Girls in Love (9 page)

Lara put the finishing touches on her outfit, adding a pair of white Lucite bangles to her wrist and a butterfly pin to her pink A-line dress, and then glanced in the mirror. Tonight she looked sort of like Audrey Hepburn in
Roman Holiday
, she thought. That was, if Audrey had blue fingernails and a habit of going shopping at the hippie stores on Haight-Ashbury.

“Groovy,” Greer said in passing as she wandered into the living room.

Jokingly, Lara flashed her a peace sign, and then looked at the clock. It was 4:45. Fifteen minutes until she met Marco at the harbor, where they planned to sail two towns over for dinner at a little Italian place he liked. And, she
thought ruefully, three hours and fifteen minutes until Drew planned to take her to dinner at Chez Paula in Pebble Beach.

Whatever had possessed her to say yes to two dates in one night, Lara had no idea. It was hardly characteristic of her—in part because she was usually more honest, and in part because she was usually disorganized and late and thus had difficulties with scheduling in general. The thought of juggling two boys like this unnerved her. But she’d said yes to them both without realizing the conflict, and once she did, it was too late to cancel.

But she couldn’t help feeling a little excited, too. After all, how often did a girl have two cute guys clamoring for dates? Selfishly, Lara felt it was an opportunity not to be missed.

And, she reflected, she truly liked them both. She didn’t want to have to choose between them. Not yet.

As she slid into Greer’s Lexus (after loaning Sadie to Jessica for her date, Greer could hardly deny Lara her chance to drive it), she turned on the radio to the oldies station. It was a Crosby, Stills & Nash song, and she hummed it under her breath as she drove.

Marco was waiting on the deck of his boat, looking breathtakingly cute in a pair of docksiders, white shorts, and a navy-blue-and-white striped Oxford. For a second,
when Lara saw him, she felt an overwhelming pang of guilt. He was so adorable, so sweet, and here she was, keeping this major secret from him. He had no idea about Drew.

Since when did I become such a two-timer?
Lara asked herself.

The sails of Marco’s boat had been unfurled, and they rustled behind him as if anxious to face the wind.

“Ahoy there, matey,” she cried gaily, and then cringed. She could be such a goofball sometimes.

Marco grinned and helped her onto the boat. Then he planted a kiss right on her lips, which made her whole body warm with pleasure. “Howdy, sailor,” he said, his dark eyes sparkling.

As they slid out of the harbor, heading south toward the town of Lincolnville, Marco handed Lara a glass of sparkling water and she sipped it gratefully.

“I think I could sail forever,” she said, gazing down into the blue-green water. “I don’t know why I have to live in Chicago, surrounded by pavement and high-rises and parking lots. I want to live on the ocean, in a little boat. I’ll catch my food every morning, and I’ll bathe in the salt water and all that good stuff.”

Marco smiled and nodded thoughtfully; perhaps, Lara thought, he was imagining her diving naked into the bay for her morning bath.

“I know what you mean,” Marco replied. “But then I
remind myself that dry land has things like movie theaters and museums and bookstores, all of which I’m pretty fond of.”

Lara took another sip of water. “You have a point. Terra firma has thrift stores, too, which are some of my favorite places on earth.”

As they moved into open water, the boat bobbed gently on the waves. Lara slid closer to Marco, and reached for his hand. “Thanks for taking me to dinner,” she said.

“Don’t thank me yet,” he warned smilingly. “You might hate it.”

“Impossible,” she said. “I already know I like it.”

He looked down at her with his deep, beautiful, dark eyes and then kissed her on the forehead. “You’re cute.”

She frowned playfully. “Cute? I prefer ‘gorgeous,’” she teased, acting more confident than she felt.

“Well, you’re that, too, obviously. I’m just trying to make sure you don’t get a big head.”

“Never,” she assured him. “I have cousins to bring me down to earth whenever I get too full of myself.” She thought fondly of Greer and Jessica. The former, especially, was always ready to take a person down a peg. For instance, there was the time Lara was trying to channel Joan Crawford in
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
and Greer told her that the shoulder pads in her 1940s-era suit made her look like a football player in drag.

