I quickly thought about whether or not it would be rude to ask who else was going to be there. I figured it would. “Sure,” I conceded, “I mean, yeah, that sounds fun.”
“
Great! So I’ll see you around eight?”
“
Okay.”
“
Great!” You said that, “Bye!”
“
Hasta.”
I flopped back on my bed, annoyed by life in general and by Toby Fanning specifically. The thing is, Toby had been crushing on me for the past six months, ever since we’d ended up together in Mr. Miller’s sixth period art class. Toby was into art, but I was there by default. My guidance counselor, Mr. Truman, had said that NYU was looking for well rounded students
and
furthermore
Survey of Arts was the only class that would fit into my schedule if I wanted to take both Calculus and Latin 3. So I’d found myself rubbing elbows with a mixture of loaded burnouts and drama girls with China bangs. Oh, and Toby, who was neither.
Toby and I had been friendly acquaintances since middle school, but thanks to the art class and the fact Hannah had hooked up with his bestie, Sam Arns, I had suddenly found Toby glued to my side like a superfluous appendage. Note, my use of SAT words, thank you very much. In any event, I had been dodging his advances for months. And now, I was facing a night with me in a bathing suit and Toby’s leering eyes. So gross.
I reached for the phone, first to call Hannah for moral support, then realizing it would be the middle of the night in Scotland, to call Toby back with some justification for flaking. I could tell him that I had suddenly come down a case of Swine flu, or that my parents said I had to stay in. Both sounded like lame excuses. People don’t generally become ill within a five minute period, and my parents never said no to anything, they’d given up on that when my older sister was in high school. I decided to go where no girl had gone before, and give good old Toby a chance. I mean, seriously, what else did I have to do?
2
About an hour north of San Francisco, past countless pastures of grazing cattle and several outlet malls is the small city where I live, Santa Juanita. It’s nestled between two unassuming mountain ranges which work to trap in both the insufferable heat of the summer, and the bitter cold of the winter. Santa Juanita was a quiet town for most of its history, its population hovering around twenty-five thousand. Then there was the advent of suburbia, and like an overstuffed burrito, the town burst wide open. In a matter of a few years the number of people moving to town doubled, and then doubled again. Real estate investors swooped in and housing developments filled with
custom-tract
homes were erected. Hannah and I, and basically everyone I knew, lived in one of the neighborhoods of suburban sprawl, called Sun Valley.
My house was on Violet Way; Hannah’s was on Marigold Road. The developer who built our particular subdivision thought it would be cute to name all the streets after flowers. There was also Dahlia Street, Rose Avenue, and Pansy Place. I thought he was really pushing his luck with Chrysanthemum Court; imagine writing that every day for the rest of your life. The streets were all deep black with bright white and yellow marks, indicative of recent repaving. On either side of the obscenely wide lanes were clean sidewalks that were very rarely utilized by pedestrians. Santa Juanita was a driving town, sidewalks were reserved for little girls on pink ten speeds and soccer mom’s walking their rat terriers.
Toby lived about two minutes from me on Honeysuckle Lane. I left my house at eight fifteen, figuring I’d attempt fashionably late this time rather than my customary on-the-dot punctuality. When I pulled up to Toby’s sprawling ranch style house, my eyes searched the long driveway for cars that I recognized. I groaned as it became apparent I was either the first to arrive, or the only one invited. I quickly popped my 1994 maroon Volvo into reverse and headed for 7-Eleven. If I was going to be stuck alone with Toby Fanning for the next several hours, caffeine would be essential for my survival. And what better way to get my fix than with a two liter Double Big Gulp of Dr. Pepper. I reasoned that the detour would also delay my arrival by at least twenty minutes, which was an obvious bonus.
Everyone who breaths oxygen and concurrently attends Montecito High School spends time loitering at the 7-Eleven in Sun Valley. Some people, and I am not even kind of joking here, actually call it
Club Sevi
. For the record, I am not one of those people. I sat in my car for at least five solid minutes mentally preparing to walk through the crowd of curly haired lipstick chicks and intoxicated football heads that were stationed in a pack by the entrance.
