Livin' La Vida Bennet

by Mary Strand

  I started to reach under my notebook, trying to guess what the goth chick would be giving me. Chocolate? But she didn’t seem like the perky, have-a-nice-day, cheerleader type. Understatement. “Lydia Bennet. Thanks. I—”

  “Girls? Are you writing down tonight’s homework assignment or already making weekend plans?”

  I grinned at Ms. Frey, who seemed to have a sense of humor, even though her English accent reminded me of those no-nonsense teachers in English boarding schools in the movies. Besides, I hadn’t actually done anything wrong, and Ms. Frey didn’t look scary as she glided up the aisle between Lauren and me. Seeing her long flowered skirt and flowing peach top, I lifted an eyebrow. She was a bit ruffly for an accounting teacher, even one straight off the boat from England.

  When Ms. Frey was five feet away, Lauren suddenly lurched to her feet and knocked all the books off my desk. What the hell?

  “Lauren?” Ms. Frey halted in front of my desk as I stooped down, scrambling to pick up my books with no help whatsoever from the goth chick. “What are you and Lydia doing?”

  As I grabbed the pen that had rolled under the guy’s desk next to me, I straightened my spine. I was used to taking crap from teachers, but only if I deserved it. “Hey, I wasn’t doing anything. She knocked over my books.” I twisted sideways to glare at Lauren, whose face looked chalky white against her ratty black hair and black lipstick. “And I don’t have a clue why.”

  The guy on the other side of me snorted. Whirling on him, I whipped him the bird.

  Ms. Frey frowned at me, but I stared her down. I was not going down on the second day of school, especially when it was the goth chick’s fault. Finally, after a long moment, she turned to the goth chick. “Lauren, do you have something you’d like to show me?”

  She shook her head furiously, and the smirk on her face was gone. So was half of her black lipstick, since she seemed to be chewing her lips off.

  Ms. Frey held out a hand. Toward Lauren, luckily, not me. But Lauren kept shaking her head. What was it? Gum? Candy? She slid something under my notebook, but it hadn’t been on the floor where all of my other stuff landed.

  My mind raced. She must’ve grabbed whatever it was when she sent my books flying, but what was it? And why did half the kids in class seem to think I knew?

  When Ms. Frey kept standing there looking grim, Lauren suddenly shot out of her seat, dodged the hand that Ms. Frey held out, and flew out the door. When I looked back at Ms. Frey, her lips were pursed.

  And she was staring at me.

  “I swear I don’t know what’s going on.”

  Her nostrils flared, not too attractively and not exactly what I’d pictured from the English rose she’d seemed to be up until now, but she finally gave a small head shake and walked back to the front of the room.

  “Class, we’re going to work on checking accounts today. Keeping a checkbook, balancing your account, etc. Eyes toward the front of the room, please.”

  That last bit was actually for my benefit, because until that moment every kid in class was staring at me.

  But not because they thought I was cool.

  That night, after Cat finally deigned to grace me with her presence, I leaned back on my pillow, watching her. Totally for lack of better things to do, I also cuddled Boris. He had to be the ugliest cat in the universe, which must be why Mary adopted him from that animal shelter.

  “Do you know Lauren Kjelstad?”

  Cat wrinkled her nose. “I heard. Since when do you hang out with her?”

  I frowned. “I don’t. I just asked if you know her.”

  “No one knows her.” She made little quote marks in the air to emphasize her point. “At least, no one wants to. I mean, except for the other druggies. She—”

  Cat broke off, clapping a hand over her mouth and suddenly staring at the floor.

  “She what?”

  Gaze still fixed on the floor, Cat just shook her head.

  I let go of Boris, who curled into a mangy ball next to my backpack on the end of my bed. Crossing the room, I willed Cat to look at me. She grabbed a book—Catcher in the Rye, which I had to read for English 12, too—and pretended to read it.

  I grabbed it out of her hands. “Spill. I don’t know Lauren, just met her today in Accounting class before she shoved all my books on the floor. For no reason.”

  Cat ran a hand through her long hair, making me wish mine still looked like that. Not that guys seemed to care one way or another as long as they thought a girl put out. “You haven’t been gone that long.”

