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"What kind of answer is that?" I asked.

"Missy, you're in the most exciting city in the world supposed to be having all kinds of new adventures. Maybe the answer you don't want to accept is what you already know. Sometimes you need to lose a person to find yourself. Sometimes only then can you get that person back. Make sense?"

"No, Obi-wan," I said.

"You'll figure it out. We miss you here but don't expect to see you back till you've figured some things out, seen something of the world. Now get off the phone and go explore."

"Don't you want to know about my real dad?" I asked.

Sugar said, "I've read your cards. I already know. Now stop wasting your life and go outside and have some fun. But BE CAREFUL."

I didn't want to let her hang up--what was I supposed to do all alone in this sci-fi twenty-seventh-floor condo thingie with honking horns and people swarming around fast-fast-fast everywhere outside? But on the other hand, I wanted Sugar Pie to enjoy her time with Fernando. I know how much I hated to be interrupted when Blank and I were alone.

"Okay, bye." I was about to hang up, then added, "I love you, Sugar." I realized I could toss those words out like Mardi Gras beads to Sugar Pie, but you would not catch me dead saying those words to Nancy.

"You too, baby. Have fun. Call me after you have some adventures to report."

"Kisses to Fernando!" I said. Sugar let out a whopping laugh at that comment and hung up.

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I looked around the apartment and didn't know what to do. All those weeks locked up in Alcatraz, and now I had all the freedom in the world in the city that doesn't sleep, and I was paralyzed. There seemed to be too much possibility. I took Gingerbread in my arms and turned on the tube. There was a public access program of these Indian women wearing beautiful saris doing some kind of sari-ness dance. It was quite spectacular looking and Gingerbread and I joined in, as if we were participating in an exercise program for our morning workout. I was all into head swishes and hip-to-hand tra-la-la when I heard the sound of applause coming from behind me. Figuring it must be Loo-ese, I curved the ends of my lips upward and turned around to say "Hey ...," but it was not Loo-eese standing before me. Standing in front of me wearing a T-shirt that was actually gray but said "BROWN" on it was a mini-Frank. Well, not literally a mini-Frank but a much younger, thinner, and somewhat shorter version of bio-dad.

I knew who he was--did he know who I was?

"You must be Cyd Charisse," mini-Frank said.

"I know who you are, too. You're Daniel!"

He looked a little quizzical and said, "Did Dad tell you that's my name? The only time I get called that is at, like, graduations and doctor's offices."

"Do you have a totally cute nickname like Junior or Flash or Poncho?" I asked.

He looked even more confused and said, "No, charm girl. People just call me Danny."

I jumped up onto the sofa--I have no idea why--to reach and shake Danny's hand on the other side of the sofa. "You can call me Cyd or Cyd Charisse. Sid is also the name

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of my other dad so's people at home call me by both names but here in Manhattan I am like starting a whole new identity so you could use my real name or even make one up if you want."

"Loving you, lil' sis!" Danny singsonged. He was too adorable. He came around to my side of the sofa and jumped up on it next to me to shake my hand. "Pleased to meet you, secret love child."

"That's not the nickname you want to use for me, is it?"

Danny smiled and said, "No, Cyd Charisse. When I think of a good one for you, I'll let you know."

I wanted to know, "You're not mad or anything about my being here?" Looking into his eyes was like looking into a mirrored reflection of my own: the same dark brown color; his hair was the same dark black as mine, his lips the same full ruby red. The difference between looking at him and Frank real-dad was that with Danny I felt an instant ka-pow ! connection. When I looked at Frank and saw our resemblance, I felt distant--separated from myself--and a little betrayed, and not at all comfortable. With my other family in San Francisco, even though Josh looks just like Nancy (he is totally the handsome Prince William babe-in-training) and Ash takes after Sid-dad and I look like the answer to the "what is wrong with this picture" question in our family portraits, at least I know more or less where I belong in that family.

Danny said, "Mad? No! How could I be mad at you about something you had nothing to do with." He plopped down onto the sofa into a sitting position and gestured me to join him. Way weirdness--once sitting on the sofa, we both crossed our legs Indian style at the same exact time.

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"I've known about you for years and have been dying to see you! Daddy finally told me about you last week--1 tried to act surprised--but I couldn't wait for him to introduce us. I've always wanted a little sister."

"I've always wanted to be one!" I exclaimed.

"Then we're a match!" Danny said. How funny that in my imagination he was some macho tough football dude, but live and in the flesh I could see he was just a regular Joe kinda fella who wore his heart on his sleeve.

"Is Rhonda coming to meet me too?" I asked. Because that would be the final chapter, of course, when my big sister and I became Sisters like in that song from the movie White Christmas although we probably wouldn't wear matching outfits and sing together, although we would totally read each other, like, instinctually.

"Rhonda?" Danny said. "Daddy told you our sister's name was Rhonda?"

I didn't want to explain how I read about them in a book and how Frank and I still had not touched the subject of me meeting his other children so I just said, "Not exactly."

Danny said, "My sister uses her middle name. Rhonda was an old family name. She never goes by that."

"Then what is her name and is she coming to see me too?"

Danny's face turned down and he said, "Lisbeth is having a little bit of a harder time with this. But she'll come around."

When he pronounced her name, he said the "Lis" part really fast and the "Beth" part really hard and long: lisBETH. It was the kind of stupid name some fourteen-year-old girl adopts when she is writing in a diary and if she keeps the

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name when she is an adult, she most likely has problems.

"Oh," I said and I looked to the ceiling so he would not be able to tell that tears wanted to form in my eyes. "Does she not like me?"

"How can she not like you? She doesn't even know you," Danny answered.

You'd think! "Then why isn't she here with you?"

Danny said, "Lisbeth is ...," Danny paused, searching for the right word, "special. She can come across as very angry and rigid, but once you get to know her, you'll see that she's all right. She always has the best of intentions."

If ever there was a warning flare, that was it. I figured the lisBETH issue was for a later time. For the here and now, I wanted to get to know Danny, the sweetest older brother ever.

"So, can we like hang out and stuff? I have nothing to do!" I told him.

Danny looked at his watch. "I have to be back at work in half an hour..."

"What do you do?" I interrupted.

"I'm a baker and cake decorator."

"No!" I said, awed. The thought of all his sugar access on top of my just finishing a conversation with my Sugar felt like fate or something. "That would quite possibly have to be the coolest job ever. Do you decorate wedding cakes or naughty cakes?"

Danny grinned and said, "I dabble with both. My partner and I own a little cafe down in the West Village. He does the cooking and I do the baking and we also do catering for special events like weddings and parties and things like that."

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I could tell he watched my face closely when he said the word "partner" to see how I would react.

"Is your boyfriend as cute as you and does he want to meet me too?" I asked.

I could see there was an unspoken test that I had just passed in Danny's eyes. "Yeah, Aaron wants to meet you too. Why don't you come down to the cafe a little later this afternoon after we've got everything ready for the evening crowd?"

"Cool!" I said. "Should I ask Luis to drive me?" How much did I want to call Blank and tell him that both our older brothers owned cafes? More than a lot. If ever there was cosmic evidence that we were soulmates, here it was. But I plucked the thought from my brain and told it buh-bye.

"Drive!" Danny exclaimed. "Nobody drives in Manhattan!"

Confused, I said, "But Frank told me Luis..."

"Oh, Daddy," Danny said. "He probably assumed Uncle Sid has a driver take you everywhere, so he is being competitive." Danny rolled his eyes.

" Uncle Sid?" I asked. "You know my dad?"

"Know your dad? He's my godfather. He and Daddy were roommates at Harvard; they were best friends for years, until the falling out over you and Uncle Sid running off with your mom. All the stuff I'm not supposed to know about."

"Oh," was all I could think of to say. This was a lot to take in after weeks stuck in Alcatraz, playing blind, deaf, and mute. A hell of a lot.

Danny said, "Look, I gotta motor. I'm writing down directions for you to take the subway. You can call me from

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a pay phone if you get lost. It would be crazy to drive down with the traffic and parking in this city." I liked that he trusted me enough and thought I was smart enough to take the subway by myself in a new and strange city.

Still, I wanted to say, forget about directions, could you just stop your life for the rest of today and sit down and tell me all this business about Sid-dad and Frank-dad, like in painful and excruciating detail? But Danny was already slinging his carry bag over his shoulder and looking at his watch like he was running late, and anyway, I felt a little weird about begging for a heart-to-heart when we'd only just met.

Then just in time I figured out a way to get to know Danny better. "I am a barista, you know," I said as he opened the door to leave. "If you need help. I used to have a job until my parents made me quit. I make killer coffee."

Danny said, "Cyd Charisse, you've got yourself a deal. Come around today at three and we'll give you an apron and put you to work."

He kissed me on the cheek and walked out. He waved behind his back to me and yelled out, "See you later, charm girl," as he walked down the generic hallway to the elevator.

I don't need a driver to figure this all out. I'm doing pretty damn good on my own.

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Twenty-three

I was too busy being psyched about new barista gig and my new most adorable older brother to think about Blank. Then Luis came by and he was so honeylicious that my heart couldn't help but go south with longing for a cute boy to be all mine to snuggle up with, even in this sticky humid New York weather.

"So you gotta plan for what you wanna do today?" Luis asked.

Concentrating on what Luis says is difficult, he is so FINE to look at.

"Huh?" I said back. Because really I was, once again, inspecting his bulging biceps and wondering about his sure-to-be six-pack abs. "Do you work out?" I couldn't help myself asking. Concentrate, Cyd Charisse, I told myself. Think about cotton ball sky clouds, think about old locker combinations, do NOT think about that bod. Trouble.

Luis said, "Yup. Every morning I'm at the gym six sharp. Used to wanna be a boxer. Got too many injuries, though. So now I'm taking college courses in business and working for your da ... ," pause, "your unc ... ," pause, "your ... Frank part-time, driving and running errands and stuff."

"How do you know 'my Frank'?"

"His family's former housekeeper is my aunt."

"Miss Loretta."

"Right! How'd you know that?"

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"I hear she makes the best gingerbread ever." Gingerbread and I shared a telepathic moment. She knew we have a date with destiny with Miss Loretta, who in some ways is Gingerbread's spiritual mother, if you think about it.

"You're right about that. So whadya say, want to go explore big bad New Yawk?"

"I have a job," I said. "Starting this afternoon."

"Do you now? Where is it, I'll drive you there. Frank said I should take you where you want to go."

I don't need a twelve-step program to figure out where I need to go without a driver. I said, "Thanks, but I'll take the subway."

"Frank know about this?"

"I can take care of myself," I said, and I think I believed it. Besides, after talking with Danny, I didn't want Luis driving me around if that whole deal was really about Frank-dad trying to be competitive with Sid-dad. I wanted no part of it, even if it meant an opportunity to cozy up to Luis.

Luis shrugged. "I got the car in the garage for now. You insist on taking the subway, I'm taking the subway with. No way some sixteen-year-old girl never taken the subway'before is going on the subway by herself. You hungry? Let's go grabba slice."

"Grabba slice? What does that mean?" I supposed I wouldn't mind--at all--hanging out with gorgeous Luis, so long as he wasn't driving me. A generous sacrifice on my part, I know. On the babe scale, Luis was like an NBA-sized Blank. How much would I have liked to just spend the afternoon on the sofa making out with him and just

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fuggedabout driving and subways and everything else? Mucho.

"Pizza, doofus," Luis said, pretend shoving me. He spoke slowly for him in what probably would have been normal pace for someone like from Idaho or something, "Go...grab...a...slice...of...pizza."

"Do you have a girlfriend?" I asked Luis as we headed toward the elevator. I know, it's like a disease I have, cute boys.

"Why? You got a friend who wants to put in an application?" Luis winked at me.

"Maybe," I said. "How old are you?"

"Just turned twenty," he said. "You got any girlfriends old enough for me?"

I guessed that was Luis's nice way of telling me I was jailbait.

"I don't have friends my age," I told Luis.

"No boyfriend back in Frisco?" he asked.

"Nobody calls it Frisco. People call it The City. It's like this stupid rule people obey."

Luis repeated, "No boyfriend back in Frisco?"

