But what I heard next was far more horrible than anything I could have imagined. “Hey, are you guys almost done in . . .”
I yanked down the dress as fast as I could. I recognized that voice. Sure enough, Teresa’s boyfriend was standing in the dressing-room doorway, slack-jawed and staring at me in all my butt-hanging-out, SpongeBob-underpanted glory.
“What are you doing in here, Jason?” Teresa exclaimed, horrified. “This is a women’s dressing room!”
“Sorry.” Jason snapped his mouth shut. We’d left him out in his Prius in the parking lot reading a book. Since neither Teresa nor I had access to a car that day, she’d sweet-talked him into playing chauffeur. “I wasn’t expecting—” he stammered. Jason was the type of guy who was rarely at a loss for words. But he was now. Score one for me and SpongeBob. “That is, at the mall the dressing rooms are usually . . .”
Meanwhile, I was frantically trying to cover various body parts with pink satin. This was just my luck. I let my laundry pile up for a day or two and I end up flashing the world with the novelty panties my friends got me as a joke.
“What do you want, anyway?” Teresa asked Jason impatiently.
Jason cleared his throat. From the expression in his greenish-gray eyes, I couldn’t quite tell if he was amused or frightened.
“Never mind,” he said, shooting one last glance in the direction of my now-mercifully-hidden underpants before turning away. “I’ll just, um, wait in the car.”
Two
My face was probably still bright red (NOT pink!) when my cell phone rang. Again.
“That’s like the fifth time since we got here,” I muttered, digging through my pile of clothes to find the phone. After Jason left, Teresa had helped me finally remove the Pink Eyesore, so now I was in nothing but my bra and SpongeBobs. “Even Crazy Camille can’t manage to come up with that many crises in forty minutes, can she?”
“Don’t be too sure,” Teresa joked. “She’s managed to have three breakdowns so far over the flowers alone.” She started ticking things off on her fingers. “Then there was the invitation emergency, the various dress debacles . . .”
“And the canapés. Don’t forget the canapés.” My hand finally closed on the cool, smooth shape of my phone. It had stopped ringing by now, so I checked the return number on the last message. To my surprise, it didn’t belong to either my mother or my sister. “Hey, it was Lance.”
I’d tossed the Pink Horror on a chair, and Teresa got busy hanging it up and smoothing out the wrinkles. “I thought he was down the shore this weekend,” she said.
“He is. He’s spending the weekend in Wildwood with his buddies.” I grimaced as I watched her fiddle with my dress. “That’s where I’d be right now too, if it hadn’t been for this stupid fitting.”
I scrolled through the other messages on the phone. Except for the one from my mother that I’d already heard, they were all from Lance.
“Weird,” I murmured. Lance wasn’t the type of boyfriend who called me all the time just to say hi—certainly not four times in forty minutes. Especially on a gorgeous Sunday afternoon when he could be outside taking apart an engine with some of his gearhead beach buddies. Which reminded me: After a whole weekend of that, I could only imagine how gross his fingernails would look. . . .
“So? Go ahead and call him back already,” Teresa said.
I nodded. Still thinking about how I was going to clean up those repulsive fingernails before the wedding, I sank down onto the nearest chair, the white brocade fabric feeling cool and scratchy on my bare legs. I punched Lance’s speed-dial number, then held the phone between ear and shoulder as I grabbed my shorts and pulled them on.
The phone only rang once before Lance answered. “Yo,” he said. “Lance here.”
“Hey, cutie. It’s me.” I zipped up my shorts and reached for my T-shirt. “Sorry I didn’t pick up before. I was at the bridal shop being tortured. Speaking of which, I was just thinking—how would you feel about a his and hers day at the salon the day before Camille’s wedding? You know, facials and manicures, just the two of us—could be fun, right?”
“Um, I don’t think so,” he mumbled. “Listen, Ava. I really need to talk to—”
“All right, all right, no his and hers salon day. Check.” I’d known that that one was a long shot. “But maybe—hang on a sec.”
