Unforgettable

  Brandon ignored the high five and nodded toward the film projector. “I heard some freshman girls talking about you back there.” “No shit.” Atherton’s eyes scanned the crowd. “Were they hot?” “Yeah,” Brandon said sheepishly. “Back by the projector.” “Cool.” Atherton made a gun with his fingers and made a clicking noise with his mouth to pull the trigger. He leered at Elizabeth. “I’ll catch you cats later.” Elizabeth didn’t even watch him leave. Instead, she put her gloved hand on Brandon’s forearm and squeezed. Her other hand held a half-empty beer. “Good to see you, sexy.” Brandon could barely stand it. Did it really not matter to her that thirty seconds ago she’d been squeezing some other guy’s arm exactly like this? “Yeah, uh, you too. You look like you’re, uh, having a good time.” He tried to keep his tone light, but he couldn’t keep the bitterness from seeping in.

  Elizabeth looked up at him in surprise, her cheeks rosy from the cold. “What does that mean?” Brandon rubbed his hand over his eyes, trying to make himself keep quiet. He couldn’t. “Atherton! He’s such a sleaze.” Elizabeth stiffened and quickly withdrew her hand from his arm. She crossed her arms in front of her chest. “Wait a second—are you mad at me? I was going to come and find you as soon as I finished my beer. What happened to Mr. Open?” “I know,” Brandon admitted, kicking the ground with the toe of his polished John Varvatos boot. “But I didn’t think that would mean having to actually watch you flirt with other guys.”

  “So what does this mean, then?” Her eyebrows furrowed together in frustration, and Brandon could tell she was actually really surprised—and hurt—that he was acting this way. But there was really no other way he could act. As soon as Atherton had disappeared, so had all his bravado. That wasn’t what he wanted—to see the girl he was crazy about drooling all over someone else, and not be bothered by it? That was fucked up.

  Brandon stuffed his cold palms into the pockets of his Rock & Republic jeans. “I guess it means Mr. Open is closed.” And he turned and walked away.

  34

  WATCH OUT! WAVERLY OWLS CAN BE A CARNIVOROUS SPECIES.

  Brett leaned back, enjoying the feel of Kara’s fingers playing with her hair. Kara was sitting cross-legged on the thick cotton quilt Brett had brought to spread out, and Brett’s head was lying on a bunched up sweatshirt on her lap. Normally she would have been worried about how that looked, but she’d had a few beers by now and she didn’t care so much. Besides, Brett’s own hands were playing with Heath’s hair, who was lying contentedly on his side, his head resting against Brett’s flat stomach. There was something very soothing about the whole thing—of course it was totally weird how suddenly Heath was their good friend, but Brett had started to genuinely like him. He seemed totally sincere about keeping their secret, and it was kind of fun for the girls to pal around with him, leaving everyone else wondering what the hell was going on. It was a pretty convenient smoke screen, she had to admit.

  Not that she liked feeling like she and Kara were fooling everyone. That wasn’t it. But it was important to keep their secret, well, secret. Things between them were so new still—Brett was trying to follow Jenny’s advice to just “go with it” and not overanalyze everything. She couldn’t do that if the whole world, or the whole Waverly population at least, was whispering about her.

  Heath’s pocket vibrated and he pulled out his phone to read a text. “Ladies, I hate to leave you, but someone’s smoking something, and I need to be part of it.” He clearly had a hard time pulling his eyes away from them as he stood up. “Don’t do anything good without me. Or if you do, take pictures.” He kept his voice low so people around them couldn’t hear.

  “Do you want me to get us some more beer?” Brett sat up and turned toward Kara once Heath had cantered off toward the cornfields.

  The film flickered and cut to a day scene, lighting up Kara’s face. Brett could read from her expressive greenish-brown eyes that she was wondering if Brett was trying to avoid being alone with her in public. But all she said was, “Sure.” Under cover of the crumpled sweatshirt, Brett put her hand on Kara’s knee and squeezed gently. In a perfect world, she’d be able to lean in and kiss her right now, tasting her grapefruit lip gloss. Brett felt a deep ache in her stomach but ignored it and got to her feet. She looked down at Kara in her black turtleneck sweater and gray down vest from her mother’s athletic line of clothing. It was so weird to be looking at a girl and thinking about how badly she wanted to kiss her. “Be right back,” she promised.

