The Chic Shall Inherit the Earth (2 page)

“A mold. Of his hand. And you don’t have guys’ hands any closer than Santa Barbara?”

“He has interesting hands, which you’d know if you ever paid any attention.”

Of course he did. And of course I did. Pay attention to him, I mean. He was my best friend. We e-mailed each other, like, twenty times a week.

“And Jeremy’s hands aren’t interesting?”

She picked up the catalog and flipped another page. “Write him back and tell him of course I’ll tutor him. We can start tonight if he’s desperate.”

Hm. Poor Jeremy, indeed. What was going on here? “He wants to know the meaning of
x
.”

“Don’t we all. Some of us wait for the universe to reveal it to us. And some of us wouldn’t know it if the universe dropped it on our heads.”

“What’s your point?”

But my friend, who usually has all the answers, didn’t reply.

H
AVING A BOYFRIEND
can be like having a root canal—once you’ve had one, you want everyone else to go through the same experience so they know what you’re talking about.

I’m not down on boyfriends, honest. I’ve had a few. And if I had half a clue about how to get a nice guy’s attention and keep it, I’d be the first one to jump on the bandwagon with Gillian and with Carly, who is joined at the lip with Brett Loyola, the captain of the rowing team. They’ve been together almost exactly a year now, to the continuing astonishment of Vanessa Talbot and her glossy posse.

Personally, I think most of Vanessa’s catty gossip about Carly is a case of sour grapes. Brett’s period of mourning after V. dumped him last year lasted, like, a nanosecond before Carly got his attention. That’s gotta sting.

Carly’s roommate, Shani Hanna, is in a long-distance relationship with Danyel Johnstone, one of my friends from Santa Barbara. She doesn’t date guys from school, mostly because she’s taken, but even if she wasn’t, she turned down a prince during fall term and now all the guys here are scared to ask her out. I heard two seniors talking behind the stacks in the library only last week: “He had a nine-figure net worth and a private security detail and she broke up with him. What are my chances?”

I didn’t step out from behind the English Novelists of the Nineteenth Century to tell them, “Zero, babe.” Danyel is adorable—think Corbin Bleu with a surfboard—and she’d rather get one e-mail from him than spend a whole evening clubbing with anybody else. Danyel is Kaz’s best friend, which is why Shani doesn’t mind sharing stuff like that with me. I’ve known Danyel my whole life, and if she could do a mind-meld with me and suck everything I know about him out of my cortex, she would.

I’m really lucky when it comes to friends. With a bud like Kaz, and with my girlfriends’ boyfriends around all the time, I’m not hurting for male company. It’s just that sometimes when Carly looks at Brett and they drift off into this personal universe that doesn’t have anyone in it but themselves… it’s hard not to want it, too. Hard not to go bug the Lord to send me someone like that. Yes, I do know He has more important things to manage. But still.

Truth? The simple fact is that after what happened with Callum McCloud last year, I’m not sure I’m girlfriend material. He called me needy and clingy, yet we’d hardly had one date and he was trying to get my clothes off. I’m not needy. I am responsible and popular… okay,
was
popular, if you’re a stickler about tenses… and I have a great family and friends to love. Needy. Pffft. I’m disproving that one as we speak, since there is no one in my life at present to need.

Case closed, Callum McCloud, you jerk.

I gave up on e-mail and snapped my notebook shut. Gillian had separated her mail into neat piles: do, read, and toss. The letter from Sarah Lawrence went into the recycle bin next to the door, along with the rest of the “toss” stack. One down, half a dozen eager colleges to go. Lucky thing we were getting lots of practice in deadlines and decisions. For Gillian, the first were getting close, and the second had to be made soon.

Me, I was already set: UC Santa Barbara, with a major in literature. (And a minor in surfing, as Gillian would point out.) After hitting the short list for the Hearst Medal in writing, the scouts for all the California universities had come knocking at my door. It felt good, but my mind was already made up. There was only one place where I wanted to kick off this business of being an adult: the place where I’d grown up.

Now that my parents were dating again (long story) and my dad’s big adventure epic,
The Middle Window
, was in global release and on its way to theaters in Japan and Australia, he’d moved from Marin back to Santa Barbara to wait for Hollywood to send him a script he couldn’t turn down. So that was where I’d be heading right after graduation.

