Clive must have been watching the TV. “Come over, Gia,” he says. “Stay here with me.”
“I can’t leave my mom. She’s a wreck.”
There’s silence on the phone. What can he say? “I’ll be here if you need anything. Anything, Gia.”
“I love you, Clive.”
“I love you more, Gia.”
Ro and her parents come over, and then Anthony’s friends, sending my mom into desperate, total despair cook mode, working too fast and preparing everything in her entire Italian repertory and it’s like a wake where you try to act like you’re there to pay your respects, only my dad is alive, even though, despite appeals and appeals and appeals, I don’t know if I’ll ever see him again without a partition between us.
And that morbid scenario makes me feel needy and crazy and abandoned and weepy and loveless, and I start to obsess about being alone and lost and think of Michael, who I haven’t seen since I got back, and all my crazy, screwed-up feelings make me cry because—oh God—my dad just got put away, so why the hell am I thinking about being with someone in law enforcement, you know?
I’m not sure if it’s the headlines on the five and six and ten and eleven o’clock news that night or the fact that I disappeared in Europe for three weeks and have not spoken to him in, what, a month? Something telepathic must be going on between us because at two in the morning my phone rings.
“Hey,” I say.
“Gia.”
“How are you, Michael?”
“How are you?” he says, like with everything going on.
“Crappy.”
“I know.”
Silence, the painful silence that’s always there and feels like he’s on one side of the continent and I’m on the other.
“You were away,” he says, more like a statement than a question.
“Yeah.”
“Where?”
“Rome, Milan, Paris, London.”
“Right.”
“I’m not kidding.”
“How come?”
I tell him about Clive and his parents and the magazine and he listens and listens.
“You have some life.”
“Yeah.”
“I want to see you,” I blurt out. Yeah, I want to see you too, I wait to hear. But no, not Michael.
“Tomorrow,” he says. “I’ll wait for you after school.”
“And then go to work after five minutes.”
Exhale. “Not five minutes, I need to see you too.”
I’m on my way into the kitchen when I hear my brother talking to my mom in a tone that puts me on alert. I stop outside the door and listen.
“All our assets,” he says, “they’re seizing all our assets.”
“Everything?”
“We’ll have to sell the house and maybe move into Grandma’s apartment, and we’ll keep some money to live on…but they get everything else…everything.”
It feels suddenly like the whole world is crashing down around us. Not only have they taken my dad away, they are punishing all of us for being in the same family.
“Everything,” she says over and over. “Everything we have after a lifetime.”
Suddenly I’m filled with anger and I burst in. “Mom, my God, didn’t you know? Didn’t you know that one day this would happen?”
She holds out her hands. “You don’t think about that. You can’t,” she says, “or you can’t go on.”
“But why didn’t you ever try to stop him? Why did you accept everything? All the shit he was into.” I’m feeling a rage at my mom that I never knew I had inside me.
“You have to accept everything with a man like your father,” she says. “There’s no other way. I talked to him, I did what I could, but he lived the way he lived.” She shakes her head. “So I committed a crime. I loved him,” she says. “I loved him no matter what. And now this is what I get, this is how they punish us.”
“But you didn’t—”
“Stop, Gia!” Anthony yells. “Don’t blame her. Leave her alone. It’s not her fault.”
“I can’t stop. Look at what’s going to happen to us now.”
“Fuck the feds,” Anthony says. “They’re not going to stop us.”
“Dad said that too, Anthony, and look what happened to him. Do you want to end up in the next cell?”
“Don’t talk like that, stop it,” my mom yells. “Stop the fighting. I don’t want this. We’re a family.”
“We were a family,” I say. Then I run up the stairs to my room.
I don’t know when it dawns on me that everything they’ll be taking from us will include the money for my school. Instead of Morgan, I’ll end up at some low-end neighborhood school with forty kids in a class instead of twelve and teachers who are too burned out to care whether we learn anything. It’s almost a laugh to think of the fight I went through to become president of the Morgan School. Now Wentworth, Brandy, and Georgina will have the last laugh. Their prayers will be answered and the don’s daughter will get what she deserves. In September, I’ll be gone. The job at the bakery will stop being a joke. We’ll need the money now.
