by Meg Cabot
“Jean,” he said. “I don’t care about Petra.”
“What do you mean, you don’t care about her?” I asked, startled. “You love her.”
“No,” Zach said. “No, I don’t. I never did.”
“Yes, you did.” I sat up a little straighter—then winced, as the motion jostled my sore knee. Still, this was too important to let pass. “You told me you loved her—”
“No,” Zach said again. “You told me that I loved her. Because that fool Robert said so. All I ever said was that there was a time when I found Petra fetching. You were the one who kept going on about it. But the truth is, there’s someone else I’ve been finding a lot more fetching for some time now.”
“There is?” I stared up at him in confusion…and dismay. “You never told me that.”
“No, I didn’t,” he admitted. “I thought it was easier to just let you go on thinking I loved Petra. Because I could tell you were still freaked over whatever had happened to you, back in Iowa, with that guy. I didn’t think you were ready—”
“Ready?” I shook my head. What was he talking about? “Ready for what?”
“For me to tell you the truth,” Zach said. He was gazing at me so intently, his green eyes seemed bright as the moon had, outside. “That I had stopped liking Petra the minute I met you.” When I continued to look at him blankly, he said, “Out there in that same damned gazebo—the day you arrived. Don’t tell me you don’t remember.”
“Me?” I still didn’t think I understood him correctly. “Me?”
“Of course you,” he said, sounding incredulous. “Jean—how could you not have seen it? Tory saw it—why do you think she was so angry? All this time, you’ve been telling her—me—everyone you knew—that you and I are just friends, when just friends was the last thing I ever wanted to be with you. And Tory knew it. She could tell what everyone else could, just by looking at me—everyone but you, apparently. That I was head over heels for you….” His voice trailed off as he looked down at me. “You still don’t believe me, do you?”
How could I believe him? How could this be happening—to me, of all people?
“That’s what I was afraid of,” he said, with a sigh. “I guess you’ve given me no other choice.”
“No other choice but…what?” I squeaked, alarmed.
“This,” he said.
And the next thing I knew, his lips were on mine.
I suppose for our first kiss, it was fairly staggering. Well, okay, maybe someone like Tory, who is light-years ahead of me sophistication-wise, could be kissed in such a manner and not completely lose her head.
I, on the other hand, could not. It wasn’t as if he snatched me up and molded my body to his, like Dylan had, the first time he kissed me. Zach’s was the gentlest kiss you could ever imagine. He was barely even touching me, except for where his fingers rested on my shoulders.
But while it might have been gentle, it was long. What you might even call lingering.
And I felt it all the way down to my toes.
Oh, I felt it.
When he lifted his head again to look at me, I barely noticed. That’s because little birds and stars were flying around in front of my eyes, I was so dazzled by the way his mouth had felt on mine.
Thank God I was sitting down. If I’d been standing when he’d kissed me, I’m sure I would have collapsed. I felt as if I were melting. From the inside.
“Now,” he asked me, in his deep, quiet voice, “do you believe me?”
But it was hard to formulate a reply, because my lips were tingling so much.
“Okay,” Zach said, when I didn’t respond right away. “Let me try that again.”
And he leaned down to kiss me some more.
This time when he raised his head, birds, stars, and even little rainbows seemed to float around in front of me. It was as if someone had spilled a box of Lucky Charms in zero gravity.
“So?” Zach asked. “Do you believe me now that it’s you I love—you that I’ve always loved, ever since that day you spat Long Island iced tea all over me? Do you believe me that I’m tired of trying not to kiss you? Do you believe that I really, really don’t want to be just friends anymore?”
“Uh-huh,” I said, nodding like an idiot.
And then I put my arms around his neck and pulled him toward me. And kissed him some more.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
My knee turned out to be deeply bruised, but not sprained. The doctor said the bruise probably went all the way down to the bone, but that it would fade. Someday.
Sort of like, I hoped, my memory of what had happened that night in the gazebo would fade.
Well, not all my memories of that night, of course.
