Dating Trouble (Grover Beach Team Book 5) (4 page)

“Ethan!” I spat.

“What about him?”

“He’s a complete and utter blockhead.”

Nick exchanged a wary glance with Sam before he replied, “Are you serious? From what I heard this morning, you and Ethan seemed to have quite a nice time after practice. Hunter mentioned that Ethan said you’d told him he could play.”

“Did he lie?” Sam demanded.

“No... I did say that.” Sort of. “But when you see Hunter again you can tell him I changed my mind. If he cares about my feelings even a little, he won’t let Ethan play my position.”

Nick sucked air in through his teeth, scrunching up his face. “Ooh.” He lifted his hands, rising from my desk like a fire had broken out. “I’ll leave you girls alone, so you can talk this out.”

The moment we were to ourselves, Sam lifted her eyebrows, prompting me to clarify. I would have done so, if the bell hadn’t cut our plans short. Sam, who sat next to Nick in science, vacated the chair beside me for Trudy Anderson. But as soon as the teacher had come in and started the lesson, I got a text from Sam asking for the full story.

Hiding my cell beneath the desk, I typed in the most important deets about my recent encounter with Ethan and sent the message off. Her reply was a sad smiley face, but another text followed soon. She suggested we skip lunch with the guys in the cafeteria today, get the girls together instead, and go into a huddle out on the campus grounds. This sounded exactly like what I needed. I looked up from my phone and over to her, pressed my lips together, and nodded. In a final text, I asked her not to tell Nick what had happened. The guys didn’t need to know everything, though they might find out soon enough. Once they met Ethan, he’d certainly spill the amusing story of how he embarrassed Susan Miller.

With Sam, Lisa, and Simone in most of my classes, the morning went by quickly enough. They were all taken aback as much as I was when they heard what had happened. When lunch break came and we found a place outside in the sun where we ate the sandwiches that Sam had picked up at the cafeteria, I could finally rant in a volume fit for a situation like this. It felt so good to just let it all out and not whisper behind cupped hands anymore.

“He’s such a moron! You should have heard him, oh my
God
! ‘What made you think you and I would be going out together?’” I reiterated in a dull imitation of his voice, then dropped my forehead to my folded arms on my knees and moaned. “He just used me. Pretended to like me so I’d say he could play.”

“Cheer up,” Simone said, placing her hand on my shoulder. “We’ll get even and make you feel better.”

I lifted my head. “How?”

“Simple. First, Lisa will tell Hunter to kick Ethan off the team. And then we go shopping.”

“Shopping?” Lisa laughed. “Is that your answer to everything?”

“That’s my answer to boy trouble. It’ll help Susan get in a better”—she leaned forward in a conspiratorial way—“mood.”

And it was the best answer she could have come up with. Buying new books always did to my soul what conditioner did to frizzy hair. There was only one problem. “I can’t. I have to drive out to Nipomo with my mom after school to pick up her car.”

“Fine, we’ll meet you in town when you get back,” Simone stated. “It can’t take you all day to drive those thirty miles.”

“No. We should be home around four. I’ll call you.” And already, my old smile was back in place.

THE GOOD THING was that Mom and I made it out to Nipomo and back in record time and I was free to go book shopping, or whatever it was that Simone had in mind, by three forty. The bad thing was that just before I left the house, my father called and said he’d be late this evening. That was going to end in another argument. Mom worked as a nurse at the French Hospital Medical Center in San Luis Obispo. She was on duty tonight, so it was Dad’s turn to cook dinner for us and make sure that Gramps took all his pills and the insulin injection.

At seventeen, I was old enough to cook dinner for myself, and Gramps wasn’t a helpless, senile old man, either. He could look after himself very well. But since my gran had died of a heart attack two years ago, Mom had become hyper-careful and overly protective of him. Nobody said it out loud, but I believed she blamed my father for my grandmother’s death.

That particular day, Dad had begged on his knees for Mom to go with him to a very boring, very late charity banquet his boss had invited him to. She thought if she’d stayed home that day, she might have been able to save her mother.

Honestly, I didn’t see how. Grams was sitting at her sewing machine when it happened. She just slumped forward and was dead. It was over within seconds, the doctor had told us. She didn’t suffer or even cry out for help. No way would Mom have heard anything, given that we lived next door. Still, that was the time when the fights had begun. And they had never stopped.

Whatever the cause, Mom and Dad would argue again as soon as they were together, but at least it wouldn’t happen until tomorrow morning. I’d learned to treasure those rare occasions when only one of them was home. Reading in a silent house was the best thing I could think of. And I planned to do that right after shopping with the girls today.

At ten to four, I met my friends in front of Charlie’s Café. We’d agreed on starting the shopping trip with a hazelnut latte deluxe, which Charlie, the middle-aged owner, had recently added to the menu.

We filed in one after the other, me being the last to walk through the door. Just as it slid closed behind me, I heard the first traitorous gasp from Simone. Another followed instantly from Sam and Lisa. Sam was small enough that I could look over her head, but it took Simone, who was as tall as me, stepping aside for me to catch a glimpse of the person who had stunned them into silence.

