Lucky (5 page)

“S
HH
.”
G
OSIA WAS ON ME
in a second, taking my bag and pulling me into the kitchen. “You want a snack?” she whispered, fake-cheery.

“No,” I said out loud. “Why are they home? And who’s here?”

“Shh,”
Gosia whispered again. “Sit down. Have a snack.”

“Stop it, Gosia, seriously. What’s going on?”

“Phoebe,” I heard Allison hiss from the back stairs.

I ran toward her, kicking off my flip-flops.

“Shut up,” Allison said, turning around. She took the stairs two at a time. I raced behind her. Instead of turning left to the upstairs den we have to cross to get to our bedrooms, she went right into the guest wing, where we almost never go unless my cousins from Oregon are visiting, and even then not so much. It smelled different in the hallway there, like Pledge, and the carpet was brown, thick and soft
like moss, so my feet sort of sank into it.

We passed the wall of school pictures of Quinn, Allison, and me—every school picture and class picture of each of us from nursery school on up, hung in identical Pottery Barn black frames with white borders, put together by Gosia. I couldn’t help noticing as I passed that Quinn, who is cool now, was seriously dorky in the early years of elementary school. Who cut her bangs? They were like tacky, badly hung window valances.

I followed Allison into the second guest room. She kneeled on the floor right next to Quinn, who was perched on the edge of the bed. They both hunched toward the night table, heads bent close together.

“What are you guys doing?” I asked.

“Shut up!” Allison whispered fiercely. “What’s wrong with you?”

“Shh,”
Quinn breathed without lifting her eyes.

I knelt down beside Allison and saw they were bending their heads over an old baby monitor that was crackling with static. I listened, too, but could barely make out the voices under all the annoying static rumble. I wanted to ask what they’d heard so far, and also how they had managed to put the other end of the monitor wherever it was Mom and Daddy and the stranger were, not to mention where they even found those old things in the first place, but I knew better than to say another word.

“How it all shakes out,” I heard somebody say, a man,
so either Daddy or if the stranger was a man, him. Quinn and Allison made eye contact with each other but not with me. I cannot stand being left out. It’s so incredibly unfair of them. I’m not a baby, no matter how they act sometimes. Hello, who was in your room yesterday helping you choose the print bikini?

“What?” I whispered. I wanted it to sound fierce and not whiny. I didn’t completely succeed. Allison glared at me. I clamped my jaw tight to keep from saying more or worse, and rubbed my freezing arms.

We heard a door shutting and some loud footsteps, which meant probably they were in the foyer, because the floor there is marble and it echoes.

Quinn switched off the monitor. “We don’t know, exactly.”

“What DO you know?” I demanded.

“Shut up, shut up, shut up,” Allison whispered through her clenched teeth. She tightened her grip on her tennis racquet and lifted it slightly off the floor. If Quinn hadn’t been there she might’ve smashed me with it.

We heard footsteps again, closer this time but less loud. They must have been heading toward us, maybe to the back door, which is the one adult guests are usually shown to, near the bottom of the back stairs.

“Let’s go,” Quinn said, shoving the monitor into the cabinet of the dresser.

Quinn and I followed Allison down the hall, out of the
guest wing—Quinn closed the door to it quietly behind me—through the upstairs den to the upstairs landing, and down the hallway to our rooms. We passed mine on the right and Quinn’s on the left to go to Allison’s, just beyond Quinn’s, before Mom and Daddy’s. Quinn closed Allison’s door behind us. I climbed up onto Allison’s high brass bed and grabbed one of her million pillows to squish, reminding myself that the more I shut up, the more I would hear from my sisters about what they knew.

They kept looking at each other like they weren’t sure they could trust me. I swear I was stopping myself from having a total tantrum only by using all of my willpower—and maybe also mangling the little pillow helped.

Finally I couldn’t take it anymore and I blurted out, “Is somebody going to tell me what’s going on or do I have to go down there and ask
them
?”

Allison threw her racquet onto her sofa. “I told you she’d react like this, didn’t I?”

“Allison, chill,” Quinn said. She sat down on Allison’s bed across from me and leaned against the footboard. I guess it was uncomfortable because she held out her arms for a pillow. I yanked one of the huge ones from the back and tossed it to her. There was practically steam shooting off the top of Allison’s head; she hates when people mess up her bed. But I could tell she was trying to be cool, not let Quinn think I could control my temper better than she could. Which I totally can. Allison grabbed her racquet
again and paced between her bed and her sofa.

