by Meg Cabot
I could only blink at her, stunned not so much by her outburst—okay, not at ALL stunned by the outburst—but by its content. Rob keeps scrapbooks about me? Rob watches the TV show about me? Rob thinks I’m brave and smart and funny? She thinks I broke ROB’S heart?
Boy, had she ever gotten THAT one wrong.
Could she possibly have been telling the truth? Could any of that stuff be even remotely—
“I HATE YOU!”
I ducked just as the lamp whizzed past my head.
Good thing, too, since the thing was made of brass, and ended up denting the cheap drywall, instead of my skull.
I straightened and glared at her with narrowed eyes.
“Okay,” I said, “that’s it. You don’t get to pack your stuff. You’re coming with me now, just as you are.”
And I reached out and grabbed her by her ear.
Sure, it’s an age-old technique, used by mothers worldwide to control fractious offspring.
But did you know the U.S. Marines use it occasionally as well, to quell a recalcitrant suspect? They do, actually.
Because it not only works, but it doesn’t leave a mark. On the victim, I mean.
Oh, yeah. I learned a lot of useful stuff like that while I was overseas.
Hannah balked at first over being dragged by her ear from her boyfriend’s cushy apartment to my motorcycle. But, as I explained to her, it was either that or I called the cops, and Randy got an extra-nice surprise when he got home from work that night, in the form of an arrest for statutory rape.
She finally gave in, but not exactly what you’d call graciously. I was strapping my helmet on her—I didn’t have a spare, so I was going to have to risk my precious cranium to transport the little brat home—when she stiffened.
I knew without even glancing over my shoulder what she was looking at.
“Where is he?” I asked evenly. “And don’t get any ideas about calling him over here. I can dial nine-one-one faster than anybody you’ve ever seen.”
“He’s getting out of his car,” Hannah said, her gaze devouring the object of her affections the way Ruth devours éclairs—or would if she went off her no-flour-or-sugar diet. “He’s going to be really upset when he sees I’m gone.”
“Yeah, well,” I said, “I bet five dollars you never hear from him again.”
“Are you kidding?” Hannah shook her head. “He’ll go to the ends of the earth looking for me if he has to. He told me. We’re soul mates.”
Straddling the bike, I glanced in the direction she was staring, and saw a tall, skinny guy getting out of a Trans Am.
Seriously. Why do they always drive a Trans Am?
But instead of heading for Apartment 2T, old Randy headed straight for Apartment 1S. Hannah and I watched in silence as he thumped once on the door. It opened and a dark-haired girl, who looked even younger than Hannah, peered up at him. He leaned down and pressed a kiss on her that appeared to make her knees melt, since he had to drag her back into the apartment, as her legs apparently failed to work properly anymore.
Behind me, Hannah made a faint noise, like a kitten who has only just woken from a long, deep sleep.
“Huh,” I said, gunning the engine. “Looks like Randy’s got more than one soul mate, doesn’t it?”
Then I got us out of there just as fast as I could. Without going over the speed limit, of course.
Eight
Rob was on the phone when I tugged open the screen door and then pulled a very humbled Hannah into his living room.
His jaw dropped when he saw us. Then, remembering himself, he said into the phone, “Gwen? Yeah. She just walked in. I don’t know. No, she looks fine. Yeah.” He held the phone out towards Hannah. “Your mother wants to talk to you, Han.”
Hannah’s face crumpled. Then she turned and ran dramatically up the stairs, weeping the whole way. A second later, we heard a bedroom door slam.
Rob looked at me. I rolled my eyes. He said into the phone, “Gwen? Yeah. She’s a little…upset. Let me go talk to her. Then I’ll call you back. Yeah. Bye.”
Then he hung up and stared at me some more.
“She’s in love,” I said, nodding my head in the direction Hannah’s sobs were floating from.
“But she’s all right?” he asked in a tight voice.
“Physically,” I said. “I think a little visit to the ob-gyn might be in order.”
His legs seemed to give out from beneath him. He sagged onto a chair at the dining room table.
“Thank you, Jess,” he said faintly, speaking not to me, but to the carved wooden fruit bowl in the center of the table.
I shrugged. Gratitude makes me uneasy.
Particularly when it comes from someone who looks as fine as Rob does in a pair of jeans. It was so unfair that he should be so hot and at the same time so unattainable.
Unless any of that stuff Hannah had told me back at the apartment complex was true.
But how could it possibly—
To keep my mind from straying into this dangerous territory, I looked around Rob’s place. It had been totally redone since I’d last been there. The chintz his mom had loved so much was long gone and replaced with masculine-looking—but still nice—olive-greens and browns. The flowered couch was nowhere to be seen, replaced by a brown suede one. The old nineteen-inch Sony was now a sleek plasma screen, mounted to the wall above a dark wood bookcase filled with CDs and DVDs.
Whatever else Rob might have been through since I last saw him, he wasn’t hurting for cash. He’d converted his mother’s place into a bona fide bachelor pad.
“You got any soda or something?” I asked. Because thinking about all the girls he might have been entertaining in said bachelor pad had left me feeling a little weak.
