Текст книги "If I Have a Wicked Stepmother, Where's My Prince? "

Автор книги: Melissa Kantor

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Chapter Eight

When I woke up in the morning I felt as good as if I'd won the NBA finals. Not only had I had

the most perfect, amazing, incredible (not to mention only) date of my life, I was actually about to spend the day alone with my dad, something that hadn't happened since we'd lived on a

different coast.

"Lucy, you up?" It was my dad yelling down from the kitchen. I looked at the clock–ten-fifteen.

We were supposed to be on our way to the Guggenheim in thirty minutes.

"I'm up!" I yelled, throwing the covers off myself and leaping out of bed. My dad hates waiting for people.

As I rushed to get ready, I kept the movie of kissing Connor running in my mind. I saw him lean

toward me, perfectly backlit by the streetlight. I felt his hand on my waist, his lips brushing up

against my temple.

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Usually my dad starts pacing around the room like a caged animal, checking his watch and

sighing dramatically as ETD approaches. But this morning when I came upstairs, he was calmly

reading the paper in the living room, and I was the one who was antsy to leave. I couldn't wait to

get in the car and start telling him all about my night.

Well, maybe not all about it.

"Chop-chop, Mister," I said, pointing at my wrist where my watch, if I wore one, would have

been. "You think Patton read the Arts and Leisure section on D-Day?"

My dad looked up. "Well, well, well, aren't we timely," he said. "You look practically ready to walk out the door."

"And you can drop the 'practically.' I'm walkin'." I started toward the door.

"I think Mara's running a little late," my dad said. "We're adjusting ETD by half an hour."

"Mara?" I said it like I'd never heard the name before.

"Don't worry, Sergeant, we'll have her up to our punctuality standards soon," said my dad.

I was glad my back was to him so he couldn't see the expression on my face. I tried to make my

voice neutral. "I just didn't... I mean I didn't realize she was coming," I said. Once I'd managed to work my mouth into some semblance of a smile, I turned around.

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"Sure, she's coming," said my dad. He looked confused. "Why wouldn't she come?"

Well, why would she? "I thought we were, you know, going into the city just the two of us." I tried to remember the actual conversation in which I'd told him about the exhibit. Had he

mentioned Mara's coming? When I said "together" did he think I meant the three of us together?

Now my dad was frowning. He lowered his voice. "Lucy, I think it would really hurt Mara's

feelings if she thought you didn't want her to come with us."

I lowered mine, too. "It's not that I don't want her to come," I began. But then I didn't know how to finish the sentence. Because quite frankly, that's exactly what it was.

"I thought you liked Mara," said my dad. He didn't seem mad anymore, he seemed hurt, like I'd

opened a present he'd been really excited to give me only to see my face fall.

"I do like Mara," I said. "Really." I went over to where he was sitting and dropped to the floor by the side of his chair. He put his hand on my head.

"Honey, we're a family now," he said. "And families do things together."

I was about to say that plenty of the families I know do things separately, but just as I opened my

mouth, Mara came down the stairs.

"Ta-da!" she said, standing in the archway between

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the living room and the foyer. "Only fifteen minutes late. A personal best."

My dad applauded. "And worth every extra second," he said. She came over and kissed the top

of his head, then bent down and kissed the top of mine. My scalp tingled with annoyance where

her lips had touched it.

"Ready?" she asked.

"You betcha," said my dad, standing. He stretched out his hand to help me up from the floor.

"Lucy? You ready?"

I looked up. His face was a mixture of concern and impatience I'd never seen before. "Yeah," I

said, reaching my hand up to take his. "I'm ready."

When we got to the car, I opened the passenger-side door and was about to get in when I saw my

dad looking at me. He frowned and shook his head slightly.

I made a face at him and gestured toward the seat. "Hop in," I said to Mara.

"Now, that's what I call service," she said, slipping into the car. I shut the door and opened the one behind it, sliding across the backseat to sit in the middle. I caught my dad's eye as he looked

into the rearview mirror before backing up.

"You okay back there?" he asked.

But it was more of a statement than a question, so I gave the answer I knew he wanted. "Sure," I said. "Just great."

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"That's what we like to hear," he said, putting the car in reverse.

It certainly is, I thought. It certainly is.

