All You Never Wanted (15 page)

It felt exactly like a candle. Heavy, square, tidy. Yes, a candle. I usually won at guess-the-gift. Cross fingers.

Finally, I called a local taxi service to pick me up and drop me at school so I could repossess my BMW. The “Hitler’s limo” comments had done their damage.

Besides, my Beemer was plenty gorgeous.

“We’re on our second batch of peach-ginger iced tea. You in?” Palmer picked up a glass from a tray on the patio table.

I nodded. “Thanks!” This was fantastic. Here I was, with all the Blondes. And it couldn’t have been more natural. I tried to hold back the goofy smiling. But it was hard.

She set it down and started to pour from the pitcher. “I brewed it my signature lethal Southern style. With ten times the FDA-approved levels of caffeine and sugar.”

“Mmm. Oh, and here!” As I took the iced tea with one hand, I thrust my present at Jess with the other. “Happy birthday, Jessica! I know Alex was really bumming that she couldn’t come out to your thing last night.”

“Sweet,” said Mo from her lounge chair, which was set apart from the others under a tent of tree. To ensure no ray of sunlight touched her milk-pale skin.

Greenwich Public could divide itself smack down the middle between those who thought Maureen was exquisitely beautiful and kids who thought she looked like the Undead. I was in the second camp. Even Mo’s smile seemed gruesome. Those red-blue lips, that blue-veined skin. It was too easy to imagine her sipping my blood from a wineglass.

“Huh.” In contrast, Jess was already a Laguna Beach bronze. She was about as mixed-race as a family tree could hybrid itself. Chinese, Hawaiian, some Egyptian, plus a few ho-hum European countries. Sure, it added up to pretty, even if Jess’s face also reminded me of a mask. But that fit her, too. Jess was hard to pierce. Like, I couldn’t even tell if she was excited about my gift. Any
normal person would start gleefully unwrapping, but Jess shook the gift against her ear, stuck it on the patio table, and said, in a slightly demanding tone, “So that’s from Alex? Or from you?”

“Me. Well. Both of us?” I wanted the Blondes to feel me generously including Alex, while also realizing that Jess’s gift was all my idea.

“Like it matters. Three things you can count on.” And Mo began to count them off on her fingers. “One, Palmer’s iced tea is always epic. Two, there’s never a parking space if I’m late for AP Bio. And three, Alex and Thea’s credit cards will get paid every frigging month. The end.”

As the others laughed, Mo swished her enchantress-black hair down from its clip to reset it higher. But it would have been hard to miss the bitchy in Mo’s voice on her third point. It was true about our credit cards. I’d known Mo forever, and she’d always been a touch bitter about money, since she had the least. I’d even heard on the Greenwich grapevine that Mo’s recent expenses (Spring Break trip to Miami plus her new laptop and prom costs) had put a real strain on her parents. Not that Mo herself was confessing to a crisis. Like a lot of Greenwichy girls, she played Little Miss Splendid to Tiffany’s-charm-bracelet perfection.

“Can I just say? I missed not seeing Joshua last night,” said Jess. “After Republic of Dim Sum, we ended up at his favorite, Louie Louie’s, for karaoke.”

“Fun,” I said. “Wish I’d been there, too.” Except I wouldn’t have been invited. No matter how hard I’d been working at my image these past months, the Blondes saw me as Alex’s little sister. Even now, I could feel their sly looks. Their
What the hell is Thea doing here?
traded glances.

I hated it, I really did. Something about Alex’s friends could really flash me back to when I’d been that other Thea—twenty-first-century bookworm Thea. Shyer-than-a-rainy-day-vole Thea. The little girl I wished I could drown like a kitten from everyone’s memory. Especially mine.

“Karaoke is my favorite,” I announced. Maybe a touch loud. But plunging deep. “So next time you all go out? Will you please
please
let me come along?”

Silence. I suppressed my squirm. But if I didn’t ask, I’d never get.

“Remember how funny Joshua was, last time?” Palmer asked this question as if I hadn’t spoken up at all. “I wished he’d have come out. Whatever else you want to say about Joshua, he owns that Beyoncé song. You know that one he does? I was cracking up all night.”

Mo made a face. “Actually, I’ve got plenty to say about Joshua. Hardly any of it good.”

“But, Mo, you don’t like Joshua for the same reason I
do
like him, kinda,” said Jess. “I mean, I really get what Alex sees. He’s a nonconformist. Unlike a lot of the plain-vanilla boys around here.”

“Joshua Gunner is extremely dangerous.”

