Prince Charming (2 page)

Of course they did.

“G
eoff!” My mother called from downstairs. The shrillness of it seemed to touch everything we owned in the mansion on Ammunition Ridge. “Diiiiiiiineeeeerr!”

“Coming, Mom,” I called down the stairs. My voice came out in breathy heaves, because every afternoon since October I’d done fifty burpees and forty-five jumping jacks in my room before allowing myself to check social media. In January, I added one hundred sit-ups three times a week, all part of a private wish that I’d wake up one day in a different body.

Before I left my room, I clicked out of Facebook and locked my computer. Then I checked it twice. I’d made that mistake before, and I wouldn’t again. I didn’t want Blake and Bruce posting on my behalf for the third time in three months.

The wide, winding staircase led to the open-air gourmet kitchen, where a variety of smells greeted me: onions, grease, and something sugary. Mom must have been at it again, trying her best to cook the perfect meal. She placed a sizable pot roast with a burned salt crust on the table in the breakfast nook before she turned to me. Blake, Bruce and David already sat in their seats, and the distinctive wide eyes they all shared bulged as they waited for me to take a seat.

“Milk or water?” she asked as she wiped her hands on her black apron. It said “Kiss the Cook” in red stencil letters embellished with red lip prints on the front.

I yanked my chair out from the table and took a seat. The chair scraped the tile floor, and I stifled a grin when I heard it.

David loved to brag. More than once, I’d heard my stepfather tell people he wanted to impress that the kitchen floor had special tiles from Italy he’d found on a business trip five years ago. Each tile cost $150. He made sure people heard the cost when he told the story.

“I’ll have water, Mom.”

“Good, that’s already on the table.” She turned her attention to David, who was poised to take a cut from the roast. He’d even already raised his fork. “David, honey, would you like a beer? Maybe something else? A bourbon? Or can I bring up something from the wine cellar?”

I frowned. She always sounded so sugary and submissive when she talked to David. She’d never been that way with Dad. Why was she always changing herself to suit what she “thought David wanted”?

“Sure, sugar,” he said. Then he cut into the roast with gusto, clinking and banging the knife and fork as juices spilled out on the white china plate. “Red.”

Meanwhile, I resisted the urge to throw up. I hated the way his voice sounded when he said “sugar.” It reminded me of the way a drunken cartoon character might speak.

“Pinot?” She picked up a dark bottle with a fancy label from the counter, and held it out like a trophy.

“Yep, sugar, that will work.” He didn’t even look at her. I wondered if he noticed how much time and effort she’d put into her hair, or the fact that she now wore makeup every evening to dinner. She never used to do that, either. It might have made her look refreshed and polished, but I didn’t like it. Not at all.

Blake and Bruce tore into the roast after their dad cut his portion. They didn’t acknowledge anyone, they just did it. As my mother and I waited for them to finish, I swirled my fork around the spinach, lettuce, celery, mozzarella, and tomato salad that took up half my plate. Mom had covered the whole thing in a purple dressing, a recipe that I suspected she got from one of the new cookbooks that lined the shelf above the stove. Again, another effort by her to please David. She never cooked very much before she married him.

“Hey, now. Don’t play with your food, Geoff,” David said once he noticed what I was doing. He added a disapproving arch of his eyebrow.

“What?” I said, incredulous as I looked from my food to David, and back again. “I wasn’t playing with it. I was just mixing the dressing.” I looked at my mom for reinforcement on this, but she just shrugged.

“Stop mixing the dressing, Geoff,” David said. “Eat. Now.”

I turned my head to him, taking in the sight of this fifty-year-old man with a comb over, who wore a wrinkled brown suit and red tie. What did my mom see in him? He must have been gangbusters in bed. Or, maybe it was the money. She did have an AmEx with a $50,000 limit now, and a personal shopper at Nordstrom. Access like that must have made up for everything.

I set my fork down against the plate. “What? I’m not playing with my food.”

He cleared his throat. “Just eat your food, Geoff.”

“But I wasn’t—”

“It doesn’t matter what you tell me, son. What matters is what I saw.”

“I’m not your son.”

“I saw you playing with it, Geoff. End of story.” He talked with his mouth full of food, and with each word a mix of salad bits and shreds of roast threatened to spray across the mahogany table.

“I wasn’t.”

“It doesn’t matter.” My mom sighed. “Eat the roast. It’s good.” She added a fake smile and pointed at her handiwork. A small piece of beef the size of a dollar bill remained. Mom hadn’t eaten any, yet either. Without another word, I cut it in half and left the rest for her.

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T
HURSDAY, JANUARY 24

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S
ENIOR YEAR, I had one best friend: Josh Anderson. We sat at a lunch table with two other guys—Mark Crawford and Nathan Priest—both of whom I called good friends, too. Together, we navigated the choppy waters of the Heritage High School cafeteria, a place where students jockeyed for tables with the best view of the room and ate calorie-balanced lunches made by two chefs the student alumni association paid for with private donations. Of all the dangerous places in the preppy school we called home, the lunchroom was the most dangerous. Student reputations rose and fell by the events in that large, loud room located in the center of the building. What happened in the lunchroom never stayed in the lunchroom, and the social hierarchy of Heritage ebbed and flowed just from that fact, and exactly the way the popular kids liked it.

The four of us ate lunch most days at a spot in the far right corner of the room. The rectangular table sat far enough away from the lunch line to see most of the action, but close enough to check out the hot senior and junior girls. Our section of the lunchroom sat six people, but two of the chairs always stayed empty. Always.