I removed the phone from my ear just long enough to shrug on my shirt. I wasn’t ready to give up on my quest to make sure Lance looked as good as he could for the big day. As I’d mentioned to Teresa, this wedding was going to be a huge deal. I definitely didn’t want to end up memorialized in the photos—not to mention in my family history—as the girl who showed up with Dirty Fingernails Guy.
He was talking when I put the phone back to my ear. “. . . and so I didn’t think it should wait until I—”
“Hello?” I interrupted. “Sorry, I didn’t catch that. Did you change your mind about the salon yet, big guy?” I used my most enticing hey-there-hot-stuff voice for the last part. Lance loved that voice—I could talk him into almost anything with it.
There was a long pause. “Um, Ava?” he said at last.
It finally dawned on me that he sounded kind of grim. “Lance? Is everything okay?” I asked with a somewhat belated rush of concern. “Wait, you didn’t, like, crash your car in some stupid street race and get hurt or something, did you? Is that why you called? Are you in the hospital?”
Across the dressing room, Teresa glanced over, looking alarmed. I shrugged at her.
“No. I called to tell you I don’t think this is working.”
“What isn’t working?” My mind was still at least partly on his fingernails. For one bizarre moment I thought he was warning me that he wouldn’t be able to get them clean in time.
“You and me. I think we should, uh, maybe see other people.”
The truth finally landed on me with a dizzying thud. “What?” I exclaimed, clutching the phone tighter. “Wait. Are you—are you breaking up with me? Seriously? I mean, seriously?”
Teresa finally stopped fussing with the Pink Horror and stared at me. Meanwhile, Lance was mumbling excuses and explanations, his words coming quickly, as if his usual lazy drawl had been sped up with a fast-forward button. As far as I could tell, the upshot was that he’d fallen for some fellow grease monkey who seemed to be his dream girl, and that he didn’t want to string me along any longer.
“It’s not you; it’s me,” he finished earnestly.
“Whatever.” I was already over this whole conversation. Who did he think he was, anyway? What kind of guy breaks up with his girlfriend of three months over the phone? It made me wonder why I’d stuck with him for so long. “You’ve made your choice. So I guess this is good-bye.”
I hung up before he could say anything else. Then I switched off my phone.
“Guess what?” I asked Teresa sarcastically.
She squeezed onto the chair beside me and put one long, slim arm around my shoulders. “Sorry, sweetie,” she said. “If it’s any consolation, I never thought he was good enough for you anyway.”
“Thanks.” I fished under the chair with my bare feet, searching for my shoes. “Can you believe him? He couldn’t even wait until he got home to tell me in person.”
She stood up and grabbed my shoes out from beneath a different chair. “Just as well,” she said, dropping them in front of me. “You wouldn’t want him to drop the bomb any closer to the wedding, right?”
“The wedding . . .” Now that the shock was starting to wear off, the truth was sinking in. “Oh my God, the wedding! I can’t believe he did this to me! Not only do I have to nurse a broken heart when everyone else is all atwitter about romance and roses and crap like that—” Noticing Teresa’s skeptical look, I grimaced. She knew me too well. “Okay, I have to nurse an annoyed heart. Is that better?”
“Much.”
“Anyway, now I’m going to have to scramble to get another date for the wedding!” I didn’t believ
e in wasting time, so I switched on my phone again. “Who should I ask? I know—Tommy!”
Without waiting for her to answer, I quickly checked the list of work phone numbers in my wallet and then dialed. Tommy was the cute new guy at work—he’d started a few weeks earlier at Wellington Gardens, the huge nursery a couple of towns over where I’d had a part-time job since I turned sixteen. Tommy was tall and broad-shouldered, with smoking Latin looks and a killer smile. He would look much better in a tux than Lance anyway, and potting soil was a lot easier to clean out from under fingernails than axle grease.
“Hold on, Ava,” Teresa said, sounding a bit worried. “Are you sure you should call right now, when you just—”
“Hush, it’s ringing.” I cleared my throat, waiting for Tommy’s husky voice to come on. Instead, it ended up going to voice mail. “Hey, Tommy,” I said, after the beep. “It’s me—Ava. From work, right? Remember me?” Okay, that sounded a little goofy. If he didn’t remember me after working with me for almost a month, he would have to be mentally deficient. I’d helped train him, for Pete’s sake. But there was no going back now, so I plowed on. “Listen, I have a proposition for you. Er, that is, how do you feel about big, fancy weddings? Wait, I mean . . .”
