Anna Martin's First Love Box Set: Signs - Bright Young Things - Five Times My Best Friend Kissed Me

by Anna Martin

  “I ain’t getting into a testosterone-fueled, look-how-big-my-balls-are contest,” Jared said, cracking open his Pepsi. “If anyone wants to take a look, they can suck on ’em.”

  Chris laughed and threw his arm around Clare’s shoulder. She looked for a moment like she was going to throw him off, then decided against it.

  “So you got on a treadmill,” Clare said. “Big fucking deal.”

  “I know, right?” Jared said. She seemed confused that he’d agreed with her. “Something going down at Hemlock’s this weekend, so I hear. You supplying?”

  Chris nodded. “Fo’ sho.”

  “I’ll take an eighth,” Jared said. “Keep some back for me?”

  “A’ight.”

  “Can’t make it Saturday,” Mia said, sliding into a seat at the end of the table with a plate of cheese fries and a bottle of Odwalla. Jared shook his head in disbelief at her lunch choice and stayed purposefully silent on the topic.

  “You better have a decent reason not to be there,” Clare said. “Or Hemlock won’t let you in to the next one.”

  “There’s a family thing,” Mia said. “Ben’s home, and—”

  Her words were drowned out by the collective groan of the dozen or so people at the table. Jared raised an eyebrow at Clare, trusting her to explain, while Mia looked extremely put out by their reaction.

  “Mia’s cousin is Ben Haggerty, better known as Macklemore,” she said. “For fuck’s sake, don’t be impressed. You’ll get dropped so quickly, you won’t know what happened.”

  “I didn’t know I’d been picked up,” Jared drawled.

  Mia sniffed and dunked a fry into a pile of ketchup. “You say that now, but I bet it’ll be a different story when you want me to get him to play at prom.”

  “Nah, we gettin’ Sir Mix-a-Lot this year,” Chris said with a wide smile, leaning back in his chair. “Baby got back.”

  “How the fuck are you going to book Sir Mix-a-Lot?” Clare asked, pushing his arm off now. “You talk so much shit, Chris.”

  Jared watched their argument with interest, wondering who he’d be able to grill for more information on their relationship. They seemed like one of those established power-couples, but they didn’t appear to be romantically linked at all. There was definitely something simmering there, and Jared wondered if it was a “Daddy won’t let me date a black guy” situation. Clare certainly was Snow White pale, and he imagined race relations in this snobby, upper-class town were tense.

  “So, when did you get pulled in?” Chris said, directing his question at Jared.

  “Huh?”

  “You split yesterday. When did they pull you into the office?”

  “I didn’t get pulled in anywhere,” Jared said and drained his Pepsi. “Why, was I supposed to?”

  There was a general “oooh” around the table.

  “What?” Jared repeated.

  “No one skips here,” Clare said. “They have this whole thing about truancy and zero tolerance. I can’t believe they didn’t catch you.”

  Jared shrugged. “Either no one noticed, which is fine, or no one cares. Which is even more fine.” From the look on Clare’s face, he could tell she was reluctantly impressed.

  “That never happens,” she said slowly. “It’s a boarding school. They catch everyone.”

  “I’m not a boarder, though. Neither are you guys.”

  “A few of us were, when we were younger,” Ryder said. “I told my mom I wasn’t going to board from my sophomore year onward. So she moved here.”

  “No one cares, Ryder,” Clare said in a bored voice.

  “I have a feeling my dad is paying Hadley serious money to keep the house,” Jared said, playing with the ring-pull on his can and interrupting Clare’s vitriol. “There’s no way she’d still be here otherwise. She likes the heat too much. All this rain would drive her crazy.”

  “That’s Hadley Saunders, right?” Mia asked.

  Jared nodded. “Yeah.”

  “You’re living in the old Saunders house.”

  “Yeah.” There was something going on, another something someone had failed to tell him. “What about it?”

  “Oh, man,” Chris said with a shit-eating grin. “He doesn’t know.”

  “I don’t care,” Jared said, forcing disinterest into his voice as he leaned back, tipping his chair onto its back two legs. “Whatever.”

