by M. F. Lorson
“What does he do?” I asked, realizing for the first time that Landon knew an awful lot about my family, and I didn’t even know what his dad did for a living, nor had I remembered his mother died.
“He coordinates press junkets for movies and television.”
“Wait, what? Really?” I asked.
Sloane nodded a big smile stretching across her face. “Next month he is going to be in Alabama for a two-day event with Matt Dillon.”
“He is not!” I shrieked. “How could you not tell me your dad is awesome?” I punched Landon on the shoulder. I was laying all my fangirl cards on the table right now, but it didn’t matter because Landon had access to freakin Dallas Winson!
“You want me to get you a T-shirt?” he asked. “Harper loves Dally with a big heart around it.”
I nodded vigorously. “Yes! That would be great.”
Landon laughed bitterly, “Yeah well, as much as I would like to see you sporting your cookie pride vest over that, I’m afraid I don’t have much influence over my Dad.”
“But surely?” I continued, looking from Landon to Gabe and back again. “Surely you can…”
“Ask?” said Landon. “I can ask.”
Inside I was bubbling over with joy. I had been watching and re-reading The Outsiders since they first assigned it in 9th grade English. I had never been a big reader, but that book sucked me in and the movie just brought it all to life so well. Dally was the bad guy with the good intentions. The one everyone wrote off as a problem, but turned to when they didn’t know what to do. I felt that.
When Alice was little, before she was perfect. She’d screw up and then beg me to help her hide the evidence. It was when we felt the most like sisters. I should probably consider answering the phone next time she calls, but then again we were along ways away from those little girls.
My phone buzzed and I looked down to find a text from Drake.
Drake: Party is all set. So jazzed. I wanna see you, with a beer in your hand and those tights with all the holes in them. I am so ready to give a big F-you to the Grover PD by hosting a party on city property.
I quickly hit the button on the side of my phone. If Landon were to see that text he would be insufferable about how Drake was just using me to get to dad.
The thing was I had always known Drake wasn’t a fan of my dad, but lately it felt like more than that. F-you to Grover PD felt personal.
“Can I bum a ride home?” I asked, anxious to get out of Landon’s house before the urge to ask him what Drake had said at that campfire took hold.
“For sure,” said Sloane, then she scooped her purse off the counter and headed out to her gremlin.
“What did you think?” she asked, as she pulled out of the driveway and headed toward the main part of town. I didn’t want to tell her what was really on my mind so I focused on the thing I knew would keep her distracted.
“I think you have been holding out on me. Matt Dillon!”
Sloane tossed her head back, shaking her soft red curls as she laughed. “Yeah, when Gabe told me what his dad did I was excited too. It definitely explained how he got into that fancy film school in Europe.”
“I’m sensing a but.”
She wrinkled up her nose and scrunched her lips together like she had just inhaled patchouli. “I’ve met Mr. Maxwell twice, and Gabe and I have been dating since the fall.”
“So he’s not a super social guy.”
“No, more like he is a very social guy who spends all of his time not with his kids.”
“Oh,” I replied, looking down at my hands in my lap.
“It’s hard on Gabe,” she said, her eyes glued on the road in front of her. “He has to be dad and big brother. There isn’t a lot of time to be Gabe. It’s a little like they lost both parents at once.”
The part of me that usually found a good reason to discredit any excuse for Landon’s behavior was tempered by the part of me that had spent a tough fall with Sloane, just after her mother died.
“I know you don’t like Landon.”
“It’s not that I don’t—”
Sloane cocked one eyebrow.
“Okay, so I despise him.”
“Right,” she said. “But maybe you could try and see your way past that. In case there is something there you’re missing.”
I didn’t agree to mine Landon for lost gems of non-douchery, but I got her point, and that night when I caught my mom and dad cuddled up on the couch, it occured to me that I at least had them there. Even if they didn’t get me. Even if it felt like they didn’t try.