Quinn sighed. “The thing is, we don’t really know anything,” she whispered.

“Tell me what you think.”

“You can’t say anything to Mom or Daddy,” Quinn warned.

“Obviously,” I said, leaning forward.

“We’re totally serious, Phoebe,” Allison growled at me. “No hinting, no asking, nothing.”

“Would you give me a break for one single second?”

“Okay,” Quinn said. She was mashing a small white silk pillow between her hands. Quinn, who is always in control, who is so cool and calm my father calls her Zen sometimes, looked seriously tense, and that, more than anything else, was making my stomach clench.

“We’re not sure,” Quinn said. “But it sounds like…”

The door opened, and my parents stood there, pale, looking at us.

“Hey,” Dad said.

“Hi,” we all answered. He was holding Mom’s hand. With her other hand she played with the little sapphire she always wears on a chain around her neck.

Dad cleared his throat. “Sorority meeting?”

I made myself smile. Quinn and Allison faked just as unconvincingly.

“So, um, Mom and I…”

We all waited. If this were a movie, I thought, he’d tell
us they were splitting up, after an opening like that. But he didn’t continue. We all just sat there waiting.

He let out his breath and started over. “We’re going out for a drive.” Mom turned to him, evidently surprised at this news. “Okay? We’re going for a drive.”

“Okay,” Quinn said.

Mom let go of her little sapphire and nodded slightly.

“Okay,” he said. “Quinn, your SAT tutor is downstairs, and the tennis guy…is…he…he…can’t come…today. Okay?”

“We don’t care,” Allison said. “Our court has a puddle on it, and…and we hate tennis lessons anyway. Right?”

I nodded. I actually do hate tennis. But Allison loves it. I couldn’t look at her so I kept my eyes on my fingernails.

“So,” Dad said, smiling fakely. “Oh, and just tell Oliver when he comes for your piano lessons that, ah, we’ll give him a check next week. Okay?”

Quinn and I nodded.

“Okay,” he said again, facing Mom. “We’re going for a drive.” He pulled her by the hand and they left.

The three of us just sat there for maybe two minutes, until Quinn leaned forward and said, “I think some people Mom works with have screwed her over.”

“Really?” I asked. “Her friends?”

Quinn nodded. “Well, she thought they were friends. You never know.”

I shook my head slowly. Poor Mom.

“This is what I think happened,” Quinn continued, tucking her hair behind her ear. “You know Mom invests huge money for people, right? Well, from what I can piece together, one of her big deals did really badly. Lost millions, maybe hundreds of millions of dollars this week. It’s not just her—there’s like six of them who decide together what stocks to pick, but—here’s the screwed up part—the other people on her team all got together and made it seem like it was just Mom, like she went off on her own somehow and made this really bad call on a drug company. They’re putting all the blame on her.”

“I hate them,” Allison said.

“Screw them,” Quinn said.

“Yeah,” I said, trying not to think about Mom in the kitchen twenty-six hours earlier, when she seemed as alone as a person could ever possibly be.

“So what’s going to happen?” asked Allison. “Like, to us?”

“Don’t know,” Quinn whispered. “That guy who was here is her lawyer.”

“She’s not, like, gonna go to jail or something, right?” I tried to grin at my own stupidity but my sisters both stayed pale and serious.

“No. He’s the, you know, other kind of lawyer, like not criminal,” Quinn said slowly. “Business lawyer. It’s bad, though. Seriously bad. They let Agnes go.”

Allison’s mouth dropped open and her eyes teared up.
“Agnes?” She sniffed and turned to look at me. “You knew! Yesterday.”

I looked back and forth between Allison and Quinn.

“Did you hear Mom fire her?” Quinn asked me softly.

“I heard her say something,” I answered, thinking fast, speaking slow. “I heard her say the phrase
had to let her go
.”

Quinn nodded. Allison grabbed my hand. Quinn grabbed my other, then Allison’s other. “This might suck.” Quinn leaned in toward us, and we leaned in, too, so our foreheads were almost touching. “But we can handle it. We’re the Avery women, right?”

“Valkyries,” Allison whispered.

Quinn and I both nodded. “Valkyries.”

Then my cell phone rang.

“H
ELLO
?” M
Y HEART WAS POUNDING
from how startled I was. My ringer must’ve been on superhigh.