  Mia leaned in, clearly unable to deal with the tension any longer. “Ms. Saunders got that house in a divorce settlement, right?”

  “That’s what I heard,” Jared said.

  “The guy she was married to is the principal here.”

  Jared raised an eyebrow. “So what?”

  “So that house is a family heirloom,” Clare supplied. “His great-grandfather or something built it from the ground up. The fact that your aunt took it….”

  “Wait, she was, like, twenty years younger than him or something. Extramarital affair turned second marriage turned second divorce, right?” Jared didn’t know the details, only the bits he’d picked up from his mother’s screaming arguments with Hadley.

  Clare nodded. “Right. And Saunders went back to his first wife with his tail between his legs when it all went wrong. She took him back but roasted him, or so legend says, for being so weak as to let the second wife take the fucking heirloom house.”

  “Is he going to make life difficult for me because of who I live with?”

  “Who knows,” Clare said, her eyes gleaming. “Won’t it be fun to find out?”

  Jared laughed and roughed his hair up with the palm of his hand. “If that’s how y’all get your kicks, then all right. I think I like Biggie’s brand of fun a little better, though.”

  “Yeah, baby,” Chris crowed, and the subject once again turned back to the party on Saturday night. While the others threw themselves into a discussion on dress codes, Jared rocked on the legs of his chair, observing and wondering.

  Chapter 4

  If Jared had been impressed by Chris’s palatial family home, he wasn’t quite sure how to gauge Adam’s. It was easily twice the size of the white mansion, and sat up on top of the hill, surrounded by lush green forest, and had a spectacular view out over the bay.

  In comparison, Chris’s place looked crude. Like what a seventeen-year-old millionaire would pick to live in: big, brash, ostentatious.

  The Hemlock house was pure class.

  The front was a jumbling mixture of glass, wood, chrome, and brick, opening the house to the nature surrounding it on several levels. There wasn’t a fountain in the middle of the drive, nor was there a drive at all, really. The house was tucked away into the landscape like it belonged there; the epitome of modern construction.

  The lack of parking space was being handled by what looked like an underclassman, who was directing cars between the trees or around the back of the house where there was a wide field. Jared laughed humorlessly, awed at the sheer arrogance of Adam Hemlock, who was apparently getting the lowlier kids to do his dirty work.

  When he was waved around the side of the house, Jared shook his head and parked at a deliberately awkward angle in front of an honest-to-God candy-pink Cadillac.

  “You can’t park there,” the kid whined as Jared hopped out of his truck with his bottle of Jack.

  Jared grinned and walked on up to the house.

  Since it was the weekend, it looked like the party was a little wilder than Chris’s, which was saying something. Instead of scouting the place like he usually would, Jared walked through to where the music was blasting and sat on the arm of Chris’s large leather armchair.

  “You one of my bitches now, homie?”

  Jared grinned. “Sure. Where’s the party boy?”

  “He hasn’t turned up yet.”

  “But he lives here!”

  Chris shook his head. “You got a lot to learn yet, new boy. Adam won’t turn up until the action really gets started. He’s down in Seattle right now getting his dick sucked. Trust me, that’
s the best thing for everyone. He’ll be in a much better mood when he gets back.”

  “I’ll take your word for it.”

  “Look around,” Chris suggested. “Don’t go upstairs, though, or Hemlock will rip your balls off.”

  “Good to know,” Jared said drily. “You want a drink?” He held up the bottle of whiskey.

  “Gin and juice.”

  “Should have known. I’ll be back.”

  The house didn’t follow any conventional layout, so it took Jared a while to figure out he needed to go downstairs to find the kitchen. It was full of girls, no guys, strangely, and the music down here was definitely more pop-orientated, as opposed to the R&B playing upstairs.

  Two of the three witches were manning a punchbowl full of a sickly-looking pink liquid. Since he was now determined to play the game with these girls, Jared crossed and kissed Ryder, then Clare, on the cheek.

  “Ladies,” he murmured, “you look delightful this evening.”

