Lucky You Page 3

  Michelle said, “His work is pretty complex, but what if it doesn’t fit the brief ?”

  “What do you think, Gia?” Kyle asked.

  Everyone turned to look at me expectantly.

  I narrowed my eyes as if deep in thought and said, “Hmmm. Yes. Well, I myself am a great fan of . . . uh . . . that philosopher. But I think his work might be too complex for this assignment. We don’t want to overwhelm people with a really heavy theory on, um . . . life.”

  “Yeah, I agree.” Kyle said, pushing his hair away from his glasses. “I don’t think it’s worth the risk.”

  “Same.” Jamie said, and Michelle nodded.

  Wow. Really? That actually worked? Hannah shrugged, but she was pouting a little.

  “What about Carl Jung?” Kyle suggested.

  Carl Jung. I remembered that name from the lecture slides, but I had zero idea what he was about. Plus, his last name had been spelt with a ‘j’ but Kyle had pronounced it as “young.” Why couldn’t psychologists just have normal names, like John Citizen?

  “That could work,” Michelle replied thoughtfully. “His theory is pretty easy to explain. Not too complex.”

  “But remember,” Hannah said. “We have to keep it relevant to modern society. Do you think Jung’s work is too old and outdated?”

  “Well, I mean he’s still Jung at heart,” I said.

  Once more, all eyes locked on me. I let out a small, nervous laugh. Sweet Jesus. Why couldn’t I just shut up for one minute and not give everyone even more reason to dislike me? Michelle smiled a little, but I think her amusement was directed more at me than the joke. I glanced at Jamie, who had his eyebrows raised. This was getting more painful with every minute that passed.

  “I think it’s actually pronounced yoong,” Hannah told me.

  “Anyway,” Kyle said, stepping in once more to diffuse the situation. “I got to run to my next class, but let’s give it some thought, and we can decide next week.”

  I gave a small sigh of relief. Judging by the way Hannah was looking at me, Kyle was going to have to play mediator a lot this semester. Everyone exchanged polite goodbyes and stiff handshakes, as if we had been thrust into a group speed-dating session that was coming to an unsuccessful end. Kyle had already run out of the hall, checking his watch frantically. Students from the next class were already piling through the front door to take their seats, filling the room with chatter. Michelle, and Hannah disappeared into the crowd on the stairs below.

  Jamie looked at me, expressionless, for a few seconds before turning to leave. Just as he turned, a pen fell from the pocket of his brown sling bag.

  “Hey!” I called out, and he turned to face me. I bent down to pick up the pen that lay a few steps ahead of me, but he had already grabbed it.

  “Don’t worry, I got it,” he said, both of us still kneeling. “Wouldn’t want you to break a nail, now would we?”

  He rose and stuffed the pen back into the pocket of his bag. I gave him a stunned look. “Excuse me?”

  The room was loud, but there was no way I had misheard him. But he didn’t reply. Instead, Jamie gave me a two-fingered salute, continued climbing the stairs, and disappeared through the exit. Well, jeez. No need to be nice or anything. It’s not like I’m a human being with feelings. I blew out a sigh, my heart still pounding from embarrassment and anger.

  Day one of classes, and I had already made some enemies. Maybe college wasn’t going to be that different from high school after all.

  Three

  I rode the private elevator up to my Fifth Avenue penthouse with zero patience. It was a twenty second journey, but it was twenty seconds too long that day. All I wanted to do was run through the doors, grab a slab of chocolate on the way to my room, crawl under the covers and never come out again. Agoraphobic people had the right idea about life. Daylight and socializing were way overrated.

  The elevator let out a small ding as the doors opened. I stepped out and sped down the small corridor before pushing the doorbell with such intensity that I was scared I was going to break it. I tapped my foot impatiently, waiting for Val, my housekeeper, to answer. The door finally swung open, and I let out an impatient sigh.

  “Finally!” I declared with relief, dropping my bag onto the nearest table.

