Unexpected (18 page)

This time a sob broke loose. I moved the short distance to where she was sitting and pulled her into a hug. She sobbed onto my shoulder for a minute but pulled herself back together pretty quickly. I reached for the box of tissues that were on the end table. She gratefully took them.

“What can I do to help?” I finally asked. “I’ll start going through the main lunch line with you.”

She gave me the evil eye for even suggesting it.

“Come on,” I argued. “You can’t go the whole year just eating a piece of fruit for lunch. Besides, the lunches look better than they used to. And it’s just lunch. Who cares?” It wasn’t like none of the students ate it. It just, for whatever reason, happened to be that our little group of four never had. It really wasn’t that big of a deal to me. I just hadn’t realized that it had become one to her.

“Are you serious?” she asked with a little laugh.

“Yes. Except for the day they serve fish patties. Under no circumstances will I go through the line to get one of those. But other than that, lunch problem solved. What else?”

She shook her head. “Nothing that you can help with, really. I think things are finally going better for my parents. I overheard them talking and it sounds like they hope to be on their feet by
summer. I don’t think they’ve told Grandma that yet. Just in case they’re not. But they’ve downsized. Now the backside of the gallery is closed off. They’re finalizing a rental agreement with someone from town that wants to open a gift shop. So that helps. It’ll bring them extra income.”

“Good,” I said.

“And,” she sighed, “I’ve been working almost every night.”

“At the gallery?”

“No. At The Red Apple,” she said, naming a small diner. I realized it was walking distance from her grandma’s house. In fact, it was a well-known gathering place for the senior citizens in town. It had been around since…well, forever. I’d never been there. I realized that was probably why she’d gotten a job there. The chance of running into people from school was not at all likely.

“I wash dishes,” she said glumly.

“There’s nothing wrong with having a job,” I pointed out.

She scoffed. “You say that because you don’t have one.”

In fact, my mom didn’t
want
me to have one. She told me I’d have plenty of time to work the rest of my life. Instead, she gave me a pretty good chunk of the money she got from my dad for child support. She claimed that she was perfectly capable of taking care of me herself. As far as I knew, she’d never touched the money from him. Anyone who knew my mom—knew how fiercely independent she was—would understand that. She had no use for money from the man who betrayed her. So since my sophomore year, the year they divorced, she’d given me my “allowance” out of it. She put the rest in a savings account to hand over to me when I was older.

“You
know
why I don’t work,” I pointed out.

“Because you have everything handed to you.” Her tone wasn’t accusatory. It was sad. I tried not to let it bother me.

“Whatever,” I said with a sigh. “But that doesn’t mean you have to feel embarrassed about working! Half our class, maybe more, have jobs. Tristan has a job. Jamie has a job!”

“At her mother’s posh spa!
She answers the phone and makes appointments. She’s not at a diner where you have to double check the dirty dishes to be sure no one’s dentures fell out on their plate!”

I cringed. I assumed she was joking. If she wasn’t, I didn’t want to know.

“I’m saving for a car. I’ve been putting every penny I can away,” she admitted. “Once I get a car, I can drive to a job. A better job.”

“Wait, I thought you worked at the gallery?”

“I do that, too. My parents work around my other schedule. I don’t get paid for that, though,” she unhappily admitted. “When something of mine sells, I get that money.” Oh, that would explain her excessive knitting. I knew she sold her items but didn’t realize just how heavily she relied on those sales. “But when I’m there, working the floor and the counter, I don’t get paid anything. My parents feel like it’s just something that should be required since I’m part of the family. Kind of like helping out with things around the house. Only, I help out at the gallery. I want to be mad about that, too. But most of the time I can’t be. I get that they can’t really
afford
to pay me. So I keep telling myself that every dollar saved on
not
paying me is another dollar to put toward a house of our own.”

We were both quite a while. I wasn’t sure what else to say. I knew she wouldn’t want to feel like I pitied her. And I had a feeling she was done with her sharing for the day.

“You know what we need to do?” I asked.

“Hmmm?”

I grabbed her hand and pulled her up.

“We need to go up to my room and try our dresses on!”

I had finally found one that I
liked two stores after Jamie and Krista found theirs. But I’d been rushed trying it on because they were worried about getting to their movie on time. “The red dress is hanging in the spare room,” I told her. “I’ll get it out for you. Then we can look through my mom’s shoes. I know she probably has something that will work. And I know she won’t mind at all if you borrow them.”

A slow smile spread across Willow’s face. “Okay,” she agreed. Then the smile faltered just a bit. “Ugh, now all I have to worry about is making sure I still have a date.”

13

I swear,” I said to Jamie
as we walked to the cafeteria, “that you are a closet genius.” I’ve asked, hinted and flat-out accused her of this before. She denies, denies, denies. But the fact that she just cursed because she got an A+ on her Trig test seems to refute her vehement protests.

“I didn’t realize you were
supposed to choose one of the five problems to work through in Section C. So I accidentally did all five.” She did them correctly, as well. “So see, I’m no genius, I can’t even follow simple directions.”

