Birthday Vicious (2 page)

“I'm sorry.” Her mother offered a limp hand to Mona. “I just don't feel very . . . BLEAAGH!”

And with that, Matilda Spencer vomited all over the coffee table, her teacup, and Mona's famous black book, all over her shoes, and all over the snow-white sheepskin rug.

The place was covered in lime-green vomit.

“Omigod!” shrieked Ashley, jumping to her feet. “Mom! Are you okay?” She looked at her mother, stricken with fear and disgust. Nimble Mona had leaped from her stool and avoided getting splattered, but Dorothy the poodle wasn't so lucky: She'd been prancing past just as her mother started barfing and was now dripping with what looked like a mess of regurgitated peas.

Ashley put a hand on her mother's elbow, shocked
speechless. She hoped it was just food poisoning and not something more serious. Nothing that would mean Ashley would live out the rest of her life having to wear itchy wool sweaters and eat Aunt Agnes's horrible cooking. Matilda was bent double, one trembling hand holding back her ponytail. Mona looked concerned and just a tiny bit appalled.

Uh-oh. Maybe this was going to be a deal breaker. Maybe Mona didn't like clients who threw up their lunches all over the black-and-white decor, even if those lunches were organic and prepared by a private chef. Maybe she'd show them the door and badmouth them to all the other party planners in San Francisco.

But even as she was anxious about her mother's health, Ashley couldn't help but wonder: What did this mean for her Super-Sweet Thirteen?

THIS WAS NOT LILI'S KIND
of place: cheap, gritty, and so
unhygienic
it was practically a health hazard. She cradled her chunky off-white coffee cup to avoid taking another sip of the generic-diner coffeelike liquid that was now lukewarm and completely bitter, nothing at all like her favorite café mochas.

Sure the diner was near Fillmore, major stomping ground for the Ashleys—they met at the Fillmore Starbucks every morning before school—but this divey roach trap was
off
Fillmore, “off” being the operative word. None of the other Ashleys would dream of coming in here, Lili was sure of that. Oh well. At least none
of her friends would spot her. The things she was doing for love!

Hanging out at the diner was Max's idea. As in Max Costa, her boyfriend. He'd only been her boyfriend for two minutes, since their dramatic reunion at the
Preteen Queen
results party, but Lili was learning fast that relationships with boys weren't quite as . . . well, romantic as she'd expected.

Especially when your boyfriend went to Arthur Reed Prep School for the Arts, where everyone spent all their time pretending to be artsy and unconventional. So there they were, squeezed into a sticky vinyl booth with his best buds, Jason Brooks and Quentin Del Rosario, talking about what they always talked about with Max's friends—their emo band's webpage.

Lili's mind drifted away from the conversation, and she lowered her coffee cup, shaking her dark curls. Sure, Max was hunky and blond, but it was easier to cast him in the role of McDreamy when he was smoldering across the room at a party. Not so easy when he and his friends were competing to see who could come up with the most obscure references to garage bands and underground movies.

She tried to suppress a sigh, thinking about Ashley and how this was the day Ashley and her mom were
meeting the party planner extraordinaire, Mona Mazur. Now
that
was a Saturday-afternoon activity Lili could get excited about. Party planning was her thing—hadn't she organized the best mixer ever at Miss Gamble's earlier this semester? Of course, her best friend had almost died at the event, but that wasn't her fault. Besides, Ashley had more than bounced back from beyond the grave.

Unfortunately, things were kind of chilly between the two of them at the moment. Even if AshleyRank had been shut down, Lili knew that Ashley would never forgive her for nabbing the top spot. Although once again, Lili had nothing to do with it. The people had spoken!

For a heady moment, Lili had toyed with the fantasy of kicking Ashley out of the Ashleys and making Ashley's humiliation complete. But Ashley proved a lot more resilient than her svelte frame suggested, and she had recouped social losses by talking up her blowout birthday bash to anyone and everyone. Still, Lili liked knowing that Ashley's prominence would never be taken for granted again—least of all by Lili.

Now that she had Max around, it was harder to make time out of school for the Ashleys anyway.

