Which isn’t a bad place to be, since they’re what’s considered the A-list round here. Oh, you have your Vanessas and your Danis and your DeLaynes, but they’re more bark than bite. They orbit in a different universe—as a matter of fact, they’ve sort of gone off orbit since Vanessa started going round with the Prince of Yasir. What do you call it when planets lose their center of gravity and start drifting off into space? That clique is like that now.
Lissa took a deep breath and I focused on her. Recovery, evidently, was complete.
“Thing one: Dad says that the UK premiere is on December 19. Term ends on the eighteenth. Thing two: he’s going over for it, and the production team at Leavesden Studios, as well as the people from Scotland, are all invited. Thing three: both your mom and your dad are invited, too, Mac.” I blinked in surprise. Dad hadn’t said a word about it, and I’d gotten an e-mail from him that morning. “And thing four: my mother says she’s not going. Dad wants me to talk her into it. What do you think my chances are?”
The hope in her eyes was almost painful. I knew all about hope. Been there, done that, threw away the T-shirt.
“I guess that means at least you’re coming, then,” I said briskly. “Because of course you’ll talk your mother round. And once you do, your parents are coming to Strathcairn afterward for Christmas. I insist.”
Because if Lissa could talk her mother into coming, then I could talk mine into it as well. For the first time since the divorce.
This was going to be the best, most unforgettable Christmas ever. I’d make certain of it.
chapter 2
THE ONLY PERSON on the planet who actually enjoys finals week is Gillian Chang—and that’s only because she swots like she has finals all the time. I gritted my teeth at her relentless cheeriness and tried to focus on my speech for debate while she coached Shani and Carly in biology. “Okay, so here’s the deal on amino acid. It’s a molecule, not a liquid. And it has the general formula H2NCHRCOOH, where R is organic.”
Deep in Lissa’s tote, her phone cheerfully informed us, “You can’t stop the signal, Mal.” Only Lissa would have a Firefly quote as her ringtone. While she got up to answer it, the rest of the girls slumped against beds and cushions, thank goodness written all over them.
“I’m so glad I finished with sciences when I took my A-levels.” I pushed my notebook off my lap and stretched. “Anyone for a break?”
“Don’t let her go to Starbucks,” Carly told the room in general. “She’ll never come back.”
“Just keep swimming,” Gillian told them. “We’re over the hump now.” Then she looked at me. “Besides debate, what do you have tomorrow?”
I tried to think, but my tired brain couldn’t make the leap twelve hours into the future. I pulled my schedule out of my binder. “French, Global Studies, and U.S. History. Gaaahh.”
“I hear the English essay is brutal,” Carly said with sympathy.
“Thanks a lot. I can hold my own with dead Englishmen, but with my luck, we’ll get an essay on American poets or something.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing.” Shani obviously liked American poetry. “Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson wrote some of the most amazing poems ever.”
“I’m not saying they didn’t. I just don’t have anything coherent to say about them, that’s all. Of course, the way my brain feels right now, I couldn’t say anything coherent about what we had for tea.”
“I don’t remember what we had for tea, either,” Gillian put in. “I got the end-of-chapter math review done, though.”
Of course she did.
If I had my way, I’d never look at another equation as long as I lived, but I was realistic. I’d have to take it in university, but as Carly would say, I’d jump off that bridge when I got to it.
A sudden bubble of tension in the air made me look up. Lissa had her back to us and her hair shaken forward to hide her face, but with one hand on her hip and her legs stiff, body language said it all.
“Mom, please,” she said in a low voice that made us all gaze at our papers while we listened intently. “You were so supportive of Dad on the red carpet last month. What’s so hard about doing that again? Or was it all just a show? I’m not being combative—I want to know. Okay, I get that. Yeah. I am not too young. I’m seventeen and I’m not completely clueless about relationships.” She was silent long enough for me to take a breath. “But the reason you’re drifting apart is because you’re… apart. Can’t you do this one thing for me? It’s just a holiday. Just ten days at Strathcairn, which, trust me, is big enough that if you wanted to be apart, you could spend a week there and not see a soul. Mac says it has fourteen bedrooms.” She glanced at me as if for confirmation, and I nodded. “Please? At least say you’ll think about it. That’s all I’m asking. Yes. Okay. Talk to you later. Love you, too.”
