by Shana Norris
We had reached Zac’s house and I pulled over to the curb in front of it. A few lights were on inside, casting golden squares onto the darkened lawn.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
Zac stared at the shadowy house, his mouth turned into a slight frown. “My dad thinks the shop is like a family legacy or something. He doesn’t want to give it up and he’s hoping I’ll keep it running. But I’m not exactly the son he dreamed of. My dad says I lack focus and ambition.”
“You,” I said, turning in my seat to look at him, “do not lack ambition. I’ve been your business partner for two weeks and already I’ve seen ambition pouring out of you. You have so much of it I can barely keep up.”
Zac’s eyes sparkled in the light of the streetlamp across the street. “You should tell my dad that. Or Hannah.”
My smile faded at the mention of Hannah again. “She doesn’t think you have ambition either?”
“Hannah believes I think life is a big joke and can’t get serious about anything.” He shrugged. “I think Hannah spends too much time taking things seriously. She’s so worried about being number one and being the best at everything she does. No offense. I know you worry about those things too, but there’s more to life, you know? She doesn’t care about the reasons for being valedictorian, she only cares about the glory.”
“Can I ask you something?” I said. “It’s probably none of my business and you can tell me off for it, but I have to ask.”
“Okay,” Zac said slowly, eying me curiously.
“Why are you with Hannah?” I would never have asked the question any other time, but here in the darkness of my car, when we were the only two people around, the words couldn’t help coming out. “You two aren’t anything alike and she’s so…unlike you.” I didn’t want to say all the words that I could think of to describe Hannah. She was still Zac’s girlfriend.
Zac tapped his fingers on his knee. “I guess we suit each other. Hannah pushes me to try harder. I could easily slack off on all of the ideas I have, but Hannah helps me organize myself and get focused. And I guess I help Hannah to not be so serious and driven all the time. It works. Or at least, it works sometimes.”
“Only sometimes?”
“I don’t know. Things are weird lately.” He paused for such a long time that I thought maybe he wasn’t going to say anymore. But then he said, “She’s so serious now, much worse than before. She cancels our plans at the last minute so she can study.”
“It doesn’t sound like she’s a very good girlfriend,” I commented.
Zac shrugged. “She’s not always so bad.”
“You shouldn’t let her treat you like that,” I told him. “Why don’t you just break up with her if she does all that?”
“Because you don’t just walk away from someone when things get tough,” Zac said. “You find a way to stick it out and figure out what’s gone wrong.”
His words echoed through my head. Because you don’t just walk away from someone when things get tough. Walking away was the thing I knew best. It was too difficult to work through the hard times.
“Anyway, it wasn’t always like this and I have to hope it’ll get better. She just lets her mom put too much pressure on her and it’s stressing her out. A person needs to take time to have fun in between all the studying and succeeding.”
It felt as if his words were directed at me, although I knew he was talking about Hannah. “I have fun,” I said.
Zac tapped the plastic seat cover. “Oh, yeah, I can tell you’re barrels of fun, Avery James. What are you doing tomorrow, shrink wrapping your couch?”
I gave him a playful punch in the arm. “If you don’t watch it, I’ll shrink wrap you. Rule number two, don’t make fun of my seat covers. Now get out of my car and go study.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Zac opened the door and practically spilled out of the car, dragging his backpack behind him. He leaned back down and looked in at me, smiling. “Thanks for the ride.”
I smiled back. “You’re welcome. But if you make fun of my seat covers again you’ll be walking next time.”
“I’m making it my mission to get you to throw out those seat covers,” Zac told me.
I shook my head. “Impossible.”
“We’ll see.”
I remembered suddenly what I had been hired to do. I hadn’t once considered flirting with Zac the entire time he’d been in my car. I was the worst boyfriend thief ever and if things didn’t change soon, I’d never make it to Costa Rica.
“Hey,” I called. When he leaned down to look into the window at me, I said, “Next time you perform at that diner, let me know. I’d like to see your comedy routine.”
His grin lit up his whole face. “It’s a date.” With that, he bounded across the grass, swinging his backpack in one arm as he moved. When he reached the front door, he turned around to give me a big wave before disappearing into the house.
Chapter 13
“Pass the potatoes,” Ian grunted in my general direction. He refused to look at me and only muttered a low “thank you” when I handed him the bowl.
My brother and I hadn’t spoken much since the scene at the mall. I hadn’t said anything to Dad about Ian wanting to get Trisha a Mother’s Day gift. I wasn’t sure how to bring it up. “Hey, Dad, I think you should stop dating because Ian wants to pretend your girlfriend is his mom. It’s not healthy for him.”
I wished I knew how to keep my brother detached. I had spent so much time protecting myself from everyone else, I had forgotten to teach Ian how to do that as well.
“How is your art project coming?” I asked in an attempt to mend things between us.
Ian shrugged. “Lots of photos. That’s about it.”
I smiled. “I’d love to see them.”
He studied me cautiously, as if he didn’t believe me. I kept smiling, my fist clenched around my fork. After a moment, Ian turned back to his food without saying anything else.
