Читать книгу Three Girls and their Brother - Theresa Rebeck - Страница 8

CHAPTER FOUR

“Rough-housing with the stars got a little rough Tuesday night at W, where pint-sized It Girl Amelia Heller took a bite out of Rex Wentworth,” claimed Rush & Molloy the very next day. There was a huge photograph of Rex swinging Amelia through the air right before she bit him, and an unnamed source giving it up that Rex had to go to the hospital, although there would be no charges filed.

Meanwhile, everyone in America was paging through their New Yorker, and stopping to look at a spectacularly fun picture of three gorgeous redheaded teenagers, dressed in green, dancing and looking like fairies or princesses or mermaids or whatever your own particular female fantasy might be. Under the picture they ran the clever cutline, “Daria, Polly and Amelia Heller, granddaughters of lit giant Leo Heller, on the verge of their own breed of greatness. Herb Lang photographs the terrific trio in a loft on Spring Street, high above the isle of Manhattan, site of their grandsire’s many triumphs.” Cool, huh? But that old La Aura, the hair stylist, was dead right: Nobody really cared about who our literary grandfather was. What they really cared about was: “Which is the one who bit Rex Wentworth?”

School was hell. Everyone was screaming at me all the time. “Did your sister really bite Rex Wentworth? What’s that about? Is she crazy? Awesome, man! Were you there? Did you see it? Why’d she bite him? Your sisters are hot. Are they all like, going out with movie stars now?” All the teachers spent the whole day digging me out from gangs of kids I didn’t even know. I mean, the Garfield Lincoln School isn’t exactly Stuyvesant; there are only sixty kids per grade level, so you pretty much know everybody in the high school by the time you’re a junior. But kids I never even heard of were everywhere all of a sudden, swarming all over me like a pack of rats.

Polly actually made an appearance at school that day, because who in their right mind would miss this spectacular opportunity to be the center of so much attention? She totally enjoyed the whole ruckus, wearing her fishnets, posing in the hallways, laughing and tossing her new spiky do about like a total pro. She was brilliant. You really do have to give it up to Polly; she makes being famous look like more fun than anybody I ever saw. I mean, she was having a great time, until it sank in that the picture was losing first position to the biting incident, as reported in the Daily News. I passed behind her, in the middle of the chaos, and heard her explaining, in the most discreet terms, that it wasn’t Amelia who was the center of the Rex Wentworth event, actually. It was her. “She didn’t bite Rex—god, that whole thing is just, you know, the newspapers are always sooo full of shit,” she bubbled, in a kind of edgy way. “They were just horsing around. He’s really fantastic. I talked to him for something like three hours, Amelia was leaving. That whole biting thing was a total nonevent. He’s not even upset about it! I talked to him, this morning he called me, we’re going to dinner tomorrow? And he didn’t even mention it.” This last bit, obviously, was a terrific whopper.

Amelia’s life was a disaster. She has a bit of a temper, as I’ve mentioned, so all the kids surrounding her and screaming questions about why she bit Rex Wentworth set her off about every two minutes or so. She never got to take that chemistry test; there was so much chaos in the chemistry lab they finally told her she had to go to Dean Morton’s office. The chemistry teacher, Dr Nussbaum, was trying to explain to her that she could make the test up another day but that she needed to go see the dean and sort out the controversy. Amelia told me this later; she rather obsessively focused on being told that she had to go “sort out the controversy,” because that struck her as being an especially stupid thing for old Nussbaum to say. And in fact, if you think about it, it is a pretty stupid thing to say to a fourteen-year-old girl who was being harassed by absolutely everybody in her high school, because she had bitten a movie star who was trying to feel her up. Anyway, at that point Amelia was so frustrated she started to cry, and then argue about how hard she had studied, and then she started babbling on even more, apparently, about how she’s missed so much school and it wasn’t her fault and were they all a bunch of fucking idiots, blaming her for this mess?

I’m not being euphemistic; she did in fact call Dr Nussbaum a “fucking idiot,” which sort of finished off the question of whether or not she was going to the dean’s office.

