The Chic Shall Inherit the Earth (19 page)

“So, we got interrupted the other night.”

It took me a second to remember what he meant. “I’m sorry about that. I’m such a klutz sometimes.” There had been no fallout from Ashley Polk at our committee meeting on Friday, so I’d concluded that stupid camera-phone picture had not been made public.

“What I wanted to ask you was, do you have a date yet for the Cotillion?”

An honest question deserved an honest answer. We had prayed together, after all. “I thought I did, but it turns out I don’t.”

“Do you want to go with me?”

“I. Um.”
Great, Lissa. Way to sound mature
.

He had the nicest smile. “I know it’s kind of a surprise, but I like you. We go to prayer circle, and I’ve seen you in the bleachers, so I thought you might like me, too.”

Oh, dear. Time to find a new place to study.

“I do like you, Derrik. But it’s a leap from bleachers to ballroom, you know?” Not to mention I needed some time to suss out Ashley on whether she’d put out a contract on my head if I changed my mind and said yes. “I’m the senior consultant for the whole gig, meaning I’ll be spending a bunch of time making sure all the logistics work out and acting as emcee and doing crisis control. Not your average date, in other words.”

“As long as I get a couple of dances, that’s fine with me.” His eyes were blue, not dark brown like Kaz’s, but the smile reached all the way into them. “I’m pretty good at crisis control. Maybe I could even help you out.”

“I’ll let you know this week, okay?”

He hesitated. “You don’t know right now?”

Which made me feel totally blond, like I couldn’t make a simple decision. “There’s something I have to work out before I can say yes or no.”

“Like what? An offer from another guy?”

With a snort, I said, “Hardly. Trust me on that one. It’s something else.”

He waited a moment, as if expecting me to give him more, but I couldn’t say a word without breaking Ashley’s confidence. Finally he said, “Okay. Whatever. I guess I’d better go do something about my English paper. It’s supposed to have five thousand words and right now it only has fifty.”

“As long as they’re fifty good ones.”

He laughed and jogged away. Okay, so he hadn’t liked being stalled, which was understandable, but he was still nice, offering to help me work the party. I mean, if Kaz wouldn’t take me, and Derrik hadn’t asked Ashley, what was to stop me from going with him?

Besides my confused and unreliable heart, I mean. And the memory of Ashley’s face when I’d told her Derrik was in no danger from me.

“Lissa!” I’d reached the halfway point of the huge quadrangle of streets that formed the Spencer campus boundary when I heard a girl’s voice half a block behind me. I turned to see Vanessa jogging up the sidewalk.

“Are you supposed to run?”

“Doc says exercise is mandatory,” she panted. “Boy, you walk fast.”

“Long legs and crowded brain. Which doc? Vallejo?”

“No. My obstetrician at UCSF.” She gave me a look under her lashes. “See? I do have the capacity to make smart decisions.”

“I never doubted it. It was your timing that was worrying me.”

“Well, you can stop worrying. About that, and about the abortion.”

I let out a long breath on a one-liner of thanks to God, and before I could stop myself, I’d turned and hugged her. Both of us stepped back, surprised.

“Don’t go getting all emo on me,” she said in disgust. “I was never going to do it, you know. I was just playing with you. Which I guess was kind of lame of me. You were so cute, trying to convince me to do the right thing.”

“I’m not going to lie about how relieved I am.” So she’d been playing with me, huh? I decided to let that go. I could just hear Gillian saying
I told you so
. “What brought on this smart decision in the first place?”

“Something you’d probably understand…. This weird God thing.”

Okay, that stopped my brain function completely. This was obviously my weekend to have jaw-dropping bombs fall on me.

“My mom’s side of the family is this huge Italian Catholic clan, and I was brought up Catholic, like Brett Loyola. We both stopped going to mass around the same time, when we were thirteen or so. But I guess some of the stuff sank in over the years, the thou-shalt-not-kill and all that.”

“It would be hard to live with the guilt if you’d gone through with it.”

“Guilt has never bothered me,” she said with a dismissive wave. “That’s for people who care too much about what others think.”

Uh, okay. It seemed to me she cared quite a lot about what others thought these days, especially when they were catcalling her in the corridors. But I didn’t want to stop the flow, so again I kept quiet.

