An Ideal Boyfriend

by Mette Ivie Harrison

  Of course, Dad still wishes that I hadn’t broken up with Laura. He thought she would make the perfect wife for the son he thinks—or maybe just wishes—he had. Trudy laughs too loud and smiles too much and Dad thinks she’s not good enough for me. Oh, he knows she has luck and all that. But he thinks that Laura was the one who had the sort of skills I would need for success in business. Not to mention the contacts and the understanding of how money works.

  I remember when I told Dad that first weekend that I had broken up with Laura. I tried to get it over with quick, like yanking off a bandaid. I blurted it out in the kitchen while he was getting a beer and I had intended to flee up to my room afterward. I should have known it would never work that way.

  Dad put back the beer, then had me come into his office and sit in the couch across from his big leather chair. He didn’t say anything for a long moment. I wanted to run away, but I made myself stay and stare back at him.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  I shrugged. “I’m sorry, but it just wasn’t right,” I said. “Sir,” I added because that always made Dad happy to hear. He liked respect, even if it was from his son.

  “Why not? Did you do something to hurt her? You can apologize, you know, Rob. You can make things right with her if you try.”

  I didn’t want to try. So I said nothing.

  “I know her father and her mother. I see them both nearly every weekend. Do you know that? I almost had them ready to invest. Do you know what this will do to the business?”

  “I’m sorry, sir,” I said.

  “What should I say to them?” he asked.

  “It just wasn’t right,” I said again. “It’s not her fault, though. She’s a great girl.” I tried to sound positive. “I’m sure she’ll get over me soon enough.”

  “You’re sure about this, Rob? You’re not going to regret it in a few weeks?”

  “I’ve never been more sure, sir,” I told Dad then.

  “And I’m not going to hear later on that there is some other story behind this, something embarrassing you’re not telling me?”

  “No, sir,” I said. I was going to ask Trudy out, but I hadn’t done it while Laura and I were still dating. I’d talked to Trudy, but it hadn’t been anything more than that. I couldn’t help how I felt about her already, but no one could say I was two-timing either of them.

  Dad hesitated. “Is it because—you don’t feel like you measure up to Laura?”

  “I don’t know what you mean, sir.”

  Dad made a motion with his hands. “I just have the feeling that you are—well, drowning. That you’re over your head in water and you don’t know how to swim.”

  Was he talking about luck? “I’m fine, sir,” I said.

  “She’s not better than you. I hope you know that.”

  I stared at him again.

  “Your mother says you have an inferiority complex. She thinks that I don’t give you enough positive feedback, that I don’t tell you often enough that you’re a great son, that I’m proud of you and am confident about how your future will play out.”

  “My future?” I said.

  “Sure, as my son. With the business. You’re going to inherit all of it. You have luck and money and any girl would be glad to have you. You don’t have to go for the easiest choice. That’s all I mean.”

  I gritted my teeth. “That is not what this is about. I just don’t think Laura is right for me. She’s—her personality doesn’t fit with mine.” How could he not see that, how she stifled me and I never said a word when she was around unless it was to agree with her?

  “You know your grandfather—he doesn’t have to be a millstone around your neck. You don’t have to think that the Chiltern name has anything to do with him. We’ve lived his legacy down and now we have our own.”

  “This isn’t about Grandpa,” I said. “This is about me.” But he couldn’t see that. Everything was about Grandpa to him. He was living his life through me, and he couldn’t see that I wasn’t him. He was just like Laura, I thought then. Only I couldn’t dump my dad and get a new one.

  Mom tried to patch things up between us a bit. We didn’t talk much, but at least we grunted at each other. He didn’t leave the room every time I walked into it and I didn’t try to do all my homework upstairs so that I didn’t bump into him. But it was strained, and it didn’t get any better when I brought Trudy home for the first time. She looked pretty, I thought, but she was wearing homemade clothes and she didn’t have her nails done just right or her hair cut by the right salon. She looked perfect to me, but Dad isn’t me, as I know darn well.

  Dad watched her all the time, and I could see he was waiting for her to use the wrong fork or something. But she didn’t. She was too lucky for that kind of mistake. She talked with all of us about the school and how she liked it here in Vermont, the trees and the cold air at night. Harmless stuff. But if Laura had been there, she’d have talked about politics and the economy, the kinds of things Dad cared about.

  Dad was stiff when he walked her to the limo that was waiting to take her back to her dorm room. I kissed her lightly on the cheek and he turned away, like it disgusted him. Finally, we went back inside.

  Mom put a hand on his arm and whispered in his ear.

  Then Dad got a beer and came up to my room. He stood in the doorway. “I don’t want you to think I don’t like this new girl. She’s pretty and she seems very down to earth. I suspect you feel very comfortable with her.”

  Maybe he was right. Maybe I did love her because she made me feel comfortable. But is there anything wrong with that?

  I asked her on Monday how she’d survived my dad’s glares. I apologized for him.

  She laughed. “Your parents really weren’t that bad,” she assured me. “Just a little different. We’ll get used to each other in time.”

  “You aren’t going to run all the way back home to Tennessee?” I asked.

  “I’ve never been much good at running,” said Trudy.

