It's All About Us Page 5

  “My dad’s in San Jose, so he’s only sixty miles away,” Carly offered, pulling a bacon strip out of her burger and eating it. “But sometimes it feels like he’s in another state.”

  “Where’s your mom?” I asked her.

  “In Mexico, with my grandparents. They’re divorced.”

  Oh. Open mouth, insert foot. “I’m sorry.”

  She shrugged. “Dad has custody of me and my little brother. We do okay. But he travels a lot with his job. Computers, you know? Antony is in boarding school, too. It’s just easier this way.”

  My mom spent most of her week in Los Angeles, working, but at least we had the option of all being together on the weekends. Poor Carly.

  “There are boarding schools in San Jose, aren’t there?” Gillian asked around a mouthful of alfalfa sprouts.

  “Maybe. But Dad wanted me here. And it worked out with”— Carly hesitated—“admissions and everything.”

  I glanced at her. I’d have bet the rest of my burger that wasn’t what she’d started to say.

  “I bet God wants both of us here.” Gillian’s tone held absolute conviction.

  “How do you know?” Carly asked.

  She smiled. “Because you’re not in Silicon Valley and I’m not at Choate or some other East Coast school. I wanted to do something different, so I asked God about it, and doors started opening right and left. Did you know this place has music scholarships?”

  I shook my head. The number of things I didn’t know astonished me.

  “Well, it does. And I got one. For piano.”

  I remembered the harp and wondered what it was for. A design element?

  “A music scholarship. Who knew?” she went on. “My dad was expecting math or maybe science, but hey, I’m not fussy. The point is, I figure God wants me out here for a reason, so here I am.”

  “I don’t know what He wants me here for.” I stabbed a fry into the paper cup of ketchup, conveniently forgetting to mention that I’d chosen Spencer. I’d had options, but I’d put myself right here on purpose. “Other than to provide endless entertainment for Vanessa.”

  Carly looked uncomfortable, but Gillian just came out with it. “You’re obsessed with her.”

  “I am not! Is Luke obsessed with Darth Vader? No. He just wants to stay alive.”

  Gillian looked at Carly. “Not to mention that she has definite image problems.”

  “That was a metaphor.” I stood and piled my empty burger wrapper and juice container on my tray. “I’ve got to go.”

  “Later.”

  I could feel their gazes between my shoulder blades as I left the dining room. Gillian had no filters. Did she say whatever she wanted without thinking about the other person’s feelings? I was not obsessed, unless you counted the good kind of obsession, namely Callum McCloud. Nor did I have problems, image or otherwise. Sure, I wished my boobs were bigger and my hair smoother, but that was normal.

  Just because I wasn’t dancing with joy at all the changes I had to deal with didn’t make me obsessive, or unhappy with God, or whatever Gillian was implying.

  I was still fuming about it as I crossed the lawn, looking for someone who would tell me where the field house was. So naturally, I didn’t even notice Callum McCloud coming up behind me until his shoulder bumped mine.

  Chapter 8

  MY HEART and my breathing stopped for a full second, I swear.

  So did my brain. This is what happens when it doesn’t get blood and oxygen. And you thought I wasn’t paying attention in Biology, didn’t you? I sucked in a breath, and all systems resumed operation. Oh, man, Callum smelled good. Euphoria, I was sure of it.

  So apropos.

  “Hey,” he said, and one side of his mouth quirked up in a way that made my brain blank again.

  “Hey.” Again, not original, but it was the best I could do.

  “Heading for the field house?”

  I nodded. “I thought I’d try out for soccer. You?”

  He shrugged and shook his head. “Probably sailing.”

  Okay, so I was going to have to backpedal with Gillian. Meanwhile, how come he was walking to the field house with me? Warm and bubbly, hope tingled through me.

  “So . . . where exactly is it?”

  As far as I knew, the Spencer campus was all on this same block of Pacific Heights. The quadrangle of the building sat back a little from the street, with pepper and eucalyptus trees shading the front staircase and the doors. Behind it, and down the slope, were the parking lot and the basketball and tennis courts.

