Splendor (10 page)

“O
hmygod, Scarlett, he’s like an answer to my prayers.”

“You don’t pray, Lily.”

“But if I did.”

The party hadn’t ended until two a.m., at which point Jack had finally pulled the plug—literally—on the music and announced, “It’s two o’clock in the morning. Halloween is over.
October
is over. Go home.”

After the last guests had left, Lily and I scrubbed off our face paint and fought our way out of our costumes before hitting the hot tub. My hair was still twisted up in braids and I watched a brown feather drift down from it and float on the bubbling, steaming water.

“He looks like Adrian. But with muscle tone. And his accent…” Lily sighed. “British accents are so much sexier than Dutch ones, don’t you think?”

“I don’t know, Lil,” I said. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard a Dutch accent.”

“Huh,” she said. “Well, British accents are
way
hotter.”

“I’ll have to take your word for it.”

We hadn’t bothered with bathing suits, which had been fine with me until my gaze landed on the still-floating body just feet away in the pool. With a jolt of fear, I suddenly felt overexposed. Around us the ghosts swung gently in the trees. Our guests gone, the music silenced, Halloween seemed at last to have arrived.

“Are you ready to go inside?” I asked.

“In a minute,” said Lily. The steam made her curls even curlier, if that was possible. “What do you think is up with his eyes?”

I shrugged. “It’s rare, but some people have eyes like that.”

“I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Someone’s got a crush,” I teased, but I didn’t feel playful. Not really.

Lily looked at me appraisingly. “More than some
one,
” she said.

Of course that was ridiculous. “Come on, Lil.”

“I’ll bet every girl here tonight is dreaming about Gunner Montgomery-Valentine. Not to mention a few of the guys.” I got the distinct impression that she was letting me off the hook. “It was a good party, don’t you think?”

“The best,” I agreed. “Everyone will remember it for a long time.”

“Except for Mike,” she said. “Did you see how drunk he got? So gross. I think it’s sad that he’s got nothing better to do than hang out with a bunch of high schoolers.”

Less than five months had passed since Mike Ryan had graduated. But already he had worn out his welcome.

“I wonder why on earth Gunner would want to spend his senior year on Catalina Island,” Lily said.

I frowned at the way Lily had practically spat the name of our home. “Catalina has got to be a lot warmer than winter in the U.K.,” I said.

Lily shrugged.

“The U.K. is an island too, you know.”

“Everything is an island,” Lily said, sounding bored. “Almost the whole world is water. We’re all just floating on it.”

At that moment, her statement seemed especially accurate as we steamed, jets pumping streams of hot water at our backs.

“The girls in our class can want Gunner all they want,” she said, changing the subject in her gunshot-Lily way. “
I’m
going to get him. No matter what.”

Maybe it was just me. Maybe it was the body floating facedown a few feet away. Maybe it was the ghosts in the trees all around us. But Lily’s words sounded like a warning.

At school on Monday, it was clear that the girls were all taking it up a notch. For once, Lily wasn’t the only one in heels, and Jane Maple was wearing her hair in a new way, parted on the side and combed across her forehead like long bangs, then pinned in place.

Lily surprised me with the relative casualness of her outfit. She was wearing a Levi’s jean skirt—which she’d made extra short by turning up the bottom an inch or so, like rolled-up jeans—and a plain white tee. Well, it was plain in
color,
but it wasn’t the kind of tee you buy in a plastic-wrapped three-pack at Target. The neckline was loose and swingy and wide, exposing her shoulders. Little cap sleeves tied up with bows revealed her arms. The fabric was soft and cloud-light. On her feet were white leather platform sandals (“No one pays attention to that stupid Labor Day rule anymore,” she told me).

“You like it?”

“Sure,” I said. “You look great. Just not as fancy as I would have guessed.”

“I’m going for pure Americana,” Lily said seriously. “For a British boy to come all this way, he must have a thing for American girls. So look.” She pointed to her head. Perched in her hair was a pair of red heart-shaped sunglasses. “Red,” she said, then pointed to her T-shirt and then her skirt, “white, and blue.”

“Ah. I guess I didn’t get the memo,” I joked. Lily popped open a little compact to check her lipstick.

“Oh, come off it, Scarlett,” Kaitlyn said from behind me. “We all know those aren’t your everyday jeans.”

I hated that I blushed. Lily raised one eyebrow and said, “Well, it’s nice to see that at least one of us hasn’t gotten all silly over the new boy, Kaitlyn.
You
look perfectly average, just like always.”

Kaitlyn, who’d clearly spent her Sunday touching up her highlights, flushed angrily before stomping away.

Lily snapped the compact closed. “Some girls don’t present enough of a
challenge,
” she said. Then she looked at me. “Those jeans
do
look great on you, Scar.”

It turned out that Gunner was in almost all of my classes—English, AP French, Anatomy, even Psychology. There was no drama class this year—Mrs. B, pregnant with her first child, was having what they called a “complicated pregnancy.” She’d moved to the mainland to be closer to her doctor and was reportedly on bed rest. So that was a huge downer, but at the last minute Mrs. Antoine, the French teacher’s wife, offered to hold a class at the same time that Drama would have been. Unfortunately, she didn’t know anything about the theater, so instead she was teaching an intro psychology class. Pretty much everyone who’d been enrolled in Drama signed up for it, mostly because it was more convenient than changing around the rest of our schedules. Connell didn’t take it, of course. It didn’t sound like an easy A, so he was out.