Landon
“Well, that was fun,” Gabe said with a stupid smile on his face. He was pulling out his laptop to continue on his scholarship essay.
I didn’t answer him. The grin on his face had me worried, a clear sign he was looking into it way too much. Gabe loved to find the deeper meaning in everything, as if life was a John Hughes movie, and we were all getting to some major morality lesson by the end.
“You should have her over more often.”
“Who?” I asked, while I played some mindless game on my phone. Sitting across the table from him, I could see my brother watching me. If I wanted to, I could take my phone to my room and ignore him, but eating dinner together wasn’t awful and hanging out was at least a little better than being alone.
“What do you mean who? Harper.”
“I made it through this one alive. Let’s not tempt fate,” I answered without looking up. A smile lifted the corners of my lips as I thought about her in a fit of rage, holding that heel in her hand ready to kill me. I lied when I said I didn’t remember it. It was the only image from that night that I kept, and I didn’t need anyone knowing just how often I thought about it. Harper was a firecracker. She didn’t back down from a fight, she had a mouth on her that got her into more trouble than she needed, and there wasn’t anyone she wasn’t willing to stand up to.
Which is probably why we hated each other so much. Because there was no one I wouldn’t stand up to.
Gabe’s laugh distracted me from my phone. “What’s so funny?”
“You two. I honestly can’t tell what’s going on there, but you’re exactly alike. It’s unnerving.”
I set my phone down and leaned forward. “Are you comparing me to a foul mouth delinquent with anger management issues? Have you seen her? She should come with a warning. Explosive. Flammable. Might bite your face off.”
“Then why did you invite her over?”
“To prove a point.”
“Then why did you put your arm around her? What about the inside jokes? The ear-to-ear smile you had on your face all night, especially when she was talking?”
My eyes widened as I stared at my brother, and I really hoped the heat I felt in my cheeks wasn’t a visible blush. I was not about to blush over Harper Huntington. “What are you implying?”
He laughed again. “I’m implying that you like her. That you two stand a chance of actually being a good couple if you could get over pretending to hate each other so much.”
“Pretending to—?”
Just then, Gabe’s phone rang. As he tapped the button, and I heard my dad’s voice over the speaker, I was still processing Gabe’s words. A good couple? Pretending to hate each other? It certainly never felt like I was pretending to hate Harper. But here I sat trying to formulate a list of all the things I hated about her...and suddenly couldn’t come up with one. Even her stupid haircut was growing on me.
This couldn’t be happening. I could not be falling for someone so chaotic and crazy. I was born to live by conventions. We were meant to fill certain roles in life and we were supposed to abide by the laws of that role. Gabe and I were part of the Khaki Collective. Harper gave us that name herself. Her and her friends were...well, I don’t know what they were classified as, but I certainly didn’t date girls like Harper. I was meant to be with the rich girls with CEO dads who knew how not to land in jail on the first day of summer. The ones who didn’t const
antly push my buttons, on purpose.
“Yeah, Landon is here,” Gabe said to my dad on the phone. “But he’s looking a little pale right now.” Pulling the phone away from his ear, he gave me a serious stare. “Are you okay?” he mouthed.
“I need to talk to dad when you’re done,” I answered. He hesitated before going back to his conversation.
Meanwhile, I was still desperately trying to find any residual distaste for Harper that I could cling to, but there was none. I invited her to my house for dinner because I wanted her to see my life...to be a part of it. I looked forward to going to work not for the internship but because I knew she’d be there. At the very least, her dad would be there, and for some reason I found pleasure in knowing he liked me. Like if her dad liked me, then eventually she would.
I dropped my face in my hands and dragged my fingers into my hair, willing to pull it all out if it helped to ease my frantic mind. Gabe was giving me a cocked brow expression, and I probably did look crazy. I felt crazy.
Then I thought about the kiss. A groan escaped my lips as my head slammed against the dining room table.
