Dream Life Read online

  I could feel my cheeks crimsoning, and I was dangerously close to screaming with frustration.

  “That picture is more realistic than reality,” Andy marveled.

  I made myself take a deep breath before speaking. “I’m glad you find it all so fascinating.”

  “Sorry.” He was holding back laughter. “At least you’re not one of those people who only look good in photographs and are freaky in real life.”

  And that was that supposed to make me feel better?

  “That picture doesn’t do you justice,” he clarified, sensing my hurt feelings. His eyes lingered on me a beat before turning back to Becca. “Let me know if you find my book, okay?”

  She nodded and put her arm around my shoulders after her brother left the room. “Ignore him,” she said.

  If only it were that simple. Turns out that when the boy of your dreams decides to stop liking you, ignoring him is the last thing you feel like doing.

  { 6 }

  Girl at Random

  I left Becca to catch up on her sleep and tried my hardest to dart past Andy’s room without attracting his attention. Which might have been easier to do if I weren’t lugging around an enormous red bicycle.

  “Claire, wait!” I looked back to see Andy poking his head out the door, motioning for me to come over. Damn it. No matter how many droplets of anger were polluting my bloodstream, I couldn’t say no to that guy.

  Once Andy had reeled me back, he patted a spot next to him on the couch. “Have a seat.” He fixed a smile on me. “I’ll behave.”

  “I trust you,” I said, maybe somewhat bitterly, from my spot in his doorway. In truth, it was myself I didn’t trust. I was trying my hardest to forget about him. If I came in and sat down next to him I’d end up saying something stupid or staring dopily at his rosebud lips and saying nothing at all. “Actually, I have to get going.”

  “I’m walking out too,” he said, jumping up. “Can you hold on one second? I just have to find that book. I know it’s here.”

  “Fine,” I huffed. Waiting for him in the doorway, I focused on everything in his room that wasn’t Andy himself—the Columbia hoodie on the floor, the bookshelf of dog-eared paperbacks, the wall that was covered with children’s crayon drawings of ghosts and skyscrapers.

  “Why are you being like that?” came his voice.

  My gaze shot back to Andy as he dug his arm deep into the couch. “I don’t want you to be upset,” he said.

  Then don’t be so cold to me.

  Before I could think better of it, my eyes were drawn to his lips. His perfect lips. His perfect lips, which I wanted to kiss. I was screwed.

  “Everyone can look weird in pictures,” he said.

  Oh right, that was what he was talking about.

  “It could be worse,” he went on. “You could have to go to tutoring every stupid waking hour.”

  I looked down and sighed. Part of me felt sorry for Andy. But only a small part. I was also mad at him. If he just spent a little less time wandering around the city and a little more time at school, he wouldn’t be suffering like this. And while we were on the subject, he wouldn’t have an excuse to avoid me.

  “Looks like we’re in business.” He plucked his Spanish book out from a crack between his couch cushions. “I wish I wasn’t running late, we could get lunch or something.”

  Still unsmiling, he stepped closer and looked at me straight in the eyes. His mouth did that trembly thing it does before he grins. Without saying a word, he wrapped my burgundy chenille scarf around and around my neck until there wasn’t any scarf left to wrap.

  “Much better,” he said.

  I’m not proud, but my heart cracked like an egg.

  We walked downstairs and I stalled outside the house, waiting for him to put his gloves on.

  “Anyway,” Andy said. “I heard what happened at the park.”

  I gave him a double take. “How’d you—”

  “Family privileges, I guess.” He shrugged. “Plus her big mouth. Of all the members of our family, I’m the only one who wouldn’t kill her for her little mistake. You have no idea what a lucky thing it is that the picture was of you and not Becca. If our parents ever found out how careless she’d been …” He puffed out his cheeks. “You know my sister. Sometimes she doesn’t think things through.”

  Andy is only two years older than Becca, but he was talking like he had his kid sister beat by a century.

  “She seems to know what she’s doing,” I told him.

