The Chic Shall Inherit the Earth Page 16

  Shani kissed her on the cheek, and I gave her a hug, careful not to bump the bag. As the two of them walked away to join the security line, I swallowed my surprise—and the lump in my throat. Doing the right thing wasn’t easy sometimes. But it was sure easier when you had a little help from your friends.

  And it was kind of nice to know that my tank hadn’t died in vain.

  * * *

  TEXT MESSAGE

  Lissa Mansfield Got a minute? Pick up—I’m about to call.

  * * *

  * * *

  TEXT MESSAGE

  Lissa Mansfield Kaz, you there?

  Kaz Griffin I’m here.

  Lissa Mansfield Is your ringer off?

  Kaz Griffin Wasn’t sure whether to answer.

  Lissa Mansfield ?? Can we talk? I’ll call your cell.

  * * *

  Chapter 19

  FALLOUT WEEK BEING almost over, I figured it was safe to call Fallout Boy and have it out with him. After all, I’d solved the Derrik problem without hurting his feelings too badly, and from the rapturous text messages all of us had been getting from Carly since she and Brett landed in New Mexico the previous night, things were looking up on that front, too.

  There was nothing I could do about Jeremy and Gillian, and I could only open up the di Amato Landscape Design and Restoration Web site in Italy to gaze at Pietro di Amato’s headshot so many times.

  Yes, curiosity had gotten the better of me, and there he was, right at the top of the Google search. The man, as Vanessa had hinted, was jaw-dropping, breath-stopping gorgeous. Poster-worthy. In fact, someone should really make a fifty-foot banner and hang it from the roof of the Uffizi Gallery, because he totally deserved to be commemorated along with the less perfect creations like, oh, Michelangelo’s David.

  But I digress.

  Because under his headshot was an e-mail link to contact him, and I can’t tell you how many times my cursor hovered over it—clicked it, even, to bring up a mail screen that I immediately deleted. Yes, I know what you’re thinking. It was not my place to tell the man he had five-ninths of a son over here in California. Maybe he was the uninvolved father to Vanessa’s anti-Madonna and had no interest in the baby at all.

  But still my cursor hovered.

  Calling Kaz was a relief. At least I could act on that. Gillian and Shani were out at the field watching the soccer game—which seemed to be going well for our team, judging from the distant happy shouts that floated through our dorm room window every few minutes. I had time and privacy, both valuable commodities when you were having a heart-to-heart with your BGF.

  “I can’t believe you guys don’t have classes Friday afternoons,” Kaz greeted me. He never said hello like a normal person. With him and me, it was more like an ongoing conversation anyway, interrupted at intervals by classes and other obligations. At least, that was the way it used to be. Now the silences of real life seemed to be longer, and our conversations over text, mail, and phone shorter.

  That needed to be fixed, stat.

  “A perk of my privileged upbringing,” I said in a smug Beverly Hills voice.

  “Or your shortened attention span.”

  “True enough,” I admitted. “Are you home or at the beach?”

  “Home, getting ready to go to the beach. Danyel might remember to pick me up, if he’s not yakking with Shani.”

  “She and Gillian are watching the soccer game, so he’ll have to compete with Derrik Vaughan and his hot teammates.”

  “Athletes. Pah.”

  “Derrik’s nice. He asked me to Cotillion.”

  Silence, while I pictured Kaz’s head spinning on his neck. Heh.

  “And you’re not out there watching him because…”

  “Because Ashley Polk wants him. And I told her I’d stay out of the way of true love because she’s my friend.”

  “That was noble of you.”

  “If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that you don’t mess with your friends.”

  “Especially if they have connections with the video geeks.” He paused while I blinked in surprise. “You told me about your big project. Or maybe it was Gillian.”

  “You make me sound like I have ulterior motives, you rat. But it doesn’t help that she’s the queen of the media lab and she can help me, Shani, and Vanessa tape the entire production process for our Public Speaking class. If I go to Cotillion with Derrik, none of that will happen, the three of us will fail Public Speaking, and Ashley will dismember me and feed my pieces to the seagulls at Fisherman’s Wharf.”