  “A year.” I shrugged, even though it felt more like five years. “Not long at all.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Lauren has a reputation, and it’s bad. I heard she was dealing drugs to you in class today.”

  “She was not!” I glared so hard at Cat, my eyes actually hurt. “Who said?”

  “Everyone?”

  “And you believed it? Even though I don’t do drugs?” Alcohol was cheaper and more predictable when it came to what it did to me.

  Cat looked around the room. At everything except me.

  “You know I don’t do drugs. Never did.”

  She finally met my gaze—and then looked away again. “The thing is, I don’t know you anymore. After what you did that summer—”

  “Believe me, it wasn’t a good summer.” Understatement.

  She rolled her eyes, but I hadn’t told her everything. I hadn’t told anyone. “Then you were at reform school with all those kids, and God knows what they do, and everyone figures you’d probably do anything at this point. Including hang out with a girl like Lauren.”

  I sucked in a harsh breath, choking on it. “Even . . . you?”

  Head down, she picked at a loose thread on her bedspread, almost like she wasn’t going to answer.

  “I guess. Yeah. I do.”

  Chapter 2

  “Have you seen any pleasant men?

  Have you had any flirting?”

  — Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, Volume II, Chapter Sixteen

  Thursday morning, I woke up with the sun, a nasty habit I acquired at reform school. It wasn’t so bad in January, when the sun never really woke up, but in early September it sucked. Over an hour before I had to start getting ready for school, and I didn’t have a thing to do.

  Except maybe suffocate the newly sanctimonious Cat with my pillow. Talk about a one-way ticket back to Shangri-La.

  I plodded downstairs in my boxer shorts and T-shirt. Mistake. Dad was already on his yoga mat, either chanting or groaning. I couldn’t tell which.

  He smiled at me in the middle of his salute to the sun, but it came out more like a grimace. Still, he tried. No one else in my life even bothered.

  “Want to join me?”

  “On a yoga mat?” I shook my head, shuddering. “I was, uh, just wondering if anyone made coffee.”

  Dad frowned. “You didn’t used to drink coffee.”

  “Yeah, well, I used to be twelve years old.” A lifetime ago. “I started drinking it in reform—” He hated it when I said “reform school,” even though he’d been the one who sent me there. It was pretty phony of him, the more I thought about it. “You know. In reform school. Shangri-La.”

  He flinched, but too bad. Moving past him, I headed to the kitchen. No coffee.

  I cursed under my breath. Dad, unfortunately, has excellent hearing. No longer saluting the sun or anything else, he joined me in the kitchen.

  “How’s school?”

  “Sucks.”

  “Cat tells me—”

  I whirled on him. “She tells you what? And you believe her?”

  “I usually do.” Dad padded in bare feet to the coffeemaker, where he took his sweet time starting a fresh pot while I stood there fuming. “Especially when she tells me what she’s reading in English class.”

  My jaw dropped.

  Dad shrugged. “Is it supposed to be a secret that she’s reading The Catcher in the Rye? Are you reading it, too? I always loved th
at book.”

  Dad had a way of pissing a girl off and totally deflating her annoyance at the same time.

  I crossed to the fridge and pulled out a carton of OJ, grabbed a glass from the cupboard and filled it, then sat down, all while ignoring Dad. Or pretending to.

  “Why does school suck?”

  So much for peace and quiet in the morning. Next time I woke up early, I’d smother myself with a pillow until the urge to get up went away.

  I finally glanced at Dad, who seemed to be focused on watching the coffeemaker do its thing. “Don’t tell me it didn’t suck when you were in high school.”

  “It didn’t.” He smiled when I rolled my eyes. “But I confess it was always more about friends and activities than classes. Are you catching up with all your friends again?”

  I could’ve sworn his nose wrinkled on the word “friends,” but he already said he tended to believe Cat, and she’d probably spent the last six months blasting all of our friends. Great. Thank you, Cat.

  I nodded, even though my friends—including Cat—had all changed so much, they were unrecognizable. I hadn’t gotten weird, and I was the one stuck for a year in a breeding ground for criminals and terrorists.

  “What about activities? Are you interested in any of the clubs or sports at school?”

