by Kate Brian
“Thank you so much for making me talk to Whittaker the other day,” she gushed. “I never would have gone up to him on my own, but he was so sweet. We talked for so long Mr. Shreeber was screaming at me to get on the bus. I made us late for the meet!”
“Wow. Glad I could be of service,” I said.
“He told me all about his trip to East Asia and asked me about the Cape,” Constance said. “He remembered that my family goes to the Cape every summer. Not that he shouldn't. I mean, his family has visited us there a few times. But still, it was nice of him to ask, wasn't it?”
“Sure,” I said, grinning as well. It was nearly impossible not to in the face of that much giddiness.
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“Do you think he was flirting?” she asked me, grabbing my forearm, which was wrapped around my books.
“Of course he wasn't flirting. Why would he flirt with me?” Constance said, pulling me aside to let a few students through to the door. “He's known me since my Elmo obsession,” she said, looking at the ground.
'Your Elmo obsession?"
“Oh, I was obsessed with Elmo--you know, from Sesame Street?-- for way too long. I carried that stupid doll around with me until I was, like, nine years old,” Constance said. “My older brother Trey threw it in the ocean one year and Whit dove in to save it.” She sighed. For the first time in my life, I saw firsthand what the expression “stars in her eyes” looked like. Kind of spooky. “I'll never forget that.”
“Wow,” I said. “He's a hero.”
“He is, isn't he?” she asked, scrunching her nose. “Anyway, I think he might actually be interested in me. Walt Whittaker. I can't believe it. He even said we should have dinner sometime. Just me and him. To catch up on old times!”
I took a deep breath and tasted relief. “Constance, that's so great. I'm really glad it went so well.”
“Me too!” she said. Then she grabbed me in both arms and hugged me. Hard. Constance was bonier than she looked.
“Come on. Let's go study!” she said.
As she dragged me through the door and into the library, I couldn't help feeling I'd finally dodged at least one bullet. If Whit
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and Constance started spending time together, he would have to see that she was ten times more appropriate for him than I was. And ten times more eager to be with him. And then I wouldn't have to worry about deflecting his advances or trying to remind him of our agreement to be just friends. One less thing to stress about.
I needed this. I needed it badly.
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* * *
When I arrived at the dinner table that night, a heated debate was taking place. Dash was definitely on one side, Noelle on the other. It was unclear as of yet whom the others had aligned themselves with. I blushed as I walked by Dash and sat down on his side of the table, as far from him as I could get, making it nearly impossible for me to see him. Ever since my illicit discovery in Noelle's room, I'd had a hard time being in the same room as Dash without constantly seeing his nether regions in my mind's eye.
Two seconds later, Josh sat down across from me. “Hey,” he said.
I smiled. “Hey.”
“I don't understand,” Dash was saying. “One phone call and we could have a limo waiting for us anywhere in town. Do you want to be uncomfortable for two hours?”
“Dash, you're not getting it. This party is all about tradition,” Noelle replied, gesturing with her fork. “And part of the tradition is taking the train.”
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They were talking about the Legacy. They had to be. The Billings Girls had never talked about it right in front of me so openly before. Were they finally, finally going to invite me?
“She's right, man,” Gage said, leaning back on two chair legs and balancing. “The train ride is half the fun.”
'Yeah. It was really fun when you booted all over the window last year on the way home and it dripped down the back of my coat,“ Dash said grumpily. ”That was fun."
“Look. The Legacy has been going on for generations,” Noelle said, taking a bite of a baby carrot. “Our forefathers took the train to the Legacy and we will take the train to the Legacy.”
“Since when do you give a crap about our forefathers?” Dash asked.
“Since when are you using wax in your hair?” Noelle asked, eyeing him disdainfully.
“Oh, that's relevant,” Dash replied.
God, this was torture. Didn't they realize that no one had officially told me about this thing yet? Didn't they want me to come? Talk about Cinderella. This was what she must have felt like when her annoying stepsisters kept talking about the damn ball.
Okay. Clearly I was going to have to make this opportunity for myself. Sometimes a girl had to do what a girl had to do.
“Um, I have a question,” I said, leaning forward.
Everyone turned to look at me. Noelle, Kiran, Taylor, Ariana, Gage, Josh, Dash, and Natasha. It was as if they had all forgotten that I existed and my speaking was, therefore, a complete shock.
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“What is the Legacy?”
Noelle and Kiran exchanged a look. Gage snorted a laugh and dropped his chair back down, reaching for a roll on his plate.
“That's for us to know and you to most likely never find out,” Gage said, enjoying himself a little too much.
“Funny,” I replied.
Josh cleared his throat. “He's fairly serious,” he said, his expression apologetic.
