Girlfriend Material

by Melissa Kantor

  Text copyright © 2010 by Melissa Kantor All rights reserved. Published by Disney • Hyperion Books. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information address Disney • Hyperion Books, Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10011-5690.

  Designed by Elizabeth H. Clark Printed in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file.

  ISBN 978-1-4231-4101-3

  Visit www.hyperionteens.com

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Acknowledgments

  To Julie L. Gantcher and

  the memory of Neal I. Gantcher

  I SWEAR MY MOTHER had been talking since Salt Lake City.

  To appreciate how truly impressive a feat this is, you need to know that we were currently heading east on Route 6 toward Dryer’s Cove, Massachusetts, almost three thousand miles from Utah, where our day had begun with a predawn drive to the airport. So officially my mother had been talking since last night. She’d talked in the car, she’d talked while we waited to clear security, and she’d talked during the flight attendant’s demonstration of the plane’s safety features, which means we could have been the first two people in history to survive a twenty-five-thousand-foot plunge into an open body of water only to die due to an inability to inflate our life preservers.

  “Oh, Katie, this is just what I’d hoped it would be. We’re really getting to know each other. Now, honey, smell the brine in the air? That’s the ocean.” Since my window was up, my mom took it upon herself to lower it. My hair started flying madly around my face like it was attacking me. I took a rubber band off my wrist and gathered it into a ponytail.

  “Mmm,” I said. It was pretty much all I’d said since we’d left Mountain Time. My mother and I were engaged in a battle of wills in which she pretended (by throwing the occasional rhetorical question my way) not to notice I wasn’t speaking to her, and I pretended (by occasionally humming a monosyllable in her direction) I wasn’t not speaking to her. All of this because she’d yanked me out of my dream summer in Salt Lake City and dragged me across the country to be her companion in marital strife.

  Every few months my parents’ marriage starts to bear an uncanny resemblance to a Desperate Housewives episode. I come home to find my mom weeping into the phone, or I wake up on Saturday morning to the lyrical sound of my dad screaming, What is it that you want from me, exactly? Up until now I’ve just made it a policy to lie low (mostly by staying at my best friend, Laura’s, house for days at a time) until the storm passes—an event that is usually marked by the appearance of several dozen red roses scattered in vases throughout the house, or the tinkling of a new bracelet on my mom’s wrist.

  This time around, things with my parents started heading south in early June, about two weeks ago, and as usual I fled to Laura’s. Just to be clear, this doesn’t exactly suck. Laura’s house is practically a mansion, and she’s got a pool and a hot tub, and except for the fact that her totally annoying brother, Tom, who’s going to be a senior, and his totally annoying and truly idiotic friend Brad, enjoy spending their days blasting classic rock and arguing about football at the top of their lungs when Laura and I are hanging out in the pool, it’s basically heaven at her house.

  When I wasn’t sitting poolside at Laura’s, I was taking a summer fiction writing class for high school juniors at the U, and there was a lot of homework for that. Plus, Laura and I were playing tons of tennis at her tennis club because we both made varsity this year— only so did about ten other girls, which meant if we weren’t kicking ass and taking names by September, we’d spend the season on the bench.

  So aside from the fact that my home life resembled nothing so much as the beaches of Normandy on D-Day, I wasn’t exactly having a bad summer, what with hanging out with Laura and getting in shape and writing stories and reading cool writers like Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Plus, if past is prologue, I was pretty sure my parents would be all lovey-dovey by July 4th, and I’d be able to go home to do more than grab clean clothes.

  Which is exactly what I was doing when I walked in the door two days ago and found my mother on the phone with her travel agent, talking about fares from Salt Lake City to Boston. I asked her what was going on, and she said, I need to have some me time with Tina and her family on Cape Cod for the summer.Tina was my mom’s college roommate, and after college, Tina and my mom and Henry (Tina’s husband) taught history in New York City together until my mom moved out West with my dad.

  At first I thought she was just sharing information with me, like, Honey, I want you to know you can reach me in Massachusetts until Labor Day. You can see where I got this idea, right? What with the words “me time” featuring pretty heavily in her description of her plans.

  My response was fairly mature, if I do say so myself. I didn’t say, for example, Well, Mom, maybe if you went back to teaching, since your kids are sixteen and twenty-one and therefore a tad old to need a stay-at-home mom, you’d be a little happier and less desperate for Dad’s attention. Instead I told her I was really sorry about things with her and my dad. I told her I totally understood her needing to get away.

  I told her I’d miss her while she was gone.

  But it turned out that by “me time,” my mother meant “we time,” and that it was not one ticket to Boston that she had purchased but two. That’s when I completely lost it. I mean, my mom and I aren’t even close. If she’d wanted my older sister, Meg, to go with her to the edge of the continental United States, that would have made total sense. Meg and my mom are peas in a pod where my dad is concerned. They love to sit around and talk about how insensitive he is and how he’s so focused on his job he doesn’t take time to appreciate Mom and how hard she works (?!?!). They especially love to say this while they’re shopping online and charging it to his Visa.

