Nightstruck (6 page)

I didn't say so, but that seemed a little idealistic of him. Piper was who she was, and you either accepted the whole package or you didn't. There were things about her I didn't like—and she'd added a few entries to the list tonight—but I knew I had to take the bad with the good. Tonight had been nothing like I'd planned or hoped for, but I'd still had plenty of good times with her in the past. It was worth putting up with moments like this. “Moderation just isn't her thing.”

Luke laughed. “Yeah. Guess you could say that.”

He got into the car, and I did too, though I was super conscious that I was sitting in the front seat next to him, where Piper ought to be. A hint of panic fluttered in my belly. When Piper was around, I never had to worry much about what to talk about, because she was never at a loss for words. If a moment of silence threatened, she jumped smoothly and easily into the breach. But Piper was passed out, and I was tongue-tied around Luke in the best of times. What was I supposed to say to him after a night like tonight? Would he think I was totally standoffish and rude if I just savored the silence after the cacophony of the club?

“Sorry tonight wasn't much fun for you,” Luke said as he started the car and pulled out into traffic.

“What? Oh. No. It was great.” I felt my face heating with a blush at my spastic response.

He gave me a knowing look. “What could be better than standing at a table watching the coats?”

My blush deepened, and I hoped it was dark enough that he couldn't see. “I danced!” I said, but even I could hear how defensive I sounded.

“There's nothing wrong with not being into the nightclub scene.”

My hackles rose, though I knew he was just trying to be nice. I'd tried to act like I was having a great time, tried to lose myself in the music—which was hard when I actually hated it. Why couldn't he just pretend he hadn't noticed I was miserable?

“It's not really my thing, either,” Luke continued, surprising me. “But Piper loves to dance, so I go with her.”

I glanced over my shoulder at Piper, who was still dead to the world. “That isn't all she loves to do,” I mumbled. How did she get away with coming home drunk like this? Were her parents okay with her drinking? Or did they just not care?

“I tried to get her to slow down,” Luke said, and this time he was the one who sounded a little defensive. “But once she gets started…” He shrugged instead of finishing the sentence. “I'm just glad she doesn't give me a hard time about taking the keys away.”

Yeah, me too. If it had been just me and Piper tonight, the way I'd expected, would she have given me her keys?

I knew the answer to my own question. She would have fought me on it. There was no way I would have gotten into the car with her behind the wheel in the shape she was in, but would I have been assertive enough to stop
her
from getting in? I don't think of myself as being particularly weak willed, but sometimes Piper felt like a force of nature, and I'd let her have her way so many times.

I didn't like where my thoughts were taking me, so I yanked my mind away—and immediately saw the flaw with having Luke drive Piper's car.

“How are you going to get home?” I asked. Piper's house was out near the Main Line, so it wasn't like he could hop on a bus or subway to get home once he'd dropped her and her car off.

“Piper's folks will call a cab for me, or one of them will give me a ride. They're just thankful I don't let her drive.”

Clearly this wasn't the first time he'd ended up in this situation. If so, it seemed like kind of a shitty way to treat your boyfriend. Piper was the only one of the three of us who'd really been free to have fun tonight, and it was only because she knew I'd stand there and guard the coats and Luke would stay sober so he could drive her home.

I can't say it was the first time I'd ever allowed myself to think that my dad's view of Piper was more accurate than mine, but I found his voice in my head harder than usual to dismiss.

“She's a handful,” Luke said, though he looked at her in the rearview mirror with a smile that said it wasn't so much a complaint as an observation. “But she's worth the trouble.”

Maybe he and I both needed to stop drinking the Kool-Aid.

 

CHAPTER FIVE

Remember how I said there wasn't much my dad could do to me in punishment if he found out the truth? Well, I was wrong.