“Hi this is Luke may I please speak with Phoebe?” Luke said practically as one word.

“This is Phoebe,” I said. “Luke?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“Hi.”

My sisters were staring at me. I shrugged. Why was he calling me on the phone instead of texting me? Sometimes he texts
hey
and I text back
hey.
That doesn’t feel weird. We sometimes even complain about our homework. Why was he calling me?

“Yeah, um, hey,” he said.

Neither of us said anything for a while. It was odd. It seemed like he was waiting for me to explain why he had called me. My heart was still thumping. It was Kirstyn’s fault, what she said about me liking Luke, making me all
weird with him. Well, that and talking on my cell with him in front of my sisters, at a kind of awkward moment. Quinn whispered that she was going downstairs to her tutor.

I popped up and almost fell off the bed because I forgot to untangle my legs. Chill, Phoebe, chill.

“So, um,” he said. “What’s up?”

“Nothing,” I lied.
Just found out my life is in the toilet, that’s all.

“You okay? You know, from, when you, like, fainted?”

“Fine,” I said in a shockingly high voice. “Anyway…”

The doorbell rang.

“Oliver’s here,” Allison whispered. “Hang up!”

“I gotta go.”

“Okay,” he said. “But, I mean, what are you doing?”

“Now?”

“No, next Tuesday.”

“Oh, um…” What? I couldn’t think. Next Tuesday?

“Just kidding,” he said. “I meant now.”

“Oh, just…um…nothing.”

Allison glared at me impatiently. I turned my back to her.

“But, if, um,” Luke was saying. “I mean, a couple of us were going down to the Shops, you know, to hang around, just, you know. How about you?”

“Me?”

He laughed. “No, somebody else.”

“Obviously,” I said. “Me. Um…”

Allison chucked her tennis racquet at me.

“Ow!”

“Well, anyway,” Luke said, very fast. “We’re gonna get some sodas, you know, me and William and I think maybe Dean. Maybe, whatever, get a slice at D’Amico’s and, are you okay? Did you just say ‘Ow’?”

“No,” I said, rubbing my hip where the racquet had hit me. “A couple of us were thinking of going down to the Shops, too,” I lied, walking out of Allison’s room.

“Great,” he said. “So maybe I’ll see you there.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Maybe. Later.”

Gosia was screaming up to us as I shut my phone and sped downstairs, one step behind Allison.

“You don’t think he could be asking me out, do you?” I asked her.

“Have you made out with him at all?”

“No,” I said.

“Then no.”

“That’s what I thought,” I said. “Hey, how did it go with Tyler?”

She grabbed my arm and twisted until my knees buckled. “Never ask me that again.”

“Okay. Sheesh.”

“He is a jock, I am a nerd, and never the twain shall meet.”

“Huh?”

“I said forget it!”

“Fine!” We never used to have secrets in my family.

I mostly let Oliver play during my piano lesson. Obviously Dad’s musical genes missed me entirely. I knew Oliver wished he could just have Quinn the whole time; he has such a huge and obvious crush on her.

“Why don’t you ever practice, Phoebe?” he asked, closing my level one piano book.

“Dunno,” I said. “Sorry.”

He bent over to pull some new Brahms music out of his bag for Quinn. “No sweat,” he said. Cute butt, I thought. “I get paid either way.”

That’s what you think, I thought. “Oh, um, my dad said he’ll give you a check next week.”

“No problem,” he said. “Hi, Quinn.”

“Gosia!” I yelled, leaving them alone with the piano. “I need to go down to the Shops!” On my way into the kitchen I texted Kirstyn:

She didn’t text back right away so I texted:

Maybe I should’ve asked Zhara or Gabrielle or even Ann instead, I thought, and was about to try Gabrielle when Kirstyn texted:

Gosia came into the kitchen as I was texting Kirstyn
back that we’d pick her up in a minute. I dumped out my book bag, in search of my good sunglasses.

“Hey,” Gosia complained.

“I’ll clean it up when I get home,” I said, on my way through the door. “Promise. We gotta hurry.”

As she was backing out of the garage, Gosia turned on the music. It was new stuff, nothing I’d heard before. She stuck a piece of gum in her mouth and chewed to the beat.

“Can I have a piece?” I asked as I took one from her pack.

“Would it matter if I said no?”

“Oh, wait, we’re picking up Kirstyn.”

“Ugh,” said Gosia, slowing down.

