Be Strong & Curvaceous Page 9

“If you’re in the market for a camera, it’s pretty appealing already.”

  “Most people, Carly, don’t know they’re in the market for a camera. They have to be reminded. Hence my question.”

  Not even Mr. Milsom, terror of the science labs, used a word like hence. Only one of the reasons I thought my boss was either a few cards short of a full deck, or one of the coolest old guys I’d ever met. I couldn’t decide which.

  I got out the Windex and a pile of clean rags. “My father says that ninety percent of marketing is making someone want what they don’t need.”

  “A man of sense.”

  “He is. I don’t know what my mother was thinking.” I stopped myself and got back on topic. “So what we should do maybe is not show people the actual stuff as much as what they’ll get when they have it. You know. Benefits instead of features.”

  “Which are?”

  I scrubbed at a stubborn nose print until the glass squeaked. Ew. People should wipe off their kids before they brought them in here. “Well, where do people have good times? At a wedding. Or a holiday. Like that lady who just left. Show people having fun with their cameras.”

  “Make it part of their experience. Hmm.” Philip’s face took on a faraway expression. “We could blow up some good shots and display them with the equipment that produced them.”

  “You could have workshops on how to get pictures like that. Do them online, even. This place has a Web site, right?”

  “Er, no.”

  “Philip, Philip.” I shook my head with mock despair and gave him a smile. “How am I going to drag you into the twenty-first century?”

  “With as little pain as possible, I hope. You must allow I’m getting there at my own pace, snail-like though it may be.”

  “The point is, there are lots of ways to get people involved with their cameras, which means they’re involved with Piccadilly Photo, right?”

  “Right. How have I stayed in business this long without you?”

  I grinned at him. “It’s a mystery.”

  He was silent for so long, I figured he was planning out his marketing campaign. I’d actually finished polishing up the longest display case, which ran down the side of the shop, when he spoke again.

  “What was that you said about your mother?”

  I stopped. “Huh?” My arm ached, so I switched the rag to the other hand.

  “You said something about your dad having sense, but you didn’t know what your mother was thinking. What was that about?”

  I ducked down and began at the bottom of the next case. “Nothing.”

  “I think it is something.”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “We have a long evening ahead of us. Punctuated, one hopes, by the arrival of customers.”

  I sighed. “Philip, you can’t possibly be interested in my boring problems or my boring family.”

  “Since the latter managed to produce a fine young woman despite what you say, I think I’m very interested. Provided you want to tell me. You can always just ask me to mind my own business.”

  I’d never been very good about keeping things to myself. I’d always had someone around to talk things over with—Papa, my mother, Alana. Even now I talked to Shani more than anyone—just not about family business. But Philip was different. He was an adult. He’d been around. And best of all, he was completely separate from the rest of my life.

  So I told him. About the divorce, about us kids living in three different cities, about our family going from one big happy Mexican-American hive to all these rootless little satellites, their orbits intersecting only once in a while.

  “And now my mom tells me she’s engaged to this doofus who lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He put a diamond ring in her dessert last weekend. Be still, my heart. She wants me and my sister, Alana, to be her bridesmaids.”

  “And will you?” Philip took a rag and squirted Windex on the other side of the cabinet I was working on.

  “Are you kidding? The last thing I want to do is stand there in a big poofy dress, watching her vow to love, honor, and cherish. She didn’t do that for my father, did she?”

  “Maybe she did, in the beginning.”

  “Yeah, well, there’s more to a marriage than the beginning. There’s the middle, too.”

  “That is the hard part.”

  “My dad isn’t hard to live with. He’s never there, for one thing.”

  “Which may have contributed to the problem.”

  Both of us were crouched down, looking at each other over the Canons as we polished the panels of glass. “What do you mean?”

  “It’s difficult to love, honor, and cherish someone who isn’t there.”

  “They could talk on the phone. Or IM or something.”

  “People do grow apart. Maybe that’s what happened.”