My shoulders slumped. I reached over and adjusted the position of my plate on the green checkered placemat until it was perfectly centered.
“How is work?” I asked, turning to Dad.
“Same as usual,” he told me. “Sales have slowed down again because of this heat wave. No one wants to be outside.”
“Maybe things will pick up soon,” I told him. My dad was assistant manager for a sports equipment store, specializing mostly in bikes, kayaks, and accessories. We didn’t get snow in our area, so winter was usually a rough time, except for Christmas when everyone wanted a bike for their kid. Each year, we faced the same struggle of trying to make ends meet while Dad worked fewer hours.
“How is the hot dog business?” he asked me, grinning. Dad always threatened to come by Diggity Dog House and take pictures of me dressed up as Bob and I always threatened to divorce him if he did.
“Smelly and busy, as usual. We debuted a slightly less fattening corn dog, with turkey instead of pork and baked instead of fried. Big hit with the older crowd. It’s selling much better than the hot dog ice cream Mr. Throckmorton thought up last month.”
Dad made a face. “The words ice cream and hot dogs in the same phrase are enough to make me stay far away.”
“I tried explaining that to Mr. Throckmorton before he added it to the menu, but he didn’t listen.”
My gaze shifted to Ian, who sat silently, tapping his fork on his mound of mashed potatoes. He didn’t even attempt to get involved in the conversation, which was very unusual. My brother usually talked so much it was hard for Dad and me to get in any words around him.
Dad cleared his throat as he wiped his mouth with his napkin and then crumpled it in his fist. “Trisha and I have been talking,” he began in a slow, nervous voice.
My chest felt as if it had suddenly iced over. I stared at Dad, unable to break my gaze away from the side of his face, my pulse pounding in my ears so loud I almost couldn’t hear him. The words I had said to my brother repeated themselves in my head: Trisha is not our mother. Tr
isha is not our mother.
“And we thought it would be nice if all of us did something together this weekend,” Dad went on. “Like a picnic or something?”
The breath I’d been holding in rushed out of me all at once. I flexed my fingers from the tightly coiled fists I’d been holding them in since he’d started talking. For a second, every horrible nightmare I could imagine had filled my head—Trisha moving in here, Trisha and Dad getting married, Ian buying her a lifetime supply of stupid Mother’s Day teddy bears.
“I have to work this weekend,” I said.
Dad raised his eyebrows at me. “All weekend?”
“Most of it. And the rest of the time I’m not working, I’ll be helping Zac with our business project.”
“I think maybe he could spare you for an hour or so.”
“I can’t afford to get a bad grade on this assignment,” I said. “If I fail anything between now and the end of my senior year, I definitely will not be valedictorian at graduation. Do you want that to happen?”
“Salutatorian is still a special honor,” Dad told me.
I laughed. “That’s what people who aren’t good enough say. Salutatorian means somewhere along the way I messed up and ruined everything. That’s not going to happen. Sorry, but no, I can’t come to your little picnic with your girlfriend.”
Dad opened his mouth, but it was Ian who spoke up.
“Everything has to be the way you want it to be, doesn’t it?” My brother glared across the table at me over his mushy pile of potatoes. “You can’t stand it if someone else has a different opinion than you do.”
“That’s not true,” I protested.
“It is! Maybe the rest of us want to have a picnic. Have you ever thought about what other people want, or is it ‘all Avery, all the time’?”
Dad looked completely flabbergasted at Ian’s sudden change in behavior. He blinked at my brother. “Ian, what is this all about?”
Ian’s face had turned a deep red shade all the way to the tips of his ears. He stood up, letting out a long breath. “Nothing. It doesn’t matter anyway. It never has.”
He stomped out of the room and a moment later we heard his bedroom door slam. Dad’s gaze shifted to me.
“Care to explain?” he asked.
I tried to look as confused as he did. “I have no idea. Probably too much chocolate. I think he’s been hiding it in his room again.”
Dad sighed, rubbing a hand over his face. “Let him have his candy, Avery. It’s not hurting him.”
“Should I print out studies on the effects of processed sugar for you to read again? It is in fact hurting him quite a bit.”
He gave me a hard stare. “Drop it. The candy stays.”
I threw up my hands. “Of course. Like the self-help books stay.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“You and Ian depend entirely too much on your fantasy lives, where everything is easily fixed by candy or some book written by a psychiatric quack who doesn’t know anything. Trisha is not the answer to all of your problems, Dad.”
A vein in his forehead throbbed, the sure sign that I had stepped into dangerous territory. “I never said she was. But what is wrong with me trying to find someone to spend my life with?”
“The problem is you’re hurting Ian and me.” My voice trembled slightly, but I sucked in a deep breath to try to steady myself. “Don’t you think that every time another girlfriend disappears, never to be heard from, we remember Mom’s leaving all over again?”
The soft tick of the clock on the wall over Dad’s head echoed throughout the kitchen for a few seconds as my words hung in the air.
“Not everyone is like your mom. Not everyone will leave.” Dad’s voice was low and he stared at his plate, his hands frozen above it.
“What about Vanessa? Or Pam? Or Jennifer? Kate? Julie?” I spouted off the names of previous girlfriends who had made themselves at home in our lives for a few months and made promises about the future.
