Little Lies

by Cherie Bennett

  I saw Shep nod thoughtfully. My father beamed. Mia had her eyes closed, as if to block out everything but what my mom was saying. My brother listened carefully.

  My mother then talked about Wait/Great—why she had organized it and how parents should support it—tying it into the theme of her sermon. She said she hoped every single teenager in our church community would want to be a part of it.

  “Young people today are challenged as never before. They should be able to rely not just on themselves and their families for the discipline and good cheer that Paul found so important, but also on each other. Wait/Great will help them do that. I hope you’ll do everything you can to support this important Church of Beverly Hills ministry. And let us say amen.”

  When Marsha Shelton asks for an “amen,” she gets an “amen.”

  Shep leaned in toward me. “I’m going to try to get my sister to come to that meeting.”

  I gulped.

  Why did I gulp? Two reasons. First, I understood that even if there’d been a Wait/Great group back in Mankato, I still would have done the deed with Sean. It wasn’t like I’d lacked for a community around me back there.

  Second, I gulped at the thought of Shep suggesting that his sister come to Wait/Great. Alex would hate that suggestion. She would hate it so much.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  I’ve talked about Lake Washington. It’s the lake where my friend Shelby’s family has a cabin. ’Nuff said.

  Aside from its being the scene of the crime, Lake Washington is a nice place to fish, canoe, and sail. Shelby taught me to sail in a Sunfish sailboat. They’re about eight feet long, seat two people uncomfortably, and have one small sail.

  Not so the Netflix I.

  The Netflix I was the smaller of the Goldsteins’ two yachts. It was twenty-six feet from bow to stern and equipped with a mainsail, a jib, and a spinnaker. There were also auxiliary engines, which could make a sturdy fourteen miles an hour if the Pacific winds happened to die at an inopportune time. The Netflix I had an enclosed bathroom, a full kitchen, and a fantastic sound system and slept six.

  I learned all this as Brett motored us out of the slip where the Netflix I was docked at the Marina del Rey Yacht Club. As we headed toward the jetties, we passed the Goldsteins’ second, newer yacht, the Netflix II. Too large for a regular slip, it had to be anchored in open water and was so huge it made the Netflix I look like a Sunfish. I saw a helicopter on the stern deck.

  It was Sunday afternoon, several hours after church. Brett had called me to ask if I wanted to go sailing. When I said I’d love to, but it would have to be in the late afternoon, he said that was the best time to be on the water. He picked me up not in his Shelby, but in a brand-new Mercedes GLK350 that belonged to his parents. We were at the yacht club by four-thirty, and motoring out by four-forty-five.

  Both of us were dressed casually, in shorts and T-shirts, with baseball caps to block the sun from our eyes and sunscreen to block it from everywhere else. Brett was at the helm while I leaned over the port railing. There was a lot of boat traffic, but Brett expertly threaded his way toward the open ocean. When there was no chance of ship-to-ship carnage, he hoisted the large mainsail and then the smaller jib. And off we went.

  It was perfect weather for sailing; wind was out of the south at fifteen miles an hour—excuse me, fifteen knots, in nautical talk—but there was just a light chop on the water. I breathed briny air and watched Brett cleat the halyards so the sails would stay full of wind. Then he motioned for me to join him on the bridge.

  “Thanks for getting us out here safely, Captain,” I joked.

  “You’re welcome, crew. Now, if you’ll go below, you’ll find a red cooler. Bring it up.”

  I saluted. “Aye-aye, sir.”

  How a full cooler got to the galley, I couldn’t imagine. We certainly hadn’t brought one with us. Yet there it was; Brett must have preordered it. I wondered what it had cost, but then realized that if you had to ask, you probably couldn’t afford to be a member at the yacht club.

  The cooler was full of beer, champagne, and juices on ice, plus clear containers of sushi and an assortment of fresh fruit.

  “Nice spread,” I commented.

  “Thanks to the club kitchen. And my father.” Brett cupped his hands around his mouth and called toward shore, “Thanks, Dad! I mean it!”

  Aww.

