Heidi looked at Ciara like she’d just suggested a romance with an escaped convict. “Kevin’s my friend,” she said. “I could never think of him as anything more.”
“Why?” Ciara asked. “He’s really cute, and smart, and funny…plus he’s an amazing DJ and he’s always coming up with cool things to do.”
“Yeah,” Heidi said. “But he’s just not for me.”
Ouch. That would hurt Kevin once she told him about it. So much for Operation Woo-ha. Operation Loser was more like it. Why had they even bothered? People were so crazy when it came to who they chose to be with. Maybe the world would be a better place if everyone just stayed single and hung out with their friends.
“Okay.” Ciara shrugged as if it had just been a passing thought. “He’s a nice guy, though,” she couldn’t help adding.
Heidi burst into a fresh cascade of sobs. “Listen, I have to get out of here,” she said, swabbing at her leaking eyes with the back of her hand. “A party is the last place I want to be in a mood like this. I just want to go home, eat chocolate, and cry myself to sleep.”
Ciara knew exactly what she meant. “I’ll go with you,” she offered.
“Really?” Heidi brightened. “Don’t you want to stay and, like, scope hotties or dance or whatever?”
“Nah,” Ciara said. She was already gathering up her sleeping bag. “I’d just as soon sleep in my own bed as on this leaky air mattress. Let’s go.”
“Cool.”
At least it had made Heidi’s tears stop. They climbed out of the tent and began taking it down.
“We should at least say good-bye to Kevin,” Ciara said as they dragged the camping equipment across the beach. “And thank him for the party and stuff. I mean, he did plan most of it.”
“Good idea,” Heidi agreed. “I wouldn’t mind giving Woofie a good-bye hug, either. He’s such a cute dog.”
They approached the campfire and scanned the faces around it, all glowing orange from the dancing flames. None of them were Kevin’s. He wasn’t by the keg or even in the makeshift DJ booth.
D-John was spinning. “Haven’t seen him in a while,” he said when Ciara asked about Kevin. “Maybe he’s down there.”
He gestured down the beach toward the surf. A few couples had spread blankets out on the sand and were taking advantage of the darkness to make out. They looked like beached humpbacked whales silhouetted against the deep blue sky.
Heidi joined her. “I couldn’t find him,” she said. “Maybe he just went for a walk or something.”
“Well, he’s on at midnight,” D-John said. “If he’s not back here by then, I’ll give you girls a call and you can join the search party.”
“Thanks,” Ciara said. She picked up her sleeping bag and followed Heidi across the beach to the parking lot.
All the power and energy she’d felt at the beginning of the night was gone. For a moment—just one—she had held the night in the palm of her hand. Now she was just a regular girl, holding nothing but a sleeping bag and leaving a party early because she didn’t get the guy.
Chapter Fifteen
Ain’t a woman alive that could take my mama’s place
—Tupac
I thought about it and I’m sorry and I want you to stay in Santa Barbara so I can be with you forever,” AJ said. They were alone on the party boat, sitting on a sleek leather couch just like the one in the living room of her old house in LA and looking out over the ocean. The boat had lost its railings, and as it pitched from side to side on the waves, the couch rolled back and forth on the deck. She realized lazily that she ought to be worried they would roll right off and into the ocean, but she was too busy staring deep into AJ’s eyes, which seemed darker and more luminous than ever before.
“I want to be with you too.” She sighed. She tilted her face up and sank into his kiss like a warm, luxurious bubble bath, letting it envelop her until their embrace was the only thing in the world.
The wind blew and the boat rocked and the couch slid back and forth, back and forth and she didn’t care as their kiss went on and on and the couch slid toward the edge…
And suddenly the boat hit a wave and the couch went flying off the deck, the force jerking her and AJ apart and then she was falling toward the water, falling for an unnaturally long time past many stories of portholes, each of which had a curious face staring out of it at the boy and the girl and the couch all tumbling toward the ocean, which suddenly seemed very dark and scary and cold.
