Bad Kitty Read online

  Michele Jaffe

  Bad Kitty

  For Dan,

  My Superhero

  Contents

  One

  I believe everyone has a superpower. My friend Polly can…

  Two

  I’d hoped that after this fascinating conversation, the Evil Hench…

  Three

  The main difference between where I was and real prison,…

  Four

  But being a Model Daughter did not exactly come naturally…

  Five

  I should have expected it.

  Six

  I swooned.

  Seven

  People are always surprising you. Take Alyson. She hadn’t seemed…

  Eight

  At first I thought the scraping was a sound in…

  Nine

  Despite wearing my lucky bikini with the padded top and…

  Ten

  It turns out that the Venetian Gulag is more extensive…

  Eleven

  Little Life Lesson 19: If you drift from the head…

  Twelve

  As I went inside and took the elevator up to…

  Thirteen

  “What’s that?” Roxy asked, tearing her eyes from Bubba’s collar…

  Fourteen

  Apparently I’d been wrong. There was still one act of…

  Fifteen

  In seventh-grade Ancient History, we learned that the Greeks and…

  Sixteen

  I guess I had always known it would happen but…

  Seventeen

  “When I didn’t see any bullets or bullet holes downstairs,…

  Eighteen

  Roxy was a little depressed that none of her guesses…

  Nineteen

  “How did you get all those people there doing that?”

  Twenty

  Four things were immediately clear to me:

  Twenty-One

  When I opened my eyes I was terrified something awful…

  Twenty-Two

  I dreamed about my mom that night. That’s not completely…

  Twenty-Three

  Polly was the first one of us to regain speech.

  Twenty-Four

  Fred had told me his room number the day we…

  Twenty-Five

  We walked in, paying no attention at all to whether…

  Twenty-Six

  I would like to say that I reacted like a…

  Twenty-Seven

  “I heard about your call to hotel security,” Mr. Curtis…

  Twenty-Eight

  Little Life Lesson 50: If you think there is anything…

  Twenty-Nine

  His words would have been more ominous if I had…

  Thirty

  This could still work, I told myself. And if it…

  Thirty-One

  There are times in a girl’s life when she would…

  Thirty-Two

  That’s right. Red Early was Jack’s father.

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  This book could never have existed without the inspiration and assistance of:

  Meg Cabot

  Susan Ginsburg

  Dan Goldner

  Abby McAden

  The Desert Passage Shops

  The Forum Shoppes (especially Phase III)

  The Grand Canal Shoppes

  The Shops at Mandalay Place

  The Via

  Bellagio Shops

  Tacos

  TiVo

  I thank you all for being so super fabulous. I thank you all for being so super fabulous.

  One

  I believe everyone has a superpower. My friend Polly can name the designer, season, and price of any garment on any person (knockoffs too) with flawless accuracy. Roxy can eat more food faster than anyone I’ve ever seen, has a perfect sense of direction, and over one spring break she built a working TV out of an old toaster. And her twin brother Tom can imitate anyone’s voice and pick any kind of lock.

  Still, I’ve never been able to figure out what my superpower is. Dr. Payne, my dentist, says my teeth generate plaque faster than anyone he’s ever seen. And I have an incredible ability to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, without fail. But I’m not sure either of those count. I guess the only thing I’ve got going for me is that cats like me.

  But if that is a superpower, you can have it, because it’s the reason I got into this whole mess.

  It had started out as such a nice day too.

  I was relaxing on my chaise lounge at the Venetian Hotel pool in Las Vegas after a grueling fifteen minutes of water aerobics with my stepmother, Sherri! (Actually, she just recently stopped writing her name with the exclamation point after it. Now she just puts a heart over the i.)

  Sherri! and I had just finished our “exercise,” which mostly consisted of me flailing my arms around like I was telling some hovering space aliens, “Over here, come this way,” and Sherri! naming the different brands of breast implants on display around us in the pool. Sherri!’s breasts are real, but since almost all her friends from the ABA where she works as a hand-breast-thigh body double, are “enhanced,” she’s become kind of an expert. (ABA stands for All-Body Agency, supplying body doubles to Hollywood since 1984, not the American Bar Association, which is what my aunt Liz thinks.)

  That’s not her superpower, though. Sherri!’s superpower is that it’s impossible to hate her. I know, you’re thinking that is not a superpower, but in the case of Sherri!, believe me, it is. Because it’s not just men who don’t hate her. Everyone doesn’t hate Sherri! Even I can’t hate her, which, if you know anything about stepmothers, is really very wrong. We are supposed to hate each other; it’s in the natural order of things. And that does not take into account the special circumstances of me vs. Sherri! Which are:

  Sherri!:

  Boobs: C-cup, real, perky

  Eyes: sky blue

  Skin: peach sorbet

  Face: could totally launch a thousand ships.

  Even rockets.

