Livin' La Vida Bennet

by Mary Strand

  I held up a hand. “I’ve already heard enough about Mary being a rock goddess on guitar, thanks.”

  “You don’t know Mary.” Liz shook her head but looked thoughtful. “Any more than I know you, I guess.”

  “She’s a geeky nerd who, last time I checked, likes to tattle on everyone.”

  Liz barked out a laugh. “Okay, she’s never completely gotten over the tattling, but we all have our faults. Even I’m not perfect. I’m sweating all over your wall.”

  “No shit.” We both laughed. “Maybe it’s time to break down and paint this room. Make it my own.”

  But was it mine? What would happen when Mary came home on break? Would I be relegated to the basement?

  Knowing Dad, absolutely.

  Liz glanced around, her eyebrows going up when she saw Mary’s poster of the periodic table still taped to the wall. I hadn’t bothered taking it down. It actually helped me with Chemistry. “Hey, if Cat can repaint the Jeep, I’m thinking you can throw some paint on these walls. I’ll even help if you like.”

  My gaze left the periodic table and shot straight to Liz. I couldn’t read her. After reform school, where it could be a life-saving skill, I thought I could read anyone. But not lately. “Why?”

  Liz clapped a hand over her heart. “Do I need a reason to help my sister?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Fine.” Liz grinned. “Alex is in Connecticut, Mom can’t be trusted with a paintbrush, and I want to hear exactly what happened in reform school. All the gory details.”

  Turning away, I stared out the window. The early-morning sun had surrendered to dark storm clouds, and the first raindrops were hitting the dirty windowpanes. Something else I needed to clean.

  Okay, I needed to clean up everything. Maybe even my life.

  After several moments during which Liz amazed me by not saying a word, I turned back to her. “It’s your poison.”

  She laughed. “No, that would be Mom’s cooking.”

  Chapter 14

  “I dare say he often hears worse things said than I am going to say. But he is an ugly fellow! I am glad he is gone.”

  — Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, Volume II, Chapter Sixteen

  Liz found two gallons of shockingly hot-pink paint in the basement, a remnant of one of Mom’s manic phases. My nose scrunched when I saw the color, more so when Liz painted a broad slash of it on my bedroom wall.

  It was blinding.

  Liz’s lips twitched. “Hey, I also found a really dark puke-green paint and a gallon of black. Pretty clearly not from a manic phase.”

  Biting my lip, I stared at the paint slash on the dirty beige wall. “Does she ever have a phase during which she buys light blue or purple?”

  “In a word? No.” Liz nodded at the paint can in the middle of the floor. “I actually like it. Bold and fun.”

  I was less enthusiastic. But I had to sleep here. “Would you paint your own room this color?”

  Liz waved her paintbrush in the air, spraying a few drops of paint on Boris’s tail. He kept whirling in a circle, trying to lick it off.

  Laughing, Liz somehow managed to corner Boris long enough to wipe off his tail with turpentine. “Jane would kill me. And, yeah, I’d probably go with light blue or purple.”

  “Great minds think alike.”

  But Liz and I weren’t alike. At all. Mr. Fogarty might be nice, but he was also wacked.

  Liz set the brush on top of the still-open paint can. “So what do you think? Hot pink or drive to Menards for light blue or purple?”

  She must seriously have nothing to do today. “Menards?”

  “Killjoy. What are we going to do with all of this hot-pink paint?”

  “Put on sunglasses and paint Mom’s office?”

  Liz shook a hot-pink finger at me. “I take back what I said before. Maybe you haven’t changed.”

  I smirked. “Not in the essentials.”

  A few hours later, after the fumes from the violet paint that now covered my bedroom walls became too much for both of us, Liz talked me into a run to Dairy Queen, claiming she might faint if she didn’t have a cherry Dilly Bar.

  I couldn’t shake the feeling that Dad had sicced her on me as my new guard dog, but I didn’t have anything else to do, and it was better than a lock on my bedroom door. Since I wasn’t Liz, though, I didn’t get a cherry Dilly Bar.

  I got a chocolate one.

