by Mary Strand
Girls like Tess.
She gave me a quick head shake, her gaze darting everywhere but at me or anyone at her table. Finally, she put her straw to her mouth and sipped.
And proceeded to choke.
She kept choking, totally hunched over and bug-eyed. When no one at her table did anything, I leaped to my feet to pound her on the back or try the Heimlich maneuver or maybe just slap her. With Tess lately, I couldn’t decide.
Lauren beat me to it.
“Ow!” With a final cough, Tess sat up straight again, even as Lauren gave her another whack between the shoulder blades. Based on the grim set to Lauren’s jaw, I’m pretty sure the last one was unnecessary. “Stop! I mean, uh, thanks. Lauren. I’m good now.”
She sneered as she said Lauren’s name, looking as if Lauren had delivered live cockroaches to their table rather than helped her out when her so-called friends didn’t.
It was pretty much how I’d treated Lauren ever since she tried to slip drugs to me in Accounting class.
Seeing Tess deliver the sting, and Lauren wince, I shook my head and waved Lauren over to my table.
The look she gave me mirrored the one Tess had given her. Without a word, she walked back to the bar.
Wow.
“Even Lydia Bennet has to admit she’s shit when a skank like Lauren Kjelstad disses her. Is it too late to send her back to reform school? Maybe we can send them both.” Chelsea flipped her hand through her lawnmower-cut hair to emphasize her words, which she’d already emphasized loudly enough for everyone in Woodbury, Minnesota, to hear.
Including, for instance, Zach. I watched as he calmly, methodically, set his bass guitar on its stand, stepped down from the makeshift stage, and walked over to Chelsea’s table. But he didn’t look at Chelsea.
Instead, slapping both his hands on the table, he got in Drew’s face. “Hate to say it, but it’s hard to believe you chose this one over Lydia or, for that matter, Cat Bennet. You might want to rethink your taste.”
Oh. My. God.
Wait. How did Zach know about Drew and Cat? The guy must pay attention.
“How dare you?” Chelsea leaped to her feet, even though Drew fumbled to grab her hand and tug her back down. “Who are you? Besides a total loser, obviously.”
She laughed, loudly and totally fake, but she also shot a wide-eyed pleading look at Amber and Tess. Amber offered her usual pinched smirk, which could mean anything, including gastric issues. Tess glanced at me, looking terrified, as if she was holding her breath.
Amber didn’t surprise me, but what had happened to Tess? Depending on her mood, the Tess I knew would’ve either fed Chelsea to the sharks or given Zach a good, hard shove. She hadn’t been afraid of anyone.
Except maybe, appropriately, me.
“Hey, we need to finish setting up.” Kirk, sunglasses in place, came up and put his hand on Zach’s shoulder.
Zach didn’t budge. He kept glaring down at Drew, whose Adam’s apple bobbed like crazy.
“Zach. Dude.”
Zach glanced over his shoulder at Kirk. “I can’t help it if your girlfriend is pals with her.” He flicked a cold glance at Chelsea. “She apologizes and shuts the fuck up, or I leave.”
Everyone stared at Chelsea. Okay, everyone but Drew, who kept swallowing convulsively. He seemed way too young for a heart attack, but you never know.
But seriously? Drew really needed to grow a spine. Cat was so much better off without him.
Even if she didn’t have Jeremy these days, either.
“We don’t need this crap, do we?” Chelsea, still standing, wobbled on her heels. Her voice wobbled, too. “Guys? Is it our fault if Russo’s lets anyone in?”
She cut me a scathing glance. Grinning, I gave her a little finger wave.
No one at her table said a word. Drew touched her hand, but he was avoiding Zach’s stare.
“Guys? Seriously. This place reeks.”
Probably not the smartest thing to say in front of Russo’s manager, Antonio Russo, son of the owners and an old boyfriend of Jane’s. He strolled over from behind the bar, casually.
“Miss? I’m afraid you’re disturbing our other guests. I’ll have to ask you to leave.”
I nodded my thanks to Antonio, even though he probably didn’t remember me. I’d been a zit-prone and hair-challenged seventh grader when he and Jane had gone out their whole junior year of high school.