"Thanks to Lucy, we're seeing one of the hottest art shows in New York," my dad said, reaching

across the gearshift and taking Mara's hand. There was no traffic on the parkway, and he was

driving about a thousand miles an hour. "Clemente's huge right now." Lying across the backseat,

I rolled my eyes at the roof of the car.

Mara turned around and smiled at me. "How did you hear about the show?"

I knew she was only talking to me because my dad was there, so I kept my answer as brief as

possible. "From my art teacher."

Mara was still turned around facing me. "It must be nice for you to have a teacher you respect so

much for art class," said Mara.

"Yeah? Why's that?"

Mara's always going on about how important it is that girls have good teachers for math and

science because once they hit high school, they apparently start flunking those subjects. It's

pretty funny to hear her go off on her feminist tirades, considering she's spent her entire adult life

being supported by not just one but two husbands. I think my stepmother's idea of equal

opportunity is women taking every chance they can to charge something to a man's credit card.

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She dropped my dad's hand, reached behind her, and patted my thigh before turning to face

forward again. "Well, I guess I was thinking how important Ms. Daniels must be since your mom

was an artist," she said.

Mara's totally convinced I never talk about my mom because of how traumatized I was by her

death. It's one of the many brilliant theories of human behavior she's concocted from the library

of self-help books she accumulated during her years as a divorcee. I sat up and tried to get my

dad to make eye contact with me by staring in the rearview mirror, but in spite of its being an

overcast day, he had put on his Terminator sunglasses, and I couldn't find his eyes.

"She's okay," I said, and I lay back down again.

The Guggenheim Museum is at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Eighty-Ninth Street, directly

across from Central Park. Frank Lloyd Wright designed the strange and beautiful building–a

stack of white circles that expands from the bottom up. Today the museum was packed with

tourists, most of whom looked like they'd just stepped off a cruise ship and couldn't wait to

reboard. As we stood reading the exhibit's introductory panel, Mara, who was leaning up against

my dad, whispered something in his ear, and he laughed and wrapped the arm that wasn't around

her waist across her chest.

Was this what he meant by families doing things together?

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"Hey, Dad, check it out," I said, "wouldn't that be a great name for a band–Prodigious Oeuvre?"

I pointed at the phrase on the panel.

My dad had been whispering something into Mara's ear when I started talking, and now they

both looked at me, like they'd forgotten I was even there.

"What'd you say, honey?" he asked.

Just as I was about to repeat myself, my dad tickled Mara, who let out a yelp and said, "Doug!"

God, compared to the two of them, Madison and Matt actually had a sense of decorum.

"I said I think I'm going to go on ahead," I said.

"How come?" Mara had her fingers intertwined with my dad's. Her cheeks were flushed.

"I kind of have to look at some things for class."

"You mean like an assignment?" asked my dad. He ran a hand through Mara's hair, letting the

fingers rest at the nape of her neck. I thought of last night and Connor holding my neck.

Everything had officially gotten just a little too weird.

"Yeah, exactly," I lied. "Like an assignment."

"Well, okay," he said. "I guess we'll find each other at the end."

I was already stepping back, letting myself get lost in the crowd. "Great," I said, nodding

enthusiastically. "I'll see you at the end."

I made my way past decades of Clemente's work,

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too mad to see any of the brightly colored canvases surrounding me. If all he was going to do

was nuzzle Mara, why had my dad even bothered to come? Had he actually wanted to ruin my

day? That was a plausible theory, except that in order to plan on ruining my day, my dad would

have actually had to think about me, something he clearly never did anymore.

And then, suddenly, just as I was considering storming out onto Fifth Avenue and putting Mara,

my dad, and the museum behind me, I was stopped in my tracks by a painting that took up

almost an entire wall: a crazed face of red and green and yellow. The mouth was open in a

grimace, and each tooth was a skull. The tongue was an impossibly pale, delicate pink. Sitting on

the razor's edge of the beautiful and the grotesque, it was unlike any work of art I'd ever seen.

I don't know how long I'd been standing there, gaping, when I noticed the guy who kept looking

back and forth from the painting to me. I stood up a little straighter before I realized it was just

Sam Wolff from my art class. Sam's got black, curly hair, and when he's painting or drawing, he

pulls on it, so usually when I see him his hair's standing more or less straight up from his head.

But I guess when he hasn't been doing that, it lies a lot flatter, which would explain my failure to

recognize him at first.

