Such a Rush (25 page)

“I don’t mean to be rude,” he said soothingly. “I just wanted to learn more about you.” He lifted his hand toward my cheek.

“No, you didn’t,” I said. His questions had a fishing-for-information quality about them. Either that or I was just mad now. The upshot was the same: I was tired of his bullshit. I scooted away from him on the bench. An inch, not enough to escape him if he wanted to touch me, but enough to be symbolic.

It was a gesture he read perfectly. He tilted his head at me, puzzled and hurt, just like he should be as his date drew back from him when he was trying to help. His instinct was to comfort an upset girl. And he was quickly learning not to do that
with me. So frustrating, that once in a while I had actual emotions that got tangled up with the fake ones.

“Okay,” he said, giving in. “Really here’s what I’ve been curious about from the beginning. My dad always said what great character you had, and how much drive you had to become a pilot.”

“One day a year and a half ago, I walked in on you and Grayson discussing my drive to become a pilot.” I meant their joke that I’d screwed Mr. Hall.

He knew exactly what I was getting at. His cheeks flushed red against his pale hair. But, typically, he pretended he had no idea. He went on, “I wondered where your drive came from.”

I nodded. “Clearly not from my mother, because she’s white trash.”

“Oh,” Molly said in warning. I wasn’t sure to whom.

Alec gaped at me for a moment, then managed, “I
never
said—”

I interrupted him. “The only explanation is that my dad is a nuclear physicist. Either I inherited that drive genetically from his side of the family, or just knowing that he’s a nuclear physicist gives me the motivation to make it out of the trailer park myself. It can’t be that I’m just like this. That I just look around and say to myself, ‘It is no fun being a sitting duck during tornado warnings, with no car to drive to the safe shelter they always talk about for people who live in unsafe places like that. It’s no fun not to have food in a refrigerator, or a car to go get it. I think I’ll make an effort to get a job.’ No, I couldn’t possibly come to that conclusion all by my lonesome.”

He stood up suddenly. I flinched at the loud screech as the bench raked back beneath me on the deck. He still blushed, but the red in his cheeks had shrunk from an embarrassed flush to two small, angry points.

“I’m going to get a refill,” he muttered. Then, almost as an afterthought, he looked down at me. “Would you like something?”

I shook my head, adamant about what I’d said, and yet ashamed at the same time.

He took his cup and stalked away across the deck, through the door to the café.

I picked through the salad with my fork again. Two days of regular meals had finally caught up with me. I wasn’t ravenous anymore. I couldn’t eat another bite. I waited for Molly’s cutting comment, which would be that much more cutting because she made it in front of Grayson.

What she said surprised me. “Leah, Alec’s not like Grayson.”

“Oh, thanks,” Grayson protested. “What do you mean, he’s not like me? I am a nice person.”

She turned and cupped Grayson’s face in both hands. I would not dare do such a thing to Grayson, but Molly got away with it. She told him, “You are
not
a nice person. Shut up.”

She turned back to me. “You can’t be mean like that to Alec. He’s such a gentleman, and he’s treating you like he wants to be treated. He didn’t understand he was wading into a hornet’s nest with your nuclear physicist daddy and whatnot. Holy Mother of God.”

I put my fork down. “You are one to talk, Miss Manners.”

“I observe and adapt,” Molly said. “I’m treating you like you want to be treated, but unlike you, I can turn that mean streak off. Watch and learn.” She spun around, lifting her long legs over the bench, and clopped across the deck to follow Alec inside.

I needed to find something else on my plate to play with, but Grayson caught my gaze before I looked down. He said,
“Molly’s right. I thought you would be good at this, but you’re incredibly bad at this because you’re so sensitive. I could have sent Molly in to flirt with Alec with better results than you’re getting.”

“If you think Molly is so great, why can’t you use her, without even using her?” I asked. “Why can’t she be the girlfriend Alec falls in love with over spring break?”

I expected him to give me an angry list of reasons why not. Instead, he seemed to consider my suggestion. His blond brows knitted. He took a long pull at his drink, watching me over the rim of his cup. After he set the cup down, he still stared at me like he would find the answer in my face.

Finally he asked, “Where is she going to college in the fall?”

“SCAD.” When he gave me a puzzled look, I remembered SCAD was a lot closer to my high school than his. Maybe he’d never heard of it, even though the people at my high school thought it was the coolest postgraduation destination possible. “Savannah College of Art and Design.”

“Then, no,” he said, shaking his head. “Heaven Beach is a two-and-a-half-hour drive from Charleston. Savannah’s a hair closer to Charleston. I need him to feel pulled
away
from Charleston.”

My obvious next question was, “What’s so awful about Alec going to Charleston?” That was the key to the whole puzzle. And yet, because clearly I had a head as big as the state of South Carolina, I asked, “How do you know
I’m
not going to college somewhere else in the fall?”

“Because you’re not.”

“I can’t believe you!” Molly exclaimed. She and Alec were coming out the door. Laughing, she leaned into him. As they stepped outside, she looked for me and arched her eyebrows at me:
This is how it’s done.

Oh, yeah? If everybody was pushing me into hooking up with this clueless boy,
I
would show
them
how it was done. I rose from the table and walked across the deck with a swing in my step, assisted by the stilettos. Ignoring Molly still touching him, I put my hand on his chest. “Alec,” I whispered huskily, “I’m so sorry I was mean to you before. You touched a tender spot.” I looked up at him through my eyelashes.

Out of the corner of my eye, I watched Molly remove her hand from him, staring at me with awe and new respect.

“Oh.” Beet red, Alec gazed down at me with wide blue eyes, mesmerized by me. He’d completely forgotten he was standing on a deck outside a restaurant with two other people, holding a drink. “No,
I’m
sorry.” He glanced down into my cleavage.

