by Mary Strand
I lasered her with an evil grin. “And I wasn’t just talking about that skanky perfume you’re wearing.”
With that, I shot inside the house ahead of Chelsea, who was wobbling in too-high heels. On an impulse, I slammed the door and twisted the deadbolt, then sauntered in the direction of the loud music coming from downstairs, quietly shutting the door at the top of the stairs.
With any luck, no one would hear the doorbell ring.
Drew caught my eye the instant I walked into the basement, but he didn’t say anything. He also didn’t exactly dash upstairs to rescue Chelsea from whatever I’d done to her. I almost thought he looked relieved.
I sat next to him on the big wraparound couch and turned to scope out the band. Kirk, in the middle front with his guitar, looked cocky and a little silly in dark sunglasses. Jeremy, in the back on drums, squinted at me as if I shouldn’t be here. Too bad. I looked over at Michael, standing at the keyboard in baggy shorts and a ridiculous Hawaiian shirt, his red hair flaming as brightly as ever and looking even taller than I remembered him.
Then I spotted the last guy. Cute. Light-brown hair, tall, with mile-long, skinny legs casually crossed as he tuned up his bass guitar. I wasn’t clumsy, not at all, but I’d trip and fall if I tried to stand that way while playing a guitar. He wore a tight T-shirt, cut off at the shoulders, and sported a tattoo on his bicep that I couldn’t make out.
I remembered him from sophomore year—like Michael, he was a year ahead of us, so he would’ve graduated by now, too—but I could swear he’d been blond then. I didn’t know him, though, not even his name. He’d been a quiet guy who spent a lot more time in the media center than I did, and I didn’t usually notice guys like that.
As I turned to ask Drew who he was, Drew’s arm came around my waist.
I sucked in a surprised breath, and he pulled me tighter.
“Uh, Drew? Won’t Chelsea—”
“Don’t tell me. You locked her out.” He leaned close, his breath tickling my ear. It actually felt kinda good, but only because it’d been so long since any guy had tickled my ear or any other part of me. But this was Drew, not Kirk. I told myself I wasn’t interested. So it made no sense, really, why I leaned into him.
Casually, of course.
His cell phone rang. His tongue touched my ear. “It’s so damn hard to hear a cell phone in a basement, you know?”
I twisted in his arms, intending to give him a smart-ass answer, but my lips accidentally brushed his. Being a guy, he took advantage of it. Despite being a girl who wanted Kirk—even in his silly sunglasses, and even though he was only twenty feet away—I let it happen. I mean, just for a moment. Just to see if I still remembered what a kiss felt like.
It was . . . nice. Warm lips and arms that knew how to hold a girl, even if they’d been practicing on a pig like Chelsea. As I snuggled a little closer, I—
Ow! I shrieked as someone yanked on my hair.
Chelsea, of course.
As she jerked me to my feet, her grubby hands still in my hair, the band stopped tuning up and the whole basement went silent. Well, except for my screeching. And except for the grunt Chelsea made when I shoved her and she went down hard.
Too bad the floor was carpeted.
“You are such a bitch.”
I blinked as I looked around, connecting the snotty voice I heard with Amber’s face.
“Are you talking to me?” I jabbed a thumb in Chelsea’s direction. “She started it, in case you forgot your glasses.”
“I see just fine, thanks.” Amber struggled to help Chelsea up off the floor. I laughed, because Chelsea had to outweigh her by twenty or thirty pounds. Needless to say, I didn’t move an inch to help. “You were trying to steal Chelsea’s boyfriend. Just like old times, huh?”
I rubbed a spot on my scalp where it felt like Chelsea had yanked out every hair on my head. “How would you know, Amber? Since when did you ever have a boyfriend I could steal?”
Seeing the flash of embarrassment in her eyes, I grinned, not bothering to glance at Kirk, who was talking to the rest of the band now in a loud voice about whatever song they were going to play first. I had a feeling they’d play something loud, just to drown out the catfight at the far end of the room.
Amber’s mouth opened and shut, as if she was trying to come up with a response but couldn’t manage a decent one. No wonder she hung out with Chelsea. They must take remedial classes together.
