The Trouble With Flirting (3 page)

“Sex,” Julia says. “I mean, I assume.”

“I’ve heard you can have sex as early as seven p.m.,” I say. “But never before five on a Sunday.”

Vanessa laughs as we head up the second flight. “You know what’s really funny? This is an
acting
program—most of the guys are gay. So if they think telling girls to stay away is going to keep anyone nice and innocent, they’re nuts.”

“I’m glad we’re on separate floors, though,” Julia says as we reach the second landing and stop in front of another smoked-glass-paned door. “I have a twin brother, and believe me, you don’t want to share a bathroom with a seventeen-year-old boy. They’re pigs.”

“Your brother—” I start to say, but Vanessa’s already speaking: “Hold on, we need a key.” She juggles her stuff so she can slip the card out of her back pocket; then she unlocks the door and we step through. The hallway runs the length of the building, with doors on both sides.

“Room 307,” Julia murmurs, scanning the numbers as we move along. A lot of the doors are open, and you can hear girls discussing who should sleep where and which side of the closet they want.

“There it is—307!” I spot it first. It’s about halfway down,
on the right.

Vanessa is still holding her key card in her hand, and it opens this door too.

The carded lock is the only modern touch. Otherwise, it’s your basic unadorned dorm room, probably unchanged for decades: white walls, bunk beds, scratched-up wooden desks and chests of drawers. There are plain plastic shades on the windows.

“Looks like there’ll be four of us,” Julia says, since there are two sets of bunk beds and four dressers.

“That could just be during the year,” I say. “Maybe it’s different for the summer students.”

“Well, there are at least three of us—someone’s already left her stuff,” Vanessa says. There’s a duffel bag on one of the bottom mattresses, and an enormous rolling trunk pulled right up next to it, which is open. A pair of jeans dangles out the top, and one fancy high-heeled jeweled sandal has fallen on the floor next to the bed. The label says Prada.

Of course.

Julia and Vanessa are discussing which beds they should take.

“The thing is,” Julia says, screwing her pretty mouth up uncertainly, “I get really freaked out on a top bunk. When I was little, my friend’s brother fell off and broke his arm, and that’s all I can think about.”

“Go ahead and take the other bottom then,” Vanessa says. “I’m happy to take one of the tops. See, I figure that if the
whole thing crashes down, it’s not the girl who’s on top who’s in trouble—it’s the girl on the bottom.”

“Oh, God, don’t say that. Now
that’s
all I’m going to think about.”

“You want me to sleep over the other girl? In case we don’t have a fourth?”

“It’s up to you,” Julia says, but she doesn’t say,
No, don’t, it’ll be more fun to share with you,
the way I would have.

I’m beginning to remember what Julia’s like.

“The other one’s closer to the window anyway,” Vanessa says diplomatically. “I’m going to go ahead and make the bed now in case we don’t have much time later.” She climbs halfway up the bunk-bed ladder and starts unfolding the sheets that have been left in a pile on top of the bed for the students to use.

Julia removes the folded sheets from her own mattress and puts them on top of one of the dressers. “Don’t laugh at me, guys. I brought my own from home.” She kneels in front of her brand-new-looking wheeled suitcase, unzips it, and digs through until she pulls out a pile of neatly folded snow-white sheets. The scent of lavender wafts toward me as she stands up with them.

“That was smart,” Vanessa says. She’s perched on the bunk-bed ladder, trying to arrange the bottom sheet without losing her balance. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

“I learned the hard way,” Julia says. “Last summer I went to this language-immersion program, and their sheets were so
rough I felt like I was sleeping on sandpaper. I was red all over for months afterward.”

“You’re like the princess and the pea,” Vanessa says with an amused glance over her shoulder.

“I’m very delicate,” Julia says, fluttering her eyelids. “Hey, Franny, what does ‘the princess and the pea’ make you think of?”

“Once Upon a Mattress!”

“Exactly. We both had lead roles in it in middle school,” she explains to Vanessa.

“It was a lot of fun,” I say.

Here’s what I remember about being in a show with Julia Braverman:

The Good: She seemed genuinely pleased that we both got good roles in the school musical and happy to hang out with me at rehearsals. Even though her family was über-rich—everyone knew it, even back in middle school—and she wore expensive clothing and was always traveling to places like Belize and Thailand, she wasn’t snobbish. We had come from different elementary schools and had different groups of friends that didn’t overlap much, but we got along fine.