Lily, who had never showed any interest in the subject, sailed into psychology class the day after Gunner arrived at our school. She gave me her famous innocent, wide-eyed look, like there was nothing at all suspicious about her voluntarily adding a class that involved writing two term papers. I was more than willing to cede my chair—which was right next to Gunner’s—to her. It was the least I could do.

And it wasn’t just the girls who were affected by Gunner Montgomery-Valentine. From the very first day, the crowd of guys who’d followed Andy around campus for the past three years changed their allegiance. Even Connell jumped on the Gunner bandwagon. Josh started combing his hair straight back like Gunner, but he used way too heavy a hand when applying pomade and ended up looking like a mortician. In the lunchroom, at the table where Andy and his boys always sat, no one seemed to question that Gunner should sit at the head. It was like they could all smell the leadership on him.

It was there, undeniably. The way he wore his shirts—tucked in, belted. The shoes he chose—never casual. The tilt of his head as he listened to the others joke around—like a beneficent warlord. The way the rest of the table seemed to wait a beat to see if he’d laugh at a joke before they’d join in. Creepy.

And, in a way, compelling. I couldn’t figure out why my gaze kept tracking him. He caught me looking at him more than once, and each time that slow smirk of his would spread across his face, making me want to smack it right off.

Or something.

Mid-November, I finally made it back to the mainland. Sabine invited me to spend Saturday evening and Sunday with her family, which was a relief since I needed a break from the island but didn’t want to repeat the visit with my mom.

I’d gotten pretty good at having normal-seeming phone conversations with her. If I didn’t pay too much attention to what we were talking about, I found I could keep the animosity out of my voice almost completely. Eventually I’d have to visit her again, but I wasn’t in a hurry.

“Try to take it easy on your mom,” Alice said to me out at the stable. I’d just hosed down Delilah and was scraping water off her red coat with a plastic sweat scraper.

“Sure, Alice,” I said. I didn’t want to fight with Alice. I didn’t want to fight with anyone.

“It’s tempting to think you know her whole story,” Alice said, trying again, “but try to be open to the idea that you might not know everything.”

Alice didn’t
look
like she was trying to be insulting. “I don’t think I know everything, Alice.”

“Of course you don’t think that. That came out wrong. It’s just…your mom is a good person, Scarlett. And she loves you.”

If I hadn’t been in a hurry to finish up with Delilah and catch the ferry to meet Sabine, maybe I would have paid more attention to Alice. She seemed ruffled. A very un-Alice-like state.

Later, on the ferry, her words came back to me.
Try to be open.
That made two people who’d given me the same advice.

The sukkah was gone from the yard and no children were playing. For a moment, standing at the gate, I wondered if the magical feeling I had experienced during my last visit had been imagined. The empty chairs, angled toward each other as if in conversation, felt kind of sad. The little canal behind me seemed stagnant.

But then Ziva opened the door and smiled out at me and I felt the magic all over again.

It occurred to me as I looked around the Rabinovich living room, open to the dining area and kitchen, all one big space, that homes reveal the character of the families that occupy them. This wasn’t an original or particularly deep insight—Will and Martin’s cottage was appropriately book-filled, the Adamses’ space was shrine-like in its worship of family, and this house, full of color and light and art, brimmed with warmth.

What hit me, though, was the thought of my own house and the fact that it wasn’t really a home. It was a hotel. A stop-off point for tourists. Our upstairs space suddenly struck me as an afterthought.

In contrast, everything about the Rabinovich house sang of forethought. Of planning. Of intention. Clearly, it was an artist’s home. For one thing, the light was fantastic. Even I could see that. And there was art everywhere, not just the hanging kind, but sculptures, collections of seashells and glass, even the fruit seemed artfully arranged. In the center of the house, like a tiny sun, hung this incredible light fixture. It was maybe four feet across, oval, and inset with dozens and dozens of spirals, each composed of even smaller spirals, cross sections of shells. I recognized them from my freshman-year geometry class.

“Those are nautilus shells, right?”

“Yes,” said David. Sabine was upstairs, he’d told me, with Ari, who had a cold. She would be down soon.

“The golden ratio,” I said.

“What’s that?” asked Daniel. He and his dad were playing a wrestling game on the TV. Both of them, the whole time they talked, kept their eyes on the screen.

“It’s also called the Fibonacci sequence,” I said. “Basically, it’s a series of numbers where you get the third number by adding the first two. So it starts with zero, then one, then another one, because zero plus one equals one, then two, because one plus one equals two, then three, then five, then eight…” I drifted off because Daniel didn’t really seem to be paying attention.

But Ziva was. “Then thirteen, right?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Then what?”

She thought for a second. “Twenty-one. Then…thirty-four.”

“You’re good with numbers.”

She shrugged, obviously pleased with herself. “Well, knowing about numbers is important. In Torah, every word has another meaning, did you know that?”

“No,” I said. “I didn’t.”

“It’s true.” She sounded a little smug now. “We study it in our group at the synagogue. It’s called gematria. See, in Hebrew every letter of the alphabet has a numerical value, so every word has a number meaning, too.”

“Like a code?”

“Uh-huh. Like the number eighteen is important, because it’s the numerical value of the word
chai.
”