by Cj Omololu
“So what’s wrong with him?” So far, he sounds like a guy Ava would keep for herself.
“He’s from Bakersfield,” she says, her nose wrinkling. “I swear I could still smell cows on him.” She looks wistful. “But his arms … Oh, man. So it looks like Alicia’s going to be extra busy for the next few weeks.”
Which gives me just the opening I need. “I’ve been thinking,” I say, watching her out of the corner of my eye. “Maybe we should quit Alicia. We’re going away to college soon, and it’s time for Alicia to disappear before she gets caught. Or worse.”
“No! I don’t want to quit Alicia.” Her face registers shock and betrayal, just like I knew it would. “Come on,” she says, her voice softer, with a singsong lilt she uses to get her way, even though she knows it doesn’t work on me. “It’s all just for fun.”
“Does this look like fun to you?” I pull at the neck of my sweatshirt again so she can see the mark Casey left. For a split second I see his face hovering above me, his eyes shut tight in ecstasy or anger. Sometimes it was hard to tell the difference. “It’s stupid. And dangerous. We’ve been lucky so far, but what if one of the guys finds out you’ve been lying to him the whole time?” I reach around and grab my wallet out of the bag that’s hanging on the back of the chair. “Here.” I slap Alicia’s fake ID onto the counter and slide it toward her. Ava got it made last year because she almost got caught with her real license by one of Alicia’s dates.
Ava’s hand slides over the card just as Cecilia shuffles into the room in her robe and slippers.
“What are you girls doing up so late?” she asks, yawning. Her brown hair is puffy on one side, and she has sheet marks on her face.
“Sorry. Did we wake you up?” My heart races, and I know I look guilty. Cecilia must really be tired, because she doesn’t call me on it.
“No,” she says, heading for the cupboard. “I fell asleep reading and I need some water before I go to bed.”
Ava’s eyes widen at me when Cecilia’s back is turned, and I shrug. To the rest of the world, Cecilia is just a housekeeper, but to us, she’s as much of a mom as we’ve ever had, and just as guilt-inducing. Cecilia looks at Ava’s outfit while her water fills at the fridge. “Ava, tell me you’re not just getting home.”
“No, I’ve been here for ages,” Ava says with a straight face that makes me jealous. I’ve never been able to lie like she can. “We were just hanging out.”
Cecilia nods and then turns to me as she takes a sip of water. “I didn’t even hear you come in. Did you get your English project done?”
It was hard enough lying to her about where I was going tonight. I don’t want to have to continue it now. “Mostly,” I say. I take my cup to the sink and keep my back to her while I wash it out.
“Well, as long as everyone’s home safe. Good night, girls.” Cecilia gives us a wave and disappears down the hallway.
“You don’t think she heard anything?” Ava says quietly as soon as we hear Cecilia’s door shut.
I shake my head. Cecilia always calls us out if she thinks we’re up to something.
Ava glances down the hall and then leans in close to me. “I still say we can’t let Casey get away with it.”
Picturing Casey’s leering face sends the same shiver of fear and regret down my spine and I wish I’d never even heard his name. “No—drop it. It’s done, and I don’t ever want to see him again,” I say. “But I think we should quit Alicia while we can. Before someone really gets hurt.”
“Alicia!”
I’m sitting on the patio of Café Roma when I hear that name, and my heart starts to pound. Don’t look up. Don’t even glance his way. Pretend you didn’t hear him and he’ll think it’s a mistake. I focus on the laptop in front of me and hope the guy goes away. He shouldn’t be here. This is exactly why we don’t do Alicia close to home.
“Alicia?” The guy says it softly this time, with more of a question on the end, like he’s not exactly sure anymore. That little catch in his voice is what makes me finally look up.
I take a deep breath. I don’t know what I expected—Casey, or someone even worse, but this one looks fairly harmless. I guess they all do at first. It takes only one glance to figure out why Ava must have given him the Alicia business. With dark brown hair and light blue eyes, he’s cute enough, but everything’s just a little “too” for him to date Ava—hair a little too long, jeans a little too worn, edges a little too rough. He looks about our age, maybe a little bit older, but everything about him screams punk rock, not premed. Not what my sister would think of as a keeper.