Antonio’s eyebrows danced a moment before he turned back to Chelsea with a serious face.
Arms crossed, she glanced from him to me. “Now I get it. Lydia’s probably slept with this guy, too.”
I blinked.
Zach, Kirk, and Drew all looked at me. Amber smirked. Tess looked everywhere but at me. Avoiding all of them, I glanced at the bar. Lauren had disappeared.
Antonio pasted a polite smile on his face. “Miss, please leave. Your friends may want to leave, too.”
Tess’s mouth formed a perfect “O,” her first real reaction to anything tonight except when she nearly choked to death. Amber wiped the smirk off her face and glared at Kirk.
Kirk sighed. “Hey, Antonio, totally understand. But okay if my girlfriend and her friend Tess stay? They promise not to create an uproar.”
He grinned over the tops of his sunglasses at Amber, who didn’t grin back.
“Amber? Tess?” Chelsea waved a hand wildly at them, even more wildly when they studiously avoided her gaze. She frowned at Kirk. “Kirk? We were all gonna listen to you guys tonight.”
Sunglasses back in place, Kirk gave her a brief smile before turning to Drew. “Sorry, dude. Catch you soon?”
After a long moment, Drew nodded. “No prob. See you.”
Pushing back from the table, Drew stood up and pulled a couple of bills from his wallet while Chelsea tugged on his sleeve and screeched in his ear.
Everyone else, including Antonio, remained frozen.
Finally, Drew and Chelsea left, Chelsea still screeching. An instant later, a waiter appeared at my table with a Coke—not a Diet Coke, unlike every other girl I knew—and an order of shrimp cocktail. Since I hadn’t ordered anything yet, I shook my head. The waiter shrugged and pointed at Antonio.
Maybe Antonio did remember Jane’s bratty little sister, even though we hadn’t eaten here since before Shangri-La. Since before Milwaukee. Since forever.
Antonio nodded before returning to the bar, at the same time Kirk and Zach walked back to the stage.
“Chelsea sure got that right. The poor guy must be another Lydia conquest.”
Unlike Chelsea, Amber said it only loudly enough for Tess and me to hear.
Forcing myself to grin, I stabbed a shrimp in the cocktail sauce. “You didn’t used to be so gutless, Amber. What’s the matter? Trying so hard to keep your sharp claws in Kirk makes you a little nervous?” When she sputtered, I took a bite of the shrimp. Yum. “Can’t blame you.”
When her nose flared, reminding me of a gorilla, I can’t say it was a good look for her.
I also can’t believe I used to hang with Tess and Amber. And Drew. And even maybe Kirk? In the year I’d been gone, the girls had become whiny, bitchy, and pathetic. Even without regard to his lousy taste in girlfriends, Drew couldn’t seem to form an opinion. And what was it with Kirk and his stupid sunglasses?
Had everyone, along with Cat, always been like this?
Worse: had I?
Pondering it all, I munched on the shrimp cocktail, slurped my Coke, and ordered a small seafood pizza. It wasn’t on the menu, but I remembered Jane getting a takeout version of it for me once. A million years and a trip to reform school ago.
Next thing I knew, and without any introduction, the band started playing Coldplay’s “Yellow,” with Heather on lead vocals. I tapped my fingertips on the table in time to the rhythm, trying and totally failing to remember how to play any of it on guitar, when I glanced up to realize Kirk and Zach were staring at me.
And maybe Jeremy. With his half-closed eyes, I could never tell.
But what did I do? Tess nearly choked to death, and Lauren helped her when Amber and Chelsea didn’t. And, okay, Lauren dissed me, but only because she didn’t know all the rules that followed me even after I left Shangri-La.
But I didn’t get Chelsea kicked out.
Even if I’d enjoyed every moment of it.
“They’re just looking at you because they’re so pissed.” Amber, speaking even more quietly, kept her gaze on Kirk as she said it, but she was definitely speaking to me.
I rolled my eyes. “More likely, they’re looking at me because they’re guys, and I’m the only remotely cute girl within half a mile.”
Amber, who’d been in the process of nibbling on a slice of pizza, dropped the slice down the front of her shirt. Her yellow, stretchy, clingy shirt now had enormous blobs of tomato sauce on each of her boobs.
