The Julian Game (7 page)

Ella took photography. That was one of her “other interests.” She’d had a photo accepted for the school’s Winter Fair exhibit. Which was a semi-big deal.

“Ella, don’t you do photography?” I prompted.

“Hardly.” She sniffed.

“Ella takes great shots,” said her mother. “And Mimi had a photo accepted to
National Wildlife
magazine when she was fourteen. It’s of a tidal pool in Stone Harbor. It’s framed in the den.”

“Mom, stop,” said Mimi. “Nobody cares.”

“Both my girls have an eye.”

“I was named after Man Ray,” I said on impulse. “My mom put an
e
on the end to feminize it.”

“Sweet. I love Man Ray,” said Mimi.

“You never told me that.” Ella turned on me. “What, did you think I’m such a jizzbrain I wouldn’t know who Man Ray is?”

“Oh, shut up, Ella. You’d have no idea if I hadn’t hung one of his prints in my bedroom,” said Mimi.

“
You
shut up,” spat Ella. “For once in your life, you pathetic retard.”

“Girls, please. Ella, your rudeness to your guest and your sister isn’t particularly impressive. And you know how I feel about the word
retard
.”

“What about her rudeness to me? What about Tragic U?”

Fatigue crossed Jennifer Parker’s face. “Mimi, will you apologize?”

“I’m sorry for presuming you might attend a nonaccredited college, Ella.”

“Whatever.” Her sister’s apology had only riled Ella. And now Mimi and her mother knit tighter together as they decided that they’d prefer to see fish.

The whole thing surprised me. I hadn’t envisioned Ella so out of step with the choreography of her household. Ella might rule the Group, but she was hardly the top dog in her own family. And yet all of the Parker females shared an aura of superiority that made me miss the warm democracy of the Zawadski kitchen.

Ella nudged me from my thoughts. Brightening me up with a sisterly smile that I highly doubted she ever bestowed on her real sister. “Let’s go,” she whispered. “Bring your drink, and I’ll pimp it up.”

“Change into this.” Ella pulled out a lacy black blouse.
Away from her mom and Mimi, she’d instantly reclaimed her familiar, finessed persona. She’d switched on her music and poured some Captain Morgan’s into my Coke can from a bottle she kept in the back of her closet. I faked drinking it. The last thing I needed was to think fuzzy tonight. “You can’t show up at Meri’s party with me in that pitiful Muppet fur.”

I was already casting off my Exchange sweater when Ella’s cell pulsed.

“That’s Hannah, our ride.” As she took the call and turned away from me, I checked out her room. It was decorated in cream and celery colors, with a canopy bed and a wall mural painted to look like a garden. I went to inspect her desk, the only messy part, a jungle of books and crib sheets and no fewer than three “please see me” notes, all from different teachers. Chaos.

The corkboard over the desk was thumbtacked with dozens of photos, some double and triple layered. From underneath a recent snap of the Group mugging in their bikinis, I found a curling picture of grade-school Ella standing between Natalya and Mickey Mouse. Not that I’d thought Natalya would lie about it, but the photo evidence of their friendship jarred me. It had seemed so unlikely.

Propped against the corkboard, I excavated a three-picture frame, each with a different image of Julian Kilgarry. One from somewhere informal, maybe a party, where he lounged, his feet up on a coffee table spilling over in bags of chips and tottered beer cans. The next was from a lacrosse game, Julian on the field in perfect profile. The last was a class portrait, where Julian was maybe in sixth or seventh grade, but minus all those middle school plagues: pimples, braces, zigzaggy bangs. He was just his same hot self with fat apple cheeks.

“ETA is twenty minutes.” Ella tossed her phone on the bed.

I held up the frame. “So I take it you’re madly in love with him, like everyone else?”

“Don’t try to be witty. Faulkner made that for me as a joke. C’mon, you need to change. You must be getting style tips from the Wad.”

She decided against the lacy number, and vetoed both a sparkly camisole with a shrug and a one-shoulder tunic thingy before decreeing that I should wear a midnight blue Chloé blouse that was probably the most expensive item I’d ever buttoned over my body.

“Don’t stink it up,” Ella warned, “like Lindy always does. That poor child reeks down to her Swiss cheese feet. Dry cleaning never gets out her skanky b.o. Come on, bathroom next.”