  “Sure, in some ways. But she had no idea how close she came to messing things up. I mean, not until it was stupidly late. And now that she’s in the Moons”—he paused to raise his eyebrows proudly—”she has to be extra careful.”

  I felt a stab of disbelief.

  “Wait—how do you know about the Moons? And how do you know I know about them?”

  He grinned. “She was nervous about telling you.”

  Everything in my head went slightly foggy

  “And you know everything about the Moons?”

  “A little.” He smiled, little crinkles forming at the corners of his eyes. “It’s kind of messed up. My grandmother was insistent that Becca join, but she doesn’t get it. In her day there wasn’t even a rival club, let alone an Internet.”

  Weird. Becca hadn’t said anything about a rival club. Could they be the merry pranksters behind Moonwatcher.net?

  “If you ask me,” Andy went on, “it’s a high price to pay for belonging to some ring of socialites. She’s lucky she has you to keep her out of trouble.”

  Was he on to something or was he just being nice to make up for his earlier gaffe?

  “I just went to the bathroom,” I replied nervously. Kiki had told me I wasn’t to let anybody know about my strange dreams.

  “Whatever, you still did my sister a huge favor. Good looking out. Or as the Spanish say …” He opened his textbook and consulted a couple of pages. “Gracias para ir al baño.”

  “That was beautiful.” I rolled my eyes.

  His gaze lingered on me and church bells started to peal in the background. I turned away, embarrassed by the yummy sugarplum feeling that was spreading through me.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” I lied, “I just wanted to see where the bells were coming from.”

  “Christ, it’s one already! My tutor is going to kill me.”

  “I’m not keeping you here,” I told him, irritated.

  “You kind of are.” He made sure to glance up at Becca’s window first, then leaned in and gave me a speedy peck on the lips. It would have been nice if it had lasted long enough for me to realize what was happening. “Don’t be a stranger, okay?” he said.

  Watching him charge toward Fifth Avenue, I could feel myself lighting up inside, and I also felt slightly ashamed. Why was he so sure I’d wait around for whatever rare moments he happened to feel like kissing me? And why was he so worried about keeping his tutor waiting around for five stupid minutes when I’d been right here for ages?

  By the time I got home, I was done trying to decipher Andy’s mixed messages. I knew I had to stop with the wishful thinking and be realistic: by this point, he was probably just stringing me along in case he ever started to like me again.

  I poured myself an Orangina and went straight to my computer. First, I checked my e-mail, and found a message from Andy that just asked if I was more scared of heights or snakes. I didn’t bother responding to his random question—Kiki always says the thing men like less than clingy women is those who don’t put up a chase. Besides, I had more urgent things to deal with.

  Moonwatcher.net was easy to find, and Becca hadn’t been kidding when she said that the site wasn’t cutting edge. The majority of the pages were labeled “Under Construction” or “Check Back Soon” and the ones that did have pictures weren’t much to write home about either. Excluding the glamour shot of yours truly, all the other images of teenage girls appeared to have been taken with cell p
hones from very far away, and it was hard to tell the real members apart from the children of divorce who were headed to their therapist’s office. I would have been hard-pressed to identify Becca if it weren’t for her trademark brown leather satchel.

  Feeling let down, I stood up to put on the Primettes, the girl group most of the members of the Supremes started out in when they were still little kids. I can always count on them to sing me out of a funk.

  My hip must have banged into the computer when I’d got up to reach for my iPod, because when I looked back at the screen, a new picture was up. Like so much of my life, I hit the jackpot by total accident.

  It’s January, which means it’s New Moon season. We proudly present you with a guide to the newest inductees. Please be understanding of the lack of detail—we’re still gathering information on the new crop. Watch this space.

  Annika Gitter (Gitter, Lowell & Harrison—Attorneys at Law)

  “Least Likely Moon”

  –Loud as a trumpet.

  –Annika puts in an appearance at every party, often with her frenemy Cosi de la Goya.

