Page 10 of Most Eligible Billionaire

I’d do anything to distance myself from when I was Vonda O’Neil, the most hated teen in America for one very long summer some seven years ago. The girl who cried wolf. Except there reallywasa wolf.

Nobody believed me.

Carly hates the clothes I wear even more than Bernadette ever did.You’re not on trial anymore, she always says.You can stop living like a monk now. You don’t have to wear those boring-ass outfits.

But the pencil skirts and dark sweater sets my lawyer recommended grew on me. For the record, they’re not boring-ass. They project an image of trustworthiness, and that’s important to me.

Anyway, there’s just one more hurdle for my jewelry line—the VP of merchandising. A huge order from Saks would make such a difference. Carly doesn’t know how hand-to-mouth we actually live; we’re still in the hole from two years of braces, but I’ll never let her know. I don’t just want to protect her from Mom; I want to protect her from everything.

“Can a person even do that? Leave an allowance to a dog in a will?”

“Rich people can do anything they want to,” I say, and then I swallow my bitterness, because Carly doesn’t need it. She doesn’t need to hate rich, entitled people, and specifically rich, entitled men, the way I do.

It still shocks me that Bernadette was fabulously wealthy. She was pretty successful in hiding it; she seemed post-rich, if anything. I sometimes wonder if she concealed it because she picked up my disdain for the wealthy.

After the shelter fundraiser fair, Bernadette suddenly started showing up on this bench that Carly and I couldn’t avoid passing in getting to Carly’s school, and she’d call us over and ask for a reading—just a few impressions,she’d sometimes say. And I’d politely decline.

Carly thought she was stalking us, because she kept on showing up. I don’t know about that, but she definitely got madder and madder that I wouldn’t read Smuckers for her. She clearly thought it was a personal thing I had against her. The woman had a paranoid and highly suspicious nature.

Then there was the day she was in distress, out in the heat. We were on the way to school, as usual, and she was half slumped on that bench, so pale and frail, with Smuckers panting at the end of his leash. We stopped to make sure she was okay. She told us she felt faint; she asked us to help her home.

Her home turned out to be a gorgeous prewar building several blocks down. We got her up and settled in and hydrated. As soon as she bounced back to her regular self, she offered me money for a special Smuckers reading from the whisperer.

It was then I saw Smuckers’s bone-dry water bowl.

“Okay, one quick free read,” I said.

Carly widened her eyes as I unhooked Smuckers’s leash and picked him up. I put my hand on his head, kind of a Vulcan mind-meld thing, and closed my eyes.So thirsty. I need a lot of water. So very thirsty, Bernadette.

Bernadette seemed pretty upset when she looked down at Smuckers’s water bowl. I made Carly fill it and we got out of there as quickly as possible after that.

That was the first step down the slippery slope of being a pet whisperer.

Bernadette’s next move was a masterful one. From a different bench, she spotted Carly playing Frisbee in the park with some girlfriends. She asked her if she’d walk Smuckers for thirty bucks—just around the park.

Carly jumped at it and treated her friends to frozen yogurt afterward. Days later came the big ask—Bernadette wanted Carly to be her permanent dog walker, once a day, an easy thirty bucks. No doubt she suspected how badly Carly would want it, and probably figured I wasn’t going to let Carly walk the streets of Manhattan alone with that dog.

I said no to Carly at first, but eventually I relented, after making Carly agree that twenty-five out of every thirty bucks would go to a college fund. And, really, dog walking is a legit service, unlike pet whisperer. Especially for Bernadette.

From then on, we’d stop off at Bernadette’s apartment on the way home from Carly’s school. We’d grab Smuckers and do an errand or two. Sometimes we’d take him to watch the neighborhood mimes. We feel sorry for them, because they are really not at all talented, but they always brighten up in a gleeful mime way when Smuckers comes around.

Little by little, Smuckers began delivering safety-conscious or morale-boosting messages to Bernadette. She was so alone, and Smuckers was the only one she seemed inclined to listen to. It felt like a public service.

Sometimes I’d wonder if Bernadette sensed our kinship—my summer as a universally hated media sensation and her present as a despised neighborhood fixture.

Either way, that money was a kindness to Carly and to me. Another reason I didn’t feel inclined to press for more for Smuckers’s upkeep.

True, I’d switched over his food from frozen raw rabbit meat to a sad dime-store brand, and the closest Smuckers has had to a blowout at a dog salon with original Warhol art is a brightly colored dog brush dragged through her fur, but Smuckers has a great life with lots of fawning attention from teenaged girls.

I decide I’ll go to the reading anyway, though, because if Bernadette left money for Smuckers to go to his special groomer and vet and all that, well, that was the bargain I’d made.

Luckily, the reading is during school hours the following week. It takes place on the Upper East Side and the letter specifically requests Smuckers’s presence.

I brush him extra well, put a dapper black-sequined bow tie on him, bundle him into his flowered carrying case, and set off. I throw a buck into the mimes’ hat set on the way to the subway station. I transfer at 59th and Lex and then walk a few blocks. I budgeted extra time so I wouldn’t have to splurge on a cab.

It’s cool for early September—autumn is definitely in the air. My iPhone map function guides me deeper and deeper into a neighborhood where I’ve never been, though I’m more inclined to call it an enchanted glen; the trees are huge and healthy, the streets are clean, and the buildings have a fairy-tale sheen to them. Will a unicorn soon bound out from the foliage?

I arrive at the address on the letter, which turns out to be an impossibly vertical mansion made from white marble, of all things. I go up the walk, ascend the strangely spotless stairway, and push through beveled-glass doors.

---