"I had a true love but he dumped me," I said. I sighed. The elevator stopped for us and we stepped in.

"His loss," Luis said. "Beautiful girl like you. He'll wake up. Trust me."

I hit the STOP button on the elevator as it was going down. The elevator came to a sudden halt. "Do you really think so? Because I am getting kind of worried."

Luis hit the START button and the elevator proceeded back down. "If you're meant to be together, you'll figure it out. You must have lots of other friends to hang out with,

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right? While you and your ex figure things out?"

"No," 1 told Luis as we arrived at ground level. "I am the girl at school that even the weird kids think is too weird."

"That just means you're the coolest girl in school," Luis said.

"Thank you, Loo-eese," I said. I pretend shoved him back as we walked out into the hot sticky summer to go grabba slice.

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Twenty-four

So I might be totally lost in this vast and strange new freakcity, but there's one gig where I totally know the scene, and that is making coffee. Pressing beans, steaming milk, pouring perfection: Here at the Village Idiots, Danny and Aaron's café, I have a little pocket of belonging in this city of millions.

"Wow," Danny said, "you were really trained well. I don't have to teach you anything except where the supplies are."

"You are a godsend!" Aaron, Danny's boyfriend, said. "I didn't know how we were going to survive the rest of the summer without a decent barista. The only people we can afford to pay are out-of-work actors, and they are too busy looking into the mirrors to make decent coffee. Cyd Charisse, where have you been all our lives?"

Funny question, huh? That's what I thought about them. Their café was quite possibly cooler than Java the Hut at Ocean Beach. The café was decorated with medieval wall hangings and gothic wood chairs and had gilded mirrors on the ceilings which reflected back the most sumptuous joy you could imagine: Danny's cakes. Some were soft and delicate, light chocolates with mousse petals, others were towering layers of buttermilk heaved with iced rose bouquets. Each cake was its own artistic masterwork. Not that the beauty of them prevented me from random samplings of as many as I could stomach. Hello Delicious, my new friend.

In the back room, Danny showed me a few of his special

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order naughty cakes which he makes for "bachelor" parties in the West Village and Chelsea. The cakes were not vulgar or crude. They were anatomically correct visions of beauty. Danny sure knew how to put pink icing, chocolate sprinkles, and whipped cream to good effect. I must confess, some of the cakes made me kind of hot. It was a good thing Loo-eese said his good-bye, after taking me on the noisy-crammed-manic-cool subway train and letting me cop a feel on his thundering biceps when I saw huge rats scurrying across the tracks. Catch my breath.

Even better than Danny's cakes and Aaron's mega-delish pasta salads and quiches was the knowledge that, at least for my parole in Manhattan, I would be properly caffeinated. The Village Idiots favored Italian coffee over Java the Hut's Indonesian, but I attributed the diff to an East Coast/West Coast thang and decided I could be hip to the new coffee groove. The taste was totally different but the coffee outtasite. Energy returned to Cyd Charisse.

"Va-va-va-voom, Cyd Charisse!" Aaron proclaimed after I gulped my first straight double espresso shot and shouted out "HIIIIIIIIIII-YAAAAHHHH" like a banshee and then shimmied with caffeinated pleasure. Gingerbread, who was reclining in a giant porcelain coffee mug, rolled her eyes at me. I know, I know, I telepathed back, I don't have to try so hard, he's just a long-lost brand-new brother, but it's just all so good and where do I feel more at home than at a coffeehouse surrounded by gorgeous guys? Just deal, okay?

I liked Aaron, and not in a dangerous Java-my-heart-beat-races-when-he's-within-five-feet-of-me radar kind of way. Aaron was not pretty-boy cute, or smoldering like Java. He was tall and chunky and scruffy, and for an upstanding

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homosexual, not that great a dresser, what with his faded decal Aerosmith T-shirt and his worn-out pajama pants he wore because of the oven heat. He was a mellow type of dude with a shock of strawberry red hair creeping out under his tall white chef's hat that he wore even though he cooked for a little café and not a four-star shi-shi restaurant, and he had big baby blue eyes that softened every time he looked at Danny. How could you not like him?

Danny and Aaron met at boarding school. They have been together that long, like almost ten whole years. High school sweethearts. They gave me hope.

Sid and Nancy have been together for just a little bit longer, but you would never see them sharing a business together, or not freaking that the business doesn't make a ton of money--hardly any actually--or bring them lots of influence and admirers. You would never see one of them bring the other ice wrapped in a washcloth when the other burned a finger and then kissing the finger to make it better, you would never see them laughing over old jokes and having hearts open enough to allow a new sister into their lives without feeling threatened or put out.

Danny wanted to take the evening shift off to spend time with me and Aaron was all, "Cool, go, have fun." One time Blank and Java didn't come to work because their cousin was visiting, and I counted the minutes until my shift ended that day, I was so uptight about them having fun without me and forgetting about me. I broke three glasses that day and sulked when Blank asked me how my day was on the phone that night. Ouch.

I was grateful that Aaron was a lot sweller about sharing Danny than I would have been about Blank. I had only

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known my brother for a day, and I wanted to spend as much time with him as he would give me. I wanted to suck information from him like a sponge. And anyway, when Danny called Frank-dad to tell him he was kidnapping me for the night, I swear I could hear the sigh of relief coming from Frank's end of the phone, even though Danny said "daddy" was annoyed with him for making my acquaintance without consulting Frank first. I had a feeling that's how things were done in his biological corner of the family: Everyone just did what they wanted and then told Frank, because you couldn't rely on him to take care of things the right way.

"So tell me about yourself, charm girl whom I'm going to call CC," Danny said when we finally sat down to dinner at about eleven that night. We had planned on ditching the Village Idiots much earlier, but the cafe got so busy, and I was churning out the lattes so smooth and Danny was dishing out the cakes so fine, that we ended up just staying a couple extra hours because Ella blasting from the stereo sounded so good and the all-over vibe, with customers chattering, forks clinking, coffee slurping, people happy, we just couldn't desert Aaron until after the crowds left, they tummies full, they teeth tingling.

"No," I said. "You first." I wanted to bask. We were seated at an outdoor cafe, which you can never do in San Francisco because it is too cold at night; it felt great to sit outside at night wearing only a black tank dress and combat boots and not be freezing. I liked Greenwich Village much more than Frank Land on the Upper East Side. There were no skyscraper office buildings or condo complexes, but loads of old brownstones, funky restaurants, and little parks where people played rapid-fire dominoes and chess

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with timers set on the sides of the tables. From where Danny and I sat perched for dinner, you could see the Empire State Building bursting in a red spoke to our north, and the Twin Towers humming in gray clouds to our south. It was like being in the center of an Oreo whose black sides were opened in a V shape.

Being the little sister, even though Danny is about my same height, being looked after and cherished, was even better. I hope one day when Ash and Josh are grown up we can come back to the Village and have dinner and bond. Hopefully Sid and Nancy will keep it together and we won't have to spend our sib time talking about our parents' secrets and lies, the way Danny and I were going to have to spend our first dinner.

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Twenty-five

So this is how it went down," Danny explained. "I was barely in middle school at the time, and so I've had to put together the pieces over the years, and my facts are not one-hundred percent reliable, but here's what I know. Daddy and your mom were having an affair and then she got pregnant. I'm sure they talked about having an abortion--if I'm making you uncomfortable just tell me--but she decided to have the baby. I think she expected Daddy to marry her, and I think Daddy wanted to. My parents' marriage was awful, you should know that. My mother spent most of her time at our house in Connecticut, and Daddy had an apartment in the city where he spent weeknights. Really, we only saw him on weekends when I was a kid. He was a workaholic and was, and still is, a womanizer. This is fact. CC, I can tell by looking at you and talking to you that you're not so innocent and naive that you can't hear this stuff--I think you get it and I think you can understand that our father can still be a loving father even though as a husband or lover, he was no angel. Right?" Danny looked a little worried that he had said too much too soon.

I nodded. I was sad to hear Danny proclaim what I already suspected to be true, but at the same time, I think I felt a little relieved not to have to put Frank real-dad up on any pedestal anymore. Also, I liked Danny for laying down the facts without sugar-coating, much as I love sugar.

"My mother would not give him a divorce. She was a

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very devout and serious Catholic, and I think she wanted to spite him, too. She held him responsible for all of her unhappiness."

"Did you hate your mom?" I asked Danny. Because even though Nancy and I aren't exactly going to be cat-walking at any mother-daughter fashion shows anytime soon, I don't hate her at all, despite what she thinks. She makes me crazy and I think she totally does not get me, but I know that in her mind, she tries to do what is right for me, even though what she thinks is right usually results in decisions I hate, i.e., boarding school, puke princess room, Alcatraz incarceration. I realized it must have been a huge leap of faith for her to let me come to New York on my own and find out things that I might not like. I wondered if, in her own way, maybe she was trying to allow me an independence that would nudge my growing up process along.

"No," Danny said, "I loved my mother very much, even though she thought my being gay was a sin. She was very controlling, but she loved us and would have done anything for us. My sister is a lot like her."

"Do you miss her?"

"I do miss my mother," Danny said. "We fought a lot when I was a teenager. She didn't approve of Aaron and was always referring to him as my 'friend.' She never told her friends I was gay. But at the end of her life, when the cancer was eating her away, I spent a lot of time with her, nursing her, talking to her. Aaron did, too, and that made a huge difference. She finally got to know him and see how wonderful he was and appreciate him as my lover and my mate. The denial wore away, and I think she came to love him as

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much as she could. He was very good to her, especially considering that initially she had been awful to him."

"What about my dad?" I asked.

"Daddy has always been great about Aaron, but in a very stiff way..." When I asked about my dad, I had meant Sid-dad. Sid-dad who had always been there for me, who loved me as much as he loved Ash and Josh, who would never try to pass me off as his niece. "It's like he was trying so hard to be cool about the whole situation that eventually he just came to accept it."

"What about 'Uncle' Sid?" I clarified.

Now Danny smiled. "I miss him!" he said. "When I was little, he was like a hero to Lisbeth and me. He didn't have a wife or children so when he came to visit, he would take us to amusement parks and baseball games. He had an inexhaustible supply of energy for us. You could tell he wanted kids but he was also a workaholic and he didn't date much. And then Daddy made the mistake of asking his old pal Sid to watch over his girlfriend and love child in the city one weekend and it was all over after that. Uncle Sid, I guess, was so furious at Daddy about the way Daddy had behaved--leading double lives and lying to my mom and to your mom--that he stopped talking to Daddy, and soon after that, I guess your mom realized he was never going to marry her or help her raise their child, and she broke things off with Daddy. And then like a year or two later, Sid came back into town, got in touch with your mom, fell in love with you from the way I understand it, and whisked you both away to San Francisco, which worked out very conveniently for Daddy and my mom because the whole situation had become this silent onus

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that everyone knew about but nobody talked about, it made them total enemies. Lisbeth and I were trapped in the middle of a very unhappy family."

More score: For all that, in my opinion, Danny had a lot to be bitter about, he accepted everyone in his family for who they were, warts and all, and seemed to love them each individually just the same. I was starting to feel like my older baker brother was a helluva good inspiration, maybe even better than Helen Keller, should I choose to heed his enlightened call.

"Okay, Ceece, now it's your turn. Spill. Tell me about you."

For once I think I felt shy and I kind of rolled my eyes and shrugged and turned the corners of my mouth down. "Dunno!" I said.

"Boyfriend?" Danny asked. "Girlfriend?"

"Well," I said. "I had like a true love in San Francisco. He is an artist and a surfer and a barista, too." As I was talking, my skin was actually tingling from missing He Who Cannot Be Named.

"And?" Danny asked.

"My mother made me not see him anymore and then he dumped me."

Danny eyed me and said, "Something tells me there's more to the story than that."

"Well, I spent the night at his house and then my parents grounded me and then he decided that I was harshing his mellow and he needed some time to, like, do things with other people and do his art blah blah blah."

"Hmm," Danny said. 'Aaron and I had a period like that, right after high school. We broke up for like six

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months because we thought we wanted to see other people, thought we needed to experience more things separately, independently."

"But you worked it out!" I said excitedly. "You decided it's better to be together!"

