Wrong About the Guy (11 page)

I
didn't hear from Heather that night, which seemed like a bad sign. Since my scores were good, I couldn't text her to ask how hers were—there are rules about these things. I knew I'd hear from her sooner or later, anyway.

And I did. The next day.

Hi
said the first text.

Hi!
I texted back.

I'm so depressed

My heart sank.

George came by that evening.

“Wondering about my scores?” I said when I opened the door to him. “You could have just texted me.”

“This may come as a shock, but not everything's about you,” he said calmly. “I'm here to help your mom organize her office.”

“So you're not even curious about what I got?”

“She already told me.”

“Damn it!” I said. “She ruins everything. I was going to tell you I did horribly just to make you feel guilty.”

“Why would that make me feel guilty?”

“Because you were my tutor. My doing badly totally reflects on
you
.”

“You didn't do badly,” he pointed out.

“But if I had, it would have been your fault.”

“So I get to take credit for your doing well?”

“No. That was because I'm smart.”

He rolled his eyes. “This may be the stupidest conversation I've ever had with you, and that's saying a lot. Where's your mother?”

I wasn't sure, so I led him into the kitchen, where I hit the intercom on the wall monitor and blasted a message through the entire house that he had arrived.

“Thanks,” he said when I had done that and Mom had called down a “Be right there!” He leaned against the counter. “I'm a little scared even to ask, but how did Heather do? Do you know?”

“Yeah.”

He studied my expression. “Uh-oh.”

“Not as well as I'd hoped,” I admitted.

“So—”

I cut him off. “She'll take it again and do better. And even if she doesn't, I've already looked online and there are plenty of people who got into Elton College with
similar scores. Well, not plenty. But
some
.”

“A lot of people are extraordinary in ways that have nothing to do with test taking,” George said. “But I'm not sure—”

“Don't.” I put my hand up to stop him from finishing his sentence. “You don't know Heather the way I do. People love her. She'll probably have the best teacher recommendations in the world. And she's really well-rounded.”
And Luke will call and make them take her.
“The scores are only one small part of this whole thing. I promise you, she and I will end up at our first-choice college together.”

“Make sure you're not assuming it's her first choice just because it's yours.”

“I'm not,” I said, and he just shook his head and went back out into the hallway.

I got a text a little while later from Aaron asking if I wanted to run out for boba. I said sure, and he offered to pick me up.

I buzzed him through the gate about twenty minutes later. When I opened the front door, he pulled up in a Porsche convertible, which he parked behind George's Toyota. He got out and bounded up to the front door with his usual show of energy and enthusiasm. “Hello!” he cried out, and hugged me tightly. “It's been way too long. Why have you been denying me the inspirational sight of your beauty?”

“I'm pretty sure you're the one who's been too busy to get together.” We'd tried making plans a few times, but they kept falling through.

“I blame you. And those rat bastard SATs.”

“At least they're over.”

“And at least you did well.”

“You too, right?” I didn't know the exact numbers, but he'd said he wouldn't have to retake them.

Mom called down from upstairs, “Who's that, Ellie?”

Aaron and I moved deeper into the foyer and tilted our heads back so we could see her; she was leaning over the banister, George a few feet behind her, in the shadows.

“Aaron's here,” I said. “We're going out to grab some boba.”

“Boba?” Mom repeated. “Okay.” She was wearing yoga pants and a zippered hoodie and had her hair in a ponytail, so either she'd been exercising before George came or was planning to after he left. “You sure you don't want to stay here? We could order something in.”

“I want to get out of the house.”

“You're not going to be drinking, are you?”

“We just said we're going out for tea,” I said. “We either have to drink it or shoot it into our veins.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Do your parents do this to you when you're leaving?” I asked Aaron.

“Only if I flunk the urine test.”

We said good-bye to her and headed out the door and toward his car. “Since when have you had a Porsche?” I asked.

“Three—almost four—hours.”

“Seriously?”

“Dad made a deal with me that if I got over a certain number on my SATs, I could get one.”

“We only got our scores yesterday. You move fast.”

“Yeah, I was desperate—I've been driving their minivan. Do you know how hard it is to look cool behind the wheel of a minivan?”

“If anyone could manage it, it would be you.”

“True enough.” We got into the car and he said, “So . . . that place on Sawtelle? Whose name I can never remember? Or the one in Westwood?”

