Wrong About the Guy(5)

“You can’t quit,” her mother told her. “You’ll be applying to college in a few years, and they’re going to want to see that you’ve done more with your life than just go to school and eat junk food. Don’t you even want to get some healthy exercise? Don’t you care about finishing what you started and about getting some good habits into your life? Most girls would kill to have the opportunities you have, and let me tell you, it’s not always easy for us to afford them.” And so on.

Heather stood silently, her head bowed, letting her mother’s words rain down on her. I thought she was genuinely overwhelmed, but it turned out to be a cunning defensive maneuver—with no one arguing against her, Sarah ran out of steam and eventually stopped on her own accord with a resigned, if frustrated, shrug of acceptance.

Before they left, Heather and I exchanged cell phone numbers and agreed that we wanted to stay friends.

At that point, she and her mother still had no idea that Luke Weston was my stepfather. They found out eventually of course, but it didn’t change the fact that Heather liked me because I had been a good friend to her and not because I was related to the hot guy from We’ll Make You a Star.





four


While I was waiting for Heather to show up at my house that morning, I worked out for about half an hour on the elliptical machine in Luke’s exercise room and then snuck into Mom’s bathroom to shower—mine was just a regular shower but hers had seven showerheads all spritzing you from different angles. It was crazily great and I didn’t even feel guilty about it, since the house had been built green, and our gray water—water we’d only used a little bit, like for showers and stuff—went directly into our yard and watered the plants.

This house was ridiculous in the best possible sense—huge and comfortable and luxurious . . . practically decadent. It sometimes freaked me out to think that this was the only house Jacob would know, that he would grow up thinking this was normal. He’d never know what it was like to share a one-room apartment with Mom or spend a few years in a small house so close to your neighbors that you could hear them calling to each other from one room to another. The funny thing was, I almost felt sorry for him. This house was so big, I often didn’t know who was home and who wasn’t. I liked having my space, but in a weird way, I was glad I’d had so much togetherness with Mom when I was little.

I heard the gate buzz right after I got out of the shower. I hit the wall panel to let Heather in and used the intercom to tell George to open the front door. I threw on a pair of shorts and a clean tank top and headed downstairs in my bare feet; it was late July and super hot outside, but the house was comfortable with the air-conditioning running.

Jacob was slowly turning in circles in the big open foyer area at the bottom of the stairs. Our housekeeper, Lorena, was standing on the steps talking to him.

Lorena was roughly my mother’s age and had an eleven-year-old daughter of her own, who she talked to about ten times a day on her cell phone. Mom had hired her to clean a couple of days a week when we first moved into the big house. After Mom got pregnant with Jacob, Lorena mentioned that she liked taking care of babies and Mom instantly hired her full-time. I think the whole Westside nanny thing kind of freaked Mom out, so she was relieved to have someone around to help without going down that road. Mom told me she expected me to continue to be responsible for making my bed and cleaning my room, but over the course of the last few years, we’d all gotten a little lazy and used to being waited on. If I left my clothes on the floor, they ended up in the hamper or cleaned and folded in my drawers—so why keep picking them up? And Lorena made my bed much smoother than I could.

We were all slightly terrified of her, even though she was totally sweet. It was just that she could be intractable. Like once she thought that a pillow looked better on the smaller armchair in the formal living room, but Mom had bought it for the bigger one. Every time Lorena was in the living room, she’d put it on the smaller one, and then Mom would switch it to the bigger one. This went on for weeks. They never discussed it or acknowledged there was a battle of wills going on. But eventually Mom gave up and just left it on the smaller chair. “She’s stronger than I am,” Mom told me with a good-natured shrug.

“Let’s do something else,” Lorena was saying now to Jacob as I came close. “Oh, look, there’s Ellie. Don’t you want to say hi to Ellie? Look at Ellie and say hi, Jacob. Jacob! Stop going in circles and say hi to your sister.”

He kept turning, his arms wide, his head thrown back so he could stare up at the ceiling. It was a classic Jacob thing to do.

I grabbed his arms and stopped him from spinning long enough to drop a kiss on his head and tell him he was my baby dude, and then I let him go and went on into the kitchen, while he went back to twirling behind me. Lorena may have been stronger than Mom, but Jacob was stronger than Lorena. And therefore everyone else.


Heather was already sitting at the big round table. George was at the counter, sticking another pod into the coffee maker.

Heather was chattering away—something about how glad she was to be done with junior year but how terrified she was of all the college application stuff.

George put the cup of coffee in front of her and said, “Do you want milk or sugar?”

“Milk, please. I can get it, though.”

“No problem. I’m up anyway.” He went over to the refrigerator.