Lust

by Robin Wasserman

  “I can’t believe you just did that,” Miranda gasped, half annoyed and half amazed. “I’m totally soaked.”

  Harper grinned lazily and, catlike, stretched her body out and preened in the sun.

  “You’ll dry. And now instead of titrating and distilling and blah, blah, blah, we can spend the rest of the hour talking about the important things in life.”

  “Like?”

  “I don’t know. Guys? What we’re going to do this weekend? Whether any of your cigarettes are still dry enough to smoke?”

  Sighing, Miranda pulled out her pack—only slightly wet on one corner—and tossed it to Harper.

  “I don’t want to rain on your parade, but did you even stop to consider what would happen if you’d gotten caught? Or if, I don’t know, you’d set the school on fire?”

  “Rand, it was a double period.” Harper spoke slowly and loudly, as if deciding that Miranda needed a little help trying to wrap her brain around the basics. “We would have been stuck in there forever”

  “Oh, please,” Miranda snorted. She began digging through her soggy backpack, assessing the damage: Spanish notebook: dry. Sort of. Paperback Hamlet for AP English: soaked. Stila mascara and MAC lipstick: mercifully intact. “If you’d just waited, we would have been out in an hour.”

  Harper took a long drag on the cigarette and took a moment to consider that. She shook her head.

  “We’re seniors now,” she said finally “We’ve waited long enough.”

  Boring.

  It had taken the girl—Harper—an endless fifty minutes to guide Kaia through the school, fifty minutes of her life that she would never get back. And the rest of the morning had just been more of the same. People she didn’t want to meet, telling her things she didn’t want to know. As if she cared what to do or where to go in this shoebox of a school, or had any interest in who was who—or who was sleeping with whom—as if the mundane details of anything in this tedious town could be anything less than tedious.

  Anything but boring.

  Boring.

  Boring.

  The word had been beating a steady tattoo in her head ever since she’d arrived in this one-horse (or in this case, she supposed, one-Wal-Mart) town. Not by plane, of course. There was no airport in Grace, CA. Apparently, there was no airport anywhere near Grace, CA, if the endless drive from Las Vegas was any indication. Though to be honest, she was surprised there were even cars in the ridiculous town—the whole place had the feel of a different century, except for the tacky tourist strip of Route 66 running through the town center—there time seemed frozen in a particularly bad year of the 1970s.

  She’d plodded through three hours of the school day and knew pretty much all that she needed to know about her new life in Grace—as in, there wasn’t going to be much of one. Now here she was, standing in line in a cafeteria—a cafeteria, a smelly, cramped room painted hospital green, with long metal tables bolted to the floor, cranky old women in hairnets doling out lumps of food, hordes of dull-eyed students who at least deserved credit for not all outweighing an elephant, if they’d been eating this greasy crap their entire lives. Who knew places like this actually existed? Kaia’s schooltime meals had varied. There was the gourmet health food in the regal boarding school dining hall, with its vaulted ceilings and centuries-old oak tables. And of course the Upper West Side takeout cuisine grabbed to go during lunch periods—well, any and all periods—at her city prep school. (Prep school had been before and after boarding school—getting kicked out was easy when you had plenty of money and connections to kick you into somewhere else. How was Kaia supposed to know that she would only have so many opportunities to vacillate between the frying pan and fire before getting thrown off the stove altogether?) Even the lunches the maid had occasionally put together for her—or, years ago, the lunches her mother had packed before she’d decided that mothering was too last season—even those had been better than this slop. But that was then, this was now. This was life in Grace: dry heat, neon, decrepit gas stations, incompetent teachers, grease, dust, cafeterias. This was her life.

  She was stuck. Stranded. A world away from everyone and everything she’d ever known.

  At least it was also a world away from her mother. Thank God for small favors, right?

  “Kaia, over here!”

  Kaia whirled around to see the mind-numbing tour guide, Harper, waving in her direction. She stuck on a smile—though she didn’t trust Harper any farther than she could throw her (which, judging from the poorly hidden roll of flesh squeezed into the waistband of the girl’s faux designer jeans, wouldn’t be very far at all). But no reason to burn any bridges—not yet, at least. Besides, no way was she eating alone.

