The Chic Shall Inherit the Earth (9 page)

Eggplant Vindaloo was an odd choice for a midmorning snack, but hey, we’d made it ourselves, so we ate it. The instructor tasted a helping from a dish presented by each quartet of students and pronounced ours A-worthy. Which was kind of amazing, considering how distracted I’d been.

I was still living in my head when it was time for Phys.Ed…. not a safe place to be when the rest of your body is on the volleyball court.

“Ow!” Vanessa spiked the ball straight into my face. If I hadn’t ducked at the last millisecond, it would have broken my nose rather than bouncing painfully off my shoulder and into the back row, where Christine Powell dove for it and missed. “Watch it!”

“Pay attention, Mansfield,” the ref called. I glared at Vanessa through the net, where we were both playing the front row.

“You heard what she said, Barbie. Or were there too many syllables for you?”

“You didn’t have to—”

“Fourteen serving five,” the ref called. “Game point.”

I already had a bruise on my arm from diving fruitlessly after another of Vanessa’s spikes. Clearly, once morning sickness was over for the day, it didn’t get in the way of her game—or her bad attitude.

Call me naïve, but part of me thinks that when you do something for someone, that person will thank you for it. Or at least not call you names for doing it. I didn’t expect Vanessa to throw aside her animosity and declare undying friendship in return for a bowl of consommé, but it seemed possible she might at least call a halt to the hostilities.

I cradled my arm in the other hand as we lost the game and trailed into the dressing room.

Evidently not.

O
N THE BRIGHT SIDE
, the committee meeting that afternoon went well. It took me a little while to convince Ashley and the others that they could have ideas of their own and that every word I said was not martial law. But once I got them deprogrammed, I could see that we were going to work well together and make this the best Cotillion ever.

At four I went back to my room to change and found Gillian already there. But for once, she wasn’t surrounded by textbooks, hunched behind her laptop like a warrior in a tower. She lay flat on her back on the bed, still in her uniform. At first I thought she was sleeping, so I tiptoed around, putting my stuff away and opening the fridge door as quietly as possible as I got a bottle of water. But then she sighed and I realized her eyes were open.

“Did I wake you up?” I asked.

“I wasn’t asleep.”

I don’t think I’d seen Gillian lying in one spot doing absolutely nothing in all the time I’d known her. “Are you okay?”

“I don’t know.”

“Tell me where it hurts.”

I thought she’d laugh, but instead, she fisted one hand and thumped it gently over her heart.

“Aw, Gillian.” I sat on her bed next to her feet and rubbed her ankle in sympathy. “What happened? Did you get bad news from home?”

She shook her head. “Nothing like that.”

“Then what is it?”

“The same old thing that’s been on my heart for weeks.”

If Shani was right, there was only one thing that could be. My hand stopped the comforting motions. “Jeremy?”

Her face crumpled and she rolled over to face me, all curled up. “I think I have to break up with him.” A tear spilled down her cheek.

“You think you…”
Wait. Start again
. “Break up? With Jeremy?”

“He thinks everything is fine. But I…” She huffed a shuddering breath. “I don’t want to do it.”

“Then don’t.” I hoped I didn’t sound as mystified as I felt. “You guys care about each other. You’ve been together for a year. Why would you want to break up?”

“You don’t understand.” Her fingers made a pleat in her quilt, over and over.

“I guess not. Tell me.”

“He’s a great guy. I really like him.”

“We all do.”

“But he wants more from me than I have to give right now. Oh, not that way,” she assured me. It took me a second to realize she was talking about sex. “It’s like he wants to make sure I remember him when I’m studying, when I’m rehearsing, when I’m eating. And the more I try to concentrate on what I have to get done, the more he texts me and turns up when I don’t expect him. It drives me nuts.”

“Have you told him you need some space?”

“He’d think I was giving him the breakup speech.” She glanced at me. “I don’t know what to do except just… give him the speech.”

“But you don’t really want to.”

She shook her head. “I really like him. But I just can’t handle it all. My classes, college, my parents, him. It’s too much.”

“What does Carly say?”

“I haven’t told her. The fewer people who know, the better. All I need is for someone to say the wrong thing to Jeremy, thinking they’re helping.”