  “What is this, the Inquisition?” I extended both hands toward Dad, palms down. “Wanna yank out my fingernails one by one until I give you the right answer?”

  “There is no right answer.”

  “Spoken by the Zen master.” Shaking my head, I pushed back my chair and headed to the counter. To annoy Dad, I grabbed the highest-octane box of sugary cereal, even though my body actually craved something healthy. Well, I could do junk for old times’ sake. Everyone expected it, right? Just like they expected me to hang out with a supposedly bad girl like Lauren?

  “I had essentially the same conversation with Cat last year.” Dad held up a hand when I started to object. “Yes, you’re different people. Believe me, I’ve been told. But it’s a new year, and I want you to make good choices.”

  Good choices. Blah blah blah. Had they really sprung me from reform school, where I heard all about “good choices” 24/7, or just shipped me to a satellite office?

  Still standing at the kitchen counter, staring at a bowl of sugary crap, I slammed the box on the counter. Bright little balls of fake food flew everywhere. “I wasn’t hanging out with that skanky—”

  Dad frowned. “With whom? Should I be expecting a call from school?”

  “No.” I crossed my arms. “I didn’t do a damn thing.”

  “Language.” Dad shook a finger, but he didn’t actually look pissed. Instead, he went back to his vigil at the coffeemaker. After verifying for the tenth time that the coffee still wasn’t ready, he glanced at me. “With Mary gone, it occurred to me that you and Cat might want separate bedrooms. Or maybe not. You must be glad to have those late-night chat sessions again.”

  He smiled, even though his and Mom’s bedroom was next to Cat’s and mine, and he’d never smiled all the times Cat and I talked so loud that he couldn’t get to sleep.

  But . . . I could have my own room? I swallowed hard, trying to digest a mouthful of sugary crap before Dad changed his mind. “I can talk to Cat anytime.” Or never, as far as I was concerned. “I’d love my own room, Dad. Could I have Liz and Jane’s? Or maybe Cat could move to Mary’s?”

  I’d take anything but Mary’s room. It was small, smelled like Boris, and probably hadn’t been cleaned since Mary was five. But Cat might not mind. If she could date a guy like Jeremy, she must not be too particular.

  Besides, I’d been locked up for the last year, thanks to Dad. He owed me.

  “I don’t think that’s—”

  “Oh, come on. Cat had our room to herself last year. It’s my turn.” I started to bat my eyelashes before remembering that Dad never fell for crap like that. “Please?”

  He sighed. “I’ll have to talk to your mother. And Cat, of course.”

  Excellent. Cat would ask for the same thing I wanted, just to spite me, but I was pretty sure I still had Mom in my back pocket. Everything hadn’t changed, after all.

  Just mostly.

  Yawning, I drifted into Speech Communications before the bell rang for first period, wishing I hadn’t gotten up so early, or at least wishing I’d run into Mom instead of Dad. Mom wasn’t the sucker anymore that she’d always been with me, but she was a marshmallow compared to Dad. Dad’s Zen was laced with steel.

  “Lydia?” Drew waved me to the back of the room, where a desk sat empty on either side of him. One of those desks had held Chelsea’s lame ass the last two days, though, so either Chelsea was sick today or Drew was even more revved by the possibility of hooking up with me than I thought.

  “Revved” wasn’t exactly how I felt about Drew, who was cute but didn’t have much else going on. Still, a friendly face was good.

  I dropped my books on the desk to Drew’s right, farthest from the door, and plunked down in the chair. Shifting in my seat, I twisted to catch Drew staring at me, stopping just short of drooling. I rolled my eyes.

  Chelsea sashayed into the room in a skirt that rode up too high on her ass, both for school dress-code purposes and the sake of anyone who didn’t want to gag this early in the morning. She tripped when she caught sight of me next to Drew, so I leaned across the aisle toward him, amused that I wore a low-cut top today.

  I dropped my voice. “Any parties tomorrow night? Or did you wanna make your own party—like, with me?”

  As I watched the Adam’s apple bob on Drew’s neck, Chelsea’s heels staccato-stepped toward us, stopping in front of Drew. It took him a moment to drag his eyes away from my chest.