“In the fridge,” he said. He still hadn’t taken his eyes off the fruit bowl. There were three red apples and a banana ripening in it. If I wasn’t mistaken, Rob Wilkins appeared to be in shock.
I went into the kitchen. It, too, had been totally remodeled, the old white farmhouse cupboards replaced by sleek unpainted cherry wood. The lucite counter was gone and a black granite one gleamed in its place. The appliances were all new, too, and were stainless steel instead of white.
I found two Cokes in the fridge and brought one out to him before taking a seat in a chair across the table from his. I figured, judging from the way he couldn’t stop staring at that fruit bowl, his electrolytes had sunk as low as mine. Or something.
“Where’d you get the money for all this?” I asked, popping open my Coke can and nodding towards the plasma screen. My mom would have killed me if she’d heard me—it’s totally impolite to ask someone how they got the money to pay for something. But I figured Rob wouldn’t care.
He didn’t.
“Dentists,” he said. And looked away from the fruit bowl long enough to open his own soda can.
“Dentists?”
He took a long slug from the Coke, then sat the can down again on an expensive woven place mat.
“Sorry,” he said. “Yeah, dentists. They’re about the only people who can afford Harleys anymore. Well, and retired doctors. And lawyers.”
I remembered the bike he’d been fixing up in his barn two Thanksgivings before. The bike he’d been fixing up when I’d told him I loved him. The time he hadn’t said he loved me back.
“I get it,” I said. “You’ve been buying old bikes, fixing them up, and selling them?”
“Right,” he said. “The market for antique bikes is incredibly hot right now.”
I thought about my bike, parked out in his gravel driveway. I wondered where my dad had gotten it. I can’t believe I had never thought to ask. Had Rob—
But no. No, that would just be too weird.
“That’s great,” I said instead. “The place looks…” Move-in ready. God, what is WRONG with me? “The place looks really nice.”
“Not nice enough, apparently,” Rob said with a grimace and a glance up the stairs.
“Y
eah,” I said. “About that. She lied to you, you know.”
“About what was going on with her mom?” Rob nodded. “I know. Now. Gwen—that’s her mom—and I have been talking. Hannah snowed us both pretty good, it looks like. She told Gwen I was suicidal over a girl and that I’d begged her to come stay with me a few weeks to help give me a reason for living.”
I thought back to what Hannah had said, about my breaking Rob’s heart. So I guess it hadn’t been true after all. It had all just been to get back at me.
But what about the scrapbook? And making her watch the TV show?
“She met him on the Internet,” I said, and filled Rob in on the details about “Randy.”
“I’ll kill him,” Rob said simply, when I was through.
“Well, you may have to stand in line,” I said, and told him about the girl we’d seen in Apartment 1S. “I don’t think Hannah’s taking off is going to upset him for long. Looked to me like he had plenty of other sweet young things to choose from.”
Rob gazed at me concernedly across the fruit bowl. “I don’t want Hannah to have to deal with cops and testifying and things like that. I mean…she’s only fifteen years old.”
“I thought that’s how you might feel about it,” I said, absently picking up some papers that had been lying farther down the table, since it hurt to meet his gaze. “Hey. What’s this?”
I held up the papers I had seized. They were a course catalog for Indiana University’s College of Arts and Sciences, and a slip of paper with various numbers written on it.
“My fall class schedule,” Rob said casually. “I’ve been taking night classes. You want another soda?”
“Sure,” I said, looking at the courses he’d listed. Intro to Comparative Lit. Freshman Psych. Biology 101. “Geez, Rob,” I said. “You own the garage, fix up old bikes, AND go to college part-time? And you thought you’d just add a teen kid sister to all of that?”
“I had it under control,” Rob said in a voice that indicated his jaw was gritted. “At least—”
“Until the kid sister came along,” I said. “Still. What were you thinking?”
“I didn’t think she’d be…well, the way she is.”
“What’d you THINK she’d be like?” I asked, taking the second can of soda from him.
“I thought she’d be more like you,” he said, causing me nearly to choke to death on what I’d just swallowed.
“ME?” I gurgled. “Oh my God, you have to be kidding me. I was the biggest pain in the ass in the world when I was her age.”
“That’s not how I remember it,” Rob said. But not in what I would call an affectionate manner.
“Yeah? Well, you can ask my parents,” I said.
“You weren’t like Hannah,” Rob said, shaking his head. “I mean, yeah, you got in trouble. But it was for punching people, not shacking up with guys you met on the Internet. You would never have…”
His voice trailed off. The only sound in the house was that of Hannah’s sobs, still coming loud and clear from what could only, I assumed, have been Rob’s old bedroom. He’d have moved into the master bedroom his mom used to sleep in. I was pretty sure it probably wasn’t pink anymore, either.
“Well,” I said, because I couldn’t, for the life of me, think of a solitary other thing to say. I mean, I wanted to ask him, of course. If what Hannah had said was true—about his having a scrapbook about me, and the part about me having broken his heart—
But Hannah had already told so many whoppers, it didn’t seem likely that the ones I wanted most to be true were actually going to be the only truths she’d told.
Especially since Rob wasn’t exactly giving off any Let’s-go-back-to-whatever-we-were vibes.