"Hey," he said, turning to face me. "You're in my art class." He didn't smile.

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"Oh, right," I said. "I was trying to figure out where I know you from. What are you doing here?"

I wondered if Ms. Daniels had told him to come to the museum, too. On the one hand, I liked the

idea that I was the only student she'd told about the exhibit. On the other, if she was going to

lump me with another one of her students, Sam Wolff wasn't exactly shabby artistic company.

"What am I doing here?" asked Sam. He looked around at the paintings and then back at me.

"I'm shopping for a sofa bed."

I couldn't tell if he was laughing with me or at me. "Funny," I said.

When he didn't say anything, I should probably have taken his silence as a subtle sign that he

was not interested in pursuing a conversation, yet I plunged on. "So, do you like the exhibit?" I asked.

He'd gone back to looking at the painting. "What?" he asked distractedly.

"Do you like the exhibit?" My question, which hadn't exactly been brilliant the first time around, sounded utterly inane the second.

"Do I like it?" Sam repeated my question slowly, rolling the syllables around in his mouth either because he wasn't sure how to answer it or because he felt he was tasting a new and particularly

impressive flavor of idiocy.

"Yes," I repeated in a snotty voice. "Do you like it?"

Why was I being so rude? After all, he'd just repeated my question. Lots of people did that and I

didn't snap at

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them. But there was something about the way he was standing there, silently, like he was all

alone with the painting, like I wasn't even there, that was driving me crazy.

Then again that was kind of how I'd been standing there a minute ago.

Sam finally looked at me. "Yes," he said. "I like it."

"Oh," I said, unprepared for such a civil response. "Well, I like it, too."

Sam ran his hand through his hair. With his curls once again veering straight up to the ceiling, he

looked more like the guy in my art class than he had a minute ago.

"That's ... great," he said. "Yeah," I said. "Great."

He glanced down at his watch. "Well, I gotta go," he said. "I'm meeting someone downtown."

"Oh, yeah, of course," I said. I looked at my watch-less wrist. "I should get going soon, too."

"Okay. Well, bye," he said, turning to go.

"Yeah, okay. Bye." I watched him disappear into the crowd.

I wandered into a little room off the main exhibition space. In the past, whenever my dad and I

went to a museum, we played this game where we each had to pick which painting we'd want if

we could have only one. I tried to play the game by myself, walking slowly through the room

and pausing before each piece as I imagined

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owning it. The stuff here was completely different from the painting I'd just been looking at;

everything in this room was either a page from a tiny illuminated manuscript or an equally

intricate pencil drawing. I imagined hanging first one piece and then another in my room. But it

wasn't any fun without having someone to show what I'd picked, so finally I quit trying and

headed back down to the lobby. I ended up wandering into the gift shop, where my dad and Mara

were comparing napkin rings. I watched them for a minute, laughing and talking together, before

I called out to my dad. He looked up, but he didn't seem especially glad to see me or anything.

The whole ride back in the car, I tried to figure out what was wrong with me. How can you be

Cinderella after she meets the prince and still feel so incredibly sad?

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Chapter Nine

The first thing I did when the bus pulled up to school on Monday morning was check to see if

Connor's SUV was in the senior parking lot. Which it was. I'll say this for the car-dependent

suburbs–it's much easier to track a crush here than in a major metropolitan area like San

Francisco.

On the way to chemistry, my last class before lunch, I still hadn't seen Madison, Jessica, or

Connor, but I was starting to get a really weird feeling. Everywhere I went small groups of

people were whispering to each other. At first I wondered if some scandal had taken place over

the weekend, like back in November when two kids got expelled for selling Ecstasy. On my way

from chemistry to the cafeteria, though, I started to sense the buzz was more localized,

something that followed me around. Two conversations ended just as I walked by and started

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up again as soon as I was out of earshot. I thought I was being paranoid, but then I passed a

group of senior girls I didn't know talking by their lockers. As soon as I was within hearing

distance they stopped talking and watched me. Then, as I walked by, they said, "Hey," even

though I'd never spoken a word to any of them.

"Hey," I said back, thinking, What's the deal?

