The Debs

by Susan McBride

  She started texting him back, but her thumbs kept hitting the wrong keys so that she ended up deleting more than she wrote. Instead, she dialed his number, biting her lip as it rang once, then a second time.

  “Ah, chiquita, so there you are, wherever that is,” he teased, and she pictured his dark eyes crinkling at the corners as he smiled, his teeth a slash of white against his olive skin.

  “You out with your homies?”

  “I’m leaving Mac’s house,” she told him, ignoring the way he liked to call her chiquita—“little girl.” “How long will you be there?”

  “Another twenty minutes, maybe. I’m just about finished.”

  “Finished for good?” Her heart sank to her belly. “Or for the day?”

  “Ah, you sound worried, like you’ll miss me, huh?” he said, and laughed. “Naw, I’ve still got a few finishing touches. But for now, I’m cleaning my brushes before I take off. You on your way home?”

  “Yeah”—she put the car in gear and pulled out of the Mackenzies’ driveway, the cell at her ear—“I should be back in ten. Is Deena there?”

  If her mother was around, there was no way she’d be able to talk to Javier alone.

  He must’ve sensed the panic in her voice, and reassured her. “Chillax. Tu madre no esta en casa. She’s probably selling another mansion to one of her rich friends and counting her greenbacks.”

  Ginger couldn’t help smiling. “Ah, so you do know her.”

  “Hell, I’m on her payroll, for a few days more, anyway,” he cracked. “See you soon?”

  “Yeah, see ya.”

  Javier hung up, and so did she.

  Ginger braked at the end of Mac’s street, waiting for a few cars to pass on Knipp Road. Setting her Razr in one of the cup holders, she glanced up and caught a glimpse of her face in the rearview mirror.

  She looked flushed, and not from the heat. Just hearing Javier’s voice made her nervous, maybe because she’d been keeping him a secret all week long, not even spilling to Mac or Laura because her attraction to him was still so new.

  Yeah, yeah. She knew she was breaking their “no secrets” rule—a rule that she’d instituted—but she was afraid that talking about him might jinx things. She’d only just met him at a Go Green rally before she’d headed down to New Orleans. They’d gone out for coffee and ended up at his apartment. They’d sat on his futon, talking for hours about art and music and how to save the earth, with Lucinda Williams’s gravelly voice in the background. He hadn’t even kissed her.

  Two days later, she’d jetted to Louisiana, not sure if she’d ever see him again. Then she’d returned from the six-week Habitat project, walked through the front door, and bam, she’d heard his lightly accented voice saying, “Hey, princessa.” And there he’d been, painting a mural of the Provence countryside on the wall of the formal dining room. He told her that Deena had hired him on the recommendation of an art professor at the University of Houston. She liked to believe it was karma bringing them together, not just some fluke.

  Every day since she’d gotten back—after Deena went to work—Ginger had hung around Javier before she met up with Mac for lunch or a movie or a lazy afternoon by the pool. She mostly watched him paint and listened to him talk about his plans to save the woodlands, once he’d graduated from U of H with a major in environmental design and a minor in art.

  “There’s a better way to build our cities without ruining the ecosystems,” he’d told her. “Nature was here first, ¿lo entiendas? We’re the ones who keep messing up the planet.”

  Oh, yes. Ginger understood, and she felt the same way entirely.

  Curious as hell about what Javier needed to say to her, she floored the accelerator, tires skidding on gravel before gaining traction and propelling her forward as fast as she could go without sliding into a ditch or catching a cop on her ass.

  She took a right on Taylorcrest and tagged along behind a Volvo SUV following the speed limit exactly. Sidewalks and grass-filled ditches lined the road on her either side, everything dry now, though she thought of how fast those ditches filled up when it rained. Low-lying Houston seemed prone to minor floods whenever the sky opened up and let them have it.

  C’mon, c’mon. Ginger tapped a finger on the wheel as she drove. It was taking forever to reach Piney Point. She hung another right, passing ranch houses mixed with Mediterranean-style villas and contemporary glass-walled structures before she saw the familiar stone pillars and cast-iron street sign for Fore’s Way. Her dad had named the street once his development firm had finished construction on the family’s monster mansion at the dead end of a long circular driveway made of a special limestone he’d ordered from a mine near Austin. “The most expensive driveway in Houston,” he’d bragged way back when, as if a then-six-year-old Ginger had cared about expensive driveways, though maybe it was appropriate, considering they lived in one of the richest zip codes in the country.

