by Meg Cabot
Brandon, looking at me with wide eyes above the huge green-and-white-striped dish towel sticking out of his mouth, said a lot of stuff.
But I couldn’t tell what any of it was, on account of the gag.
“The thing you need to know, Brandon,” I said, leaning back in the seat and crossing my legs, “is that I’m the one who set your Murciélago on fire.”
Brandon’s eyes got a lot wider, and he said a lot more things, in a louder voice. I still couldn’t tell what any of them were, though. Well, any of them that weren’t swearwords.
“Yeah,” I said. “I know. You totally deserved it. You can’t treat women— or anyone— the way you treated me. Do you understand? And no, I’m not going to pay for a new car for you. Instead, I’m going to do a lot worse to you if you mess with me again. I’m going to call Oprah’s people and schedule an in-depth interview on her network about how you used me, and what a total and complete loser you are. You will become the most detested man in America. And then you will have zero chance of the Stark Enterprises shareholders letting you take over when your dad goes down.”
Brandon quieted when I said all this. He stared at me with wounded eyes, looking almost like Cosabella when I scolded her for chewing on a pair of Jimmy Choos, which for some reason she seems to find irresistible.
“So, what’s it going to be?” I asked him. “Are you going to play ball? Or are you going to continue going through life acting like a total butthead? Because at some point, Brandon, you are going to have to decide.” I lifted both hands like they were the scales Lady Justice held. “Butthead? Grown-up? It’s up to you.”
He studied my hands. Then, nodding toward the hand signifying grown-up, he said something. Only of course I couldn’t tell what, because of the gag.
“Did you say grown-up, Brandon?” I asked.
He nodded vigorously. I leaned over to remove the gag.
“Oh, thank God,” he said. “And I forgive you for the Murciélago. Really, I do. I admit, what I did to you was really, really crappy. Like you said, I can be a loser sometimes. I really can. Now, could you please, please untie me and get the stewardess to get me a drink and a turkey sandwich? I’m dying here.”
“Flight attendant,” I said.
“What?” He looked at me like I was crazy.
“She’s a flight attendant, Brandon,” I said. “Not a stewardess. On your journey toward not being a butthead anymore, you might as well start using the correct language. Stewardess is sexist. And I will untie you and get you a ginger ale. We told them you’re on your way to rehab so it would be better for you not to have anything alcoholic.”
“Whatever,” Brandon said. “Thanks. And I’m sorry.”
Getting up from my seat, I stopped and looked at him in surprise. Those were the last two words I’d ever expected to hear from Brandon Stark…I’m and sorry.
Was it actually possible for guys like him to grow and change?
I glanced over at Christopher, who was bent over his cell phone, pounding away at the keys with his thumbs.
Hey, if guys could change for the worse, why couldn’t they change for the better?
But maybe that was just wishful thinking.
Ten
IT FELT GOOD TO BE HOME.
Oh, there was a ton of mail I was going to have to go through— not just bills that needed to be paid but gift bags and packages from appreciative clients and sponsors and even, I supposed, some of Nikki’s old friends, wanting to wish her happy holidays. Someone had sent her an entire case of Grey Goose vodka, someone else a $3,000 Chanel bag, someone else four different iPods, still in their boxes.
Happy holidays, indeed, for someone— at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Thrift Shop, where I was going to donate all this stuff so they could sell it to raise money to give to people who needed cancer treatment (although I wasn’t sure they’d take the vodka).
And of course I wasn’t going to be able to avoid my voice mail— or Mom and Dad— forever.
But it was amazing to be in my own place, surrounded by my own things, in my own beloved New York City.
Except of course it wasn’t really my own place.
And they weren’t really my things.
And who knew for how much longer I was going to be able to enjoy any of them? I was still going to have to worry about giving them back to their rightful owner. Or maybe not, since I also had the whole my-boss-might-be-trying-to-kill-me thing to worry about, as well.
Because things hadn’t ended particularly well with Christopher. Or Nikki.
I’d tried my best with both of them. I really had.