“I think he’s having a nervous breakdown,” Gabe muttered to Dad.
My dad’s voice echoed from the speaker. I couldn’t hear the words exactly, but I knew he asked what was wrong with me. Nice of him to care, I guess.
“Oh I think he’s just realizing that he has the hots for his worst enemy,” Gabe answered with a laugh. I shot him a warning glare, but it did nothing to stop his smile.
“He wants to talk to you.” He passed me his phone and went back to work on his essay, the smug grin still plastered to his face.
My dad sounded tired as he asked me about school, girls, my internship, and I answered each question pretty noncommittally.
“Hey, I need a favor,” I said when he stopped talking.
“What’s up?”
“Are you still working with Matt Dillon?” I asked.
“Sure, why?”
“I need an autograph. On a shirt...which I’ll send to you.” Across the table, Gabe smiled bigger, and I kinda wanted to punch him for it. As I talked on his phone, I did a little research on my phone, flinching when I noticed how much it would cost to order a custom-made T-shirt and have it overnighted to the hotel my dad was at.
“Who’s it for?” my dad asked with a teasing tone.
I hated this. I hated it so much. Feeling like the butt of the joke was bad enough, but something—or I guess, someone, I shouldn’t have cared about in the slightest suddenly felt important. Fifty dollars for a T-shirt important.
But I was still going to do it because as messed up as my head was, there were two things that were abundantly clear: one, Harper could never know how I felt about her because I knew for a fact she did not feel that way about me. And two: she needed to own that autographed shirt.
Harper
I had been dreaming about Matt Dillon for the past three nights. Not the good kind of dreaming. We weren’t making out or flying around the Tower Bridge of London hand in hand. No, we were in the church from The Outsiders and it was burning. He kept telling me to bail on the party, and then he would morph into Landon, khaki pants and all smugly telling me I told you so as the walls burned down around us. It was pretty obvious what the dream meant. Especially because it was punctuated with a flaming Drake laughing like a maniac. But here is the thing about dreams, you can’t dump your boyfriend because dream-Matt-Dillon told you to.
The party was a week away and every day made me more anxious. It was probably all going to be fine. Just another dumb party, not much different than other’s I had been to. But what if it wasn’t fine? I wasn’t sure how many more strikes dad was willing to give me before he decided I was a lost cause.
“You look deep in thought,” said Landon. We were still stuck sitting across from one another at the station.
“I’m just working through the details of the murals.”
“Oh yeah?” Interest burned behind his green eyes and I found myself wondering when he had stopped hating me and began to care. “Did you decide how to tie it all together yet?”
“Tie it all together?” I asked.
Landon’s cheeks tinged with pink. He was blushing, like blushing because of me. I more than suspected he liked me, but the physical evidence was still surprising.
“I saw some of your sketches,” he admitted, quickly looking down so our eyes wouldn’t meet as he confessed to peeping my project notebook. “You’ve got the quotes from the book, which could be very cool, and the scene of Cherry and Ponyboy at the drive-in, I loved that. But...”
“But what?” I asked.
“But I don’t see Grover in it.”
I rolled my eyes. “Grover is what I’m trying to cover up.”
Landon laughed and turned his attention back to his work, but he was right and we both knew it. I couldn’t just turn a mile of the riverwalk into an ode to my favorite book and movie. I had to show why The Outsiders mattered. Why it mattered here and now, as much as it had when its sixteen-year-old author first scratched out the story.
I flipped open my notebook and began doodling. After twenty minutes Dad dropped by our desks to hand Landon some more paperwork to input into the computer. He peeked over my shoulder.
“Is that?” his eyes darted from my notebook to Landon and then back down to the page. “Is that my intern front and center on your mural?” Now it was my turn to blush. When Landon said it needed to be more Grover, I started thinking about how the Khaki Collective were the Grover version of Socs. I had intended to depict their group with a vague resemblance, but the boy on the page and the boy before me shared the same face. Awkward!
