Girls We Love (3 page)

“I like the Boat House,” the Ava girl with all the freckles said. She had a big smile on her face. “I think
it's really classic. And I think it's much older than that.”

“Mmmhhmm,” Liv said, rolling her eyes. Liv had decided that Jonathan was totally cute, and Ava was totally not. She leaned over to Flan and whispered, “He is so darn cute. For you, I mean.” Flan evidently agreed, because she jabbed her elbow into Liv's side in excitement/horror.

Two guys wearing blazers and gigantic chrome watches walked by and gave Liv the up and down.

“It must make you sort of uncomfortable that all these guys are hitting on you,” Patch's friend David said. He was really tall. David was obviously not a guy who had ever been very smooth with girls and probably wouldn't know fun if it came over and yanked down his baggy jeans.

“No, I've gotten used to it,” Liv said. Then she laughed (being careful not to shoot champagne through her nose, which was so something she would have done two years ago, except with milk) just to show that she didn't take her new hotness too
too
seriously.

“Oh, okay,” David said. Liv gave him a pitying smile, because she could tell he wanted her a little bit, and then she craned her neck for Patch. He'd been kind of oblivious to the fact that they were about to begin the most important romance of their young lives, which of course made him totally all the more irresistible.

A new song came on, and Flan grabbed Liv by the arm, in this weird awkward way that made Liv wonder if maybe Flan wasn't a little jealous of the new, hot Liv. “Let's dance!” she said really loudly, and started pulling her away from the other kids.

“No, wait,” Liv said. “Where's your brother? Let's get him first. He loves to dance, right?” She looked around, and realized that Patch, who had been standing so quietly and patiently, had finally snuck off to some secret place, probably hoping that she would watch him go and then follow a few minutes later. But she had totally missed it, and now she had no idea where he was or even which direction he might have gone in. Damn!

“Um, not really,” Flan was saying. She widened her big blue eyes at Liv in a way that made Liv wonder if something was wrong. Like, maybe Flan was trying to tell her that she had lipstick on her teeth?

“Patch definitely doesn't like to dance,” Arno said, kind of sarcastically. Liv made a mental note: Her dream man did not like to dance. “Hey, where'd he go anyway?”

Jonathan and David shrugged. “We should be used to Patch disappearing by now,” Jonathan said.

“I'll dance with you, Liv,” Arno said, stepping forward.

“Oh my God!” Liv shrieked, pretending not to hear
Arno's offer. He was cute, too, of course, but she had to keep her eyes on the prize. “Look, you guys, you see that girl in the big movie star glasses over there? I think that's Sara-Beth Benny.” She looked at the group, waiting for them to recognize the starlet and be as excited as she was. “You know, from that old TV show
Mike's Princesses—
do you recognize her?”

“That's not her,” Arno said, arching an eyebrow dubiously in the direction of the girl hiding behind the sunglasses. She had a dramatic black bob, and she looked very tiny making her way through the crowd. “I know SBB. And so does David. And that's totally not… David?”

They all turned toward David, but David had scurried away in the other direction.

“That's weird,” Jonathan said. “I think that maybe
is
SBB. No one else could have made David bolt like that.”

“You know her?” Liv gushed. “She is like my style icon. Can we meet her?”

Jonathan shrugged. “I guess, if you really want, but don't tell David. He's still pretty messed up about how she moved into his parents' house and morphed from his girlfriend into his sister.”

“Gross,” Liv said, wrinkling her nose. “I still want to meet her, though. Flan, don't you
totally
want to meet her?”

Flan looked like she wasn't sure for a minute, and
then a smile broke through on her face. “Okay,” she said, “I totally want to meet her, too.”

Jonathan smiled, and Liv was pretty sure there was some kind of connection between him and Flan. Liv resolved to give Flan whatever help she needed. That way, once it came out that Liv and Patch were like this hot super couple, Flan and Jonathan could be like their slightly-less-golden-couple friends. “All right, ladies,” Jonathan said, bringing Liv back down from her Patch fantasy. “But prepare yourselves. That one has got some real emotional problems.”