Just then they hit a wave, and the salty spray splashed both of their faces, not to mention their clothes.

“Good thing I decided against the white dress,” Lara commented, wiping the water from her eyes and wringing out the hem of her sheath. “That could have been scandalous.”

“Too bad,” Marco said. “I kind of like scandalous.”

She poked him in the ribs and he laughed. Then he pointed ahead. “Look—the restaurant. Right there on the water.”

Lara was instantly charmed by the homey little café that hugged the shore. White Christmas lights were draped festively along its porch, on which happy couples were enjoying plates of seafood risotto and spaghetti
con vongole.

“It’s perfect,” she breathed. “And did I mention I’m starving?”

Over dinner they talked about their families and where they hoped to go to college. While Lara tried to save room for the next dinner she had coming up, everything was too delicious.

When the waiter finally removed their plates, she sat back and held her stomach in both hands. “Ohh,” she said. “I must have eaten five dozen clams.”

Marco waved the dessert menu in front of her. “But of course you have room for the tiramisu? Or the homemade cranberry gelato?”

Lara figured she could probably manage to stuff a few bites of dessert into her mouth—sugar, after all, was an essential part of her diet—but then she looked at her watch. She had only forty-five minutes until her date with Drew, which sent a little ripple of panic through her.

“Oh, I don’t think so,” she said, shifting nervously in her seat. “I’m really just too full. I think we should get going, don’t you? Before it gets too dark?” When Marco didn’t reply right away, she continued breathlessly. “I mean, I know you’re an experienced sailor and everything, but being on the ocean at night makes me kind of nervous. It’s all that dark, deep water business. I keep thinking that maybe the Loch Ness Monster or Jaws or something might be swimming around beneath me. And maybe he hasn’t had as big a dinner as we did, so he’s really hungry, and he thinks that a girl from Chicago sounds like just the ticket to fill him up. You know? I mean, wow, I guess I’m not ready to live on a boat after all!” Lara was surprised at her ability to lie this way.

Marco gave her an odd look and she understood that she was babbling. But it was extremely important that they leave,
right now
, and if they didn’t, she was going to have to start feigning a headache or a sudden case of narcolepsy or something.

But Marco signaled the waiter for the check, and quickly enough they were heading back to Pebble Beach. Lara
wanted to cuddle up to him as she had earlier, but she was just too jittery.

Back in the harbor, he kissed her good night tenderly, and she nearly didn’t get off the boat. She almost just blew off the date with Drew entirely. But she didn’t. She disentangled herself unwillingly from Marco’s strong, brown arms and headed back to Greer’s car.

“Thanks again—I’ll call you,” she yelled to Marco, who waved and blew her a kiss.

“Try the choucroute,” Drew urged Lara. “It’s a house specialty.”

She looked at him blankly. He’d dressed up for their date, and he looked very handsome in his vintage sport coat and skinny tie. He looked a little like a young Paul McCartney, in fact, back when he was in the Beatles, except that Drew was much better-looking. He’d even given her another bouquet of flowers. As she’d thanked him, the feel of Marco’s kisses still lingering on her lips, she’d felt like one of the worst, most deceitful people in the world.

Lara looked at him in bafflement. “What in the world is choucroute? It sounds like a fancy crouton.”
And a single crouton is about all I can bear to eat right now
, she thought.

Drew folded his hands over his menu. “It’s a long-simmered combination of sausages, smoked meats, and sauerkraut,” he informed her. “It’s a traditional dish of the
Alsatian region of France, which is where Paula of Chez Paula is from.”

Lara glanced up to see a small, fifty-something woman with long, gray braids and a long, white apron smiling at Drew.

“That’s her,” he said, waving. “Her daughter used to babysit me, and she’d always feed me choucroute after the beach.”

Even the
sound
of choucroute made Lara feel full to bursting. “I was sort of leaning toward the salad,” she said meekly.

He threw up his hands. “Women!” he cried theatrically. “Always dieting.”