  “Wow.” He was silent for a moment. “Asking a girl to prom was never this scary in junior high.”

  “Oh, I think it was. It was just a different level of scary. Why, who did you ask?”

  “Katie Fedorov. You remember, that girl who used to be your best friend? She said no and I came and cried on your shoulder. You told me to stop being such a weenie and lent me your sister’s skateboard for a week.”

  “Ah, yes,” I said, remembering. “That’s when you broke your arm. I don’t think your mom ever forgave me.”

  “Since she’s not around anymore, it doesn’t matter, does it?”

  I kicked myself for bringing her up. Kaz hated talking about his mother, who had left him and his dad that summer to marry her wealth management advisor.

  “So while we’re talking about asking people out, how about you give me the real reason you won’t come to Cotillion with me? We never got a chance to hash it out when you were here last weekend.”

  “Due to my clever time management skills.”

  “You dropped a bomb on me and then avoided talking about it on purpose?” I held the phone out and stared at it. Did I have a wrong number? Who was this person?

  “Would you relax?” I heard his tinny voice say, and put the phone back to my ear. “Can’t a guy just say what he’s got to say and leave it at that, without having to present a paper about it to a committee?”

  “I am not a committee. And when I get turned down, it’s nice to have an explanation so I don’t feel like a bag of trash that just got tossed in the Dumpster.”

  “Did you give Derrik the Soccer Player an explanation?”

  “Of course. The same one I just told you, only I left out Ashley’s name. She’ll make sure he figures that one out on his own.”

  He heaved a sigh. A nontheatrical one. One that meant he was clearing the decks for bad news. Danger, danger…

  “Okay. You want an explanation. Here it is. The only reason you asked me to Cotillion is because I’m convenient. Available. Currently unclaimed and unlikely to turn you down.”

  “That’s not true. I asked you because you’re my best friend and I want to share the big events in my life with my friends.”

  “Right. You told me that last weekend. But, see, what if I want more than that?”

  “What does that mean?”

  “What if I want to go as your date? Your guy. With the whole romance thing going on.”

  “You?” The second I said it, I wished I could grab it back. Insulting much? “I mean, we don’t have that kind of relationship.” What had I thought earlier? Oh, yeah. “We operate on a different level.”

  “Obviously you don’t think I operate on the boyfriend level. With you.” The life leached out of his voice.

  “No, no. I mean, Gillian thinks you’re hot and she’s right. You are.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “What do you mean, then? I don’t need a boyfriend, Kaz.”

  “See, that’s exactly what I mean. You don’t need another Prada bag, either. Or another iPhone. Or any other accessory.”

  The breath whooshed out of me. “You lost me. Can we go back to hello and take it from the top?”

  “You see a boyfriend as an appendage. An accessory. Something you like to have around to take out on special occasions, but that’s not totally necessary for every day. I want more than that. I want to be necessary.”

  “You are necessar
y. I think of things to tell you all the time. I want to see you whenever I can. How much more necessary can you be?” Then an idea occurred to me—one that had to be said. The elephant in the living room that he was too sensitive to bring up. “Kaz, is this about sex?”

  “Oh, good grief.” He sounded utterly defeated. “Good-bye, Lissa. Have a good weekend.”

  Click.

  My best friend had just hung up on me.

  THE LAST MONTH of senior year is supposed to be this triumphal ride to the finish, drenched in sunshine and victory and teachers easing up on homework.

  I peered at the sky as I crossed the playing field, heading back to the dorm after Phys.Ed. Yep. Sunshine. Everything else? Not so much.

  Not for me, anyway. Carly’s life seemed to be back on track, at least. In the two weeks since her mom’s wedding on Memorial Day weekend, she and Brett had become tighter than ever. In between fittings and festivities out there in New Mexico, they’d spent a lot of time talking, and by the time Alicia had become Mrs. Richard Vigil, Brett had made up his mind to register at UCLA instead of Stanford. How he managed to break this to his father, I don’t know. But somehow I figured that Mrs. Loyola, weighing a Carly-less Brett going to Stanford versus a happy Brett going to UCLA, would use her influence to work on her husband’s disappointment.