  She drove her Prius to a stop smack in front of the Castle’s mammoth doors, carved and arched and looking like they belonged to some Gothic fortress. Only, there was no moat, just low green hedges of boxwood and lots of wild ferns the landscape crew had put in while Ginger was gone.

  Javier’s beat-up old Volvo baked beneath the sun to the left of the four-car garage; Ginger didn’t see her mother’s gas-guzzling Jaguar anywhere, thank God.

  She got out of the car, hesitating for a second to squint through the sunlight, gazing up at the stonework and turrets and the thick line of tall pines that encompassed the grounds, feeling very small somehow.

  Or was that merely the effect of having a father like Edward Fore, who had always seemed larger than life? The local press liked to call him the Donald Trump of Houston, but Ginger thought of him more as the Chronically Unavailable Father.

  She raced up the flagstone steps, unlocked the door, and pushed her way in, at once doubly certain Deena wasn’t around, as no Chanel bag sat on the marble-topped table in the foyer and there was no trace of her mother’s overpowering White Linen. The chatter of Oprah on TV emanated from the kitchen, the usual background noise while Doreen, their longtime cook, began preparations for dinner.

  Ginger caught her breath, composing herself, before she crossed the foyer into the dining room, stopping when she saw the nearly finished mural on the wall: the waves of lavender against a verdant field edged with yellow flowers, a charming villa nestled in the background, green trees behind it. Beautiful was the only word to describe it. Ginger wished she could paint half as well as that.

  “Javier?” she asked the empty room, looking around for him and relieved to see the long, dark Chippendale table and its dozen matching chairs still pushed aside, the canvas tarp covering the planked floor, and the Persian rug that normally filled the space rolled up and set away. The smell of paint hung in the air, but there was no sign of the artist or his brushes.

  Ginger cut through the dining room, heading for the rear hallway, which led past the butler’s pantry to a side door, so she could see if his Volvo had disappeared sometime in the last two minutes. She was nearly there when a pair of arms reached out of nowhere and pulled her into the mudroom.

  Ginger let out a startled yelp.

  “Hey, chiquita, it’s just me.”

  She turned around and came face to face with Javier. His dark brown eyes crinkled at the corners as he smiled and slowly released her arm. Behind him, on the stone-slab countertop near the sink, his damp brushes were lined up on paper towels.

  “You getting ready to leave?” she asked, smiling at the sight of him. The dimple in his chin and the dabs of acrylic paint on his gray U of H T-shirt were too cute. He even had a bit of yellow in his black hair.

  “You would’ve missed me if you’d come five minutes later,” he told her. “I can’t hang around this mansion of yours for too much longer. It’ll start to look suspicious, and I wouldn’t trust Doreen not to rat us out, princess.”

  The way he said “mansion” and “princess,” even joking, made G
inger’s stomach clench; it was like he was focusing on another divide between them, one that was much harder to bridge than a five-year age difference.

  “You wanted to talk to me?” She wiped her damp palms on her denim miniskirt and tugged down the hem of her FREE TIBET T-shirt.

  “Yeah, I do.” He set his hands on his lean hips, his full lips now unsmiling. “Did you mean it when you said you wanted to help out the cause?” The line of his unshaven jaw looked tightly set, his dark eyes serious and unblinking. “If you’re sincere, then I need you to do something for me. Something important.”

  Which cause? Ginger wondered, because he’d mentioned about a dozen different Go Green projects he was involved with, from cleaning up oil spills in the port and along Galveston’s beaches to picking trash out of area creeks to turning junkyards into parks for city kids. But then, it really didn’t matter, did it?

  “Sure, I’ll help,” Ginger said eagerly, praying whatever it was didn’t involve sewage, dead fish, or spiders. “Um, doing what?”

  “Saving a tree,” Javier told her simply.

  “A tree?”

  “The Sam Houston Oak,” he said, as if that would explain everything.

