by Rachel Vail
“No problem,” he said. “Hi, Quinn.”
“Gosia!” I yelled, leaving them alone with the piano. “I need to go down to the Shops!” On my way into the kitchen I texted Kirstyn:
Shops? Pick u up?
She didn’t text back right away so I texted:
U mad @ me?
Maybe I should’ve asked Zhara or Gabrielle or even Ann instead, I thought, and was about to try Gabrielle when Kirstyn texted:
I cd never b mad @ u!
Gosia came into the kitchen as I was texting Kirstyn back that we’d pick her up in a minute. I dumped out my book bag, in search of my good sunglasses.
“Hey,” Gosia complained.
“I’ll clean it up when I get home,” I said, on my way through the door. “Promise. We gotta hurry.”
As she was backing out of the garage, Gosia turned on the music. It was new stuff, nothing I’d heard before. She stuck a piece of gum in her mouth and chewed to the beat.
“Can I have a piece?” I asked as I took one from her pack.
“Would it matter if I said no?”
“Oh, wait, we’re picking up Kirstyn.”
“Ugh,” said Gosia, slowing down.
“Why don’t you like Kirstyn?”
“Because she’s a spoiled brat.”
“She’s just rich,” I argued. “And pretty. All that is just stuff from her parents. You can’t judge her on that.”
“I don’t,” Gosia said. “I couldn’t care less if she’s on the cover of every magazine or has all the money in the world. Or none of it. She could say hello.”
“She says hello!”
“Not to me,” Gosia said, stopping the minivan at the bottom of Kirstyn’s driveway. Kirstyn was there waiting in a cute new outfit, her dark Gucci sunglasses covering half her face. Gosia pressed the button to let the back door slide open and checked her makeup in the mirror.
Kirstyn jumped in and, taking one of the pilot seats in back, said, “Hi, Phoebe!”
Gosia raised one eyebrow. She’s the one who taught Allison. I slumped in my seat and said, “Hi.”
When Gosia got the door closed and the car moving, Kirstyn leaned forward, as if there’d never been a moment of tension between us. “How was piano?”
“Brilliant,” I said.
“He’s so hot.”
“Hot for Quinn,” I said.
“Yum.” She leaned back in her seat and looked out the window. “We should go by Fabio’s and look at the shoes, even though we don’t have dresses yet. Is that stupid? But I mean, we’ll need metallic or beige anyway, right? You weren’t thinking dyed-to-match, were you?”
“No.”
“I know, totally tacky. That’s what I was just telling my mother. Did you get cash or your mom’s credit card?”
“Oh, damn,” I said, and checked my wallet. One dollar. Eighty-seven cents in the change compartment. I asked Gosia as sweetly as I could, “Do you have any money on you?”
“Now you want my money?” Gosia asked.
“They’ll pay you back,” I said to Gosia. “Just take it from the envelope in the kitchen drawer. There’s a couple hundred in it, right? I only want like forty.”
“What are you going to buy for forty?” Kirstyn snorted.
“I’m not buying today, just looking,” I said. “I mean in case we need a soda or a lip gloss or something.”
“You pay me back,” Gosia said to me, pulling into a parking spot. “Here’s twenty. You get it from them and pay me back. I don’t want to ask your parents for the money. Understand?”
I nodded. So she knew something was up. My heart pounded as I shoved her twenty in my back pocket and got out of the car.
“Don’t worry about it—I have my mom’s platinum card,” Kirstyn said. “She felt bad after the tackiness of her dyed-to-match idea.” She showed me her teeth.
“You’re good,” I told her, after seeing nothing was stuck in them.
Lowering the passenger-side window, Gosia said, “Call me when you want to be picked up.”
“Okay.” I was all shaky, my fingers icy despite the heat. What did Gosia know? “Thanks, Gosia.” She pulled away after nodding gently at me.
I took a deep breath to steady my nerves.
“You okay?” Kirstyn asked as we started to wander down the strip of stores on the first stretch of the Shops, looking in windows at the card store, Mac’s Pharmacy, Kimmel’s Bagel Shop. “If you were anybody but Phoebe Avery, I’d think you were actually stressed!”