  Since my disastrous phone call with Kaz, I couldn’t seem to shake the regret and loss that hung over my emotions like a gray smog. In the mornings, I’d gaze at my yogurt and fruit, a sick lump in my stomach.

  “Lissa, not eating isn’t going to make it better,” Gillian said after about three mornings of the same, but I just couldn’t.

  “Are we going to have to force-feed you?” Shani’s tone was no-nonsense, but worry lurked in her eyes.

  Not even the prospect of shopping for a Cotillion dress could pull me out of it, because if he wasn’t going to be there, it didn’t matter what I wore. Oh, I got one, don’t worry. Gillian and Shani made sure of that, delivering me to Robin Brouillette’s studio one day after school, where the designer made me a beautiful sky-blue confection with a rose-petal bodice that, under normal circumstances, would have had me babbling with happiness.

  But circumstances weren’t normal. I’d made an awful mistake and now I was paying for it.

  How could I have been so stupid? That final click of the phone in my ear seemed to have set off an explosion of neurons all connecting at once in my brain. I’d handled the whole thing badly, had misunderstood everything he’d said because I was too mired in my own thinking to get what he was trying to say.

  What was the matter with me? “We operate on a different level,” I’d said fatuously, when that was the whole point. He wanted to take our relationship to a different level, and there I was, stuck in the way we’d been since elementary school. Well, I’d grown up in a hurry, hadn’t I?

  Even a flying trip to Santa Barbara the weekend before finals didn’t do any good. Kaz’s dad met me on the front porch of their house, his face slack with surprise.

  “Hey, Lissa, I didn’t expect to see you here. Have you graduated already?”

  “No, not yet. I just thought I’d fly down to see my dad.” I craned a little to look behind him into the Spanish-style living room. “Is Kaz home?”

  “No, not right now.”

  “Will he be back before dinner?”

  “I don’t think so. He went eco-camping with a bunch of the guys. Something to do with their environmental science class, they said, but it’s more to do with having fun and getting a Friday off school, if you ask me.”

  “Oh.” I turned away, disappointment such a heavy weight that I could hardly keep my shoulders from slumping.

  “Lissa, are you okay?” Mr. Griffin asked behind me. “Do you want to leave a message for him?”

  “Um, no. It wasn’t important. I just thought I’d stop by, since I was in town.”

  As I drove home, places we’d hung out in elementary school and junior high jumped out at me. The playground at Willows where he’d set me spinning on the merry-go-round and I’d tumbled off it and thrown up from dizziness. The pond in the neighbor’s backyard where we’d watched tadpoles become frogs. The beach where we’d learned to surf and, later, where we’d sat up late and solved the problems of the universe.

  Every place was so familiar, and yet… that was the problem. They were all scenes from childhood—something I’d left behind too late.

  What was that line from A Room with a View? I’d quoted it myself in the term paper I had to turn in next Wednesday: “But to Cecil, now that he was about to lose her, she seemed each moment more desirable.”

  I was Cecil Vyse, the idiot. I’d pinned a bunch of my own childish notions all over Kaz and told myself that he was my friend. And why? Because it was safe. Because with Kaz, I’d never face the humiliation dished out by people like Aidan Mitchell and Callum McCloud, two guys who’d worn the label boyfriend for me. I’d kept Kaz in his place, and now that he’d burst out of it by speaking to me with total honesty, I’d tried to push him back in and lost him in the process.

  I thought I was so mature. But it had taken this last couple of weeks, learning what loss really was, to make me finally grow up. Now I knew where the term growing pains came from. It had nothing to do with calcium deficiency, and everything to do with the mind and emotions.

  How did people learn to live with this gray haze of “I’m sorry”? To realize how wonderful the other person was, and never be able to act on it?

  “You’ve got to try to focus on something else,” Gillian finally told me on Sunday, the first day of our last week of high school. “Agonizing over it and beating yourself up over what you said or didn’t say isn’t going to change anything. Trust me, I know.”

