Love, Lies and Texas Dips (28 page)

He settled down with his long legs stretched out in front of him, and she noticed he still had on his tan pants and white shirt, the uniform at Caldwell. There were smudges of dirt at the knees, from crawling around in the tree house, no doubt.

“What’s on my mind,” Mac repeated, and sank into the chair just a foot away from him. She took her glasses off and rubbed them on the hem of her green Lacoste shirt, wiping off the condensation before she plunked them on again. “I don’t know exactly,” she said, and sighed.

He pushed lank strands of brown from his face and laughed. “Yeah, right. You always have a reason for everything.”

Why?
Because she was so practical and reliable, like the Honda Civic Laura had once compared her to? Hey, just because she
drove
one didn’t mean she
was
one.

Mac shrugged. “I guess I was feeling nostalgic, going through some of the letters from my mother,” she said, picking at the splinter, not looking at him. “I guess I was just
missing her.”
And missing you
, she wanted to say, but somehow couldn’t. “Maybe I just needed to hang out for a while. I don’t see you as much as I used to.”

“Well, we’re both busy with school and all, considering our load of AP courses, and I’ve got the chess club and computer club, and you’ve got all your deb stuff now.” He hesitated, scratching his jaw. “Speaking of deb stuff, I heard there was some sort of dustup at your house last night.” Grinning, he leaned over and poked her. “I heard you knocked Camie Lindell flat on her ass.”

“Who told you that?” she said, lifting her head, realizing exactly what he was going to say the minute he uttered, “Cindy.”

Cindy Chow. Mac pursed her lips, thinking,
Of course
.

“Did your girlfriend mention that Camie was trying to totally humiliate Laura by making references to that big lie someone posted on MySpace?”

She expected Alex to say, “She’s not my girlfriend,” but he didn’t. Instead, he drew his legs up closer and rested his forearms on his thighs. “Yeah, I heard that, too,” he said, and made a face. “Girls can be so vicious. Guys don’t fight like that. If we want to have it out with another dude, we do it up front. We don’t hide behind words.”

“Guys are cavemen,” Mac agreed, gnawing on the fleshy part of her palm to get the splinter out. “Girls tend to go for the knife in the back.”

“Most girls, maybe,” Alex said, sitting up straight. “But not you, Mac.”

Mac wiped her hands on her jeans, suddenly wanting to change the subject. “Hey, remember the time we came up here with a bag of candy during Elliott’s birthday party,” she
said, rushing on, “and your dad tied a piñata to the tree? None of the kids could hit the thing worth a darn, so we started tossing the candy down and they thought it was raining packs of Skittles?”

“That was hilarious.” He grinned, nodding, and Mac’s heart swelled.

“Or when you chased me around the backyard, acting like a zombie, and kept saying—”

“Braaaains,” Alex piped up, and fell off the chair, raising his arms in front of him, as Mac watched, giggling and murmuring, “You’re crazy!”

“Braaaains,” he said again, inching toward her on his knees until he’d bumped right up against her chair and his hands grabbed her shoulders. He pulled her so close that their noses touched, and the lenses of their glasses were just a smidge away from bumping as well.

Mac stopped giggling and swallowed hard instead. He was near enough to kiss, and his eyes seemed to bore right into hers. Her pulse thumped like a drumbeat in her ears, pounding out:
Don’t be afraid … reach for the stars
, until Mac blurted out, “Will you be my escort for the deb ball?”

Oh, man, where did that come from!

The next few seconds felt like slow motion as he stared at her, a look of pure amazement on his face. He drew back, rising from his knees and bumping his head on the roof of the tree house before he sat down again, looking straight at her.

He moved his mouth, but Mac’s ears seemed not to hear him at first. All she could see was his frown, and the disappointment in his face.

She blinked at him, asking, “What?”

“I said, I’m sorry, Mac. I really wish I could.” He ran a
hand through his shaggy hair. “But I already said I’d go with someone else.”