“Yeah,” Arno said. “She's like the most needy person ever, and she apparently will recite whole episodes of that old TV show she was on for anybody who asks. All that stuff about her passing out at weird bars and going to, like, Thailand at the drop of a hat … it's all true.”

“Really?” Liv said, wishing she knew what Thailand looked like. “That's so cool.”

Ava made a face. “This feels kind of exploitative. I'm just going to stay here, okay?” she said, like she thought they were all being celebrity whores.

Jonathan looked sort of exasperated or confused or something and then he said, “Okay,” and turned back toward Flan and Liv. They all looked to where Sara-Beth Benny had been, but by then the whole room had shifted. The crowd had parted at the middle, and people were pushing at them to move back from the center.
The music had changed, too; DJ Tahoe had been replaced by a quartet of classical musicians playing some very dramatic piece.

Liv turned toward the entryway, and that was when she saw a white horse cantering into the restaurant. The horse had a big pink bow around its neck and on its back was a tall, slender girl with thoroughbred cheekbones and a mane of ash-blond hair rising from her forehead. She was wearing a white eyelet Michael Kors dress that buttoned all the way from the ankle to the bust and had a prairie shirt collar, and she was smiling and waving like a princess.

“Oh my God,” Flan said, clapping her hands, “isn't that horse beautiful?”

Liv clapped, too, because she was witnessing the sort of wattage you just don't get out west. She felt like every moment she spent in New York, she was learning a little bit more about how to win Patch and then keep him in her clutches forever.

When the big white horse came riding through the Boat House, Sara-Beth Benny breathed a sigh of relief. Now, finally, people would stop staring at her and wondering if she was who they thought she was. Or whether or not she'd had lunch. Or dinner.

She wouldn't even have gone out, except that she had to find David Grobart. And some sixth sense had told her that David Grobart would be at the Boat House tonight. Which was a nice coincidence, because the Boat House was where her mother had always taken her for lunch as a little girl when they were in New York. Sara-Beth's mother was a famous stage actress who retired at thirty-three to marry the CEO of a telecommunications company, and always regretted it, and when she took her only daughter to the Boat House they would bond by ordering their hamburgers
well-done and then sending them back to the kitchen for being burned. Mom loved the Boat House almost as much as Sara-Beth did, but she wouldn't come to New York anymore because she insisted that everyone just looked at her and whispered
failure
under their breath. That was why SBB lived in a New York apartment by herself, and only went back to her parents' Los Angeles home for holidays. But she didn't really like being in her cold, lonely apartment, which was one of the reasons why she had to find David Grobart. His parents, who were therapists, had taken her in and let her live with them before her last business trip to Los Angeles.

So she had put on a shapeless dress made out of burlap that she'd bought in this little boutique on Mott Street, and a black wig that she had worn in one of the last episodes of
Mike's Princesses,
the TV show that had made her famous. She'd worn the wig in the episode where she and her sisters suspected that their single dad might be dating their school principal, and trailed him in disguise.

She was pretty sure that people were still staring at her. A-holes!

SBB pushed against several of them as she moved out into the crowd, and hoped that the burlap would scratch them.

There was some to-do in the middle of the room—
a guy in a bow tie who evidently worked at the Boat House was sweating and pleading with Liesel Reid, resplendent on top of a white horse, to get down.

“Miss Reid,” he was saying, “animals of a certain size are simply not allowed in our establishment. Now, you are a very special guest, but I'm still going to have to … ”

Liesel Reid shook her mane of ash-blond hair and continued to blow kisses at her friends, who were all jumping up and down and calling out her name. SBB was glad to see Liesel even if she was surrounded by adoring fools. The girls had known each other since kindergarten, when they had gone to the same school, and they understood each other. SBB pushed past the bow-tie man, consciously trying to scratch him with her dress, and grabbed on to the horse's saddle. The horse snorted and shifted nervously in the crowd.

“Liesel,” she hissed.

