Adored (2 page)

Tinsley laughed and rubbed her gloves up and down her arms. Her carefree giggle cut through Callie.
What
was so funny? “You need to get on some medication,” Tinsley said, tossing snow into the air. “You act like you don’t know how to have a good time. There are more things in life than…” Before she could finish, her phone buzzed in her pocket, and she quickly scrambled to pull out her black Nokia.

Callie glanced up at the steps of the dining hall, dreading going inside and having to face everyone. Why did breaking up with Easy make her feel lonely instead of free? She couldn’t help but feel sad. The Callie-Easy era was over.

“It’s Julian.” Tinsley was unable to keep the giddy grin off her face. “You girls go in—I’ll just be a second.”

“Later,” Callie said coldly, following Jenny up the steps. As they pushed through the heavy oak double doors of the dining hall, Brandon Buchanan called out Jenny’s name. She headed over to a table full of boys, and Callie was left standing alone in the doorway, hesitating. The smell of overcooked pasta hit her nose, and suddenly Callie’s unshaven legs felt scratchy in her smooth black tights.

Oh my God
, she couldn’t help thinking.
I have hairy legs and I’m going to die alone.

T
he whir of the cappuccino machine rose over the hum of study-group chatter in Maxwell Hall. A fire crackled in the massive stone fireplace, and outside the large, arched windows the snow fell steadily down in the dark December evening. Brett Messerschmidt’s almond-shaped green eyes scanned the lounge, eyeing the well-dressed Waverly Owls enjoying warm cups of coffee, their snow-covered parkas and peacoats tossed aside temporarily. Now that Thanksgiving break was over, Waverly students were reluctantly starting to prepare for finals.

At last Brett spotted who she’d been looking for. Of course, when she’d sent Sebastian Valenti to grab them a seat, she hadn’t meant the overstuffed rust-colored velveteen love seat smack in the middle of the room, directly in the line of vision of every single curious eye at Waverly. But with his shiny black Nikes propped up on the low coffee table, and his black Adidas track jacket unzipped halfway down his chest to reveal a tight white T-shirt, Sebastian looked like he didn’t give a shit who saw him.

Brett sighed and walked toward him, stepping carefully over the well-worn Oriental throw rugs, damp with sludge tracked in from outdoors. “Here.” She handed him one of the two lattes she’d just bought from the coffee bar. “Congratulations,” she added, a little petulantly.

Sebastian puffed out his chest. “You know I couldn’t have passed that test without you. Have a seat.” He casually slung an arm over the back of the love seat, as if that made it more inviting.

Brett eyed the space on the couch next to him. It seemed… well, awfully cozy for a tutor to be sharing a love seat with her tutee, even if she was buying him coffee to celebrate his acing yesterday’s Latin exam. But her mind wandered back to Thanksgiving break, when they’d certainly been friendly. Faced with spending the whole holiday with the Coopers, her sister Bree’s ridiculously uptight future in-laws from Greenwich, Connecticut, Brett had invited Sebastian over for Thanksgiving dinner to make things more interesting. It had worked—the Coopers had fled quickly, mortified by Sebastian’s slicked-back hair and appetite for Mountain Dew. And Brett had actually had a surprising amount of fun hanging out with Sebastian.

Until, that was, he’d overheard Brett telling Bree she’d invited him for the sole purpose of pissing off the Coopers, and he’d stormed out. Which left Brett to show up at his house Sunday morning to apologize and beg for a ride back to Waverly. They’d had a nice time, but it still irked Brett that she’d been forced to say sorry to cocky Sebastian. She had been blatantly in the wrong, of course, but there had been a shift in their balance of power, and now Brett was struggling to level things again.

“Yes, that’s true.” Brett sat down primly on the other cushion of the love seat, tugging down the hem of her capsleeved heather gray Free People sweaterdress. “You’d be nothing without your fearless tutor,” she teased, crossing her legs and tapping the toe of her flat black Børn riding boot against the coffee table.

Sebastian leaned back against the cushions and took a long sip from his Waverly logo coffee cup. “Oh, come on, like you’re not getting anything out of this too?” He cocked his head, a satisfied grin on his handsome face. He was a good-looking guy, in spite of his overly greased
Sopranos
-reject hairdo. “Admit it: you’re going to miss me.”

