The only thing I want to do when my alarm wakes me is hurl it against the wall. But not showing up will send a clear message to everyone at school that the don’s daughter can’t deal, and screw that, so I get out the door. And even though I’d rather hide on the subway wearing sunglasses and a baseball cap, that’s not happening.
Frankie and I don’t talk on the way to school, but he keeps looking over at me to see how I’m doing. And then I get a text and it’s just xs and os from Clive, who doesn’t know what to say but just wants to send me love, which is why I love him. He’s one of the few people who knows and accepts the real me even though sometimes I’m not sure there is a real me with a single identity anymore.
I decide to hide out at Clive’s after school to get away from Little Italy and the reporters. And for the second time I call and cancel work and they’d probably like to fire me, but they can’t because my dad and Ro’s are best friends and associates and yada yada.
Nothing really special happens at school in the morning. I guess even Christy and Georgina are afraid to open their mouths because with all the attention on my dad and the arrest I might explode and blow them to bits. There are no metal detectors at Morgan, at least not yet, and there’s a chance that Mafia Girl might be packing heat, which isn’t so remote since I know where Anthony keeps his gun and I did go with him to a shooting range when we were out West and I took lessons and no one could believe how good a shot I was.
I remember what the instructor all duded up in camouflage gear said, “Shit, girl, you’re a natural born killer.” That was a compliment, I think. So after that I asked my dad for a gun like the little .38 pink lady revolver I saw online, and he smiled but didn’t answer, which wasn’t a yes, but wasn’t a no either.
After lunch I need my math book, so I head to my locker. Mafia Slut has been sanded away, a fresh coat of paint covering the evidence.
Amped-up heartbeat…early warning system.
Only now there’s a folded piece of paper wedged into the side of the locker door. Someone copied a newspaper picture of my dad with the headline: Mob Boss, and underneath it scrawled: Like father, like daughter.
When I look up I realize that I’m not the only one to get the flyer. They’re sticking out the sides of every locker door.
I must be on Clive’s radar screen, because a moment later he runs over to me waving the copy that he got.
“These people are pigs,” he says, making his way along the row of lockers, removing the flyers, tucking them into his notebook. “Every one of these is going to the principal’s office.”
“Like that will help?”
My mom calls and tells me to come home after school, but I can’t stand all the cameras so I have a fight with her and win and Clive and I walk across the park and go to his apartment.
“Are you okay, Gia?” He puts his arm around me and pulls me closer to him.
“Sort of,” although this never gets easier. I look over at Clive. “I’d never admit it to anyone but you, but what I wish is that I could be anonymous like everyone else with a dad who has a normal, boring job like a teacher or an accountant or a salesman so everyone would think his work is so dull that they’d never bring it up.”
“I know,” Clive says, staring off.
“I wish I had other kids’ problems, like how am I going to afford new Uggs or a down jacket from the Gap or a trip to Disney World or whatever, you know?”
He nods again, biting his nail.
And not be bullied on a regular basis or see full-page ads in the papers about upcoming documentaries about the mob or think about my dad being dragged off to prison and our family becoming the target of my dad’s enemies who want to show their muscle by gunning us down.
“I just want all the crap with my family to go away.”
Clive must read something in my eyes that he’s never seen before because he does something he’s never done before. He opens up to me about his parents and how everyone thinks he’s the luckiest person in the world because his family is rich.
“All I ever wanted was to have a brother or a sister and parents who came home at the end of the day and cooked dinner and sat down with me around the kitchen table and asked me about school or my friends or whatever.” He shakes his head. “People who cared, Gia,” he says. “I never even had anyone to fight with. No one.”
I can’t think of what to say to that because, I mean, who is he telling, Miss Average American Girl? My family is dysfunctional too, just in a different kind of way.
“Maybe friends have become the new family.”
He considers that but doesn’t buy it. “It’s not the same.”
The truth is that even though my life is crazy, I’ve always had the family stuff, usually too much of it. When it comes to being loved that’s one thing at least that my parents got right. Only our family is so tight and afraid of outsiders that we don’t let anyone else in and other people see that and don’t let us in.
So Clive and I are both lonely and strung out in our own different ways, but I mean maybe other people are strung out in their own ways too, because I don’t really believe that people who I think look normal are really happy, happy, happy all the time either.
But instead of thinking too hard about deep stuff like that we veg out in front of the TV. And while we’re surfing past the History Channel and prohibition stuff and Sopranos reruns, which remind me of me and my life, I yell stop when Clive starts to skip past the New York 1 story about my dad being busted.
It’s not because I want to see him on the big screen. It’s because while I’m watching, I’m looking at the people around my dad and all the back-up cops, and my eye catches something in the corner of the screen, and I sit up straight and focus and—Holy Christ!—one of the faces of one of the cops looks familiar. Is it Michael?
Only no, it’s not. My brain is playing tricks on me and I have to stop this obsessing because Michael is on some other planet.
Or might as well be.
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