  Figure: she’s a body double for Hollywood stars.

  Need I say more?

  Height: perfect (5'6"; 5'9" in heels)

  If her hair were a character in a horror movie, it would be: the pretty girl who always looks tidy yet sexy even when running for her life from the scary unpredictable murderer Dream: to invent a line of comfortable, safe, and attractive seat belts for small dogs

  Age: 25

  Me (Jas):

  Boobs: nonexistent (like my superpower)

  Eyes: grass green (from my Irish father)

  Skin: chocolate milkshake (from my Jamaican mother. Along with my dimples.)

  Face: could launch, maybe, a science experiment Figure: stick bug

  Height: King Kong

  If my hair were a character in a horror movie it would be: the scary unpredictable murderer who sometimes looks perfectly normal and then other times reveals an inner demonic self.

  Dream: to have a boyfriend I can look up to. Literally. While wearing my cowboy boots. Oh, also to fight crime and make the world a safer place.

  Age: 17

  Yes, that is right, my stepmother was eight when I was born. Don’t even ask how old my father was when she was born; it’s upsetting. And yet, despite that, I cannot hate her.

  Since she and my dad got married a year ago, Sherri! has been nothing but excellent. She doesn’t take my dad’s side in our arguments, and she uses logic on me to get me to do what she wants. Like, “If you use the car without permission, you’d better remember to fill the gas tank. You have money for gas, right? If you don’t, you might not want to go.” I mean, that’s helpful. Plus, she has never tried to give me menstruat
ion tips, or tell me how lucky I am because my exotic coloring opens up a whole palette of eye shadow colors most women can’t go near, or point out that some boys like to date women a foot taller than them, or advise me about guys at all.

  Not that her advice would work anyway, since her experiences as a seventeen-year-old and mine have nothing in common except that we are both the same species. And I’m not even sure that’s true. I mean, Sherri! could well be some new, improved form of Homo sapiens designed to end hatred and bring voluptuous beauty to the world. The way the really cute guy sitting at the pool’s Snack Hut looked in our direction as she perfectly “Right arm, jab! Left arm, jab!”ed her way through water aerobics made this very clear.

  My plan for the afternoon was to lie around far, far from Sherri! and Dad and their cooing, trying to come up with something to write in my summer Meaningful Reflection Journal for school. It seemed like a good time to start, since school was beginning in two weeks and so far my journal was empty. So I decided I would just write down whatever I wanted. Like this haiku:

  Cute guy at Snack Hut

  Why won’t you remove your shirt?

  It’s so hot (you too)

  The point of the Meaningful Reflection Journal, according to Dr. Lansdowne, the college counselor at the Westborough School for Girls, which I attend, is to encourage us to compile thoughts and reflections and take stock of all the little life lessons we learn each day. (Translated, that meant that it would force us to practice SAT vocabulary words while helping us come up with something that sounded deep in our college essays.) Young people, Dr. Lansdowne said, experience so much and process so little; the journals would change that. He can get away with saying things like that without choking on his tongue because he looks like Hugh Grant did when he was young, complete with British accent.

  (I wonder if that could count as Little Life Lesson 1: If you have to say something that would be better printed on one of those posters with a photo of a kitty hugging a tree branch, say it with a British accent. Being the only cute male at a school of 480 girls might also help.)

  Dr. Lansdowne says we should aim to learn sixty Little Life Lessons, “or approximately one each weekday of summer vacation.” Talk about a depressing calculation. I mostly try to do what Dr. Lansdowne says, not only because he has dedicated his life to helping us get into college when he could be making a lot more money as a teen sex icon, and I think that deserves validation, or because I have what Polly calls British Accent Stupidity Syndrome, but really because college is my only chance of escaping from my father. But despite being highly motivated, I still could not bring myself to write anything in my journal all summer. And not for lack of trying. The truth was, I didn’t learn anything in those three long months. Unless of course you count the random facts and quotations I picked up playing Dixie Cup Trivia during my breaks with the receptionist and nurse’s aide at my uncle’s office.

  I’d had a really fantastic summer internship lined up working as a junior criminalist in the Los Angeles Sheriff’s office, but my father refused to let me take it. For some reason he thought being an assistant’s assistant in his brother’s medical practice would be more educational. And who could blame him, really? I mean, when it comes to developing skills I will call on again and again in my future life, how can knowing how to sequence DNA possibly compare to being able to say, “Please urinate in this cup and leave it here for the doctor,” fluently in English and Spanish? Right, no contest.

  (In case you’re wondering, that’s “Favor de dejar un especimín en este copa para el doctor.”)

  (Also, in case you’re wondering, the cute guy still had his shirt on.)

