by Kelly Oram
I managed not to gasp, but my stomach dropped. I’d completely forgotten about caller ID. How was I supposed to explain why we had the same area code? “Um yeah…no. I know. That’s because my dad lives in LA. I’ve been here since I got out of the hospital.”
I waited for him to freak out on me and demand we meet, but the line was silent for a minute, and then he quietly asked, “Why didn’t you ever say anything?”
I was surprised at how cautious he sounded. Maybe I’d hurt his feelings by not telling him I moved. Hopefully I could explain it without having to tell him what my accident did to me. “I don’t know. It took me a while before I was brave enough to e-mail you at all. Then everything went right back to normal between us so fast that I never really thought about it. You’ve always just been an Internet friend, you know? I think I might have been afraid to ruin that.”
He let out a breath that sounded suspiciously of relief. Maybe he was just as afraid of meeting in person as I was. The thought was as disappointing as it was relieving. “Yeah, I know what you mean. The fact that we’ve never met has always been my favorite thing about our relationship.”
“Why?”
“I guess in person it’s hard for people to see past the outer me—the looks, the money, the car, the connections—but since you can’t see those things, you only see the real me. It’s nice.”
“Wow, Cinder.” I snorted. I knew he was being serious, but that’s what made it so funny. “That was so incredibly profound of you. I’m impressed.”
“You see?” Cinder laughed. “You’re giving me a hard time right now. Nobody who knows me in person would ever do that. Most people act so fake toward me. They say whatever they think I want to hear, and they do whatever I want them to.”
“Well, it’s no wonder you’re so egotistical. Maybe you’re right about the anonymity. I don’t know that I’d be able to tell you how stubborn, argumentative, and shallow you are to your face. Or that you have horrible taste in movies. Especially not if you’re as swoonworthy as you say you are. Then who would be left to keep you from turning into a true self-absorbed jerk?”
Cinder laughed again—a huge, deep, bellowing laugh. I could picture him throwing his head back, his entire gut convulsing from the action. Not that I imagined he had a gut, of course. Anything less than a six-pack didn’t seem like his style.
Cinder sighed his way down from his laughing fit. “Oh, Ellamara. You are the only girl in the world that ever says things like that to me. That’s why—infuriating, self-righteous, opinionated, and obnoxious as you are—you are my favorite person in the whole world.”
My lungs seized up, making it impossible for me to breathe. But somehow the burning sensation in my chest was the best feeling in the whole world—like turning your face to the sunshine or drinking hot chocolate after being out in the snow.
I prayed Cinder wouldn’t be able to tell I was crying, but luck seemed to have left me forever when my mom died. “Ella?” His voice went from lazy and relaxed to high alert. “What’s the matter? Why are you crying?”
“I’m fine.” I’m not sure he believed me with all my sniffling. “It’s just, it’s nice to have someone who cares. You’re my favorite person, too. You’re my best friend.”
Cinder was quiet for a moment. When he spoke again, he dropped all hints of the confident, sexy, funny guy I knew so well. “Are you sure you’re really okay? I mean, you would tell me if you weren’t, right?” There was true vulnerability in his voice. “I had a friend commit suicide once. Ella, the thought of losing you like that—”
He cut off so abruptly that I would have thought the line went dead except that I heard him clear his throat as if trying to get his voice back under control. “You do have someone who cares,” he said softly. “No matter how bad things are at home or at school or whatever, you have me. You’re my best friend, too. You have my number now. Save it in your phone and call it anytime—day, night, the witching hour—it doesn’t matter. Okay?”
It took me a moment—and a series of deep breaths—before I could respond. “Okay.”
“Promise?”
“I promise. As long as I always have you, I’ll be fine.” I kicked myself internally and laughed. “Wow, that sounded really cheesy. You see? That’s why I didn’t want to call you. I can filter my stupid mouth so much better when I have to type out my thoughts.”