Someone screamed her name from the boat’s deck, and she looked up to see Kevin quickly lowering a rope.
“Kevin!” she screamed, flailing her arms, trying to catch the rope. But it was too late. With a terrible splash, she hit the water and, in that moment, woke up to find herself wrapped in the sheet of her own bed, her heart thudding violently in her chest.
Had she yelled his name out loud? She listened for her father’s footsteps—he’d come running in an instant if she screamed—but everything was quiet. Outside, the sky was the color of skim milk. The clock on her nightstand read 7:17.
She lay in bed for a long time, trying to fall back asleep and forget all about how she’d flubbed all her summer plans. But the events of the night before kept running through her head: the kiss with AJ and then his horrible speech about needing time to think, comforting Heidi in the tent after crying there herself, and then deciding to leave and trying to find Kevin and not being able to.
Kevin. Ciara wondered where he was. She lay in bed until she couldn’t bear to be alone with herself anymore, then showered, dressed, and sat staring at the screen of her cell phone, wondering if it was too early to call.
She ended up sending him a text message, saying simply: Tried to find you last night. R U ok?
She was surprised when her phone buzzed just moments later. For some reason, hearing the familiar ring tone made her inordinately happy. Maybe she was just relieved to know that Kevin was all right.
I’m fine. Just got home.
It was all she needed to hear. Ciara was already gathering her car keys and heading out the door. As she drove to Kevin’s house, she told herself that it would be easier for them to talk about Operation Woo-ha in person. Her phone buzzed again.
Where R U? Kevin had texted.
Coming over right now, she wrote back. She’d only been to Kevin’s place once before, but the route felt familiar and comforting. She couldn’t wait to see him and find out how his night had gone and where he’d disappeared to.
She pulled into his driveway and found Kevin in the kitchen, eating a bowl of Froot Loops. He’d just showered, but even with the scent of shampoo drifting from his freshly washed hair, he looked tired from the night before.
“I only got a couple hours of sleep,” he explained. “Have you ever tried to sleep in a tent once the sun comes up? It’s like a Dutch oven.”
“I can imagine,” Ciara said. Kevin finished his cereal and rinsed out the bowl before motioning for her to follow him to his studio. He flicked a switch at the top of the stairs to the basement, and a dim bulb lit their way down to the room he’d tricked out with a set of turntables, a kicking sound system, and egg crate foam on the walls to absorb sound. Crates of records were scattered around the room, and he’d tacked a poster of Qbert, his favorite DJ, to one of the walls. Ciara looked around in surprise. She’d never seen his studio and, aside from that time at Satellite West, had never seen so much vinyl in her life. So this was where Kevin spent hours by himself, putting together the sets she loved.
“Welcome to my world,” Kevin joked when he noticed her gawking. He knelt in front of one of the crates and began digging through it, muttering something about having a track stuck in his head.
“So where’d you go last night?” Ciara asked, hovering awkwardly behind him. She told herself she would have found somewhere to sit, but every available surface was covered in records. “We looked everywhere for you.”
“Oh.” Kevin didn’t turn around. “Marlene and I went fo
r a walk.”
She waited for him to elaborate, but he just kept flipping through the albums. Her stomach tightened as she pictured him strolling along the dark, empty beach with Marlene, their bare arms brushing. Had anything happened? Would he tell her if it had? She knew she could just come out and ask him, but the words stuck in her throat.
“What happened with AJ?” Kevin asked.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Ciara said. She hesitated a moment before settling on the floor next to him, hugging her knees. The shampoo smell was even stronger up close.
Kevin looked over at her and raised an eyebrow, and that was all it took for her to spill the whole story of the night. When she got to the part about Heidi crying over AJ, Kevin got up and put a record on one of the turntables. It was a bouncy eighties electro song with a happy synth line that didn’t match Ciara’s mood at all. She wished she could ask him to turn it off, but Kevin had his back to her and was messing around with the record, scratching it back and forth.
