by Linda Gerber
“And soaked!” Daniel plucked at the sleeve of my hoodie. “Look at you.”
“It’s raining,” I told him.
“Well, come in by the fire and dry off.” Victoria bustled me from the entry into the main room. “I’ll introduce you to our tico friends.”
“Tico?”
“That’s what they call the locals,” Daniel explained, “on account of how they talk.”
Which didn’t explain a thing as far as I was concerned. “How they talk?”
“Their speech,” Victoria said. “Costa Ricans are known for adding the diminutive ‘-tico’ suffix to words, hence the name tico. Or tica for the feminine.”
“Okay, I have no idea what you just said,” I told her, “but I bet we’ll talk about it in our lessons.” She always did find a way to add stuff about our host country to our studies wherever we traveled.
“That and a whole treasure of tiquismos,” she said, smiling.
“Tiki-what?”
“Tiquismos. Colloquialisms.”
“Later,” Daniel said, “but now we need to introduce you to our new friend Marco.” He took my arm to steer me over. “He’ll be our tico guide while we’re here. You’ll love him. The guy’s a gas.”
“Oh. Uh…” I stole a quick peek to where Logan was still sitting. Why was he still sitting? Shouldn’t he have come over to say hi by now? Sure, I had stopped to talk with Victoria and Daniel, but if it had been me sitting there and Logan had walked into the room, I would have jumped up and run straight over to him.
“…met Britt yet, have you?” Victoria was asking.
I blinked back to the present. “I’m sorry?”
“Britt,” Victoria repeated. “She joined us while you were in Ohio.”
“Come on,” Daniel prodded. “I’ll introduce you to her, too.”
“Sure.” I forced a smile. “That would be great.”
Daniel presented me to Marco first. He looked pleasant enough, with friendly eyes and a full, wide mouth that broke easily into a smile. He’d been talking to Britt, but he excused himself and stood as we approached. She smiled stiffly and pushed to her feet as well.
“This,” Daniel told him, “is Cassidy.” And then to me, “Cassidy, may I present Marco. And our newest crew member, Britt.”
Britt murmured a greeting I could barely hear, but before I could answer her, Marco took my hand and bent over it like I was some kind of royalty.
“Ah, la chica moda,” he said, his dark eyes laughing. “Con mucho gusto. It is a pleasure.”
I groaned and pulled my hand away so I could swat Daniel. “You had to tell him?”
La chica moda was a nickname the tabloids had given me in Spain. It means “the stylish girl.” And since I must have looked like a drowned kitten with my wet, stringy hair and rain-soaked clothes, I could see why Marco found the name funny. Thanks a lot, Daniel. I pulled myself up taller than I felt and nodded back at Marco. “Gracias,” I said. “Thanks. It’s nice to meet you, too.”
Marco asked the usual polite questions: how was the flight, how did I like Costa Rica so far, what kind of stuff did I like to do—that sort of thing. I tried to give equally polite answers, but my eyes kept wandering over to Logan. Maybe he was waiting for me to come to him?
Finally, Victoria saved me. “Well,” she said, nodding first to Marco and then to Britt, “we didn’t mean to interrupt, but we wanted to give Cassidy the chance to meet you.”
“No problem,” Britt said, suddenly all smiles.
“Our pleasure,” Marco said. “Ahí nos vidrios, Cassidy. I will see you later.”
With the necessary pleasantries out of the way, Victoria pulled me aside. She nodded toward Logan. “Go on.”
“Thank you,” I whispered, and turned to start across the room.
Which was when my dad called out to me. “Cassidy! Come on over. There’s someone here I’d like you to meet.”
I trudged to where he and Mom were standing with Cavin and the mystery lady. Logan glanced up at me as I passed him and gave me a little shrug and a half smile. I didn’t know what that was supposed to mean, but I shrugged in return anyway. My shrug meant, I have no idea how I’m supposed to act right now.
“Cassidy.” Dad pulled my attention back to him. “This is Elizabeth Ricketson from the network.”
Ah. I should have known. She did have that polished media-executive look—tailored clothes, understated makeup, no-nonsense hair, a smile that was a little too broad to be genuine.
