“I know I said I didn’t want to put you in the middle, but can you please try to find out what’s going on with Liam?” she asks. “Just . . . I mean, I know you don’t want to come right out and ask him, but can you just . . . sort of, like, hint and see if he’s been talking to someone else?”
“Izzy,” I say carefully. “If you’re worried about Liam, I think you should just ask him what’s going on. Seriously, it’s not—”
“Please, Aven,” she pleads. She grabs my arm and her fingers dig into my flesh. It actually kind of hurts. “You’re the only one I can turn to for help. You know I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.”
“I know, Izzy, but—”
“Just see what you can find out, okay?”
“Okay.” The word slips out of my mouth before I can stop it. Of course I’m not going to try and see what I can find out. First of all, it’s kind of none of my business. And second of all, why would I want to know if Liam is cheating on Izzy? I’m having enough trouble with him liking Izzy. Now I’m going to have to find a completely new girl to have to deal with? No way.
I’ll just tell Izzy I couldn’t find out anything.
She probably won’t even care that much. She just wants to vent and feel like someone cares.
“Thanks, Aven,” Izzy says. “You’re the best.”
She turns around and walks away, her ponytail swishing behind her. I watch as she meets up with her dance team, all of them with the same long ponytails and toned bodies.
I shake my head.
I can’t believe Izzy’s worried about Liam cheating on her. No one would cheat on Izzy. She’s just too damn perfect.
Welcome to my life.
Of course, good-looking people get cheated on all the time. I mean, look at Beyoncé and Jay-Z. Everyone says he cheated. And Beyoncé’s beautiful and rich and amazing. So Liam could be cheating on Izzy. Not that I think Liam’s the type to do something like that. Of course, I’m definitely biased. I glance at him out of the corner of my eye, trying to see if I can spot anything different about him.
It’s half an hour or so later, and we’re walking down Ocean Boulevard, looking for a place to grab some snacks we can eat during book club on the beach. He doesn’t look like the kind of guy who’s cheating or harboring any kind of secret.
In fact, he looks even more relaxed than he usually does. He’s wearing his Brookline Lacrosse hat, the one he spent days working on so he could get the brim to fold just right. He’s walking fast, the way he usually does, his strides so long I’m almost struggling to keep up.
He needs a haircut. I can see the back of his hair sort of peeking through the back of his baseball cap. Hmm. That doesn’t seem like the kind of thing a guy cheating on someone would do, does it? If he was with some new girl, wouldn’t he be keeping up with his hair in an effort to impress her? Or maybe she likes it long, so he’s growing it out.
“Your hair’s getting long,” I say nonchalantly.
“Yeah,” he says. “I know. You want to cut it for me later?”
“What?”
“Yeah.” He pulls his hat off and runs his fingers through it. “It’s too hot to keep my hair like this.”
“You trust me to cut your hair?”
“What’s the worst that can happen?”
“Um, I screw it all up and you end up looking ridiculous.”
“Good thing I already got my senior pictures done, then.” He looks over and smiles at me. “You won’t screw it up. And if you do, I’ll just shave my head.”
Hmm. A guy who was cheating definitely wouldn’t trust me to cut his hair and then shave his head if it didn’t work out. Although Liam doesn’t usually get all worked up about things like that. So maybe this new girl just likes him for himself.
I start to run through a list of girls in my class who it could be. Karli Karlson? Jada Ryan? Rhiannon Joy? Then I realize I’m acting crazy. Just because Izzy thinks Liam is cheating on her doesn’t mean he is. That’s ridiculous. Liam wouldn’t cheat. If he didn’t want to be with Izzy anymore, he would just break up with her.
I don’t think it’s my bias talking, either. Yes, I’m in love with Liam. But I’m not under the illusion that he’s perfect. He’s not. He gets cranky when he doesn’t have enough sleep, he sometimes lets his dad push him into doing things he doesn’t want to do, and he can be lazy about school stuff. There are a million things Liam isn’t perfect at, but he’s not a cheater. I need to stop letting Izzy get into my head.