“Anyway, I’ve been talking with the counselor ad nauseam… literally. There’s stuff about my mom that played into it. I am
so
not going to be like her in any way.” Her tone dropped into harshness, and then softened. “So between that and your nagging, I tried to do the right thing.”

After a second of impulse control, I asked, “What about the baby’s dad? What are you going to do about that?”

“One thing at a time.”

“He deserves to know, Vanessa. What if he wants the baby?”

A laugh burst from her. “You’re kidding.”

Nobody likes to be laughed at. I’d controlled my tongue for long enough. “Well, if you think so little of him, why’d you sleep with him?”

Again the laugh, but it sounded more for show than because she meant it. “The obvious reasons, you ninny.”

“Don’t call me names. Help me understand.”

“For one thing, he’s gorgeous.”

“That goes without saying.”

“You think I pick them only for their looks?”

“If you don’t think he’d care about his own kid, that’s a logical conclusion.”

“Harsh, aren’t you?”

“Honest.”

“You can say that because you don’t know him. He’s amazing. His family are the landscape architects for our villa in Italy.”

“So you did sleep with the gardener’s son, like everyone says.” And here I’d thought the rumor mill was just being nasty.

“No, Lissa,” she said in a surprising display of patience. “I mean he’s the heir to one of the foremost landscape design companies in the country. They specialize in the equivalent of National Trust houses, from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Pietro can design a garden you’d swear had been approved by Louis Quatorze.”

“Oh.” I regretted the residual cattiness that had made me share the gossip. “He sounds very talented.”

“He is.” Her tone softened as we rounded the last corner and the school gates came into view in the distance. “He’s talented and beautiful and five years older than me, and my mother would have a pink furry fit if she ever found out about it. She has the same view you did about the gardener’s son.”

“Your family still doesn’t know?”

“Please.” She made a face. “The Principessa di Firenze would never live down the shame. Of course, the fact that she’s paid a fortune in hush money about the two babies she aborted that aren’t my father’s or my stepfather’s will never come up in
that
discussion.”

I swallowed carefully. Imagine facing this kind of battle on two fronts—between your church’s views, which you’d come to believe were right, and what your own mother obviously thought was expedient. And this was the maternal example Vanessa had to look up to? Yikes.

“I didn’t know your dad was still alive,” I said lamely, for lack of anything else.

“He isn’t. He died in a speedboat crash when I was nine. I still miss him, every single day.”

I couldn’t imagine losing my dad. The very thought made a chill run through me. “If it’s a boy, you could name him after him.”

“No point in that if I’m giving him up for adoption.”

“Listen to us, talking as if it’s a boy.”

“It is,” she said. “I had an ultrasound, too.”

Oh, my. First she felt him swimming inside her; now she knew what he looked like. “That’s going to be tough, giving him up.”

“I know.”

“You should tell Pietro.”

“I know.”

“He deserves the chance to be part of the choice, too, especially if he’s as lovely inside as you say.”

“I know. Can we not talk about this anymore?”

We’d reached the gates anyway. A breeze had sprung up, coming up the hill off the water. It felt good, cooling our backs, but it snuck under her white Aquascutum topper and blew it open from below. She shivered, and from behind a tree, a shutter snapped.

Vanessa cursed and snatched the coat closed around her. “I hate those people. Why don’t they get a life?”

“We should have come in by the rain tunnel.”

“I’m glad I wore a coat, at least. And I had my hair trimmed yesterday.”

This sounded so much like the old Vanessa that I had to smile. “Talk to you later,” I said. “I’m going to go find my roommate.”

She nodded and pushed open the front doors. The fact that she let them swing shut in my face didn’t even faze me. She might be willing to confide in me, but she was still Vanessa.

Some rules didn’t apply to her.

A
S DINNER WRAPPED UP
, I caught Ashley Polk’s eye at the next table and waved. “Want to get dessert and join me?” I mouthed, pointing at the toothsome display of ganache-covered chocolate layer cakes across the room.

Her face went blank and she motioned vaguely to her ear. What did that mean? She turned away and began to talk to someone else.

Hmm. Maybe I’d been too optimistic about the cell phone picture. I hadn’t been around all weekend—anything could have gotten out to cause trouble. Well, public or not, I wanted to clear the air between Ashley and me, which would then clear the path to Derrik and me, if that was meant to be.

