The Fruit of My Lipstick (16 page)

“Where’d you go?” Lissa asked. “I know you took off with Lucas really early.”

They were not going to get off my case unless I told them. I sighed and pulled the covers down. “I had breakfast with him and his dad and this other guy, and then we went back to his dad’s place so we could coach him for the Olympics.” How many people was I going to have to explain my business to? “I tripped over a sneaker in his room, fell, and had to go to Emergency. I came home on the train. Can I sleep now?”

“The
train?
” Shani said in the same tone she’d probably use if I said I’d come home by elephant.

“Didn’t Lucas bring you home?” Lissa asked.

“Obviously not.”
Okay, losing patience now
. “Can you guys go down to the library or something?”

“Let me get this straight,” Shani said. “You had an accident that needed stitches to the head and they sent you home by yourself, like, forty miles on the train?”

I pulled the covers over my head. “You sound like my mother. It was my idea. Now will you go away?”

“She tripped over a sneaker,” Lissa said to Shani. “In his room.”

“It’s not what you think,” I said, my voice muffled.

A second or two of silence. “They always say that,” Shani said. “They trip, or fall, or run into doors.”

“Who is
they?
” I was beginning to feel like I was playing a game of peek-a-boo with this quilt. I gave up and folded my arms on it. The light from the miniature chandelier overhead hurt my eyes. “Look, are you guys done?”

“
They
are girls who are abused.” Shani ignored my second question. “They make excuses, you know? Like ‘I tripped. He didn’t really push me.’ Or ‘Klutzy me—I walked into a door and now I have this black eye.’”

“Gillian, what’s really going on with you and Lucas?” Lissa asked in a soft voice, as if she was afraid to know.

I stared at both of them. “Are you guys crazy?”

Lissa shook her head. “Worried would be a better word.”

“No,” I contradicted her, “you’re crazy. Delusional. Making up stuff to punish me. Well, I apologized once. I’m not doing it again. Now, please leave.”

And to my huge surprise, they did.

“
Thank
you,” I said to the back of the door as it clicked shut. I yanked the covers back up over my head.

Too bad I couldn’t do the sensible thing and go straight to sleep. I sure needed it. But instead, I got monkey-brain: pictures and snippets of conversation and memory bouncing off the walls of my skull and crashing into one another. My mom’s voice on the train. Lucas’s kiss. Lucas’s hands, flying up. Lucas pulling my chair out at the restaurant. That stupid sneaker, growing bigger and bigger every time I tripped. All of it kept me awake until Lissa crept back in a couple of hours later.

Lights-out had already been called. Huh. Once a rule-breaker, always a rule-breaker.

There was no way I was reopening any kind of conversation with her. So I pretended I was asleep.

I didn’t move, even when I heard her crying with her face against the wall.

RStapleton
   Thought you might like to know something.

Source10
      I know a lot of things. You pay me for most of them.

RStapleton
   You don’t know this. I got hauled into Curzon’s office on Friday and grilled like a steak.

Source10
      What’s that got to do with me?

RStapleton
   She wanted to know about the midterm. But I didn’t give you up.

Source10
      What did you tell her?

RStapleton
   That my dad hired a retired Berkeley prof to tutor me.

Source10
      She’ll call him. Did you think of that?

RStapleton
   I’m not stupid. I paid the guy 1K to say he’d been tutoring me all term.

Source10
      But did he?

RStapleton
   He must have. Curzon sent me a note saying sorry. LOL

Source10
      Who else has she talked to?

RStapleton
   For a discount on the final I can find out.

Source10
      OK. 1K even for the final. Find out what they told her, too.

RStapleton
   Cool.

Chapter 15

I
T WASN’T GOING
to be easy telling Lissa I’d go to church on my own on Sunday, so I didn’t. Call me chicken, but she was the one going around calling my boyfriend an abuser for no reason at all, so I didn’t feel guilty about leaving her a note and going to the early service at Lucas’s church.

She wouldn’t miss me, anyway. She had her family.

Lucas was miles away in Palo Alto, but somehow, sitting in the church where he said he worshipped, I felt closer to him. The sermon was about the still, small voice of God, and I let it wash over me, cleaning away the sour-lemon feelings I had toward Lissa and Shani.