Suddenly I started to get a bad feeling in my stomach. What if Connor had told Dave or Matt

about how we'd made out in the car, only he'd turned it into some kind of joke. Yeah, man, she

was so into me. She practically lost her friggin' mind when I kissed her. I remembered how I'd

been so disoriented I'd tried to get out of the car without taking off my seat belt. Could that be

what everyone was whispering about? Remembering all the movies I'd ever seen where the cute,

popular guy asks out the ugly, unpopular girl on a dare, I walked faster, not meeting the eyes of

anyone I passed.

The cafeteria was crowded, but instead of taking my sandwich and heading for the exit and the

studio, I found myself walking toward the table where Madison and Jessica and I had sat on

Friday. As I got closer, I could see Jessica sitting there alone, but just as I was about to wave, I

stopped myself. What if she and Madison had concocted this whole setup with Connor in order

to humiliate me? Why had I been so quick to dismiss Madison as too stupid to come up with a

complex practical joke? This was what happened

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when you underestimated people–they destroyed you.

I decided I'd slow down as I approached Jessica's table but wouldn't stop. That way if she didn't

ask me to sit with her, I could pretend I was just passing by on my way to join all of my other

friends. When I was two tables away, I cut my speed in half, and by the time I was one table

from Jessica's, a paralytic snail could have overtaken me. Just as I was about to start walking in

place, Jessica looked up, saw me, and squawked with delight.

"Oh my god," she said, running over and giving me a hug. "Can I just say," she walked me back to the table and pulled me down next to her, "that you two are adorable together?"

"You really think so?" I felt the urge to administer a polygraph test right there on the spot.

"Oh my god, are you kidding? I wish you could have seen yourselves. It's all we talked about all

weekend. We wanted to call you, but we don't know your cell. So we just kept going, 'Don't they

make the cutest couple?'"

I didn't know what to say. I'd never been part of a cute couple before.

"Hel– lo!" Madison called, walking toward us. She collapsed into the chair opposite Jessica's with her enormous backpack on her lap. "Please tell me one of you knows something about imagery

in The Great Gatsby."

"We read that first semester. It's all about the green

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light," said Jessica. "Just keep talking green light."

"For five typed pages}"" Madison shook her head and changed the subject. "But enough about me. How are you guys?"

My spokesperson responded with alacrity. "How do you think she is?" She put her arm around my shoulders and gave me a hug. "She's only, like, Connor Pearson's girlfriend."

"I know!" Madison practically shouted. She pushed her backpack to the floor and leaned toward

me. "He's totally into you. He told Matt he thought you were really smart." She paused and

smiled at me. "And really sexy. He said he's going to ask you to come to the game on Friday."

She took my hand in hers and then reached out for Jessica's, too. "How incredibly cool is this?"

"Okay, tell us everything," said Jessica. She was smiling and squeezing my hand tightly.

"When was the last time anyone had wanted me to tell her anything, much less everything? Their curiosity was the warmth of the sun after a swim in the frigid ocean.

"Is he a good kisser?" asked Madison.

"Yeah," I admitted. "He's a good kisser."

Jessica and Madison each gave my hand a squeeze. "We knew it!" Madison said.

"So, wait," said Jessica. "How good?"

I couldn't help smiling at the memory of kissing Connor.

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"Oooh, she's smiling," said Madison.

I took my hands back and dropped my face into them. "Stop," I said through my fingers. "You're embarrassing me."

"Okay, we'll stop," said Jessica. But when I looked up she and Madison were still staring and

smiling at me.

"You are, like, so cool," Jessica announced, and Madison nodded as if Jessica had just recited a holy truth.

Looking at their awestruck faces, I could literally see the power of Connor's touch. With his kiss,

the prince had turned this unlovable stepdaughter into a popular girl.

I didn't run into Connor until after sixth period, when we were coming toward each other from

opposite ends of the hallway. I saw him before he saw me, and watching him from a distance, I

remembered all the times I'd passed him in the hall before today, totally aware of who he was

while he didn't even know I existed. Then he spotted me, and suddenly he was smiling from ear

to ear, like seeing me was the greatest thing that had happened to him all day.

Was he really my boyfriend now? It didn't seem possible.

"Hey, Red," he called, slowing down. He was wearing a soft-looking green sweater with his

basketball jacket over it. The hall swarmed with people going to class, and

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out of the corner of my eye, I noticed some of them checking us out.

"Hey, Connor," I said. A girl I didn't know walked by and said, "Hi, Connor," and he waved in her direction without looking up.

