"It looks pretty good. Actually, you look fabulous, but…"
My hand went to the bow tie. Had it already gone squiggly? "But what?"
"You hardly look like… you."
Her voice cracked on the last word, and in one awful moment my mother managed to go all the way from profanity to tears. Her eyes glistened, her lips trembled, and she actually sniffed.
I was appalled.
"Mom."
"I'm sorry." She rested one hand on my shoulder, the other covering her eyes. Her shoulders shook.
"What's wrong? What did I…?"
She looked up at me, and I realized she was laughing now, a deep sound that shook her whole body.
"I'm sorry, Hunter, you just look so damn different."
I took a deep, relieved breath. We were back in profanity territory.
"Yeah, I'm going to this party tonight," I explained. "And it's kind of formal, so Jen and I were hanging out and we figured it would be fun to… you know, dress up."
"Jen did that to your hair?"
"Uh, yeah."
"Well… well." She cleared her throat, just smiling now, though her eyes still glittered. "You look incredible. When did you learn to tie a bow tie?"
"Recently." I looked at the clock. "Sorry, Mom, but I've got to get to the party. It's way uptown."
"Of course." She nodded, the shock finally releasing its hold on her. Then she giggled. "I'm not going to tell your dad, though. Can't wait until tomorrow morning. Oh, hang on, I almost forgot." She reached into her bag. "This really nice guy—"
"Yeah, I know all about the nice guy."
My phone emerged, and I reached for it. The familiar shape slid into my hand, solid and gloriously real. "Thanks for getting it back for me. The nice guy, he didn't ask any weird questions or anything, did he?"
"Uh, no. He just said he found it in Chinatown."
"Was he a bald guy?"
Her eyes narrowed. "No. Why would he be?"
"Or a silver-haired woman with a big alien face right here?"
"Hunter, how exactly did you lose your phone?"
I shrugged, promising myself to explain everything later. "Just dropped it, I guess. Thanks. I'm glad you're okay."
"Of course I'm okay." She smiled, stepping back to take me in again. "I've survived worse things than you dyeing your hair blond."
I didn't tell her that wasn't what I'd meant, just hugged her.
"Have a good time, Hunter," she said as we pulled apart. "And tell Jen that I really, really want to meet her."
I smiled. "I will. I want you to meet her too."
The weird thing was, I really did.
The launch party was at the Museum of Natural History.
The Natural is a sprawling Gothic castle settled against Central Park. The immediate neighborhood, full of park views and private grade schools that cost as much as Ivy League universities, is home turf for the hoi aristoi, which is Greek for "aristocrats." Us regular folk, we're the hoi polloi.
I took a cab uptown, a relatively small investment to lower the odds of damaging my two-thousand-dollar outfit. The long summer day hadn't completely given up its steamy grip on New York's asphalt; it was way too hot to be standing on a subway platform in black tie. And too weird. Mom thought I looked good, I thought I looked good, but cool is all about context. Among the rest of the hoi polloi, I would probably just look like a penguin.
A hungry penguin. What with my brief, perplexing encounter with Mom, I still hadn't managed to get anything to eat. Hopefully the party would have a few platters of aristocratic food circulating.
In the cab I pulled the two phones from my pocket, mine and Mandy's, comparing them to confirm that my own had actually come back to me. But what did that mean? Maybe the really nice guy who'd returned it was exactly that, and no one was after me. Could Detective Johnson have been right about Mandy? Had she simply been called away to care for a sick relative and lost her phone somehow? Of course, for that to be true, the whole chase through the abandoned building would have to have been a misunderstanding. Or a random crazy guy? A hallucination?
Didn't seem likely.
And even these radical theories didn't explain the Hoi Aristoi launch party invitations. The anti-client was real and wanted to talk to me. Probably they had ditched my phone for some random passerby to find. They didn't need it anymore because they knew that I couldn't abandon Mandy to her fate (or resist the lure of the shoes) and that I would be at the party tonight.
Fiddling with the phone's buttons, I decided to call Jen.
"You got Jen's phone. Leave a message."
"It's Hunter. I got my old phone back. Some guy, not a bald one, brought it to my mom at work. I don't know what that means. So, uh, see you later, I guess. That's the plan, right? Um, bye."
I settled back into the taxi seat, wishing she'd answered or at least that I'd managed not to leave such a dorky message. I've never been a fan of voice mail, which is basically a big magnifying glass for anything or anyone that makes you nervous. But surely I had no reason to be nervous around Jen. I thought about all the times she had caught my eye that day, had found reasons to touch me, to keep hanging out with me. Not to mention give me a complete makeover. Jen liked me.
But did she like me? I rubbed my temples—the big problem with being dazzled by someone (yes, I was dazzled) is that you wind up too dazzled to see if they're dazzled by you in return. Or something like that. Maybe Jen was just fascinated by the hunt for the missing Mandy. Or maybe she thought I had adventures like this every day and was going to be disappointed when it turned out I didn't. And do girls usually bleach the hair of guys they want to hook up with? Probably not, but maybe Jen did
Added to this mental remix was a certain awareness that my anxiety was probably focused in the wrong direction. If my disguise didn't work tonight, my crush on Jen was going to be the least of my worries: the anti-client might squash more than my ego.
I thought about all those movies where the doubtful guy says, "But we'll be walking straight into a trap!" And the brave guy says, "Yeah, but that's why they won't be expecting us." Which is, of course, complete crap. The whole point of setting a trap is that you expect someone to walk into it, right?
But they were expecting dark-haired Hunter of the Skater Shorts, not blond non-Hunter the Mighty Penguin.
I took a deep breath. I really needed some food.
By this hour the museum was closed to the public, but its hillside of marble stairs was still dotted with tourists. I joined the other party-bound filtering up through the tired and sunburned clots of camera pointers. We swept gratefully into the museum's air-conditioned cool, women in evening gowns and men in black tie. In the lobby a barosaurus skeleton reared up over our heads, eighty feet high, defending its skeletal young from a skeletal T. rex. I remembered coming here as a kid, wondering why all these dinosaur skeletons were bothering to eat each other when there clearly wasn't much meat on any of them.
The crowd was big enough to disappear into, the horde of voices smoothed to a rumble by marble echoes. Among my fellow penguins I felt very much in disguise, blending into the throng as velvet ropes channeled us from the lobby to the Hall of African Mammals.
This was the old part of the museum, dating to the days when conservationists went to other places, shot animals, brought their corpses back, and stuffed them. Which is a kind of conservation, I suppose. In the center of the huge hall a family of stuffed elephants tramped along together, massive and clueless. Set into the walls around us were dioramas—zebras, gorillas, and impalas against painted African landscapes, staring out at us with wide glass eyes, looking paralyzed with surprise, as if no one had told them that tuxedos were required.