“I’ve got an idea,” she started out, keeping her voice low, “of how we can blow any chance of that skank becoming a Rosebud. But we have to move fast.”
“Ooo, do tell,” Camie said, and Trisha leaned in.
“Remember those photos we took? Why don’t we print out an anonymous note with the nastiest of those and arrange for a few special deliveries to the GSC selection committee,” Jo Lynn laid out. “And just to drive the dagger in deeper, I’ve got a little something extra that you can do, Miss Camie, and it involves Avery.”
“You know I’m in, girlfriend.” Camie nodded.
“Me too,” Trisha replied.
“Okay then.” Jo Lynn smiled. “This is how we do it.”
An hour later, the plot in place, they got up and left their table littered with empty cups, used napkins, and biscotti crumbs. Jo waved goodbye to her buds in the parking lot and slid behind the wheel of her Audi A8, the Valcona leather sighing softly beneath her as she settled in. She used the voice control to turn the radio up so the Fray filled her ears. She’d barely pulled out of the parking lot when her iPhone squealed with a text message from Dillon: Sorry abt last nite. Will make it up 2 U.
Jo Lynn was so psyched at hearing from him she could hardly keep her car in the lane. She texted back: U better! ILY
BTW.
Dillon’s response: ILY2.
Jo was grinning madly by the time she sailed the Audi into her driveway, parking directly behind her mother’s white Escalade. Not only was she beyond psyched that Dillon had apologized, but she could hardly wait until Bootsie and her committee got her little surprise tomorrow. Wouldn’t they all be shocked as hell when an ape-sized monkey wrench got tossed into the deb selection process and they had to go back to the drawing board?
Jo Lynn sighed happily as she let herself into the house and jogged up the stairs to her oversized bedroom suite. She tossed her bag onto a chair and flopped onto her bed, hitting the remote that raised the flat-screen TV from the footboard. She was in the mood to chill in her final hours of freedom, before her senior year at PFP started with the shriek of her alarm waking her up at the crack of dawn. As she surfed through the local stations, she glimpsed a plug for the ten o’clock news and stopped right where she was, sitting up straighter.
“And on the local front, a teenager from a prominent Houston family was detained by police after protesting the destruction of the two-hundred-year-old oak known as the Sam Houston Oak. The catch? Her father’s the one who donated the property to Pine Forest Preparatory Academy. More on that story at ten.”
“No way,” she murmured, watching a brief video clip of a redheaded girl being deposited in the backseat of a Villages police car.
Was that Green Girl, Ginger Fore?
It had sure looked like her, only with shorter hair than Jo remembered.
A teenager from a prominent Houston family whose father donated property to Pine Forest Preparatory Academy?
Yep, it had to be.
Instantly, her cell began ringing, and Jo snatched it up.
“Did you see what I saw?” It was Camie.
“Oh, yeah, and if I didn’t know better, I’d think it was Christmas.”
“You think the GSC will boot Miss Ginger off the list, even if her grandmother debuted at the first Rosebud Ball, like yours?” Camie sounded more excited than when she’d gotten liposuction on her butt for her birthday.
“Even great-granddaughters of Glass Slipper Club founders won’t get cut any slack if they’ve got a rap sheet,” Jo Lynn assured her, thinking all the while that tomorrow would be a day that would live in infamy, once Laura Bell got her big ass kicked.
Jo Lynn couldn’t think of any better way to start her senior year.
* * *
I think the measure of your success, to a certain extent, will be the amount of things written about you that aren’t true.
—Cybill Shepherd
I love to gossip about other people. I just don’t like thinking other people love to gossip about me.
—Laura Bell
* * *
Thirteen
Laura couldn’t get down more than a piece of toast and glass of juice before she left the house extra-early on Monday morning. She usually devoured a spinach-and-feta omelet but couldn’t stomach one when she was all butterflies. She had a million things to worry about besides first-day jitters, like when the Rosebud invitations would go out and whether she’d get one, whether she’d bump into Jo Lynn Bitchwell at PFP when she was without Mac or Ginger to protect her, and why Avery hadn’t called her since he’d carried her to her car after her catfight with Jo Lynn on Saturday night.