"We did. But the time apart was good. We did need to work on our own individual identities. We still do."

"Oh," I said. "Right."

"Do you have lots of friends? You don't seem like one of those squealing teenyboppers who travel in packs and like to scream for pop stars in Times Square."

"My best friend is Sugar Pie. She lives in a nursing home. She is a psychic and can read tarot cards."

"Interesting! Do you get along with your mom?" Danny asked.

I hesitated, then said, "We try." I could try to try, I considered.

"Do you have plans for your future? Do you know what you want to do?"

I shook my head. "I don't understand those people who have it all figured out, who know 'I want to go to XYZ College and then I'll be a lawyer' or a weatherperson or whatever. I'll be lucky to get into junior college. Anyway, maybe I just want to be a barista."

"You could do worse," Danny said. "You're great at that, and the most important first steps in figuring out what you want to do, you already have--a good work ethic and loving what you do."

Hmm.

I yawned and looked at my watch. It was past one in the morning, and the streets were still teeming with people

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and life, laughter and music. I was drained, not just sleepy tired, but emotionally exhausted.

'Are you tired?" Danny asked. "Maybe you want to just crash at our place tonight rather than go back uptown to Daddy's?"

I surprised myself when I said no. It was almost like we had sprinted to the finish line of our sibling learning curve, and now we needed a breather, because we had cheated past years of growing, struggling, fighting, and adoring to get to this one day and night of perfect togetherness. "I'll take a cab back to Frank's," I said.

I looked up at the Empire State Building to the north and the World Trade Center to the south. I had been born at a hospital on the Lower East Side sandwiched between those two monoliths. Pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that is Cyd Charisse started to feel like they were being identified and put in their proper place.

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Twenty-six

After five days of me grabbing a slice with Luis at lunch and then working the dinner shift at the Village Idiots, Frank has decided that I am worthy of his time. He has done me the immense favor of clearing his social calendar on Saturday until five o'clock, after which he has to get dressed and leave for the theah-tah. We are going to be father-daughter until the clock strikes five and I am flying solo and Frank is off wining and dining clients and hopefully not impregnating impressionable young dancer-models.

We started with a walk through Central Park. For once the weather was not that sticky and the sun beamed down through the midtown skyscrapers onto the lush greens of the park as we strolled, not walking close like chums, but at a slight distance from each other as, I suppose, wayward dads and their love children are wont to do.

Frank was very proud of himself when we arrived at Strawberry Fields on the West Side.

"See," he said. "This area was dedicated to John Lennon, who lived right over there." He pointed to a haunted-looking old apartment building creeping over the trees in the distance.

"Who's John Lennon?" I asked, and Frank's face fell.

"He was a musician and a songwriter and a revolutionary. People come from all over the world to see this tribute to him." How much do you want to bet he gleaned this information from a commercial? I offered a blank stare back

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and Frank added, "Ever hear of the Beatles?"

"I think so," I said, but I was humming a song to myself: Yeah yeah yeah. Torturing Frank on the generation gap like this was somewhat amusing.

"Many people thought John Lennon was a hero," Frank said very seriously. "Your brother Danny worshiped him." You could tell Frank was real pleased with himself for knowing about this spot with the oval that proclaimed "Imagine."

"Oh, I remember," I said. "Wasn't he also the guy that was like doped up all the time and having an affair with some other Asian lady that wasn't his wife?"

Frank looked down and then back at me. "You're not going to make this easy for me, are you?" he asked.

"Nope," I answered, but in a very pleasant way.

We walked in silence for a while. As we approached the middle of the park, Frank said, 'Are you interested in art? We could walk over to the Metropolitan Museum from here."

"I like art," I said. "I especially like artists."

Frank gave me a quizzical look back. We changed directions and started heading back to the East Side. We stopped for crushed lemon ices from a rolling cart vendor, and as we proceeded with our stroll, sour-sweet lemon quenching our thirst, Frank kind of cleared his throat and then said to the open air in general and not directly at me, "So, are you...uh...managing to stay out of trouble?"

I realized that in his way Frank was trying to make sure I was okay and part of me suspected that was probably the best I would ever get out of him. "Yup," I said. "I'm on the pill now."

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Frank blushed, which was funny considering all the women with spaghetti-strap sundresses and bloodred-painted toenails whom he had been covertly eyeing all afternoon. And even with his East Coast docksiders on his feet and his goofy polo shirt and khaki shorts and his sixty-something self, they had been scoping him back. Blech!

Maybe Frank has produced too many public service announcements as the King of the Advertising World because he said, "Your boyfriend and you...you practice...you be sure to be safe. The pill is not enough."

"I know," I said. It's funny that I would not want to have this conversation with Nancy, but since Frank is a certified dawg, it did not bother me at all. "Condoms are good, too." I gave him a friendly punch in the arm and said, "You remember that, old buddy!"

Frank did laugh. I think he realized that there was just too much awkwardness between us so why not just suspend it entirely?

Frank relaxed and said very bluntly, "This boyfriend of yours. He was the one that got you into trouble?"

"Nope," I answered. "That was the boyfriend before." I could tell Frank was a little relieved that he wasn't going to have to give me a speech about continuing in a relationship with a boy who knocked me up and then stuck me with looking up my secret father to wire me the money to pay for the abortion. "I'm actually not seeing anybody right now. My boyfriend in San Fran broke up with me." Now Frank looked double relieved. Not only did he not have to give me the aforementioned speech, but he also did not have to worry about me fooling around with a current

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boyfriend. And yet he was the one that threw Luis into my hormonally challenged world! Irony.

Having dispensed with the safe-sex talk, Frank was free to move on to tamer topics. "So, do you have a favorite subject in school?"

"Skipping school is probably my favorite subject. I just cannot get myself interested in anything that goes on there."

"Don't you want to go to college?"

"Eh," I shrugged. I know it's super cool to be one of those hyper-achieving teens who kill themselves on extracurriculars and cram for SATs and write extra credit reports about saving the environment to get higher GPAs, but I am just not one of those people. I may, in fact, be one of those people who will be content just to make great coffee and hang out on foggy broody beaches and not worry too much about the great issues of the world. I don't think that makes me a bad person.

"Your sister," Frank said proudly, "was a stellar student. Went to Harvard, my alma mater. She's now an investment banker with a top Wall Street firm."

"When am I going to meet this sister?" I asked. Rhonda lisBETH was like the dark shadow of my visit so far. Everyone seemed to dance around the issue of her, like she was some kind of monster who couldn't be unleashed upon love children.

"Soon," Frank said, although I don't think he believed that. Clearly, lisBETH was the person who did not want to meet me.

We arrived at the grand steps of the Met where swarms of people were milling about, sitting around and drinking

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sodas, taking pictures, chilling in the hot summer breeze. "So what'll it be," Frank asked as we walked up the steps. "Egyptian artifacts, Asian pottery, Renaissance paintings, what's your pleasure?"

I said, "I don't like that portraits of ancient kings and queens and velvet tapestry stuff. I dig on more modern kinda art. Not that streaks of paint splashed across a canvas that a four-year-old could do, but like that cube stuff and Picasso-ness and that guy who drew windows and that lady who did the erotic flowers and oh, I especially like that guy who did the intricate mathematical-like black-and-white pictures of like hands and buildings and such."

Frank looked impressed, actually. I have no idea why. "You mean you like Magritte and Georgia O'Keefe and Escher?"

"Yeah!" I exclaimed. "Those guys!" Shrimp used to love dragging me to museums on the days we skipped school together.

"Hmmph," Frank said, pleased.

While we were standing in the admission line, some old white guy wearing golf pants and a shirt with a little alligator came up to us. "Frankie!" the guy exclaimed. "Good to see you, good to see you. What brings you to the Met in the middle of summer when most respectable people are on the Vineyard or in the Hamptons? Heh heh heh." I locked my eyes into place to prevent them from rolling in disgust. I hate snobs.

Frank gestured toward me and said, "I'm showing my nie ..." He looked at me and I bore my eyes straight to the center of his soul, and he continued, "my...my...my

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goddaughter, showing her a little bit of the city. She's a modern art fan! Quite knowledgeable, too."

Oh, please. I know Frank wanted me to give an innocent and sweet smile to his friend but I didn't. I just stared ahead blankly.

You could tell the old guy was confused and had probably never before seen a goddaughter that looked exactly like her godfather, but if he suspected anything, he didn't let on. The old guy gave me a friendly tap on the shoulder. "Well, enjoy! See ya later, old fellow. Lunch at the club soon?"

Frank said, "Definitely. I'll have Dolores call your girl."

"Excellent, will do," the old guy said, and proceeded back toward his own family.

When he was gone, Frank cleared his throat again and said, "That was the CEO of one of my biggest clients."

I suppose "goddaughter" was the best compromise he could give. I wasn't even mad. I wasn't. That's just Frank, I guess.

He must have mistook my silence for my wanting an explanation because he added, "CEO. That's the Chief Executive Officer. It's the head guy for an important company."

"I know what one is, Frank," I said. "My dad is one."

We both knew I meant Sid-dad, my real dad.

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Twenty-seven

So in the Biological Father of the Year category, Frank might not be winning any awards anytime soon. He asked if I would like Luis to hang out with me on a Saturday night. Would I! Nancy would have choked on her LifeSavers before allowing a Luis-like hottie to "baby-sit" me for a Saturday evening, but Frank didn't think twice about it.

I was good, though. I said no. Frank didn't expect to be home until very late and he seemed like he almost felt bad about leaving me alone. Danny and Aaron had invited me to par-tay with them in the Village, but they had spent all their evenings of the last week working with me and laughing with me, so I figured they needed a night for just them without Cyd Charisse, third wheel. God only knows where Rhonda lisBETH was, not like I cared anymore.

I knew that the warm and sultry summer air was beckoning Temptation just too strongly, so I said, don't you worry about me, Frank. I don't need Luis to chaperone me. I'm gonna watch this here satellite TV and order me some moo shoo something or other and we'll be just fine. Gingerbread and I will hang out and hit the sack early, no problemo . I meant it when I said it, too, and Frank was all, Well, Luis said to call him if you want company, and I said, Right.

So even though TV usually bores me, I got sucked in by this cheesy '80s movie about this dorky pizza delivery boy who mistakenly becomes this gigolo to all these posh

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women. And the thing about the pizza delivery boy was that he was kinda skinny and scrawny and average-looking, but he was all heart, and somehow, he managed to turn himself into what each of the women's fantasies were.

This, of course, made me think of Blank, because of (a) the pizza boy's good heart, (b) he was a great loverboy, and (c) did I mention the warm and sultry summer weather that just seduces your skin?

But still, I was good. Gingerbread gave me a look like, Don't do what I know you're thinking about doing, by which she meant, Don't be fooling with my boy Loo-eese. I told her, Don't you worry, it's cool.

I had another plan in mind. A call-by. A call-by is what I call the telephone equivalent of a drive-by, when you're crushing on someone so you figure out a way to drive by their house to see if they're home, if the lights are on, if, oh my goodness you're hanging out on the porch and I just "happened" to be driving by, why don't we go out for coffee or something? Coincidence! Call-by's usually end, however, when you listen to the object of your affection saying, "Hello? Hello? Who is this? Goddamnit, who is this?" and you sigh because you love that person so much and then you hang up. Call-by's, by the way, are not advisable if the person on the receiving end has Caller ID, which I knew for a fact that the recipient of my call-by did not have, or if that person is a chronic '69er (which is an interesting numeric choice on the part of the phone company, in my opinion).

So I picked up that phone and Gingerbread closed her eyes, and the phone went ring ring and my heart went flutter flutter. After six rings I was about to hang up when a voice answered very sharply, "Ya, what?" Java. My lust

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factor shot through the ceiling even though I wanted to ask him, How is you-know-who? Is he okay? Does he miss me like I miss him? Have you fired that incompetent piece of shit Autumn yet?

But my mouth froze and my body grew warm and almost instantly, there was a fire inside me that was going to need to be quenched. I could almost hear the roar of the Ocean Beach surf in the distance and see Java standing in his wet suit on the roof, the cordless at his ear as he stared longingly at the water, hungering for the cold curls.

