by Amanda Grace
Because good things never happen to me.
And Liam is a good thing.
Olivia
When I open the door to our condo on Thursday, the first thing I hear is a crack sound.
Our pool table.
Great. I’d kind of hoped Liam’s friends weren’t going to be over today. I wanted to try and beg my way into going
to Quinault with him, but I can’t possibly grovel in front of the other guys.
But … I also can’t spend my birthday alone. That’s pathetic. I’m this close to asking Ava to let me go to L.A. with her, even though she’s going there to support her mom’s charity-of-the-moment.
When I round the corner, I find Liam stooped over the table just like I expected, but he’s not playing the guys.
“Zoey,” I say, before my brain kicks into gear.
“Shhh,” Liam says. “I’m about to beat her in pool.”
I find my mouth curling up into a smile. “Ah, she wasn’t dumb enough to bet you, was she?”
Her immediate scowl tells me otherwise.
“Aw, shucks, are you hustling your own girlfriend?” I ask, heading over to the seat next to Zoey.
I wait for one of them to correct the label, but neither does. Liam just leans over the table, concentrating on the cue ball as Zoey flicks a glance at him, as if she’s expecting something.
Ugh. They can’t possibly be boyfriend-girlfriend this fast. Liam doesn’t usually label the girls he churns through.
“I haven’t even had a turn yet,” Zoey says, once the awkward moment passes. “At least he never claimed to be a gentleman.”
“We didn’t bet,” Liam says. “And it’s not my fault I’m so good at this game.”
“I want to play next,” I say, dropping onto the chaise lounge in the corner and putting my feet up. They’re pounding after a long afternoon working on my floor routine. After that one perfect pass a few days ago, I haven’t nailed it since.
Liam sinks the last ball and Zoey stands up, pool cue in hand. “I’ll play you, but I get to go first this time around.” She walks to the side of the table.
Liam hands me his cue, mumbles something about a snack, and walks off, leaving the two of us alone.
Zoey racks the balls, arranging them and twirling them with such great care it’s like they’re made of glass. I watch, fascinated, as she narrows her eyes, assembling the balls in an odd diamond shape with the shiny black 8 is in the middle. I don’t know where the rest of the balls are, but we’re at least a few short.
Then, carefully, she pulls the frame off and hangs it on the wall behind the table. “All set,” she says, rounding to the far end, where she places the cue ball.
I want to ask her what game this is, since I’ve only ever played with a triangle-shaped mass of balls, but for some reason I don’t want to ask. I’ll look stupid.
I know a moment later, as the cue ball hits the tip of the diamond and the balls scatter with a loud crack, that she expected to win the game against my brother. And I know she’s going to win this one. She sinks four balls before I get a chance to try at all.
She looks up at me, a triumphant, cocky grin on her face. “It’s all yours.”
I nod, circling the table and studying the balls. I’m just hoping to get one shot off without looking too dumb.
I lean over, staring down the cue ball for all I’m worth. Then I slide the stick back and let loose. The cue ball streaks across the table, smacking into a group of other balls.
The eight ball careens across the table, then drops into the corner pocket.
“Woohoo,” I say, fist-pumping.
“You just lost,” Zoey says. “And clearly you have no idea how to play pool.”
“Oh.” I glance back at the table. Obviously I should have inquired about the rules first. We’ve only had the table for six months, and I’m terrible at it since Liam never wants to play me.
“I’m going to go sit on the deck,” I say. “You can come out if you want.”
Outside, I stand at the railing, staring across the darkened waters at Brown’s Point—still technically Tacoma, but the jagged edge of Puget Sound separates the two ends of town. Houses blaze light across the darkness, nothing more than tiny pricks of light in the distance.
Zoey doesn’t follow. I don’t even know if I want her to, but as I sit out here in the dark, listening to her laugh at something Liam must’ve said, I feel … lonely.
I don’t know if it’s how Ava is getting more wrapped up in Ayden lately, or how Liam’s pulling away, or the fact that we haven’t seen our parents in almost a month … But I can’t seem to shake this shade of emptiness.
Ava and I used to connect on everything. We used to talk about our first crushes, our parents’ fights, and everything in between.
I scowl out at the water. It makes me feel small. That’s why I’m thinking these melancholy thoughts. I always feel introspective when I stare out at the bay.
“Contemplating your plans to solve world hunger?” Zoey says into the darkness.
I glance back, surprised she’s come outside, with a glass in her hand that’s filled with ice cubes and something dark.
“Something like that.”
“Why don’t you ever have friends over when I’m here?”
“Liam and I are friends.”
“I mean, besides your brother.”
“Ava’s busy.”
“Ava’s seriously your only friend?” Zoey asks, and the surprise is evident in her voice.
“You already knew that,” I say, “or you wouldn’t have issued that little challenge.”
“I mean, I knew you didn’t have some enormous group of friends, but I figured you had more than Ava.”
I feel my cheeks warm, and I hate it. “Why the hell do you care?”
That shuts her up for a second. Her lips press into a thin line. When she finally speaks, her voice is icy. “I’d rather have no friends than the artificial, backstabbing one you call a best friend.”