  “Hi, Harper,” she said lazily, paying for her “lunch” (an apple, skim milk, and some wilted lettuce masquerading as a salad).

  “My friends wanted you to come have lunch with us,” Harper explained.

  Kaia noticed, but didn’t mention, the pronoun that was plainly missing from Harper’s halfhearted invitation. She followed Harper obediently out of the dingy cafeteria and into the cramped “quad” behind it, where students were apparently allowed to eat—if they could find a place to perch amidst the broken tables, scattered garbage, and everpresent dust. Kaia wrinkled her nose—this whole school should be declared a toxic waste site. Students included.

  “Everyone, this is Kaia Sellers,” Harper said with a sarcastic flourish of her hands, once they’d found the right table.

  Mmm … maybe not all the students. “Everyone” apparently included two tasty guys who looked as if they’d just walked out of an Abercrombie ad. They were sprawled on the wooden benches along with a few other apparent A-listers—even mahogany-filled dining halls have tables set aside for the social elite, and as a lifelong member of that class, Kaia could spot the signs from a mile away. The table was on the outskirts of the quad, far from the lunchroom monitor who poked her head outside every once in a while to make sure no one was smoking, drinking, or destroying school property. But even physically on the margins, the group was still somehow at the center of everything—attention, conversation, focus. These kids were loved, they were hated—but most of all, they were watched. Kaia knew the feeling.

  “Kaia, this is Miranda Stevens.” Harper stood next to Kaia but had carefully angled her body away, so that she could keep a close watch on her but didn’t have to make any direct eye contact.

  One of the girls, apparently Miranda, stepped forward to shake Kaia’s hand. Scarecrow thin, limp, dull hair pulled back into geeky braids, some unfortunate fashion choices—the white T-shirt under the imitation Chanel jacket just wasn’t doing it. But cute, Kaia thought. She’d do.

  “And I’m Beth,” the other girl, blond and beautiful—if you liked that farmer’s daughter thing—waved from the other end of the table, where she was nuzzled under the arm of Abercrombie Number One. “Welcome to Haven High. I’m sure you—”

  “And this is Adam and Kane,” Harper interrupted, stepping around to the other side of the table and placing a possessive hand on each of their backs. Adam was an all-American boy, with blond hair, a square jaw, an honest face, a dark blue T-shirt that no doubt hid washboard abs but revealed astonishingly thick biceps—no surprise, then, that he would be dating the farmer’s daughter, Kaia supposed. He kept one arm tightly around the blond girl, but reached out the other to shake Kaia’s hand. His fingers were warm, his grasp firm—she held it just a second too long.

  Kane, on the other hand—there was nothing honest about him. The same muscles (they definitely didn’t make them like this in New York), the same striking good looks, but she could tell from his hooded eyes, from the smirk playing across his lips, from his unabashed and appreciative appraisal of her body as he rose to greet her, that he was playing in a different league. Maybe playing a different game.

  Again Kaia extended a hand; instead of shaking it, Kane gently turned it face down, then raised it to his lips and gave it a light kiss.

>   “Charmed,” he said. From anyone else, it might have been smarmy. From him? It worked.

  Both boys grinned at her, and Kaia could feel their gazes traveling down her long neck and lingering at the point where her silver pendant disappeared into the darkness of her low-cut V-neck. Boys and cleavage, she thought. It never fails.

  She also noticed Harper noticing the boys’ glances—and saw the girl’s eyes narrow.

  Not bad, Kaia decided. Pretty standard, maybe, but not too bad.

  Who knows—maybe she could have a little fun here after all ….

  It was a perverse rule of nature: The first day of school always lasted forever. Temporal distortion not covered by the theory of relativity: One hour of first-day time roughly equivalent to half an eternity of normal time. Endless minutes of staring out the window, cursing the wasted daylight, all that time not getting a tan, not drinking a frozen strawberry margarita, not listening to cheesy eighties music and complaining there was never anything to do while secretly delighting in the Madonna singalong. Outside was suddenly Eden—inside, sweating through sixth period and watching the decrepit clock tick off the minutes, surely nothing less than the seventh level of Hell.