“I asked Heidi if she liked you,” Ciara said, desperate to break through to Kevin. “She said only as a friend.”
“Oh, well.” Kevin shrugged. She wished he would look at her. “We can’t always get what we want.”
“But we’ve been trying to land AJ and Heidi for weeks now!” Ciara shouted, jumping to her feet and going to stand next to him by the turntables. For some reason, it seemed very important to get him to look at her. Why was he acting so weird? “We had a whole plan and an operation with a special name and everything, and it totally blew up in our faces. Shouldn’t you be more upset?”
She didn’t know what she wanted from Kevin. Tears? Throwing things against the wall? She at least wanted him to mirror the way she felt—which was all dried up and useless and rotten on the inside. She was the one thing she hated to be most in the world: a failure.
“Look.” Kevin finally turned and looked at her, and just being able to make eye contact made the tension in her shoulders release a little. “It didn’t work out, okay? If they liked us, they’d be with us by now. So I’m just going to let what happens happen. Maybe you should try and go with the flow a little too.”
“But we worked so hard,” Ciara said. She knew she was whining. She heard Kevin’s words and knew they probably made sense, but she just couldn’t get them to penetrate her brain.
“Ciara.” Kevin placed a comforting hand on her shoulder. “Just chill. Everything’s going to be fine.”
“All right,” she said quietly. His eyes held hers, and his hand felt solid and warm. She wished she could just stay there for the rest of the day, safe in his studio with the rest of the world far away. The moment stretched out, and she felt the same tiny spark that had been there that night on the party boat when they had almost kissed.
“Things are going to be okay,” Kevin said, giving her shoulder a friendly pat. “Really. I know you’re probably freaked out about meeting your mom later, but it’s going to be fine.”
“Thanks,” Ciara said gratefully. Once again, Kevin had managed to cut right through to what was really bothering her. Without thinking, she threw her arms around his waist and gave him a hug. She felt the uncertainty in his back for a moment before he wrapped his arms around her and hugged her tightly too, and then she closed her eyes and just let herself be next to him, smelling his clean, just-showered smell and luxuriating in the softness of his T-shirt against her cheek, his chest solid and strong.
Kevin let go just as she was starting to really feel relaxed. “What time do you have to meet your mom?” he asked.
Ciara opened her eyes, trying to ignore the sudden dizzy feeling in her head. “Soon,” she said, checking her watch. “I should probably get going.”
“All right,” Kevin said. He quickly turned back to the turntables. “Good luck.”
“I’ll need it,” Ciara muttered. She fought the urge to run over to him and beg for another hug, telling herself she must be feeling really vulnerable. It was probably just some weird reaction to getting rejected by AJ and having to face her mom in the same day: some shadow of the old Ciara who dealt with uncertainty by hooking up with the nearest guy. She told herself it was a good thing she was leaving before she did something she’d really regret.
“You’ll be fine,” Kevin said again. He flipped the record over and began playing the B side as she trudged up the stairs away from his studio and into the unforgivingly bright California day.
Her mom had made plans for them to meet at a quaint French bistro on Anapuma Street. Ciara felt anxiety squeezing her stomach into knots as she navigated the car down the twisting streets to Santa Barbara’s quaint downtown. She hadn’t seen her mom since the beginning of the summer, and so much had changed since then. At every stoplight, she wished she could turn the car around and go back home, crawl into bed, and sleep until fall. But then what? Was there any point in staying in Santa Barbara after everything that had just gone down? Things obviously weren’t going to work out with AJ the way she’d planned, and if Heidi found out about Operation Woo-ha, she was in danger of losing one of her only girlfriends. Just thinking of returning to LA and Em’s land of happy couplehood made her stomach turn. She felt like she had nowhere to go. And on top of all that, she had to go face her mom. What would she say?
She tried to brush away the nagging doubts as she made her way downtown, parked in the big municipal garage shaped like a bullring, and tugged at her shirt, trying to make the buttons lie flat across her chest. As she headed toward the restaurant, she whispered a plea to make the meal pleasant and drama free.
