Gettin' Lucky (16 page)

“Hey.”

I looked up, startled. It was Alana. We were allies now that we’d collaborated in screwing Jesse over, but that didn’t mean we were, like, blood sisters or anything. It had only been a few days since our grand revenge. I didn’t know how things between us were going to play out. And I had no idea what she wanted from me right now.

But talk about your timing.

“Uh, what’s up?” I stammered.

“Can we … talk?” she asked me, sounding extremely uncertain.

It was a total trip to hear Alana sound so insecure. Even with everything that had gone down between us, it kind of broke my heart a little bit. But—I still needed to talk to Elliot.

“I … have a class …,” Elliot mumbled, his face sweaty and red.

Okay, so, um, maybe later, then?

I turned back to Alana. “I have … I mean …”

“Right,” she said, getting it immediately.

Right. “I’ll see you later,” I said, and ran off, not knowing if I meant it or not.

Wednesday night was chili night at Chez Parker. You might think that we Vegasites wouldn’t eat chili, what with how it’s hot and heavy and we live in, like, the desert. It would make sense, I guess. But chili is one of the few things that I know how to make from scratch, and I make it well. Wednesday is Dad’s night off from the restaurant, so I told him I’d take care of dinner. It seemed like the thing to do.

There are two good things about chili: It’s very easy to make well, and you end up with a ton left over that you can freeze.
However, while you make it in one big pot, cleanup is not one of the better things about chili for dinner. There’s a lot of scrubbing, and one has to be extremely vigilant about errant flecks of tomato—particularly if one is washing dishes in a pastel Juicy tank top. Which, as it happened, I was.

Dad had offered to do the dishes, like he always does when I take care of the cooking, but he looked so tired—like, seriously, I thought he’d go facedown into his chili bowl at any minute—that I had to take pity on him. Cut to me at the kitchen sink getting all sorts of sudsy while I try to be the dutiful daughter. Highly glamorous. Not. Maxine sat just at my feet, staring at me like my canine stalker. She didn’t seem to understand that once the dinner dishes had made it from the table to the sink, there wasn’t much chance she was making off with too many scraps. What can I say? My dog is not exactly a brain trust.

Given as how I was in a particularly domestic frame of mind (seriously—like, Rachael Ray, eat your heart out), you can imagine how totally unprepared I was for
my father to return to the kitchen only to tell me that “you have a visitor.”

I shut off the faucet and stepped back from the sink. What had once been an extremely cute tank top was now splotchy and waterlogged. My hair, which I’d piled up into a crazy ponytail-bun-hybrid for dish duty, was fast unraveling down my back. I was wearing rubber gloves.

Suffice it to say, I was not expecting company.

I peeled the gloves off my hand. They were sticky with moisture. “A visitor?”

“A gentleman caller,” Dad clarified.

I raised my eyebrow. Curiouser and curiouser, seeing as I how I knew so few gentlemen. And those few that I did know were unlikely to be calling on me.

It was only when I got into the hallway in all my maid-to-order splendor that I realized that a certain, tiny part of me had been hoping my house guest was Elliot. Which probably meant something. Something that I wasn’t necessarily equipped to think about right exactly now.

It didn’t matter, anyway, because it wasn’t Elliot. And hence my disappointment. The person standing in my living
room was, like, the exact polar opposite of Elliot.

Instead, it was Jesse.

And he looked pretty upset.

“What a … pleasant surprise?”

No way was Dad going to let me have Jesse in my room alone—I mean, he’s laid back, but he’s not, you know, insane—so instead we went out onto the patio. The screen door was totally not soundproof, but it did give the charming illusion of privacy. Which, this being Jesse, I wasn’t even sure that I wanted.

“Yeah, sorry about that,” Jesse said. “I guess I should have called first.”

“I can’t promise I would have picked up,” I shot back. What could I say? I had a couple of months’ worth of backed-up hurt, anger, and humiliation brewing inside of me. I’d managed to keep it at bay by avoiding Jesse all this time, but seeing as how he was standing right in front of me, that option seemed to be off the table. For the time being, at least. Hence the hostility.

“You know, I’m the one who should be mad,” he said.

I snorted. “Really? Please, do tell.”

“You completely shot me down—in front of, like, the whole school!”

