The Elite (15 page)

Sophie stood up, her body shaking with rage, her fists 1 3 5

J E N N I F E R B A N A S H

clenched at her sides. Her whole life up until now had been nothing more than one enormous
lie
.

With his usual impeccable timing, Jared sauntered into the room bare- chested, shoving the last of her personal stash of chocolate- chocolate chip Häagen- Dazs she’d hidden in the back of the freezer last week into his open mouth.

“What’s going on?” Jared scraped the bottom of the carton with a spoon, and flopped down on the couch, grabbing the remote.

“We’re talking to Sophie, dear,” Phyllis said, standing up and running a hand through her dark, chin- length bob. “And shouldn’t you be working on your college applications?”

“Uh, yeah,” Jared said, his mouth full. “That’s a great idea, Mom. You know—considering I just got kicked out of Exeter and everything. I’m sure Ivy League schools will be lining up to admit me.”

“Jared,” her father began, his voice like steel, “you have got to get serious. You can’t go surfing through life as if there aren’t any consequences. When I was your age . . .”

From somewhere far away, Sophie could hear her father droning on about “responsibility” and “choices,” as she watched her brother put his dirty feet up on the couch and lean back, scraping the last dregs of chocolate ice cream from the now- empty carton while she just stood there, being totally ignored. Couldn’t this moment be about
her
for once? She’d just received the most potentially life- changing information in all of her almost- sixteen years—and now all anyone wanted to talk about was Jared’s dumbass college applications, as if any 1 3 6

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university in its right mind would ever accept him anyway.

Sophie tightened her fists, digging her nails into her palms and wondered how long she could stand there, feeling invisible. If she didn’t say something soon, smoke would start pouring out of her ears like in the cartoons she still watched on random Saturday mornings.

“How could you
lie
to me?” she screamed at her parents, tears falling from her green eyes and streaming down her face, smearing the Urban Decay bronzer she’d applied that morning into ugly brown streaks.

“Oh, Sophie,” her mother said, her face falling. “It’s more complicated than that, honey. We just—”

“You just
what
?” Sophie screamed, tears running down her face. “You just decided that it would be more con ve nient to
lie
to me for my entire life until now? Is that it?” Her parents just stood there silently—even Jared stopped licking the ice- cream carton and just sat there, mouth open. Sophie could feel her nose snotting all over her upper lip, and she wiped it away with the back of her hand, not caring how gross it was as she ran out of the room and down the long hallway, slamming her bedroom door behind her and sinking to her knees on the plush carpet.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw her pink razor lying on the counter of her white-and-turquoise tiled bathroom. She wanted more than anything to pop the blade from the casing and draw it roughly across her skin until she couldn’t feel much of anything at all. But she knew that it wouldn’t solve any of her problems. She’d feel better for the moment, sure, but to-1 3 7

J E N N I F E R B A N A S H

morrow morning she’d feel just as bad and the cycle would start all over again. And maybe she was looking at this all the wrong way. Okay, so her biological mother may have given her up, and her parents may have lied to her, but now, at least, she knew the truth—and that meant she had options.

Sophie stood up and then sat at her desk in front of her titanium MacBook. She pulled up Google and plugged in her own name, but all she got was a passing mention in an online society rag, and some weird girl’s blog talking about how hot Jared was. Gross.

Jared had always teased her about being adopted, but it had never seriously crossed her mind that it really might be true. Sophie sat back in her chair and crossed her bare legs beneath her, Indian style, her eyes drawn to the framed photograph on her desk of her family at Jared’s lacrosse game last year, her blond hair shining brightly out of the picture like a beacon—or a signal to pay attention. Why had she never really considered it?

And would having a brand- new family be so bad? It’s not like she got along so well with her own anyway. And her real mom could be anyone. Hadn’t Phyllis said that her mother had been an actress? Maybe her real mom was someone truly fabulous—

even though she obviously needed her head examined for giving up a daughter as amazing as Sophie. What ever the reason, Sophie knew that she wanted to find out. And maybe, just maybe, for the first time ever she just might end up somewhere she really belonged . . .