I rolled my eyes. “Besides, I wasn’t stealing Chelsea’s boyfriend. No surprise, but Drew doesn’t exactly seem too hot on her.” I glanced at Drew, who was leaning forward on the couch, his head in his hands, looking like he wanted to barf. “And in case you didn’t notice, he was the one hitting on me.”
A cymbal crashed, Michael hit a jarring chord on the keyboard, and the bass guitar sounded like someone was strangling a cat.
“That’s so not—”
I glanced at Drew, who was still trying to hide from the world. Or at least Chelsea.
“Drew, was I hitting on you?” Okay, that might be open to interpretation, at least from Drew’s delusional perspective, but the truth was that I’d only accidentally kissed him. The fact that I’d enjoyed it was purely incidental. “Was I making you doing anything you didn’t want to do?”
I don’t think a band could possibly be louder than Kirk’s band was right at that moment. The cacophony of clashing instruments, seeming to play four different songs at the same moment, practically made my heart jump out of my chest. I clapped my hands over my ears.
I glanced again at Drew just as he slithered off the couch and tried to escape to the stairs. Chelsea caught him by the arm.
“Is that true, Drew? Was she hitting on you or were you hitting on her?”
Did it matter? We were locking lips, as she perfectly well saw, and her so-called boyfriend was an active participant.
“Uh . . .”
Drew had never exactly turned me on, on any number of levels, but I saw now what a complete wimp he was. He obviously liked me more than Chelsea, but he didn’t have the guts to admit it. Of course, maybe she’d used her claws on him, too. Wincing, I rubbed my forearm where it still stung from her gouging me.
“Lydia, are you causing trouble?”
My head whipped around at Kirk’s voice, booming out through the microphone, as I belatedly realized that the band had stopped playing. I wasn’t sure this time if they’d stopped because of me or because they just needed to get on the same page. Or at least the same song. Kirk was grinning, though, and only Jeremy looked pissed. But he always seemed to look pissed when he saw me.
I stepped closer to the band and away from Chelsea and Amber. “You know me, Kirk. Always hanging out with girls who are up to no good.”
I heard squeaks behind me. If Amber and Chelsea were the kind of girls Kirk and Drew actually wanted in a girlfriend, I’d been gone too long. The world really was coming to an end.
“Can you play guitar like your sister?”
I frowned at Kirk. “Like Cat?”
He started to laugh until a cymbal crashed in his ear. “Uh, no. I meant Mary.”
“Totally.” I waved a hand, knowing I could do anything my sister Mary could do, only ten times faster. Especially with a crowd watching. “But I, uh, didn’t bring a guitar.”
“No problem. I brought an extra.” Kirk turned his back on me, and five seconds later he held up a shiny black guitar. Crap. “Wanna give it a try?”
I felt unexpected beads of sweat on the back of my neck where Chelsea had yanked my hair. God, it hurt. I’d barely even touched Drew. Ohmygod. Perfect excuse! “I’d love to, but the truth is that this—” I pointed at Chelsea, at the same time sniffing the air as if it reeked. “This creature went spastic and tried to pull all my hair out, no doubt because she forgot to take her meds today.”
It wasn’t funny, actually, since my mom had to take bipolar meds just to stay on a remotely even keel. Not that she’d ever tried to yank anyone’s hair out.
We usually knew something was wrong whenever she did a bunch of housework, which was why Dad always seemed a bit conflicted about making her take her meds. I wasn’t sure if he loved Mom or a clean house more.
“And?” Kirk stared at me through his sunglasses as he dangled the shiny black guitar in the air.
“I don’t think I can play when my head hurts like hell.”
I heard someone snicker behind me. But since I’d already stolen—or at least borrowed—Chelsea’s boyfriend and Amber’s was next in line, I brushed it off.
Shrugging, Kirk set the guitar back on its stand. “No worries. Feel free to play another time if you want. We could use another guitar.”