I reach for my latte and give him a sad smile that goes with my slightly stained Stanford sweatshirt. “Sorry. No.”
I can see the light in his eyes dim a little as he studies me, and I glance down to see what he sees—three-year-old sweats and scuffed UGGs, never mind a serious lack of makeup and my hair piled into a messy bun. He must not know Alicia very well if he thinks I’m her—Alicia doesn’t leave the house unless she’s camera-ready. We work hard to make Alicia look effortless. I just don’t make much of an effort.
The poor guy looks so confused, I almost feel sorry for him. “I’m Lexi,” I say, wondering how much of this I’m going to have to explain before I can get rid of him. How much did Ava tell him, anyway? “Not Alicia.”
The confusion starts to lift from his face as he puts the pieces together. “Oh! You must be one of her … sisters.” Now he just looks embarrassed. “I met Alicia at a show in Leucadia a couple of months ago.… We went out a few times. I um … had to do some things up north and just got back into town.” He hesitates. “How is she?”
“Fine.”
“Good,” he says with a slightly uncomfortable smile. “That’s good.”
I nod, silently urging him to move along. Nothing to see here. I’m not the one you’re looking for. When they realize it’s just me, guys usually vanish.
Instead, he puts one hand on the empty chair across from me at the table. “Do you mind if I sit here?”
“Um.” I look around, trying to come up with something other than a flat, bitchy “Yes,” but there’s something in his blue eyes that makes me hesitate. The café patio has filled up since I sat down. I’ve had my face so buried in my laptop, I didn’t even notice.
The guy follows my glance. “It’s just that it’s packed out here.” He nods toward my laptop. “I won’t say a word. I promise.”
I shrug and kick the chair toward him. All he wants is a place to sit. “It’s fine.”
He sets his drink and little plastic restaurant number on the table. “Thanks.”
I turn pointedly back to my laptop, but it’s impossible to concentrate with him sitting across from me, even though he’s not doing anything I can pinpoint as irritating. Just distracting.
He drapes his jacket over the back of the chair and squints across the sidewalk toward the beach, where the sun is starting to break through the midmorning fog. “Gonna get hot soon.”
I don’t look up. “Yep.” Sweat is starting to trickle down my back, but I can’t take the sweatshirt off because the T-shirt I’m wearing is in even worse shape.
After settling in, he pulls an actual book out of his bag, so I slowly let my eyes wander past the laptop screen to see what he’s reading. Pride and Prejudice. Seriously? I watch his eyes to see if he’s just holding the book for effect, but it looks like he’s actually reading it.
We sit in silence for a few minutes, until Cheryl brings his burger and fries to our table. She winks at me as she sets the plate down, and I smile, praying with all my might that she won’t start some random conversation. Everyone around here knows we’re twins, not triplets, and I’m too far into this to have to explain it now. I relax a little after she walks away without a word, and he slides the plate toward me. “Fry?”
I don’t look up. “No. Thanks.”
“It’s only fair. You share your table with me. I share my fries with you.”
The salty smell
hits me, and I look over at my empty glass. That latte is the only thing I’ve had in the two hours I’ve been sitting here. “Okay,” I say, reaching for the plate. “Just a couple. Thanks.”
One of the fries barely grazes the floor before a watchful seagull dives from the railing and scoops it up in a blur of feathers and squawking. I laugh as the guy jumps back in his seat, obviously not familiar with the vultures masquerading as harmless seabirds that are the real overlords of this place. It makes sense that he’s not from around here. Ava would never pull an Alicia this close to home. Alicia is strictly for guys we’d never bump into in real life. We hope.
“You’d better hold on to those fries. The seagulls are ruthless,” I say.
“Duly noted.”
My phone buzzes, and I jump, just like I’ve done every time for the past few weeks—the waiting is killing me. I click on my email, but it’s only junk. Nothing from Stanford. Not yet.
The guy grabs a couple of fries and gestures toward my phone. “Expecting something?”