  She sprang for it. What the hell. I let her.

  “So.” Liz bit off a chunk of her Dilly Bar. “You were going to tell me about reform school.”

  I shook my head. “I was going to slog through my Chemistry and Algebra homework, then spend some quality time mangling my D chord.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Mary used to bitch about her D chord, too. What is it with D chords?”

  I licked my Dilly Bar. “To be fair, my C chord can be frightening, too. My teacher mentioned bar chords but said she’s not sure she has the courage to listen to me trying them.”

  “Ha ha.” Liz eyed my Dilly Bar as if she contemplated stealing it the moment she finished hers. Good luck with that. “You make me glad I never tried guitar, but you’re sticking with it. Lack of better things to do?”

  Zing. The Liz I knew was back.

  I shrugged. “It’s better than talking about reform school. Believe me, you don’t want to know.”

  “I wouldn’t mind hearing.”

  I jerked at the deep voice behind me. Whirling in the booth, I looked up—and up some more—at Zach. His deadly serious face was an improvement over his angry scowls last night while the band played, but not by much.

  “Zach?”

  “I also wouldn’t mind a Dilly, but I think I’ll stick with cherry.” He whipped his own cherry Dilly Bar from behind his back. “Join you?”

  “Um.”

  Taking that as permission, he sat down. “You were about to tell your sister—Liz, right?—about reform school. Don’t let me interrupt.”

  It was more than Zach usually said to me, but he also wasn’t usually this cheerful. Had he gotten together with Lauren after last night’s gig? Had he scored a million kisses—or more than kisses—when the only person I’d kissed in forever, and only by accident, was Drew?

  I bit off a huge chunk of my Dilly Bar. It was so cold, I started to choke.

  Liz and Zach both thumped me on the back. At the same time. Then both started laughing.

  Liz swallowed the last of her Dilly Bar and wiped her hands, several fingers of which were still painted hot pink or violet. “I’m Liz, yeah, but do I know you? Zach?”

  “I was two years behind you. Mary’s class.”

  “I remember now. You’re an artist like Cat. You were at the art show last spring.”

  “Cat’s a much better artist, but I try. I also played in the band with Mary until she left for MIT.”

  The whole time he was talking, Zach methodically bit off the cherry coating on his Dilly Bar. He now had a round blob of vanilla ice cream on a stick. Bizarre. No wonder he played classical music on his car radio.

  It didn’t explain the Cat in the Hat tattoo, though.

  “Oh, yeah.” Liz lifted an eyebrow at Zach’s devoid-of-cherry-coating Dilly Bar, so I wasn’t the only one. “You play bass? Mary mentioned you, but I’ve never heard you play. How do you feel about D chords?”

  D chords. Guitar. Shit. So much for claiming I’d played guitar for years. Of course, thanks to Cat, Zach already knew the truth, no matter what Liz and Jane claimed to Kirk.

  Zach looked at Liz, not me. “On bass, chords are a different concept. I just play roots and fifths. I mean—” He broke off when we stared at him blankly. “Bass guitar is different. We don’t always get a lot of respect.”

  Liz nodded. “I know what you mean. My incredibly inspired rendition of ‘Chopsticks’ on piano doesn’t get a lot of respect, either.”

  When Zach laughed—even though he’d never laughed at a single thing I’ve ever said—I almost choked on
my Dilly Bar again.

  I held up a hand before either Liz or Zach, or both, could slug me.

  Zach turned to me. “So you do play guitar? Or are you just starting? Jeremy said something, but then he and Cat broke up, and then last night . . .”

  I frowned. “What about last night? I was there.”

  “No kidding.” Zach licked all the way around his bare Dilly Bar, casually, and not fast enough to keep it from dripping all over the table. “But it’s cool. Lauren is cool. That girl Drew goes out with . . . isn’t.”

  I had a million questions, but I didn’t plan to ask them in front of Liz. Probably not even if Liz weren’t here.

  She was, though. Silently watching Zach and me as if we were the best ping-pong match she’d ever seen.

  But Liz didn’t watch sports; she played them. For blood.

