Hooked (2 page)

“When?” I asked, the squeak of sneakers on the marble floor grating on my nerves.

“Last year,” she said, putting her hand absently on my shoulder. “She graduated. Calm down.”

I went to the library and found Amanda Lieberman in the yearbook. She was pretty in a neat, preppy way I wasn’t: clean, shiny brown hair and wide, bony cheeks sort of like his. I was more blobby—cherubic, not chiseled. I kept my highlighted blond hair dirty because washing it made it limp. When it got too greasy, I sprinkled it with powder, like I read George Washington used to.

At home after school I fell asleep on our gray sectional and had a dream that Will and I were lying together on a car hood in the blazing sun in our underwear. It’s funny how love is like the flu, how one minute you’re fine and the next it digs in and takes over.

“Have you finished your homework?” Mom asked, rousing me out of my coma.

“Haven’t started yet,” I said. “I don’t start till after five.”

“Since when?” she asked, glancing at her Canal Street Chanel watch.

“Since always.” I pried myself out of the split in the sectional.

“You’ll never guess what just happened,” she said, jamming the sleeves of her blazer up her arms.

“What?” I was sitting up now, braced.

“I think I just sold my first flat. The two-bedroom on Astor. Can you believe it? The client made an offer and the seller accepted. I just got the call.” She waved her cell phone around, then combed her fingers into the front of my scalp, “lifting” my hair. “Would it kill you to wear your gorgeous hair down one day? It looks so grotty when it’s in that godforsaken mess at the back of your head.”

“Anyway, congratulations,” I said, falling back onto the couch, taking in the whole picture of what she was wearing: a short black skirt that was possibly shorts, black tights and high-heeled boots that went up to her knees. It was her signature look: a Barneys version of Madonna’s Danceteria phase.

“You wore that to the showing?” I asked.

“Got a problem with it, honey chile?” she asked, her working-class-and-proud-of-it English brogue morphing into a pathetic attempt at ghetto. She strutted into the kitchen, her wavy blond hair hitting her cheeks as she uncorked an open bottle of pinot grigio. “ ’Cause yo momma is some hot shit now, yo momma is yo real estate ho.”

I rolled over onto my stomach. I needed sugar.

“They finally gave me my business cards today,” she called. “Come see.”

I stumbled into the kitchen and she handed one to me. Her fire-engine-red grin ate up the postage stamp–sized photo in the upper left, and in the middle, in royal-blue italics, were the words
“Fiona Galehouse, Sales Associate.”

“Galehouse?”
I asked, flabbergasted.

“It sounds nicer than Addison,” she sniffed, dropping an ice cube into her glass. I slumped at the kitchen table. Only my mother would take her husband’s surname once they’d finally
divorced
. “It has a better ring for sales.” She avoided my
eyes and I realized the real reason for the switch: she wanted to distance herself from the whole tax-evasion thing. My mother had gotten into some kind of trouble when I was twelve and Fiona’s, her nightclub, was winding down from its heyday. It had to do with taxes, and all I know is that Mom secretly blamed Dad for it, for not being “aggressive enough,” even though it was never really clear to me that he’d had anything to do with it. He worked at an investment bank and never spent time at Fiona’s, or with us, for that matter. It didn’t help that the tax thing coincided with the summer Dad stopped drinking. Everyone was weirdly on edge that summer—Mom screaming on the phone all day, Dad coming home from work with five bottles of Clamato—but then after making such a huge deal about getting Dad to quit drinking, Mom went and divorced him anyway.

After they did the intervention on him and Dad went away to rehab, Mom realized that she was pissed as hell that it took Dad’s
boss
to get him to stop, when she’d been pleading with him for years. She’d tried leaving—I remember trekking out in the middle of the night many times with my hamster and staying at her friend Maryanne’s—but we always ended up coming back to the same routine: Mom in the bedroom with her plate of cheese and crackers, her phone and the TV, Dad in his leather swivel chair in the living room, ignoring us, with his headphones and piles of paper. They had an uncanny habit of never being in the same room together. But when the almighty Bill Mindorff told Dad he’d get the ax if he didn’t sober up, only
then
did he take it seriously. Bill Mindorff. I’d never met him, but the picture of him in my head was crystal clear: red tie with little blue polka dots, white shirt, feet up on his desk, wielding his untold powers over Dad.

