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.
four
While I was waiting for Heather to show up at my house that morning, I worked out for about half an hour on the elliptical machine in Luke’s exercise room and then snuck into Mom’s bathroom to shower—mine was just a regular shower but hers had seven showerheads all spritzing you from different angles. It was crazily great and I didn’t even feel guilty about it, since the house had been built green, and our gray water—water we’d only used a little bit, like for showers and stuff—went directly into our yard and watered the plants.
This house was ridiculous in the best possible sense—huge and comfortable and luxurious . . . practically decadent. It sometimes freaked me out to think that this was the only house Jacob would know, that he would grow up thinking this was normal. He’d never know what it was like to share a one-room apartment with Mom or spend a few years in a small house so close to your neighbors that you could hear them calling to each other from one room to another. The funny thing was, I almost felt sorry for him. This house was so big, I often didn’t know who was home and who wasn’t. I liked having my space, but in a weird way, I was glad I’d had so much togetherness with Mom when I was little.
I heard the gate buzz right after I got out of the shower. I hit the wall panel to let Heather in and used the intercom to tell George to open the front door. I threw on a pair of shorts and a clean tank top and headed downstairs in my bare feet; it was late July and super hot outside, but the house was comfortable with the air-conditioning running.
Jacob was slowly turning in circles in the big open foyer area at the bottom of the stairs. Our housekeeper, Lorena, was standing on the steps talking to him.
Lorena was roughly my mother’s age and had an eleven-year-old daughter of her own, who she talked to about ten times a day on her cell phone. Mom had hired her to clean a couple of days a week when we first moved into the big house. After Mom got pregnant with Jacob, Lorena mentioned that she liked taking care of babies and Mom instantly hired her full-time. I think the whole Westside nanny thing kind of freaked Mom out, so she was relieved to have som
eone around to help without going down that road. Mom told me she expected me to continue to be responsible for making my bed and cleaning my room, but over the course of the last few years, we’d all gotten a little lazy and used to being waited on. If I left my clothes on the floor, they ended up in the hamper or cleaned and folded in my drawers—so why keep picking them up? And Lorena made my bed much smoother than I could.
We were all slightly terrified of her, even though she was totally sweet. It was just that she could be intractable. Like once she thought that a pillow looked better on the smaller armchair in the formal living room, but Mom had bought it for the bigger one. Every time Lorena was in the living room, she’d put it on the smaller one, and then Mom would switch it to the bigger one. This went on for weeks. They never discussed it or acknowledged there was a battle of wills going on. But eventually Mom gave up and just left it on the smaller chair. “She’s stronger than I am,” Mom told me with a good-natured shrug.
“Let’s do something else,” Lorena was saying now to Jacob as I came close. “Oh, look, there’s Ellie. Don’t you want to say hi to Ellie? Look at Ellie and say hi, Jacob. Jacob! Stop going in circles and say hi to your sister.”
He kept turning, his arms wide, his head thrown back so he could stare up at the ceiling. It was a classic Jacob thing to do.
I grabbed his arms and stopped him from spinning long enough to drop a kiss on his head and tell him he was my baby dude, and then I let him go and went on into the kitchen, while he went back to twirling behind me. Lorena may have been stronger than Mom, but Jacob was stronger than Lorena. And therefore everyone else.
Heather was already sitting at the big round table. George was at the counter, sticking another pod into the coffee maker.
Heather was chattering away—something about how glad she was to be done with junior year but how terrified she was of all the college application stuff.
George put the cup of coffee in front of her and said, “Do you want milk or sugar?”
“Milk, please. I can get it, though.”
“No problem. I’m up anyway.” He went over to the refrigerator.
“You’ll wait on her, but not me?” I said.
“Heather asks nicely,” George said, setting down the milk carton and taking his seat. “You should try it. You guys ready to do some work?”
“I should warn you that I did terribly on the PSATs,” Heather said. “I may be hopeless.”
“That’s why you’re here,” I said.
George gave us a bunch of multiple-choice math word problems. It took me a little while on one, and I made a careless error on another, but I basically knew what I was doing, which he acknowledged.
But Heather kept saying, “I just don’t get it. I don’t get how you can turn this into something solvable.”
“You make x stand in for the unknown answer,” George said, for about the fourth time in five minutes. “And then you create a simple equation and solve for x. Did you see how Ellie set hers up?”
“My brain doesn’t work like Ellie’s.”
“I’ve just done more SAT prep than you have,” I said. “That’s all.”
“I’ve taken an eight-week class and two one-day workshops,” she said morosely.
While we worked, my phone kept vibrating with texts from my school friends Riley and Skyler, who wanted to get together with me that afternoon. The fourth time I picked up my phone to read a text, George plucked it out of my hand and said, “You can’t have this thing near you. You’re an addict.”
“Some of us have social lives. You wouldn’t know about that.”
He squinted at the screen. “Who’s Skyler? Boy or girl?”
“Never occurred to me to find out.”
“Whoever it is wants to come over.”
“Shocker,” I said, because everyone always wanted to come over to my house: my house was where Luke Weston lived. I grabbed my phone back and quickly texted Skyler and Riley—while George tapped his fingers impatiently on the table—to tell them I’d rather meet at the mall and go see a movie. “If I don’t answer, they’ll just keep bugging me,” I said.
