by Rachel Vail
I shrugged again. I don’t really have many opinions about landscaping. Kirstyn’s family was one of the first to move into Magnolia Estates, so their trees and hedges are the highest. Ours are way higher than the new people’s at the front end of the street, but not as high as Kirstyn’s family’s. We moved to our house four years ago. But really, what do I care about the height of hedges?
“So nouveau,” Kirstyn’s mom continued. “Especially with all our houses now practically cheek by jowl, you know what I mean?”
I had absolutely no idea what she meant, so I said, “Hmm.” Didn’t even slow her down.
“Oh, look! They got the garage addition, like your family did. Smart,” Kirstyn’s mother added as we passed the new house diagonal from my own. “We only have the two-car. Ridiculous, really. They’re coming from California, three boys,” she said flirtatiously. Neither Kirstyn nor I said anything. “And I heard they’re putting in a squash court.”
“Yeah?” I could care less about a squash court. She had slowed the car to a crawl. Just please go up my driveway, I silently begged, or let me out here.
“I love when new people move in,” Kirstyn’s mother said.
She and Kirstyn had come over the first day after we moved in; Kirstyn was carrying a plate of cookies and her mother had what my father described as a very nice bottle of champagne. Before that, Kirstyn had barely noticed me—back when I lived on McNealy Street and she was the princess of third grade.
“Can you believe the Greens?” Kirstyn’s mom asked. She had practically stopped the car.
I had no choice. “What?” I asked. Roxie Green, Allison’s new best friend, had moved here last summer, into the house Kirstyn’s mom was pointing at, across the street from ours.
“You know they bought this house, next door to their first one. I was their broker.” She made her finger sign for mucho dinero again. “Did you know they turned this one into a giant recreation center?”
“Yeah,” I said vaguely.
Kirstyn hadn’t budged or said a word. I decided not to look at her, let her cool down. Everything would be fine later, it always is. What was she even so mad about, anyway? Luke?
What if Luke actually likes me, likes me?
“So fabulous,” her mother continued. “Indoor pool, full-court basketball, a yoga studio and giant steam room upstairs. All designed by you-know-who…”
I looked where she was pointing, at the huge house wrapped in Tyvek, with two giant green Dumpsters in the driveway and lots of machinery in the yard. “Cool,” I said. “I should get home.”
“Sorry!” she said, and whipped the minivan like it was a sports car into a right-angle turn, and zoomed up my driveway. “Ask your mom to call me,” Kirstyn’s mom said. “I’ve left her a few messages but I guess she’s so busy. I don’t know how she does it, working full-time with three active daughters, but I guess she has a lot of help…. Anyway, I want to talk to her about the party, ask her what she thinks about overlays….”
I willed Kirstyn to look at me, smile her meek apologetic smile she uses after she’s been bitchy to me. Nothing. Great, the silent treatment, one step worse on the Kirstyn emote-o-meter than biting sarcasm, just up from full-out tantrum. She might as well have been a statue in the front seat. Fine, I thought. Whatever, I could wait. I’m just lucky to be so uncomplicated. There’s nothing to figure out with me—what you see is what you get. Life is good and I bump along with it. Maybe it’s better to be deep and poetic and moody, like Kirstyn or even Allison, but honestly, I was thinking, I’m happy to be happy.
Halfway up the driveway Kirstyn’s mom slowed the minivan down abruptly. We all bucked forward. My mother’s Porsche was in front of the house, and my father’s Jeep, too—neither of them in the garage—and also a cream-colored Jaguar two-seater.
“We weren’t invited to the party?” Kirstyn’s mom asked laughingly.
I sat there staring at the cars for a few seconds, trying to figure out what it meant. I couldn’t. It made no sense. Something must have happened. What? I jumped out of the car and slammed the door shut behind me, running as fast as I could up the driveway and through the gate and up the walk into my house, where I was hit with an intense blast of cold.
“What’s going on?” I yelled, slamming myself through the mudroom door.
