Authors: Claire Lazebnik

Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Girls & Women, #Social Issues, #Dating & Sex, #Adolescence

The Trouble With Flirting (28 page)

BOOK: The Trouble With Flirting

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“Yeah. So you’re new, huh? Where’re you from?”

“Amherst, Mass.”

She actually showed some interest. “That near Harvard?”

“No. But Amherst College is there. And UMass.”

She dismissed that with an uninterested wave. “You get snow there?”

“It’s Massachusetts,” I said. “Of course we do. Did.”

“So do you ski?”

“Not much.” My parents didn’t, and the one time they tried to take us it was so expensive that they never repeated the experiment.

“We go to Park City every Christmas break,” Gifford said. “But this year my mother thought maybe we should try Vail. Or maybe Austria. Just for a change, you know?”

I didn’t know. But I nodded like I did.

“You see the same people at Park City every year,” she said. “I get sick of it. It’s like Maui at Christmas, you know?”

I wished she’d stop saying “You know?”

Fortunately, we had reached room 23. “In here,” said Gifford. She opened the door and went in, successfully communicating that her mentoring ended at the room’s threshold.

Over the course of the next four hours, I discovered that:

Classes at Coral Tree Prep were really small. When we got to English, I was worried that half the class would get EMDs or whatever they were called because there were fewer than a dozen kids in the room. But when Ms. Phillips came in, she said, “Good—everyone’s here, let’s get started,” and I realized that
was
the class.
The campus grounds were unbelievably green and seemed to stretch on for acres. I kept gazing out the window, wishing I could escape and go rolling down the grassy hills that lined the fields.
Teachers at Coral Tree Prep didn’t like you to stare out the window and would tell you so in front of the entire class who would then all turn and stare at The New Girl Who Wasn’t Paying Attention.
Everyone at Coral Tree Prep was good-looking. Really. Everyone. I didn’t see a single fat or ugly kid all morning.
Maybe they just locked them up at registration and didn’t let them out again until graduation.
Girls here wore every kind of footwear imaginable, from flip-flops to spike-heeled mules to UGG boots (despite the sunny, 80-degree weather), EXCEPT for sneakers. I guess those marked you as fashion-impaired.
I was wearing sneakers.

two

T
here are all these clichés about what it’s like to be the new kid at school, like in movies, when you see people playing pranks on them or ostracizing them or publicly ridiculing them. I had no previous experience at being new: I had gone to only one public elementary school, which fed into my middle school, which fed into my old high school. So I don’t
know what I had been expecting, but the reality was more boring than anything else.

People were all willing to acknowledge me, ask me if I was new and what my name was, welcome me to the school (literally, several kids said, “Welcome to Coral Tree!”), and then they lost interest and went back to talking to their friends. I was isolated but not ostracized, ignored but not abused.

Still, it was stressful sitting alone and trying to look like I was fascinated by the posters on the various classroom walls whenever the other kids were chatting, so I was
very
happy to spot Juliana waiting in the cafeteria line when lunch break finally rolled around.

“Hey, you!” I ran over and just barely restrained myself from hugging her.

“Hey, yourself,” she said calmly.

“How’s it going? No one’s talking to me. Is anyone talking to you?”

“Actually,” she said, “people have been really nice.”

“That’s great.” I wanted to be happy for her, but I had been looking forward to sharing the misery. “So what are you going to eat?”

“I don’t know.” She gave a vague look around. “Salad maybe? I’m not that hungry.”

“You’re not? I’m starving.” It wasn’t until I had grabbed a huge turkey sub and Juliana was balancing a dainty little green salad on her tray that it occurred to me there was some
thing weird about Juliana’s not being hungry. Usually she had a pretty healthy appetite. The only other time I could remember her not wanting to eat (when she wasn’t sick) was the year before, when she had a crush on a guy in her Health and Human Fitness class. That had not ended well—the guy turned out to be a total tool.

As I moved through the cafeteria line, I saw raw tuna sushi. And pomegranate seeds. And tamales. And Nutrisystem shakes. And sausage sticks made out of ostrich meat.

We definitely weren’t in Massachusetts anymore.

I passed by a guy grabbing a can of soda out of the cold case. He was at least six feet tall, broad-shouldered, dark-haired, and way cuter than any guy at my old school, which had been full of highly cerebral and physically underdeveloped faculty brats. (To give you an idea: we had both a varsity and junior varsity debate team, but only enough recruits for a single basketball team.) While Juliana and I waited in line to pay, I glanced over my shoulder at him again—I’m not usually a gawker, but I’d had a tough morning and deserved a little pleasure.

I balanced my tray against my hip, checked the line—still a few people ahead of us—and stole another glance at Handsome Guy.

Whose gorgeous eyes met mine as he turned around, soda in hand. He gave me a vaguely annoyed and weary look—a look that said,
I’m so done with people staring at me
—and turned on his heel. Guess I wasn’t as subtle as I thought.
Blushing furiously, I turned back to the cashier before I embarrassed myself any more.

After we’d paid, Juliana led the way out of the cafeteria to the picnic tables scattered around the school courtyard.

“Outside tables?” I said. “What do they do when it rains?”

“It’s L.A.,” Juliana said absently, turning her head from side to side like she was searching for something. “It doesn’t rain.”

“That’s got to be an exaggeration. How about there?” I pointed to an empty table. I just wanted to be alone with Jules, have a few minutes to relax before starting all over again with the afternoon classes.

But she was on the move, marching deliberately toward one of the tables—

Where some guy was rising to his feet and exuberantly waving her over, then gesturing down at the empty space next to him, like he’d been expecting her.

And she was going right toward him.

Suddenly, her loss of appetite made sense.

About the Author

Johnny LaZebnik

Claire LaZebnik
lives in Los Angeles with her TV-writer husband and four children. She has co-authored two books about autism with Dr. Lynn Kern Koegel (
OVERCOMING AUTISM
and
GROWING UP ON THE SPECTRUM
). Her previous novels include
KNITTING UNDER THE INFLUENCE
,
THE SMART ONE AND THE PRETTY ONE
,
FAMILIES AND OTHER NONRETURNABLE GIFTS
, and
EPIC FAIL
. You can visit her online at www.clairelazebnik.com.

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Other Books
Also by Claire LaZebnik

Epic Fail

If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home Now

The Smart One and the Pretty One

Knitting Under the Influence

Same As It Never Was

Copyright

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The Trouble with Flirting

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

LaZebnik, Claire Scovell.

The trouble with flirting / Claire LaZebnik. — 1st ed.

p. cm.

Summary: Loosely based on Jane Austen’s
Mansfield Park
, relates high school junior Franny’s summer at Mansfield College in Portland, Oregon, where she helps her aunt sew costumes for an acting program and gets caught between the boy she likes and the one who likes her.

ISBN 978-0-06-192127-8 (pbk bdg)

EPub Edition January 2013 ISBN 9780062203045

[1. Interpersonal relations—Fiction. 2. Theater—Fiction. 3. Actors and actresses—Fiction. 4. Flirting—Fiction. 5. Universities and colleges—Fiction. 6. Portland (Or.)—Fiction.] I. Title.