Dream Girl Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  I was breezing down the airport…

  1 A Supposedly Beautiful Mind

  2 Cameo Appearance

  3 Lawn Twister

  4 Meet the Beatles

  5 Dinner Date on Wheels

  6 Roll Out the Red Carpet for #6013V

  7 A Curious Incident on the Thirty-eighth Floor

  8 A League of Our Own

  9 Potlucky

  10 Ace in the Hole

  11 Dead Men Walking

  12 Dr. Quack

  13 Digging Up Act Two

  14 Divine Intervention

  15 Mode of Expression

  16 The Worst Kind of Magic

  17 Snowcaps and Setbacks

  18 An Unfortunate Plus One

  19 Red-Light District

  20 Shakespeare in Sheep’s Clothing

  21 Punch-drunk Powwow

  22 Looking for Mr. Goodbar

  23 Tired of Waiting

  24 When Only Bubbly Will Do

  25 Meeting of the Minds

  26 Our Own Happiness

  27 Eye of the Tiger

  28 How I Became a Fake Wife

  29 Bon Voyage and Cheerio

  30 Rocky Rentrée

  31 Crowded House

  I was riding my bike along…

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  I was breezing down the airport corridor, minding my own business and thinking about the new look I’d have with the liquid eyeliner I’d picked up at the duty-free shop in Paris, when I saw it in the distance: the pink combination lock.

  It was bobbing from a burgundy tasseled handbag that was slung over the shoulder of a woman who’d been on my family’s flight back to New York. She’d been in first class, and when we boarded I did a double take at the way she’d piled her chestnut hair into a perfectly disheveled updo. That’s the French for you—even their disheveled is perfect. Only, now I was checking her out for a different reason. The lock on her bag was the same as the one I’d seen in my daydream in the waiting area before our flight.

  Without a second thought, I peeled off from my family and tore ahead. As I neared her, I saw that she was younger than I’d thought—probably not much older than me. She was one of those beautiful but deadly types, with cold onyx eyes and blade-sharp cheekbones. More Hollywood starlet, less French sophisticate. And there was no question about the lock. It was exactly the same as the one I’d imagined.

  If she sensed me following her, she didn’t show it. She just kept strutting along, her heels click-clicking on the hard floor. I picked up my pace, and when I got closer I saw that her trench coat was pulled tight around a huge and suspiciously uneven lump. What was she hiding in there?

  I hung back and kept an eye on her as she wove in and out of the crowd. And then I must have blinked too slowly or something. She was gone.

  I started to panic—no doubt, she was up to something fishy, and now I’d lost her.

  Then another glimpse of pink lock—she’d veered off to the side of the passageway and opened a bathroom door. A flap of her trench coat rippled, and the door closed.

  I glanced over my shoulder. My family was catching up to me, and I knew they wanted to get out of the airport as quickly as possible. But there had to be a reason why I’d seen that pink lock in my daydream. She looked shady, and I needed to find out what she was hiding under her coat.

  I pushed past a group of stewardesses and darted over to the door. Gearing up for the worst, I pulled it open. The girl was hunched over a table by a row of sinks. In the mirror I could see her focused expression and the accordion-like folds that had formed across her forehead. Was she importing drugs? Assembling a dirty bomb? Or maybe she’d been hired by a black market adoption agency to smuggle in an illegal baby!

  I crept up behind her, my eyes set on the pink lock. I still didn’t have a plan, but I had to get to the bottom of this. And then, without really thinking about it, I reached out and grabbed her shoulder.

  She pulled away, then whipped around. Her coat was unbuttoned, and a tiny dog was on the counter, barely balancing on its legs as it lapped water out of a plastic bowl.

  “Can I help you with something?” the girl snapped at me.

  “No, I…I thought you were someone else.”

  She glared at me, and the ominous lump—or, as it turned out, the thirsty little puppy—pulled its head out of the water and sneezed.

  I could barely muster an apology as I stumbled away.

  Me and my stupid visions.

  { 1 }

  A Supposedly Beautiful Mind

  “Claire!” Dad screamed down the airport hallway. “Zeep zeep!”