I wasn’t sure why I just said that.

Too late—it was out of my mouth. Flopping around in the open like a landed fish.

“What? What do you mean?” Palmer, who’d resumed her Southern Belle swoon on the deck chair, lifted her sunglasses so they rested on her forehead, the better to stare me down. I was in a mental scramble. Where was I going with this? And why? And
yet I could feel the rush, the tightrope of the lie, stretching out in front of me.

Daring me to walk it.

“I don’t know. It’s a feeling I get. He’s too aggressive. Like how he forced me to help him steal that whale last night.”

“He forced you,” Jess repeated sarcastically. “At gunpoint?”

“No, but—I didn’t know the plan until he’d gotten me on the highway. He said the prank would cheer up Alex.”

“It cheered her up. I could tell.” Palmer sounded thoughtful. “Stratford Mini-Putt was the first Alex-Josh date. Everyone knows their first kiss was under the whale.”

“Oh, that’s right. Cute,” said Mo.

“I’d forgotten about that,” added Jess.

I
hadn’t even known it. Let alone forgotten about it. I swallowed. My throat turned scratchy. So was I the only one who hadn’t known about the first kiss? Why didn’t Alex ever tell me anything anymore?

“Well, even if that stupid whale made Alex happier for three seconds,” I said quickly, “it didn’t make her happy enough to finish one single piece of pizza.” And had anyone else noticed that Alex and Joshua hardly bothered with the PDA anymore? To the point where you might wonder if there was even any DA happening.

“Joshua loves Alex,” said Palmer. “Maybe his love isn’t worth a dollar, but he tries. And Thea, if you’d wanted to nuke the Stratford prank, Josh would have let you off the hook. I was there, remember, when you came back. As I recall, it was more like, ‘Oooh, Joshua! Cracking the shim! So good with your hands!’ ” She batted her eyelashes.

As Mo and Jess laughed. But I was a caged bird, hopping on my swing, ruffling my feathers, and readjusting my perch. “Really? You really think Joshua loves Alex? Then why can’t he get her to eat more than a hundred calories a day? And why does Alex call
me
—not him—when she gets stuck in her car in the driveway or at the train station? You know what he says about that? He says she’s having an ‘off-season.’ Like she’s some ESPN channel he’s watching. But Joshua never shows that he wants to help Alex. Personally? I think he prefers her to be weak.”

Mo, who’d been upright as a meerkat the whole time, now surprised me with her loud squeal of agreement. I looked over at her, snapping her skeleton fingers and pointing at me. “Exactly! Thea’s saying exactly what I was talking about before! Joshua’s making Alex’s bulimia worse. It’s his strategy. So that she doesn’t leave him for college this fall.”

No no no. I eyed Mo cold. “I’m glad you and I agree about some of this, but my sister doesn’t have bulimia, Maureen. She’s never stuck her finger down her throat in her whole entire life.”

Mo scraped back her chair. Now she was so deep in the shade, she might have been under Witness Protection. “Who cares about which exact label to hang on Alex’s problem?” she asked from the shadows. “She’s punishing herself physically because she’s emotionally disturbed. She doesn’t talk to any of us about it—in fact, she’s pushed us all away. Nobody’s close with her anymore. And meanwhile she gets worse and worse.” She unclipped her hair for another vampire swish. “If you ask me, the whole thing is completely twisted and depressing.”

Mo was right on all counts. I knew it and it stung. Still, I wanted the last word. Needed it. After all, I knew my sister best.
“Alex is too sensitive for Joshua. He takes advantage of her. She puts up her guard around him. She’s alone in this crisis. When what she really needs is somebody who understands her from a deep place.”

From a deep place
. I’d even stirred in a little Grange-like wisdom. Mo’s eyes were shiny; her mouth drooped with listening. It felt good. Once I stared down an obnoxious little kid in a grocery store for so long that his face had crumpled with bewilderment. That was Mo right now. I’d altered her. I’d hit target.

But I felt righteous about this, too. Why should anyone trust Joshua? He was secretly flirting with me behind his girlfriend’s back. He’d hit me in the truck. He was a thief and a pot dealer. Nobody should be on his side until I figured out what I wanted from him myself.

“So what are you doing at my house, anyway, Thea? Besides brutally critiquing your sister’s boyfriend to all her best friends?” Palmer sheathed the question in the special guest appearance of her hostess smile, but I knew Palmer too well. And I guess vice versa.

“Like I said. I’d picked up a present earlier for Jess. For her birthday.”