“Could you move over?” asked a snooty voice, and
Lili's heart sank. Jason and Quentin had brought their girlfriends with them—Cassandra Allison (Lili thought it was odd to have two names that were first names, but whatever) and Jezebel Jackson-Green, both seventh-graders at Reed too—and the girls were back from a ten-minute bathroom trip.

Both wore torn skinny black jeans, white wife beaters, and too much black eyeliner. Cassandra had on an oversize khaki fatigue jacket, and her dyed-red, greasy bangs looked like they'd been dipped in raspberry sauce. Jezebel (whose real name was Jennifer, Lili found out later) had a pierced nostril, and her mousy hair tied up with an oil-stained bandanna. They made Lili want to wrinkle her pert little nose.

She wriggled over in the booth, scrunching up next to Max to make room for Cassandra, while Jezebel plopped down on the other side of the table, next to Jason. Lili just knew that the two girls had been bitching about her in the bathroom. Though why they were acting so superior was beyond her. Hello—was there a mirror in the bathroom? Had they
seen
how stupid they looked? Grunge was so over. Even Avril was now toting Vuitton bags.

“So, Lili,” said Cassandra, glancing over at Jezebel's
smirking face. “How do you feel about camping? Max is really into it, you know.”

“Um . . .” Lili was flustered for a moment. She didn't know that Max was into camping. She barely knew
anything
about him, apart from the fact that he was a star player on the lacrosse team (a fluke, apparently, at boho heaven Reed Prep), that he spoke fluent French (and only took French conversation to sharpen his skills), and that he rode a skateboard and played in a band. He was cute and he liked her. What else was there to know? She inadvertently nudged him with her leg, but he didn't even notice. The guys were still engrossed in band talk. “I guess so. I mean, why not?”

“Really?” Jezebel screwed up her face. “You don't look like the outdoor type.”

“Neither do you,” Lili retorted. It came out sharper and ruder than she intended, but really! Both of the girls were as pale as ghosts. Apart from the red smudges of oversqueezed zits, that is.

“My parents take us hiking in the Sierra Nevadas every summer,” said Jezebel, a strange glint in her unusually milky blue eyes. “My dad is, like, a
woodsman
.” Uh-huh. Jezebel's dad ran a hedge fund.

“Yeah, and our families let us go camping up on
Mount Tam all the time.” Cassandra ran her pale, ink-stained fingers through her dyed bangs. “They believe in kids being independent, learning to fend for themselves. Have you ever been camping?”

“Probably . . .” Lili tried to play for time. “I don't really remember, exactly.”

“Either you have or you haven't.” Jezebel rolled her eyes.

“God, you've totally missed out!” said Cassandra, elbowing Lili. Just what Lili needed—scaly flakes of skin from Cassandra's dry, moisturizer-deprived arms on her new black suede Daryl K jacket! “Are your parents really overprotective or something?”

“Or maybe they think you're just
too young
?” Jezebel asked with a curled lip, and the look she and Cassandra exchanged suggested that this was exactly what they thought. They were acting as though she was a complete baby.

“Of course not,” Lili said quickly. Her heart was beating fast. “They let me do whatever I want.” Which was not at all true. Her parents were pretty strict.

“Even go camping on Mount Tam?” Cassandra sounded skeptical.

“'Course!” Lili lied, looking down at the dregs of
her coffee cup. “Mount Tam” was Mount Tamalpais, just north of the Golden Gate, but it might as well have been north of the Arctic Circle as far as Lili was concerned. Her family was definitely not the camping type. More like the five-star-hotel type.

Her father, Charles Li, was a Silicon Valley CEO, and his idea of relaxing was flying up to Napa for a weekend in his prop plane to buy cases of wine for his cellar. Her mother, Nancy Khan, was an ex-high-powered lawyer who now channeled her excess energies into Miss Gamble's board of trustees meetings and haranguing her daughters' private tutors. Their house in Presidio Heights was as big as a small nation, so there was always a battalion of staff members for her mother to manage—including two nannies, one each for Lili's adorable little sisters, Josephine and Brennan, and two personal assistants for her mother's charity and social events.

Lili had more extracurricular activities and classes to attend than the entire seventh grade of Miss Gamble's combined, from music and language lessons to assisting a genetic researcher at Stanford. Whenever her two older sisters were back from college or boarding school for any length of time, the whole family flew to Taiwan
to visit relatives. Her mother's idea of roughing it was to fly first class rather than charter a jet. When—and why—would they ever go camping?