“Stressed?” I forced out a laugh. “No. You want to hear the funniest thing? My sisters rigged up our old baby monitor to spy on our parents!”
“That is fantastic!” she shrieked. “Don’t even tell me you overheard them, you know…”
“No! Ew!”
“So what did you hear?”
“Static, mostly,” I said, adding, when she frowned, “So far!”
We laughed together. “So far,” she repeated. The sun was beating down hard and I thought about suggesting ice cream but decided against it. Kirstyn only orders the nonfat which pisses me off, and anyway I didn’t really want to spend Gosia’s twenty if I could avoid it. So we just wandered around talking about eavesdropping. “I have to try that,” she said. “Baby monitor. I love it! Sorry I was a bitch today.”
“You totally weren’t,” I assured her.
“My mom is just making me nuts,” she whispered, grabbing my arm and pulling me close. “Three more pounds to lose or no dress. I’ll have to wear that hideous organdy poof from my cousin’s wedding last fall. Oldest flower girl in history. Just shoot me now.”
“She won’t make you wear that,” I said as we passed the cell-phone store. “She hated it, too. She’s just stressed,” I told her. “You know how she gets planning parties. But even she can see you’re totally gorgeous.”
Kirstyn sighed. “I wish I could not care what she thinks. Maybe your mom could adopt me. I think I’d be sweeter if I lived in the perfect American family.”
I tried to laugh but it kind of got stuck, and then Luke and William walked out the door of D’Amico’s just as we approached it.
Luke said, “Hey,” and William said, “What’s up,” and when we just nodded, William added, “Man, it’s hot.” I swear I could not even look at Luke at all. Thank goodness I had my sunglasses on.
After an awkward silence, Kirstyn faced Luke dead-on and said, “Funny meeting you here.”
Please don’t tell her, I silently begged him.
“Hilarious,” he said, staring right back.
“Well, see you later,” she said, and turned sharply away.
I started to follow her but turned back toward them. “Or, hey, it’s still really hot out. You guys want to come over and swim?”
“Yeah,” Luke said, his voice sort of squeaking. “Sounds great!”
“What about suits?” William asked.
“You can do shorts,” I told him. “No big deal.”
Kirstyn put her hand on her hip and looked at me, shaking her head slightly. “So much for shoes,” she muttered.
“It’s too hot,” I said. “And I think Fabio’s closes at five anyway.”
I called Gosia and we all stood around waiting for her. I slid her twenty under her pack of gum when I got in the car.
“These guys are coming over to swim,” I told her.
“I’m not,” Kirstyn said. “You can just drop me at home, please.”
“Why?” I asked, turning around.
She gave me a withering look.
“Youch,” William said, the worst possible thing.
Kirstyn’s eyes narrowed slightly before she slid them away and looked out the window. When we got to her driveway, she started to get out but Gosia drove up the hill. “Can you just open the door, please?” she demanded, her hand gripping the handle.
Gosia pushed the button and her door slid open. Kirstyn was out before it had moved a quarter of the distance.
“What’s wrong with her?” William asked bef
ore Gosia had gotten the door closed again, so I just shrugged.
As we made our way around the circle at the top of her driveway, under the portico, I said, “She doesn’t, um, enjoy, you know, swimming.”
“She’s a whack,” William muttered.
Gosia tried to hide it but she was smirking; I saw it. Luckily she didn’t say anything. Instead she turned on her music again and Luke leaned forward. “I love this album!”
“Isn’t it great?” Gosia asked.
“Have you read the lyrics of that one about the train?”
Her eyes met his in the rearview. She nodded.
“I know it,” I added lamely.
When we got to my house, I sent them straight out to the pool house around back and dashed inside to get my suit. “He’s cute,” Gosia whispered.
“Who?”
“Sure,” she said, smirking. “Play innocent. Dinner’s in an hour. Are he and William staying?”
“No,” I whispered. “Just a quick swim. You really think he’s cute?”