I paused and took a deep breath, a little embarrassed. Anyone who’d heard me at that moment would have thought I’d never asked a guy out before in my life. Clearly, Lance’s bombshell had left me a little scattered.
“Okay, starting over,” I said into the phone. “Look, I need a date for my sister’s wedding the weekend after next. Dinner, dancing, free cake—could be fun. Want to go? Call me back. . . .” I left my cell number, then hung up.
Teresa was staring at me. “What the hell was that? You sounded like a blithering idiot.”
That was Teresa for you. She didn’t believe in dancing around the truth.
“Whatever.” I jammed my feet into my shoes and stood up. “Maybe he’ll think I’m charmingly ditzy. Anyway, it doesn’t matter how I sounded as long as he says yes. Come on, let’s get out of here.”
When we left the dressing room, Bridal Lady was on the phone again, so we just waved our good-byes and headed outside. It was one of those rare perfect Pennsylvania summer days: low eighties, light breeze, negligible humidity. Still, I couldn’t help feeling kind of cranky. Okay, so maybe Lance hadn’t been my dream guy. It still felt pretty rotten to be dumped.
“I can’t believe he did this,” I grumbled, squinting into the afternoon sunshine, which was reflecting off the shiny metal bumpers of the Volvos and SUVs in the strip-mall parking lot. “Where’s Jason?”
“Right over there where we left him.” Teresa headed across the lot toward a shady area under a couple of trees.
Jason was slouched in the front seat of his blue Prius fiddling with his hair in the rearview. That was typical. Jason was almost as obsessed with maintaining perfect hair as the King of Hair Gel himself, Boring Bob. The windows were all down, and loud music poured out of the car’s sound system.
“Do you mind, princess?” I leaned in through the passenger side window and cranked down the music. “Some of us still have functioning eardrums. Personally, I’d like to keep mine that way.”
“Hey!” Jason reached over and turned it back up, though not quite as loud as before. “I was listening to that song.”
I made a face. “You call that a song? What is this crap, anyway? I’ve never even heard it before.”
Like I said, I was in a cranky mood. Actually, the music wasn’t that bad. On a different day I might even have called it catchy in a cool punk-ska-retro kind of way.
“It’s his new favorite local band,” Teresa said, opening the car door. “They’re called the Manayunk Mucus.”
“Ew, what a name.” I wrinkled my nose as I climbed into the backseat. “I mean, the mucus part is bad enough. But who even goes to Manayunk anymore?”
Jason glanced back at me, then over at Teresa. “Okay, I guess she’s still holding a grudge,” he said. “Listen, Ava. I’m sorry I walked in on you and SpongeBob just now, but it was—”
“Hold that thought,” I interrupted as my phone rang. I fished it out and pressed it to my ear. “Hello?”
“Hey, Ava. It’s Tommy. From the store?”
“Hi!” I smiled and shot Teresa a thumbs-up. “What’s up? Did you get my message? What do you say—can you make it?”
“Not exactly.” Tommy sounded apologetic. “That is—I’m already going to your sister’s wedding. Do you know Millie Myers? She’s Camille’s sorority sister Mary Myers’s cousin.”
“Um . . .” I was definitely a little confused by now. “Maybe, I guess.”
“Her mother and mine are old friends. So Millie asked me to the wedding. You know—as her date.”
“Oh.” Now I got it. But that didn’t mean I had to like it. Why did Camille have to invite half the population of the Delaware Valley to her stupid wedding, anyway?
“I’m sorry, Ava,” Tommy said. I could imagine his adorable face going all bummed out and his tanned forehead wrinkling with regret. “If I didn’t already have a date, I’d be all over going with you. Maybe you can save me a dance?”
“Sure.” I did my best to sound chipper and carefree. “Uh, thanks for calling back.”
“See you at work.”
“Okay. Bye.” I hung up. Teresa was staring at me from the front seat. “Tommy already has a date for the wedding,” I told her.
