Being Audrey Hepburn Read online

  “You know her too well!” ZK said and gave me an amused look. I felt as though he knew I was faking and was congratulating me on my recovery, but it didn’t really matter what he was thinking. I was gobsmacked by his gold-flecked eyes.

  “Well, you haven’t done poorly yourself,” Dahlia added, watching ZK watching me, but he barely seemed to notice. As I searched for a witty reply, I saw Joe the security guy leaning over the upper gallery stairs. He was pointing right at me and looking down at—Jess! She’d just reached the bottom stairs of the main gallery.

  I was in so much trouble. Jess motioned me to come right away. I shrugged helplessly, unsure how to extricate myself.

  “Is there something going on over there?” Dahlia asked. She couldn’t quite see Jess, and even if she had, a mere museum employee wouldn’t register for her.

  “Not at all, it just seems as though someone has had too much fun and it’s time for them to go home,” I said sadly. Jess pulled a waiter over, handed him a note, and pointed in my direction.

  “And I’m afraid I will be on my way as well. It’s been lovely meeting you,” I said and turned from my newfound “friends.” But ZK grabbed my arm. First the creeper, now Mr. Underwear-Man … these rich people were so grabby.

  “I’m curious, have we met before?”

  “Darling, I assure you, no one knows me. I’m quite a homebody, actually,” I said in my quietest Audrey voice.

  “Excuse me,” the waiter interrupted. “I believe this is for you.”

  “Thank you, dear.” But before I opened the note, a perky thirtyish young woman with a blond ponytail and an expensive camera interrupted us.

  “Page Six?” she asked.

  “I’d rather not,” Dahlia started.

  “Oh, come now. Take one of the three of us,” ZK said. He put one arm around Dahlia and the other around me before I could say a peep. God, he smelled good. Like citrus, musk, and leather—all sex appeal. ZK squeezed me tighter, as if we were old friends. It was so totally absurd that I practically giggled as the camera flashed.

  I caught Jess’s eye. She was in shock. It took a second to register what I had just done. There was now Page Six photographic evidence of me wearing the Audrey dress. Oh God, I was a total screw-up.

  “Thank you,” the photographer said, looking down at her camera. “Would you mind spelling your name?” Before she looked up, I slipped into the crowd without answering.

  ZK, Dahlia, and Page Six were probably wondering who I was and where I came from.

  I walked deliberately in Jess’s direction, savoring the last few seconds of everything—the champagne, the dress, the sad pop princess, and my too-big shoes, leaving the world of my dreams to begin the unavoidable descent back to my sad, uneventful life.

  11

  The Hole.

  If you wanted to visit my own personal version of hell, it was right off the Jersey Turnpike, exit 14C.

  Everybody called it the Hole, except tourists. Our semiofficial motto was, “It’s gotta taste better than it looks.”

  It wasn’t the worst job in the world, but it was close.

  At 11:08, I was late for my shift. I overslept—if staying up all night and passing out for two and a half hours could be considered oversleeping. It seemed more like undersleeping. But how could I stop thinking about that night? The shimmering dress, vomiting pop stars, and gorgeous baby moguls.

  And Page Six. Holy shit, Page Six.

  I acted totally horrified that the Page Six reporter snapped my picture, but secretly I was amped. I spent the night at Jess’s place; her mom was totally cool as usual. After Jess fell asleep, I googled Page Six on her computer and hit refresh over and over until it posted at 5:43 A.M.

  ZK Northcott, Dahlia Rothenberg, and little ole me. Me.

  It was so Technicolor vivid in my mind that it already didn’t feel real anymore. It seemed more like a movie I had seen, a dream I had, or a lost scene from Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which was why I couldn’t wait to see Jess at the Hole that morning to rehash every glorious second of it. I’d promised myself over and over, though, that I’d be considerate of how freaked Jess was.

  I dropped off some of my things at the house around 10:30 A.M., tiptoeing in and out as Mom was leaving for work. She seemed pretty hungover, so we barely said hi. Not a word about the calls.