"So you're coming to the game Friday, right?"

"Right," I said. Thinking about the game and then going out with him after made me feel all

tingly, and I shivered a little.

"Are you cold?" he asked.

"Oh, no, I'm just–"

But he was already slipping his jacket off and draping it over my shoulders. It was heavy and

smelled of whatever delicious soap or cologne or shampoo Connor used.

"Hey, you look pretty good in that," he said, admiring me. "Why don't you keep it for a while?"

He took my hand for a second.

"Yeah, sure," I said. "I'll keep it for a while." I felt faint. I actually felt faint. And I knew that if I fainted, Connor would pick me up in his arms and carry me to the nurse's office, and the image

of him doing that only made me feel fainter. Luckily, just then the warning bell sounded. "Gotta

go," he said. "Higby'll go nuts if I'm late." And he turned and was swallowed up by the crowd.

By the time I got to English, my last class of the day, I must have said hi to at least fifty people.

Maybe a

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hundred and fifty. It was like I was a celebrity or something. As I walked into the empty

classroom, I realized it was the first time I'd been alone since lunch. I sat down in my usual seat,

opened my notebook to a blank page, and started doodling, glad to have the quiet room to

myself. My solitude, however, was to be short lived. A minute later Rachel Smith came into the

room and rushed over to where I was sitting, pulling out the chair of the desk next to mine.

As she sat down, she blew a massive bubble in my direction. "I saw you at Piazzolla's Friday,"

she said.

"Oh, yeah," I said. "I had dinner there." Was that what we'd done at Piazzolla's? I couldn't actually remember eating a thing.

"Want some gum?" she held out a pack in my direction. Through the wrapping I got a whiff of

something very strawberry.

"No thanks," I said.

She put the gum back in her bag. "I waved as you were leaving, but I guess you didn't see me."

She'd waved at me? "I guess not," I said. "Sorry." Just then Bethany Miller came in and made a beeline for the empty desk on my other side.

"Hey," said Bethany. She was wearing a miniskirt that would have been too small on a house cat.

When she took off her jacket, her boobs practically fell out of her low-cut shirt and onto her

desk. She gave me an enormous smile.

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"Hey," I said. Rachel and Bethany, who were best friends, usually sat right next to each other so they could pass notes from the second class started to the second it ended. Once, in September, I

made the mistake of sitting at the empty desk next to Bethany's, and she asked me to move.

Actually, she didn't ask me to move, she told me to move. What she said was, "You're sitting in my friend's seat."

"You and Connor Pearson are the cutest couple," Bethany squealed. "You guys looked so good together Friday." She squeezed my shoulder when she said "Friday." Then she dropped her hand onto my desk.

"Um, thanks."

'"Cause you're both, like, tall and thin and stuff. You look like two models."

"Thanks," I said again. If there's one thing I know I don't look like, it's a model. I looked down at my doodle as the rest of the class started filing in. A few people smiled at me or said hey.

"Oooh, that's cool," said Rachel, looking at my notebook. "It really looks like a glass of water."

Bethany looked down to admire my drawing, too. "Totally. Are you, like, a really good artist?

Because that's really good." She nodded enthusiastically, then repeated. "Really."

"Oh, I'm not–" I started to say, but just then Miss Merriam walked in.

"Let's settle down, class," she said.

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Rachel reached over and tapped my shoulder. Then she mouthed, "Call me."

I nodded, too surprised to mention I didn't have her number.

I may have become royalty at school, but my elevated status didn't have any effect on my home

life, where I remained invisible as ever. At dinner Mara and her daughters talked exclusively

about the shopping spree they'd gone on after school (without me, naturally). Princess One

couldn't decide if she should have gotten a sweater in green, like Princess Two had, or if she was

right to have gotten it in blue, like Mara had. Mara promised they could go back to the mall on

Friday and Princess One could get the green sweater, too.

While Princess Two complained about how unfair that was, Mara listened intently, taking tiny

bites of her food and following each with a sip of water.

"Oh, girls, I almost forgot," she said after assuring Princess Two she could get another sweater also. "Your father called and said you need to bring something nice to wear this weekend

because they're having people for dinner on Saturday night."

"I hate when they have company," whined Princess One, clacking her fork against her plate for emphasis.

