Scarlett Fever

DINNER IS ALSO FOR SUCKERS

Coming at them through the melee of waiters and bright yellow chairs and blue tables and guacamole carts was Chip Sutcliffe, Lola’s ex-boyfriend.

“I didn’t do this,” Lola said quickly. “I swear.”

Scarlett believed her. Lola’s constant, unfailing composure completely fell away for a moment, and she backed up gracelessly into a dark corner by the host stand, bumping her head into a low-hanging piñata of a yellow cab.

“So this is a coincidence?” Spencer asked. “We just stumbled on Chip while he was on a mad, lonely hunt for tacos?”

Lola shook her head in confusion.

Chip paused in his progress and stood by a large cactus, prodding it gently with one outstretched finger. Marlene had his other hand and was tugging him along, trying to force him onward.

“I told you,” Scarlett said, pointing. “I told you.” She was glad to have her worst suspicions vindicated—Marlene had been up to something. There was nothing quite like the sweet, sweet nectar of being right.

“You have to be kidding me,” Spencer said. “You told me you were taking us out.”

“I was covering for Marlene,” Lola said, flustered. “She wanted it to be a surprise.”

“How the hell would Marlene be able to afford this?”

“You know how she gets stuff through Powerkids. I figured she had a gift certificate or something and was sharing it. She gets all kinds of things. I didn’t know!”

“So what do we do now?” Scarlett asked. “Want to have family dinner night with your ex?”

“Well, we can’t leave,” Lola said.

“Why?” Spencer asked.

“We’re here for Marlene,” Lola said.

“If Marlene wants to have dinner with Chip, let her have dinner with Chip.”

Something very strange had come over Scarlett’s older sister. There was a totally foreign blush to her paper-white cheeks, and she was rocking a bit on her low heels.

“Don’t leave me,” she said, clutching them both by an arm. “Please. Don’t leave me. Tomorrow, he’s gone. He goes to Boston for school. You won’t have to deal with him anymore.”

“I thought the day you broke up with him was the day I didn’t have to deal with him anymore,” Spencer said, looking at the tiny, pale hand that gripped his wrist.

“You weren’t that picky on the day he saved your show. You owe him.”

This, sadly, was true. Chip had played a large part in making Hamlet happen by distracting their parents on a day-long cruise on the Sutcliffe family boat, giving Spencer and Scarlett enough time to load in an entire cast and stage a show. He did this after Lola had broken up with him, no less.

“Look,” Lola said, when neither Spencer nor Scarlett responded to that statement. “Maybe…I don’t know. I want to stay. But I can’t stay here alone. And Marlene must have gone to a lot of effort, so, let’s just stay, okay? It’s a free dinner at our favorite restaurant. It could be worse. I’m just going to go to the ladies’ room, and then we’ll stay, okay? Okay?”

She accepted their stunned silence as a yes, nodded tersely, and tiptoed off to the ladies’ room behind her.

“This is so bad,” Spencer said, leaning up against the decorative old-fashioned gas pump behind him. “This is so, so bad…”

He trailed off, and his face stiffened into a neutral mask as Marlene dislodged Chip from the cactus and brought him over.

“Stay here,” she commanded them all. “I’ll get us a table.”

Chip had really outdone himself tonight, outfitwise. The pants were stripy, the shirt was a different color and seemed deliberately too small, the tie a different stripy still. Ridiculous as it was, there was no doubt in Scarlett’s mind that what Chip was wearing cost a fortune—that perhaps, if you touched him, an alarm would go off somewhere. Not that Scarlett had any plans on touching him.

He took a careful step in Spencer’s direction and extended a hand of greeting.

“What’s up?” he asked.

Chip seemed understandably nervous to be facing the Martins once again, because even he knew that Scarlett and Spencer weren’t his biggest fans. Scarlett’s dislike was fairly tepid, but Spencer genuinely couldn’t stand him and had never hidden that fact. Chip had no real personality; at least, Scarlett had never seen it. It may have been one of those things that stayed hidden most of the time, like a groundhog.