  “Is everything okay?” Val asked. She did a quick scan of the hallway before closing the door. The way I had hurried in, she had probably presumed someone had been chasing me. “No,” I said, flopping onto the sofa dramatically. “Everything sucks.”

  Val walked over to the sofa and looked down at me with her kind, brown eyes. “Bad first day?”

  “Bad doesn’t even begin to describe it.”

  She gave me a sympathetic look and said, “Sorry, G. There’s always tomorrow.”

  I pressed a cushion to my face and tried not to scream. Tomorrow there would be another day of college, and yet another day where I’d want to disappear into a sinkhole. I could hear the gentle pattering on the floor as my Yorkshire terrier, Famous, trotted about the place.

  “Chocolate,” I whimpered, my voice muffled by the pillow. “Now.”

  I listened as Val’s footsteps faded. Sometimes I wondered if she had a resignation letter ready to go whenever I got on her nerves too much. She was far too young to be babysitting me, and far too old to be dealing with my tantrums. I saw her as a big sister. She probably saw me as a pain in the ass. But, then again, she really worked for my mother and not me. If she hadn’t quit after all the trauma Mom must put her through, she definitely wasn’t going to desert me.

  My ringtone blasted from inside my bag, and I removed the pillow from my face with a groan. I checked the caller ID.

  “You’re late,” I said simply, placing the phone to my ear.

  “I’m here now, aren’t I?” came the reply.

  “I even told the front desk to let you up without asking, and you’re still late.”

  “You just got here yourself !”

  “No, I didn’t. I’ve been here for, like, an hour.”

  “Your doorman told me you just got here.”

  Goddamn it. I knew I couldn’t trust Phil. “Just hurry!”

  “Alright, alright! Stepping into the elevator now.”

  I hung up without a goodbye and peeled myself off the sofa with all the energy I had left. Finally, something to look forward to after this horrible day. Val emerged from the kitchen with a sealed box of Ferrero Rocher.

  “I think this is all we have,” she said, holding up the box to show me.

  “It’ll do,” I replied, dropping it onto the sofa.

  The doorbell chimed, and I rushed to the front door, tugging on the gold handle with excitement.

  “I bring gifts from the land of Chinatown!”

  Jack held up two big plastic bags, the delicious smell of noodles wafting through the penthouse. I moved aside to let him into the house, closing the door behind us.

  “I thought we were supposed to go out?” I said.

  “Yeah, well,” Jack replied, placing the plastic bags on the dining table. “Change of plans.”

  Typical Jack Anderson: make a plan and then change it last minute without letting anyone else know. Sometimes I wondered why I even kept him around, but I knew the answer to that was simple. Jack had been my bodyguard when Frank was stalking me. We hadn’t liked each other much when we first met; he thought I was a spoiled brat, and I thought he was an arrogant jerk. Neither of us were really wrong about the other, but we had found a way to work around it. He had jumped in front of a bullet for my father and had put up with a lot of my complaining over the months. So, sure. He could be extremely stubborn, and sometimes I caught myself staring at his perfect blond hair and bright blue eyes a little longer than I should. But he was one of my best friends now—really, the only one in New York. Except Zoe, of course, but I don’t think one forced hug counts as friendship.

  I walked over to the table with a pout, watching as Jack pulled out little white boxes from the bags. “We were supposed to do fancy Italian tonight.”

  “And now we’re doing common Chinese takeout.” He handed me a pair of packaged chopsticks. “Keep up.”

  “Oh, hey Jack!” Val said, walking out of the kitchen in her plain black dress and ballet flats. She had a small purse hanging on her shoulder. “I thought you guys were going out tonight.”

  “We were,” I told her. “But then Mr. Change of Plans over here decided we were having Chinese takeout instead.”

  “You want some?” Jack asked Val, bending down to pet Famous.

  “No thanks. It’s a little early for dinner, isn’t it?”

  Jack cocked his head toward me with a smirk. “Tell that to everyone in LA.”

  I gave him an offended look. “It’s, like, seven o’clock! How is that early?”

  “This is New York, Gia,” Jack said, and Val let out a giggle.

