Wrong About the Guy (2 page)

I
was twelve years old and safely at home with my grandma the night Luke Weston met my mom in a Philadelphia alleyway. (It's not as skanky as it sounds, I swear.) At that time, Luke was a singer/songwriter/guitar player who had so far scored only one moderate and esoteric hit, which played occasionally on a few alternate-rock stations and was loved by a very small handful of music geeks. That song had gotten him some early afternoon small-tent gigs at music festivals and the occasional booking as the opening act for better-known musicians.

That's what he was doing in Philadelphia that summer—opening for a Portland band that had a lot more fans than he did. He had finished his set and was wandering out back into the alley to smoke a cigarette when he spotted a pretty, petite young woman with chin-length black-brown hair squinting down at her
phone a few feet away. He assumed she was a fan, since she had chosen to duck out after he had left the stage, so he approached her with a cocky grin.

“Like the set?” he asked.

She stared at him blankly. “The set?” She was simply on a break from her job slicing onions and mushrooms at the hibachi restaurant next door.

A little sheepishly, Luke explained that he'd just been performing at the club, and she said, “Oh, I heard a little through the walls! That was you?” Later, when she told me the story, she admitted she hadn't heard a thing, but she thought he was cute, so she figured it was worth pretending.

Luke found himself trying to prolong his conversation with the tiny, delicate woman with the surprisingly deep laugh and large, lively eyes. And I can't imagine Mom wasn't equally interested in spending the rest of her break with the thin, long-limbed, wavy-haired musician who had appeared out of nowhere. Still, they'd been flirting for only a few minutes when she spun her phone in her hand and casually mentioned that she had been in the middle of texting her twelve-year-old daughter. The defiant dare in her eyes and the lift to her chin both said,
If you have a problem with that, don't waste my time or yours.

He didn't have a problem with it.

They talked until she had to go back inside, and by
then they'd agreed to meet up after the restaurant closed.

He lingered in Philadelphia as long as he could, days after his gig had ended, meeting Mom for after-work dates and before-work lunches at our apartment, where he entertained us both with silly songs on his guitar. Eventually he had to return to LA, where he lived and performed semiregularly at a few small clubs, but he and Mom continued to talk and text and video-chat every day, and he flew her west a month or so later to come see him headline at his biggest venue so far, a club on the Sunset Strip.

That was the night that a hit-making music producer named Michael Marquand signed Luke to his label.

It was also the night Luke promised to quit smoking forever if Mom would agree to marry him. (Technically it was the next morning when he proposed, but they hadn't gone to sleep, so it counted as that night.)

My grandmother and I flew to the West Coast in time to join Mom and Luke at a ridiculous little chapel tucked in between two huge casinos in downtown Las Vegas.

“Tell me I haven't made a huge mistake,” my mother whispered to me as she pulled off the veil Luke had bought her in the gift shop and gulped at the air as if the veil had been made out of lead instead of lace.

“You definitely haven't,” I said. Not that I was a reliable adviser: I was as caught up in the excitement of
the sudden wedding as she was, and totally in love with the idea of having this handsome rocker with the mildly devilish smile for my dad.

Mom and I moved into Luke's rental house in LA (small as it was, it was still twice as big as the studio apartment we'd been living in, and I had my own room, which was tiny and miraculous), and Grandma went back alone to Philadelphia, where she worked as a nurse. Her last words to Mom were, “He's got to be better than that last one.”

She was referring to my father, a wildly romantic and brilliant older man who had said to the teenage Cassandra, “I love you madly and want to be with you forever.” His sincerity and enthusiasm rang true, and Mom had no training in identifying a manic episode. By the time he came crashing down, she was pregnant.

I was born shortly after he had gone missing, but Mom used his last name on my birth certificate, so I was named—and remained—Ellie Withers.

She thought he'd come back. He never did. Total disappearing act. No paper trail, no way for even the child support system to track him down.

Luke was definitely better. For one thing, he
stayed
. For another, he worked hard. The first album he made for Michael Marquand generated two decently successful singles. They became good friends during the process, and Michael arranged for Luke to be featured
on songs with a couple of major rock stars, which bumped him into a higher level of fame and exponentially increased his gigs.

It was around then that Michael decided to move into television producing. The show he cocreated,
We'll Make You a Star
, combined a singing contest with an image makeover. While Michael planned to appear on the show as a mentor and judge, he didn't want to commit to a full-time television job. He needed someone else to work with the contestants on-screen every week. Someone with real musical talent, who could also bring a little sex appeal to the show. Someone likable, but not TV slick. Someone with a hit or two to prove his music credentials but not so huge he was unaffordable. Someone teenage girls could drool over, but who wouldn't drool back.