When I went back to Enchantments to thank Lisa for all she’d done for me, and to tell her what had happened—why, for instance, I was using crutches—she’d smiled and said, “So. You did it.”
I didn’t have to ask what she meant.
“Yes,” I’d said. “Yes, I did.”
She told me to sleep with lavender beneath my pillow. That it would sweeten my dreams.
It didn’t.
But it definitely made my sheets smell better.
What helped, actually, was time. Time and, of course, my friends.
Aunt Evelyn and Uncle Ted were horrified when they heard about what Tory had done to me. But she was still their daughter and, well, they had to stand by her.
Even if she was a total whack job.
I could sympathize. And it wasn’t as if she’d been trying to kill me.
I’m pretty sure.
Tory had just meant to drink a few drops of my blood, absorb whatever it was she was so convinced I’d inherited that she hadn’t, force me to drink some noxious potion she’d concocted from some toadstools off a gravestone, and then let me go.
At least, that’s what she told her parents would have happened, if Zach hadn’t barged in.
I guess I believe her. I mean, it’s the same story Lindsey and Gretchen told THEIR parents.
But they, of course, were hardly likely to admit they’d been accomplices to attempted murder.
Really, the only question I had about the whole thing was…well, the one I put to Zach the next day. I was home from the doctor’s office with an ice pack on my knee, sitting in the den in front of the TV while Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner were at Tory’s therapists…with Tory, of course.
That question was: How had he known? About what was going on in the gazebo.
“I was up,” he said. “I couldn’t sleep.” He leveled a wry smile in my direction. “I think you know why.”
“That,” I said, for what seemed like the millionth time, “was Tory’s doll, not—”
“—yours. I know. Gretchen said as much last night, remember? Anyway, I was up, and…I don’t remember exactly—oh, I heard a cat crying. It must have been Mouche—”
“It was,” I said. Mouche was safely back with Alice, who’d been kept from the knowledge that her beloved pet had been used in such a dangerous manner.
“Right. Well, that’s when I looked down and noticed the lights in the gazebo. And I just thought it was…weird. You know, that there should be candles burning in the gazebo. Also that Mouche should be out so late. So I went downstairs and hopped the wall between our two gardens to take a look. As I walked over, I heard that crazy stuff Tory was saying to you. Then I walked in and saw…well, you know what I saw.”
I nodded. Yes. I knew what he’d seen.
And also what he’d heard.
Mouche, yes. But also, me. He’d heard me.
He didn’t know it. He would probably never know it. But that was all right.
For now.
“But if you knew that doll wasn’t mine all along,” I asked him, “why didn’t you say anything? At the dance, I mean?”
“You left so fast, how could I? I tried to come by later, too, but Petra said you’d gone to bed. Anyway, I knew you hadn’t made the doll,” he said, “because I know you.
You always tell the truth—well, except for that fib about buying that book for your sister Courtney’s birthday.” I blushed—prettily, I hoped. But still. “Which you eventually fessed up to. You admitted you made the Dylan doll, and it was easy to tell the two dolls hadn’t been made by the same person.”
I should hope so. I mean, I totally got an A in sewing in the seventh grade. Whereas Tory’s Zach doll…well, you could tell it had been made by someone who’d never so much as woven a pot holder.
“So I knew you hadn’t tried to put a love spell on me using a stupid doll,” Zach went on. “But…well, earlier in the day, I did find something kind of weird in my backpack—”
And he pulled, from the pocket of his jeans, the little bag Lisa had made for me.
“That’s for protection,” I said. “I was worried Tory might try to do something to you. You’re supposed to keep it with you, and then nothing bad will happen to you.”
He looked down at the bag, and nodded.
“I suspected something like that,” he said, returning it to his pocket. “But I wasn’t sure.”
Then I realized what he meant.
“Wait…you didn’t think it was a love potion, or something, did you?” I asked, turning crimson.
“Well,” he said. “I was having trouble getting you out of my head. So it did cross my mind that maybe—”
“Zach!” I cried, sitting up—and jostling my knee. “I would never—I told you, I learned my lesson with Dylan! I will never, ever do another love spell for as long as I live.”