  When I suggested to my mom that maybe Meg could accompany her East, she said Meg was taking classes this summer (she’s going into her senior year at NYU). Oh, taking classes, I said. Who else do we know who’s taking classes this summer? My mom said it wasn’t the same thing because I’m in high school and Meg’s her favorite—oh, wait, no she didn’t actually say that. She made up this whole thing about how the summer could be the perfect opportunity for us to “get to know each other better.” Considering that my mom’s idea of getting to know me involves asking if I’m really going to go out of the house in whatever it is I’m wearing, and telling me I have such pretty hair it’s a shame I don’t cut it more fashionably, this didn’t exactly sound like a promise so much as a threat.

  That’s when I gave up on my mom and started begging my dad to let me spend the summer with him in Salt Lake. I reminded him that Laura and I had been playing tennis together every day so that we could be first singles this fall. I was sure that would convince him even if the whole writing class thing didn’t. My dad’s really into my being a great tennis player. He’s the whole reason I started playing
in the first place—when I was little, practically before I could walk, he had me out on the court hitting with him.

  But it was too late: my father, like King Hamlet (which we read in English this year), had already had poison poured into his ear by my mother. He just said I shouldn’t give my mom a hard time and there’s plenty of tennis courts in Massachusetts and, Sorry, honey, gotta go, I’m late for work.

  And there you have it, folks—writing class, gone. Kick-ass tennis game, gone. Summer with my BFF, gone. And why? So my mom could have some “alone time.”

  With me.

  “I’m so excited for you to see Sarah again,” said my mom. “Do you remember her at all from their visit?”

  My mom was referring to this time around ten years ago that Tina and Henry and their daughter, Sarah, came to Utah on a ski vacation. I didn’t really remember Tina or Henry, but I definitely remembered Sarah. She was awesome. She slept in my room and we spent the whole week playing really stupid tricks on our families. I remember once we hid about a million pieces of silverware in Meg’s bed, and another time we put whole milk in the skim milk carton because both our moms were on this intense no-fat diet. But it’s not what we did that’s important, since most of it seems pretty stupid now. It’s what it was like to be with Sarah. When I think back on that week, it seems as if we spent every second laughing our heads off. Sarah was hilarious. She was fun. She had these crazy frizzy curls that stuck out in every direction as if even her hair was having a good time.

  She was like a party in a person.

  Even though I would never in a million years have admitted it to my mom (and not just because it would have involved speaking to her), I was totally looking forward to spending the summer with Sarah. I hadn’t spoken to or seen her since that visit almost ten years ago, but I had a feeling that wasn’t going to matter, given how much fun we’d had the last time we were together. Now that we were too old to find sabotaging our mothers’ after-dinner beverage of choice a satisfying evening activity, I pictured us having more age-appropriate fun, like driving around in her car (which I was sure was a convertible), going to parties with her cool New York private school friends, trading clothes, and talking about our futures together.

  One of the books my writing teacher, Ms. Baker, assigned to us this summer was Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. It’s about this group of disillusioned and depressed twenty-somethings in Europe after World War I. All the main characters are men except for one— Lady Brett Ashley, who is without a doubt the coolest woman in the world. Basically, every man she meets falls madly in love with her because she is so beautiful and chic, but she doesn’t care about any of them.

  In Utah, I am exactly the opposite of Lady Brett Ashley. First of all, no guy has ever fallen madly in love with me. Second of all, unlike Her Ladyship, I do not have “curves like the hull of a racing yacht.” I don’t have a terrible body or anything, but I think my curves are probably more like those of a ferry or tugboat.

  Third of all, I am not British aristocracy.

  But ever since my mom had announced her determination to make me the Sancho Panza to her Don Quixote this summer, I’d been kind of thinking that maybe crossing the Mississippi would … I don’t know, transform me. I imagined that Sarah and her friends were a little like the characters in The Sun Also Rises. (Not the depressed and disillusioned by the war part, but the having fun and going everywhere together part.) And if they were like them, then maybe I could be like Lady Brett, and maybe instead of having a good summer of writing and playing tennis and hanging out with my best friend, I could have a perfect summer of being chic and irresistible with a group of really cool kids from New York City.

  Which, while I hadn’t chosen it, was a trade I didn’t exactly mind making.

  EVEN THOUGH I HAVE my learner’s permit, you have to be twenty-five to drive a rental car. When we’d left the rental agency, I’d been pretty bummed about the prospect of a summer with no driving, but now that I saw what driving (“driving”) was like on Cape Cod, I didn’t mind not sitting behind the wheel.

  The road we’d turned onto when we left Route 6 wasn’t really a road: it was more like a sandy driveway. Tacked up to trees alongside it were wooden signs with names on them. Lipinsky. Charles. Boxer. The signs pointed down roads that were, impossibly enough, even smaller and more overgrown than the one we were on.

  My mom was driving at a snail’s pace, and every hundred yards or so she’d suddenly jerk the car sharply one way or the other to avoid a hole or a tree root she hadn’t seen until we were practically on top of it. I don’t usually get carsick, but if we had much farther to go, I was definitely going to need to get out and walk the rest of the way.

