Wrong in All the Right Ways

by Tiffany Brownlee

  At dinner, all I can think about is not embarrassing myself or letting anyone catch on to any romantic subtext here. For Dylan and me to keep things a secret, I need tonight to go as smoothly as possible.

  “You ever been to the batting cages near City Park?” my dad asks as he takes a piece of garlic toast from the basket in the center of the table. “I used to spend so much time there after the injury. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to hit like I used to, but I couldn’t lose the skill, you know?”

  “I know what you mean. When I broke my hand diving for a catch last season, I thought I wasn’t going to be able to play again, but thankfully, I’ve recovered and I’ll be back on that field when the season starts in the spring.”

  “Enough baseball talk,” I say as I feel Dylan’s foot tap mine under the table. He’s not playing footsie, but rather warning me when I’m getting too close to Keegan, who’s sitting on my right. I wish he would stop monitoring my every move.

  “Yes, I agree. Let’s talk about goals and ambitions,” my dad says as he takes a sip from his wineglass. This was bound to come up sooner or later. “Graduation is approaching rapidly, as I’m sure you know. Now, Emma’s keeping her university picks a secret—even though I’m sure UCLA is at the top of her list—so we’re dying to hear someone else’s post-graduation plans.”

  “UCLA, huh? Trying to keep it in the family, I see.”

  “We’re trying.” My dad and Keegan share a laugh, but I don’t join in.

  “Well, for starters, I’m going to go the college route, too,” Keegan begins.

  “Good job. I knew I was going to like you,” Dad continues.

  “I’ve been corresponding with USC, and I’m pretty sure that I’ll be able to secure a baseball scholarship from them if I play a clean season. So that’s where I’m putting all my eggs.”

  “Any thoughts on what you want to major in?” Mom asks with a smile. I’m sure she’s just as happy as I am that we’ve moved on from the subject of baseball. “Emma’s going to be an English major. She has her heart set on publishing a book someday.”

  “As smart as she is, I’m sure she’ll have no problem getting there.” I see Dylan jealously snarl at Keegan’s comment. “But to answer your question, business with a concentration in entrepreneurship. If I don’t go pro, my buddy and I want to start up a sports rehabilitation center for injured players. When my hand was broken, I relied heavily on my trainer to get me back to where I needed to be.” He pauses for a minute to finish chewing his food. “Plus, I look good in a suit.” My mom and dad chuckle at his comment, and I think I even see a grin pass over Dylan’s lips.

  “You’ve got a good head on your shoulders, son. And I wish you the best in your endeavors.”

  “Thank you, sir. By the way, Mrs. Ellenburg, this pasta is divine.” He’s really turning on the charm, and my parents are swooning. Even I find myself falling for his alluring personality as the night progresses.

  “So what about you?” he says to Dylan. “Are you into baseball, too?”

  “Not really. I’m into the arts. Have been since before the Ellenburgs started to foster me.”

  “Fostered? I thought you were adopted.”

  “No. Not yet, anyway.”

  “Well, I’m sure a lot of people are rooting for you. Everyone at school loves you, from what I hear.” I see Dylan’s hard looks soften, and I can tell that he’s getting sucked into Keegan’s gentle ways, too. “There’s been talk about asking you to paint a mural to commemorate those who died in the school shooting here a few decades ago.”

  Cedar Pointe fell victim to a school shooting back in the mid-eighties. At an assembly during my freshman year, we were told that three students ran through the school at lunch and killed eighteen students and permanently disabled five others. Another tragic random act of violence.

  “Really?” Dylan’s eyes light up when he hears this. I know he saw the video clip about the shooting during his orientation, and from what I heard, he was very emotional about it.

  “Yeah. I heard Principal Reed and Ms. Portman”—she’s the art teacher—“talking about it in the office the other day. They’ve seen some of your work in the art room and they’re impressed.”

  “See, Dylan?” Dad interjects. “I told you. People are dying to see your work.”

  “He’s waiting to hear back from the San Diego Museum of Art. Hopefully he’ll get picked to exhibit his pieces in their teen art showcase in December.” My mom is radiant with pride as she speaks.

