Flawless (15 page)

“Can you pick up orange juice?” Ella cried, but Byron shut the front door without answering.

A second later, Mike stormed out of the kitchen without putting his plate in the sink. He grabbed his jacket and lacrosse stick and wormed his feet into his sneakers without untying them. “Now, where are
you
going?” Ella asked.

“Practice,” Mike snapped. He had his head way down and was chewing on his lip, like he was trying to keep from crying. Aria wanted to run up to her brother and hug him and try to figure out what to do here, except she felt stuck, as if grouted to the checkerboard ceramic tiles on the kitchen floor.

Mike slammed the door, making the whole house shake. A few seconds of silence passed, then Ella raised her gray eyes to Aria. “Everyone’s leaving us.”

“No, they’re not,” Aria said quickly.

Her mother went back to the table and stared at the remaining chicken on her plate. After a few seconds of pondering, she laid a napkin over it, uneaten, and turned back to Aria. “Has your father seemed strange to you?”

Aria felt her mouth go dry. “About what?”

“I don’t know.” Ella traced her finger around the porcelain dinner plate’s edge. “It seems like something’s bothering him. Maybe it’s about teaching? He seems so busy….”

Aria knew she should say something, but the words felt gummed up in her stomach, like she needed a toilet plunger or a vacuum to suck them out. “He hasn’t said anything about that, no.” It wasn’t exactly a lie.

Ella stared at her. “You’d tell me if he had, right?”

Aria bent her head down, pretending she had something in her eye. “Of course.”

Ella rose and cleared the rest of the stuff off the table. Aria stood there, useless. This was her chance…and she was just standing here. Like a sack of potatoes.

She wandered up to her room and sat down at her desk, not sure what to do with herself. Downstairs, she could hear the beginning strains of
Jeopardy!
. Perhaps she should go back down and hang out with Ella. Except what she really wanted to do was cry.

Her Instant Messenger made the bloopy noise of a new message. Aria went over to it, wondering if maybe it was Sean. But…it wasn’t.

A A A A A A
: Two choices: Make it go away or tell your mom. I’m giving you till the stroke of midnight Saturday night, Cinderella. Or else. —A

A creaking sound made her jump. Aria whirled around and saw that her cat had nosed her bedroom door open. She petted him absentmindedly, reading the IM again. And again. And again.

Or else?
And
make it go away
? How was she supposed to do that?

Her computer made another
bloop
. The IM window flashed.

A A A A A A
: Not sure how? Here’s a hint: Strawberry Ridge Yoga Studio. 7:30 a.m. Tomorrow. Be there.

17

DADDY’S LITTLE GIRL HAS A SECRET

Hanna stood six inches from her bedroom mirror, closely inspecting herself. It must’ve been a freak reflection at the mall—here, she looked normal and thin. Although…were her pores looking a little bigger? Were her eyes slightly crossed?

Nervous, she opened her bureau drawer and pulled out a giant bag of salt-and-pepper kettle chips. She shoved a big handful into her mouth, chewed, then stopped. Last week, A’s notes had led her into the horrible binge/purge cycle all over again—even though she’d refrained from the habit for years. She
wouldn’t
start doing this again. And especially not in front of her father.

She rolled up the bag and looked out the window again. Where
was
he? Nearly two hours had passed since her mom called her at the mall. Then she saw a forest-green Range Rover turn into her driveway, which was a winding, wooded, quarter-mile-long road. The car easily maneuvered around the driveway’s twists and turns in a way that only someone who had lived there could. When Hanna was younger, she and her dad used to sled on the driveway. He taught her how to lean into each turn so she wouldn’t tip.

When the doorbell rang, she jumped. Her miniature pinscher, Dot, started to bark, and the bell rang again. Dot’s barking became more high-pitched and frenzied, and the bell rang for the third time. “Coming!” Hanna growled.

“Hey,” her father said as she flung open the door. Dot began to dance around his heels. “Hello there.” He reached down to pick up the tiny dog.

“Dot, no!” Hanna commanded.

“No, he’s fine.” Mr. Marin petted the miniature pinscher’s little nose. Hanna had gotten Dot shortly after her dad left.

