Chapter 497 | The Court of the Tuesday Café

Chapter 497: 497 | The Court of the Tuesday Café

The café was called Maison, because everything in Newport that charged nine dollars for oat milk needed a French name to justify itself. Alexis had come every Tuesday since September. Same corner booth, same eucalyptus arrangement, same natural light that made her stories look like an editorial without a filter. The hostess kept the table empty from two to four on Tuesdays because Alexis Van Der Berg did not make reservations. Reservations implied the possibility of being told no.

She wore the champagne silk, the set she had hand-washed Sunday night in Chloe Kim’s kitchen sink with dish soap and cold water while a girl in a cat onesie cried about dumpling pillows behind her. The marinade stain was gone. Silk always survived. So did Alexis.

The black henley sat underneath, invisible, warm against her sternum.

She had chosen the silk on purpose. If her mother wanted to play understood, Alexis would play understood right back. She would hold court, drink her nine-dollar latte, and look so exactly like the girl Catherine Van Der Berg had spent eighteen years building that nobody would suspect she had slept in a converted factory forty hours ago while a girl with pink ribbons sang her a Japanese lullaby about forest spirits.

She crossed her legs. The silk fell across her thigh in an eleven-hundred-dollar line. The cat slippers were in her bag. She had not been able to leave them.

Her phone lay face down on the marble. It had been face down since Monday morning. Catherine had not texted again. The word understood sat in the thread like a closed casket, polished and final.

Other threads had not been so quiet. Kumiko had sent fourteen messages since yesterday, eleven of them stickers. Jordan had sent nothing at all. She suspected that was a rule, probably Chloe’s, probably written down with a footnote. She had checked anyway, eleven times, and hated herself a little more each time.

Ivy arrived first, because Ivy always arrived first. Ivy Calloway carried a matcha from somewhere else, a violation of unspoken café policy that Alexis let go because her brain was running a different program today. Ivy slid in and asked whether Alexis had seen Madison’s new nose.

Alexis smiled. The smile worked. Ivy’s shoulders relaxed the way they always did when Alexis gave her permission to gossip.

"It’s a good nose," Alexis said. "It’s just not hers."

Ivy shrieked into her matcha, and the table behind them turned to look, and Alexis let them look.

Bree and Sienna came together at two-twelve. Sienna wore the same sunglasses Alexis owned, which Alexis filed under problems too small for today. They had brought their own drinks too. Three outside matcha lattes on her table, like a small insurrection.

Charlotte arrived at two-fifteen with Megan, and Megan brought a sophomore with a tennis tan who introduced herself as Dylan. Alexis shook her hand and made a note to decide later whether Dylan was value or filler. Six at the table. The full court.

Alexis ordered for the table. She always did. It was choreography, the way her mother ordered wine and her father ordered the car brought around. She knew what everyone drank because she listened, which separated her from ninety percent of the student body. Vanilla oat latte, extra foam, for Ivy. Iced americano, no room, for Bree. Dirty chai with almond for Sienna. Flat white for Charlotte. Drip for Megan, because Megan had never developed a personality beyond agreeableness and drip was the most agreeable thing on the menu. A London Fog for herself, because her throat was still raw from Sunday night, from the sound she’d made on Chloe’s couch when Jordan’s thumb broke something old and knotted under her shoulder blade.

She did not order for Dylan. Dylan had not earned that.

The conversation ran its usual stations. Who was sleeping with whom. Which professor had been seen at a bar in Costa Mesa with a woman who was not his wife. Whether Tiffany Chen would hold the spring formal budget hostage until everyone agreed to her tropical theme, which everyone hated except Tiffany. Alexis dropped observations like little grenades and watched the girls laugh at the detonations.

Then Charlotte set her flat white down and said, "So. Thursday."

Five faces turned toward Alexis. Charlotte smiled the way she did when she already knew the answer and wanted to watch someone say it.

"My mom says Mrs. Van Allen booked a photographer. For the upstairs room."

The real answer sat on Alexis’s tongue, the size of a coin. No. She had said it on a pink couch to a girl pretending to be her mother, and it had cost her nothing there, because nobody in that room had wanted anything from her. Here it would cost everything at once.

"Thursday’s a family matter," she said, and smiled, and the table accepted it, because the table had been trained to accept that exact smile.

She hated how easy it was. She hated more that a week ago she wouldn’t have noticed.

Forty minutes in, her heart rate had not spiked once. Fourteen-year-old Alexis could have run this table with a fever and a broken heel. Nobody looked at her and saw the girl who had fallen forward onto a dining table while a boy with illegal hands turned her spine to warm water.

The server came back. Tessa, maybe twenty, septum ring, the flat expression of someone who worked near a college and had stopped pretending to care around month three. She set the drinks down, then leaned toward Alexis, voice low.

"Your card was declined."

At the far end of the table, Dylan’s eyes came up off her phone for the first time all afternoon.

Alexis’s fingers stopped on the marble. The words didn’t connect to anything for two full seconds, like a foreign sentence waiting for the translation to catch up.

Under the silk, her thumb found the frayed edge of the henley cuff and pressed it flat against her wrist.

"Run it again."

"I ran it twice."

"Then the machine is broken."

Tessa’s expression said the machine had worked fine for the eight people before her. She held the Black Card between two fingers like a parking ticket and set it on the marble with a small plastic click.

Six girls watched. Ivy’s matcha stopped halfway to her mouth. Bree’s thumb froze over her screen. Sienna’s lenses reflected the overhead lights.

Alexis put the Black Card away with fingers that did not shake. She had trained herself not to shake in public the way other girls trained themselves not to cry. She produced the backup Amex, the emergency titanium her father had given her at sixteen, to be used only for real emergencies. So far those had included a flat tire in Laguna, a hotel room in San Francisco when Cassie McKnight was still just a stranger’s name, and a pair of Louboutins that constituted a spiritual emergency.

"Try this one."

Tessa took it behind the counter without a word.

Charlotte sipped her flat white. Megan studied her drip as if there were a quiz at the bottom. Dylan took out her phone and scrolled TikTok with the careful nonchalance of someone who had decided this table no longer merited eye contact.

Tessa came back and set the Amex down the same way. Flat and final.

"Also declined. I’m sorry."