  I took a bottle of pomegranate juice; Brett took an Ekstra beer, which he said was brewed in Lithuania. “Don’t worry. I’m only having one,” he assured me.

  I shrugged. “It’s not for me to say what you drink.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “I know what you’re thinking. Plus, you went to church this morning. What was your mother’s sermon? How her eldest daughter needs to avoid a certain Jewish teen television actor who’d dare drink a beer on his father’s yacht?”

  I sipped the juice. “That’s closer to the truth than you’d guess. Except for the Jewish part.”

  “She preached about yachts?” Brett asked.

  “Funny. No, she talked about beer. Well, not just beer.”

  I filled him in on the Wait/Great thing at church. I held practically nothing back. How it had come about, that my mother had asked me to spearhead it, even that the accident involving him and Alex had been a big impetus in my mother’s thinking.

  “She’s not saying, ‘Wait till you’re married,’ ” I hastened to explain. “She’s saying, ‘Wait until you’re an adult.’ ”

  Brett adjusted the wheel so we were heading due west, into the afternoon sun. “Should I dump this beer and switch to prune juice?”

  “ ‘Judge not, that ye be not judged,’ ” I quoted.

  “Not helpful,” was Brett’s rejoinder. “Since our mother’s making plenty of judgments herself.”

  “She’s judging the behavior, not the person,” I responded quickly, enjoying the repartee.

  “Which is a distinction without a difference,” Brett retorted with a smile as the Netflix I cut heavily through a larger-than-average swell. Spray kicked up in foamy shimmers on both sides of the boat. “A person is what he does. When he stops doing? He’s dead. Right?”

  Let me stop right here and say what this conversation was making me.

  Hot. And I’m not talking about the blazing afternoon sun, either.

  It didn’t matter that Brett and my mother—or Brett and I, for that matter—didn’t see Wait/Great the same way. I sometimes think that agreement between people in a couple—not that Brett and I were an official couple—is highly overrated. He was thinking and talking and grinning, and I was thinking and talking and grinning. We were connected in this very deep way.

  I loved it, though the next thing he said would really have annoyed my mom.

  “You do what you want with it, Natalie, but I think this Wait/Great thing is ridiculous.”

  I looked him in the eye. Hot.

  “Don’t have to be a part of it, then.”

  He looked right back at me. Hotter.

  “I won’t be.”

  “Good.”

  “Don’t you want to hear why I think that?” He finished his beer, put the bottle into a recycling bin, and, true to his word, cracked open a container of cold Fiji water. Hottest.

  I did want to hear, but there was also a boat to sail. Brett brought us around so that the Netflix I ran north, extending the sails to catch the full power of the south wind. He said there wasn’t enough breeze to set a spinnaker, but it still felt like we were flying.

  Suddenly, I saw something jump through the water to our left. Then something else. It took a couple of seconds for me to realize they were dolphins, keeping pace with the boat.

  Beautiful. Stunning. Like Brett’s eyes.

  We watched for a while, until the dolphins peeled off for parts unknown.

  “Okay, that was fantastic,” Brett said about the dolphins. “But back to what we were saying. I think Wait/Great is dooming kids to failure.” The wind picked up slightly; Brett loosened the mai
nsail halyard even more. “Kids aren’t dumb. We know that drinking too much is bad for us. We know that drugs are bad for us. We know that unsafe sex is bad for us, and sex too young is bad for us. I’ll agree that maybe a group like this is good for your little brother. But high school kids? Here? Please. Mark my words, Nat. There’s someone in your group who’s having secret sex with her boyfriend and is too embarrassed to say anything. In fact, she’ll never say anything. But how holy is that?”

  Whoa. That had been quite a monologue. Especially because the person he was talking about having secret sex was sailing north about three feet away from him. I hoped that if I was blushing, he’d think it was early-onset sunburn.

  Brett turned back to me. “What do you think?”

  “I think you’ve got a point,” I admitted. “But I also think there’s strength in numbers. There’s strength you can find in a group that you can’t find on your own.”

  Brett nodded thoughtfully, then reached into the cooler and took out a container of sashimi—sliced raw fish. He held a piece to my lips.

