Julianne zipped up her hoodie and leapt out of the bathtub in one motion.
“Chloe?! What are you doing here?” She was pretty sure her heart was beating louder than Randy’s hammer upstairs. This was actually what it felt like the second before the whole world ended. Oh. My. God.
“Well, I’m not making out with my archenemy in a bathtub.” Chloe was oddly matter-of-fact as she said it.
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All of the color had drained from her face and her hazel eyes looked like dull coins. “The living room flooded.
Badly. Dad’s in New York and I need your help. I can’t do it by myself.”
Julianne looked at her robot sister and nodded dumbly. “Sure.” She heard the word hanging in the air before she realized that she had said it.
Chloe looked from Julianne to Remi and back again.
Then she stormed out, her hot pink galoshes squealing through the basement. Julianne began to run after her, then stopped mid-stride and turned to Remi. His eyes widened, and he started to reach a hand out to her. “I can’t see you again,” she heard herself say blankly before chasing Chloe out to the car.
For most of the ride home the sisters sat in tense, awkward silence. Finally, Julianne couldn’t take it anymore.
“Chloe, I’m so, so sor—” but Chloe dismissed her apol-ogy with a wave of her hand, restoring silence to the car.
Julianne had never seen her sister like this before. She was terrified and completely overwhelmed with guilt.
Then it was like someone flipped Chloe’s on switch.
All of the color came rushing back into her face, along with a lot of extra red. She went ballistic.
“I can’t believe you!” she bellowed at Julianne, before rapidly changing her mind and switching tactics. “No, I can’t believe him! ” She ran her hands through her hair like she was on the verge of ripping it out in clumps. She 188
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flailed, and if she hadn’t been piloting a small car down a flooded highway, she probably would have started pacing. “It’s not enough that he knocks me over at the first party of the summer,” she continued. “It’s not enough that he and his yuppie, tacky-ass parents move in and build the largest, ugliest house in the history of the universe. It’s not enough that they’re trying to kick my family out of the home we’ve owned since before I was born to make more room for their McMansion, but now he goes and screws around with my baby sister?! Is he evil? Is that his deal? Is he actually a malicious person who gets his kicks out of harming others?”
If Julianne hadn’t been scared for her life, she would have made Chloe rewind all the way to “tacky-ass.” In any other situation it would have been hysterical that the phrase had even crossed her sister’s well-glossed lips.
But she was scared for her life, so she just sat there, glued to the gray upholstery, stupefied as Chloe turned her rage away from Remi and back in Jules’s direction. “And you!” she shrieked at her. “I don’t think I can ever forgive you! How could you? How dare you? Julianne, if I can’t trust my own sister, who can I trust? The Moores are trying to take our house away—they are actively trying to make us homeless so they can install a freakin’ sauna—
and you’re practically sleeping with their son? At work?
Jules, who are you? You’ve totally betrayed our family.
What would Mom think of this?”
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Julianne sat there silently, almost numb, staring out the rain-streaked windshield with tears streaming down her face. She couldn’t think of anything to say in her own defense. Maybe Chloe was right. Maybe she was a traitor.
She tried to quell the torrent of words spilling out of Chloe’s mouth. “Chloe, I never meant . . . Remi’s really—” she began.
Chloe cut her off before Julianne could figure out where her own thoughts were going. “Remi?!” she barked. “You trust him over me? Over Dad? Over every single solid thing we’ve seen happen this summer? Grow up, Jules—he’s probably using you to find out how much it would take for us to just sell outright to his parents!
He’s probably a spy!”
It had never occurred to Julianne in all of her imaginary spy scenarios that she could be double-crossed. She felt cold all over. Remi was just using her. He had been spying on her for his father all along. Of course! How could she have been so stupid? Remi idolized his father.
He was using Julianne to help his father make his architectural dreams come true. Jules forgot everything she had felt in that stupid bathtub, for the past month, and even the first time she had seen Remi at the bonfire party. It was like the anger accompanying Chloe’s words automat-ically made them true. Julianne couldn’t move. She sat in the passenger seat, tears silently staining her face until her dark curls hung limply against her cheekbones.
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“I can’t believe you would compromise our position like this!” Chloe continued. “Did you know that we might have to sell the house? Did you even realize that?
I can’t believe you would do this to us! As soon as Dad gets back to LA, you need to tell him about this, Julianne. If you don’t, I will.” Julianne couldn’t argue. She spent the rest of the car ride in the same stunned silence.
When Julianne and Chloe got home, Julianne ran right into the living room to assess the damage. At the very least, she could be helpful. All told, the flooding wasn’t bad. The old ottoman was soaked through; it would need to be replaced. So would the rocking chair, but it had been slowly crumbling for years, anyway.
As Julianne scanned the room for additional damage, her heart caught in her chest. Last week when she’d given her mother’s painting to Dad and Chloe, they’d propped it up against the grate in front of the fireplace, to get an idea of how it would look above the mantel.
Sure enough, her painting—her mom’s painting—that she’d worked so hard on all summer had been caught in the deluge. A border of about four inches of paint at the bottom of the canvas was totally distorted. She couldn’t even tell it was paint, let alone a picture of their beach.
It was completely ruined. Everything was completely ruined.
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Chapter Twenty-one
!
For the next few days, Julianne walked around like a zombie. She called out sick from work, ignoring the obvious concern in Bill’s voice. She just couldn’t face Remi.
Chloe wouldn’t talk to her or even look at her.
She’d never known Chloe to hate another living soul in her entire life, and she never in a million years would have thought that she’d be the first. Julianne could barely even sleep. Every time she closed her eyes, she had horrible nightmares about telling her father what she’d done. In one, he threw her out of the house, leaving her with nowhere to live but the beach—which wasn’t really an option, because the Moores had paved over the entire thing and built an amusement park. In 192
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another, Dad made Jules walk down to her mother’s grave to apologize in person for betraying her memory, only to find the epitaph had been changed to read, “I don’t forgive you.”
The flood damage in the living room was so intense that Julianne wasn’t sure how to tackle it, so she’d decided to start by cleaning the rest of the house first. As Julianne pedaled her bike toward Palisades Hardware for cleaning supplies, she looked at the clear sky and sparkling beaches and couldn’t believe that this was just a pocket in between miserable storms. The fronds of the palm trees were a lush green, and the beach looked smooth as stone. She pulled up in front of the store, checked her pocket for her shopping list, and pushed down her kickstand. Locking her bike, she headed inside.