“Apparently we don’t factor in nearly as importantly as the
possibility of not becoming a bloody managing director,” Mom had said one night while Dad was away “drying out.” I’d dabbed my pinky into the tub of her cold cream and swirled it around on my forehead, wondering how Dad could love his job more than us. But the fact that he was gone for all but maybe five hours on the weekends meant it must be true.

“I’ve got some beautiful asparagus for dinner,” Mom said, wiping her hands on the blue-flowered dish towel. “It’s after five. Start your homework.”

“I met a guy,” I said, fishing a rice cake out of its plastic pack.

“Ooh,” she said, downing a sip of wine.

“He’s a senior. His name’s Will Weston.”

“Is he cute?”

“Beyond.”

“Well, well, well, I’m really pleased, Thea,” she said unconvincingly, wiping her lipstick off the rim of her glass. “I’m not surprised. You’re a knockout.” She smiled at me and I studied the crescents of her red-rimmed brown eyes, eyes that looked like she could be crying even when she smiled, as if even though she was smiling, she was never, for a second, forgetting how screwed up the world was. I wondered if anyone thought she was an addict. My mother was a vegetarian who drank wheatgrass shots and herb tinctures and did yoga every day, but she still had red-rimmed druggie eyes. She banged her glass loudly on the slate countertop. “You could have anyone you want. Just take your hair out of that hive.”

The week crawled by until Will and I went for burgers that Friday, four days after the fire drill. The restaurant was in the basement of a garment industry building with fake wood paneling and head shots of soap actors. There were a few suits at the bar and that was it.

“She’s beautiful, my friend.” A guy with a bow tie cupped my elbow as I caught a glimpse in the mirror of my too-yellow, flat hair, which Mom had made me wear down. “Where do you want to sit? You have the place to yourselves.”

“He doesn’t say that about just anyone,” Will said as we headed to the back of the room. I looked at the empty booths, awash in red-webbed candlelight. The last thing I wanted to do was eat. I was dying for a drink but didn’t want to get carded, so I ordered a Diet Coke. Will got a beer. He clinked my glass, still on the table.

“Glad you agreed to dine with me.” He swallowed with a quick jerk of his head, like he was swallowing an aspirin. He leaned forward, his wide, square shoulders pointing at me through his wrinkled button-down. “So tell me about you,” he said. “Where do you live?”

“I live in Chelsea with my mom,” I answered. I was having trouble figuring out which eye to look into. Looking into the left one, the one that worked, felt too focused, too intense. It made me feel like I was ignoring the right one, but looking into the right seemed wrong, since I didn’t think he could see out of it. I pushed the paper off my straw, deciding to just get it over with. “So can I ask you …”

“The left one.” He smiled assuredly. “You’re good. Most
people skirt around it for years. Just ignore the right one. Pretend it’s not there.”

“Okay.” I sipped, catching some lemon pulp, trying not to make lemon lips. “Were you born with your eyes that way?”

He shook his head, sucking in his cheeks to quickly down the beer he’d just swigged. “I looked up into a tree when I was three and an acorn popped me in the eye.”

“Did it hurt?”

He shrugged, smiled, didn’t answer.

“So where are you going next year?” I asked, focusing on the left side of his face.

“Columbia,” he said. “Got in early. I hope it’s less of a waste of time than this place.”

“Well, you get to stay in New York. That’s a plus.”

“That’s right,” he said. “Close to home. I’m a city boy. A New York boy.”

He explained that his dad was a financial analyst who did consulting with big banks. “He works two days a year,” Will said. “The rest of the time he walks up and down Broadway. He’s a big walker. He goes to the movies a lot. He’s seen everything.” I told him that my own father worked endlessly, was consumed by his job, and had very little personality to show for it. Will had two brothers. He got along with Johnny, the younger one, but not Roy, the older.

“What about your mom?” I asked.

“Mom’s got a degree in public health management, whatever that is.” He sighed. “Yet she spends all of her time baking desserts no one eats and puttering. How many times can you leaf through a twenty-year-old
National Geographic
, I ask you?” He shook his head in wonderment. “You got any siblings?”

“No,” I responded, worrying about my hair.