  I rolled my eyes. “Thanks for the reminder.”

  Val told me she fed Famous and said, like, four other things about cleaning the house that I didn’t really care about, before letting me know she was heading home for the day.

  “Enjoy your takeout,” she said brightly.

  Jack yelled out a goodbye just as the door clicked shut. He turned to me with a raised eyebrow. “You know I think she’s really hot, right?”

  “You know I think you’re disgusting, right?”

  “You may have mentioned that on occasion, yes.”

  Rice, noodles, veggies, chicken, and pork. I inspected the feast with a frown. “This better be the best Chinese takeout in the city,” I told him.

  “I’ve never tried it,” Jack replied. “But my friend Scott said it was life-changing.”

  “H
e actually said ‘life-changing’?”

  “Actually, I think he described it as ‘dangerously cheap but excellent quality.’”

  “Anything that combines the words dangerously and cheap doesn’t go near my mouth.” I held up my finger just as Jack began to say something. “Don’t!”

  He clasped his lips shut, smiling at whatever dirty joke was still at the tip of his tongue. “I wasn’t going to say anything.”

  “Good, don’t.”

  Jack handed me a pair of wooden chopsticks. “Just eat it, Princess. Chances of food poisoning are, like, 20 percent. I’m kidding. Jeez! Just eat it.”

  I cautiously nibbled on some noodles as Jack watched with excited anticipation, as if he had made them himself.

  “Well?”

  “They’re pretty good. But you and I haven’t had the best luck with Chinese food in the past.”

  Jack laughed. “This isn’t the Dumpling Hospital, don’t worry.”

  Boy, that was a relief. After Frank Parker, or “Dr. D,” as he called himself, was “robbed” of his one chance at making it big in Hollywood, he had traveled to the place everyone would least expect to find him: China. He spent most of his life there before returning to LA, taking over a rundown Chinese restaurant called The Dumpling Hospital and, of course, stalking me intensely for two months. Jack and I had paid the place a visit, hoping to find some answers. And answers we found, along with possible stomach infections.

  As we later found out, while I was conveniently tied to a chair in the middle of a Universal Studios set, Dr. D had ruined his own chances of ever becoming a star when he had an affair with his agent’s wife. Like I said before, I can’t make this stuff up. Not only did Frank Parker have a poor business sense, he was also an absolute idiot. But it always made me smile a little thinking about how ridiculous his restaurant looked. It was the place Jack and I had begun our investigation and maybe even our friendship.

  I picked up two white boxes and carried them to the sofa, which was so big that if I sat all the way back, I could stretch my legs out almost completely with only my feet dangling off.

  “Are you sure you want to sit there?” Jack asked, balancing the rest of the takeout boxes in his hands. “If I accidently drop a noodle, I don’t want your mom to kill me because I stained a pillow or something.”

  “Mom’s not even here.”

  “Yeah, but mothers have a sixth sense about sofas being stained. Especially white ones.”

  “Don’t worry, we have good cleaners.”

  Jack sat on the edge of the sofa, carefully placing the food in between us. “Why is everything in this damn place so white, anyway?”

  He had a point. Mom’s interior designer had gone a little nuts with the pearly white. The plush sofas were white, the walls were white, the stairs were white, and the doors were white. The rest of the penthouse consisted of fluffy gray rugs, gold-plated handles, marble sinks, and beige wardrobes. Lots of room for error. Lots of room for stains.

  “Okay, I’ll admit it,” I said, reaching for a piece of broccoli. “This is delicious. Tell Scott he has my seal of approval.”

  “See! Doesn’t this beat your fancy Italian food?”

  “It really doesn’t, but I can deal.”

  Jack kicked off his shoes and eased himself further up the sofa, crossing his legs as if he were sitting in a kindergarten classroom, waiting for story time.

  “How was your first day of college?” he asked, stealing a few noodles from the box I was holding.

  “Ugh.”

  “That sounds promising.”

  “It was terrible. I got lost a zillion times, and everyone kept staring at me like I had a unicorn horn attached to my forehead.”