By the time Amelia got down to Morton’s office, the whole situation—gorgeous redheads, the Daily News, a bitten movie star, screaming students everywhere—had exhausted the school so much that the dean instantly decided to simply send Amelia home. Which was not, technically, a brilliant solution, as the front sidewalk of the school was positively lousy with photographers, and had been since ten in the morning. So when Amelia stormed out the front door, alone, at noon, there were thirty or forty of them waiting there, crawling all over each other and ready to commit multiple acts of homicide on the off-chance that it might net them an out-of-focus photograph of the fourteen-year-old girl who bit Rex Wentworth.

I could see all of it from the third floor, where I was trapped in a Spanish lab. That dipshit Morton hadn’t even arranged for someone to come pick her up; it says in our files that we’re authorized to walk ourselves home, but wouldn’t you think he’d have a half a clue?

The paparazzi went haywire. I mean, as upsetting as it had been to be mobbed by our fellow students all morning, they were rank amateurs compared to these bozos. They descended as one, shouting questions, grabbing, pushing, shoving their cameras right into her face, acting really like she was some sort of stupid animal in a zoo, instead of just a little kid. Amelia stood on the front steps of the high school, frozen, and then she totally just disappeared. I mean, one minute she was there, and the next minute she wasn’t. It was like they had eaten her.

I bolted. I mean, what else are you going to do, just sit there and watch your sister get eaten? Señor Martine (his real name is Mr Martin, but he makes us call him Señor Martine) shouted something at me in Spanish, but I was truly in no mood. I made it outside in maybe ten seconds, but the situation was already way out of control. The shoving was unbelievable, it was like being at some insane British soccer match. Photographers were pushing and shoving and cursing wildly, and I had to literally pull at arms and legs and throw myself up against somebody to get him out of the way, just so I could clamber one or two inches further into the onion layers of photojournalists who had encrusted themselves around my little sister. People were screaming, “Fuck you, fucking asshole, get in line, fucker, hey who is this fucker?” while I pushed and shoved and yelled, “Amelia! Hey, Amelia, where are you?”

By the time I got to her she was just curled up in a little ball. Seriously, she was like all folded in on herself, a little turtle of a person, crouched down over her feet, her arms crossed over her head, down on the cement sidewalk. You got to wonder what’s wrong with those guys, why they thought this would be a cool picture to take, a little kid so scared she’s doing something that spooky. I mean, I wondered that about a minute later, but while I was surrounded by the crazy people with her, I was mostly just screaming at them to get away. Amelia was crying and hitting at me, because she didn’t want to move, that’s how freaked out she was, but I was pretty sure they’d just start stomping on her if I left her there, so I started dragging her back toward the front door of the school. They of course kept taking pictures and shoving at both of us. It was a ridiculous mess.

By the time we got back through the glass doors and into the security lobby, a whole bunch of teachers and students was gathering. Meanwhile, all those journalists were like in a feeding frenzy or something; it was like once they got started on the craziness they didn’t know how to turn it off, so they actually tried to come in after us. Which finally turned into a kind of a showdown. Señor Martine, Dean Morton and Luke, the black guy who sits at the front desk and makes you sign in if you’re tardy, charged the mob and started yelling at them.

“This is private property! I am asking you to leave! You are not allowed entrance to this building! This is a private high school!” yelled Morton. He was actually holding his arms out, sort of like he was being crucified, but more like he thought those photographers were actually chickens or pigeons or something he could just shoo away. “If you do not leave this property immediately, we are calling the police!”

This was not good enough for Luke. “Motherfuckers! Get out of here, you fuckheads! The police are coming to kick your ass—get out—GET OUT.” He grabbed one guy, a kind of short, fat guy with a big beard and a huge lens, who was shooting wildly at anything and everything.

“Don’t you fucking touch me, man!” the short photographer yelled. “I can sue you! That’s assault!”

“You take another picture of these kids, I’ll show you what assault looks like,” Luke told him, sticking his finger in the guy’s face. Meanwhile, two other photographers were deep in it with Morton.

“The police are coming. You are not permitted in this building,” Morton droned. These idiots started to argue about freedom of the press.