To the silence, Java said, "Who's there? Hello? Delia, is that you? Listen baby, you know I'm sorry about last night..."

I hung up.

I remembered how Blank's last words to me had been, "And maybe you need some time to figure out your crush on my brother." I looked at my Mickey watch. Seemed to me like that time had come. I looked at Gingerbread and she was giving me that same look she used to give me before I would sneak off to Justin's room to fool around. I took Gingerbread into our bedroom and tucked her in for the night. I whispered in her ear, "Don't worry, I'll be careful." I gave her an eskimo kiss and placed my sleep mask over her eyes so the moonlight would not keep her awake or distracted.

I returned to the living room and called Luis's mobile phone.

"Hey, buddy," I said in this indifferent but kind of sexy way.

"Uh-oh," Luis said. "What, you don't like being home alone on a Saturday night?"

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"Maybe," I said, coy. "Maybe not."

This is how I used to be around Justin. And he actually fell for this, too. Men. I don't get them.

Luis said, "So what do you want me to do about it?" I could hear laughter and music in the background of wherever he was.

I said, "I was thinking of going out clubbing tonight. Got any recommendations for places to go?"

Luis said, "No, you're not! Frank'll kill me!" I think he covered his hand over the phone because there was a pause and what sounded like a voice softly exclaiming, "Fuck!" Then he came back to the phone and said, "What do you say I come over and you and me go get a coffee or some tea?"

"Long Island Iced Tea?" I asked.

Luis said, "NO! I'll be over soon. Man, girl, I took one look at you and knew you were trouble." The tone of his voice was not entirely displeased by that observation. "Don't go anywhere, I'll be over soon."

'"Kay," I said, and hung up.

Her natural psychic abilities must be greater than Sugar Pie's because guess who called exactly when I hung up with Luis? My mother. How does she know when I'm about to score?

"Oh, hi," I said, nervous. Since arriving in New York I had talked to Nancy once, when I was in the car on my way to Frank's from the airport and I had called to tell her I arrived okay. She had promised then she wouldn't call me every two minutes and she had been pretty good about it. She had promised we would give each other "space."

"How are things going, sweetie?" she asked. "Is your

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da...is he...is Frank there?" I don't know what is wrong with people. Nobody knows how to address what Frank and I are.

"No, he went out," I said.

Nancy sighed, of course. "Surprise surprise," she said. "What are you doing now? Are you home alone?"

"Gingerbread and I are watching TV," I said.

Nancy sighed again. "Don't you think it's time for you to give up that doll?"

Silence.

"NO."

"Did I hear you say you're watching TV?"

Silence.

"Yes."

I could hear Ash and Josh in the background screaming and knocking things around.

"I can't hear anything!" Nancy shouted to them.

"I wasn't saying anything," I told her. "You didn't miss anything."

"Well," Nancy said sternly. "We miss you here. You stay out of trouble and if you need anything, call me."

I suppose she was trying to be nice but all I could think about was how she grounded me so I couldn't see the love of my life and how she was responsible for him dumping me. Who was she to tell me to stay out of trouble? She was my trouble.

"Yeah, right," I said. "Say hi to dad and the kids."

"Love you...," she started to say into the phone but I hung up.

So now I was fired up by Java's voice and pissed off by Nancy. I took a shower to try to cool off. No dice. And

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who should swim right into my trouble brew but Loo-eese, arriving all glassy-eyed and somewhat tipsy.

"You're stoned," I told him as he walked in.

He didn't respond to my proclamation but handed me a package of Twizzlers red licorice. "Hungry?" he asked.

"Way," I answered. I could feel my wet hair cascading down the bare part of my back, snaking drops of water down my spine, making me shiver with warmth and excitement.

Luis plopped down on the sofa and said, "So, what's really on your mind?"

I am a get-to-the-point kind of girl so I told him, "I know you have been checking me out since I came here and I have been checking you out too and I think we should do something about it."

Luis looked sad and said, "Can't. You're too young. You're Frank's...you're Frank's... whatever."

"Do whatevers do this?" I put his hand on my hip and leaned in toward him.

Please let me live my Wallace fantasy out on you, I thought, please help me get it out of my system.

"Brazen" was the word the headmaster at boarding school used to describe me.

I straddled Luis on the sofa and kissed his neck. "Please, Luis," I whispered into his ear. "Do me this favor. We don't have to go all the way. I don't want you to like have to go to church and say a million Hail Marys because you had consensual sex with an underage girl. But bases one, two, and three are wide open, so why not take a shot at bat?"

Oh, it felt so nice to kiss a guy again after Alcatraz. He

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did not even pause to consider my proposal, he just pulled me toward him and our lips went right at it. The great thing about making out with someone who is stoned is that it doesn't necessarily have to lead anywhere; neither of us seemed to need it to. It was just all hands and hair and hot breathing, languorous into forever. And let me tell you, those tight biceps and abs felt great to the touch.

I have no idea how long we fooled around, could have been twenty minutes, could have been an hour. The strange part was that for as good as it felt, the whole make-out session made me feel kind of sleazy, too. It was so absent any kind of connection other than lust. I realized the feeling was one I would also experience if I hooked up with Wallace. My longing for Shrimp--say his name loud and proud--increased exponentially the longer I made out with Luis. I wanted kissing-of-the-soul kissing variety, and not of the sleazy entice-a-stud-over-to-your-place variety.

Not like the sleaze factor stopped me from gettin' a little booty from Loo-eese. Let's be real. My hormones were digging it. But then, as his hands were smoothing over my bare thighs under my short skirt and I was running my fingers through his hair and I was wondering if we shouldn't just go for home base after all because why not we were so close already, what should we hear but a door slam and a female voice exclaim, "Well, I guess the apple doesn't fall far from the tree."

Luis and I jumped up, all tussled and guilty, to stand before our accuser.

"Aw shit," Luis said, zipping up the pants my hands had only seconds before unzipped, and tucking his shirt back in. He took his bag of licorice off the coffee table and

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said, "I'm outtie." I don't know which scenario was worse for him: appearing stoned and inebriated or fooling around with the family love child. He scrambled toward the door and muttered, "This family," as he walked out to leave me alone with the monster who was my older sister Rhonda lisBETH.

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Twenty-eight

If Danny was the shorter, thinner, and happier of Frank, Rhonda lisBETH was surely the Nellie Olson version: beautiful long hair, but pulled back with a preppy headband, framing a face that would be very pretty but for the scowl that looked, from the lines around her eyes and lips, permanently attached to her face. You could tell right away from looking at Rhonda that she only wore clothes she ordered from catalogs of companies in Maine and she was probably never going to meet a love child-sister she liked.

She said, "Cyd Charisse. Do you have a nickname? I can't imagine being called a movie star's name."

"I like my name," I said, then added, "Rhonda."

She demanded, so abruptly I nearly jumped, "Who told you to call me that!"

"Who told you to drop by without calling first?" I answered. I smoothed my hair down and pulled down the ends of my rumpled short skirt, but my heart was racing, as if on attack alert.

"I thought it was about time we met," she said, all huffy.

"Here we are," I said. "We're meeting."

We stood in front of one another staring one another down, like we were preparing for a shootout. I towered over her by a good four inches.

She couldn't stop staring at me. I wondered if my resemblance to Frank tweaked her out. She asked, "Was

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that Luis? I haven't seen Luis for years but I could swear that was him." When I didn't answer, she said, "Daddy will not be happy."

Like what, I'm supposed to be afraid that Frank will ground me? Mister Love Child-Spawning Indiscretion man? Yeah, right. He'd probably applaud me for scoring. Chip off the old block, eh? Wink wink. Whereas Sid-dad would have given me a lecture about ladylike behavior and making sure I respected any boy I dated, and making sure that said boy appreciated and respected me.

"That was a friend of mine," I said. In hip-hop speak, I added, 'Awright?"

Now Rhonda lisBETH was not just mad, she was confused. She answered, in a very slow and clipped manner, 'All right," as if she was correcting my English. Then she kind of sized me up and announced, "So, you're Daddy's little indiscretion."

If she hadn't been so completely nasty, I might have felt bad that she probably had a really unhappy childhood and now spent hours in an overpriced shrink's office working on her anger issues.

I asked, "Have you been tested for Tourette's Syndrome?"

"What are you talking about?"

I let Sugar Pie channel my body and I said all sassy, "Girl, don't trash talk to me. I ain't hearin' it."

My so-called sister got a look of deep offense on her face. She said, "Well, I never!"

"That's right, you never," I said.

She headed toward the door. "I'm not going to stand here and be insulted," she said.

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"You started it," I reminded her. "Who are you to call me 'Daddy's little indiscretion'?"

Maybe Rhonda lisBETH was embarrassed she had behaved so badly, or maybe she was just that p.o.'d, but she walked out and slammed the door behind her. I opened it back and said, "Better luck next time!" as she proceeded toward the elevator.

Then I cuddled into bed with Gingerbread, who told me everything would be okay and that I should be nicer to unhappy people.

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Twenty-nine

Communes are not meant for families, I suspect. That's why they're communes. You can choose your family if you start your own commune. That's the new rule.

My next commune will be in Greenwich Village. We will wear rainbow flags for clothes, and charm bracelets with pictures of Ann-Margret around our ankles. We will only eat Michelangelo-worthy cakes baked by Danny, and we will dance around to punk rock thrasher music, with subways thundering beneath our floors, making us vibrate with pleasure, but not the sleazy kind.

Our commune will be all beautiful men and me. It will be like that Wonder Woman island in reverse, except we won't have superpowers, although we will all look great and be super strong and we will really dig on our collective philosophy, whenever we figure out what that is.

Since I will be the only girl and since all the boys won't be interested in me in that dangerous way, I will stay out of trouble. I will meditate and figure out ways to get along with the outside species of women who like to get bogged down in petty shit and that's why we had to start our own commune, to get away from them. I won't leave the commune until I'm ready, which could be never.

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Thirty

So there was something called a lunchtime poll taken at the Village Idiots, and in this poll it was decided that I was the Village Idiot du jour . According to the poll, I overreacted about Autumn and I jumped to conclusions about Shrimp's relationship with her. According to the poll, I should have trusted my boyfriend more and been a little more secure with myself before accusing him of cheating on me. According to the poll of customers, who I might add were very happy munching away on their quiches and cakes so they had no reason to bitchslap me, I was the wrong party, not the wronged party.

One thing about being a barista is you can't just be all coy with your mysterious self. Serving and drinking too many straight shots of caffeine will sear right through that. You have to let your coffee-drinking clientele feel your pain, even if it means telling them your love saga over and over and letting them analyze it and take polls about it and such.

I decided not to hold their opinions against the customers by watering down their lattes or serving them whole milk with their cappuccinos when their lean muscley selves had requested skim. I decided to take their opinions under advisement.

After the poll, Danny came up to me and said, "Were you planning on telling me about your and Lisbeth's visit ever? It's been two days."

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"Not particularly," I said. How mad was I? A lot. On top of her nasty insinuations was the fact that she was not some cool older chick who would like take me under her wing and divulge important information about men and sex and want to exchange funky clothes and go get pedicures and make puking noises while we looked at the skinny model freaks in the fashion mags as our feet soaked.

It was lucky a lot of steam was coming from the milk I was foaming so my almost-tears did not seem obvious.

Danny said, "Well, I'd like to know your side of it."

"My side! There are no sides here! She was wrong, simple as that. She busted in on me unannounced and then called me 'daddy's little indiscretion' and was not exactly what you would call gracious and welcoming."

"Ouch," Danny said, which was so cute because he had adopted one of my pet expressions and he said it exactly the way I do. "Take a break, Ceece, let's sit down and have a Java."

"Coffee," I said. "Let's not use that word 'Java.'"

"Why?"

"Let's just not." Somehow in my rendering of the Shrimp saga to Danny, Aaron, and dozens of Village Idiots customers, I forgot to mention that teensy little part about how I had the major hots for Shrimp's brother. My bad.

The lunchtime-poll crowd had left and the cafe was nearly empty. Danny and I took seats in the big cushion chairs at the front, by the window looking out onto the Greenwich Village scene.

"Lisbeth said you had some guy there with you."