  “And what about me coming to meet your parents sometime? You know my dad’s offer about the jet wasn’t a joke. He could send us down in it anytime he wanted it. He would probably figure out a way to write it off as a tax expense, even if he’s not on board.”

  Trudy’s face darkened for the first time since I had known her. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “Why not?” I felt a cold pit in my stomach. Was she going to break up with me? Because of my parents? I didn’t think I could bear that.

  “Because I don’t want you to go there. I don’t want you to see them,” she said.

  “Are you ashamed of me?” I asked, the cold spreading out from my stomach and down my arms and legs into my fingers and toes. This was it. This was the part where she said that she knew the truth, that she had always known the truth about my luck, and that she had only been pretending to like me. Because she was nice to everyone, and so she’d been nice to me.

  “Of course I’m not ashamed of you,” Trudy said, and lifted my hand to her face, holding it there with her own hand. “It’s just that you wouldn’t be comfortable there and neither would they.”

  There was that word again: comfortable. It stung. “Maybe they’ll be more comfortable with me than you think. You could let us try.”

  “Is it just about the forks? I can live without two forks, you know,” I said, teasing. “I’m not as spoiled as you think.”

  Her eyes twinkled and her mouth relaxed into the smile I loved so much. “Oh, Rob,” she said, and kissed me gently on the cheek.

  My heart jumped into my throat for just a moment, then fell back down. “I’m serious,” I said and looked deeply into her eyes.

  “And if they don’t have any forks at all? If they just use their fingers?” She acted like it was a joke, but the smile on her face was crooked.

  “Hey, I’ve heard certain foods taste better when eaten with fingers. My parents go to very fancy restaurants where they charge a thousand dollars to let them eat w
ith their fingers.” I mimed my parents’ dainty way of eating with their fingers.

  Trudy laughed, and this time I thought it was for real. “Actually, my parents do have forks. Three of them, one for each of us,” she said, grinning. “Although I think my mom’s is missing two tines.”

  “I’ll get a new one. Just for me,” I said. “Not new or anything. I’ll break one of the tines, just to make them feel comfortable. You know.”

  I thought I would get a laugh at that, but no. I got a long, thoughtful pause instead.

  “Rob, you really can’t understand what it’s like to live without luck,” she said. “It’s more than just not having money. Their whole lives are about working hard and getting very little in return. They’re happy for me that I’m lucky, but they don’t know what to say to me anymore. It’s like we speak completely different languages.”

  “That’s the way it is with me and my parents, too.” That was the moment when I might have admitted the truth to her, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. The risk was too high.

  I tell myself it was because things between us were still too new. Or because she wasn’t ready yet. Maybe that’s true, but in the year plus since then, I still haven’t gotten up the courage to do it. There have been dozens of moments when I could have done it, but I didn’t.

  The way she talked about her parents, it was pretty clear how sorry she felt for them. And how much she wanted to avoid being with them. She wrote them real paper letters in the mail because they didn’t have good internet access and couldn’t have afforded it even if they did. But she didn’t go visit them when she was out of school. She always had excuses about why not.

  “You’ll let me meet them someday, won’t you?” I asked softly. “I’ll bring the forks, I swear it.”

  “Sure. Someday,” said Trudy, and she put a hand around my arm and tucked her head under my chin.

  I didn’t want to say anything to stop that. It felt so right, you know? I felt lucky with her there, like the luckiest guy in the world. Even if it wasn’t true.

  Chapter 3: Trudy

  Mabel Marchmont and Arlee Basildon are my best friends at St. James. Arlee is from a luck family, but one that was never particularly well-known or well-respected. She has great grandfathers who were extremely successful pirates, but you can see how that wouldn’t necessarily make her in the same group as people like the Chilterns and the Cavershams and the Phipps. Mabel is like me, one of those weird flukes who was born to a family that had never shown any luck before. She has ancestors from China, South Africa, and Siam, which explains her coloring, her almond eyes and her black hair. She and I became friends because we were the two who didn’t get picked to be partners in biology. We both tend to go for low profile, “scholarship kid” strategies at school.

  Arlee, on the other hand, has been treated like a nothing for so long that she makes herself stand out so no one can ignore her. For one thing, she changes her hair color every week, so I honestly have no idea what is actually natural for her. This week, she’s got bright orange on one side and blue on the other. She also likes to wear outrageous clothes. She spends hours on end putting things together, mostly for the disgusted reaction she tends to get in the halls. Today she is wearing a short, fluffy skirt and funky tights with a plain white shirt and a jeans jacket which is her one concession to November weather up north here.

  “Did either of you see this?” asked Arlee, handing us a piece of paper on Monday. It was the flyer about the science fair for this year, which was about four weeks away.

  “I saw it,” said Mabel, shrugging.

  “Look at the prize they’re offering this year. It’s in conjunction with Excel Pharmaceutical. Think what we could do with one hundred thousand dollars,” said Arlee. “I could stop asking my parents for a car. Or anything, basically. Clothing budget, money for going out, dance lessons.”