  Brett wove her way through the crowds of people sprawled out on blankets. The crowd watching the movie had thinned out a little, which was not surprising, as there seemed to be a multitude of other outlets for entertainment offered by the unsupervised, off-campus evening. How the hell had Tinsley managed to get this approved? And where was Tinsley, anyway? But Brett’s musings faded to the back of her mind as she noticed that people were sort of hushing one another as she approached. Were people . . . talking about her? Her face flushed immediately, but she managed to make her way over to the keg line gracefully enough.

  However, as she tapped the toe of her Stuart Weitzman clog against the hard, grassy ground, she heard something in front of her in line that almost turned her blood instantly into ice. “Brett? You mean she’s . . . gay?” She felt sick. Heath fucking Ferro. Of course. That lowlife, degenerate hornbag squealer. Immediately, Brett spun on her heel and dashed back toward her blanket, obviously forgetting all about the beer, and stepping on several other blankets carelessly. Out of nowhere, a very drunk and staggering Ryan Reynolds popped up and slung his arm around her lean shoulders “Think I can join in sometime?” “Fuck off,” she hissed, shrugging off his arm and continuing her stomp across the lawn, blinded slightly by the darkness and her anger. Finally, she was able to sink down on the blanket where Kara was sitting.

  “What’s the matter?” Kara asked, immediately knowing something was wrong.

  “Where’s Heath?” Brett could barely get the words out, her whole body was shaking so much. “I’m going to kill him, right now. In front of the entire world.” Kara’s eyes widened. “What are you talking about?” Brett pressed her lips together, trying to calm down. But her heart was beating a thousand times a minute and all she could think about was punching Heath right in his stupid, cocky face. “He told everyone. They all know. Everyone knows.” “Ohhhhh.” Kara glanced around her, and Brett knew she wanted to hug her or grab her hand or do something to make it feel better, and it made her feel even more pissed off by the whole situation. “But he wouldn’t do that.” “Well, he did.” Brett ran a hand through her bobbed red hair, forgetting all about how nice it had felt to have Kara combing it with her fingers ten minutes ago. But everything had changed now—everything. All because fuckface Heath couldn’t keep his goddamned mouth shut. He had to gloat, didn’t he? Share it with the whole world? “Who else could have told?” Kara bit her lip, worriedly. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s not the end of the world if people find out?” A lock of her silky hair fell in front of her face, partly hiding her questioning eyes.

  Brett looked at Kara’s sweet, pretty face, wishing she could agree. She knew it was silly to be embarrassed about being with Kara—but having people stare at her like she was a circus freak was the last thing she wanted. She’d just gotten over people finding out about her totally tacky family, and frankly, she didn’t like being at the center of the Waverly gossip tornado. Unfortunately, it seemed she was in the eye of the storm.

  35

  A WAVERLY OWL KNOWS HOW TO EXTRACT HERSELF FROM AN UNCOMFORTABLE SITUATION.

  “But we’re going to play I Never. You can’t go!” Verena Arneval protested as Jenny stood up and stretched her legs. Jenny hadn’t quite felt like herself all night, but she wasn’t really sure why not. Brett and Kara and Heath seemed to be in their own little world that she didn’t really want to interrupt. Callie had disappeared about an hour ago, leaving her to drink with Verena and Alison and Alan and a bunch of others. It was fun, but . .
. it wasn’t really that fun. Jenny’s brain was feeling slow from beer, and if she drank any more, she would be drunk.

  Not to mention the disaster that had happened the last time everyone played I Never. No, thank you. She shook her head resolutely, stepping away from the bales of hay she’d been sitting on. Jenny played with the hood of her green sweater and glanced up at the black-and-white film still playing on the side of the barn. She hadn’t exactly been paying attention, but something about it seemed so . . . romantic. “I’m just going to walk around a little. I’ll be back.” She heard Ryan’s camera click as he took a photograph of her ass as she walked away. Sigh.

  Jenny had never actually seen the inside of a real barn before, only in the movies and on TV, so she meandered toward the building, stepping around groups of people making out on blankets or playing games involving slamming down as much of the now-warm beer as possible. Snippets of conversations about Brett and Kara and their illicit love affair hit Jenny’s ears more than once. Yikes. Looked like the secret was already fullfledged gossip. She squinted her eyes but couldn’t see Brett’s fire-engine-red hair anywhere. She was such a private person, it was going to kill her to have her secrets made so public.

