Out with the In Crowd (13 page)

Unless she
knew
I’d tell him and it was all part of her plan . . .

My ballet flats skidded against the linoleum as I stopped. Should I
not
tell Connor? Would telling him somehow force him closer to Jodi in a way I couldn’t predict?

I paced the width of the hall several times. It seemed to me that telling Connor could only help our situation. At least he’d know I wasn’t being paranoid, that Jodi really was after him. And if I didn’t tell him now, it would likely come out later in some heated argument.

Maybe
that’s
what Jodi had anticipated—me losing my cool and blowing up about it. Well, I’d show her. I’d explain everything to Connor in a perfectly calm, rational way.

I hunted down his English class, fibbed him out of there, and waited for him to join me in the hall.

“What’s going on?” he asked, forehead creased with concern.

“C’mon.” I dragged him around the corner so his teacher wouldn’t notice our loitering.

“I have a test tomorrow,” Connor said, “so if this isn’t important, I need to get back in there.”

“Why would I pull you out of class if it wasn’t important?” I asked, then unloaded my entire conversation with Jodi. He frowned all the way through it.

“
Now
do you believe me that she’s after you?” I asked.

“It just doesn’t make sense.” He tugged at the drawstrings of his hoodie. “At youth group last night she said—”

“Don’t you see that everything she’s saying is just to get to you? You can’t trust her.” So much for sounding calm and rational.

Connor sighed. “As I was saying, last night she told me she’s thinking about breaking up with Eli, but because she thinks he’s wrong for her.”

“She must’ve told you that just to gauge your reaction.” I thought of Jodi studying me, searching for signs of happiness.

He considered this. “Or maybe when she said she’s into someone else, she didn’t mean me.”

I rolled my eyes. “Who then? Jesus?”

I rolled my eyes. “Who He shrugged. “Maybe.”

“No, because she said you’d told her you weren’t interested in me.”

“When did I say that? Of course I’m interested in you.” “Not now. When you and Jodi were dating.”

“Oh.” A crease formed on the bridge of his nose as he thought. “Right, I’d forgotten about that. She was jealous that Cameron and Curtis liked you better than her. Who, by the way, miss you and want you to come by the house.”

So not the time. I tapped my foot, impatient. “What are we gonna do about this?”

“About Jodi?” He shrugged. “What’s there to do? The absolute worst-case scenario is she likes me. That doesn’t change how I feel about you.”

Relief flooded me. When he put it like that, it sounded so sensible. This wasn’t junior high. Jodi’s liking him didn’t have to affect his feelings.

I sagged against the wall, against the large painting of our school creed. “I guess you’re right.”

“I’m always right,” he teased, taking my hand and squeezing it.

I fixed him with a serious look. “Please promise me you’ll be careful.”

He pressed a kiss onto my hand as a smile crept onto his face. “Sorry, girl. You can’t get rid of me so easy.”

14

Observing our lunch table dynamics, I wondered why people seemed to want whatever they couldn’t have. Even when they’d had and rejected it, oh, a million times before.

Case in point: John practically salivated as he leaned toward Lisa. “So I went to P.F. Chang’s last night, Lisa. Remember that time I ordered the Kung Pao and you didn’t know how hot those peppers were?”

Lisa smiled politely. “Mm-hmm.”

“I hadn’t been there since then.”

“Yeah, me neither.” Lisa turned to Connor. “Hey, you lived in Vegas, right?”

As the two fell into a discussion about best and worst casino buffets, I watched John fidget with the remains of his pizza. He couldn’t keep his eyes off Lisa. Even before he and Alexis broke up last week, there’d been indications that he liked Lisa again. Now he appeared incapable of hiding it, even with Alexis sitting at the table.

Alexis seemed to be doing her best not to pay attention to John. She turned her back to him and spoke to Jodi, who appeared grateful for an excuse to ignore Eli’s sulking. He’d been acting like this all week, ever since she broke up with him. Yeah, we’d clearly crossed the line into incestuous. Time to move on to college, to find new friends.

“How’s the pizza?” I asked Eli, who sat beside me. Not the cleverest of conversation starters, but I wanted to say something.

“Fine.”

“Doesn’t look like it’s swimming in grease, you know?” “Yep.”

Okay, fine. We didn’t need to talk. I’d just been trying to do him a favor.