Where I let Ella do my hair and makeup. “The first time I fixed you up, I almost thought it was a fluke,” she told me. “I mean, who’d ever given you a second look before I added the mascara and the magic? But then I decided you do it on purpose.”

“Do what?”

“You know. Hide in plain sight. Hair in the face and Salvation Army reject clothes. I bet your idea of hell would be the spotlight, right? All eyes on you.”

“Once I read an essay for the Daughters of the American Revolution to a packed auditorium,” I said. “It was for more than two hundred people, and once I got going, I wasn’t scared at all.”

Ella smirked. “Nerbit spotlights don’t count.” She picked up a brush and began to yank at my hair. Hard. “Hair in the face screams insecurity complex. And would you stop pinching up your mouth like you swallowed a lime?”

“I can’t help it, I feel bad,” I answered.

“About what?”

“About seeing Julian. About this whole night. Maybe we really should go to the library.”

I met Ella’s frown as she sat back on the edge of the tub. The hairbrush tapping tapping tapping against her shin. “Are you high?”

“No, it’s just, how are we going to have any fun if Julian’s there, searching all over—”

From outside, a horn honked.

“This is not exactly about fun.” Ella reached forward and took my hand between hers. So soft, the same texture as I’d imagined those buttery kid gloves she wore to protect them. Her eyes had turned soft, too, and entreating. “Please, please don’t nerb out on me, Looze. I mean, it’s hardly even a prank when I think of what Julian actually deserves. ’Kay?”

It wasn’t that I trusted her. It wasn’t that I believed for a second that she’d ever have my back if I needed her. But if I had to take a hard look at why I was in this predicament tonight, I knew it was because I’d way rather walk into a party, any party at all, with Ella Parker, than one more night stuck on the couch between Dad and Stacey, or even seated at the Zawadski table.

“Yeah,” I told her. “Okay.”

“Cool. I always knew you were a secret rock star.” Her smile was like a sparkler that lit us both up, and in the perfect sisterhood of the moment, I felt like I’d do anything for her.

As we bolted through her bedroom, Ella grabbed her three-photo frame and tapped three kisses to her fingers, then one to each Julian. “It just this thing I do,” she said. “I make a wish on the Julians. I’ve been doing it forever.”

“So tonight you’re wishing on the picture Julians for revenge on the real Julian?”

She laughed. “Right. Ironic.”

More like Unstable, and it set me back. At the front door, I stopped.

“What?” Ella jiggled the keys. “Come on. We’ve been through this. Motor already. Mom and Mimi left, so I’ve got to set the alarm.”

“Listen. Just to say. I’m okay with this to a point. But I think down the line—maybe not tonight, but soon—we need to tell him that Elizabeth’s a joke.”

“Oh, for God’s sake.” Ella nudged me aside so that she could set the alarm code. “I can dress you up, but underneath you’re still the same ant. Hiding under the leaves and analyzing how every single thing in your tiny ant world can go to shit. Piece of advice for you, Raye. No matter what happens tonight, you should get out more.”

I stared. In the shadow of the night, Ella seemed unreal, a soothsaying cyborg with pale hair and a washboard body held taut against the nip in the air.

“Ha,” I stammered. “Thanks for the tip.”

“Don’t be mad, fancy ant.” She waved at the car, then casually looped her pinkie finger through mine and swung. “All I meant is find your life and take control. Am I right?” Stepping off the porch, she didn’t look back as she tugged me, pinkie-hooked, into a striding lope across the lawn. “’Cause it’s sure as hell not gonna come find you.”

One eighth-grade graduation party at D’Arcy Brewer’s
house with parents present, no alcohol, and random couples feeling each other up behind the Brewers’ shed. Two parties last year, with absent parents, keg beer and everyone in the kitchen playing endless rounds of drinking games: Circle of Death, Quarters, Give One-Take One.

The sum total of my partying experience.

As soon as Doug turned into the drive, I saw that this party would be different.

For one thing, the property was huge. I was getting used to prepster wealth—even Natalya’s house claimed a kidney-bean pool and a weedy clay tennis court. And we’d all been to Faulkner’s faux Tudor fortress back in October when she’d hosted that class party to celebrate her shoo-in presidency.

Rolling fields, a bend in the drive and there was the house. And the barn. And the pool house.

