three
Mom said she loved the idea of an anniversary trip, but couldn’t even begin to figure out how to plan it.
“Why don’t you ask George to do it?” Luke suggested. “He’d probably love the extra hours of work.”
George Nussbaum was my mother’s assistant. Sort of. He was also my SAT tutor. Sort of. Basically he did whatever our family asked him to at an hourly rate, while he waited for a better job to come along.
George’s older brother Jonathan worked for Luke—originally as his personal assistant but now as the head of his new TV production company (the last time Luke’s agent negotiated his contract with the show, he scored him a development deal). Jonathan was the oldest of a big family; George was the youngest and, according to Jonathan, the smartest: he was only twenty and had already graduated from Harvard.
At some point over the summer Jonathan had mentioned to Mom that his brother was looking for temporary work to pay the rent while he wrote a TV spec script and tried to get an agent. Jonathan had already bragged about how his brother had gotten perfect SAT scores and gone to Harvard so Mom jumped at the chance to get all that brain power into my life—part of her your life is going to be better than mine plan was for me to go to an Ivy.
Once George started showing up at our house with SAT books, my mom kept discovering other odds and ends he could do for her. I don’t know how much she paid him, but I bet it was pretty generous—her own minimum wage days weren’t that far behind her and now she had plenty of cash to throw around. Because she had once been a waitress, she left ridiculous tips at restaurants: forty, sometimes fifty percent of the bill.
The Nussbaum brothers looked a lot alike: they were both slightly above-average height and thin, with gray-green eyes and brown hair. George had a lot more of that though; Jonathan’s was thinning at the crown, even though he was only in his late twenties. Fortunately for him, he already had a fiancée.
Jonathan was mellow and good-natured, but George was less sunny. He sighed with impatience and rolled his eyes a lot. Of course, it’s possible I brought that out in him: I wasn’t in the mood to be studying over the summer, and I refused to take any of the tutoring seriously.
It made sense for Luke to put George in charge of the travel and party arrangements, but it had been my idea, so I wanted to keep some control.
“Tahiti?” I suggested hopefully when I found George in the kitchen the next morning researching resort hotels on his laptop.
“Hawaii’s looking like the better option.”
“Yes, but I’ve been to Hawaii,” I said. “I’ve never been to Tahiti.”
“Oh, right,” he said. “This is about you, not your parents. I forgot.”
“Try not to do it again,” I said loftily.
“I’m going to need more coffee.” He got up, went over to the pod coffee maker, put a mug under the spout, and hit the switch.
I was proud of that coffee maker: I’d used one like it in a hotel suite last spring and talked Mom into ordering one for us. I also made her get this wooden Christmas tree decked out with different-flavored pods—coffees and teas and cocoas—all tucked into holes on the branches of a spinning wooden frame.
“Can you make me a cup?” I asked with a yawn. I was still in my pajamas: a tank top and PE sweatpants with the words “Coral Tree Prep” (the name of my school) running up the left leg. It was almost eleven thirty, but I’d only just gotten up.
I love summer.
“Make it yourself,” George said as he carried his mug over to the refrigerator.
“You suck as a personal assistant.”
He got the milk out and poured some into his coffee. “I’m not your personal assistant. And heaven help anyone who is.”
“Hey!” I said. “That was gratuitous.”
“Good SAT word.”
“I know, right? Oh, that reminds me—my friend Heather’s going to come study with us today. I think it will help me focus.”
“Let’s hope,” he said.
Heather didn’t go to Coral Tree Prep with me; she lived in the Valley and went to public school there. We’d met at a dance class back when we were both thirteen, and I had decided that my true vocation in life was to be a modern dancer, despite the fact I’d never taken a single lesson before.
We’ll Make You a Star had been on the air for a few months at that point and people were already recognizing Luke. No one at the dance studio knew I was his stepdaughter, though—my last name was different, and Luke never brought me there. The only thing that made me stand out from the other girls was my total lack of skill and grace.
There was one other girl there who was also new and awkward and alone. She had a round belly under her leotard and I saw a couple of the other (delicately thin) girls eye it and whisper to each other and giggle, so I made a point of catching her eye and smiling. She smiled back gratefully and moved closer and closer to me. When class ended, we walked out together.
While we waited to be picked up, Heather told me that her mother was making her do the class for exercise. I learned later that it was only one in a long series of attempts on Sarah Smith’s part to slim down her daughter. Sarah was a tall, skinny brunette with an angular face, but Heather took after her father, who was rounder and had big blue eyes and dimples. Mrs. Smith, I soon discovered, liked to talk loudly and pointedly about how wonderful exercise was and how good it felt to be in shape and how people who didn’t move their bodies turned into shapeless slugs. She also liked to drag me into the discussion: “You are so petite, Ellie. Isn’t she wonderfully petite, Heather?” Heather would cheerfully agree that I was wonderfully petite, which pissed me off because (a) I didn’t want to be held up as some kind of example and (b) Heather was adorable exactly the way she was, and the only person who didn’t see that was her own mother. Oh, and those jerky girls in dance class, who continued to annoy me.
A few classes later, one of them giggled and pointed when Heather stumbled during a routine. I already disliked that girl, who had long blond hair and expensive dance clothing and acted like she was the queen of the class, so I marched over to her and growled, “What’s it like to have a sucky personality? How’s that working for you?”
“You’re the one with the sucky personality,” she said, flipping her hair.
“I guess that makes us twins,” I said, which seemed to stump her—she couldn’t come up with anything to say except a lame “No, it doesn’t.”
I walked away from her, grabbed Heather by the arm, and said, “Let’s go.” She willingly let me lead her out of the practice room. The teacher called after us, but we ignored her. A good teacher wouldn’t have let her students ridicule each other.
Sarah Smith was already there, sitting on a bench and balancing her checkbook while she waited for class to end. “What’s going on?” she asked when we came out.
“We’re done with class,” I said. “We don’t like it.” And Heather echoed me.
“You can’t quit,” her mother told her. “You’ll be applying to college in a few years, and they’re going to want to see that you’ve done more with your life than just go to school and eat junk food. Don’t you even want to get some healthy exercise? Don’t you care about finishing what you started and about getting some good habits into your life? Most girls would kill to have the opportunities you have, and let me tell you, it’s not always easy for us to afford them.” And so on.
Heather stood silently, her head bowed, letting her mother’s words rain down on her. I thought she was genuinely overwhelmed, but it turned out to be a cunning defensive maneuver—with no one arguing against her, Sarah ran out of steam and eventually stopped on her own accord with a resigned, if frustrated, shrug of acceptance.
Before they left, Heather and I exchanged cell phone numbers and agreed that we wanted to stay friends.
At that point, she and her mother still had no idea that Luke Weston was my stepfather. They found out eventually of course, but it didn’t change the fact that Heather liked me because I had been a good friend to her and not because I was related to the hot guy from We’ll Make You a Star.