Jesse nudged me. “Don’t you wanna go do orphan backup?” He grinned.
“After you, Daddy Warbucks.” Then I turned to Roux. “Roux, honey, this isn’t pretty.”
“I knoooow,” she said. She had the microphone in one hand and the empty wine bottle in the other. “But the sun, Maggie? The sun is going to come out! Tomorrow!” She pointed the wine bottle at me. “And do you know what kind of life it is?”
“A hard-knock one,” I answered. “Too easy.”
“Does she take requests?” Jesse asked, then ducked out of my reach.
“That’s exactly it!” Roux said. “Oh my God, where has this song been all my life?” She pressed a button and started the song again.
To be fair, even though she was drunk and barely able to stand, Roux didn’t have a bad voice. Her singing voice was actually beautiful, and she managed to hit every note even while slurring the lyrics. “This song is annoying,” Jesse muttered. “We get it, the sun is going to come out. Jesus.”
Once again, the spy had to save the day. I walked over to the machine, found the plug, and yanked it out of the socket. Roux got some scattered applause, and she gave them a wobbly curtsy. “I’m here all week!” she announced. “Residency!”
“Roux?” I said. “Let’s go home.”
She looked like one of those geckos you see on Animal Planet, the ones whose eyes go in completely different directions. “Is there more wine?” she asked.
“Not for you,” I said, then let her put her arm around my neck. “You’re done for tonight.”
“Okay. It’s important to pace yourself. Where are we going?”
“Home.”
“My home or your home?”
“Your home.”
“But you don’t even know where that is!” She giggled.
I looked over at Jesse. If he thought my wrinkled-notetaking face was cute, then he was going to love my puppy-eyes face.
“Oh, no,” he said. “Nuh-uh. No way. You’re on your own.”
“I can’t carry her by myself!” I protested. “Please? You said yourself that it’s good she has a friend.”
“There are, like, a hundred people here! In my house! How am I going to get them out?”
“Easy,” I told him, then poked my head around the corner. “Oh, shit, the cops are here!” I yelled.
And voilà, it was a teenage stampede out the door.
Jesse looked at me. “You are very lucky,” he said, “that you’re so cute.”
I helped him carry Roux down the stairs and to the front door, even as the electric eels continued to thrash around in my stomach.
The cab driver who pulled to the curb took one look at Roux and shook his head. “Got change for a hundred?” Jesse asked him, flashing the bill before herding me and Roux into the cab.
“I charge a fifty-dollar, cash-only cleaning fee if anyone pukes in the back,” the driver said, pocketing the cash even before Jesse had shut the door behind him.
“A bargain at twice the price,” I told him, but he didn’t seem amused. Jesse laughed, though, then shoved Roux toward me when she started to loll toward him.
“Maggie?” she said.
“Yeah?”
She opened her eyes and smiled at me. “I think Jesse Oliver likes you.”
Jesse groaned and Roux turned to look at him. “Oh my God!” she cried. “You’re here, too?”
Chapter 11
The cab driver let us out across the street from Roux’s building, and it took both Jesse and me to get Roux back to the house, mostly because she couldn’t make up her mind about whether she wanted to walk next to Jesse or me. First it was me, then she decided I was too short, so she walked next to Jesse. Then she decided that he was too tall (“You’re crowding me!”), so she made us stand next to each other so she could walk between us. “I can’t be on the end!” she said, giggling. Then she waved the wine bottle as if it were a baton and sent Jesse and me scrambling for safety. An empty wine bottle is still really heavy, after all, and I wasn’t born into a family of international espionage experts just so I could get clocked by a drunk high school girl with bad coordination.
Roux’s apartment was across the street from Central Park. It took us thirteen minutes (Jesse timed it on his phone) to get her across the street to her building. That should give you an idea of what that experience was like.
The doorman eyed the three of us suspiciously as Jesse and I dragged Roux through the ornate lobby. “Harold!” she crowed when she saw him. “It’s me! Wait, wait, wait!”
Jesse and I came to a halt as Roux started digging around in her purse. Some lip gloss clattered to the floor, along with a MetroCard and what looked like a movie-ticket stub. I hoped Roux wasn’t going to the movies by herself. That would just be sad.
“Here!” she cried, finally producing a five-dollar bill. “For the swear jar!”
Jesse and I looked at each other, but Harold just produced an old glass jar that was filled with bills. “You have a swear jar with your doorman?” Jesse asked, incredulous.
Roux hung on a little tighter to my arm, wobbling on her heels. “Let’s just say that some neighbors and I had a little run-in three months ago.”
“And by run-in, you mean …?”
(Harold was now reading his newspaper like we weren’t even there.)