“Sure.” After a lesson or two and maybe a beer for courage. In the meantime, I grabbed a spot on the couch again—me at one end, Chelsea and Amber at the other end, and Drew next to Chelsea thanks to her death grip on him—and leaned back to watch Kirk play. Maybe I could learn guitar by osmosis.
Because I definitely wasn’t going to run and hide.
“How was the band?”
“Did they ask you to sing?”
As I slipped off my shoes in the front hall after a long but blissfully free-of-sharp-nails walk home, Dad’s question sounded sincere. Cat’s? Not so much.
I shrugged. “Kirk asked me to play guitar. I said I would next time.”
Cat just frowned.
Dad gave me one of his clueless dad smiles. “Did you learn guitar at school last year? Mary picked it up pretty quickly, you know.”
“So I heard. No, I’ve never played, but I figured I could pick it up even faster.”
So much for Dad’s smile. “She practiced for a few months before joining that band, didn’t she, Cat? And of course she played piano for years before that.”
“Whatever.” Dying for a soda, if not some relief for my still-stinging head, I crossed through the living room and headed to the kitchen. “Not that piano has anything to do with guitar.”
“Piano is the best possible foundation for—”
I tuned him out as I opened the fridge, grabbed a can of Coke from the bottom shelf, and popped the top on it. Dad was still blathering in the living room, but maybe Cat could take notes. God knows she didn’t have anything better to do.
After chugging half of my soda, I headed back through the living room.
“So you’re really serious about learning guitar?” Dad wasn’t ready to drop it, apparently. “How do you plan to pay for lessons, let alone the guitar itself?”
I’d heard all about the ridiculously expensive guitar Dad got Mary for her eighteenth birthday last year, which she’d taken to MIT, on top of the Prius Dad bought for Jane when she went to Carleton for her first year of college. And I couldn’t help noticing all the new clothes Cat had acquired since I left last year. “I thought you could maybe spring for it? As a homecoming gift?”
Rolling her eyes, Cat stormed out of the living room and thundered up the stairs to our bedroom.
Dad looked at me over the tops of his reading glasses. “And you think you deserve this because . . . ?”
“Because I do. Because you buy stuff for everyone else around here. Because you haven’t had to do a damn thing for me for a year now.”
“Not since I bailed you out of jail?”
“You didn’t bail me out. You had them send me to reform school.”
“The judge sent you to reform—er, to that school.”
“At your request. I was there, Dad. You can’t blow smoke up my ass.”
We stared at each other, neither of us willing to be the first to blink. Just like always. In the old days, Mom would walk in the front door now and save me. I held my breath and waited.
Nothing happened.
Dad shook his head. “This might be a good moment to talk about your plans, both this year and after you graduate. Cat has a job and activities and is looking at colleges.”
“Yeah? Am I supposed to care what Cat does?”
A door slammed upstairs.
Dad tilted his head, studying me. I crossed my arms and stared right back at him.
Finally, he sighed. “It’s ultimately up to you, but plans are a good idea. And I’m pleased to see that Cat, at least, is making them.”
“Yeah, well, that makes one of us.”
I strode past Dad into the front hall, grabbed my shoes and the keys to the Jeep out of the cracked bowl on the front-hall chest, and headed to the door.
“Lydia, that’s not a good idea.”
So what else was new? I slammed the front door behind me.
Chapter 4
“It would be such a delicious scheme, and I dare say would hardly cost anything at all.”
— Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, Volume II, Chapter Sixteen
I hopped into the Jeep and hit the locks, but I didn’t have a clue where to go or what to do.
When the front door opened, though, I cranked up the engine and pulled out from the curb with a squeal of tires. Dad expected me to do it, and I hated to disappoint.
At the corner, I stopped and drummed my fingers on the steering wheel. This was actually the first time I’d driven anything in over a year, but that wasn’t the problem. Before, I’d always had plans. A destination. And, in Cat, a partner in crime.
Now, for the first time in my life—with the exception of every single moment of my stint in Milwaukee—I wondered what I was doing. My sisters all had boyfriends, not that I cared, but I’d always been the most popular with guys. Jane, Liz, and Mary were in college, and Cat was seriously looking at colleges. The concept eluded me.