  “Jared,” Clare said. “I hope you’re not coming over to the dark side.”

  He laughed at that. “I don’t think so, sweetheart. Biggie wants a gin and juice.”

  Giving her Chris’s drink order was an experiment. He still wasn’t sure what was going on between the two of them, and there was something strange about Clare’s unusual insistence on calling Chris by his given name, where mostly everyone else called him Biggie or Wallace. Her gaze hardened for a moment; then she turned to fix the drink.

  “That’s mine,” Jared said, handing the bottle of Jack to Ryder. “Watch it for me, and I’ll share it with you.”

  “Works for me,” she said with a shrug. “Pepsi?”

  “Yeah. And ice.”

  “Got it.”

  The three of them piled back upstairs with drinks in hand, joining Chris where he’d planted himself next to the DJ and his turntables. Jared looked around, trying to take things in.

  The DJ and his setup were clearly portable and not a permanent structure in the house. If he had to guess, Jared thought that this was probably a study area, although a huge, luxuriously appointed one.

  The walls were a sage green color, and walnut bookshelves reached floor to ceiling on either side of a wide fireplace. Huge windows looked out over the front of the house, and this was where the DJ had set up, so the light from a low-hanging white moon shone in behind him. The effect was eerily entrancing.

  Any furniture other than a couple of leather couches and wingback chairs had been moved out of the room, and most of the kids were dancing or spilling out of the carved wooden doors into the entrance beyond. The room was almost antique in its design, apart from a wide flat-screen TV on the wall opposite the fireplace.

  “Where’s Mia?” Chris demanded as Clare handed him his drink.

  “On her way,” Clare said easily, ignoring the flash of anger coming from the big man. “She’ll be here in a minute.”

  It was more like half an hour later when Mia arrived looking slightly disheveled and out of breath. Jared caught sight of her through the big double doors and lifted his hand in greeting. She gave him a grateful look, smoothed down the front of her cherry red dress, and walked calmly through to the library, snagging a drink from some poor girl on her way to make it look like she’d been around longer than she actually had.

  “Hey,” she said, nodding at the small group, sipping the drink, then wincing slightly.

  “Where you been?” Chris demanded.

  “Oh, come on,” she sighed. “You knew I was going to be late. Ben’s planning this thing for the Grammys, and he wanted to show off.”

  “What’s he doing?” Ryder asked.

  “Some big equal marriage thing. I can’t really talk about it,” Mia said.

  Jared had what he liked to think of as a finely tuned bullshit detector. Mia might be playing it cool, but it was a delicate balancing act between desperately wanting to tell her friends about her insider Grammy knowledge and being so very, very cool.

  “Don’t talk to me about the motherfuckin’ Grammys,” Chris said suddenly, his eyes wider than normal. “Clare, load it up.”

  “Oh, Chris, not now,” she said with a groan.

  “Clare.” His voice was a little dangerous, and Jared worried for a moment whatever it was Chris was on would get them all in trouble. “Load up the fuckin’ video.”

  Clare sighed and reached for an iPad on the arm of the chair, pressing a button on it to make the TV come on. A few minutes later, the familiar YouTube buffering screen loaded, then sprung to life. With a flick of his hand, Chris silenced the music from the DJ stage.

  The assembled partiers groaned, then silenced as people turned to the TV.

  “Watch this, Haggerty,” he said to Mia, “from twenty-five fuckin’ years ago. This shit is older than all of us, and still this bitch has got more soul and balls than any other diva out there right now. And that includes your cousin.”

  Clare pressed play.

  Jared was forced to take deep, even breaths, trying not to fall over laughing, because it was the 1989 Grammys. Whitney Houston and her epic performance of “One Moment in Time.”

  The bouncing crowd of teenagers who had been dancing to Nicki Minaj only moments before was suddenly enraptured by a sadly deceased singer belting out a power ballad in a sparkly white dress.

  When Whitney had finished wailing the final notes of the song, Chris led the way with a standing ovation, then Clare turned the TV off again, and the DJ resumed with Rhianna.