And Michael knew just the guy.

Luke agonized for a while over the decision. It meant he'd have a lot less time to write and record music, and that his life would be far more tightly scheduled than he was used to.

On the other hand, he and Mom wanted to have a baby, and Mom was eager for me to go to a private high school. The money would come in handy. Mom was uncertain, but I was totally in favor of his being on TV. (I was thirteen—of course I was.) And what were the odds the show would actually be a hit? Next to nothing,
he and Mom assured each other. He'd probably end up working just a few short months for a fair chunk of change. Then life would go back to normal.

So he said yes. And life never went back to normal.

Luke went from mildly respected musician to A-list TV star in less than a year. He started to be recognized everywhere we went, and audiences packed his concerts, which became a lot less frequent—taping
We'll Make You a Star
took up a lot of time, as did the ten million events a week the show's publicist wanted him to make an appearance at.

We'll Make You a Star
was a huge hit, and his agent renegotiated his contract for A Lot of Money.

We moved into our current, much bigger, house the year after that.

“I didn't sign on for this,” Mom said one night, after she and Luke had gone out for a quiet dinner and emerged from the restaurant to find a mob of screaming teenage girls gathered there, desperate for a glimpse of him. Some of them were sobbing.

“Believe me, I didn't either,” he said.

The loss of privacy was hard to adjust to.

We got used to the money and the perks much more easily.

Being rich was a big change for all of us. Mom and Luke had both had tough childhoods. In the neighborhood Mom was from, having a baby at seventeen—like
she had done—was virtually a rite of passage. But she was smart and scrappy and wanted something better for
her
daughter, so she had gotten us a tiny apartment in a neighborhood with a good school system, even though it meant she had to share a bed with me every night and had no room of her own.

The only thing Luke ever said about his childhood was that it had been rough, and he didn't like to think or talk about it. Which was pretty typical of Luke—he preferred to keep things cheerful, even if it meant actively avoiding certain thoughts and subjects. His father was in the military and had moved his family around from army base to army base. Music was Luke's salvation: alone with his guitar, he could create his own beauty, his own world.

So while we all now lived in an enormous house behind a tall gate and could hire people to wait on us and had closets full of beautiful clothing, well, both Mom and Luke had paid their dues.

And that's why they deserved a really nice five-year anniversary celebration to make up for that off-the-rack Vegas wedding.

M
om said she loved the idea of an anniversary trip, but couldn't even begin to figure out how to plan it.

“Why don't you ask George to do it?” Luke suggested. “He'd probably love the extra hours of work.”

George Nussbaum was my mother's assistant. Sort of. He was also my SAT tutor. Sort of. Basically he did whatever our family asked him to at an hourly rate, while he waited for a better job to come along.

George's older brother Jonathan worked for Luke—originally as his personal assistant but now as the head of his new TV production company (the last time Luke's agent negotiated his contract with the show, he scored him a development deal). Jonathan was the oldest of a big family; George was the youngest and, according to Jonathan, the smartest: he was only twenty and had already graduated from Harvard.

At some point over the summer Jonathan had
mentioned to Mom that his brother was looking for temporary work to pay the rent while he wrote a TV spec script and tried to get an agent. Jonathan had already bragged about how his brother had gotten perfect SAT scores and gone to Harvard so Mom jumped at the chance to get all that brain power into my life—part of her
your life is going to be better than mine
plan was for me to go to an Ivy.

Once George started showing up at our house with SAT books, my mom kept discovering other odds and ends he could do for her. I don't know how much she paid him, but I bet it was pretty generous—her own minimum wage days weren't that far behind her and now she had plenty of cash to throw around. Because she had once been a waitress, she left ridiculous tips at restaurants: forty, sometimes fifty percent of the bill.

The Nussbaum brothers looked a lot alike: they were both slightly above-average height and thin, with gray-green eyes and brown hair. George had a lot more of that though; Jonathan's was thinning at the crown, even though he was only in his late twenties. Fortunately for him, he already had a fiancée.

Jonathan was mellow and good-natured, but George was less sunny. He sighed with impatience and rolled his eyes a lot. Of course, it's possible I brought that out in him: I wasn't in the mood to be studying over the summer, and I refused to take any of the tutoring seriously.

It made sense for Luke to put George in charge of the travel and party arrangements, but it had been my idea, so I wanted to keep some control.

“Tahiti?” I suggested hopefully when I found George in the kitchen the next morning researching resort hotels on his laptop.

“Hawaii's looking like the better option.”

“Yes, but I've been to Hawaii,” I said. “I've never been to Tahiti.”

