Escaping Perfect (4 page)

“Jennifer Kay. She's backing up Patty Parkman now,” Fiona said, sweeping her stray hairs behind her ears.

“Wow. How'd she land that gig?” he asked.

For the first time all day Duncan's expression darkened. “Why? Looking for a way to grab onto her coattails?”

The cowboy shot him an irritated look. Fiona and I glanced at each other, and instantly I knew—there was some kind of history between these guys.

“Well, Jasper Case! As I live and breathe,” Hal interjected, like he was greeting a major celebrity, but with a touch of sarcasm. “To what do we owe the honor of this visit?”

I almost fell off the stool. “You're Jasper Case?”

Jasper smiled at me. That smile. Obviously. Obviously it was Jasper. How had I not realized it before? The eyes, the hair, the teasing personality. Of course, the last time I'd seen him he'd been pulling my pigtails and stuffing a wriggling worm down the front of my dress, but still. It was clearly the same boy.

“You heard of me?” he asked.

Duncan scoffed, wiping out a glass with serious vigor.

“What? No . . . I . . .” I paused and took a breath. “I got my hair cut at your grandmother's place earlier,” I improvised. “I think she mentioned you.”

Jasper's eyes narrowed, and he took a half-step back, staring at my head. “Red Sox?”

I reached up and self-consciously touched my neck, which was burning. “Yeah, it's me. Home-wrecker,” I added for good measure.

He leaned away and looked me up and down. “I didn't recognize you,” he said. “But I like it. It's very you.”

“You don't even know me,” I said, sliding off the stool to do one last check on my tables. I had this sense that it would be a good idea to put some distance between me and Jasper Case. Not because I thought he'd ever realize who I really was, but because my body was reacting to being near him in ways I didn't know how to handle.

“Fair enough.” He chuckled. “But I still like it.”

I turned away before he could see the huge smile that lit my face.

“So Jasper, are you gonna order something, or did you just come in here to flirt with my waitresses?” Hal asked, rolling his shoulders back.

“Take a guess,” Duncan muttered under his breath as he dropped the clean glass onto the shelf with a clatter.

“Duncan! Shut
up,
” Fiona said through her teeth.

“I'll take a fried chicken basket to go, and throw some of those delicious tomatoes of yours in there too,” Jasper said. “They got the best fried green tomatoes on the planet,” he told me, coming up behind me and leaning in like he was
sharing state secrets. “And here. Flyers for tonight's open mic.”

When I turned around, I found myself face-to-face with a bright green flyer. It advertised open-mic night at the Mixer Bar and Grill, starting at midnight. Jasper lowered it to reveal that damn smile.

“My new band's playing our premier performance. You should come.”

I plucked the flyer from his hand and moved past him to the counter. He handed out more to the couples sitting at my booth. “Are you going?” I asked Fiona.

She looked from the flyer to me to Jasper. “I don't know. I'm kinda tired.”

“Come on, Fi,” Jasper said, grabbing her around the waist and twirling her toward the window. “We even got a new song we're gonna try out. You've gotta be there.”

By the time he released her, Fiona was breathless. She also had more of a spark in her eye than she'd had all day, which made her instantly prettier.

“I'll go if you'll go,” she said to me tentatively.

“I'll go if you have some clothes I can borrow,” I replied, looking down at my once-crisp, now-ketchup-mottled Little Tree Diner T-shirt. “And possibly a shower.”

Jasper clapped his hands and rubbed them together. “Now we're talking.”

I blushed, and Fiona shoved Jasper's shoulder from behind.

“Duncan?” Jasper said genially.

“I wouldn't go if you paid me,” Duncan replied. Then he shot me a look I couldn't quite pin down, turned around, and disappeared into the kitchen.

“What flew up his butt tonight?” Jasper asked, making Fiona laugh.

“Of course you can come back to our place for a shower. I don't know how well my clothes'll fit you, but we'll give it a try,” she said to me. “I may even have an idea of an apartment for you.”

“Awesome.”

Walking into the Little Tree Diner was the best decision I'd made all day. Maybe ever, considering I hadn't been making decisions on my own for very long.

I picked up the water pitcher and reached over the booth to refill some glasses. Jasper stood back, and I could see his reflection in the window as he blatantly checked me out from behind. God. If he could think I was attractive after a whole day on the road, no sleep, and eight hours slinging burgers, then something was clearly wrong with him.

