Unmaking Hunter Kennedy (3 page)

“Please. You know you love my look. And, as someone who truly loves you, I claim the right to veto the fake-cursing thing.”

Jenna grinned. “Maybe you’re right. I’ll
e-ffing
re-think my
e-ffing
potty mouth. But it’s so
e-ffing
fun to feel like a bad-girl.”

“You’re not even close to bad if you can’t say the real word.
E-ffing stop.
It’s going to backfire and force us into an even lower social status.”

“Is there one lower than ours?” Jenna grinned.

Vere’s phone buzzed again. She pulled it under the table so she and Jenna could read the next text together: VERE? ARE YOU GETTING THESE? ARE YOU THERE?

Vere typed into her phone:
Mom. Jeez. What’s up?

The phone buzzed a third time just as she hit send.

YOU AND CHARLIE COME STRAIGHT HOME. PROJECT TO DISCUSS. SOMEONE TO MEET. ALL WEEKEND. UP AT THE LAKE. MAKE NO PLANS. NONE. AND NO. TELL JENNA, SHE MAY NOT COME ALONG. SORRY HONEY. DON’T EVEN TRY. NO.

Jenna frowned. “Your mom’s psycho with the all-caps. Does she not know she’s constantly text-yelling? What does she mean
project
? And why would she not want me to come? It's a THREE day weekend. That hurts where Band-Aids can’t touch.” Her frown turned into a pout as she added, “Your mom always wants me to come to the lake.” Jenna leaned her chin on a fist. “The last time she had ‘someone for you to meet’ you guys got that Ukrainian exchange dude for spring break. Remember?”

“How could anyone forget. Thank
God
that was only for two weeks.”

Their gazes met, and they both grinned and said, “Lexi.
Not SEXY.
”

They cracked up all over again.

“Her text sounds doomish,” Jenna added.

Vere tapped her pen on the desk. “UGH. I smell me and Charlie stuck at some church thing passing out cookies. Remember when she made us wear white gloves and stand around guarding hanging blankets for a whole weekend because of that quilting competition?” Vere shuddered.

Jenna gathered her papers into one crumpled pile but then dropped them with a short gasp. “Alert. Alert.
The Wish
. Entering our airspace.”

She’d glued her eyes to a spot just beyond Vere’s head.

Vere choked. All air sucked out of her lungs.

Jenna lowered her voice, speaking through a smile, “And the summer was good to him. YUM. ME. I love tans on boys. I love boys—and OMG! He’s with most of the football team.
Varsity
. Football. Team.”

Vere reached up to check her bun, straightened her back, but didn’t turn to look. “If you make a scene, I’ll kill you. How close is he and...
ugh
.” She put her hand over her racing heart. “Why are the seniors in here with us? I thought we were safe. I checked. They register from two to four.”

“Juniors and
all
sports are now.” She wiggled her brows. “I checked too. They’ve got some sort of special info-assembly. He’s setting up camp on the next row of tables. You’re safe enough. He’ll never spot us in this sardine can.”

“Should I look? Is it worth it to turn around?”

Vere had seen Curtis yesterday on her very own front porch. Because the guy had been her brother’s best friend since kindergarten. He’d been riveting with his fresh, new hair cut. So riveting, she’d hidden in her room feeling sick for two hours.

Am I the only one in the whole world with a crush that makes me physically ill?

Jenna shrugged, flipped her long braids around again and gave her a pitying look. “I’ll let you know if he does anything worth turning colors and stuttering for, okay?”

“Thanks,” Vere said, trying unsuccessfully to find Curtis’s reflection in Jenna’s wide eyes, but even that activity had her stomach cramping and sent a warning tingle up the back of her neck.

No need to fire the cherry-bomb-cheeks for everyone’s entertainment. Stupid blushing.

Vere wasn’t a natural when it came to school. But she’d learned if she worked hard (sometimes really hard) she could make the grades and hit the goals she wanted.

So, she’d taken that idea and applied it to her blushing problem.

Only, the world (and her face) refused to cooperate.

