Page 35 of Inferno
‘Sophie,look.’ Millie was tapping her fingernail on another picture, this time of a different floor, where everything was bamboo, and fire-lamps blazed around the contours of a pooling dance floor. ‘It’s the most exclusive club in the city. Wehaveto go.’
The logistics of actually getting inside were still hazy. Millie had a pretty good fake ID. I didn’t. If that crimson business card was my ticket into Eden, I was in trouble, because it was in Nic’s pocket.
Stupid Nic.
We barricaded ourselves in Millie’s bedroom and rifled through every single item of clothing in her wardrobe. ‘If we want to get past the bouncers, we have to be sexy but not slutty. It’s a very fine line,’ said Millie, picking up and discarding a floral wrap dress. I examined a cream blouse. Millie snatched it from me and flung it on to the ground. ‘I said sexy, not politician!’
After almost an hour of indecision, Millie chose a royal-blue strapless dress, a thick silver necklace and hoop earrings. I picked a black body-con dress with spaghetti straps. I borrowed a simple gold necklace and stud earrings, pairing the outfit with a pair of gold strappy sandals. Millie insisted on doing my hair and make-up. ‘Voila!’ shetriumphed, spinning me towards the mirror.
I gaped at my reflection. I had been Barbie-fied. The dress was miniscule, and so tight it clung to every inch of me. My hair brought new meaning to the word ‘volume’ and the hair-spray had turned it into a glittering blonde rock. My eyes were rimmed with so much black it was hard to find the blue inside them, and my lips had been lined and glossed until they shone at twice their normal size against my bronzed and blushed face.
‘Well?’ Millie wiggled her high-definition eyebrows at me through the mirror.
‘I look like one of those Real Housewives.’
She came to stand beside me.
‘You also look like a Real Housewife,’ I told her.
‘Excellent,’ she said with a triumphant smirk.
Eden was a sleek three-storey building on the corner of West Grand Avenue. It climbed into the sky in a display of black monochrome and tinted glass. On the corner, two bouncers and a severe-faced woman holding a clipboard were guarding a velvet-roped entranceway. Above them, ‘EDEN’ was imprinted in illuminated red letters that lit up the street below. The spiralling tree emblem from the crimson card stretched across the entire second storey.
My mind flittered across Luca and his disdainful thoughts of my intelligence. Oh, if he could only see me now. ‘I never considered myself an idiot until this very moment,’ I said, staring wide-eyed at Eden as we drifted towards it.
‘Really?’ said Millie, blinking heavily. ‘But you’ve donesomany idiotic things already.’
I winced.
‘If anything, this is the least idiotic, because we’re going into a public place and, most importantly, I am here!’ She waved her hands in front of her. ‘It’s cool, you know. Some people just wait for danger to find them, but not you, you go after it. You say “Hey, Danger, bet you weren’t expecting me. Suck it.” You don’t wait for the dolphin.’
‘Huh?’
‘Thedolphin,’ she emphasized. ‘You don’t wait for the dolphin to hit you in the face.’
‘Oh.’ I touched my head against hers as we reached Eden, smiling, despite everything, because I had found someone just as weird as me to be friends with. Smiling because I was doing my best not to freak out.
There were two lines of people trickling from the entrance; the first was a short one that moved quickly. The second line stretched all the way around the building and down the street and was moving at a snail’s pace.
Millie flipped her hair over her shoulders and sashayed into the smaller, elite line. I went with her, pursing my lips to try and look pouty and important. The woman with the clipboard dragged her gaze along our outfits. A smug smile flitted across her thin red lips. ‘Names?’
Millie had already pulled her ID card from her purse.
The woman didn’t glance at the ID or her clipboard. ‘Sorry, girls. You’re not on here. You’ll have to join the back of the line.’
Millie bristled. ‘You didn’t even check.’
Her smirk returned. ‘Hon, I don’t need to check.’
Millie released a sharp laugh. ‘Excuse you? Perhaps you need a refresher course on who we are?’
The woman’s expression faltered. She flicked her gaze to me. ‘Your name?’ she asked me.
‘Sophie Gracewell,’ I said. ‘I have… an appointment with my uncle.’
An appointment?
Smooth. Real smooth.