  We’d had the car drop us in Sausalito after church, and she, Shani, and I sat at a sunny table overlooking the Bay, drinking fresh-squeezed orange juice while we waited for our brunch orders to arrive.

  “You and Jeremy are still friends, though,” Shani pointed out. “Kaz won’t even talk to Lissa, on the phone or in person.”

  “That doesn’t mean I don’t regret it,” Gillian said.

  “Jeremy would take you back,” I told her softly. “I know he would.”

  “I know, too. But I can’t. It would be like trying to surgically attach an arm you’d just removed.”

  Shani flinched. “Spare me the romantic images, girl.”

  “It took everything I had to say those things to him and make the break.” Even a month down the road, the memory had the power to make her mouth tremble. “I can’t go back and undo it. I have to go on. He goes to Davis and we go to Harvard.”

  “And we all go to the Cotillion wishing we were with the guys we’ve chased away.” The thought of it overlaid the sunny day with gloom.

  “Speak for yourself,” Shani said briskly. “Y’all better not have these long faces next weekend, or Danyel really will be chased away. And I’m not having that.”

  “This is all we have to look forward to?” I moaned. “Pity dances from Danyel and Brett? I knew I should have said yes to Derrik Vaughan when I had the chance.”

  “If you had, I’d have gone around you and broken it up,” Shani informed me. “I’m not putting in all this work for Public Speaking and having you mess it up because you want a date.”

  She was right, of course. That boat had sailed, and Ashley Polk had been working her fingers down to nubs for us.

  “I heard Ashley was going to Cotillion with him,” Gillian said.

  “Does Derrik know he was the prize in this whole exercise?” Shani asked.

  “Oh, I told him,” I said. “I didn’t tell him who liked him, but when he didn’t get why my friendship with Ashley would make me turn him down, I changed gears and told him my grade depended on me not going out with him. Boys are so weird. He thought that was a compliment.”

  “Guys love it when girls fight over them.” The waitress put Gillian’s plate down in front of her and she paused un
til we all had our food: fruit salad and Brie—the smallest thing on the menu—for me, an omelette and hash browns for Shani, and huevos rancheros with fresh pico de gallo for Gillian. “I don’t see why. One guy is enough trouble. Having two fighting over me would make me run screaming for the hills.”

  “Jeremy wasn’t trouble,” Shani said softly. “He was lovely, as Mac would say.”

  “He was,” Gillian agreed. “I’m glad we’re still friends. I still plan to dance with him, mercy or not.”

  “Have you heard from Mac?” I asked. “Google Alerts sent me a link to an article a couple of days ago about the big grand opening at Strathcairn happening in September.”

  “I got an e-mail last night,” Shani said. “Their school year is over and she’s back at the castle, ‘working like a draught horse,’ she says. Whatever that is. Carly would know. Anyway, she sent me pictures of the commercial kitchen they had put in. It’s pretty amazing. And that Naked Chef guy from London is coming to open it on the big day.”

  “Jamie Oliver?” I asked. “He’s cute. What’s not to like about a guy who can cook?”

  “Carly’s invited over before college starts,” Shani went on. “Wouldn’t it be fun to go, too?”

  “Why don’t we?” Gillian knocked back her orange juice. “We can help them get things ready.”

  A long, Kazless summer stretched out before me. A few weeks in Scotland working like a draught horse sounded enormously appealing in comparison. “Suits me. I’ll go. Shani, I’ll pick up your ticket and Gillian can cover Carly’s.”

  “Deal. I’ll owe you.”

  “Of course you won’t. It’s a graduation present.”

  “Only five more days.” Gillian sighed, chin on hand as she looked out over the sparkling Bay. “Can you believe it?”

  “Five more days of backbreaking work and managing contractors and crisis control,” I told her. “Five more days of wondering if we passed our finals and having to sit in class anyway.” Five more days until I had to pack up my stuff and go back to Santa Barbara, where memories would ambush me at every turn.