The Fruit of My Lipstick (2 page)

“Well, cold or not, I still think it’s cool that you met an earl,” Carly said. “And I can’t wait to see your dad’s movie.”

“Filming starts in February, so Dad won’t be around much. But Mom’s big charity gig for the Babies of Somalia went off just before Christmas and was a huge success, so she’ll be around a bit more.” She paused. “Until she finds something else to get involved in.”

“Did you meet Angelina?” I asked. Lissa’s life fascinated me. To her, movie stars are her dad’s coworkers, like the brokers and venture capitalists who come to the bank are my dad’s coworkers. But Dad doesn’t work with people who look like Orlando and Angelina, that’s for sure.

“Yes, I met her. She apologized for flaking on me for the Benefactors’ Day Ball. Not that I blame her. It all turned out okay in the end.”

“Except for your career as Vanessa Talbot’s BFF.”

Lissa snorted. “Yeah. Except that.”

None of us mentioned what else had crashed and burned in flames after the infamous webcam incident—her relationship with the most popular guy in school, Callum McCloud. I had a feeling that that was a scab we just didn’t need to pick at.

“You don’t need Vanessa Talbot,” Carly said firmly. “You have us.”

We exchanged a grin. “She’s right,” I said. “This term, it’s totally all about us.”

“Thank goodness for that,” she said. “Come on. Let’s go eat. I’m starving.”

RStapleton
      I heard from a mutual friend that you take care of people at midterm time.

Source10
        What friend?

RStapleton
      Loyola.

Source10
        Been known to happen.

RStapleton
      How much?

Source10
        1K. Math, sciences, geography only.

RStapleton
      I hate numbers.

Source10
        IM me the day before to confirm.

RStapleton
      OK. Who are you?

RStapleton
      You there?

BY NOON THE next day, I’d hustled down to the student print shop in the basement and printed the notices I’d laid out on my Mac. I tacked them on the bulletin boards in the common rooms and classroom corridors on all four floors.

Christian prayer circle every Tuesday night 7:00 p.m., Room 216 Bring your Bible and a friend!

“Nice work,” Lissa told me when I found her and Carly in the dining room. “Love the salmon pink paper. But school hasn’t officially started yet. We probably won’t get a very good turnout if the first one’s tonight.”

“Maybe not.” I bit into a succulent California roll and savored the tart, thin seaweed wrapper around the rice, avocado, and shrimp. I had to hand it to Dining Services. Their food was amazing. “But even if it’s just the three of us, I can’t think of a better way to start off the term, can you?”

Lissa didn’t reply. The color faded from her face and she concentrated on her square ceramic plate of sushi as though it were her last meal. Carly swallowed a bite of
makizushi
with an audible gulp as it went down whole. Slowly, casually, I reached for the pepper shaker and glanced over my shoulder.

“If it isn’t the holy trinity,” Vanessa drawled, plastered against Brett Loyola’s arm and standing so close behind us, neither Carly nor I could move. “Going to multiply the rice and fish for us?”

“Nice to see you, too, Vanessa,” Lissa said coolly. “Been reading your Bible, I see.”

“Hi, Brett,” Carly managed, her voice about six notes higher than usual as she craned to look up at him.

He looked at her, puzzled, as if he’d seen her before somewhere but couldn’t place where, and gave her a vague smile. “Hey.”

I rolled my eyes. Like we hadn’t spent an entire term in History together. Like Carly didn’t light up like a Christmas tree every time she passed a paper to him, or maneuvered her way into a study group that had him in it. Honestly. I don’t know how that guy got past the entrance requirements.

Oh, wait. Silly me. Daddy probably made a nice big donation to the athletics department, and they waved Brett through Admissions with a grateful smile.

“Have any of you seen Callum?” Vanessa inquired sweetly. “I’m dying to see him. I hear he spent Christmas skiing at their place in Vail with his sisters and his new girlfriend. No parents.”

“He’s a day student.” I glanced at Lissa to see how she was taking this, but she’d leaned over to the table behind her to snag a bunch of napkins. “Why would he be eating here?”

“To see all his friends, of course. I guess that’s why
you
haven’t seen him.”

“Neither have you, if you’re asking where he is.” Poor Vanessa. I hope she’s never on a debating team. It could get humiliating.

