The Fruit of My Lipstick (7 page)

The three of us cracked up. Rory Stapleton’s dad may own some sports team or other, but his son and heir isn’t the brightest bulb in the box.

“Speaking of smart people, I went and saw that Jodie Foster movie last weekend with one of the girls in Dad’s condo complex,” Carly said. “Have you seen it?”

“I have.” Lissa grinned. “Didn’t you love the part where she—”

“Spoiler!” I warned, threatening to clap a hand over her mouth. “Don’t say a word.”

“But it was so cool when she and the guy who was pretending to be a—”

“Lissa!”

“All right, all right,” she grumped. “You’d better go see it soon, then, so we can talk about it.”

“Ask Lucas if he wants to go with you,” Carly suggested. “You can casually bring it up in conversation and then pop the question.”

“Ooh, good plan.” Lissa sat back and tossed her pen onto her notebook. “The hook ’em and reel ’em in scenario.”

“Spare me the marine metaphors,” I groaned. “On top of everything else, that’s all I need.”

It was still a good plan, though—one that ran through my head the next day as I passed the physics lab and remembered that Lucas’s free period fell on Thursday afternoons. And where would a guy whose life was physics be during his free period?

Not in the gym or the common room, that’s for sure.

I found him at the back of the lab, gazing at the high-resolution, widescreen computer monitor as though it were the window into an alternate universe.

For him, maybe it was.

He didn’t even hear me until I was practically next to him, and only then because I made my heels clack just a bit harder than usual.

“Oh,” he said. “Hey.”

“I haven’t seen you around much.” I shifted my backpack on my shoulder, trying to be casual. “Thought I’d stop in and make sure my sweater didn’t send you to the hospital after all.”

He flushed, and I kicked myself. Maybe pointing out a guy’s weaknesses was a faux pas.
Mouth, Gillian. Watch the mouth. Nai-Nai is right. You never stop talking
.

“You don’t have it around someplace, do you?” He pretended to look behind me. “Talk about a secret weapon guaranteed to bring a man to his knees.”

“His sneeze?” Puns are the lowest form of humor, but I can’t help it. Sometimes they beg to be said.

“That, too.”

Well, this didn’t sound like a guy who’d been avoiding me on purpose for almost two weeks. He’d even skipped prayer circle last week. Maybe he was busy with his experiments and studying for the Olympiad. “What do you have there?” I nodded at the screen.

“Oh, this.” He leaned back. “Two scientists my dad introduced me to at Stanford discovered a new star. I was just reading the paper on it.”

And some people think I’m a geek for doing chemical equations during my free period. At least that’s homework. This was recreational reading.

“I’ll leave you to it, then,” I said. “I’m just on my way to Mandarin and thought I’d look in on you.”

“I’m glad you did.” He swiveled in the chair and smiled, and my heart did this strange sideways beat in my chest. “IM me or something, okay?”

“Sure.” I smiled back and reluctantly got myself out of the lab, managing not to knock anything over with my backpack on the way. Maybe it wasn’t me after all, or my deadly tunic. Maybe it was just as simple as a guy being busy with his life.

You’d think Mandarin would be a no-brainer for me, since we speak it at home with Nai-Nai. But no. Is English class easy for you? Uh-huh. With Mandarin you still have to nail down grammar and vocab and remember inflections and tones, with the added pain of learning to write characters. Gracefully. With brushes. Kind of like learning Chaucer’s Middle English and then writing it out in perfect calligraphy with a feather quill.

So, bottom line, Mandarin isn’t the easiest thing to master on the best of days, never mind when your head is filled with a guy and the what-ifs and if-onlys. If Dad and Nai-Nai knew how I was messing up on the translation exercises Dr. Leung had just handed out, they’d be ashamed of me. Was this the result of going out with someone? Your brain turned to oatmeal as thick as what they served in the dining room, and you were unable to think about anything else but him? Did it work this way for guys, too?