Not that Lili would ever suggest such a thing to her parents in the first place. The shoes people wore when they went camping were just plain ugly. Who wanted to wear giant work boots or those sandals with congealed-black-rubber soles and straps made out of Velcro? Not any of the Ashleys, that was certain. She couldn't help shuddering at the thought.

“Are you cold?” Max asked. “I could ask them to turn up the thermostat.”

Lili shook her head and returned his smile. At least he was paying her some attention at last. He reached over and squeezed her hand. With his fine blond hair and inky-dark eyes, he was so striking. She could almost forgive him for dragging her to a place like this and abandoning her to these witchy alterna-wannabes.

“We were just talking about the camping trip to Mount Tam,” said Cassandra, leaning across Lili like she wasn't there. Lili flinched: Cassandra's hair smelled gummy and looked like it hadn't been washed in three days. At least she didn't have to worry about Max dumping her for some girl at his own school—they
made the Helena Academy pigs look like debutantes.

“Yeah, I meant to mention it.” Max sounded sheepish. “We've been talking about it at school.”

“Lili wants to go,” chimed in Jezebel from across the table. “Don't you, Lili?”

Lili nodded and tried her best to smile. Not only did she
not
want to go, she would never be allowed to go. Not in a million years. Her parents would think it was absurdly dangerous, especially at this time of the year. And they would never agree to a coed camping trip, whatever the season.

Her parents didn't even know Max was her boyfriend—for one very good reason: Lili wasn't allowed to have a boyfriend.
Any
boyfriend. Not until she was fifteen, two long years away. Nobody knew about this rule, not even the other Ashleys. This afternoon she'd told her mother she was meeting A. A. at the Fillmore Starbucks to plan a science project and then ducked around the corner once Nancy's black hybrid SUV was out of sight.

“It would be so cool if you could come.” Max's smile was bright: It lit up his whole face. “I wasn't sure if you'd be able to.”

“Yeah.” Cassandra sighed, giving a mock-sympathetic shrug. “You probably won't be allowed, right?”

“Hey, Max—it's okay,” Jezebel said. “We can invite another girl from school to make up the numbers.”

“My sister could come,” Quentin suggested, snapping his checkerboard suspenders.

“I'll go!” Lili almost shouted. No way was she going to be jostled aside by Courtney Love's godchildren. No way were they going to get away with implying she was an over privileged, overprotected princess who was too delicate to go on a camping trip. Lili was good at everything she set her mind to—why should camping be any different?

“That's great.” Max beamed. “We were thinking about two weekends from now, before it starts getting really cold. Will that be okay?”

“Sure.” Lili nodded, but her heart was pounding. With her overscheduled life, it was hard enough lying to her mother about a few hours in the city. How was she going to get away with a whole weekend up on Mount Tam?

A. A. DRUMMED HER FINGERS IMPATIENTLY
on the cracked wooden table, trying to focus on the vintage black-and-white photos lining the opposite wall. This was Buzz Burgers, one of her favorite places to eat, especially when she wasn't with the other Ashleys. Unlike her best friends, A. A. actually liked to eat, especially on a Saturday evening in November after she'd played a boisterous game of soccer in the afternoon. She loved how the fresh, brisk, soon-to-be winter wind felt on her skin.

She didn't even mind eating in public, unlike Ashley Spencer, who would rather starve than be seen in public consuming anything larger than an olive—even if it meant scarfing a pint of ice cream when she got home.
And Lili never let food pass her lips if (a) there were boys around, (b) the restaurant wasn't scrupulously immaculate and scrubbed clean, or (c) Ashley Spencer wasn't eating. Those two would faint from hunger before conceding in front of each other. It was a totally ridiculous competition, and A. A. was always glad she wasn't part of it.

Tall and slim, with a super-speedy metabolism, sports-mad A. A. could get away with eating like a boy. Her fashion-model mother kept warning her that she couldn't keep stuffing her face forever, but A. A. was going to enjoy every minute of eating like a whale while she could. And there was nothing in the world she liked to eat as much as a huge, juicy burger, dripping with melted cheese and crammed into a lightly toasted bun—just the way Buzz made them.