On the other hand, he HAD just found out his kid sister had been seduced by a twenty-seven-year-old Trans Am owner named Randy.
“I better go,” I said. “I’m sure Mom’s got dinner ready by now.”
“Sure,” Rob said. “I’ll walk you out.”
And the next thing I knew, we were strolling across his well-groomed lawn to my bike.
I wanted to ask him, then. You know, if it was one of his. But the truth was, a part of me already knew.
“She’s a beauty,” Rob said, nodding towards the bike.
“Blue Beauty,” I said automatically, before realizing how cheesy it would sound out loud.
“She runs good?” he asked.
“Like a kitten,” I said.
“I can’t believe somebody ever gave you a license,” he said with a chuckle.
“One of the few perks,” I said, “of working for the government.”
Then wished I hadn’t. Because Rob’s smile vanished.
“Right,” he said. “Well. Thank you. I mean, for bringing her back.”
I felt like a total and complete jackass. There was so much I wanted to say—so much I wanted to ask.
But all that came tumbling out of my mouth instead were the words, “I’m sorry.”
He looked down at me in the purpling light, as the sun sunk down below the treetops, past the fields that surrounded the farm.
“Sorry?” he asked. “For what?”
“For,” I said uncomfortably. For everything, I wanted to say. For being such a freak. For listening to my mother. For ever letting you out of my sight.
“For all that stuff I said to you last night” was what ended up coming out of my mouth. “For acting like such a total—um, überbitch, is how I believe your sister put it.”
Something happened to his face, then. It seemed to twitch, almost as if I’d slapped it.
But instead of looking angry about it, an expression of—well, something I couldn’t identify—spread across his face. And the next thing I knew, he had put his hand over mine, where it rested on the gearshift.
“Jess,” he said.
Who knows what would have happened next if he hadn’t been interrupted by a tinkling crash from the upstairs bedroom Hannah had locked herself inside? The crash was followed by an enraged scream. Hannah was having a tantrum.
The truth is, even if she hadn’t…well. I doubt anything would have happened next, anyway.
“You better go deal with that,” I said in a voice that didn’t sound much like my own. That’s on account of how dry my throat had grown, despite the two Cokes.
“Yeah,” Rob said, dropping his hand from mine and glancing back towards the house. “I guess I better. Listen. Will you call me this time? Before you go back to New York?”
His eyes seemed to blaze in the twilight.
“So we can talk about what we’re going to do about Randy, I mean,” he added quickly, lest I make the mistake of thinking he actually, you know. Cared about me. As more than just a friend.
“Sure,” I said. Even though I was totally lying. Because the truth was, I knew I could never be just friends with him. This was good-bye—whether he knew it or not. “See ya.”
“See ya,” he said. And turned and walked slowly back to the house.
I tugged on my helmet, relieved that, if he should happen to turn and look back—fat chance of that happening—the plastic shield would hide the tears that had sprung suddenly into my eyes.
God, I am such an idiot. First for falling for Hannah’s lies, and then for ever believing—
But whatever. Really, what had changed? Nothing. He was still just a guy I’d—whatever-we-were—for a while.
Still. I mean, at least Hannah, messed up as she was, had taken a chance on the guy she loved. Sure, he was a jerk and obviously didn’t care about her at all.
But at least she’d gotten some pleasure out of it. At least, I hoped so.
What had I gotten out of my relationship with Rob? Nothing but heartache.
The funniest thing? Those things Hannah had said Rob had told her about me—they weren’t true. I wasn’t the brave one. No, that was Hannah. Sure, I’d risked my life, plenty of times. But Hannah had risked something that, in the end, proved much more painful to lose:
> Her heart.
I didn’t look back as I drove away. Because I didn’t want to see him close the door on me.
Again.
Nine
I returned to my parents’ house to find a party in full swing.
It’s really something what my mom can do when she puts her mind to it. She’d decided she wanted to have a party to celebrate my (temporary) homecoming, and by the time I got back from rescuing Rob’s little sister, a party was what was going on.
And okay, it was a bit on the small side for Mom.
But both Ruth and Skip’s parents were there from next door, as was Douglas, with his girlfriend, Tasha. Even Tasha’s parents, the Thompkinses, from across the street, were there, Dr. Thompkins out on the back deck with my dad and Mr. Abramowitz, swapping barbecue tips (not that my dad, a restaurateur and himself an amazing cook, was listening to any of theirs).
I had always felt uncomfortable around the Thompkinses, since their only son, Tasha’s brother, Nate, disappeared three years ago, and I had failed to find him…until it was too late.
But to their credit, none of them seemed to hold a grudge. This might be because in the end, I had brought their son’s killers to justice.
Still, you would think seeing me would just bring back memories. A lot of people—including me—were kind of surprised the Thompkinses stayed on Lumbley Lane at all, considering the fact that the place could hardly have had good memories for them.
But they stayed. And came over to my parents’ house for dinner quite often. Often enough, it would seem, for their daughter and my brother Douglas to have formed what was now the longest-lasting—and probably emotionally healthiest—romantic relationship of any of the three Mastriani kids so far.