She nodded.
I tried not to squeal, I know it! Instead I asked, “Mom and Dad still out?”
She opened the door and the music answered me: I could hear Dad playing the piano in the living room.
“They okay?”
Gosia shrugged. She headed for the kitchen and I took the back stairs by threes, listening to Dad playing something I didn’t recognize. I used to sit on the steps and listen while he played, even in our old house when we had an upright with a broken middle C. Mom bought him the grand piano for his forty-fifth birthday present. We had practically no furniture yet in most of the rooms in this house, because we had just moved in. He cried when the delivery guys started unloading it, and then Mom started crying, too. He only stopped hugging her when he went and sat down on the leather piano bench and started to play, tears still streaming down his cheeks at the sound of that huge thing. He played love songs and laughed at himself for being such a sap, but she shook her head and sat squished next to him on the bench, watching his fingers on the keys. He was still playing when I went to bed that night, Beethoven to Beatles and everything in between, so many songs I had never even heard him play before. It’s the one thing still sure to uncrease my mother’s forehead: sinking down into one of the couches we have now and listening to my father play.
I figured that’s where she was. Part of me wanted to forget about the boys in the pool and just cuddle up with Mom on the couch. But I’m not a baby anymore. Also, right then Mom and I each had our own crap to deal with.
I ripped off my clothes and dropped them on the floor, put on my best suit, the green-and-white one Allison says looks hot on me, and flew down the stairs.
I ran from the back door across the yard in my bare feet to the pool, ripped open the gate, and, seeing the guys were already floating in the middle, dived into the deep end. The cold water hit my body from fingertips to toes like a shockwave, and then it was quiet. I glided underwater to the shallow end to Luke’s raft and flipped it. We ended up in a huge water fight, me, him, and William. When we were all panting, we each grabbed a raft and then floated around for a while, catching our breath, squinting at the sky.
“This is great,” William said. “This is the life. Your babysitter’s really hot.”
“Shut up,” Luke said.
“What? She is, right?”
“Yeah,” Luke agreed. “I’ve had a crush on Gosia since sixth grade.”
“You’re both rude,” I said, flipping over onto my stomach. I didn’t need them comparing me to her. Also, I didn’t think it was normal to mention sixth grade, when Kirstyn would’ve been in the pool with us. We would’ve been playing Marco Polo and nothing would’ve been weird.
I closed my eyes and floated for a while, letting the sun dry me off. Actually, this is nice, I was thinking. Old friends, hanging out together. There’s something really great about old friends, how you don’t even have to talk. You can just float and be perfectly comfortable. Well, almost perfectly. But maybe that’s why there was a tiny part of me that wasn’t in such a big rush to get this year over with—next year maybe everything would change.
Or maybe everything was already changing. Too fast.
“This is great,” William murmured. “Hard to believe it’s past six, and still bright as noon. It’s like summer already. Hey, you know your party?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“You think I could score an extra invite? There’s this girl in all-county jazz band with me, and…”
“No problem,” I lied. Though Kirstyn would swear on her life she didn’t like William at all anymore, I knew she would freak out if he had a date at our party and she didn’t. But what could I say?
“Awesome,” William said, trailing his long fingers in the water. “My mom says no way we can get a pool, too much liability or something. You’re so lucky.”
I closed my eyes. Lucky. Yeah, except, maybe not so much anymore.
When I opened my eyes, William was on his back, his eyes with their long dark eyelashes shut and his hands behind his head, but Luke was lying on his stomach, staring at me.
“What?”
He didn’t answer.
“What are these thingies for, these circles?” William asked.
I squinted over at him. His eyes still closed, he was pointing at the cup holders in his raft.
“Sodas,” I said. “You thirsty?”
“Yeah,” he said.
Hooray for William. I was instantly, overwhelmingly thirsty myself, and grateful for a getaway. “I’ll get some.” I hoisted myself out of the pool and headed for the pool house.
“I’ll help,” Luke offered, and before I could say I really didn’t need any help getting sodas from the pool house fridge, he was out of the pool, dripping on the hot stone deck.