Now, stretched out on my bed, I remembered how, Brandon taken care of, I’d gone to try to make amends with Nikki. I don’t know why I’d felt like I owed her something. She’d been nothing but nasty to me.
But I couldn’t stand to see her sitting there crying in the back of the limo we’d taken into the city from the airport (well, all of us except for Frida, who’d taken the charter jet back to Florida, to finish out the rest of her week at cheerleading camp).
I just want to be pretty.
Hadn’t all those times I’d sat in our living room, wishing that Christopher would notice me as something more than just someone to play Journeyquest with, I’d sort of longed to be pretty, too? Frida had always been the one who’d said the actual words, though.
“I wish I could be pretty,” she’d say, and sigh, looking at a photo spread of Nikki Howard in some kind of ridiculous, $20,000 gold metallic dress in Elle magazine.
Mom, feminist professor of women’s studies at NYU, would always huff the same thing in reply.
“Don’t be ridiculous, honey,” she’d say. “Looks don’t matter. What matters is the kind of person you are, how much character you have.”
And Frida would snort: “Yeah. All the boys in school really care about my character, Mom.”
“Looks fade,” Mom would go on. “But intelligence lasts forever.”
“But you do think I’m pretty,” Frida would say. “Don’t you, Mom?”
“Honey,” Mom would say, cupping Frida’s face in her hand, “I think you and your sister are both growing into strong, independent young women. And that’s how I hope you’ll always stay.”
I’d always wondered if Frida had noticed how Mom never really answered the question.
I’d laid a hand over Nikki’s and squeezed it, and said softly, “Nikki. You’re going to be staying at Gabriel Luna’s place for a little while until we can get this thing worked out.”
This wasn’t something Gabriel had been particularly delighted to hear. He’d been shocked when I’d called him from the plane and announced that the Howard family was coming to stay with him in his place.
On the other hand, he had offered to help back at Lulu’s holiday party, when all of this was going down.
Well, we needed his help now. We couldn’t exactly stash Nikki and Steven and their mom in a hotel— Stark was sure to be tracking all of our credit cards.
But hiding them directly under Robert Stark’s nose, in the new high-rise, supersecure apartment (into which he’d had to move to escape his hordes of screaming fans) of Gabriel Luna, a recording artist on Stark’s very own label? Genius, even if Gabriel had his doubts…not just about Stark not finding out, but about playing host to Nikki, who practically spat at him in response to his cheerful “So nice to meet you,” before locking herself into his spare bedroom.
“Well,” Gabriel had said. “This is going to go well, I see.”
“I’m going to do everything I can to try to get you back all the things you’ve lost,” I’d assured Nikki, back in the limo. Or attempted to, anyway.
“Really?” She’d whirled to look up at me with tears streaming from her eyes. “Like my face? You’re going to give me back my face?”
“Well,” I’d said, startled. My hand had risen unconsciously to my cheek. Or Nikki’s cheek, I guess it was. “I’m not sure I can give you that, Nikki. But your money and your apar
tment— those things are yours.”
She turned right back to the limo’s window.
“Then we have nothing to talk about,” she said coldly. “Because all I want is to be pretty again.”
And kind of like my mom, I hadn’t known the right thing to say. Because pretty was the one thing I couldn’t give her. Because maybe pretty was something she had to give to herself.
Lying on my bed in Nikki’s loft, staring up at Nikki’s ceiling, with her dog snuggled against my neck, all I could think of was what she’d said to me in the car.
Then we have nothing to talk about. Because all I want is to be pretty again.
I had never seen anyone look as sad as she had.
I could understand her loss. I’d lost the same thing. Well, not quite the same thing…but sort of the same, if you counted the fact that I’d lost things I probably loved as much as Nikki loved her looks: my family, my home, my friendship with Christopher….
I don’t know how long I’d been lying there before Lulu popped her head into the doorway and said, “I’m starving. I’m thinking of ordering in. Do you want a banana split?”
I rolled over to look at her.