“So you'll be there, Red Sox?” Jasper asked.

“I'll be there,” I said.

“Good. 'Cause my new goal in life is to earn a standing ovation outta you,” he said.

I turned around and looked him in the eye. Very brazen of normally reserved little old me. But maybe I wasn't the old me anymore. “Good luck with that,” I said.

As I walked away, he whistled like he was impressed, and I just about died. Suddenly I wasn't that tired. In fact, I wasn't tired at all.

Chapter Four

After a free dinner of sliced steak
and fried green tomatoes—they were as good as Jasper had promised—I went to Hadley's, which thankfully stayed open until eleven p.m., and scored a shower cap and some of the foaming apricot scrub I loved so much. Then Fiona took me home and showed her pity by letting me shower first. Nothing had ever felt so good as the warm water hitting my skin and washing off the grime. Good-bye, sticky Everglades pollen; so long, dried blood; sayonara, bus exhaust; hardly knew ye, ketchup stuck up in my arm hairs.

Fiona and Duncan lived with their father and mother in a big, beautiful home near the edge of town, where everything was antique but impeccably preserved. In Fiona's room was a huge canopy bed with about a zillion pillows that had
made me almost sick for sleep, but I'd powered through. The thought of seeing Jasper again, of hearing him sing and play guitar, had a lot to do with it.

Now, an hour later, I was freshly scrubbed and wearing a knee-skimming floral skirt and white T-shirt—borrowed from Fiona—and my black heels, since my feet turned out to be two sizes bigger than hers. I felt almost normal as we walked the surprisingly busy streets of Sweetbriar. All around us cars edged into parking spots, crowds of people chatted and laughed, couples ducked into alcoves to steal kisses. I felt like I was back in busy, touristy Boston instead of moseying the streets of a small southern town. Of course, the most I'd ever walked the streets of Boston was from a car into a building, and even then I'd been constantly surrounded by guards. Just being able to breathe, look around, not worry about someone trying to snap my picture was beyond freeing.

“This place is a scene,” I commented, as we slid around a crowd of teenagers smoking cigarettes in the center of the sidewalk.

“It is every Thursday through Sunday,” Fiona replied, her hands shoved deep in the pockets of her denim jacket. She'd put on a striped sundress and cowboy boots; her blond hair fanned out over her shoulders. With a little mascara and a swipe of blush she'd become startlingly pretty in a doe-eyed,
pixieish kind of way. “They say our population doubles on big bar nights.”

I believed it. When we got to the Mixer, the line to get in looped down the block and around the corner, but Fiona walked right up to the surly-looking man at the door. It wasn't until that moment that I realized he was probably checking IDs. Instantly, I began to sweat. This night was going to be over before it began.

“Hey, Felix,” she said. “This is Lia.”

“Ladies.” He gave me a nod and stood aside to let us through the door.

The people at the front of the line groaned in protest, but their gripes were instantly drowned out by the noise inside the bar.

“You know him?” I shouted to be heard.

“I know everyone in this town.” Fiona made this declaration wearily, as if it was not something she was proud of.

Inside, the Mixer was almost impossibly dark, aside from the huge glowing beacon that was the stage at the top of the room. On it were two girls in ripped jeans, one playing a violin, the other strumming a guitar and crooning into the mic. There were about twenty round two-top tables in front of the stage, each one currently crowded by four or five people, and the bars at either side of the room were stacked three partiers deep.

My palms began to prickle. This was a crowd. An uncontrolled, unsupervised crowd. And I had no bodyguard. I had never been in a situation like this. Not once in my entire life. What if someone recognized me? What if someone tried to hurt me, or worse, kidnap me again? I felt an almost unbearable need to get back outside. To be alone—my natural state of being.

This was what you wanted,
a little voice inside my head chided.
You going to chicken out now?

Fiona surged ahead. I took a deep, steadying breath and gripped the back of her jacket to keep from getting separated. I kept my head down, waiting for my eyes to adjust, trying to calm the erratic beating of my heart. No one here knew me. No one here was looking for me. I was Lia Washington. Unfamous, uninteresting Lia Washington. I breathed in and out deliberately, just as I'd been taught in meditation, and gradually unclenched.