  Dance lessons was the flavor of the week for Arlee. I’d never heard her talk about wanting them before. But the rest was a constant source of friction with her parents. You’d think former pirates would be more liberal with their daughter’s education, but they were real tight wads.

  “Excel Pharmaceutical—isn’t that the company that own all those luck spas? The ones for the people who already have luck? They’re supposed to make sure that their luck remains high, and that they have time away from the luckless who might suck up their luck energy?” asked Mabel.

  I thought about what one hundred thousand dollars could do for my parents. A new house maybe? Or maybe they’d invest it somewhere. Either way, with their luck, they’d end up losig it when the stock market fell or there was a fluke tornado in the area. It’s hard to help people who have no luck.

  “Why do people who were lucky waste their money on something so obviously stupid?” I asked. There wasn’t any way that unlucky people drained luck from lucky people. It was a total myth.

  Arlee made a face. “We all know that lucky people aren’t necessarily smart.”

  “Maybe the person who owns the company is just lucky enough they keep making money at it,” said Mabel.

  “Yeah, well, you know whose family owns Excel Pharmaceutical?” asked Arlee.

  I shook my head. I’d seen all the ads on TV and the internet, but I’d never bothered to look any farther into it. I had no idea.

  “Laura Chevely,” she said. “Not her parents, but cousins twice removed or something like that. It’s part of the reason that they’re offering such a big prize at St. James.”

  Laura Chevely, I thought, and shivered a little. I tried to stay away from her. While she had gone through a long list of boyfriends after Rob, she did not have a single girlfriend. Any girl who had ever tried to be friendly with her got used up and disposed of. Last year, it had been Sarah Cross. Laura had stolen her boyfriend for a week, used her family yacht for something that ended up ruining it, gave Sarah a complex about being fat and eventually an eating disorder, and taken her job at the yearbook before deciding she was too busy to keep it up. All that in about two weeks.

  “Anything to do with Laura Chevely is a good reason for the rest of us to stay out of it,” I said. “She probably thinks that money has her name on it.”

  “Laura Chevely? Win a science award? I think that would be beneath her,” said Mabel.

  “Well, it will be interesting to see who tries for it. It will have to be someone who’s brave enough to dare to cross Laura,” said Arlee.

  “Or someone whose family is luckier than hers,” said Mabel.

  “Yeah, and how many people are there like that? Three? Maybe Rob Chiltern and Art Goring. I don’t know who else,” said Arlee.

  I said goodbye to Mabel and Arlee and headed over to my locker. I was surprised to see Art Goring hanging around it. He’s Rob’s best friend, which is weird because as far as I can tell, they are complete opposites. Art is tall and blonde and geeky, but somehow he still has girls flocking to him—probably his luck. But he has no idea what to do with them. He makes out with them when he can, then ignores them, and pretty soon they dump him. I think he just has too much other stuff going on in his head.

  “I haven’t seen Rob yet today,” I told him.

  “What? Oh, Rob. Actually, I wanted to talk to you, Trudy,” said Art.

  I stopped moving and stared at Art. “Why?” I said after a long moment. Art and I only ever spent time together when we were both with Rob. I couldn’t recall Art ever even speaking to me without Rob around.

  “Ever think about how to get more luck?” he asked abruptly—very Art.

  “Uh—not really,” I said.

  He peered up at me around his glasses. “I guess you have so much you could give donations or something. Like people who donate blood. There should be a Red Cross or something for luck,” said Art.

  “You know, I think I’d actually be happy to give some away,” I said.

  “It’s easy to say that luck doesn’t matter when you have it,” said Art.

  I thought about my parents and h
ow badly things had gone between us the last two years since I started school at St. James. I wrote to them by snail mail since they didn’t have regular internet access, but it was less than once a month. I hadn’t seen them all summer, had figured out internships and summer classes so I had excuses not to go home. I loved my parents and I knew that they loved me. But I didn’t want them to be embarrassed by the way they would be treated here. Their life was bad enough. They didn’t need to be sneered at, too.

  I closed my locker and started to walk off. I didn’t think Art would notice. He seemed like he was talking to himself more than to me.

  But he ran after me and put a hand on my shoulder. “Trudy, please,” he said.

  I turned around, thinking I would make an excuse to get to class. But I’d never seen Art look desperate before. There were beads of sweat sprouting up along his hairline and I could see a spot on his lower lip that had been chewed raw.

  “Don’t you think it matters who controls access to luck?” he asked.

  “It’s just a waste of time, Art. Whoever is trying to sell you something on the internet to give you more luck, it isn’t real.”

  “It’s not the internet,” said Art.

  I had been walking down the academic hall toward my English class, but Art moved in front of me and led me back down the hall to the alcove above the stairs, behind the girls’ bathroom.

  I realized as soon as we stopped there that this was where couples came to make out. It was such a cliché that I’d never have been caught dead here with Rob. Art had been here plenty of times with his girlfriends, but there couldn’t be any mistaking what Art and I were to each other, surely. Not by Art or by anyone else.

  Still—yuck!

  “Art, you’re going to make me late for class,” I complained.

  “Trudy, it started out as a science fair project idea last year, but I ended up not turning it in because I realized that if I revealed my work, I wouldn’t have control over how it was used.”