But what she lacked in logic she made up for in venom. She ignored me and gushed, “I love your outfit, Lissa. I’m sure Callum would, too. That is, if he were still speaking to you.”

I barely restrained myself from giving Vanessa an elbow in the stomach. But Lissa had come a long way since her ugly breakup with a guy who didn’t deserve her. Vanessa had no idea who she was dealing with—Lissa with an army of angels at her back was a scary thing.

She pinned Vanessa with a stare as cold as fresh snow.

“You mean you haven’t told him yet that
you
made that video?” She shook her head. “Naughty Vanessa, lying to your friends like that.” A big smile and a meaningful glance at Brett. “But then, they’re probably used to it.”

Vanessa opened her mouth to say something scathing, when a tall, lanky guy elbowed past her to put his sushi dishes on the table next to mine. Six feet of sheer brilliance, with blue eyes and brown hair cropped short so he didn’t have to deal with it. A mind so sharp, he put even the overachievers here in the shade—but in spite of that, a guy who’d started coming to prayer circle last term. Who could fluster me with a look, and wipe my brain completely blank with just a smile.

Lucas Hayes.

“Hey, Vanessa, Brett.”

My jaw sagged in surprise, and I snapped it shut on my mouthful of rice, hoping he hadn’t seen. Since when was the king of the science geeks on speaking terms with the popular crowd?

To add to the astonishment, the two of them stepped back, as if to give him some space. “Yo, Einstein.” Brett grinned and they shook hands.

“Hi, Lucas.” Vanessa glanced from him to me to our dishes sitting next to each other. “I didn’t know you were friends with these people.”

He shrugged. “There’s a lot you don’t know about me.”

“That could change. Why don’t you come and sit with us?” she asked. Brett looked longingly at the sushi bar and tugged on her arm. She ignored him. “We’re much more fun. We don’t sing hymns and save souls.”

“So I’ve heard. Did you make it into Trig?”

“Of course.” She tossed her gleaming sheet of hair over one shoulder. “Thanks to you.”

I couldn’t keep quiet another second. “You
tutored
her?” I asked him, trying not to squeak.

He picked up a piece of California roll and popped it in his mouth, nodding. “All last term.” He glanced at Vanessa. “Contrary to popular opinion, she isn’t all looks.”

Oh, gack. Way TMI
. Vanessa smiled as though she’d won this and all other possible arguments now and in the future, world without end, amen. “Come on, Lucas. Hold our table for us while Brett and I get our food. I want to talk to you about something anyway.”

He shrugged and picked up his dishes while she and Brett swanned away. “See you at prayer circle,” he said to me. “I saw the signs. Same time and place, right?”

I could only nod as he headed for the table in the middle of the big window looking out on the quad. The one no one else dared to sit at, in case they risked the derision and social ostracism that would follow.

The empty seat on my right seemed even emptier. How could he do that? How could he just dump us and then say he’d see us at prayer circle? Shouldn’t he want to eat with the people he prayed with?

“It’s okay, Gillian,” Carly whispered. “At least he’s coming.”

“And Vanessa isn’t,” Lissa put in with satisfaction.

“I’m not so sure I want him to, now,” I said. I looked at my sushi and my stomach sort of lurched. Ugh. I pushed it away.

And here I’d been feeling so superior to Carly and her unrequited yen for Brett. I was just as bad, and this proved it. What else could explain this sick feeling in my middle?

Two hours later, while Lissa, Carly, and I shoved aside the canvases and whatnot that had accumulated in Room 216 over the break, making enough room for half a dozen people to sit, I’d almost talked myself into not caring whether Lucas came or not.

And then he stepped through the door and I realized my body was more honest than my brain. I sucked in a breath and my heart began to pound.

Oh, yeah. You
so
don’t care
.

Travis, who must have arrived during dinner, trickled in behind him, and then Shani Hanna, who moved with the confidence of an Arabian queen, arrived with a couple of sophomores I didn’t know. Her hair, tinted bronze and caught up at the crown of her head, tumbled to her shoulders in corkscrew curls. I fingered my own arrow-straight mop that wouldn’t hold a curl if you threatened it with death.

Okay, stop feeling sorry for yourself, would you? Enough is enough.