Where was Fiona going? She just kept walking, snaking around the chairs and bodies like she had a destination in mind, even though there were clearly no seats left in the entire place. Finally she stopped at a table front and center and proved me wrong, falling into an empty chair.

“Hey, Britta.”

A broad-shouldered Asian girl with a couple dozen tiny
ponytails sticking out in all directions from her head looked up from her laptop. She wore a black T-shirt that read
I CAN BEAT UP YOUR HONOR STUDENT
over a pair of plaid shorts, torn purple tights, and knee-high black boots.

“Way to be late. Do you know how many times I've had to say ‘these seats are taken'?”

“Sorry. My fault,” I said, taking the other empty chair. “I hadn't showered in a while, and I think I stayed in there a little too long.”

The girl looked at me and pushed her black-framed glasses up on her nose. Only they weren't glasses, because there was no glass in them. She had Band-Aids in a rainbow of colors around her fingers.

“You're pretty,” she said, like an accusation. Then she went right back to typing.

I looked at Fiona, confused. “Britta both tells it likes it is and saves most of her words for her music review blog,” Fiona explained, nodding at the computer. “I'll bet you ten dollars she's ripping these poor girls to shreds right now.”

“Give her ten dollars,” Britta said, her fingers never slowing.

I laughed as the girls finished up their song. There was a mild smattering of applause from around the room, and then a gangly black kid in a white cowboy hat too big for his head took the stage.

“That was Danny and Delia! Let's hear it!” he shouted.

The crowd cheered again, but this time with even less enthusiasm.

“All right, all right,” the MC said cheerily, not seeming to notice. “Next up we have the Case Files!”

The bar filled with hoots and cheers and hollers as Jasper bounded onto the stage with a gleaming black guitar, followed by two other guys with guitars and one drumstick-twirling girl. They all wore some combination of distressed jeans and artfully wrinkled T-shirts, and each sported a small, distinguishing accessory—a sparkly green scarf for the drummer, a slew of rope bracelets for guitarist number one, a silver nose ring and eyeliner for guitarist number two. But not Jasper. Jasper looked every bit the cowboy in his pressed snap-front shirt, gleaming belt buckle, and black hat. My heart caught at the mere sight of him. He gazed past us, over our heads, out at the crowd, and I somehow felt disappointed that he hadn't psychically known I was there, down front, and caught my eye right away.

Honestly, there was something wrong with me. There were probably a dozen other girls in this bar he really did know. Maybe a dozen girls in this bar he'd even hooked up with. I had no idea. What I did know was that he hadn't played a note yet and I was thinking like a groupie idiot.

“The Case Files?” Britta scoffed and shook her head at her computer screen. “Worst name he's come up with yet.”

Her fingers flew furiously.

“So, Fiona, what's the deal between your brother and Jasper?” I asked, keeping one eye on him as I spoke to her.

Britta made a startling bleating sound that might have been a laugh or a hiccup. “Got a few hours?”

“They just . . . don't get along,” Fiona said, adjusting herself on her chair. “It's a long story.”

“Understatement!” Britta sang.

Up on the stage Jasper leaned in to the mic. “Evening, everyone! We're the Case Files.”

Then he turned around and counted the rhythm. “One, two, three, four!”

The music began, a harmonious, upbeat strum of guitars, and I tore my eyes off Jasper, deciding to change the subject. “Worst name yet?” I asked.

“This is Jasper's third band in two years,” Fiona replied, nodding along to the beat. “The first one was In Case of Emergency, and he had a keyboardist. The second was the Black Case, which included a brass section. He told me now he's trying to pare things down.”

Wow. Talk about an ego. Naming every one of his bands after himself? Not that I was surprised. Boy was full of himself
when he was eight years old, and that was before the testosterone and the cheekbones and what I was betting were some pretty serious abs under all those silver snaps.

The thought had barely formed in my mind when Jasper looked down at us midstrum and winked. I blushed as at least twenty girls in the room turned to stare me down.

Britta groaned. “Lord, you'd think he was still channeling JT.”

“JT?” I asked.

“Justin Timberlake,” she clarified. “He had this whole phase in middle school.”

I snorted a laugh.
That
I would have liked to see.

“So, Lia, Britta's looking for a roommate. She used to live with Jennifer. You guys should talk,” Fiona said.

“Oh, yeah?” I said hopefully. “Where do you live?”

