Royally Crushed (24 page)

Once I pass through security, she gives me this monster hug. I suddenly realize that I’ve missed her hugs, even
though she always hugs me so tight it crushes my shoulders because she’s one of those super lovey-dovey moms. You know, the kind who hugs you as if she thinks you’re never, ever going to hug her again, every single time.

“Oh, Valerie, honey! I’m so glad to have you home!”

“Thanks.” I know I should tell her I’m glad to be here, but even though I’ve had almost a week to get used to the idea, I still can’t decide. I mean, Jules refuses to reconsider her threats to do me bodily harm (with Natalie’s full support) and that’s the least of my problems. Four e-mails to Christie have gone completely unanswered, and all of my texts have been ignored, which is a Very Bad Thing.

Even worse, Gabrielle is looking at me with this dopey, mom-ish smile, and I just know she’s going to tell me how much she’s looking forward to spending this week getting to know me better. I’ve gotta give her credit for hanging back and trying to give me and Mom a little space to hug and say hello, but when I give Gabrielle a polite smile—because it’s the nice thing to do and I know it’s what Dad would expect—I still feel like a total faker doing it. Especially when she gives me this
I’m so excited you like me
look.

Blond freak.

“I’m really happy to see you, Mom,” I finally say, focusing on her. And it’s no lie—I am glad to see her. Just not her haircut or her girlfriend, particularly. I mean, she’s
still my mom and I still love her, even if I feel like I don’t understand her anymore.

I try to act all happy and smiley as we pick up my suitcase from the carousel, and the two of them ask me about the flight and whether or not I’m hungry. But by the time we’re walking out to Mom’s green Toyota SUV, I’m only half-listening. My bullshit detector’s going off and I can’t pinpoint why. Since it’s pretty finely tuned, even when I’m tired and grumpy, I figure I’m better off just keeping my mouth shut and watching the two of them.

Or not watching. As Gabrielle puts my suitcase in the back of the SUV and we all climb in, I figure it out: The two of them haven’t stood within five feet of each other since I came through security.

This has to be planned. I mean, given how intense they were with each other in the weeks before I moved to Schwerinborg, they must have discussed ahead of time how to act around me. Decided not to hold hands or do anything mushy.

While I know they’re doing it so I won’t freak out, it’s having the opposite effect. It’s making me wonder what they’re hiding. What they’re really like together on an everyday basis. And what they think of my being here.

I’m an intruder in my own mother’s car.

I grab an elastic out of my purse, yank my hair back
into a ponytail, then turn and stare out the window. It feels bizarre to be back in the States, even though I’ve only been gone a few weeks. I’ve lived in Virginia all my life, but only now am I noticing how wide the roads are and how loud people are when speaking to one another compared to how they speak in Europe. And in Virginia, everything is spread out. We have to drive five miles to the mall, and three to a movie theater. School is nowhere near walking distance for 99 percent of the students.

At the palace, on the other hand, I can walk to anything. School. Shops. Whatever. Even my boyfriend’s—assuming I have one. And lots of Europe seems to be that way. City-ish and walkable.

As we slide from one lane into another and the trees and houses of suburbia flash by out my window, I try to adjust mentally to being home. The air even feels different when I crack my car window, and when Mom turns on the radio to my favorite station, the sound of American English and the obnoxious commercials make my new life with Dad feel very far away.

And it makes Georg feel far away too.

I know I shouldn’t be so hung up on him, especially when I’m fairly certain I’ve been dumped, but I can’t help it. All week long he’s all I could think about. I saw him sneaking looks at me in the halls at school and he didn’t
seem openly hostile or anything. He even shot me a little smile once when no one was looking, just enough to make me keep my hopes up. On the other hand, he never once approached me—let alone e-mailed me—and I sure as hell wasn’t going to walk up to him.

I just wish I knew whether his whole avoidance thing is part of the plan for spin control. I mean, is he avoiding me because his parents say he has to, and maybe it’s a temporary thing? ’Cause that would explain the looks and the smile. Or is it because he’s figured out for himself that it’s not worth it to date me and he wants to extract himself from our relationship while he has a good excuse? Either way, as I lean my head back against the headrest and stare out the window, I feel very much alone.

