Children’s Hospital, was Los Angeles’ hottest mega-dance venue. It accommodated more than two thousand partiers on any given night—far more than the maximum capacity of nine hundred at Ben’s former club, Trieste—and got its name from its convenient location on Vermont Avenue near Santa Monica Boulevard. Once upon a time, it was a major legitimate theater. That theater turned into the largest burlesque house in the city in the 1930s, only to be converted into a movie theater in the 1940s.

In the past few years, though, the theater had fallen on hard times with the rise of the megaplexes and sat vacant for many years until a couple of San Fernando Valley movie producers who’d made a fortune producing the kind of salacious direct-to-DVDs that the valley was famous for decided they wanted to be in the nightclub business. They bought the theater, dropped five million or so on the renovations, and opened to great fanfare at the start of the summer.

Cammie had never been there. Most of the time, she couldn’t care less about the Vermont Theater, which attracted a clientele that was obviously less exclusive than the usual Beverly Hills A-list. But the club’s egalitarian door policy—they let in everyone, as long as the cover charge was paid—had been ballyhooed in the press, and it had developed an overnight stellar reputation for outstanding music and even more outstanding DJs.

If there was one thing that Bye, Bye Love needed, it was an outstanding DJ. The DJ could make or break a club. Cammie was determined that the right one was going to make theirs. Tonight was the theater’s battle of the DJs, and John Carlos—of Montmartre Lounge renown—had been listed as one of the competitors for the fifty-thousand-dollar first prize posted by the Valley movie producers. Cammie knew that if she and Ben were to have a shot at him, it would have to be away from the video surveillance cameras at Montmartre. Poaching DJs was considered beyond the pale.

This night would be their opportunity. It was turning out to be rather fun, and not only because she was with Ben. She glanced over at him. Ben had that thing that instantly attracted girls to him. Adam didn’t have it; of that Cammie was aware. He was the kind of guy you thought of as a friend, and then one day you were surprised to find that you’d fallen madly in love with him.

Adam. She knew he was in town, because he’d texted her multiple times and left one message on her voice mail, asking if she’d be willing to meet him for a drink. She hadn’t responded, and didn’t intend to. If he couldn’t be the kind of boyfriend she deserved, then he didn’t deserve to be her boyfriend at all. It was simple: he’d go to Michigan in a few weeks, and she wouldn’t ever see him again. Out of sight, out of mind. This decision was helped along by what—or rather who—was in her line of sight: Ben. Ben was
heat
. He’d been heat in high school, and now that he was—or at least had been—in college, he was heat squared. Plus, his enthusiasm for this project was contagious. The more time she spent working with him on his dream, the more excited she got about it herself. Of course, Cammie mused, if this dream had belonged to someone short and squat, but equally as fabulous as Ben on the inside, would she feel as enthusiastic? She laughed out loud at her own mental query. Looks mattered. Anyone who said they didn’t either looked like a bag of dirt or was lying.

A tall, buff guy who seemed to be channeling Justin Timberlake walked by and gave Cammie The Look. She was glad she’d worn her new black Forplay silk halter top and matching micro skirt. She cut her eyes to see if Ben was watching Justin check her out. But Ben had his eyes glued to the DJ in the cage, an Asian girl with hair down to her ass who wore oversized khakis that fell around her hipbones, and a man’s sleeveless T-shirt that showed her pierced nipples nearly poking through the material.

Okay. So Ben was looking. It didn’t mean anything. Guys looked. It wasn’t like he was looking at Anna. Cammie could deal with free-floating lust. Ben nudged her. “That chick is hot.” He cocked his head toward the DJ.

“Girls don’t really do it for me.”

He nudged his hip playfully into hers. “We’re looking for a DJ. I was talking about her talent.” He looked right into her eyes, a bit more serious now. “Hey, thanks for hooking this up, Cammie. Really.”

She smiled. “No prob.” A quick phone call to the producers of the DJ Smackdown had been all that was necessary to get her and Ben comped, plus given plastic bracelets that made paying for drinks unnecessary. The waitstaff was keeping a careful eye on them, to make sure they had plenty of drinks and free food. And the battle of the DJs itself was interesting—each DJ was given a ten-minute set to show off his or her skills at scratching, MC’ing, and revving up the crowd. Since the club’s DJ booth was a Plexiglas cage suspended over the dance floor, they could see the competing DJs in action, and each seemed to have brought their own cheering section, judging from the crowd reaction when a new competitor took over the booth.

Cammie consulted a small card that one of the waitresses had given her when they’d arrived. “John Carlos is next,” she declared. “Let him do his thing. Then we’ll meet him in the VIP Lounge.”