I expected Landon to have a field day with this, but instead the corners of his lips turned up in a smile. “Looks like the Socs to me.”
He was being nice, and it was making me nervous. Where was the dude that called Sloane a ginger all of sixth grade? The guy who ratted me out at girl scout camp and made fun of my patches? It was easy to hate that guy. This guy was close to appealing.
Bag of tools, bag of tools, I repeated the phrase in my head, until I couldn’t glance up at Landon without remembering that he was in fact, a bag of tools. This probably wasn’t going to be a permanently effective strategy, but for the moment it helped me not think about the lines of his jaw, and the wickedly sexy way his dirty blonde hair kept falling into his eyes as he worked the ten key.
I forced myself to work on my sketches and ignore the half dozen times his eyes popped off the computer screen and landed on my face. By the time five o’ clock hit, I was desperate to get out of the station and away from the shifting nature of Landon and me.
I neatly stacked my notebook, closed the station laptop Dad had been reserving for my use and headed toward Dad’s office to let him know I was ready to go. Before I could get there I felt a hand on my shoulder.
I spun around to find Landon standing with a brown paper bag in his hand.
“I promised I would ask,” he said, extending the bag out in front of him and looking particularly unsure of himself.
“Ask what?” I began, but the moment I opened the bag I knew exactly what he meant.
“Are you serious?” I whisper shrieked. I pulled the white T-shirt from the bottom of the bag and held it up against my chest. Harper Loves Dally with a big heart around it would have left me in stitches, but Harper Loves Dally with Matt Dillon’s autographed scrawled below my name? I couldn’t help it. I lost my cool and jumped onto Landon like an eight-year-old whose grandpa has just said, let’s get ice cream!
“This is the gift.” I bubbled, my lips were just millimeters from his ear, and his body, at first stiff as a corpse, loosened as he wrapped his arms around my waist and said, “You’re welcome.” It took us all of about three seconds to realize that me with my legs wrapped around the intern’s waist was a bad idea. I slid down, straightened my clothing and grinned up at Landon.
Officer Nealson and the others could
stare all they liked.
“Matt Dillon touched my shirt!” I yelled, holding the T above my head for all the officers and support staff to see. “He touched it!”
Landon
It was hard to sleep that night. What with Harper’s smile—aimed at me—etched into my memory, not to mention the way she felt in my arms, wrapped around me like an adorable little spider monkey. That was exactly why I got her the shirt. Call it brownie points. I knew it would make her smile, and I suspected it would make her hate me a little less and perhaps see that beneath the Landon-King-Jerk facade, I wasn’t actually a terrible dude.
The next morning, I came into work with three iced lattes from the donut shop with a smile on my face the size of Texas.
“Good morning,” I said as I sat Hunt’s coffee down on his desk. He was on the phone, looking like he would have preferred water torture to listening to whoever was on the other end of the line. The more I watched Hunt at work, the more I realized that the big office and a fancy title came with a lot of paperwork and listening to the librarian at Grover Public Library complain about whatever it was this time.
When I turned around, Harper was there with her Dally shirt on, wearing a similar expression as I handed her the white chocolate soy double shot latte that she loved so much.
“Why are you so happy?” I asked.
“We start work on the mural today,” she squealed.
“The permit came back?” I asked, my arms open...ready for another one of those hugs if she was willing to distribute them.
“Yep!” she squealed, and I noticed her hesitation so we settled on an awkward high five. She curled the long side of her blonde locks behind her ear, holding her smile but avoiding my eye contact as she picked up the keys from her dad’s desk. “You ready to head over?”
“Whenever you are, Picasso.”
We waved to Hunt who shooed us out of his office as if he could spare us from whatever boring conversation that librarian was using to slowly murder him with. Harper and I scampered out of the station like we were heading to Disneyland. I couldn’t remember the last time I felt excited about anything.