We settled on the Sawtelle place, and I sat back in my seat as he peeled out through the gate and onto the street. “You know what's weird?” I said. “I smell new-car smell but I also smell perfume.”

He sniffed. “Oh yeah. Eau de Evil Stepmother. Crystal made me drive her to the market before I came over here—she was almost out of the blood of virgins to bathe in. Which reminds me: What are you going to be for Halloween? You're coming to our party, right?”

“Yes! We're all going.” Michael threw a big annual Halloween party that my family always went to.

Aaron proposed coordinating our costumes, so we spent the rest of the evening discussing what we'd go as, finally settling on the two kids from
Moonrise Kingdom.

He dropped me off at home around ten. I gave him a quick peck on the cheek and then jumped out of the car. I didn't want a long good-bye—these things can get weird, and Aaron and I were definitely in uncertain territory. We were old family friends—theoretically, at least, since we'd never spent all that much time together—so it made sense that we'd want to get together to complain about our families and just hang out.

But . . . this evening wasn't exactly
not
a date either. I mean, he texted me, picked me up, and took me out to a quiet place where we sat and talked alone for a couple of hours. He even paid for my tea. (It cost a whopping three bucks—and his father was richer than the entire universe—but still. He paid.)

We got along incredibly well. We were practically the same person: we both had to deal with having ridiculously famous fathers, and we'd also both spent a lot of our lives alone with our unfamous mothers. We both considered ourselves Californians, but had lived in other states. We both had these much-younger half siblings who were equally adorable and annoying.

Our personalities were similar, too. We were both outgoing and quick and impatient and greedy. We got each other.

So in a lot of ways you could say we were soul mates. Which maybe meant we were destined to be a couple.

But I wasn't feeling it. Friends, yes. But nothing more. Yet.

I
flung open the front door. “Heather's coming,” I told George, who had appeared, at my mother's request, to help me with my college essay. “Only not for another hour, so you can focus on me first. But then you have to focus on her.”

“Okay. Where do you want to work?”

“Where do we always work?” I led him to the kitchen and he sat down and took his laptop out of his bag.

“Your mother said you'd send me your essay ahead of time but I never got it.”

“I forgot.” Which wasn't entirely true—I had remembered a couple of times (mostly because Mom kept reminding me) but never when I felt like running to the computer and actually doing anything about it. “Hold on.” I located the document: a rough draft that I had written during a summer essay workshop at school. It was about a trip I took to Haiti a year or so ago—the
show had arranged for Luke and Michael to do a PSA calling attention to the need for adequate housing there and I'd gone with them because Luke and Mom had felt it would be educational for me.

My college counselor had said the essay was “good but needed work.” I hadn't looked at it since then.

“It's possible it sucks,” I said as I opened the document on my laptop and swiveled it around for George to see.

“I'll leave myself open to the possibility,” he said, and then read silently. I watched his face for signs of approval or disapproval, but he kept it studiously blank.

“Well?” I said when he finally looked up.

“It's a little too long. You need to cut it by about thirty percent.”

“I know. But is it good?”

He leaned back and regarded me. “Here's the thing. It's fine. It's well-written and takes you on the right sort of journey. There's nothing wrong with it exactly—”

“Wow,” I said. “Stop all the gushing. It's going right to my head.”

He ignored that. “If you want to use this, you certainly can.”

“But—?”

“It's just . . . It feels a little generic. Tons of students write essays about being exposed to poverty and having some kind of an epiphany because of it—as if third
world countries only exist to expand our rich American minds.”

I flushed, embarrassed because he was right and annoyed at him for the same reason.

“Also,” he said, “how much did that experience really change your life?”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you actually volunteer more now? Watch the news and stay on top of global events? Donate to groups like Doctors Without Borders? What did you take home with you other than a, um . . .” He glanced down at the screen and read, “‘A sense that we draw boundaries and turn our backs to keep ourselves from feeling the pain of people whose only separation from us is geographic'?”

I squirmed at hearing my own stupid words. “Okay, that may have been over-the-top.”

“Maybe,” he said. “I would definitely rewrite it. But that's not my point. My point is, how did that trip really affect you?”

“I think about it a lot.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Shut up.”

“I didn't say anything.”

I glared at him. “Okay, fine, so what do you want me to do? Add in something about how now I give all my allowance money to good causes or something like that? You don't think that will sound smug?”