“Well, then, maybe you shouldn’t have been scamming, like, the whole school,” I countered. “I mean, don’t tell me you didn’t have this coming to you.”

“I don’t think anyone is ever going to play poker with me again,” he said, sounding woeful.

“Jesse,” I replied, “I don’t think anyone’s ever going to play
anything
with you again.”

He paused for a moment, tossing that idea around in his brain. Jesse wasn’t used to being shut out, certainly not when it came to the social scene. I imagined this was a pretty difficult process for him.

But, I mean, too freaking bad, right?

“You’re probably the wrong person to come to for sympathy,” he said ruefully.

“Probably,” I agreed. “But there must be some unsuspecting female out there who hasn’t gotten word of your rep yet. So, you know—fingers crossed.” I smiled.

He winced. “Alana broke up with me.”

Somehow I was not exactly shocked by this crazy and unexpected turn of events. “Now,” I began, “when you say ‘broke up’
with you, do you mean, like, in the proper sense of the term? Like she actually called you up and told you she didn’t want to be with you anymore? Or was it more, like, you just came home one day and found her straddling one of your basketball buddies? I mean, I’m just curious.”

He turned bright red, which I must say, I enjoyed immensely. “No, I mean, she broke up with me. Like, she told me in person. Not over the phone.”

“How lucky for you.” I smirked. “I guess Alana can be very considerate—when she wants to.”

He sighed and looked at me helplessly. “What do you want from me?”

“Nothing anymore, Jesse.” As I said the words, I realized it was true. I was angry and frustrated, sure—but I was also sort of over him. Now that I knew the real Jesse, I knew that he was a jerk and a cheater, through and through. And I had no interest in having him in my life.

Jesse and Alana had both taken me under their respective wings when I first got to Vegas, and I’m not going to lie—at the time, I’d felt incredibly lucky. I’d
managed to avoid a lot of pain and awkward social navigation at a very, uh, formative age. But they’d both let me down, big-time. And in the time since I’d lost them as friends, I’d gained something else.
New
friends, of course, in the case of Kelly and—God, I hoped, still, please—Elliot. But also an awareness that what I’d thought of as luck was sometimes just … well,
me.
Taking care of myself.

Sometimes luck had nothing to do with it. Sometimes I just knew what to do.

Go figure.

“You’re the one who just showed up on my doorstep,” I reminded him. “I mean, what is it that you want from me?”

He stepped forward and lowered his gaze. Jeez, I’d forgotten about those eyelashes. He could be, like, an eyelash model, or something. They were that long.

Shake it off, Cass. They’re just eyelashes.

Cheating
eyelashes.

“To be honest, Cass, I’ve been thinking about us a lot lately—I mean, even when I was with Alana.”

Oh, barf.

“And I miss you.”

Double barf.

“I guess I was wondering what you might think about us … giving it another shot?”

Oh. My. God.

He fixed me with the level-three high-beams version of his soulful, steel-blue Tom Welling gaze. Suddenly, the thought of barfing was the furthest idea from my mind.

Mainly because I was going to pee in my pants laughing.

I absolutely lost it. I mean, the last thing I expected from Jesse was that he would want to get back together with me. Please! He cheated on me—with my best friend! And then he cheated me out of money!

Seriously, I was going to pee in my pants.

“Uh, it’s not that funny, Cass,” he said, sounding testy.

I couldn’t see his face because I was literally doubled over, and my eyes were actually tearing, I was laughing so hard. But I could guess what I looked like. I had a feeling he wasn’t, um, laughing with me.

“Yes—it—is!” I gasped.

And then I keeled over and cracked up some more.

At some point in the midst of my incapacitating hysteria, Jesse must have just given up. I wouldn’t know, because, as I say, I was pretty much hanging upside down. But I did hear the screen door slide open, and then slide shut again. The next thing I knew, it was just Max and me out on the patio, her licking at my face confusedly, not knowing at all what was going on but appreciating my amusement much more than Jesse had.

And, I must say, that was perfectly fine by me.

Thirteen

I couldn’t avoid Alana forever. Or maybe I just wasn’t trying hard enough. My encounter with Jesse had softened me up. A bit.

On Thursday, she cornered me in the library. Very stealthily.