"It's so unfair," said Princess Two. "We have to sit there and not say anything and everyone ignores us."

"I'm going to speak to Diana about that," said

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Mara. "The two of you are a lovely addition to any dinner party. She should be more gracious."

The Princesses hate their stepmother Diana with a passion, and I got the sense the feeling was

mutual. I'd met Diana a couple of times when she and the Princesses' dad dropped them off or

picked them up, and I always tried to use ESP to let her know I shared her feelings and supported

her one hundred percent.

"I'm sorry, sweetheart," said Mara. I swear, she was practically tearing up. It was all I could do not to puke up my risotto.

"You don't understand," said Princess Two. Then she slumped down in her seat like going to her

father's was the equivalent of going to the electric chair. "You don't know what it's like to live

with Diana."

I wanted to point out that actually she doesn't know what it's like to live with Diana considering she "lives" with her about four days out of every thirty. Then I wanted to point out that I'm the one who lives with her horrible stepmother three hundred and sixty-five days a year, and that if I

only had to do it two weekends a month, I'd consider myself lucky.

I finished my risotto and spooned some more onto my plate. Mara watched what I was doing

with her eyebrows raised. "Lucy, you don't need to gobble your food. It's not going anywhere."

"Sorry."

"If you eat too fast, your brain can't register that

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your stomach is full. That's why you should take tiny bites and wash each one down with a sip of

water."

Just as I was about to tell Mara what she could do with her water, the phone rang. I looked at my

watch. Eight o'clock. The only hope I had of getting even a second alone on the phone with my

dad was if I moved faster than Mara. "I'll get it," I said. I raced into the kitchen with my plate and grabbed the phone.

"Hey, Dad," I said, still holding my plate.

"Hey, Goose," he said. "How's it going?"

"Okay," I said. I wanted to tell him just how okay things really were, since usually my okay was a total lie, but there was no time for that. Through the open door, I saw Mara stand and make her

way toward the phone in the den.

"Are you going to watch any of the Knicks game?" he asked. The other line rang, and I heard

Mara pick up. I hoped it was one of her friends calling about a new home-decorating scheme,

something guaranteed to keep my stepmother occupied for hours.

"Maybe," I said. "Probably just the fourth quarter, though." I rinsed my plate off and slipped it into the dishwasher. The thing about a Knicks game is you know how it's going to end–defeat.

Still, every once in a while they can surprise you.

There was a click. "Lucy?" God, couldn't she leave us alone for two minutes?

"Yeah?"

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"Phone's for you."

"For me?" I couldn't imagine who it would be. Neither Jessica nor Madison had said anything

about calling me later.

"Bye," said my dad.

"Bye, Dad," I said. I heard him say "Hello, darling," before I had a chance to hang up.

I pushed the button for our second line. "Hello?"

"Hey, Red."

My heart started pounding. I squeezed my hand into a fist and pressed it against my scalp,

hoping the pressure would somehow keep me from floating into outer space. "Hey," I said.

"How's it going?"

"Okay," I said. "How's it going with you?"

"Not too bad," he said. There was a pause. This was definitely not good. It's one thing to have a long silence when you're walking next to someone and he's massaging your neck. It's another to

be on the phone with that someone and have nothing to say.

I wracked my brain for a conversation starter. "You watching the game?" I asked finally.

"You know it. In fact, you hear that?" I could hear something in the background, but I couldn't

tell what it was. Luckily, Connor answered his own question. "That's Madison Square Garden in

surround sound."

"Not too shabby," I said. "But won't those great acoustics make it all the more depressing when they lose?"

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"Ouch, woman. You're harsh." I could tell from his voice that he was smiling, and I smiled, too. I slid down the wall until I was sitting on the floor.

"Well, if the shoe fits," I said.

"Listen, you," he said. "Just because you're cute, don't think you can get away with dissing the home team."

Connor Pearson had just told me I was cute. I bit down on the telephone cord to keep from

screaming.

In the background, I heard the announcer say something.

"All right, I'm gonna go watch, Red. I'll call you at half time, okay?"

"Okay," I said. Connor hung up, but I waited a minute before standing and putting the receiver

back in the cradle. I could see from the light that Mara and my dad were still talking on line one.

Normally I might have gotten annoyed, but tonight I didn't care. Let them talk until dawn if they

wanted.

I had a game to watch.

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