“You want to do that? Show these kids that the press can be silenced? What’s that teaching them? This is a free society. This isn’t fucking China, we’re covering a legitimate story.” Meanwhile the rest of the gang behind them kept clicking away.

It really was enough to make you sick. Luckily Luke is rather large, and when he gets mad enough to yell it’s rather undeniable. “GET OUT OF HERE,” he yelled. “I DON ‘T GIVE A SHIT ABOUT FREEDOM OF THE PRESS, YOU SHITHEAD, YOU THINK I WON ‘T HIT YOU, YOU TRY IT, MAN, JUST TRY ONE MORE STEP IN THIS BUILDING, THESE ARE MY KIDS. MY KIDS, MOTHERFUCKER.”

Dean Morton cringed a little at that; obviously he was not thrilled that Luke was cursing so freely in front of all us fragile teenagers, but there was no denying that it was an impressive performance. And all of us fragile teenagers were definitely stoked that our security guard was willing to slug it out with all of the representatives of the free press that New York could spare that morning. Truth be told I think Morton was impressed too. In any event, he didn’t say anything, and after they managed to get off another few hundred shots, the so-called protectors of all American freedoms finally took off.

Everybody got sent back to class and I got sent to the nurse’s office, because I had a scraped-up face and a split lip. By the time they patched me up, Amelia had already been sent home, which really pissed me off. I mean, they couldn’t wait and let us go together? But people don’t think of these things. Anyway, the next day we all got the beginnings of a clue as to how serious the shit was that Amelia had stepped in. The many pictures taken by all those protectors of a free press were really quite impressive. And they printed all of them. Pictures of Amelia screaming, Amelia hitting photographers, Amelia kicking photographers, Amelia kicking me. Amelia curled up in a little ball on the sidewalk; they printed that one, too. A couple of those geniuses actually had video of the whole thing, which they showed on three local news shows, Entertainment Tonight and CNN, which, due respect to CNN, but there was in fact a war going on in Iraq at the time; you had to wonder why they actually cared about some kid who hit a couple of photographers in Brooklyn.

In any event, they showed the footage on television quite a bit, and the story that went along with the visuals went something like this: “Pint-sized It Girl Amelia Heller is burning through her fifteen minutes as fast as she can. Recently showcased in the New Yorker magazine, the fourteen-year-old heiress to a major American lit legacy has been spending her nights partying with the likes of film actor Rex Wentworth, who she allegedly bit in a scuffle at a Manhattan hot spot last week. Here she lets the paparazzi get a taste of her teen angst. An unidentified fellow student comes to her aid …”

The unidentified fellow student, that’s me.

Polly and Daria were livid. Their moment in the sun had been completely obliterated by Amelia’s shenanigans. Our home life now veered between long stretches of sullen silence and endless hours of screeching female rage.

“This is not about you, Amelia. None of this was ever supposed to be about you,” Daria would hiss.

“I said, I didn’t want to do it in the first place!”

“Do you know, do you have any idea of how long it’s taken me to get my career to this point? Do you even have half a clue—”

“Oh, what career?”

“Look, people say that no publicity is bad publicity.” This halfway optimistic opinion, or something like it, coming from Polly.

“People who have never had this kind of spectacularly shitty publicity say that! And it’s not my fault! None of this is my fault! All of it is her fault, and she doesn’t even care!”

“I care! I want to go to school! I can’t even go to school, everybody hates me, and I hate everybody!”

This was occasionally punctuated by a series of slamming doors.

And in fact, she couldn’t go to school—Collette called, the first morning, and put everyone in lockdown. Nobody was allowed to leave the apartment, and nobody was allowed to talk to anybody, either. Which put everyone in an even worse mood. The phone would ring off the hook until Mom finally answered it, and then she would hold the receiver tightly to her ear, cover her face with one hand and melodramatically whisper, “No comment.” Then, infinitely bereaved, she would set down the receiver. It was quite an act and, as far as I could tell, gained us not one shred of legitimacy from the reporters on the evening news, who just kept reporting, snidely, “No comment from the girl’s family. Looks like they’re trying to keep this under wraps.”