Ethan sat at the bar.

My heart pounded like a bass drum—not from excitement to see him, but from anger. He turned around, maybe because he’d been waiting for someone and heard us enter, or because my friends’ loud gasps drew his attention. Whatever it was, when he saw me, he cracked a goddamn smile.

I gritted my teeth and just followed the others past him. Strangely enough, Ethan seemed to be expecting me to stop by him, so when I didn’t, his smile vanished and a confused frown took its place.

“Hey, Susan,” he said in a wary voice from behind me.

Now look who remembered my name when his friends weren’t with him.

Simone stopped walking and cast me a quick glance full of questions over her shoulder, but I shook my head, so she went to the low, rectangular table in the back. I, on the other hand, turned around and folded my arms over my chest. “What?” I snapped.

He peered at me, tongue-tied, for a couple of seconds. His brows furrowed even more as he slid from the bar stool to stand before me. “Um, I thought we had a date at three?”

“Excuse me?”

At my harsh tone, the guy behind the bar, who Ethan had been talking to when we’d come in, cast a surprised glance at me. He was a pretty boy with dark hair and even darker eyebrows. His name was Ted, and I knew him from my journalism class.

Ignoring Ted, I concentrated on Ethan as he murmured, “I’ve been sitting here the past hour, waiting for you to show up, and now you come with your friends and don’t even say hi?”

“Whoa, dude, you’ve got some nerve. Maybe you should’ve been thinking about that before you dumped all that shit on me.” I paused and put on a sugary smile. “Have a good day, Ethan.” Spinning on my heel, I stomped off to my friends.

Man, payback felt so good.

By the time I sank into one of the dark rattan chairs and picked up the menu just to have something to hold on to, Ethan had disappeared from the café and the door slowly drifted closed on its own.

“What did he say to you?” Sam hissed, shoving the menu down so it was no longer hiding my face.

“That he was waiting for me.”

“He did? That’s weird.”

I grimaced. “It is, isn’t it?”

Ted came over to take our orders and hushed us into silence. Only when we were alone once more did Lisa demand, “So, what are you going to do?”

“Nothing. He’s a moron, obviously with multiple personalities, and I don’t have to stand for that.”

She let out a thoughtful sigh. “I just don’t get it. I’m sure I saw Ryan hanging out with him a few times and, even though we were never officially introduced, he seemed like a nice guy to me.”

“Whatever problems he has, it shouldn’t ruin our shopping, so let’s not talk about him anymore,” I said. Ted returned then and served each of us a hazelnut latte deluxe. I took my cup and lifted it in a salute to my friends. “He was a short chapter in my book. Very short, indeed.” I took a sip, dipping my lip into the hot milk foam, and wondered why Ted was still standing by our table.

When our gazes locked, he said, “Your drink’s on Ethan. He paid for it before he left. And he says sorry for whatever shit he supposedly dumped on you.”

Choking on my mouthful of latte, I put the cup down before it spilled over my pants. Sam smacked me on the back until I could breathe again.

I wiped the foam off my mouth. “You’re kidding me!”

“Nope.” With a smirk that made him appear several years older, Ted turned around and went back behind the bar.

Was Ethan really that crazy? How could he forget what he’d said to me this morning? “Serious mental issues,” I thought out loud, shaking my head. “Can any one of you make sense of this?”

All three shook their heads. A great help they were.

I moaned. “Here I finally find someone seriously sweet”—someone who could measure up to any fictional character I’d ever been in love with—“and he turns out to be just a weirdo.”

Leaning back in her chair and lacing her fingers over her stomach, Sam chewed on her bottom lip. “What if it was all just a big misunderstanding? Maybe he’s on some anti-amnesia meds and simply forgot to take his pills this morning.”

I let out a throaty laugh. “Watched some Sci-Fi with Tony last night, did you?”

“Why?” She looked at me innocently. “Things happen.”

“In what universe?”

“Fine, don’t believe it.” She stuck her tongue out at me. “But I think, for the latte alone, he deserves a second chance.”

“You can’t be serious.” I grabbed a sugar pack from the glass bowl in the middle of the table and ripped it open. Adding the sugar to my latte, I stirred until it sank into the foam. “He totally embarrassed me this morning. How does that deserve a second chance?”

Sam raised her eyebrows, grinning. “Tony was a complete douche when I met him. Now we’re happy together. Just saying.”

Fair enough, she had a point. And the side I got to know of Ethan yesterday made me want to spend more time with him. It was as if we were on the same wavelength. Maybe there did exist some weird explanation for his behavior this morning. There were certainly no anti-amnesia pills involved, though. I’d rather believe Ethan was abducted by aliens. Finding out the truth tempted me… Only, was it really worth the effort?

I doubted it, yet I wanted to hear my friends’ opinions. In eleventh grade, you didn’t make such serious decisions all by yourself. “All right. Let’s vote. What should I do?”