A few minutes later we pass an ice-cream shop called Big Olaf, and we stop for cones even though neither one of us has had anything resembling real food since this morning. Another one of Liam’s flaws—he eats processed sugar whenever he can.
Although that’s not really a flaw—why should it be when his body is still insane? Seriously, I’ve seem Liam without a shirt a fair amount of times—at the pool, after his games, at the end of a 10K he ran. His stomach is flat and toned, with a perfect six-pack, and his arms are defined in all the right places. So obviously the processed sugar isn’t hurting him much.
After we get our cones (chocolate chip cookie dough for me, and a double scoop of chocolate brownie for him) we head to the beach. We find an open spot on the sand and lay out the Siesta Key beach blanket we bought at a souvenir stand. It cost us forty dollars. For a blanket! Another one of Liam’s flaws—he spends money like crazy and doesn’t really think about it.
And it’s not like his family is rich or anything, either. Liam even had to get an after-school job at Dick’s Sporting Goods so he could save money for college. Which obviously he’s not doing if he’s spending forty dollars on a blanket.
He’s probably going to be broke soon. I try to imagine a future where I’m married to Liam, and he’s taken all our money and spent it on something frivolous, like a huge flat-screen TV. Our children would end up hungry. Or eating nothing but cheap packaged snacks filled with high fructose corn syrup.
Our children would be so cute, though. We’d have three boys. I don’t want any girls. They seem like they would be too much to handle. And boys really look to their dad to handle all of the hard stuff. I’ll bet Liam would be so good at that. He’s so patient and kind. He’d be a great dad, especially after the way his own dad is so hard on him. Liam always said he wouldn’t want to be that way with his kids, that he’d let them make their own decisions and not put any kind of pressure on them.
He’d be—wait. How did Liam spending all his money and eating processed foods and possibly cheating on his girlfriend turn into a fantasy about how he’d be a great dad?
Gah!
“So let’s talk about the book,” Liam says.
“Okay.” I take a lick of my ice-cream cone and wait for what I know is coming.
“I hated that book.”
It’s the way we start every single book club. Whoever picked the book sits there patiently until the other person says, So let’s talk about the book, and then you’re supposed to reply, Okay, and then the person who had to read the book you picked says, I hated that book.
“No, you didn’t,” I say.
“Yes, I did.” Liam’s already almost done with his ice-cream cone, even though he had two scoops and I only had one. “It was ridiculous.”
“What was ridiculous about it?”
“The ending!” he says, taking the last bite of his cone. He chews and swallows before talking again. “There was all that buildup, you know, about how she was trying to make it as an actress and how she’d set this weird deadline for herself, and then at the end, it just . . . sort of ended. Like you didn’t know if she made it or not.”
“Well, obviously she did!”
“It didn’t say that, though.” Liam turns his hat around until it’s backward and then tilts his face toward the sun.
“You should be wearing sunscreen,” I say, shaking my head. “You’re going to burn.”
“But I need my vitamin D,” he says. “You should have ten to fifteen minutes a day
of sunshine with no sunscreen.”
“Says who?”
“Dr. Oz.”
I frown. “Really?”
“Yeah.”
“Since when did you start watching Dr. Oz?” Maybe his new girlfriend watches it. Maybe all those times Liam claimed to be working on his music he was really holed up somewhere watching Dr. Oz. Not that Dr. Oz is on late night. But maybe he DVRs a bunch of them and then the new girl comes over and they cuddle up in bed and watch episode after episode. Like a marathon. I wonder what Dr. Oz has to say about ordering a double chocolate brownie ice-cream cone and downing it in three seconds.
Liam shrugs. “My mom had it on.”
I shake my head. “Anyway, back to the book.” I take a delicate lick of my ice-cream cone, trying to make sure I’m not hoovering it down while still trying to keep up with it enough so that it doesn’t drip down my arm. “She did make it at the end. She was getting all those auditions and work.”
