She’d crash every time.
Or come close to it, anyway.
And watching her ride Mikey’s banana bike into town made me really, really glad I had my skateboard back. There’s no way I would’ve survived on those handlebars! Just watching her was scary. She had to scrunch way up to pedal, and with the little plastic fringe flapping in the wind and the way she was concentrating so hard because the training wheels didn’t let her lean and the handlebars were hard to steer with, she looked like some wild child escaping the circus.
“This better be important!” she said when we got to the restaurant. “And he’d better be here. I’m not riding this thing another foot!”
I picked up my skateboard and started walking through the parking lot, muttering, “I sure hope he’s okay,” as I looked around for Casey.
“Casey’s probably fine.” She pushed the banana bike along. “I’m the one you’re supposed to be worried about.” Then, before I could say anything, she muttered, “And if anyone saw me on this stupid bike, I’m gonna die. Hello, morgue—I’m dead.”
“No one saw you,” I said, searching for Casey.
“What are you talking about? How could they miss?” She sighed. “I just hope Danny wasn’t one of them.”
I snapped to. “Hey! He’s a jerk and you hate him, remember?”
“Oh yeah,” she said with a pout.
So there we are, walking through the parking lot of the Landmark Broiler, me holding my skateboard, Marissa pushing along a clown bike with training wheels, when all of a sudden Marissa grabs my arm and points. “Look!”
So I look, expecting to see Casey in…I have no idea what kind of crisis. But instead I see a dressed-up couple coming out of the restaurant, walking along the awning-covered walkway.
At first I don’t understand why Marissa’s gasping and grasping and carrying on like the world’s exploding. I mean, my head’s wrapped around finding Casey, and the couple she’s pointing to is not a teenage guy in jeans and a T-shirt.
But then the world does seem to go ka-blam as I realize that Marissa’s not pointing at just some random couple leaving the restaurant.
“That is your mother, isn’t it?” Marissa whispers.
I nod, but really, that’s about all I can manage.
“And the guy with his arm around her?” She pulls a face at me. “Is that…?”
I take a deep, deep breath and nod. “Casey’s dad.”
“That’s it,” I said, watching them move along the walkway under the awning. “I officially hate her.”
“Wow,” Marissa gasped. “I thought I had problems.” Then she added, “Look how cozy they are!” and then she started musing over all the things I didn’t want to think about. “Maaaaan. If they get married, that would make Casey your stepbrother, Heather your stepsister, and Candi your stepmother.”
“It would not! To be my stepmother, that witch would have to marry my father.”
“Good point,” Marissa said with a very calm nod. “But Casey and Heather—”
“Stop! What are you trying to do? Torture me?”
“Hey!” came a voice behind me.
I spun around. “Casey!”
He nodded out at our wonderful parents strolling toward his dad’s car. “Nice, huh? How do you want to deal?”
“By never talking to them again?”
Casey shook his head. “That’s not an option for me. On the outs with him means I’m stuck at my mom’s.” He grabbed my hand and said, “Come on,” and as he pulled me toward the little lying lovebirds, he eyed Marissa’s bike and said, “Can’t wait to hear the story behind that.”
Mr. Acosta was just opening the passenger door for my mother when Casey and I sort of appeared beside them. My mom gasped, then immediately tried to make it seem like we were the ones who’d done something wrong. “How dare you follow us like this!”
“What?” I sputtered. “I didn’t follow you! Grams and I thought you went back to Hollywood! But I get it now—you didn’t come home to see us at all. You came to see him. It was just bad luck that Grams saw you at the store!” I could feel a cold hard knot tying in my heart. “Grams is gonna love this.”
“This is none of her or your or…or anybody else’s business!” Then she threw in her two cents’ worth of parenting. “And what are you doing out so late? You should not be out this late!”
Casey had his eyes locked on his dad the whole time, but his dad could only seem to look at his shiny-shoed feet. Very quietly, Casey said, “You told me the two things that mattered to you were trust and truth. If you wanted to go out with Sammy’s mom, why didn’t you just say so? I know how to make myself scarce. You didn’t have to lie and say you were going out of town or banish me to Mom’s with some stupid excuse about me needing to bond with her and Heather.”
