CHAPTER ONE
I bury my secrets in a potted plant on West Seventeenth Street. There’s nobody inside the brightly lit lobby of the apartment building next to me, and only a couple of people farther along the street. A man and a woman. From their loud, slurred voices, I guess they’ve just rolled out of Bar Qua. They’re not interested in a seventeen-year-old girl loitering next to an overly primped topiary.
I shove three things into the dirt. Nothing too shocking, really: a keychain, a lighter, and a lurid pink lipstick.
The keychain I stole from some guy. I saw a girl give it to him outside the public library, and there was something about the heat in her cheeks that made me tell my tutor I was going to use the restroom, and I followed the boy inside. The moment he took his jacket off, I grabbed the keychain from his pocket.
It’s not fancy or expensive, only a silver letter D. I just wanted to see if I could get away with it.
The cigar lighter is Nolan’s—my dad’s. I took it because I knew it would piss him off. That’s a good, solid reason, right? It’s gold, and has the looping double N of his initials engraved on the casing. I’m sorry I didn’t guess he would accuse and then fire the housekeeper when the lighter failed to show up, but I didn’t, and he did, and so it became a secret.
The pink lipstick is my newest acquisition. I stole it tonight from the restroom of Bar Qua—the same bar the couple up the street just stumbled out of. I just couldn’t resist hiding one last secret before leaving New York behind.
I don’t always take things that aren’t mine. I usually just scribble my secrets on scraps of paper and bury those. But I’ve been stealing more and more over the last few weeks. Small things, like a pen or a pair of sunglasses left on a restaurant table. Easily missed. Easily slipped into a pocket or purse. I know this isn’t a healthy development or anything, but at least it is a development. My life doesn’t have many of those. And it’s good to have a hobby, I guess.
There was a farewell party going on in the bar. This guy with hard, over-gelled hair and a loose tie was at the center of it all. I hung around, having a few drinks, eating hors d’oeuvres, daring someone to notice me.
Look at me. Go on, look.
But they didn’t know that I’m the daughter of a legend. All they saw was a strange girl not talking to anyone. Then came the inevitable frown from Mr. Hard Hair, the exchange of raised eyebrows with Ms. Chardonnay and Ms. Lipstick Teeth: Do you know her? No, you? No. And then the subtle shift in temperature as that group of connected people closed ranks and froze me out.
Of course they didn’t recognize me. Nobody ever does unless I’m next to Nolan. He trots me out all the time at parties. Industry parties. Parties where people know him well enough that they wouldn’t dream of taking my picture or paying me more than the most fleeting of glances, because everybody knows that you don’t cross Nolan Nox.
Twenty minutes after Mr. Hard Hair and Ms. Chardonnay and Ms. Lipstick Teeth looked me straight in the eye, I’d be surprised if even one of them remembered seeing me.
After being dismissed, I wandered to the restroom and saw the garish pink lipstick sitting next to the sink. Two young women—one of them the owner of the lipstick, I guess—were involved in a very animated discussion about some older woman named Celine Reynard who was, by all accounts, a two-faced bitch. I washed my hands and pretended to smooth my hair in the mirror.
“And the whole time, she was screwing Joanna’s teenage son behind her back! Can you imagine?”
I could imagine—quite vividly, which I probably shouldn’t have. Celine, who I’d decided was probably elegantly gray-haired and svelte, with some pimply kid energetically grinding away while Joanna went about her day, making business calls or cooking a lasagna or driving to the liquor store or whatever mothers do, totally oblivious to the skin show going on behind her back.
Maybe Joanna should pay a little more attention to her son.
“What did you do?” the other woman asked.
The first woman shrugged. “What could I do? I wasn’t going to be the one to tell Joanna and have Celine call me a liar to my face.”
She used washing her hands as an excuse to break eye contact, her nostrils flaring. Was she lying? Her neck had started to turn blotchy.
Before I could make up my mind, the other woman changed the subject to a boring update on her home renovations, so I tuned out. I was about to leave when my gaze snagged on the lipstick sitting next to the sink. Casually, I reached out and slipped it into my pocket. Walked to the door. Let the throbbing music of the bar swallow me.
And they didn’t even glance my way. They were as oblivious as poor Joanna. But did that make me Celine Reynard—stealthy rogue, breaking all the rules? Or was I Joanna’s sweaty son, craving attention? I search the cracks in the sidewalk for an answer. If it’s there, it’s buried too deep for me to see.
It isn’t the car itself, but the harsh screech of its tires that catches my attention. My heart sinks. It’s Nolan’s car, though I doubt he’s inside. This is confirmed when the driver’s-side window rolls down and my father’s assistant glares out at me. “Get in the car, Lola!”
“Hey, Larry,” I monotone, making no move to get in. I tilt my head and tap my chin. “Did you do something new with your beard?”
He hasn’t, of course. His beard is probably exactly the same as when he first grew it in kindergarten. Larry Brown is a short, stocky man with black hair covering pretty much every part of him you can see. I saw a documentary once about some guy who absorbed his twin in utero, but it kept growing inside him like a tumor until it was the size of a raccoon. When they cut it out, the tumor-twin was this mass of flesh with hair and teeth growing out of it.
That’s what I think of when I see Larry.
“Nolan texted me, said to come find you,” he says, ignoring the beard thing.
“He texted you? Nolan doesn’t text.”
“Well, he did tonight,” Larry snaps. I stifle a wince. For Nolan to text Larry rather than call, he must be too incandescent with rage to actually speak. And I caused that. “Damn it, Lola! You know you shouldn’t be here. He’ll be out of his mind worrying about you.” He sighs. He’s an aggressive sigher. I guess I’ve messed up his plans for the night, whatever they were. “What were you thinking?”
“Oh, Larry,” I drawl, channeling Lestat from Interview with the Vampire. “I thought only of oblivion, of course.”
It’s easy for me to slide into another persona like this. I watch way too many movies.
If Larry gets the reference, he gives no sign of it. He’s probably too distracted by the vein pulsing all the way up the middle of his forehead.
I bite my lip, but stop as soon as I notice I’m doing it. Nolan would tell me I look like an airhead. Not Optimal.