Somehow I doubted it.

After classes were over, and before Lissa and I went down for supper, I opened my Mac notebook and checked my mail. Another note from Mom. One from each of my three brothers. Wow. One each from Kylie Omimura, my best friend from school in New York, and my cousin Kate Fong, who went to Choate. Both of whom I adored, but who were such perfect examples of talented Asian girls making their families proud that I always felt like the rude, noisy bumpkin Nai-Nai accuses me of being when she’s annoyed.

Nai-Nai has a hair-trigger temper, which means she’s annoyed a lot. One of the reasons I’m out here instead of staying at Brearley, or even going to Choate with Kate.

Don’t tell anyone I said that, okay?

To:      kate.fong©choate.edu

From:      GChang©spenceracad.edu

Date:      February 12, 2009

Re:      Re: winter blah

Hey, cuz, thanks for the note. Things are pretty busy around here—I’m taking AP Chem, Mandarin, English, and a bunch of other stuff, along with an advanced piano class, chamber ensemble, and composition, which is kinda interesting. Also taking a graphic arts class, can you believe it? And volleyball. Gotta exercise all parts of the brain, huh?

Congrats on the social coup! I knew all those dance classes would pay off. So he’s the captain of the fencing team AND does social dance in competition? Geesh. How do you find these guys? All there are out here are trust-fund babies and scions of old families—oh wait, that’s all there is out there, too! ::snicker::

There might be something interesting developing along that line for me. Too new to say anything yet, but he’s brilliant in physics and plans to bag his Ph.D. in eight years. Not to mention, tall, dorky, and cute.
Which is OK, since I’m short, dorky, and cute. LOL

TTYL,
Gill

I hit Send and popped off a similar note to Kylie, then brief ones to my family telling each of them what they wanted to hear. Only with Darren did I get really honest, but only about classes and stuff.

None of them needed to know about Lucas. While it might have delighted Nai-Nai if she heard I was dating an Asian guy, I couldn’t have stood the barrage of phone calls and general freaked-out nosiness that would ensue if they found out I was seeing a white boy. No matter what he looked like, a person’s first boyfriend was private, at least in the beginning stages. My family would overwhelm a relationship like a tidal wave and drown it before it even got off the ground.

Another marine metaphor. What was with me today? Was my subconscious telling me I needed a day out on the Bay in a sailboat or something?

I’d been sitting so long staring at the e-mail screen that my computer had gone to sleep. I poked a key and opened a note.
IM me
, he’d said. So, confession time: I’d been sitting here doing e-mail while I worked up some courage.

GChang
      Up for seeing a movie? Maybe tomorrow night?

LHayes
      Which one?

GChang
      I’ve been trying to get to
Seeing Double
since it opened.

LHayes
      What’s it about?

GChang
       Jodie Foster goes to Africa and saves her dead best friend’s child. Political mayhem ensues.

LHayes
      Chick flick.

GChang
      I like Jodie Foster.

LHayes
       Nothing wrong with that. Have you seen the new
Silver Surfer
?

GChang
      No.

LHayes
       Want to go? It’s playing at the Cineplex at the bottom of the hill. Maybe dinner first at TouTou’s and then the 9:00 show?

GChang
      Great! Front steps at 6:30?

LHayes
      Me and my cute car will be there.

Smiling, I closed his note and enjoyed the sweetness of the moment. First an exhibition opening, now dinner and a movie! If this didn’t mean “be my girlfriend,” I was a Ming empress. And so what if I didn’t get to see Jodie. It would be out on DVD in a couple months, or I’d download it off iTunes.

And Saturday was Valentine’s Day. I’d never paid much attention to it before, but now the timing seemed cosmically perfect. Who knew what might happen on a day meant to commemorate love?

New mail came in while I was gloating—er, sitting there being thoroughly happy.