Mac didn’t even bother to ask who. She willed her heart to slow down, willed her chest to stop aching. How she wished she could fling herself from the tree house and fly home and pretend this had never happened!

She tried so hard to be nonchalant, and still her voice cracked as she told him, “I understand.”

“I’ll see you there though, huh?” Alex said. “We can at least dance or something, right?”

“Sure.” She forced a smile despite how twisted she felt on the inside. She knew that if she stuck around another minute, she’d die of shame. Abruptly, she stood up, brushed off her jeans, and lied, “I’ve got to go. I promised my dad I’d help Honey cook dinner tonight after I finish my homework.”

Alex didn’t call her on it, though he knew she’d rather eat worms than cook
or
spend time with her stepmonster, much less do both at once. Yet he didn’t wisecrack about needing a fire extinguisher to put out her pants.

Instead, he nodded, saying, “I’ve got stuff to do too.”

Mac waited as he descended the slick wooden ladder ahead of her, which gave her a chance to pick the Spock-Kirk coin from her back pocket and leave it on one of the folding chairs. She’d e-mail him later and tell him where she’d left it. But she didn’t want it anymore. Its luck definitely didn’t seem to have rubbed off on her.

She managed to get down from the tree house without falling and making an even bigger fool of herself. She snatched her umbrella off the ground as she and Alex said their awkward goodbyes. Then she raced for home, unmindful
of the rain that fogged her glasses, frizzed her hair, and soaked her clothes.

As she sidled between the bushes and sloshed through the wet grass to her own backyard, she wished she could scream and let it all out, thinking of Alex escorting Cindy Chow to the Rosebud Ball and of Laura possibly not being at the Ball at all if the GSC came down on her because of that nasty rumor.

Mac realized then and there that if she hadn’t already assumed being a deb would suck, she knew it now for sure.

She’d never make the same mistake again:
she always made a new mistake instead.

—Wendy Cope

How can you know which risks are worth it
unless you take them?

—Ginger Fore

Sixteen

Ginger spent most of Thursday afternoon sitting at her desk in front of her Mac, where she’d been furiously checking on the MySpace page where the lie about Laura had spread like some obnoxious strain of the flu. She’d posted two comments defending Laura already and was about to post a third when Deena’s new housekeeper, Soleil, called up the stairs, “Miss Ginger! There’s someone here to see you!”

Maybe Soleil hadn’t gotten explicit instructions from Deena, because Ginger technically wasn’t supposed to have friends over while she was grounded. So it was a good thing that Deena wasn’t home, wasn’t it? Having a mother who pimped expensive real estate to her pals—and who actually
liked
to work even though she didn’t have to, not with the Dupree family money and the combo of alimony and child support she was getting from Edward Fore—came in handy once in a while.

“Miss Ginger!”

“Coming!” she yelled back as she shut her laptop and sprang up from her chair. She didn’t even bother to slip on a pair of shoes, figuring her “guest” had to either be Laura or
Mac, considering all the shit hitting the fan lately. She raced from her turreted room and down the winding stairs that took her past the first-floor landing and down to the cathedral-like foyer.

But as Ginger padded across the polished teak floor and into the living room where Soleil had been trained to deposit visitors, she caught sight of her “guest” well before she’d crossed the threshold to the living room. She came to a dead stop when she realized that it wasn’t Laura or Mac at all.

It was Kent Wakefield.

He turned around that very moment, as if sensing the weight of her gaze upon him, and Ginger forced herself to walk toward him, feeling practically naked in shorts and bare feet. If only she’d taken half a second to slip on flip-flops or run a brush through her wild red hair. Too late for that.

“Hey,” he said as she neared. He smiled hesitantly, gray eyes crinkling at the corners. He had his dark hair combed back from his clean-shaven face, and a simple white T-shirt hanging loose over a slim pair of black jeans, but kept his arms behind his back, like he was hiding something. “Did you get my message?”