  He was doing his best to sound authoritative, but with his French accent, he reminded me of Pepé Le Pew. My entire family had stopped walking and was looking at me as if I were personally responsible for how grumpy and tired they all felt after our eight-hour flight home. Mom made an exaggerated yawn, and my little brother, Henry, weighed down by his enormous backpack, crumpled against her legs.

  The girl with the puppy emerged from the bathroom and cast me a wary glance. She coasted ahead of me, and I couldn’t help taking one last look at the pink lock dangling off her bag. It was definitely the same one I’d seen in my mind before we’d boarded. Unfortunately, that was all it was.

  It didn’t mean a thing.

  “I’m coming!” I screamed.

  I’d been having visions ever since I was little, but they were usually stupid and meaningless, like Henry holding a green umbrella with a frog on it or, say, a bright pink lock—things that I’d later see in front of me but that never lead me to anything groundbreaking.

  There was one time I saw something worthwhile: a picture of a tabby cat napping in a fedora. When I saw the same image on one of my grandmother Kiki’s hatboxes, I peeked inside and found bundles of carbon-copied letters between Kiki and my mother from the time my mother was still in college. Suddenly everything made sense—my parents and Kiki didn’t clash regularly just because of a difference in lifestyles, as they’d led me to believe. There had been a massive falling-out. Kiki had violently disapproved of Mom’s getting engaged to her “penniless French professor,” and when my parents went ahead and eloped, Kiki wrote my mom a soap-opera-worthy letter saying something along the lines of “Being excluded from my only daughter’s wedding has been more painful than you, who do not yet have children, can imagine. I don’t expect I will ever fully recover.”

  This revelation was huge—and not only because it explained so much about my family. It also gave me reason enough to believe that my next vision might lead to another monumental discovery. A hope I was hanging on to for dear life.

  I never said a word to Kiki about the letters, but she already knew all about my visions. I had to tell her—the second you so much as think about a secret you’re keeping from her, she sniffs it out. And she wasn’t too weirded out when I told her. She said it was my parents’ fault since they were the ones who’d given me my name. “You don’t do that to a girl whose last name is Voyante,” she’d moaned. “Not that Claire isn’t a lovely name on its own…”

  For their part, my parents said they’d named me after my dad’s great-aunt Claire, who died in a Parisian heat wave the summer I was born. My little brother, Henry, is legally Henri, or as Dad pronounces it, On-ree. My mom, who thinks she’s French, tries to pronounce it the French way, but she forgets at least half the time.

  Down at baggage claim, Mom was channeling her inner Frenchwoman. “Voilà! There it is!” she cried, waving her Evian bottle across the carousel as if her luggage might be looking for her, too. Even when she’s shouting, Mom’s voice is light and girly, the polar opposite of my own husky
rasp.

  “You see it?” Dad asked. He squinted and perched on his tiptoes to look past the crowd. “Ah, there’s mine, coming right along behind yours!” And then he pulled Mom in close and kissed her, as if their suitcases’ being next to each other were the most romantic thing in the world.

  I guess that’s the way it goes when your mom isn’t just beautiful but hot. And we’re not talking hot-for-a-mom, here. She’s unfairly, across-the-board hot, with huge drowsy eyes and chopstick-skinny limbs.

  As fate would have it, I look like my dad, or at least the way he would look if he were a fifteen-year-old girl and not a middle-aged French professor. I’m short and blond, with a Cheerio-shaped mouth, a flat chest, and a megabutt—I’m keeping my fingers crossed for future developments. The only way I’ve figured out to wear my puffy hair is in a high ponytail. Most people say that the most distinctive thing about me is that I have one green and one hazel eye, but I think my friend Louis nailed it when he said I’m always scrunching up my nose like a confused duck. Attractive, I know.

  As we gathered our baggage and headed toward the exit, we could see our friend and neighbor Cheri-Lee Vird waiting for us in her teal Honda at the curb. “Yoo-hoo!” She stuck her bright red bob out the car window. Mom and Dad don’t believe in paying for cabs (or, for that matter, new books or name-brand cereal) and always arrange to have somebody pick us up at the airport. Cheri-Lee is generally that somebody.

