“Voice-mail her,” Alix suggested. “Strike a blow for our generation.”
Sophie grinned, but she answered anyway. Sure enough, as soon as she took the call, Alix could hear Sophie’s mom start haranguing her. Sophie made a face as she hung up.
“Jeez,” she said. “It’s like she thinks this is Sandy Hook all over again.” She frowned thoughtfully at the phone. “I probably shouldn’t have ignored her first three calls.”
Alix and Cynthia cracked up. With a shrug and smirk, Sophie headed out, leaving just the two of them. “I’ll bet everyone’s parents are freaking by tonight,” Cynthia observed as she lay back.
“Yours won’t be?”
“Are you kidding?” she said with her eyes closed. “They’re going to kill me for not coming straight home.” She shrugged. “This 2.0 thing is going to make my life miserable. Next thing I know, they’re going to want to ship me to Finland.”
“Are you serious?”
“Best schools in the world, my dad keeps saying. Free, too. And no school shootings.”
“This wasn’t a shooting,” Alix protested. She was surprised to find that she felt oddly defensive about the way Cynthia characterized the morning.
Cynthia glanced over. “So what was it, smart girl?”
“A prank?”
“A prank that destroyed the science building.”
“It didn’t blow it up.”
“No.” Cynthia turned serious. “But I’d say it was a little more than a prank.”
Alix was about to answer, but she was interrupted by the buzz of her father’s voice rising from his office. He didn’t normally sound angry, but now his voice rose and fell in sharp bursts.
“Wow,” Cynthia said. “He sounds ticked off.”
“Work,” Alix said. “I guess it’s intense.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever talked to him,” Cynthia said.
“I’ll introduce you—” Her father’s rising voice interrupted, and Alix grimaced. “Some other time.”
“Yeah.” Cynthia made a face. “Definitely.”
Alix felt a little embarrassed. She’d had Cynthia over to the house only a few times since they’d become friends, and here Dad was, going berserk.
“He’s not normally like this.”
Cynthia grinned. “Don’t worry about it. You should see my dad when work’s going badly for him. He mopes around the house and snaps at everyone, and then we all have to act like he’s still the little emperor that he was back when he was a kid in Shanghai. That’s the problem with only kids from China. They’ve got all these relatives and there’s only one kid for them to focus on. Makes them totally spoiled.”
“But you’re an only child,” Alix pointed out.
Cynthia made a face of mock horror. “But I’m a girl! I could never be a little emperor.”
Once again, Alix’s father’s voice interrupted them. Alix sighed. Cynthia rolled her eyes. “Seriously. Don’t worry about it.”
Alix was reminded again why she liked Cynthia. Most of the other girls at school would have listened to her father and then turned it into some kind of gossip, but Cynthia didn’t seem to be interested in those games at all.
Alix’s mother called Cynthia “wonderfully mature,” which sounded suspiciously like “good role model” to Alix. She would have never invited Cynthia over again just for that, except Cynthia had heard the same note of approval in Mom’s voice and turned it into a joke. Then she invited Alix out for a “Wonderfully Mature” evening of getting drunk in a bar with a couple of fake IDs that she’d scammed off someone.
Alix’s father’s voice got louder, then launched into a tirade that was impossible to ignore.
Cynthia glanced again toward the office window. “What’s he do, anyway?”
“He’s a product consultant.”
Cynthia looked confused. Alix explained. “It’s sort of a fancy name for a PR flack. Public relations. Press releases. That kind of thing.”
“Oh. Sure,” Cynthia said. “Like for Coke or something?”
“For lots of companies. He’s not allowed to say who.”
“Is that, like, company policy?”
“Well,” Alix said with a laugh, “since it’s his company, it’s his policy. He started out working for Hill & Knowlton, but now he’s got his own company. Banks Strategy Partners. BSP.” Alix couldn’t help but feel a little proud of him. “When he started, it was just him and George. Now they’ve got offices in New York and DC, and he’s got more than a hundred people working for him.”
“Yeah. I guessed it was pretty successful,” Cynthia said, eyeing Alix’s house and pool and the grounds beyond.
Alix flushed, suddenly feeling embarrassed at the mention of money.
“Well,” she said. “He works hard.”
She shut up, not sure what else she wanted to say or why she suddenly felt embarrassed. It wasn’t like they were the richest people in Haverport. They weren’t rolling in it. It wasn’t like they were some hedge fund family or anything like that. Sure, they weren’t poor—Mom and Dad reminded her and Jonah of that whenever they tried to pull a poor-me-I’m-so-deprived complaint. This was normally followed by a reminder to Alix that although they’d pay for her college, they didn’t believe in people who didn’t build their own lives. Which was really code to say that they weren’t going to let Alix turn into one of those Seitz alums who went off to find herself in the Med and wound up drinking absinthe and doing lines of coke on the back of a yacht off the coast of Barcelona…. They had money, sure, but it felt a little lame for Cynthia to bring it up.
“I mean, I guess it’s a lot, but he works a ton. I mean, he’s hardly here most of the week…” she trailed off, trying not to show how uncomfortable she felt.
Cynthia seemed to read her loud and clear, and immediately backtracked. “I didn’t say he—” Cynthia broke off. “Sorry. I guess I’m still getting used to this place. Seitz is…”
“Prison?” Alix cracked, trying to change the subject.
“Weird. About money. And status. I don’t know. Before I moved here…” she trailed off. “It was different, that’s all. My dad was the richest person in town. People noticed.” She shrugged. “And you couldn’t really hide it, I guess. Anyway, we just talk about money in my family. It’s a Chinese thing. I didn’t mean to…” She threw up her hands and grinned helplessly. “Never mind. Whatever.”
“Your dad does something in tech, right?”
“Yeah. It’s this dot-com thing. I don’t get most of it. I guess Google uses whatever he does. Some kind of data mining.”
Cynthia was fairly private about what her family life was like. She’d said her mom and dad were real first-generation Chinese, fresh off the boat, and their English wasn’t that good, so it would be pointless and weird for Alix to meet them. But it did make Alix curious.
Alix’s dad’s voice rose again. It was odd to have him in the house in the middle of the day. Normally, he worked in the city, or down in DC and came home on weekends. Everything felt strange today. Alix could still remember the stranger pulling her close, whispering in her ear….
“What am I supposed to ask Dad?” Alix muttered.
Cynthia glanced over, surprised. “What did you just say?”
Alix flinched, not realizing she’d spoken out loud. Part of her still wanted to keep what had happened between her and the stranger to herself.
He’d pulled her close and spoken to her. Said the whole prank was for her. And then the smoke had enveloped them, and he’d disappeared.
When she thought about it, it was kind of romantic, in a hot stalker kind of way.
You are one fucked-up bitch, Alix thought to herself.