Brett narrowed her eyes at him. “What are you talking about?”

“Well, I didn’t know how to break it to you, but this is gonna be our last study session for a while.”

“Oh, really?” Brett blew across the top of her cup, trying not to sound surprised—and a little rejected. She was the one who had to do all the work here. Getting Sebastian to memorize flash cards was harder than making your way through the crowds at Macy’s on the day after Thanksgiving. “You get an A-minus on one test and suddenly you don’t need me anymore?”

“God, it’s hot when you get all defensive.” Sebastian reached out and patted Brett’s arm, but she pulled it away as if she’d been burned.

“Can you stop being a pig for once and just tell me what you’re talking about?”

Sebastian trained his dark brown eyes on her, and she felt herself squirm. “I was in Horniman’s office this morning, bragging about my A…”

“A-minus,” Brett corrected, leaning back into the corner of the couch. Mrs. Horniman was their shared faculty adviser, and the one who had roped Brett into tutoring the failing Sebastian in the first place.

Sebastian rolled his eyes to the vaulted ceiling. “Right. Anyway, I was telling Horniman how I hadn’t started any college applications yet, and she—”

“You haven’t started your applications yet?” Brett interrupted, astonished. Most seniors had been working on their apps for
months
. Brett even knew a couple of nerds in the junior class who had already started drafts of their essays— and not that she’d admit it to anyone, but she had a whole file in her computer of brainstormed ideas for her Brown personal essay. (Everything from “Why I Went to Boarding School” to “Life with Bright Red Hair.” Good thing she still had a year to work on it.) “Are you crazy? Deadlines are, like, in a few weeks.”

“God, you even
sound
like her.” Sebastian casually raised a hand and patted down his greased-back hair, which was in no danger of moving. “She told me it was unacceptable for a Waverly Owl not to apply to college, and said she wanted me to spend the next two weeks ‘hunkering down’ and filling out paperwork.”

“That’s probably a good idea.” Brett pressed her lips together, wondering why she felt so out of sorts at the idea of not having to tutor Sebastian anymore. It wasn’t as if tutoring was any fun. And she’d have a little more time to concentrate on studying for her own finals. But suddenly, the image of Sebastian, sitting on the floor of her family room, rubbing the ears of her mother’s squealing Teacup Chihuahuas, flashed through her mind. She quickly squashed it. “So where are you applying?”

Sebastian shrugged. “The Waverly standards. You know. Yale, Cornell, Middlebury.” He glanced at Brett, as if daring her to contradict him. “Brown. I might as well try, right?”

Brown?
Brett pursed her lips. “If you spend half the time on your applications that you do sculpting your hair, you won’t have to even worry about getting in.”

Sebastian chose to ignore her remark. “I’ll be up to my elbows in college guidebooks and applications,” he said, rubbing his chin. He’d been kind of quiet all day, and Brett suddenly realized that maybe he was feeling down about having to fill out college applications? Or maybe… over not getting to see her?

“Well,” Brett said slowly, “if you need help…”

“You offering your services, tutor?” A familiar self-satisfied grin covered Sebastian’s face, and Brett felt irritated that she actually cared about his future prospects. “Just be sure to call ahead, so I can get you on the schedule. Nothing fires the ladies up like looking through college apps, eh?”

Brett’s back stiffened. How dare he think that she—junior class prefect, straight-A student, one of the hottest girls at Waverly—would
wait in line
to spend time with him? He was such an arrogant prick—or he would be, if the idea of Waverly girls actually lining up outside his door weren’t so comically absurd. “Yeah, right. I’m sure all the girls at Waverly are dying to sit in your room and watch you fill out application forms,” she chided, draining the last of her latte. “That’ll be the day.”

Sebastian leaned forward on the couch. “You don’t think I know what the ladies want?” He studied her face again and Brett had to glance away, staring instead at the massive fireplace. “Throw a polo shirt on me and all the girls in this place will be clawing each other to get at me. It’ll be like the Beatles, circa 1974.”

“The Beatles broke up in 1970, genius,” Brett countered snidely. She examined his too-tight T-shirt, too-tight track jacket, too-greasy hair. All of it screamed
tacky
, and the girls at Waverly tended to prefer guys who subtly smelled like a Ralph Lauren store to those who bathed in Drakkar Noir.

