Mafia Girl (7 page)

“Go back upstairs!” my dad yells. “It’s just Gia, and put that fuckin’ gun away.”

“What the fuck?” Anthony says.

I don’t know who my dad is madder at.

“And you go up,” he says to me. “
Now!
” he yells. I walk up the stairs to the living room. He points to a chair. “Sit. Sit there.” A vein is throbbing at the side of his eye. “Where were you?

“Out with friends.”

“Friends. What friends?”

“You don’t know them. From school, okay?”

“No, not okay.” He stares through me and then looks away. I’ve never been caught before, at least not until the car thing with Ro. “You don’t listen anymore! You get into trouble!” he yells. He shakes his head. He doesn’t know what to do now. He looks around the room, as if he’s hoping to find answers.

“Your mother will handle this tomorrow,” he says. “But now…you’re staying home…you’re staying in the house at night. You’re not going out. Not for math. Not for pizza. Not for nothing. If you have so much time to run around, you work. You get a job at the bakery.”

“What? The bakery?”

“To pay Mario, to pay for the bills—the bills from cutting school and drinking and—”

“Daddy, I— ”

“Go to bed now. No more.”

If it wasn’t bad enough that Michael dissed me, now I have to sell cookies and probably earn less than Mario spent on ink for his pen.

Welcome to my charmed life.

My so-called job isn’t starting for a week, so instead of boning up on baking and packing cookies, I decide to concentrate on being
serious
, and making myself school president although lately it’s hard to focus.

“Prioritize,” Clive says, morphing into my life coach. We’re sitting at lunch together the next day and I’m telling him what happened. There’s no way I’m going to go to his apartment after school, so I tell him everything, talking as fast as I can before the bell rings.

“Prioritize,” I say, parroting his words. I try that and rather than dwelling on being grounded for life and forced into menial labor, I focus on my campaign because the election is only a month away. We have the posters, but we haven’t put them up yet. What we want to do is get into the school at night, put them everywhere, and surprise everyone the next day when it’s wall-to-wall Gia.

Only that plan doesn’t cut it with Mr. Wright, the principal.

“I’m sorry, folks. We can’t have students putting up posters in the school at night by themselves,” he says.

So we’re on to plan B.

“There are no classes on election day,” Clive says. “Let see if they’ll let us put them up then. At least there will be people in school.”

“We’re not talking about the election for president of the United States,” I tell the office. It’s just a local city election. “The turnout will be light and all we have to do is quickly tack up the posters. We won’t be in anyone’s way.”

We get the okay and Ro, Clive, Candy, and I get together early in the morning and, like Santa’s elves, we parade from room to room and along the hallways. If other candidates plan to put up their own posters, I don’t know where they’ll go because when we’re done the only space left will be on the ceiling or the floor where their faces will be stepped on, which is fine with me.

By noon half the posters are up and we stand back and view our work. Most of them are white with the writing in one major color group to keep it clean looking. We did a lot of them in grass-green lettering because how fresh is that? And we did some in dark purple and a few in script to look artsy. The idea was to keep the look crisp like the message, no matter how people would tease us.

We take a break before we head to the gym where the voting is going on. I carry a stack of posters and a folding ladder over my arm as I walk around surveying the space. The gym has high ceilings and I’m not sure whether our ladder is tall enough. It probably wasn’t the smartest move to arrive at school in a pencil skirt and heels, but at six that morning, I wasn’t thinking clearly.

Clive climbs up the ladder for me and puts up the posters and I stand back and check his work, yelling out obnoxious orders like “a little higher on the right,” and “no, a little lower. More. Keep going, Clive. No, Clive, no. Too much, too much. Up again on the right.” And even Clive who has the patience of a saint is starting to get a trifle sick of it and me, I think, because I see him stop and take a deep breath and shoot me a look before he makes the adjustments and all the fine tuning so that everything looks perfect.

I step back to look at the posters from a distance and walk backward farther until—whack—I slam into someone and lose my balance, and all I remember as I’m on the ground is seeing a crowd of people around me.

“Gia, Gia, can you hear me?”

