Wrong About the Guy (3 page)

W
hile I was waiting for Heather to show up at my house that morning, I worked out for about half an hour on the elliptical machine in Luke's exercise room and then snuck into Mom's bathroom to shower—mine was just a regular shower but hers had seven showerheads all spritzing you from different angles. It was crazily great and I didn't even feel guilty about it, since the house had been built green, and our gray water—water we'd only used a little bit, like for showers and stuff—went directly into our yard and watered the plants.

This house was ridiculous in the best possible sense—huge and comfortable and luxurious . . . practically decadent. It sometimes freaked me out to think that this was the only house Jacob would know, that he would grow up thinking this was normal. He'd never know what it was like to share a one-room apartment
with Mom or spend a few years in a small house so close to your neighbors that you could hear them calling to each other from one room to another. The funny thing was, I almost felt sorry for him. This house was so big, I often didn't know who was home and who wasn't. I liked having my space, but in a weird way, I was glad I'd had so much togetherness with Mom when I was little.

I heard the gate buzz right after I got out of the shower. I hit the wall panel to let Heather in and used the intercom to tell George to open the front door. I threw on a pair of shorts and a clean tank top and headed downstairs in my bare feet; it was late July and super hot outside, but the house was comfortable with the air-conditioning running.

Jacob was slowly turning in circles in the big open foyer area at the bottom of the stairs. Our housekeeper, Lorena, was standing on the steps talking to him.

Lorena was roughly my mother's age and had an eleven-year-old daughter of her own, who she talked to about ten times a day on her cell phone. Mom had hired her to clean a couple of days a week when we first moved into the big house. After Mom got pregnant with Jacob, Lorena mentioned that she liked taking care of babies and Mom instantly hired her full-time. I think the whole Westside nanny thing kind of freaked Mom out, so she was relieved to have someone around to help without going down that road. Mom told me she
expected me to continue to be responsible for making my bed and cleaning my room, but over the course of the last few years, we'd all gotten a little lazy and used to being waited on. If I left my clothes on the floor, they ended up in the hamper or cleaned and folded in my drawers—so why keep picking them up? And Lorena made my bed much smoother than I could.

We were all slightly terrified of her, even though she was totally sweet. It was just that she could be intractable. Like once she thought that a pillow looked better on the smaller armchair in the formal living room, but Mom had bought it for the bigger one. Every time Lorena was in the living room, she'd put it on the smaller one, and then Mom would switch it to the bigger one. This went on for weeks. They never discussed it or acknowledged there was a battle of wills going on. But eventually Mom gave up and just left it on the smaller chair. “She's stronger than I am,” Mom told me with a good-natured shrug.

“Let's do something else,” Lorena was saying now to Jacob as I came close. “Oh, look, there's Ellie. Don't you want to say hi to Ellie? Look at Ellie and say hi, Jacob. Jacob! Stop going in circles and say hi to your sister.”

He kept turning, his arms wide, his head thrown back so he could stare up at the ceiling. It was a classic Jacob thing to do.

I grabbed his arms and stopped him from spinning
long enough to drop a kiss on his head and tell him he was my baby dude, and then I let him go and went on into the kitchen, while he went back to twirling behind me. Lorena may have been stronger than Mom, but Jacob was stronger than Lorena. And therefore everyone else.

Heather was already sitting at the big round table. George was at the counter, sticking another pod into the coffee maker.

Heather was chattering away—something about how glad she was to be done with junior year but how terrified she was of all the college application stuff.

George put the cup of coffee in front of her and said, “Do you want milk or sugar?”

“Milk, please. I can get it, though.”

“No problem. I'm up anyway.” He went over to the refrigerator.

“You'll wait on her, but not me?” I said.

“Heather asks nicely,” George said, setting down the milk carton and taking his seat. “You should try it. You guys ready to do some work?”

“I should warn you that I did terribly on the PSATs,” Heather said. “I may be hopeless.”

“That's why you're here,” I said.

George gave us a bunch of multiple-choice math word problems. It took me a little while on one, and I
made a careless error on another, but I basically knew what I was doing, which he acknowledged.

But Heather kept saying, “I just don't get it. I don't get how you can turn this into something
solvable
.”

“You make
x
stand in for the unknown answer,” George said, for about the fourth time in five minutes. “And then you create a simple equation and solve for
x
. Did you see how Ellie set hers up?”

“My brain doesn't work like Ellie's.”

“I've just done more SAT prep than you have,” I said. “That's all.”

“I've taken an eight-week class and two one-day workshops,” she said morosely.

While we worked, my phone kept vibrating with texts from my school friends Riley and Skyler, who wanted to get together with me that afternoon. The fourth time I picked up my phone to read a text, George plucked it out of my hand and said, “You can't have this thing near you. You're an addict.”

“Some of us have social lives. You wouldn't know about that.”

He squinted at the screen. “Who's Skyler? Boy or girl?”

“Never occurred to me to find out.”

“Whoever it is wants to come over.”