“Oh, so that’s what you’re getting at. It’s not about me at all, is it? You don’t like Ava.”
“Of course I don’t like Ava. Don’t be stupid.”
“You don’t even know her,” I say, gripping the railing harder.
“Don’t I? Go ask Ava about freshman year, then.”
“She had nothing to do with that,” I say, anger rising. “It was all you.”
“She has everything to do with what everyone thinks of me,” Zoey snaps. “An insult or two here and there, fine. But it’s been a three-year smear campaign. Take your fucking blinders off and get a clue, will you?”
“They’re not blinders,” I say, my anger flashing to meet hers. “It’s called loyalty. Maybe if you had some, you wouldn’t be such a pariah in the first place.”
“People were loyal to Hitler too, you know. It’s not always a good quality.”
I scowl and stare back out at the water, wondering why I’m even talking to her, and where the hell my brother went, and why she has such a chip on her shoulder, and …
“Ava’s a good person,” I say. “We both are. It’s not my fault you two don’t get along.”
“You know, I thought you were smarter than that,” Zoey says. “I thought you’d see through her bullshit eventually. But maybe you never will.”
And she spins on her heel and stalks off, leaving me huddled there in the darkness.
Zoey
I don’t know why I’m doing this.
I don’t owe Olivia Reynolds anything, most definitely not a birthday party, or whatever this is going to become.
The thing is, I can’t get that image out of my head—of Olivia out on her deck alone in the darkness, staring out at the water, her shoulders slumped. The more I’m around her, the more I see this fragility about her, something a little cracked and broken behi
nd the façade.
And I keep remembering what Liam said—that she’s been clinging to him.
And now it’s her birthday, and he’s two hours away at the beach, and she’s … she must be alone. I heard her, yesterday at school, telling Ava that she’d see her when she got back. I don’t know where Ava’s going, but it sure as hell sounds like out of town.
Which leaves one Olivia Reynolds alone on her birthday.
I grit my teeth, wondering why, for the millionth time, I’ve decided that Olivia needs me. She could probably rent some friends for the weekend.
“This will just take a second, okay?” I say, glancing over at Carolyn in the passenger seat.
“But I want to come with you,” she whines. “Pleeeeeeaaaaaaase?”
I put my mom’s battered old car in park and look up at the buildings that comprise Ruston Point.
“I’ll only be a minute.”
“But it looks so cool,” she says, “and I want to ride in the elevator.”
God, how pathetic is it that my sister, age ten, so rarely rides in elevators that it’s a point of excitement?
“Fine. Come on. But don’t say anything, okay? My friend might not even be home.”
“Deal.” She beams, jumping out of the car before I can change my mind.
I’m regretting the decision already, but I don’t order her back into our dilapidated car. I simply walk to the front entry, pausing at the call box. I rake in an oddly shaky breath before I tap in 403, and then, just as it starts to ring, I panic.
There was no call box on the wall inside their condo, like in all those old Friends episodes, so it’s gotta be ringing someone’s phone. I don’t even know where it’s ringing—their parents’ phones, wherever the hell those would be, since their parents don’t seem to be around much—or Liam’s phone, or—
“Hello?”
Relief. It’s Olivia. Maybe they have a house phone or something just for this purpose, or maybe it rings her cell.
“Um, hey, it’s Zoey.”
Silence. I glance over at Carolyn.
“Uh, Liam’s out of town.”
“I know. I was driving by on the way to the zoo with my little sister, and we passed your building. And then I just … I don’t know, I turned around and thought I’d see if you wanted to come with us.”
I press my finger to my lip in a shhhh sign when Carolyn opens her mouth to correct me. I hadn’t driven past at all. I told Carolyn, when we left our place, that we were going to make a stop along the way.
“Oh.”
“My mom got some free passes from her coworker. Three of them. So if you want to go … ” My voice trails off because I don’t know what else to say.
The box is silent, and I start to feel stupid. I shouldn’t have invited her. I don’t even know why I—
“Come on up. It’ll take me a few minutes to get ready.”
And then there’s a buzz, and the door next to us clicks, and we’re in.
I just invited Olivia Reynolds to go to the zoo with me and Carolyn, and I have no idea why.
“Your car is much nicer than ours,” Carolyn says from the back seat four hours later. I can’t believe she’s awake after so much running around, but maybe it’s all the sugar. Olivia bought her soda and cotton candy, and she promptly consumed them both.
“Plus, ours makes funny noises,” Carolyn adds.
I try not to cringe, instead pretending that I’m completely deaf. Oblivious. I mean, there were many reasons I asked Olivia if she could drive us to the zoo, and the funny noises topped the list.
“Um, thanks,” Olivia says. “My dad let me pick it out.”
“Awesome.” Carolyn’s voice is full of awe. “I would have picked something red.”
“Yeah?” Olivia asks, glancing into the rearview mirror to meet my sister’s eyes. At some point today, the two clicked. I’m almost envious. It’s easy between them. Olivia doesn’t have to do much to make Carolyn happy. She doesn’t have to solve all the problems to make her forget that she still had that fading black eye. “My brother’s car is red.”
“You guys both have your own cars?”