Mr. Acosta glanced at him. “Can we discuss this at home?” His voice was low, and it was easy to see he felt awful.
Casey snorted. “So I’m allowed to come home?” But then he started to back away. “You know what? Forget it.”
Mr. Acosta seemed torn and really embarrassed, looking at my mom, then Casey, at my mom, then Casey. Finally he said to Casey, “Why don’t you stay right here. I’ll take Lana to her hotel, then give you a lift home.”
Casey tossed him a disgusted look. “I can get home fine without you.”
My mother got in the car, still acting like I was the one who’d done something wrong. So I said, “Should I tell Grams you’ll be stopping by the flea-ridden hovel before you leave town?”
She glanced at me and whispered, “Insolence is very unattractive.”
“So is being comatose,” I whispered back. “Wake up, would you? You’re not the only one with feelings!”
She blinked at me twice, then shut the door.
So I caught up to Casey and Marissa as Casey’s dad called, “I’ll see you at home, son!”
“Wow,” Marissa said when we were a safe distance away. “That was freaky!”
“Freaky?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said, pushing the bike along. “It’s like you guys are the adults and they’re the children.”
I looked at Casey, who muttered, “Freaky is right.” He shook his head. “Why’d he have to lie to me? Why didn’t he just tell me?”
Marissa was right, though—it was all kinda backward and freaky. “You know what?” I said to Casey. “I think you need to have a serious talk with your dad. You need to tell him that my mother is a bad influence and that getting tangled up with her could have seriously negative consequences.”
“She didn’t make him lie. He didn’t have to!”
“But see? That’s her influence. That’s how she deals with things she doesn’t want to face—she lies. And if she’s already got him lying, too, what’s next?”
He shook his head. “Man. He must really like her.”
“Which is freaky enough right there,” I grumbled.
We walked along for a minute, then he eyed me and said, “I’m glad you made it out here.”
“Well, you sounded really stressed, and then the phone went dead—”
“My battery died. It was already low this morning, and I’ve been trying to get you all day. First after I found out that Heather was totally lying about Mom being ticked about the kitchen—I went back to the ballpark, but you guys were gone. Then when I spotted my dad and your mom driving through town—I thought I was hallucinating.”
“Did you follow them to the Landmark Broiler?”
“I couldn’t keep up, but the Landmark Broiler is my dad’s favorite place, so I came down here on a hunch, and sure enough, his car was in the lot.” He looked at me. “Glad I finally caught you.”
I looked down. “Yeah, I’m sorry I was so, you know, crazed today.”
He raised an eyebrow at the banana bike. “Did it have something to do with transportation issues?”
I sure didn’t want to explain what I’d really been doing, so I said, “Yeah, Marissa’s kind o
f in crisis mode.”
“Kind of?” Marissa said. “Kind of?”
Casey laughed. “Yeah, what do you mean, kind of? To ride around on that thing, you’ve got to be in serious crisis mode. What happened?”
And see, that’s the great thing about Casey. He can make you laugh and still let you know that he cares. And boy! Did Marissa ever use the opportunity to tell him what was wrong with her life. From having no money to her dad storming off and backing over her bike, she told him about everything…except Danny.
When we got to the corner where we had to turn to go up the hill to Marissa’s house and he had to go straight to start the long ride out to his dad’s house, Casey kinda stood facing me a minute. Finally he said, “Well, I guess I’d better go. I’ll see you at the pool party tomorrow, huh?”
I nodded. And I felt like I wanted him not to go, but there we all were on the street corner feeling kinda, you know, awkward. So I just gave a dumb little wave and said, “Yeah.”
“See ya, Casey!” Marissa called as he took off on his skateboard, and the minute he was a little ways down the road, she turned to me and said, “He would so have kissed you if I wasn’t here!”