And then the anchor-idiot would say, “Little too late for that!” And they’d all chuckle. I mean, you really wanted to blow your brains out.

After three days of this I came home from school—the lockdown only counted for girl members of the family; nobody out there really seemed to give a shit, frankly, about the unidentified fellow student—to find Collette holding a major powwow around our kitchen table. In spite of how crucial she had become to everyone’s lives over the past six weeks, this was in fact the first time I had ever laid eyes on Collette, and she was, frankly, pretty impressive. She wore one of those perfect suits—tight, curvy, both sexy and severe—and she was drinking ice water, and crossing her legs to one side, so that anyone who entered the room could see right off what great legs she had.

“All right, the fact is, Maureen Piven got out in front of us in every media outlet,” she announced. “She had them all in her pocket within twenty-four hours, caught us absolutely flat-footed. She’s brilliant at this, absolutely flawless. I would have warned you ahead of time not to take her on, but I had no idea Amelia would do anything as stupid as biting Rex Wentworth.”

“He was—”

“Save it, Amelia. The damage is done.” Collette clearly was not interested in discussion at this point, but the level of anxiety was pretty high. Mom leaned forward, wringing her hands.

“But why can’t we even defend ourselves? It’s not doing any good. We don’t say anything and it just keeps getting worse and worse and worse, what they’re saying about us, in the news papers, on the television—”

“I know it feels that way,” Collette nodded, not terribly sympathetic. “But you don’t want to provoke Maureen any further. This is completely personal to her. Karl Rove could take lessons from Maureen, when she’s in a mood like this. Did you guys do anything to piss her off? Besides biting Rex, did you say anything or do anything that I need to know about? Because we have maybe one shot to save this situation. I need to know everything.”

Amelia glanced at me, worried, then looked away. I looked down. We were fast, but not fast enough. Mom caught the look, thought for a moment, then another moment. She can be stupid about some stuff, but on other stuff she’s crackerjack. “Philip was rude to her,” she said. Daria and Polly turned and stared at me. Amelia kept looking at the floor.

“I wasn’t,” I said. “I barely said two words.”

“You were rude. She was telling us about her family, a story about her family, and Philip—”

“She said her great-grandfather was Franz Kafka!” I said.

Amelia’s face twitched. She was trying not to laugh. Daria caught it.

“You’re a moron, Philip,” said Polly. “What were you even doing there, anyway? No one invited you.”

“I was fucking polite! I was pretty fucking polite, if you ask me, about such a spectacular piece of bullshit!”

“He was polite about it, he really was, considering,” Amelia chimed in.

“No one was fooled, by either of you,” Mom snorted.

Really, the whole thing was ludicrous. It was suddenly my fault there were thirty crazed reporters in front of our building waiting to tear us all to pieces, because I didn’t say, “Oh really?” with enough conviction when a giantess in a green dress told me she was the direct descendant of a hooker who had once slept with Franz Kafka.

“Oh my god,” said Daria. “That’s what happened? That’s why they went after us? Because Philip was—”

“I wasn’t anything!” I yelled. “I hardly exist around here, you can’t dump this on me!”

“It doesn’t matter,” sighed Collette. “If that’s what’s behind it, the damage is done. She’s notoriously sensitive, so if she thought Philip was playing her she was going to punish everybody sooner or later. It’s just as well that we got it over with.”

“Is it over with?” Polly asked, raising an eyebrow. “’Cause it sure doesn’t look like that from where I sit. We’re all under house arrest.”

“You let the story have its natural life,” Collette explained, standing and pacing now, like a drill sergeant. “I couldn’t have you talking to the press because they want nothing more than to keep it all going—statements from you, statements from Rex, statements from Maureen—and she’s just too good at this. You go to war with Maureen Piven, you’re all dead before you’ve even started.”

“You mean we’re not? Dead?” said Daria. This was the news she was waiting for. And Collette sighed, apparently at our collective stupidity.

“No,” she said. “Not quite yet.”