“Why don’t you like Kirstyn?”

“Because she’s a spoiled brat.”

“She’s just rich,” I argued. “And pretty. All that is just stuff from her parents. You can’t judge her on that.”

“I don’t,” Gosia said. “I couldn’t care less if she’s on the cover of every magazine or has all the money in the world. Or none of it. She could say hello.”

“She says hello!”

“Not to me,” Gosia said, stopping the minivan at the bottom of Kirstyn’s driveway. Kirstyn was there waiting in a cute new outfit, her dark Gucci sunglasses covering half her face. Gosia pressed the button to let the back door slide open and checked her makeup in the mirror.

Kirstyn jumped in and, taking one of the pilot seats in
back, said, “Hi, Phoebe!”

Gosia raised one eyebrow. She’s the one who taught Allison. I slumped in my seat and said, “Hi.”

When Gosia got the door closed and the car moving, Kirstyn leaned forward, as if there’d never been a moment of tension between us. “How was piano?”

“Brilliant,” I said.

“He’s so hot.”

“Hot for Quinn,” I said.

“Yum.” She leaned back in her seat and looked out the window. “We should go by Fabio’s and look at the shoes, even though we don’t have dresses yet. Is that stupid? But I mean, we’ll need metallic or beige anyway, right? You weren’t thinking dyed-to-match, were you?”

“No.”

“I know, totally tacky. That’s what I was just telling my mother. Did you get cash or your mom’s credit card?”

“Oh, damn,” I said, and checked my wallet. One dollar. Eighty-seven cents in the change compartment. I asked Gosia as sweetly as I could, “Do you have any money on you?”

“Now you want my money?” Gosia asked.

“They’ll pay you back,” I said to Gosia. “Just take it from the envelope in the kitchen drawer. There’s a couple hundred in it, right? I only want like forty.”

“What are you going to buy for forty?” Kirstyn snorted.

“I’m not buying today, just looking,” I said. “I mean in case we need a soda or a lip gloss or something.”

“You pay me back,” Gosia said to me, pulling into a parking spot. “Here’s twenty. You get it from them and pay me back. I don’t want to ask your parents for the money. Understand?”

I nodded. So she knew something was up. My heart pounded as I shoved her twenty in my back pocket and got out of the car.

“Don’t worry about it—I have my mom’s platinum card,” Kirstyn said. “She felt bad after the tackiness of her dyed-to-match idea.” She showed me her teeth.

“You’re good,” I told her, after seeing nothing was stuck in them.

Lowering the passenger-side window, Gosia said, “Call me when you want to be picked up.”

“Okay.” I was all shaky, my fingers icy despite the heat. What did Gosia know? “Thanks, Gosia.” She pulled away after nodding gently at me.

I took a deep breath to steady my nerves.

“You okay?” Kirstyn asked as we started to wander down the strip of stores on the first stretch of the Shops, looking in windows at the card store, Mac’s Pharmacy, Kimmel’s Bagel Shop. “If you were anybody but Phoebe Avery, I’d think you were actually stressed!”

“Stressed?” I forced out a laugh. “No. You want to hear the funniest thing? My sisters rigged up our old baby mon
itor to spy on our parents!”

“That is fantastic!” she shrieked. “Don’t even tell me you overheard them, you know…”

“No! Ew!”

“So what did you hear?”

“Static, mostly,” I said, adding, when she frowned, “So far!”

We laughed together. “So far,” she repeated. The sun was beating down hard and I thought about suggesting ice cream but decided against it. Kirstyn only orders the nonfat which pisses me off, and anyway I didn’t really want to spend Gosia’s twenty if I could avoid it. So we just wandered around talking about eavesdropping. “I have to try that,” she said. “Baby monitor. I love it! Sorry I was a bitch today.”

“You totally weren’t,” I assured her.

“My mom is just making me nuts,” she whispered, grabbing my arm and pulling me close. “Three more pounds to lose or no dress. I’ll have to wear that hideous organdy poof from my cousin’s wedding last fall. Oldest flower girl in history. Just shoot me now.”

“She won’t make you wear that,” I said as we passed the cell-phone store. “She hated it, too. She’s just stressed,” I told her. “You know how she gets planning parties. But even she can see you’re totally gorgeous.”

Kirstyn sighed. “I wish I could not care what she thinks. Maybe your mom could adopt me. I think I’d be sweeter if I lived in the perfect American family.”

