Wrong About the Guy(7)

They were both smart and entertaining and quick to laugh, which made them fine to spend an afternoon with, but I could never shake the feeling that my greatest appeal for them was the fact that Luke Weston was my stepfather. Maybe it was unfair of me—God knows I could be paranoid about that kind of thing—but still . . . there were moments. Like even that afternoon: we passed a poster advertising the upcoming season premiere of We’ll Make You a Star, and Riley instantly stopped and pointed to it. “It must be so weird for you to see Luke’s picture everywhere you go,” she said to me a little too loudly, like she wanted people to overhear our conversation. “Doesn’t it freak you out? I mean, you live with him.”

“I’m used to it,” I said, and moved away.

Heather flashed me a sympathetic eye roll. I’d confided in her how much I hated how famous Luke had become and the way it made people act. I couldn’t complain to him and my mom about it—they couldn’t change anything and they would just feel bad—and I couldn’t complain to people I didn’t trust, so I only complained to Heather, who had loved me for me right from the start, and who kept any secret I asked her to.

So even though Skyler and Riley were my closest friends at school, I didn’t feel relaxed around them. They were always inventing reasons to come over to my house, where their eyes would flicker around hopefully at every noise, like they were just waiting for Luke to come through the door and fall in love with one of them. You’d think the fact that he was my mother’s husband would make them a little less obvious about their crushes, but apparently his fame made him some kind of acceptable universal object of lust. I just tried to avoid having them over, which is why I usually met them at places like the mall.


When I got home, I found Mom and Luke lying on their bed, Jacob between them, curled up on his side, staring at some animated show on TV. Luke was reading a script (he read a lot of scripts now that he had his own production company), and Mom a glossy magazine. She never cared much about fashion before Luke got famous, but now they were always going to dressy events, and she felt like she had to keep up.

“There you are!” she said, putting her magazine down. “How was the movie?”

“Moderately not-awful,” I said. “But only moderately.”


“And the SAT tutoring?”

“About as thrilling as you’d expect.”

“Just be grateful we didn’t make you get a job this summer,” she said. “A few hours of studying won’t kill you. Is George a good tutor?”

“Yeah, he’s fine.” I came over and sat down on the edge of their bed. “Speaking of George, I wanted to ask you something. Could we go to Tahiti for your anniversary party?”

“Tahiti? We were leaning toward Hawaii.”

“But I’ve always wanted to go to Tahiti. Plus . . . you know . . . Gauguin.”

My mother laughed. With no makeup on and her hair a little rumpled, she looked the way I liked her best: like my mom. When she was all glammed up for going out with lots of eye makeup and curled hair, she looked Hollywood-wife generic. “So it would be educational? Is that what you’re telling me?”

“Totally. I’d read up on Gauguin before we went and become a total expert on him, I swear.”

“How can I say no to that?”

“Cool.” I slid off the bed and stood up. “I’ll tell George.”


I may have sounded a tiny bit smug when I told George that he should start looking at resorts in Tahiti.

His eyes narrowed. “Just because you want to go there?”

“I convinced Mom. I always get my way, you know.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I see that. Kind of like Veruca Salt.”

“Don’t be a bad loser.”

Except he didn’t lose. Somehow, once he had done the research and presented all the options to my mother and Luke, and the final decision was made, they went with Hawaii after all.

I complained, but Mom said it just made more sense, because we only had four days, and Hawaii was a lot closer. “Only four days?” I repeated. I’d been picturing a real end-of-summer blowout, days and days of beaches and walks and lazy meals and long naps in hammocks before having to get back to fall semester and college applications and all that stuff. But now Mom said the show was taping and Luke couldn’t take more time off than that.

Luke’s schedule ruled our household and was the one thing impervious to my coaxing and begging, so there wasn’t much I could do about it except whine to George later that we’d be spending more time flying than actually lying on a beach.

“Yeah, it’s rough,” he said. “You don’t get to go on a tropical vacation for as long as you’d hoped. Complain about it to everyone you meet and bask in the sympathy.”

He was coming with us—my mother told him they’d pay for his airfare so long as he shared a hotel room with his brother, who was already coming as Luke’s guest. She claimed she needed George to deal with the logistics once we were there, which seemed more kind than true. When I pressed her about it, she admitted she just wanted to give him a vacation. “I felt bad that he was spending all this time looking at pictures of Hawaii and not getting to go. He’s never been. A trip like that would have meant so much to me at his age.”