SUITE SCARLETT
by Maureen Johnson
Point/Scholastic
On Sale Now
Paperback
368 pages
ISBN: 9780545096324
Author Bio | Excerpt | Buy the Book
DESCRIPTION
Scarlett Martin and her family live in and manage a hotel in New York City. When Scarlett turns 15, she is given charge of one of the hotel’s rooms. Into this room moves Mrs. Amberson, an aging C-list starlet who has returned to write her memoirs. Soon Scarlett is taking dictation, running around town with Mrs. Amberson, and getting caught up in her Auntie Mame-meets-Bianca Jagger adventures.
AUTHOR BIO
Maureen Johnson is the author of THE KEY TO THE GOLDEN FIREBIRD, 13 LITTLE BLUE ENVELOPES, THE BERMUDEZ TRIANGLE, DEVILISH, GIRL AT SEA, and SUITE SCARLETT.
EXCERPT
There was no one behind the desk when Scarlett answered the emergency call — and no one had put out the we’ve just stepped away please ring the bell for service! sign.
“Mom?” Scarlett said, hoisting herself up and looking over the desk.
Her mother was not crouching underneath.
Scarlett looked around in bafflement, then went behind the desk and sat down.
A tall woman suddenly stepped from behind the archway leading to the dining room. She had short, deep brown hair, cut through with an even darker streak, like a chipmunk. She wore skinny jeans on the bottom and a pink kimonolike shirt on top. Scarlett had seen lots of similar items in Chinatown, but there was something about the way the material hugged her form so gracefully, how the pink was soft and muted instead of super shiny . . . something told her that this was the real deal. Silk. Thick silk. Many worms had given all they had to make that shirt.
The woman was standing with her fisted hands planted on her hips. Something about her stance suggested that at any moment she might raise her arms above her head and superhero it right
through the ceiling and every consecutive floor until she hit the sky.
Both Scarlett and the woman stared a bit on seeing each other.
“Did you just call me mom?” the woman said.
“Not you,” Scarlett said quickly. “My mom . . . is here.”
“Your mother is here?” the woman said, looking around.
“Not right now.”
“But she’s staying here?”
“No.”
“Should you be behind that desk?” the woman asked.
“Do you need help?” Scarlett replied.
“Do you work here?”
“I live here,” Scarlett said. “I can help you.”
“Oh, so your mother is . . .” Scarlett could see the woman putting two and two together and slowly, ever so slowly, pulling a four into focus. “Who said child labor was dead? I’m being helped. But thank you. Someone, probably your mother, is getting me an espresso as we speak, an espresso that will hopefully prevent me from falling over. I’ve just gotten off the plane from Thailand. Twenty-nine hours. Have you ever been on a plane for twenty-nine hours? I haven’t sat still that long since I did a marathon meditation for two days when I was on the ashram. My ass could take it then. I don’t want to sit down again for a week, at least. I’ll admit it. I have jet lag.”
The majority of that was delivered in one long breath. She swiveled her torso, cracking her back loudly, then strode over to the desk and peered at the framed pictures that hung behind it, showing all the successive generations of Martins posed in front of the hotel. The last picture had been taken four years ago. Scarlett loved the way her braces caught the sun in it. Eleven had been a rough year, for many reasons.
“God!” the woman said. “How many of you are there?”
“You mean my brothers and sisters? Four.”
“Four!” The woman laughed again. It was a strangely animated laugh, like someone had attached her chin to a string and was jerking it toward the sky. “You don’t see that much in the city. I guess
your parents aren’t fans of birth control.”
Scarlett had had this exact thought many times herself, but she didn’t really like hearing this stranger saying it out loud. Nor did she like strangers hanging over her, practically staring down her cleavage. But it wasn’t the cleavage, or lack thereof, that the woman seemed most interested in.
“That’s Dior, isn’t it?” she asked, pinching the strap and feeling the material.
The woman was close enough for Scarlett to smell — she carried a faint fragrance of incense, and a light perfume that had an expensive feel inside of Scarlett’s nose.
“Yes,” Scarlett admitted.
The woman leaned over farther and stared at the picture again.
“Interesting group,” she said. “All the girls are blonde, like your dad. And your brother is brunette, like your mother. Good-looking guy, your brother. How old is he?”
“In the picture or now?” Scarlett asked.
“I’m only interested in now,” the woman said with a smile.
“Nineteen.”
“Older sister as well? She’s stunning. How old is she?”
“Eighteen.”
Her interest seemed to end with Spencer and Lola. She tapped a fingernail against her front teeth.
“It’s not exactly what I pictured,” she said, turning to look around the lobby.
Scarlett didn’t know what to say. The hotel was what it was. Not the best. Far from the worst.
Her mother entered from the kitchen, bearing a white mug on a saucer, with a tiny pile of orange rind clustered around it. The woman eagerly accepted this, pinching up all of the orange and dropping it into the cup.
“Four shots of espresso,” her mother said.
The woman nodded and sucked this back like it was nothing at all.
“This is my daughter Scarlett,” her mother explained.
“We’ve met,” the woman said. “Nice name. And nice dress. I’m more of a Vivienne Westwood woman myself. But really, I like small, up-and-coming designers, right out of design school. You get all the freshest ideas for a song.”
Scarlett’s mother’s face had slipped into that half-paralyzed mask it got when a seriously paying customer was around.
“This is Mrs. Amberson,” she said to Scarlett. “She’ll be here all summer.”
“All summer?” Scarlett repeated.
“All summer,” Mrs. Amberson said.
“All summer,” her mother said again. “In the Empire Suite.”
“The Empire Suite?” Scarlett said.
“This is adorable,” Mrs. Amberson cut in. “Do you often sing in rounds? Makes sense. You look a bit like the Von Trapps.”
It took Scarlett a minute to realize that she was talking about The Sound of Music. Actually, yes. Maybe they were a little Von Trapp like. Many, blonde, repetitive. Also, running for the hills sounded like a pretty good plan.
“Will your husband be joining you at some point?” her mom asked, sitting back down in front of the computer.
“Oh, no,” Mrs. Amberson said. “My husband is more of a concept than a person.”
She let that mysterious sentence linger in the air for a moment.
“Oh . . . fine,” Scarlett’s mom replied. “Just checking. And just so you know, we have a policy here at the Hopewell. As a family, we personally take care of some of the rooms.”
“So I read.” Mrs. Amberson pulled a Whaddya Say We Do New York? guidebook from her voluminous bag. She flipped the bookopen to the correct page with one shake of her hand. It looked likeit had been turned to that page a number of times; the spine hadcracked there as a kind of permanent bookmark. “The Empire Suite comes highly recommended. How fortunate that someone just canceled and it was free.”
The size of the lie almost caused Scarlett to burst out laughing. But that would only result in her mother having to kill her in front of the new guest, so she played with the stapler instead.
“It is,” her mother said, forging on. “Scarlett is taking care of your room. She’ll be able to give you a hand with day-to-day matters, errands, things like that.”
Mrs. Amberson looked Scarlett up and down like she was sizing her up for a harness.
“I could really use something like that,” she said. “I’ll bear it in mind.”
Excerpted from SUITE SCARLETT © Copyright 2009 by Maureen Johnson. Reprinted with permission by Point, an imprint of Scholastic Inc. All rights reserved.
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