“Just
one
family lives here?” I squeaked.

“I know. Holy Great Gatsby, Batman, right?” murmured Hannah from the passenger seat. But nobody seemed surprised.

Cars and jeeps parked haphazardly over the vast lawn. Tucked under willows and wedged into hedges, as if all drivers had spied the same spaceship in the sky and then abandoned their vehicles for a better look. Doug did the same, veering his brand-new birthday Volvo off into a field.

“This is good. Not trapped,” said Ella, “in case we gotta bolt.”

“If the cops come, I’m not waiting for you two,” Doug answered.

“Chivalry lives,” Ella answered, unbothered, while I made a decision to keep an eye on Doug all night.

Light boomed from the downstairs, but the kitchen was nearly empty when we walked in from the enormous pillared veranda. Doug and Hannah seemed familiar with the territory. They were a spidery, stylish couple, twin heights to match an identical gender that lay in that futuristic zone between male and female. His thin hips and her jutting ones, his pink T-shirt and her black leather jacket making a complementary mix-and-match.

Also they were nice to me, which made them vital in this evening of strangers.

I followed them as they followed Ella through the kitchen and dining room and then into the hotspot central area, molded and paneled and gilded—and feebly lit, despite the multiple wall sconces. Looking around, I got an instant, high-dive shock. Maybe the light was deceptive, but on a glance it seemed like everyone at this party was ridiculously beautiful. A gathering of the gods.

A freestanding bar took up the back of the room. Where drinks, with ice and mixers and stirrers, were being served. Not for the last time, I wished Natalya were here, just to get an eyeful.

Every single person except for me seemed interconnected. As if all the jokes and conversations lapped around the room on the same wavelets and I was, without a shred of doubt, the only person off the matrix. To make matters worse, Ella had disappeared on the far side of the room, and Doug and Hannah had attached to another couple.

“You driving?” A guy who looked and sounded like Harry Potter’s devious cousin veered up out of the jam of bodies. British accent—could this be the infamous Henry Rubbish? He was on the quirky end of cute, with an outgoing smile, malt-brown eyes and hair like a dropped pile of straw, and he was offering me one of two red-wine-filled juice glasses.

“No.” I squinted. “And no, thanks.”

“Only the hard stuff for you, then?” Was his smile baiting or just teasing me?

“I’m more of a champagne person,” I offered. Which was true, though I’d had champagne only the past two New Year’s Eves. I knew as soon as the words left my lips that I sounded pretentious and childish. I wanted to run.

But the spark in his eyes seemed friendly. “How about a fine old port? Or a brandy with a Cuban cigar? Let’s go hunt down the wine cellar, shall we?”

I didn’t have any time to answer because suddenly, Ella had zipped in to sling an arm around my shoulder and whisper something unintelligible in my ear.

“Oh,
cheers
, Henry,” she said as she pretended to just that moment spy him. “You alone?”

“Parker. Not a bird I thought I’d see tonight.”

“What a curiously British expression. What are you doing here?”

“I’m playing wingman. But I wasn’t aware of your vast array of West Chester High School friends.”

“Maybe I’m playing spy.” Ella’s voice had a cool edge.

Definitely not pals, these two, as Henry matched the temperature of her tone. “Let’s keep it neutral tonight, Ellie, shall we?”

“Neutral is my middle name.”

If Henry had a retort for this, he decided not to use it. I had a gut feeling he wanted to keep talking to me but didn’t want to hang out with Ella. Sure enough, Henry handed the glass of wine to me as a parting gift, and then slipped off into the crowd.

“Good.” Once he’d disappeared, Ella turned to me and gave a little clap of delight. “That means Kilgarry is on the premises. I couldn’t have planned this more perfectly. Meri says Brandon will be here any minute.”

“Who’s Brandon?”

“Meri’s new boyfriend, Brandon Last, who got in a beat-down with Henry after an ice-hockey game this past winter. Then the rumor was that Julian and Henry slashed Brandon’s tires over Valentine’s Day, and now Brandon’s beyond aggro. Not that Meri has a clue, or she’d have never let them in. So stand back, it’s gonna get ugly.”

Tension flicked down my spine. “Wait a minute, Ella. Is that why you got me to invite Julian here? To set up a fight?”