The Bad: I don’t think Julia ever once asked me about myself or my family. At rehearsals I heard a
lot
about her life. Like I knew that she got so nervous before every performance that she had diarrhea (not exactly the kind of thing you want to remember about someone you haven’t seen in almost four years, but I don’t seem to be able to forget that little detail),
and I knew that she had a crush on Steven Segelman even though it was pretty obvious that he was obsessed with Rachel Goldman. But she never bothered to learn anything personal about me.

The Ugly: She was always going through some kind of emotional crisis, always grabbing on to me and moaning about how scared/tired/overwhelmed/anxious/miserable she was, even though (as far as I could tell) her life was pretty good. I endured it because I didn’t know anyone else in the cast very well—my friends were mostly athletes, not performers—and she always seemed happy to see me.

Actually, things aren’t that different now. When you’re away from home, any familiar face looks pretty good.

Any familiar face that’s not your annoying aunt’s, I mean.

“Hey, Julia?” I ask casually as I reach up to tug on Vanessa’s sheet from my end, to help smooth it out. “How’s your brother doing?”

She’s pulling something big and white out of her bag—ah, a pillow. She fluffs it up a bit. “Alex?” she says absently. “He’s good, I guess. Same as always. He’s here too, you know.”

I turn around to look at her. “Wait,
really
?”

“Uh-huh. Room 203.”

“I met him outside,” Vanessa puts in. She clambers down the ladder and surveys her handiwork, then reaches up to tuck in an uneven bit of sheet hem. “He’s pretty cute.”

“I totally had a crush on him back in middle school.” I say
it lightly, which makes me feel like I’m betraying my thirteen-year-old self. Back then I wouldn’t have called it a crush. I was seriously and totally in
love
with Alex Braverman.

“Oh, God, everyone did. They still do.” Julia places the pillow at the top of her bed. “At least you never tried to wangle an invitation to the house just to meet him. Do you remember Cara Sackeroff?”

“The one who always wore glittery eye shadow?”

She shakes her head. “That was the other Cara. Piecrust.”

“Cara Piecrust?” Vanessa repeats incredulously.

“That was what we always called her—I think her last name was really Pietz. Something like that.”

I nodded along, but I didn’t recognize the nickname. Must have been something Julia’s circle called her, not mine.

“Anyway, she begged me to do this English project with her and then said we had to do it at
my
house because her younger sister was a total pain in the butt, and so I said fine and then she spent the entire time following Alex around. She even went into his
room
after he’d gone in there and shut the door just to get away from her. I wasn’t allowed to invite her over ever again. Not that I wanted to.”

“He was really nice to me,” I say. “He even gave me a flower once.”

“He did?”

“Yeah. Your parents had brought you a bouquet, because of the show, and I was standing next to you after the performance and my parents weren’t there that night—they had just
separated and everything was like this big deal with them and there had been some confusion about which one was going when—and anyway, I guess I looked lonely or something because Alex pulled out a flower from your bouquet and handed it to me.”

“That is so sweet,” Vanessa says.

“I should get the credit,” Julia says. “It was
my
flower he stole. I’m going to have to yell at him for that.”

“No, don’t!”

She laughs at my panic. “I’m just teasing. I’m glad he did it.” She glances up. “What’s that sound?”

“Lunch bell,” Vanessa says. “Let’s go.”

“Let me just change my shoes.” As she slips off her sneakers and puts on some flip-flops, Julia glances at me. “Oh, wait . . . can you eat there?”

“Yeah, I have a meal card.” As we walk down the stairs and out the building, I’m feeling very optimistic about this summer for the first time since Mom committed me to coming here. I already have people to hang out with, and even more important . . .

Alex Braverman is here. And I’m about to see him.

As we cross the courtyard, I pull out my hair elastic and shake my hair so it falls around my face, then rake my fingers through the waves.

Alex Braverman is here. And I’m about to see him. A ponytail isn’t going to cut it.

I
follow Julia and Vanessa into the dining hall, a large open room with a snaking buffet line at one end, a salad bar in the middle, and about a dozen large round tables filling up the rest of the space.

