The International Kissing Club (10 page)

And wasn’t that just typical? In her mother’s world, it didn’t matter how things really were as long as they appeared good on the surface. Who cared if Piper was suffering as long as she pretended to be happy? Who cared if her mother was a drunk as long as she looked and acted sober? Who cared if her mom actually loved her as long as everyone thought she did?

Piper could feel her annoyance turning to tears, and she battled them back. It wouldn’t do her any good to cry. Her mother would just remind her that crying made her skin blotchy and her eyes swollen—two things she really couldn’t afford, especially with her “eccentric” looks.

“Aren’t you going to be late to dinner with the Franklins?” she asked desperately.

Her mother glanced at the Cartier watch on her wrist. “We still have a few minutes. Your father isn’t quite ready yet.”

She reached into one of the bags and pulled out the funky shoes Piper had bought to go with her new sundresses. They had thick heels and were a really cool electric-blue that made her happy just looking at them.

“Oh, Piper, really? Blue shoes?”

“I like them, Mom.”

“Which just goes to show how little taste you have,” Savannah said with an eye roll.

“Of course you like them, dear. But this color shoe doesn’t look good on anyone. And those heels aren’t the right shape. They’re going to make your legs look short and with your thigh issues, that’s not what you need.”

Piper swore she could feel her perfectly normal thighs expanding under her mother’s judgmental gaze.
Aren’t mothers supposed to make you feel better about yourself?
she wondered as she frantically began chewing on a thumbnail. It was a habit left over from when she’d been a kid and one she’d mostly broken—except when her mother was on a
tear. Which was more often than not these days, thanks to the whole Kiss the Pig thing.

“And this dress.” Her mother pulled out one of the sundresses she’d bought on sale. “Do you really think you need to be showing off your arms in this thing? It’s not like you’ve been going to the gym with your sister and me lately.”

“You know what? Forget it. If you don’t like what I bought, you can take it all back tomorrow. It doesn’t matter to me.” Piper headed for the stairs at a dead run, leaving her bags where they were, knowing that she’d lose it completely if she didn’t get away from her mom.

“Don’t speak to your mother like that, young lady!” Her father’s voice boomed from down the hall.

Suddenly, she couldn’t keep quiet any longer. “Why don’t you tell her not to criticize everything about me?” she shouted back as she ran up the stairs, her mother’s Chihuahua, Pookie, nipping at her heels. “I’m sick of her trying to control every part of my life. I’m not Savannah. I’m not going to let her dress me up and parade me around the pageant circle.”

Her sister snorted. “Like the pageant circle would want you.”

“I don’t know what to do with that girl, Tom,” she heard her mother say as she ran to her room.

“Don’t let her upset you, Mom,” Savannah said in a tone that would make Germaine proud. “You know Piper hates that she’s the only one of us girls not to win a beauty pageant.”

Piper gritted her teeth and swallowed the urge to scream at her sister. That was exactly the reaction Savannah was looking for, and she
so
wouldn’t give her the satisfaction. Not now, when freedom was within reach.

“I was just trying to help,” her mother said with a sigh. “Doesn’t she realize if she looked better, she wouldn’t be such a target? No one would ever make Germaine kiss a—”

Piper slammed her door in Pookie’s face, then hurled herself on
her bed. Yanking her iPod off her nightstand, she slipped it on and then cranked up her favorite playlist. Pink came on and masked the sounds of her parents leaving for the night. But it couldn’t mask Piper’s thoughts—or the tears that burned behind her eyelids.

She blinked them back. It was bad enough that Germaine had made her cry—she wouldn’t let her mother do it, too.

The Official Rules and Guidelines for the International Kissing Club

Info

• Kiss and be kissed

• Often

• Kiss and tell

• One point per kiss. Three points if it really makes you shiver …

° Bonus points: five points for two guys in one week and ten points for three

Chapter 6
Cassidy

“Cass? Earth to Cassidy?”

“Huh?” she said, staring in a daze out of Mei’s car window.

“I asked if you thought Izzy was acting weird, but then maybe you’re not the best judge right now, either,” Mei said.

“I’m sorry.” Cassidy shifted in her seat and fiddled with the air vents. “I was just thinking about other things.” She sighed heavily. “Just about calling my dad.” She paused. “He’ll do it, right? Give me the money, I mean. It’s not like I’ve ever asked him for anything before.” Not that he’d been around to ask even if she’d wanted to. She knew Mei had no idea whether her father was going to agree to this or not, but when she said it out loud like that it sounded completely within the realm of possibility.

“You haven’t talked to him lately, have you?” Mei’s question made Cass realize she hadn’t been as smooth about hiding this fact as she’d thought.

She was slow to answer. “No. Not since my tenth birthday.” She turned and caught Mei’s sympathetic gaze. “Don’t tell Piper and Izzy. I just … just don’t tell them, okay?”

“Of course I won’t.” Mei looked so serious, it made Cassidy smile. She and Piper had been friends the longest of the four of them, but sometimes Mei understood her better. Maybe it was because Mei was
adopted and she knew what it was like to have a parent she didn’t know.

“So, what are you going to say to him?” Mei asked the question that had been weighing on Cassidy’s mind all week.

“I guess I’m going to tell him the truth: I’m going to Australia and I want him to pay for it.”

“And what if he says no?”