She disconnected and put the phone away with a sigh. Then she looked up. “She won’t come. I just know it.”
“Mothers.” I tapped a stack of binder pages together and snapped them in where they belonged. “The most stubborn race on earth.”
“The stupid part is, they used to be crazy about each other. Jolie and I used to get so embarrassed at the PDAs.” Lissa sat on the bed and picked up her textbook, then put it down again. “I don’t get how you go from that to separate houses.”
“Or separate countries.” The words popped out of my mouth by themselves. “Like my parents. I know there’s never been anyone for my father but Mummy. And yet,” I waved my hands about two feet apart, “there they are, like this.”
“You are so lucky, Gillian,” Carly said. “At least your parents are together.”
Gillian raised her eyebrows, glanced at Shani, and said nothing. Which, for her, is unusual.
“Well,” I said briskly, “let’s not obsess about what we can’t fix. Who’s for a walk down the hill and a gelato?”
“Me,” Gillian said. “I’m starting to read things twice. I’m done.”
The studious mood was officially broken.
So what if it was December. La Dolce Vita was bright and warm and the gelato was to die for, imported straight from Italy. I let the tart flavor of raspberry slide down my throat and sipped a hot chai latte with it. “This beats biology and debate any day.”
“We should study here,” Shani agreed, spooning up bright green pistachio. “I bet I wouldn’t get brain cramps if I ate a different flavor every hour or so.”
“You’d get a bunch of poundage, is what you’d get.” Lissa gazed into her blueberry cheesecake gelato. “I’m sure there’s like, five thousand calories in here.”
“And I’m enjoying every one.” Shani licked her spoon with satisfaction.
The door of the shop opened and Brett Loyola and Tate DeLeon cruised in. Somehow I was not surprised.
“Great idea.” Brett kissed Carly on the temple and we shuffled chairs to make room. “Thanks for the text.”
He came back from the counter with a big pile of something with ribbons of caramel through it. Tate got black licorice and somehow managed to insert his big, unwelcome self between Shani and me.
Traitor. I gave her a glare for moving her chair over, but she ignored me.
“Hey,” he said. “What did you get?”
“Raspberry.” Some people love licorice. The smell of it makes me ill. Or maybe it was the company. Earlier this term, Tate stalked Lissa for a month before she finally got through to him in words of one syllable that she wasn’t interested. Whereupon he transferred his attention to me, being the only unattached female in our group at the time.
Not that there’s anything wrong with him, really, if you leave out the licorice. He’s got great shoulders because he’s on the rowing team, and there must be something upstairs or Brett wouldn’t hang round with him. But a boy who wants a girlfriend that bad just makes me want to take evasive action.
And my coming in second to Lissa didn’t help his case, either.
“I think I aced the math test
today. How’d you do?”
“I’m not taking math.”
“Huh?” Again a gust of licorice as he stared at me. “How’d you manage that?”
“I’m an exchange student, remember? I don’t have to take math under the American system. I wrapped it up last year in sixth form.” Blank look. “What you’d call eleventh grade.”
“Oh. Lucky you.” His spoon tapped the waxed cardboard of his size-large bowl as he hunted down the last of his gelato. “So once the torture is over on Friday, what’cha got going? Big plans?”
“Just getting ready to go home for the holidays.”
“Home to the UK?”
“That’s where it is.”
“We do have big plans,” Lissa put in. Carly looked up suddenly, and her hand jerked, as though she wanted Lissa to stop. I looked at her, puzzled, as Lissa went on, “A bunch of us are going with her. It’s going to be great.”
“Huh? You’re all going to Scotland?” Tate’s eyebrows rose into his carefully mussed hair.
“What’s this?” Brett looked round the glass-topped table, stopping on Carly. “Scotland?”