I heaved a sigh and started up the hill. “I don’t think so. Things feel weird now.” I kicked a rock. “Good ol’ Lady Lana’s ruining everything.”
I mean, come on.
What guy in his right mind wants to kiss his future stepsister?
TWENTY-TWO
Casey has tried to kiss me before.
A couple of times.
Or at least I think he was planning to. What do I know? I’ve never been kissed by a guy.
Well, okay. So there was that one time Billy Pratt kissed me, but that was done on a dare. It was just another one of Heather’s stupid schemes to mess up my life, so it doesn’t count.
Anyway, the problem with the times Casey’s tried to kiss me was that I wasn’t ready. Either I was still freaked out about him being Heather’s brother, or I was too self-conscious about…well, stuff like my lips being dry and chapped and cracked from camping in the wilderness.
You do not want your first kiss to be on dry, chapped, cracked lips.
You just don’t.
But in the short window between getting over the fact that Casey was genetically linked to Heather and the fear that he might become my brother, I’d sort of shied away from kissing him.
Maybe I was a kissing coward.
Or maybe I still couldn’t believe that a guy as amazing as Casey actually wanted to kiss me.
Whatever. As we trudged up the hill to Marissa’s house, I felt really heavyhearted. For months Marissa and Holly and Dot had told me how terrific Casey was and how lucky I was that he liked me, and for months I’d come up with excuses about how come he and I could never work out.
Hudson had once said something about a “self-fulfilling prophecy,” and when I’d asked him what that was, he’d said, “It’s getting what you expect. If you expect the worst, that’s exactly what you’ll get. Instead, you should expect great things—you’ll get them instead.”
At the time it all sounded like a bunch of mumbo jumbo, but now it seemed like the situation with Casey was a self-fulfilling prophecy—I’d believed for so long that it couldn’t work out that now, just as I was finally admitting to myself that I wanted it to work out, it was too late. The whole thing was just blowing up—lit fuse courtesy of my self-centered mother.
Fortunately, Marissa’s mother distracted me from getting terminally ticked off at my own. We could hear Mrs. McKenze’s voice through her office door as we tiptoed down the hallway. “Bob, please. Walk away. Just walk away…. Yes, I know you’re on a roll, but…Bob, listen to me. You can’t win it all back. You’ll lose what you’ve won. Just walk away!…It’s okay, we’ll work it out. Just come home!…Bob! Bob, no! Listen to me! Red may seem lucky, but you’ve been drinking, and…Bob?…Bob?…Bob!”
From the cursing that followed, it was obvious he’d hung up on her. Marissa looked at me with wide eyes and whispered, “He went back to Vegas?” She knocked twice on the door and walked in. “Mom?”
“Not now,” Mrs. McKenze said, frantically stuffing things into a briefcase. “I’ve got to go.” She saw me standing in the hallway. “Sammy’s still here? Well, that’s good.” She eyed me. “Just stay out of trouble, all right?” She slid her laptop into the briefcase and turned to Marissa. “Can you check on Michael tomorrow? Tell him I love him?”
“Check on him? Where is he?”
“He’s…he’s staying at Hudson’s tonight.” Marissa’s eyes bugged out, so real fast Mrs. McKenze added, “It’s fine. Everything’s fine. He wanted to stay there, and under the circumstances…I just can’t handle dealing with him right now.”
“Are you going to Vegas?” Marissa asked, her voice small.
All Mrs. McKenze’s frantic motion stopped for a second, then she shut the briefcase lid. “If I can catch the eleven-thirty flight.”
“How much has he lost?”
Mrs. McKenze snapped the latches closed. “More than I care to think about.” She came around from behind her desk, gave Marissa a quick hug and kiss, and said, “I’ll get him home and we’ll straighten this all out. Don’t worry. We’ll recover. Everything will be fine.” She hurried down the hallway, calling, “If there’s an emergency, contact Aunt Nola and Uncle Bruce. But please don’t tell them we’ve got problems, all right? We don’t need the whole family to know!” She was out of sight now, but right before the door to the garage slammed, she shouted, “And feed Michael’s fish!”
