The Chic Shall Inherit the Earth (3 page)

“It’s not about student life, though, is it?” Carly asked. “It’s about your life, and what God wants you to do with it.”

“That’s the point I always arrive at,” Gillian admitted. “I want to wait on God, but I can’t wait too long or I miss the registration deadline. I mean, He gave me this brain for a reason. I just have to figure out the best place to use it.”

“That’s gotta be hard,” Shani said. “I mean, granted, I’m new at being a Christian. But it never occurred to me to ask God what He wants me to do. I just went ahead and applied to Harvard Business School, got in, got my scholarship, and I’m good to go.”

“You make that sound as easy as Jeremy did,” I said. “But I know you’ve been working like a demented person for months and months to get in. And don’t even talk to me about your application essay. That was grueling for all of us.”

“And I appreciate every bit of help you guys gave me.” She flashed a rare Shani smile, the kind that lit her up and softened the cut planes of her face—the ones that had photographed so well in our
People
spread last fall—into real beauty. “But, Gillian, you’re, like, solid. Don’t you think you’re going to make the right decision just because you belong to God?”

“Not necessarily.” Gillian’s gaze fell to Jeremy’s foot, crossed over his knee, his sneaker beginning to bounce up and down as the caffeine kicked in. “I wouldn’t want to make a big decision like this without knowing it was in His will for me. It’s fine to make up my mind on the little things, like what classes to take and stuff. But a big thing like college? Nuh-uh.”

“Even the classes are messing you up,” I pointed out. “Like taking art last year when you never did it seriously before. It showed you there was a fork in the road. That’s where all this angst started.”

Gillian nodded and dimpled at me. “That Kaz. It’s all his fault. If it weren’t for him telling me I had talent, I’d have let that graphic arts class stay dropped when I dumped it for a personal trainer.”

“I’m glad you didn’t,” Brett put in. “I wouldn’t trade the portrait you did of Carly for anything.”

“At least some good came out of Nazareth, then,” she quipped. “You can tell my parents all about that when they fly out here to lecture me personally.”

Knowing Gillian’s parents, I had a feeling she wasn’t kidding.

C
ARLY CAUGHT UP
with me after Phys.Ed.—volleyball for me, soccer for her. I hadn’t seen much of her since Tuesday, mostly because Gillian had to turn in a ten-page English midterm. If Gillian could have chained me by the ankle to my bed for twenty-four-hour coaching, she’d have done it. As it was, the poor girl was so stressed that I’d have done practically anything to make her feel better. Helping her with what she called “the dead white guys with verbal diarrhea” was the least I could do.

Though I didn’t think Keats and Shelley had verbal diarrhea. I thought their poetry was beautiful.

“I got a note from Mac this morning.” Carly swung her backpack onto her left shoulder as we crossed the playing field, heading for the dorm.

“Yeah? I haven’t heard from her since last week. Cool that they got their grant from the whatever-it-was, huh?”

“Society for Self-Sustaining Estates.”

“Say that five times fast.”

“So now her parents will be up to their eyes in torn-out plumbing and giant gas piping for the commercial kitchen. But that wasn’t what she wrote to me about this morning.”

“What? Oh, wait.” I held up a hand. “Alasdair Gibson’s coming for the weekend.”

“No such luck. I guess he’s studying pretty hard, and getting from Edinburgh to London isn’t so easy when you’re as poor as he is. She can’t wait to be finished with school. I’m sure she’s packed already.”

“Of course she is. They sold the London townhouse, remember? So if it wasn’t Alasdair, what else is up?”

Carly didn’t answer for a second. “I wrote to ask her about something. She was answering it.”

I eyed her as we walked over the grass, still green and thick from the sprinklers and the San Francisco fog that kept it from burning up in the late spring and summer. “And that something would be…?”

“You know how Gillian is all tweaked out about picking a college?”

“Do I. I swear, her needle is buried in the red zone. I’m trying to feed her vitamin B complex to bring the stress levels down.”

“Want to give me some?”

