It's All About Us Page 2

  He had a lean, tan body, eyes that looked like they could see through your soul, and, from what I’d seen, he seemed to be nice, too. He did his share of joking around, but they weren’t mean jokes. I’d even seen him pick up a spilled lapful of books for Carrie Whiteside, who rolled around on an electric scooter because there was something wrong with her legs.

  In short, I was crushing bad on Callum, and I wanted him to be crushing just as bad on me.

  Only two things stood in my way:

  1.The fact that he didn’t know I was alive.

  2.Vanessa Talbot.

  BLoyolaWho’s the new girl?

  VTalbotDon’t ask.

  BLoyolaOn your bad side already, V? She’s cute.

  VTalbotIf you like ‘em blond and dumb. Which I think you do.

  BLoyolaMeow. Single?

  VTalbotWho, me?

  BLoyolaHaha.

  VTalbotWhy don’t you ask her? I’m not your social director.

  BLoyolaCatfight!

  CMcCloud??

  BLoyolaThe lovely Talbot has a hate on for the new girl.

  CMcCloud??

  BLoyolaYou blind? The blonde behind you in Trig. Yowza. Smokin’.

  CMcCloudYou interested?

  BLoyolaMaybe. You?

  CMcCloudIf I was, I wouldn’t tell you. May as well put out a press release.

  BLoyolaParanoid much?

  Chapter 3

  I HOPE THERE’S NO practical application for trigonometry out there in the real world, because with Callum practically within touching distance, I was totally blanking on it. But even though I tried to oh-so-casually reach the door when he did, Vanessa got there before me and dragged him off to their next class together.

  I will prevail, I thought. Just give me time.

  The nice thing was, the buzz of having locked eyes with him as he turned to put something in his backpack lasted through the rest of Monday afternoon (Psychology and Spanish)—right up until the moment I walked through the door of my room and was reminded that You Are Not Alone.

  The loud Asian girl from New York stood on the second bed, which was covered in boxes and two huge Louis Vuitton suitcases, trying to get a paper parasol with cranes painted on it into the corner above the wall unit, where she must have just put a lamp with a red bulb.

  I took my earphones out. “What are you doing?”

  “What does it look like? Help me with this, would you?”

  I took in the situation. “The parasol’s top-heavy. That’s why it keeps rolling off. You need to move the lamp back so the handle can go down the back of the wall unit.”

  Mission accomplished. Immediately, that corner of the room was bathed in this rosy glow, the kind that reminds you of pajama parties and playing Truth or Dare. Frankly, Gillian Chang didn’t look like a pajama-party kind of girl. Or the kind you shared your deepest, darkest truths with.

  Which shows you how little I knew about her then.

  She jumped off the bed and pulled a big silk shawl out of one of the suitcases. And I mean really big. It would have covered the dining room table in our house in Santa Barbara, which seated eighteen.

  Now, wait just a minute. “Are you going to put that up, too? You know, you might ask me whether I want my room to look like Inara’s boudoir before you start hanging stuff all over it.”

  Gillian turned and stared at me like I was speaking Mandarin. “What?”

  “You know. Inara, from Firefly. You’re going to make the room look like her shuttle, all hung with silk and brocade. Which is fine for a Companion, but it’s not my style.”

  “Oh, it’s not.” Azure blue silk with little gold figures of birds all over it bunched between her hands. “Well, maybe it’s mine. And if I have to live here, I’m going to make it look like home.”

  “Keep it on your half of the room, then.”

  The thing you have to understand about Spencer is that it used to be some countess’s house back in the early nineteen hundreds. When the earl died in England, he left her pots of money, so she came to California and built this place with the intent that it would be a school for the nobs’ kids and she’d live in part of it. Consequently the rooms are not your standard dorm rooms. They’re huge, with ten-foot ceilings and wainscoting, and some of them even have chandeliers. So hanging a massive piece of royal-blue silk on the wall makes quite a fashion statement . . . one I wasn’t prepared to live with.