I turn back toward my laptop and type a few words. It almost feels like I’ve been caught doing something embarrassing. “I thought we agreed no talking.”
“I thought we were on a break.” He smiles, revealing prominent canine teeth, a defect that I secretly love.
“I wouldn’t want to keep you from your heavy reading,” I say, nodding at the book.
He turns it over and looks at the front like he’s just noticing it for the first time. “Yeah. I thought I should see what all the fuss is about.”
“Let me know when you figure it out,” I say, glancing at the book. I can’t stand Jane Austen, with all the preening and dancing and girls who are interested in a guy only when they realize he has money.
He looks right into my eyes, a piercing gaze that makes my stomach flip. “Not an Austen fan,” he says quietly. “Good to know.”
I look down at my hands and shake my head. What am I doing? This is one of Ava’s rejects, and I’m sitting here stealing fries and talking about Jane Austen when I should be studying for that statistics test on Monday. After the catastrophic end to last night’s date, I need to keep my focus. Eyes on the prize, as Dad always says. I seriously don’t have time for this.
He peers over the top of the screen. “What’s so important that you’re hunkered down here typing away on such a beautiful day?”
“ ‘Hunkered’? I don’t hunker.” Who under the age of sixty uses words like that?
Without even looking up, I can tell he’s smiling. “I don’t know. You look pretty hunkered to me, and one little text got you all twitchy. I stand by my word choice.”
“I’m just waiting for an email.” He doesn’t comment, so I go on. “From college. Admissions acceptances are due this week.”
He nods thoughtfully. “Sounds important. Where did you apply?”
“Stanford.”
There’s a beat of silence as he waits for more. “That’s it? Just Stanford?”
I put my hands in my lap and look at him. It’s obvious he’s not going anywhere anytime soon. “No, that’s not it, but it might as well be. The first thing I ever wore was a Stanford onesie. My father’s had the Stanford Dad bumper sticker ready for his car since I was nine. Stanford’s the only place that matters.” It doesn’t help that I applied for early action and got deferred. Deferred. As in a definite maybe. My life feels like it’s been on hold the past few months.
“But why?”
I stare at him, amazed that anyone can be so oblivious. “Um, because it’s the best?”
The guy shrugs and gives me a little grin. “The best for what? The best for meeting your very own Mr. Darcy?”
I turn back to my laptop, irritation bubbling up inside me. Why am I even bothering trying to explain myself to this nouveau-grunge P & P–toting hipster? Not like this conversation is ever going to matter. “Only the best university on the West Coast. For everything,” I say into my keyboard.
“Prelaw?”
“No.” I hate the smug look on his face. “Business.”
The look of derision in his eyes isn’t subtle at all. “Hmm. Serious.”
“What’s wrong with that?” I can hear the defensiveness in my voice, but I can’t help it.
“Nothing. Lots of kids want to grow up to be CEOs.”
I try to tell myself to shut up, but I rarely listen to my own advice. “I’m going to be a partner in my dad’s company,” I say before I can stop myself.
“What kind of company?”
I hesitate. I usually hate telling people what Dad does, but this guy looks expectant, so what the hell? Not like I’m ever going to see him again. “They make Andy Bars.”
“Your dad is that Andy?” The guy’s eyes are wide.
I smile tightly. His actual name is Alvaro, but Dad thought “Andy” was catchier, back in the days when he started making his nutrition bars in small batches in the kitchen of his restaurant. Now that he’s practically famous, it’s too late to change it. “Yep.” I wait for the next question, which is always “Can you get me some?”
But he just seems surprised. “Interesting. Is that what you’ve always wanted to do?”
I don’t like the way he’s looking at me, like my family is all entitled or something. “My dad’s family came here from Guatemala when he was five. His father was a custodian at a high school. Dad put himself through college by bussing tables and got his MBA from Stanford. He does a lot of charity work through his corporation.” Not to mention being the only parent to his adopted twin daughters after his blond trophy wife bailed on him. Okay, maybe she wasn’t blond—I don’t know because Dad got rid of all of the pictures of her—and not exactly a trophy wife, because they didn’t have a lot of money back then, but that’s what I imagine when I think about the woman he was married to once upon a time.