  “Oh yeah. I heard of that. My twin sister, Karmin, was saying something about that a while back. She interned at the museum over the summer, and helped raise the prize money for it.” It still blows my mind that he and Karmin are twins. He had always looked older than her. “She says the turnout is amazing every year.”

  “Cool.” Dylan slinks back into his quiet state, probably from Dad mentioning the showcase.

  When dinner ends and when my mom and dad say their goodbyes to Keegan, I know the night is almost over. He did a fantastic job selling himself to my parents, but now I have to seal the deal and get him to ask me out to homecoming. I don’t really want to do it, because I know how much this is going to bother Dylan, but it’s the only way that all of this is going to work.

  “Sorry if they embarrassed you tonight or asked too many personal questions. I told them not to,” I say as I walk him back to his car.

  “Oh, it’s fine. Your parents are pretty cool.”

  “If you say so.”

  “I do. And you’re pretty spectacular yourself.” We’re halfway down the walkway when he pauses and looks in the direction of my room. “You guys have a pool house, too? That’s it, I’m coming to live here.” He laughs.

  “That’s actually my room.”

  I see Keegan’s eyes light up with curiosity. “Can I see it?”

  “Keegan Ortega, are you trying to … seduce me?”

  “No, no. Not at all. I read that bedrooms can say a lot about a person. I’m not trying to seduce anyone. I just—”

  He’s pretty cute when he’s flustered, too.

  “I’m only joking,” I say, scanning the walkway to see if anyone—namely, Dylan—is following us. “Come on.” We enter my room, and I see his eyes fly from the guitar next to my bed, to my rose-colored curtains and wallpaper, to my bookshelf, to my shoe closet, and then land on me. “So what does my room say about me?”

  “Well,” he starts as he takes a seat next to me on my bed, “I gather that you can play the guitar, your favorite color is pink, and you love to shop almost as much as you like to read.”

  “Wrong, wrong, and half wrong. Nice try, though.” I giggle. “I love antique furniture but most of it only matches with pink, not purple, which is my favorite color, and I hate shopping. I only go to hang out with my mom. But I do like to read. That one you got right.”

  “What about the guitar?” I see his eyes fall on the instrument that I haven’t picked up to play in almost six years, and then circle back to me as a wide grin creeps across his face. “Do you play?”

  To answer his question, I grab the instrument and pluck a few chords. It’s rough and out of tune, and I’m embarrassed that I even picked it up to show him how horrible I sound. “After hearing a beautiful guitar ballad at a Justin Timberlake concert, I decided to try my hand at the guitar. I took a couple lessons and called it quits shortly after. The strings hurt my fingers, and my wrist hurt from holding it in an awkward position. It was just bad.” I giggle nervously. “But I keep it around in case I want to give it another try one of these days.” Before I can finish speaking, Keegan grabs the guitar from my hands and returns to my bed. “What are you doing?”

  “Well, if you don’t play it, someone should.”

  “You can play?”

  He doesn’t answer. I watch him quickly tune the instrument by ear, and before I know it, he’s plucking and strumming away. Maybe it’s just the vibrations of sound I feel pulsing through my body, but when Keeg
an begins to play, my palms start to sweat.

  So this is how it’s supposed to look and sound, I think as a flashback memory of my guitar lessons works its way through my mind. I watch Keegan intently, his fingers moving gracefully across the strings on the neck of the guitar, creating the rainbow of sounds that I hear in my ears. There are no words to his song for me to connect with, but when Keegan’s gaze pierces into me, we’re harmonizing with each other through the melody.

  “Whoa” is all I can get out when he finishes, his last strum still trembling through me like leaves hanging from a tree on a windy spring day. “You’re really good.”

  “Thanks. Maybe I can teach you how to play sometime.”

  “Yeah. I’d like that.” It isn’t until now that I notice how little space is between us. An inch, maybe half an inch. As much as I don’t think Dylan would like it, I know I’m going to have to kiss him in order for him to ask me out.