He snatched a French fry off my plate. “That was a test,” he said. “Good sharing. You passed with flying colors. How are you with attention? Do you need someone’s undivided attention all the time or are you more of an independent-spirit only-child type?”

“Independent-spirit only child. Type.”

“Good. Actually, now that you tell me that, I see it. You have a lonely way about you.”

“I’m not lonely,” I protested. “My mom’s home all the time.”

“That doesn’t count,” he said dismissively. “All the time?”

“Yep.”

“Is she okay?” He leaned back. “I know what you’re going to say. Depends what you mean by okay, right? Does she work?”

“She used to. She used to own a club.”

“What kind of club?”

“A club club.” I shrugged. “Fiona’s.”

“No way,” he said, his left eye widening. “Did you ever go?”

“Only when it was closed. It scared me when I was little. The guys dancing in cages, you know, half-naked, dog collars … she sold it when I was twelve.”

He bit off giant bites of his burger, dipping what he had left in a pile of mustard. He said he didn’t like ketchup. Only mustard. My mom drowns everything in ketchup, including Chinese food.

“Didn’t she …” He paused, examined his bun. “This is awkward. Didn’t she get, like, busted for tax evasion or extortion or something like that?”

“She took a plea,” I answered quickly.

“A plea?”

“Some kind of plea-bargain thing that let her off,” I said, dousing my fries with more salt. “You can tell I so enjoy talking about this, right?”

“Sorry.” He grinned, his good eye lasering into me. “What’s she doing now?”

“Watching
Days of Our Lives
,” I said. “Moisturizing.”

“What about Dad?”

“They’re divorced,” I said.

He looked at me pensively. “Did you take it hard? How old were you?”

“I was thirteen. Of course I took it hard, although I never saw him.” I slid my empty, wet glass around on the table. “Doesn’t everybody?”

“Don’t deflect. Some people are waiting for it, or expecting it.”

“I wasn’t expecting it,” I said.

“So your mom sold Fiona’s and then right after, went about getting a divorce?”

“Sort of makes your head spin, doesn’t it?” I chirped.

He peeled at his beer label. “Does it make you not want to get married?”

The room blurred behind him into chunks of brown and red light. “I do want to get married,” I said.

“Awwww.” He pretended to swoon.

“Walked right into that one, didn’t I?”

He reached for my hand and patted it.

“Boys,” I sneered. “Anyway, now that they’re finally divorced, she’s decided she wants Dad’s name. How weird is that? She was always Fiona Addison, now she’s Fiona Galehouse.”

“Okayyy.” He smiled.

“Hopefully it’s just on her business card.”

“So she
is
working.”

“Yeah, sort of,” I said. “She’s started selling real estate. Apartments. She’s always made a big deal about working. ‘You never want to be financially dependent on anyone,’ she tells me that all the time. ‘It’s the most important thing. Financial independence. If you don’t make your own way, you’ll have no choices in life.’ When I was little, I had no idea what she was talking about. Whenever she said ‘choices,’ I always pictured parting my hair on the left, then shaking it out and parting it on the right. To this day, when I hear the word
choices
, I think of parting my hair.”

He sat very still as he listened, which made me worry that I’d been rambling. After a moment he cleared his throat dramatically. “So Thea,” he said, looking at me sideways. “You seeing anyone?”

“Who, me?” I asked, my tongue feeling as though it had quadrupled in size.

He looked down at his plate, then up again, waiting.

“I’m not seeing anyone at the moment,” I said. “What is that, anyway? Seeing someone?” I made a peekaboo gesture.

“I see you!”

He waved for the bill. The bow-tie guy threw the billfold across the room like a Frisbee, and Will caught it and folded in money.

“Thank you,” I said. I wondered if his family watched the Oscars together. And if he’d ever seen his parents naked.

We navigated the dark stairs up and out into the empty street. The sidewalks were streaked with black ice, and the howling February wind shot up and down the street. Will put my arm through his and we walked hunched into the cold like
old people. He told me about his favorite building, which we were nowhere near.

“Did you know that if you work in the Seagram Building, you can only have your shades all the way up, all the way down or exactly in the middle?” he asked.

“That’s assuming you have a window office.”

“I’m going to assume that,” he said emphatically. “I’m an optimist. You have to be an optimist in life. No one told me that, by the way.” The wind screamed at his face, making his eyes water. “Shiver me timbers.”