But that wasn’t the problem. Chip’s crime was something he couldn’t really help. He was rich. Seriously rich. Bona fide, centuryold, New York society, private school rich. To be fair to him, Chip never bragged about his wealth, nor did he appear to care that Lola and her family came from a totally different financial league. He was not snobbish. If anything, he acted like he’d recently landed on the planet and was charmed and fascinated by the things he found there. The magical underground “subway” train that transported people all over the city. Credit card limits. Doing your own laundry. Having a job. Chip gazed in wonderment at it all.

This trait, however innocent, had never been very endearing to Spencer or Scarlett. Scarlett thought Chip was dull and a little dim. Spencer exhibited something that ranged from profound irritation to seething hatred. Scarlett always assumed that this had something to do with seeing a guy a year younger than himself, who had an endless spending limit, no known vocation, and no pressure to accomplish anything right away. Chip would get four years of college to continue his lacrosse-playing and shirt-buying, and maybe a year or two after that, before anyone asked him what he planned on doing with the rest of his life.

He loved Lola. Of that, no one had any doubt. He loved Lola with a kind of palpable, squeamish love. His eyes followed her when they were in a room together, and when she left, his brain seemed to go into a sleep mode, waiting for her reappearance. He cared enough about Lola to extend his hand to Lola’s tall, unpredictable older brother who had fixed him with a gaze of stone. Scarlett had no idea what Spencer was going to do with the extended hand—so many things were possible in his world—but he merely shook it. Even Chip seemed surprised by this.

“I like your tie,” Spencer said.

Chip grabbed the tie reflexively with his free hand.

“Oh…thanks. I just got it. I’ve been looking for one in this color for a while. They don’t make this shade that often, so…anyway, I found it at Hugo Boss and…”

Spencer’s face had frozen in a tableau of slightly exaggerated interest, inviting Chip to keep digging his hole, keep talking about his tie until the universe finally went poof, rolled itself back into a ball, and took itself home.

Lola quietly emerged from the restroom. Chip opened his mouth to say some kind of greeting, but failed. Lola smiled shyly and put her head down.

“Chip got a new tie,” Spencer said. “I did something with a tie this morning, Chip. Want to see?”

Before Spencer could demonstrate his strangulation method, Marlene reappeared.

“Table’s ready!” she said.

“Guess we should sit,” Lola said, knocking Spencer gently out of the way as he reached for Chip’s tie. “Lead the way, Marlene.”

As she walked off, Lola mouthed the words “stop it” over her shoulder, and Spencer pointed to his heart, as if he had no idea what she could possibly mean.

“Remind me to kill Marlene later,” he said quietly to Scarlett. “Just in case I forget. Let’s eat and get this over with. And eat a lot. Order everything.”

At the table, Lola and Marlene were positioning themselves on a bench seat against the wall. Chip was milling around, trying to do the mental math about where he should sit. He backed up on Scarlett and Spencer’s approach, letting them take whatever seats they wanted. Spencer delayed sitting down, hesitating between two chairs for over a minute. Chip eventually got so nervous from this that he excused himself.

“Sit!” Lola exclaimed when Chip was out of earshot.

Spencer gleefully took a seat next to Scarlett. A trayful of organic guava smoothies arrived, unbidden. These were the best drinks in the place, but were also shockingly expensive.

“Chip is trying to win us over with fancy fruit drinks, huh?” Spencer asked, accepting one.

“I ordered them,” Marlene said. “I also got guacamole.”

“Spencer,” Lola said, “be nice!”

“I was,” he said, straightening the napkin on his lap. “I was being very nice. I was asking him about his nice tie.”

“I know what you were doing.”

“Yes, but could you prove it in court?”

“Spencer, please…”

“What? I’m telling you, nice is my middle name. Right, Scarlett?”

“Your middle name is Reynolds,” Scarlett said, sipping from her smoothie.

“Just one night,” Lola said. “Please, Spence. Don’t bait him. He’s trying to be friends.”

“Kind of a pointless activity, don’t you think? Considering that he’s your ex, and he’s leaving the city tomorrow?”

“Stop it, Spencer!” Marlene said, a note of absolute authority in her voice. “Don’t ruin everything!”

Spencer shrugged and sat back, folding his arms over his chest in temporary surrender.