  “The one in the little park next to PFP that’s, like, two hundred years old?” Ginger squinted thoughtfully, not wanting him to think she was distracted by the adorable habit he had of tugging on his earlobe, or by the way his nostrils flared when he was excited about something.

  “They’re tearing it down? Since when?”

  “A friend of mine who works in the city manager’s office said they’re quietly razing it sometime on Sunday evening. The school finally got clearance to use the land—it was donated anonymously for a VIP parking lot. Bastardos avaros…greedy bastards,” he spat out, and ran his fingers impatiently through his hair before he grabbed Ginger’s hand, holding on tightly. “I want you to be there with me tomorrow night when they come to take the tree down. Will you do it? Will you stand up with me?” he asked. “¿Por favor?”

  He looked so damned intense that it scared Ginger a little, and she thought about reinforcements.

  “Should I ask my friends to come, too?”

  “Gracias, pero no,” he said. “I just need you. And don’t tell anyone, ¿comprende? I don’t want your mother talking you out of it.”

  “I won’t,” Ginger said softly. She was eager for the chance to prove to him that she wasn’t just a spoiled princess who lived in a castle. Maybe this was how to stop being a chiquita in his eyes. She needed to have a cause all her own, one that Javier respected.

  Well, once she was a Rosebud, she knew, her favorite philanthropy would get a boost from the Glass Slipper Club, and she’d already mentioned to Javier that she might be able to direct GSC Foundation money toward earth-friendly projects, like Trees for Houston, which planted trees all over the city, and the annual Trash Bash, which cleaned up trash in waterways and parks from the Buffalo Bayou to the Houston Ship Channel.

  “Can I trust you?” Javier said, gripping her arms, forcing her to look up at him.

  “Yes, you can trust me,” she answered, as much for herself as for him, her heartbeat loud in her ears.

  “Bueno.” Javier grinned. His arms suddenly slipped around her as he pulled her close, his warm breath on her cheek as he whispered, “I’ll see you at the tree, tomorrow night at seven. I know it sounds early, but we’ve got to make sure there’s still good light and plenty of time for the cameras to roll.” He backed away and rubbed her arms before letting her go. “I’ll bring the chains and handcuffs. You bring the water. Don’t be late. I’m counting on you.”

  All too quickly, he turned his back on her, putting away his brushes before he took off, ruffling her hair on his way out.

  Ginger leaned against the wall of the mudroom, vaguely dizzy, wondering what had just happened. What had she agreed to do? Then again, what did it matter? She would say yes to anything Javier asked of her.

  Chains and handcuffs.

  That sounded so kinky.

  And don’t tell anyone.

  How was she going to keep this secret from Laura and Mac? She was itching to get on her cell right now and call them, spilling everything.

  Ginger left the mudroom on shaky legs, bypassing the kitchen, where Doreen banged pots and pans, and she dragged herself upstairs to her room, a huge round space beneath one of the turrets.

  She tried not to think of the practical questions popping into her head, like what if Javier’s plans to stop the demolition of the old tree got them arrested? What if Pine Forest Prep suspended her? Scarier still, what if her mother found out?

  She made a beeline for the bed and was preparing to throw herself across it when she spotted a box sitting atop the duvet. The return label read “Seasalt Cornwall,” one of her favorite online shops, and she plucked the lid off frantically, pulling out a blue-and-green-striped V-neck sundress. A monogrammed note card fell from the tissue, and she opened it to see her mother’s loopy handwriting.

  Here’s a little something special for you to wear tomorrow night for supper at your grandmother’s house. (Six o’clock sharp, don’t forget.) You’ll look so pretty, my socially conscious future debutante! I’m out late this evening, so enjoy the sleepover with your friends. See you in the morning (but not before noon!).

  Love, Mom

  P.S. It’s 100% organic cotton. I didn’t see anything I liked in hemp.

  Ginger dropped down on the bed, holding the dress out before her, her smile at her mother’s surprise slowly fading when her brain clicked into gear. All of a sudden, she found it hard to breathe.

  They were having dinner at her very proper Southern grandmother’s house in uptight, Old-Moneyed River Oaks tomorrow at six?