We get in line together. I grab a slice of pizza and a brownie; Vanessa grabs a slice of pizza and a dish of vanilla pudding; Julia doesn’t grab anything until we reach the salad bar, and then she piles lettuce on her plate and douses it with balsamic vinegar.

We get drinks, then look around for a place to sit. “This way,” Julia says, and leads us over to a table.

She drops her tray down in front of an empty chair that’s next to an extremely good-looking guy. She says to him, “You remember Franny? She went to our middle school.”

He smiles up at me. “Hey, Franny! Nice to see you again.”

“Hey, Alex,” I say. Even if I hadn’t recognized him—which I had—I would have figured out pretty quickly that he
was Julia’s brother: they have the same straight nose, same unusually light blue eyes, same thick dark hair. They’re beautiful specimens, both of them, a persuasive argument for genetic engineering.

“Can you believe it?” Julia says, plopping down on the seat next to him. “I’m so relieved to actually know someone already. I was freaking out all yesterday about being with strangers,” she tells me and Vanessa.

“She really was,” Alex says. “But she freaks out easily.”

“True. And now I know Vanessa, too. She’s my roommate and she’s from New York and she’s way cooler than we are.”

“Way cooler than you’ll
ever
be,” Vanessa adds with a laugh. We both sit down at the table. “Who are you?” she asks the thin, brown-eyed guy on Alex’s other side.

“Lawrence.” He squints at me. “You look really familiar.”

“Probably because I knocked into you at the entrance to the dorm half an hour ago,” I say. “Sorry about that.”

“Oh, right. Yeah, that’s it. Totally my fault.”

“Nope, mine.” We grin at each other.

“You were Lady Larken!” Alex says suddenly.

“I was?” Lawrence says with mock surprise.

“No,
I
was,” I say. “In
Once Upon a Mattress
.”

“I totally remember you,” Alex says.

“You acted like you already did!”

“I knew you looked familiar. But it just clicked: You were Lady Larken, and you wore a big pouffy dress. And you sang a couple of songs. You have a great voice.”

“Thanks, but I don’t really—I’m just good at faking it.”

“And we had a class together, right?”

“Chemistry.”

“Ms. Adanasio.”

“Except she disappeared three-quarters of the way through the year, remember? And they hired that other guy to take her place?”

“Oh, right,” he says. “The guy who never showered.”

“I wonder if we’ll get to do any singing in the shows here,” Vanessa says. “I mean, I know it’s not specifically musical theater, but there’ll be some singing, right?”

The others start discussing that, which leaves me out of the conversation, so I pick at my slice of pizza without much interest. Hunger fled at the sight of Alex Braverman. Stomachs are like that—there isn’t room for both swooning-on-the-inside and digesting.

A guy and a girl approach our table. They obviously know each other already, since their arms are entwined.

“Can we sit here?” asks the girl.

Everyone at our table nods frantically, not just to be friendly but also because the two newcomers are like
comically
good-looking. As they sit down and introduce themselves—Isabella Zevallos, Harry Cartwright—the rest of us stare at them unabashedly.

Harry’s got gray-green eyes and thick dark blond hair that he runs his fingers through impatiently whenever it falls forward into his eyes, which it keeps doing, because,
as far as I can tell, it’s been cut to do just that. His features aren’t perfect—his nose is a little crooked, like maybe it’s been broken, and his eyes are almost too far apart and his lips are so full they’re verging on feminine—but somehow it all kind of works together. When our eyes accidentally meet at one point, I quickly glance away, embarrassed to be caught studying him so openly, but then I realize that every other girl at the table is doing the same thing, except for Isabella, who’s watching the rest of us with amusement and leaning her head in toward Harry’s to exchange a whisper.

So they’re definitely a couple.

No wonder: they belong together. Isabella is so beautiful that if she’s even a halfway decent actress, she’ll be a star one day. The girl is gorgeous, but not in the way that the prettiest girl at my high school is gorgeous (long blond hair, long blond legs, long blond personality)—no, Isabella looks more like an adult than a teenager. She has elegantly angular cheekbones and slightly tilted dark eyes that swiftly examine all of us from under a thick fringe of eyelash. Even her hairstyle is grown-up: it’s pinned in a narrow coil at the back of her head. It makes her look like an old-fashioned movie star. She’s wearing a silky white tank top over tight blue jeans, and her bare shoulders are elegantly square above her slender arms.