The International Kissing Club (21 page)

Mei was right. Izzy needed to spend more time studying for the SAT. Her vocabulary was crap if she couldn’t think of the words to describe how annoying someone was.

She was nibbling on a spicy mango truffle and contemplating whether she could inflict her mother’s cooking on innocent farmers’ market vegetables, when she heard someone calling her name. She looked up and scanned the thinning crowd.

At first she didn’t recognize anyone. But just as she decided she must have imagined it, he called her name again, and she spotted him coming toward her. Tanner.

“Um. Hi.” She popped the last bit of chocolate into her mouth and rubbed at her lips self-consciously with the back of her hand. Then she added, “If it isn’t Tanner Smith and Wesson.”

“Hey, Isabel.” He grinned, stopping a few feet away. Tanner was usually pretty well dressed. He had that all-American clean-cut thing going for him. But today he was wearing a flannel shirt open over a
dark blue T-shirt. His jeans were faded. His Dingo work boots scruffy and worn. Somehow she liked him better for looking less like he modeled for Abercrombie & Fitch. She smiled at the thought.

Tanner’s grin slowly faded and he seemed to be studying her. Suddenly she was aware that she’d been crying her eyes out not too long ago, and she probably looked all red and blotchy. She didn’t particularly mind his seeing her red and blotchy—he was just Tanner, after all—but she hated anyone knowing she’d been crying over River.

Turning back to the vegetable stall, she pulled her shopping bag from her purse and started mindlessly loading it up.

Beside her, Tanner chuckled. “Wow, your family must really love acorn squash.”

She glanced down at the bag. Acorn squash? Was that what these things were? “Yum,” she muttered. “We love the …” And then her mind went blank. The what? The … ? The … ? “Fiber,” she finished lamely.

Note to self: There’s a fine line between not caring what someone thinks of you and purposefully making a fool of yourself. Let’s not cross it again.

“You need any help with that?” he asked, looking like he was trying not to laugh.

“Don’t be silly.” But then she could barely lift it.
Okay, study SAT words and hit the gym.
Before she could protest—or more logically, put some of them back—he’d hefted the bulging bag and carried it over to the clerk.

Izzy fished out her wallet and paid the lady, carefully hiding her shock at how expensive eight acorn squash were. Now she really wished she
had
put them back. Her family was not worth emptying out her cash reserves. Plus, now she was stuck with Tanner walking the bag to her car.

Even though he seemed to be at her house constantly, they never talked much. She found herself unsure what to say to him. “So … ,” she began awkwardly. As if anything could be more awkward than talking about dietary fiber. “What are you doing here?” Then she
cringed. That sounded so
accusatory
. “I mean, you don’t seem like the farmers’-market type.”

“My parents sell fruit here.”

She laughed. “No really, what—” Then quickly realized he wasn’t joking. “Oh. Fruit, huh?”

“Yeah. Sun Valley Orchards.” He pointed to a stall near the entrance.

Izzy glanced at it. “They have great stuff!”

“I know.”

“I had no idea. I
love
that jam.”

“The apple ginger, right?”

“Yeah. Now that’s how ginger should be used.” Not in a tea strong enough to choke a horse. “I guess I should have stocked up. I doubt I’ll be back anytime soon.”

“I guess not.” He looked over his shoulder toward the back of the market where Autumn was packing up her T-shirts. “River always was a pretentious douche.” Tanner’s voice was low and harsh as he said it.

There was something in his tone that surprised her. It must have shown on her face, because when he looked over at her, he smiled again and shrugged. “I’m sorry. I know you dated him for a while. I’m sure he’s a great guy.”

“No,” she said, suddenly feeling better than she had in weeks. “He
is
a douche.”

When they’d reached her car, she opened the passenger side door so he could deposit the squash.

“So what’s next for you, Isabel?” Tanner asked as he closed the door.

She looked pointedly at the bag he’d carried. “I’m going to go home and eat a lot of squash.”

He chuckled. “No, I meant for the semester. With Mei, Cassidy, and Piper out of town—”

“And my idiot ex in Lubbock,” she added, just because it felt so good to joke about it.

Tanner let it slide. “You’re going to have to find something else to keep you busy.”

“Well, since I’m bored and broke, I think I’m going to get a job. If I can knock my self-respect down low enough, I’m going to apply at Dairy Queen.”

“Ouch.” Tanner gave an exaggerated wince. “If you want a job, you don’t have to work there.”

“No, I really think I do. Nowhere else is hiring experience-less teens.”

“You could get a job working for my parents.” He pointed back toward the stall. “I know they could use someone to help out around the farm. With football practice I’m not there much.”

