The Husband Hour(24)
Chapter Fourteen
Lauren instantly hated herself for asking the question. She wanted to know what her sister had said on camera, and at the same time, she didn’t.
She hugged herself, watching over Matt’s shoulder as he clicked through still images just slightly larger than thumbnail size, all of them numbered.
Wait, was that her living room?
“You were in my house?” she said.
Stephanie filled the screen. She wore white jeans and a turquoise tunic; her hair was loose and gold under the light, her deep blue eyes arresting and steady as she gazed at someone off camera. Then, Matt’s prompt: “So Lauren met Rory through you?”
“She was writing some article for the stupid paper,” Stephanie said. “The school paper. And she was like, Oh, I need to interview Rory. Can you give me his number? Like, she had zero interest in sports and suddenly she’s Bob Costas.”
Lauren tensed, waiting for Stephanie to make it all about herself, as she always did. As she certainly could have when Matt asked, “How well did you know Rory prior to him dating your sister?”
Lauren felt Matt watching her, and she struggled to maintain a poker face. Had he noticed Stephanie’s split second of hesitation before answering the question? Because Lauren saw it. She followed it with a sharp intake of her own breath, not exhaling until Stephanie spoke. “I mean, we hung out. Went to the same parties. I went out with some of his friends.”
So she did have some sense of decency. It wasn’t that Lauren wanted Stephanie to lie, but why make something insignificant into a tawdry sound bite? For once, her sister had showed some class and restraint.
Really, it wasn’t a big deal. Lauren hadn’t thought about the night of the party for years now.
It had been early fall in her sophomore year of high school, a few weeks after Lauren first spotted Rory at practice. After the day at track, she’d seen him only one more time. Her second sighting happened during sixth period, when the halls were empty. She’d left the newspaper classroom to pick up a USB drive from the science room and passed him. They were the only two people in the hallway, and it was as if there were a magnetic field around him. Her heart pounded so hard she was afraid she would faint. Again, they made intense eye contact. But neither said a word.
She felt a high that lasted for hours.
Two weeks before Thanksgiving break, her parents went to New York for a wedding. They warned Stephanie: “No parties.”
“I know!” Stephanie said.
By seven that night, a Friday, their house was wall-to-wall people. It was surreal for Lauren to see upperclassmen she recognized from the hallways suddenly in her living room, sitting paired off on the stairs, drinking from a keg in her dining room. She drifted among the crowd, practically invisible, a stranger in her own house.
When she got tired of trying to find someone to talk to, when she lost track even of Stephanie, she retreated upstairs. At the second-floor landing, she heard Stephanie’s bedroom door click open.
“Steph?” she called out. But it wasn’t Stephanie.
It was the hockey player.
Seeing those dark eyes flash at her just feet from her own bedroom was the shock of her life. The only thing saving her from a complete freak-out was the realization that he was surprised to see her too.
“I’m looking for my sister,” she said.
“Stephanie?”
Lauren nodded.
“She’s in there.”
With that, he brushed past her, went down the stairs. It took a minute for her to breathe normally again. It also took that time to process the fact that the boy she had been obsessing over for a month had just walked out of her sister’s bedroom. Maybe they’re just friends, she told herself, inching toward Steph’s room.
She knocked softly on the door.
“Party’s downstairs,” Stephanie called out.
“It’s me.”
Silence. The door opened a crack. Stephanie was wearing cutoff jean shorts and a tank top. She was braless, her breasts barely concealed by the thin fabric. Barefoot, she smoked a cigarette.
“What’s going on?” Stephanie asked. Her eyeliner was smudged.
“I’m going to bed,” Lauren said.
“With who?” A wicked little smile.
“Ha-ha. Very funny,” Lauren said.
“Yeah. Okay, whatever. See you in the morning.”
“Wait—Steph?”
“Yeah?”
“Who was that guy I just saw leaving here?”
“Oh. That’s Rory Kincaid. Hottie, right?”
Lauren nodded. “Are you…dating him?”
“Dating him? It’s not 1985. Go to sleep, Laur.”
The next time Lauren spotted Rory Kincaid in the hallway, she averted her eyes. Stephanie didn’t mention him again the rest of the year. But then came the article.
Every week, the fledgling reporters for the school paper submitted their pieces. Some were assigned, some were spec. Senior editors put the paper together on Thursday evenings, and the writers didn’t know until Friday if their articles made the final cut. But the kids who’d been around long enough knew that their chances for getting published were higher if they wrote something for the favored pages.
The editor in chief of the Merionite was a lanky, pale-faced guy named Aaron Rettger. His personal pet was the op-ed page, and he also paid close attention to the front page, the news section. The bastard stepchild of the paper was the sports section. According to Aaron, it was a waste of ink: “Anyone who gives a shit about sports goes to the games. They don’t even read the Merionite.” Lauren suspected his stance on the sports articles was based less on his instincts about their readership and more on his own bitterness over never having made a sports team in his life. In issues when they were tight on space, the sports articles were the first to be cut.