“Hi, Cassidy,” she said, stretching her well-manicured hand toward me. “You may call me Liz.”
I shook her hand the way my mom had taught me to do, with a firm but gentle grip and steady eye contact. “Pleased to meet you,” I said.
“And I’m delighted to meet you. I’m looking forward to working with you and Logan on the junior features.”
“She’s the producer for the promotional spots you kids will be filming for this episode,” Mom interpreted.
I nodded and slipped another look at Logan…and my heart dropped. He was scowling now, looking the other way.
“We’re very energized about the potential for this project,” Liz said. “We think it’s going to do very well for us.”
“We’ll talk more about it once ye’ve had a chance to settle in,” Cavin said. Then to the adults, “If you’ll excuse me, I’ll see to the room assignments.”
I jumped at the chance to excuse myself as well. “If you don’t need me,” I said, backing away, “I’d like to say hi to Logan. It was nice meeting you, Liz.”
“We’ll chat soon,” she promised. “We have a lot to talk about. Very exciting stuff.”
When I finally managed to break away, I hurried over to Logan before anyone else could stop me.
He set his book aside and stood as I got closer. “Hi, Cass” was all he said.
That’s it. Monotone. No smile. Nothing. It’s like I was just seeing him again after being in another room instead of another country. All those weeks of missing him, I had imagined this moment much differently. In my perfect scenario, there was hugging involved. I almost worked up the nerve to give him a quick hug then, but to tell the truth, I wanted him to be the one who made the first move. Plus, I was suddenly feeling a lot shyer than I should have felt with my best friend. I hugged my soggy arms around myself instead and just said hi back.
“How was your flight?” he asked politely.
I shrugged. My travels weren’t exactly what I had hoped we’d talk about. Not that I had the conversation mapped out or anything, but I thought as best friends we were beyond small talk. “Fine, I guess,” I told him. “How are you? Is everything okay?”
“Yeah. Why?”
I hugged my arms tighter and hunched my shoulders.
“I don’t know.”
He motioned for me to sit in his wingback chair, and he took the tooled leather ottoman in front of it. “You mean with Da,” he said in a low voice.
Is it bad that a gigantic swell of relief washed over me? Here I was reading all sorts of things into Logan not coming to say hello, but if there was tension with his dad, he could have simply been distracted. Maybe I didn’t have to worry. I almost let myself smile, but that probably wouldn’t have looked very supportive, so I showed him my best concerned frown instead. “Right. Your dad. What’s going on?”
This time he shrugged. “No big deal. It’s just this project thing.”
“Uh-huh?” I had no idea what project he was talking about, but I leaned forward, nodding, the very picture of understanding and sympathy.
“Nothing.”
“No, tell me.”
“I don’t know.” He glanced quickly over his shoulder and lowered his voice. “I mean, you probably get the same thing from your mum and dad all the time. Like what happened with you and Mateo in Spain. I just wish he’d ask, you know?”
Now I was totally lost. Mateo was my dad’s old college buddy’s son. When we were in Valencia, Mateo had gotten roped into doing
a bunch of on-camera background shots with me. But what did that have to do with Logan? “I don’t—”
“These ‘spots,’ or whatever you call them,” he said, waving a hand in the air. “It was never, ‘Logan, would you like to do them?’ It was ‘Logan, you’re going to do them,’ and ‘We need it for the show.’”
My heart dropped right down to the polished wood floor. Not good. I was the one who had suggested Logan do the promo spots with me, not his dad. And “suggested” isn’t exactly the right word, either; I’d told Cavin it was a condition of my coming to Costa Rica. I’d figured if Logan and I were both working on the spots, we’d have more time to spend together. I hadn’t ever considered that Logan might not want to do them.
“I don’t know,” I said weakly. “It could be fun.”
He shook his head, and his dark hair fell into his eyes. He pushed it away impatiently. “Not my thing.”
The tone of his voice hit me straight in the gut. Dismissive. Disgusted. As if being in those spots with me would be beneath him.