At least she wouldn’t be arriving at school by herself. Ginger had called late the night before, begging for a ride because the keys to her Prius had been confiscated by her pissed-off mother. She’d also been grounded for a month after getting hauled into the police station for handcuffing herself to a tree with some ecoterrorist-in-training named Javier. Apparently, Ginger had been keeping secrets lately too.
Who exactly is this Javier dude, and when did he come into the picture? Laura wondered as she wove through traffic, finally reaching Fore’s Way off Piney Point and making a hard right. Is he someone Ginger hooked up with in Louisiana?
Laura had a few questions ready when she pulled up her Mercedes Roadster in front of the Castle. Before she’d even honked the horn, Ginger was out the door and hurrying toward the car. Laura wiggled her fingers when she spotted Deena Fore standing in the doorway, monitoring Ginger’s progress to the car.
“Come straight home after school,” Laura heard Mrs. Fore yell after her as Ginger opened the door and climbed inside.
“God, I feel like I’m on parole,” Ginger muttered as she worked on her seat belt.
Her spiky red hair had been tamed into flatter layers, making her do nearly as conservative as their school uniform of white button-down shirt with knee-length black and tan plaid skirt. Only Ginger’s stack-heeled Mary Janes belied her prissy schoolgirl image.
“You okay?” Laura asked as her friend wedged her knapsack between her legs. “Your parents came down on you hard, huh?”
Ginger’s eyes looked tired and a little puffy, like she’d done her share of crying. “Obviously, my mother freaked.” She glanced out the window toward where Deena Fore had been standing not a minute ago. “My dad wasn’t happy either, not when he had to come down to pick me up from the police station in the middle of some big dinner party. He was wearing a tux.”
“Did you get the lecture?”
“The ‘I’m so disappointed in you’ shtick?”
“That’s the one,” Laura said as she headed out of Fore Way back onto Piney Point.
Ginger held up two fingers. “I heard it twice, from him and my mom, who got on the phone immediately to my grandmother. Then good ol’ Rose called Bootsie Bidwell to assure her I didn’t have a police record or anything and that this tiny indiscretion shouldn’t affect my becoming a Rosebud.”
“Holy shiz” slipped out of Laura’s mouth, because getting dropped from the deb list surely sounded more horrifying to her than getting fingerprinted by the Memorial Villages Police Department.
“So now Deena’s keeping me prisoner for the next month, until I ‘come to my senses,’ as she puts it. Although, of course, I’m allowed out for Rosebud functions”—Ginger snorted—“if I don’t get myself booted.”
“You won’t,” Laura tried to reassure her, dropping one hand from the steering wheel to squeeze her friend’s arm.
“Your dad’s too big in this town, and your grandmother was in the first class of Rosebuds. It would take a lot more than doing something crazy for the committee to cut you down.”
“I hope you’re right.” Ginger nibbled on her bottom lip.
“My dad’s donating a boatload of money to PFP to ‘calm the waters,’ as he put it. Enough so they can build that new library they’ve been raising funds for.”
“Leave it to the gr
eat Edward Fore to smooth things over,” Laura said. “Your dad’s a pro. My father would probably just offer the school new toilet seats for the bathrooms.”
If she expected Ginger to laugh, she was off the mark.
“I guess we’ll know if I’m dead or alive soon enough, huh?” Ginger remarked, her voice as low-key as the rest of her. She turned her head then to glance out the window, and suddenly there was silence.
Laura decided maybe it was best just to leave her alone, though she hated the quiet because it gave her time to dwell on her own troubles. Would Jo Lynn seek revenge because Laura had crashed her party? More importantly, what was with Avery’s disappearing act? She hadn’t gotten so much as a text from him, and she’d been fighting the urge to make first contact. What had happened when he’d gone back to “smooth things over” with the Bimbo Cartel after he’d deposited Laura at her Merc? Had Jo Lynn brainwashed him again and convinced him to stay away from Laura because she wasn’t worthy? Or was it something much, much worse?