  “Across there.” Callum pointed. “It’s a hike, but what are you gonna do?”

  What I’d thought was a private park turned out to be the soccer field, with an Edwardian stone building that was the field house. I learned later that it also housed an Olympic-sized swimming pool, weight rooms, and squash courts. We crossed the street and I took a step toward the gate in the fencing around the field. A man in a safari jacket leaned against it, people-watching.

  “No, not that way.” Callum turned and picked up his pace, so that I had to skip a little to catch up.

  “Where are we going?”

  “There’s another gate. I can’t stand those guys.”

  “What guys?”

  “Didn’t you see him? That guy on the fence was a photographer.”

  “He was?” I craned my neck, but we were half a block away. “Who’s he waiting for?”

  “Any of us. Anyone who will sell a picture. Vanessa has to deal with it all the time. Brett punched a guy out once, when he wouldn’t let him go into a restaurant without posing first. I hate them. Hate that I can’t have a normal life even in my own neighborhood.”

  “My family gets that sometimes,” I offered. “Usually only when a movie comes out, though. And at premieres.”

  “I get it all the time. Take my advice.” He glanced at me. “Stay under the radar and don’t let people talk about you. Then you can keep your life to yourself.”

  We went through another gate and walked across the field, with me slowing my steps practically to a crawl to take as long as possible getting there. Callum didn’t seem to mind—or even notice.

  I had to change the subject to happier topics. This might be my only opportunity, so I needed to mine it for all it was worth.

  “So I talked to my dad about the Benefactors’ Day thing,” I said. “He’s going to be in town. I was afraid he was going to have to go to New York, but that’s not ’til the Monday after.”

  “Yeah?”

  I lost my train of thought again as those eyes met mine. Not as green as the grass we walked on. More of a willow green, with a bit of Earl Grey tea thrown in.

  I took a breath. “So maybe I can introduce you then.”

  “That’d be great.”

  We were still hundreds of yards away from the field house, and the ears of a bunch of milling students. Was this my opportunity? Should I take the plunge and say, “If we went to the dance together, you could spend a lot more time talking to my dad”? Somehow that didn’t sound as romantic as it could. I wanted him to do the asking. And to do it because he wanted to, not because it might get him an introduction or a summer internship.

  This was about me and him, not about business.

  But first, I needed to know a few things. “Is Vanessa looking forward to it?”

  He looked at me curiously. “I guess. Girls like dressing up and all that.”

  I couldn’t just come out and ask him if he was going with her. “Well, I hope she lets you have a dance with me.”

  Even that was pretty heavy-handed, but I couldn’t think of a way around it.

  “Lets me?” He huffed a laugh.

  “Well, you know. Some people expect their date to stick with them the whole evening.”

  “She’s not going with me.” He sounded surprised that I would think that.

  I turned my biggest smile on him. “Oh? But I thought—”

  “I’ve known Vanessa my whole life,” he said. �
��We hang out.”

  Oh joy oh joy oh—

  “If I asked her to the dance, she’d laugh at me. We don’t stick around anyway. Brett usually throws a party, or I do.”

  This was a good news/bad news scenario. The good news was, he wasn’t Vanessa’s date, and he wasn’t likely to be. The bad news was, it didn’t sound like he was too inclined to ask anybody else, either.

  A private party was better anyway. My task was clear. No matter what, I was going. As of this moment, I was renewing my goal to become best friends with Vanessa, Dani, and Emily.

  We were only a few hundred feet from the crowd now. “A bunch of us are going down to San Gregorio beach on Sunday,” Callum said. “You doing anything?”

  Sunday. Sunday. I pulled out my iPhone. Church and lunch with my parents. My dad’s not a believer, but my mom . . . well, she goes to church when she has time. We’d had this on the calendar since she’d kissed me good-bye at my dorm the week before. She’d spin over in the Mercedes and get me, we’d go to this tiny little clapboard church she’d found by Googling “church Marin County,” and then the three of us would have lunch at whatever her latest favorite place was. Some people have a nose for fine diamonds or the latest designers. My mom has a nose for food. Put her down in a Hungarian village and she’ll find the best place to eat in ten minutes or less.