  I caught my reflection in a metal strip and tried to smooth out the grumpy frown lines in my forehead. “How can you know that?”

  “I don’t, of course. But possibly you don’t know the whole story, either. I’d want to shield my children from as much as possible, if it were me.”

  I looked up. “Do you have kids?”

  “One son. He’s a teacher in Vermont.”

  “And your wife?”

  “Gone.”

  “Gone how?”

  I’d meant divorced, left, whatever, but he said simply, “In the usual way. She passed in 1985, when Kimball was still a child.”

  The smell of ammonia went up my nose. I realized my hand was pressed to my mouth, as if it were preventing one more whiny, complaining word from coming out of it. “Oh, Philip. I’m so sorry.”

  “I am, too.”

  “I didn’t mean to go on about my dumb stuff when you’ve had worse things happen.”

  He lifted a shoulder. “I wanted to hear about your ‘stuff.’ You might think about doing this thing for your mother, Carly. I can tell you from experience that chances to do things for each other can be taken away, just like that. And then you spend the rest of your life wishing you’d had just a few more minutes.” He stared through the glass at the Sony videocam on its pedestal, without seeming to see it. “Just to say yes. Or to bring them a glass of cold water. Or to give them a kiss to say you love them.” He looked up, and I had no doubt that he saw me in every glaring detail. “Or to catch a bouquet that they threw just for you.”

  Chapter 10

  SO MUCH FOR professional distance.

  As I rode back to school on the eight-twenty bus, I regretted telling Philip all the stuff I had. After all, when you tell somebody something, it isn’t to hear what you already know. It’s to get a different perspective, right? Or find a different way of solving the problem.

  Going to the wedding and doing what my mom wanted was, in Philip’s mind, the right thing to do. But it just seemed wrong to me, when she’d never done anything us kids had ever wanted. Nobody had asked us when she’d left, had they? Nobody wanted our opinion about her going back to her parents in Veracruz—who, incidentally, lived in a beautiful house my dad had paid for. He’d done that out of love for her, and what had she done for him?

  I got off the bus and crossed the playing field as the last of the sunset faded to purple over the skyline and lights began to wink on all over the city.

  I should have been paying more attention. That’s what they tell you in self-defense classes: “Be aware of your surroundings.” If I hadn’t been so deep in my own thoughts, I’d have had a few seconds to prepare myself when a shape wearing a hoodie loomed up on my right.

  “Hey, Carly,” Brett Loyola said.

  My heart seized up and I froze.

  “It’s just me,” he said. “Brett. Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  Scare me? Two of my dreams had just come true, right there in the middle of the plushy grass field. One, Brett Loyola had remembered my name, and two, he’d spoken to me of his own volition, without chemistry notes or his entourage around him. What was he doing without Callum or Tod
d or one of the innumerable girls who always followed them around?

  “Carly? You okay?” He leaned in to try to see my face.

  “Yes,” I squeaked, then cleared my throat and tried again. “Sure. I didn’t realize anyone was there, that’s all.”

  “You did look kind of preoccupied, all right. Mind if I walk with you?”

  Mind? Was he crazy? This was probably a hallucination or a dream, but I was going to enjoy it for all it was worth.

  “No, not at all. Are you heading back to school?” I asked. “Aren’t you a day student?”

  “Yeah, I am, but some of the guys are going out, so I said I’d meet them in the common room.”

  Oh. “Sounds like fun.”

  “Want to come with us?”

  “I’d be taking my life in my hands,” I said, trying for a joke to give myself a second to recover.

  “Nah. We’re just going downtown to hang out, maybe have a drink. I want to apologize, by the way.”

  My mind went blank. To the best of my knowledge, we hadn’t been together enough for him to be sorry for anything. “Why?”

  “The other night, when I ordered that drink for you without asking what you wanted. That was pretty ignorant.”

  “You were being thoughtful.”