Simone said, “Forget him.”

Lisa said, “Forget him.”

Sam said, “Talk to him.”

“That’s two against one.” I shrugged. “Sorry, Sam, you’re out.” And that was that. I wasn’t going to talk to Ethan ever again. With that decision made, I could finally enjoy my hazelnut latte deluxe, which I didn’t even have to pay for. Win-win.

The shopping afterward was pure delight. I found a dozen books to add to my TBR stack, a pair of skintight blue jeans, a picture frame—which I had no idea how to fill but needed to have because of the beautiful seashells on it—and some accessories for my hair. Satisfied, exhausted, and happy, I sank against the door when I got home and reveled in the silence in the house.

My new books found a place on the giant shelf my dad had built for me some years ago and which reached from wall to wall on one side of my room. The bags with the other stuff I’d bought today, I dropped on my desk. There was no time to put them away. Quiet nights were as holy to me as Christmas Eve. I didn’t intend to waste even one minute of it. Armed with a book, I settled on my bed in the corner next to the window and stuck my feet under the crochet blanket that my grams had made for my eighth birthday. Bambi was on that quilt. It was my most valued treasure.

Before I began to read, I leaned as far out of my bed as I could without falling. My arm was just long enough to reach the top drawer of my desk where I kept a pack of liquor-filled chocolate pralines. Placing them on the mattress next to me, I shoved a piece into my mouth. The pralines would keep my hunger in check, because no way was I going to stop reading for dinner alone.

Around nine, Dad came home and knocked on my door to say hi. I was lucky he didn’t make it past the threshold or kiss me good night, because from all the pralines I’d consumed, my liquor breath might have gotten me into trouble.

I waved from the bed and when he closed the door again, I finished this volume in my now-favorite series. As I turned off the light a couple of hours later, I hoped to dream of the Scottish Highlands.

Instead, I dreamed I was swimming in a pot of caffè latte while Ethan sat on the edge of the pot and repeatedly shouted down at me, “You can’t even play soccer right now! What made you think that you and I would be going out together?”

Since my paddling didn’t seem to be getting me out of the pot, I stopped at some point and drank up the five thousand liters of coffee instead. Afterward, I walked up to Ethan and spit it all at his face. “That’s for playing my position!” I yelled at him.

Luckily, I woke up after that. To say I wasn’t done with Ethan yet was a vast understatement. The guy seemed stuck in my mind like a toothpick in a cheese cube. So how could I get him out of there?

Sitting at the kitchen table and shoving a spoonful of scrambled eggs into my mouth, I wondered if it was better to evade soccer practice for a while. At least until my knee was fine and Ethan would have to clear the field for me again. Not seeing him seemed like the easiest way to forget about him. I toasted myself with my glass of orange juice on that decision and washed the eggs down with a sip, then I got ready for school.

A few minutes before the bell rang, I slipped into the building and headed straight for my first class. Certain that Sam would be the first to grill me this morning on the subject of
Ethan
and how I felt about him today, I was surprised to run into Lisa in the hallway.

“Susan, wait,” she hissed with an urgent look. “I have to tell you something.” Only problem—she was talking to a teacher and had to finish that little chat first. Patiently, I waited at the corner of the hallway, off to the side, for a couple of minutes, until a familiar voice carried to me—and caused the hair at the back of my neck to stand on end.

I cast a look over my shoulder. In front of the restrooms, Hunter and Ethan were engaged in a chat. It looked like one had just come out and one was about to walk into the restrooms, but both had too much to tell the other to move on.

Instantly, I shielded my face with one hand and lowered my head. Right, as if Hunter wouldn’t recognize me the second he looked over. And probably Ethan, too. Rolling my eyes at myself, I ducked around the corner fast, so they wouldn’t see me, but their voices kept drifting through the corridor.

So much for not going to soccer practice to avoid Ethan. I’d have to skip school, too! Seeing him today totally ruined my intention of getting the blockhead out of my mind. And heck, yesterday’s free hazelnut latte still had my emotions in a knot. Maybe we needed to talk it out once and for all—just so I could stop thinking about him and hopefully sleep better.

But with my nerves in this state, I could hardly walk over and confront him.
Gah
! What misery, and before first period even started. Frustrated, I banged my head against the wall behind me, pulling at my hair.

Lisa, who was standing with her side to me, must have caught my angst. She shot me a puzzled look, which I returned with a nod in Ethan’s direction. She bit her lip, so obviously wanting to tell me something, but the stout woman wasn’t done talking to her yet. I had no idea which subject Lisa had with her, but they seemed on very close terms. Man, what would I give to spring my friend from her teacher’s clutches and consult her about my trouble with Ethan.

Since that obviously wasn’t going to happen anytime soon, I steeled my nerves and stepped around the corner, facing the guys in front of the restrooms. My breakfast rolled around in my stomach, but I ignored that queasy feeling and walked straight up to Hunter and Ethan, gaining speed and courage as I went.