  She had forgotten. Completely.

  Supper with Grandmother entailed a minimum of five courses and lasted for hours. How was she going to slip out early so she could meet Javier at the Sam Houston Oak by seven o’clock?

  She couldn’t do it alone, that was for sure.

  * * *

  I have my bitchy side, but I don’t think I’m really nasty. I think that a lot of people probably think that I am.

  —Debbie Harry

  If pageants have taught me anything, it’s to strike first to stay on top. Does that make me a winner or a bitch?

  —Jo Lynn Bidwell

  * * *

  Four

  “Do I have enough oil on my back?” Jo Lynn Bidwell asked the girls sprawled on the chaise longues on either side of her, doing the vaguest peek over one shoulder.

  She couldn’t very well check things out herself. Her head didn’t swivel that far, for one thing, and she’d untied her bikini top, so getting up would mean exposing herself to half the country club. The pool area was packed to the gills even though it was fast closing in on dinnertime.

  Jo, Camie, and Trisha had staked out their usual spot near the snack bar at the Villages Country Club hours ago. They’d lubed up their deeply tanned skin with baby oil—a trick Jo Lynn had picked up from her mother, Bootsie—and they’d simmered in the Texas sun for hours, splitting the afternoon evenly between lying on their stomachs and their backs, with occasional breaks to wade into the shallow end of the pool, never diving underwater, God forbid. Who besides the Amazons on the swim team wanted funky green chlorine-bleached hair? As Jo Lynn’s stylist, an effeminate man named Zuzu, kept telling her, “Those nasty chemicals will ruin your highlights and lowlights, and they’ll make you as frizzy as a French poodle! Listen to Zuzu. No pool water for you!”

  So Jo Lynn only dipped up to her armpits.

  No harm, no foul.

  It was almost too bad that school started on Monday, because the rules of summer were so simple: eat, sleep, play with boys, keep your hair out of the chlorine, and tan your butt off.

  Jo Lynn was browner than she’d ever been, and the way the lifeguard kept staring at her—Lord help any poor drowning soul—she wasn’t the only one who thought she looked ready for the
cover of Maxim.

  “So? Do I need more oil? Am I good?” she asked again, impatient for an answer. “We still have at least a half hour of sun before I’ll pack it in. Gotta get ready for tonight, you know. My little bash won’t put on itself.”

  She heard a sigh in response.

  A dark head raised itself as Camie Lindell got up on her elbows, her full breasts straining against the triangle top of her brown Maya bikini. Her fingers slick with baby oil, she slid her enormous Roberto Cavalli sunglasses down her tiny nose, and her wide-set green eyes peered over the rims to survey Jo Lynn’s hindside.

  “Looks okay to me. You’re shiny from your ass dimples up to your shoulders,” she drawled before lowering her bikini-topped torso to a reclining position and tipping her face to the sun.

  “Ditto what Cam said. Seems like good coverage from here, too,” Trisha Hunt chimed in from Jo Lynn’s right. Her strawberry-blond hair was pulled tight off her round face in a floppy ponytail so everyone could see the entwined Gs on her Gucci shades.

  “You’re shakin’ and bakin’, Jo-L.”

  “Okay then.” Jo Lynn tried to relax again, closing her eyes. “I trust y’all,” she said, which was a total lie.

  Jo Lynn Bidwell didn’t trust any female, not even her two best friends, something that stemmed from her pageant days, starting back in first grade. Bootsie Bidwell had drilled into her head that other girls were her mortal enemies, her fiercest competition, and Jo Lynn had grown up believing it.

  And really, who wouldn’t be jealous of her?

  She had everything any seventeen-year-old could possibly want, starting with a daddy who sent her and Bootsie to Paris every spring and to New York in the fall for no-holds-barred shopping and who let Jo Lynn use the Bidwell Electronics jet now and then to fly her BFFs to their cottage in the Caymans for long weekends. Anything for my girls, he liked to say, though he did as much for Rick, Jo Lynn’s older brother. In fact, both Bootsie and Ken Bidwell were in Austin with Rick now, setting him up in his own townhouse so he wouldn’t have to rough it in the freshmen dorms at UT.