  “People like unicorns.”

  “Yeah, well, apparently they don’t like me.”

  “Oh, come on,” Jack said. “You’re famous! Who doesn’t want to be friends with a famous person?”

  “I can think of a few people.”

  “Hey, you can’t win ’em all. Some people just suck.”

  Those were definitely words to live by. I gave Jack a quick rundown of my classes, describing my professors and how people kept trying to sneak a photo of me any chance they got. I told him about my group assignment in psychology, and Hannah’s smug smile, and Jamie’s little comment. Jack said he sounded like an ass, and I suggested the two of them would probably get along just fine then, and then he tried to throw a mushroom at me, but he was too scared it would fall on the sofa. If there was one silver lining, it was that my Foundations of Criminal Theories professor was a quiet woman who didn’t really care that much about my celebrity status. She had enough sensitivity not to call me out and quote my father’s movies to me in front of hundreds of students, all of whom were already ogling at me like I was a science experiment. She had simply come up to me after class, introduced herself as Professor Weber, and told me I should probably avoid joining a sorority during Rush Week.

  “After all of that,” I told Jack, “I had to go to Steph’s office for a meeting.”

  Jack choked back a laugh, swallowing a mouthful of food. “Yikes.”

  “Yikes” was probably the most accurate way to sum up my publicist Stephanie. Before the kidnapping, Dad had a strict rule that Mike and I weren’t allowed to interact with the media in any way. No magazine cover shoots, no TV interviews, no radio, nothing. It was a rule Mike and I were pretty comfortable obeying, but after the Golden Globe Awards, everything changed. People swarmed outside our LA mansion as if we were throwing hundred-dollar bills from the balcony, and I was hounded every time I stepped outside the house.

  When it became apparent that the spotlight wasn’t going away anytime soon, Dad decided to take charge of the situation. It wasn’t a way to make extra money; it was just an opportunity to set the record straight about what had happened. Rumors had been flying in every direction, some worse than others, and I guess Dad got sick of hearing them all. A thirty-minute exclusive on 60 Minutes was all it took to clear the air. Frank Parker was labeled a scorned lunatic; I was labeled as helpless and innocent, and that was all that needed to be said. Kind of. The interview offers continued to flood in, but we had said our piece. Suddenly all these magazines that I had read cover-to-cover my entire life were calling Dad’s assistant nonstop. Apparently getting kidnapped is trendy, because everyone wanted me as their representative. The magazine cover shoots were approved after much persistence on my part. If everyone was going to talk about me, then I wanted it to be on my terms. I never answered any more questions about the incident, and they never outright asked. Instead I just posed happily and gave some generic spiel about overcoming difficulties and staying positive, like I was some kind of expert.

  When I had made the decision to accept NYU’s offer, I had been so excited. I was dying for some more freedom from Dad. But when that feeling wore off pretty quickly, I figured a few distractions might help. So after much convincing, Dad hired Steph, an overzealous thirty-something woman with way too much enthusiasm for her petite frame. As long as I wasn’t selling stories about Frank to strangers or train surfing, I could do what I wanted. Just as long as Steph and my dad approved, of course.

  “She wants me to do this volunteer project,” I told Jack.

  “That sounds nice.”

  “Yeah, except it’s in Haiti.”

  “Like, the Haiti?”

  “No, the other one.”

  “Tell me you said no.”

  “I didn’t have to say no; Dad said no for me. She was just ‘double-checking.’”

  “That reminds me . . .” Jack put down his chopsticks. “Your dad called me.”

  I tried not to groan out loud. I had a feeling this was going to happen. “Really?” I mumbled, innocently shoveling more food into my mouth. Somewhere behind us, Famous was wrestling with his squeaky ball.

  “He said he called you a few times, and you never picked up.”

  I took my time chewing before I swallowed. “I didn’t get any missed calls.”

  Jack leaned across me to where my phone was and grabbed it before I could snatch it away. He pressed the home button, and the screen lit up. It showed five missed calls from Dad among a few text messages on a group chat that I hadn’t even checked yet.