“I think it
will
sound smug,” he said. “Not to mention that it would be totally dishonest, since I'm guessing you don't actually do that.”

“So what then?”

“You have a couple of choices. You can sharpen and edit this, and it will be fine. Totally acceptable. Or you could do something completely different.”

“Write a whole new essay, you mean?” I made a face. “Ugh.”

“You don't have to. It's your call. But—” He leaned forward. “Ellie, you're one of the funniest, smartest, most interesting people I know. You don't think like everyone else and that's mostly a good thing—”

“Mostly?” I repeated. But I felt a little bit better; George never complimented me if he could help it, and he'd just complimented me a lot.

“
Sometimes
a good thing,” he said. “And I'm trying to make a point here, so don't get all full of yourself. This essay could have been written by anyone—well, by anyone rich and privileged enough to travel safely to a third world country with her parents, which is a large percentage of the people applying to liberal arts colleges.”

“So what
should
I write about?”

“Something only you could write about.”

“Which would be . . . ?”

“I don't know,” he said a little impatiently. “If I
knew, it wouldn't be something only you could write about, would it? Think for a second: What makes you unusual? What do you think about that most people don't?”

“How annoying George Nussbaum can be. No, wait—I bet a ton of people think about that.”

“Funny,” he said.

I slumped down in my chair. “I honestly don't know what to write about other than that trip. The college counselor said it should be meaningful and that's the only thing I can think of.”

He waited a moment, then said, “So I was reading everything I could find about college essays last night—”

“Of course you were.”

“And I came across this one article by someone who consults about college applications for a living—she gets like thirty thousand dollars per client—and she said the best essay she ever read was about
napping
. The kid who wrote it just really liked taking naps and he was able to say why in a funny, charming way.”

“I don't like to take naps. I never know what time it is when I wake up and I feel all groggy and stomachachey.”

He shot me a look. “You may be missing the point here.”

I waved my hand. “I get it. I should come up with something offbeat.”

He nodded, watching me expectantly.

We sat there for a minute and then I shook my head. “I can't think of anything interesting. My life is boring. I'm boring.”

“That's it?” he said. “You're giving up?”

“What was yours about?” I said, almost accusingly.

“About having a lot of older brothers. And about how no matter what I did, I felt like I could never measure up. And a little bit about how I had crushes on all their girlfriends.”

All right, so his
was
cooler than mine. No wonder he got into Harvard. “Can I see it?”

He shook his head. “Nah, too embarrassing for me to look at it now.”

“Did you have a crush on Izzy? Do you still?”

“If I did, you'd be the first person I'd tell,” he said. “Okay, let's go over this essay.”

It was painful to read through it with him. I hated every word now that we'd had that conversation. George was right: it was self-satisfied and dishonest. I was trying to make myself look virtuous and caring, when I wasn't really either.

But the college counselor had approved it and it was safe and I didn't have any other ideas.

“You're unusually quiet,” George observed after he'd pointed out some minor edits.

“I'm listening,” I said.

“You sure you're not getting sick?”

“I am capable of listening quietly, you know.”

He raised his eyebrows but didn't say anything. The doorbell rang, and I jumped to my feet. “Heather's turn. Thank God.”

Once she had her own essay displayed on her laptop, I asked if I could read it over George's shoulder, and she said, “If you want to, but I don't know why you would. It's not very good.”

“Stop that,” I said. “You're always putting yourself down.”

“But it's not.”

“I bet it's better than mine. George hated mine.”

“I didn't say that,” George protested.

“You strongly implied it.” I stood behind George's chair so we could read Heather's essay at the same time, George glancing up at me to make sure I was ready each time he scrolled down. Fortunately we read at the same pace.

The essay was about how Heather had found a stray dog when she was ten and helped to rescue it, and that got her interested in animal rights, so now she worked at an animal shelter once a week. She said we all had to speak for the animals because they couldn't speak for themselves and too many were euthanized or mistreated. The essay finished with “I hope to do something to change this sad situation someday.”

“Well?” she said when we had finished.

“It's good.” I circled around the table and sat down. “It could maybe be a little less . . .” I stopped. “I don't know. What do you think, George? You're the expert.”

“I'm not really an expert,” he said. Then: “You did a good job laying out the issues with stray animals and I can tell you're passionate about the subject. It's just . . .” He halted.