As if it mattered. I'd take a mattress in the back of someone's pickup right now.

“Apartment above Hadley's.” For the first time her fingers stopped moving, and she really looked at me. “Two bedrooms, one bathroom, unreliable water heater. Rent is six fifty a month, but I pay three fifty for the bigger room. You have a job?”

“Yep.”

“You smoke?”

“Nope.”

“You like boy bands? Because I can't live with someone who likes boy bands.”

“Um, no.”

“Okay, then. You're in,” she said. “Jen left all the furniture, but she took the sheets. You'll need sheets.”

“Oh my gosh, thank you,” I said. “You have no idea—”

“Shh!” She held up a hand, a Buzz Lightyear Band-Aid glowing at me in the dark. “He's coming to the bridge.”

We looked up at Jasper. The music slowed. He closed his eyes as he got into the emotion of the song, letting his guitar hang as the drummer pulled back and the other two guitarists strummed quietly.

Man. Jasper was Hot with a capital
H
.

“So, Lia, why'd you leave Florida?” Fiona asked.

It was amazing how fast my throat went dry. I coughed into my hand and couldn't seem to stop.

“Are you okay? Is she okay?” Britta asked, looking at Fiona.

“Sorry,” I croaked. “Tickle in my throat.”

“I'll get you a drink.” Fiona started to get up, but I grabbed her arm.

“No. I'll go.” I was desperate to avoid their questions. I cleared my throat half a dozen times as I stood. “Will they serve me here?” I tried to focus through teary eyes. “I'd love to
get us some drinks to celebrate our new living arrangement.”

As long as they were cheap drinks. And not very high proof. I'd only been drunk once in my life, when my classmate Trevor Thurmonson had smuggled vodka into his dorm room in shampoo bottles. After downing almost an entire Frederic Fekkai bottle myself, I'd spent half the night puking, the other half begging the Tank not to tell my mom, and I still tasted soap whenever I felt even slightly nauseous.

“Oh, they'll serve anyone,” Britta said. “But I only drink water and one hundred percent fruit juice.”

“Would you mind getting me a beer?” Fiona asked.

“I'm on it,” I said, with one last cough into my fist. Beer and water I could handle, both financially and gastro­intestinally.

As I stood up, the song finally came to a close. Half the crowd was on its feet, and everyone was whistling and applauding. A crowd of girls in tight little dresses shouted Jasper's name and held out Sharpies and autograph books, like he was some kind of country god and not just participating in an open mic night where literally anyone could perform. The band started to walk offstage as I headed for the bar.

“Well, look-a here!” Jasper shouted into the mic. “I got the standing O I was hoping for.”

He gestured in my direction, and the spotlight swung
around to blind me. My heart hit the trashed wood floor.

“Actually, no. I was just going to the bar,” I said. “Sorry to disappoint.”

The people at the nearest tables—the ones who could hear me—laughed. Jasper's smile faltered for half a second, but then the MC came out again and whispered something in Jasper's ear. Jasper's grin widened.

“Well, well. Guess what, folks?” he drawled into the mic. “Ryan here's just informed me that we've come to my favorite part of the evening.”

There were cheers all around, and I felt a slight tingle of apprehension. Probably because Jasper was giving me this totally focused,
you are so going down
kinda look.

“That's right!” Ryan shouted, taking the mic back from Jasper. “It's time for . . . the Hidden Talent Showcase!” More screams and cheers. Jasper jumped down from the stage and took my hand. Which, yes, gave me goose bumps. “And it looks like we have our first volunteer!”

“Here we go, Red Sox!” Jasper said, tugging me toward the stairs.

My stomach was in my shoes. “What? No! I can't go up there!” I staggered along behind him, trying to pull away, but he held my hand tight. “Jasper! I can't!”

“Yes, you can, Red Sox,” he said, guiding me in front of
him and placing his hands on my hips now. He maneuvered me up the stairs until I was finally standing on the stage, albeit the very edge of it. I looked out at the audience—more people than I'd ever seen in one place in my life—and my pulse palpitated. There were camera phones everywhere. Suddenly I felt faint. I was about to just jump and run and hop on the next bus to wherever, when Jasper leaned in from behind, his lips oh-so-close to my ear. “Come on, Red Sox. I'm sure you're talented in a lot of ways.”