8
“SHH.” GOSIA WAS ON ME in a second, taking my bag and pulling me into the kitchen. “You want a snack?” she whispered, fake-cheery.
“No,” I said out loud. “Why are they home? And who’s here?”
“Shh,” Gosia whispered again. “Sit down. Have a snack.”
“Stop it, Gosia, seriously. What’s going on?”
“Phoebe,” I heard Allison hiss from the back stairs.
I ran toward her, kicking off my flip-flops.
“Shut up,” Allison said, turning around. She took the stairs two at a time. I raced behind her. Instead of turning left to the upstairs den we have to cross to get to our bedrooms, she went right into the guest wing, where we almost never go unless my cousins from Oregon are visiting, and even then not so much. It smelled different in the hallway there, like Pledge, and the carpet was brown, thick and soft like moss, so my feet sort of sank into it.
We passed the wall of school pictures of Quinn, Allison, and me—every school picture and class picture of each of us from nursery school on up, hung in identical Pottery Barn black frames with white borders, put together by Gosia. I couldn’t help noticing as I passed that Quinn, who is cool now, was seriously dorky in the early years of elementary school. Who cut her bangs? They were like tacky, badly hung window valances.
I followed Allison into the second guest room. She kneeled on the floor right next to Quinn, who was perched on the edge of the bed. They both hunched toward the night table, heads bent close together.
“What are you guys doing?” I asked.
“Shut up!” Allison whispered fiercely. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Shh,” Quinn breathed without lifting her eyes.
I knelt down beside Allison and saw they were bending their heads over an old baby monitor that was crackling with static. I listened, too, but could barely make out the voices under all the annoying static rumble. I wanted to ask what they’d heard so far, and also how they had managed to put the other end of the monitor wherever it was Mom and Daddy and the stranger were, not to mention where they even found those old things in the first place, but I knew better than to say another word.
“How it all shakes out,” I heard somebody say, a man, so either Daddy or if the stranger was a man, him. Quinn and Allison made eye contact with each other but not with me. I cannot stand being left out. It’s so incredibly unfair of them. I’m not a baby, no matter how they act sometimes. Hello, who was in your room yesterday helping you choose the print bikini?
“What?” I whispered. I wanted it to sound fierce and not whiny. I didn’t completely succeed. Allison glared at me. I clamped my jaw tight to keep from saying more or worse, and rubbed my freezing arms.
We heard a door shutting and some loud footsteps, which meant probably they were in the foyer, because the floor there is marble and it echoes.
Quinn switched off the monitor. “We don’t know, exactly.”
“What DO you know?” I demanded.
“Shut up, shut up, shut up,” Allison whispered through her clenched teeth. She tightened her grip on her tennis racquet and lifted it slightly off the floor. If Quinn hadn’t been there she might’ve smashed me with it.
We heard footsteps again, closer this time but less loud. They must have been heading toward us, maybe to the back door, which is the one adult guests are usually shown to, near the bottom of the back stairs.
“Let’s go,” Quinn said, shoving the monitor into the cabinet of the dresser.
Quinn and I followed Allison down the hall, out of the guest wing—Quinn closed the door to it quietly behind me—through the upstairs den to the upstairs landing, and down the hallway to
our rooms. We passed mine on the right and Quinn’s on the left to go to Allison’s, just beyond Quinn’s, before Mom and Daddy’s. Quinn closed Allison’s door behind us. I climbed up onto Allison’s high brass bed and grabbed one of her million pillows to squish, reminding myself that the more I shut up, the more I would hear from my sisters about what they knew.
They kept looking at each other like they weren’t sure they could trust me. I swear I was stopping myself from having a total tantrum only by using all of my willpower—and maybe also mangling the little pillow helped.
Finally I couldn’t take it anymore and I blurted out, “Is somebody going to tell me what’s going on or do I have to go down there and ask them?”
Allison threw her racquet onto her sofa. “I told you she’d react like this, didn’t I?”