  “You have to begin as you mean to go on,” my great-grandma told me once when I was little, like in first grade. I hadn’t begun well with Vanessa, so I was going to make up for that, starting now.

  Gillian’s bed was on one side, with her desk and wall unit, and mine was on the other, with a big window in between. The only place you could hang something like her silk tablecloth was on the wall next to the door, where I already had hung my bulletin board and a couple of my favorite posters. And I wasn’t taking them down.

  I’d begin the way I meant to go on. After all, what else might be in the depths of those suitcases? What if she practiced an Eastern religion? What if she had a statue of the Buddha in there? It would be none of my business if this was her own room, but I wasn’t too keen about sharing space with graven idols, of choking on the smell of incense, of maybe even hearing her chant mantras or whatever it was practitioners of Eastern religions did.

  Uh-uh. Ain’t gonna happen.

  “There isn’t room,” she said. “It should go there, by the door.”

  “Sorry,” I said, and put my earphones back in.

  So what did she do? She marched over and pulled the tacks out of my Don Juan DeMarco movie poster, which is the hottest Johnny Depp movie of all time. She rolled it up (neatly, Gillian reminds me) and put it on one of my shelves, then went to work on the Edward Scissorhands one.

  “Hey!”

  “We’re sharing this room. And sharing, in case you didn’t learn this when you were potty-trained, means we each get equal space.”

  “We do have equal space. Yours is on that side. Mine is on this side. And those posters were on my side.”

  “Please tell me you’re not going to make me draw a line down the middle of this room. Even you can’t be that selfish.”

  Even me? She’d known me for, what, a grand total of five minutes?

  “You beey—” I caught myself just in time. I’d come to Christ three years before, but there are some verbal habits that take a long time to change, especially in moments of stress. My dad swears like a pirate, so I come by it honestly. And I’m trying to overcome it, equally as honestly.

  “What did you almost call me?” Gillian’s eyes narrowed with dislike. With my luck, she probably had a black belt and I was about to become a pile of crumpled limbs on the floor.

  “Nothing.”

  “I heard you. You almost called me a b—”

  “But I didn’t, did I?”

  “You wanted to. And intent is just as bad as action.”

  Oh, brother. What was she in, eleventh-grade pre-law? “Give it a rest, Gillian. And put those posters back.”

  “Put them back yourself. After I get my hanging up.”

  “Fine.” I flopped on the bed and pulled out my Psych homework. “They’ll go over it. I’ll try not to damage it with too many tack holes.”

  Outmaneuvered you on that one, didn’t I, sweetie?

  I barely had time to start feeling smug when she got into my face. “You snotty, stuck-up little mo guai nuer! You touch my hanging and you’ll be sorry.”

  Okay, it’s one thing to swear in English, but no way was I letting anyone swear at me in Mandarin. Who knew what she was calling me?

  “I am not stuck-up.”

  “Oh, yeah? You could have fooled me. You parade around here with your nose in the air like you’re the Queen of England and the rest of us are peasants. You order me around and threaten to damage my stuff. In the real world, that is stuck-up.”

  “Right, like you live in the real world.” All that about the ferry a
nd the Eiffel Tower was probably made up. Kids did it all the time—they came to a new school and invented a life just because they were scared and wanted people to think they were cool.

  “At least I’m not a spoiled rich kid who treats people like trash and needs a good spanking.”

  I’d had just about enough of Miss Loudmouth here. I was not spoiled, and I treated people the way I wanted to be treated, just like Jesus said.

  Present company excepted.

  “Oh, yeah? I’d like to see you try.”

  Gillian glared daggers at me. “I’m going to do even better than that.” She paused, and a light came into her eyes, as if she’d thought of the most evil punishment ever devised. “I’m going to pray for you.”

  Chapter 4

  I STARED AT HER.

  Then I recovered and closed my mouth, which had been hanging open in astonishment. She couldn’t have meant what I thought she meant.