  “Halibut,” he murmured. “Try it.”

  I opened my mouth; he slid the firm white morsel between my lips. It was an amazingly intimate gesture. Delicious. As I chewed, I saw one of those really fast speedboats called cigarette boats cut a sharp turn in the distance, sending up a wave of water before it roared on.

  “You’ve got a point, too,” Brett acknowledged. “In Judaism, did you know there are some prayers that shouldn’t be said unless you’ve got at least ten people together? Ten men, some places.”

  I told Brett I’d never heard that, but it wasn’t as if there was a big Jewish community in Mankato.

  “I’m serious. To read the Torah—that’s the big scroll of the five books of Moses—at a service? You need ten people. Taking it out and reading it is communal, it goes back—”

  “Brett? You might want to change course a little.” I pointed to the speedboat. It was now bearing down on us at a good clip.

  Actually, “bearing down” is an understatement. There were two bald guys in the speedboat cockpit, and they were brandishing beer bottles and whooping as their vessel smashed through the waves toward us.

  “Drunk assholes,” Brett muttered.

  He yanked the halyards from their cleats and let the sails flap in the wind. We slowed to a dead stop, bouncing on the groundswell. If the nautical drunk drivers wanted the right of way, they now had it.

  That wasn’t what they wanted. The driver and his buddy whooped some more and angled their high-speed craft toward us.

  “Put this on.” Brett kept his voice calm but handed me a life jacket. He slipped one over his head at the same time. “And get ready to jump.”

  They were a hundred yards away now, and closing. Fifty. Twenty-five.

  “Jump!” Brett yelled.

  We jumped overboard, away from the onrushing boat.

  I waited for a sickening impact.

  They didn’t hit us. Instead, the driver cut an insanely close high-speed turn and sent an eight-foot-high wall of water in our direction that pushed us away from the yacht. Fortunately, Brett and I were both good swimmers. As the cigarette boat roared away, we swam back to the Netflix I, where a ladder hung on the starboard side from the deck to the water.

  I climbed up easily. So did he. We stood there dripping. My heart pounded.

  “Know what?” Brett asked as he dug around in a box for some towels. “Maybe your mom is right. Maybe those guys need to be in Wait/Great for life!”

  He found a white towel, seemed about to toss it to me, and then changed his mind. Instead, he crossed the deck and touched it gently to my forehead. My cheek. My other cheek. My forehead again, my chin. My lips.

  I wouldn’t have thought that being patted dry by Brett Goldstein after an emergency dunk in the chilly Pacific would be romantic, which just shows you that sometimes my thoughts don’t run in the right direction.

  It was incredibly romantic. It was even more romantic when he kissed me. His lips tasted briny like the sea but with the indescribable spice of Brett. I didn’t want the kiss ever to end. Brett did his best to oblige me.

  “Well, well, well. If it isn’t the Virginator herself! With the one and only Brett Goldstein. Brett, did you have to bribe the guy at the gatehouse to let her in?”

  I hadn’t heard that voice in a long time, but its unpleasantness was indelible.

  Brooke Summers. One of Alex’s party-girl friends. She wore tight white trousers and a beige tank top over the stringiest of string bikinis. Her pale white skin would have fit the décor at Whitehall perfectly, her blue eyes were the color of the western sky, and her thick dark hair cascaded over her shoulders.

  Brooke was flanked by two blond girls I’d never seen before. Each wore a sarong skirt with a bikini top. Each had abs that rippled in a way that mine never would.

  It was two hours after our sail. Immediately after our impromptu swim, we’d headed back to the club. Brett had radioed ahead, and the club steward—an elderly man in a white uniform—had met us at the slip with bathrobes and towels. After we’d each changed below, the steward said he’d wash and dry our clothes and have them ready in an hour and fifteen minutes. In the meantime, why didn’t we use the club’s coed steam and sauna rooms?