Lara nodded, happy to be offered the calorie-restricting excuse. “It
is
bathing suit season, after all!” she said brightly.

After they ordered, Drew filled her in on the various exploits of his summer campers: There had been the requisite water balloon wars, food fights, and pantie raids, of course. There’d been one kid who liked to stuff spaghetti noodles up his nose and another who refused to wear his bathing trunks, insisting, instead, on swimming in his footy pajamas. “And don’t get me started on the kid who thought he could talk to the animals just like Dr. Dolittle,” Drew warned.

Lara giggled at his stories, and she remembered again
how much fun they’d had last summer. If there was one person who could always be counted on to make her laugh, it was Drew. Even his purposely lame jokes—like the elephant series (“Why did the elephant sit on the marshmallow? So he wouldn’t fall into the hot chocolate!”, etc.)—were funny, just because he delivered them with such obvious pleasure.

Even though they’d been talking on the phone nearly every day up until their fight, it seemed like so much had happened since then. Lara had become obsessed with Flannery O’Connor’s short stories, and was eager to share with Drew the plots of the weirder ones. Drew had finally learned how to drive a stick shift after his older brother, Jordan, had bet him twenty dollars that he wasn’t coordinated enough to master it. They compared notes on the movies they’d seen and rented, and debated whether or not
Pirates of the Caribbean
was (a) a good
bad
movie, (b) a good
good
movie, or (c) a bad
bad
movie. Lara voted for (c) while Drew held out for (a).

Drew devoured his giant plate of choucroute, while Lara ate about three leaves of lettuce and one cherry tomato. When they’d finished, Drew reached across the table for her hand. “I’m so glad we’re back together again,” he said.

So we are together?
Lara wondered, feeling both happy and confused. Where did that leave things with Marco?

She had never dated two guys before, and she’d never imagined that she could like two different people equally. As night finally descended over the streets of Pebble Beach, Lara felt full of both food and anxiety. She wondered how long she could possibly keep this situation up. That annoying little voice in her head warned her that it wouldn’t be for very long.

The fourteenth of July—Bastille Day in France, and Chace Warner’s birthday in Pebble Beach—dawned hazy and hot, and the humidity did no favors to Jessica’s hair or her mood. Greer had solved the first problem with a dab of Kérastase Lait Nutri-Sculpt, which restored Jessica’s blonde locks to their normal smoothness, but the two cousins’ attempts to cheer Jessica up were not improving her gloomy outlook.

Lara offered her a bite of her very favorite candy bar—dark chocolate with pieces of crystallized ginger—but Jessica shook her head. She felt like she’d lost her taste for sweets ever since she’d spotted Connor coming out of Izzy’s Ice Cream with another girl.

“I mean, just who is this Lily person anyway?” she fumed for what was probably the millionth time. “If she’s BFFs with Connor, how come I’ve never hung out with her? Is he trying to keep her a secret from me?”

Greer disappeared into their shared bedroom for a moment and then returned to the living room where Lara and Jessica were spread out on the soft taupe couches. All the adults were off at the beach, and the house was quiet.

“Here,” Greer said firmly, holding out a laptop so sleek and tiny it could have almost fit in her little royal blue Banana Republic satchel. “Time for a little detective work.”

When Jessica looked at her blankly, Greer sighed and logged onto Facebook. After another moment, she was on Connor’s page.

“You’re friends with Connor on Facebook?” Jessica asked incredulously.

“Of course, dummy,” Greer answered. “I’m friends with everybody. Because personally I prefer electronic friends to actual ones. Actual ones are always calling you up and wanting you to do things, when really all a person wants is to be left alone.”

Jessica looked at her quizzically. “I don’t want to be left alone.”

“Me, either,” Lara piped in.

“Well, whatever,” Greer said dismissively. “One man’s meat is another man’s poison.”

Lara and Jessica shared a quizzical look as Greer went on. “The point, Jessica, is to find out what Lily has posted on Connor’s wall and to see if it’s at all incriminating.”

“Did you learn this tactic watching
CSI
?” Lara queried jokingly.

“Please,” Greer said, her eyes glued to the screen. “Like I watch that trash.”