I hadn’t made things up with them. In fact, our relationship just seemed to be getting more prickly, hurting every time we bumped up against each other.

It’s their fault, Lord. They’re the ones saying a bunch of stuff that isn’t true.

The music and the voices of people praying calmed me. Maybe it didn’t matter whose fault it was or who was saying what. Maybe if I heard the still, small voice inside saying, “Time to make it up,” then my job was to do it. But, true to form, I had to argue.

This really irks me. Why should I be the one to humble myself first? I did that already.

If not me, then who would?

Uh—just a guess. One of them?

But they weren’t here, talking to the Lord. It was just me, and I was going to need strength. Luckily God had shown me before that He had plenty of that to go around.

Thanks, Lord. I’ll try again.

I shook hands with the pastor on the way out the door and introduced myself. “Thanks for what you said today,” I said. “I’m Gillian Chang, a friend of Lucas Hayes.”

He had a great handshake—firm and warm. “Nice to have you with us, Gillian. Who did you say your friend was?”

“Lucas Hayes? Tall, really smart? We both go to Spencer and he told me he worships here.”

The pastor smiled a little self-consciously. “The name seems familiar, but I can’t place the face. Comes of getting old, I suppose. I hope we’ll see you again.” He turned to the family behind me, and I pushed the wrought-iron gate open. Either there was a really big congregation hidden away somewhere, or the poor guy really did have memory problems.

I turned my iPhone back on when I started the walk home, and got my reward. Lucas.

“Hey,” I said happily. “Guess where I am?”

“Judging by the time and the day and your usual habits, I’d say that you’re either on your way to or coming back from church.”

“Right you are. But which church?”

“That would take more input.”

“Okay, so here’s some for you. A equals I didn’t go to lunch with Lissa. B equals I’ve just come from the early service. C equals you’ve only known me to go to three churches here, one of which doesn’t have an early service. So A plus B plus C equals—”

“You went to my church.”

“Give the man a hundred percent.”

“I wish I was there with you.”

“So do I. I told your pastor I was a friend of yours, but he didn’t remember you.”

Lucas laughed. “That guy. He’s such a joker. Of course he remembers me. I’m there every week.”

“Did you go with your dad today?”

“He’s not a believer. So we did differential equations and calculus all morning. I’m going to head out after lunch.”

“Maybe we could study together when you get here.” I tried to keep the wistfulness out of my voice, but I don’t think I succeeded.

“Probably not, Gillian. I really have to concentrate, and you’re kind of . . . distracting.” I just had time to feel a little glow of happiness when he added, “Especially when hospitals are involved.”

Ha. Geek humor. So much for romance.

“I promise to watch for stealth sneakers next time. Though if some people would keep their rooms picked up, I wouldn’t have to.”

Joke. It was a joke, honest. But something in the quality of the silence told me he hadn’t taken it that way.

“Yeah, housekeeping is right there at the top of my list, along with making the semifinals,” he said in a tone edged with sarcasm. “You might have time to think about stuff like that, but I don’t.”

Inferring that I was a girl, and girls think about housekeeping. Which in my case is so not true, as Lissa will tell you. “I’m sorry, Lucas.” Could I not say or do one thing right this weekend? “Of course you don’t. You need to focus right now, and I want to do everything I can to help you.”

“Thanks.” His tone softened. “So, I hear they have a suspect in the exam answer case.”

I’d just passed through the school gates, and hurried up the driveway, out of earshot of a disappointed photographer who was glaring at me for not being somebody famous. “They do? Who?”

If it wasn’t me and it wasn’t Lucas, the pool of suspects was pretty small. “It’s not Shen Huang, is it? He’s so nice. He always helps me clean up my lab station.”

“No, it’s not a guy. At least, I don’t think so. What was the name?” He paused. “It was a chemical. That’s what tripped my memory. Titanium? No. Beryllium?” He made a disgusted sound. “Man, I hope this doesn’t happen when I take the exam. No, wait. I’ve got it. Argon.”

I stopped walking. “Argon? That’s not a name.”

“I didn’t mean that’s their name, I mean it’s like that. You know. Mnemonics.”

