Au Revoir, Crazy European Chick by Joe Schreiber Read Free Book Online Page A

back in the morning, along with your precious automobile. Until then you will not call him or harass him in any way, or I assure you that my next phone call will be to Mrs. Stormaire. Do we understand each other?"
    "Now just a moment." Dad's voice sounded hoarse. "I'd like to speak to my son for moment, please."
    "He heard everything you just said."
    "Gobi, please—"
    "Later," Gobi said, and hung up, handing me back the phone.
    We were back on Broadway, and I just drove.

10
You've just written a 300-page autobiography. Send us page 217. (University of Pennsylvania)
     
    Traffic loosened south of Union Square. Broadway fed down past restaurants and all-night groceries, flower shops and guys setting up tables on the sidewalks, selling knockoff purses and jewelry and bootleg DVDs. I kept my eyes straight ahead, not talking, until Gobi turned and glanced up at me.
    "I am sorry you had to find out this way, Perry."
    "He promised us that was over," I said.
    My voice felt dead, even to me, like somebody talking in his sleep. Gobi didn't say anything, just kept her attention on the street ahead as we passed through the Lower East Side toward the Financial District, the concrete canyonlands where college funds and retirement money was gained and lost every day.
    "That stuff you told him about Madelyn," I said, "that wasn't just a bluff, was it?"
    She picked up her BlackBerry, tapped in keys. "Wiretapping your phones was a security precaution along with routine surveillance. As part of the assignment, I had to secure the site, including your father's private line."
    "That's not an answer," I said.
    But it was.

11
Courage has been described as "grace under pressure." How would you describe it? (Ohio State University)
     
    My sinuses felt like they were filling with hot molten lead, suffocating me from the inside. I was thinking about what my dad had told me back in his office. "'A man has obligations outside himself...'" I muttered. "That hypocritical piece of crap." My hands gripped the wheel hard enough to whiten my knuckles, but I didn't let go because I didn't want to see how badly they were shaking. "She's his personal assistant—can you believe that? The first time Mom caught him, he promised it would stop for good."
    Gobi said nothing, lost in her BlackBerry. I let her go. I could feel the past swimming up behind me to swallow me up. It took me back to the night two years ago when I'd come home from the library and stepped on a piece of broken dish lying in the foyer. Mom had thrown three of them at Dad on his way out the door. There was a gash in it, just above the doorknob.
    I'd found her sitting on the couch in the living room with a gin and tonic in her hand, staring at Dancing with the Stars with the sound off.
    "She threw him out of the house," I told Gobi. "He went to stay at a hotel that night and when he came back he promised it would never happen again."
    She shrugged. "Men are swine."
    "Not all of us."
    Gobi nodded at the next intersection. "Pull into the alleyway," she said. "We're here."
     
    She glanced at the lit office window twelve floors off the street, then back at me. "Here," she murmured, leaning over to wrap the plastic handcuffs from her bag around my wrists.
    "Wait, what's this?"
    She looped the restraints through the Jaguar's steering wheel, cinching them to the skin.
    "Ow, that's too tight!"
    "Stay here."
    "Like I could go anywhere?"
    She reached into the bag and took out the gun I had seen earlier.
    "Gobi, wait— "
    She got out and sank into the shadows half a block off Pearl Street, a Lithuanian ninja. I jerked tentatively on the wrist restraints but that only made them tighter. She had left her bag sitting on the passenger seat, and I wondered what else she had in there—passports, more weapons, a bazooka?
    I looked up to the rearview mirror, back up the alleyway to the street. I put both hands on the steering wheel and blasted the horn. It was ten fifteen. Somewhere over on Avenue A, Inchworm