Cinder laughed again. “Ah, but then you would miss out on all the sweet nothings I plan to whisper in your ear now that I know how much you like my ultra-sexy voice.”
I blushed but refused to let him know that his flirting rattled me. “I never said ultra, you egomaniac. But you should definitely consider recording audiobooks for a living.”
“Hmm. That’s not a bad idea.” Cinder’s voice dropped to that slow, seductive purr again as he asked, “Would you like me to read to you, Ellamara?”
I thrilled at the thought and couldn’t quite mask my excitement. “Seriously?”
“Why not? Before you called, I was getting ready to have a Top Gear marathon all by my lonesome.”
“You are such a liar. Tonight is Friday night, and it’s Halloween. There is no way you don’t have plans.”
“I don’t have important ones. It’s just a stupid party that my sort-of girlfriend wants me to go to.”
“Your ‘sort-of’ girlfriend?”
“Yeah.” Cinder stretched the word out in a long breath. “It’s a long story, but I’m not that into her. I’d much rather stay home and read with you. Besides, I can’t hang up on you when you’ve had the worst day ever. What kind of best friend would that make me?”
I almost cried again. The offer was so sweet. And thoughtful. Reading was a passion Cinder and I shared. We read and discussed books all the time. We’d even decided to read the same book at the same time before, but we’d never read one together. Cinder had to know how much that would mean to me.
“It has to be The Druid Prince,” I said.
Cinder laughed. “It’s already in my hands.”
When I went back to school on Monday, the whispers and stares were as bad as they’d been on my first day. It was nothing new. I kept my head down as I always did, and prayed things wouldn’t be worse because people blamed me for Jason getting suspended.
So far nothing traumatic had happened, but as I sat down at lunch in my normal seat at a small table in the corner of the cafeteria, a hush fell over the whole room. I’d just noticed the unnatural stillness when I felt someone standing behind me.
Slowly, bracing myself for whatever torture was about to ensue, I turned around to face whoever was behind me. I was shocked to see Juliette standing there. Next to her was a girl I’d seen around school, but who wasn’t in any of my classes. She had violet eyes—obviously colored contacts—and bright red hair with platinum blonde streaks in it. It was a combination I’d never seen before, but it actually suited her very well.
Her hair was twisted up on her head and clipped into place with hair clips made of brightly-colored feathers. Her shoes, backpack, and fingernails were all works of art, the same way her hair was. I imagined she would be something to behold if she weren’t constricted to the limitations of our school uniform.
She was pretty, but not the same gorgeous knockout type that Juliette was. She was wild in a way that demanded respect. She was the kind of girl you couldn’t help but follow down the hall with your eyes. The girl that guys feared, yet secretly wanted at the same time.
And she was smiling down at me.
“Ella, this is Vivian Euling,” Juliette said in a bored voice. “Vivian, my stepsister, Ella.”
I still had no idea what was going on, but I was pretty sure Juliette wasn’t masterminding some vicious scheme, and Vivian was holding out her hand to me, so I took it. As we said hello to one another, Juliette reapplied her lip gloss and said, “My work here is done.” She walked away without another glance.
I turned my eyes back up to Vivian and she gave me another warm smile as s
he sat down next to me and took a sack lunch from her backpack. “I hope you don’t mind.” I shook my head and Vivian smiled again. “I think Juliette is playing matchmaker with us.”
“She what?”
I turned around and saw Juliette sitting at her normal table with all of the most popular people in school. She was laughing and joking around with them, not paying the slightest attention to me, just like always. You’d never know something out of the ordinary had occurred if it weren’t for the way Anastasia was still gaping at her in shock.
“I have dance with Juliette,” Vivian said. “We’re not friends or anything, so I was surprised when she came up to me this morning and asked if she could introduce us.”
“She did?”
I knew how incredulous I sounded. I could feel my face contorted in confusion, so I wasn’t surprised when Vivian laughed. “She said she thought we would have a lot in common,” she explained while rolling her eyes. “Considering she knows nothing about me, and I doubt she’s made any effort to get to know you, either, even though you’re stepsisters, I can only assume she was pairing one outcast with another.”