  I could see the neon-pink DINER sign perched on top of the dilapidated, art deco train car from a block away. Roaring into the lot, I overshot the parking space a little, screeched on the brakes, and choked the Purple Beast. One tire was up on the parking block, but I grabbed my stuff off the seat and slipped through the front door, trying to blend in as fast as I could.

  I’d worked the past two and a half years at the Hole, where the smell of coffee and bacon permanently emanated from the cracked orange Naugahyde booths. There was greasy black gunk in every corner of the floor from decades of half-assed mop jobs. The most expensive thing on the menu was the Jersey T-bone, at $13.85. I’d seen them in the fridge before they were cooked. I wouldn’t go near them.

  The customers at the Hole were frequently wasted and always cheap. Although we were pretty steady all day long, our busiest time was after 2:30 A.M. That was the zombie shift, right after the bars closed and the shift change at the window factory. It paid more tips. People didn’t seem to know how to count change after two in the morning.

  The Hole was a convenient place to eat for people who’d rather take their chances with food poisoning than tunnel traffic. It made for a lot of cranky, unhappy customers. Thankfully, the people who worked there were mostly cool.

  “You’re late,” chided Buela, my boss. Her middle-aged body was squashed into an ancient pink waitress uniform, and her unnaturally red hair was teased and sprayed into a pouf, adorned with a silvery clip. Buela’s dad, Milton, owned the Hole, and she’d worked there ever since she was twelve.

  “One day,” she always told us, “I’m going to own this joint.” We always nodded enthusiastically and wondered why she’d ever want to.

  “Sorry, Buela,” I said meekly over my shoulder, not slowing down as I made my way to the employee lockers in the back.

  Jess was there, joking with Jake, who was leaning against my locker. His faded jeans hung low on his hips in that way … that way that made you want to hook your finger around a belt loop and just reel him in. Jake had smoky-blue eyes and broad shoulders and great arms, which I couldn’t help but notice because he was wearing this sky-colored BLUE NOTE RECORDS T-shirt that looked vintage and fit him exactly right.

  My heart did a little flip when I saw him. Jake and I had this thing … well, we sort of had a thing. I guess it was almost a thing, like an urge to have a thing. I don’t exactly know how to describe it.

  He’d started working there three months earlier. Light flirting early on had recently turned into heavier stuff. We’d gone out a couple of times but always with people from work. Then the previous week, in a shocker, he kissed me in the walk-in freezer, pressing me against the giant bags of frozen french fries until I was breathless.

  Jake Berns was older than me, twenty-three, a musician who had graduated a couple of years ago from Paterson and lived in Hoboken with six roommates, all of them in his band, Rocket Berns, although everyone called then simply the Rockets. Jake fronted the band, played guitar, sang lead, and wrote most of the songs. He was determined to make his mark. They played five or six gigs a week, but basically only made beer money. Jake waited tables at the Hole to keep up. Money was tight because, strangely enough, the music scene in Jersey was astonishingly good, which meant that, in addition to the homegrown talent, bands came from all over to get heard by the record execs who were always trolling the clubs, scouting for the next Bon Jovi or Springsteen. The gigs were prime exposure-wise, so the club owners nickel and dimed the bands to the extreme.

  The great thing about Jake was that he knew exactly what he wanted with no backup plan, which was hot as hell—to me anyway. He had complete and utter commit
ment to his purpose. Not like some people—aka me. Honestly, he was out of my league, but for reasons I didn’t understand, he was into me. Maybe it was because I gave him a hard time about being a rock ’n’ roll heartthrob, since I figured he was beyond my reach. Honestly, he scared me a little.

  Jake was one of the few genuinely cool people I knew. The other one was Jess, of course. Considering I was ready to nod off, I was glad all three of us were on shift that day. I was hoping to grab rewind time with Jess to rehash the previous night in detail.

  “Hey you,” Jake said. He gave me a sly grin.

  “Hey back.”

  “You look like roadkill,” said Jess. She tied on her pink apron and grabbed an order pad. “Did you sleep at all?”

  “A couple hours.”

  Jake shifted just enough away from my locker so I could shove my stuff in.

  “How much did your mom freak out?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. I was only there for a sec.”

  “She’s probably just worried about you,” offered Jake and gave me a look with those soul-puppy eyes.