Marissa and I decided the fish could wait.
We were starving!
So we fed ourselves first, snacking on chips, Oreos, and ice cream. And even though we’d eaten a lot, I was still hungry. It had been a long, incredibly intense day, and I needed something real to eat. But that’s the problem with the McKenzes’—there’s never anything real to eat. It’s all prepackaged, microwavable, man-on-the-run stuff.
And then Marissa, who’d just finished putting two Pop-Tarts in the toaster, suddenly gasped and punched the bright blue eject button on the toaster. “What am I thinking?” she said, snatching the Pop-Tarts out of the slots. “I’m wearing a two-piece tomorrow!”
“Oh, good grief.” I took a Pop-Tart out of her hand and chomped down. “Forget the stupid two-piece. We’re playing water hoops!”
She punched open the trash compactor with her foot and chucked the other Pop-Tart inside it. “Not the whole time….”
One look at her pathetic pout and I understood. “Aw, Marissa, come on.”
“It looks really good on me,” she said, her eyes doing a total puppy-dog plead.
“Yeah, it does.”
“And he is going to be there.”
I sighed. “We really need to find you a new crush.”
But then she said, “And she’ll be there, too.”
I choked on a chunk of Pop-Tart. And after a coughing fit, I said, “Who? Heather?”
“Of course Heather.”
“Why would she be there?” But suddenly I realized that of course she would be. Heather had been at the ballpark when Brandon had called out that everyone was invited. “Oh, maaaaan!” I chucked the rest of my Pop-Tart into the compactor. “Talk about ruining a party.”
Marissa pulled a face and shook her head. “I can’t believe you hadn’t thought of that.”
To me this was like visiting Disneyland with a sniper on your tail. Heather wouldn’t actually get in the pool and play water hoops. Oh no, she’d act all cool and superior and snipe from the sidelines. She wouldn’t just sun herself or enjoy the food or hang out and be normal, she’d find some way to make us miserable. Anything to make us miserable.
“Look, Marissa,” I said once I was over the shock of it, “you do not want to compete for Danny’s affections like that. Your best bet is to ignore him and ignore her.”
“Oh, I’m going to ignore him, all right!” she said. “And I’m going to make
sure I look good doing it.”
I groaned, but I knew there was no talking her out of it.
The phone rang, and after Marissa picked it up, she said, “Okay…okay…okay…I will…. Okay…okay…okay, bye,” and hung up.
“Your mother?” I asked.
Marissa nodded. “She made the flight. She says I shouldn’t worry, not to eat junk food, and to feed the fish.” She eyed me. “She also wants me to keep you away from matches.”
“Matches? Why matches?”
She laughed. “Some vision about you burning down the house.”
“I do not deserve that.”
She laughed again and said, “Come on. Let’s go feed the fish.”
Now, since we were both wiped-out tired, no one had to tell us to go to bed. We just wound up in Marissa’s room and dived for the covers. “What a day,” Marissa said with a yawn. “Softball…spying on Heather…riding Mikey’s bike downtown…my parents…your mother…. Holy smokes.”
I propped up on an elbow and looked at her. “That softball game was this morning?”
She laughed. “Yeah.”
I plopped back down. “Holy smokes is right!” Because between all the things Marissa had listed, I’d also run around town buying stuff and infiltrated the Highrise as Old Lady Superspy.
No wonder I was wiped out!
“G’night,” Marissa mumbled after a minute.
“Good night,” I said back.
“My family is such a mess,” she said, the words all slurring together.
“Mine too,” I chuckled.
“Yours has always been a mess. Except for your grandmother. She’s a rock.”
I nodded in the darkness. Grams was definitely a rock.
“Wish I had a rock,” she mumbled. “My parents have always been more into work than spending time with me or Mikey. And now my dad’s got a gambling problem?” Her voice was totally drifting off now. “Money makes you do weird stuff. It controls you. Once you have it, it’s hard to let it go.”
She may have been talking herself to sleep, but I was now wide-awake.
Money did make you do weird stuff.