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my hands. “Here it is, the long awaited campaign slogan: Gia. Fresh thinking. Fresh answers. Vote outside the box .”
    Silence.
    “Earth to Clive?”
    “I like it,” he says finally, “but you know the people you’re running against, Gia. Can you handle how they’re going to twist it and throw it back at you?”
    “I can deal.”
    “Just one thing, Gia,” Ro says. “When they start snickering and sticking it to you about the word fresh and calling you a slut, how do you plan to answer that?”
    “That this is the year of the slut.”
    “What?” Clive says, his eyes widening.
    “I’m kidding. I don’t know. Any ideas?”
    “Say that they have filthy minds for thinking that,” Candy says, “and for perverting the truth. Act totally indignant.”
    We all look at Candy with new respect.
    “You go, girl. That’s exactly what I’ll say.”
    Then we get to work coloring, never mind the blisters on our fingers from all the work, three hours later we do actually finish all of them and they come out fabulous. Then Clive’s driver takes Candy home to Park Avenue and drops Ro off at home in Little Italy. I stay behind to hang with Clive.
    “You never told me about that night with Michael Cross,” he says. “Excuse me, Officer Hottie.”
    “He’s in total denial about his feelings for me. Plus he probably thinks I’m jailbait—even though I’m not—and the daughter of a don and he’s my arresting officer and blah blah blah.
    “Did he actually say all that?”
    “He didn’t have to.”
    “What did he actually say?”
    “He didn’t say anything. He’s not a talker.”
    “So how do you know he’s into you and can’t handle it?”
    “By the way he looks at me.”
    “That’s all?”
    “Clive,” I say. “Chemistry. Does. Not. Lie.”
    He’s quiet after that and we sit there looking at each other.
    “Maybe I should just marry you,” I say. “And we could live happily ever after.”
    “I would love that,” Clive says.
    “And you’d give me a giant diamond ring and everything?”
    “Absolutely everything.”
    I smile back at Clive, not sure exactly what he means. He said he’s not gay, but he’s not like anyone straight that I know either. Not that it matters.
    I climb into his bed and pat the place next to me and then Clive and I snuggle together while the rain comes down hard so that the view of Central Park outside looks all drippy and speckled like it was painted by Seurat, the French artist we learned about in art history who freaked everyone out at first with his weird way of painting called pointillism. He put like three million paint dots or something on his canvas, and if you stand away from it, you see that, whoa, it totally all works, because what happens is those separate color dots you see next to each other close-up magically morph into different patches of colors from a distance.
    And that made me start to think about whether in real life you need to step back from things to see the real picture and the true colors, aka perspective, and that if you’re too close and fixated on the individual dots, you can get it all wrong and maybe what you think you’re seeing isn’t reality or the true picture at all. It’s something else entirely.
    “What are you thinking, Gia?
    “Of George Seurat.”
    “Because of our painting?”
    “What painting?”
    “You know, the one in the living room.”
    “You have a Seurat? A real Seurat?”
    “Mmm, over the couch.”
    “Clive, do not tell anyone.”
    “Why?”
    “Because they’d steal it and kidnap you for ransom.”
    “Like they could ever track down my parents to pay.”
    I look at Clive and he looks back at me and we start to snicker and then laugh and a minute later we’re keeled over laughing so hard we’re practically choking and holding our stomachs because they hurt so much.
    I mean what’s sadder, the fact that my dad’s people would probably get behind stealing the art, or the fact that his dad is MIA and