  “By getting you a Cosmo when you don’t drink? I don’t think so.”

  A glow began to spread all over me. Yep, definitely a dream. I’d fallen asleep on the bus and had probably ridden all the way downtown to the terminus, but I didn’t care. Please, nobody wake me up.

  “Well, thanks for the apology, anyway, even if it wasn’t necessary.”

  We’d nearly reached the trees at the side of the main building. If this was a dream, surely I should be able to say something witty and brilliant, something I’d never say in real life. Something daring that would get his attention, once and for all.

  “So Vanessa says you’re a Christian.” I couldn’t really be sure in the dark under the trees, but I thought he’d turned his head to look at me as we walked. “And that’s why you didn’t want it.”

  Was that good or bad in his mind? “Yes,” I said a little cautiously. “I’m kind of a noob though.”

  “A newbie Christian?” He chuckled, as if that was an odd concept.

  “I mean, I just made the decision really recently. I don’t know very much yet.”

  “What’s to know?”

  “That’s the thing. I don’t even know that. How much there is to know, I mean. I’m kind of feeling my way along, and my friends are helping me a lot. My family is Catholic, so at least I learned something when I was a kid.”

  “Yeah, mine, too. But I stopped going to mass a long time ago. Saturday nights aren’t exactly conducive to matins or whatever the next morning, you know?”

  I laughed because he did, and because here was proof this had to be a dream. There was no way I’d be talking about my faith with Brett Loyola in real life. No way.

  “Gillian organized the prayer circle, and she and Lissa talk with me about whatever I want to know,” I went on. “We go to church together on Sundays.”

  “I came to that prayer circle thing once,” he said. “Kinda bizarre.”

  “It got better,” I said quickly. I remembered that night. Boy, did I. “A bunch of kids come now. There was one tonight, in fact.”

  “Is that where you were?”

  “No, I was”—I stopped myself just in time—“out.”

  “Skiving off, huh?” In the lights from the front windows, I could see he was smiling at me.

  “Oh, no. I just had something I had to do tonight.” I paused. “What does that mean? Skiving off?”

  His grin widened. “That’s something your roomie taught me. It means skipping out. Cutting.”

  The glow from the lights flattened into a glare as I hurried up the front steps. With his long stride, though, he beat me to the door and opened it for me.

  “Thank you.” We walked into the main entry hall together.

  “Anytime. Nice talking to you.” He paused in the doorway to the common room. “Let Lindsay know we’re meeting in here, okay?” he added. “She said she might come.”

  “Oh?” I hardly knew what I was saying. I was too busy waking up from the dream and realizing it was a nightmare. “She did?”

  “Sure you won’t change your mind?”

  I smiled vaguely at him. “I have about eight hours of homework ahead of me.” Which was the truth. And it shows you just how uncool I was. What woman in her right mind would do homework instead of going downtown with Brett Loyola, especially when he’d asked her twice in the space of five minutes?

  I’ll tell you who was in her right mind.

  Lady Lindsay MacPhail.

  EOverton You will never ever guess who just came in with BL.

  DGeary Vanessa? Are they back together?

  EOverton No.

  DGeary Tell.

  EOverton MexiDog.

  DGeary !!!!!!!! Came in like they happened to be at the door together, or came in like they WERE together?

  EOverton Door number 2. As in, holding it for her and everything.

  DGeary OMG. What is he thinking? I thought he was hot for Her Highness.

  EOverton The man likes to slum, as we know too well.

  DGeary Well, yeah, but this is going a little far. Does VT know?

  EOverton I’m not gonna be the one to tell her.

  DGeary You got that right.

  MAC LAY ON HER BED, intent on her laptop. She glanced up as I came in. “You had your phone turned off.”

  That was one of the first things Philip had made crystal-clear. No personal calls during work hours. “I know. Were you trying to call me?”

  “Not me. Lissa and Gillian both called on the room phone around seven, as did a person called Alana.”

