Chanel Bonfire by Wendy Lawless Read Free Book Online Page B

Now hurry because I have a taxi waiting downstairs.”
    “Yes, ma’am.” I followed her down the hall and out the front door of the apartment. I imagined another little girl, the next little girl, finding the angel dolls and the teddy bear, like a hidden treasure.
    We all got into the elevator and went downstairs, where we said good-bye to Johnny the doorman, who held open the door of the taxi that was to take us to our new home: the Croyden Hotel on East Eighty-sixth Street and Fifth Avenue.
    “You’ll love it there,” said Mother as we barreled down Park Avenue. “There’s a gift shop in the lobby, and there’s a movie theater right around the corner.”
    My sister and I stared dumbly at her. This morning we’d left our home to go to school, and at the end of the day we had a new one. Maudie was wailing from her carrier on thefront seat next to the driver. I understood exactly how she felt.
    As promised, a gift shop was in the lobby—more of a newsstand really—where Robbie and I lingered while Mother checked in. Our eyes roved over the Tiger Beat s, True Romance comics, Chiclets and Chunkys, as the reality of our collective fate sunk in.
    “We can get room service,” I told Robbie, reverting to my Little Mary Sunshine routine as I always did at moments of massive upheaval.
    “Like Eloise,” Robbie said glumly.
    “And the maid will clean up our room,” I chirped.
    I pointed out to her that this meant no more being chased around by Catherine telling us our room was a pigsty and trying to smack our bottoms with a tea towel as we screamed and ran away. I was trying to melt Robbie’s sadness through sheer perkiness and it worked.
    She looked at me and her mouth popped open. “We can make as many spitballs as we want.”
    Catherine used to get furious when we threw wet wads of toilet paper up onto the ceiling. The balls either fell to the floor, making a ploppy mess, or fused to the ceiling, making them impossible to remove.
    Now, breakfast was an Entenmann’s chocolate doughnut and a glass of Tropicana orange juice from the little fridge in our kitchenette. All our other meals were ordered over the phone from the restaurant in the lobby, and the hotel did our laundry.
    Four weeks later, on our last day of school, we came home and couldn’t find Maudie. She usually ran to the door to greet us, meowing hello and rubbing against our kneesocks. We looked under the bed, in the closets, and even in the hallway outside the door. We were about to call the front desk to report her missing when Mother came home. Robbie and I ran up to her and told her we couldn’t find Maudie.
    “I had to give her away,” Mother said. She stood by the hall table, dressed in a khaki-colored Yves Saint Laurent linen trouser suit with her Vuitton purse hanging in the crook of her arm, and started to remove her thin leather gloves, pulling at them one finger at a time. “But don’t worry, she’ll be fine. I gave her to Joy Wallace, remember her? She has three girls so Maudie will have lots of playmates.”
    “But why did you give her away?” Joy Wallace’s bratty kids weren’t deserving playmates for our Maudie. The youngest one, Caroline, had pulled her pants down and bent over to show her tushie at the dinner table the last time we were over at their house.
    Mother explained that we couldn’t take Maudie with us because of a quarantine on animals coming from America. I didn’t know what she was talking about. From her purse she produced three pieces of paper. She placed them down on the table with a snap, raised her eyebrows, and glanced down at us as if she had produced the winning hand in a high-stakes card game. I looked at them. They were tickets to sail on the Queen Elizabeth 2 —boarding in two days. “We’re moving to England. London, to be exact.” Mother thrust hergloves into her handbag and walked down the long hallway to her bedroom. Robbie and I followed her.
    “What about the summer with Daddy?” I