And Page Six. Holy shit, Page Six.
I acted totally horrified that the Page Six reporter snapped my picture, but secretly I was amped. I spent the night at Jess’s place; her mom was totally cool as usual. After Jess fell asleep, I googled Page Six on her computer and hit refresh over and over until it posted at 5:43 A.M.
ZK Northcott, Dahlia Rothenberg, and little ole me. Me.
It was so Technicolor vivid in my mind that it already didn’t feel real anymore. It seemed more like a movie I had seen, a dream I had, or a lost scene from Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which was why I couldn’t wait to see Jess at the Hole that morning to rehash every glorious second of it. I’d promised myself over and over, though, that I’d be considerate of how freaked Jess was.
I dropped off some of my things at the house around 10:30 A.M., tiptoeing in and out as Mom was leaving for work. She seemed pretty hungover, so we barely said hi. Not a word about the calls.
I could see the neon-pink DINER sign perched on top of the dilapidated, art deco train car from a block away. Roaring into the lot, I overshot the parking space a little, screeched on the brakes, and choked the Purple Beast. One tire was up on the parking block, but I grabbed my stuff off the seat and slipped through the front door, trying to blend in as fast as I could.
I’d worked the past two and a half years at the Hole, where the smell of coffee and bacon permanently emanated from the cracked orange Naugahyde booths. There was greasy black gunk in every corner of the floor from decades of half-assed mop jobs. The most expensive thing on the menu was the Jersey T-bone, at $13.85. I’d seen them in the fridge before they were cooked. I wouldn’t go near them.
The customers at the Hole were frequently wasted and always cheap. Although we were pretty steady all day long, our busiest time was after 2:30 A.M. That was the zombie shift, right after the bars closed and the shift change at the window factory. It paid more tips. People didn’t seem to know how to count change after two in the morning.
The Hole was a convenient place to eat for people who’d rather take their chances with food poisoning than tunnel traffic. It made for a lot of cranky, unhappy customers. Thankfully, the people who worked there were mostly cool.
“You’re late,” chided Buela, my boss. Her middle-aged body was squashed into an ancient pink waitress uniform, and her unnaturally red hair was teased and sprayed into a pouf, adorned with a silvery clip. Buela’s dad, Milton, owned the Hole, and she’d worked there ever since she was twelve.
“One day,” she always told us, “I’m going to own this joint.” We always nodded enthusiastically and wondered why she’d ever want to.
“Sorry, Buela,” I said meekly over my shoulder, not slowing down as I made my way to the employee lockers in the back.
Jess was there, joking with Jake, who was leaning against my locker. His faded jeans hung low on his hips in that way … that way that made you want to hook your finger around a belt loop and just reel him in. Jake had smoky-blue eyes and broad shoulders and great arms, which I couldn’t help but notice because he was wearing this sky-colored BLUE NOTE RECORDS T-shirt that looked vintage and fit him exactly right.
My heart did a little flip when I saw him. Jake and I had this thing … well, we sort of had a thing. I guess it was almost a thing, like an urge to have a thing. I don’t exactly know how to describe it.
He’d started working there three months earlier. Light flirting early on had recently turned into heavier stuff. We’d gone out a couple of times but always with people from work. Then the previous week, in a shocker, he kissed me in the walk-in freezer, pressing me against the giant bags of frozen french fries until I was breathless.
Jake Berns was older than me, twenty-three, a musician who had graduated a couple of years ago from Paterson and lived in Hoboken with six roommates, all of them in his band, Rocket Berns, although everyone called then simply the Rockets. Jake fronted the band, played guitar, sang lead, and wrote most of the songs. He was determined to make his mark. They played five or six gigs a week, but basically only made beer money. Jake waited tables at the Hole to keep up. Money was tight because, strangely enough, the music scene in Jersey was astonishingly good, which meant that, in addition to the homegrown talent, bands came from all over to get heard by the record execs who were always trolling the clubs, scouting for the next Bon Jovi or Springsteen. The gigs were prime exposure-wise, so the club owners nickel and dimed the bands to the extreme.
The great thing about Jake was that he knew exactly what he wanted with no backup plan, which was hot as hell—to me anyway. He had complete and utter commitment to his purpose. Not like some people—aka me. Honestly, he was out of my league, but for reasons I didn’t understand, he was into me. Maybe it was because I gave him a hard time about being a rock ’n’ roll heartthrob, since I figured he was beyond my reach. Honestly, he scared me a little.
Jake was one of the few genuinely cool people I knew. The other one was Jess, of course. Considering I was ready to nod off, I was glad all three of us were on shift that day. I was hoping to grab rewind time with Jess to rehash the previous night in detail.
“Hey you,” Jake said. He gave me a sly grin.
“Hey back.”
“You look like roadkill,” said Jess. She tied on her pink apron and grabbed an order pad. “Did you sleep at all?”
“A couple hours.”
Jake shifted just enough away from my locker so I could shove my stuff in.
“How much did your mom freak out?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I was only there for a sec.”
“She’s probably just worried about you,” offered Jake and gave me a look with those soul-puppy eyes.
“What’d she want?” Jess prodded.
“Something incredibly important she couldn’t remember,” I answered, tying on my pink Finer Diner apron. “Just the usual vodka-induced amnesia. She probably doesn’t even know she called me a gazillion times. Maybe she was butt dialing.”
Jess shot me a painful look. She knew how my mom got. What Jess didn’t know was that I had been avoiding Mom way more than usual. There would be a meltdown when she found out I wasn’t going to college next fall. I hadn’t told Jess either. At some point, I was inevitably headed for a complete and total shitastrophy.
“So Lizzy’s a regular party girl, eh?” Jake said. I half-smiled at his warm bad boy eyes. Jake, like everyone I knew, had the Sopranos accent that everybody else always made fun of, saying “party” like “potty.”
“Yeah, but nothing compared to you and your groupie worshipers,” I said. Jake laughed.
Jess and I had made a concerted effort in our last year of high school to drop our accent by getting rid of the w and u sounds we grew up adding to everything. We also sharpened our r’s. But I still let out a “youse” now and then, especially if I’d had a few beers. And whenever Jess stabbed herself with a sewing needle, she gave out the biggest “owwuhwhwwwuhwwwuh”—five whole syllables of ouch. But I think she did that on purpose.
We thought New Yorkers had accents. Even though you didn’t hear a trace of it when he was rocking with the band, Jake talked totally Jersey. Kind of like Audrey and me. That was one of the weirdest, most undeniable things about that night at the Met: not one of the guests talked the way my friends and I did. It was like Americans visiting London: everybody speaks English, but nobody speaks your language.
I couldn’t help comparing everything to last night. God, I was gonna burst if I didn’t get a chance to talk about it. I turned to Jess. She could tell I was about to blurt it all out and shot me a cautionary glance.
“Are you three forming a social club or something?” yelled Buela. “We got customers. You too, lover boy.”
Hurrying up front, we saw there was only one guy sitting in the far booth by the window—typical Buela. We traded annoyed looks with one another, but I figured I was the late one, so it’d better be me. I went over politely to see if he wanted to order something.