Collette’s opening gambit, as it turned out, was to drag the two offending dimwits into the belly of the beast, whereupon both dimwits were expected to throw themselves on the beast’s mercy. I’m not kidding, that was the entire plan. We didn’t even call ahead; she just tossed us into the back of her town car and the next thing I knew we were standing around in the waiting room of the swankest offices I had ever seen. I mean, this place was spectacular: Leather chairs, walnut paneling, a little Jackson Pollock action on one wall and a full southern exposure of Central Park on the other. And that was the waiting room. A skinny guy in a white shirt and tie sat in a tiny cubicle around the corner; he had no expression on his face and kept telling people on his headset to hold, while he simultaneously listened to Collette explain that Maureen would see us.

“But she doesn’t know you’re coming,” he observed, with a kind of expressionless skepticism.

“No,” said Collette, smiling politely at this little shit. “Nevertheless, as I said, I’m fairly sure that she will see us.”

“Hold please,” he said into his headset. “Take a seat, please,” he told Collette.

Since she was already in a power struggle with him, Collette opted to stand, but Amelia and I slouched in that leather furniture obediently. I kept trying to catch Amelia’s eye in some insane attempt to establish a kind of Vulcan mind-mold so that we might have something resembling a game plan when we went in and faced the Ogress, but no matter what I did she wouldn’t look at me. “Knock it off, Philip,” Collette told me, the third time I tried to get Amelia to communicate with me without actually saying anything. She clearly didn’t want us cooking anything up. We were just supposed to go in there and suck up.

Which I was fairly sure was never going to happen, since Kafka’s giant offspring kept us waiting just long enough for me to think this might turn into one of those stories about how they made you wait for two days and then said oh by the way that person isn’t even here! We were there a long time; and then we were there even longer. The sun was setting gloriously across Central Park, in fact, when suddenly there she was, herself, in a purple tent this time—mauve let’s say—again with those giant amber stones glittering on her chest.

“I’m so sorry to have kept you waiting,” the giantess sighed. “It’s just been a nightmare, I’ve been on conference calls about three different films all afternoon.” Then she smiled happily, as if we were the most delightful interruption she could ask for on this busy afternoon. “It’s so good of you to come by.”

“Of course we wanted to come,” Collette smiled back.

“Amelia, the picture, in the New Yorker! Wonderful. You must be so pleased,” said Maureen as she opened the door to her office.

“Oh, sure, yeah. Oh! The picture. Yeah, it’s good, I guess,” said Amelia, completely confused. Who could blame her? They were being so nice. The whole thing was so weird you didn’t know what to say.

“No. It’s better than good. Herb Lang. He’s a genius. He did one of my clients years ago: It absolutely put her on the map. It made her. As I’m sure it’s going to make you,” Maureen nodded.

I had the total urge to say “make her what?” but Amelia stepped on my foot. So instead I said, “Ooooow, you stepped on my foot, jerk.” Which finally got Amelia to look at me, and shake her head and roll her eyes like, stop it, you moron. At which point apparently Collette knew that she’d better get us in and out of there fast, so she just launched in.

“We wanted to come by and see if there was anything we could do—any of us—about this terrible, terrible misunderstanding with Rex,” Collette began. “Amelia feels just terrible about it.”

“Oh,” said Maureen, taking this in as if it were entirely surprising information instead of the complete reason we were even there. She looked at Amelia, a little snake for a moment appearing behind those sincere, kind eyes.

Amelia jumped a little bit, startled, as I was, by the sudden appearance of the snake. But she got right with the picture. “I’m really sorry, I really am,” she said. “I totally did not mean to bite anybody. Wow. I just don’t even know how it happened. And Philip and I also, you know, if you thought that we thought it was stupid that your great grandfather was Kafka? I so hope you didn’t think that. Because it is really awesome, that you, know, that you—Philip was saying—”

It was clearly time for me to chime in. “Yeah, I think it’s cool, I really do,” I said.

Kafka’s great-granddaughter thought about this, without responding, and suddenly turned to look out the window. There was a kind of creepy silence that settled in, while this enormous woman considered the intricacies of apologies, and what it means to make them, and what it means to accept them, and how long you should wait, in fact, before doing something so pedestrian. No one said anything. Just below, in Central Park, a couple of little kids suddenly bolted into the fading light of the sunset, and ran recklessly down the path, leaving their Jamaican nannies calling after them. They were all laughing, you could see it; the air was so clear, you could see them laugh. I totally wished I was out there.