“It’s not so bad,” I said, a bit defensively. “You might like it.”
“Are you serious? The cheesy lines? The fake enthusiasm? No, thanks.”
“You could try it for a day. It might not be so—”
“No. No way. I don’t want to be some idiot pretending for the camera like—”
“Like what I do,” I cut in.
“That’s not what I meant.”
“It’s okay. I get it. You’re too good for that kind of thing.”
“Cass, stop.” He reached for my hand, but I pulled it away. He didn’t want to do the spots? Fine. Not everyone was comfortable on camera. But he didn’t have to disrespect what I did. What my parents did.
“I should go get changed,” I said, standing. “Wet clothes suck.”
“Cassidy…”
I walked away, and it felt like my heart was breaking up, dissolving, just like those roads in the rain. I’d been so excited about seeing Logan again. I had daydreamed how it would be, the two of us spending every day together. Now I was wet, I was miserable, and I wished I’d never left Gramma’s farm. At least when I was still there, I could pretend Logan liked me as much as I liked him.
Maybe I really was an idiot, like he said.
All the guest quarters were nestled around the circular balcony that made up the lodge’s second floor. I had my own room, if you could call it that, right next to my mom and dad’s. The space wasn’t much larger than a closet, with a narrow bed pushed up against the wall and a small dresser squeezed in under an even smaller window. The sleeping arrangements were a little tight, my mom explained, but everyone could spread out in the common areas, like the kitchen and the dining room and the big open room downstairs. Family-style, my dad called it.
“They offered to let the three of us stay in the smaller bungalow,” Mom added, “in the casita. We would have privacy there, but we thought it might be more fun to be where the action is.”
Action. Great. Usually, I would be the one begging to stay where everyone else was so I wouldn’t miss anything, but all I could think of was that Logan would be staying in the lodge, too, and now I’d have to be on guard to avoid him. I wouldn’t want him to have to pretend to be nice to me.
“Well, we’ll leave you to it,” Dad said.
Mom hesitated before pulling my door closed as they left. “You’ll feel better once you’ve unpacked,” she said.
If only it was that easy.
When I was in Greece, I met a girl named Zoe, who worked on our yacht. She had a serious crush on Nikos, the guy who was doing the travel special with me. I did all I could to push Zoe and Nikos together, and it worked. In the meantime, Zoe and I became good friends. She was the one person who knew all about Logan and me. Maybe she could tell me what to do about our disastrous reunion.
I dropped onto the bed and pulled out my phone to text her, but there were no connectivity bars in the corner of the screen. Just to be sure, I tested for a ringtone. Nothing. “You’ve got to be kidding me.” I held the phone up higher. Climbed onto the bed. The desk. Pointed my phone at the window. No luck.
Fine. I tossed the phone onto the mattress. There was a card on the desk with instructions for connecting to the lodge’s wireless Internet. I could IM her on my computer…if only the connection had worked. I tried three times to log in, but I couldn’t get a signal. There must have been a trick to it that I didn’t know. Which meant that, for the time being, I was on my own.
Without my computer or phone, there was nothing for me to do in my room, but I wasn’t about to go back downstairs. I wasn’t ready to talk to Logan yet. I took my time unpacking, even though there wasn’t much space to put anything. A lot of stuff I just left in the suitcase.
I did take out my decorations to personalize my room, even though my heart wasn’t in it, in the hopes it would make my space less depressing. I tossed my Hello Kitty pillow on the bed, dropped my incense cone in its brass holder without lighting it, and thunked my grampa’s picture on the dresser. I had just started hanging my string of twinkling lights around the room’s tiny mirror when Mom knocked on the door and poked her head inside.
“Are you about done?” she asked. “Liz has some things she’d like to go over with us before dinner.”
I left the lights dangling and followed Mom down the wide staircase to the main room. Liz was seated on one of the leather couches in front of the fireplace, with about a dozen gift bags arranged on the cushions to one side of her. Cavin sat on the other side. I stopped dead when I realized Logan was sitting opposite them on the other couch. I wanted to turn around and head back up to my room, but it was too late; Liz had already seen me.