  But this year, waiting through the day presented, at least for some, a special torture. They weren’t waiting for the final bell, they were waiting for the final period: advanced French. Normally a snoozefest with 150-year-old Madame Marshak (who, in the best tradition of hatefully eccentric high school French teachers, remained convinced of her essential Frenchness, despite her Houston birth certificate and unmistakable Texan twang). But this year Marshak had finally gone on to greener pastures—her sister’s house in Buffalo. Although given her advanced age and penchant for driving around tipsy after too much cheap French wine, it seemed likely that Buffalo would be only a brief layover on the way to her final destination.

  Regardless, there was a new professeur in town—the first new teacher Haven High had seen in years.

  He was young.

  He was British.

  And, if freshman gossip was to be believed—for he’d already made an appearance in third period’s French for annoying beginners—he was hot.

  Seriously hot.

  There was only one advanced French class, which meant that Beth, Harper, and now Kaia would be stuck in the small room together all year long. Beth sat toward the front (though not in the front row—she’d learned long ago that good grades were one thing, teacher’s pet was quite another) and flipped through her organizer, trying to figure out how she was going to fit in homework, editing the school newspaper, applying to colleges, babysitting her little brothers, and working a part-time job without going insane. And, oh yeah, without letting her boyfriend forget what she looked like.

  Harper, ensconced as usual in the back row, lazily examined her nails and decided that it was definitely time for a manicure. And, come to think of it, maybe a pedicure. And a haircut. Not that there was a decent salon anywhere in town, but at Betty’s off of Green Street, they did a slightly better than half-assed job, and threw in a ten-minute head and shoulder massage for free. Which was an appealing thought—it was only the first day of school and already she could use a serious de-stressing.

  Kaia slipped into the classroom just before the bell—Haven High stuck its language classes down in the basement, and she’d already stumbled across a decrepit boiler room and overstuffed janitor’s closet before finally finding her way here. She took the only seat that was left, on the aisle next to a boy who smelled like rotten fruit. A fitting end to the day. Or un fin parfait pour le jour, as her new French teacher would say. Wherever he was. “Advanced” French. Such a waste of her time, Kaia thought, considering she’d spent half of last summer on the Riviera, gossiping with the château’s staff like a native. Such a joke. Such a—

  Such an unexpected treat. If the man who had just appeared in the doorway, flashed the class a rakish smile, ran a hand through his adorably floppy hair, and strode to the front of the room was actually their teacher, life at Haven High was suddenly looking up.

  For the rumors were right.

  This guy was hot.

  Seriously hot.

  Just like a movie star, Beth sighed to herself as he grabbed a piece of chalk and wrote his name on the board in quick, loping script.

  Jack Powell. “Hola! Me llamo Jack Powell. Como esta?” he asked, as the class stared blankly back at him. “Okay, and if you understood any of that, you’re probably in the wrong place and you should get out. As for the rest of you, bienvenue and welcome to French 4.”

  Hot and British, Harper mused. Tasty—Hugh Grant meets Clive Owen. So what the hell is he doing here?

  “As you probably know, I’m new around here,” Powell admitted, taking off his sports jacket and perching casually on the edge of his desk. “So I’m sure this class is going to have some surprises to offer all of us.”