To:
All Students

From:
NCurzon©spenceracad.edu

Date:
February 12, 2009

Re:
Exams

Ladies and gentlemen, a serious breach of the qualities our school colors stand for—loyalty, purity, and intellect—has come to my attention and I need your help.

I have been informed that some of the grades you achieved during our last set of midterms were attained by fraudulent means. In other words, they were bought. Someone has accessed the school server illegally and downloaded some professors’ examination materials. These were subsequently marked with answers and sold to students.

If you know of someone who has obtained answers in this manner, please inform your core class instructor or come to me directly. Your identity will be kept confidential. I don’t need to tell you how sorry this makes me. I had thought that the students of Spencer Academy held themselves and their achievements in higher regard.

Thank you for any assistance you can give us in finding the persons responsible.

Natalie Curzon, Ph.D., M.Ed.
Principal, Spencer Academy

Wow. So Carly’s ear for the word on the street was sharp. I could only imagine what would happen to the person caught selling exam answers. Expulsion, of course. Even though I knew—thanks to Lissa’s experience last term—that Spencer gave people three chances before they were kicked out, there were still circumstances under which they’d boot first and ask questions later. Fire, blood, and drugs being three of them. Fraud probably ranked right up there, too—especially when it involved something as serious as grades.

Well, knowing the grapevine in this place, sooner or later the guilty people would surface, whether they wanted to or not.

Meanwhile, I had a date to think about.

Chapter 7

Y
OU KNOW HOW
when you were a kid, Christmas and your birthday seemed to take an eon to arrive? How every day seemed like a week, and all you could think about was that moment when you could throw the covers off and run to where the presents were?

That’s kind of how it was for me, waiting for Friday night.

“You are totally crushing on him, aren’t you?” Shani said to me as Carly joined us on the volleyball court on the upper level of the field house, after Life Skills and before Phys. Ed. class got started. Idly, we set up the ball for each other while we waited for Ms. Stockton, the gym instructor, to come out of her office and start drills.

“No,” I said with dignity. “I like him, that’s all. And I think he likes me.”

“He must.” Shani served the ball in my direction. “TouTou’s costs a fortune. Nothing says true love like a hundred and fifty a plate.”

“It doesn’t cost that.” Carly looked shocked. “Does it?”

“Appie, dinner, dessert, and coffee?” Shani got under my return and bumped it to Carly. “Three hundred for two, easy.”

“Maybe I should suggest something else.” This was making me nervous. “I mean, we could just eat here and walk down to the theater afterward.”

“Gillian, let the man take you out.” Carly caught the ball and hung onto it. “If he said TouTou’s, he had to know it would mean shelling out. And it’s not like he can’t afford it.”

“Or that I can’t, if we went Dutch.” I didn’t come armed with a platinum AmEx for nothing. “It’s just that—”

“What?” She tossed the ball, and I bumped it to Shani to give myself time to find the right words.

“I don’t want him to think I’m like—” I jerked my head in the direction of Emily Overton and Dani “I’m cashing in on my cousin’s fame” Lavigne, who were setting their ball back and forth, dropping it every third time. “I don’t care about going to expensive places just because celebrities go there. I don’t want him to think he has to impress me that way.”

“He won’t,” Carly assured me. “Any guy who can survive an angora sweater attack has to know better than that.”

They both cracked up. I was
so
not going to live this down. Thank goodness nobody else knew I’d nearly sent the school’s leading prospective Physics Olympian to the hospital.

“Would you stop overthinking?” Shani tossed the ball to Carly as Ms. Stockton finally appeared. “Just go have a good time. And tell us if you like that movie.”

I tried to stop overthinking. Really. But even just thinking about it on the most superficial level (what was I going to
wear?
) made me nervous. By six-thirty, though, I was on the front steps, immaculately dressed in a Tori Wu velvet minidress with a vintage jean jacket over it. Style, comfort, and a little edge, all in one package. All of which I needed badly to shore up my jittery self-confidence.