Forbidden Boy (17 page)

“Stop!” Julianne giggled. “Did you hear something?”

“Probably just the guys upstairs making fun of us for a change.” Remi shrugged before kissing her again.

Before long, Julianne and Remi were too focused on making out to hear the bathroom door open.

Julianne heard a sickeningly familiar gasp. She froze under Remi, who took a few seconds to realize she’d stopped kissing him back. Julianne slowly sat up and pulled her hair out of her eyes. She thought she was hallucinating. Standing in front of the bathtub, slack-jawed in horror, her eyes filling with angry tears, was Chloe.

Julianne zipped up her hoodie and leapt out of the bathtub in one motion.

“Chloe?! What are you doing here?” She was pretty sure her heart was beating louder than Randy’s hammer upstairs. This was actually what it felt like the second before the whole world ended. Oh. My. God.

“Well, I’m not making out with my archenemy in a bathtub.” Chloe was oddly matter-of-fact as she said it.

All of the color had drained from her face and her hazel eyes looked like dull coins. “The living room flooded.

Badly. Dad’s in New York and I need your help. I can’t do it by myself.”

Julianne looked at her robot sister and nodded dumbly. “Sure.” She heard the word hanging in the air before she realized that she had said it.

Chloe looked from Julianne to Remi and back again.

Then she stormed out, her hot pink galoshes squealing through the basement. Julianne began to run after her, then stopped mid-stride and turned to Remi. His eyes widened, and he started to reach a hand out to her. “I can’t see you again,” she heard herself say blankly before chasing Chloe out to the car.

For most of the ride home the sisters sat in tense, awkward silence. Finally, Julianne couldn’t take it anymore.

“Chloe, I’m so, so sor—” but Chloe dismissed her apol-ogy with a wave of her hand, restoring silence to the car.

Julianne had never seen her sister like this before. She was terrified and completely overwhelmed with guilt.

Then it was like someone flipped Chloe’s on switch.

All of the color came rushing back into her face, along with a lot of extra red. She went ballistic.

“I can’t believe you!” she bellowed at Julianne, before rapidly changing her mind and switching tactics. “No, I can’t believe
him
! ” She ran her hands through her hair like she was on the verge of ripping it out in clumps. She flailed, and if she hadn’t been piloting a small car down a flooded highway, she probably would have started pacing. “It’s not enough that he knocks me over at the first party of the summer,” she continued. “It’s not enough that he and his yuppie, tacky-ass parents move in and build the largest, ugliest house in the history of the universe. It’s not enough that they’re trying to kick my family out of the home we’ve owned since
before I was born
to make more room for their McMansion, but now he goes and screws around with my baby sister?! Is he evil? Is that his deal? Is he actually a malicious person who gets his kicks out of harming others?”

If Julianne hadn’t been scared for her life, she would have made Chloe rewind all the way to “tacky-ass.” In any other situation it would have been hysterical that the phrase had even crossed her sister’s well-glossed lips.

But she
was
scared for her life, so she just sat there, glued to the gray upholstery, stupefied as Chloe turned her rage away from Remi and back in Jules’s direction. “And
you
!” she shrieked at her. “I don’t think I can ever forgive you! How could you? How dare you? Julianne, if I can’t trust my own sister, who can I trust? The Moores are trying to take our house away—they are actively trying to make us homeless so they can install a freakin’ sauna—

and you’re practically sleeping with their son? At work?

Jules, who
are
you? You’ve totally betrayed our family.

What would Mom think of this?”

Julianne sat there silently, almost numb, staring out the rain-streaked windshield with tears streaming down her face. She couldn’t think of anything to say in her own defense. Maybe Chloe was right. Maybe she was a traitor.

She tried to quell the torrent of words spilling out of Chloe’s mouth. “Chloe, I never meant … Remi’s really—”

she began.

Chloe cut her off before Julianne could figure out where her own thoughts were going. “Remi?!” she barked. “You trust him over me? Over Dad? Over every single solid thing we’ve seen happen this summer? Grow up, Jules—he’s probably using you to find out how much it would take for us to just sell outright to his parents!

He’s probably a spy!”

