I go home and pretend I don’t see the cartons. There are more of them each day as my mom and Anthony start to pack up the house. I’ve been putting off packing mine and they lie flat against the wall of my room.
While I can’t deal with packing up my life and giving up my room and especially my princess bed, I go to my closet and pull out six pairs of fabulous heels. I carry them into Anthony’s room and put them on his desk.
“Time to eBay these.”
“I thought you loved—”
“They’re shoes, Anthony. Just shoes.”
In the middle of finally going through all my stuff the phone rings.
If it isn’t enough that Dante has a 911, he is now the owner of a Harley, and I mean how cool is that?
“Wanna go for a test drive?” he asks.
And duh, do you think I’d say anything but yes? Even though my mom is shaking her head and going, “Gia, I don’t like motorcycles. You could fall off. You could kill yourself,” I’m like, “Ma, Dante loves me, he’s going to crawl. He’ll be careful. Do you think he wants to kill me?”
I put on jeans and a leather jacket to kind of look the part. And even though I hate helmets, I run over to Ro’s and borrow one and put it on even though it flattens my hair. In the meantime Dante is sitting in front of the house waiting impatiently and, like a complete asshole, he keeps revving up the engine over and over, which is totally stupid, but kind of funny. And then Mr. Giancana from across the street comes out and yells, “Keep the noise down, keep the noise down, you stupid kids!” And Dante mutters something under his breath, and then we take off and go up the FDR.
He’s getting off on weaving all around the traffic instead of being stuck in it, which is always what happens, even with the 911, which can go from zero to sixty in four-and-a-half seconds, which Dante always reminds us, like it matters in Manhattan, and then he turns around to me and keeps saying, “How cool is this, huh, Gia?” And I’m like, “Yeah, unreal,” and hanging on to him and telling him to go faster. Then a cop car goes by so Dante slows down and when it passes he goes faster. A car nearly cuts us off, and Dante curses him out and then cuts him off and gives him the finger, and after about an hour of intense speeding, I say, “I have to go back and do homework.”
“C’mon, Gia,” he says, “don’t be such a killjoy.”
He’s talking about going upstate, which would take four hours, and asking why we have to get back so soon, and we’re having this stupid conversation while he’s going like seventy-five. I’m starting to get cold and cranky and I hear a siren and think, oh shit, we’re going to get pulled over. And crap, this is not what I need. But no, the cop isn’t chasing us, because, thank God, there’s someone who’s going even faster than we are. And I look at the police car and start to think, could it be Michael? Omigod, what if it is Michael, would he bust us? And how intensely weird would that be?
Only no, it’s not Michael, because the cop is some fat, beefy guy with reddish skin, and I am starting to think that I’ve lost it because New York City has, what, about thirty-five thousand cops, so why is that thought even entering my mind now?
For a fleeting second I think about what Clive found out about Michael. I’m tempted to ask him just to know once and for all what the mystery is all about then decide no, that’s stupid and just forget it.
I close my eyes and concentrate on the wind blowing my hair and I pretend I’m sitting on the wing of an airplane as it flies through the open sky carrying me to a different life.