I stopped walking and gazed at her in astonishment. “Not you, too. I thought you had it all figured out.”

“There was a welcome letter from Parsons in my mail this morning.”

“Parsons School of Design? That’s New York, right? Wow. Congratulations.”

“But I already got the one from FIDM.”

Pause. “Oh.” Now I got it. The campus of the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising that Carly wanted to go to was in L.A. Brett planned to go to Stanford because Carly’s dad had his heart set on her going to Berkeley, like he did. In Brett’s mind, even on opposite sides of the Bay, they’d still be close enough to see each other.

New York, on the other hand, was not close. Neither was L.A.

“What does your gut tell you?” I asked her as we resumed trekking across the grass.

“My gut and Mac both tell me I shouldn’t factor Brett into my decision. But my heart tells me something different.”

“And the heart is the strongest part of the girl we know and love. Oops. Sorry. Didn’t mean to make you blush.”

“That’s why I wanted to talk to Gillian. Maybe we can pray for each other and get the Lord’s attention that way. Because, honestly, I don’t know how to make up my mind and make everyone happy.”

“You have to live with you. That’s the person you should make happy.”

“And then there’s my dad,” she went on as if I hadn’t spoken. “You know how he is.”

I did. “Have you given him the news flash about FIDM?”

She shook her head. “Why invite trouble when I haven’t decided yet? Maybe I should tell him about Parsons. Then if I decide to go to L.A., it’ll look great in comparison.”

“Man,” I said on a sigh. “Can adulthood be any more complicated than this?”

“Meanwhile, there’s my mom.” Now it was Carly’s turn to give a big sigh, blowing it up through her wispy bangs.

“Oh, help. Now what?”

“She and Richard Vigil have picked a new date for their wedding.”

“When, this summer?”

“Not even. The Saturday of Memorial Day weekend. She says it’s so I can fly out and back without missing any school. Hint, hint.”

“She’d be right… if you plan to go.”

“Uh-huh.”

I waited for a second. “And? Do you?”

I thought about Christmas, when she’d flown to Scotland with us rather than be her mother’s bridesmaid at a Christmas Eve wedding. Mr. Aragon, her dad, tried to hide the fact that he was still in love with his ex-wife, even though she was trying to marry another guy, and Carly, loyal girl that she is, wouldn’t hurt her dad for anything. Yeah, he’s old-fashioned and sometimes heavy-handed and strict, but he loves her to pieces.

“If I stand up in that church with her, I’ll be betraying my dad and everything he feels for her.”

Carly’s not the betraying kind. Hence the problem.

“But, leaving him out of the equation, how do you feel about her?”

She glanced at me as we waited for the light. The playing field, the field house, and all the Phys.Ed. and dance classes are a block away from the main building. In the winter we take the rain tunnel back and forth, but on a beautiful day like today it felt great to be outside, with the San Francisco Bay sparkling in the sun in the distance.

“That would be like taking Brett out of the school equation, Lissa. It can’t be done.”

“Maybe you should try. If it weren’t for your dad’s feelings, would you do it?”

After a long pause, she said slowly, “Probably. I mean, at least Richard Vigil stuck around after the Christmas debacle. And this house they bought—it has studio space, like he really means to support her art.”

“Well, then? If the guy honestly cares about her, so what if he looks like Duran Duran on their reunion tour?”

She made a face. “They’d make me be in the pictures. Imagine being in the same frame.”

“That is the downside. But the upside is, you could have a relationship with her again. Maybe. If you wanted.”

“That’s the upside?” She began to walk faster. “You’re talking about the woman who left me and Antony behind to go teach art on cruise ships and find herself. She didn’t do much thinking about a relationship then.”

“Still.” Just how far could I butt into her business? At the same time, she’d brought it up. If she didn’t want me to give her my opinion, she wouldn’t have done that, right? “Think about it. The wedding, I mean. That’s only, like, three weeks away. Sometimes there’s a big difference between doing something out of love and doing something because it’s the right thing to do.”

