“Can I get changed at your place?” Jasmine asked.
“Changed?” Then I remembered we were going out. I was exhausted. “Actually, I think I just want to go home and pull the covers over my head.”
“Nope. Not an option. We need to get you out, before you disappear into a practice room and we lose you forever.” She pulled me forward and I started walking.
I really didn’t want to go out, but I’m not good at saying “no” to people. Especially Jasmine. Out of all my friends, she’s the most like a sister—or how I imagine a sister should be, since I’m an only child. A junior year actress, she looks like she was born for the screen. I don’t just mean she’s beautiful—she is, but that isn’t it. It’s that she’s eye-catching. When she walks into a room, you can’t not look at her—men and women alike. For starters, she has thick red hair almost down to her waist that she either wears in big, pre-Raphaelite curls or in a super-sleek straight curtain down her back. Secondly, she has these huge green eyes that can be innocent and shocked or incredibly filthy, depending on what she’s saying. And finally she has the body. She’s curvy, and I don’t mean that as a euphemism. She has an honest-to-God hourglass figure and she makes the most of it. Guys in particular stop and stare.
I sometimes busked for charity as part of a string quartet in Central Park. One Saturday the previous summer, we were having an okay day with maybe fifty dollars in the hat. Jasmine showed up in a green summer dress that showed quite a bit of cleavage and did nothing more than sit on the grass listening to us. We made three hundred dollars in the next hour, the crowd swelling by the second.
She was the anti-me, beautiful and confident. Maybe that’s why we got on so well.
“Fine,” I told her. “One drink at Flicker.”
A particularly cruel gust of wind lashed at us and I pulled my coat around me. I realized that Jasmine was in a light autumn jacket that stopped at her waist. She wasn’t just snuggling up to me to be cute.
“What are you wearing?” I asked. “You’ll freeze!”
“Not if we hurry up and get to your place.” She towed me along.
I tried to hurry, but no one moves fast with a cello strapped to their back.
“Why can’t you just leave it at the academy?” she asked, for what must have been the hundredth time since I’d known her.
I looked at her blankly. “How would I practice at home?”
Jasmine shivered and gave me a very strange look. “Karen, in all seriousness, you need to get out more.”
***
When I asked to move to New York so I could attend Fenbrook, my dad argued and grumbled and moaned about how Boston was better and then, when he finally saw that it was the only option, he rented an apartment for me. He didn’t wire me the rent money or help me pick out a place, he just dropped off the keys and told me where I’d be living for four years.
I know, I know—poor little rich girl. Don’t get me wrong, I’m very grateful for it. But it did demonstrate how our relationship worked.
The place he’d picked was in a nice neighborhood, because he wanted me to be safe. But it was a one bedroom apartment, because he didn’t want me to be distracted by anyone, and it was several stops on the subway from any of the areas popular with students, because he wanted me well away from “the party scene” (as if I’d ever go to a party anyway).
It was great, and very generous of him, and not having to pay rent meant that I was one of the few students at Fenbrook who didn’t have to work a part-time job (another thing he’d never allow). But the place never felt like mine. He’d even furnished it himself, which meant that—just like at home—there was no television (I’d been the only kid at school with a music score on their lunch box instead of Elmo or Batman). In a tiny show of defiance, I was saving up to buy a TV, though I knew I’d have to find somewhere to hide it when he visited.
We trudged in out of the cold and Jasmine gasped as the warm air hit her. “You have your heating come on before you’re even home?” she asked in disbelief.
“Isn’t that the idea of a timer?”
She sank into the leather couch with a groan of pleasure, long auburn hair trailing languidly over the edge. You could have pointed a camera at the scene and you’d have had a furniture store commercial right there. “Sure. But no one actually does it. What if you’re late home or you go straight out? You’d have wasted all that money.”
“Good point.” I didn’t like to mention that all the bills went straight to my dad. I had no idea how much the power cost. I had no idea how much the apartment cost, for that matter. He’d given me everything I needed.