Mafia Girl Read Free

time-traveled and ended up at Morgan because he took a wrong turn on his way home to Camelot.
    Clive has long, wispy blond hair and pale skin. No one has ever seen him without the navy cashmere scarf he wears knotted around his neck no matter how cold or hot it is. I think he’s hypothermic if that’s a word or a medical condition or state of being or something when you walk around perpetually chilled.
    In addition to the scarf, Clive lives in a vintage Burberry raincoat, which weirded me out the first time I saw him in school. But then I heard him answer a question in class and I realized that he’s completely brilliant and doesn’t have a mean bone in his emaciated body. He was so deserving of extreme niceness by someone who isn’t put off by his strangeness that he became my closest friend, not counting Ro.
    It’s not like Clive is some poor soul who sleeps on a park bench and dump dives for food. His family is beyond rich and he lives in a ginormous ninety-million dollar duplex high up in the Time Warner Center, and when you’re looking out the window it feels like you’re in a plane hovering over a twinkling skyscraper fairyland.
    Clive’s parents are media moguls so they’re always flying around in their own private Gulfstream. So Clive is mostly alone with maids, a butler, and a driver with only an aunt and uncle on speed dial. His only other company is the delivery guys from the Whole Foods downstairs because he’s always calling up and ordering crap. And all he does is read, read, read all day from his Kindle.
    So every day Ro and I pack manicotti or lasagna for him so he’ll have a hot, homemade dinner because that’s the least I can do for a friend—because I don’t have too many of those.
    Clive takes my paper and tucks it into his backpack. When he gets home he’ll scrawl little notes to me proving that he’s even smarter than Mrs. Carter. Then he’ll invite me to hang out with him and I’ll say yes because he’s sweet and kind and fun and has a wall of vinyls, never mind the pictures of the city that I love to take from his floor to ceiling windows to see New York in changing lights.
    Especially from the bathroom.
    Clive is the only person in the universe who has a white marble Jacuzzi in front of an enormous wall of glass with no curtains, so it’s fun to take bubble baths there and drink Dom and then stand up naked in front of the window and hope that someone in some other part of Manhattan in a crappy little apartment will see me through a telescope so I can give them a cheap thrill.
    Anyway, the A on the paper is deserved. I worked for it because inside my head, my conscience is always telling me prove yourself, prove yourself so that one day I will have an actual life and become more than the self-sucking don’s daughter—the nickname I’ve been branded with since birth.
    There’s a second voice too. That one keeps reminding me that if I don’t get As I won’t get into the right college and be able to follow my secret plan for the future.
    Almost no one knows about my plan. Not Ro, my separated-at-birth best friend and next-door neighbor. Not Clive—at least not yet. Not my mom. And especially not Anthony. He wouldn’t believe me anyway because in his head the only career for a woman is domestic servant.
    The only one who knows about my secret plan for the future is the person who keeps secrets better than anyone in the world: my dad.
    When I told him, his eyes got all misty, something that doesn’t happen much, except when he watches sad movies where good people or animals die. Then he doesn’t just cry, he sobs.
    Shut up. I know what you’re thinking.
    I didn’t plan to tell him. But after my grandma’s funeral last year, he was sitting all alone in the living room in his favorite gold velvet armchair. My dad is almighty powerful all the time, only right then he wasn’t. He looked defeated, like he had shrunk inside himself. He was staring out the window as the rain