“Oh, right,” he said. “This is about
you
, not your parents. I forgot.”

“Try not to do it again,” I said loftily.

“I'm going to need more coffee.” He got up, went over to the pod coffee maker, put a mug under the spout, and hit the switch.

I was proud of that coffee maker: I'd used one like it in a hotel suite last spring and talked Mom into ordering one for us. I also made her get this wooden Christmas tree decked out with different-flavored pods—coffees and teas and cocoas—all tucked into holes on the branches of a spinning wooden frame.

“Can you make me a cup?” I asked with a yawn. I was still in my pajamas: a tank top and PE sweatpants with the words “Coral Tree Prep” (the name of my school) running up the left leg. It was almost eleven thirty, but I'd only just gotten up.

I love summer.

“Make it yourself,” George said as he carried his mug over to the refrigerator.

“You suck as a personal assistant.”

He got the milk out and poured some into his coffee. “I'm not your personal assistant. And heaven help anyone who is.”

“Hey!” I said. “That was gratuitous.”

“Good SAT word.”

“I know, right? Oh, that reminds me—my friend Heather's going to come study with us today. I think it will help me focus.”

“Let's hope,” he said.

Heather didn't go to Coral Tree Prep with me; she lived in the Valley and went to public school there. We'd met at a dance class back when we were both thirteen, and I had decided that my true vocation in life was to be a modern dancer, despite the fact I'd never taken a single lesson before.

We'll Make You a Star
had been on the air for a few months at that point and people were already recognizing Luke. No one at the dance studio knew I was his stepdaughter, though—my last name was different, and Luke never brought me there. The only thing that made me stand out from the other girls was my total lack of skill and grace.

There was one other girl there who was also new and awkward and alone. She had a round belly under
her leotard and I saw a couple of the other (delicately thin) girls eye it and whisper to each other and giggle, so I made a point of catching her eye and smiling. She smiled back gratefully and moved closer and closer to me. When class ended, we walked out together.

While we waited to be picked up, Heather told me that her mother was making her do the class for exercise. I learned later that it was only one in a long series of attempts on Sarah Smith's part to slim down her daughter. Sarah was a tall, skinny brunette with an angular face, but Heather took after her father, who was rounder and had big blue eyes and dimples. Mrs. Smith, I soon discovered, liked to talk loudly and pointedly about how
wonderful
exercise was and how
good
it felt to be in shape and how people who didn't move their bodies turned into shapeless
slugs
. She also liked to drag me into the discussion: “You are so
petite
, Ellie. Isn't she wonderfully
petite
, Heather?” Heather would cheerfully agree that I was wonderfully petite, which pissed me off because (a) I didn't want to be held up as some kind of example and (b) Heather was adorable exactly the way she was, and the only person who didn't see that was her own mother. Oh, and those jerky girls in dance class, who continued to annoy me.

A few classes later, one of them giggled and pointed when Heather stumbled during a routine. I already disliked that girl, who had long blond hair and expensive
dance clothing and acted like she was the queen of the class, so I marched over to her and growled, “What's it like to have a sucky personality? How's that working for you?”

“You're the one with the sucky personality,” she said, flipping her hair.

“I guess that makes us twins,” I said, which seemed to stump her—she couldn't come up with anything to say except a lame “No, it doesn't.”

I walked away from her, grabbed Heather by the arm, and said, “Let's go.” She willingly let me lead her out of the practice room. The teacher called after us, but we ignored her. A good teacher wouldn't have let her students ridicule each other.

Sarah Smith was already there, sitting on a bench and balancing her checkbook while she waited for class to end. “What's going on?” she asked when we came out.

“We're done with class,” I said. “We don't like it.” And Heather echoed me.

“You can't quit,” her mother told her. “You'll be applying to college in a few years, and they're going to want to see that you've done more with your life than just go to school and eat junk food. Don't you even want to get some healthy exercise? Don't you care about finishing what you started and about getting some good habits into your life? Most girls would kill to have the
opportunities you have, and let me tell you, it's not always easy for us to afford them.” And so on.

Heather stood silently, her head bowed, letting her mother's words rain down on her. I thought she was genuinely overwhelmed, but it turned out to be a cunning defensive maneuver—with no one arguing against her, Sarah ran out of steam and eventually stopped on her own accord with a resigned, if frustrated, shrug of acceptance.

Before they left, Heather and I exchanged cell phone numbers and agreed that we wanted to stay friends.

At that point, she and her mother still had no idea that Luke Weston was my stepfather. They found out eventually of course, but it didn't change the fact that Heather liked me because I had been a good friend to her and not because I was related to the hot guy from
We'll Make You a Star.