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back

to

basics

Drew sat in his room, s tar ing at the blank w hite screen of his laptop and nursing an imported Dutch beer. Why were girls so weird? He thought that he and Casey were getting along pretty well before she’d practically attacked him in French class. By the time lunch had rolled around, he could barely look at her, and he’d prayed that she’d get the hint and stay on the other end of the Dining Hall with Mad, Phoebe, and Sophie—where she belonged. Still, each time he’d looked up and caught her staring at him with that sad, mournful look, he’d felt kind of bad. Tomorrow, he was definitely going out for some Ray’s sausage and mushroom pizza—his favorite—

and avoiding all the potential drama.

Drew exhaled heavily and took another swallow of beer. It J E N N I F E R B A N A S H

kind of sucked—he’d had this whole Woody Allen–type fantasy of showing Casey around the city, maybe taking her at sunset to that spot where Woody and Diane Keaton had their first almost- date, sitting on the bench overlooking the Manhattan Bridge, watching the sunrise. As they’d stood there in the Dining Hall talking so effortlessly, he could almost see her curly hair resting lightly on his shoulder as they looked into the changing sky, the lights coming on across the bridge like a strand of Christmas lights . . .

Too bad it was never going to happen—girls who hung all over him were always a turnoff. No matter how pretty she was, or how into her he might be, when girls started throwing themselves at him it always just seemed kind of desperate.

And, to be honest, it made him kind of ner vous, too. What was he supposed to do when some girl ran her hand up and down his arm in front of the whole class? Kiss her? Throw her to the floor and rip off her clothes? Actually, that wasn’t sounding like such a bad idea all of a sudden . . .

Drew drained the last dregs of beer from the amber bottle and tossed it in the trash as a Gchat message flashed across the blank screen.

socialiez666: What up?

Drew paused before answering, his fingers hovering over the keyboard, a smile creeping across his face. It was so totally predictable—why fight it? He and Madison couldn’t seem to stay away from one another, no matter how much they pissed 1 4 0

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each other off. Come to think of it, they’d never really given things a serious shot—they’d always just hooked up and pretended it didn’t really happen the day after. Maybe he should really try and see what happened. The only problem was, when he looked at Mad, as gorgeous as she was, he didn’t really get that
feeling
, those crazy butterflies everyone talked about in the movies. Sure, he wanted to tear off her dress and eat it for breakfast, but it wasn’t like he spent his nights thinking about holding her hand and watching the sunset. But maybe that was because, except for that disastrous night before he left for Amsterdam, he’d never really
tried.

dva1990: Not much. Wanna hang tomorrow night?

The Gchat window stayed motionless, the icon blinking for what felt like forever. Drew realized that he was holding his breath waiting for her response. All of a sudden he was completely terrified that she might say no. Madison was as much of a constant in his life as his parents—or that chair in the corner.

He couldn’t even for a minute imagine his life without her in it. And if that wasn’t love, than what was? Probably something best described by Jerry Springer . . .

socialiez666: K J Talk later.

Drew logged off, breathing a sigh of relief and stood up, stretching his long arms above his head and stretching his muscles until he heard his back crack, unlocking the tension in his 1 4 1

J E N N I F E R B A N A S H

spine he’d been carry ing around all day. Maybe, despite what his dad or anyone else said, it was just easier to continue playing it safe—and for Drew Van Allen, Madison Macallister was about as safe as it got. In a way, it was effortless—Mad was the girl everyone expected him to be with, the most beautiful girl in school from the most notorious family on the entire Upper East Side. But that was exactly the problem—Drew had never been the kind of guy who did what was expected of him—in fact, once he knew that he was supposed to do something—or someone—he usually did the polar opposite, and ran as fast as his feet could carry him in the other direction.