The penny dropped. She hadn’t told him yet about our plans, which in itself was unusual. Those two talk constantly. What about, I don’t know—couple stuff, one presumes. Not that I envied her or anything. After all, I had my chance with old Tate here, anytime I wanted.
“Are you going with them?” Brett asked Carly.
“Nothing’s for sure yet.” Her voice was soft. “Mac invited all of us, but I haven’t had the guts to bring it up with my dad yet.”
“Don’t wait too long, or we won’t all be able to get seats on the same plane,” Lissa told her. “We’re cutting it pretty close as it is.”
“Your dad’s not going to let you go to Scotland.” Carly looked up from her gelato at the finality in Brett’s tone. “If he won’t let you come to my place, he’s not going to let you go there.”
“I know,” Carly said. Why did he have to make such a point of it? “It would be fun, though.”
“So would Christmas with us.” He slid an arm round her shoulders and smiled. “Even if he did say yes, you’d still come to our house, wouldn’t you?”
Carly’s answering smile, which had been all soft and besotted, faltered. “I don’t know. That’s a tough call.”
Brett drew back a little. “It is?”
This was getting far too serious. Time for me to step in and lighten it up. “Oh, yeah. Nineteen-sixties plumbing versus the latest in high-tech bathrooms. Stone walls versus Italian drapes. A howling gale off the Hebrides versus the sun on the Golden Gate. That’s a tough call, that is.”
Any more and I’d convince myself to stay with Carly instead of the other way round.
Brett had been so focused on her that he looked surprised at my horning in. “I think we need to talk about this in private.”
“Brett, relax,” Carly told him. “There’s nothing to talk about, because my dad won’t let me go anywhere but the mall on the day after Christmas. If I’m lucky.”
Not that I’m competitive or anything, but somehow his proprietary attitude with her rubbed me the wrong way. “Carly, if I came to stay with you at the weekend, maybe I could talk him round.”
She laughed. “Thanks, Mac, but you don’t know my dad. If I even bring up Scotland, we’ll have another rolling blackout on our hands.”
“But what if I bring it up? I could even get my dad to call him.”
“Great idea.” Brett’s dark eyes have a rep for slaying the girls. Only in my case, slaying took on its literal meaning. “Break the ice for me. ’Cuz if he okays Scotland, then for sure he’ll okay Christmas with the Loyolas. The old bait and switch. The lesser of two evils.”
“You’re not an evil,” Carly assured him. “You’re my guy, and I’m sure the only reason he’s bent about it is because he’s been in Guadalajara for, like, the last month. He misses Antony and me. It’s got nothing to do with you as a person. You know that.”
Me, I thought it had quite a bit to do with Brett as a person. What dad—Latino or not—would ship his daughter off to her boyfriend’s house for a bunch of overnights? I mean, even Mummy, who trusts me despite certain evidence that she shouldn’t, wouldn’t let me spend a weekend with a boy, family hanging about the place notwithstanding.
When Brett spoke, he dropped his voice. But I’ve got ears like a cat. Gillian and Shani had already gone on to some other topic, so I was the only one besides Carly to hear him say, “I just want to know that you’d pick me, that’s all. I’ve already got your Christmas present.”
Oh lovely. Would you like a side of guilt with that?
“I’ve got yours, too,” Carly told him. “But can we drop this? You sound jealous, and that’s totally not like you.”
“It’s important. Of course I’m not jealous. I just don’t want you running off to the other side of the world when it’s winter break and we could do stuff together. We could go up to Napa or go to our house in Tahoe and ski. Both my brothers and their wives are coming, and they’re all rabid skiers.”
“I don’t know how to ski,” Carly said.
“That’s okay. We can snowboard.”
“I’ve never done that, either.”
“I’ll teach you. It’s easier than riding a dirt bike.”
“If I’m going to go up the side of a mountain, fall on my butt, and freeze, I may as well be at Strathcairn.”
I barely managed to keep my mouth shut as I carefully scooped the last of my gelato out of the cup. Our place wasn’t that cold. Some years it didn’t even snow.
