Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen - Dyan Sheldon [57]
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.”
Ella gave me one of her looks. “Yeah,” she muttered. “Fruitcake.”
* * *
“Plan B isn’t going to work,” said Ella with new-found authority.
“You mean, unlike Plan A?” I asked sarcastically.
Plan A was Ella’s. Plan A entailed sitting in the doorway across from 63 to wait for our chance to crash the party. We’d pushed a few empty beer cans out of our way and sat. And waited. I guess we thought the guests would arrive more or less all at once, like they do for the Oscars and movie premières, but we were wrong. The guests arrived in dribs and drabs. A car would pull up, a couple of people would jump out and rush to the black door, and the car would vanish back into the night as its passengers vanished inside. Maybe if Stu Wolff’s friends really had been just regular guys, we would have been able to sneak in with them, but though he was a man of the people, most of those people drove Jaguars and Porsches and none of them shopped at K-Mart. There was no way we were going to be able to slip in without at least a dozen of them as camouflage.
“And anyway,” I continued, “it is going to work. It’s perfect.”
I was tired of waiting for a stretch limo with fifteen passengers who’d just been in a boating accident to turn up. I gazed at the black door, shining in the rain, then raised my eyes to the lighted windows of the loft above it. I could see people talking and drinking and having a good time. Music and laughter seeped into the quiet street. I didn’t want to sit in the deluge. I wanted to be inside with all the famous people, talking and laughing and dancing the night away. All the women we’d seen enter the building were stunningly beautiful and wearing stunningly beautiful clothes. Stu Wolff would never notice Carla amongst them. She’d look ordinary in that crowd. But not Ella and I. Stu might think we were homeless runaways, but he’d notice us for sure.
I grabbed Ella’s arm. “Don’t argue,” I ordered. “Let’s do it now, before anyone else arrives.” I tugged her to her feet. “Plan B, here we come.”
Plan B was simple. I’d pretend to be ill, and Ella would ask to use the phone to call my mother to pick us up.
Ella rang the bell. She did it so gently, you’d think she was hoping there was no one home.
“Harder,” I whispered. “You want to sound urgent.”
She rang it again.
“Ding dong, ding dong,” I mimicked. “What are you, the Avon Lady?” I’d been putting myself into the part of someone in intense and unbearable pain, but now I rallied. “Let me do it.” I pushed her aside.
“I thought you were supposed to be dying.” She pushed me back.
“I’ll start dying again after he opens up.” I put my finger on the bell and kept it there.
“Stop upstaging me,” said Ella, trying to pry my finger off the black button. We were so engrossed in how to ring the bell and who should ring it, that we didn’t hear anyone coming down the stairs.
The door swung open so suddenly that we almost fell in. That is, we would have fallen in if our way hadn’t been blocked by six feet of leather and a face like a wall. The doorman looked a lot bigger up close, and not nearly as charming.
He didn’t say anything, he just stood there staring at us in a sullen and inhospitable way.
I groaned and clung to Ella, holding