That surprised me. Not Juliette’s thinking that being outcasts would make two people automatic friends, but I couldn’t imagine why a girl like Vivian would have no friends. “You don’t strike me as the loner type. You seem so confident and nice, and you’re so pretty.”
“I also was raised by two dads.”
I was still confused. “What does that matter?”
Vivian did a double take.
Figuring she was the type who could take a joke, I smirked. “Massachusetts was the first state to allow same-sex marriages, so, no offense, but that makes you totally old news to me. I hope you weren’t expecting special treatment or anything.”
Vivian’s eyes flashed, surprised, and a wide grin spread across her face. “I like you.”
I laughed, but it died quickly as I glanced around the cafeteria. “Picking on me I understand, considering this is the town where image is everything, but you’d think people would be more open-minded about your situation.”
“You’d think,” Vivian agreed. “I’m sure at Hollywood High I’d fit right in, but at a pretentious private school like this one I’m an easy target. It also doesn’t help that I’m here on scholarship. My dads are humble costume designers. They make enough to afford our two-bedroom apartment in West Hollywood, but that’s about it.”
Now that made perfect sense. “And the picture becomes even clearer. I was raised by a single mother.”
Vivian rolled her eyes again. “So you’re saying not only are we both social outcasts, we’re both poor, too.”
“Exactly.” I joined her with an eye roll of my own, but then sighed and glanced at Juliette. “It may have been a shallow and judgmental perception, but it was still thoughtful of her to try to help.”
“True.” Vivian followed my gaze to my stepsisters’ table. Juliette was laughing with a girlfriend, while Anastasia was sitting in some guy’s lap—some guy who was decidedly not Jason. “But then, Juliette’s always been the lesser of two evils.”
I nodded in agreement. “Sometimes I think she might not be so bad if she didn’t have her sister poisoning her mind, and a completely clueless mother teaching her what’s truly important in life.”
At Vivian’s questioning look, I said, “Designer clothes and an eight-hundred calorie a day diet.”
Vivian laughed again. “I think Juliette was on to something. You might just be a kindred spirit.”
. . . . .
The ride home from school was a tense one, thanks to the rage bubbling just beneath the surface of Anastasia’s Marc Jacobs Daisy-scented skin. When we got home she stomped inside, slamming the door in Juliette’s face. By the time I managed to climb out of the car and get in the house, the two of them were laying into each other.
“…humiliated us like that!” Anastasia was screaming.
“All I was doing was cleaning up the mess you made. You’re the one who embarrassed us.”
“It’s bad enough we have to be associated with her. Now she’s BFFs with Charity?”
“So what? Let them be freaks together. They aren’t hurting anything.”
“Not hurting anything? What if they start making out in the cafeteria and stuff? We’ll be sisters of the lesbian crippled freak!”
“Um, her name’s Vivian, not Charity,” I said, setting my backpack on the counter as I headed past the two of them into the kitchen.
Juliette rolled her eyes. “People call her that because she’s the school charity case.”
“Nice.” I scoffed. “You know, Anastasia, just because her dads are gay doesn’t mean she is. Even if she were, why should you care? It has nothing to do with you.”
Anastasia glared at me so hard her eyes became bloodshot. “Stay away from me,” she hissed, storming off to her room.
Once we heard the door slam, Juliette shook her head as if disgusted with her sister. “She’ll cool off in a few weeks.”
I stared after her as she headed down into the family room to get started on her homework. It had been such a strange day. I didn’t understand Juliette at all. In the few months I’d lived here, she’d gone from being rude to simply ignoring the fact that I existed, to actually coming to my rescue on Friday. Then, this morning she risked the wrath of her sister to help me find a friend. It was a really sweet thing to do. I couldn’t figure out why she’d done it—especially because, while she wasn’t outright hostile toward me anymore, she clearly still didn’t like me.