I tugged him by the arm down the deck steps, toward his car. As we walked, I glanced behind us and stuck out my tongue. Molly stared after us with her lips parted.

But my greatest triumph shocked me, and I had no idea whether it was really a triumph at all. Grayson stared after us too. His blond brows were down. His face had gone pale underneath his tan. Down by his side, he had squeezed all the blood out of his white fist.

As soon
as we reached the party, it was like my triumph had never happened. Walking to the door of Francie Mahoney’s parents’ mansion, Molly caught up with Alec and asked him who he remembered from her classes. She must have assumed, probably correctly, that Alec would recall these people, whereas Grayson would not, or wouldn’t admit it.

“Does she know the whole school?” Grayson asked me quietly as we fell in behind her and Alec.

“Yes,” I said. “Molly’s so popular that she’s not even worried about being popular. I’ve never seen a popular person before who wasn’t trying really hard at it. But she’s rich and smart and interesting
and
she doesn’t give a shit.”

“She sounds perfect.”

“She
is
perfect,” I said. “I want to be her. Not be
like
her, but
be
her, like in a creepy roommate movie.”

He laughed, the genuine relaxed laugh I’d heard from him
a few times. “I don’t know everybody. And I didn’t when I lived here, either.”

“Did Alec?”

“Yes,” he said as we walked through a huge front door into the party.

Molly was instantly surrounded by her friends, who screamed over her and wanted to know who she’d brought. She introduced Alec—didn’t they remember him?
Didn’t they?
And they did!

Didn’t they also remember Grayson? Maybe not. He was acting polite enough, though, so several girls who couldn’t fight their way into the circle around Alec settled for the circle around Grayson. Molly’s friends hardly noticed me, which was good. Their eyes might slide over to me, but they didn’t dare flare their nostrils or, worse, pointedly look me up and down. Not with Molly standing there. They went back to talking to Grayson.

I wished for a drink. I didn’t particularly want to get drunk. I definitely didn’t want to be hungover when I had an airplane to fly the next day. Grayson was right about that. But forced to stay here with these people, I would have preferred to nurse a beer in a corner and bond with some geek I hardly knew from history class, who was plastered. It was easier to make a good impression on plastered people. As it was, I stood in the same circle with Grayson, or sometimes with Alec, and listened to what these drunk girls had to tell them. I grinned so I wouldn’t look unhappy.

After several years of this, I snuck up behind Molly and whispered that I was going to find a soda. I was parched from my long, hot flights that day. “Come with?” I asked hopefully.

“No, I’m good,” she threw at me before turning back to Alec and the girls. Alec didn’t even glance at me. Grayson did,
though, over several girls’ heads. He probably thought I was going to get wasted. I would let him worry.

I wandered through the crowd standing on the expensive hardwood floors and lounging with their feet up on the white sofas. I’d almost reached a wide doorway that I assumed led to the kitchen when Francie Mahoney herself caught up with me. She was about a foot taller than me even in my stilettos, and she had a tall friend with her. When she took me by the shoulder and rudely whipped me around against the wall, I had to fight down the urge to run between their long legs like a rabbit cornered by dogs.

“You’re here with Alec?” Francie asked me. “The cute one?”

I felt my brows go down, perplexed that she thought Alec was the cute one. I supposed I understood why she would think this. Alec had the face of an angel. A girl might think he was sexier than Grayson if she’d never seen Grayson move, walking with barely contained energy across the tarmac. “Yes,” I said.

“But I heard you were dating Mark Simon,” she said.

I wondered how she’d heard this. Mark was about as far as possible from popular, and her crowd did not keep up with his crowd. Only their own. “No,” I said.

“Yes,” she insisted. “I heard he moved into your trailer with you.” She smiled at me, teeth large and white, lips glossy red, but her words dripped sarcasm. It was hard to say which part of this scenario held more derision for her:
moved into
or
trailer
.

Girls like her slept with boys. They even slept over with them when they could get away with it. But they and their boyfriends would stay at home with Mommy and Daddy until they were safely ensconced in a college dorm. And girls like her did not live in trailers.

At school I avoided these girls by arriving late on the bus so I didn’t have to hang out before school, leaving early on the bus so I had no opportunity to hang out after school, and skipping lunch. It was unintentional but lucky that I’d neglected to turn in my homework throughout middle school and landed in the stupid classes, so I never encountered these girls in their college-track experience. In the unlucky event that I ran into them in the women’s bathroom, I played deaf.

But at school, they hated me only in passing. Now they wanted to take me down. I was in possession of the beautiful blond boy who had stolen their hearts long ago and moved away. They didn’t like it.

I couldn’t tell them the truth: “Yes, I shacked up with Mark Simon, and now I’m dating Mr. Popularity from another school.” Even “Yes, I
had
shacked up with Mark Simon, but now he’s moved out” sounded hopelessly trashy, and “It’s none of your business” would verify I had something to hide. Briefly I considered taking the offensive with “You are a bitch,” but these girls would tell everyone what I’d called them without explaining what the provocation had been, which would make me seem, if possible,
more trashy.

So I squinted at Francie and said, “I don’t mean to be rude, but what have you been eating? You’ve got something stuck in your teeth.”

She blinked at me, straightened, and inserted one manicured fingernail between her front incisors.

“Let me see,” said her friend, whose name was Tara, I thought. My only interaction with her was that she had tried to trip me with her tennis racket in the locker room in PE.

“Check in the mirror,” I told Francie. “It looks like gristle.” I stepped past her, which I could do easily now because she was headed to the bathroom. She must have suspected I was
lying, but she wouldn’t waltz away through a party without verifying that.