  “Drew? Why is she sitting here? I sat in that desk yesterday.”

  “Uh, she was already—”

  I grinned at Chelsea, who ran her spiky red fingernails through her lawnmower-cut hair. “I guess Drew wanted to improve the scenery.” I gave Chelsea a casual up-and-down, my eyebrows lifting when my gaze stopped at her muffin top. “All things considered, I can’t blame him.”

  Chelsea sucked in her gut. “I wasn’t talking to you. I was talking to Drew.”

  “That makes two of us.” I flashed a grin at Drew, who looked a little sick. “We were just talking about getting together.”

  “Uh, to work on homework. Sometime. With some other kids from English.”

  Liar. Still, I relished the look on Chelsea’s face. It wasn’t my fault Drew liked me, considering the cheap polyester miniskirts Chelsea poured herself into, and I might as well prolong her suffering.

  “You didn’t say she was in English with you.”

  The bell rang, but Chelsea stayed standing in front of Drew, even though Ms. Ciccarelli was already at the front of the room. In black slacks and a hot-pink blazer, she was one of those teachers who looked relaxed, even hip, until the moment they decided to zap you with a stun gun—or homework, as the case may be. Her toe tapping, she narrowed her gaze at Chelsea and a few other stragglers. One of the stragglers, Travis, a linebacker on the football team, grabbed the chair on the other side of Drew.

  Leaving Chelsea out in the cold.

  Ms. Ciccarelli rapped her knuckles on her desk. “Could everyone please take a seat? Now?”

  When Chelsea tried to sit down in the desk on the other side of Drew but landed on Travis’s lap, her spine went rigid.

  “Chelsea?” Ms. Ciccarelli clapped her hands. “I’m sure the rest of the class is eager to get started, even though our first assignment requires you to work with a partner this weekend.”

  The whole class groaned.

  Chelsea whirled on me. “Yeah, well, I was just standing here because this girl—”

  I raised my hand. “Lydia.”

  Chelsea foamed even more. “This girl took my seat.”

  Ms. Ciccarelli frowned. “But we don’t have assigned seats. I thought everyone preferred it that way.”

 
As the rest of the class nodded and a few kids told Chelsea to get over it and go sit down, Chelsea turned bright red. It didn’t exactly go with her hideous orange top, which stretched as tightly over her flabby stomach as it did over her boobs. I waved at her as she turned to go to the only open desk, right in front of Ms. Ciccarelli.

  Drew leaned over to me, his breath tickling my neck. “Wanna pair up this weekend?”

  I looked into his eyes, which told me what I wanted to know before I even asked. “For the homework assignment? Or were you thinking . . . otherwise?”

  He just grinned.

  Drew and Chelsea were both missing from our table at lunch, which was sort of a relief. Pretending I had even the slightest interest in Drew wore me out, and I wouldn’t bother if it didn’t annoy Chelsea so much.

  Besides, I’d rather concentrate my efforts on Kirk Easton.

  Who didn’t seem to be concentrating his on me.

  “Hey, Kirk.” I set my tray next to his, even though someone had left her purse in that chair. I set the purse on the table, about five feet away. “We haven’t really had a chance to chat since I’ve been back.”

  He glanced at the purse, then turned to look at something across the cafeteria, before shaking his head and grinning. “Lydia. Sorry. You have so many admirers, it’s tough getting a word in.”

  “Ha ha.” I punched him in the arm, acting more like my sister Liz than myself, but it’d been a while and so much had changed. I had to take things slowly, even with a guy like Kirk, if I wanted to make this work.

  Whatever “this” was.

  Kirk and I had been buddies since forever, close enough that we’d never hooked up, even though we were the leaders of our crowd and either one of us could go out with pretty much anyone we wanted.

  Which was maybe why we never had hooked up.

  But I’d had a lot of time in reform school to think about what I wanted—understatement—and I wanted Kirk. I mean, I think so. The last guy I’d wanted was Justin Truesdale, and the nightmare that was Justin still haunted me. That summer in the Dells, I’d lost myself for him. What did he give me? Let’s just say that pole-dancing in a strip bar to get enough cash for that night’s hotel room, followed by a one-way ticket to Montana, wasn’t the worst of it.