“I know,” he said, with a laugh. “I loved you way before you ever had a chance to put a spell on me. I loved you at I’ve never been to Long Island.”
I couldn’t keep a big goofy grin from my face.
“I loved you at I like seals,” I admitted.
He grinned back. “And anyway,” he went on, “you know I don’t believe all that witchcraft mumbo-jumbo. I told you that.”
“I know you don’t,” I said. “But you have to admit…” How could I put this? “The whole thing with Dylan—”
“You said it yourself. He was a guy primed to fall in love, and you showed up at just the right time.”
“Yes,” I said. “But then how do you explain me pushing you out of the way of that bike messenger?”
“Same thing. Right place, wrong time,” Zach said.
“And last night? Zach, how can you even begin to explain last night?”
“Which part? The part where your psycho cousin tried to drain your blood so she could inherit some of your dead grandma’s magic? Or the part where I rescued you?”
“The second part,” I said. “How did you know to look out the window right then?”
“I told you,” he said. “I heard Alice’s cat.”
The cat? Or me?
Or…Branwen?
“Anyway,” Zach said, with a shrug, “we’re even now, you know. I no longer owe you eternal servitude. You saved me from being run over by a bike, and now I saved you from your psychotic cousin. And speaking of psychotic, what happened to that Dylan guy, anyway?”
“The Gardiners put him on a plane back to Iowa this morning,” I said, with a sigh.
I realized I would never get Zach to admit there might be such a thing as magic. Oh, well. He’d find out for himself, eventually. If he hung around with me long enough, anyway. Of that, I had no doubt.
“They found him staying at the Waldorf,” I said. “Dylan, I mean. Tory used one of their credit cards to get him a room—not to mention the plane ticket. He spent five hundred dollars on room service and pay-per-view alone.”
“Wow,” Zach said. “You sure know how to pick ’em.”
I threw one of the pillows from the couch at him. He caught it with a laugh and said, “You must be feeling better.” Then he settled onto the couch beside me—careful of my sore knee—and leaned over until his face was just an inch or two from mine.
“Hey, Jean,” he said, much more softly.
I looked up at his lips. “Yes?”
“I have a feeling”—now Zach was looking down at my lips—“no one’s going to be calling you Jinx anymore. I think from now on, your luck’s going to be taking a turn for the better.”
Then he kissed me.
Oddly enough, it turned out Zach was right. About my luck taking a turn for the better after that. For instance, the Chapman School scholarship that Zach told me about?
Well, I auditioned for it.
And I got it.
Then, of course, there was the awkward part…asking Aunt Evelyn and Uncle Ted if I could stay with them for the next school year.
But from the way they reacted, it was clear it had never occurred to them that I might even have wanted to go back to Hancock. I was a member of the family now—their family—and I was welcome to stay as long as I wanted.
This might have been on account of the fact that it was Tory, in the end, who left…for juvenile boot camp, where she got to spend the rest of her sophomore year, as well as her summer vacation. And then, when she got back—her dyed black hair gone, and a new fuzz of her natural blond hair covering her head like the fluff on a baby chick—her parents had a surprise: they’d enrolled her in a “specialty” boarding school, instead of Chapman, for her junior year.
And even though Tory accused them of shipping her off to military school, that wasn’t true. Not at all. The school they sent her to was a beautiful camp in—of all places—rural Iowa, where students did things like run a farm, go on nature hikes, and basically challenge themselves in ways they’d never been challenged before. In other words…
They learned to embrace their fears.
On a daily basis.
It wasn’t easy for Aunt Evelyn and Uncle Ted to send Tory there. But, as Aunt Evelyn put it, she had Teddy and Alice to worry about, and she didn’t feel like Tory was exactly the best role model in the world for them.
And the nice thing about the place where they sent Tory? She could stay with my family on the weekends.
That’s right. Tory got to visit Hancock every Saturday and Sunday, and see what being a kid in a preacher’s house was all about.
According to Chanelle, to whom Tory occasionally wrote, Tory found life in my house even harder than boot camp.
