Get Dirty (19 page)

“Where are you going?” Olivia asked.

“I’m going to learn my lines before rehearsal,” she said, without looking at Olivia. “Don’t wait up.”

Olivia stared blankly at the door long after her mom had slammed it in her face. She was worried, angry, stressed beyond belief, and for some reason, she felt incredibly guilty. Her mom was right about one thing—she’d sacrificed her career for Olivia. A lot of actresses in her position wouldn’t have had the baby at all, or at least wouldn’t have kept it. Where would her mom be today if she’d never had Olivia? Tony winner? Oscar winner? Instead, she was stuck here, broken and forgotten.

Olivia’s eyes shifted across the room to where almost a dozen pill bottles lay strewn across the coffee table. More? She was pretty sure there hadn’t been that many yesterday.

Suddenly, her mom’s recent mood swings came into focus. She stormed across the room, scooped up all the bottles, leaving only the two prescriptions she recognized, and marched into her bedroom. She had no idea where her mom had gotten all the pills, but something had definitely shifted in her mom’s emotional state in the last couple of days, and the pills must be to blame. Olivia would stash them until she could talk to Dr. Kearns and find out what was going on.

But as Olivia searched her bedroom for a hiding place, she heard a sharp knock at the door.

Her mom must have forgotten her keys again. She dumped the pill bottles on her bed and rushed to the front door.

Only it wasn’t her mother on the landing.

“Amber!” Olivia exclaimed. Amber didn’t even make the short list of people who might have been knocking on her door in the middle of the afternoon. “What are you doing here?”

Without answering, Amber shouldered past Olivia into the living room. “So this is where you live,” she said, eyeing the small interior. “I didn’t know it was a one-bedroom.”

Olivia stiffened. She’d been in Amber’s gorgeous four-bedroom home more times than she could remember. The eight hundred square feet Olivia and her mom shared could have easily fit into Amber’s room alone.

She was ashamed of the way she lived, afraid of letting her friends know just how poor she really was. But she wasn’t going to let Amber see that.

“It’s all we can afford,” she said proudly. “My mom works double shifts to cover rent.”

“Worked,” Amber said. “Past tense. Right?” She turned and faced Olivia for the first time. “I ran into her out front and she told me she’s doing a Broadway play?”

“It’s previewing here,” she said, holding her head high, unwilling to let Amber see the shame she felt over her mother’s delusions of grandeur. “Before a possible run off-Broadway. My mom’s a well-known figure at the Public Theater in New York so it’s a perfect fit.” Okay, slight exaggeration. But Amber wouldn’t know that.

“I guess.”

Olivia took a deep breath. She was tired of the mind games. “Why are you here?”

Amber looked Olivia dead in the eyes. “I want to ask a favor.”

“From me?” Olivia blurted out. Amber had never admitted to needing anything from anyone in the history of their friendship. Maybe today’s humiliation had affected her more deeply than Olivia realized?

“I know that Rex and I are broken up,” she said by way of an answer. “But I’m asking you not to date him.”

Olivia laughed. She couldn’t help it. “I don’t want to date Rex.”

Amber took a step closer to her, scrutinizing her face. “Are you sure about that?”

Why didn’t she believe that Olivia was in no way interested in her ex-boyfriend? “Absolutely sure.”

“Because I remember the night of the bonfire. I saw how you kissed him.”

Dammit. That stupid bonfire! Olivia desperately regretted the idea of making out with Rex to make Donté jealous. That momentary lapse in judgment had caused her nothing but grief.

“Amber, I know what you saw that night,” she started. She just needed to make a clean break of it. Get it off her chest. “But it’s not what you think. I was only—”

A shrill, old-fashioned telephone ring ripped through the room. Amber’s cell phone volume must have been on full blast. She whipped her phone out of her purse and quickly answered it.

“What is it, Kyle? I’m busy.”

Olivia could hear the muffled, unintelligible syllables coming through the phone, but the only hint as to what Kyle said was in Amber’s reaction. The color drained from her face, the hand
holding the phone shook uncontrollably, and her eyes glassed over. Her arm fell away from her face; her phone clattered the floor.