  Like now. “Cat has played guitar forever, but she’s always bitched about mangling her D chord.”

  I tried giving her a look.

  “Do you? Play? Really?”

  Zach was annoyingly persistent.

  I was just annoyed. And sick of lying and bullshit and covering my ass. And possibly, despite the violet paint now covering my walls, sick of Liz.

  I’d have to think about that one.

  “I play, but I suck.”

  The moment I said it, my breath caught when I realized too late that Zach would make some perverted joke about exactly how I suck. Like guys did. Even in front of me.

  “Taking lessons?” He nodded without so much as an eye twitch to tell me he’d already heard I sucked. And not on guitar. “It takes a while to get good. Your sister Mary—”

  “Is a child prodigy. Yeah. I know.”

  He shook his head. “She’s good, actually, but it took a while. She joined our band when she was still busy mangling her D chord. Like you might say.”

  Liz patted my hand. “See? Mary sucked, too.”

  “I didn’t say she sucked.” Zach leaned back in his seat, his Dilly Bar now dripping down the front of his shirt. He glanced down, wiping off the biggest blob but leaving several smaller ones. Guys. “It takes a long time to get good. You shouldn’t wait until you’re good to join a band.”

  I thought about Cat. About how she’d sung with Zach’s band and been jeered until she fainted.

  I wouldn’t have fainted; I would’ve crushed whoever pulled crap like that on me. But still.

  “That’s not what I hear from Cat.”

  Zach started licking his Dilly Bar so intently, I almost thought he hadn’t heard me. Or maybe he was struggling to come up with an excuse for what they’d done to Cat, but he looked as if red ants were crawling around inside his shirt. “Hey, I don’t like to get involved.”

  I snorted. “Right. I saw how uninvolved you were last night when Chelsea started cutting on Lauren.”

  Zach’s hand tugged on the collar of his T-shirt as if it was too tight. Maybe from all those red ants crawling around and all. I bit my lip, wishing I hadn’t mentioned Lauren. Wishing I knew why I cared that he was so protective of her and not, say, Cat.

  I already knew he didn’t give a flying fuck about me.

  He sighed. “The thing is, Cat didn’t join our band. That time they asked her to sing, they set her up.”

  Liz glanced at me and nodded.

  I frowned, jabbing my Dilly Bar in Zach’s direction. It’s possible a dab of ice cream hit him on the nose. “Did the whole band know? Is that why Cat and Jeremy broke up?”

  “Cat didn’t tell you why?”

  Liz asked the question, not Zach, startling me.

  I whirled on her. “She told you?”

  She shook her head. “Not me, not Jane. But I figured you’d know.”

  “Not a clue.”

  I didn’t plan to tell Zach that Cat didn’t speak to me, even if he already knew. He seemed to know everything.

  For once in my life, I didn’t know a damn thing.

  Liz and I both looked at Zach, who held up his hands in surrender. His right hand, holding his quickly melting Dilly Bar, had ice cream dripping off of it.

  He licked his hand, then shrugged. “Cat told Jeremy that you don’t play guitar, so Kirk reamed out Jeremy when your sisters told him you do.”

  I frowned. “Why would Kirk care one way or another?”

  He looked out the window so long, I thought he wasn’t going to answer. Finally, he turned back to me. “Let’s just say bands are easier when love interests aren’t involved.”

  What did that mean? “But I’m not—”

  “Anyone’s girlfriend. Yeah. That’s not reassuring, as it turns out, to some of the girlfriends out there.”

  Including Cat?

  No way. Jeremy’s hair was bright green this week, which wasn’t an improvement on last week’s burnt orange. Cat was afraid I might want him? She was afraid I’d go after anyone she wanted? Was that why she hated me?

  Was she really such an idiot?

  “But you were going to tell us about reform school.”

  Lost in thought, I blinked at Zach’s words. For someone who had zero interest in me, the guy didn’t let go. “No, I wasn’t.”

  Liz kept licking the stick from her Dilly Bar, which she’d long since finished. Finally, she set it on the table, then picked it up again and started playing with it. “I know I’m not Jane, but wouldn’t it help to tell someone about it?”