I returned my attention to eating rather than distracting him. My gaze involuntarily flickered Jodi’s direction. She smirked and turned back to Alexis. In Jodi’s twisted world of revenge, she probably interpreted my talking to Eli as flirting in hopes of making her jealous. And Eli being tight-lipped looked like a rebuff.

Oh, if I wanted to make her jealous, I could. In five minutes I could have him wrapped back around my finger, vanquishing any desire he had for Jodi.

I grinned at Eli, warm and inviting. I opened my mouth to speak, but nothing came out.

He raised his eyebrows. “What?”

I swallowed my baiting words and turned back to my sandwich. “Never mind,” I whispered.

“You sure?”

I nodded, careful to keep my gaze averted. Tears burned my eyes, and I didn’t want to risk him seeing them.

My desire to pay Jodi back lingered beneath the surface, as if waiting for the moment I let my guard down. When would this be over, the battle of the new me against old habits? Would I ever feel like I was making headway?

“In all likelihood, no.” Amy lowered the laundry basket of clean linens to the couch. “But someday you’ll face a difficult situation and realize that not so long ago, you might have handled it poorly, yet you’re no longer tempted to act that way. Then you’ll know you’ve made progress.”

I helped myself to a washcloth and folded it. “I wish it could be more like this. You can see ahead of time how much work there is to do, you know you’re finished when the basket’s empty, and you know you did a good job if it all stacks neatly in the closet.”

Amy smiled. “Ah, but of course if we really knew how much work it’d be to change ourselves, we’d be too overwhelmed to get started.”

I sighed. How true that felt. It seemed any progress I made only revealed more things needing work.

Amy’s hand rested on my shoulder, and I looked up at her. “Don’t be discouraged, Skylar. You’re doing great.”

For possibly the thousandth time, I wished she was my mother.

Cameron burst into the room. “Skylar, you said five minutes!”

“I know, I’m coming.”

He tapped his foot as I smoothed away the wrinkles of a kitchen towel.

“Go on,” Amy said, taking the towel from me. “I’m sure Connor’s waiting on you too.”

I glanced at the basket full of tangled towels and washcloths. Did Amy ever get breaks? My mom didn’t seem to do half the housework Amy did, yet she was in constant need of time away. “You sure?”

“This’ll take me no time at all.” She shooed me off the couch. “Go be young.”

Cameron snatched my hand and dragged me through the living room. “It’s so cool,” he said, stomping up the stairs. “The painter let me help. I did one of the stars, but I betcha can’t tell which one because it looks just like his.”

Since I’d seen his room last week, it had been completely transformed. No more plain blue walls, mismatched furniture, or ragged carpeting. Now painted furniture from—I’d bet—Pottery Barn Kids took its place. Three of his walls were painted dark with yellowish stars. The fourth wall, empty of furniture, had a large moon mural on it, as if you stood on its surface.

I made a big show of my admiration. “Wow, Cameron. This is the coolest room I’ve ever seen.”

He hopped from one foot to another. “Guess which star I did. Guess which one.”

“I don’t know.” I looked the walls up and down. “I can’t tell.”

“Connor, she can’t tell either!” Cameron cried, and I turned to find Connor standing in the doorway. “I think I’m going to be a painter.”

Connor smiled at his brother, then looked back to me. “Sorry, buddy, but I’ve got to steal Skylar. We have to study.”

Cameron made a face. “Last time you said that, I saw you guys kissing.”

I flushed, but Connor laughed. “We have a test tomorrow. We really do have to study.”

Cameron launched into a song about K-I-S-S-I-N-G. As we headed down the hall toward Connor’s room, Amy hollered up the stairs, “Stop that right now, Cameron Michael!”

Connor rolled his eyes. “Aren’t little brothers the best?”

“No worse than my grumpy, withdrawn little sister.”

“Still?” Connor grabbed his textbook and took the beanbag chair, leaving me the desk. “I thought she’d snap out of it by now.”

Ever since her showdown with Lance last week, Abbie had been a recluse. A snippy recluse.

“What do you think it is?” Connor asked. “Just being freaked out about the baby?”

“I don’t know.” I drew my knees to my chest. “But it’s weird because for a while we were so close, and now there’s like this great big wall between us. And I don’t even know how it happened.”

“You’re still close. It just goes in phases sometimes.” He nodded at the wall dividing his room from Chris’s. “We’re like that too.”