It had never occurred to Julianne in all of her imaginary spy scenarios that she could be double-crossed. She felt cold all over. Remi was just using her. He had been spying on her for his father all along. Of course! How could she have been so stupid? Remi idolized his father.

He was using Julianne to help his father make his architectural dreams come true. Jules forgot everything she had felt in that stupid bathtub, for the past month, and even the first time she had seen Remi at the bonfire party. It was like the anger accompanying Chloe’s words automat-ically made them true. Julianne couldn’t move. She sat in the passenger seat, tears silently staining her face until her dark curls hung limply against her cheekbones.

“I can’t believe you would compromise our position like this!” Chloe continued. “Did you know that we might have to sell the house? Did you even realize that?

I can’t believe you would do this to us! As soon as Dad gets back to LA, you need to tell him about this, Julianne. If you don’t, I will.”

Julianne couldn’t argue. She spent the rest of the car ride in the same stunned silence.

When Julianne and Chloe got home, Julianne ran right into the living room to assess the damage. At the very least, she could be helpful. All told, the flooding wasn’t bad. The old ottoman was soaked through; it would need to be replaced. So would the rocking chair, but it had been slowly crumbling for years, anyway.

As Julianne scanned the room for additional damage, her heart caught in her chest. Last week when she’d given her mother’s painting to Dad and Chloe, they’d propped it up against the grate in front of the fireplace, to get an idea of how it would look above the mantel.

Sure enough, her painting—her mom’s painting—that she’d worked so hard on all summer had been caught in the deluge. A border of about four inches of paint at the bottom of the canvas was totally distorted. She couldn’t even tell it was paint, let alone a picture of their beach.

It was completely ruined. Everything was completely ruined.

For the next few days, Julianne walked around like a zombie. She called out sick from work, ignoring the obvious concern in Bill’s voice. She just couldn’t face Remi.

Chloe wouldn’t talk to her or even look at her.

She’d never known Chloe to hate another living soul in her entire life, and she never in a million years would have thought that she’d be the first. Julianne could barely even sleep. Every time she closed her eyes, she had horrible nightmares about telling her father what she’d done. In one, he threw her out of the house, leaving her with nowhere to live but the beach—which wasn’t really an option, because the Moores had paved over the entire thing and built an amusement park. In another, Dad made Jules walk down to her mother’s grave to apologize in person for betraying her memory, only to find the epitaph had been changed to read, “I don’t forgive you.”

The flood damage in the living room was so intense that Julianne wasn’t sure how to tackle it, so she’d decided to start by cleaning the rest of the house first. As Julianne pedaled her bike toward Palisades Hardware for cleaning supplies, she looked at the clear sky and sparkling beaches and couldn’t believe that this was just a pocket in between miserable storms. The fronds of the palm trees were a lush green, and the beach looked smooth as stone. She pulled up in front of the store, checked her pocket for her shopping list, and pushed down her kickstand. Locking her bike, she headed inside.

Julianne was standing near the front of the store, trying to figure out how much of what she needed would fit in her bike basket and her backpack, when she heard her name. Looking up, she saw Liz Moss, a girl from school who’d sat behind her in calculus last year.

“Julianne! How are you?” Liz asked with a hug. “You look upset. Are you okay?”

Julianne made a concerted effort to perk up. “Yeah, I’m okay. Just a little bit stressed. The storm hit us pretty hard. The entire living room is flooded and my dad’s out of town, so I’ve got lots to do.” Julianne gestured at the aisles of the store. “How has your summer been?”

“Oh, yuck. Sorry about your living room. My summer has been good.” Liz’s shaggy, blond hair bounced around her face. “I’ve been lifeguarding—the usual. It’s been really nice. But I promised my mom I’d help her stain the deck today, so here I am.”

“Well, have fun. It was great running into you.”

Julianne gave Liz a hug goodbye.

“Yeah, good luck with the flooding stuff,” Liz said as she turned to go. “But I wouldn’t worry too much about it, Jules—if worse comes to worst, you can always move into that glass castle thing that’s growing next to your house!” Liz giggled and waved as she walked off to find her mother. Julianne sighed and headed in the opposite direction.

The last few days, she’d been getting out of bed in the middle of the night, cleaning and dusting and straightening the house. She was fixing the things she knew how to fix before Dad got home and everything else fell apart again.