Had Hannah’s dad not decided to uproot his entire family and force his daughter, my partner in crime, to move six thousand miles away to a dark and dreary country, I wouldn’t have been alone that night, practically stalking a minimart. In fact, I would not have been watching through the store’s huge windows as Darrell Carpenter, pervert extraordinaire, shoved a four pack of strawberry flavored wine coolers into his backpack. But I was there, taking a deep breath, climbing out of my car, slamming the heavy door shut, and pushing my way through the double doors of the convenience store.
I went directly to the beverage bar and grabbed the super enormous, colossally big, altogether gluttonous Double Big Gulp cup in my two hands and began to fill it with the brown syrupy liquid that had been my savior time and time again. From my periphery I could see Darrell moving towards me, with his clearly rehearsed swagger. Normally I would have groaned inwardly, but that night, I went with all out with an audible,
Oh my God, do I really have to deal with you?
sigh.
“
Chelsea,” Darrell cooed as he reached my side, “I want to kill myself knowing that my fantasy of a Hannah Larson, Chelsea Mallory sandwich will never come true.”
“
Yeah, that’s really a loss. You know it’s always been my dream to be with a guy whose penis is the size and shape of a fingerling potato,” I scowled at him.
“
Dude Chelsea, what do you even know about dicks?” he scoffed.
“
I know I’m looking at one,” I spat back at him, nearly overfilling my cup with soda.
He laughed, “You are so screwed next year with Hannah gone. You are more than a nobody now.”
“
Sorry if I’m infringing upon your territory, Darrell,” I said snapping the lid on my soda.
The thing that made me mad, that really pissed me off, was that Darrell, with all of two gleaming brain cells, got right to the heart of the issue. A guy, whose claim to fame was that he could inhale spaghetti through his nostrils, saw that I was a nonentity without Hannah. She had been my backbone. Without her, I was a spineless piece of nothing, just biding my time until college. If Darrell saw that, then surely everyone at Montecito would.
My anger at Darrell was bubbling hot inside me as I walked purposefully to the cash register and placed my dollar ninety-five on the counter, “You see that guy over there?” I asked the clerk, motioning my head toward Darrell, “The super grimy one who looks like he’s washed his hair with canola oil?”
The clerk nodded, and pushed a strand of his own rather greasy hair behind his ear, “Yeah?”
“
He’s got a pack of your wine coolers in his backpack,” I informed him.
“
Thanks,” the clerk mumbled as he moved around the counter, and headed for Darrell.
It was at that precise moment, as I turned my head to watch the ensuing confrontation, that I first saw a set of eyes which would ultimately change the course of my life. You know how in movies, when something really important happens, everything freezes except for the main characters? Well that is exactly how it was when I first saw him. There he was, not ten feet from me, in line at the next register. He looked right at me with a tiny smile at the corner of his lips. My eyes met his, deep and dark blue, piercing, like they could see into me. I quickly turned away. It was like being punched in the stomach. I literally gasped. I tried to concentrate on putting my change into my wallet, but my heart was pounding so determinedly in my chest, I was unable to focus. Get a grip, Chelsea
,
I thought, it’s not like you’ve never seen a hot guy before. But I hadn’t, not like him anyway.
Then I heard him laugh as he walked past me toward the door, holding a six pack of beer in one hand. His eyes landed on my face and for the briefest of moments, I froze. He smiled as if we were sharing our own personal joke, and nodded his head slightly as he walked out of the store. “Oh my god,” I said, sticking my straw into my mouth and gulping up a swig of Dr. Pepper.
I hurried to the parking lot, my jumbo soda held securely in my two hands, just in time to see
Mr. I Am the Hottest Thing to Walk the Face of the Planet
climb into the driver’s seat of a navy blue BMW SUV. His car pulled swiftly onto Gladiola Lane, and just as it passed, I caught a glimpse of who was riding shot gun, Bryce Fanning, Toby’s step brother.