“Lulu,” I said. “Banana splits are not a meal.”
“Yes, they are,” Lulu said, coming over to hop up onto my bed beside me. “They have fruit and nuts and dairy. So they represent most of the major food groups. If you include chocolate sauce. And I’m always full after I eat one.”
“Go ahead and order me one, too, then,” I said, giving up and rolling over onto my back with a sigh.
Lulu clambered over me to reach for the landline sitting in its cradle on the nightstand by my bed. She hit the auto dial for the deli on the corner and ordered us two banana splits for delivery. Then she hung up and looked at me.
“Are you thinking about Christopher?” she asked accusingly.
“No, I’m thinking about Nikki,” I corrected her. Although of course I had been thinking about Christopher, even if only peripherally.
Lulu made a face. She evidently didn’t consider her former roommate worth thinking about, much less discussing.
“He still loves you, you know,” she said, about Christopher.
“Oh, really?” I asked, with a bitter laugh. “That’s not what he says.”
“He’s just upset,” Lulu said, “that you lied to him. Not just once, but a bunch of times. It’s wrong to lie to the person you love. Unless it’s to tell him that his hair looks good, even when it looks awful.”
“What if it’s to protect his life?” I asked, rising up on my elbows to look at her.
“Especially then,” Lulu said, shaking her head gravely. “Guys hate that. They’re supersensitive, especially now, with feminism and stuff. It’s completely confused them. They don’t know where they stand. Are they supposed to do stuff for you like open doors and pay for dinner when you go out, or let you do it all? They don’t know. Then he tried to rescue you, and you wouldn’t even go with him. So you’re going to have to let him do things for you once in a while. Even if you know he’s just going to screw it up. Especially when you, you know, have so much going for you, and he…doesn’t.”
I glared at her, feeling a little hurt. How dare she say my boyfriend (well, ex-boyfriend, I suppose, technically) didn’t have anything going for him?
“Christopher has a lot going for him,” I said. “He’s a total computer wizard and he’s really funny and sweet— when he isn’t being all supervillainy about avenging my death and stuff. Or mad at me about running off with the son of his mortal enemy.”
“I’m sure he is,” Lulu said diplomatically. “But right now, he’s hurt. And so you’re just going to have to work on breaking through the protective wall he’s built up around himself for fear of getting hurt again.”
“Well,” I said, collapsing back against the pillows. “It wasn’t just to protect him. It was to protect my family. And Nikki, too. I explained that to him. And he still hates me.”
“I told you.” Lulu had found some black nail polish in Nikki’s nightstand drawer, and now she was applying it to her toenails, having kicked off her purple platform mules. “He doesn’t hate you. But you’re going to have to find a way to make him understand how much you really do need him, so he can see how important he is to you.”
“He is important to me,” I cried. “I love him!”
“But he can’t really do anything for you,” Lulu said, concentrating on her toes. “You’re the one with all the money and power. He’s just a high school boy. He can barely afford to buy you dinner at Balthazar. At least, not dinner and an appetizer and the crème brûlée there. He probably couldn’t even afford to buy a bottle of this nail polish.” Lulu closed the cap on the bottle and shook it. “It’s Chanel. More than twenty bucks. Like I said back at Brandon’s—”
“But he had the opportunity to do something for me today,” I cried. “To help with the Stark Quark thing. And he wouldn’t!”
“He’s still mad now,” Lulu said. “Let him cool down. Boys need cooling-off periods, just like my nails are going to need to dry off before I can put my shoes back on and go over to Gabriel’s to give Nikki a makeover. She needs one just like you and Christopher need some relationship counseling from Dr. Drew.”
I gave her a dirty look. “Christopher and I don’t need relationship counseling. He just hates me, is all.”
“He does not. Going to rescue you was all his idea,” Lulu pointed out. “He was the one who called me and was completely gung ho about sweeping in and getting you out of there. It was way Luke Spacewalker.”
This made me want to cry, it was so sweet.
“Skywalker,” I corrected her. “It’s Luke Skywalker.”