If he was totally honest with himself, Drew knew that he’d never really taken Mad seriously as actual girlfriend material—

when they weren’t making out frantically, they were more like an old married couple who argued and bickered all the time than anything resembling the kind of great love stories he sometimes caught on late-night TV—if he was Bogie, Madison was definitely not Bacall. The problem was that they were so set in this ridiculous pattern of fighting, then making up—or out—that the whole thing had gotten pretty old. Maybe they needed to bust out of their comfort zone and do something that would take their relationship to a different level—one where they couldn’t argue all the time—or tear each other’s clothes off either.

Not that total nakedness with Madison was necessarily a bad idea . . .

1 4 2

owner

of a

lonely

heart

Casey sat cross- legged on her bed, sur veying the open textbooks that surrounded her like an ocean of slick, glossy paper. She’d never really experienced the pressure of having to exceed academically before. Back in Normal, no one really paid much attention to her test scores or eventual report card except for her mother, who would usually use Casey’s grades as an excuse to start waxing ecstatic about the merits of “applying one-self in an academic setting.” It was hard not to yawn when Barbara really got going, but Casey had learned to plaster an engaged expression on her face, nodding periodically as though she were actually listening, when in reality she was usually entertaining a series of completely random thoughts—like what the probability would be of getting her hair to grow J E N N I F E R B A N A S H

back in magically straight if she buzzed it all off with a pair of clippers like Britney Spears in the throes of her nineteenth ner -

vous breakdown . . .

It’s not that she didn’t care about doing well—it’s just that, before now, she’d never had to particularly
try
very hard. No offense to her former Illinois classmates, but the kids back home were more interested in planning the next kegger and cruising Main Street on Saturday nights than they were in studying for the dreaded SATs. Class was for passing notes and daydreaming—not for raising your hand or, God forbid, actually paying
attention.
But at Meadowlark, she had to fight just to get a word in during class discussions, which could only be described as
intense
. To add a little more pressure, keeping her grades up was one of the conditions of her continued enroll-ment. If she wanted to stay at Meadowlark, good grades weren’t a choice—they were a necessity. The thing that un-nerved her the most about her new school was the feeling that she wasn’t allowed to screw up, even if she wanted to. As she sat in class after class, listening to her fellow students give intri-cate, detailed explanations of the Crimean war and global warming, Casey started to wonder if too much perfection was really a good thing. It wasn’t the pressure to excel that was really bothering her—it was the fact that being a Meadlowlark student meant that she flat- out wasn’t
allowed
to make mistakes.

And that made her ner vous indeed.

After a full day of French, Trigonometry, History, and So-ciology, Casey’s brain hurt, her eyes glazing over as she mind-lessly flipped through her French workbook.
I probably have
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drain bramage from reading too much
, she thought, closing her sore eyes and rubbing her temples with her index fingers. Not that she could study even if she wanted to—not after the way Drew acted after she’d practically attacked him. Casey flipped open her battered Sprint phone and checked for missed calls . . . again. Predictably, there weren’t any. She snapped the phone shut and threw it to the end of the bed, where it landed with a thump, and picked up her violin from the floor, running her hands over the taut strings. Sometimes just holding the rich, reddish- brown- hued wood seemed reassuring—and right now she needed all the reassurance she could get.

She couldn’t stop thinking about the look on Drew’s face when she ran her hand up his arm—and the look that must’ve been all over her own when he had pulled away. And later that afternoon as he passed by her in the hallway, he just smiled, waved . . . and kept walking. She thought he would at least stop, say hi, and maybe ask how her day was going—but the way he waved so nonchalantly, his smile so tight, made it clear that stopping to talk, or calling her later was the last thing on his mind. Was she not aggressive
enough
? Casey couldn’t help but entertain the sneaking suspicion that maybe she’d be better off simply ignoring Madison’s dating advice. Why did making friends have to be so hard here? Back home in Normal, hanging out with her friends had been effortless, but since she’d arrived at The Bram, Casey couldn’t help but have the feeling that no matter how hard she tried to get along with Mad, no matter what she said or did, it wouldn’t make any difference. Why couldn’t they all just be friends without guys getting in the way?