  “That’s my sister. She lives in Texas. She does sound design for a recording studio in Austin.”

  “Does she?” Mac looked interested. “Do you ever notice the number of things that need to be designed? Sound design. Hair design. Interior design. What is with that?”

  I was so not interested in a philosophical discussion of semantics when I was still trying to recover from massive disappointment. “Brett says to tell you that they’re meeting in the common room, if you want to join them.”

  She pushed the laptop away. “Oh. Is that tonight?”

  “I guess.” I took my math textbook out of my bag and tried to calculate how many of the assigned exercises I could get through before dawn.

  “Do you mind?”

  What had we been talking about? “Mind what?”

  “Mind that Brett asked me to go with them.”

  “Why should I? He asked me, too.”

  “Did he?” She smiled and pushed up the pillow behind her back, as if she were settling in for a girl-to-girl talk. “And of course you said yes.”

  “No, I didn’t.” I glanced up. “Look, if you’re going to go, you should. I have about five tons of homework to do.”

  “You turned down Brett Loyola to do homework?”

  Basically what I’d been asking myself—and kicking myself over—all the way upstairs. “Don’t rub it in.”

  “Why didn’t you do your homework earlier? You really need to learn some time management skills.”

  Okay, that did it. My emotions had been batted all over the place today, and I did not need this. “There’s nothing wrong with my time management skills. I had something to do this afternoon, all right? And it took until eight. Why is everybody giving me such a hard time about it?”

  She gazed at me for a few seconds. “You do mind.”

  “I told you, I don’t. All I’m trying to do is get a dress into this fashion show and everyone is giving me grief about it.” Okay, so I’d left out a couple steps—like getting a job so I could get some fabric—but my lips had to stay sealed about that part. Especially with Mac. I still wasn’t a hundred percent sure she’d understand what being a scholarship kid
meant, and why I had to keep it under the radar.

  She opened her mouth to say something else, but her laptop pinged to announce a new e-mail message. When she glanced down at the screen, the color drained from her face.

  “Mac.” My irritation seeped away, too. “What’s wrong?”

  She lifted her gaze to mine as if it took a lot of effort. “It’s him.”

  I dropped my math book and sat on the bed next to her, all thoughts of Brett and my impossible social life evaporating. There in the colorful list of her e-mail was a new message from Drifter. “Are you going to open it?”

  “I’m afraid to.”

  It was hard for me to imagine her being afraid of anyone. Vanessa Talbot was about the scariest thing I’d ever met, and Mac had faced her down without even breaking a nail.

  “Go on,” I said. “Maybe he’ll let something slip that will help us figure out who he is.”

  * * *

  To:lmacphail@spenceracad.edu

  From:drifter1989@gmail.com

  Date:April 28, 2009

  Re:California girls

  I heard the Beach Boys playing in the café tonight and had to laugh. I wish they all could be, etc. Do you think of yourself as a California girl now? Never mind. The point is, you’re here and I’m here and soon everyone will . . . but I can’t tell.

  Drifter

  * * *

  “Soon everyone will what?” I asked.

  Mac just shook her head, staring at the e-mail as though it might refresh itself and offer a clue.

  “Why is he so creepy? Is he trying to scare you?”

  “I don’t know what he’s thinking.” At least anger was beginning to beat back the fear in her voice. “I don’t know why he’s picked me to vent on. Or how he found me in the first place.”

  “How long did you say he’s been writing to you?”

  She shrugged. “Months.”

  “I can’t believe you haven’t told anyone.”

  “Told them what? The first messages were just chatty little one-liners. I thought it was one of my mates from school, but I soon found out it wasn’t. Then I thought maybe it was some weirdo off MySpace, so I took down my page.” She glanced at me and pressed Print, and in a second the wireless laser printer spat out the e-mail. “I don’t answer them, but they don’t stop coming. They just get longer and more pathetic. With pictures. And now they’re in my school mailbox, which only my parents and Carrie have.”