“About starting over?” she asked, thinking of the text he’d sent her last night at curtsy practice, before all hell had broken loose.

“Yeah, that one.”

“I got it.” She rounded the large leather sofa and took a perch on a scrolled arm, pulling her knees up to her chest.

“So, are we okay?” he asked, walking over and drawing his hand from behind his back. In it, he held a plump bouquet of pink hyacinths wrapped in white paper. He presented
them to her, and Ginger lifted them to her nose, inhaling their sweetness.

“Truce?”

“Hyacinth for forgiveness,” she said, and he raised his eyebrows, looking surprised that she knew. “My father sent them to my mother a few times when he was cheating on her,” she told him bluntly, not embarrassed at all by her family history, though it had taken a while—and a lot of tears—to get to that point. She slid off the scrolled arm and settled onto the sofa itself. “Do you want to sit down?”

He shook his head. “I can’t stay long. I just wanted to be sure we were cool about the sixth grade … about the dress … everything. I really am sorry.”

He rocked on his heels, hands jammed in his jeans pockets, looking honestly nervous, and Ginger smiled at him. “Yeah, I’m okay,” she said, “about sixth grade and the dress. Everything. My grandmother seems convinced her laundress will have the gown good as new in no time, so maybe we can have a do-over on that first portrait session sometime soon.”

“I’d like that.”

Ginger surprised herself by telling him, “Me too.”

Kent looked around then, at the well-appointed room with the unpainted beamed ceiling, the lead-glass windows, and mostly Arts and Crafts-period antiques. He pointed to an oil that Ginger particularly loved. It hung over the library table where her father used to spread out his paperwork before he’d moved out. “Franz Strahalm,” he said, sounding suitably impressed. “He’s a master of Southwest landscapes.”

“My dad’s taste in women might be considered questionable, but he always had great taste in art,” Ginger remarked guilelessly, still clutching the hyacinth bouquet in her lap,
and Kent’s eyes glinted, like he wanted to laugh but wasn’t sure it was appropriate.

“Mind if I look around?” he asked.

Ginger shrugged and curled her toes against the soft Persian rug as she smelled the flowers again and wondered what her mother would say if she walked in the door. Deena would probably have a seizure, seeing Ginger in the “parlor” entertaining a young man of whom she actually approved.

Ginger wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing. She followed Kent with her eyes as he moved about the room, thinking he was certainly taking his time for someone who’d professed he couldn’t stay long.

He paused to study a modern-looking canvas filled with heavily brushstroked shapes and splashes of color and vibrant streaks of black.

“Very primitive, but cool,” he remarked, tipping his head as he viewed the piece and squinted at the illegible signature in the right-hand corner. “I don’t think I know the artist.”

“Oh, but you do.” Ginger suppressed a giggle as she set the bundle of hyacinths down on the sofa and padded over to stand beside him. She jerked her chin at the canvas.

“I painted that years ago, before someone convinced me my work looked like cat puke.”

Kent glanced at her. “You painted that?”

“Guilty as charged.”

He scratched his nose, and his neck flushed above his collar. “Hmm. Maybe you shouldn’t have listened to the idiot who suggested you didn’t have what it takes. He was probably just jealous of your, um, startling originality.”

Ginger groaned.

“Too much?” he asked, squinting.

“You had me at the flowers.” She wrinkled her freckled nose, and he laughed.

“Okay, okay, I won’t overdo it. I said what I came to say, and I won’t bother you any more.” He glanced at the black-banded TAG Heuer on his wrist and tapped the square face. “I’ve got another appointment, like, in fifteen minutes. We’ll set up a session soon, if that’s all right with you? I’ll speak to Mrs. Dupree and then give you a call.”

“Sounds great,” she said, walking him toward the foyer and to the front door.

She saw him out, watching as he dashed down the front steps through the rain. He gave her a quick wave before slipping into the sleek black Ford Explorer (a hybrid, she noticed, which scored even more points than the hyacinths).