  “Oh, man,” I said, “I’m supposed to spend Sunday with my parents.”

  “They won’t mind, will they?”

  I haven’t seen them for a week. And getting them both in one place at the same time is a miracle. No, I couldn’t say that. It would make me sound like I was nine years old. But I wanted to see them. I wanted to drag Gillian over to Marin and watch her make my dad laugh.

  At the same time, the thought of spending a day at the beach, of watching Callum take his shirt off, of borrowing a board from someone and catching a wave . . .

  This was so not fair.

  “Can I come next time?” I smiled playfully at him. “I’d love to go.”

  “Sure,” he said. “I guess you’re right. If I had the chance to spend the day with your dad, I probably would, too.”

  I opened my mouth to invite him, dumping Gillian off my mental calendar, but at that moment a group of guys hailed him. He smiled at me and loped off, leaving me to find my way into the soccer group on my own.

  Loss sat in my chest like a dead weight. Loss of opportunity, loss of time with Callum. From here on out, I told myself, I wasn’t going to make plans. Maybe he wouldn’t ask me again. Some guys had such fragile egos they could only handle “no” once. Turn them down and they never come back. Callum didn’t strike me that way—a guy as popular as he was couldn’t be that fragile—but you never knew. He could have sensitive depths to him that I would have to handle carefully.

  He’d see. I’d be the best girlfriend he ever had.

  LMansfieldHey Mom.

  Patricia_SutterThere you are.

  LMansfieldOK if I bring my roomie Sunday?

  Patricia_SutterOf course. Pick you up at 9:30.

  Patricia_SutterI’m in L.A. You should go see your dad tomorrow. He’d love to have you to himself.

  LMansfieldSorry, I can’t. Phys. Ed. signups.

  Patricia_SutterOh right. See you Sunday.

  Patricia_SutterLove you.

  LMansfieldLove you 2X.

  Chapter 9

  GILLIAN LOOKED a little surprised on Saturday morning when the bus chartered to take us to the yacht club pulled up and I got on it with her.

  “What’s up with you?”

  I shrugged. “I thought I’d give sailing a try. It isn’t surfing, but you made it sound like fun.”

  And then Callum got on the bus, along with Vanessa, Dani, Brett, and Todd. Gillian gave me a look, rolled her eyes, and pulled her iPod out of her backpack. She settled back for the ride and didn’t give the others another glance.

  I, on the other hand, knew exactly the moment when Callum looked away from whatever Dani had been saying to him. We rolled down the hill past the house where the exteriors for Mrs. Doubtfire were shot, and I turned my head. Our gazes connected, and his eyes crinkled in a not-quite smile that told me he was glad I was there.

  Warmth flooded my body and I struggled with the dopey smile that wanted to paste itself all over my face. I settled for a flicker of my lashes and turned to look outside again.

  Gillian elbowed me and took one of her earphones out. “If you don’t want to crew with me, let me know now.”

  “Of course I’ll crew with you.”

  “Even if you get a better offer?”

  “I’m not taking sailing lessons for that.”

  “Huh,” she said in a tone that painted me totally transparent.

  “Besides, Va—those guys would probably make sure we capsized if I was on the boat.”

  “And you still want these people to be your friends?”

  “Just some of them. My real friends come and meet my family.”

  Gillian smiled at me and the little suspicious coolness that had seemed to fog our view of each other dissipated in the warmth.

  “You meant what you said at breakfast, right? I mean, I could look up a local church and go on my own. No biggie.”

  “I meant it.” I pushed aside the memory of how easily I’d been prepared to ditch her if it had meant Callum coming to lunch instead. It had only been a thought. Easy come, easy go. No harm done.