Their voices fade and get lower and lower and lower until everything goes still and an eerie silence fills my head, and in the last few seconds of consciousness I’m thinking that, you know, maybe I’m not going to live to be the class president after all.

They called
a stupid ambulance. I find out when I come to because I must have been down on the floor unconscious for a while, which is totally embarrassing. I guess I didn’t wake up as fast as I should have. Then the stupid ambulance takes me to the stupid Lenox Hill Hospital emergency room like I might need life support, and anyway I totally hate being in those kind of places because who do they put you next to except people dying of cardiac arrest or paralyzed by strokes or burning up with fever from pneumonia or some other raging contagious Ebola-like infection or what have you? And is that what you need on top of what you already came in with?

When I open my eyes again, some EMT guy, who’s blond and surferish and not half bad looking, is holding my wrist and taking my pulse and then shining an annoying flashlight pen thingie in my eyes and lifting my lids, and I really wish he would stop it for chrissake.

“I think she’s probably fine,” he says, “but we should just check her out anyway.”

Another voice above his says, “Christ, do you know who she is? We damn well will check her out,” and then he laughs.

I pretend not to hear that and ignore them because, hello, no surprise. So I turn my head away and rub my eyes, and on the other side of me there’s someone else, and I look up at his face and—oh my god—nearly go into shock because he looks so much like Michael Cross. And then I’m convinced that I’m not okay and I’m hallucinating or delusional because it couldn’t be; but anyway, I blurt out, “Michael?”

“Yeah.”

I sort of can’t breathe then and whisper, “What are you doing here?”

“Riding with you in the ambulance.”

Yeah, that’s, um, obvious—even to me in this condition. “How come?”

“You tripped…over me…over my foot.”

I look at him like what? “Start over.”

“I was assigned to security at the school for the election and you walked into me and I tripped you.”

And I’m like,
what
? Because I think it was all my fault because I remember walking backward in four inch heels and the eyes behind my head were obviously not working.

But I don’t say that. I don’t say anything because all this time he’s leaning over me, my blouse is pulled up out of my skirt, I realize. And there is a significant amount of naked skin below his full gorgeous lips. I can practically feel his warm breath on me as he exhales. I stare at him and he stares back, and very gently, he reaches up and slides my blouse down, covering my stomach. And something about him slowly pulling the swath of silk across my skin…

The EMT guy interrupts the most erotic moment of my life and starts babbling like a moron.

“Who’s the president of the United States?” he asks, to see if I’m brain injured or what have you, which breaks the steamy staring thing and destroys the mood.

“Abe Lincoln,” I say because I’m pissed.

So that’s it and for like the next four hours I have x-rays and a brain MRI, which is like lying inside an open casket and listening to a sledgehammer on your iPhone. And then they take all these vials of blood and that nearly makes me faint because I hate needles, particularly when they’re sliding into my skin. And hours later everything comes back normal, normal, normal, which I’m clearly not, so that surprises me. But normal or not, I wrenched something in my back when I went down so I move slower than a slug.

When my mom gets the call from the hospital, she goes crazy as usual. But then when I call her a minute later and say, “Ma, I’m fine, the school was just being extra careful because I tripped and fainted, and, anyway, they didn’t want to be legally liable in any way if they didn’t do what they were supposed to do,” she calms down and stops her usual chant of “It’s always something with you kids, it’s always something. If it’s not you, it’s Anthony, and if it’s not Anthony, it’s you.” Then she takes a breath.

“I’m leaving now,” she says. “I’ll pick you up.”

“You don’t have to, Ma, I’m fine.”

“I have to,” she says. “I have to.”

So there goes my plan to have Michael take me home. Anyway, it’s two in the afternoon and traffic on the Upper East Side will fortunately be brutal so that leaves me about half an hour to be alone with Officer Hottie unless he decides to abandon me.

“Will you call me now?”

He looks at me and doesn’t say anything.

“I mean as a courtesy, just to see how I am because I did nearly die falling over your foot.”

He smiles his half smile. “You’re something.”