  –Don’t expect anything she says to make sense—we hear she’s no Einstein.

  Diana Stoeffels (Stoeffels Realty Development)

  “Horsey Moon”

  –A die-hard animal lover, Diana has been spotted talking to squirrels and birds in Central Park.

  –Keeps her thoroughbred Blue Thunder in a Cold Springs stable.

  –Rumored to be a nudist.

  Reagan Hendricks (GDB Global Media)

  “Pale Moon”

  –Has the blondest hair in New York—and it’s supposedly natural.

  –A senior at Brookfield Academy, she’s the oldest Moon, and is headed to Dartmouth next year.

  –Throws infamous house parties (her parents are always in L.A.).

  –Only eats sugar-based products.

  Poppy Williamson (Red Apple Bank)

  “Man on the Moon”

  –Don’t let her baby face fool you—Poppy has gone out with every boy north of Canal Street… all for less than a week (it’s rumored she’s never gone farther than a kiss).

  –Taller than most professional basketball players (some of whom she’s dated).

  –Used to study at New York City Ballet, hence her impeccable posture.

  Samantha “Sills” Dressler (Dressler Life Insurance)

  “Loner Moon”

  –Armed with a bone-dry wit and Veronica Lake hairdo, Sills doesn’t get the pack mentality.

  –BFF with her dad, Jackson.

  –Used to date Wiley Martins.

  –Still might date Wiley Martins?

  Rebecca Shuttleworth (Soul Sauce fortune)

  “Scary Moon”

  –Die-hard horror movie aficionado.

  –Studies opera at Lincoln Center.

  –The most enigmatic New Moon, Becca takes after her kooky mother and doesn’t care about social customs. Attended zero galas last year and hangs out with Clara, a random girl from Henry Hudson High. Nobody knows anything about her.

  There were also write-ups on a bunch of girls whose names I didn’t recognize, but I didn’t bother with the false leads. I was too keyed up, and, yes, a little hurt from the lame mention I’d scored. But I could either sit there licking my wounds or I could do some snooping of my own.

  Not surprisingly, my Google search of Annika Gitter, Miss Teen Vogue, was incredibly fruitful. She was pictured on countless society Web sites, often accompanied by a girl who had a thing for wearing her dresses backward—I could only assume this was the famous frenemy “Cosi.”

  The other five girls were a different story. There were only a handful of pictures of them, which was interesting considering how many parties their ridiculously connected families must get invited to on a daily basis. Reagan, the ghostly one with the media mogul parents, was last photographed at a movie opening when she was twelve. There were two pictures of Sills—one taking a walk with her dad, the other wearing a grungy knit hat and trying to have a secret brunch with my former classmate, Wiley Martins. The supposedly boy-crazy Poppy Williamson was captured leading a jazz dance class at a public school in the South Bronx. Becca was looking off to the side in a Young Friends of Lincoln Center Christmas party shot. And on the Web site for Miller’s Saddlery store, there were a few shots of redhead Diana “Horsey Moon” Stoeffels, rocking an outfit that was appropriate for the English countryside circa 1896. And yet, she still looked crazy good. If I ever dared to don a riding cap, the horse would take one look at me and gallop away.

  The thing that really did my head in, though, was the realization that I’d been so clueless all this time. I’d always taken it for granted that Becca’s social life was limited to her family and me, and that her reason for maintaining a low profile was that she wasn’t interested in rubbing her good fortune in everyone’s faces. How had I never stopped to consider that she belonged to a world that mandated keeping under the radar?

  I’d grown up shuttling between my immediate family’s pseudo-bohemia and Kiki’s world of former playboys and showgirls, where nothing could be too fabulous or loud. The concept of an upper echelon where people’s entire lives were to be conducted in secret was too alien to even begin to understand.

  I chewed the end of a pencil as I stared at the screen. My dreams seemed to be pointing me to the club. But was it my cameo’s way of keeping Becca and me from drifting apart, or was something bigger going on?