  Except that if his friends hadn’t interrupted, I might have done a little harm. How would I have felt if Gillian had made plans with me and then ditched me the first time some guy smiled at her?

  Was I really that desperate for new friends, and Callum in par-ticular, that I would become the kind of person I despised?

  Ouch.

  I needed to stop thinking about that before I started asking Gillian’s forgiveness for something I hadn’t even done.

  The bus rolled past a sign that said Tiburon Yacht Club, and I straightened up as Gillian put her stuff away. You might think that sailing at the end of September is just asking to be swamped by a fall storm, but the truth is, it was over eighty and clear outside as we trooped out of the bus.

  My lime-green and black Body Glove zip-top halter and mini were what I usually wore when I went out on friends’ boats or catamarans in S.B. But up here, it was different. Callum wore jeans. Vanessa had on capris that fit as though they’d been tailor-made for her, with D&G strawberry-colored deck shoes. Didn’t they expect to get wet? I mean, you didn’t have to fall in. There’d be plenty of spray to go around.

  The instructor couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, and whoa, was he gorgeous. Shaggy blond hair with that laid-back vibe of a guy who spent all his time caring about wind direction and not much else. Cushy job. Kaz should get a gig like this while he tried to get Demon Battle published.

  “Guys. Ladies,” he greeted us as we gathered in a crowd on the dock next to a row of upended hulls. “I’m Jake Mercer, and I’ll be your sailing instructor for the next ten weeks. Except for today, of course, we’ll meet on Fridays, same time. You’ll be starting out on fifteen-foot Coronados crewed by two each, and at week five you’ll progress to twenty-four-foot Moores crewed by four. Your final consists of nothing more than a sail to Treasure Island and back without running into a ferry, a bridge, or some kind of land mass.”

  Dani and Emily giggled, and he smiled at them.

  “Okay, let’s get started.”

  After the obligatory talk about safety and the rules of the water (“Stay on the right when you make your way out of the harbor, just like driving a car”), we had to assemble a boat. Gillian and I worked up a sweat lugging the mast and sail over, stepping the mast, sliding the keel into its slot, and figuring out which ropes—which are called sheets for reasons that escape me—do what. I didn’t expect to actually get into the water on the first day, but that shows you what I know.

  Gillian looked from me to the little Coronado bobbing next to the dock. “Tell
me you know how to steer one of these.”

  I got in and steadied it for her while she clambered aboard. “No, but I bet Jake is about to tell us.”

  “What do you mean? You’ve got the outfit. You must know.”

  “I’ve sailed on other people’s boats. The most I ever had to do was find my own Diet Coke in the galley.”

  “Great.” She was looking green already. “I’m not touching that thing.”

  And who’d been trying to talk me into it? I gripped the tiller. “That means you have to be ballast. Sit there, on the gunwale, and give us some balance. These things tilt when you get some speed going. That much I do know.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Brett take the tiller of the next boat and Callum wind the sheet around his hand as if he’d done it a hundred times. Their sail luffed in the breeze and then filled as they turned, and they sailed out into the channel between the docks like Sasha Cohen doing a spread eagle at the Olympics.

  Men. They made it look so easy. Meantime, Gillian and I wobbled and bobbled and tilted so close to the water I could see the starfish wrapped around the pilings deep down.

  Guhhh. I’d been right to want to stick to something with fewer movable parts.

  Vanessa and Dani crewed the next boat, launching right behind us. And behind them, Emily sat on the gunwale chirping admiring things at Todd as he slid the keel in and pushed off from the dock.

  Gillian gasped. “Lissa, we’re going to hit!”

  I jerked the tiller over to the left and we missed some guy’s catamaran by, like, two inches. Gillian switched sides and fended it off with her bare hands until we got past. “Lawsuit averted,” she muttered. “Pay attention, will ya?”

  “I’m good.” I gripped the tiller like a drowning person, which is what I would be if I didn’t master this thing. The water tugged at the rudder, the wind tugged at the sail, and between the two of them, I was having to process way more information than usual. “Other side!”