“So,” she began, collapsing against a shelf and sliding down until she was sitting on the cold, tiled floor of the library. We were tucked away within the stacks for privacy. It was SOP for personal conversations.

I crouched down next to her. “Yeah?” I still had my suspicions, after all. She was still the same chick who was getting all PG-13 (and possibly some R action, too) with
my
boyfriend while I was away in the land of the blue-plate specials.

“Well”—she fixed those hypnotic emerald eyes on me and I had to force myself to concentrate, to remember that she’d used her powers of persuasion for evil, rather than good, when she’d gotten all gropey with
my
boyfriend—“it—s just that you never let me apologize.”

My eyebrows flew up. “Apologize?” Was she serious? “Alana—you were making out with my boyfriend. Over Christmas. While I was away visiting my grandparents. I mean, what are you going to say? ‘I’m sorry I tripped and accidentally stuck my tongue down Jesse’s throat’?”

She smiled weakly. “That would at least be a start.”

I shook my head. “No way.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I mean, I thought all that time at Kelly’s house—you know, I thought that was a start. Toward a reconciliation.” She sighed. “I meant what I said, you know. Whether it was wrong or right—”

“It was wrong—,” I interjected. “Completely.”

“Whether it was wrong or right,” she repeated, “I did have feelings for Jesse. I’d
had feelings for him for a long time. I didn’t tell you about them, for obvious reasons. I mean, I was hoping they’d just go away on their own. But they didn’t. And then he—”

“
Please.
Spare me the details,” I begged her. “I had an eyeful, remember? Trust me, it was plenty.”

“That was not the way that I wanted you to find out,” she insisted.

“Really? How thoughtful of you,” I snapped. I couldn’t help it. So she had planned to break it to me gently, the fact that she was messing around with my boyfriend? I mean, it was amazing that Angelina Jolie hadn’t tracked her down and, like, knighted her or whatever it is that Angelina Jolie does when she’s into someone. Alana could be, like, a junior UN Goodwill Ambassador. Or something.

“I just wanted you to know that our friendship meant a lot to me. And I wouldn’t have deliberately done anything to ruin it,” she said.

I rolled my eyes.

“I liked him. Cass, I thought I
loved
him, or I would
never
have hooked up with him.
Cross my heart and hope to die. I mean, I swear on … I swear on my Japanese straightening treatment.”

I swallowed. That was some serious swearing, there. Alana’s hair was practically a presence of its own at Midvale. It had its own fan club and everything. Seriously. Just Google it.

“You’re not saying anything,” she observed. “Say something?”

I took a deep breath and looked at her. “I hear what you’re saying,” I began, cautious. “And I appreciate it.”

“But?” her eyes looked round and full of doubt.

“But … you have no idea what it felt like to walk into that room, thinking I was going to surprise my boyfriend, and—hello!—instead, finding a welcome home surprise for me.”

“It hurt,” she ventured.

“Like lemon juice poured over a thousand tiny, salt-filled paper cuts,” I confirmed.

She shivered at the imagery.

“Even more than finding out that Ryan was leaving Reese. That’s how much it hurt,” I went on. “I’m glad you apologized. And I’m grateful to hear your side of the
story, really I am. And now that we know that Jesse is just a huge sleazebag, I’m glad that we exposed him for the gross fraud that he is.”

“Me too,” she said, beaming brightly at the thought.

“But that doesn’t really change anything between us,” I said softly. “I still need … time. It can’t be like it was, okay? Not for a while. Maybe not ever.”

I glanced at her to see how she was taking the news. Her eyes were shiny and rimmed with red, which I knew was a harbinger of tears, but to her credit, she was putting up a good front and keeping the waterworks at bay. I could tell that she was hearing me. And, to be honest, it made me feel a little bit nice to know that she was being sincere. Does that make me a horrible person?

“I get it,” she said, sounding unhappy. “I wish things were different, but I understand.”

“I wish things were different too,” I said. For, like, a thousand reasons.

“I, um, also wanted to tell you that I broke up with Jesse,” she said finally, her voice very small.

“Good call,” I said, really meaning it. Alana was gorgeous, funny, and incredibly popular. And, as her former BFF, I was glad to see that she had retained some good judgment. I patted her on the back reassuringly. “You’ll replace him in a day.”