  Last thing I did was check the Blue Moons’ official Web site. It was password protected, so I didn’t get far, and the main page provided precious little information. The tagline said its “volunteers” had been “making New York a better place since 1743” and featured a group photograph that looked like it had been taken around the same time (okay, the 1980s). A group of girls with puffy, Princess Diana–like hairdos were clustered around a young girl in a wheelchair. It gave an East Seventy-third Street address, which was probably now the psychiatrists’ office. There was no club e-mail or phone number, and no pictures that had been taken anytime since the invention of roll-on deodorant.

  “Claire.” Mom’s voice scared me. I turned around to see her sinewy body leaning in the doorway. Her face bore a trace of embarrassment. “I just made some langue du chat cookies and discovered after they started baking that Henry had left his Shrinky Dinks in the oven.”

  “Uh-huh?” I said. Not that Mom ever notices anything, but I minimized the screen, just in case.

  “I can’t tell if the cookies taste like burned plastic or if the room just smells that way,” Mom went on, utterly clueless. “Can you spare your professional opinion?”

  “Okay, one sec.” As I was getting up, something made me open the window again, and what I saw this time made me fall right back in my seat.

  The little girl in the wheelchair was holding on to a butt-ugly Cabbage Patch doll. Just like in my Santa dream.

  “Claire?” Mom almost sounded worried.

  “Coming,” I said, squinting at the photograph until it was nothing but pixels and dust. It made zero sense, but there had to be more where that came from. And there had to be more going with this club than I understood.

  It was kind of scary, but it sure beat a life of pretty gardens and Shrinky Dinks.

  { 7 }

  Flight of the Swann

  The French writer Marcel Proust was born in the middle of July, though not a single one of my parents’ regular Proust birthday parties has ever taken place in the summer, or even in the same month. Dad tries to sell the scattershot nature of the tradition as an “homage” to Proust’s book In Search of Lost Time, but I don’t buy it. My space cadet parents just like to fill the apartment with madeleine cookies and their crazy-pants friends whenever the mood strikes.

  All this to say, while Becca must have been running around with her secret socialites, Henry and I spent Saturday evening helping our parents get ready for the fifth annual Proust party—and by “helping” them I mean we were doing
the work while Dad graded papers and Mom locked herself away in the bathroom, applying Eau d’Hadrian lotion or whatever it is she does to get in the French mood.

  Every now and again, she’d drift out into the living area in various stages of makeup to say how “magnifique” the place looked. And even though he was chained to his wheelie desk, Dad was also in unusually good spirits. When I put one of my favorite CDs on the stereo, he cried out, “The Zoup-reams!” and raised his stubby thumbs ceiling-ward.

  After a little while, Henry’s friend from downstairs, Rio Dershowitz, came by.

  “You ready?” he asked my brother.

  “We’re working on a secret project,” Henry said by way of explanation. Rio was impatiently jiggling in place. “We’ll be back.”

  “All three of us,” I heard Rio say as he and my brother disappeared into the hallway, their footsteps followed by peals of mad scientist laughter.

  I felt a pang of depression. How was it that the only semi-normal member of my family was also the only one who had nothing better to do on a Saturday night than put out paper cocktail napkins for my parents’ friends? And how was it that instead of feeling bitter, I was grateful for any distractions from my own nonlife? Becca had her mysterious secret society plan and Louis had told me he was spending the night manning the waterless urinal booth at Farmhouse’s sustainability fair. I continued to spruce up the place and tried not to take it personally when Diana Ross sang about being trapped in a world that’s a distorted reality.

  “Bravo!” Dad exclaimed after I propped the last remaining prop—a Proust postcard—over one of Mom’s Versailles snow globes. “Now vas-y. Go and be fifteen.”

  Like the thought hadn’t occurred to me.

  For once, I was relieved to see Mom poking her head out the bathroom door and smiling sheepishly my way.

  “Claire, I still need to finish my column and send it off. What can I do to convince you to look after the crudités? Everything’s in the fridge and—”