“That story is very precious to me,” Maureen said. “I don’t tell it to everyone.”

“Well, no, I mean, I totally understand that,” I said. Which okay, that wasn’t what I meant, what it sounded like I meant? It’s just the whole thing was so stupid. “I mean, Kafka is really a great writer and it is awesome that he’s, you know.”

Collette leaned forward, crossing her legs fast, like a pair of scissors. “Are you cast yet, on The Fury of the Titans?” she asked pleasantly.

“I saw you on the news, Philip,” Maureen announced.

At this point I was ready to blow my own brains out. I mean, I could not follow any of this. The only thing that was clear to me was that I was completely tanking and that the only safe bet now was to say as little as possible. I kept my head down, figuring that she hadn’t asked a direct question—maybe that meant I didn’t have to respond.

“Philip was on television?” said Collette, surprised.

“It’s cute, he feels protective of his little sister,” Maureen said. “Isn’t that what he was doing when she got attacked by the photographers?’

This floored Collette, it really did. “What do you mean?” she asked, curious.

“He’s in all the pictures,” Maureen informed her. That giant ogress with the magic stones on her chest was literally the only person who had figured out that the “unidentified student” was me. Collette looked back and forth between Maureen and Amelia, still not getting it.

“He saved me,” said Amelia, simple.

“Yes, it was very sweet, very sweet,” said Maureen. “I have a brother, too. He sells auto parts out of a storefront in Astoria. Every other year he sends me a screenplay that he’s written with one of his friends, every one of them worse than the next. My sister is married and living on Long Island. I hear from her when she needs money. But she’s very sweet too. She has two hideously ugly daughters, they both want to be actresses. Do you want to be an actress, Amelia?”

Amelia squirmed like a six-year-old. “Not particularly,” she said.

“No?” smiled Maureen Piven, all those stones winking on her chest. “I thought everybody did.”

“I heard you were from Long Island, I didn’t realize you still had family there,” Collette purred, as if we were at a cocktail party. “They must be proud of you.”

“I don’t often speak to them,” Maureen purred back. “The distance. You know. Where you’re from and where you’re going. They don’t really mix.”

“How did you manage it? I mean, how did you get from there—to here!” Collette wondered, astonished. “I’ve always wanted to ask, if it’s not too personal.”

“I stalked Sidney Lumet until I got him alone,” Ogress laughed coyly, charmed to be asked to narrate the seminal event of her life’s story. “He was waiting for a cab and I made a complete fool of myself, insisting that I wanted to work for him, that I’d do anything! He absolutely brushed me off but he’d had a couple drinks and I was pretty sure he wouldn’t even remember what he actually said. So I showed up at his office the next day, and started making coffee. It took a week for everybody to realize he hadn’t actually hired me, but by then it was too late, I was indispensable.”

“You started by making coffee for Sidney Lumet!” Collette bubbled, elegant.

“There are worse ways to start in this business, as I think you know,” Maureen noted. The two women laughed one of those “boy do we ever” laughs.

“It sounds like you were a totally different person,” Collette smiled, both sucking up and narrating. “You really transformed yourself, didn’t you?”

“Just like The Metamorphosis,” I said.

We were all there to suck up, right? And she was the one all hung up on the Kafka thing. They all stared at me, like I was suddenly speaking a foreign language.

“You know, The Metamorphosis,” I said. “The guy wakes up one morning and he’s a giant bug, and no one in his family knows how to talk to him anymore?”

“Really?” said Maureen, unfriendly as hell.

“You haven’t read it?” I asked.

“No, I missed that one.”

“It’s pretty good.”

“I’m sure it is.”

“I just meant, you know, you were like, a different person and your family understood you and then you transformed yourself and now you’re like totally mysterious to them. That’s all,” I concluded lamely.

“Thank you for the exegesis,” she said.

