Mafia Girl Read Free Page B

because of all the crap he gives me. So when he grabs my hand, I follow him into the laundry room.
    Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five. Four. Three. Two. One.
    The door to my room flings open and my dad x-rays me so hard I can practically feel the burn. I stare back. And crumble.
    “I’m sorry,” I whisper again in broken record mode.
    He doesn’t dignify that with an answer. “You don’t go out for a month,” he says. “No movies, no out for coffee, no nothing.”
    I wait. There’s more.
    “And you babysit every Friday and Saturday for the Andreottis. And every cent, it comes to me to pay for the bill from Mario. You understand?”
    I nod.
    “No more cutting school,” he says. “No more drinking. No more trouble.”
    “Okay, okay,” I whisper.
    “Not okay,” he says. “You get serious. Serious .”

FIVE
    Serious.
    My dad has guilt-tripped me like no one else can with his honor code and expectations. So after barely sleeping, I walk down the corridor at school and see the signs about the upcoming student council election and a light bulb goes off in my foggy brain. Even though the idea of running for president of this place is definitely something I should run from, I’m immediately jazzed by the thought of jumping in where I don’t belong and stirring things up.
    At the very least, I could have fun buying art supplies and making posters and calling it schoolwork. But more importantly, I could get over on skanky people at Morgan who hate me, because most of them are. Spoiled. Stuck-up. Bitches.
    Who dress in paisley or what have you and wear things like Belgian Shoes and have moms with names like Muffy who carry those stupid Nantucket straw baskets with scrimshaw medallions and talk interminably about going riding in Connecticut on the weekends or watching horse jumping or entering their purebreds at Westminster or playing golf, while the non-Wasp world, not in Litchfield or Greenwich, Connecticut, who are stuck in places like the fucking Bronx and Queens and lower Manhattan, except for Soho, are mostly out of work and panhandling, fencing crap on eBay, lining up for chump change from unemployment, and jumping turnstiles because they can’t even afford stupid MetroCards. I would love to drop-kick most of them so that they would open their recessive-gene eyes and get over that rarefied bullshit way of existing.
    You probably think I’m being paranoid, that no one really has it in for me.
    Wrong.
    I’ve just locked the bathroom stall door behind me when Christy Collins and Georgina Richards, the two-faced Brit twit, walk into the bathroom. They obviously know I’m there because I’m sure they toe peeped, and who else wears purple or green Louboutins with four-inch heels and nail heads, even when it snows? At first whiff I know it’s Christy because she wears massive amounts of musk oil or something else that she must think smells hot but actually smells like pond scum.
    “This school has really gone downhill since they let that Mafia bitch in,” she says.
    “Really,” says Georgina.
    “I mean look at who her dad is,” Christy says. “How can they do that? She and that other one are total mafioso trash.”
    I sit coiled up like a rattlesnake poised to strike. The plural is mafiosi, I’m tempted to call out, but never mind that. How could they let Christy into the school when her dad works on Wall Street and who ever thought we should bail out those people?
    Pins and needles make my legs tingle.
    The door slams finally and it’s quiet again. I go out and wash my hands, scrubbing too hard. I strut down the corridor almost passing the school election table, but I stop when the kid behind the desk smiles at me.
    “Thinking of running, Gia?”
    He’s actually serious . I smile and shrug, stifling a laugh. Me? Run for president?
    On the desk are applications and white pencils with The Morgan School in magenta. I reach for one and slip it between my teeth. Then I move on.
    President. How would that