I sense more than hear the purr as the engine turns over. I pull away from the curb cautiously, not because I’m a cautious driver by nature, but because I am still in character. Once I’ve turned out of sight of the house, I crank the radio up and slide the windows down while I push the gas pedal to coax the car to a peppier speed. It’s a warm Sunday in early September, and I want to milk it for all it’s worth. With one hand, I pull out the pins holding my hair back, letting the tangled tresses fall naturally to my shoulders.
Sam knows I’m not a legal driver. We’ve known each other since fourth grade, when we started pulling the three-card monte on our classmates, so he’s well aware of my age. You’d think he’d be more nervous about lending his brand-new Volvo to an untried, untested, unlicensed driver. But then, I’m the one who taught him how to drive.
Ten minutes later, I pull into the parking lot of my local coffee haunt, the Ballou, which is half a block from the St. Aggie’s campus, and claim a space next to a souped-up seventies muscle car. Chevelle, I think, though I’m hardly an expert. Black with two thick white racing stripes down the hood and windows tinted black enough to put Jay-Z’s to shame.
I take off my jacket and untuck my blouse. Kicking off the heels, I flip open my ratty old canvas bag and take out my well-worn Converse high-tops. I wriggle my feet into them as I tie my hair up again. Then I toss the glasses into the bag and grab my dad’s old leather jacket.
The Ballou is pretty much what you’d expect a coffee shop to be: wooden tables, scuffed and stuffed chairs, a lacquered bar polished to within an inch of its life, a smattering of patrons sipping lattes and reading Yeats. You see lots of MacBooks and iPads, and the occasional stack of textbooks gathering dust while their owners text or surf the Web.
Sam is sitting at our favorite rickety, mismatched table with the cardboard coffee-cup sleeve under one of the legs.
“To the minute,” Sam says, spotting me over the top of his graphic novel. “I’ll never know how you can guess that close.”
“Just have to know the mark.”
“That’s what you say for everything,” he says, smiling and moving his bag aside.
“Well, it’s true for everything,” I say while I casually steal his cappuccino.
Sam has a gorgeous smile. I often tease him about it, which he hates, or at least pretends to hate. But I think he secretly appreciates being noticed for something besides his status as the only son of Hudson Seward, board chairman of the Seward Group and the richest black man in Chicago. Sam wants to escape his father’s name as much as Heather wants out from under her mother’s iron fist.
Everyone wants something, I suppose. Me? I want a full ride to Yale. Hence my internment at St. Agatha’s.
“How’d it go?”
I yawn.
“That good?”
“Cake,” I say. “But we prepped well this time.” I take a swig of his coffee.
“As opposed to any other time?”
“Granted.” I set his keys on the table. “Thanks for the car.”
He pockets the keys. “And you’re thanking me because …?”
“Hey, I say thank you sometimes.” I cradle the cup between my hands to warm them.
“No you don’t,” he says.
“Yes I do.”
He plucks the cup out of my grasp and leans back. “No you don’t.”
I’ve just conceded when Heather appears. I don’t love that she insisted on meeting up with us, but she’s the sort who needs to know each step of the plan in detail. She’s more her mother’s daughter than she thinks. She slips gracefully into the chair next to mine.
“That went … well?” she says with a slight question at the end, like she’s asking for confirmation.
“It did,” I say. I make it a policy to avoid hand-holding. But she’s my client, and far be it from me to begrudge her a bit of customer service.
“So what now?” She huddles into herself and lowers her voice to a whisper. Really, how my clients keep anything a secret when their body language continually screams Look at me! I’m planning something nefarious! is beyond me. I guess it’s true what the French say: fortune favors the innocent. Lucky for me, it also favors the moderately dishonest.
“Now I welcome you to NYU,” I say.
Then I detail the rest of the plan, which involves sending Heather a fake internship offer from a modeling agency to raise the stakes. Mrs. Stratton will be so desperate to secure Heather’s spot at NYU she won’t think to question our irregular instructions for sending the tuition check. In my profession, this is called the shutout, and it works every time.
“But how do I cash a check made out to NYU?” Heather asks.
“It won’t be made out to NYU. It will be made out to me. Or to Jena Scott, actually.”
“You think she’ll fall for that?”
“Fall for it? She’ll be the one suggesting it. Trust me, the check is the easy part.”
Heather’s doubt is evident, but she’s not the one whose confidence I’m trying to steal.
A half hour later, Sam drops me off at my apartment building.
“Catch you on the dark side,” I say as I get out and head to the front door.
“The dark side is a bad thing,” Sam calls after me.
I wave while he pulls away from the curb, shaking his head at me.
“Hi, Fred,” I say to the homeless man sitting between the row of mailboxes and the radiator in the entryway.
“Hey, Julep,” he says in his Dominican accent. “How’s shit going?”
“Shit’s good,” I say, and open our mailbox. I pull the comics out of the paper and hand them to Fred. If anyone needs a laugh, it’s him.
In case the homeless guy hasn’t given it away, my dad and I live deep in the West Side slums—the same apartment building we’ve been in since my mom left us. I was eight at the time, so that’s, what? Seven years? Well, in all that time I’ve seen neither hide nor hair of any maintenance personnel beyond the very occasional plumber.
I’m so used to it, though, that I climb the narrow stairs without seeing the fuchsia and black graffiti or the grime in the corners. In fact, I don’t even notice when I get to our apartment that the door is slightly open. When I try to put my key in the lock, the door swings away from me. Still, I’m distracted by a tuition bill from St. Aggie’s, so I walk right in.
The first thing I notice is my dad’s chair tipped upside down, the stuffing from the cushion littered around it like yellow sea foam. My lungs constrict as I take in the rest of our belongings: Pictures torn down to reveal stained walls. Drawers pulled out and overturned. Even some of the linoleum flooring in the kitchen has been ripped up and left in curling strips.
“Dad?” The sound of my heart hammering is probably carrying farther than my voice.
This makes no sense. We have nothing worth stealing—no one breaks into the apartments in our building for monetary gain. Not that there isn’t violence; it’s just usually domestic or drug-related.
I push open the door to my dad’s room and it gets stuck about a third of the way open. This room is in even worse shape than the rest of the apartment. Books and papers and blankets and broken bits of furniture cover the ratty carpet like shrapnel from a bomb blast. But still no Dad. At this point, I’m not so sure that’s a bad thing.