“Amber?” Kyle yelled, so loud that Olivia could hear it. “Amber, are you there?”

“What happened?” Olivia asked. “What’s wrong?”

Amber lowered herself to the arm of the sofa but didn’t say a word.

Olivia snatched the phone off the floor. “Kyle? It’s Olivia. What happened?”

“Oh, thank God you’re with her,” he said.

“What happened?”

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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BREE WAS PRACTICALLY CRAWLING OUT OF HER SKIN WHILE
she waited in her bedroom for John, desperately trying to keep her mind off Tammi Barnes.

Everything she believed in had been turned on its end. She’d cast herself as a hero, or at least a penitent sinner, attempting to atone. Instead, she had just made things worse for Tammi. And how many others? Coach Creed and Ronny DeStefano had turned up dead. Now Wendy Marshall was MIA. Was that on her head?

And then there was Christopher. His death would stay with her forever.

Seriously, she was a menace. Maybe she should just join a convent, like her dad kept threatening. She would be doing the world a public service by locking herself away where she couldn’t do any more damage.

A loud thud from her window snapped her out of her self-pity.

John’s muffled voice floated through her window. “Are you
going to let me in or should I just hang out here all night?”

Bree leaped out of bed and threw open the window. “Why are you here so early?”

John planted his hands on his hips in a fake pout. “If you don’t want to see me I can just leave.”

“No!” Damn, she wanted to see John more than anything else in the world. “But school’s not out yet. Did you ditch gym?”

“School was canceled after fourth period.”

“What?”

“Throw down your hair, Rapunzel,” John said. “We have a lot to talk about.”

Twenty minutes later, Bree sat on her bed, dumbstruck. “Rex and Amber in the same day? Whoever did it is either incredibly smart or painfully stupid.”

“What do you mean?” John asked.

Bree shrugged. “Pulling off a prank is the easy part. But not getting caught afterward? That’s where it gets dangerous. This new DGM group pulled off two missions at once after just a few days of planning. That’s not going to end well.”

“I wonder who it is.” John shifted onto his side and lay down next to her, propping his head up with his hand. “One person? Two people?”

“At least,” Bree said. She thought of all the different roles she and the other girls had played during their missions. Recon, tech, contact, research, breaking and entering, decoys, red herrings. There was no way they could have pulled off any of their missions with fewer than the four of them. “Four was the perfect
number for us.” She paused, and considered the current state of DGM with its two newest members. “I guess six is even better.”

John smiled up at her. “You’re the DGM master.”

“Yeah.” A
Star Wars
quote popped into her head, oddly appropriate to her mood. “Only a master of evil.”

“You’re not blaming yourself for Tammi Barnes, are you?”

“Why not?” She flopped back onto her comforter. “DGM was the catalyst for everything that’s happened to her. She went from being a normal teen to a homeless one, and that’s all because of me.”

“Bree . . .” John eased his way up to her side and tilted her face toward him. “Did you ever think that maybe you helped her? Even though she’s broke and living in a group home, maybe that’s an improvement from what her life was like before?”

“Stop trying to make me feel better.” She didn’t want to be absolved.

“Yeah, yeah,” John said, dismissively. “You crave the guilt. I get it, Catholic girl.”

Bree scowled at him, not because he was wrong but because he was right.

“But beating yourself up over this isn’t going to make up for anything. Not for what she did, and not for what you did.”

Bree had to admit he had a point.

He leaned down and kissed her, soft and slow, and all thoughts of Tammi Barnes faded. She caressed his cheek, her fingers lingering on the square lines of his jaw. She felt so much calmer when John was with her. He was the only person in the world who cared about her, who really listened to her, and she
knew that he would always be there when she needed him.

She arched her back and his kiss deepened. Right now she needed him. Badly.

John shifted his body and Bree slid her hands down the back of his pants, pulling his hips closer. He moaned into her mouth, the hum buzzing her lips, then he moved lower, kissing her chin, her neck, her collarbone. She lifted her arms over her head as he slid her dress up and—

A sharp knock on the door jarred both of them from the moment.

“Bree?” her mom said. “Are you in there?”