“Mhmm.”
I purse my lips and stare out the windshield, as if I can’t even hear their conversation, as if I’m not thinking that Olivia has figured out how pathetically poor we are. I didn’t miss the way she watched me as I moved my mom’s car over to the guest parking space, with it coughing and hiccupping like it was on its last dying breath.
Hell, maybe it is. Maybe I’ll get back in and it won’t even start.
“That’s so cool,” Carolyn says. “I hope I get my own car someday.”
“I’m sure you will.” Olivia clicks on a blinker, turning and heading downhill toward their condo. “When I was a kid I used to want a motorcycle, just because my brother wanted one too. We’d smash cans on the top of our bike wheels so they’d grind against the tire and make sounds like a motorcycle.”
“I don’t have a bike, either,” Carolyn says.
I squeeze my eyes shut and try not to notice the way the air went from happy and warm to dead cold.
“It got stolen,” I say, opening my eyes again and glancing over at Olivia, trying to gauge her reaction.
Trying to gauge her pity level, really.
“Oh.” She grips the steering wheel tighter but says nothing.
“It was too small, anyway,” I add. “She’d had the same bike since, like, first grade.”
“We have some of my older ones in our storage unit,” Olivia offers. “There’s one that will probably fit her. And it’s red.”
“It’s fine,” I say, my face warming. This is exactly what I don’t want. From her. From Liam. From anyone. “You don’t need to give us anything.”
Carolyn’s silent in the back seat, but I swear I can feel her hot gaze on the back of my neck. She wants a bike more than anything. She’s had it on her Christmas list for two years.
“See, the thing is … ” Olivia reaches over and taps the down button on her window, then sticks her hand out, letting it wave up and down in the wind. “My dad’s been bugging the crap out of me to empty out the storage room for, like, months. If you take the bike, it would be one less thing I have to haul to Goodwill.”
And then my seat kind of shakes as Carolyn grabs it. “Say yes, say yes, say yes.”
I want to hang on to my protests, to deny Olivia the ability to give me anything, but faced with Carolyn’s enthusiasm, my resistance dies away.
“Um, okay. Sure.”
Olivia flashes me a smile, like she just single-handedly convinced General Lee to surrender in the Civil War. “Cool. Thanks for doing me a solid.”
Right. She knows it’s her who’s granting the favor, making Carolyn happy.
“Sure,” I say, going along with the farce.
“If you want to test it out,” Olivia says, glancing back at Carolyn again, “we can use the big patio along the water. It’s private for the residents.”
“YES!” Carolyn says, bouncing up and down, kicking my seat. “Awesome.”
Twenty minutes later, after Olivia goes into a storage unit somewhere in the labyrinth of their parking garage, Carolyn has her new bike.
Olivia and I sit on the stone ledge of a huge flower planter as Carolyn wobbles back and forth on the bike, gliding past us like a girl out of practice.
“Thank you,” I say quietly, once she’s out of earshot.
Olivia smiles at me, and when I look into her eyes, it’s not pity or charity or anything like that. It’s simply kindness.
“Sure. Any time.” She watches Carolyn make another pass, and then adds quietly, “And thank you, too.”
“For what?”
“For ensuring I didn’t spend my birthday alone.”
“It’s not a big deal,” I say.
“It is. You’re the only one who cared. And I’m not even sure why. I haven’t been very nice to you.”
“I don’t know. It just didn’t seem fair. For you to be alone on your birthday, you know?”
“Yeah. Well, thanks.”
“Sure.”
“Do you want to work on our project once she gets tired of this?” Olivia asks, nodding toward Carolyn. “We can use my dad’s office and she can watch movies on our big-screen in the den. We’ve got Netflix and cable and everything.”
“That sounds great,” I say. “My backpack’s in the car. I made some notes earlier for what I want to cover.”
“Cool. I’ll watch your sister, if you want to go get them.”
It’s not until I walk away that I realize it’s the first time anyone else has offered to watch Carolyn—the first time I’ve ever been able to walk away and know that she’s safe.
Olivia
“I think your sister likes the surround-sound,” I say as I step into the office space, where Zoey is already spreading out her notes.
“Oh yeah?” She doesn’t looks up from her notes, just chews on her lips and says nothing else.
“Her eyes got big as saucers when the movie started.” I grin. “We have a really cool popcorn maker, too. I flipped it on for her. Hope that’s okay.”
I still can’t believe Zoey showed up today. Can’t understand why she chose to rescue me from the downward spiral of my thoughts. Maybe she’s not who I thought she was. Maybe there’s more to her than the hard looks and the quasi-punk rock style.
“Oh, uh, yeah. Sure.” She glances at me briefly, and it seems like something in her eyes has shifted. Like I’ve said the wrong thing.
“Something wrong?” I ask, pulling out a chair across the table from her.
“No. It’s fine.”
I narrow my eyes. “So then why do you sound so ann-
oyed?”
Moments tick past, and neither of us speaks. I can just barely hear the low hum when the bass from Carolyn’s movie hits. If I closed the door, we’d be sitting in silence.
“It’s nothing,” Zoey says. “Let’s just work on our assignment.”