  I smiled sweetly at her. “Someone like Jane?”

  Liz laughed, surprising me. “She’d coo and say all the right things, I admit, but she’s not here.”

  “Don’t tell me. You locked her to the fridge in your apartment so you could beat it out of me?”

  Liz tilted her head. “Tempting. She did eat all the leftover pizza.”

  Zach laughed. “How about if I coo and say all the right things instead?”

  I just stared at him. And kept staring.

  He blinked first. “You figure I suck at cooing as much as you suck at D chords.” When I bristled, he held up a hand. “Not that I said you suck at D chords.”

  He didn’t have to. Jazz had finally shown me an easier way to play a D chord, but even that was hit or miss.

  “Seriously. You don’t want to know.”

  “Why did you cut your hair?” Liz leaned forward on her elbows, totally ignoring the fact that I didn’t want to talk about it, let alone in front of Zach. At least she didn’t make a crack about how vain I’d always been about my long hair, but maybe she was just waiting for the perfect moment.

  My chin went out. “If enough girls try to yank out your hair by the roots, you eventually decide you’d rather give them less of a target.”

  I didn’t add that our jailers gave us a bare minimum of bathroom time at Shangri-La, that hellhole. I refused to mention bathroom time in front of Zach. He was already looking at me as if he were wondering if leprosy was contagious.

  “You weren’t . . . safe?”

  Liz’s eyes were bright and shimmery, almost as if she might cry. Liz? Cry?

  I waved a hand. “Like I said. You don’t want to know. Compared to everything else that went down, the length of my hair didn’t much matter.”

  Liz pressed her lips together. Tightly. Yeah, those were definitely tears in her eyes. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Your hair looks good.”

  Liz and I whirled on Zach. After a long, weird moment, Liz laughed first. “He’s right, you know. Your hair looks good either long or short.”

  Hey, I had a mirror, okay? But I didn’t see any point in arguing. It’d take years to grow my hair all the way back, and Zach would be long gone from my life by then.

  Or much, much sooner.

  He shrugged. “I don’t see why so many girls wear their hair long. It must be a pain in the ass.”

  Running a hand through her shoulder-length hair, Liz laughed again. “You got that right. Shorter makes life easier.” She turned to me. “And like your friend says, it looks good on you.”

  Zach wasn’t my
friend.

  He was Lauren’s friend.

  I don’t know why I kept picturing them together, in vivid detail, then blowing up the picture in my mind with a huge crate of explosives.

  “So reform school gave you short hair.” Zach took a last lick of his Dilly Bar, then used the stick to start a sword fight with Liz. No, Liz started it. Of course. “Did you get anything else good from reform school?”

  I frowned. I put my haircut under the category of “How I Survived Reform School,” not “Good Things That Happened in Reform School.” The latter list had exactly zero items on it.

  “I didn’t want a haircut.” Understatement. I’d cried the whole time the barber hacked away at my hair. “The only person who saw anything good about locking me up in reform school for a year was my dad. Period.”

  I shot Liz a quick glance, daring her to argue, but she just studied me the way she’d study a rat from one of her lab experiments. None of the rats had a good life, as I recall, except maybe the one Mary rescued and kept in her room until the day Mom opened the door, shrieked, and collapsed in a heap in the upstairs hall.

  Liz kept watching me for several seconds. “Mom said your grades went way up in reform school. Was it easier?”

  I gave her the Glare of Death, and not just because Zach did not need to know about my grades. Or my hair, although that was already obvious. Or anything else about me.

  Finally, I shrugged. “It was harder, actually. Everything in reform school was hard.”

  Understatement.

  “But you never used to—” Liz broke off and glanced at Zach. “I mean, that’s great. Good teachers?”

  “They were all strict, cranky, sadistic assholes.” A lot like Jazz, my guitar teacher, come to think of it. “What’s not to like?”

  Zach laughed, softly, stopping when he realized that Liz and I weren’t smiling.

  “Hey, good preparation for college, right? Have you taken the ACT or SAT yet? Where are you thinking about going?”