“So.” Her father lingered on the porch awkwardly. He wore a charcoal gray business suit and a red and blue tie, as if he’d just come from a meeting. Hanna wondered if he wanted to come in. She felt funny inviting her dad into his own house. “Should I…?” he started.

“Do you want to…?” Hanna said at the same time. Her father laughed nervously. Hanna wasn’t sure if she wanted to hug him. Her father took a step toward her, and she took a step back, bumping into the door. She tried to make it look like she’d meant to do it. “Just come in,” she said, the annoyance in her voice showing.

They stood in the foyer. Hanna felt her father’s eyes on her. “It’s really nice to see you,” he said.

Hanna shrugged. She wished she had a cigarette or something to do with her hands. “Yeah, well. So do you want the financial thingie? It’s right here.”

He squinted, ignoring her. “I meant to ask you the other day. Your hair. You did something different with it. It’s…Is it shorter?”

She smirked. “It’s
darker
.”

He pointed. “Bingo. And you don’t have your glasses on!”

“I got LASIK.” She stared him down. “Two years ago.”

“Oh.” Her father put his hands in his pockets.

“You make it sound like it’s a bad thing.”

“No,” her father answered quickly. “You just look…different.”

Hanna crossed her arms. When her parents decided to divorce, Hanna thought it was because she got fat. And clumsy. And ugly. Meeting Kate had just felt like more proof. He’d found his replacement daughter, and he’d traded up.

After the Annapolis disaster, her father tried to stay in touch. At first, Hanna complied, having a couple of moody, one-word phone conversations. Mr. Marin tried to tease out what was wrong, but Hanna was too embarrassed to talk about it. Eventually, the length of time between conversations became longer and longer…and then they stopped happening altogether.

Mr. Marin strolled down the foyer, his feet creaking on the wood floor. Hanna wondered if he was assessing what was the same and what had changed. Did he notice the black-and-white photo of Hanna and her dad that hung above the Mission-style hall table had been removed? And that the lithograph of a woman going through the yoga sun salutations—a print Hanna’s father
hated
, but Hanna’s mom loved—hung in its place?

Her dad flopped on the living room couch, even though no one ever used the living room.
He
never used to use the living room. It was dark, way too stuffy, had ugly Oriental rugs, and smelled like Endust. Hanna didn’t know what else to do, so she followed him in and sat down on the claw-foot ottoman in the corner.

“So. How are you doing, Hanna?”

She curled her legs underneath her. “I’m all right.”

“Good.”

Another ocean of silence. She heard Dot’s tiny toenails tick across the kitchen floor, and his little tongue lap up water from his dish. She wished for an interruption—a phone call, the fire alarm going off, even another text from A—anything to take her away from this awkwardness.

“And how are you?” she finally asked.

“Not too bad.” He picked up a tasseled pillow from the couch and held it out at arm’s length. “These things were always so ugly.”

Hanna agreed with him, but what, were the pillows at Isabel’s house
perfect
?

Her father looked up. “Remember that game you used to play? You put the pillows on the floor and jumped from one to the other, because the floor was lava?”

“Dad.” Hanna wrinkled her nose and hugged her knees even tighter.

He squeezed the pillow. “You could play that for hours.”

“I was six.”

“Remember Cornelius Maximilian?”

She looked up. His eyes were twinkling. “Dad…”

He threw the pillow up in the air and caught it. “Should I not talk about him? Has it been too long?”

She stuck her chin stiffly into the air. “Probably.”

Inside, though, she cracked a tiny smile. Cornelius Maximilian was this inside joke they made up after they saw
Gladiator
. It had been a big treat for Hanna to go to a gory, R-rated movie, except she’d been only ten, and all the blood traumatized her. She was positive she wouldn’t be able to sleep that night, so her father made up Cornelius to make her feel better. He was the only dog—a poodle, they thought, although sometimes they changed him to a Boston terrier—mighty enough to fight in the gladiator ring. He beat the tigers, he beat the other scary gladiators. He could do anything, including bring the dead gladiators back to life.

They made up a whole Cornelius character, talking about what he did on his off days, what sorts of studded collars he liked to wear, how he needed a girlfriend. Sometimes, Hanna and her father would reference Cornelius around her mother, and she’d say, “What? Who?” even though they’d explained the joke a thousand times. When Hanna got Dot, she considered naming him Cornelius, but it would’ve been too sad.