I sipped my iced mocha and summoned an innocent expression to my face. Me?

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"Ceece?" Danny said.

Danny was just too nice; I couldn't lie to him. I raised my hand like I was in court and said, "Guilty, your honor."

"Who?"

I squirmed. Danny said, "Please don't tell me it was Luis."

I raised my hand again and repeated, "Guilty."

"Cyd Charisse!" Danny said. He tried to feign shock but I think he was impressed, too. I mean come on, Luis is major score gorgeous. "Does Daddy know?"

"Not unless your sister told him."

"She's your sister too," Danny said.

"She's not. She's a biological oddity that I choose not to accept as my blood."

And then who should walk into the cafe but that same biological oddity. She did not see us sitting in the window but ran right up to the counter where Aaron was tossing a salad.

'Aaron!" she squeaked and it was sad, her tone was totally soft and you could tell by the forwardness of her chest and the happy expression on her stern face that she had a thing for her brother's lover. I'll say this for Frank, he breeds complicated people.

Now Danny took on the innocent expression. "Oh, did I forget to mention I asked her to drop by this afternoon for a visit? She had a business meeting not too far from here."

"You," I accused. If it were possible to be annoyed with someone as adorable as Danny, I was, but I admit, I was also curious. My first meeting with Rhonda lisBETH had been disastrous, but if Danny and Aaron could like

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her as much as they did, there had to be something redeemable about her.

Aaron led her over to sit with us. I would guess he and Danny both knew about lisBETH's crush and they were trying to butter her up.

"Oh, hello," she said when she saw me. "I didn't know you'd be here." She gave Aaron a look like, I have to share you with her ?

"Likewise," I said. I gave Aaron a look like, do you get a major case of the icks from It having a crush on you?

Danny said, "Did you ladies know that both of you have a sweet tooth? You both like my chocolate mousse cake best of all the cakes here, and you both like to drink mochas!"

Now lisBETH and I both gave Danny the same look: You're stretching.

"Well, then," Danny said, deflating. "Aaron and I will just go fix some food for all of us. Why don't you ladies sit here and chat while we're in the kitchen?" They scurried off before we could protest.

It sat down opposite me and once again the staring showdown began. She broke it first by asking, "So, was that your boyfriend the other night?"

"Nah," I said. "Just some guy."

She borderline snorted. '"Just some guy'? Nice. Really nice."

I told her, "If you didn't happen to notice, he was way

hot."

There was almost a smile on her dour face. "I'll give you that," she admitted.

"I'll say!" I answered. I did not include, and he's

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almost of legal drinking age! Howdya like them apples! LisBETH said, "How many boyfriends have you had?"

"Major or minor ones?"

There was a stunned pause, then, "Hmm," she said. Somehow I had a feeling lisBETH hadn't had many boyfriends in her life and maybe I should shut up about my bounty of booty. "Excuse me a moment, I need to use the ladies." She hopped up from the table and headed toward the bathroom.

Her premium leather briefcase was lying in the window seat. Danny and Aaron were in the back kitchen. I could not resist. Underneath the tablecloth, I slipped my hand onto the briefcase and unlatched it.

Briefcase contents: one electronic organizer; three huge business documents called prospectuses; a disturbingly organized group of faxes, clipped together in sets of descending order by size; a cosmetics bag containing sunscreen, a Chanel lipstick in a ridiculously tasteful pale color, three tampons (the environmentally correct kind), one mini-bottle of hand sterilizer, and no stash of condoms--not even in the zippered compartment (although there was a business card in there that said only "Paulo" and had a telephone number on it...hmmm); a cell phone that was actually a funky crystal blue color; a book called Forgiving Our Fathers: Successful Strategies for Building Healthy and Happy Relationships ; and a book with a cover by someone called Goethe, but when you opened it up, it was actually a Chicken Soup for the Soul book.

One more thing. There was a small framed picture of Frank, lisBETH, and Danny and their mom. Danny was

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about five in the picture, lisBETH about ten, and the family was gathered around a Christmas tree opening presents. Danny had tousled bed head and was wearing pajamas with feet and lisBETH's hair was pulled back into two tight pony-tails with ribbons and she was wearing a girlie Christmas-colored frock. What kid takes time to get dressed and put their hair into neat ponytails on Christmas morning when there are presents to rip apart? The Rhonda lisBETH kind, I guess. Their mom, who was more homely than pretty, and sort of full-bodied in that unhappy Betty Crocker kind of way, was gazing adoringly at Frank, who was handsomely staring off into the distance, oblivious to the family moment.

So that was the family torn apart by Frank's deceit. I wondered if Nancy had ever seen pictures of Frank's kids when she and Frank were carrying on.

I looked up and saw lisBETH huddled in conversation with Danny at the back of the cafe. They were all hushed whispers and hand gestures. It looked like Danny was pleading, "Please!"

LisBETH returned to the table, sat down, and announced, "Let's try this over again." She said it more like a demand than a request. "Shall we get together sometime, just the two of us?"

"I'm around."

She said, "I'm at the office most days until about ten in the evening. In fact, I need to go back now for another meeting. How about this Saturday? I think I could fit you in sometime around lunchtime."

" Could you?" I said, but she did not hear the sarcasm.

"I could. I'll pick you up at my father's at noon."

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"Lucky me." LisBETH took her electronic organizer out to punch in the date. Her father's indeed.

I wondered if she had any curiosity about me, if I went to the ladies if she would try to open my plastic Sailor Moon backpack that I bought in Japantown in San Francisco.

Contents: various lipsticks and powder compacts and my birth control prescription strewn across the bottom; the picture of me (laminated) that Shrimp drew the first day we met at Sugar Pie's; crayon letters and school pictures Josh and Ash sent me when I was at boarding school; a pillow I made for Gingerbread in home ec class; my Walkman with a mix tape that Shrimp made me that I actually listen to a lot because it has the songs from The Sound of Music interspersed with all these hardcore punk songs; a menu from Java the Hut; a small cosmetics case containing dental floss, a toothbrush, and toothpaste for use after all meals because I have had a major crush on my dentist since I was eight and I like to hear him rave about my dental hygiene; and in the little zipper compartment, a stash of condoms, and in a small case of no particular distinction, a silver baby rattle I bought at the drugstore the day out I found for sure I was pregnant, that somehow I have never managed to remember to throw out.

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Thirty-one

Luis hasn't been by all week so Gingerbread and I decided to take matters into our own hands. So to speak. Luis must be a Caller ID kinda fella because he did not answer when I called him on his mobile. That meant I had to go look for him myself.

Frank was working, not like it would have mattered. After two weeks, we had settled into a pattern of don't ask, don't tell. There was never going to be any Daddy/Princess connection between us, and strange as it may sound, I wasn't so bummed about that. Occasional dinners and carefully plotted blocks of "quality time" were the best Frank had to give; frankly, after two weeks of Frank, that was plenty.

Gingerbread and I grabbed the menu from Miss Loretta's House of Great Eats and headed out on our quest for Luis. The funny thing about Manhattan is that on TV and in movies, everyone seems so gruff and the streets so mean. And it's true, when you are pounding the pavement here, masses of people whoosh right past you and nobody bothers to say "Have a nice day," which they are always saying in California and which I personally find creepy, but in New York, if you actually stop for a moment, at a bus stop or a subway station, a newsstand or the grabba pizza joint, if you actually make eye contact with a person and ask for help, they can't wait to help you! People in New York love talking about New York. Stand at the pizza counter and ask for directions to the Village, and five people who were

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reading their tabloid newspapers or listening to the talk radio and ignoring everybody will all of a sudden perk up and give opinions about different ways to take the bus or subway, or what directions to give the cab driver so the driver doesn't try to cheat you by mistaking you for a tourist and taking the long way. The guy at the newsstand where I asked for directions to Miss Loretta's, who by now knew me because every day I had bought a pack of gum from him on the way to the Village Idiots, practically wanted to walk me to Miss Loretta's, he was so excited I engaged him in direction conversation. Geez. Talk about a mean city--not.

I walked over to Madison Avenue and started walking up, with Gingerbread perched in my designer handbag that Nancy gave me on my last birthday, a bag that in her book is totally chic and expensive, and in my book is a perfect luxury limo for Gingerbread. It was fun to look in the windows at all the posh designer fashions and haute couture wedding gowns--fun except when you think about how people like Nancy starve themselves to wear those chic threads. About twenty blocks up, the fancy stores stopped and the neighborhood changed-- the color of it, the stores, the buildings. Now we were in the 'hood. We turned a corner onto a side street and there it was, Miss Loretta's House of Great Eats, in the ground floor of an ancient beautiful brownstone. It was the kind of building so old and cool you could totally imagine that like two hundred years ago some quirky colonial girl lived there, afraid of being found out she was a witch--if brownstones had been around back in that day. And guess who was sitting out on the brown-stone stoop listening to some old school funk radio with his buddies: Loo-eese.

"Hey," I said.

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"Hey yourself," he said when he saw me. He stood up and walked down the stairs and over to the street, I guess so his buddies would not hear our convo. "Whatcha doin' here?" He looked embarrassed to see me.

"I have a karmic debt to repay," I said.

"Huh?"

"Two words: I'm sorry."

Luis got a little eensy smile on his gorge face. He said very low, "Yeah, me too. That whole scene was so uncool on so many levels."

"I am so hearing you," I said, also speaking low, like we were spies. "I shouldn't have called you when you were with your dudes when I knew you'd feel obligated to come over and keep me out of trouble 'cuz all I was doing was trying to make trouble with you."

"Yeah," he said, "well, I wasn't no choirboy either." Luis paused, appraising me, but not in the scamming kind of way, more appreciatively and respectfully. "Ya know, I wouldn't have thought you would be the type of girl to come up to this neighborhood just to apologize."

"You might think I am spoiled, Luis, but I am not."

"I'm hearing you now," he said. He full-on smiled now and my heart melted but in a we're-going-to-be-friends way because that sleazy feeling when we're more is just not nice.

"So, ya wanna grabba slice, right?" he asked. "Ya wanna know the best pizza place in the projects up the street, right?"

I said, "I want to meet your aunt, Miss Loretta."

"Smart girl," he said. "C'mon in."

The restaurant was in the ground level space under-

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neath the stoop. It had red gingham curtains hanging on the windows, and pretty lace tablecloths on the small number of tables. For a little nook of a place uptown with not that much room, it was packed with people. I went to the counter where a slender black lady with salt-and-pepper hair was manning the register.

Luis said, "Hey, Aunt L, this is Frank's...you know."

Miss L looked me up and down. "You're not kidding!" she said. "It's nice to meet you, Cyd Charisse," she said.

I got a sudden case of shy and I mumbled, "Thank you, you too." From inside the designer handbag, Gingerbread was squirming and kicking. I took Gingerbread out of the bag and said, "This is Gingerbread and she was named after the gingerbread you had made that Frank was carrying one time when I met Frank when I was little."

Miss L did not ask how old was I to be carrying a doll. She extended her hand to Gingerbread's. "Nice to meet you, Gingerbread," she said. "I've never met a namesake of my cooking before. I'm honored."

Gingerbread beamed. She's a sweet little rag doll not used to getting such a reception from anyone other than me.

Miss Loretta said, "I'm knowing your father many years. Known him since we're both children, that's how far back we go." How relieved was I that she dispensed with the niece/goddaughter/whatever business.

I said, "Was he always such a dawg?"

She laughed and said, "Pretty much. It's not funny, I know, but it's the truth. Lord, you are the image of him! That must make your momma crazy!"

I said, "You reap what you sow."

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Miss Loretta raised her eyebrow at me. "Well, we all make our choices, and our mistakes. And then we learn and we grow and we move on."

Interesting.

Miss Loretta pointed to an empty shelf over one of the windows. "See that empty space there? My favorite doll from when I was a girl sat there until recently. Her name was Flowers and she was given to me by an aunt from Jamaica. Flowers was as black as night and wore a turban on her head and I swear to you, she knew when I was even thinking about being naughty."

Gingerbread gave me a look like, Hmph.

"One of my baby granddaughters took to Flowers about a year ago, and now Flowers is living with her. So there's an empty space just waiting for the right doll, should you ever feel like you and Gingerbread are ready to move on."