  Jenny also scanned the crowd for signs of another familiar body but didn’t see him. Maybe that was why she was feeling so depressed tonight.

  Her boots kicked their way through the grass as she turned the corner to the other side of the barn, and there was blessed silence. The sounds of the movie disappeared. Jenny leaned against the weathered wood of the barn and stared up at the fat, silvery moon hanging like a globe in the navy night sky, wisps of clouds half-covering it.

  She peeked her head inside the barn door, surprised to see two tiny flecks of red light at the far end of the barn. Curious, she squinted again, not quite sure what she was looking at. As her vision cleared, two things happened at the exact same instant: the clouds moved to let some moonlight shine fully in the barn, illuminating the interior, and one of the red flecks moved. It was Callie, standing up in the last stall, a cigarette in her hand, and her perfect, bare shoulders glowing in the moonlight. The stall wall hid the rest of her body, but it wasn’t hard to guess from her naked shoulders that she probably wasn’t wearing a strapless dress.

  Especially when Jenny noted that the other fleck of red belonged to someone else’s cigarette—Easy’s.

  Her hands started to shake and tears instinctively sprang to her eyes as she realized something she probably should have known all along: they were together again. And then, in a flash of insight, she saw the abstract portrait Easy had hung up in art class today. That strawberry shape that had seemed so familiar to Jenny—it was the birthmark on Callie’s lower back, something only someone who had seen her recently in a bikini, or a bra, or nothing at all—would have been able to portray so perfectly. She felt her lower lip start to tremble. They were together again, but that wasn’t the worst part. Callie had lied to her. She’d thought they were really friends, but she’d been so . . . wrong.

  Jenny spun around and walked away from the barn quickly, away from the party. She wasn’t sure exactly where she was going, but she knew she had to get away. She was tired of drinking beer and playing stupid games and having people she thought were her friends lie to her. As she plowed ahead, a horrible image of Easy and Callie came to mind, of the two of them, laughing—at her, for believing they were all friends. She could almost hear Callie saying, “I can’t believe she really thought you liked her better than me.” Jenny stumbled over something on the ground—a corncob. She kicked it hard with her boot, sending it flying through the air and thwacking into some kind of metal silo in front of her with a satisfying thud.

  “You’d better watch where you’re aiming that. You might hit an innocent bystander.” Jenny looked up, and her heart almost stopped in her throat. Julian. He was sitting on some sort of tree stump off to the side of the silo, an empty plastic beer cup in his hands.

  An amazing feeling flooded through her entire body—that wonderful, unexpected feeling that comes when, totally out of the blue, you’re given something that you hadn’t even realized you wanted or needed or craved. Like that morning, when Jenny had opened the package from her father and pulled out a Tupperware container of pumpkin-chocolate-chip muffins from the bakery on Amsterdam Avenue that were quite possibly the most delicious and comforting things on the planet.

  But that obviously didn’t compare to the way she felt when Julian appeared before her, all by himself, just when she thought things were at their absolute worst. He was the one she’d been looking for all night.

  “What are you doing out here?” Jenny asked, suddenly flustered that things were happening so fast. She’d just come from seeing her ex-boyfriend, the boyfriend she thought maybe she loved, naked with his ex-girlfriend, her roommate who had made a pact with her that they were done with Easy for good. So much for pacts. She shivered to shake off the awful feeling that she’d been majorly duped in some massive con. “In the dark?”

  As usual, he had a ready answer. “I gave myself a timeout.” Jenny laughed. “So you mean you’re hiding?” For some reason, she always felt the urge to be bold around Julian—it was like that part of her brain that naturally prevented her mouth from actually saying the first thing that came to her mind somehow shut off around him. But at the same time, she got the feeling that he didn’t mind.

  “Well . . .” Julian drew out the word. He squeezed the plastic cup in his hands, crumpling it up noisily. Finally, he sighed. “Sort of.” Then he patted the stump next to him invitingly. she sank down next to him, knowing better than to ask who he was hiding from.

  As they sat together on the bench, Jenny was completely aware of how close her leg was to his. Only about an inch of air separated them. Neither of them said anything for a few moments, listening instead to the faint sounds of the movie in the distance. Weirdly, it wasn’t uncomfortable at all.