At the bottom of the stairs up to the girls’ dorm, she stopped. A muscle twitched in the smooth line of her jaw as she chewed the inside of her lip. I’m not sure I wanted to know what she wasn’t letting herself say. Her mom is Carly’s most vulnerable point, and talking about her is fraught with traps that you can’t avoid.

“I know. ’Bye, Lissa.”

“See you at lunch? Got any plans this afternoon before you catch the train?”

But she ran up the stairs and didn’t answer me.

GILLIAN WASN’T IN
our room, and when she didn’t answer my text, I figured she was busy with something more important than what to do with our Friday afternoon.

I was thinking about the dress safari, myself. Spencer Academy doesn’t have a traditional prom or graduation dance. Instead, it has the Senior Cotillion, all the details of which are arranged by a committee of juniors under the management of one senior. And all of us had known who
that
would be from the moment school started in the fall.

You guessed it. Vanessa Talbot.

The mover and shaker. The social director of everything that was anything at the school. The ultimate control freak.

Not that I wanted to be the one commanding the troops of wide-eyed juniors with a languid wave of my manicured fingers. Uh-uh. But it would have been nice to at least get the chance to put my name in the hat.

As it was, Vanessa wore the hat. Period.

Still, it meant my Friday afternoons and weekends were free for fun things like hanging out with my friends and shopping for a dress. I could even go home to Santa Barbara or plan a jaunt to Rodeo Drive with my mom if I felt like it. People who needed to be in the spotlight had deeper issues going on. I didn’t have issues. I had a life.

Feeling better after this pep talk, I changed out of my plaid skirt and white button-down blouse and into a pair of comfortable jeans and a ruffled Free People tank. And since Fridays deserved to be celebrated, I put on a Badgley Mischka crystal necklace that filled the scoop neckline with sparkle.

I ran down the stairs toward the dining room, slowing in the corridor when Emily Overton came out of the administrative office and fell into step beside me.

“Hi, Lissa. TGIF, huh? I like your necklace.”

“Thanks. I was in Hot Rocks one day last spring and fell in love with it. Have you ever been there? It’s like Ali Baba’s cave. Or like Portobello Road, only for jewelry.”

“No. I hate shopping.”

Um, okay.

“Mostly because it depresses me. When you’re forty pounds overweight, nothing fits and you just go away feeling disgusted.”

When we were kids, my sister Jolie refused to hang out at the community pool for the same reason. If she went swimming, it was on our beach, where she’d rather freeze in the open ocean than expose herself in a bathing suit to the local kids. “But you have a personal trainer, don’t you? And a dietician?”

She shrugged. “It’s genetic. Nothing I can do about it.”

Did she really believe that, or was it a handy excuse? I pushed open the dining room door and held it for her. “I bet there is.” She frowned and glanced at me as if she hadn’t expected to be contradicted. Which was probably true. “I’ve seen your binder with your diet plan. I bet there’s some stuff in there that tastes good. And if it doesn’t, you could experiment, like they have us do in cookery class.”

“Cooking is boring,” she said. “Besides, what do you care what you eat? You’re a size two.”

“
That’s
genetic. I take no credit for it. But I try not to mess up, which is all too easy on days there are cupcakes.” Emily nodded, as though the cupcakes were her weakness, too. “And it helps to find a balance to the eating, like playing volleyball and doing gymnastics and walking to places. Lucky thing I like salad.”

“I don’t. Anyway. That wasn’t what I wanted to talk about.” We took trays and considered the offerings on display. “Burger bar,” Emily said happily. “I love Fridays.”

So did I. I loved cheese and crispy bacon and big heaps of fried onions. But why would anyone listen to what I said if my actions didn’t back it up? I closed my eyes to the temptations of the fryer and began to build a salmon burger with lots of lettuce and roasted red pepper and a tiny bit of wasabi. Emily looked from that to the cheeseburger with bacon and avocado. Then, with a sigh, she grabbed the serving tongs and began to build a salmon burger. I smothered a smile and asked the guy behind the counter to make both of us fruit smoothies.