“Bummer.” Teresa glanced over at Jason, who looked confused. “Ava just got dumped by that loser, Lance. She’s working on finding herself a replacement date for the wedding.”
I winced, wishing she hadn’t told him. Jason thought he was pretty funny, and I could only imagine the obnoxiously “witty” teasing I was in for now. Probably something like “always a bridesmaid, never a date.” Or a suggestion that I should just go with my good friend SpongeBob. I did my best to steel myself for what was sure to be a supremely annoying ride home.
To my surprise, though, he just shrugged. “Sorry, Ava,” he said. Reaching over and punching the start button on the dashboard, he put the Prius in reverse. “I’ll tell you, I’m just glad Teresa’s going to be out of town so I’m not stuck going to this thing.” He backed expertly out of the parking space. “Since everyone in the world—or at least everyone on the Main Line—will be at Camille’s extravaganza, I figure I’ll have Burrito Moe’s all to myself that night.”
“You’re lucky,” I muttered.
I meant it too. Because even hanging out with Jason eating tacos would probably be better than being the pathetic girl in the ugly dress without a date to her own sister’s wedding.
Three
I wasn’t the type to wallow for very long. By the time Jason’s car pulled into my driveway, I was back on track. If Lance was out and Tommy wasn’t available, I would just have to find another date. After all, the Big Day was still nearly two weeks away. I figured it shouldn’t take me more than two days to find the perfect date. Two hours if I was lucky.
“You could just go by yourself, you know,” Teresa pointed out as I climbed out of the car.
“Go stag?” I shrugged. “I guess. But it’ll be way more fun to go with someone. Especially since you won’t be there. I’m definitely going to need someone around to help me make fun of my sister’s Big Fat Main Line Wedding.”
Jason smirked. “Nice attitude, maid of honor.”
I ignored him, leaning on the passenger-side window frame to talk to Teresa. “Anyway, I’m not looking for my true love here. I just need some eye candy to walk in with. How hard can it be to find that? There are tons of cute guys around here, especially now that everyone’s back home from college for the summer.”
“Well, okay.” Teresa didn’t seem totally convinced. “Call me later and let me know what happens.”
“Will do.” I waved and stepped back. Jason leaned one elbow on the window and leaned out to back down the driveway. I stared at his arm, which was just muscular and ta
nned enough without being overdone. Nice.
Then I shuddered. After all, this was Jason I was ogling. My best friend’s boyfriend and the most annoying guy I knew. Double trouble.
“Yeah, I must be feeling desperate,” I muttered under my breath.
As the blue Prius disappeared down the tree-lined street on its way back to Montgomery Avenue, I turned and headed inside. My family’s house was a rambling old Tudor revival–style place with a big, deep porch, lots of peaked windows, and several mature shade trees in the front yard. It looked completely old-fashioned and charming from the outside, though the inside was a lot more up-to-date. The perfect combination, if you asked me.
I punched the code into the security-system number pad by the front door and let myself in. The AC was on, and it felt almost too cold inside.
“Anybody home?” I called out. There was no answer, so I kicked off my shoes and padded down the front hallway in my bare feet.
The spacious eat-in kitchen was empty but smelled faintly of scrambled eggs. There were breakfast dishes in the sink and papers scattered all over the butcher-block table. I didn’t even have to walk over there to know that the papers had something to do with the wedding. Just about everything in the Hamilton house these days had something to do with the wedding.
There was a note stuck on the refrigerator with a golf-ball-shaped magnet. I walked over to read it.
At the club. Home in time for dinner. Dad
No surprises there. My father was an avid golfer at the best of times. Lately, with the increasing frenzy of talk about flower arrangements, seating charts, and whatnot, he’d all but moved into the club full-time. Not that I blamed him.
I poured myself a glass of orange juice. Then I grabbed the cordless phone off the kitchen counter, dug my little black book out of my backpack in the mud room, and headed for the sliding glass door leading out to the backyard. Dragging one of the teak pool lounge chairs into the shade of the wisteria arbor, I sat down and got to work.
Something Borrowed Page 2