Brett was silent for a second. “You really want to go, don’t you?”
“It doesn’t matter what I want. Papa isn’t going to let me go anywhere, so that’s that.”
Thankfully, he dropped the subject. But I didn’t. When we got back to the dorm, I launched another sneak attack. Call me a troublemaker, but deep down I sensed Carly wanted to go with us. It kind of makes her feel bad that we’ve all traveled and she hasn’t. I mean, Gillian has been to so many countries, she’s run out of places to sew patches on her duffel bag. I’ve tripped all over Europe on various holidays, and Lissa certainly doesn’t hide the fact that her dad shoots films all over the world and she’s been on most of his sets.
If Brett were a proper boyfriend, he’d be delighted to see Carly’s dream of traveling come true. But no. He wanted her all to himself instead of sharing her with us. That needed to be nipped in the bud, and tonight I was in a nipping mood.
I twirled off the lid of my pot of Crème de la Mer and rubbed a bit of it into my skin as Carly brushed her teeth. “I meant it, you know. About coming to stay with you this weekend. Do you think your dad would mind?”
“Of course not. He likes you. He calls you la chiquita con el pelo rojo.”
Rub it in. “I also meant it about me asking if you can come to Strathcairn.”
She rinsed her mouth and put her toothbrush in the holder. “You’re welcome to try. But don’t be mad if he says no.”
“Someone else will be mad if he says yes.” In the mirror, I saw Shani come over and lean on the door, as if she thought things were about to get interesting.
“He won’t. Trust me.”
“But what if he does? Is Brett really going to make you choose between him and us?”
Carly hung up the towel with care. “If Papa says I can go to Strathcairn, it will be totally different than going to Brett’s. You guys know why.”
“Because he’s your boyfriend,” Shani said quietly from the doorway. “Because he thinks Brett’s going to try something on if he gets you alone overnight.”
Carly snorted. “How alone can we be with the whole family there? But that’s exactly what he thinks. Which shows how well he really knows Brett.”
“I bet the luscious Mr. Loyola has thought about it plenty,” I said. “You guys have been going out for six months. He wouldn’t be normal if he hadn’t.”
“Maybe
he has,” Carly said. “But I told him I don’t believe in sex before marriage, and I mean it.”
“No matter what the provocation?” I teased.
“That’s right,” she said with a rueful grin. “Which is why, if I had the choice, I’d choose a nice cold castle in Scotland to help me protect my man’s virtue.”
Shani threw back her head and laughed, and I couldn’t help it. The picture of Carly protecting the captain of the rowing team from her hot little self was just too funny.
Funny, but kind of sweet and admirable, too. Because of course she would put him before herself. Do the right thing. Keep everything on the up-and-up.
These Christians. Sometimes I just didn’t know why they put up with me.
chapter 3
GLOBAL STUDIES. HISTORY. CLASSICS.
The term ticked down in two-hour increments, one for each of my exams. I don’t think I even saw Shani or Lissa on Thursday and Friday, even at meals. A blur that might have been Gillian buzzed the sandwich case and swiped something to eat, but other than that, she was holed up in her room. No wonder. My course load is a holiday in Tahiti compared to hers.
This is the beauty of having done my A-levels already. Well, okay, U.S. History is not a holiday, nor is Economics, but compared to Gillian’s honors science classes, I’m practically skiving off in Ballet and Intro to Computer Science and Medieval History. Not to mention Art, where I think I’ve actually managed to complete one collage in time to be graded.
By Friday afternoon we were all in a state of collapse. I lay on my bed, waiting for the cramps to ease out of my cortex—not to mention my shoulders—while Shani checked e-mail on the bed next to me, comfortably propped up with pillows.
“Hey, girl,” a male voice said from her laptop. It took me a second to realize it wasn’t some random YouTube video, but Danyel Johnstone.
“Do you want me to leave?” I asked her.
Shani paused the video and turned the screen toward me. “Of course not. What do you think he’s going to do, take off his shirt?”
Tidings of Great Boys Page 2