“Allison, chill,” Quinn said. She sat down on Allison’s bed across from me and leaned against the footboard. I guess it was uncomfortable because she held out her arms for a pillow. I yanked one of the huge ones from the back and tossed it to her. There was practically steam shooting off the top of Allison’s head; she hates when people mess up her bed. But I could tell she was trying to be cool, not let Quinn think I could control my temper better than she could. Which I totally can. Allison grabbed her racquet again and paced between her bed and her sofa.
Quinn sighed. “The thing is, we don’t really know anything,” she whispered.
“Tell me what you think.”
“You can’t say anything to Mom or Daddy,” Quinn warned.
“Obviously,” I said, leaning forward.
“We’re totally serious, Phoebe,” Allison growled at me. “No hinting, no asking, nothing.”
“Would you give me a break for one single second?”
“Okay,” Quinn said. She was mashing a small white silk pillow between her hands. Quinn, who is always in control, who is so cool and calm my father calls her Zen sometimes, looked seriously tense, and that, more than anything else, was making my stomach clench.
“We’re not sure,” Quinn said. “But it sounds like…”
The door opened, and my parents stood there, pale, looking at us.
“Hey,” Dad said.
“Hi,” we all answered. He was holding Mom’s hand. With her other hand she played with the little sapphire she always wears on a chain around her neck.
Dad cleared his throat. “Sorority meeting?”
I made myself smile. Quinn and Allison faked just as unconvincingly.
“So, um, Mom and I…”
We all waited. If this were a movie, I thought, he’d tell us they were splitting up, after an opening like that. But he didn’t continue. We all just sat there waiting.
He let out his breath and started over. “We’re going out for a drive.” Mom turned to him, evidently surprised at this news. “Okay? We’re going for a drive.”
“Okay,” Quinn said.
Mom let go of her little sapphire and nodded slightly.
“Okay,” he said. “Quinn, your SAT tutor is downstairs, and the tennis guy…is…he…he…can’t come…today. Okay?”
“We don’t care,” Allison said. “Our court has a puddle on it, and…and we hate tennis lessons anyway. Right?”
I nodded. I actually do hate tennis. But Allison loves it. I couldn’t look at her so I kept my eyes on my fingernails.
“So,” Dad said, smiling fakely. “Oh, and just tell Oliver when he comes for your piano lessons that, ah, we’ll give him a check next week. Okay?”
Quinn and I nodded.
“Okay,” he said again, facing Mom. “We’re going for a drive.” He pulled her by the hand and they left.
The three of us just sat there for maybe two minutes, until Quinn leaned forward and said, “I think some people Mom works with have screwed her over.”
“Really?” I asked. “Her friends?”
Quinn nodded. “Well, she thought they were friends. You never know.”
I shook my head slowly. Poor Mom.
“This is what I think happened,” Quinn continued, tucking her hair behind her ear. “You know Mom invests huge money for people, right? Well, from what I can piece together, one of her big deals did really badly. Lost millions, maybe hundreds of millions of dollars this week. It’s not just her—there’s like six of them who decide together what stocks to pick, but—here’s the screwed up part—the other people on her team all got together and made it seem like it was just Mom, like she went off on her own somehow and made this really bad call on a drug company. They’re putting all the blame on her.”
“I hate them,” Allison said.
“Screw them,” Quinn said.
“Yeah,” I said, trying not to think about Mom in the kitchen twenty-six hours earlier, when she seemed as alone as a person could ever possibly be.
“So what’s going to happen?” asked Allison. “Like, to us?”
“Don’t know,” Quinn whispered. “That guy who was here is her lawyer.”
“She’s not, like, gonna go to jail or something, right?” I tried to grin at my own stupidity but my sisters both stayed pale and serious.
“No. He’s the, you know, other kind of lawyer, like not criminal,” Quinn said slowly. “Business lawyer. It’s bad, though. Seriously bad. They let Agnes go.”
Allison’s mouth dropped open and her eyes teared up. “Agnes?” She sniffed and turned to look at me. “You knew! Yesterday.”
I looked back and forth between Allison and Quinn.