“So what are we going to do?” Lulu asked, looking at me with her huge brown eyes. For once, she’d foregone one of her many pairs of tinted contacts, which often gave her eyes an eerily catlike glow against her dark skin. “I mean, about this mess? We can’t hide the Howards at Gabriel Luna’s forever. Brandon’s totally scared of you now since you told him you’re the one who lit his car on fire, so he won’t tell. But his dad—”
“—is the fourth-richest man in the world,” I said. “And also the most powerful. I know.”
I stared back at Lulu. Why was she asking me what we were going to do? I had no idea. I had never wanted any of this to happen.
And I had no idea how to fix any of it, either.
We were sitting there looking at each other blankly when something rang, loudly enough to make us both jump practically out of our skins.
“Ahhh!” Lulu screamed. “What is that?”
We jumped off the bed and began running around the loft, trying to find the source of the ringing, while Cosabella dashed up and down, barking.
“Is it the banana splits?” I asked. “Are they here already?”
“That’s not the buzzer,” Lulu said, meaning the intercom the doorman used to let us know when someone was waiting for us in the lobby.
“Then what is it?” I wailed as the ringing continued, loud as ever, at regular intervals.
“Oh, my God!” Lulu cried, stopping by a side table. “It’s the house phone!”
“The house phone?” I didn’t even know that we had a house phone, we were both so dependent on our cells. We only ever used it to call out for food. “Are you kidding me?”
Lulu reached down and picked up the phone. “Hello?” she said, a curious expression on her face. Someone said something, and Lulu looked over at me.
“Oh,” she said. “Yes. Oh, hi! Of course she’s here. Hold on one moment.”
Then Lulu covered the receiver with her hand and said to me, in an excited way, “It’s for you. It’s your mother.”
I immediately threw both my hands into the air.
“My mother?” I whispered back to her. “I don’t want to talk to my mother! Tell her I’m not here!”
Lulu looked confused. “But I just told her that you were here. Why don’t you wa
nt to talk to your mother?”
“Because she’s mad at me!” I whisper-yelled. “I just spent the holidays at a boy’s house without his parents being there! You might have read about it in every tabloid in America? I’m in big trouble with her.”
“Ooooh,” Lulu said, nodding, as understanding dawned. “I get it. Do you want me to explain that you were being blackmailed and that if you didn’t do it, Brandon was going to tell his dad where he could find Nikki, and then Mr. Stark would kill her? I’m sure Karen will understand that.” Lulu took her hand away from the receiver and said, “Hello, Karen? It’s me, Lulu. Listen, if it’s about Em going to South Carolina with Brandon Stark, I can—”
I don’t think I’ve ever moved as fast before in my life. I literally dove for the phone in Lulu’s hand, landing with it on the couch and then pressing it to my ear. Lulu looked down at me in shock as I said to my mother, “Hi, Mom!” in the fakiest voice you could imagine.
“Emerson,” my mom said.
Uh-oh. This was bad. My mom only called me by my full name when she was really, really mad.
Plus, she wasn’t even supposed to be using my real name on the phone, let alone on Nikki Howard’s house phone.
Something in her tone, however, suggested that this might not be the best time to remind her of this.
“So,” I said, lying full length on the couch, as Cosabella, excited by all the activity, leapt on the cushions around me. “How’s it going? How’s Dad?”
“Your father is fine,” Mom said, in the tightest voice you could imagine. She sounded like she’d just gotten Botox in her lips or something, she was speaking in such a cold, controlled, tiny little voice. It was clear that she’d been bottling up her anger with me all week, just saving it for the moment when she could see me, so she could explode all over me like one of Christopher’s pipe bombs. “Thank you for asking. I’ve been leaving messages for you on your cellular telephone. Have you not received any of them?”
Cellular telephone. She had actually said the words cellular telephone. I was so, so dead.
“Uh, no,” I said. “You know what happened, actually? It was the funniest thing, I dropped my cell phone in the ocean, and I haven’t gotten around to replacing it….”