Jessica leaned over her cousin’s shoulder as Greer scrolled down Connor’s page. She was not at all pleased to see plenty of little pictures of Lily popping up, signaling the girl’s public messages to Connor. “Happy birthday, sweetie,” said one, from several months ago. Another said, “Hope you feel better” and was signed XOXOXO.

Jessica frowned deeply. She’d seen some of these posts before, but she’d never thought twice about them. She’d assumed they were completely innocent. Now, however, they took on a different tone entirely. What did Lily mean, exactly, when she called Connor “sweetie”?

Jessica read farther down on the page, finding more messages that seemed just a little too affectionate. “If her public messages are that lovey-dovey, what do you think her private e-mails to him might say?” she wondered.

“I know a hacker,” Greer said mildly, “if that’s the direction you want to go.”

Jessica shook her head, though there was a tiny part of her that was curious. “No,” she said, “definitely not.”

Lara sat up and plucked a shiny Granny Smith from the giant fruit bowl that Aunt Trudy kept in the living room “to encourage healthy eating and the consumption of fiber.” Trudy had a thing about fiber.

“I think you need to be careful, Jessica,” Lara said, taking a big bite of the apple. “Connor is a really sweet guy, and I don’t think you want to jump to any conclusions about his relationship with Lily.”

Jessica was still staring at Lily’s wall posts and wondering why it had never occurred to her that Lily might have a thing for Connor. Or that Connor might have a thing for Lily.

“Hello? Hey, Jessica,” Greer said, waving a hand in front of her face. “As much as I hate to admit it, seeing as how I prefer to assume the worst about people, I think Lara has a point. Connor is
not
like Liam, that player brother of his. He’s a good guy, and he really cares about you. I’m sure he had a perfectly good reason for bailing on you to take Lily to ice cream.”

Jessica fell back against the cocoa-colored shantung throw pillows and moaned. “When you put it that way, you know perfectly well that it sounds terrible. Bailing on me to take Lily to get ice cream!”

Greer reached and gently touched Jessica’s shoulder.
“I didn’t mean it to sound like that. I really do think Connor must have had a really good reason for doing what he did.”

“Yeah, and you should just talk to him,” Lara said, her mouth full of apple. “Find out what the reason is.”

Jessica nodded slowly. She knew her cousins weren’t only trying to make her feel better—they were making actual sense. “You’re right,” she sighed. “I’ll talk to him tonight. He said he’d meet me at Chace’s party.”

Greer rolled her eyes. “Why can’t anyone else throw a party in this town?” she asked. “That guy is such a loser.”

“Actually he’s kind of nice,” Lara said. “When he’s not being drunk and stupid, that is. I ran into him the other day at Ahoy.”

“And he has a really good house for parties,” Jessica pointed out, already feeling better about the evening’s plans.

Lara leaned over to a side table where the multiple remote controls were gathered in a confusing cluster. “Does anyone have any idea which one turns on this giant TV? I want to watch Animal Planet.”

Jessica reached out and poked her with her toe. “Don’t change the subject! We’re still talking about tonight.” She still wanted to talk about her fears about Connor, but she didn’t want to sound like a whiner. So she said, “I want to know what you guys are planning on wearing.”

“Hmmm,” Greer said. “I’m going to guess that Lara’s going to go for something like Marilyn Monroe meets Sofia Coppola.”

Lara grinned. “I like the sound of that. Maybe you can help me put something together?”

Greer nodded. “Of course. And you, too, Jessica. We’re not going to let you go to Chace’s in a T-shirt and athletic shorts, no matter how comfortable you say they are. And I am banning any mention of your Keds, even the supposedly cute ones with the daisies all over them.”

Jessica giggled and reached for an apple herself. “No Keds!” she cried. “And I promise to wear a skirt to Chace’s.” She bit into the apple and smiled. “As long as you let me borrow one.”

“Of course,” Greer said. “We’ll find you a skirt that’ll make Connor Selden forget Lily even exists.”

“That sounds like a very good plan,” Jessica said, and took another big bite.