“Yeah, but she hadn’t had her big break, though. We didn’t know for sure it was going to work out.”
“That was the point! It was all about the journey.”
“But you just said that of course it worked out, that she made it.”
“She did.”
“How do you know?”
“Because she was gaining momentum!”
Liam shakes his head. “If you say so.” He looks over at me and gives me a sly grin. “What did you think about the romance?”
“What did you think about the romance?” I counter. Liam has this crazy idea that I need to have a romance in a book to truly enjoy it. Which isn’t true. I just think that romance adds something to books, because let’s face it—love and romance are a huge part of life. They trump almost everything else. That’s why you always hear about people with power and celebrity and money being brought to their knees by a new love or an affair or a divorce. Love really does make the world go round.
“I thought it was ridiculous,” Liam says. “Why was she with that guy? The actor guy who was getting famous?”
“Um, because he was hot and a famous actor?”
“Yeah, but he was such a douche. And the guy who really liked her, Dan? He was so nice, and he seemed interesting. He was a writer. I wanted to see more of them together.”
“But they did end up together at the end,” I point out.
“Yeah, after she’d wasted the whole book with that other guy.”
I take in a deep breath, wondering how Liam can so clearly see the wrongness of a romance in a book, and yet can’t tell the wrongness in his romantic life right now. I mean, what he’s saying is the same exact thing that’s happening to him in real life. Why does he want to be with Izzy when he could be with me? I mean, yeah, she’s prettier than me. And I’m not saying that to be self-deprecating or whatever. It’s just a fact. She has long blond hair, and her body is perfect from all the dancing she does. But that’s all she has over me when it comes to Liam.
Liam and I have more in common.
We talk more.
We’re just . . . better.
So how can he sit there and tell me about the romance being wrong in that book when he’s living out the exact same thing? Unless . . . maybe he’s trying to give me some kind of hint.
“Well, yeah,” I say slowly. “But sometimes we need a little help, you know, figuring out what’s right for us. Like who we should end up with.”
“I guess.” He shrugs. “But that guy was so obviously wrong for her.”
“They had sexual chemistry,” I say, before I realize that might not be the best thing to bring up. Although if Liam and Izzy aren’t having sex much, maybe their sexual chemistry has been dampened a bit.
“So what?” he says. “Sexual chemistry fades out.”
I lick my ice-cream cone and think about what he’s saying. I can’t imagine my attraction to Liam fading out. Every time he’s around me, my stomach does somersaults, my skin prickles, and my heart does a weird little dance.
He turns to look at me, his blue eyes bright and serious. He’s staring at me. Now’s the moment. Now’s the time I should tell him how I feel. It’s the perfect segue.
I’ll tell him that it’s important you have a good friendship with the person you end up with, just like Franny did in the book. That it might have taken her a while to realize it, that she might have spent a lot of time with the wrong person because she was blinded by lust or bad decisions, but all that matters is who you end up with, not how you got there.
“Liam,” I say, taking a deep breath. Just do it. Do it. It’s just Liam. You have to know. You have to do it.
“Yeah?” he asks.
My mouth goes dry. Go on. Tell him.
“Oh God, Aven, your ice cream,” he says.
I look down. It’s dripping all down my arm, leaving a sticky trail on my skin. “Oh,” I say, surprised.
Liam laughs and takes my cone from me, licking it until it’s fixed. He takes his napkin, which he’s hardly touched, and wipes my arm until the melted ice cream is gone.
“Thanks,” I say.
He holds the cone back out to me, but I shake my head. “You can have it.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah, I just . . . I’m not hungry anymore.”
“You okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine.”
He looks at me. “No, you’re not.”
“Yes, I am.”
“No, you’re not. Tell me what’s wrong.”
“Nothing! I swear.”