He was waiting up for me when I got home, and just as I'd feared, he'd called Piper's house to check on me when I didn't answer my cell. Piper's mom ratted me out, of course, and to say my dad was furious is an understatement. The fight we had was truly epic, and I ended up not just grounded but confined to my room. He made sure I had nothing to do other than homework and college applications, stripping all the books from my shelves and blocking the Internet on my computer.

I said some awful, hurtful things while we were yelling at each other, and it wasn't until afterward that I realized how much I'd sounded like my mom, in those final, miserable months before she moved out. I don't know how long she and Dad had been fighting in private, but they'd gone totally public with it in the year or so before their divorce, the fights getting louder, more frequent, and nastier as time wore on. Having been an unwilling witness—or at least listener—to many of those fights, I knew where Dad's weak spots were. Poking a wounded bear rarely turns out well, but after the disappointment and discomfort of my night on the town, I couldn't seem to help myself.

It wasn't until I woke up on Sunday morning that I started to feel really bad about it. After all, I
had
lied to him, and in a big way. I'd known exactly what I was getting into when I decided to go out with Piper, and I'd done it anyway. A parent who wouldn't get pissed off about what I'd done was probably a parent not worth having.

I was allowed out of my room for meals and bathroom breaks only, and I slept so late it was lunchtime by the time I made it downstairs. Dad was in the kitchen scrambling eggs when I dragged in, still in my pj's. There was a full pot of coffee waiting, and I helped myself. Dad's face was tight and unhappy, and he didn't say good morning. The silence between us felt like a physical force, daring us to break it.

He was still royally pissed at me, and I could hardly blame him. My own anger had faded into resignation and a heavy dose of shame, not so much for disobeying him but for the things I'd said. Once upon a time, we'd been really close, and I'd thought having this time with just him and me living together would make us even closer. So far, it had turned out just the opposite.

The silence was still too oppressive to break. Dad poured what had to be at least six scrambled eggs into the sizzling pan, and I noticed his coffee cup was empty. I couldn't seem to force myself to speak, so I just grabbed the cup and refilled it for him. As peace offerings went, it wasn't much, but I figured it was better than nothing.

“Thanks,” he said with a gruff nod.

At least he was willing to speak to me—and make me eggs, because although he was a big eater, I knew all those eggs in the pan weren't only for him. I tried to think of a way to apologize for the things I'd said last night. Especially the accusations that he had neglected his family in favor of his career—a favorite refrain of my mom's, even though it was a case of the pot calling the kettle black.

In the end, I swallowed all the inadequate words I came up with. I believe that words have power—as I'd proven the night before, when I'd wounded him with them—but sometimes they just aren't enough.

“Do you want me to put on some toast?” I asked instead, vowing that when breakfast was over I would go into my solitary confinement with no complaints or delays.

*   *   *

Piper was waiting for me by my locker first thing Monday morning. It was a rare show of punctuality from her, but I was still too pissed off about our crappy excuse for a girls' night out to be very impressed.

It wasn't really Piper's fault that our Saturday had been so miserable. Since she had no idea how I felt about Luke, she couldn't have realized how unappealing being a third wheel on her date would be to me, and she really had gone out of her way to make sure I was included. She danced with me, and she made sure Luke danced with me, and I could hardly blame her for the fact that I'd hated the nightclub. How could she know I hated loud, overheated, overcrowded nightclubs when I hadn't even known that myself? I should just chalk it all up to a learning experience and get over it.

Sometimes, Piper comes off as being totally oblivious to other people, but she was still capable of surprising me. I thought I'd done a pretty good job of hiding my feelings on Saturday night, but the first words out of her mouth when she saw me were, “I'm so sorry about how I acted at the club.”

I wanted to laugh it off, maybe pretend I didn't know what she was talking about. In some ways, it felt almost ungrateful to complain. But after having spent all of Sunday shut up in my room with nothing to do but work on college applications—my dad hadn't even let me out to do chores or walk Bob or anything—I was in too brittle a mood to manage it.