I was a little taken aback but Gingerbread seemed intrigued by the possibility. I said, "I have to head down to the Village to Danny and Aaron's. But we will think about it. Thank you, Miss Loretta."

Miss Loretta took a whole homemade gingerbread out of the bakery case and wrapped it up for me. She said, "You tell my Danny he can make cakes pretty enough to be in pictures, but he'll never make gingerbread as good as mine!" She smiled and Gingerbread and I left, content.

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Thirty-two

When I arrived later that afternoon at the Village Idiots after the lunch crowd had left, Danny and Aaron were oblivious to my arrival in the deserted cafe. They were on the floor making out, the slow, sweet, soul-kissing kind. Sigh. I remember.

I would like to think that if Shrimp and I had stayed together that ten years down the road we would still be into each other like Danny and Aaron are.

The interesting thing about Danny and Aaron is that they are not greedy about their love; they manage to find pockets of together time at the most unexpected moments. They don't need to be touchy-feely PDA all the time to prove how devoted they are. They just are.

I announced, "Excuse me, but I could be like a robber or something."

They unlocked lips. Aaron rolled off Danny, stood up, and said, "Hey, will you help me set up the bandstand for tonight?"

"Righty-o!" I said. Aaron belongs to this laid-back band called My Dead Gay Son that is made up of all these professional guys, straight and gay, whom they've known since college, who jam together whenever they have the time and inclination, with no particular agenda, musically or otherwise. The band is named after this line from some '80s movie that Danny and Aaron have been obsessed with since high school. The line "I love my dead gay son!" is said

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by this dad at his football hero son's funeral. The football hero, who is totally a homophobic jerk, is found murdered in a compromising position with another football player. I said that doesn't sound like a very funny movie to me and Danny said, don't take everything so literally, Cyd Charisse. To Danny and Aaron, the father's line from the movie reminds them of how their own dads reacted about their relationship: sort of overly cool and tolerant, masking a lot of confusion and discomfort. Danny and Aaron are always teasing each other, saying "I love my dead gay son!" and bursting into crocodile tears, and then tearing up laughing.

As Aaron and I sat on our knees putting together the bandstand, my brother/baker/genius man went into the kitchen to crumble a section of Miss Loretta's gingerbread into pieces and sprinkle the crumbs over some of that night's cakes. Aaron said, "He's going to miss you so much when you go back to San Francisco. We have loved having you here."

I didn't have many days left in Manhattan. It felt like I had been here a long, long time. I was actually looking forward to going home, much as I adored Danny and Aaron. I wondered if I had grown and changed during my time here--how could I know if there were no physical signs? I knew that the thought of living in Nancy's House Beautiful did not tweak me so much, that I should probably take Danny's advice and try to make actual friends at school and not have my only female friend be a cool chick in a nursing home, and that Shrimp and I were not finished--not by a long shot. In fact, to my mind, maybe I wanted to figure out a way to start fresh. Maybe that's how I knew I had changed, at least a little. I knew if I wanted to try with

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Shrimp again, I wanted to try not as the same person I had been the first time around: needy, always looking over my shoulder, distrustful of a good thing.

I answered Aaron. "Danny's just probably glad I'm not a big bleh like his other sister."

"Lisbeth's not so bad," Aaron defended. "She's just a tough nut to crack."

"You've got the nut part right."

Later that night, when My Dead Gay Son was warbling through an old Otis Redding tune and I was foaming a cappuccino for a customer, I felt Danny's arms reach under my arms to give me a hug from behind. I am not an affectionate type of person but I did close my eyes for a sec to savor the moment as Danny nuzzled his head into my neck and whispered, "I'm so glad you came here, CC." For once, I felt totally at ease in time and space, grateful that I could have a relationship with a guy that was safe and tender, even if he was my brother and I had only known him a couple weeks.

Our moment was interrupted when we looked up to see Frank real-dad standing before us at the espresso machine. Danny did not untangle his octopus arms from around me, he just said, '"Sup, Pops?"

Frank blushed a little, I guess from Danny's and my affection. He hadn't spent any time with the two of us together and so he didn't know that we had grown tight in the shifts we had spent together nearly every day when Frank was at work or off gallivanting with clients or women or whomever, but in general not spending time with me when I had specifically come to get to know him.

"Well, hello," he said, somewhat awkwardly. "I came down to see if I could steal Cyd Charisse away for dinner.

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She's spent so much of her time here I've hardly had a chance to see her."

Danny kicked me under the counter so I would not say something rude back, as I was about to. Something about being a hypocrite.

"She'd love to!" Danny shouted over the music.

Now I kicked him under the counter.

I said, "I ate already."

Danny said, "Why don't you two go sit down and I'll bring you some dessert?"

"That will be fine, son," Frank said, and I suppressed a giggle from how formal he was.

Danny brought over a piece of perfect pound cake with the gingerbread sprinkles and whipped cream on top. Just one piece, so Frank and I would have to share, and it was amazing-scrumptious, even sharing. Frank drank from a formal tea set and I took a walk on the wild side: a late-night double shot, fully caffeinated café au lait.

My Dead Gay Son was rifflng on Jazz standards, so it was easier to hear than when the band had been playing Sex Pistols covers. Frank said, before a sip of herbal tea, "Cyd Charisse, you are a lovely girl. A little, er, spunky, but a lovely girl. I want you to know that. Your mother and Sid did a beautiful job."

"They might contest that observation, Frank. But thanks." It wasn't much from him, but it was something. Actually, it felt really, really, really good to hear him say those words, even if I wasn't going to let him know it, not after he'd called me "spunky."

"You understand why I had to make the choices I did?" he asked.

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"Yah," I said, but not too convincingly.

Frank pulled his wallet out and reached into the picture section. Underneath a class photo of lisBETH circa fifth grade, he pulled out a picture of Nancy, her blonde hair pulled back by a ribbon, wearing a hospital gown and holding me the day I was born. Her face was so happy and young and lovely, I almost didn't recognize her. Underneath that picture, he pulled out a small photo of me from kindergarten, the year we moved to San Francisco. My black hair was long even then, with ponytail curls, and my eyelashes thick, black, and curly over my almond eyes. I wasn't smiling, but I never smile for pictures. I remember I was so happy the day that picture was taken because Sid-dad had come to school to flip burgers for the school's Halloween barbecue that afternoon and I had been so proud to have an actual dad to show off at school. I had loved that day.

It was good to know that for all the years I had been wondering about Frank, longing to know him, at least a small piece of his heart had been holding on to me as well. I thought about what Miss Loretta had said about growing up and moving on, learning from mistakes. I asked Frank, "If you had to do it all over again, would you?"

Frank said, "Probably. I loved your mother very much."

For Nancy's sake, I was glad he said those words, even though I thought he was paying lip service to the Right Thing to Say to Your Love Child. Nancy had been young and beautiful, he had been older and on the make. Shit happens. I don't think someone like Frank is actually capable of loving another person enough to make sacrifices and tough choices that would make him look bad.

Frank added, "But I was not strong enough to do what

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was necessary to allow us to be a family. It took your dad coming along to make the hard choices." I felt a small sliver of appreciation seeping in for Frank's unpretty self-realization.

I told Frank, "Did you ever think of me, like on my birthdays?"

"The day hasn't gone by since you were born that I haven't thought of you," he said. 'And when you're ready for college, you'll find a trust fund I set up for you, to which I contributed money every year on your birthday, for your future."

"I don't need money," I said. I hate when adults revert to that topic. It's so ugly. "And for your information, maybe it would have been a lot nicer if you had, like, sent a card or something every year, so that I would have known you were thinking about me."

Frank said, "Your mother and I agreed it would be in your best interest for us to have no contact, to save you the confusion of two fathers, one of whom could not participate in your upbringing."

"Nice of you guys to make these decisions for me."

"You were a child, you couldn't have known what to do. We agreed it was best to wait until you were older, until you wanted the connection, could understand it."

That answer was so lame and unsatisfactory, however true it was. I told Frank, "I don't think I'm planning on going to college. Maybe you could just give the money to Danny and Aaron. They can barely keep this business alive what with the cost of doing business in this neighborhood."

"It's your money to do with as you please, when you are of legal age to assume the trust."

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This was not a scene that was going to end in octopus hugs, but I did allow, "What I needed was time, Frank. And I got it, and I'm glad for it. I needed to know you. I don't have to wonder 'what if anymore. I know."

Frank's head hung low as he absently stirred his tea around. I think he was glad My Dead Gay Son had switched to a Led Zep tune that was deafening the room.

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Thirty-three

Rhonda lisBETH arrived for our lunch date exactly at noon, dressed in preppie white shorts that fell just above her knobby knees, a tucked-in forest green polo shirt and white tennis shoes with exactly no scuffs on them and the kind of tennis socks with a little fuzz ball at the back in a coordinated forest green color. Her gorgeous black hair with the strands of gray was tucked under a white golf visor.

Not even a "hello." She looked at me and said, "You're wearing that?" Who would have thought lisBETH to be afflicted by a case of Nancyitis?

I looked down at my combat boots, short black skirt, and New York Knicks b-ball sleeveless net jersey, boys size. "What's the prob?" Seemed to me the fashion police should have been descending down on her, not me.

"You don't think that outfit is rather...revealing?"

"Only on the lay-up, lisBETH, only on the lay-up." I made a clucking sound with my mouth.

"What's a lay-up?"

I made a dribbling motion with my hands and raised my eyebrows at her, as if to say, does this look familiar? LisBETH's face showed zilch comprehension. "Oh, never mind," I said.

She hustled past me over to the dining table and spread out a garment bag she had been carrying in her arms. She turned to me and announced, like she was a military general, "I brought something for you."

I admit I was curious about the very old-looking garment

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bag. LisBETH did not seem the crazy night out on the town type.

She unzipped the front of the bag and I half expected her to pull out a hideous prom-type puke princess dress as some kind of see-how-hip-l-am type of gesture, but instead she pulled out a glorious, narrow-cut, vintage silk Chinese gown in a soft lilac color with small ivory and jade embroidered flowers. It was very simple, elegant, and exquisite.

I said, "I don't understand."

LisBETH walked over with the dress and held it up in front of me. "Just as I thought, the right length," she said. She looked up at me--I am about four inches taller than her--and said, "This dress belonged to my... to our grandmother, Daddy's mother. Grandma Molly was quite the character. She ran a liquor joint during Prohibition, married five times, cursed like a sailor, and smoked three packs of cigarettes a day. God, she was an incredibly astute businesswoman, though. She made a fortune on the stock market from her divorce settlements. You look a lot like her, you know? Surprised the hell out of me when I first saw you. I think Daddy sees it too--must terrify him! He deserves it, though. That should be his cross to bear, that his secret child should be the image of the mother whose shadow he's spent a lifetime trying to come out of."

I was starting to see what Danny and Aaron had meant about lisBETH not always being so bad. I said, "Do you have a picture of her?"

"Not with me. Some time you'll come to my apartment and I'll show you." Maybe in lisBETH's book, I was starting to become not such a despicable character as well. She said, "Grandma Molly was exceptionally tall, like you, and

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sort of elegant in spite of herself. This was her favorite dress. I've had it cleaned and stored away for years, but you know what? When I feel this dress, I can still smell her Lucky Strike cigarettes! I can practically see her standing here now, in you, a cigarette in one hand and pointing her finger, bossing us around--'Go make me a sherry!' 'Take Mister Poodle for a walk!'--with the other hand." LisBETH let out a little giggle--a feat I wouldn't have thought possible. "Grandma Molly wanted me to have this dress, but let's be honest here, it was never going to fit me, no matter how much I had it taken up or taken out. This dress is meant for a lovely, lithe, tall girl." Dramatic pause. "Like you."

I looked lisBETH squarely in the eyes and said, "Thank you."

She recognized the moment and said, without a single trace of nastiness, "You're welcome. I thought we could go shopping for some shoes for the dress. Sound good?"

"Oh, yes please," I said.

"Cyd Charisse, for all that you come across as a wild child, I must say, you have impeccable manners."

'Ain't that the truth!" I said as we walked out the door together.