“Shocker,” I said, because everyone always wanted to come over to my house: my house was where Luke
Weston lived. I grabbed my phone back and quickly texted Skyler and Riley—while George tapped his fingers impatiently on the table—to tell them I'd rather meet at the mall and go see a movie. “If I don't answer, they'll just keep bugging me,” I said.

“Whatever,” he said. “Ready to get back to work?”

“One sec.” Now I had to text Mom to let her know my plans and make sure she wasn't counting on me for dinner or anything. Texting was our main method of communication. Mom liked me to keep her informed, but sometimes I had no idea if she was even home or not (like I said, our house was really big) so . . . texting. The next best thing to being there.

“Okay, now,” I said, and put the phone down for the rest of our study time—except when I got bored waiting for Heather to catch up and used the time to check my Instagram feed.

Once George said we were done for the day, I invited Heather to come to the mall with me, and she ran to the bathroom to get ready.

George looked up from his keyboard; he was back to researching anniversary celebration venues. He said idly, “So . . .
is
Skyler a girl or a guy?”

“Does it matter?”

“Yeah. I could be walking down the street and someone could yell, ‘Skyler's getting away!' and I wouldn't know who to look for.”

“Probably a dog,” I said. “In that scenario.”

“Yes, but a boy or girl dog?”

“You'd have to look between its legs to figure that out.”

“Sounds risky.” He beckoned to me and lowered his voice. “Listen, Ellie, Heather's really sweet but you might want to study with someone who can keep up with you.”

“I like helping her.”

“Very noble,” he said. “But if she's slowing you down—”

“I'm back,” Heather announced from the doorway.

I said, “Let's go. Skyler texted that she's already there.”

“Aha!” said George. “She's a girl.”

“Shes usually are,” I said.

W
e saw the movie and then ate and shopped. Heather had to leave early; she checked her phone right after the movie to discover that her mother was freaking out because Heather hadn't returned her six calls and five texts. “My phone was off,” I heard her explain. “I
told
you I was going to a movie.” Then after a long listening silence: “I didn't mean to worry you. Okay, fine, I'm on my way.”

Skyler and Riley pretended to be sorry Heather had to go, but they only hung out with her because of me. The two of them were best friends and I guess I was sort of their third Musketeer, since I ate lunch with them every day at school and sometimes saw them on the weekends, but deep down I didn't feel that close to them. They were perfectly fine high school friends, but I doubted we'd stay in touch once we left for college.

Riley was probably going to be our class valedictorian.
She took all honors courses and was the top student in most of them. She wore her long brown hair in a ponytail and studied incredibly hard during the week, and then let her hair down both literally and figuratively on the weekends, when she liked to go to parties where she got so drunk she usually threw up and passed out on the floor. It didn't appeal to me much as a lifestyle, but she seemed committed to it.

Skyler was more mellow about school, partially because she
could
be. She'd already been recruited by Brown for volleyball. She had red hair and green eyes and was over six feet tall. She and Riley had both been going to Coral Tree since kindergarten and had been best friends the whole time.

They were both smart and entertaining and quick to laugh, which made them fine to spend an afternoon with, but I could never shake the feeling that my greatest appeal for them was the fact that Luke Weston was my stepfather. Maybe it was unfair of me—God knows I could be paranoid about that kind of thing—but still . . . there were moments. Like even that afternoon: we passed a poster advertising the upcoming season premiere of
We'll Make You a Star
, and Riley instantly stopped and pointed to it. “It must be so weird for you to see Luke's picture everywhere you go,” she said to me a little too loudly, like she wanted people to overhear
our conversation. “Doesn't it freak you out? I mean, you
live
with him.”

“I'm used to it,” I said, and moved away.

Heather flashed me a sympathetic eye roll. I'd confided in her how much I hated how famous Luke had become and the way it made people act. I couldn't complain to him and my mom about it—they couldn't change anything and they would just feel bad—and I couldn't complain to people I didn't trust, so I only complained to Heather, who had loved me for me right from the start, and who kept any secret I asked her to.

So even though Skyler and Riley were my closest friends at school, I didn't feel relaxed around them. They were always inventing reasons to come over to my house, where their eyes would flicker around hopefully at every noise, like they were just waiting for Luke to come through the door and fall in love with one of them. You'd think the fact that he was my mother's husband would make them a little less obvious about their crushes, but apparently his fame made him some kind of acceptable universal object of lust. I just tried to avoid having them over, which is why I usually met them at places like the mall.

When I got home, I found Mom and Luke lying on their bed, Jacob between them, curled up on his side, staring at some animated show on TV. Luke was reading
a script (he read a lot of scripts now that he had his own production company), and Mom a glossy magazine. She never cared much about fashion before Luke got famous, but now they were always going to dressy events, and she felt like she had to keep up.

“There you are!” she said, putting her magazine down. “How was the movie?”

“Moderately not-awful,” I said. “But only moderately.”

“And the SAT tutoring?”

“About as thrilling as you'd expect.”

“Just be grateful we didn't make you get a job this summer,” she said. “A few hours of studying won't kill you. Is George a good tutor?”