  “Yeah, all right,” Mia conceded. “Whitney was good. Now she’s dead. Time to move on, Biggie.”

  “Whitney did not die,” he corrected. “She was martyred.”

  “From a coke overdose.”

  “So don’t talk to me,” Chris continued as if he hadn’t heard her, “about the Grammys, or about same-sex love, or whatever it is Ben ‘Macklemore’ Haggerty is preachin’ this time. That is how you do a fucking Grammy performance, and you will never—” He paused. “—ever see anything like that ever again.”

  “Rest in peace,” Jared added, and Chris nodded.

  “Word.”

  It was too much for Jared, who already loved Chris more than he thought possible, but couldn’t spend another moment in his presence without killing himself laughing. His questions about Chris’s authenticity were redundant, really; Wallace was a legend. The rest didn’t matter.

  “Did you enjoy Whitney?” someone asked as Jared headed back down to the kitchen for a refill, and he startled, then turned.

  Adam was leaning against the wall holding a short glass with a measure of liquor.

  “How can you not enjoy Whitney?” Jared answered. “She’s a legend.”

  “Martyr,” Adam corrected.

  That was it. Jared lost it, and sat down on the top step of the stairs that led to the kitchen, and laughed until his stomach hurt. At one point he was dimly aware of Adam sitting next to him and giggling too. They had shared nothing but a few short conversations so far and this changed things—they could laugh together. Maybe Adam got it—the pure ridiculousness that was this group of people.

  “How do you take them seriously?” Jared asked, wiping his eyes. “I just….”

  “Who said I take them seriously?”

  People were having to step over them or between them to get down the stairs, and Adam clearly didn’t care at all. After a moment he slipped his hand into Jared’s.

  “Come on. I want to give you the tour.”

  After being warned not to go upstairs, being led to the sweeping staircase with his hand in Adam’s made him feel like Belle in Beauty and the Beast, exploring the forbidden west wing. And holding hands was weird. It wasn’t childish, like kids taking each other’s hand for safety, or romantic, with fingers laced together. It just was.

  “So, you probably figured out already that the house is built on levels,” Adam said as they ascended. “It’s all about light and green, and where you can get the best light at certain times of day. So it seems
weird at first for the kitchen to be downstairs, but that’s the best place to watch the sunset, which is when we’re in there anyway.”

  “That makes sense,” Jared said.

  “Yeah. And up here… my mom likes to wake up when the sun comes up, so the master bedroom faces east, so she gets the most sunlight in there.”

  At the top of the stairs, Jared looked up into a large glass dome that showed the stars. No one could see this from downstairs. Adam tugged lightly on his hand and led him down a short set of steps and to the far side of the house, where a bedroom suite wrapped around the building.

  “Is this your room?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Who was the architect for this place?” Jared asked, standing at the top of the stairs and looking into the forest through the bedroom windows. “It’s incredible.”

  “My mother,” Adam said and finally let go of Jared’s hand. “She’s in Paris at the moment, working there. She’s great.”

  Jared decided not to ask anything else, instead walking down into the room that had clearly been designed to be minimalist, and had then been taken over by a teenage boy.

  The walls were the color of whipped cream, and the floors were natural wood, matching the furniture. A long, curved, steel desk had a Mac desktop on it, the wide screen dominating, and a laptop was on the unmade bed. One whole wall was taken up by windows that looked like they could be folded back, opening the room to the elements.

  “There’s actually a balcony out there,” Adam said. “You just can’t see it from here. Bathroom’s down there. Let me show you out here.”

  Jared followed Adam. He didn’t really have a reason to refuse.

  What might have been a playroom for a younger child was now a game room, complete with a low black leather sofa and an enormous television. It all started to make more sense. The house was a little too shiny, too perfect to look lived in by a family. This was where Adam’s family existed, hidden away upstairs while the ground floor served as a beautiful, modern art showroom.

  “This is awesome,” Jared said with a grin. “Do you play GTA?” Conquering Grand Theft Auto was one of his personal challenges for this school year.