Our heads all robo-swiveled to check out where Jessie’d left it on the table. My skin got tingly—I really needed whatever was in there to work, gift-wise. No golf balls or wine-bottle openers. Now that I’d done it, it struck me that if it really ended up being golf balls, there wasn’t much wiggle room on my excuse.

Here I was again, out on the tightrope.

“Maybe I should open it,” said Jess lazily.

“Or whenever. I thought I’d drop it off,” I said, plowing ahead,
“since I didn’t know if anyone was coming to the party. Oh, hey, but since you are—are any of you coming? To my house? To the party, I mean? Tonight?”

Of course, this was the Entire Real Reason I was here. To get the Blondes on board. A Greenwich Public party was nothing without them.

“About that,” said Mo.

“Yeah,” said Jess.

“We’ve got a tiny question mark over tonight,” said Palmer.

My smile was stretched to cracking over my fear. “Why?”

“Obviously, we’re all a little pissed with Alex,” added Mo. “She really disappointed Jess by not showing up for dim sum. A best friend’s eighteenth-birthday party is kind of a big deal. And Jess was the last one.”

As Jess, the Disappointed, held a stoic silence.

“And then she didn’t come over today,” added Mo. “How hard would that have been? She sent us a bunch of notes about the party, and it’s sweet that she wants to do a birthday thing for Jess. But the best thing she could have given us was herself.”

“Totally. I’m feeling that.” Uh-oh. My stomach was gargling wavelets of nausea. A party with no Blondes? Especially when Alex was my own sister?

“We all just might go to the movies or something,” said Jess. “I feel like there’s no way to get through to her. To show her how hurt we are.”

A party minus the Blondes. It would be social sabotage.

“The extra-fun thing about this party,” I said easily, “is there’s not even any of Arthur’s staff there. Know how he’s always got a servant or two? Not tonight.”

“Oh. Interesting,” said Palmer.

Was she being sarcastic? I couldn’t tell. It was probably the doubt, plus the three sets of eyeballs on me, that motivated the next stupid thing out of my mouth. “Also, Joshua’s selling. Just discreetly. He’s scored some top-drawer ganja.”

There was a pause. A pause that I didn’t like. My top teeth found my bottom lip. What had I done now?

“What?” Palmer wrinkled her nose. “
Ganja?
Did you steal that word from an old
Cops
show?”

“Ha! Ha! Ha!” Jess’s laugh was a pistol-whip.

Mo sneered.
“Ganja!”

“Or how about ‘dope,’ ” asked Palmer. “You meant ‘dope,’ right, Thea?”

They were edging toward hysteria. Thinking up other words. “Wacky Tobaccy!” “Maryjane!” My heart hammered. Unfair! Using “ganja” was one hundred percent Lulette’s fault! She’d said it just last week when Joshua had lit up down at the pool house. Lulette had picked up the scent like a bloodhound. First sniffing down the lawn to the source. Then chasing Joshua to his truck.

“Boy, you’ve got no business smoking your dirty ganja ’round here! You take that somewhere else! Not on Mr. Arthur’s property!” Lulette’s running down Joshua had been funny enough to get Alex and me laughing, too.

Maybe that was why the episode had twanged in my head. Why the word stuck.

Now I’d gone and used “ganja” in front of all these girls. My sister’s best friends. Who also happened to be the most visible, valuable social unit at Greenwich Public. Why hadn’t I said “weed” or “shit” like any normal person? Why hadn’t I just said
“Joshua’s selling”? Everyone knew what that meant. I was such a moron.

I breathed in and out. Slow. Careful-careful. “C’mon, don’t be harsh.” I hoped my voice showed I cared “not a whit,” as Grange said, about their teasing. This would be a great short story. A story about a girl who was trying so hard to be cool in front of her sister’s friends that she used the wrong slang word and was humiliated and then … what? What next?

In real life you just get over it. In a movie, you blow up the school.

Grange would love me to write that story. Especially if it was about pot-selling. Then she could fight the English Department about getting it into
The Impulse
. Free speech. No censors. Go, Grange.

“ ‘Ganja’!” I laughed. “I’m such a loser. It’s a retro word, though,” I added. “Like my dress. Do you like this dress? I’m wearing it tonight, I think.”

“That
is
a cute dress,” acknowledged Jess. “I was about to ask where you got it.”

“She made it herself, if you can believe,” said Palmer. “With help from that manic manager at Topshop. Remember her? Betsy, Becky? What was her name again?”

“I forget,” I said. “It was such a long time ago.”