Rolling my eyes, I glanced at the band. Heather stumbled on the words to the chorus of “Yellow,” then fumbled with her guitar before she stopped strumming altogether.
Kirk grinned but kept playing.
Zach was playing bass as if “Yellow” was a raging heavy-metal song. Which it wasn’t. Understatement.
I glanced over at the bar and caught Zach looking in that direction, too. Lauren hadn’t returned.
Yep, Zach was definitely pissed. Maybe he and Lauren didn’t hang out naked in wading pools anymore, or maybe they did, but he was way more protective of Lauren than Kirk and Drew were of their girlfriends.
Not that I gave a damn. Not about Zach or Lauren or Kirk or Drew or any of them.
I stayed until I finished my pizza, but I don’t think I heard another song the band played.
“You took the Jeep.”
Cat’s charms weren’t all that.
I tossed the keys in the general direction of the bowl on the small chest in the front hall. Missed it completely. Shrugging, I bent down to pick them up just as Cat’s foot booted them halfway down the hall.
Leaping to my feet, I waved a fist in her face. “You almost kicked my hand! What the hell?”
She didn’t back up, and her eyelids didn’t so much as flicker. “My aim must be off. I was going for your face.”
“Girls?” Mom stepped out of the kitchen, swallowing hard and wiping what looked like frosting off the corner of her mouth. “Why are you fighting? You two never used to fight. You were such good girls.”
Mom is a great lawyer, but her memory can be pretty questionable.
“Lydia stole the Jeep.” Cat jabbed her finger at me, barely missing my face. “Dad said I get to drive the Jeep. Lydia can’t.”
Mom’s tongue caught the last of the frosting. “I told your father that Lydia could take the Jeep tonight. She’s no longer in reform school.” She screeched that last part, so Dad must be somewhere in the vicinity. “But you can both drive the Jeep. Take turns.”
Mom smiled so brightly, I could tell she was hurting. She still didn’t speak to Dad without screaming, and he deserved it, but Mom didn’t deserve to find out that her husband had pulled a stunt like this on both Mom and me.
“We will, Mom. Totally.” I patted her arm the way I might pat a three-year-old who’d just ripped up her knee on a floor full of broken glass. Carefully. Cooing at her. “You don’t need to worry about Cat and me.”
“Bullshit.” Cat blurted it out, caught her breath, then started shaking. “Just like always, you have Mom wrapped around your finger. I am so freaking sick of it.”
Mom started shaking now, too. Couldn’t Cat see it? For once in her life, couldn’t she worry about someone other than herself?
“Jesus, Cat. She just wants us to get along.” I shrugged, even though Mom had recoiled at my word choice. “I’d like that, too, you know.”
Cat rolled her eyes. “What’s the matter? No one else is speaking to you?”
As a matter of fact, no. But it wasn’t why I missed Cat. Even living under the same roof, five feet down the hall from her, I missed my twin. So sue me.
“Girls, you love each other. You know you do.” Even Mom didn’t look like she believed it, though. Mom, who had a tear or two in the corner of her eye. Mom, who really would do anything for me.
And I mean that in a good way.
Brushing past me, Cat grabbed the keys to the Jeep off the floor. “Hate to break it to you, but maybe we never did.”
She took off out the front door without her purse. Next to me, Mom called after her long after an engine rumbled and the Jeep peeled out and roared down the street.
My Chemistry and Algebra weekend homework assignments made The Catcher in the Rye seem like a good time in comparison.
In the old days—before Shangri-La—Cat and I would’ve laughed over the homework together, ignored it most of the weekend, and spent Sunday night searching desperately online for shortcuts to doing it.
Cat wasn’t in any of my classes this year, even though I’d emailed her last spring to tell her what I was signing up for. Saturday morning, alone with my books, Boris, and Mary’s old study aids, I finally realized that our separate classes might not be an accident.
I heard a door slam downstairs followed by the thunder of running footsteps that usually meant Liz was in the house.
Sure enough, my bedroom door banged open. Boris took a flying leap off the armoire and landed on my legs. Ouch.
“Studying?” Liz’s eyebrows went up the way anyone else’s would in my family if anyone else in my family was speaking to me or even gave a shit. “What are you taking?”