“Hey, everyone, thanks for coming,” I said brightly, getting to my feet. “I’m Gillian Chang. Why don’t the newbies introduce themselves, and then we’ll get started?”

The sophomores told us their names, and I found out Travis’s last name was Fanshaw. And the dots connected. Of course he’d been assigned as Lucas’s roommate—he’s like this Chemistry genius. If it weren’t for Lucas,
he’d
be the king of the science geeks. Sometimes science people have a hard time reconciling scientific method with faith. If they were here at prayer circle, maybe Travis and Lucas were among the lucky few who figured science was a form of worship, of marveling at the amazement that is creation. I mean, if Lucas was one of those guys who got a kick out of arguing with the Earth Sciences prof, I wouldn’t even be able to date him.

Not that there was any possibility of that.

As our prayers went up one by one, quietly from people like Carly and brash and uncomfortably from people like Travis and the sophomores, I wished that dating was the kind of thing I could pray about.

But I don’t think God has my social life on His to-do list.

Chapter 2

T
HE FIRST TWO WEEKS
of school are always a big schmozzle of adjusting to new instructors’ expectations, figuring out what they want, seeing who’s in your classes, making schedules . . . you know the drill. I kind of like it. I like a lot of things going on—comes from growing up in New York, I guess. The city that never sleeps.

By the end of January, our first set of midterms was over—or thirdterms, I suppose you could call them, since we got two sets of them before finals. When you’re in your second term of AP Chem, one more set of exams is no laughing matter. Getting A’s in Chemistry is like running a marathon. You have to pace yourself, and you have to have rest stops.

For me, music is rest. I can pound the stuffing out of the antique Steinway in the deserted assembly hall late at night and come out of there feeling like my neurons have been given a shot of electricity, making them fire the way they should.

My mother tells me I should just eat my vegetables, get some rest, and stop drinking coffee. Moms have to say stuff like that. The reality is, if I didn’t have the piano, I think I’d go nuts from everything my family expects from me. They’re on the other side of the country, and yet I can feel the cloud of expectation from here, the way you can see the fog hovering on the hills west of San Francisco before it rolls over them and blots them out.

It’s just there, waiting. Like my parents.

It scares me sometimes.

I mean, getting top grades and winning music prizes has been my focus since I was old enough to span an octave with my hand. Side note: my brothers have short fingers, thanks to my dad, so much to their disgust, I turned out to be better at piano than they are. Before they started their careers, they played things like violin and oboe, and I had the keyboard to myself. No competition.

My parents always told me that boys could wait—that while I was in school I had to get the grades so I could get into a good college.

Right. Like the family really cares what I do, when my brothers are out there being insanely successful. I, after all, am just a girl, and the youngest at that. According to Nai-Nai—my grandmother—my job is to find a man like them, get married as soon as possible, and start popping out insanely successful children.

I don’t think Nai-Nai understands that I’m only a high school junior. It’s not like she was married the minute she hit puberty, but she was born in the old country and she’s pretty set in her beliefs about how things should be. My mom says I’m just like her. Which I totally don’t get.

My only focus certainly isn’t to land a man. Cone of silence, okay? If any of my family learns about my hopeless thing for Lucas, I will never, ever hear the end of it. Between my dad’s demands that I think about nothing but chemistry and numbers and getting into an Ivy League college, and my grandmother’s nagging about getting married, I’m being pulled from both ends as it is. One of these days I’ll wind up snapping in the middle.

This term my free period was still on Tuesdays and Thursdays, right after breakfast. I snagged a table in the library, which is this huge, wood-paneled room that reaches up for two stories. It has heavy wood tables and study carrels and big windows that let in the light, and it’s a lot quieter than the common room or the dining room, but the librarian doesn’t let you bring any liquids in, unfortunately. Lissa had Spanish and Carly had her core class—History of the Ancient World, right up her alley—so I was on my own with fifty minutes to look over my thirdterm results and see where I could have done better.

Math and Chem were okay. I’d missed a couple of things that were worthy of a smack on the forehead, but on the whole, not bad. History—ow. Eighty-two percent, and I had no idea why I’d gotten a bunch of the questions wrong. Maybe Carly would look it over with me if I bribed her. She probably would even if I didn’t. That kid hasn’t got a malicious or unkind bone in her body.