The pathetic part is that I can’t help but wonder if he feels alone too. I mean, if he wants to break up with me, fine. Well, not fine. But it’d be a hell of a lot better if he’d just freakin’ say it. Just flat out end it. Otherwise, this whole living in limbo will slowly eat me alive.

But part of me thinks he doesn’t. Part of me is convinced that what we have is special, and “cool it” really means that we have to stay away from each other awhile so we can be together later—which, in a way, is totally romantic and totally believable, coming from Georg.

“Valerie, did you hear me?” Mom turns in her seat and
frowns at me as she angles the car down the exit ramp and through the streets of Vienna.

“Sorry, Mom. Guess I’m tired.” I didn’t sleep well last night (go figure), and the flight has my body clock all screwed up. I left Schwerinborg at noon their time, and now it’s two p.m., Virginia time. I think that means eight or nine p.m. in Schwerinborg, but my brain’s just not operational.

“I suppose so. You haven’t said a word about where we’re headed.”

“Home, right?” I lean forward and don’t see anything unusual. Then it hits me: We’re headed toward
my
home. The home where I grew up. Where I lived with Mom and Dad until Mom left to move in with Gabrielle. I’m so used to driving this direction from the airport that I forgot we weren’t supposed to come this way anymore. That we should have gone to Mom’s new place—the apartment she shares with Gabrielle.

“I thought you might like to see your friends for a while before we go to the apartment. And this gives me a chance to water your father’s plants and pay the bills.”

“Oh. Okay.” I still think it’s strange that Dad is having Mom look after his stuff while he’s away, but he insists they’re still friends despite the divorce and that he’s more comfortable with her taking care of things than asking a neighbor or one of his buddies.

I hope I never get divorced and have to deal with this level of weirdness in my life.

“Um, I didn’t tell my friends when I was getting in,” I tell Mom. “I mean, they know it’s today, but they don’t know what time unless you told them.”

“Of course I did,” Mom says, and her voice is just overflowing with happy-happy-happy. “Julia, Natalie, and Christie all agreed to come over. They should be at the house about twenty minutes after we get there. I wanted to give you a little more time, so you could shower or take a nap if you wanted, but your flight came later than scheduled.”

“That’s okay.” For one, the girls have seen me smelly and gross before. For two, even if I look like I just crawled out of the Potomac, they aren’t going to notice. They’re going to be far, far more interested in telling me off than in whether I’ve loofahed in the last twenty-four hours.

And despite what Mom thinks, Christie probably won’t show. It’s completely unlike her to ignore e-mail. And I know the e-mail thing is no accident, because she was all worked up to call me, and on her mother’s dime, too. In exchange, her mother made her promise to be nice to her Tennessee cousins for a solid week when they came to visit. She even made Christie take them to the Smithsonian and all the typical Washington tourist sites.

Christie even went along on the freaking White House
tour, which she’s totally sick of, so I know she really wanted to talk.

But after the Georg thing hit the
Washington Post
, she didn’t even bother to pick up the phone, so it doesn’t take superior insight to guess what her attitude toward me must be. She’s feeling totally betrayed and I don’t blame her. She’s the best friend I’ve ever had, so hiding all this from her is pretty huge.

“You don’t look very excited to see everyone, honey.” My mom is looking at me in the rearview mirror, and I feel bad because I know she went to a lot of trouble to get everyone to come over. Five bucks says she even went shopping this morning and picked up treats of some sort from Giant. (Well, now that she’s living with Gabrielle, I guess they’d get groceries from Whole Foods instead, and I’m guessing Whole Foods does not carry Ho Hos, which Mom always used to keep in the pantry because they’re Jules’s fave.)

“I’ll be fine once I can eat and sleep a little,” I say as we pull into the driveway. Thankfully, no one’s beaten us here, so as soon as I break away from Mom and the freak, I dump my stuff in my room—which has to be ten degrees warmer than my room in the palace even though no one’s even been living here—and take a quickie shower.

Why I even bother, I have no idea.

*   *   *

Surprise, surprise. When I walk back into my bedroom in one of my mom’s old ratty robes, there’s Christie, sitting on my bed. She’s the same beautiful self she’s always been, and I instantly feel horribly, terribly guilty for keeping so much from her.