Derrik and Lissa.
Didn’t that sound weird? Clunky, like a car with a flat tire. Not smooth, like
Kaz and Lissa
.

But that was stupid. There was no Kaz and Lissa, and never had been. No pair. No couple. Just friends, circling around each other independently. Not a bicycle. More like a gyroscope, with wheels inside wheels.

Never mind. Focus.

I abandoned dessert (with less than a month to go until Cotillion, it was time to knock off the sugar and bump up the water and fruit intake, anyway) and dogged Ashley out of the dining room. She moved in a circle of juniors, some of whom were on the Committee, who would probably take over the table in the window next year after we had graduated and were out of the way.

If I were a freshman, I’d find some of them intimidating. Livvy Valentine belonged to a powerful Silicon Valley venture capital family who had financed the startups of many of the students’ parents. Dorian Escobar’s mom was dating George Clooney—one reason parental visits had waned this term. Two of the girls were Gettys and one was a Hilton.

And at this moment all of them were ignoring me. “Ashley, wait up.”

She turned, her eyebrows raised in surprise. “Did you say something?”

The other girls moved on a few steps, enough to give us the illusion of privacy while being able to hear every word.

“Can I talk to you a minute? Privately.”

“I don’t think there’s anything left to say, Lissa.”

“Is something wrong?”

“Not for you. Why should you care?”

“If it’s what I think it is, your information is bad. That’s what I want to talk about.” I opened one of the waiting rooms outside one of the administrators’ offices. On Sunday night, it was empty. “Alone, okay?”

With an annoyed huff of breath, she rolled her eyes toward her posse. “I’ll catch up with you guys in the common room. Mommy wants to give me a talking-to.”

Oh, please. The girls giggled as they walked down the corridor, their Louboutin and D&G heels tapping out a message that told everyone, “We have it all and there’s nothing left for you.” I felt sorry for next year’s students.

Inside the waiting room, Ashley leaned on the door, her whole body informing me I was a waste of her valuable time and she had somewhere way more fun to be.

“It looks like you’ve seen a certain gossip-gram picture.”

“What if I have?”

“It explains this sudden change. I thought we were friends.”

She dropped the pose and leaned forward, her temper snapping between one second and the next. “You promised! You told me you weren’t interested in Derrik, and the next thing I know, you’re plastered all over him!”

“It was an accident.”

“Give me a break.”

“It was. Ashley, listen. I tripped and fell on him at the vending machine and some trashmonger snapped the pic. You know how they are. They may as well be standing out at the gates with their cameras. Some kids get a thrill out of spreading stories that aren’t true.”

“So you can look me in the eye and say you’re not going out with him?”

I could, and did. “I’m not going out with him. But—”

She wilted against the door. “Oh, thank goodness.”

“He asked me to Cotillion.”

Slowly, her knees straightened. “No. You didn’t just say that.”

“This afternoon. That’s why I wanted to talk to you.”

She gazed at me, her eyes bleak as a winter’s day. “What’s it got to do with me? He asked you. Game over.”

“I don’t think he knows you like him.”

“So? That won’t make any difference now.”

“But there’s more to it than that. Sure, I’d like a date to Cotillion, but—”

“You said you had one.”

“I was wrong.”

“How can you be wrong about that?”

“Long story. The thing is, it’s more important to me that you and I can work together. The dance needs to go off without a hitch, and I need all our teams pulling together, not the glossy posse making smart remarks in the halls and playing I’m-more-popular-than-you.” Her gaze faltered. “It would be pretty stupid of me to go with Derrik, wouldn’t it, knowing that it would hurt your feelings and ruin the Cotillion for both of us. Not to mention everyone around us.”

I heard my own voice and realized I had just told myself the truth.

If Kaz didn’t want to take me, I was going to go stag. I would do my job as senior consultant as brilliantly as I knew how. I would snag that A in Public Speaking. And I’d resist the temptation to take Derrik away from Ashley, because I wasn’t the needy person Callum McCloud had once accused me of being. I didn’t need the security of a date with a consolation guy to make myself feel better about being turned down by the one I really wanted. I could face a dance floor alone if I had to. After all, Gillian was in the same boat. If worse came to worst, we could get out there and shake it together.