“Yeah, he's fine.” I came over and sat down on the edge of their bed. “Speaking of George, I wanted to ask you something. Could we go to Tahiti for your anniversary party?”

“Tahiti? We were leaning toward Hawaii.”

“But I've always wanted to go to Tahiti. Plus . . . you know . . . Gauguin.”

My mother laughed. With no makeup on and her hair a little rumpled, she looked the way I liked her best: like my mom. When she was all glammed up for going out with lots of eye makeup and curled hair, she looked Hollywood-wife generic. “So it would be educational? Is that what you're telling me?”

“Totally. I'd read up on Gauguin before we went and become a total expert on him, I swear.”

“How can I say no to that?”

“Cool.” I slid off the bed and stood up. “I'll tell George.”

I may have sounded a tiny bit smug when I told George that he should start looking at resorts in Tahiti.

His eyes narrowed. “Just because
you
want to go there?”

“I convinced Mom. I always get my way, you know.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I see that. Kind of like Veruca Salt.”

“Don't be a bad loser.”

Except he
didn't
lose. Somehow, once he had done the research and presented all the options to my mother and Luke, and the final decision was made, they went with Hawaii after all.

I complained, but Mom said it just made more sense, because we only had four days, and Hawaii was a lot closer. “Only four days?” I repeated. I'd been picturing a real end-of-summer blowout, days and days of beaches and walks and lazy meals and long naps in hammocks before having to get back to fall semester and college applications and all that stuff. But now Mom said the show was taping and Luke couldn't take more time off than that.

Luke's schedule ruled our household and was the one thing impervious to my coaxing and begging, so there wasn't much I could do about it except whine to George later that we'd be spending more time flying than actually lying on a beach.

“Yeah, it's rough,” he said. “You don't get to go on a tropical vacation for as long as you'd hoped. Complain about it to everyone you meet and bask in the sympathy.”

He was coming with us—my mother told him they'd pay for his airfare so long as he shared a hotel room with his brother, who was already coming as Luke's guest. She claimed she needed George to deal with the logistics once we were there, which seemed more kind than true. When I pressed her about it, she admitted she just wanted to give him a vacation. “I felt bad that he was spending all this time looking at pictures of Hawaii and not getting to go. He's never been. A trip like that would have meant so much to me at his age.”

“You know, Heather's never been to Hawaii either—”

“Forget it,” she said. “I have reached the limits of my generosity.”

Jonathan's fiancée was coming as his plus one, and Luke was flying my grandmother out, which would be a big help with Jacob. Luke didn't talk to his own family anymore; they'd ignored and ostracized him when he was struggling, and then came running with their hands
out when he got rich and famous. He sent them money but never saw them.

We saw my grandmother a ton, though. She came to visit whenever she had time off from work. Mom had tried to convince her to move out to LA to live with us (or at least near us), but she said she didn't want to be dependent on anyone, which was also why she wouldn't let them buy her a nicer apartment in Philadelphia. Mom sent her a lot of gifts and bought her first-class airplane tickets, but other than that, Grandma took care of herself.

Luke had also invited a couple of his closest friends to join us. Carl Miller used to be his business manager and was now CFO of his production company. And of course Michael Marquand was coming—he and Luke were like brothers.

Mom said she didn't need to invite any friends because Grandma and I were her best friends, which was probably true. Most of the people she'd met in Hollywood saw her more as Luke Weston's wife than a person in her own right, and she'd been too busy working and taking care of me to make a lot of friends back in Philadelphia.

Luke got first-class tickets for the family. Jonathan, George, and Jonathan's fiancée, Izzy, were on our flight, but in coach. Luke and Mom sat together on the flight out, and so did Grandma and Jacob, who happily
watched movies the entire way—I'm not convinced he even knew we had left the house.

I was across the aisle from Grandma and next to a businessman who never once made eye contact with me and who quickly popped two pills, drank three cocktails, donned headphones and an eye mask, and fell asleep. I guess he didn't want the fancy lunch with the real silverware and all.

I did. I loved first class. We never flew at all when I was a kid; we had nowhere to go and we couldn't have afforded it anyway. The first time I got on a plane was the summer that Mom and Luke got married, and even though it was fun to go up into the sky, I didn't like much else about flying coach. Then Luke got rich and we all started flying first class together, and it was totally different—you could watch your own movies on a personal screen and the food was good and the flight attendants waited on you hand and foot. It felt like vacation.

Like me, Grandma hadn't flown until Luke came into our lives, but she wasn't a convert the way I was. “It's a necessary evil,” she said to me, leaning across the aisle at one point. “I do it because I have to, but I don't trust it. There's gravity. Things fall down.”

“People fly all the time,” I said. “It's pretty reliable.”

“I don't want to scare you,” she said, “so I won't argue. Even though I could. What was that noise?”

“Nothing. Oh, look.” I handed her the menu card. “Wine. You should have some.”

“Maybe,” she said primly.

She had some. And soon after dozed off in her seat, leaving me to enjoy the rest of the flight in peace.