“Hey.” The word comes out froglike, probably because my quickie shower ended up taking nearly half an hour. I think my brain needed to soak. “I didn’t think you’d come.”

“Well, I did.” She doesn’t even bother to stand up. She’s not visibly mad or visibly happy, just blah, which means she’s about as angry as she can get.

“I guess we need to talk.” I sound like a total dork, but we’ve never had a fight before, ever, so I don’t know how to deal with Angry Christie. She’s usually the peacemaker in our group. “I didn’t mean to piss you off, really,” I tell her. “You’re my best friend. Ever.”

“So you keep secrets from me?”

“No—”

“Funny, because I swear the
Washington Post
knows more about your life than I do.”

I unwrap the towel from my head and toss it over my desk chair. “Okay, I did keep secrets from you. But I didn’t mean to. I was just confused and I needed time to absorb everything. And”—I look her in the eye, which doesn’t help matters, because she still looks very blah and unreadable,
which, for Christie, is hard to do—“I didn’t think you’d understand.”

“What I don’t understand is what’s downstairs.” She lowers her voice and points toward the door. “Who is that woman? She’s not a neighbor, so I thought she might be from your mom’s book club or something, but they don’t look like book club buddies to me.”

Oh, crap. How could this not occur to me on the ride home?

GABRIELLE IS HERE.

And I can’t lie to Christie. Not with everything else. She’d never speak to me again, and right now, I just can’t handle having her hate me. “Are Jules or Natalie here?” I ask.

“Not yet. I came early so I could see you alone. Good thing I did, too.” Christie leans forward, and she actually looks concerned. “There’s a lot more you’re not telling me than the fact you’re getting busy with some European prince, isn’t there?”

I open the curtains partway and stand near the window—not to flash the neighborhood, but so I have warning when Jules and Natalie show up—then I look back at Christie. She’s probably figured it out, but even if she hasn’t, I have to tell her. “‘That woman’ . . . is named Gabrielle. And Gabrielle is my mother’s new girlfriend.”

“Girlfriend.” Her voice is dead level, but I can tell what she wants to know.

“Yeah. And so you don’t have to ask, she’s that kind of girlfriend.”

“You are freaking kidding me! Get
out
!” Her voice is low, but I glance toward the door, anyway, to make sure Mom and Gabrielle don’t hear. “Your mother . . . is she . . . does she think she’s
gay
?”

“Yeah. She is.”

All of a sudden, I feel myself getting teary, which I completely did not expect. I manage to hold it in, but when I hear my own voice, I sound like I’m about to completely lose it. “That’s why she and my dad are getting divorced. My mom decided—or admitted to herself or however you want to describe it—that she’s gay, and announced over dinner one night that she didn’t want to stay married to my dad. That it wasn’t anything either of us had done, and that nothing would change her mind, it’s just that she—and these were her exact words—
needed to be true to herself
, even though she knew it was going to be hard on me and Dad.”

Instantly, Christie comes over to the window and gives me a hug. And then I can’t help it. The waterworks start and I realize how hard it’s been not to be able to tell my friends—Christie, most of all—what’s been going on with Mom and Dad.

“That’s terrible, Valerie,” she says in a whisper, right next to my ear. “I never in a million years would have guessed. I’m so sorry.”

For once, I don’t care that someone’s saying she’s sorry, probably because this time I know it’s heartfelt. And, of course, that thought makes me snarfle right into Christie’s shoulder. “She dumped my dad right in front of me, Christie. It was so awful. I mean, I was beyond blown away, but Dad . . . the look on his face scared me. It was like she’d died or something.”

“Why didn’t you tell me, Val? It’s been weeks and weeks!”

“I didn’t think you’d understand. Telling you guys about the divorce was bad enough. And I felt so stupid.” I’m totally blubbering now, though it’s a restrained kind of blubbering, since I don’t want Mom to hear any of this. I’m sure Christie thinks I’ve lost my mind, but I don’t care anymore.

Christie lets me go because she’s getting teary too. She reaches over to the top of my desk and grabs a tissue. They look a little dusty, since no one’s been in the house for a month, but she shoves it toward me, anyway, then takes one for herself. “Why would you feel stupid?”