"Shall we make our first stop the Gap?" she asked in a hopeful tone in the elevator. When I made a horror movie face, she said, "But I thought all teenagers like to buy their clothes at the Gap!" She probably picked up that piece of information from some guidebook like How to Mentor Your Illegitimate Teen Sister .

"Not this one! I am more of a Tar-jay slash thrift store freak kind of gal. But posh shoes, them's I can go for."

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"If you say so," she said, and you know what, as we ventured outside together, I would almost say she was having fun. Almost say I was too.

As we walked toward Madison, I asked her, "So lisBETH, any special guy in your life?"

She sighed, pretty impressively I might add. I'd give her sigh an 8.6. She said, "No, all the men I know are either gay, married, complete imbeciles, or have no money."

I said, "Sometimes the ones with no money are the nicest ones of all."

"You can't own an apartment in a desirable neighborhood and raise a family on nice, Cyd Charisse."

"Yes you can, if you want to," I said.

"Oh," she said, laughing, a little bitter, a little amused. "You are naïve. I wish I could be that sure of things." She stopped walking and turned to me. "Listen, I dated a boy in college. Nice guy, from a good family, not terribly bright or a go-getter, but we got on fine. When it came time to graduate, he wanted to get married. I wanted to get a job on Wall Street and then go for my MBA. I thought I had all the time in the world. I told him, we're too young, let's wait, let's see other people. That was Daddy telling me what to do! And you know what? That boyfriend, he married someone else, and funny, I had no idea then he would be the last serious boyfriend I would have. Had no idea the pool would dry up so quickly."

Yikes!

I said, "LisBETH, I think if you really wanted to meet someone, you could. There are like personals and dating services."

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She said, "You don't understand. If I marry, it has to be to someone who makes as much money, or more, than me. Who has a respectable career. A professional woman who is poised to become a managing director at a major Wall Street firm cannot just date anybody."

"That's your rule," I told her, resuming our walking. "If I were like some cool painter or electrician guy with a heart of gold, I would think twice before asking you out, with an attitude like that."

"Oh, aren't you precious and wise," she said. 'Anyway, what does it all matter? I have resigned myself to being single and I have a wonderful career that takes me all over the world, and if I turn thirty-nine and find myself still single and childless, well, there are ways to have a family without having a husband, you know. You of all people would know that."

That's Rhonda lisBETH, I guess: Give with one hand and take away with the other.

Suddenly I connected the dots to her crush on Aaron. I thought, Aaron and his little swimmers better watch out when Rhonda lisBETH's biological clock strikes midnight, because someone is going to be asked to do lisBETH a very, very special favor, one that would keep her future wee'un "all in the family," quite literally.

I shuddered at the thought and said, "Ya know, maybe now is a good time to go to the Gap?" Because fondling identi-clothes in the Gap was surely a good way to bypass lisBETH's detour down Too Weird Street.

This is America, so of course there was a Gap store within blocks. Do you know that creepy feeling of being watched? That's the feeling I was having while lisBETH and

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I were going through the racks of capri pants at the front of the store. Then lisBETH sidled up to me and said, "Don't look now but there's a very hunky young guy standing outside the window who can't take his eyes off of you."

Figure on lisBETH to have the word "hunky" in her vocab. Well, of course I had to look!

And how much do I wish I hadn't. Standing on the other side of the windows at the Gap was Justin.

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Thirty-four

Once our eyes locked, there was no turning back. Now he wasn't looking through the window at someone he thought might be me. It was me. Lucky me.

He came inside. He seemed smaller than I remembered, although he was still beautiful, in that way that young actors are in movies about rebel boys who are on the brink of manhood and are probably going to die tragic, senseless deaths. He had the kind of deep eyes you could get lost in, chiseled cheeks, and full, sensual, extremely kissable lips.

"Wow," he said. "You look great."

What, you mean I look happy, and content, and not all tortured and panicked? I was speechless. When I didn't say anything back, Justin checked out my b-ball shirt and said, "I didn't know you were a Knicks fan."

LisBETH said, "You know each other?" Her voice was very pleased. Not only was Justin gorgeous, he was wearing a lacrosse shirt from like the snootiest prep school in all of Connecticut.

He introduced himself to her. She said, "Oh, I know that name. Your family lives in Greenwich, right?"

Justin smiled in that smug way. "Yeah," he said. "But I'm hanging out at our apartment in the city for the weekend." He turned to me. "How are you? How have you been? Did you ever get the phone messages I left with your housekeeper with the weird Celine Dion accent?"

I mumble-shrugged. "Mmm."

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He asked, "What are you doing here?"

There was a petite, pretty girl with long, straight blonde hair held back by a headband who was casting nervous glances at us from the other side of the window. You just knew she was wearing a pleated skirt and cutesy lace-up shoes with ankle socks and probably Love's Baby Soft perfume.

"Is that your girlfriend?" I said, pointing to her.

He didn't answer, which meant yes. He said only, "I've thought about you a lot."

Point score for lisBETH. She must have realized this was an awkward scene with bad history so she discreetly stepped aside to browse the button fly jeans.

There was only one thing I had to say to Justin. "You let me go there all alone."

And worse, I thought, I continued to sleep with you after that. And I probably would have continued to even longer if the headmaster hadn't found us, expelled us, and returned me home, where I would find out about true love, about kindness and good people.

Justin's hollow beautiful eyes looked away, then back at me. "Cyd, when I called you, the thing I wanted to say was..." He stopped cold, paused, then said, "I can't believe you're standing here. I thought you moved back to Frisco."

"Nobody calls it Frisco."

"Um, okay..."

"What did you want to say?"

He could not look me in the eyes but he did say it. "Sorry," he mumbled.

I swear my heart was palpitating so fast I thought it

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would spontaneously zoom out of my throat and land with a giant red splotch onto a pile of precisely folded white cotton ribbed tees.

Maybe he said it, but I wasn't going to congratulate or thank him for his admission that he was the asshole of the century. I just called out to lisBETH, "I'm ready to go," and bless her, she fell right into line, no questions. We left without so much as a good-bye to Justin.

I did flip him the bird behind my back as we walked out the door.

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Thirty-five

LisBETH: "Want to talk about it?"

Me: "No."

LisBETH: "What was that all about?"

Me: "Nothing. He's just some guy."

LisBETH: "If you need to talk..."

Me: "I'm okay. Thanks."

Thinking, just keep moving, don't think, just walk, don't think.

I was not okay. I begged out of our shopping adventure, saying I was tired from the humidity and wanted a nap.

When I got back to my room at the Real Dad Corporate Suites, I shut the heavy drapes and snuggled into bed with Gingerbread, lying on my side in a crunched position, getting lost in the quiet hum of the air conditioner.

Frank had gone to New Jersey for the day for a golf tournament his company was sponsoring, not like I would have turned to him for fatherly wisdom. LisBETH was great, actually. She didn't pry, she just said, "I'll be at home if you need somebody." I think she almost wanted me to unload on her, to give her something juicy to dwell on, but I just couldn't. I didn't even call Danny. I guess there is such a thing as getting to know your biological family and making connections with them, but when it comes down to it, a couple weeks of knowing one another does not trusted confidantes make, at least not at times like these.

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Perhaps the only time in my life I have ever felt more alone was that day I had the cab come and take me home from the clinic. Justin couldn't be torn away from his lacrosse game with our school's biggest rival. He also couldn't be bothered to come up with the money to help, so I don't know why I was surprised or disappointed.

It had been almost a year since the shit went down. It had started last September, when we returned to boarding school after a summer apart and we could not get our hands off each other. The first time back together we could not even wait long enough to use protection--we didn't care. And the next morning, I knew: trouble. I just felt it. By the beginning of October, I could not deny the changes in my body: sudden cleavage, morning nausea, deepening sense of panic and hysteria that I could share with no one.

I had liked being Justin's girlfriend. I did not want this trouble. I wouldn't say I fooled myself that we were in love--even then, I understood the diff between love and lust, even if the love part I'd yet to experience--but I liked that when I was with Justin, I was Somebody. I was not the weird girl with the unsmiling face and strange mannerisms. I was a pretty girl who people chose on teams and sat with at lunch, the girl hanging on to the varsity jacket of practically the most popular guy at school. I was admired. I could have done without the drugs and alcohol, but those were part of the Justin package, a price I was willing to pay. Believe it, I was the girl I would pass by on the street now and go, "Yuck."

When I told him, the first thing he said was, "But you know I'm planning to, like, go to Princeton. My dad'll kill me over this." Not, "How are you doing?" Not, "How are we going to take care of this situation?" It was all about him.

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The one thing he did do for me was arrange for this girl who was eighteen to lend me her birth certificate. I gave him a picture of me and he got a fake ID made with her name on it. So technically the record states that a certain Allison Fromme, two months past her eighteenth birthday, was the girl who showed up alone at the clinic with a birth certificate and picture ID to back it up and did not need any kind of parental consent to have an unwanted baby torn from her body.

Afterward, the lady at the clinic said, "Is there somebody here to take you home?" and I pointed to a car waiting at the curb outside, which I knew was waiting for a girl who had gone at the same time as me. I said, "There's my ride," and I would have run out, but the cramping in my stomach made it hard even to walk. So I kind of hobbled to the 7-Eleven across the street and called a cab to take me back to school. And may I just say, that was not the first time that cabdriver had picked up a girl from that 7-Eleven and driven her back to that fancy boarding school. You could just tell by the way he kept looking at my pale face in the mirror and asking, 'Are you gonna be all right?"

That was the only time I cried, in the back of this stranger's cab, when I realized that the cabdriver was more concerned about me than Justin was.

It's funny to think that Nancy sent me to boarding school thinking that would straighten me out, that I would meet the right people and start to appreciate everything I had been given. And in the end, what had straightened me out and given me hope and life again was going home.

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Thirty-six

I think I lay in bed, comatose, for hours. I lost track of time trying to squash down the pain of memories, trying to think about nothing. I finally fell asleep around eight in the evening, and when I awoke at eight the next morning, for all of my twelve hours of sleep, I felt not at all rested. I had tossed and turned the whole night.

Frank came into my room and said, "You doing all right, kiddo?" He held out the telephone to me with his hand over the speaker part. He mouthed the words, "Your mother." I think he was trying to be Mister Cool, giving me the option of shaking my head in case I wanted him to tell her I was still asleep. Somehow, though, the thought of talking to Nancy was not annoying; it was almost comforting.

I took the phone and drowsily said "hi" into it.

I would have thought Nancy would be the drowsy one--it was five in the morning her time. But no, she was all perky morning sunshine. "Guess what!"

I did not say, "That's what!" I said, "Hmm?" So much for our "space."

She said, "I'm here in New York! We flew in last night. We're staying at the Plaza Hotel. Daddy had to come on business for a couple days and I figured I would come too and we could maybe do some shopping together for school clothes for the new school year!"

I think we both knew the shopping for school clothes excuse was a flimsy one to cover up the fact that she simply

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was incapable of giving me three whole weeks on my own, but I found it curious that, after the previous day's events, I was a little happy to hear Nancy's excited voice. The funny thing was, after dealing with the Justin stuff in the company of people who were my blood but actually felt more like strangers, I kinda missed her.

She said she could have a car waiting downstairs for me in an hour if I could be ready. I said I'd take the subway and meet her in two.

When I got there, she answered the door and threw a giant bear hug around my stiff body. "Hi, sweetie!" she squealed. I don't know how she manages to turn on and turn off like she does. She has the amazing capability to forget all about fights at the drop of a hat, as if Alcatraz and her forbidding me to see Shrimp could be undone just like that, as if, after two and a half weeks in New York and one giant hug, we were at a zero balance, with everything swell and nothing having ever gone wrong to lead us to this point.

Still, I admit, I was glad to see her. And was she ever dressed the part. She was wearing sleek, narrow, white three-quarters pants with a silk navy sleeveless top and white mule sandals over her pale-painted toes, looking lovely and happy to show off her skinny aerobicized body in tasteful, flesh-revealing summer clothing, which you cannot do in the San Francisco summer cold.

"Where's Dad?" I asked. Ash and Josh had stayed in San Fran with Leila and Fernando, which meant they would probably actually behave for a few days, eat normal meals, and go to bed on time.