So why was she so worried?

Sebastian waved a hand in her face. “Whatever. It’ll be like the Jonas brothers, circa now.”

Brett burst out laughing. Somehow Sebastian always knew how to derail her line of argument. “
Whatever
is right.” Brett smirked. “I’ll believe it when I see it.”

“So beautiful, so skeptical.” Sebastian shook his head mockingly. “I just love to prove you wrong, Red.”

“I won’t hold my breath.” Brett glanced up to see Benny Cunningham staring at her and Sebastian. She couldn’t imagine someone like Benny, with her pearl drop earrings, her two-hundred-million-dollar trust fund, and her blue-blooded Philadelphia heritage, ever giving Sebastian the time of day. Maybe it would be good for his ego—his massive ego—for him to be proven so devastatingly wrong.

“A friendly wager,” he insisted, holding out his hand.

Brett glanced down. A shiny gold watch hung loosely on his wrist. This was going to be even easier than she’d thought.

T
insley blinked as her eyes adjusted to the darkness of the Rhinecliff Lucky Strike later that night. The fluorescent lighting flooded the bowling lanes and carpeted lobby with a urine-colored light. The lanes were half-filled with blue-haired ladies in matching shirts, a couple of families with crying kids, and groups of beer-bellied men in too-small tees. Tinsley groaned audibly. The bowling alley was a place where many Waverly Owls ended up on Friday nights when there was nothing better to do, but in Tinsley’s opinion, there was
always
something better to do. She’d been dragged here a dozen times in her three years at Waverly, but never had she come willingly. Until, that is, Julian McCafferty invited her. It was sad but true: she couldn’t deny the boy anything.

She slipped out of her long gray coat and hung it on a rickety, almost empty coatrack in the corner. The heels of her Miss Sixty oxford pumps sank into the thick carpeting as if it were quicksand. The whole
place
seemed to be covered in carpeting— the walls, even the ceiling—that reeked of smoke. Against the far wall, she spotted the dimly lit bar, the bar stools filled with overweight townies in butt crack-revealing jeans downing beers. Tinsley was wondering what on earth she was doing in this smelly, tacky place when a familiar head popped up from behind a rack of bowling balls. Julian’s shaggy blond-brown hair was still damp from a shower and curled slightly around his ears. He caught her eye and smiled, and the tiny dimple at the corner of his lips appeared. Tinsley’s knees trembled.

“I always feel like I’ve gone back in time when I come in here.” Tinsley waltzed down the two steps into the little seating alcove where Julian stood. In his dark gray boot-cut corduroys, faded black White Stripes T-shirt, and green cardigan sweater, he looked hopelessly adorable.

“Yeah, it’s kind of old school.” Julian leaned forward, his warm brown eyes taking in Tinsley’s whole face, and planted a soft kiss on her cheek. She closed her eyes, enjoying the smell of his woodsy-scented shower gel. It made her want to get even closer to him. “But it’s perfect now.”

“It is,” Tinsley replied huskily, stepping closer to Julian and planting her lips fully on his mouth. As they kissed, the whole rest of the world disappeared—the fat guys at the bar, the nasty carpeted walls, the poor boyfriendless people back at Waverly.

Tinsley had never expected to be grateful to dorky senior Yvonne Stidder for anything in her life. But it was only after spending Thanksgiving snowbound at Yvonne’s town house in New York with a group of other Owls, Julian included, that she’d been able to secure her second chance with him. The Friday after Thanksgiving, she and Julian both decided to head back to Waverly early, having nowhere else to go. Being practically alone with Julian on campus was delicious. They trudged through the unplowed snow to the diner in town, and sledded down Goat’s Hill on garbage can lids stolen from Dining Services. They spent the evenings in the Cinephiles film room in the basement of Hopkins Hall, drinking hot chocolate and Baileys and watching old movies. It had been about midway through
To Catch a Thief
, when Cary Grant and Grace Kelly were bantering sexily on the screen, that Julian had leaned over and kissed Tinsley. Weeks and weeks had gone by since they’d last hooked up, but Tinsley hadn’t forgotten the warm, honey taste of his lips.