  “What’d she want?” Jess prodded.

  “Something incredibly important she couldn’t remember,” I answered, tying on my pink Finer Diner apron. “Just the usual vodka-induced amnesia. She probably doesn’t even know she called me a gazillion times. Maybe she was butt dialing.”

  Jess shot me a painful look. She knew how my mom got. What Jess didn’t know was that I had been avoiding Mom way more than usual. There would be a meltdown when she found out I wasn’t going to college next fall. I hadn’t told Jess either. At some point, I was inevitably headed for a complete and total shitastrophy.

  “So Lizzy’s a regular party girl, eh?” Jake said. I half-smiled at his warm bad boy eyes. Jake, like everyone I knew, had the Sopranos accent that everybody else always made fun of, saying “party” like “potty.”

  “Yeah, but nothing compared to you and your groupie worshipers,” I said. Jake laughed.

  Jess and I had made a concerted effort in our last year of high school to drop our accent by getting rid of the w and u sounds we grew up adding to everything. We also sharpened our r’s. But I still let out a “youse” now and then, especially if I’d had a few beers. And whenever Jess stabbed herself with a sewing needle, she gave out the biggest “owwuhwhwwwuhwwwuh”—five whole syllables of ouch. But I think she did that on purpose.

  We thought New Yorkers had accents. Even though you didn’t hear a trace of it when he was rocking with the band, Jake talked totally Jersey. Kind of like Audrey and me. That was one of the weirdest, most undeniable things about that night at the Met: not one of the guests talked the way my friends and I did. It was like Americans visiting London: everybody speaks English, but nobody speaks your language.

  I couldn’t help comparing everything to last night. God, I was gonna burst if I didn’t get a chance to talk about it. I turned to Jess. She could tell I was about to blurt it all out and shot me a cautionary glance.

  “Are you three forming a social club or something?” yelled Buela. “We got customers. You too, lover boy.”

  Hurrying up front, we saw there was only one guy sitting in the far booth by the window—typical Buela. We traded annoyed looks with one another, but I figured I was the late one, so it’d better be me. I went over politely to see if he wanted to order something.

  “Hey, you want a coffee?”

  He silently nodded no. Couldn’t care less. No problem. So much for the lunch rush. It was going to be a very long day.

  I was wrong. During the next five hours, we were hit by so many customers that I felt as if I’d fall over from exhaustion. Which was how I ended up dumping an entire deluxe chili con carne and egg special with homemade cornbread hash and salsa all over myself trying to serve an old truck driver named Buddy at table 6. He was a regular, so Buela was furious. Jake leapt across the diner in a flash, cleaning up my mess.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “Super,” I said, shaking egg yolk and chunks of chili from my hair. “I’m good. Jake, you don’t have to do that.”

  “No worries, I got this. Take a break.” Buela seemed anything but fine with that.

  He winked at me and began wiping down the side of the booth, now speckled with hash browns.

  “You’re the best,” I said. Really, I felt as if I was gonna faint if I didn’t sit down. Shuffling off to the bathroom to clean up, I did my best not to make eye contact with Buela, who was steaming at the cash register. I barely could keep my eyes open.

  I grabbed a Coke in the back for the caffeine and sat down in Buela’s office, the only place I could sit down. I took a swig and figured I’d rest my eyes for a second and wished I could crawl into my closet and dream about being Audrey at the Met.

  * * *

  “Hey, I don’t think you want to sleep here forever,” I heard a voice say. “Buela might start deducting rent from your paycheck.”

  I opened my eyes and there was Jake, gently shaking me by the shoulders, my head on Buela’s desk and a puddle of drool in the shape of a whale. So not cool. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and then secretly dried the desk with my other sleeve, hoping Jake wouldn’t see. Classy, I know. Jake was smiling, wearing his “dress-up” blue flannel shirt. Our shift must have ended. Shit.

  “God. You’ve changed your shirt. How long have I been sleeping for?” I was so screwed.

  “Musta been a killer night,” Jake said. He laughed, tossed me a couple aspirins, and handed me a cup of water.

  “Yeah, totally killer,” I said groggily and swallowed the aspirin.