I felt a blush creeping onto my cheeks. “Come on.”
Dash cleared his throat and leaned onto the table to better see me. I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from laughing and tried as hard as I could not to see his guy parts superimposed over his face.
“Reed, the Legacy is an exclusive party,” he said sagely. “Only private school legacies are invited.”
My insides turned. I had kind of expected someone to make me an exception, to tell me they would find a way around the rule. Was it possible that Constance's theory had been completely off base?
“Not just legacies,” Kiran corrected. “Multiple-generation legacies.”
“Oh,” I said, looking down at my food.
“We came over on the Mayflower' legacies,” Gage added.
I get it. I'm not invited. Thanks for the hammer to the head.
“The only way to get in if you're not a legacy is to be a legacy's plus-one,” Noelle said, looking directly at Dash until he started concentrating very seriously on his food. "And only a very,
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very select few even get a plus-one. Your family has to go back to practically the dark ages."
“Now where on Earth would Reed find a legacy with a plus- one?” Kiran pondered aloud.
I looked around at all of them, waiting for the answer, until Noelle tilted her head toward the other side of the room. I turned and followed her gaze. Whittaker. Whittaker, who was, as he always seemed to be, chatting with an adult. This time, Dean Marcus.
Suddenly it hit me like a cartoon piano to the head. This was why London had wanted to use him. This was why Vienna had suggested that every girl in school would be after him in the next few weeks. Whit could get one lucky girl into the Legacy with his coveted plus-one. If I had any shot in hell of going, I would have to be Walt Whittaker's date.
I looked at Noelle again. She arched one eyebrow and lifted a shoulder, like
, Told you so. She had planned this from the start. The things Whittaker could get me that I wouldn't otherwise have. We weren't talking about diamond earrings or other random luxury items. We were talking about entre into exclusive parties. We were talking about acceptance among the elite. Just being a Billings Girl wasn't enough. At least not for me. I was a special case. I needed another leg up.
I took a deep breath. What Noelle didn't realize was that I couldn't be Whittaker's plus-one. I couldn't lead him on just to get an invite to some party, no matter how intriguing and mysterious and exclusive. He clearly liked me. A lot. Using him would
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be way too mean. And besides, Constance was totally in love with him. There was no way I was doing that to her. Except...
“Do you guys really think Pearson is going to be there?” Josh asked.
Except for that.
“Are you kidding? Wherever Pearson is right now, he'll be at the Legacy,” Dash said. “Dude wouldn't miss this party if he was dead.”
Thomas was going to be at the Legacy. His friends seemed fairly certain of that fact. That was the whole point of me trying to get to this thing, wasn't it? So that I could yell at him for everything he'd put me through. So that he could explain. So that I could see that he was okay.
Slowly, I looked up at Whittaker again. He was laughing heartily at something the dean had said--a nice, big belly laugh. And sure enough, a few random girls were looking on with stars in their eyes, just waiting to pounce on him once he was free. Thomas was going to be at this party. The only way for me to get into this party was to get Whittaker to invite me. If I wanted to see my maybe - ex, I was going to have to use my maybe-stalker to do it.
Fate had a really messed-up sense of humor.
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THE WRONG INVITATION
The days had been growing rapidly shorter. Now when I left the library after a postdinner study session, the torch lights along the pathways were already aglow to light my way back to Billings. With the dark came the intensified cold. After days of resisting and coming home with my teeth chattering, I had finally caved and broken out my crappy gray wool coat with the embarrassingly short sleeves and the unidentifiable stain along the hem. Already I'd caught a few disgusted stares from the female population. I was overdue for a phone call to Dad anyway. Looked as if the next one would include me begging him to put in an order with Lands End.
Yes, Lands End. While my classmates walked around in their Prada and Coach and Miu Miu, Lands End was the best I could hope for.
I ignored a pair of girls coming in the opposite direction who stared into my semifamous face, then started twittering and talking the moment I was past them. I barely even noticed this stuff anymore. If I ever did hit it big, this semester was going to be perfect prep for handling celebrity.
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I turned up the path to Billings, already mentally pep-talking myself for whatever chore list my “sisters” had devised for me, when I saw a dark figure lurking in front of the door. For the splittest of seconds I thought of Thomas and my heart caught. But then I realized that a figure of that size could belong to only one person.
“Reed,” he said, stepping out of the shadows.
“Whit,” I replied, mimicking his serious tone.
“How was the library?” he asked with a small, knowing smile.
I decided not to ask how he knew I'd been at the library. I'd save him the pleasure of sharing, and me the pain of hearing, how he predicted my every move.
“Fine. What's up?” I asked.
“Well, I have a question to ask you,” he said, slipping his hands into the pockets of his overcoat. “An invitation to offer, actually.”