“Very good,” she said, powering up the tablet PC she held on her lap. “Everyone’s here. Let’s get started.”
Mom dragged me to the couch, where she took the end seat, leaving me the cushion next to Logan. I sat stiffly, not really sure how I wanted to act around him. Or how he expected me to act. He said hi to me under his breath and I said hi back to him, but that was as far as it went.
“I’ve got some exciting developments to talk to you about,” Liz gushed, oblivious. “Publicity has been working overtime, building on Cassidy’s name recognition from her adventures in Spain and Greece.”
She sounded so cheerful about it, as if all the half truths and made-up drama about me in the tabloids while I was there were good things. I looked to gauge my mom’s reaction to Liz’s chirpy attitude, but Mom appeared to be perfectly composed, her expression neutral. I tried to follow her example. One thing she always told me is that, as celebrities (although I still have a hard time thinking of myself as a celebrity), we are always “on.” As I have learned all too well, you never know when someone could be watching (or worse, taking pictures). That philosophy has made my mom the queen of the unreadable face. I wasn’t quite there yet.
“We’ve been able to line up some big-hitting sponsors for your shows,” Liz continued, “and—”
“Wait. Shows?” I know I just said I was trying to act composed, but the last thing I’d heard, Logan and I were supposed to be doing little promotional spots for When in Rome. Thirty-second commercials, not shows.
“Oh, yes.” Liz seemed delighted by my confusion. “That’s one of the exciting developments I wanted to talk to you about. We ran Logan’s head shots and audition tape past our teen focus group, and the response was overwhelmingly positive.”
“You had head shots done?” I whispered to Logan. He didn’t answer, but his cheeks might have gotten a little pinker.
“And Daniel was able to provide us some candid footage of the two of you in Spain. The chemistry between you is perfect.”
Now I could feel my cheeks turn pink. It was perfect, wasn’t it? Emphasis on “was.” I didn’t know if we had chemistry anymore. Not after Logan’s comment about how fake I was on camera. And speaking of cameras, when exactly did Daniel film Logan and me together? Whatever footage he gave th
e network had to have been truly candid, because I thought Daniel was filming only when I was with Mateo; I didn’t remember him pointing his camera at Logan and me alone. Then again, when I was with Logan and Mateo, I wasn’t really paying much attention to Daniel.
“We’re so confident that the two of you will be a winning combination,” Liz continued, “that we’ve decided to expand your on-air time. What we’re looking at now is a running series of five-minute segments. Think Disney Channel’s As the Bell Rings, only these shows will be unscripted.”
“What does that mean, ‘unscripted’?” Logan asked.
“Reality TV,” Liz said gleefully. “We’ll film the two of you throughout your stay in Costa Rica and edit the footage into four five-minute minisodes—mini episodes that will play throughout the week leading up to the When in Rome air date. With the two of you, it will be brilliant! Great idea to include Logan, Cassidy.”
I flinched when she said that, hoping Logan didn’t catch what she meant. But judging by the hard stare he gave me, he did. I should have told him earlier that the whole thing had been my idea, but he’d been upset about having to do the spots and I didn’t want him to be mad at me. Now it was probably worse.
“Sorry,” I mumbled. “I thought it would be fun to do this together.” I might have said more, but he stared me down, so I pressed my lips together and looked straight ahead.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” Liz’s bubbly inflection melted away. “What’s all this? We can’t have any discord between the two of you; there’s much too much riding on this project. So whatever little drama you’ve got going on, you need to resolve it this instant, understand?” She turned to Cavin and practically growled, “Tell me I didn’t make a mistake investing in these kids.”
“It’s fine,” Cavin assured her. “They simply haven’t had the time ta settle in yet, is all.”
Mom still looked as composed as ever, but the little muscle in her jaw was twitching, so I knew I was destined to have a “talk” with her once the meeting was over.
Liz regarded us for a moment, then launched back into her chipper routine. “Well, this might brighten things a bit. When we announced this project, sponsors literally lined up to support it. They’ve sent a few little things for you both to express their delight in working with you.”