Cassidy took a deep breath. “Then I’ll remind him that my mom stopped taking child support six years ago and he owes me. He’s got his own business, and, from what little I’ve been able to find out, he does pretty well for himself.”

“Why did your mom stop accepting the payments? Seems like she’d want him to keep paying through the nose after he left her.”

Cassidy shrugged. “You know my mom—too much Barlow pride. She said that if he didn’t want to be a real father to me, then we didn’t need his guilt money, either.”

They pulled into the drive of the little house Cassidy shared with her mom. “Won’t she get mad when you tell her?” Mei asked as they got out of the car.

Cassidy had been wondering the same thing. She and her mom had always been close; they’d pretty much grown up together. And this would be the first time she’d ever deliberately gone behind her mother’s back to do something. Conspiring with her father no less—to her mom, it would be the ultimate betrayal. She might even try to keep Cassidy from taking the money if her father ponied up. Which was why Cassidy had decided she wouldn’t say anything until it was done. If he didn’t give her the money, there would never be any reason to tell her mom what she’d done.

“No. Not until after. She’s working an extra shift at the lab today, so I’m going to do it before she gets home.”

“Do you want me to stay while you call? For moral support?”

It would be good to have someone there in case she chickened
out, but Cassidy didn’t want to say that. “You don’t have to. You know, if you have stuff to do …”

Mei smiled. “I can move my guitar lesson to tomorrow. Let’s do this.”

They walked inside the house and Cassidy dropped her backpack on a chair in the living room. Everything was quiet. “Mom?” she called, just in case. No answer.

“Do you have his number?” Mei asked.

“No, but I know where I can find it. Come with me.” Cassidy walked into the back bedroom and went to her mom’s dresser. She quashed a pang of guilt as she reached for the drawer handle. She and her mother didn’t have many boundaries, and she hated that she was crossing one now. Cassidy slid open the top drawer and dug beneath a pile of socks. At the bottom her fingers hit the edge of a large manila envelope.

“I found this a few years ago,” she said to Mei, pulling it out of the drawer. “My mom doesn’t know I’ve seen it.” She opened the metal clasp and reached inside, bringing out a collection of papers. One fell to the floor and Mei picked it up.

It was a picture of Cassidy’s mom sitting on the back of a late ‘80s maroon Mustang convertible. Her fuchsia satin dress had big bows on the puffy sleeves to match the riot of blond, poufy curls on her head. She was beaming at the tall, slim guy standing next to her in a tuxedo coat, creased Wranglers, and cowboy boots, with military-short reddish hair and blue eyes as bright as his smile.

“Are these your parents?” Mei asked.

“Yeah, at prom.”

“They look
so
young.”

Too young
, Cassidy thought. “My mom got pregnant that night. They were going to get married, but in the fall my dad left to play baseball at Texas A&M like he’d always planned, and it never happened.”

“You don’t look anything like your dad, Cass. Well, except the height.”

Cassidy stared at the guy in the picture. She’d definitely gotten his tall, lanky frame. Everything else—her wavy blond hair and brown eyes, the smattering of freckles across her nose—was all from her mom.

Sifting through the papers, Cassidy found what she was looking for: a business card. “Conway Brothers Well Digging” it said, with a cartoon of a well gushing water in the corner. Beneath that read “Casey Conway, Co-Owner.” She flipped over the card. On the back in a man’s messy scribble was a home address and phone number.

Mei looked at the card in Cassidy’s hand. “Your dad lives in Tyler? But that’s only two hours away!”

Cassidy nodded. “He has a whole new family there, two little boys and a girl. I’ve never met them, though.” And she bet they had no idea they had another sister.

Until her dad’s new daughter had come along, Cassidy had held out a secret hope that maybe he just couldn’t relate to girls and that’s why he’d stopped calling. But a birth announcement had come in the mail when her half sister was born, and she’d seen the look of pride and love on his face as he held his new daughter.

Cassidy put the other papers back in the envelope and hid it under the socks again. They crossed the hall to her room and sat on the bed, staring at the card. Now that she had the number and was actually about to do this, the nervous energy was almost paralyzing, like she’d just shotgunned a Red Bull while wearing a straitjacket.

“Are you okay, Cass?”

“Mm-hmm,” was all she could manage.

Mei reached for the phone. “Do you want me to dial for you?”

Cassidy couldn’t answer. A kaleidoscope of images flitted across her mind like an out-of-control slide show until it stopped at the picture of her mom before prom. She’d looked so happy, but Cassidy
wondered how much she regretted the decisions she’d made that night. Because the fact was that her mom had gotten left behind not only by Cassidy’s dad but also by life—stuck in a shitty job, in a nowhere town, forever.

Cassidy would not let the same thing happen to her.

“No. I’ve got it.” She took the phone from Mei and dialed the numbers on the back of the card, ignoring her shaking fingers. The line rang once, twice, three times.

“Hello?” a woman’s voice asked. Cassidy hadn’t expected his wife to answer. She choked.

“Hello?” the woman repeated.

Oh God.
Hang up, hang up
, Cassidy thought. Mei squeezed her hand reassuringly.

“You can do this,” her friend mouthed to her.

Cassidy squeezed her eyes shut and breathed. She could do this. She
had
to do this. “Hello, may I speak with Casey Conway, please?” She was proud of herself—her voice wavered only a little at the end. Mei gave her a thumbs-up.

“Yes, can I tell him who’s calling?” the woman asked.

“This is Cassidy. His daughter.”