  My uncle Andy was the reason we were in Vegas. It was his and my aunt Liz’s turn to choose where we would take our annual End-of-Summer-I-Know!-Let’s-Torture-Jas-by-Making-Her-Leave-All-Her-Precious-Pals-and-Spend-Time-with-Her-Family Vacation, and they’d decided on the Venetian Hotel. To which I could only say: Bless you, Uncle Andy and Aunt Liz. Because even sans little pals and avec embarrassing family members, the Venetian Hotel? Yes, more or less my definition of heaven.

  In fact, I was kind of bummed we weren’t staying longer. We’d arrived the night before and would be there through the weekend. Even though it was a Thursday, the pool area was full and the people-watching was mind-boggling. There was everything from two really pale punk girls with dyed hair (one hot pink, one bright blue) wearing black cutoff cargo pants, black combat boots, black studded leather wrist cuffs, black lipstick, and black suspenders over white tube tops small enough to show off their navel art; to a woman wearing huge diamonds and fancy matching bathing suit–robe combo; to a man with a tattoo on his back of a parrot saying, “Doobie or not doobie, that is the question.”

  And there was the cute guy at the Snack Hut. I had gotten a good look at him earlier when I went to order a root beer float for breakfast, and they made me wait a long time while they found the ice cream (apparently some people do not consider ice cream a breakfast food. I shudder for them). He was sitting at the table reading a copy of Spin magazine, not just flipping through it like I would have been, which showed he was a deep intellectual soul, as well as interested in music. Even better, as I casually ambled by him on my way back to my lounge, I could tell that he was admiring my root beer float. Clearly we were destined for each other.

  I was just thinking that between the presence of my Destined One, the green marble bathroom with the steam shower, the Krispy Kreme doughnut bakery, and the outstanding people-watching, I could happily live and die at the Venetian, when I heard a menacing crack crack crack from my left and smelled the sugary scent that could only mean one thing.

  Do not look up, I told myself. Maybe if you don’t look up, the frightening creature will slink away. Or you’ll suddenly be invisible. That would be a very helpful superpower. Do not look up do not look up—

  I looked. And there it, or rather she, was, perching on the lounge chair next to mine like an Abercrombie and Fitch version of a praying mantis: my perfect cousin, Alyson (superpower: ability to turn people into gnats with just a look, or at least make them feel like she has).

  Alyson and I are the same age and go to the same school and presumably share some strands of paternal DNA since her father and my father are brothers (not that I’ll ever be able to sequence it), but that’s pretty much where the resemblance ends. She was with her Evil Hench Twin, Veronique, who is not her real twin like Roxy and Tom are, only her twin in terms of darkness of the soul, clump-free mascara application, perfect glossy straight brown hair, and that kind of thing. They were wearing coordinating rainbow bikinis, rainbow heart-shaped necklaces, and rainbow-striped newsboy caps, looking (it pains me to say) quite cute doing it. The only difference between them was that their caps were skewed at slightly different angles, and Alyson had a pack of sugar-free Bubble Yum stuck through the elastic part of her bikini bottoms, while Veronique was using that prime real estate to store her chapstick.

  I forgot to mention that Alyson has another superpower, which is that she can blow the largest bubbles you’ve ever seen with chewing gum. When we were in third grade, Alyson won a bubble blowing contest and I don’t think I’ve ever seen her without Bubble Yum since then. It’s her signature scent.

  Alyson blew a huge, perfect bubble, let it snap back, and said, “Look, it’s Calamity Callihan. Didn’t do your journal this summer, Calamity? Did being a receptionist-slash-loser in my dad’s office take up too much of your time?”

  Because her thoughts are quite lofty, mere words are not sufficient for my cousin Alyson to express herself and she must string them together with slashes. Alyson and Veronique high-fived each other in honor of this recent slash, and Veronique went, “That was so MasterCard.”

  I couldn’t help myself. I had to ask. “MasterCard?”

  “Duh,” Alyson said, popping a bubble. “Like the ads? You know, ‘priceless.’ Gee, Calamity, get out much?”

  There were about a thousand excellent things I
could have said as a comeback to that, but I couldn’t think of a single one of them.

  It’s one of the great galactic mysteries how Alyson’s father, who is among the kindest men in the world and would provide medical care—not to mention summer employment—to any stray who wandered in off the street, and her mother, my aunt Liz, who hand-sews clothes for her teddy bear collection and bakes “Welcome to Our Blessed Block” cakes for new neighbors, ended up with a daughter whose idea of kindness to others is to wear a push-up bra and smile occasionally. But I was under strict orders from my father to be nice to “your sweet cousin Alyson and her friend,” and since I am above petty things like bitterness that she got to bring a friend on our FAMILY vacation and I did not, and since I noticed that Alyson had bitten the acrylic tips off her nails which meant something was really bothering her, and (to be perfectly honest) since I’d just remembered that the last time Polly saw anyone wearing a newsboy cap she said, “Holy Time Portal to last year, Batgirl!,” I smiled at the Evil Hench Pair and said, “So, how was your summer?”