“Shit!” Bree whispered. Her mom hadn’t been in her room since she got out of juvie. Why now? She glanced at the window, where the rope ladder still hung. Dammit, she’d forgotten to haul it up. Had the neighbors noticed and called her mom?

John rolled off of her onto the floor and began to shimmy under the bed.

“No,” Bree hissed. She pointed at the window.

“No time,” he said, and slithered his skinny torso under the frame.

“Bree, did you hear me?” Her mom jiggled the door handle. “Why’s this locked?”

The last thing she wanted was for John to witness the horror of drunk Mrs. Deringer, but she didn’t have a choice. She dashed to the window and pulled the curtains closed, then quickly unlocked the door.

“Heeeey, Mom,” she said, hand on her hip in what she hoped as a casual pose. “What’s up?”

Her mom stood in the hallway, arm braced against the door jamb, and peered over Bree’s shoulder into her bedroom. “Why did you take so long to answer?”

“I was sleeping.” And to illustrate the point, Bree stretched an arm over her head and faked a massive yawn.

“Mm-hm.” Her mom’s eyes swept the room, lingering on the drawn curtains. Bree held her breath. “And why was the door locked?”

“There’s a strange guy living in our house,” Bree said. “My door is always locked.”

“Olaf is not a stranger,” her mom said with a huff. She breezed past Bree into the bedroom, eyes still searching. “He’s practically part of the family.”

“Right.” Bree folded her arms across her chest. “And I’m sure your intentions toward him are purely maternal.”

Her mom’s head snapped around, eyebrow raised. “Purely.”

The curtains fluttered in the breeze, exposing the hooks of the rope ladder. Bree casually moved to the other side of the room to keep her mom’s focus away from the window.

Her mom strolled around, examining the band posters tacked up on the wall. She paused at the dresser and her eyes swept across the framed photos. They were all of Bree and her brother Henry at various stages of childhood through his high school graduation. Bree wondered if her mom even processed the fact that there were no photos of either parent in the montage.

Finally, her mom sat down on the edge of Bree’s bed. “I wanted to continue our conversation from yesterday.”

“Are you going to give me my phone back?” Bree asked.

“No.”

“Let me have internet access?”

“No.”

“Allow visitors?”

Her mom pursed her lips. “I can’t do that.”

Bree set her teeth. “Then we have nothing to talk about.”

“Bree,” her mom said. She sounded almost sad. “I know you think I’m a horrible mother . . .”

That’s because you’re a horrible mother.

“. . . and that I’ve abandoned you here in Menlo Park. But did you ever stop to think that maybe you’re better off without me?”

Every single day.

A faint buzzing sound emanated from beneath the bed. John’s phone! He muffled it immediately, but Bree held her breath, praying her mom didn’t hear it.

“I realize,” her mom began, oblivious to the cell phone, “I haven’t been particularly . . . motherly. You have to realize, Bree, that I was raised to be selfish. To think only of myself. I was miserable here, playing the dutiful politician’s wife. I didn’t want to feel like that, and I certainly didn’t want you to see me like that.”

Bree snorted. “Are you trying to tell me that you did me a favor by taking off for France?”

“In a way, yes.”

Lady, you are out of your mind.
She wanted to say it, but starting a fight with her mom was not going to get her out of the room faster. Better to just play along.

“You know what, Mom? You’re right. I think you made the right decision.”

“You do,” she said drily.

“Absolutely.” Bree put her arm around her mom’s shoulder and guided her toward the door. “We learned in therapy today about processing our emotions and looking for noncombative solutions. So I think, right now, the best thing for me is to have some alone time to process what you’ve said.”

“Okay.”

She practically shoved her mom into the hallway. “So I’ll see you at dinner. Bye!”

Bree twisted the handle, locking it firmly, and rested her forehead against the smooth, cold wood of her bedroom door. “That was close.”

John dragged himself out from underneath the bed. “I’m sorry.”

She turned and smiled. “It’s not your fault you got a text.”

“Not that.” He walked purposefully toward her and enveloped her with arms. “About your mom.”

“Oh.”

“Why didn’t you tell me she lived in France?”

Bree avoided his eyes.

“So if your dad’s in Sacramento all the time, that means you’re here alone in this house. Is that even legal?”