  “Sorry if we kept you waiting,” Mom said when we were all squished inside the car. We had more luggage than the trunk could hold, so Henry sat on my lap in the oh-so-comfortable elbow-jutting-into-spleen configuration.

  Since she’d taken us to the airport at the beginning of the summer, Cheri-Lee had done some decorating on her car. A flock of red plastic swallows was pinned to the felt covering the ceiling, and she’d affixed turquoise roses to the steering wheel. Over the last year she’d started to go through a crafty phase, dip-dying old nightgowns and attending potato-stamping seminars. Looked as though the party wasn’t over yet.

  “You must be exhausted,” Cheri-Lee said, adjusting the rearview mirror. “Travel can be so discombobulating.” As a poetry professor, Cheri-Lee feels it’s her duty to trot out interesting words. “I was stuck in the library for the past three months. Nothing like fluorescent lighting to keep a summer glow away. For the love of the Dewey decimal system, tell me your summer was better.”

  “Oui,” Dad said. “I think it was better.”

  “Care to elaborate?” Cheri-Lee cut into another lane.

  “We went all over,” I piped up. “Paris, the countryside, the South. We saw family, old castles, unpasteurized cheese stores, nude beaches…”

  “You wild and crazy Europeans!” Cheri-Lee tittered. “Now, Claire, I hope you’ve had your fill—wild and crazy isn’t really Hudson’s specialty. Still, there’s nothing wrong with a bright new beginning! Sheila sure loved her fresh start.”

  Oof. Why did she have to bring up Henry Hudson ten minutes after we’d touched ground? Then again, if we waited a hundred years, I still wouldn’t want to talk about Henry Hudson High, the school I was starting in a few days. It was a nerd school on the Lower East Side known for its competitive math and science departments, nationally ranked chess club, and recurring asbestos problem. It was also the school Cheri-Lee’s daughter, Sheila, attended.

  Sheila and I used to be close, so close that the summer after sixth grade I convinced my parents to let me skip our annual French vacation and join Sheila at Camp Maple Rock. The problem was, Sheila attended a two-day “precamp” for returning campers, and by the time I arrived, the former sword and sorcery fanatic had managed to become normal and befriend all the popular kids she’d been making fun of in her letters to me for the past two summers. I couldn’t believe it—as soon as I showed up, she acted as if she barely knew me. And things didn’t get any better when I became friends with Hayden Chapman, her cute shaggy-haired boyfriend from the summer before. Nothing ever happened between Hayden and me, but Sheila—and the rest of Camp Maple Rock—was convinced otherwise. Two years later, Sheila and I still barely spoke, but Mom and Cheri-Lee were constantly scheming to get us back together.

  “You’re going to get such a phenomenal education,” Cheri-Lee hooted. Dad—Henry Hudson’s biggest advocate—turned around and sent me an approving wink. Cheri-Lee went on, “Trust me, this school is nothing like Farmhouse.”

  I felt as if I was going to choke. Was this supposed to be encouraging? I had no desire to leave the Farmhouse School, my spiritual home for the last nine years. Farmhouse, a school for the “gifted and talented,” was the best place ever. A few members of a communist theater troupe had founded it in the 1940s, and it had everything a kid could want in a school: tiny classes, no exams, a test kitchen where students could conduct their own chocolate fondue experiments. There was even an extended family of rabbits living in the backyard.

  There was, however, one terrible thing about Farmhouse: since they didn’t normally give tests, the school made its ninth graders take the entrance exam to Henry Hudson as practice. It was billed as a precautionary measure against future SAT disasters. If you bombed the Hudson test, you were required to go to standardized test tutoring until you got the hang of taking exams.

  I didn’t think much about the test, not even when I ended up acing it. It wasn’t as if there was any chance I’d end up at a school like Henry Hudson. Farmhouse valued creativity, community, and eccentricity, the same things Mom and Dad stood for.

  Supposedly.

  That was before my acceptance letter came. Henry Hudson was free. Mom and Dad were cash strapped. You do the math.