Home.

Gillian glanced at the clock. “Almost seven. You ready?”

“Just gotta brush my hair.”

Five minutes later we were on our way to prayer circle, which has happened every Tuesday night since Gillian’s and my first term here. Not that I deserve any credit. She’s the one who organizes it, and the rest of us follow along, being thankful that she does.

I could hear Shani’s and Carly’s voices on the marble staircase above us, and a few seconds later they clattered into view.

“Nice sandals, girlfriend,” I said to Shani with an admiring glance at her perfectly pedicured feet. “Don’t tell me. Prada?”

“Not even close. Those days are gone.” Remember the prince? When Shani refused to go through with an arranged marriage to him, her parents disowned her. They cleaned out her room and sent all her stuff to charity, leaving only what she had in her closet here at Spencer. She hasn’t really heard from them since. Harsh or what? Needless to say, we’ve become the closest thing to sisters to her, trying to make up a family for her right here.

“No,” she went on, “these are Miu Miu, and I snapped them up on eBay for next to nothing.”

Carly nodded with approval. “I like the gold. It goes great with your skin tone.”

“Black and gold, my favorite combination.” Shani gave us all a smug smile at her superior bargain-hunting skills. You’d never know she owned a dress Karl Lagerfeld had designed for her personally. Like she said, those days were gone forever.

In Room 216, we dragged the chairs into a circle and people slowly trickled in. Gillian sat at the spinet in the corner and proceeded to turn a worship tune into a work of art. When Jeremy came in, she didn’t even look at the keyboard as she smiled at him, and her fingers just kept finding all those handfuls of rapid notes. Brett came in shortly afterward, trailed by a couple of the guys from the rowing team. Don’t get excited—I think they follow him into the bathroom, too, not to mention lunch and half his classes. They’d probably carry his backpack if he let them. With the school’s sportsman’s trophy 99 percent locked up and the unofficial title of Hottest Guy in Pacific Heights, I suppose it’s inevitable that Brett would have a posse. As it is, he’s as nice to them as he is to everyone—and ditches them whenever he can, so he can hang out with Carly. The guy does have his limits.

Two juniors and one very brave freshman filled up the circle, and Gillian wound up with a flourish. “Thanks for coming, everyone. Who wants to start?”

“I will,” I said. She slid into her seat between me and Jeremy, and I closed my eyes. “Father, thanks for these prayer circles. Some days, knowing that I get to sit down with You and my friends here is what keeps me going. Thanks for Gillian, and for putting the idea of a prayer circle in her heart in the first place.” I took a breath. “Father, Gillian’s the one I want to pray for tonight. She’s got a lot of decisions to make, and she wants to do the right thing and wait on You to tell her what You want for her. Please let her hear Your voice clearly. In Jesus’ name.”

People murmured “amen” and Gillian leaned over and bumped my shoulder gently with hers.
Thank you.
With a smile, my eyes closed, I bumped her back.
Don’t mention it.

A laptop snapped open, and a second later I heard Danyel Johnstone’s familiar voice. He sent Shani a podcast or a video every week so he could join us by proxy. As he prayed for all of us he knew by name, part of my mind wondered why Kaz never did that. I’d have loved to hear him pray with us. His voice had deepened as he got more mature, and I never got tired of hearing it. And what better way to use your voice than in prayer circle? I’d send him an e-mail as soon as I got back to our room, I decided. Maybe it had just never occurred to him.

After we’d gone all around the circle, skipping over the crew guys, who never said a word when they came, Gillian played while we belted out her current favorite praise song.

“I love listening to you sing that,” I told Shani as we collected our handbags. “I can’t believe they didn’t snap you up when you auditioned for the chorus.”

“I’m not a chorus type,” she admitted. “I’m a soloist, and that wasn’t what they were looking for. I’m okay with it. I’d rather sing with my friends, anyway, than have a whole bunch of people staring at me.”

“I hear ya. Especially since you gotta believe they’d be thinking of… you know.”

The prince
. He was like Brett’s hangers-on, only invisible. Everywhere Shani went, the story of the girl who had turned down the Lion Throne of Yasir went, too. You could ignore it, but you just couldn’t shake it.

“Who’s coming to Starbucks?” Carly asked.