“Don’t your parents live in Oklahoma?”

He sent her a “well-duh” look. “No.”

“Then why do you live with your uncle?”

“So I can go to Paris High. Play ball for your dad.”

“Oh.” She started digging through her purse, looking for her keys, only to realize they were still in her hand.

“My parents’ farm is about twenty minutes from Paris. But it’s a one-A district. I could never get a football scholarship going to school there.”

She didn’t quite know what to say to that. After living in Austin for so much of her life, dumpy little Paris seemed like a place you ran away from. Not a place you ran to.

This odd, uncomfortable tightness formed in her throat. Not pity, exactly. Maybe sympathy? It seemed wrong, somehow, to feel anything so human for Tanner.

“Why are you helping me like this?” she asked.

He slanted a smile at her. The same one that had half the girls in Paris High School crushing on him. “ ’Cause we’re friends. That’s what friends do.”

She’d spent years harassing and being harassed by football players. She didn’t want to be friends with one. Did she?

Of course, she wasn’t exactly in a position to be picky.

“My parents are especially busy right now,” Tanner was saying. “The apples and jams are doing so well, they’re converting the ten acres near the house into organic crops. If you’re interested, I’ll talk to them about it.”

“That’d be great.” Was it helping with scientific research in the rain forest? No. But it was so much better than sprinkling jimmies on soft serve. She swung open the driver’s door and clambered into the car, feeling upbeat for the first time in weeks.

Tanner had been—dare she say it?—
nice
to her. On a day when she’d really needed it. And he’d offered to help her get a non–Dairy Queen job.

“You know, Tanner,” she said lightly, “for a knuckle-dragging purveyor of violence, you’re pretty easy to talk to.”

For an instant, surprise flickered across his face. Then he flashed her a smile. “It’s because I know so few words.”

She thought about what Mei had said about him being the only other person in honors biology to get an A. Izzy had barely managed a B+ in normal biology. “Yeah. Right.”

She started the car with a shake of her head. Since it was one of those gorgeous warm fall days, she rolled down the windows.

Just before she slipped the car into reverse, Tanner leaned down and poked his head through the window. “You
can
drive a tractor, right?”

The Official Fan Page for the International Kissing Club

1,391

people like this

IKC Page

Chapter 12
Mei

Mei tried not to feel sorry for herself as she stared at her laptop screen, reading the Facebook updates on the IKC page. It was hard, especially when Piper and Cassidy seemed to be having so much fun.

Both of them had already racked up points—Piper more than Cassidy, big surprise—but still, Cassidy was holding her own with some hot guy named Lucas. She’d promised to post a picture soon and Mei couldn’t wait to see what kind of guy had managed to get past the No Trespassing signs Cassidy usually kept at full mast.

Even Izzy seemed to have found her groove. No kissing action, but she’d gotten a new job on Tanner’s farm. Knowing her, she’d be knee-deep in compost by the end of the week. And at least everyone in Texas spoke the same language she did, which was a lot more than Mei could say about China. Here, even the girls who did speak English went out of their way to ensure that they spoke Mandarin in front of her. God forbid she should forget—even for a second—that she was an outsider here. Again.

Mei put her head down on her desk and tried to ignore the sadness that beat at her a little more with each day that passed. She was so tired of being the girl who never fit in anywhere. In Paris it was understandable—she was Chinese, adopted, and the daughter of a liberal gender-studies professor and a well-respected journalist. She didn’t have a chance of fitting in there.

But here, in China, where she’d been born? She’d thought it would be perfect. Instead, she was as much an outcast here—maybe more—than she’d ever been in Texas.

What did it say about her that she was in a country with 1.6
billion
people and she still couldn’t find even one who liked her enough to talk to her?

Not that they’d given Mei much of a chance. The girls in the dorm had made it abundantly clear that they wanted nothing to do with her—not because she was American, but because she was Chinese. Because her birth parents had given her up for adoption seventeen years before, she was undesirable. Unsuitable. Unwelcome. It turned out, in China the girls who’d been given up for adoption were just above Democratic protestors on the social ladder.

Her stomach growled loudly, distracting her from her misery for a second, but she ignored it—just as she’d been ignoring it for the last two hours. She was sick of going to the dining hall alone and trying to figure out which of the long lines of dishes were edible and which weren’t. So far, she’d had singularly bad luck in what she’d picked out and had ended up throwing away most of the food on her tray at the end of every meal, which only earned her more dirty looks. But who would have guessed that authentic Chinese food could be so disgusting? She shuddered. She really was a long way from Sherman’s Panda Express.