“Whatever,” he said. “Ready to get back to work?”
“One sec.” Now I had to text Mom to let her know my plans and make sure she wasn’t counting on me for dinner or anything. Texting was our main method of communication. Mom liked me to keep her informed, but sometimes I had no idea if she was even home or not (like I said, our house was really big) so . . . texting. The next best thing to being there.
“Okay, now,” I said, and put the phone down for the rest of our study time—except when I got bored waiting for Heather to catch up and used the time to check my Instagram feed.
Once George said we were done for the day, I invited Heather to come to the mall with me, and she ran to the bathroom to get ready.
George looked up from his keyboard; he was back to researching anniversary celebration venues. He said idly, “So . . . is Skyler a girl or a guy?”
“Does it matter?”
“Yeah. I could be walking down the street and someone could yell, ‘Skyler’s getting away!’ and I wouldn’t know who to look for.”
“Probably a dog,” I said. “In that scenario.”
“Yes, but a boy or girl dog?”
“You’d have to look between its legs to figure that out.”
“Sounds risky.” He beckoned to me and lowered his voice. “Listen, Ellie, Heather’s really sweet but you might want to study with someone who can keep up with you.”
“I like helping her.”
“Very noble,” he said. “But if she’s slowing you down—”
“I’m back,” Heather announced from the doorway.
I said, “Let’s go. Skyler texted that she’s already there.”
“Aha!” said George. “She’s a girl.”
“Shes usually are,” I said.
five
We saw the movie and then ate and shopped. Heather had to leave early; she checked her phone right after the movie to discover that her mother was freaking out because Heather hadn’t returned her six calls and five texts. “My phone was off,” I heard her explain. “I told you I was going to a movie.” Then after a long listening silence: “I didn’t mean to worry you. Okay, fine, I’m on my way.”
Skyler and Riley pretended to be sorry Heather had to go, but they only hung out with her because of me. The two of them were best friends and I guess I was sort of their third Musketeer, since I ate lunch with them every day at school and sometimes saw them on the weekends, but deep down I didn’t feel that close to them. They were perfectly fine high school friends, but I doubted we’d stay in touch once we left for college.
Riley was probably going to be our class valedictorian. She took all honors courses and was the top student in most of them. She wore her long brown hair in a ponytail and studied incredibly hard during the week, and then let her hair down both literally and figuratively on the weekends, when she liked to go to parties where she got so drunk she usually threw up and passed out on the floor. It didn’t appeal to me much as a lifestyle, but she seemed committed to it.
Skyler was more mellow about school, partially because she could be. She’d already been recruited by Brown for volleyball. She had red hair and green eyes and was over six feet tall. She and Riley had both been going to Coral Tree since kindergarten and had been best friends the whole time.
They were both smart and entertaining and quick to laugh, which made them fine to spend an afternoon with, but I could never shake the feeling that my greatest appeal for them was the fact that Luke Weston was my stepfather. Maybe it was unfair of me—God knows I could be paranoid about that kind of thing—but still . . . there were moments. Like even that afternoon: we passed a poster advertising the upcoming season premiere of We’ll Make You a Star, and Riley instantly stopped and pointed to it. “It must be so weird for you to see Luke’s picture everywhere you go,” she said to me a little too loudly, like she wanted peop
le to overhear our conversation. “Doesn’t it freak you out? I mean, you live with him.”
“I’m used to it,” I said, and moved away.
Heather flashed me a sympathetic eye roll. I’d confided in her how much I hated how famous Luke had become and the way it made people act. I couldn’t complain to him and my mom about it—they couldn’t change anything and they would just feel bad—and I couldn’t complain to people I didn’t trust, so I only complained to Heather, who had loved me for me right from the start, and who kept any secret I asked her to.
So even though Skyler and Riley were my closest friends at school, I didn’t feel relaxed around them. They were always inventing reasons to come over to my house, where their eyes would flicker around hopefully at every noise, like they were just waiting for Luke to come through the door and fall in love with one of them. You’d think the fact that he was my mother’s husband would make them a little less obvious about their crushes, but apparently his fame made him some kind of acceptable universal object of lust. I just tried to avoid having them over, which is why I usually met them at places like the mall.
When I got home, I found Mom and Luke lying on their bed, Jacob between them, curled up on his side, staring at some animated show on TV. Luke was reading a script (he read a lot of scripts now that he had his own production company), and Mom a glossy magazine. She never cared much about fashion before Luke got famous, but now they were always going to dressy events, and she felt like she had to keep up.
“There you are!” she said, putting her magazine down. “How was the movie?”
“Moderately not-awful,” I said. “But only moderately.”
“And the SAT tutoring?”
“About as thrilling as you’d expect.”
“Just be grateful we didn’t make you get a job this summer,” she said. “A few hours of studying won’t kill you. Is George a good tutor?”
“Yeah, he’s fine.” I came over and sat down on the edge of their bed. “Speaking of George, I wanted to ask you something. Could we go to Tahiti for your anniversary party?”