It was a couple of blocks’ walk down one of San Francisco’s steeper hills, which is why I could knock back an entire grande-with-whip mocha and suffer no ill effects from the calories. The climb back up the hill to the school wiped them out as if they had never been.

As we crowded out the double front doors and onto the stone steps that led down to the school’s gravel drive, Vanessa Talbot passed us on the way in. The limo she’d just climbed out of bowled away toward the gates, and she tugged her Furla shoulder bag higher and swung an Elie Tahari shopping bag onto the other arm.

“Vanessa’s been out shopping alone?” I murmured to Carly. “Is that even possible? How can she function with no one to fetch her coffee and hold her bag while she tries things on?”

Carly coughed to cover up a giggle. Sorry about the catty remarks. But Vanessa Talbot is a sore point with me, after what she did to me last year.

“Finished praying for the night?” she asked sweetly as she passed us.

“Yes.” Gillian’s reply was sarcasm-free. Sometimes that is the only way to deal with nastiness. “Unless you want us to put in a good word for you.”

Vanessa rolled her eyes. “Like I’d ever need anything from you losers. How does it feel to be on the outside again, looking in?”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something as the door swung shut on the last word.

“What?” Carly said. “It’s too late for that snappy comeback I see on the tip of your tongue.”

“Did you see that?” I wagged a thumb over my shoulder as we walked down the drive toward the wrought-iron gates, where, sure enough, a photographer lounged in a beat-up subcompact, his telephoto lens propped on the open window frame. One or more were always there, trying to catch a thousand-dollar shot of one of the celebrity offspring or children of minor royalty like Vanessa. “Vanessa was wearing Apple Bottoms jeans.”

Carly swung around to look at the front door, but of course the other girl was long gone. “Impossible. You must have been hallucinating.”

“The mushrooms in the soup at supper were morels, not anything stronger,” I retorted. “I know my jeans, and that girl was not wearing her usual custom Stella McCartneys.”

“She has been packing on the pounds,” Brett said as we headed down the hill. “But she always was too skinny.”

Shani gave him a look. “Everyone knows that the camera puts twenty-five pounds on you. She’s photographed all the time. Of course she’s going to be skinny. If she were bigger than a size zero, she’d look like a Dumpster on SeenOn-dot-com.”

“Whatever.” Brett obviously thought of body mass in terms of how much torque a person could put on an oar, not how they looked in front of a camera. “She just looks healthier with a few extra on her, that’s all.”

Healthy
wasn’t the word for it. She hadn’t just been wearing Apple Bottoms. That babydoll top wasn’t the norm for her, either. It was neither sleek nor chic. Hm. “Guess that’s the reason for the emergency shopping trip,” I mused out loud as we passed the eclectic little shops on Fillmore Street. “Maybe someone commented on her recent wardrobe choices, and she had to take corrective action.”

“What, like you?” Gillian said. “Stop obsessing, already.”

I clamped my mouth shut on what would only sound defensive. I did not obsess about Vanessa. Why would I? She had her posse—or what was left of them. Dani Lavigne was doing an exchange term in Paris (and spending way more time clubbing with her famous cousin on her European tour than studying, if the tabs were to be believed). Emily Overton hovered on the fringes of our group. None of us were sure if she really wanted to be friends with us, or if, as Shani suspected, she was a deep-cover spy for the enemy. DeLayne Geary, who had been one of Vanessa’s second-tier friends, was about the only one left who had the right to walk down the corridors with her, or to sit at the prize table in the window in the dining room.

I had no desire to sit there anymore. My friends were the real kind—like gold tried by fire. We’ve been through a lot together since junior year. A symbol like that table in the dining room was not only unnecessary, it was sort of silly.

At Starbucks, I ordered the aforementioned grande-with-whip mocha and when we all had our drinks, we settled into the corner group of chairs around a low table. “So, Jeremy, when are you going up to UC Davis for orientation?” Carly asked him.

“I can’t believe you’ve made up your mind,” Gillian moaned into her cup. “How can it be that easy?”

“I’ve always known what I wanted to be,” Jeremy said simply. “And the best veterinary program is at Davis. All I had to do was get in.”

“Augh.” Gillian gulped her caramel macchiato. “I have a spreadsheet of pros and cons. A cost/benefit analysis. Even a photo slideshow from every school’s “Student Life” page. And still I can’t make up my mind.”