“So, someone with a name like Argon who could actually pull this off. That doesn’t leave very many people. Except maybe—” I stopped.

“Who?”

“Oh, no one.” My heart began a slow, horrified drubbing in my chest. “Maybe it wasn’t Argon. Maybe you’re thinking Barium. As in Barry Stockton. Or Francium, like Ernesto Francese. Both those guys are in AP Chem.”

“Maybe,” he agreed easily. “I thought it was one of the noble gases, though. Not my business, anyway. As long as they figure it out before finals, I’m just going to keep doing what I’m doing. Talk to you later.”

“’Bye.” I disconnected with fingers that felt cold and clumsy.

Not Barium, or Francium, or anything like that.

Argon. Aragon. As in my friend, Carly.

Who had been very emotional lately. And who was clearly a lot smarter than I gave her credit for.

IT NEARLY KILLED ME to keep my mouth shut Sunday afternoon instead of storming up to Carly’s room and screaming at her for putting the entire junior class in danger. But I did it. I locked myself into a practice room and forced my galloping brain onto the composition track, where it slowed down and began to produce measures of music. I guess it’s true that passion produces art. I didn’t have unrequited love to fall back on, but I sure had a lot of horror and frustration, so I put it to work.

By four o’clock I had the melody and accompaniment hammered out, which is the hard part. The chord arrangements were more mathematical and less creative, so I could do those in pieces throughout the week. The harp part, to be recorded on my Mac and mixed in my GarageBand software, was pretty straightforward once I had the piano melody. I was working on that in our room when the door opened and Lissa, looking very stylish in a Max Azria short jacket and lace blouse, stepped in.

She glanced at me but didn’t say a word as she shrugged out of her clothes and pulled on a T-shirt, jeans, and the creamy Arran cableknit sweater she loves.

“Very après ski,” I said, laying my hand against the harp’s strings to silence them. “Makes me want some hot chocolate with marshmallows in it.”

To my surprise, she took the silly image as it was meant—as a hint that I still wanted to be friends. “I underdressed today. The fog was all the way in over Marin and I had to borrow one of my dad’s sweaters. I asked Bruno to turn the heat up in the car on the way back and nearly melted him.”

Bruno is her dad’s driver. To hear Gabe Mansfield tell it, he found the guy on a street corner with a Will Drive For Food sign and hired him. But with Lissa’s dad, you never know if he made that up or if some magazine did.

“Mom says hi, and Dad said the same when he called,” Lissa added. “We missed you.”

My throat closed up with an unexpected ache. I’d been going to church with them and then having lunch at their place since September. It started out with Lissa feeling kind of sorry for me, because except for Aunt Isabel and her family, I’m on my own out here, but since then it had become something we both looked forward to. I love her dad. Her mom is a little harder to warm up to—she and my father would probably get along, though—but I really respect her. They do their best to be home on Sundays for family time, except when Gabe has to be in places like Scotland for filming, like now.

“He called you guys?” I glanced at the clock and counted ahead eight hours. “It must have been late there.”

“Just ten at night. He calls every Sunday because he knows we’ll all be together. And with the video feed on my computer, it’s the next best thing to being there.”

Another little silence fell.

“Gillian—”

“Lissa, I—”

We grinned sheepishly at each other. “You go,” she said.

I took a deep breath. “I want to apologize for being so hard to deal with lately.”

“And I’m sorry we said that about Lucas. We were talking and stuff has been happening with a friend of Shani’s and we, um, probably jumped to conclusions because that’s been on her mind so much. She’s stressed; Carly’s stressed; we’re all stressed.”

I just bet Carly was stressed. “I should have realized you were only trying to help.” Delicate pause. “Carly’s stressed? More than usual for this point in the term, I mean?”

Lissa nodded. “Finals are horrible. I hate this time of year. Especially when I’m struggling with Bio and she’s banging her head on her Chem book. I’m thinking of giving up AP next term and just going with the regular class. Even with your help, I can’t take it.”

I refused to let myself get sidetracked. “Is that it? Just Chemistry?” I waited for a clue. Was Carly spending more time in the computer lab than studying? Was she looking over her shoulder all the time and getting distracted? Was she nervous and not sleeping?