But in the end, they had all gone away. It was always the same. Only the faces changed.
“Stop trying to fix us with these books and girlfriends,” I told him.
Dad slammed his fist down on the table, causing the dishes to clatter against each other. “Stop trying to control my life, Avery. You are the child here, I’m the parent.”
“You’re one to talk about controlling someone else!” I didn’t know how we’d gotten to this point, this shouting at each other across the table while Ian hid in his room, probably stuffing Hershey’s Kisses in his mouth. This wasn’t what my family was supposed to be like. “Every time I talk about Costa Rica, you change the subject. You can’t bear the thought that maybe I have different plans for my life than you do.”
“We can’t afford Costa Rica,” Dad said. “We can barely afford this house. I’m a single parent here, trying raise you and your brother on the one salary I have.”
“Well, don’t worry about it anymore,” I told him. “By next month, I’ll have all the money I need, which I earned all on my own.”
He looked at me with panic in his eyes. “Avery—”
I set my fork down parallel to my plate, stood up from the table, and then pushed my chair in so that it lined up perfectly with the table. “I may not be able to control what you do, but my own life is the one thing I do have complete control of. I’m not having a faux family picnic with Trisha or anyone else. And come summer, once she’s disappeared like the rest of them, I’ll be gone and you can figure out how to fix everything around here on your own.”
Chapter 14
“So?” asked Delia Greeley. Her smile looked like her brother’s. She resembled him in other ways too, with the same dark brown hair and tanned skin. She even had that same sparkle in her eyes that Zac did.
She was not, however, quite as energetic as her brother. While Zac sat with one knee bouncing constantly, Delia managed to keep all of her limbs still.
I sat in the Greeleys’ den, melted into the plush couch, and had just listened to Delia give a presentation on her preliminary plans for our website.
A website for a matchmaking business that didn’t really exist.
Once I’d arrived at the Greeley house before heading to work, Zac had surprise-attacked me with an entire presentation on how the website for our business project would work. Delia, who it turned out was studying graphic design in college, already had several mockups done and pasted onto big sheets of poster board, which she set up in chairs around the room. Delia had also printed out a ten-page description of the basic setup, along with screenshots of the data collection part, where customers would submit their information.
I held one of these reports in my hand while I stared back at her. The ambush had left me a bit dazed and panicked. I had barely said hello to Zac before he whisked me into the den where his sister was waiting. Now he and Delia looked at me, waiting for my response.
“Um,” I said, trying to sort out the thoughts swirling through my head. “Isn’t this all a bit much for a school project?”
Zac’s eyes sparkled. “This could be much more than a school project. It could be something real to help people.”
“What do you mean by real?” I asked.
“As in, a real matchmaking business. Run by the two of us.”
The laugh burst out of me before I could stop it. “Are you insane?”
His smile faltered a bit. “What’s wrong with that? We’ve done all the planning already. We have everything we need to start this.”
“I just...,” I began, taking a deep breath, “I don’t know if I want this to be more than a school project.”
Delia’s eyes moved between her brother and me. “Okay,” she said in a perky voice. “Maybe I’ll leave you two alone for a moment to discuss things.”
When she slipped out the door and closed it behind her, Zac said, “Embrace the passion, Avery.”
“This stuff doesn’t work,” I said. “How can a computer calculate your per
fect match?”
“I’ll admit it might not be one hundred percent accurate. I’m sure there could be matches that wouldn’t work out. But the majority probably would be good. And even if the matches didn’t work out forever, they could at least give people a little romance in their lives for a while. What’s wrong with that?”
Zac talked as if this were a simple thing. As if this proposed business idea didn’t toy with people’s emotions and lives. “There are all kinds of factors a computer program could never work into the equation,” I said. “What if someone got into a bad accident, hit their head, went into a coma, and then woke up with a completely different personality that no longer matches the person we originally set them up with?”
Zac raised his eyebrows at me. “Avery. I doubt every single customer we have will go into a coma and wake up as a different person. But if it makes you feel better we could offer a money back guarantee for the people who do develop a different personality than what they first had when they purchased our service.”
I flailed my arms in agitation. “It was an example of the many things that could happen. My point is, the computer won’t know everything.”
“Of course not,” Zac said. “That’s what makes life interesting. You never know how something will work out until you go for it. Maybe the matches won’t work, but what do you have to gain by never putting yourself out there?”
I felt myself almost wavering as I looked into Zac’s dark eyes. What was it that made me feel so weird whenever I was around him?
This had to stop. I had to regain control of this whole thing and get the money for Costa Rica. The money was the only thing that mattered.
I moved across the couch, closer to Zac. “I don’t believe a computer can tell you who you’re supposed to be with. How can a computer factor in chemistry between two people?”
I made sure Zac had a good view of my legs beneath the denim mini skirt I wore. It was close to being obscenely short, since I’d grown a few inches since I’d bought it years ago. His gaze darted down toward my legs, then back up. He kept trying to look at the wall behind me, but his eyes flickered to meet mine every few seconds, as if he couldn’t force himself to look away.