"He's downstairs in the lounge having a business

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meeting. He'll be back up soon to take us to lunch. He can't wait to see you."

We sat down on the plush frilly sofa. "So," she said, "What do you think about Frank?"

I shrugged. "Eh. He's okay." If Nancy felt a moment of triumph, her face did not show it.

She said, "When I talked to him this morning, he said his daughter told him you two ran into Justin yesterday."

My heart rate whizzed back up. I nodded but didn't say anything back.

"He said she thought you were pretty upset afterward."

I felt my body go completely cold and still. That was the only way I would be able to keep it together.

Nancy nudged a little further, as only a mom can do. "Want to talk about it?"

If she hadn't leaned over to smooth my hair back, I might not have fallen apart like I did. But somehow that soft and tender touch from the one person in the world who can make you feel safe and loved, no matter what your differences, set off the tears. I did not outright bawl; no, it was worse; a flood of tears streamed down my face, out of control.

Nancy pulled me to her, surprised. "Honey! I didn't realize it was that bad." She placed my head on her shoulder and stroked my hair. "Tell me, Cyd Charisse. Tell me what happened. What's wrong?"

I couldn't hold it back. I sputtered, "He let me go alone."

"Go where?"

My mouth moved faster than my judgment. "The clinic."

There, I said it. If she was going to punish me or torture

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me with another sentence in Alcatraz, so be it.

Instead, she pulled me away a little so she could look me squarely in the eye. Her face was as pale as mine.

She said, "Do you mean what I think you mean?" I nodded. Now it was her eyes that welled with tears. I recoiled a little, thinking she was going to start one of her screaming fits, but instead she grabbed me back to her and kind of rocked me back and forth. We were both crying.

"That little schmuck," she whispered.

After our tears ran their course, we sat together in silence for a few minutes, absorbing the moment, wondering about the consequences of my little secret being out in the open.

When we separated, we were both calm, all cried out. I tell you, I felt better than I had felt in a long time, relieved, lighter, even though I knew she was about to give it to me.

Nancy moved to sit on the ottoman opposite the sofa so she was facing me. Our knees were touching, and she took my hands in hers. She said, "You should have told me. I could have helped you."

"Really?" I said, disbelieving.

"You know, Cyd Charisse, we have our problems. That's normal for a mother and daughter, especially at your age. But no matter what, you are my child, and I am here to help you, to protect you."

"You're not mad?"

"Oh, I'm mad, make no mistake!" She was, too. Her pale face had turned all red and splotchy from the tears and the anger, and her perfect makeup was now streaked on her face. "We'll be dealing with that when you return home and we take a trip to the gynecologist and a family

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counselor together to talk about these issues. But what's done is done. I can't undo it. I can tell you this. I'm horrified you got into that situation to begin with, but I want you to understand that when it comes to your health and your body, you can never, ever be scared to ask for my help. It's too important. I will always help you and I will always support you."

This was about the last reaction I would have expected from Nancy. Even the thought of having to go to therapy with her did not undo the fact of how cool and understanding she was about the whole deal.

Something clicked. I asked her, "You didn't get any help when you were pregnant with me, did you? Is that why we like hardly ever see your parents in Minnesota or talk to them?"

"Yes," she said. "That has a lot to do with it."

I said, "Did you consider having an abortion when you found out you were pregnant with me?"

I do admire about Nancy that she always tells it straight. She said, "Yes. I even got so far as the abortion clinic. Twice."

"Did Frank go with?"

"Yes."

"How come you didn't?"

"When it came down to it, I just couldn't do it. I knew your father was never going to marry me, knew he was making false promises, I knew he would support me financially, but only in quiet. I knew there was no way I could make it work. But I just couldn't do it. Believe me, I agonized."

"What changed your mind?"

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"You might find this shocking, but I had planned to give you up for adoption."

This was shocking. For all that I have not always been the happiest camper in our family, I cannot imagine being part of any other.

"How come you didn't? What changed your mind?"

Nancy said, "My dear, did you ever wonder why you were named for a movie star?"

"Not really," I said. "It's just my name. I thought you named me after that lady because she was your idol."

"She was. But there's another reason. I was all set to give you up for adoption. The papers had been signed, the parents chosen. But I had insisted that I get to name you. I chose the name Cyd Charisse because I wanted to be able to find you, later, and I wanted you to have a name so distinct there could be no mistaking you when I found you. But then, after the birth, they gave you to me to hold, and I couldn't let go. I just couldn't. I knew that whatever it took, I would find a way for us to be together, to be a family."

Just when I thought my tears had run their course, I found a fresh set streaming down my cheeks. I said, "Mom, we don't always get along, but I'm glad you're my mom. I wouldn't want anybody else but you."

She took my hand and rubbed it along her smooth cheek. "That means more to me than anything you could say," she said.

Later, when Sid-dad came back to the hotel room, he found me lying on the sofa, with my head in Nancy's lap. She was stroking my hair and massaging my scalp as I rested. Sid-dad took one look at us then looked up at the room number to make sure he was in the right room.

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"Well, aren't you two a sight for sore eyes!" he said.

"Aren't you!" I said. I leapt up to give him a hug. "Little hellion," I added.

Nancy went into the bathroom, I think to have a good cry in private.

I sat down with Sid-dad and said, "What was I like as a little girl?"

He said, "Fun, and sweet, and rambunctious and naughty."

"Like Ash and Josh?" I said.

"Yes," he answered. "Just not so loud."

When Nancy had said she knew she would do whatever it took to make us a family, I realized she meant Sid-dad. I told him, "I musta really needed a dad."

Sid-dad gave me one of those looks like in those commercials where the dad sends his daughter off to college and the moment is like so proud and bittersweet at the same time. "You know," he said, "I needed a daughter just as much."

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Thirty-seven

On my last evening in New York, after Sid and Nancy had returned to San Francisco, the whole bio-fam Frank clan got together for dinner at a very fancy restaurant. I got to wear my special new-old, perfect-fit dress that belonged to lisBETH and Danny's Grandma Molly (mine too, I guess), and we got to see what we would be like as a real family.

Boring, is the first word that comes to mind.

Lots of, "So, Cyd, what's the first thing you'll do back in San Francisco?" and, 'Are you looking forward to going back to school?" You know, the usual deal: lame questions when people really have nothing to say to each other but don't really have anything against each other either, which I guess is something, for this family at least. Watching lisBETH try not to make eyes at Aaron was pretty trippy, and watching Frank try to be discreet checking out all the ladies in fancy dresses and Danny sneak knowing kicks at me under the table, well, it was all cute and good, but my mind was elsewhere: about three thousand miles away in the city where people leave their hearts.

I was busy thinking about my visit with Sid and Nancy, how we had spent a whole day together and not fought, but had talked about the future. Sid didn't get mad when I said I wasn't interested in college and that I wanted to be a barista, at least for a while, maybe own my own cafe some day, like Java and Danny. I told them really I wouldn't mind skipping out of my senior year of high school entirely

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and just have a job. Sid-dad said no way, no day, but we did work out a compromise. I will go to school for half a day on a work-study arrangement, and then I will spend three afternoons a week in the business office of his company cafeteria, learning about budgets and inventories, and the other two afternoons volunteering at Sugar Pie's nursing home. We all agreed that if I ended up at junior college, it would not be considered to be a tragedy by any of the relevant parties, but we would revisit the issue after Christmas. Nancy agreed that I can take the bus and not have a driver, but both Sid and Nancy said I cannot tease Fernando about Sugar Pie. Good help is hard to find, they said. Plus, they consider him to be a friend. I said I did too but please not to tell him that because we didn't want his broody head to get too big.

The most interesting part of our day had been when they told me about Shrimp. They said he had come to the house right after I left for New York. They said he'd known from Sugar Pie that I was in New York, and he had come to set the record straight with Sid and Nancy. He said he was sorry and that he accepted full responsibility and that he hoped they wouldn't hold the fact that we were young and stupid against us. Nancy tried not to laugh when she related that last part, and she actually called him "Shrimp" instead of that boy . I said does this mean Shrimp and I are off probation, and Nancy said "We'll see," but behind her back, Sid-dad nodded yes.

On the cab ride back from dinner with bio-fam, I asked Frank, could we please stop at Miss Loretta's House of Great Eats. He did not look uncomfortable and said, sure, why not. When we got there, I ran inside and found Miss

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Loretta. She pointed to the empty shelf. "You and Gingerbread ready to part ways?" she asked me.

I shook my head. I said, "Naw. Gingerbread is not just a childhood doll. She is as much a part of me as my arms, my legs, my heart. We just wanted to come by and say bye and, like, thanks for the legacy and all."

Miss Loretta twinkle-smiled. "I understand," she said. I think she really did. That is why Gingerbread and I so totally dug Miss Loretta.

Gingerbread and I promised everyone we would make another visit next summer. Danny was the most sad and he said, There'll always be a job here with us for you. Frank said, There will always be a place for you in New York, with us, when you want. I said, Thank you, nice people, and lisBETH said, She really does have good manners, you know?

But by then Gingerbread and I, in our minds, were already halfway home.

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Thirty-eight

I thought about it on the plane ride home to San Francisco, my new ultra fantastico tribute commune to all things ginger. Think about it. Sustenance, so long as we keep the ginger roots cultivated, will be easy. We'll live on ginger jerky, ginger chicken, and stirfried ginger veggies, we'll drink ginger ale and ginger beer, and for dessert, oatmeal ginger cookies or our favorite staple, gingerbread.

Ash and Josh will be happy-hyper, because we will put them to work constructing gingerbread houses. We won't care if they eat off the sprinkles and candy hearts that were meant to be decoration, so long as they're careful not to choke. Sid and Nancy will chill on the whole scene because we will serve them ginger tea laced with mellow vibes, and just the thought of all those gingerbread-house colors will keep Nancy occupied, coordinating peppermint-stick patterns and LifeSaver-stained glass windows, and will keep Sid-dad on his toes, worrying about cost overruns and labor laws.

Bio-fam will be invited on special holidays, like Labor Day and Columbus Day, those holidays not meant for intimate family occasions but for overall general ginger barbecue fun. Danny and Aaron will have special ginger-scented permits to come anytime they want, but that will be our secret.

Our slammin' girl Gingerbread will tell Leila RELAX! Gingerbread will run the whole joint. She will decide where

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the ghosts of Ginger Spice, Ginger Rogers, and Ginger from Gilligan's Island are seated at dinner, and she will make all those Gingers help with the cooking and cleaning even if they just did their nails. When Gingerbread is tired of all those Gingers' diva-like antics, Sugar Pie will mosey in to take over. Fernando will make all the ladies swoon with the ginger donuts he will make specially for them.

Once a year we will sponsor a ginger-java marathon run from the Golden Gate Bridge to Ocean Beach. Runners will start out under the red mystical spokes of the bridge with the fog whipping through their bodies, and they will end at the finish line at Java the Hut, where they will be rewarded with caffeine, ginger cookies, and more fog.

At the end of the rainbow in Cyd Charisse's Land of All Things Ginger, there will be a Shrimp.

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When I was six months old, I dropped from the sky--the lone survivor of a deadly Japanese plane crash. The newspapers named me Heaven. I was adopted by a wealthy family in Tokyo, pampered, and protected. For nineteen years, I thought I was lucky. I'm learning how wrong I was.

I've lost the person I love most. I've begun to uncover the truth about my family. Now I'm being hunted. I must fight back, or die. The old Heaven is gone.

I AM SAMURAI GIRL.

A new series from Simon Pulse

The Book of the Sword

The Book of the Shadow

BY CARRIE ASAI

Available in bookstores now

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Author Bio

Rachel Cohn is a graduate of Barnard College and lives in Manhattan. Her first novel, Gingerbread , was named to the Best of 2002 lists for Publishers Weekly, School Library Journal , Barnes & Noble, and the Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books , and was a Book Sense 76 pick. Rachel Cohn is also the author of the middle-grade novel The Steps , for which she was praised with a starred review in Publisher's Weekly for "once again creating a funny and fiesty narrator." Look out for Cohn's next teen novel, Pop Princess.