After raiding the fridge and not finding anything appetizing, I grabbed a couple of my usual V8 fruit juices and made my way down to the family room. Instead of heading for the desk in the corner, I sat down on the couch and held out one of the drinks to Juliette. “Want one?”
She frowned at me, but warily accepted the juice. “Thanks.”
We did our homework in silence with the TV once again muted on some entertainment news show. Eventually, Juliette sighed. “Some girls have all the luck. Can you imagine being engaged to that perfection?”
Startled from my work, I looked at the TV just in time to see Brian Oliver on the screen, heading into some club with a scantily-clad Kaylee Summers hanging all over him.
There was another dreamy sigh from Juliette. “He has got to be the hottest guy ever to roam the Earth.”
I couldn’t disagree. He was six foot one, had dark hair, milk chocolate eyes, and a body so perfect it hurt to look at it. He was one of those actors who could play either the pretty boy, or the sexy bad boy—depending on how they dressed him up. At the moment, he was sporting a leather jacket and a five o’clock shadow that made you want to defy your parents, jump on the back of his motorcycle, and let him drive you off into the sunset after having had his name tattooed somewhere on your body.
He always smiled as if the world were his oyster, and yet he had that smoldering thing down, too. Countless girls had fallen victim to that gaze. The thing that I liked best about him, though, was how he seemed so sharp. In every interview I’d ever seen him do, he was playful and cocky, but witty. He bantered with those talk-show hosts as if they were the ones in the hot seat. The guy had some major intelligence hiding behind that pretty face.
I matched Juliette’s wistfulness and said, “I’d definitely have his babies if he gave me the chance.” Clearly, I’d spent too much time talking to Cinder lately.
Juliette snorted but stopped laughing when she realized it was me she was joking around with. Things got awkward again fast. We both went back to our work, but this time I couldn’t keep quiet. “Thanks for helping me yesterday in class and for talking to Vivian.”
Juliette shrugged as if she didn’t think it was worth talking about, but I couldn’t let it drop. “Why did you do it?”
Juliette considered not answering my question, but then said, “Mostly because Ana’s being such a jerk. I was mad about having you here too at first, but it’s really not that bad. Y
ou stay out of our way and keep a low profile at school. She’s the one making it worse by constantly trying to turn the whole school against you, or at least making them too afraid to be nice to you. I’m sick of the drama. All of our lives would be easier if you weren’t such a freakish loner, and you’d have a lot more friends if Ana would just back off.”
Once again she turned back to her work. I went back to mine too, but after another ten minutes or so I had another question I needed an answer to. “What exactly did I do? Why do you both hate me so much?”
I knew Juliette wouldn’t deny the implication that she hated me. She was a very direct person. Most of the time the stuff she said was shallow, judgmental, or just plain ignorant, but at least she always told you what she really thought. She wasn’t afraid to say what was on her mind, and I had to admire that about her. “Different reasons,” she said. “Ana feels threatened by you.”
“What?” I laughed incredulously. “That’s ridiculous.”
“Not really. First of all, you’re Dad’s real daughter. She’s worried that he’s going to start playing favorites.” After a short pause, she said, “I’d be lying if I weren’t jealous about that, too.”
I was shocked. Juliette and Anastasia were jealous that Rich was my dad? As if that made some kind of difference? It’d never stopped him from loving them more than me before.
“Second, you have scars and you limp, but you’re actually really pretty aside from that. Some of our friends have said as much. Plus, everyone thinks you’re really funny.”
“What? How can people think that? Nobody knows anything about me.”
“When we learned about your blog, Ana told everyone at school about it, trying to show them what a nerd you are.” Juliette smirked. “Her plan totally backfired because everyone loved it. Half of our friends follow you now.”
The kids at school followed my blog? I didn’t know what to say to that. It seemed impossible. Juliette saw the look on my face and shook her head. “You’re not nearly as hated as you think. Yeah, there are a few people who’ve been really mean to you, but everyone else respects you.”