God forbid he’d gotten back together with Camie Lindell. If he had, Laura wasn’t sure she could ever look him in the eye again, not after the way she’d opened up to him when they’d gone back to her house from the airport.
Stop inventing bad things before they’ve happened, she told herself, and relaxed her tight grip on the steering wheel. Somewhat calmer, she guided her Roadster down Taylorcrest toward the intersection with Stray Lane, where Pine Forest Prep sat on a huge corner lot bordered by towering pine trees. She turned the radio on and then off again when she could find nothing but morning talk-jocks yammering.
Within a quarter mile of the school, they hit a major traffic jam, vehicles bumper to bumper. The first day of school was always like this, with all the overprotective parents wanting to drop off their own children rather than carpool. It made one hell of a mess. But it gave Laura a chance to ask Ginger the question she’d been dying to ask.
“So,” she started in gently, “what about this Javier Garcia? I saw his picture in this morning’s paper. He looks hot, girlfriend. How come you never mentioned him before?”
Ginger looked over and gave in to a sly smile. “He’s too hot for his own good, and he’s smart and passionate….”
“Ooooh.”
“About the environment,” Ginger clarified, rightly assuming Laura had jumped to her own conclusions. “And he’s a really gifted painter. He was doing a mural on our dining room wall until Deena fired him this morning.” She stopped smiling, and her expression tightened. “I thought he was one of those pathologically honest people, you know? But he’s a stone-cold liar. I mean, he used me because I’m Edward Fore’s daughter.”
“Maybe he didn’t mean to.”
“How could he not mean to?” Ginger scoffed. “He obviously had everything planned all along. He knew that I was his key to getting media coverage, and he didn’t care how I’d feel when I realized what was up.”
“You’re right. That is stone-cold.”
“More like frigid,” Ginger corrected her.
Laura thought of Avery defending her to Jo Lynn at the party, when she’d never seen him step up like that before, not for her. “Sometimes people make mistakes,” she said.
“They can change if they want to.”
“Please.” Ginger picked at some lint on her skirt. “He can go screw himself as far as I’m concerned.”
“Has he tried to call?”
“Only, like, a hundred times.”
“Did you answer?”
“Of course not.” Ginger crossed her arms, looking tough and wounded at the same time.
“Even though he was wrong, maybe he thought he was doing it for all the right reasons,” Laura said, because she couldn’t help herself; she didn’t like seeing marshmallow-hearted Ginger so bitter about Javier and what he’d done.
“Please, don’t turn into an emotional hard-ass like Mac’s always trying to be and write this dude off as fast as that. Do you think you’ll ever see him again?”
“Yes…no…maybe…I don’t know. Oh, God, I feel so totally lame.” Ginger dropped her head back and rolled it against the headrest. “I haven’t even talked to Mac since it happened. I can already hear her saying ‘I told you so.’ That’s why I called you for a ride. I didn’t need a third lecture about what a loser I am when it comes to boys. If Mac had her way, we’d all be entering a convent after high school.” Ginger shook her head. “Okay, a little extreme, but you know what I mean.”
“She’s definitely the Uptight Musketeer,” Laura agreed, though she knew a lot of Mac’s fears and defensive behavior were tied to Jeanie Mackenzie’s death. “But maybe we should cut her some slack. I mean, her dad married Honey Potts not that long after she lost her mom. Mac’s trying so hard to protect her own emotions that I think it spills over to us sometimes. She doesn’t want us getting hurt.”
“You may be right,” Ginger agreed, then went on to explain, “but I hate it when she acts disapproving, especially when it comes to my picking the wrong guys. She might not mean to come down hard, but she can.”
Laura glanced sideways at her. “You weren’t afraid to talk to me, though.”
“Are you kidding?” Ginger snorted indelicately. “I knew you’d totally understand.”
“I’m no Mac, that’s for sure,” Laura remarked. “I guess I’d rather get my heart broken than never let myself feel anything at all.”
“Amen to that.”