  You have no idea, Kaia thought. She had never expected to find someone like him—so handsome, so charming, so cosmopolitan, so her—in this shitty town. But now that opportunity had knocked, it seemed only polite to open the door and invite him in.

  chapter

  3

  “Adam, I told you. Not yet.” Beth reached out a hand toward him, but he pulled away, rolling over on his side. It was still strange for her to see him there, in the bed she’d slept in since she was a child. It was still a child’s room, really—ruffled bedspread, white wooden furniture with light blue trim, so much pink that it was embarrassing. If she’d had her way, the room would be sophisticated and sparse, with only a dark mahogany desk, some Ansel Adams prints on the wall, and a crowded bookshelf in the corner. But these days her parents had neither the money nor the patience for interior decorating, so her seventeen-year-old self was forever trapped in the pink pleated land of her eight-year-old self’s dreams. There was even a stuffed animal, the only thing in the room she didn’t hate—though at the moment, poor Snuffy the Turtle was crushed beneath Adam’s half-naked body. One of these things is not like the other, she thought crazily, the Sesame Street lyric wandering through her mind as she sought frantically for something to say that would make Adam understand. Was this really her life? “I’m just not ready.”

  “I know, and I’m not trying to rush you,” he said with his back to her, a petulant tone creeping into his voice. “I’m not—it’s just that …”

  Beth sat up and pulled on her pale pink bra, struggling to fasten the clasp behind her. It was past five and her mother would be home soon. Now was not the time for this conversation—couldn’t he see that?

  “Look, Adam, you know it’s not that I don’t love you, it’s not that I don’t want to …” God, how she wanted to!

  “What, then?” He rolled back to face her, clasping her hands and pulling her close. “What’s stopping us? I know you wanted to wait … but … what are we waiting for?”

  If only she knew the answer. If only she could put into words the heart-stopping terror she felt when she let her fantasies get away from her and imagined throwing herself at him, losing herself to the moment, and—but her imagination took her only so far. That’s when the terror set in. And however handsome he looked lying there, one arm stretched out over his head and a lock of hair falling over his deep, dark eyes, however much she may have wanted him—all of him—she just couldn’t do it. Not yet. Not like this.

  It hadn’t always been like this, the pressure, the silent give-and-take, worrying about what she wanted and what he wanted and what happened next. No, in the beginning, it had been simple. She had hated him.

  Totally hated him, and everything he stood for—which as far as she was concerned, was sports, sex, and beer. She’d hated the way the whole school thought he walked on water, just because he could swim quickly across a pool every fall, could drop a ball into a hoop every winter, just because he was tall, and chiseled, and had a smile that warmed you like the sun. She’d hated his stupid jock clothes, his stupid jock jokes—most of all, his stupid j
ock friends, and the girls who hung all over them. The guys were all so arrogant, acting like they governed the school, like Beth and her friends were expected to bow and curtsy every time they swept down the hall—and the girls were even worse, simpering and giggling, desperately trying to keep their jock’s attention, or at least to win favor with Harper and her gang, the female counterpart to all this athletic royalty.

  When she’d been stuck with Adam as a lab partner last year in bio, all her friends had been jealous—but Beth had just sighed in exhaustion, already figuring that she’d have to do all the work. And she’d been right—put a scalpel in his hands and a pickled frog on a slab in front of him, and Adam was as incompetent and helpless as she would be if plopped down in the middle of a basketball court, facing down the WNBA all-star team. She’d been right about that—but not much else.

  He wasn’t arrogant, he wasn’t stupid, he wasn’t an asshole or a dumb jock. By October he was just … Adam. Sweet, funny, adorable—and, for whatever reason, he would stop at nothing until she went out with him. And, for whatever reason—well, basically for the reason that it seemed he’d flirted with or dated half the school, and she didn’t particularly want to be his next randomly selected conquest—she refused. And refused again. How many times had she said no?

  Too many—but it hadn’t stopped him. He’d started slipping notes in her locker, leaving flowers for her at her seat in lab—he wouldn’t give up. And then came the day he’d waited for her at her locker after school, greeting her with a giddy smile and a goofy wave. Before she knew it, he was down on one knee.

  “Marry me?” he’d asked, pulling a giant plastic ring out of his pocket. It was a bright blue flower, about the size of her palm. It was ludicrous—and irresistible.

  “Get up!” she’d urged him through her giggles, blushing furiously as a crowd began to gather.

  “Not until you give me a chance,” he had sworn, seemingly oblivious to the curiosity-seekers. Or maybe he was just used to being the center of attention.