She did have one person to comfort her in her misery, however.
With Dylan coming home every weekend from Iowa State, and Tory there in Hancock every weekend, well…I guess it was only natural that love would bloom.
At least if Courtney’s last e-mail—complaining that Dylan and Tory are constantly being busted by Mom for making out in the TV room—is to be believed.
And despite what Zach might think, I had nothing to do with it. After all, I promised Zach that I’ve sworn off love spells.
I really meant it, too. Because the best, most long-lasting love has a magic all its own, and doesn’t need any help from witchcraft.
Zach was right about one other thing, too:
No one calls me Jinx anymore. Now it’s just Jean. Plain old Jean.
And I actually like it that way.
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to Beth Ader, Jennifer Brown,
Michele Jaffe, Laura Langlie, Amanda Maciel,
Abigail McAden, and especially Benjamin Egnatz
About the Author
MEG CABOT is the author of many bestselling, critically acclaimed books for teens, including the Princess Diaries books, the Mediator series, the 1-800-Where-R-You series, ALL-AMERICAN GIRL, READY OR NOT, TEEN IDOL, AVALON HIGH, HOW TO BE POPULAR, and PANTS ON FIRE, as well as NICOLA AND THE VISCOUNT and VICTORIA AND THE ROGUE. She also writes books for adults, including THE BOY NEXT DOOR, BOY MEETS GIRL, EVERY BOY'S GOT ONE, SIZE 12 IS NOT FAT, SIZE 14 IS NOT FAT EITHER, QUEEN OF BABBLE, and QUEEN OF BABBLE IN THE BIG CITY. She currently lives in Key West and New York City with her husband and a primary one-eyed cat named Henrietta, as well as various backup cats.
To read Meg's diary and learn more about her b
ooks, visit Meg's website at www.megcabot.com.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.
Books by
MEG CABOT
ALL-AMERICAN GIRL
READY OR NOT: AN ALL-AMERICAN GIRL NOVEL
TEEN IDOL
AVALON HIGH
AVALON HIGH: CORONATION #1:
THE MERLIN PROPHECY(MANGA)
HOW TO BE POPULAR
PANTS ON FIRE
JINX
NICOLA AND THE VISCOUNT
VICTORIA AND THE ROGUE
THE BOY NEXT DOOR
BOY MEETS GIRL
EVERY BOY’S GOT ONE
SIZE 12 IS NOT FAT
SIZE 14 IS NOT FAT EITHER
QUEEN OF BABBLE
QUEEN OF BABBLE IN THE BIG CITY
BIG BONED
The Mediator Books:
THE MEDIATOR 1: SHADOWLAND
THE MEDIATOR 2: NINTH KEY
THE MEDIATOR 3: REUNION
THE MEDIATOR 4: DARKEST HOUR
THE MEDIATOR 5: HAUNTED
THE MEDIATOR 6: TWILIGHT
The 1-800-Where-R-You Books:
WHEN LIGHTNING STRIKES
CODE NAME CASSANDRA
SAFE HOUSE
SANCTUARY
MISSING YOU
THE PRINCESS DIARIES
THE PRINCESS DIARIES, VOLUME II:
PRINCESS IN THE SPOTLIGHT
THE PRINCESS DIARIES, VOLUME III:
PRINCESS IN LOVE
THE PRINCESS DIARIES, VOLUME IV:
PRINCESS IN WAITING
VALENTINE PRINCESS: A PRINCESS DIARIES BOOK
(VOLUME IV AND A QUARTER)
THE PRINCESS DIARIES, VOLUME IV AND A HALF:
PROJECT PRINCESS
THE PRINCESS DIARIES, VOLUME V:
PRINCESS IN PINK
THE PRINCESS DIARIES, VOLUME VI:
PRINCESS IN TRAINING
THE PRINCESS PRESENT: A PRINCESS DIARIES BOOK
(VOLUME VI AND A HALF)
THE PRINCESS DIARIES, VOLUME VII:
PARTY PRINCESS
