Dyan Sheldon - Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen

“I have a dollar forty in coins,” said Ella, dropping several of them on the stairs. “How much do you have?”

I knew how much change I had without looking: fifty-eight cents.

“It’s not enough,” I said in a voice thick with sadness. Ella started picking up the coins she’d dropped. I turned my unhappy eyes on the driver. “Please… She had to crawl to the phone to call us. She—”

“Take a cab,” said the driver. “It’s quicker.”

“But we don’t have enough for a cab.”

There was a shriek of disgust behind me.

“Oh, my God!” screamed Ella. “I just saw a cockroach.”

No one paid any attention to her. A cockroach on a city bus isn’t exactly news.

I waved the bill at the driver. “Don’t you understand?” I was practically sobbing. “My poor sister’s all alone with three little babies and a broken foot, maybe even a compound fracture… She’s lying there in pain, waiting for us to come and save her.”

Ella straightened up. “I almost touched it,” she squealed. “I almost touched it with my hand.”

This statement didn’t catch anyone’s attention, either.

“Look,” said the driver. “This isn’t an ambulance, it’s a city bus. You have to have the exact fare.”

Bitter tears of frustration welled in my eyes. “But the littlest is only two months old,” I wailed. “Two months old, sir. Do you have children? Do you remember when they were two months old? How they’d lie in their little cribs crying and crying until their mother picked them up and took them in her arms…?”

“Look,” said the driver, sighing heavily. “It isn’t my bus. I just drive it—”

“You do remember!” I was nearly sobbing. “You do know what it’s like.”

He looked over his shoulder. “Anybody got change for a five?” he called.

Ella, shaken from the attack of the killer cockroach, spent the entire ride downtown standing up, watching her feet to make sure nothing with more than two legs walked over them. When she wasn’t staring at her shoes, she was darting anxious glances at our fellow travellers. Ella had never been on public transport in New York before. When her parents brought her in they went everywhere in cabs. The Gerards don’t take any chances.

“Do you think that man back there is crazy?” she whispered.

Pretending that I was reading an advertisement for a computer course, I looked towards the back.

“Which one?” I asked, my eyes now on the headline of the paper the woman sitting in front of us was reading. “The one who’s talking to himself, or the one holding up the snake so it can look out of the window?”

“Neither,” said Ella. “The one wearing the sombrero.”

We got off at Fourteenth Street. I knew my way from Fourteenth Street. At least, in dry weather and daylight I did.

“Aren’t we there yet?” grumbled Ella.

I got us to Soho OK, but I was having a little trouble finding the exact street we wanted. It was one of those little ones tucked behind a lot of other little streets with funny names. I’m better on the numbered streets and avenues.

Ella stopped and leaned gingerly against a building. She didn’t trust touching anything. “My feet are killing me,” she moaned.

“Maybe you should put your sneakers back on till we get there,” I suggested. Her heels weren’t as high as my mother’s but they were still significant.

Ella, however, wasn’t listening to me. She was looking around us as though she’d just landed on a planet with sixteen moons where everyone lived in glass bubbles and looked like trombones.

“Now what?” I asked.

It was pretty late and the streets were more or less deserted. The only people out were the kind your mother warns you never to talk to, huddled in doorways. It kind of reminded me of old photographs of war-torn Europe.

Ella finally turned back to me with a worried look on her face.

“Are you sure you know where we are?”

“Of course I know where we are,” I said with more confidence than I felt. Since I’m being totally honest, I have to admit that I wasn’t as knowledgeable about Soho as I could have been. I’d never actually been this far downtown at night by myself. Everything looked different with the shadows and the rain. But I didn’t tell Ella that. She was nervous enough.

“This is my city,” I assured her. “I know it as well as I know my own room.”

Ella gazed at the sodden avenue. “Your room isn’t this big,” she said, but she sounded relieved.

I pointed to the corner. “I think we go left down there.”

We went left, and then we went right, and then we went right, and then we went left, and then we doubled back and went right this time.

“Why aren’t there any policemen around to ask?” Ella complained as we staggered back again to where we’d started.

I was about to repeat my father’s joke about New York cops spending all their time in diners eating doughnuts and drinking coffee, but at that instant the gods blew the clouds of hopelessness away.

“Look!” I shouted. “Look what’s there!”

Ella looked to where I was pointing. “It’s a car stopped at the light.”

“No, it’s not,” I said, already yanking her forward. “It’s Mr Santini’s car stopped at the light.”

Keeping close to the buildings, and counting on the fact that Carla and Alma, who were sitting together in the back seat, would be looking in the mirror, touching up their make-up, and that Carla’s parents, if they did see us, wouldn’t recognize us in our new personae as flood victims, Ella and I started to run in the direction of the car.

We caught up with it at the next corner. It turned right. Ella and I went with it. Mr Santini obviously didn’t know Soho any better than I did, because he was going really slowly, his eyes on the street signs. We managed to keep up until he shot suddenly to the left down what looked like an alley. I gave a quick look both ways, just as Karen Kapok taught me to, then splashed into the road with Ella in tow.

We raced around the corner; just in time to see the Mercedes turn into the cross street.

“Come on,” I said, dragging her on. “He’s looking for the address. We must be pretty close.”

Ella flapped her arms in a gesture of despair. “So near, and yet so far…”

“So near, and yet so near,” I corrected.

We reached the end of the narrow road and peered cautiously around the corner building.

I squeezed Ella’s hand. “I told you!” I hissed. If by some cruel twist of fate I don’t become a great actor, I can always become a great detective instead.

Mr Santini had stopped at the curb in the middle of the next street. We were just in time to see Carla and Alma step out of the plush cocoon of the back seat and into the stormy night, an enormous silver umbrella held high. Carla was dressed to kill (or dressed to roast a turkey) in a short, tight dress – silver to match the umbrella – and silver stilettos. I glanced at my sodden clothes and muddy feet. I looked like someone had tried to kill me. With the umbrella quivering above them like a halo, Carla and Alma glided towards the black door with the number 63 painted on it in gold.

Mr Santini leaned across the passenger seat and said something. Ella and I ducked back. When we peeked out again, the Mercedes was pulling away, and Carla was showing her invitation to a very large man in black leather. He looked like the guy you’d find guarding the gates of hell.

“So all we have to do now is get past him,” whispered Ella.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “We’ve gotten this far. From now on it’s a piece of cake.”