The Legacy. My conscience and my desire had been at war ever since dinner the night before and neither one had yet waved the white flag. I was not prepared for this. What was I going to say? What was I going to do? Somewhere in one of the rooms above, someone was practicing the violin. Something fast and manic. It didn't help with the thinking.
“I was wondering if you would do me the honor of being my dinner guest on Friday night,” he said.
Wait. His what? Where was my plus-one invite? And, hold on, he'd already asked Constance to sit with him at dinner. What was he doing, throwing out these invites like they were bath water?
“Whit, we already sit together at dinner every night,” I pointed
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out. A stiff breeze blew past us, filling my nostrils to bursting with the pungency of his evergreen-scented aftershave. I held my breath and tried not to cough.
Whittaker chuckled. “No, no, no. Not here. Off campus,” he said. “You see, Friday is my eighteenth birthday. I've been granted permission to dine off campus, and I'd like you to be my guest.”
There were so many things wrong with this proposal that I didn't know where to begin.
“How did you get permission?” I said finally.
“My grandmother. She's on the board of directors and she's not above occasionally pulling the odd string,” he said with pride. “She's granted you a pass as well. We don't need to bring a chaperone.”
The word chaperone made me shudder.
“But, Whit, what about everyone else?” I said. “I mean, it's your eighteenth birthday. You don't want to spend it with just me.”
His expression told me that this was exactly what he wanted. This was very not good. Clearly Whittaker was even more serious about me than I had estimated. He could be here, on campus, ringing in his eighteenth year with a drunken party in the woods with Dash and Gage and the others, but instead he wanted to whisk me to some off-campus restaurant.
“Say yes, Reed. We'll get dressed up; we'll go for a drive. I know this incredible little Italian place in Boston--”
“Boston?” I croaked. I had never been to Boston. I had never
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been to any city other than Philadelphia, and that was just for one day on my eighth-grade field trip.
“Of course. You didn't expect me to celebrate my eighteenth at one of the three decent restaurants here in Easton,” he said with an incredulous exhale. He reached out and caught my hand in both of his, looking me deep in the eye. “Say you'll come.”
My heart actually responded to that plea. He sounded so sincere, how could I not? So there I was. I could say no and crush this sweet guy and also obliterate any chance of being asked to the Legacy and seeing Thomas, or I could say yes, go to some fancy restaurant in Boston, and keep the hope of seeing Thomas alive.
In the end, it was no contest, really. My conscience took a dive.
“Okay,” I said finally, nearly choking on my dry throat. “I'd love to.”
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PRESSURE
My entire life I had always found brushing my teeth to be a soothing activity. It was the perfect time to ponder the events of the day in privacy. To go over the things I might have said or done differently. To pat myself on the back for the things that had gone well. Unlike the parents of every other kid on the planet, my parents had often been forced to yell at me to stop brushing my teeth. Fifteen minutes would pass while I zoned out. Half an hour. It was amazing I had any enamel left.
That night I was somewhere into my second quarter of an hour, my mouth full of foam, when the bathroom door banged open beh
ind me. I nearly choked on my own spit.
“How's it going?” Natasha asked, folding her arms over her sizable chest and leaning against the doorjamb. She glared over my shoulder at my reflection in the mirror.
I leaned over the basin and emptied my mouth into the drain, then slowly filled the cup with water and tipped it into my mouth. After sloshing it around for a half a minute, I spit again. Let her wait. She was only waiting for nothing.
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“Fine,” I said finally, wiping my face with a hand towel. “I had a great day, how about you?”
“You know that's not what I'm asking,” Natasha said. “What have you found?”
Let's see: a refinery's worth of sugar, evidence of serious psychological self-abuse, and some Skinamax-worthy photos. Oh, and a secret, hidden computer with a password-protect program.
I folded the towel, hung it on the towel ring next to the sink, and turned around, heaving an exasperated sigh. “Nothing,” I said. “I've found nothing.”
I might have told her about the computer if I had thought that the information would get her off my back, even for a moment, but I had a feeling it would have the exact opposite effect. I had a feeling it would only make her turn the screws tighter. And they were plenty tight already, thank you.
'You can't be serious,“ she said as I brushed by her into the room. 'You really expect me to believe that after a week and a half you've found nothing?”
'You can believe whatever you want to believe,“ I told her, sitting blithely on my bed. ”This country was founded on that principle."
Natasha clucked her tongue and rolled her eyes. She pressed the heels of her hands into her forehead like I was giving her a migraine. Good. She deserved mind-splitting pain. That'd teach her to blackmail me.
“What's the problem here, Reed?” she asked me. “Was I not explicit enough when I told you exactly what I would do if you didn't help me?”