“You guys keep stopping!” she said. “It's okay. I know it's bad. The counselor at my school said it was fine, though. And my dad likes it.”

“It's not bad,” George said. “It just needs more of you in it. Why did that stray dog speak to you?”

“It just started barking.”

“No, I mean, what made you want to take it under your wing?”

She giggled. “It's funny to talk about wings when you're discussing animals. I just loved her at first sight—she had this silly scruffy hair on top of her head that was
so
cute.”

“Well, see, that's a nice detail,” he said. “Details make an essay come alive. You want this to be less about rescuing the dogs of the world and more about who you are.”

“Okay,” she said, and proved over the next half hour or so to be a far more obedient and tractable student than I was, eagerly suggesting new ideas and word choices whenever he asked her for them.

I stayed at the table with them, aimlessly surfing the net on my own computer. George had told me to edit my essay while he worked with Heather, but I just couldn't bring myself to look at it again right away.

After they'd been working for about half an hour, the wall monitor beeped that someone was at the front gate and as soon as I hit the intercom, a voice said, “It's Aaron, let me in!”

I had the front door open by the time his Porsche had scrunched to a stop in front of our house. “This is a surprise!” I said as he got out.

He came bounding up the steps. “I know, right? I was in the neighborhood. Well, not really, but I was in the car and bored, so I drove to the neighborhood to see you.”

“You are brilliant,” I said, and we hugged, and then I pulled him inside. “You have to meet my friend Heather. She's the best.”

We entered the kitchen and I introduced him to Heather and reminded him who George was. “Right,” Aaron said, nodding at him. “You're the guy who's always here doing something.”

“That's pretty much my job description,” George said.

Aaron turned to Heather. “Word on the street is that you're the best. Is this true?”

She shook her head, smiling. “No. Not even close.”

“Don't listen to her,” I said. “She is.”

“I believe you.” Aaron glanced at the table. “Wow. Three laptops. You guys must be doing something important. Should I leave?”

“God, no,” I said. “Those two are working together right now, but I wasn't doing anything other than thinking about how hungry I am. Want to go on a food run with me?”

“Are you kidding? I fantasize about going on food runs with you.”

“What does everyone want to eat?” I asked.

“Something sweet,” Heather said. “Like cookies.”

“I'm good.” George checked his watch. “How long will you be gone? Will we have time to work more? Early applications are due in two weeks, Ellie.”

“Yeah, I wasn't aware of that,” I said. “We'll be back in less than half an hour. Shouldn't affect my application process all that much.” I whisked Aaron out of the kitchen.

We picked up cupcakes at my favorite place and brought them back to the house. “You should have seen the cashier's face,” I told George and Heather when we walked back in. “I'd forgotten to bring my wallet—”

“Oldest girl trick in the book,” Aaron put in. He fluttered his hand to his chest.
“Oh, my goodness gracious
me! I seem to have forgotten mah li'l ol' purse! I guess you'll just have to pay, you sweet, gullible young man, you!”

I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, I sounded just like that. Anyway, Aaron pulled out his credit card and the girl at the counter looks at it and goes, ‘Wait, are you related to Michael Marquand?' And he says, ‘Yeah, he's my dad and he really loves your cupcakes.' And she gets incredibly excited and says, ‘We have some new flavors you have to take for him to try' and starts loading them into the bag. So now we have all of these!” I held up the bag. “There's like twenty cupcakes in here. And she wouldn't let us pay for them.”

“In retrospect, I probably should have tipped her,” Aaron said.

“Are you kidding?” I said. “You made her day. She'll be talking for years about how Michael Marquand's son bought her cupcakes.”

“And flirted with her,” Aaron said. “Don't forget that I flirted with her. I'd say at least four of the freebies are flirtation cupcakes. The rest are celebrity perk cupcakes.” He pulled some out of the bag and lined them up on the counter.

“That is so cool,” Heather said. “Did you get any red velvet?”

“Sorry,” Aaron said. “That's not a new flavor. We
have one called a caramel crunch wizard, though.”

“Blizzard,” I corrected him.

“How does that make sense?”

“It's white on top. How does
wizard
make sense?”

“Wizards usually have white hair,” Heather pointed out.

“There you go!” Aaron crowed. “Nice save! You
are
the best.”