“Did you hear Mom fire her?” Quinn asked me softly.
“I heard her say something,” I answered, thinking fast, speaking slow. “I heard her say the phrase had to let her go.”
Quinn nodded. Allison grabbed my hand. Quinn grabbed my other, then Allison’s other. “This might suck.” Quinn leaned in toward us, and we leaned in, too, so our foreheads were almost touching. “But we can handle it. We’re the Avery women, right?”
“Valkyries,” Allison whispered.
Quinn and I both nodded. “Valkyries.”
Then my cell phone rang.
9
“HELLO?” MY HEART WAS POUNDING from how startled I was. My ringer must’ve been on superhigh.
“Hi this is Luke may I please speak with Phoebe?” Luke said practically as one word.
“This is Phoebe,” I said. “Luke?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“Hi.”
My sisters were staring at me. I shrugged. Why was he calling me on the phone instead of texting me? Sometimes he texts hey and I text back hey. That doesn’t feel weird. We sometimes even complain about our homework. Why was he calling me?
“Yeah, um, hey,” he said.
Neither of us said anything for a while. It was odd. It seemed like he was waiting for me to explain why he had called me. My heart was still thumping. It was Kirstyn’s fault, what she said about me liking Luke, making me all weird with him. Well, that and talking on my cell with him in front of my sisters, at a kind of awkward moment. Quinn whispered that she was going downstairs to her tutor.
I popped up and almost fell off the bed because I forgot to untangle my legs. Chill, Phoebe, chill.
“So, um,” he said. “What’s up?”
“Nothing,” I lied. Just found out my life is in the toilet, that’s all.
“You okay? You know, from, when you, like, fainted?”
“Fine,” I said in a shockingly high voice. “Anyway…”
The doorbell rang.
“Oliver’s here,” Allison whispered. “Hang up!”
“I gotta go.”
“Okay,” he said. “But, I mean, what are you doing?”
“Now?”
“No, next Tuesday.”
“Oh, um…” What? I couldn’t think. Next Tuesday?
“Just kidding,” he said. “I meant now.”
“Oh, just…um…nothing.”
Allison glared at me impatiently. I turned my back to her.
“But, if, um,” Luke was saying. “
I mean, a couple of us were going down to the Shops, you know, to hang around, just, you know. How about you?”
“Me?”
He laughed. “No, somebody else.”
“Obviously,” I said. “Me. Um…”
Allison chucked her tennis racquet at me.
“Ow!”
“Well, anyway,” Luke said, very fast. “We’re gonna get some sodas, you know, me and William and I think maybe Dean. Maybe, whatever, get a slice at D’Amico’s and, are you okay? Did you just say ‘Ow’?”
“No,” I said, rubbing my hip where the racquet had hit me. “A couple of us were thinking of going down to the Shops, too,” I lied, walking out of Allison’s room.
“Great,” he said. “So maybe I’ll see you there.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Maybe. Later.”
Gosia was screaming up to us as I shut my phone and sped downstairs, one step behind Allison.
“You don’t think he could be asking me out, do you?” I asked her.
“Have you made out with him at all?”
“No,” I said.
“Then no.”
“That’s what I thought,” I said. “Hey, how did it go with Tyler?”
She grabbed my arm and twisted until my knees buckled. “Never ask me that again.”
“Okay. Sheesh.”
“He is a jock, I am a nerd, and never the twain shall meet.”
“Huh?”
“I said forget it!”
“Fine!” We never used to have secrets in my family.
I mostly let Oliver play during my piano lesson. Obviously Dad’s musical genes missed me entirely. I knew Oliver wished he could just have Quinn the whole time; he has such a huge and obvious crush on her.
“Why don’t you ever practice, Phoebe?” he asked, closing my level one piano book.
“Dunno,” I said. “Sorry.”
He bent over to pull some new Brahms music out of his bag for Quinn. “No sweat,” he said. Cute butt, I thought. “I get paid either way.”
That’s what you think, I thought. “Oh, um, my dad said he’ll give you a check next week.”