  “Praying to your friend the Buddha won’t get you a thing where I’m concerned,” I informed her. “And you can forget about putting him anywhere I can see him.”

  “My—” She blinked at me. “For heaven’s sake, pull the stereo type out of your eye, would you? My prayers go to Jesus.”

  It takes a lot to render me completely speechless, but this did it.

  Gillian was a Christian. We both were—sisters under grace—and what were we doing? Screaming at each other like a pair of banshees who had never heard the name of Jesus in our whole lives.

  I felt my eyes fill with tears, and I sat with a thump on the bed, my hand over my guilty, uncontrollable, hateful mouth. When was I ever going to learn to shut up?

  Because she was completely right. I had superimposed a big old ugly stereotype right over her, and said all those nasty things to it instead of taking the time to get to know the real girl underneath. I had seen my dumb assumptions instead of an actual person. She had every right to be angry with me.

  So she wanted to hang some blue silk on the wall. Big deal. I had turned it into a whole religion and condemned her for it, all in my imagination. No wonder she thought I didn’t live in the real world. I’d just proven it, hadn’t I?

  “I’m so sorry,” I managed to say without breaking down and crying in front of her, though I was close. Luckily I had a Kleenex in my tote. I dug it out and blew my nose.

  She looked a little surprised, but I didn’t know if it was because of the snotty Kleenex or because I’d apologized.

  “I meant it.” Her tone was aggressive, as if I was going to resume the attack and she was getting ready for me. “I’m going to pray for you.”

  “I wish you would,” I said with a sigh. That took her back a bit. She must not have expected me to agree with her. “My mouth gets me into trouble a dozen times a day. I pray and pray about it, but it doesn’t seem to help. Do you think God has call-waiting and He’s just busy with everyone else but me?”

  This time it was Gillian’s mouth that hung open. “Are you saying—”

  I nodded. “Pretty lousy example of loving my sister, huh?” I knew I was giving her a giant opening for another attack.

  Humiliation, thy name is Lissa.

  “I’m sorry I said that about the Buddha,” I went on. “I’m just having a really bad week.”

  She tossed the silk over the Celtic harp standing in the corner—how had I missed that?—where it draped in a glorious spill of color, and sat on the ergonomically correct chair in front of my desk.

  “You’re not the only one. I’m sorry I called you all those names.”

  I’d had most of them thrown at me before, but they’d never hurt quite like this. “What does that mean, what you said? Mo guai whatever.”

  Her neck and forehead flushed red. “Mo guai nuer. It means ‘evil girl.’ The closest you can come in Mandarin to—uh, you know.”

  “Ouch. Well, it was accurate, for what that’s worth.”

  “I still shouldn’t have said it.”

  I looked at her, hoping that this moment of honesty would last for a few more seconds before we set each other off again. “Do I really come off as snotty and stuck-up? Because that’s the last thing I want.”

  She rubbed at a speck of something on the desk. “Maybe. A little.”

  Oh, great. No wonder Vanessa thought I was a threat. “I don’t see how. I’m just trying to figure things out around here. Get through a day without Vanessa and her crew dumping on me. How does that translate to being stuck-up?”

  “Gimme a break, Mansfield. You’re tall and blond and you have cheekbones. That’s enough reason for anybody to dump on you.”

  “Unlike you. You had a whole audience hanging on your every word.”

  “Not the A-group.”

  “Maybe not, but at least you’re making friends. Not one person except Vanessa, Emily, and Dani has talked to me since I started, and those three only do it so they can set me up for something.”

  “You just answered your own question. If you’re hanging around with them, of course no one’s going to talk to you. Please tell me you’re not really that clueless.”

  I shot her an annoyed glance. “Are you always this brutal?”

  “I call ’em like I see ’em, you know? And it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the A-group only talks to other people in the A-group. Normal people aren’t going to stick their necks out and risk getting their heads bitten off.”

  “Except me.”

  “So why do you keep going back for more?”