I tried to laugh but it kind of got stuck, and then Luke and William walked out the door of D’Amico’s just as we approached it.

Luke said, “Hey,” and William said, “What’s up,” and when we just nodded, William added, “Man, it’s hot.” I swear I could not even look at Luke at all. Thank goodness I had my sunglasses on.

After an awkward silence, Kirstyn faced Luke dead-on and said, “Funny meeting you here.”

Please don’t tell her,
I silently begged him.

“Hilarious,” he said, staring right back.

“Well, see you later,” she said, and turned sharply away.

I started to follow her but turned back toward them. “Or, hey, it’s still really hot out. You guys want to come over and swim?”

“Yeah,” Luke said, his voice sort of squeaking. “Sounds great!”

“What about suits?” William asked.

“You can do shorts,” I told him. “No big deal.”

Kirstyn put her hand on her hip and looked at me, shaking her head slightly. “So much for shoes,” she muttered.

“It’s too hot,” I said. “And I think Fabio’s closes at five anyway.”

I called Gosia and we all stood around waiting for her. I slid her twenty under her pack of gum when I got in the car.

“These guys are coming over to swim,” I told her.

“I’m not,” Kirstyn said. “You can just drop me at home, please.”

“Why?” I asked, turning around.

She gave me a withering look.

“Youch,” William said, the worst possible thing.

Kirstyn’s eyes narrowed slightly before she slid them away and looked out the window. When we got to her driveway, she started to get out but Gosia drove up the hill. “Can you just open the door, please?” she demanded, her hand gripping the handle.

Gosia pushed the button and her door slid open. Kirstyn was out before it had moved a quarter of the distance.

“What’s wrong with her?” William asked before Gosia had gotten the door closed again, so I just shrugged.

As we made our way around the circle at the top of her driveway, under the portico, I said, “She doesn’t, um, enjoy, you know, swimming.”

“She’s a whack,” William muttered.

Gosia tried to hide it but she was smirking; I saw it. Luckily she didn’t say anything. Instead she turned on her music again and Luke leaned forward. “I love this album!”

“Isn’t it great?” Gosia asked.

“Have you read the lyrics of that one about the train?”

Her eyes met his in the rearview. She nodded.

“I know it,” I added lamely.

When we got to my house, I sent them straight out to the pool house around back and dashed inside to get my suit. “He’s cute,” Gosia whispered.

“Who?”

“Sure,” she said, smirking. “Play innocent. Dinner’s in an hour. Are he and William staying?”

“No,” I whispered. “Just a quick swim. You really think he’s cute?”

She nodded.

I tried not to squeal,
I know it!
Instead I asked, “Mom and Dad still out?”

She opened the door and the music answered me: I could hear Dad playing the piano in the living room.

“They okay?”

Gosia shrugged. She headed for the kitchen and I took the back stairs by threes, listening to Dad playing something I didn’t recognize. I used to sit on the steps and listen while he played, even in our old house when we had an upright with a broken middle C. Mom bought him the grand piano for his forty-fifth birthday present. We had practically no furniture yet in most of the rooms in this house, because we had just moved in. He cried when the delivery guys started unloading it, and then Mom started crying, too. He only stopped hugging her when he went and sat down on the leather piano bench and started to play, tears still streaming down his cheeks at the sound of that huge thing. He played love songs and laughed at him
self for being such a sap, but she shook her head and sat squished next to him on the bench, watching his fingers on the keys. He was still playing when I went to bed that night, Beethoven to Beatles and everything in between, so many songs I had never even heard him play before. It’s the one thing still sure to uncrease my mother’s forehead: sinking down into one of the couches we have now and listening to my father play.

I figured that’s where she was. Part of me wanted to forget about the boys in the pool and just cuddle up with Mom on the couch. But I’m not a baby anymore. Also, right then Mom and I each had our own crap to deal with.

I ripped off my clothes and dropped them on the floor, put on my best suit, the green-and-white one Allison says looks hot on me, and flew down the stairs.

I ran from the back door across the yard in my bare feet to the pool, ripped open the gate, and, seeing the guys were already floating in the middle, dived into the deep end. The cold water hit my body from fingertips to toes like a shockwave, and then it was quiet. I glided underwater to the shallow end to Luke’s raft and flipped it. We ended up in a huge water fight, me, him, and William. When we were all panting, we each grabbed a raft and then floated around for a while, catching our breath, squinting at the sky.