No girls ever sat with us at lunch, despite Mark’s best efforts to convince them. Mark crushed on at least five girls during senior year, but he had no skills. Every time he talked to girls, they just wound up laughing in his face. He didn’t lose hope, though, and at least once a day he brought up his latest crush.

Nathan, on the other hand, was more interested in his latest level achievement on the
Mass Effect
video game. He’d turned eighteen without having even kissed a girl. Josh, meanwhile, often kept his feelings about girls and the rest of high school to himself.

I think that’s why we became such close friends.

“Dude, check out the shirt Jillian James is wearing,” Mark said at lunch one typical Thursday. He clutched his burger in one hand, and stopped it a few inches from his mouth as his eyes widened. Lettuce and tomato threatened to fall out of the bun and land on his shirt, but he ignored it. “That sweater is see-through. You can see her tits.”

“Tits.” Nathan’s eyes scrunched up behind his horn-rimmed glasses as he laughed. “You said tits. Such a great word. God, I love that word.”

“Even better when they’re up close,” I said under my breath.

“This is awesome.” Mark’s eyes followed Jillian as she walked across the lunchroom. “It’s like she doesn’t even realize people can see them . . .”

I glanced at Josh, then turned my head to see exactly what about Jillian had so distracted Mark from his food. On that day, Jillian wore a knee-length black sweater over grey leggings. The loose knit of the sweater revealed what looked like a tan camisole underneath, one that hugged her hourglass body. Her long, curly black hair tumbled down her back, and she walked across the lunchroom like it was her own personal runway. A couple of kids stopped eating as she passed. But that didn’t mean I could see her boobs.

“Well. I don’t see anything,” I said.

“You must have missed it, you idiot,” Nathan said. “They were out. It’s that sweater.”

“They were not out. She wouldn’t do it, anyway. She’s not that stupid.” I paused. “Well, she is dumb. But that doesn’t mean you saw them.”

“You didn’t see her from the front.” Nathan sounded annoyed. In fact, he sounded that way a lot when he talked to me.

My eyes stayed on Jillian as she made her way to the usual table where she sat. She reached it, placed her tray down, and I sucked in my breath a little bit. She sat right next to Laine, in the middle of the table, and Monica, a brunette, sat across from them. Even though I already knew they were all lifelong friends who sat at the same lunch table every day at Heritage, my heart still jumped from my chest to my ears.

Something about Laine did that to me every time, and not just because she had a rail-thin body and wavy blonde hair.

On that day, she looked perfect in a black turtleneck sweater and fur vest. As I watched, Laine smiled at Jillian, and then said something to her, and they booth laughed. Monica, always the wannabe, laughed, about half a second later.

People were always like that around Laine. She never went long without finding something funny, and her round, warm laugh often made other people laugh, too. She radiated happiness, confidence, and perfection.

The whole scene intoxicated me.

“Nice,” Josh said when he noticed what and who had my attention. “Good to see some things never change, including your worship of the princess.”

“Shut up. I am not worshiping her.”

“So, you do still like her?” Josh’s left eyebrow shot up.

“No. I don’t—no.”

“Whatever.” He grinned. “You could run a Facebook page about how much you like her.”

“Come on. Shut up.”

“She really is a princess. I heard her say something in the hall about how she and Evan went to some concert downtown over the weekend.” He shook his head. “Of course she had front-row seats. Snobby bitch.”

I glared at him. “She’s not a snobby bitch.”

“I’m just trying to be a good friend here.”

“Yeah, I get that.” I didn’t hide my sarcasm, because I just wanted Josh to stop talking about her.

“You can look all you want.” Josh cleared his throat and pointed his fork at me. “Laine will never look back at you, Geoff. She’ll never pay attention to anyone but Evan Carpenter.”

Ah, Evan. Damn him.

Also a senior, Evan Carpenter threw for over two thousand yards during the football season that year, and he led the team a 35–14 win over the Bowling Green High School Purples in the state championship game. For the last two weeks, he’d worn a variety of Ohio State jerseys and sweatshirts to school because he planned to play football there in the fall. I only noticed this because he sat in front of me in World Cultures, and he farted a lot. I got to smell it. Right after lunch.

No one at Heritage ever challenged or confronted Evan. The kids at school just idolized him. The class even voted him Mr. Perfect in our junior year.

“She’s super-hot though,” Mark said his eyes still on her. “I’d take that. If anyone is fuckable celebrity status in this school, it’s Laine.”

My next bite of food stopped about an inch away from my mouth. “Fuckable celebrity status?”

“Yep. Fuckable celebrity status. But I’d still take Jillian,” Mark said, still sneaking glances at Jillian and her huge boobs.

“You’d take anything,” I pointed out, but my eyes remained on that table, too. Laine took a bite of her salad. She ate salads a lot. She also only drank water, and on Wednesday, she often bought soup from the hot bar on the far side of the cafeteria. I knew these things because I watched her a lot during lunchtime, more than I wanted to admit to any of my friends.

“I would not just take anything,” Mark replied, and then he shook his head and turned back to his wilted lunch. “Laine’s one of those girls who will always have everything. But I think Jillian might be more accessible. Maybe even hotter.”

“Maybe not. She used to have that uni-brow, and all that acne,” I said. “Remember freshman year? Jillian wasn’t hot then.”

“Plus she’s stupid,” Nathan said. “She asked me if I knew the capital of England last week.”

“She did?” Mark’s lips twisted into a smile he couldn’t hide.

“Yep.” Nathan smirked. “She didn’t know if it was Berlin or Birmingham.”

We all laughed. We might not have had girlfriends, but at least we didn’t have dumb ones.