Stephanie had left the door the tiniest bit ajar at their last meeting—if you have something new to show me, she had said, really new, maybe we can talk. But Bea would have to show the pages to Leo first. Probably. Maybe. Maybe not.
“When are we going to read about your life,” he’d said, a little testily, after she published the final Archie story, the one where she’d veered a little too close to his less desirable, more predatory qualities. Well, here she was. Using her life. How dare he object? Leo owed her. Especially after the night in the hospital. What happened last July had also happened to her. It was her life, too.
NORA AND LOUISA WERE WALKING along Central Park West, hand in hand, winded from running the three blocks from the SAT classroom, breathless with anticipation. “Here we go,” Nora said, squeezing Louisa’s hand. “Straight to a certain death or sexual servitude or both.”
Louisa laughed but she was nervous. Ditching SAT prep had started as a joke. “We could leave our phones in our lockers and just take off,” Louisa had said to Nora after one excruciating session. “The only person who cares if we’re here is Mom.” Louisa knew by the look on Nora’s face that she’d unwittingly put something inevitable into motion. They both hated the classes. The tutor who ran their group seemed barely older than they were and never took attendance or remembered anyone’s name or seemed to care who did what. “This is largely self-directed,” she’d say, sounding bored and uninspired while staring out a window that faced Columbus Avenue, looking as if her most fervent wish was to leap outside and stroll back into her precious weekend. “You get out of it what you put into it.”
“You’re a genius,” Nora had said to Louisa. “Let’s do it!”
“I was kidding. Mom and Dad are paying for this.”
“Everything is in the book!” Nora’d pulled out the enormous SAT guide. “They paid for this book. All that tutor does is read from the chapter and make us do the exercises. We can work on the train and at home. It’s not even that hard. We have another year before applying anywhere. We’re juniors.”
Louisa was tempted but nervous. She agreed the classes were lame, but she felt guilty. Something was up at home concerning money—there was always something up concerning money, there was never enough money—but this time seemed different and possibly more dire. Her parents spent a lot of time heatedly whispering and had even taken their discussion to the freezing and snowy yard the night before. But she knew once Nora set her mind to something that it was just a matter of time before it happened.
“Think of how beautiful the park will be today with the snow,” Nora said, petitioning the second they were out from under their mother’s watchful eye. “Snow in the city is evanescent. See? I just used an SAT word. Come on. Today’s the perfect day.”
Nobody stopped them when they bolted out of the building through a side door and ran down the street expecting to hear their names called at any second. They buried their cell phones deep in a locker in case their mother checked their location on Stalkerville (and she was their mother; she always checked their location).
Louisa hesitated. Melody’s admonitions about Central Park and its dark pathways full of nefarious men wanting vaguely disturbing and dangerous things genuinely frightened her. But Nora wanted to find a hot dog vendor and the carousel and Belvedere Castle and other things they’d heard about but never seen. She’d downloaded and printed a map before they left home. “We’ll stick to the main paths today,” she said, unfolding the map and pointing to the spot marked “Strawberry Fields Memorial.”
“Let’s start here.”