Since that was exactly what I’d been thinking of doing, I hastily revised what I’d been going to say. “If this is how you feel, though, he obviously knows something isn’t right. It’s better to be honest.”

“Sometimes honesty can hurt the person dishing it out as much as the person getting it.”

“Then you pray about it. And you can be loving, too. It doesn’t have to be a verbal amputation or anything like that. Jeremy doesn’t deserve it.”

“So you think I should do it.”

“I think just thinking about it is making you miserable. All of us have noticed. You can’t feel any worse than this after it’s done, can you?” What did I know? I’d been the dumpee in both my serious relationships, not the dumper.

“I guess not.” Gillian sighed. “What are you guys doing tonight?”

I shrugged. “Taking you out for a post-breakup movie?”

“So I can cry through the whole thing? Wow. A good time was had by all.”

“There’s always dessert down at Ghirardelli Square. We haven’t tried Kara’s Cupcakes yet. Or the Crown and Crumpet.”

She brightened about half a degree. “True. There could be chocolate.”

See? This is how it was supposed to work. You show your friend you’re concerned about her, you listen, you offer her chocolate. Things become more bearable. And inside, she finds the strength to do what she has to do.

Too bad Vanessa wasn’t taking notes.

“Thinking about Vanessa and the way she treats you is a waste of good energy,” Carly told me after I’d confided this to her a little later. Shani had gone down to the library to check out some books she needed, so I stretched out on the second bed until she came back.

“I know. You’re right. I must be an optimist, huh?”

“I’m glad you took her breakfast, even if she didn’t appreciate it. We can only control what we do, not how other people take it.” She smiled at me. “Want to come home with me for the weekend? Get your mind off it?”

“I thought Shani was going with you.”

“She’s starting to panic about her Poli.Sci. midterm. Says she’s going to spend the whole weekend in seclusion, studying.”

“Hm.” I gave this about five seconds’ thought. “Gillian and I are going to Ghirardelli Square for cupcakes. How about you guys come with us, and your cousin can pick us up there?”

“We’d have to bring our weekend bags, and our books.”

“That’s okay with me if it’s okay with you.”

With a couple of phone calls, we had everything arranged. Then, once we’d all had as much calamari as we could eat in the dining room, we grabbed our bags and headed down to Fisherman’s Wharf on the Powell Street cable car.

Once we’d snagged a table at Kara’s, it didn’t take Gillian long to spill to the others what she’d already told me. Both Shani and Carly looked heartbroken as they realized they were about to lose a charter member of the Happily Unavailable Club.

“I can’t believe you’d do that to him.” Shani bit into her Raspberry Dazzle. “How can you break up with a guy for liking you too much?”

Gillian’s eyes got a little too sparkly, and she blinked several times. “Now you’re making me feel selfish. And mean.”

Carly swallowed a bite of carrot cupcake before she spoke. “We don’t mean to. It’s just hard for us to understand, that’s all.”

“I’d give anything if Danyel would turn up unexpectedly a dozen times a day,” Shani said. “This long-distance relationship stuff really blows.”

“Maybe there’s something wrong with me.” Gillian’s gaze dropped to her plate, or rather our plate. She and I were each eating half of a Peanut Butter Milk Chocolate Ganache and a nice light coconut cupcake. So far I’d managed to consume both my halves while hers still sat there. “Maybe I just don’t have the capacity to care as much as you do.”

I blew a raspberry at that notion. “Maybe it’s just a simple matter of chemistry. Instead of being Pepsi and Mentos, you’re Pepsi and—” I tried to think of an analogy. Chemistry is so not my thing.

“Water?” Gillian gave me a rueful glance and took her first bite. I pushed the plate closer to her and nodded.

“Both perfect on their own, but together, they’re just kind of…”

“
Meh
,” Carly supplied.

“He’s not
meh
, though,” Gillian protested. “He’s really nice and I like him a lot. I need space, and”—she paused and then said in a rush—“and if we’re going to colleges in two different parts of the country, what’s the point?”

“Have you made up your mind?” I asked her.

She glanced across the table. “Shani and I are both going to have to learn the Harvard fight song.”

“Really?” Carly asked. “You decided on Harvard?”

“What program, though?” I knew this was the sticking point for her.