  I should kiss him. Now is the perfect time to kiss him, right? Keegan doesn’t break my gaze, like I expect him to. Yeah, I should definitely kiss him now. But do I initiate it, or do I let him lean in first?

  In the middle of me trying to figure out the perfect moment to kiss him, I hear Keegan say, “It’s … um … getting late. I better start heading home.”

  “You’re right. It is getting late, and you probably have z’s to catch.” Get it? Catch, because you play baseball? Keegan doesn’t even chuckle. My attempt to make a baseball joke fails miserably, and the longer I let my words linger between us, the more I want to trade them in for something less lame. “Not saying that you look tired, because you don’t. You look great, actually. I mean … I’m going to stop talking now.”

  Dammit! I mentally kick myself. I missed my chance. That’s my second denial in two months. Clearly this bed is Rejection Central.

  Keegan doesn’t comment on the blabber coming out of my mouth. Instead, he just replaces my guitar and silently holds the door open for me to lead him out of my room. When we get to the end of the walkway, he leans up against the side of his truck, like he’s expecting me to plant one on him now. What was wrong with kissing me in my room, a second ago?

  “Thanks for coming. I know it was last minute, and I really appreciate it.”

  “Again, no problem. Truth be told, I’ve been trying to work up the courage to ask you out ever since I helped you with your car. I just didn’t know the right time to do it.”

  I feel a shiver of excitement run down my back. Really? But the feeling dies down when my mind shifts to Dylan. For a moment I regret pursuing him instead of Keegan. With Dylan, it’s complicated, but with Keegan, it could be so easy. My parents like him almost as much as I do. It would have been perfect. But I can’t hurt Dylan like that.

  “So,” he says, “why did you invite me over? I’m sure it wasn’t just to hear me strum on your guitar.” Our eyes connect, and when they do, another chill crawls down my back.

  “Because I like you.” When I say it, it doesn’t feel like a lie, like I told Dylan it was. It feels real.

  “Good, because I like you, too.” Perfect, I think. This is going to work.

  “So where does this leave us?” I say, taking a step closer to him.

  I’m waiting for him to say something about homecoming when I feel his hand grab the back of my neck and his lips press into mine. It’s kind of weird to kiss him; I’m so used to Dylan’s lips. But when he cups his hands around my face, I melt into him, just like I do with Dylan.

  “Look, I like you, Emma. A lot,” he says, breaking contact and leaning his forehead on mine. I feel the but coming on before it can even pass over his soft lips. “But I want to get to know you a little better … before we go any farther. What do you say we go to homecoming together?”

  I don’t even think about my answer. “I’d love to.”

  chapter 13

  DYLAN DEFINITELY ISN’T thrilled when I tell him. It’s not like I expected him to be, but still. I give him a play-by-play of what happened between Keegan and me, carefully leaving out the part about our kiss. He’s already upset; I don’t want to make him furious.

  “Homecoming? I thought we decided not to go with anyone else. That was the arrangement we made, remember?” He doesn’t look at me when he talks; he just stands with his back to me, flicking paint at a blank sheet of paper. He says he’s cleaning his brushes, but I think he’s looking for a way to release his anger about the Keegan situation.

  “I’m sorry, but you should have seen how Mom grilled me the other day. I had to tell her something. And this is going to work. Want to know why?” He shrugs his shoulders, and I can’t tell if it’s because he wants to hear my answer or because he doesn’t care. “Because I chose you. I want you. Keegan means nothing to me. It’s all you.”

  This is the first lie I’ve ever told to Dylan, and I’m not even sure if it’s a lie. Yes, Keegan and I had a moment after dinner, but what I feel for Dylan is much greater than what I feel for Keegan.

  I see his shoulders relax and his grip on the paintbrush loosen. He’s calming down. “Maybe we should just stop this right now. We have too much at stake.” I can hear the resistance in his voice as he speaks. “Well, I have too much at stake.”

  “Are you worried that we’ll get caught?” He goes quiet again. “Because I will never let that happen. I have our bases covered. You just have to trust me.”