They were inching closer to the campus of PFP every minute, and Laura could see cars unloading girls of various heights and ages, so that it looked like an army of females in plaid skirts and white shirts swarmed the sidewalks and grassy yard between the redbrick buildings.
Laura swallowed the lump in her throat, tightening her hold on the steering wheel the nearer they got. The butterflies went wild in her belly as her nerves did somersault after somersault. Her gaze darted right and left, seeking Jo Lynn’s shiny Audi, praying she’d luck out and miss running into her all day. Though that would be tricky, considering they only had thirty girls in their whole senior class. Laura figured that with her luck, she’d end up having several courses with the Queen of Mean. God forbid. How the hell could she handle that?
I will survive, she told herself, inventing another mantra. I will rise up and stand strong against my enemy.
Who was she kidding? A vengeful Jo Lynn Bidwell would frighten the pants off the Angel of Death.
“Have you got any Tums?” she asked Ginger, feeling decidedly queasy.
“Girlfriend, I’ve been sucking down Pepto all morning. You want the bottle?”
“Please.”
While Ginger rummaged around in her bag, Laura pulled the car into the semicircular drive in front of the school, heading for the senior parking lot—which was when she spotted the burnt orange Corvette idling near the sidewalk drop-off.
Her heart leapt in her chest.
Avery is here?
Had he come to see her, maybe wish her good luck on her first day back before he headed over to Caldwell? Well, he’d shown up at Hobby on Saturday, so it wasn’t that farfetched, was it?
Grinning with anticipation, she edged her Mercedes ahead, slowed by the barely moving parade of vehicles in front of them, hoping she could pull up alongside him so she could lay on her horn and let him know she was there.
“Isn’t that the Ratfink?” Ginger asked, handing over the pink Pepto-Bismol bottle, which Laura stuck in her lap between her thighs.
“Looks like it,” Laura said gleefully, but her hopeful smile died as the passenger door of the ’Vette flew open and none other than Camie Lindell emerged. The skinny brunette leaned back inside the car for a lingering moment before she shut the door and scooted off.
“Oh, hell,” Ginger said, exactly what Laura was thinking.
“Are you okay, sweetie? You’re awfully pale all of a sudden. Seriously, are you breathing?”
“I don’t know,” Laura got out in a strangled voice.
Wa
s it possible to breathe with a knife stuck straight in your heart?
The Escalade directly ahead of her moved forward, giving Laura enough space to surge forward in the Roadster, coming up right alongside the Corvette and boxing it in. “Are you insane?” Ginger asked as Laura threw her car into park and unlocked the doors. “I know what you’re thinking, but it’s not a good time for a public smackdown. You’ve gotta resist the urge.”
But Laura wasn’t listening. She had her seat belt off in a flash, grabbed the Pepto, opened the door, and scrambled out of the Mercedes as fast as she could, striding around its hood and marching straight up to the driver’s-side door of Avery’s sports car. Horns honked all around her, and someone shouted, “Hey, don’t hold the line up!” But she didn’t care. It was all she could do to keep breathing as she rapped on the window and Avery slowly rolled it down.
“Laura, hey,” he said, looking surprised. “You know, I meant to call you yesterday, but I kinda got tied up.”
“Tied up, huh?” She leaned down so they were eye to eye. “Did you make Camie Lindell wear her mother’s deb gloves too?”
“What?” His face clouded over. “You’ve got it all wrong. Camie called, she was upset, and—”
“Doesn’t all this screwing around give you a guilty conscience?” Laura cut him off, hardly able to hold back her angry tears. “Or maybe heartburn?” she said, her hands shaking as she took the lid off the Pepto and dumped the slimy pink contents of the bottle right into his lap.
“Jesus, Laura! What’s the matter with you?”
But she didn’t stick around to chat. She hauled ass back to her car, figuring he had nothing to say—or yell—that she’d want to hear. All she knew for sure was that she’d given him all she had and he’d tossed it back in her face again.
“My God, are you okay?” Ginger asked the minute she got back behind the wheel of her Merc. “What happened?”
“I let Avery have your Pepto.”
“You let him have it?”
The Debs Page 13