“You know you’re going to end up telling me eventually,” he says confidently. And he’s right. At least, he would be if we were talking about anything else. He’s the first person I tell about whatever’s going on with me, good or bad. When Lyla and Quinn and I had our fight, I spent, like, three days at Liam’s house, curled up on his bed, moaning about how sad and lonely I was. When I was sick of talking about it, I’d crawl under his covers and watch Netflix documentaries or read books while he worked on his music and brought me snacks.
But this is different.
The one thing I want to tell him is the one thing I can’t.
“Are you upset because I didn’t like the book? Because I’m just joking, Aven. I mean, I did like it. Parts of it, anyway. It wasn’t a bad pick. Definitely not as bad as Baby Proof.”
I elbow him playfully. “No,” I say. “I’m not upset about the book.”
“Good, because—”
“Yo, Marsh!” a voice comes from down the beach.
Liam and I look up to see one of his friends from soccer, Miles Wentmore, walking toward us. He’s wearing board shorts and no shirt, tossing a football back and forth between his hands.
“Hey, Miles,” Liam says. I’m not sure, but I think he sounds kind of annoyed. Is he annoyed? Is he upset that Miles is interrupting our book club?
“Come on, we’re playing catch,” Miles instructs, in the way that only very cocky, good-looking guys can do.
“I’m kind of tired,” Liam says.
“Oh, come on, don’t be a pussy,” Miles says. He’s tossing the ball faster now, like showing off will somehow convince Liam to do what Miles wants.
Liam glances over at me, questioning.
“Don’t stay because of me,” I say, holding my hands up.
“Are you sure? I mean, we’re kind of in the middle of something.”
“It’s fine.” It is, but it isn’t. I don’t really care that Liam is going to throw the ball around with his friends, but at the same time, I don’t want him to leave, either. But it’s not like I have a right to be selfish about it—I’ve never had to fight Liam to spend time with him. In fact, it’s kind of the opposite. He’s usually accessible to me, always there when I need him, always wanting to be around me. But that’s what makes everything so horribly confusing. If he’s spending more time with me than with Izzy, if he’s so happy to just sit and talk about a chick-lit book with me, then why aren’t we together?
“You’re the best,
Aven,” Liam says. He stands up and brushes the sand off his shorts, then reaches down and grabs the bottom of his T-shirt, pulling it up and over his head. I catch my breath. Seeing Liam shirtless is a completely different experience from seeing Miles without his. Although it could be argued that Miles has the better body, with his eight-pack and smooth, perfectly tan skin, Liam is definitely hotter.
He’s lean, and his six-pack sits perfectly above the waistband of his shorts, which are sitting so low on his hips that he has to reach down and hitch them up, tying the drawstring tighter. A thin line of hair starts at his belly button and slides down out of sight. He tosses his shirt at me, hitting me in the face with it. “You’re in charge of that,” he says.
“Eww,” I say, throwing the shirt back at him. “What makes you think I want to take care of your smelly shirt?”
He gives it a sniff. “It’s not smelly,” he says. “It’s perfectly clean.”
“No, it’s not,” I say. “You’re a boy. Boys are dirty.”
“Aven,” Liam says patiently, the way he does when he’s pretending he’s exasperated with me even though he really isn’t. I love when he does that, love the way my name sounds coming out of his mouth, like it’s not just my name, but something special he calls me. “I’m a very clean person.”
“Right,” I say, rolling my eyes, even though it’s true. Liam’s very clean. Well, for a boy. He always showers and uses Axe body spray. I know because one time I saw it in his bathroom. Not to mention how good he smells.
“Come on,” Miles whines. “Are you coming or not?”
“I’ll watch your shirt,” I say to Liam, and he tosses it back to me. “But it’s going to cost you something.”
“What?”
“Rent.”
“How much?”
“Marsh! Stop flirting and come on,” Miles says.
Miles thinks Liam and I are flirting! Are we flirting? Do we flirt? “I’ll see you later, back at the hotel?” Liam asks.
“Sure,” I say. “See you back at the hotel.”
I sit there for a minute, watching the two of them disappear down the beach.
My phone buzzes.
Before graduation, I will . . . tell the truth.