  “I do trust you. I just … I wanted you all to myself.”

  “You do have me all to yourself. Keegan’s just the decoy. There’s nothing going on between us, I promise.” My second kind-of lie. I give him a hug from behind, and leave him on that note.

  It takes me a few days to get Dylan on board with the plan, but eventually he comes around. Not to the point where he no longer grimaces when I say Keegan’s name, but, hey, progress is progress. And when I ask him to be my dress-up partner for Nerd Day during Spirit Week, he agrees to that, too. It’s so un-Dylan of him—he’s way too introverted to do something like that—that I have to question if I’m abusing my power as his girlfriend.

  “The Willy Wonka Nerds costume you and Dylan wore for Nerd Day was so cute. The added suspenders and glasses were a great touch, too,” Karmin says as we change into our dance team uniforms for the football game. “How’d you get him to agree to that?”

  “I don’t know. I just asked him, and he said yes. Simple as that.”

  “Simple? Please. Keegan and I may be twins, but he would never in a million years do something like that with me.” A comparison of Dylan and Keegan was the last thing I wanted to hear about right now. I’d been doing enough of that on my own, and apparently, so had Dylan.

  Earlier, I made the mistake of mentioning to him that Keegan would be in full Cedar Pointe High gear at the game tonight to lead the student cheer section, and Dylan—through some deranged change in character—said he was going to do the same but “better.” Now I’m afraid to see what ridiculous thing Dylan is going to do to try to show him up. But I don’t have time to think much on it. With the game in half an hour, there’s nothing I can do now.

  “And speaking of Keegan,” Karmin starts, pulling her hair into a ponytail, “I heard that you two are going to homecoming together.”

  Of course she already knows. “Yeah. He asked me a few days ago and, since we’ve been fishing around for a date for me, I said yes.”

  “Hmm” is all she says at first, but when I don’t elaborate, she continues. “So was he the mystery guy you were talking about?” She’s so open about things—unlike me—that I can’t help but wonder why she’s so adamant about adding me to her arsenal of friends. I’m a shy nobody, and she’s the irresistible it-girl that gets voted things like Most Likely to Be a Celebrity in the yearbook. Why does she want to hang out with me all the time? I know she has better options to choose from.

  “Yep.”

  “Well, why didn’t you tell me? I could have set you guys up weeks ago.” I’m glad she’s taking it so well. With her being his twin
sister, this could have gone south fast. “So do you like him like him or … what?”

  “Yeah. I mean, he’s cute. And smart. And did I mention, he’s cute?” Again, it doesn’t sound like a lie. Am I really starting to fall for Keegan?

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really.” What’s wrong with me liking Keegan? I wonder as I fasten a bright red bow to the top of my head.

  “You just don’t seem like his type. His last girlfriend, Lori, was feisty, flirty, and very experienced. She balanced that out with her smarts, though.” Karmin must see my gaze fall to the floor, because she quickly edits herself. “Not saying that you’re not feisty, flirty, or sexy. You’re just not on our level.”

  “Our level”? What is that supposed to mean? “Explain.”

  “Guys like girls who are aggressive. You know, who aren’t afraid to tell them what to do every once in a while. And they like girls who know how to embrace their sexy side.”

  “And his ex-girlfriend had that? A sexy, aggressive side, I mean?” As the question rolls off my tongue, I can’t help but wonder if Keegan is a virgin. Probably not. He’s eighteen, and from what I’ve read in magazines, most guys lose their virginity in their early teens. But I won’t know anytime soon; I’m not bold enough to ask.

  “Like I said, she was experienced. And everything I know about attracting guys, I learned from her. How do you think I got Sam?” Sam is Karmin’s hot surfer boyfriend. The one I see pressing Karmin up against her locker to engage in an in-between-class kiss every day.

  I check around the locker room to see if any other girls remain inside; there is no one in sight. I know I shouldn’t ask her, but my curiosity wins me over. “Can you teach me?” I whisper. “You know … to be feisty and sexy?” I cringe as the words escape me. I know this is weird, but I have no one else to ask.