Liesel took a look at the pint-sized girl standing below her, and then gave her a bland smile and a cupped-hand wave. A beat later, she realized who was hiding under those big glasses.

“Oh my God, SBB!” she shrieked.

Sara-Beth gave a fierce little shake of her head and put a finger over her lips, which she had used an almost white shade of lipstick on.

Liesel shifted her tan, well-defined jaw, and realized
her mistake. She rotated and waved at the crowd. After the moment had passed, she leaned over slickly and blew kisses on either side of Sara-Beth's face. “I'm so glad you could make it,” she said. “I haven't seen you since the Mawc Jacobs show.”

“That catastrophe,” Sara-Beth said from behind her Marc shades. “They put us in the second row.”

“Idiots,” Liesel said happily. “Anyway, why the wig? New look for you. Very Uma circa
Pulp Fiction.
”

“I'm undercover,” Sara-Beth said, looking about her furtively to make sure that no one was listening. Luckily, everyone was busy discussing how gorgeous Liesel looked. Even Mr. Bow Tie had run away for backup. “I've just been on the coast, and guess what! I got a part in that genius indie director Ric Rodrickson's new movie. It's due to start shooting in Gda
ń
sk in ten days, and it's in my contract that I'm not supposed to be partying.”

Liesel and Sara-Beth exchanged simultaneous eye rolls.

“Anyway, great party. We should catch up once you come down off the horse.”

“I would love that,” Liesel said, making the call-me gesture with her hand, and squeezing her heels into her horse's sides. Then the horse moved into the crowd, with Liesel extending her hands down for people to touch as though she were a princess or a rock star. Or a little bit of both.

Sara-Beth moved with hunched shoulders and downcast eyes through the crowd. She tried to imagine that she was in character … as a hobo. She spotted David's friends standing near the dance floor, but David wasn't with them, and Sara-Beth decided that it would be too much of a to-do if she tried to say hi to all those people. They were cool kids, but even they couldn't help getting sort of starstruck around her. She was, after all, a star.

She slipped along the wood-paneled walls, smiling at waiters and generally trying not to be noticed. All of the air-kissing and music and hellos and all the food smells were sort of getting to her, though, and she was struck by a sudden panic that maybe she looked more SBB-like than she realized.

She swiveled in the other direction and headed for the bathroom, trying to hide her face with her hand. That's when she saw him.

He was standing against a wall and looking around warily, all six foot five of him, and his hair was a dark shadow on a nearly shaved scalp. David Grobart was, without a doubt, her hero. He was even wearing undercover garb that must've been meant to be sympathetic to her—a regular navy hoodie and nondescript jeans and plain old basketball shoes.

SBB spread her arms back against the wall and moved in. Meanwhile David pretended not to notice
her. When she reached him she did a little spin and landed against his chest. Before he could say anything, she put her finger across his lips.

“You're going to make such a good prison guard,” she whispered.

David's face did a number of confused contortions.

“I missed you so much,” Sara-Beth went on. “But now we're going to be together all summer on the movie set! In Gda
ń
sk. We'll probably live in a little tent together and cook meals on an open fire… ” SBB paused, remembering she had never cooked anything, and that she'd never seen her mother cook anything, either. “Or maybe it'd be better if we got someone else to do that… ”

SBB was feeling all kinds of emotions, and she knew the small, soft tip of her nose was probably bobbing with feeling. Directors kept telling her not to do this, but she couldn't help it. Finally, in Ric Rodrickson, she had found a director who liked what her nose did.

“Don't look at me that way, I know I'm not making any sense,” Sara-Beth said, leaning her face against David's chest so that she couldn't see his face.

“I'm just confused,” he said. “I mean, you just disappeared … and now you're back.”

“I was in L.A., meeting a director, and now I'm going to star in a moo … film. And you're coming with me! I got you a part and everything! As a prison guard.”

She pressed herself against David again, happily indulging herself in his warmth and bigness. When she looked back up at him she was met by blank eyes and a face that looked sort of freaked out.