Chip returned just as the guacamole cart came rattling up to the table. They all watched a man with an alarmingly wide smile whack avocados in half and smash them to bits in a huge stone mortar. It looked like a carefree job, one that helped you get out all your aggressions and frustrations. Scarlett watched him enviously as he smacked down the pestle, grinding in the garlic and onions and cilantro. He would never need therapy. Anytime he had a problem, an avocado would meet a terrible death.

“Obviously, um, tonight’s on me,” Chip said as the waiter approached. “I just thought, you know, dinner…”

“Thank you,” Lola said politely. She was doing some kind of napkin origami in her lap.

Once they had ordered half the menu (Spencer wasn’t kidding), a fog of silence fell on the table. Lola and Chip kept slipping looks at each other, being tediously, horribly coy. Unlike the silences between Scarlett and Eric, these were full of meaning and potential, and Scarlett wanted no part of them.

“What are you majoring in?” she asked, breaking the silence. She didn’t care, it was just the only question that sprang to mind.

“Oh…yeah.” Chip shuffled his utensils. “We, um, we don’t have to pick our majors for a year or two. So I’m just taking a bunch of classes. And probably row. I guess. They row a lot. In Boston. They have a…big river. I forget what it’s called.”

“The Charles,” Marlene said. “I looked up your school online, and some stuff about Boston.”

Sometimes, Marlene could be really creepy. She could get away with it while she was eleven, but it was going to be a problem really soon.

“Oh right,” Chip said, smiling. “Yeah, I knew it was a name.”

“You knew the name was a name?” Spencer asked politely.

Scarlett thought she felt a kick brush by under the table.

“I won the canoeing trophy,” Marlene said. And this time, she provided an explanation. An extremely long one. The trophy had apparently been the result of some all-day adventure course where Marlene had to navigate around the lake. They were treated to descriptions of every single girl in Marlene’s bunk (she didn’t like them, except for one named Zoe, who sounded like she was now Marlene’s little lieutenant). Chip listened intently. A conversation about eleven-year-olds rowing around a lake was one he could keep up with. And he was a rower. Paddling techniques were exchanged. This had a softening effect on Lola, who liked it when anyone paid attention to Marlene.

After a while, Chip must have felt like he had to share his attentions with another Martin, and so he finally turned to Scarlett.

“Hey, Scarlett,” he said. “Good summer?”

“I…guess?”

“Are you still seeing that guy?” he asked. “Ed…no…”

“Eric,” Scarlett corrected him, far too hastily.

“Right,” Chip said. “Eric. Nice guy. From the show, right?”

“Right…”

Spencer fell back in his chair and looked up at the red-tiled ceiling, probably wishing that it would choose this moment to collapse.

“That guy was an idiot,” Marlene continued. “He was just messing with Scarlett. And he was really—”

“Marlene!” Lola said brightly. “Tell Chip about the Powerkid of the Year competition. Marlene is being considered for…”

The interruption only confirmed Marlene’s suspicion that she was onto something worth talking about.

“Eric was gross,” Marlene went on, leaning toward Chip. “I hated him, and…”

“Hey, is this one spicy?” Spencer said, making a wide reach across the table for the Scotch bonnet salsa, the one that glowed an alarming yellowish-green. Before anyone could answer, he filled a chip with a massive scoop and ate it.

The reaction that followed, while certainly exaggerated, was not entirely fake. The gasping and grabbing all the glasses of water—the banging on the table that drew the attention of all the nearby diners and the waiter—all of it was designed to kill this avenue of conversation. Marlene took the hint this time.

Dinner passed by slowly. Now that he had convened the Martins, Chip had nothing to say to them. It was a puzzling exercise of silences punctuated by the sizzle of fajitas and the endless consumption of pricey smoothies. Marlene tried to keep filling the air, but after a while no one was even pretending to listen to the canoe stories.

Just as they finished up, Spencer’s phone rang.

“I have to take this,” he said, springing out of his chair. He returned a minute later. Scarlett could tell from the tightness of his jaw and the way he fixed his eyes on the table and didn’t play around anymore—the call had been about the audition, and the news had not been good.

“Anyone want dessert?” Chip asked cheerfully.