✦ ✦ ✦

When she got home from the hardware store, she beat out the rugs over the deck railing and sorted the wrapping paper in the living room drawer by color. Julianne couldn’t sit still, but she didn’t have any idea what to do with herself, either.

She was shocked that she could feel this lousy. She couldn’t eat. She couldn’t sleep. She had completely destroyed everyone she loved. And, to top it all off, her mother’s painting was totally ruined. The paint had twisted into grotesque lumps of oil and plastic; even the canvas underneath had warped. She wouldn’t even know where to begin to repaint it. It had been so hard the first time, Julianne couldn’t imagine trying to reconstruct it now—what with most of the summer light gone, along with the view of the beach that had informed it in the first place, not to mention her ability to see anything beautiful in the world at all. She had somehow managed to lose every single thing she cared about. Julianne moved through the living room, trying to separate out cushions that were ruined from ones that were still usable. She had been planning on taking the now saggy, waterlogged ottoman out back to dry a bit before she left it on the curb, but it had started pouring again right after she returned from the hardware store. She set up fans to dry out the rest of the soggy furniture and mopped up the few puddles that had collected along the floor moldings when the rain picked up again. Frustrated at how little progress she was making, she sat on the window seat, looking out on the angry gray waves, her forehead pressed against the cold glass and her ruined painting sitting dejectedly at her feet.

Julianne felt the chill of the dampening windowpane sink into her forehead and settle behind her eyes. As the cold seared its way into her brain, she tried to see the ocean through the foggy window. In the periphery of her vision, she saw palm trees bending over themselves. It looked to her like they were trying not to break in two.

Julianne knew the feeling. She thought of all the times during the summer that she’d felt like everything was a mess and she just felt stupid. Deeply, profoundly stupid.

She wished she had appreciated how lucky she was before it all fell apart. Even though she was terrified that her family would lose their house, there had at least been something comforting to fall back on. Chloe had been her best friend. Dad had been tirelessly optimistic.

She’d been caught up in the whirlwind thrill of loving Remi. If nothing else, she’d had things to work toward.

Toward finishing her painting, toward saving the house, toward finding a way to be with Remi. Now there was nothing to run to. Chloe couldn’t even look at her without turning eggplant purple, and Dad would undoubtedly feel the same way when he got back. She’d misjudged Remi, and now the Moores were going to take her home. And, of course, there was the fact that her heart had been torn into millions of microscopic pieces.

Julianne pushed herself up off the cushions and paced through the musty living room, her footsteps keeping time with the raindrops outside the window.

She was moving so quickly that when she looked down, she saw nothing but a brightly colored trail of hot pink toenail polish. Swiping her tears away wildly, Julianne told herself,
I will not cry. Not now.
She gazed down at her pajamas, a black sleeveless T-shirt and drawstring pants printed with cartoon sushi rolls, and almost didn’t recognize them. Julianne felt strangely separate from the body they were hanging off of.

Outside, the rain was still pouring down in bucket loads and the wind was shrieking, but Julianne didn’t care. She couldn’t sit around with her racing thoughts for one second longer or something was going to snap.
I
just need to do something,
she told herself. She sprinted up the stairs and made a beeline for her bedroom. Julianne threw on her grubbiest painting clothes. Then, without looking back, she rushed out of her room and bolted down the stairs, barefoot.

She threw herself into cleaning the house from top to bottom, keeping herself focused on the task at hand.

Before she knew it, she was sliding around on the wood floors, rags tied to her knees and feet like one of the orphans in
Annie.
She polished all of the candlesticks and the silver coffee percolator that probably hadn’t shined since her parents got them as wedding presents.

She even called to rent a steam cleaner for the water stains on the living room rug. Then she did all of her laundry.

Julianne stayed up all night, cleaning and scrubbing, and when the morning sun shone through the back windows, it was undeniable how beautiful her home was. It was bright and open, yet still cozy. When she scrubbed the windows of the balcony attached to her bedroom, she was literally breathless at the streaks of orange, pink, and lavender reflecting off the ocean as the sun was rising. From the bay window off of Julianne’s balcony, the beach went on forever—at least when she had her back to the Moores’ glass house—and the ocean went even farther. She understood exactly why her mother had known this house would be their home the first time she saw it.