Okay, I happen to go to the Garfield Lincoln School, and I’m also the grandson of Leo Heller so I actually do know what “exegesis” means. “You’re welcome,” I told her, with a slightly edgy tone, to match her own.

“Is this you?” Collette cooed. “Look, Amelia, it’s a picture of Maureen with Ron Howard!” I was suddenly feeling like I was stuck in The Castle.

“Hey Collette, you know, I kind of have a lot of homework,” Amelia said. “This has been really fun and I’m so glad to see you, Maureen, and I’m really really sorry for biting Rex and I’m especially sorry if I said anything that bugged you that night in the bar, and Philip is too, but we need to get home, okay, Maureen?” Even though she was saying all the right things, Amelia sounded even worse than me. She has no idea how to spin anything. Next to Maureen and Collette we sounded like a couple of rude teenagers, and the fact is, we were there to prove that we weren’t rude teenagers. I actually saw Collette raise her eyes to the heavens for a split second. I couldn’t say that I blamed her.

But Maureen was suddenly in a forgiving mood. She smiled, half to herself, and leaned back, letting the side-lighting play on her giant beads on her giant chest. I swear, it is no wonder I thought of her in the light of The Metamorphosis; she really did look like a giant cockroach, with all those beady eyes.

“Amelia means—”

“It’s all right, Collette, I know what Amelia means. You too, Philip. No hard feelings. But perhaps you’d better go before either one of you opens your mouth again.” She twinkled at us, benign. Who could keep track of this? I was getting whiplash. But the offer to leave came none too soon.

“Yeah, thanks,” I said. “I really do like Kafka, I really do.”

“Good,” she told me.

And everything would have been fine if we had just gotten our butts out of there before Rex showed up. Really. We were out of there; we were all about to stand up and wave goodbye to this whole hideous interchange when the door swung open and the king himself walked in.

“Oh hey, sorry, Maureen, no no, stay, you know you can use the place whenever you want, I just didn’t know you were in here,” he said, giving up the fact that this was his office, not hers, before he even saw that in fact Maureen was using his office to have a sit-down with the kid who bit him, along with her dorky brother. But of course we all turned to stare at him, and then he saw Amelia, who was unfortunately wearing a teeny little turquoise tank top over black jeans in which she looked awesome.

“Oh hi,” Rex said. “Yeah, hi.”

She didn’t say anything. She just turned white.

“Nice picture. I mean, the thing in the New Yorker, that’s …” Rex trailed off. He was totally giving himself away. Amelia looked at the ground.

“Thanks,” she said. That was it. She was not too nice about it, either.

“Amelia and her brother came by to apologize about what happened at W the other night,” Maureen narrated, expressionless. I thought it was weird because she had been so nice to us and now here was Rex and she was suddenly a block of ice.

“Yeah, whatever,” said Rex. “Just finish it up, huh? I mean, it’s okay for you to use this place, but I wish you’d clear it with me ahead of time.” Maureen looked at him, sort of like a mother who is thinking about whether or not slapping her own kid is maybe a good idea. He looked back at her, like one of the shitty kids on the playground who’s getting off on being a jerk. “Is there a problem?” he asked.

“Not at all,” said Maureen, pulling out that dazzling smile. “As I said, we were just finishing up.”

“Whatever,” he said, and he grabbed the doorknob and turned to go.

And just as he did he snuck another look at Amelia. I saw him do it. And it was so clear, just in that one little sneaky look, that the asshole had the hots for her. I’ve seen it enough times, it’s not like I’m likely to miss it. That guy was forty years old, at least, and he had the hots for my fourteen-year-old sister.

But anyway, then he was gone and we were going. So Collette reached over and held Maureen’s hand meaningfully for a few seconds, smiling at her sincerely.

“I really appreciate your helping us through this,” she said.

“Of course,” said Maureen. I reached for the door.

“There’s just one thing,” she added. We all turned. Maureen, looking out the window, sighed. “It’s wonderful that you came by and apologized,” she noted. “But this really is so private. And the whole … event … wasn’t private, was it? Was it, Amelia?”

“What?” said Amelia.

“I just mean,” smiled Maureeen, “for an event that public—the apology will have to be public too, won’t it?”