It may be that Clive wants to distract me from everything or he just doesn’t know what else to do, but at lunch he starts talking about the school fund-raiser called Celebrate and about volunteering to help and me helping him to get my mind off my life, which is useless. So I say yes because it’s easier than saying no.
And then I’m getting crazy about how I’m feeling about my dad and for the first time how final it feels and how alone I am now, and I think about my grandma’s funeral and how he looked after he came home, like someone cut out his heart.
I feel that way too now. I get what he went through and there’s nothing you can do about the hurt. Maybe it’s my imagination, but it seems like everyone at school is looking at me and then turning away when I catch them.
It doesn’t help that the TV news did a report on how our family’s assets were being seized with pictures of our townhouse, my dad’s Mercedes, the Cadillac, even a shot of my mom taken years ago in a sable coat that she doesn’t even own anymore because she donated it to charity.
Candy stops me by my locker and touches my shoulder. “I…I just feel so bad for you.”
“Thanks, Candy.”
She stands there staring at me, hesitating.
“What?”
She glances around then steps closer. “I never told anyone here this, Gia, but the reason we moved to New York”—she stops and looks lost in thought and then turns back to me—“was because my dad got convicted of tax evasion and he was sent to prison.” Tears fill her eyes. “It was embarrassing for everyone, so we moved here, where no would know us.”
“Candy, I’m sorry.” I am. She looks so victimized, so hurt. I look at her expression. It was hard for her to say that. She did it to try to help me not feel so alone. Everything I thought about her world in LA and the movies was wrong.
“I wanted you to know…because I know what it feels like, in a way. So if you ever want to talk…”
I feel a lump in my throat. “Thanks.”
“I think you’re stronger than I am, Gia. And surer of yourself. I think you’ll be okay. I really believe that.”
Me? “Feeling sorry for yourself doesn’t help,” I say.
Then Brandy and Christy come down the hall, and I cross my arms over my chest, stand taller, and start walking.
Ro catches up with me in the hallway.
I pull her over to the side. “Did you see the TV last night?”
“I’m so sorry, Gia.”
“We’ll have to move.”
“Where?”
“My grandma’s apartment. It’s small, but it’s decent. It’s a few blocks from my house. Everything will be different, Ro.”
“But you’ll get through it, Gia. You’re strong. ”
“Everybody thinks that. What do they know?”
“They can take your money, but not who you are inside, Gia. Your belief in yourself, everything that your dad gave you, they can’t seize that.”
“When did you get so fucking sure of everything?”
She smirks. “When you survived the bakery. I saw what you were made of.”
We meet Clive in the dining hall, and after we get our food, we sit down together at our usual table.
“I heard that there’s a van outside from CNN,” Ro says. “Someone heard that the reporter is going to wait until you come out at three o’clock to get a comment or whatever.”
“Oh good, I’ll tell them how terrific it feels to see your dad put away for life.”
No one says anything and everyone kind of stares down at the table.
“If they’re really out there, Gia,” Clive says finally, “I’m going to go into the office and have the school call the police to ask them to get the van off school property because it must be harassment or something.”
I’m not sure he’s right, but since I’m a minor, that sounds reasonable and why not try to chase them away if we can.
I can’t help thinking that yeah, in fact, the cops will be here after school because I’m meeting Michael, which is humorous in a dark way, so at the end of lunch everyone goes off to class and I stop at the bathroom.
A moment after I sit down, I’m hit by the nauseating scent that Christy shrouds herself in, which means she probably followed me in along with her joined-at-the-hip friend Georgina, who comes in next because they even pee in tandem.
It’s awfully quiet, which makes me wonder because the two of them are incapable of not talking. I wait and then think screw this and go out of the stall and I’m face-to-face with them.
Christy looks at Georgina and Georgina looks at Christy and they both smile these little, smug, full-of-themselves smiles. For no reason, I hold my hand up to them like it’s a gun.
“BANG, BANG, BANG!” I shout.
They look at each other and run from the bathroom.
For the first time in a week my mouth curls up into a smile.