Laying my Chem book upside down on my bed, I shrugged. “Chemistry with Mr. Schumacher. Algebra with Ms. Patel.”
Liz would’ve taken Advanced Chem and Calculus in her senior year of high school, but Liz was a brainiac, now majoring in biomedical engineering. I’d always taken the bare minimum to get by. That had changed in a big way at Shangri-La, and so had my grades, but we still didn’t have much in common.
No matter what Mr. Fogarty kept telling me.
Liz took a few steps closer, peering at my textbooks, Mary’s study aids, and the sneer on my face.
“Need any help?”
“I’m good.”
Okay, not particularly, but Liz didn’t need to waste her weekend on me. She wore running shoes and workout clothes, and if I didn’t know how many miles it was from her apartment in south Minneapolis to our house in Woodbury—thirty? minimum?—I wouldn’t put it past her to have run all the way here.
“Are you studying all weekend?”
Was that code for asking if I really had no social life? No friends? No nothing?
All true. Bizarre but true. But only momentarily.
I shook my head. “I’ll probably play some guitar.”
If I practiced every day for the next five years, maybe Jazz would break down and teach me something by Green Day.
Or maybe she wouldn’t.
“You’re still playing? Cool.” Liz said it without smirking, but it didn’t mean she wouldn’t laugh hysterically about it with Jane later.
“Where’s Jane?”
Liz glanced back at the open door. “Like you, she’s actually studying. Everyone I know is studying today. Cat, too?”
I snorted. Only if absolutely everything had changed. “I wouldn’t know.”
“What’s with you guys?” Liz glanced at the foot of my bed as if she planned to sit there, but Boris bared his teeth at her. When I rubbed his back, she sat instead in the middle of the floor. I still hadn’t gotten rid of Mary’s ugly, disgusting, multi-stained rug. If I were Liz, I wouldn’t risk sitting on it, but Liz was fearless. Stupidly, in this case. “You and Cat used to be as tight as Jane and I are.”
“Times change. People change.”
I hadn’t, but Cat had.
Liz skewered me with the sort of intense stare that would take out a lesser mortal. Having survived a year at Shangri-La with girls who could frighten even Liz, I didn’t flinch. Instead, I picked up my Chemistry textbook.
“You’re seriously go
ing to study and play guitar. Then what?”
“Study some more?”
Liz leaned back on her hands and stretched out long legs that I’d kill for. “What happened to you in reform school?”
I’d rather not think about it. Ever again. “I’ve been home six weeks. Believe it or not, you’re the first person to ask that question.”
Liz’s jaw dropped. Another first.
Being Liz, she grinned and made a quick recovery. “Like they say, I’m the reigning queen of empathy in this family.”
I snorted. “No one says that.”
“They will now.” Relaxing again, she studied me. “Seriously. No one has asked? Not Mom or Dad?” She scowled, although it might be because she’d finally realized exactly how disgusting the rug was, and she was sitting on it. “Not Cat?”
“No one.”
Lucky thing reform school had toughened me up so much. Otherwise, the realization that no one in this family gave a shit—not when I left, not when I came back—might make me cry.
And they weren’t worth it.
At all.
Liz stood up, then surprised me when she walked out of my room without a word. She didn’t surprise me when she walked back in a minute later with one towel draped around her neck and another that she threw on the end of my bed, startling Boris into a squeak. She shrugged, which was as close as Liz ever came to asking permission.
“So tell me. What happened to you in reform school?”
I scooted back a few inches, pressing my back against my headboard. “I survived.”
Silence. Liz wasn’t exactly known for it.
“You are different.” She tugged on the ends of the towel around her neck. “What I mean is, at first I didn’t think so, but I’ve noticed.”
I rolled my eyes, then blinked away a drop of moisture. “You don’t need to patronize me. So I study now. I’m playing guitar. Big deal.”
I also wasn’t partying. But only because I wasn’t invited to any parties.
Liz leaned back against the wall. Lucky thing it was already stained. Seriously, this whole room could qualify for federal disaster relief. “I’m not patronizing you. I just said you’re different, and I’m glad you’re sticking with guitar. Mary always said—”