Mafia Girl Read online

  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!”

  TWELVE

  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.

  “The Tewl has changed her hair color,” I whisper to Ro.

  She sticks her finger down her throat. “Yesterday it was light brown and now it’s bright red?”

  That is off the charts weird in the middle of an election because you look like you don’t trust who you are and that you need help because you’re going through a serious identity crisis.

  Jordan the jock is actually striding through the cafeteria working the room as if he’s relying on political advice about networking dating back to President Clinton’s campaign.

  If all that’s not weird enough, even Domingo, the guy who cleans the cafeteria, passes my table and says, “you going to be the president?” And, whoa, I didn’t know even the kitchen staff is following this.

  “I’m trying,” I say with an embarrassed laugh.

  He smiles and picks up the trash on the table that people leave behind because some kids at Morgan feel they are so above carrying a single empty Arizona bottle to the recycle bin ten feet away in order to save the planet.

  “President,” Domingo says again, like I’m in line for 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

  I’d never admit it, but I’m feeling pretty good about my chances until someone comes up with the brilliant idea of holding a debate with the candidates to give the election more cosmic importance or something. I can’t exactly get to the bottom of who came up with that idea—because the school never did that before—but whatever, I can take the heat. Anyway, as everyone knows, I am a motormouth and good at thinking on my feet. They schedule the debate for an assembly that is only forty-five minutes long and everyone is invited to submit questions, which a committee of teachers will then sort through to pick the best.

  Our next move is to prepare me, and Clive salivates at the thought. That afternoon instead of going home I get permission from my dad to go home with Clive who transforms himself into one of the more obnoxious kids in school and fires questions at me, pretending he’s holding a microphone:

  “Gia, tell us in a sentence or two why you think you’d make a better president than anyone else in this school?

  “What is the first thing you’d do if you became president?

  “What do you see as the biggest shortcomings in our school and how would you address them?

  “Our biggest strength?

  “What qualifications do you bring to the job?

  “Have you held office in other schools?

  “What would you do to stop bullying in our school?

  “How would you help make the school more diverse?”

  If all that isn’t exhaustive enough, he goes on YouTube and gets a video of the Kennedy-Nixon debates like I could definitely apply lessons from those to what I would say at Morgan.

  “Clive, you’re taking this pretty seriously.”

  He takes that as a compliment. “I’m just trying to think of everything I can to prepare you, Gia, because you know how those people can get.”

  “I don’t know, not really.”

  Aside from Christy and her garbage mouth group, I don’t know what to expect, and anyway, I really can’t concentrate because my attention keeps flipping back and forth between reality and my fantasies of Michael Cross, who, of course, has not reached out and touched me and probably never will because Mr. Hot Cop is probably totally chickenshit.

  But Clive isn’t thinking about Michael. He’s thinking about making me class president. So we drill and drill and drill until he thinks I’m ready.

  “I’m surprised you haven’t rented out a TV studio to stage a mock debate on camera,” I mutter when it’s nearly ten.

  “I should have thought of that,” he says.

  I finally pack up and leave his building at ten thirty and while I’m going down in the elevator I’m not thinking about the election anymore or the stupid people or the questions they will throw at me, because on my phone I see something I’ve never seen before.

  A text. From Michael.

  THIRTEEN

  I get a cab on Fifth and as it goes south I look again to make sure that I really saw it.

  Off at 11. Meet?

  Cardiac arrest. Yes. Where?

  Simone Martini Bar. Know it?

  Yes. Actually no, I don’t. What was I thinking? I google it and find it in the East Village on First Avenue and St. Marks Place. Then the name Simone Martini sets off memory bells so I google that and realize why.

  Simone Martini was an Italian painter from Siena (1280–1344) who they talked about in art history. We saw a painting of his from this online tour of the Uffizi in Florence, which was cool. And then I remember that he painted a portrait of a woman named Laura something who the poet Petrarch was crazed over and sort of stalked.

  Instead of going home, I get out in the village and call my mom, mumbling something about meeting a friend to work on the campaign some more so I’ll be home later, but not really late. Who knows if she believes me, but my mom doesn’t have the strength to check out all the stories I dream up and my dad is out and I know she’s in the middle of a rerun of Golden Girls, her favorite TV show, because can you possibly mistake the voice of Bea Arthur?

  I get there way early, so I circle the block twelve times like a streetwalker and then stroll in finally at 11:15 like this is so no big deal. The place has soft lighting, zebra fabric on the seats, and a tin ceiling, and I love the vibe so I am in the zone.

  I spot him and go into overdrive. He’s sitting with a drink looking lost in thought, only he has this telepathic awareness of me because he looks up and the electrical currents begin pulsing. I head toward him, and he stands, and he has to be six-four because even in my heels he’s high above me.

  I kiss his cheek and breathe in his lemony scent. He must have cleaned up and doesn’t that say something? I slide out of my jacket and sit in the banquette next to him and live in the moment.

  “How you feeling?” he asks, pretending not to see the low-cut silk tank top.

  I shrug.

  “Your back, I mean.”

  “It’s mostly better.” I hold off on joking about Percocet because that would be playing into his law enforcement antidrug thing and I know that script. The waiter comes by and I order a Coke to avoid flashing my bogus ID.

  I can’t say it feels easy or natural or comfortable or any other emotion that I’ve ever felt to be near him in a bar, his thigh inches from mine. What it feels is otherworldly, as though the rest of humanity is closed off behind glass like the dioramas in the Museum of Natural History, and there’s just the two of us.

  “I didn’t know if you’d call,” I say.

  “Neither did I.”

  I look in his eyes and stare at his lips and force myself to look away.

  I start toying with the black leather and gold bracelets on my arm, tightening them, loosening them, tightening them again and feeling twelve years old again and not me. And where did that come from? Because right now I need my Gia alter ego on steroids, the one who says what’s on her mind and isn’t gnawing at the inside of her cheek.

  I’m convinced that in cop school they teach you never to say anything that advances the conversation so that the other person will feel forced to fill the silence. I snap to and start wondering if he’s like this just with m
e or with other girls too which tightens my insides because for the first time I think of other girls.

  Does he have a girlfriend? What a complete jerk I am. I mean, look at him, how could he not?

  “Why didn’t you know…if you’d call?”

  “Gia…” he says, lifting his head and looking at me. I’m looking back at him and fixated on those lips again and how they’re parted now. I expect flames to shoot up and burn us.

  “This is totally off the wall.”

  “What is?”

  “My seeing you, my sitting here.”

  “Because you’re a cop?”

  “Because of a lot of things.”

  “Does that scare you?” I say.

  “What? Being with you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You know what scares me, Michael?

  “What?”

  “Not being with you.” Then I swallow extra hard and close my fingers around his upper arm and just leave my hand there and try to pretend that I’m not breathing ragged because I’m touching his skin.

  Did I really have the nerve to say that? Why didn’t I just shut up? And how can my mouth come out and say what I’m thinking? But it does and I can’t seem to control that, and here we go again with my head telling my mouth what it wants to say, not what it should.

  Michael tries to pretend my hand isn’t where it is, but he stirs and something inside him changes. We sit there without talking, surrounded by ghosts of things in his head, and he mostly looks down at the fake black marble table. And then he stares inside his glass at his drink before he lifts it and drains it, and I watch his throat as the liquid goes down.