I sighed. Tons of things needed to be done—stocking the nursery, birthing classes, registering at the hospital—but Abbie didn’t seem interested in any of them. And whenever I mentioned any of this to her, she told me to back off.

“If I knew you’d take care of things, I wouldn’t have to constantly bug you about it,” I’d told her yesterday.

“Just leave me alone,” Abbie said as she stormed away. “You’re my sister, not my mom.” She slammed her bedroom door, leaving me alone to ponder various retorts.

Abbie hadn’t been too affected by our fighting. Twenty minutes later, I’d heard her snoring.

“There’s so much that needs to be done,” I said to Connor. “I’m trying to figure out a way to do it all, but Abbie keeps backing away from me.”

“March 10 is still a ways away.”

I blinked at him. “Connor, today’s the
twenty-eighth
. We’ve got six weeks until her due date, and we don’t have a crib or diapers or clothes . . .” I trailed off as Connor covered my hands with his.

“It’ll all get done. And I’ll do whatever I can to help.”

“Something about this feels wrong. She shouldn’t be acting like this.”

“She shouldn’t be in this situation to begin with.
That’s
why it seems like she’s acting weird.”

I wanted to believe Connor was right, that this gnawing fear in my belly was an overreaction. But when I returned home a couple hours later, I knew he’d been wrong. That things were far from okay.

Mom’s Lexus sat in the driveway.

I found Mom and Abbie seated at the kitchen table.

“No cookies today?” I asked in a dry voice from the doorway.

Mom’s mouth twitched into her normal, cool smile. “Hi. We didn’t think you’d be home this early.”

I glanced at Abbie, who stared into a steaming mug of something. The kitchen reeked of coffee. Hopefully Mom thought to make decaf for Abbie.

“What’s going on?” I asked, lowering my backpack to the floor.

“You want coffee?”

“I hate coffee.”

Mom nodded. “Do you want to join us?”

“Is it, like, a private club or something?”

Her mouth pressed into a line. “Don’t be snotty, Skylar.”

I plopped into the farthest chair from them, at the head of the long, oval table. My sister still wouldn’t look at me.

“What are you doing here?” I asked Mom.

“This is still my house.”

“You know what I mean.”

Mom reached for the stainless steel carafe and refilled her cup, then Abbie’s. “I’m here to talk to your dad about Hawaii. About making this as simple and easy a transition as possible.”

Abbie looked at me. Already my head ached from grinding my teeth.

“And what’s your story?” I asked.

She hesitated. “Please don’t be mad—”

“Abbie, you
can’t
go. You’re having a baby—”

“Stop saying that! You think I don’t know I’m having a baby?” She raked her hands through her hair and took several deep breaths. “I can’t stay at school much longer anyway, so I might as well drop out now. And Mom explained the situation to the insurance company, so it won’t be a problem for me to switch doctors.”

“Explained the situation,” I repeated in a flat voice. I cut my gaze to Mom. “I’d love to hear that.”

“Skylar, you know the situation,” Mom said, well measured as always. “I let you make your choice, and now you should let Abbie make hers.”

Had I really been stupid enough to dream this was over?

That Mom wouldn’t try to talk Abbie into going? That Abbie wouldn’t feel swayed to go?

Abbie splayed her hands on the table. “I have a chance to start over. Everybody needs a fresh start.”

I bit back a laugh. Those words had echoed in my head since Mom had said them to me at Starbucks. What an alluring idea, a fresh start. Reinventing yourself. Not being accountable for past mistakes.

Only now I saw it as a chicken’s way out.

“You could come with us,” Abbie said. “No more Jodi. Wouldn’t it be great?”

I ignored this and focused on Mom. “So you’re really going to Hawaii?”

“I told you I was.”

“You also said you were here to stay, so I don’t exactly trust you.”

“He cheated on her. Did you know that, Skylar?” Abbie turned to Mom. “Did you tell her?”

Mom’s gaze didn’t leave my face as she answered Abbie. “Your sister thinks I’m overreacting.”

“Overreacting?” Abbie gaped at me. “Remember how you felt when Eli cheated on
you
?”

“Mom and Dad aren’t in high school.”

“Mom and Dad aren’t in high school.”

She rolled her eyes. “See what I mean?” she said to Mom, her voice brimming with bitterness.

“What?” I asked, wary.

“You have no compassion anymore,” Abbie said. “It’s like you’re so much better than everyone else.”