I didn’t buy it. I even had a theory. Tristan was the “smart one”. Jamie wanted to keep it that way. If she could continue to prove she was simply average, the expectation for her to be average would stay in place.
Right now, Tristan was the one with all of the expectations laid on him. I shook my head. Tristan may have outsmarted her when it came to the car. But I had a feeling Jamie had outsmarted everyone when it came to avoiding some pretty intense expectations of what she should do with her life.

Tristan was expected to follow in his dad’s footsteps and go into the medical field. From what I knew, he actually wanted to. So it wasn’t all bad. Jamie, however, was still floating along,
delightfully undecided about what she wanted to do with the rest of her life.

Just like Willow and me.

“You can admit it to me,” I teased. “I’ll never tell.”

She wasn’t falling for it.

She ripped her test in two. Then she proceeded to make confetti out of it. “Forget you saw this. This? It never happened.” She sprinkled the pieces into a garbage can as we walked by.

“You two, y
ou’re both so lucky. You’re like genetically inclined to succeed in life. You both have parents that are doctors. It’s like they handed down their disgusting amount of intelligence to you,” Willow miserably noted. “It’s not fair.”

I wanted to tell her that I got good grades because I
studied
. So did Jamie, though I’d say she studied the least of any of us. But to point that out to Willow seemed a little condescending when I thought about it. Why? Because I had the
time
to study. Willow? She had two jobs and watched her siblings frequently. On top of that, I couldn’t imagine trying to study in that loud, cramped house.

And yeah, okay, maybe having smart parents helped. Who knows? What I did know was that I was nowhere near on the same level as my mom.
I fought for every A I earned. But I let it slide.

As w
e entered the cafeteria, Willow and I headed to the main lunch line. Luckily they were serving chicken quesadillas and honestly they looked pretty good. Jamie veered off to go through the other line. We met at our table.

“I think my mom is dating Mr. Gallagher,” I glumly admitted as I slumped down into my chair. I’d been fighting with this suspicion for weeks. But after today, I thought I had proof.

“Why?” Jamie asked as she narrowed her eyes at me.

“Because I got an A on my essay on
A Tale of Two Cities
. And a note that said ‘exceptional work’. But I bluffed my way through the whole thing.” I’d also had the Trig test to study for. My grade in World Literature was more stable so I’d let that assignment slide.

“Maybe you’re smarter than you think you are,” Willow suggested.
“I told you, genetics.”

I snorted indelicately at that thought. “Yeah. No. That’s not it.”

“Why don’t you just ask her?” Jamie wondered.

“
Actually, the last few weeks or so, I was thinking of asking her. Things seemed to be getting serious. But now? If it’s him? I don’t want to know anymore. Because I don’t want to have to sit and watch him, day after day in class knowing he’s the one that made my mom all…
giddy
after their weekend away. I don’t want to think my teacher is the one that put that goofy look on her face.” I shuddered involuntarily.

Thinking
it was bad enough but I could at least exercise my option to be in denial.
Knowing for sure
might hinder my learning experience in the classroom. I was afraid if I knew I would never be able to get past the
Ewww Factor
. And there was simply too much of the year left for me to allow that to happen.

Jamie smirked. “I used to think it was so weird. The way you and your mom are going about this. But now? Now I can see how being blissfully unaware has its advantages. There are just some things a person does
not
want to think about.”

Willow giggled at that but I just scrunched up my face. Looking at it that way, I could actually really see why she wouldn’t want me with Tristan. Even though
our
Ewww Factor was nowhere near what I was afraid I knew my mom’s was.

Now
she
shuddered, mimicking me. “You and my baby brother? Talk about an Ewww Factor,” she said, borrowing my terminology.

I grimaced. “Would you please stop calling him that? He’s only thirteen months younger than you! And only
seven months younger than I am. When you call him your baby brother it makes me sound—”

“Like a cradle robber?”
Willow helpfully supplied with a grin.

“He’ll always be my baby brother,”
Jamie said, somewhat hotly.

“Speaking of that little cutie pie,” Willow began. She ignored Jamie’s derisive snort. “What’s he
been up to lately?”

I shrugged. We’d been together for a few weeks now. “
We’re finally getting together tonight. I don’t see him as much as I thought I would. He’s usually really busy.”  But more often than not, he’d stop by my house for at least a few minutes in the evening, on his way home.

“He works a lot,
doesn’t he?” Willow pointed out.

“He does,” Jamie agreed. “
Sometimes I think he does it just to get out of the house. You know how our parents can be.”

I did. My mom h
ad strict rules but the Jacobs were stricter still. Especially Robert.

“Somehow, that surprises me,” Willow said. “I thought for sure if Tristan ever got you, he’d drop everything for you.”

“I would never want him to do that,” I insisted. And yet…to be honest, I had thought he’d be…I don’t know…Maybe willing to drop a
few
things for me? While I saw him every day and most evenings, it always felt more rushed than I would like. We had managed to set Sunday afternoons aside. But it didn’t feel like nearly enough.

“Is your mom dating Heidi’s dad again?” Krista asked as she plunked herself down.

I felt myself bristle. “Not that I know of.”

She shook her head subtly. “Oh, yeah right. I forgot about that weird little deal you two have.”

I scowled because I didn’t find it weird at all.

She grimaced at my scowl. “Sorry. I sometimes forget that you’re like, mentally scarred or something.”