Read Online Mafia Girl by Deborah Blumenthal - Free Book Online Page A

x-rays and a brain MRI, which is like lying inside an open casket and listening to a sledgehammer on your iPhone. And then they take all these vials of blood and that nearly makes me faint because I hate needles, particularly when they’re sliding into my skin. And hours later everything comes back normal, normal, normal, which I’m clearly not, so that surprises me. But normal or not, I wrenched something in my back when I went down so I move slower than a slug.
    When my mom gets the call from the hospital, she goes crazy as usual. But then when I call her a minute later and say, “Ma, I’m fine, the school was just being extra careful because I tripped and fainted, and, anyway, they didn’t want to be legally liable in any way if they didn’t do what they were supposed to do,” she calms down and stops her usual chant of “It’s always something with you kids, it’s always something. If it’s not you, it’s Anthony, and if it’s not Anthony, it’s you.” Then she takes a breath.
    “I’m leaving now,” she says. “I’ll pick you up.”
    “You don’t have to, Ma, I’m fine.”
    “I have to,” she says. “I have to.”
    So there goes my plan to have Michael take me home. Anyway, it’s two in the afternoon and traffic on the Upper East Side will fortunately be brutal so that leaves me about half an hour to be alone with Officer Hottie unless he decides to abandon me.
    “Will you call me now?”
    He looks at me and doesn’t say anything.
    “I mean as a courtesy, just to see how I am because I did nearly die falling over your foot.”
    He smiles his half smile. “You’re something.”
    I try to sit up but my back fights me, so I “ow, ow, ow” a little harder than I have to, and Michael comes over and puts an arm around me, and I lean against him for support and nearly die from excitement being so close. It’s a good thing I’m not wearing a heart monitor because the needle would go off the chart and they’d bring out the paddles to reset my heart.
    Michael goes back to his chair and runs a hand through his hair. I watch how his eyes flit back and forth between me and anyone who passes outside the door and I’m wishing, wishing, wishing I could peek inside his head.
    Suddenly I think of that old movie I saw called The Bodyguard with Kevin Costner when he was young and seriously hot, and I pretend there’s this bodyguard vibe going on here because Michael’s hunky and protecting me and he could play the part because Costner was strong and silent too. Like Costner, Michael’s presence fills the room and he seems to have laser vision capable of seeing my split ends from the opposite side of the room. I lean back in the bed watching him exist, loving that at least for this moment in time we’re breathing the same air, even if we’re in a depressing hospital room and instead of clothes I’m wearing a shapeless shit gown with the opening in the back that shows my entire ass—not to mention that people who have died here have probably worn this same rag to the morgue or down the runway to hell.
    I stare at him and he looks back at me and then he glances down at my feet and notices the jade green polish and the toe ring and I wiggle my toes and he fights a smile. So we keep sitting there and, no surprise, he refuses to chitchat or maybe doesn’t know how, which prompts Miss Motormouth to spice things up with annoying questions.
    “Do you think your sergeant is going to wonder about this?”
    “Wonder about what?”
    “I mean, I assume you had to write up a report and it must look like an awfully strange coincidence that I’m the same girl you brought in two weeks ago.”
    He shrugs.
    “So how did you end up at my school?”
    “Morgan is your school?”
    That’s when I know for sure that he’s bluffing. He must have seen the posters.
    “Gia—fresh thinking, fresh answers?” I raise an eyebrow.
    “I saw the posters,” he says with a half smile. “You got the fresh part