“Right,” I said. “Have fun.”
“Fun? I’ll be working eighteen-hour days. Fun isn’t on the agenda.”
“No one feels sorry for you, you know.”
He flashed the gently roguish grin that made hearts beat faster all over America, told me he’d miss me lots, and left.
I went back to the kitchen, where George was typing on his laptop. He looked up when I entered. “They gone?”
“Yeah.” I threw myself into the chair across from him. “So . . . kegger tonight? You bring the coke.”
“As in cocaine?”
I rolled my eyes. “A-doy.”
“Just checking. Last time you asked me for Coke, it was a whole different thing.”
“Yeah. And you never gave it to me.”
“Are we really going to rehash this? Or are we going to work on your essay?”
“My essay sucks. It’s boring. And clichéd. I don’t like it.”
“So what are you going to do about it?”
“Complain a lot and whine.”
“You’re doing great!”
My phone dinged with a text. I glanced at it.
“Aaron?” he asked.
“Heather. She wants to know if you’re here and if she should come over to work.”
“Fine with me.”
I texted Heather to come and then looked up again. “Did you go back and get that cute catering girl’s phone number?”
“Did I? I can’t remember.”
“Don’t be a jerk. What’s her name?”
“Ethel? Maybe Gertrude. No—Brunhilde.”
“You’re no fun.” My phone dinged again. “Aaron?” he asked.
“Riley.”
“Don’t you have any friends with gender-normative names?”
I texted her back that I was busy and couldn’t hang out, then looked up. George was watching me. “You want to work?” I asked.
“Only if you’re not too busy,” he said with exaggerated politeness.
“Never too busy for you,” I said genially. My phone dinged again.
“Aaron?” he said.
“Yep.”
“Ha! Guessed right.”
“It’s not a good guess if you’ve made it three times and were wrong the first two.” I read the text then said, “Hey, what time do you think we’ll be done?”
“The usual. Two hours from when we start. Assuming we ever actually start.”
“Hold on.” I sent a text to Aaron, who had asked if I wanted to go see a movie later: Yah. You okay if Heather comes?
The cute blonde? Why wouldn’t I be?
I smiled at my phone, relieved. I had been wondering whether we’d be able to go back to normal after the other night’s weirdness, but he sounded like himself. And also like he didn’t care whether or not we were alone together, which meant he was in no rush to start pushing things forward again.
“I really hate to interrupt the love affair you’re having with your phone,” George said. “Any chance I can get you to put it aside for . . . I don’t know, ten seconds? To start?”
I tossed the phone onto the counter. “Look how I obey you,” I said. “Use your power over me wisely.”
“I’ll try to,” he said, with a sort of odd seriousness that made me feel anxious—was I about to get in trouble? And why did George always make me feel like I was about to get in trouble? But all he said was, “Let’s read through the essay again. Did you make those changes we talked about last time?”
“Um . . . about that . . .”
He sighed and we bent over my laptop together. We went back through all his notes and I made the changes right there and then, with him at my elbow, pointing at the screen. But even though he kept me on task, he wouldn’t actually cut anything or dictate any phrases; he had said earlier that every word of it had to be mine and apparently he meant it.
I worked hard for twenty minutes, which, as I explained to George, was as long as my attention span ever lasted. He said, “I guess that is true,” so I got up and made us tea and found some cookies in the freezer in a big bakery box that someone must have brought my mom as a hostess gift.
We sat and ate our microwave-warm cookies and drank our tea and talked about some of the short essays on the application and what I could say about extracurricular activities since I didn’t really have much other than the Holiday-Giving Program—I showed up to meetings for the Gay-Straight Alliance and Diversity Council, but I didn’t run anything other than the H-G.
Then Heather arrived, looking extremely adorable in a pink-and-gold sundress, and George asked her if she’d made the changes he wanted, and she dimpled up and said that of course she had, she’d made every one of them and all of his comments had been so helpful and made it so much better, and he glanced at me like he wanted to make sure I’d heard that, and I shrugged because Heather was the kind of girl who did what you told her to and I . . . wasn’t.
While they went over her changes, I worked on the common app, adding the information we’d just discussed. A while later the intercom let us know that someone was at the gate. I jumped up and buzzed in Aaron’s car.
“We did good work here today,” I announced to the kitchen in a “Let’s wrap this up now” kind of way. It had been almost two hours . . . if you considered an hour and a quarter almost two hours.
“Oh no,” Heather said, looking up. “Do we have to be done? Can you look at this one more time, George?”
“Call him Georgie,” I said. “He likes that.”
“I can stay as long as you need me,” he told her. “I’m doing some organizing for Ellie’s mom, so I was going to stick around to work on that anyway.”
“Do you really like to be called Georgie?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “I hate it.”
“I figured. Ellie likes to be mean sometimes.”
“I do not!” I said, but before I could defend myself more, there was a knock at the front door. I ran out into the hallway and swung it open. “Yay, you’re here!” I said to Aaron. Then, a little less enthusiastically, “And you brought my grandmother.”
“‘Brought’ isn’t entirely accurate,” Aaron said. “But we got here at the same time.”
“Am I supposed to tip him?” Grandma asked me in a loud whisper. “He looks like he expects a tip.” For a second I thought she meant Aaron, but then I spotted the cabdriver coming up behind them with her suitcase.
“It’s taken care of,” I said.
“Are you sure? I think maybe I should tip him.” There was no way he hadn’t heard her stage whisper.
“It’s good. We’re good. Thank you,” I said more loudly to the driver, who handed the suitcase to Aaron, wished us all a good day, and stepped away.
She looked back over her shoulder. “I just don’t like having someone out there who thinks I’m ungenerous. Bad energy always comes back to you.”
“He doesn’t think you’re ungenerous.” I led her into the foyer, and Aaron followed us. “Mom already paid the tip online. You know she would never expect you to use your own money for this. You’re doing us a favor.”
“I am using up all of my vacation days on you,” she said. “Not that I mind.” She pressed me tight against her ample chest. “We’re going to have so much fun together.” She released me. “Aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend?”
I explained that Aaron was Michael Marquand’s son and then reminded her that she had met Michael and his wife at the anniversary party.
“She’s very beautiful,” Grandma said to him. “Your mother, I mean.”
“Crystal’s not my mother!” Aaron looked horrified at the thought. “She’s, like, twenty-five.”
“I see. Well, I hope you get along with her. The stepmother/stepchild relationship can be a very meaningful one, if people are willing to be open to it. Have you let her into your heart?”
“Uh, yeah, sure,” he said, but he looked like he wanted to both laugh and vomit.
“Come into the kitchen,” I said quickly. “More people to meet there.”
Both Heather and George had already spent time with my grandmother, so no introductions were needed. Heather hugged her warmly, loving her because she was my grandmother and Heather was the kind of person who loved other people’s grandmothers. George was going to shake her hand, but she threw her arms around him, which seemed to surprise him but not in an unpleasant way. He nodded over her shoulder at Aaron with a curt, unenthusiastic “Hey.”