Okay, so I shouldn’t blame my heart for doing its job, but I found it rather annoying the way it was beating like a friggin’ race horse on steroids inside my chest cavity. For one thing, how lame is it to get that excited over a boy, right? And secondly, it’s glaringly obvious that said boy was so beyond my league, it was like Ugly Betty getting excited over Zac Efron. But nonetheless, there was now the distinct possibility that
Drop Dead Gorgeous Guy
was going to be at Toby’s pool party. My pulse was racing at double speed as I drove toward Toby’s house for the second time that night.
I was relieved and admittedly disappointed when a certain SUV was not parked in the Fanning’s driveway. I climbed out of my car, pulled my backpack over my shoulders and headed toward the door. It dawned on me that this was the first social function I had attended without Hannah in as long as I could remember. Knocking on Toby’s enormous front door would be so much easier with her by my side. Damn her father, damn Scotland, in fact damn the entire British Empire.
Toby and Bryce lived in one of, if not the biggest homes in Sun Valley. It was one story, but exceptionally long. Its shape was something like a boomerang, with the wide angle looking out at a view of the valley for which our neighborhood was named. To the left of the house was a sports court, and beside that was a separate garage which stored Bryce’s father’s collection of Porsches.
Bryce’s father was a lawyer, a successful one I surmised. He had married Toby’s mom when we were in middle school, thereby creating our school’s version of the Brady Bunch. Bryce and Toby each had sisters who were two years younger, Sophie and Shawn. They’d all played on soccer teams together and were good friends when their parents married. We’d been invited to the wedding, where Hannah and I had spent most of the night taking random pictures of Hannah’s plastic lobster, Seymour, and laughing uncontrollably.
I rang the doorbell which chimed enthusiastically. Toby swung the door open, an eager smile pasted on his face, and I was inside before the doorbell was done with its recital of Pachelbel’s Canon.
“
Hi! You’re here!”
“Yup,” I responded to his obvious statement, my soda’s straw still shoved in the corner of my mouth.
“Come into my room, I was just picking out some CDs for the pool,” I followed him down a long, long hallway noticing the school pictures of each of the four kids progressing from kindergarten to high school. “We just put in a really killer sound system out by the pool,” he continued jabbering.
I tuned out his words as we entered his room. I began looking casually at the pictures on his desk, my eyes immediately finding what they were looking for. In a simple silver frame was a picture of
So Cute it Should Be Illegal
with Toby and some other boys I didn’t recognize. They were standing by a lake; several of them holding dead looking fish. The photo was small, but
Mystery Boy’s
deep blue eyes stood out like they’d been
BeDazzled
. I moved the frame closer to my face to get a better look. He had short black hair that appeared to have been dyed. It was spiky in that way that looks perfectly imperfect. He was wearing a white t-shirt and black board shorts. His legs looked muscular as did his arms. I could feel myself breathing a little faster, oddly fascinated by his image. Toby paused in his monologue and I realized that he’d asked me a question.
“What?” I asked.
“Music? What do you like?” he seemed annoyed having realized I wasn’t listening to him.
“Oh. I don’t care. Whatever.” Toby turned back to his CD rack. “Where was this picture taken?” I asked trying to sound nonchalant.
Toby moved in, positioning himself behind me, looking over my shoulder and pressing his body against my back, “Oh, yeah. That’s at Blue Lake. Check out the fish I caught!”
“Mmm, hmm,” I replied not moving my eyes, “Who are these guys you’re with?” Casual, casual
.
“A bunch of friends I have over at St. Jacobs.” Well, that explains the BMW, I thought. St. Jacobs is the private Catholic school where all the rich kids go so that they can do drugs and get into Ivy League colleges. Toby’s hand reached around me to point to the figure I was scrutinizing, “That’s my best friend, Levi.”
“
As in the jeans?”