  Jake didn’t mind how Jersey he was. We had talked about it. He’d never leave. And me? I didn’t know why, but more than ever after last night, it seemed as if I had been dying to get out of there forever. What’s that expression about keeping them down on the farm after they’ve seen Paris? It was something like that.

  Jake pulled up a chair and straddled it. “So Lizzy, there’s this band called Dalton that’s supposed to be total kick-ass playing at Hiram’s Junction. I’m checkin’ out the drummer for my band. It’s a couple miles away. You up for it?”

  I gazed into his smoky eyes full of mischief and shook my head no. I didn’t even know why.

  “Pillow, bed,” I mumbled. He leaned toward me. His fresh, clean shirt smelled so good.

  “You sure?”

  My body trembled a little bit. I knew where this was going. He moved closer and kissed me on the cheek, his lips slowly making a trail toward my mouth. I didn’t stop him. I kissed him back, closing my eyes, feeling his breath, the warmth radiating from his lips winding through my body, forgetting where we were until there was a bang on the door to the kitchen.

  “Am I counting all these tips myself?” Jess called. “Because if I do, I’m taking the whole show. I can definitely use the cash.”

  One last breathless kiss, and I pulled myself away from Jake.

  “I’m coming, I’m coming.” I dragged myself out front. Jake trailed behind, gently pulling the tie on my apron until it fell off. I snatched it back.

  “Behave yourself,” I whispered.

  We settled up with Jess, and I offered my share to them. Jake, of course, refused to take it. I threw my pink apron into the locker and figured I’d better make the first move or it would look bad.

  “G’night, I’m nowhere near cool enough to hang out with you two. Besides, I can’t keep my eyes open.”

  “You’re stickin’ with that line?” Jake asked with his sweet hangdog face.

  “I gotta check to see if my mom called another hundred times.” They both laughed.

  “Okay, then listen. There’s a gig the day after tomorrow that we’re playing and then next weekend—we’re rocking a big showcase for lots of A and R guys at Reilly’s that you’ve got to come to, deal?” he asked. He hesitated for a split second before he gave me a chuck on the shoulder. I wanted another kiss. From the look he gave me, he did, too.

&nbs
p; “Okay rock ’n’ roll Romeo, deal.” I chucked him back on the shoulder, which was firm and strong, hard as a rock. As I dragged myself away to my overparked purple monster, I regretted my decision.

  I heard Jess console him as they left. “Come on, stud bucket,” she said. “You can take me. Maybe we can both get lucky and pick up some chicks.” Hearing them laugh, I felt like an idiot. I guess there was no reliving my night of glory with Jess either. I hesitated for a second, but my brain was starting to go fuzzy from sleep deprivation. I checked my phone, just to see if Mom had really called.

  Shit.

  “Ms u bathroom buddy ! Let’s connect b4 the party ! ;) Tabby”

  Ohmygod—I had a text from Tabitha Eden, the Princess of Pop. She was so wasted; I thought for sure she’d forget.

  I imagined how incredible it would be to go to an Island Records release party, the entire industry of rock stars, fashionistas, trust funders, and me hanging with my BFF Tabitha Eden on her own turf. But there was no way I’d get close enough to pass the ropes.

  And what if we had gotten busted at the Met? Jess fired. Both of us facing felony charges for hacking a million-dollar dress. Humiliation. Shame. Mug shots on the Internet. And though it ended up being, hands down, the greatest night of my entire life, I would have to be incredibly stupid and boneheaded to ever try and pull off another Audrey charade again, right?

  12

  Crap, crap, crap.

  Rounding the corner in the Beast on the way home from work, there it was—red and blue lights flashing, a New Jersey State Trooper squad car in my driveway.

  Ohmygod, ohmygod, ohmygod.

  My heart bashed at my rib cage. This was it. They’d come to arrest me. They knew about the dress. I tried to breathe, but my lungs felt as though they were being crushed. Stay calm, stay calm.

  Okay, I didn’t actually steal it, right? I didn’t leave the premises. So that wasn’t stealing. It was borrowing. Not even. Really, I just relocated the dress from the archives to the main gallery and back again. Like a curator. Except not.