“Yeah, right,” I said.
“Because you have to just go with the flow. Your life is not your own, with people coming in and out all the time. You get mellow because you have to. I mean, you know exactly what I’m saying, I bet.”
“Oh yes,” I said flatly, “I am just so easygoing. That is precisely the word that describes me.”
“Isn’t it?”
“No,” I told him. “It isn’t.” And then I stood up and got my bag, feeling my feet ache as they settled into my shoes. “I have to go home now.”
He got to his feet, taking his jacket off the back of the chair. “Share a cab?”
“I don’t think so.”
“All right,” he said, shrugging. “Suit yourself.”
I walked to the door, thinking he’d be behind me, but when I glanced back he was across the room, going out the other way. I had to admit I was surprised, after such intense pursuit, that he had given up already. The drummer had been right, I supposed. The conquest-getting me alone-was all that mattered, and once he saw me up close I wasn’t so special after all. But I, of course, knew that already.
There was a cab parked out front, the driver dozing. I climbed into the backseat, sliding off my shoes. It was, by the green numbers on the dashboard, exactly 2 A.M. At the Thunderbird Hotel across town, my mother was most likely fast asleep, dreaming of the next week she’d spend in St. Bart’s. She’d come home to finish her novel, to move her new husband into the house, to take another stab at being a Mrs. Somebody, sure that this time, indeed, it would be different.
As the cab turned onto the main road, I saw a glint of something through the park, over to my right. It was Dexter, on foot, turning into a neighborhood, and in his white shirt he stood out, almost as if he were glowing. He was walking down the middle of the street, the houses dark on either side of him, quiet in sleep. And watching him head home, for a second it was like he was the only one awake or even alive in all the world right then, except for me.
Chapter Five
“Remy, really. He’s just wonderful.”
“Lola, please.”
“I know what you’re thinking. I do. But this is different. I wouldn’t do you like that. Don’t you trust me?”
I put down the stack of checks I’d been counting and looked up at her. She was leaning on her elbow, chin cupped in her hand. One of her earrings, a huge gold hoop, was swinging back and forth, catching the sunlight streaming through the front window.
“I don’t do blind dates,” I told her, again.
“It isn’t blind, honey, I know him,” she explained, as if this made some kind of difference. “A nice boy. He’s got great hands too.”
“What?” I said.
She held up her hands-impeccably manicured, naturally-as if I needed a visual aid for this basic part of human anatomy. “Hands. I noticed it the other day, when he came to pick his mother up from her sea salt scrub. Beautiful hands. He’s bilingual.”
I blinked, trying to process the connection between these two characteristics. Nope. Nothing.
“Lola?” a voice called out tentatively from inside the salon, “my scalp is burning?”
“That’s just the dye working, sugar,” Lola called back, not even turning her head. “Anyway, Remy, I really talked you up. And since his mother is coming back this afternoon for her pedicure-”
“No,” I said flatly. “Forget it.”
“But he’s perfect!”
“Nobody,” I told her, going back to the checks, “is perfect.”
“Lola?” Now the voice sounded more nervous, less polite. “It’s really hurting…”
“You want to find love, Remy?”
“No.”
“I don’t understand you, girl! You’re about to make a big mistake.” Lola always got loud when she felt passionate about something: now, her voice was booming around the small waiting room, rattling the sample nail polishes on the shelf above my head. A few more active vowels and I’d be concussed, and as quick to sue as the woman whose hair was burning off, ignored, in the next room.
“Lola!” The woman, now shrieking, sounded like she was on the verge of tears. “I think I smell burning hair-”
“Oh, for God’s sake!” Lola bellowed, angry at both of us, and whirled around, stomping out of the room. As a purple nail polish crashed onto my desk, missing me by inches, I sighed, flipping open the calendar. It was Monday. My mother and Don would be back from St. Bart’s in three days. I turned another page, running my finger down past the days, to count again how many weeks I had before I left for school.
Stanford. Three thousand miles away from here, almost a direct shot across the country. An incredible school, my top choice, and I’d been accepted by five out of the six others I’d chosen to apply to. All my hard work, AP classes, honors seminars. Finally it meant something.
Freshman year, when such decisions are made, my teachers had me pegged for the state party school, if I was lucky-someplace where I could do an easy major, like psych, with a minor in frat parties and makeup. As if just because I was, okay, blond and somewhat attractive with an active social life (and, okay, not the best of reputations) and didn’t do the student council/debate team/cheerleader thing, I was destined for the sub-par. Grouped with the burnouts and the barely graduating, where just making it down from the parking lot after lunch was far exceeding expectations.
But I’d proved them wrong. I used my own money to pay for a tutor in physics, the class that almost killed me, as well as a prep class for the SAT, which I took three times. I was the only one of my friends in AP classes except for Lissa, who as the daughter of two Ph.D.’s had always been expected to be brilliant. But I always worked harder when I was up against something, or when someone assumed I couldn’t succeed. That’s what drove me, all those nights studying. The fact that so many figured I couldn’t do it.
I was the only one from our graduating class going to Stanford. Which meant I could begin my life again, fresh and new, so far from home. All the money I had left from my salon paycheck after my car payment I’d stuck in my savings account, to cover the dorm fees and books and living expenses. The tuition I’d gotten out of my part of the trust left to me and Chris in our father’s estate. It had been set aside, by some lawyer who I wished I could thank personally, until we were twenty-five or for school, which meant that even during the lean times my mother couldn’t touch it. It also meant that no matter how she burned through her own money, my four years in college were safe. And all because each time “This Lullaby” (written by Thomas Custer, all rights reserved) played in the background of a commercial, or on lite radio, or was performed by some lounge singer in Vegas, it bought me another day of my future.
The chimes over the door sounded and the UPS man came in, carrying a box, which he put down on the desk in front of me. “Package for you, Remy,” he said, whipping out his clipboard.
I signed on the screen, then took the box. “Thanks, Jacob.”
“Oh, and this too,” he said, handing me an envelope. “See you tomorrow.”
“Okay,” I said. The envelope wasn’t stamped-weird-or sealed. I opened the flap and reached in, pulling out a stack of three pictures. They were all of the same couple, both in their seventies, probably, posing in some seaside setting. The man had on a baseball hat and a T-shirt that read WILL GOLF FOR FOOD. The woman had a camera strapped to her belt and was wearing sensible shoes. They had their arms around each other and looked wildly happy: in the first picture they were smiling, the next laughing, the third kissing, sweetly, their lips barely touching. Like any couple you’d see on vacation who would ask you to take a picture, please, of the two of us.
Which was all fine and dandy, except who the hell were they? And what was this supposed to mean, anyway? I stood up, looking outside for the UPS truck, but it was already gone. Was I supposed to know these people, or something? I glanced back at the pictures, but the couple just grinned back at me, caught in their tropical moment, offering no explanation.