I try to sit up but my back fights me, so I “ow, ow, ow” a little harder than I have to, and Michael comes over and puts an arm around me, and I lean against him for support and nearly die from excitement being so close. It’s a good thing I’m not wearing a heart monitor because the needle would go off the chart and they’d bring out the paddles to reset my heart.

Michael goes back to his chair and runs a hand through his hair. I watch how his eyes flit back and forth between me and anyone who passes outside the door and I’m wishing, wishing, wishing I could peek inside his head.

Suddenly I think of that old movie I saw called
The Bodyguard
with Kevin Costner when he was young and seriously hot, and I pretend there’s this bodyguard vibe going on here because Michael’s hunky and protecting me and he could play the part because Costner was strong and silent too. Like Costner, Michael’s presence fills the room and he seems to have laser vision capable of seeing my split ends from the opposite side of the room. I lean back in the bed watching him exist, loving that at least for this moment in time we’re breathing the same air, even if we’re in a depressing hospital room and instead of clothes I’m wearing a shapeless shit gown with the opening in the back that shows my entire ass—not to mention that people who have died here have probably worn this same rag to the morgue or down the runway to hell.

I stare at him and he looks back at me and then he glances down at my feet and notices the jade green polish and the toe ring and I wiggle my toes and he fights a smile. So we keep sitting there and, no surprise, he refuses to chitchat or maybe doesn’t know how, which prompts Miss Motormouth to spice things up with annoying questions.

“Do you think your sergeant is going to wonder about this?”

“Wonder about what?”

“I mean, I assume you had to write up a report and it must look like an awfully strange coincidence that I’m the same girl you brought in two weeks ago.”

He shrugs.

“So how did you end up at my school?”

“Morgan is your school?”

That’s when I know for sure that he’s bluffing. He must have seen the posters.

“Gia—fresh thinking, fresh answers?” I raise an eyebrow.

“I saw the posters,” he says with a half smile. “You got the fresh part right.”

His eyes hold mine and for those few seconds, it feels like the air is as thin as on top of Mt. Everest because it’s hard for me to breathe and it has nothing whatsoever to do with the fall.

“How come you were working there…at my school?” I ask, my eyes not leaving his. “Instead of, say, cruising around and giving tickets or whatever…”

“Extra pay.”

“That’s all?”

“What else?”

Even though it hurts, I get to my feet and walk over to him, perching myself on the arm of his chair. “To see where I go to school,” I whisper, my lips nearly grazing his ear.

He closes his eyes momentarily. “Why would I do that?”

“I don’t know, Michael, you tell me.”

He doesn’t answer.

I lift his chin with one finger. “Maybe to see me?”

He opens his mouth to answer then stops, abruptly turning toward the door.

“
Gia
,” my mom bursts in, hurling her purse to the floor before grabbing me in a hug, nearly smacking Michael in the head. “Oh my god, I nearly had a heart attack over you!”

After a week
goes by I’m feeling better, so I go to the bakery with Ro after school and meet Teddy, the manager, and stand behind the counter pretending I know what I’m doing while Ro sits at a table and sips cappuccino and makes faces at me because she’s enjoying this. Then I make them back at her, which makes Teddy mad because I’m not concentrating while he’s showing me all the cakes and cookies and telling me what they cost and showing me how to wrap them, blah, blah, blah. Then he covers my hair with a net and hands me plastic gloves.

“Am I handling plutonium?”

“This is a bakery,” he says, “you have to be clean.”

“I’m clean,” I say before sticking my tongue out at Ro. “I’ll start next week.”

“Fine,” he says. “Don’t worry. This a great place to work.”

“Umm, If you want to carbo-load and grow your ass.”

He shakes his head.

Back at school, the election is going to get ugly. In keeping with the tradition of Manhattan’s elite private schools, the race has nothing whatever to do with issues or values or ethics or how the school is run and everything to do with popularity.

I work at being nicer than usual to everybody. At lunch while we eat the gross chicken meatloaf, we pick out people and try to figure out who they’ll vote for so we can get some idea who is going to win and who they are going to wipe the floor with.