  Suddenly she let out a shriek. “I knew I’d recognize it!” she said, pointing at a fork in the road up ahead. A small official-looking sign on the left read, PRIVATE ROAD. NO BEACH ACCESS. Just above this, tacked to a tree branch, was an even smaller sign: COOPER-MELNICK.

  As soon as I read the word beach, my mind was saturated with the image of me and Sarah driving home from the beach while our adorable boyfriends sat in the backseat, planning what to barbecue for dinner.

  It was an image my mom’s voice almost immediately dissolved. “I just hope you won’t be intimidated by Sarah. I know she’s a year older than you, and she’s applying early to Harvard and all of that, but you bring so much to the table, honey. I’m sure she’s really excited to have you as a buddy for the summer!”

  Okay, why was my mother still talking? Because five seconds ago I’d been excited to see Sarah, and now she was making it sound as if Sarah was going to be baby-sitting me or something.

  Suddenly my mouth felt dry.

  My mom turned into the tracks and followed them for about a hundred yards. We crested a small rise, and then the house appeared almost out of nowhere. I’d been picturing, I don’t know, a mansion or maybe some super-modern glass box, but this was an older, wooden building. Or I should say buildings. We pulled up to what

  I guess was the main house, since it was much bigger than the other structure, which I realized from the shape was the garage. All the windows had window boxes that were practically bursting with brightly colored flowers. The whole setting was so beautiful and soothing that I was able to put my fears about Sarah out of my mind. It wasn’t as if she’d never met me before. I mean, we were already friends.

  And since when did my mom have her finger on the pulse of normal human relationships, anyway?

  I heard a voice shout, “They’re here!” as the front door shot open and a woman who had to be Tina came toward the car. A second later my mom had unbuckled her seat belt and then they were hugging. From the way the hug went on for longer than a hug hello normally does, and how Tina wasn’t just hugging my mom but was patting her back and talking softly to her, I had the bad feeling my mom was crying. I took as long as I could getting out of the car, and by the time I was standing next to it, my mom and Tina had let go of each other. My mom’s eyes were a little bloodshot, but if she’d been crying during the hug, she wasn’t anymore.

  “Katie!” said Tina.

  “Hi,” I said. I didn’t know how to tell her that I haven’t been called Katie by anyone but my family in about ten years.

  “We’re so glad you and your mom are here!” She said it nicely, like she really was glad my mom and I were invading their summer, then reached out and gave me a huge hug. “Thanks for having us,” I said. It was funny to see my mom and Tina next to each other. My mom not only colors her hair blond, she wears it straight and kind of feathered back from her face, while Tina’s curly hair has streaks of gray in it, and she didn’t seem to have combed it that morning. Tina was wearing faded jeans with a hole in the knee and a tank top, while my mom had on a pair of crisp white pants and a pale pink sweater set. I could not imagine them as college roommates. Tina was so urbane, my mom so suburban. What could they ever have had to talk about?

  The door opened and a man came out. Like Tina, he was
in jeans and flip-flops. His hair had a little more gray than hers, and he wore hip, tortoiseshell glasses. Neither Tina nor Henry looked anything like any of my junior high history teachers.

  “Hi,” he called, walking toward us. “How was the trip?” A minute later he was hugging my mom, and I had the awful feeling that she was going to start crying again, but she didn’t.

  “We’ve met before, but it’s been a long time. I’m Henry,” he said, extending his hand to me. Like Tina, he seemed honestly glad to see us. “You must be starving.”

  “We stopped for lunch,” said my mom. “But I wouldn’t say no to a snack. How about you, Kate?” Usually my mom calls me Katie. I figured maybe she was trying to send a message to Tina and Henry that they should call me Kate. It was nice of her to do that, since she knows I think Katie is a babyish nickname. Her trying to communicate that information to Tina and Henry without embarrassing me made me feel a tiny bit bad about how, basically, I hadn’t spoken to her for the past seventy-two hours.

  “Sure,” I said, following the three of them into the house.

  I didn’t know what to expect from the interior of a house belonging to New Yorkers with “old family money” (which, according to my mom, was what Tina and Henry had). I wondered if it would be super chic with, like, only one piece of furniture in each room and enormous modern art everywhere; but it was nothing like that. We passed through a living room with big comfy-looking couches and pale wooden floors. There was a vase filled with fresh flowers on a grand piano, and a wooden rocking chair, but most of what you noticed were the books. One entire wall of the room was built-in bookcases, only even with all the shelves there wasn’t enough room for the books. They were everywhere— the couches, the floor, even the bottom step of the staircase had a couple of ancient paperbacks stacked on it. I’m a total book junkie, so a house overflowing with books is basically my idea of heaven. I wanted to stop and see what the titles were, but Tina led us straight into the kitchen. It was sparkling clean and white, and it seemed to be all windows. There were enormous sliding-glass doors that led to a deck overlooking the water. Even on an overcast day like today, the room was dizzy with natural light.