“Okay,” I said. He followed me across the deck and into the pool house, where he closed the door behind us.
10
IT WAS DARK IN THERE UNTIL I opened the refrigerator door. I grabbed two Sprites and handed them to Luke, but didn’t look him in the face. It’s not the first time he’d been in the pool house; we have parties all the time and anyway I could see his and William’s T-shirts on the bed in one of the rooms, the one to my right. But there we were, in the pool house, dripping wet, alone together.
“You want a towel?” I asked, going quickly around him, trying not to look at his flat stomach and tan chest on my way to turning on all the lights and opening the closet. When did he get arm muscles? I flung a towel back toward him. He caught it on top of his soda cans.
“Phoebe,” he said.
I took a breath and forced myself to look up at him. Water was dripping off his hair.
“Yeah?”
He took a deep breath, too, and looked at his feet. “So, uh, what’s going on?”
My mouth opened but nothing came out. Going on? With me and him? Me and Kirstyn? My family? “I honestly have no idea,” I whispered.
He smiled, frowned, then smiled again, so quickly that if I hadn’t been staring at his face I’d definitely have missed the frown.
“What?” I asked, echo-smiling.
“Nothing, just…” He bit his lower lip. “I just know exactly what you mean.”
“You do?”
“No.” When I squinted at him, he smiled again. “Not exactly, I guess, I mean, but yeah. It’s weird, isn’t it?”
“What?” I tried to keep smiling, but it was a challenge.
“Everything,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. Okay, so here’s the thing. He really is incredibly cute. He’s fun and hot and maybe Kirstyn was right about me liking him again, and I had just been in denial.
How intense and black are his eyes? Were they always like that?
He isn’t the clingy little mama’s boy he was when we were five, I thought, but hello, I’m not in a little pink dress anymore, either. And the way I acted to him the first week of seventh grade was so long ago, I was probably rem
embering it all wrong anyway. Maybe I hadn’t been as much of a jerk as I thought. Maybe he’d forgotten, or decided we had all grown up a lot and forgiven me.
There was really nothing stopping us from hooking up, since that’s what we clearly both wanted to do.
Well, anything other than the fact that my best friend would think I was crazy, and an idiot, and a loser. But maybe she would never know anyway.
He took a step toward me. We had only kissed a few times, back when we went out in sixth grade, and all those kisses (other than the last one) were in front of everybody, at those dumb parties we used to have. Still, I could remember how soft his lips were, how lightly they brushed mine, so different from gross Dylan Baker at camp with his gross tongue. Ew, I couldn’t even think about him without gagging; I don’t care how tall he was—yuck. So what if Luke is only my height, and wears Old Navy clothes, and maybe doesn’t shave at all yet, and his father is friends with my father and we’ve known each other forever?
Right there in my pool house, on a perfect warm May day, in my best Calvin Klein bathing suit and him in just shorts, smiling at me like that…it did not seem babyish and boring to think about kissing him again. The opposite, actually.
“I was wondering,” Luke said.
I just waited. I didn’t want to mess him up, in case he had it kind of planned out or something.
“Do you have any chips in here?” he asked.
“Chips?”
“I’m starving.”
“Oh,” I said. “You want some, some what?”
“Whatever, pretzels. Doritos. Remember one time you had those orange things, the crunchy ones?”
“Yeah,” I said. I opened the cabinet with all the snack food. “Take whatever you want.” If this was his introduction to asking me out, I was not hugely impressed. “What else were you, um, going to ask? Or say? Or whatever?”
“Nothing,” he said. “I just…I’m just a little…I’m always hungry lately.” He shrugged apologetically.
“You’re hungry,” I said.
“Is that okay? You seem, kind of, annoyed.”
“No, not at all,” I said, completely annoyed. “Take as much as you want.” You immature puppy. You want chips? That’s what you want? Take them. I don’t know why you had to look all cute and bashful, if all you wanted was a snack. But I didn’t say any of that. I just pointed at the well-stocked shelves.