Her mom was sitting at a table by the window, sipping a club soda with lime. Ciara was exactly on time, so her mom must have arrived early. Typical—an overachiever in everything she did.
Her face lit up in a smile as Ciara entered the restaurant. She stood and gave her a huge hug, wrapping her arms so tightly around her daughter’s waist that Ciara thought she was going to pass out.
“It’s so good to see you!” she said as they sat down across from each other. Ciara was surprised to see the tiny network of wrinkles that had appeared around her mom’s eyes and forehead—had those always been there? And what about the slight bags under her eyes? Her mom had always prided herself on her young-looking complexion. Her hair was an aggressive shade of black, much darker than usual, so that Ciara knew she had dyed it recently to cover up the gray. Was the divorce really taking that much of a toll on her, or was she just busy with work like always?
Ciara looked around for a waiter. She was tired and thirsty and dying for a Diet Coke. “It’s good to see you too, Mom,” she lied. “How are things?”
“Okay.” Her voice faltered, making Ciara think that maybe things weren’t really okay at all. She hoped her mom wouldn’t go into it. The last thing she needed was more drama in her life. But her mother forced a smile and soldiered on. “Pretty busy. Packing up the house and moving is taking up a lot of time. I set aside a few boxes of your old toys and books, and I want you to go through them when you come home and let me know if there’s anything you want to keep. We can give the rest away to Goodwill.”
“Okay,” Ciara said blankly. The phrase when you come home bounced around inside her head. A new house in LA wouldn’t feel like home. Should she tell her mom about her plans to stay in Santa Barbara? Were those even still her plans?
“Plus, I’m thinking of switching ad agencies,” her mom continued. She looked down at the table and toyed with her fork, using it to rake tiny furrows in her napkin.
“Really?” Ciara asked. She knew it was common to move around a lot in the advertising world, but her mom had been with the same agency since Ciara was in the sixth grade. “Why?”
“There have been some…internal complications, and I think I’d be happier somewhere else.” Ciara wondered if it had anything to do with Clyde, the coworker with whom she’d had the affair. Had people found out? Did he change agencies too? Her mom sighed. “It’s weird not having your dad to talk to about work s
tuff anymore,” she said. “He always used to help me figure things out when I had to make tough decisions.”
Ciara felt herself starting to get mad. Her mom was clearly the one who had ruined the relationship—she had no right to get all nostalgic over how wonderful her husband was. She grunted a neutral response to mask her anger.
The waiter came, and her mom ordered gratefully, clearly happy at the interruption. When he was gone, she turned to Ciara. “And how are you?” she asked.
“Oh, fine,” Ciara said, trying to keep her tone light and focus on the positive. She told her mom all about her job at the beach club and the new friends she’d made, even adding that she was helping with marketing for a popular local band. The whole time, she couldn’t help turning over her mom’s comment about not having Dad in her life anymore. If she cared about him so much, why would she have done what she did?
No drama, she reminded herself as the waiter arrived with their food. Instead of talking about her relentless pursuit of AJ, she launched into the requirements of the prelaw programs she’d been researching on the Internet.
Her mom smiled proudly. “You remind me so much of me when I was your age,” she said. “Always so driven and focused on making it. You know, that’s part of the reason I married your father—he understood that my career always came first.”
There she went: reminiscing about Ciara’s dad again as if she hadn’t stomped all over his heart in steel-toed boots. The gall made Ciara almost sick to her stomach. She quickly put down her forkful of blackened string beans and made herself take a deep breath before slowly sipping water. She couldn’t even look at her mom for fear she’d explode and start screaming at her across the table.
“He was always so supportive,” her mom mused. “You know, you’re very lucky to have him as a father.”
That did it. “If he’s so great, why’d you dump him for someone else?” Ciara snapped before she could stop herself.
The Perfect Boy Page 12