I’d also wasted an entire year of my life at a reform school that could inspire a horror movie, plus the three months of my life I lost with Justin. All because I’d been too mortified to come home and admit what he’d done. What I’d done.
He’d forced me, but I could’ve run. Begged for help. Something. Anything.
I drove aimlessly, soon finding myself cruising Highway 494 at a million miles an hour just to blow off steam. Blinking, I finally realized I’d stopped. In front of a music store.
I didn’t really want to play guitar, did I? I didn’t need to play guitar just to hook Kirk. Picturing him and me together, I glanced in the rearview mirror. Okay, maybe I did. If I saw much more of Chelsea, my hair wasn’t going to get any longer, and Kirk liked girls with long hair.
Except for Amber, who wore her dark hair in a pixie cut like a five-year-old. But maybe even Kirk went through dry spells.
Shrugging, I climbed out of the Jeep and trudged into the music store. I told myself I didn’t have anything better to do.
And let’s face it: I didn’t.
Seeing the rows of gorgeous guitars on the wall, I sucked in my breath. Ohmygod. I didn’t know a thing about guitars except that Mary played, so it must be easy, and Kirk looked good with one hanging from a strap over his shoulder.
An employee came up and offered to help, but I brushed her off. I didn’t know her, but I didn’t plan to embarrass myself by admitting how little I knew about guitars. I just kept gazing at them, not even touching, afraid I’d break something.
The girl kept hovering. “If you don’t play yet, you might want to start with an acoustic guitar.”
As I frowned, she pointed to a few dozen guitars at the far end of the store. I couldn’t help picturing some old guy in overalls and a toothpick in his teeth strumming them.
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“That’s how I started out. It’s how most people start.”
“My sister started on a Gibson Flying V.” Or so I’d heard. Like, repeatedly. “So don’t pull that beginner crap on me.”
The girl laughed. “No one starts on a Flying V. I mean, you wouldn’t.”
“She did.” Since Dad sprang for it even though we can’t afford to replace the ratty couch in the living room, it also proved that Mom isn’t the only one in the family struggling with instability. Both of my parents had it.
From the looks
of things lately, so did Cat.
I turned my back on the girl, who finally gave up and went over to annoy someone else. But I didn’t have a clue what to get. Glancing at a few price tags, my eyes bugged. I couldn’t afford anything, either.
But Mom could help with that.
I walked in the front door, hoping to catch Mom alone, because I could still talk her into almost anything. Not as easily as I once did, but a lot easier than Dad. Talking to him was like talking to concrete. Only harder.
No such luck. Mom and Dad were both waiting for me in the living room. As my stomach growled, I tossed the Jeep keys in the bowl and headed through the living room for the kitchen. I’d missed dinner, which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing when no one in your family cooked. At least, not anything edible.
“Lydia.” Dad. Not happy. I knew the feeling.
I kept walking. I was actually starving to death, but I also didn’t need a lecture about swiping the Jeep. No one else was using it, it was long past my turn, and I hadn’t totaled it or anything. Besides, old Mr. Fogarty across the street really shouldn’t have a mailbox that sticks out so far like that.
“Lydia, we’re talking to you.”
“I’m eating.” Or I would be, anyway, if I found anything in the fridge that didn’t disgust me. Score! Leftover cartons of Chinese, which definitely beat all the casseroles Mom made that had the word “surprise” in them.
I pried open a carton with my chewed-off fingernail and scrunched my nose. Kung pao chicken. Stupid family. They knew I was allergic to nuts. Spying another carton tucked behind the first one, I opened it. Beef lo mein. Two-thirds gone, but enough to take the edge off my hunger, and I could top it off with rice and a bowl of ice cream.
So much for craving healthy food.
As I waited for the microwave to ding, Mom joined me in the kitchen. I debated whether to broach the guitar with her when Dad was only twenty feet away, but then he walked into the kitchen, too.
“We’d like to talk to you.”
The microwave dinged, and I turned my back on both of them to pull my bowl out of the microwave and carry it to the kitchen table. My hands didn’t tremble. They wouldn’t dare.