“Let's just forget about it, okay?” I said, staring at the buttons on my coat as if I needed absolute concentration to get them open. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Piper lean against the bank of lockers, letting me know she planned on hanging around.

“I promised myself I'd stop at two beers,” she said. “I should have remembered that once I get a couple of beers into me, I forget all about promises like that. It was selfish and stupid and words can't describe how sorry I am.”

There was an unfamiliar hitch in her voice that made me look up and meet her eyes. She wasn't crying, but the remorse on her face was so genuine I couldn't help but believe it.

I won't say the anger went away, but its intensity lessened. There were so many other things I had hated about Saturday night, but at least Piper was apologizing for the one thing I could blame her for in good conscience. It was more than I'd expected to get from her.

“I'd suggest you try apologizing to my dad,” I said, “only I'm not sure getting within a mile of him would be a good survival strategy.”

She smiled tentatively. “Are you suggesting your dad doesn't like me?”

“Shocking, I know.”

I took my coat off and shoved it in my locker. Piper frowned at me.

“You're out of uniform,” she commented.

I groaned. Shit! “I was hoping no one would notice.”

Thanks to my stint in solitary confinement yesterday, I'd completely forgotten the one Sunday chore that absolutely had to be done: laundry. I hadn't remembered until this morning, when I'd had to dig through my hamper in search of a uniform. I found a tunic that probably wouldn't wrinkle if an elephant slept on it all night, but all of my button-down white shirts were a mess. I'd had to settle for a long sleeve white polo, hoping the tunic over the top would disguise its nonregulation placket.

“Maybe no one else will,” Piper said doubtfully.

But if
Piper
noticed, I would never get through the whole day without at least one of my teachers noticing. “Dad's probably going to send me to military school if I get a detention on top of everything else.”

Piper eyed me appraisingly, cocking her head, then frowned and shrugged. “Don't know if it's going to work,” she said, more to herself than to me, “but might as well try.”

Without another word, she grabbed my arm and tugged me into the ladies' room across the hall. Then she reached up and started unbuttoning her own shirt, which she'd paired with a uniform kilt that was probably at least an inch shorter than regulation. “Give me your shirt,” she ordered.

I should have had more coffee that morning. It took me a beat or two to realize she was planning to switch shirts with me.

“You don't have to do that!” I quickly argued, once I figured it out.

“Of course I don't have to,” she said. “But it's the least I can do after getting you into trouble with your dad this weekend.”

“But you'll get a detention for sure!” At least my tunic covered my placket and gave me an outside chance of getting away with it. There would be no hiding the fact that it was a polo shirt instead of a button-down if Piper wore it with her kilt.

Piper already had her shirt off and was handing it to me. “No one's going to be shocked, disappointed, or pissed off if I get a detention. Can you say the same? Now come on and give me your shirt.”

I looked at her lean figure and then down at my own much more curvy one. “What are you, a size two or something?” I asked.

Piper waved the question off. “Just try it and see. If it doesn't fit, it doesn't fit.”

The thought of letting Piper take a detention in my place didn't sit well with me, even though what she said made perfect sense. I'm not the kind of person who feels comfortable letting someone else take the blame for me. That didn't stop me from pulling my tunic and shirt off over my head and taking the shirt she offered me. My dad was going to go ballistic if I came home with a detention, and I didn't need any more drama at home.

Unfortunately, no amount of breath holding was going to make Piper's shirt button over my boobs. Another half an inch or so of play and I might have made it, but as it was, there was no way.

“It's the thought that counts,” I said as I handed the shirt back to Piper.

“Sorry, Becks,” she said. “I wish I could have helped make it right.”

I gave her a quick, impulsive hug. “You don't have to make anything right. All is forgiven, okay?”

And it really was. My irritation had vanished as if it never existed. Piper wasn't always an easy friend to have, but she
was
a good one. My life was richer for having her in it, even if my dad was incapable of seeing that.