  There was no way I was going. A whole lot of kicking and screaming ensued. I burst into tears at the dinner table, on multiple occasions. When that didn’t work, I went on a two-day silent strike. Mom and Dad still didn’t back down, so I appealed to Kiki, but she wasn’t any help, either. “I’m sorry, dear,” she’d said, “but seeing that I’d only spend my money on a fine boarding school and I’m not interested in your living any farther away from me than you already do, I’m afraid I can’t be of any assistance.”

  Of course Henry gets to stay at Farmhouse. In Mom and Dad’s opinion, Henry is a genius who deserves a place at a school for the creatively gifted and talented. And I hadn’t shown any signs of talent, unless you count knowing the words to most sixties girl group songs or chasing innocent girls and puppies into airport bathrooms.

  Even though my friends from Farmhouse said they knew it wasn’t my fault I was leaving, everything changed—and fast. I’d always been fairly popular, but after word got out that I was leaving, people started acting weird. My parents said it was because they were jealous that I’d done so well on the test, but I knew the truth: they were mad at me for splitting. And at the end of the year, when Sarah Blumenthal had a party and invited everybody but the class mute Cyd Federman and me, I wasn’t all that surprised.

  “Cheri-Lee’s talking to you,” Henry said, poking me in the thigh. I looked out my backseat window and realized we were already cruising down Houston Street. Labor Day was just a few days off, and people in shorts and flip-flops were shuffling around as if they had nowhere to go.

  “You should come over and visit Sheila before school starts,” Cheri-Lee was saying. “I’m sure there’s gobs of advice she can give you.”

  “That would be wonderful,” Mom chimed in.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Cheri-Lee trilled. “I know the school has a reputation for being a little dorky, but Sheila’s posse is completely adorable. Not a single pocket protector in the bunch. Oh, and did you know you’re in the same homeroom? Talk about serendipity!”

  “That’s…great.” Groaning internally, I folded my hands around Henry’s waist and dug my nose into his shoulder. I didn’t want to talk about serendipity, or anything else, for that matter.

  { 2 }

  Cameo Appearance

  We live in building number two of Washington V
iew Village, a New York University faculty-housing complex whose name is an eternal mystery to me. None of the apartments have views of Washington Square Park, and all the buildings in the complex are over twenty stories tall—not exactly the first image that springs to mind when you hear the word village.

  When we walked into the lobby, everything felt slightly unfamiliar, no one else in my family seemed the least bit disoriented and they started for the elevator as if it were just any other old day.

  Upstairs, our apartment was a wreck, even more so than usual. In addition to the books and the rest of the summer’s mail strewn everywhere, a couple of French country plates had fallen from their wall brackets, and there was a vaguely sour smell coming from the refrigerator.

  Mom went directly for the mail and pulled all her missed issues of the Planet out, as if nothing were out of the ordinary and we hadn’t just come back from the other side of the world. Mom supplements her career ghostwriting autobiographies for C-list celebrities with writing a horoscope column for the country’s second-most-popular gossip magazine. Don’t get me wrong—Mom isn’t a professional astrologer by any stretch of the imagination. When her old friend Tom Blakeson dropped out of grad school to move to Tampa and edit the Planet, he gave Mom her first astrology assignment as a joke. In her head shot—“Priscilla Pluto’s” head shot, that is—she’s posed over a pot of boiling water for a smoky effect with our blue floral tablecloth around her head like a turban. With her attention deficit disorder, she never could hold down a regular job, so her weird combination of jobs-you-never-knew-existed is perfect for her. Besides, it’s pretty obvious she sees hero-worshipping Dad as her real job.

  “There’s no place like home,” I said, ditching my suitcase and kicking my new Lacoste sneakers onto the shoe heap by the door. Mom and Dad say their no-shoes rule is to keep the rugs clean, though it’s plain as day they think having everybody in socks or bare feet ups the place’s bohemian street cred.

  I aimed for Mom’s left purple sandal. My right shoe skidded over to land by Henry’s galoshes, but the left one was a perfect shot. If only this qualified as being athletically inclined.