  We did, and it was heavenly. When we were done, our clothes were waiting in our respective locker rooms. Then Brett led me to the oceanfront yacht club restaurant, with its teak deck that faced the Pacific. We settled in at a cozy table for two under a spacious umbrella. Not that we needed the umbrella, since the setting sun had dipped behind an offshore fog bank, turning it into a striking low-slung curtain of red and pink. No shot at the green flash that night, I told Brett.

  Brett ordered for us: fried calamari appetizer, fresh scallops and bok choy in a Sauterne wine sauce, plus a bottle of sparkling cider. We’d been sitting in companionable silence, holding hands and sipping cider, when Brooke showed up with her wing-girls.

  Ugh. I really, really didn’t like her. And not just because she’d obviously encouraged Alex to drink on the night of her accident, either.

  Brett kept his voice easy. “Brooke, where are your manners? Gone with your virtue? Let me do the honors. Nat, you know Brooke. Meet the MacGregor sisters. Brittany and Frances. They’re all members here, too.”

  “Nice to meet you,” I managed to say.

  The MacGregors had nothing to say. Brett had nothing to say. Brooke had nothing to say. I definitely had nothing to say. For a long half minute, it was an uncomfortable Sunday-evening tableau on the deck.

  Then—why was I not surprised?—Brooke spoke up.

  “Virginator, do you mind if we join you? Brit and Frances and I want to hear all about the Wait/Great group. We’re thinking about signing up. Isn’t the first meeting next Saturday night?”

  Crap. How could she possibly know? Who would have told her?

  It didn’t make a difference. She knew.

  Brittany nodded and stretched so that her abs rippled. “Yeah, that’s right! Know what? We can go to Wait/Great, and then let’s go clubbing!”

  “Definitely!” Frances chortled. “It’s an open meeting, right, Natalie?”

  “Right!” Brooke answered for me. “The meeting is open, but the idea is to keep ’em closed, like the Virginator here! I just wonder how long Brett can hold out.”

  She cracked up at her own juvenile humor. Her minions laughed with her.

  I found nothing funny.

  Brett spoke up. “Guys? If you know what’s good for you, you’ll leave now.”

  Brooke gave us a little wave. “Already gone. Have a great night! And, Natalie? Your hand looked sooo cute in Brett’s. But I really have to know. Is that okay in Wait/Great? Because I might have to call your mommy!”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  I’d been awake on Monday morning for all of twenty seconds when my iPhone rang. Or maybe it woke me up. I’m a slow riser; I couldn’t really tell.

  “Hullo?” I c
roaked.

  It was Alex. “I’m sorry to wake you up so early. I wanted to tell you I’m going back to Arizona.”

  That woke me up in a hurry. “You are? Since when?”

  “Yep. Shep and I agree it’s the best thing. A check-in at rehab. It was my idea, actually.”

  It was the day that I was supposed to be navigator for my father as he went from meeting to meeting about Inside Doubt. I’d set my alarm for eight. The first meeting was at eleven-fifteen, at Universal.

  “Is there, um, a specific reason?” I asked her, stifling a yawn.

  Alex laughed a little. “As in, did I have a date last night with Jack Daniel’s? Nopers.”

  “Then …”

  “It just made sense to me. I’m feeling better physically. But I want to make sure I’m good in my brain, too.” Alex was silent for a moment. “I did what I did at the party, Nat. No one forced me drink like that.”

  I asked her how long she’d be away. She’d be back on Saturday or Sunday. I asked if I’d be able to talk to her while she was there. Unlikely, she said.

  “And you’re sure there’s no specific reason you’re going.” I knew I was pressing, but I just had to know.

  “Just trying to keep myself safe,” she said.

  “Then good luck, and I’ll see you when you’re back.”

  “Tell Mia, okay?” Alex asked. “We’re leaving for the airport in twenty minutes.”

  “Will do. I’ll miss you.”

  “I’ll miss you, too. Have a good week.”

  Alex clicked off. I put my iPhone by my pillow and stretched out. Alex was going back to rehab for a refresher. In a way, that had to be good. In another way, it wasn’t so great. People don’t go to rehab because it’s fun. Maybe she didn’t drink while I was at the yacht club being humiliated by Brooke and the MacGregor sisters, but maybe she was sorely tempted.