  At last, Julian spoke, his breath visible in the darkness. “This is kind of a cool place. I just wish, you know, it wasn’t such a . . . circus.” His longish blondish-brown hair was tucked behind his ears, skimming the shoulders of his olive green fleece jacket. Jenny looked down at their feet—his vintage black Tretorns were enormous, especially next to her small, round-toed boots. But somehow, they looked, well, kind of cute together.

  “Do you want to go back and watch the movie?” she asked, hoping he’d say no.

  He turned his head toward her, the moonlight lighting up his deep brown eyes so that Jenny could practically count the little flecks of gold in them. “No,” he answered simply.

  Her cheeks flushed, and her hands, inside the pockets of her sweater, started to sweat just a little. What was going on here? Was this . . . was something . . . really happening? Jenny suddenly felt a little nervous. “This, uh, kind of weird thing happened, just before.” She felt, for some reason, the need to explain this to him—she wasn’t quite sure why, but she felt like it was something she had to do. “I walked into the barn, and Callie and Easy were in there, kind of . . .” She trailed off. It looked like they’d been having sex, but she wasn’t going to start spreading rumors. She knew how much that sucked. “Well, you know. Together.” “Oh.” If Jenny hadn’t been so acutely aware of exactly how close Julian’s leg was to hers, she might not have noticed at that moment how he moved himself, almost imperceptibly, about a centimeter away from her. “Wow. That sucks.” His eyes turned down to stare at his shoes, and she wondered if he was thinking that hers looked cute next to his. “That must have been really hard for you—to see him with someone else, I mean.” Jenny shook her head slowly, and before she realized what exactly she was doing, she’d put her hand on his arm. “That’s not it, really.” Julian’s fleece was worn out and soft as a baby’s blanket beneath her hand. It was kind of exciting to be touching him like that, and he immediately turned his face back toward her, quizzically. “It was weird, but not because of Easy.” As if it had a mind of its own, Jenny’s t
humb started to stroke

  Julian’s arm and she realized that since she’d been talking to him, she hadn’t once thought about how cold she was. “I’m over him, and now I kind of know for sure that we were never really meant to be.” “Yeah?” Julian asked, his eyebrows raised as if he wasn’t sure he should believe her. But then he glanced down at her small hand on his jacket and seemed to believe in that. He shifted a little on the stump to face her.

  She nodded. “Besides, I kind of like someone else now.” She pressed her lips together to keep from smiling. There was that boldness again.

  Her heart was beating at a crazy speed, and her fingers were cold, and the bark from the stump was kind of poking into the back of her thigh. And yet . . . she didn’t want the moment to end. Especially not when Julian touched her hand with his. He cleared his throat. “I was kind of hoping,” he admitted, his voice deep and a little husky.

  She felt a curl of dark hair fall into her face, and she pushed it delicately behind one ear. Julian traced a finger along her wrist, something she wouldn’t have imagined could feel as good as it did, and turned her face up toward his. She couldn’t believe his hand was touching hers, and as he leaned in toward her, she still wasn’t convinced it was actually happening.

  His full lips paused an inch from hers. “I’ve been thinking about you all day,” he whispered. Then he kissed her, his warm mouth meeting hers. Her last thought before she closed her eyes was that his face, which looked so adorable hanging on the wall of the art studio, was even better close up.

  36

  A WAVERLY OWL KEEPS HER COOL, EVEN WHEN SHOCKED AND PISSED AS HELL.

  Tinsley flicked open Julian’s Zippo, watching the flame spring up and illuminate the dark night. She had the lighter, but she wanted the boy. Where the hell was he? She clicked the lighter closed in frustration. She hadn’t seen him since the ride over, when he’d been acting . . . weird. Heath had been kind enough to reserve for her the most over-the-top vehicle the rental agency had in its fleet: a Hummer with a waterbed in the back. A total shagmobile. But from the very second she had met Julian outside the front gate, he’d been acting a little, well, distant. Tinsley had written it off at the time as playing hard-to-get, an attempt on his part to get her riled up. But really, she shouldn’t have to be working that hard. In her wide-leg navy velvet Armani pants that hugged her ass like it was their job, and her ecru Anna Sui lace top that allowed the outline of her chocolate brown La