Dad saved the newspaper article from almost seventeen years ago. It’s on the front page of our baby book. I love the headline: FOUNDLING TWINS LEFT ON RESTAURANT STEPS. When I was little, I thought a foundling was something out of Harry Potter, some mythical creature with tiny shimmering wings and secret magical powers, not that it was just a nice word for an abandoned baby. Dad decided that the fact that we’d been left at his restaurant was a sign that he’d been chosen just for us. They spent months working on our adoption, only to have his wife decide before we were two years old that maybe the whole parenting thing wasn’t for her. But he stuck around.
“So you feel like you have to do the same thing in order to measure up?”
Yes. “No. It’s just what I’ve always wanted to do. If he was a doctor, I’d probably want to do that. He’s one of the best people I know.”
“I see,” he says quietly, and I can’t tell if he’s mocking me or not.
I glance at him. That turned into a lot more of a moment than I’d meant it to be. “So, what did you want to be?”
He stares at the sky. “At first, I wanted to be Superman, but then I realized that leaping tall buildings and bending steel is not exactly a skill set you can learn. So then I wanted to be a rock star.”
“And you’re studying Jane Austen because it will help you at rock star school?”
“Something like that.” The guy smiles, revealing those big, square teeth. “Right now the school of life is a better choice than Stanford for me.” He leans back in his chair. “Okay, future CEO, what about Harvard? Yale? Dartmouth?”
I glance out at the bicycles on the path in front of the sand, their riders in shorts and flip-flops despite the fact that winter is barely behind us. “I don’t believe in snow.”
He lets out a sharp laugh. “You don’t believe in snow? How can you not believe in it? It exists. I’ve seen it myself.”
“I believe in it for other people, just not for me. I hate it. And all the other Ivy League schools have snow, so it’s Stanford or nothing.”
“Obviously.” He leans back in his chair so that the front legs lift off the ground. “Now that you’ve explained i
t to me, I totally see your point.”
He goes back to eating, and I try to focus on the statistics problem in front of me, although my mind is whirling and I’m having a hard time concentrating. I have no idea why I just told him all that.
“So, Lexi? Alicia told me that your other sister is Ava. Ava, Alicia, and Lexi?”
I pointedly take my hands off my keyboard and put them in my lap. “Alexa,” I say. “Lexi is short for it. Ava, Alicia, and Alexa.”
He laughs a little and nods. “I see what they did there. Why do people always name twins and triplets things that rhyme?”
I don’t even remember how we came up with the name for the third twin, but once we started calling her Alicia, it just seemed to fit. “Technically they don’t rhyme. But honestly, I don’t know. I didn’t exactly have a say in it.”
He waves to a bunch of guys as they take over an empty table in the corner.
“Let me guess,” I say, looking at the group. It’s full of way too much hair, visible tattoos, and those ear gauges that make a person look like an escapee from National Geographic. “Your band?”
He grins. “Is it that obvious?”
I look from the table of guys back to him. He fits in perfectly. I’d bet money he’s the lead singer. “Yep. It is.”
“So much for conformity in individuality.” He thumps his chair onto the deck as he leans forward, and I feel the heat from his body as he closes the space between us. I wonder what Ava wore the night she met him at the show, if she put her hair up in a ponytail like she does sometimes when it’s hot, if she wore the shorts Dad hates because her ass plays peekaboo when she walks. I wonder what she said to him over the loud music at the club, if she leaned in close in the steamy air, her lips brushing his ear as she shouted her answers. If she smiled in that annoying way she has when she gave him the fake name to go along with the fake personality.
He tilts his head, and for a split second I wish I was wearing Alicia’s pendant. Instead of sitting here going on about Stanford and the joys of business school, Alicia would probably put her hand on his arm, brush the soft skin of his wrist with her finger. She’d look straight into his eyes with a gaze that would leave no doubt about how she felt, a look that would leave him grasping for words. Alicia can get a guy to do anything she wants.