What works in one area fails in others.

Where Curtis was concerned, Vere had studied, researched, and followed all the rules. But when he was near, she couldn’t shake her healthy, textbook case of chronic shyness and social anxiety.

She knew these terms, because she’d looked herself up hundreds of times, searching for a cure that would help her. She’d tried textbooks and any psychology websites she could find.

For the most part, Vere had discovered she was a classic case.

A person who was simply shy and who turned red because of it. Not a major thing.

Vere had also pinpointed her shyness would ramp into what was called
social anxiety
when she was around boys—
guys
—she didn’t know very well. Totally normal for her age too. And, a condition that calmed down once she knew the guys better.

Again, all normal.

But what hit outside normal was how Vere’s social anxiety spiked to uncontrollable levels when she thought she had a crush on a guy.

Enter Curtis Wishford. Her forever crush.

The only guy Vere had ever cared about.

As though her crush could read her thoughts, Curtis’s shouting laugh fired off somewhere behind her. In response, Vere’s cheeks fired off the burning-red feeling all over again.

Stupid. Dumb. Crush.

She slouched into her lab stool as low as possible, turning away even more while she worked to cool down her red-hot ear tips in this two thousand degree room.

She would only have to survive forty minutes of this pain and then she could escape.

Please...please...let him NOT see me.

Before the crush, Vere, Curtis, Charlie and Jenna used to be inseparable. They were all neighbors. Their parents were close friends since before any of them had been born.

That meant there were whole photo books filled with photos of them all drooling at each other while in diapers.

From there, they’d moved on to sword fights, mud pies, dressing up in costumes, army battles, decorated hundreds of cookies, attended birthday parties, hung at the neighborhood pool and walked to school together on the first day—all that.

All together.

Every. Single. Year.

But all normal hanging out, normal conversations between Vere and Curtis had completely ended in middle school.

Died. Double died. In front of everyone.

This was thanks to two things: 1. Seventh grade and, 2. ‘The incident’.

Seventh grade was when Vere had decided that she had a real live
crush
on Curtis Wishford. In her classic style, she’d taken her crush to her usual high level of dedicated excitement and commitment. Her ‘hard work always pays off’ thing was out of control back then.

Worse, she’d upgraded her crush to include visions of grandeur. (A term she’d also learned off the online psychology websites.) People who did that were usually also flagged as crazy.

But everyone is crazy in seventh grade.

At the ancient age of twelve, Vere decided she was in
love
with Curtis. Major, huge, obsessive, seventh-grade
mega-love
.

She’d written his name on her binders, had countless journals filled with pages and pages of things like:
Gwenivere Juliet Wishford
, or
Vere Juliet Wishford
, or
Mrs. Vere Wishford
.

She’d made up the names of their kids (Claire and Mara).Planned their entire future lives, including their matching careers as world famous, cat and dog rescuing veterinarians.

Ugh. Middle school madness.

Vere felt the back of her neck heat up all over again, remembering how insane she’d been those years.

The evidence of those notebooks had been burned in the family fireplace on a sleep-over. A night spent bawling, because of thing number two. The famous ‘incident’.

Jenna still called it:
‘The Incident That Can Not be Named’.

As in, Vere’s personal Voldemort.

She and Charlie called it one, sad, out of control moment that no one would let her forget. If she had advice to pass on to other middle school girls heading for that ‘first love’, she’d say straight up:
don’t knock out the boy you love in front of everyone —and their parents.

Ever since that day, her shyness around Curtis had grown steadily worse. The guy was always around too. Almost as inescapable as the snickers and snide comments that had followed Vere year after year.

Because of Charlie, Curtis was always in her very own house.

She had become so epic with her public
blush-and-stutter
tricks, no other boys seemed to look twice at her.

Maybe it was because she simply steered clear of them.

Which is just fine. Other boys don’t interest me.

I’m still in love with Curtis Wishford, so there!
And it’s going well. Curtis and I...oh yeah...very well...