“Pre-med,” she said, as though it were the final line of a long argument.

“Not art.”

She shook her head. “I don’t have to give it up, but what you said the other day stuck with me. I’m going to need some kind of relief valve, and it’s not like I can be an art major and take advanced calculus to relax.”

“
You
could,” Shani pointed out with no irony whatsoever.

Gillian laughed, and then looked surprised at herself.

“That’s more like it,” I said. “That’s the laugh I’ve been missing since our acceptance letters started rolling in.”

“But Jeremy has always known he was going to Davis, and you were going to the East Coast somewhere,” Carly said. “Maybe he’ll have seen it coming and it won’t be so hard. Though if it were me, I’d wait until after the Cotillion.”

“She can’t hang onto him just to have a date for a dance,” I pointed out. “That would make her a user.”

“I just don’t think I can do it,” Gillian said. “Leaving everything else out, he was a good friend to me after I broke up with Lucas and through that whole awful exam-fraud thing. Maybe I’ll just have a talk with him. Then, if he decides to break up with me, it will be up to him. At least I’ll have tried to explain how I feel.”

“And you never know, he might be good with it,” I said. “I think it’s just a case of him missing you already, before summer even starts. It’s like he’s storing you up for when he doesn’t have you.”

“That’s so romantic,” Carly said with a dreamy smile.

“That’s so unlike him,” Gillian retorted. “But maybe you’re right. I’ll talk to him sometime this weekend and just get it behind me. I have to tell him about Harvard, anyway. May as well make it one massive reveal.”

“Do you want me to stay?” I asked her. “For afterward?”

With a smile, she shook her head. “No. I’ll just hole up in our room and cry. By the time you get back Sunday night, it’ll all be over.”

Carly’s cousin Enrique buzzed her on her phone about then, so in a flurry of paying the bill and grabbing our things, there was no time to talk any further. But on the way down the peninsula in the limo, Carly was so quiet that I could tell she was still thinking about it. When we got to their condo in San Jose, her dad met us at the door and gave us hugs of welcome.

“Make yourself comfortable with us, Lissa,” Mr. Aragon said with his warm smile. “I am glad to see you again.”

“Thanks for having me. Otherwise I’d be locked out in the corridor while all the other girls bury themselves in exam prep and… other stuff.”

“And you have no exams to prep?”

“Oh, I do. But my Austen paper is a lot more fun and less stressful than Poli.Sci. or Chemistry. More portable, too. I’ll be working on it here.”

When it looked like all we planned to do that evening was settle down in our PJs to watch
Enchanted
, Carly’s little brother Antony gave up on getting any entertainment out of us and vanished to cozy up to his Xbox. But instead of her normal commentary on costume and character, Carly stayed nearly as quiet as she had on the ride down. Something was definitely up with her, too.

When the movie ended, she shut it off. Everyone else must have gone to bed and forgotten to leave a light on. With the TV off, the room was lit only by the lights of the parking lot outside, across the grassy space between the condos.

I heard her sigh in the dark. “What’s on your mind,
chica?
” I asked softly.

Another sigh. “Nothing.”

I chuckled. Her profile made a dark silhouette against the other end of the couch. “Nice try.”

A second passed, and then she chuckled, too. “I guess, huh.” But she didn’t go on. Instead, the silence stretched out, punctuated by the wail of a siren in the distance.

“If it were Shani sitting here, would you tell her? Or Mac?” People with boyfriends, who would understand?

Another sigh, and then Carly gave in. “It’s my mom.”

“Your
mom?
” And here I’d been thinking she had boy trouble, like Gillian. Only, because Carly and Brett really did love each other, it would have been twice as hard to talk about. Not that Gillian didn’t care about Jeremy. But Carly and Brett were on a whole different plane of caring. They were the closest I’d ever seen to the real thing. At Spencer, at least.

“She rescheduled her wedding from Christmas to Memorial Day weekend,” Carly said.

“Right. You told us that. You also said you might go.”

“But
might
doesn’t mean I’ve decided. Lissa, this is killing me. I’ve beaten the subject to death in my head so much I don’t know what the right thing is anymore.”

“Have you talked it over with your dad? His feelings are what you care about—what’s holding you back.”