Her father sat back on the couch. “I’m sorry that things are like this.”

Hanna pretended to be interested in her French manicure. “Like what?”

“Like…with us.” He cleared his throat. “I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch.”

Hanna rolled her eyes. This was way too after-school special for her. “No biggie.”

Mr. Marin drummed his fingers on the coffee table. It was obvious he was really squirming. Good. “So why’d you steal your boyfriend’s dad’s car, anyway? I asked your mom if she knew, but she didn’t.”

“It’s complicated,” Hanna said quickly. Talk about ironic: when they first divorced, Hanna tried to think of ways she could get her parents to talk again so they’d fall back in love—like Lindsay Lohan’s twin characters did in
The Parent Trap
. Turned out all she’d needed to do was get arrested a few times.

“Come on,” Mr. Marin coaxed. “Did you guys break up? Were you upset?”

“I guess.”

“He ended things?”

Hanna gulped miserably. “How’d you know?”

“If he’s giving you up, maybe he wasn’t worth it.”

Hanna couldn’t believe he just said that. In fact, she didn’t believe it. Maybe she’d misheard. Maybe she’d been listening to her iPod too loud.

“Have you been thinking about Alison?” her father asked.

Hanna looked at her hands. “I guess. Yeah.”

“It’s pretty unbelievable.”

Hanna gulped again. All of a sudden, she felt like she was going to cry. “I know.”

Mr. Marin leaned back. The couch made a strange farting sound. It was something her dad might have commented on years ago, but now he kept quiet. “You know what my favorite memory of Alison is?”

“What?” Hanna asked quietly. She prayed he wasn’t going to say,
That time you girls came to Annapolis and she bonded with Kate.

“It was summer. I guess you guys were going into seventh grade or so. I took you and Alison to Avalon for the day. Do you remember that?”

“Vaguely,” Hanna said. She recalled that she’d eaten too much saltwater taffy, that she looked fat in her bikini and Ali looked perfectly skinny in hers, and that a surfer boy invited Ali to a bonfire party, but she ditched him at the last minute.

“We were sitting on the beach; there were a girl and a boy a few blankets over. You guys knew the girl from school—but she wasn’t anyone you typically hung around with. She had some sort of water bottle contraption strapped to her back that she sucked through with a straw. Ali talked to her brother and ignored her.”

Suddenly, Hanna remembered it perfectly. It was common to run into people from Rosewood at the Jersey Shore—and that girl had actually been
Mona
. The boy was Mona’s cousin. Ali thought he was cute, so she went over to talk to him. Mona seemed ecstatic that Ali was even in her vicinity, but all Ali did was turn to Mona and say, “Hey, my guinea pig drinks water from a bottle like that.”

“
That’s
your favorite memory?” Hanna blurted. She’d blocked it out; she was pretty sure Mona had too.

“I’m not done,” her father said. “Alison walked down to the edge of the beach with the boy, but you stayed behind and talked to the girl, who looked just crushed that Alison had left. I don’t know what you said, but you were nice to her. I was really proud of you.”

Hanna wrinkled her nose. She doubted she was nice—she just probably wasn’t straight-up mean. After The Jenna Thing happened, Hanna didn’t savor teasing quite as much.

“You were always so nice to everyone,” her father said.

“No, I wasn’t,” she said quietly.

She remembered how she used to talk about Jenna:
You wouldn’t believe this girl, Dad,
she said.
She tried out for the same part Ali wants in the musical, and you should’ve heard her sing. She was like a
cow. Or,
Jenna Cavanaugh might’ve gotten every question right on the health test and done twelve pull-ups in gym for the Presidential Fitness test, but she’s
still
a loser.

Her father had always been a good listener, as long as he knew she didn’t say mean things to people’s faces. Which had made what he asked a few days after Jenna’s accident, as they were driving to the store, that much more devastating. He’d turned to her and said, out of no where,
Wait. That girl that was blinded? She’s the one who sings like a cow, right?
He looked as if he’d made the connection. Hanna, too terrified to answer, faked a coughing fit and then changed the subject.