Vere put her head on her arms, trying to see if she could catch a glimpse of his feet under the tables. She had become a master at avoiding Curtis while admiring him from afar.

If he was over hanging with Charlie, Vere could be found hiding in her room. Feeling queasy.

Queasy, but desperately gluing her ear to the door while listening for the sounds of Curtis’s voice to float up from the basement.

Vere had also perfected peeking through curtain cracks so she could watch Curtis stare at his car engine, or toss the football around the yard with Charlie—if they were hanging outside.

If they were in the kitchen or doing homework at the dining room table, she could listen to his voice perfectly by sitting on the stair landing, pretending to read on the window seat.

Curtis had the most beautiful baritone. Plus a loud, travelling laugh that separated him from all of Charlie’s other friends.

Curtis couldn’t be beat.

Not in her house vents, anyhow. And not in her heart. Ever.

She had no problem admitting her situation made her pathetic. And yes,
fine
. She’d reached some serious low points of possible stalking where Curtis was concerned.

But is it really stalking if the guy comes over to my house?

Hangs out in my front yard? Lounges around in my basement, eats dinner with my family, at my table?

I think not.

It wasn’t like Vere had plans to lurk around his locker. Nor did she drive by his house or deliberately try to be face-to-face with her crush like other girls did with theirs.

After ‘
the incident
’ Curtis had made things easy on her.

He’d mastered the art of politely ignoring his best friend’s little sister. He was never rude or harsh—just painfully and completely
distant
. There was also the part where the guy always had a fresh (swapped out—every two months) girlfriend by his side.

Yeah...that helps. Ouch. Helps so much... At least he’s single this week. That’s something.

She sighed, dangling her foot under her chair, wishing she could at least hear his voice one more time above the increasing noise in the room.

Vere had been pretty good at keeping her feelings hidden for all these years—behind her constantly flaming cheeks, that is.

Only Jenna and Charlie knew her deepest secrets about her crush. How crippling her shyness and anxiety around Curtis had become—how much she simply longed for the guy to drink some magic, forgetting potion, and fall in love with her right back.

If only.

Vere didn’t care. The cards she’d been dealt in seventh grade had been played very badly by her. And in front of too many people. All she had left was awkwardness and her incurable crush. At least her chronic blushing meant she wasn’t dead.

It also meant she was still in love with the cutest boy in the whole school. The feeling of being in love was better than everything else, anyhow.

Even if he didn’t feel the same, no one could take away how she felt inside. Maybe, when Curtis went to college next year, her blushing would finally stop. But Vere secretly hoped she’d still get to have a few butterflies hanging around her heart when she thought about him.

Stupid, dumb, crush.

3: black italian coffee

HUNTER

The limo’s passenger door swung open before the chauffeur could make it around the side, startling both Hunter and Barry.

His mother, a blur of lavender silk, shopping bags, and clicking heels barreled toward them.

“Hunter...oh my. You’ve lost a ton of weight. Oh, and that long hair...hmm. Might be a good thing.” She looked him up and down but kept her distance as though he were contagious.

“That’s all you can say to me? Really?
Really
?” Hunter tried to meet her gaze, but her eyes seemed glued to his shoes.

“You’ve got the outfit on perfectly.” She nodded.

Hunter tensed, as he waited, wondering what her next line would be—
hell
—hoping for any next line.

As usual, she didn’t engage.

Without another word, she turned her wide, blue-laser eyes on Barry. “Barry. Darling,” she started.

Blink. Blink. Blink.

No one could resist his mother when she made the blinky-blinky face.

“I need a bathroom—one with a sink. What I need to do to Hunter could get messy.”

Barry’s expression changed from loyal golden retriever to nervous Yorkie. “I don’t have much staff at this hour. How messy?”

Hunter’s mom dug deep into a plastic bag marked SuperDrug Center. She pulled out a square, gold-foiled box with a head-shot of a beautiful woman on it and tossed it to Hunter, still not meeting his gaze.

Hunter read the gleaming gold words on the top of the box aloud: “Venus Permanent Hair Color: Black Italian Coffee. What the...?”