  Why did I? Gillian made me feel like a dope—a blond dope who couldn’t tell that someone was abusing her and kept going back in hopes that eventually she’d pay her dues and be accepted.

  Can you say masochist?

  “I used to be popular. At my old school.” How feeble was that?

  “Were you popular, or did people actually like you?”

  “There’s a difference?”

  “Of course there’s a difference.” Gillian scooted the chair forward a little and I prepared for another whack on the old self-confidence. “I mean, what do you want? For a bunch of backstabbing fashionistas to invite you through the sacred portal to hang out with them? Or do you want friends who actually might think you have a brain and something to share? Who like you just because you get up in the morning, not because there’s something in it for them?”

  Okay, this was getting just the slightest bit annoying. “You sound like my sister.”

  “In case you forgot, I am your sister.”

  She had a point. And what she said might even be right. But—

  “It can’t go on much longer,” I said. “It’s like an initiation, and when it’s over, they’re your friends. And besides—”

  “Besides what?”

  “There’s this guy.”

  Gillian exhaled, as though I’d just taken away her last hope. Then she smiled. Humoring me. “I bet.”

  “No, really. You’ve probably seen him.” When I pictured Callum McCloud, putting up with Vanessa and Dani didn’t seem so bad. “He is so hot he makes the air sizzle around him. And he hangs around with those girls. He and Brett Loyola and Todd Runyon.”

  “I’ve heard about Todd Runyon.” She made him sound like an ax murderer. “And I haven’t even been here twenty-four hours.”

  “I don’t care about Todd.” I waved a hand, as if to push the idea of him away. “We were talking about Callum McCloud.”

  “Oh.”

  “Oh, what?”

  “Nothing. I just heard he and Vanessa were together, that’s all. But, you know, unrequited love is kind of romantic.”

  Whack. “They’re not together. If they were, believe me, Vanessa would be taking out ads in the Chronicle and putting up banners in the hallways.”

  “Maybe he likes her. Unofficially.”

  “Could you look on the bright side? All I have to do is hang around with them and he’ll see I’m totally the one he wants. Because, believe me, I’d be better for him than Vanessa by, like, a factor of a hundr
ed.”

  I hadn’t had trouble getting boys’ attention since I’d graduated out of my training bra. And I had every intention of making Callum not only see me, but ask me out, too. And after that, it wouldn’t matter what Vanessa or Dani or anybody thought. Especially a certain person at Pacific High who dumped me flat on my face exactly one week before we moved up here. Someone who swore I was his one and only, and with whom I’d made plans for Christmas that involved him flying up to be my date at whatever Spencer’s equivalent of a holiday party was.

  Needless to say, those plans had crashed and burned and now lay in cinders all around me.

  I’d get the hottest guy in school, I swore to myself. And when I had him, I’d be popular by default. Despite Vanessa Talbot. Despite my bruised self-confidence. And no matter what my opinionated roommate thought.

  After all, just because she was a Christian didn’t mean she was right about everything.

  To:lmansfield@spenceracad.edu

  From:jolie.mansfield@film.ucla.edu

  Date:September 22, 2008

  Re:First week

  Hey girl,

  Thanx for sending me your addy. Time for a real message instead of IMs. It’s been crazy around here but I’m loving it. Found out our term project is a nonfic documentary about a person or organization. I figure this is a perfect opportunity to do a thing on Pastor Norman and his soup kitchen on the beach. What do you think?

  But enough about me. I know you’re having a tough time. I’m sorry, kiddo. It was rough leaving PHS but I kinda envy you being up there in Fog City. I bet there’s some great opportunities to talk about God to people. You can bet I’m gonna let my documentary do the talking for me :) Maybe Dad will even watch it.

  And as far as that loser Aidan, I think you’re well rid of him. Nobody sets my sister up and dumps her for the homecoming queen without consequences. Good grief, what a cliché he is. You deserve better. This Callum guy sounds nice, but don’t let looks be all that. He’s got to have more to be someone you can care about, right? Is he a Christian?